Ben, Author at Common Reader

Defiant Happiness

Does joy flow from temperament, then, or from grace? What does it matter? Joy defies gravity. Poised at the edge of a cliff, you need it more than ever.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Why Woke Language Backfires

By Jeannette Cooperman

If this is our notion of inclusivity, we are doomed.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

The great Victorian-era writer and art critic John Ruskin explores the change in mindset that marked contemporary painters apart from their classical, medieval forbears, and that would later give birth to modern painting. “It is evident that there are both evil and good in this change; but how much evil, or how much good, we can only estimate by considering, as in the former divisions of our inquiry, what are the real roots of the habits of mind which have caused them.”

Essays

Being Funny

By Jeannette Cooperman

There are indeed joke-telling and joke-writing techniques, but the comic sensibility cannot be taught. Finding something funny in the first place—seeing the absurdity, the irony, the analogy, the edge—is what matters, and it emerges from a combination of detachment, affinity, and wry intelligence.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Wild Flowers

By Jeannette Cooperman

Wildflowers are simple. They are flowers that grow in the wild, not where we demand them to grow. They do not obediently line our sidewalks, arrange themselves by order of height in our mulched beds, fill our wrought iron boxes, spill over our terra cotta pots. Wild means self-determined, free, priceless.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Do We Make Ourselves Too Comfortable?

By Jeannette Cooperman

Comfort is supposed to follow a challenge, not replace one. Tension, risk, and physical or emotional discomfort are parts of larger experiences that are worth having, so there is no need to dread or avoid them. With a shift in focus, they shrink in proportion to the part that matters.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Naming Names

By Jeannette Cooperman

Even in this time of flux, with fluid identities and avatars that split us into separate selves, names write code for who we are. We bear someone’s name, take someone’s name, carry on a name, drop one. Names, in other words, have weight. They arrive with little suitcases that we roll along for the rest of our lives.

Essays

How the English Major Became Minor

By Shaye Herman

By lifting the literature of the academic elite above the literature of the masses, English departments imply that the masses are unimportant and further the belief that English is a field and degree of little consequence. The inclusion of commercial fiction in university and college English departments would help lessen the perception that English majors are unemployable, better prepare students to work in the commercial book market, and attract students deterred by current curricula.

Essays

Failing the Test of Purging Oneself

By John Griswold

In the hogan I was miserable, not enlightened, felt funky and slimed. All the individual animal and species sins poured out of me, not as catharsis or healing, but as reminder and irritant, and I did not believe in sin. This was not my culture, my ceremony, my victory, my tribe. It was like being put to death slowly and humiliatingly for my presumption.

Essays

The Tough Detective’s Weather Forecast: Cloudy with Occasional Pain

By Gerald Early

The Spillane biography is a good book, if only to remind us of how important Mickey Spillane was to American Letters and American popular culture. Now, if only someone would write a solid biography of Frank Yerby.

Reviews