Category Archives: Personal

A Quick Note

01 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by in Personal

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Books

For about a year and a half, I’ve been receiving emails every so often from online advertisers who want me to hawk their stuff. This is the new wave of internet “native” advertising, where companies and online stores will pay even modestly popular blogs a small sum to publish posts linking to them. I’ve had fun telling them no.

A site, like anything else, isn’t free. To fund TBP, I’ve been an Amazon affiliate for much of this year. This means that anything you buy on Amazon — whether it’s a book linked on here or anything else in their catalog, from eye drops to high tops — will go towards supporting this site, so long as you first click to Amazon through any link on here.

This is a way to show your support for a website that’s doing something rare on the internet: giving air to evergreen ideas about things that matter. My goal — if I can, in retrospect, claim one — has never been to be a million people’s hundredth favorite blog, but 10,000 people’s favorite blog.

But that’s not the only reason to make all your Amazon purchases here.

Beyond operating costs (which go mostly toward keeping this space clean and ad-free), 20% of funds raised through the Amazon affiliate program will now go directly to fund the Mattie Miracle Cancer Foundation, a Virginia-based nonprofit that’s changing the way we care for children with cancer. I sort of stumbled into teaming up with this organization early this year, and have been extremely impressed by the energy, commitment, and kindness that its members bring to what is a seemingly unbearable and unfair challenge – serious childhood illness.

A lot of charities do the necessary, elevated work of searching for cures, but these people train doctors and nurses and lobby Congress to funnel research dollars more effectively.

So, at the end of this year, a donation will be made to them on behalf of us. It won’t be a lot, but it’ll have some effect. And in January, we’ll look to other groups to support for ’16.

To learn more about the organization, please check out their website, which I built this summer, mattiemiracle.org.

As always, drop me a line if you’ve picked up a book from here or enjoyed browsing. I enjoy hearing from you: john@jrbenjamin.com.

Who Turned the Page?

17 Friday May 2013

Posted by in Personal, Poetry

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Seagull in Ireland

Who turned the page? When I went out
Last night, his Life was left wide-open,
Half-way through, in lamplight on my desk:
The Middle years.
Now look at him. Who turned the page?

__________

Biography by Ian Hamilton.

As the penultimate line suggests, Hamilton seems to have written this cryptic lament for a certain stage of life — his “middle years”. But I read it now and reflect with great melancholy on the passage of a different period: the first year of post-college life. I graduated from the University of Virginia 365 days ago, and although I just recognized today as that anniversary, “Biography” careened into my consciousness early this morning and has been rattling around the back of my mind all day.

My friend D. sometimes recalls aloud — just as I repeat back to him — the epigraph of Gore Vidal’s great novel about youth and loss, The City and the Pillar.  It is the 26th verse of Genesis 19: “But his wife looked back from behind him and she became a pillar of salt.” This is a reference to the flight made by Abraham, Sarah, Lot, and Lot’s wife from the city of Sodom, which God is said to have smote as he commanded the four to flee without glancing back. Lot’s wife turned to look, and she was frozen mid-flight. She became the pillar.

In his novel, Vidal used this image as an allegory for the idleness and destructiveness of longing for things that cannot be regained. My friend D. usually caps this reference by saying, with quiet assurance, “You can never look back. You can never look back.” (He embodies this mantra so completely that he refuses to revisit our old college town and old college friends, despite living only two hours away.)

And maybe he’s right. I like to defiantly repeat Emile Zola’s stoic incitement, “Allons travailler!” (“Get on with it!”), but in quieter moments, I’m more often staring out the window and whispering (with equal parts disbelief, amusement, and melancholy), Who turned the page?

The picture was taken in County Kerry, Ireland.