fiction

Podcast Episode: Philadelphia Neighborhood Stories

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Pip: Ghost Dog, the blog where Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, Kentucky is apparently a punchline, and the bar tab sorts itself out in the end.

Mara: Today we're covering Benn Bell's writing on city life — specifically what it means to belong to a place, and what happens when you come back to one after a long absence.

Pip: Let's start with the neighborhood itself.

Tony's Way and the Geography of Belonging

Mara: The question this piece is really asking is what it means to become a regular somewhere — and what that status is actually worth, in a city where neighborhoods have their own cultures and their own rules.

Pip: The post sets the scene directly: "In Kensington, where Tony's Way is located, it is mainly Spanish, as in Puerto Rican. Tony's Way is a little Puerto Rican bar nestled below the elevated Blue Line in Kensington."

Mara: So the bar isn't just a bar — it's embedded in a specific block, under a specific train line, in a neighborhood with a specific identity. The geography is doing real work here.

Pip: And the way you earn your place in that geography is incremental. You walk past enough times, you become a face, and eventually Tony himself comes over to introduce you to Ricardo and Edwardo — his cousins, his security arrangement, his welcome committee all at once.

Mara: That introduction is the piece's first marker of belonging. The second comes later, on a busy Friday night, when the bouncers are frisking every man at the door and they just wave him through.

Pip: Which he initially reads as an insult — not dangerous enough to bother with — until the guy next to him offers the obvious alternative: they probably just know you.

Mara: That's the hinge of the whole story. Being known in a place is the thing that looks, from the outside, like being overlooked.

Pip: Then he moves away. Trenton, then Kentucky. Ten years pass.

Mara: And when he returns, Tony recognizes him immediately — notes that his hair was shorter, asks where he went. When he says Kentucky, Tony calls the barmaid over, and the laughter spreads down the bar until the whole room is shouting "Kentucky!" A second version of this story, posted separately under the same title, revisits that same Philadelphia frame: a city of neighborhoods, a million stories.

Pip: The detail that he drank free that day and suffered for it the next morning is doing quiet, honest work — the city gives you something, and it costs you something, and you go home glad anyway.

Mara: Which is about as clean a definition of belonging as you're likely to find. The neighborhood keeps its own ledger.

Pip: And the ledger, it turns out, has a long memory.

Mara: What stays with me is that the geography and the community aren't separate things in these pieces — the bar under the El, the walk home, the cousins in the corner. Place and people are the same thing.

Pip: Kentucky never stood a chance.

Podcast Episode: THE FALL: BOOK REVIEW

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Pip: There are books you read, books you reread, and then books that reread you — the ones that find new ways to indict you every time you open them.

Mara: Today on Ghost Dog, Benn Bell takes us deep into Albert Camus's The Fall — a novel about guilt, self-deception, and what it costs to finally see yourself clearly. Let's start with the book itself and what it does to a reader across three decades.

Camus, Clamence, and the Weight of Seeing Clearly

Pip: The question at the center of this segment is deceptively simple: what does it mean to reread a great book and discover you missed almost everything? The review isn't just about The Fall — it's about what changes in a reader over thirty-four years, and why some books only reveal themselves once you've lived enough to deserve them.

Mara: The review describes arriving at the novel for a third time and finding it transformed — "there on every page was an earthquake. In each sentence an incendiary device." That's not a description of a book changing. That's a description of the reader finally being ready.

Pip: And what the reader is now ready to receive is genuinely uncomfortable. Clamence, the novel's narrator — a former Parisian lawyer who presents himself as a man of pure virtue — turns out to be running a long, elaborate con, mostly on himself.

Mara: The plot mechanics matter here. Clamence is holding court in a dive bar in Amsterdam's red light district, telling stories to a stranger he addresses as "you" — which Camus makes literal. The "you" is the reader. You are the interlocutor. You are being confessed at.

Pip: The pivot from "successful humanitarian lawyer" to "man who walked away from a drowning woman" is where the novel earns its title. He hears the body hit the water. He hears the screaming go downstream. He goes home.

Mara: And that's not even the deepest charge against him. The review traces how Clamence eventually retreats into debauchery, framing it as philosophy. He quotes Camus directly: "True love is exceptional — two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom."

Pip: Which is a beautiful sentence for a man to say while drinking himself to death in the red light district of Amsterdam. Not that I'm judging.

Mara: The review is careful to show that Clamence's self-awareness doesn't redeem him — it's actually the mechanism of his continued corruption. He invents the concept of the "judge-penitent": confess your own sins loudly enough, and you earn the right to condemn everyone else.

Pip: The novel's most devastating passage comes near the end, and the review lets it run long enough to land properly.

Mara: Camus writes: "Don't wait for the Last Judgement. It takes place every day." The little-ease passage that surrounds it — the medieval dungeon cell too small to stand in, too narrow to lie down in — is Camus's image for the condition of modern guilt. You can't stand up straight. You can't rest. You just crouch on the diagonal, indefinitely.

Pip: The review's conclusion is the part that stays with you. Guilt isn't only about what you do. It's about what you fail to do. Clamence didn't push anyone off a bridge. He just kept walking.

Mara: And the review closes with three spare lines that feel like Camus wrote them himself: no objective truth, the fall always occurs at dawn, and one sentence sufficient for modern man — "he fornicated and read the newspapers."

Pip: Right. On that note — the novel's Amsterdam setting isn't incidental. Those concentric canals, the circles of hell, the question of what it means to live at the bottom of them — that geography of guilt points somewhere.

Mara: What holds all of this together is the idea that clarity comes late, and costs something when it arrives.

Pip: Clamence saw himself perfectly clearly and used that clarity as a weapon. The question the novel leaves open is whether any of us would do differently.

Is Irony Dead?

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Is irony really dead? In his famous essay “E Unibus Pluram,” David Foster Wallace argued that irony had become so pervasive in American culture that it had lost much of its rebellious power.

Television and advertising could take any sincere statement, immediately put quotation marks around it, and turn it into a joke. Everything could be mocked, including the act of mocking itself.

And paradoxically, irony can begin as a weapon against bullshit and eventually become another form of bullshit.I don’t think irony is dead. It’s walking with a limp. It’s become harder to use well, and Wallace was diagnosing that problem rather than predicting the literal disappearance of irony.

He worried about a generation that had learned to protect itself from sincerity by making fun of everything. If you never say anything straightforwardly, you can never be embarrassed by being earnest. Irony becomes armor.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world without irony. Irony is one of the greatest tools of the intelligent. It allows us to hold two ideas simultaneously in our minds: what is said and what is actually meant. It exposes hypocrisy. It punctures pomposity. It creates distance between ourselves and our own certainty.

Think of the novel, The Fall. Camus uses irony almost like a scalpel. Clamence tells us one thing while gradually revealing something quite different about himself. The reader becomes complicit in discovering the deception. That’s philosophical irony.

And Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Mark Twain, and Jonathan Swift all understood that irony can tell the truth precisely because it refuses to state the truth directly.

Wallace may have a point: Irony becomes destructive when it is the only voice we have. If everything is a joke, nothing matters. If everything is mocked, there is nothing left to stand for. And if the writer is perpetually winking at the reader, eventually the reader wants the writer to stop winking and say something that costs him something to say.

Hmm. Maybe so.

Wallace believed in sincerity. He wasn’t really calling for the death of irony. He wanted to recover something that irony had driven underground: earnestness, vulnerability, moral seriousness, even love.

So, I’d put it this way:

Irony isn’t dead. But irony without sincerity becomes sterile, just as sincerity without irony can become naïve.

Nevertheless, some of my favorite authors, Camus, Nietzsche, Sartre, Albee, and Steinbeck seem to employ it with great authority and sophistication. I am drawn to that uncomfortable territory where truth and illusion overlap. Irony is perfectly at home there, and so am I.

One shouldn’t abandon irony.  One should know when to put the mask on andwhen to take it off.

The moment you sincerely acknowledge that you’re being ironic, the irony changes again.

As long as you are sincere, you can be ironic. Isn’t that ironic?

Here we are getting closer to the truth. The place where a statement simultaneously means what it says and something beyond what it says.

Irony isn’t dead.

It just needs a reason to live.

Podcast Episode: Book Review: Recessional by David Mamet

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Pip: Ghost Dog, where we read so you don't have to — though today's post makes a reasonable case that sometimes you shouldn't bother reading at all.

Mara: Today we're covering a book review from Benn Bell — one that sits at the intersection of craft, politics, and the particular disappointment of a writer you admire going badly off the rails.

Pip: Let's start with the book itself — David Mamet, Recessional, and the question of what happens when a genuinely talented writer loses the plot.

Book Review: Recessional by David Mamet

Mara: The tension here is real: Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross. He wrote The Verdict. His dramatic work is undeniable. So what do you do with a collection of short essays that flatly contradicts the intelligence behind those plays?

Pip: The review doesn't bury the lead. The verdict on the essays is that they are, quote, "loaded with misinformation, lies, and incorrect conclusions."

Mara: And that framing matters, because the review isn't dismissing Mamet wholesale. It's making a distinction — the playwright versus the essayist. The craft that produced great drama is simply not present in these three-and-four-page pieces.

Pip: Which makes the moments of genuine agreement more interesting, not less. There are quotes in here worth sitting with. On screenwriting: "The script exists to describe to the cameraman what to shoot and to tell the actors what to say. Everything else is besides the point. The nature of a script is a recipe."

Mara: That's a clean, useful definition — and the review accepts it as very sensible. There's also real warmth for Mamet's line about Beckett being the greatest dramatist since Shakespeare, with the addition of Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee as possible company.

Pip: So the review is doing something careful: holding the good lines and the bad arguments at the same time rather than throwing the whole book out.

Mara: Right — and then the politics arrive. Mamet argues the left is the tyrannical force in American life, that the left tried to steal the election. The review pushes back directly: domestic terror attacks, January 6th, Bill Maher calling Mamet out on his own show, Mamet responding with "skip that page."

Pip: "Skip that page" is not a rebuttal. It is, however, an accidental summary of the review's final recommendation about the book as a whole.

Mara: The review lands there too — suggesting we might skip the entire book. But the craft observations survive. The Aristotle and Campbell references Mamet cites as essential drama reading even make the reviewer's own TBR list.

Pip: So what we're left with is a writer who can still identify the right tools — he just stopped using them.

Mara: The craft holds even when the argument doesn't — that's the tension the review keeps returning to.

Pip: Next time, more from Ghost Dog on whatever Benn Bell reads, watches, or decides to push back on. We'll be here.

Podcast Episode: Night at the Museum

/ Benn Bell / 3 Comments

Pip: Ghost Dog is the kind of site where you go for a quiet afternoon at the Frick and come back with an existential crisis — which, honestly, is the correct use of a museum.

Mara: Today we're covering a piece by Benn Bell about a chance encounter with a Renaissance painting that turns into something much harder to explain. Let's start with what he found on that wall.

Night at the Museum

Pip: The setup here is almost mundane — last afternoon in New York, a detour away from the crowded rooms, a small panel in a dimly lit alcove marked simply Unknown Painter. The question the post is really asking is: what happens when the past looks back at you with your own face?

Mara: The painting stops him cold, and he describes it this way: "It wasn't just a shock; it was a physical sensation of disorientation."

Pip: That line does a lot of work. This isn't aesthetic admiration — something in the body registers before the mind catches up. The stakes are personal in a way that a museum visit almost never is.

Mara: He dates the work to circa 1505, notes the sfumato on the skin tones and the deep Renaissance pigments, and describes a double portrait — a silver-haired man in a cream doublet, a dark-curled woman in velvet, her arm around his neck, rings and a decorative chain bracelet rendered in meticulous detail. What he doesn't say yet is why any of that should matter to him personally.

Pip: Right — and the withholding is deliberate. He pulls out his phone, opens his photo roll, and the post earns its turn.

Mara: He puts it plainly: "There was no mistake. It was beyond likeness." The contours, the proportions, the individual expressions — he's comparing the painting directly to a photograph of himself and someone named Robin, and he finds them identical.

Pip: Five hundred years of paint and pigment, and the artist got the specific curvature of a nose right. That's either the most extraordinary coincidence in art history or something the post is deliberately leaving unnamed.

Mara: He closes on that ambiguity. The phrase he uses is "a revelation of continuity I wasn't prepared to receive." He photographs the painting, the plaque, and his own hand holding the reference photo next to the canvas — assembling proof for someone who wasn't there.

Pip: Robin, specifically. Who he's certain won't believe him. Which is a reasonable position to hold until you see the evidence.

Mara: What stays with me is that word — continuity. Not reincarnation, not coincidence. Something quieter and harder to dismiss.

Pip: The Frick as a place where time gets unreliable. More from Ghost Dog next time.

Currently Reading

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The Existentialist’s Survival Guide – How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age by Gordon Marino, PhD. It is a pretty good book on existentialism. I was a little skeptical at first because the author writes through the lens of Soren Kierkegaard. It’s not that I don’t like Kierkegaard; it’s that Kierkegaard doesn’t particularly resonate with me like the other existentialists. Not to worry, there were heavy doses of these other authors that I like, like Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

As a matter of fact, he checks all the boxes of some of my favorite authors, with mentions from the works of Camus: The Fall and The Stranger. Sartre: Nausea, No Exit, and Being and Nothingness. Dostevsky: Notes From Underground. These books are the touchstones of my life, and I was grateful for their inclusion.

Finally, this book was well written with many anecdotes from the author’s colorful past to illustrate his points and help inform the reader. It is more than just a self-help book. It is indeed a survival guide for living authentically.

Reading Blood Meridian for the second time, I picked up a lot that I missed the first time around 20 years ago. 20 years ago, when I first read it, I could not believe my eyes at what I saw on the page. I literally could not put the book down. I carried it with me everywhere I went until I finished reading it. In the intervening years, I read every other book Cormac McCarthy ever wrote.  He is unquestionably one of America’s finest writers.

Blood Meridian shocks one’s consciousness with its scenes of violence and haunts the imagination with its vivid descriptions of the Old West in Mexico and Texas.

Thematically, it is about the primacy of violence. The nature of good and evil, and fate vs. agency. The story follows a character known as “the kid,” who joins a group of scalp hunters known as the Glanton Gang. They are hired by the Mexican government to hunt down Apache Indians and collect their scalps for a bounty. They soon descend into madness as they stop distinguishing enemies from foes and start slaughtering everything in their path.

Another character in the gang is Judge Holden, who may or not be the devil. His philosophy is “War is God,” and combat is the ultimate truth. He refers to “the dance” by which he means a commitment to violence and the will to power. If you aren’t dancing, you aren’t truly alive.

The kid has a spark of mercy in him, and the judge views him as his natural enemy. The final confrontation takes place in an outhouse. What happens there is not mentioned but the reaction of those who look inside would suggest something awful.

Blood Meridian is not for everyone, but it is a masterpiece of storytelling, somewhere on the level of Moby Dick. It is the telling of the end of the Old West and the beginning of the New and so-called civilization.

The City and Its Uncertain Walls

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Book Review

“The City and Its Uncertain Walls” by Haruki Murakami is a richly imagined and thought-provoking narrative that explores the themes of isolation, identity, and the complexities of urban life. This is a take-off from another of his novels, “Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”. If you drill deeper into the history of this novel, you will find a short story or novella that Murakami wrote early in his career that he was unsatisfied with.  I think he may have achieved perfection with this latest iteration.

In this book, Murakami masterfully constructs a labyrinthine cityscape that serves as a mirror to the inner worlds of its inhabitants. The protagonist, whose name remains undisclosed, journeys through this enigmatic urban sprawl, encountering a myriad of characters who each add a layer of complexity to the narrative. Their stories intertwine, creating a tapestry of human experience that is as fragmented as it is compelling.

The protagonist’s quest for meaning and connection is punctuated by encounters with figures such as a reclusive artist, a disillusioned academic, and a mysterious woman who seems to hold the key to the city’s secrets. Each of these individuals grapples with their own existential dilemmas, reflecting the broader themes of isolation and identity that pervade the novel.

Murakami’s prose is both lyrical and haunting, imbuing the city with a sense of melancholy beauty. The walls that encircle the city are not just physical barriers, but also metaphors for the psychological and emotional confines that the characters must confront. The walls seem to be alive and have a life of their own as they change slightly from day to day and represent for me a sense of consciousness. They are interior walls as well.

The novel is essentially a ghost story. We don’t realize this until we are well into the narrative. Murakami is a master of magical realism, and he refers to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his telling of the tale.

Through the struggles of the various characters, the narrative probes into what it means to seek freedom and understanding in a world that is perpetually uncertain.

Some authors’ voices are missed when absent for a while. Murakami is one such author. I return to him again and again.

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

/ Benn Bell / 1 Comment

A book review

Timequake is a novel about free will. Vonnegut freely intersperses throughout the novel his own stream of consciousness. Oh, and there is also his alter ego, Kilgore Trout, who exclaims, “Oh Lordy, I am much too old experienced to start playing Russian Roulette with free will again.”

The premise of Timequake is that a Timequake, a sudden glitch in the time-space continuum, made everybody and everything do exactly what they’d done during the past decade a second time. It was déjà vu all over again for 10 years. The timeframe Vonnegut chose was February 13, 2001 – February 17, 1991. The Timequake would zapp everyone back in an instant to 1991. They had to “live” their way forward to 2001. Or you might say, back to the future again. Only when people got back to 2001 did they stop being robots of their past. Kilgore Trout would say, “Only when free will kicked in could they stop running an obstacle course of their own construction.” Free will. That is what the novel is about. Do we have it or not? That is the question. You would think that because the author mentions “when free will kicks back in” some 20-odd times he was arguing for free will. But no! Not so fast!  I’m not so sure.

Other pithy comments by Kilgore Trout would include, “If brains were dynamite, there wouldn’t be enough to blow your hat off!” and “Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch!” which is the punch line to a variation on a joke having to do with Chinese doorbells.

So, it goes.

Vonnegut goes on to say, in his own peculiar voice, that writers of his generation had reason to be optimistic because of things like the Magna Carter, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, The Emancipation Proclamation, and Article XIX of the Constitution giving women the right to vote. He advocated for two more amendments that he would like to add: Article XXIII: Every newborn shall be sincerely welcomed and cared for until maturity. And Article XXIX: Every adult who needs it shall be given meaningful work to do at a living wage.

Another pithy saying he was fond of throwing around was, “I never asked to be born in the first place!”

Photo by the author.

https://amzn.to/42BZP58

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami

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Book Review by Benn Bell

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is the fourth Murakami novel that I have read. The others are Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, and Hardboiled-Wonderland and the End of the World. I would be loath to say which one I liked the best. Probably Norwegian Wood is the greatest departure from the other three, but they all stand on their own and are all equally excellent in my view.

I love the way Murakami blends magical realism and naturalism into his novels and the way he sprinkles his writing with cultural references (mostly Western).

Wind-Up Bird is the chronicle of a man who first loses his cat and then loses his wife. It is partly a detective story as the main character searches for his cat and his missing wife. Along the way, we meet some fascinating characters and find ourselves at the bottom of a deep dark well contemplating the mysteries of the universe.

Some of the themes Murakami explores are Identity and journey to the self, polar opposites, the forgotten war, parallel universes, past and present; marriage and love, alienation, aloneness, and isolation; loyalty and trust, subconscious, and reality, and finally the power of fate.

This is a big long book and perhaps a little rambling, and at times incoherent, but it is pure Murakami and if you have a taste for his writing it is a joy to read.

The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy

/ Benn Bell / 1 Comment

Book Review

The Old Absinthe House, one of the venues depicted in the novel. Photo by the author.

Take a deep dive with me to the bottom of The Gulf of Mexico as we explore along with Bobby Western the depths of the human consciousness.

Cormac McCarthy’s, The Passenger starts off with a mystery as Bobby Western, a deep sea salvage diver, explores a downed plane in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi coastline. He and his friend Oiler find the plane submerged under 40 feet of water and all of the passengers onboard are dead and one is missing. Also missing is the black box. This missing passenger is the passenger from the title of the novel but we soon find that that is not what the book is about at all. Bobby is the actual passenger, as are we the readers, following along on Bobby’s journey into darkness.

We follow Bobby into the seedy bars on Bourbon Street in the City of New Orleans and meet a cadre of colorful characters from blue collar workers in the salvage business to street philosophers, transsexuals, race car drivers, mathematicians, physicists, and a Jewish private detective.

This is a novel of intrigue, paranoia, loss, grief and despair. It is also very funny with many moments of dark humor sprinkled throughout.

Bobby Western’s father worked with Oppenheimer on the atomic bomb for which he experiences generational guilt. His sister, Alicia, is a math wizard who is haunted by a crew of imaginary characters emanating from her schizophrenic mind. She is also a great beauty and Bobby is deeply in love with her.

The whole novel has a dreamlike quality to it but never fails to compel the reader to keep turning the pages to see what happens next.

This is perhaps McCarthys swan song and it echos much of his previous work. It is a tribute to a life well lived and a career well made. McCarthy has been compared to Melville, but I see traces of Beckett, and as another reviewer has pointed out, Kafka.

Much has been made of his signature style of no punctuation and a lack of tags for the dialogue. Sometimes one has to go back and reread a section to understand who it is talking. I found that to be true in this novel. But, I think the ambiguity is intentional on McCarthy’s part as it adds to the dreamlike quality of the work. Has written a prequel to this novel which acts as kind of a “coda” to The Passenger. I haven’t read Stella Maris as yet but when I do I expect it to give me a greater understanding of this one.

This book covers the waterfront on a variety of topics. Topics I am sure are McCarthys interests. He weaves them into the story in a very realistic, convincing and entertaining way. Here is a compendium of what his characters talk about or are involved in: Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, a trans-woman, incest, food and wine, schizophrenia, philosophy, particle physics, mathematics, and paranoia.

McCarthy has a prose style that is incomparable to other modern day writers. His descriptions are sublime and memorable. Such as: “ The lamps had come on down Bourbon Street. It had rained earlier and the moon lay in the wet street like a platinum manhole cover.” Or: “…the tide pools stood like spills of blood.” Or: “ …sunrise. It sat swagged and red in the smoke like a matrix of molten iron swung wobbling up out of a furnace.”

All in all a fine read of a much anticipated novel that more than delivers on expectations.