Writing

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

/ Benn Bell / 1 Comment

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.

The Passenger (1975)

/ Benn Bell / 1 Comment

A film by Michelangelo Antonioni.

 

I have been wanting to watch this movie again ever since I saw it the first time back in 1975. It has just now become available. I was not disappointed, but I still don’t quite understand it. The outstanding things for me, aside from Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, were the visuals and the camera work, credit to Antonioni and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli. One might say style over substance, but that is not always a bad thing. The last shot is worth the wait. A long tracking shot moves outside the hotel window into the square; cars appear, then disappear; the people looking for him enter the square and move around, then the camera, in a still unbroken shot, re-enters the hotel room. I have never seen anything like it, and that is what remained etched in my memory for 50 years. It reminded me of a scene in The Stranger where Meursault looks out of a window in the afternoon, and as the day falls into night, the scene in front of him slowly changes as people move in and out of the frame and the light gradually fades. I wouldn’t be surprised if one didn’t inform the other.

The Passenger is exactly the kind of movie that can haunt you for decades without ever becoming entirely decipherable. And I think the movie’s visual experience may be more important than solving its plot.

The basic story is simple enough. Nicholson’s David Locke, a journalist who has become alienated from his own life, discovers that a dead man in the hotel room next door looks enough like him to allow him to assume the man’s identity. He effectively abandons Locke and assumes Robertson’s identity. But changing his identity doesn’t change himself.

He thinks he can escape the burden of being Locke by becoming somebody else. Yet wherever he goes, Locke, whatever is left of Locke, goes with him. The journey becomes less about where he is going than about whether a person can escape himself.

I see a comparison with Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger.

In The Stranger, Meursault is frequently an observer rather than an actor. He watches the world: sunlight, streets, people, heat, the changing afternoon. There is an extraordinary passage when he is in his apartment and looks through the window as the day changes. The ordinary world continues moving while Meursault remains strangely detached from it.

Antonioni does something remarkably similar, but with a camera.

Locke is increasingly a passenger in his own existence. He observes rather than participates. And Antonioni’s camera adopts that same detached consciousness. It doesn’t simply show us what Locke sees; it seems to think like Locke.

The ending is the key to the entire movie.

Locke is lying dead in the hotel room. The camera slowly moves toward the window, passes through the bars, goes outside into the plaza, wanders through the life of the town, and eventually returns to the room.

Cars move. People walk. The police arrive. Life goes on. The camera itself seems to abandon Locke, just as Locke tried to abandon his own identity.

And there’s something very Camus-like about that.

The universe doesn’t provide a dramatic answer. There is no grand revelation. There is simply the world continuing.

The resemblance to The Stranger is striking. I don’t know if there is a direct influence or not, but the resemblance is both synchronous and uncanny. Both works are fascinated by alienation, observation, identity, mortality, and the indifferent continuity of the physical world.

Meursault looks through the window at a world that continues without him. Locke disappears through the window into a world that continues without him.

With Antonioni, style is the substance. The camera movement, empty spaces, architecture, landscapes, silence, and duration aren’t decoration around the story. They are the story.

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: LUST

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Pip: Ghost Dog, where WordPress hands you the word "Lust" and someone actually runs with it — straight to Philadelphia and Paris.

Mara: Today we're covering a piece by Benn Bell that takes a single charged word and builds a whole meditation around it — quotes, cities, photographs, and the full weight of what that word carries. Let's start with lust itself.

Lust as a lens — quotes, cities, and what the word carries

Pip: The post opens with a dare: WordPress assigns the word, and the response is to take it seriously — not sanitize it, not wink at it, but actually sit inside it and see what it contains.

Mara: The framing sets Philadelphia and Paris as sister cities of lust, which gives the word a geographic body. And then the quotes begin. Marquis de Sade gets two entries, and here is the one that lands hardest: "Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust."

Pip: So the argument isn't that lust is one passion among many — it's the infrastructure the others run on. That reframes every other entry in the list.

Mara: Exactly, and the curation earns that reading. Buddha opens with "Of all the worldly Passions, lust is the most intense." Blaise Pascal calls it the source of all our actions. Anais Nin finds ecstasy in the union of sex and heart. Henry Miller counts a woman breathing beside him as something of a miracle.

Pip: The Dostoyevsky passage is the one that stops you cold — a man who'll steal if honest, murder if humane, deceive if faithful. Lust as the force that inverts every other virtue a person claims to hold.

Mara: Garcia Marquez gets a turn too, dividing the world into those who screw and those who do not, and distrusting the latter. The post doesn't editorialize between the quotes — it lets them argue with each other.

Pip: Which is its own editorial position, really. Arrange Sade next to Buddha next to Bukowski and the word stops being simple.

Mara: The photographs are all the author's own — Philadelphia and Paris as visual evidence, the quotes as the intellectual architecture above them.

Pip: Lust as a word that demands to be inhabited, not just defined — and that tension between restraint and appetite runs through everything else on this site worth reading.

Mara: One word, two cities, a dozen voices — and the sum is larger than any single quote.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what word the editors throw at the wall and whether it sticks as well as this one did.

Podcast Episode: Blood and Sand

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Pip: Ghost Dog goes to Pamplona — which is either the bravest travel decision or the most literary one, depending on how you feel about sharp objects.

Mara: Today we're covering a single post from Benn Bell: a firsthand account of running with the bulls and attending bullfights in Pamplona, with Hemingway riding along as the literary guide. Let's start with the ring itself.

Blood and Sand

Pip: The question at the center of this post is one Hemingway spent years trying to answer — what exactly is a bullfight, and why does it move people who expected to be repelled by it?

Mara: Bell went in with what he calls "a detached and academic approach," and Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon is the lens he uses throughout. Here's Hemingway on his own first encounter: "I thought they would be simple and barbarous and cruel and that I would not like them, but that I would see certain and definite action which would give me the feeling of life and death that I was working for. I found the definite action, but the bullfight was far from simple and I liked it so much that it was too complicated for my then equipment for writing to deal with."

Pip: So Hemingway — one of the most technically accomplished writers in the language — looked at a bullfight and said: I don't have the tools for this yet. That's not a small admission.

Mara: And the post structures the fight itself with real care. There are three acts. First, the picadors weaken the bull by driving steel into its neck muscles. Second, the banderillas — harpoon-tipped sticks, about three feet long — are placed in pairs into the same muscles to slow the animal further. Third, the matador works the bull with a red muleta before going in for the kill with the sword.

Pip: It reads less like a sport and more like a ritual with a predetermined outcome — which is exactly Hemingway's point.

Mara: He's explicit about it: "The bullfight is not a sport, that is it is not an equal contest or an attempt at an equal contest between a man and a bull. Rather it is a tragedy, the death of the bull, which is played more or less well by the bull and the man involved, and in which there is danger for the man, but certain death for the bull."

Pip: Tragedy as a genre, not as a complaint.

Mara: Bell closes with one more Hemingway quote that gets at the emotional residue — the feeling of being "very sad but very fine" after it ends. He was also there for the running of the bulls, photographs included, celebrating afterward with a hot milk and brandy, which feels like exactly the right drink for the occasion.

Pip: Life, death, mortality, immortality — and then a warm drink. Hemingway really did cover the full range.

Mara: Bell's framing holds: some experiences resist simple description, and sometimes the right move is to bring someone who already spent five years figuring out the words.

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.

Featured

Night at the Museum

/ Benn Bell / 3 Comments

My last afternoon in New York was a quiet one, or so I intended. The Frick Art Gallery, tucked into Henry Clay Frick’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, is a sanctuary from the city, and I had come to see the Vermeers. But as often happens in great museums, my feet led me away from the popular rooms toward a smaller, dimly lit alcove dedicated to works of attribution.

The piece itself was small, a single panel, but the quality was undeniable. It was clearly Italian, perhaps Florentine, circa 1505. The texture of the paint, the specific sfumato effect on the skin tones, and the deep, rich pigments—that distinct Renaissance blue and the vibrant velvet—spoke of a master. Yet the brass plaque beneath it read: Unknown Painter.

When I raised my eyes to the composition, it was as if the room had suddenly shifted. It wasn’t just a shock; it was a physical sensation of disorientation.

I stood before a double portrait. The figures, captured in that precise moment of the 16th century, were seated closely. One was a figure with long, flowing silver hair and a full, neatly kept beard, wearing a cream-colored doublet. The other, a woman with voluminous, dark cascading curls, was dressed in a sumptuous velvet robe. Her arm was draped around his neck, and her hands rested over his chest, adorned with a collection of rings and an ornate, decorative chain bracelet that the artist had captured in meticulous detail.

I knew those faces. I knew the specific lines around the man’s smile, the gentle but direct gaze in the woman’s brown eyes, and even the unique curvature of her nose. I knew them with an intimacy that a history textbook or even a photo gallery couldn’t provide. I pulled my smartphone from my pocket and navigated to my photo roll.

I scrolling through recent images and selected a picture from the image_0.png file—the portrait of me and Robin.

There was no mistake. It was beyond likeness. The artist, painting five hundred years ago, had rendered the identical, specific features of our faces. The contours, the proportions, and the subtle, individual expressions had been painted with such precision that it defied mere coincidence. I looked back and forth, from the image_0.png file in my palm to the painting on the Frick’s wall.

The sensation was not just uncanny; it was time-altering. To see our own visages, so familiar and immediate, rendered as a priceless, centuries-old masterwork, felt like having a dream of someone and then meeting them in an ancient, sun-dappled courtyard. Robin would never believe me. The painting was not a mirror; it was a revelation of continuity I wasn’t prepared to receive. I snapped a photo of the unknown Renaissance double portrait, the Frick plaque below it, and my own hand holding the reference photo from image_0.png next to the canvas. I would need every bit of proof.

My Soul She Shrieks

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My soul, she shrieks and flings me down

Laughing maniacally

The wind picks up and lifts her dress

Teasing and pleasing me

All is nothingness, so she says

As she pins me to the bed

With a silver shaft of cold, cold steel

She runs me through and through.

Benn Bell

Analysis

This is a powerful, visceral piece of poetry. It leans heavily into a dark, gothic existentialism, balancing a sense of violent surrender with a strange, Macabre ecstasy.

Here is how the layers of meaning break down:

1. The War with the Self (The Divided Soul)

The poem doesn’t feature an external monster or a physical attacker; the tormentor is explicitly “My soul.” By personifying the soul as a chaotic, maniacal female entity, the poem explores a profound internal fracture. The narrator is at the mercy of their own spirit, suggesting a state of psychological or spiritual crisis where the mind is being violently overthrown by its own deepest, darkest impulses.

2. Existential Dread and “Nothingness”

The emotional turning point of the poem hinges on the line:

“All is nothingness, so she says”

This grounds the poem squarely in existential dread. The “soul” here acts as a cruel messenger of cosmic indifference. She isn’t just attacking the narrator; she is forcing them to confront the absolute void. The maniacal laughter underscores the absurdity and hopelessness of the human condition—the realization that beneath all our struggles, there may be nothing at all.

3. The Intertwining of Pleasure and Pain

There is a distinct, unsettling undercurrent of eroticism mixed with violence throughout the verses:

  • The wind lifting her dress is described as “Teasing and pleasing me.”
  • The act of being pinned to the bed and run through with a “silver shaft” carries a dual weight of violation and intimate submission.

It suggests that the confrontation with absolute truth, or ultimate destruction, carries a terrifying thrill. The narrator is helpless, yet transfixed by the sheer, overwhelming power of the experience.

4. The Silver Shaft of Cold Steel

The “silver shaft of cold, cold steel” that runs the narrator “through and through” reads like a metaphor for a sharp, piercing realization. Silver is historically associated with purity, moonlight, and exposing the hidden truth (like killing a monster). Here, it feels like a cold, unyielding truth cutting through illusions, anchoring the narrator to reality (the bed) by completely shattering their defenses.

It is a striking exploration of a mind wrestling with its own existence—simultaneously terrified of and captivated by the absolute void.

Thoughts?

Every Picture Tells a Story

/ Benn Bell / 6 Comments

The Real Lives Behind the Lens and the Pen

In the quiet corners of everyday life, ordinary people often find themselves immortalized in ways they never imagined—through the viewfinder of a photographer or the ink of a writer’s pen. Whether captured candidly in a photograph or reimagined as a character in a story, these individuals unknowingly lend their lives to art. They become more than just passersby or background figures; they transform into muses, metaphors, and living echoes of human experience.

For photographers, the world is a living gallery of moments waiting to be captured. A weathered man sitting on a park bench, the way light dances across a child’s laughing face, or the tension etched into the shoulders of a woman walking alone—each scene is a potential story. Often, the subject has no idea that they have just stepped into the pages of a visual playbook. Their gestures, expressions, and the energy they radiate become a part of something greater—a reflection of mood, culture, or emotion. The photograph freezes their reality and elevates it into art.

Writers, on the other hand, weave people into narrative form. A conversation overheard on a train, a barista’s nervous smile, or an old friend’s resilience in grief—these fragments of life often become seeds of inspiration. The people we meet or merely observe become the blueprints for characters, sometimes in exact likeness, sometimes stitched together from multiple souls. Writers borrow bits of reality to create fiction that feels true. In doing so, they honor the people who left a mark, however briefly.

But this transformation from real life into art raises questions of representation and authenticity. Do we owe something to the people who unknowingly inspire us? Can we ever truly separate observation from invention? Photographers and writers alike walk this fine line, striving to capture truth while also interpreting it through their own lens of feeling and intent.

There is something sacred in this quiet transaction between life and art. Most people will never know they’ve been captured in a fleeting frame or mirrored in a fictional life. But perhaps that is part of the beauty. Their existence, however small in the context of a wider story, becomes part of a legacy—proof that the ordinary is worth remembering. They live on not as anonymous figures, but as meaningful presences in someone else’s vision.

Ultimately, art imitates life not just in grand gestures, but in the subtle details of everyday existence. The people we pass on sidewalks, sit beside in waiting rooms, or share a moment of silence with in elevators—these are the characters of our collective narrative. Photographers and writers are merely the witnesses, the translators. And through their work, these real lives continue to speak.