Jacob Bender's Blog, page 17

Sweet Hitch Hiker

Picking up a hitch hiker is a split-second decision.  Like all good acts, you have to decide ahead of time if you're going to do it at all.  Otherwise, you'll be speeding down the freeway in the middle of desert Colorado (like I was) when you'll suddenly see a lonesome stranger with his thumb out, and you'll at once worry what if he's a serial killer? An escaped convict?  A strung-out drug addict? Mentally unstable? A scammer?  A con artist?  A hijacker?  What if...

Mission Pics Greatest Hits

This year will mark the Decennial of my return home from my LDS mission to Puerto Rico, which was now officially too long ago.

To put that in perspective, the day I got home, our greatest hope against Bush was Kerry (dark days indeed).  Facebook wasn't on any of our radars, smartphones weren't even a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eyes, and digital cameras were in ascendancy, such that suddenly all my rolls of actual film that you have to get developed at Walmart felt hopelessly anachronistic--an...

My Proposed Bob Marley Soundtrack for a Joseph Smith biopic

 Run with me a minute on this one: for I suspect that one of the things too many people really fail to understand about "Mormonism" is that we really do think Joseph Smith was a prophet of God.  As in, he's like Moses, or Abraham, or Paul beholding Christ on the road to Damascus.  But then, not too many religious sects nowadays have a tradition of a bona fide, contemporary Prophet who can lead his people to the Promised Land, while bringing forth a Zion of no rich/no poor, wher...

On Midwest McDonalds

Little under a year ago, I was driving through Keokuck, IA when I saw a McDonalds with a "Closed" sign.  "A McDonalds!  Closed!" I thought in wonder, "And in the Midwest no less!"  I was impressed.

But then about a mile later, I passed an even bigger McDonalds, one with a "Grand Opening" banner.  I was less impressed.

C'mon America, we're better than this.  Or at least should be.

West Trade Review

Yesterday I discussed the endless rejection endemic to the humanities, how you learn to be thick-skinned about it, to never take it personally, to just sort of roll with the punches and find better reasons to do what you do than mere personal validation.

But then every so often you do get accepted--by total strangers no less!--and even if it ultimately amounts to just an extra line on your CV, it is wholly appropriate to let yourself feel good in those moments.

For what's this?

Did the West Tra...

On The Endless Rejection of the Humanities

I tried my best to cheer her up.  She'd been rejected from an summer internship at the university literary journal, one for which I'd helped edit her cover letter.  She was a few years older than my other students; she'd worked awhile in that most eminently safe and recommended of careers, health care, before she finally decided she'd had it, that life's too short to merely help others prolong theirs, so she would instead pursue her desires to become a writer.  Folks with the c...

The Faustian Deal of Inaction

So it's been a long winter.  Literally.  Those polar vortexes simply would not quit hurling off from the Arctic Circle and ravaging across the Midwest.  Spring Break rolled around in name only, the corn was planted at least 2 weeks late, and only recently has the greening grass and blossoming trees made this region look less like Cormac McCarthy's The Road and more like someplace actually fit for human habitation.

But metaphorically, too; this winter also featured, for me at lea...

Meeting Manny Fox

So I of course knew nothing about Manny Fox the one and only time I met him; only years later would the obituaries inform that he was some sort of Broadway legend, a prolific producer who had worked with the likes of George Burns, Orson Welles, Barbara Streisand, Johnny Cash, Salvador Dali, Louis Armstrong, and etc, etc.

But then, I was only 19 after all, and a Mormon missionary in Puerto Rico.

I was in my first area, in the gorgeous coastal town of Humacao; in those days the F-14s still flew h...

The Final Swindle of Quevedo's Buscon

(An old paper from my Utah days, posted in hopes of rectifying the incorrigible moralistic reading of a novel that is obviously anything but.)
           Francisco de Quevedo’s famed 1626 picaresque novel El Buscon (The Swindler) famously ends with the line, I thought things would go better in the New World and another country. But they went worse, as they always will for anybody who thinks he only has to move his dwelling without changing hi...

On The Great Gatsby and Turning 30

"...I just remembered that today's my birthday."
-Nick Harroway, The Great Gatsby 

About a month ago I finally finished The Great Gatsby for the first time since High School, wherein I realized was that this isn't a book for High Schoolers at all.

Much like how "We Are Young" by Fun isn't actually about being young, but about how "Tonight we are young"--that is, we haven't been young in awhile and may never be again--The Great Gatsby is not about the recklessness of youth, but of the reckle...