Author: abendelow
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Memoir: Beginnings and first recollections 1961-65
I am born at 10:10 pm on May 7th in a room at West Suburban Hospital, in Oak Park, Illinois. My parents are Ernest Bruce Bendelow, 30, and his wife, Patricia, 29. They currently reside on Second Avenue in the near-by Cook County suburb Maywood, but Bruce will soon complete purchase of a three-story, four-square […]
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Memoir chapter: pre-me
My father Ernest Bruce Bendelow’s mother and father both came from Scotland to the United States. He father’s father came in 1892, his mother’s in 1903. My father’s mother, Mary (Mae) Loudon Gibson (1896-1977), and her family came from East Ayrshire, a green region of rolling hills south of Glasgow, Scotland. Their town was Dalmellington. […]
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Book review: Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility
Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility (2011) As an enthusiast of his A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), I wanted to totally enjoy this earlier effort of the author’s, but its sketchy conclusion left me wanting. Until the ending (and after the first two chapters), I was entirely enthralled by this time-travel to New Year’s Eve, 1938 […]
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Memoir introduction: Losing my religion–from dispensationalism to pantheism
Over MLK Weekend 2022, my wife and I enjoyed a winter “staycation” in the Loop, where we stayed in a wonderful room on the 12th floor of the historic Reliance Building, arguably the finest remaining skyscraper of the First Chicago School of architecture. The accommodations in the room were clean and very comfortable: not […]
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Memoir Self-reflection: Black and White thinking
As suggested elsewhere, a big part of my family’s culture was centered around the Bible-believing Plymouth Brethren. In the Austin neighborhood, on Leamington Avenue, this group of fundamentalist Christians that included my father’s grandparents established this “Gospel Hall” (photo from 2018) in the 1910s. The congregants of this fellowship ordered their lives by its weekly […]
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Memoir Foreword
“Now also when I am old and grey-headed, O God, forsake me not; UNTIL I have shown thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to everyone that is to come.” — Psalm 92:13 Statement of purpose Why this memoir? Who benefits from it? And in the first place, how real, or even in the author’s […]
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Reflections on three Atwood novels
Having read Handmaid’s Tale and then this spring The Testaments, I decided to read deeper into the novels of Margaret Atwood, and my step-daughter, a huge fan, suggested the following titles as a way into her non-Gilead narratives. I’m very grateful for her suggestions, as you’ll see below. Cat’s Eye (1988) Kunstlerroman of a Canadian woman […]
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An empowering Nobel Laureate
One of the joys of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday has been the proliferation of Youtube performances of songs in the vast Dylan oeuvre by famous and amateur performers across the globe. I’m sure other Nobel literature laureates have inspired their readers (or, if poets, their listeners) to perform the author’s works in response to the award, […]
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A new genre for romance? A review of two of Paulo Coelho's books
Coelho, Paulo. By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept (1994) Coelho, Paulo. Hippie. (2018) Pir Vilayat Khan recently commented to me, “Your first Rumi volumes seemed very sexual.” He’s right. There is too much of that energy in the first work with Rumi I did, especially in some of the quatrains. I was […]
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Tracking adolescent development in Rowling: Freudian and Jungian growth in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince
Sam Pull ACP Composition Bendelow 1 May 2018 Tracking adolescent development in Rowling: Freudian and Jungian growth in Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince “Rowling has artfully created a textual looking-glass where young readers can observe their own unconscious conflicts in a displaced and imaginary form, indulge their fantasy lives, and find magical solutions to […]
The Wikiness 