EBOOK
About
A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both is a collection of stories about love, the most elusive and problematic of all phenomena. With a mix of traditional, literary prose and bold—some might even say irresponsible—experimentation, Ben Greenman explores the ins and outs of modern romance. Expect tears, nudity, and recrimination. From the half-hearted summer affair between a part-time bartender and a married doctor in a Miami hotel to the cryptic pseudo-erotic love letters to a friend who is "more than a friend," we experience the love of pop songs, the love of cohabitation in Chicago, and love that is so transporting it takes us to the moon—literally.
Introduction
I was Ben's second-grade art teacher. I tried at the time to get him to see that the world was composed of both large movements and small decisions. Did he grasp it? Not at the time—mostly he just drew trees with odd-shaped fruit hanging from them—but he appears to have made up ground since then. I especially appreciate the way that the title of the book holds together the opposites of orientation (the compass) and escape (the balloon), not to mention the way the title conflates the zero of nullity and the O of orgasm. Has anyone ever titled a book with the shape of a circle before? I do not know but I hope it happens again and again.
That is all I have to say, and still I have something more to say. Years later, I encountered Ben again. By then I was not teaching art full-time, but substituting in that same school district, and Ben was not a second grader, but a tenth grader. Eight years had passed in my life; it was as if eight hundred had passed in his. Substitutes are the strangest kind of monarch, complicit in their own overthrow, and I decided that day to give the children an impossible assignment. "In your life, you will have to choose between options," I said. "Write a short story that justifies not one choice or another, but the process of choosing." I made the assignment from fun, perhaps even a touch of sadism. I could not have expected that the students would rise to the challenge. Many of them did a superb job with such an abstract assignment. Something about Ben's response struck a chord in me, and I kept it among my papers. When I learned he was working on a story collection, I sent it to him, and he called me, laughing. "You know why I wrote that?" he said. "To impress a girl. A specific girl. She was sitting to the right of me. Her name was Mary Pollock." I laughed, too, even though I think that he was not being honest. He did not write it to impress a girl so much as to calm himself in the presence of a girl he wished to impress. This is why we create: to keep our demons down without banishing them entirely.
Introduction
I was Ben's second-grade art teacher. I tried at the time to get him to see that the world was composed of both large movements and small decisions. Did he grasp it? Not at the time—mostly he just drew trees with odd-shaped fruit hanging from them—but he appears to have made up ground since then. I especially appreciate the way that the title of the book holds together the opposites of orientation (the compass) and escape (the balloon), not to mention the way the title conflates the zero of nullity and the O of orgasm. Has anyone ever titled a book with the shape of a circle before? I do not know but I hope it happens again and again.
That is all I have to say, and still I have something more to say. Years later, I encountered Ben again. By then I was not teaching art full-time, but substituting in that same school district, and Ben was not a second grader, but a tenth grader. Eight years had passed in my life; it was as if eight hundred had passed in his. Substitutes are the strangest kind of monarch, complicit in their own overthrow, and I decided that day to give the children an impossible assignment. "In your life, you will have to choose between options," I said. "Write a short story that justifies not one choice or another, but the process of choosing." I made the assignment from fun, perhaps even a touch of sadism. I could not have expected that the students would rise to the challenge. Many of them did a superb job with such an abstract assignment. Something about Ben's response struck a chord in me, and I kept it among my papers. When I learned he was working on a story collection, I sent it to him, and he called me, laughing. "You know why I wrote that?" he said. "To impress a girl. A specific girl. She was sitting to the right of me. Her name was Mary Pollock." I laughed, too, even though I think that he was not being honest. He did not write it to impress a girl so much as to calm himself in the presence of a girl he wished to impress. This is why we create: to keep our demons down without banishing them entirely.