Men Waiting Badly: Antonio di Benedetto, Bill Callahan, and the Comedy of Masculine Drift
Some men can turn waiting into a full identity. They are beings-in-suspension. They are waiting for the transfer, the call, the woman, the apology, the promotion, the revelation, the clean beginning, the better self that is supposedly on its way and will, any day now, assume control of the situation.
Until then, they endure. They observe. They form opinions. They confuse delay with depth.
There is a very specific type of art that explores the comedy of masculine ego, a crossroads where brilliant existential books and music meet to look at people who are completely stuck in place. This is where Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama and Bill Callahan’s songs start to line up with eerie precision.
On paper, the pairing sounds a little unlikely. You’ve got an Argentine novel about colonial bureaucracy and humiliation on one side; a dry-voiced American songwriter on the other, singing about birds, horses, rivers, roads, women, loneliness, and the occasional bad decision delivered with suspicious calm.
But the connection is real.
Both di Benedetto and Callahan are brilliant on a particular type of man that’s neither the grand tragic hero, nor the charismatic disaster, nor the mythic outlaw. A smaller and more recognizable figure. The man who keeps waiting for life to confirm his importance. The man who mistakes drift for wisdom. The man who has stood there so long he has started calling it a philosophy.
That is Zama’s whole condition.
And it is all over Callahan’s music too, especially on Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle and Apocalypse, where his narrators sound like they have learned a few things, lost a few things, and are still not entirely sure whether they are deep or just stuck in an unusually elegant way.
Both artists understand masculine failure in the least flattering register. It isn’t explosive failure or noble failure. Most of the time it’s not even properly tragic failure. It’s something slower and more embarrassing.
The failure of men who keep expecting the world to reward their pose.
Diego de Zama, professional waiter
The first thing to say about Diego de Zama is that he is not waiting nobly.
He is waiting resentfully and vainly, with the injured self-importance of a man who believes his real life has been delayed by clerks, distance, incompetence, and the failure of the universe to recognize quality when it sees it. He is posted in a colonial outpost, far from the center of power he believes should properly frame him. He wants a transfer. He wants status restored. He wants movement. He wants his life back.
Instead, he gets more waiting.
That is the whole sick joke of Zama. Zama treats his current life as a temporary inconvenience, a bad stretch before the real story begins again. He believes in the future the way some people believe in inheritance, as something already owed.
It is a deeply human lie, which is part of why the novel cuts so hard. Most people have told themselves some less catastrophic version of it. Once I move. Once I get the job. Once they notice me. Once this stretch is over. Then the real life starts.
Di Benedetto’s cruelty is that he does not let Zama keep that illusion. And Zama, who thinks he is temporarily misplaced, starts shrinking inside it.
The novel is brutal because it refuses to grant him the dignity of pure tragedy. He is too vain, too needy for that. He is constantly trying to preserve the fantasy that he has not failed, only been postponed.
That distinction is everything to him.
And it is very funny, in the driest possible way.
Bill Callahan and the man who has been standing there a while
Bill Callahan often sounds like a man who has been alone long enough to become interesting, but not necessarily better.
His narrators watch closely. They move slowly. They make strange little jokes. They sound thoughtful, then suddenly wounded. They drift through roads, horses, rivers, rooms, women, mornings, birds, and stretches of quiet as if stillness might eventually reveal something useful.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just gives them another angle from which to remain themselves.
That’s the part of Callahan’s work that connects so strongly to Zama. His songs are full of men who sound calm, but the calm is never entirely trustworthy. You can hear the effort in it. These are not healed men, these are men who have developed a style of endurance.
On Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, that endurance becomes inward and domestic. Failed love, strange dreams, repetitive thoughts, sadness that has learned to speak softly so as not to alarm the furniture. “Jim Cain” opens like someone trying to account for his life without pretending the books will balance. “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” turns heartbreak into language breakdown, which is both funny and sad because the nonsense syllables feel absurd until you realize they are doing real emotional work. “Too Many Birds” repeats itself until repetition itself becomes the point.
Callahan’s great trick is that he can sound steady without sounding cured.
Then Apocalypse widens the frame. Suddenly there are roads, horses, work, America, rivers, movement. It can almost look, at first glance, like masculine myth-making. But Callahan undercuts that too well to let it become simple swagger. “Drover” gives you labor and command, but also a man half swallowed by his own image. “America!” gestures toward big national and masculine symbols, then quietly pokes at them. “Riding for the Feeling” is one of his great departure songs, beautiful and also faintly suspect. Leaving is real, but so is the possibility that leaving is just another posture.
Now we’re back in Zama territory.
One man is physically trapped in colonial bureaucracy. The other is often out on the road, under a big sky, with some animal nearby and plenty of room to project meaning. But movement is not the same as transformation. A man can remain in one place and avoid himself. A man can keep moving and do exactly the same thing.
That’s the joke and also the wound.
Waiting as masculine performance
Waiting has one enormous advantage as a self-concept in that it lets a man believe he has not failed yet. He has merely been delayed.
That is Zama’s central psychological maneuver. If he is only waiting, then the real test has not arrived. The real version of himself has not yet been called into service. His fantasy stays alive because the world has not officially rendered judgment.
Delay preserves dignity. Or seems to.
It says: I am not small, I am pending.
That is why his waiting becomes a kind of performance. He is not just enduring circumstances. He is preserving a story about himself. The future becomes the vault where he keeps his imagined importance.
Callahan’s narrators understand a version of this too. The man on the road, the man looking at birds, the man speaking slowly enough to sound wise, the man riding toward some feeling rather than naming what he has actually done or failed to do. Sometimes that figure may be wise. Sometimes he is just very committed to the atmosphere of wisdom.
“Riding for the Feeling” is a perfect example. It is beautiful, open, moving. It is also just slippery enough to raise the question whether this motion is a truth, or a style of not staying put long enough to be known?
That’s the Callahan move at his best. He lets the myth rise, then leaves enough air around it for you to notice the human being still awkwardly standing inside it.
Zama does something similar, only without the music and the sky to help him. He is all pose and waiting-room erosion. He confuses endurance with significance. He thinks his dissatisfaction is proof that he was meant for more.
And maybe he was, but dissatisfaction is cheap. Plenty of fools have it.
The dry joke that hurts later
Neither di Benedetto nor Callahan is interested in letting these men become solemn monuments. That’s part of what makes them so good.
Zama is funny in a way that sneaks up on you, because the comedy lives in the gap between self-image and reality. Zama wants rank, beauty, desire, recognition. The world keeps handing hi the bureaucratic equivalent of a shrug. He sees himself as a man temporarily misplaced by history. The novel keeps presenting him as a man repeatedly reduced by his own vanity.
That reduction is cruel.
It is also funny, because so much of his suffering comes from the insistence on maintaining a pose that stopped working several humiliations ago.
Callahan’s humor works the same sore spot. He can deliver a line so dryly that you laugh before you realize he has just opened something genuinely sad. “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” is a joke until it becomes a little portrait of how feeling can outlast language. “Too Many Birds” sounds almost absurd in its simplicity until the repetition starts to feel like the mind hitting the same wall over and over. “America!” plays with grandeur but never lets grandeur settle.
His jokes deepen the sadness, they don’t release it.
That is the shared method here. Dryness is feeling under pressure, refusing to make a scene. Both di Benedetto and Callahan understand that if you underplay the wound, the reader or listener may lean closer. The joke lands first. The bruise arrives a beat later.
And the bruise tends to last longer.
Why the cruelty lands
It would be easy to call all this cruel, and sometimes it is.
But it is not shallow cruelty.
Neither di Benedetto nor Callahan is simply pointing at pathetic men and laughing. Zama’s ridiculousness grows out of real human hunger to matter, to be seen, to move, to escape the terror that your life has narrowed without your permission. Callahan’s narrators, for all their dry distance, know loneliness from the inside. They are not empty men. They are evasive men. That’s more painful.
What both artists allow, finally, is embarrassment. And that is where the truth usually leaks out.
Not the polished truth. Not the noble truth. The awkward version. The version that waits too long, leaves too early, makes the wrong joke, stands there with a little too much self-consciousness, watches the birds, and hopes the silence will make the meaning arrive on its own.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
No rescue coming
There is no rescue coming in Zama. Not the kind Zama wants, anyway.
And in Bill Callahan’s songs, the road can keep going, the river can keep shining, the horse can keep moving, the birds can keep gathering, but the man still has to live with himself when the song ends.
That is the small, devastating truth both artists share. Sometimes a man is just standing there badly, hoping the world will turn his disappointment into significance.
Sometimes the best art is the kind that notices the absurdity, smiles without mercy, and still lets the ache remain visible.
This post is part of Shared Obsessions, a Melodic Margin series about the strange, revealing overlaps between books and music. Each piece pairs a writer and artist to explore the shared moods, fears, images, and questions that echo across different art forms. Including:
The Room You Can’t Leave: Infinite Jest, The Weeknd, and the Trap of Desire
