If one of the challenges of a weekly newsletter is not just having something to say but having something worth saying, this past week has been particularly confounding. I experienced two things that halted my impulse to analyze and describe: The Turin Horse (2011), Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s merciless anti-parable of a film, and The Oval Window, a long and trying poem by J. H. Prynne that was recently published in an annotated, book-length edition. I would highly recommend both of them, though they are odd things to recommend. They defy the predominant mode of recommending, which is fundamentally one of pleasure and relevance: that familiar, algorithmic, jacket-copy language of vibe- and audience-curation. The Turin Horse and The Oval Window are difficult and masterful and have been lodged in my head for days. I wouldn’t know how to blurb them if I wanted to.
One of the impressions I get from being very online is that culture is often treated as a system of inputs and outputs, a pipeline that runs from teaser trailer to thinkpiece, through the metering stations of consumers and curators, before vanishing into the archive or behind the paywall. (Or vanishing altogether: few things are more taken for granted in our age of surfeit than the inevitability of preservation.) This is no doubt due to actual, material factors: media consolidation, venture capital, PR. But it likely comes as much from personal fatigue: the fear that cultural criticism, that exercise so dear to my heart, is just one vast consumer guide; the feeling of hollowness in the midst of plenty; that sensation of realizing you’re 20 minutes into a podcast without having listened to a single word.
The austerity of The Turin Horse and the inscrutability of The Oval Window demanded a kind of viewing and reading incongruous with the notion of consumption. They felt less like objects than mysteries to contend with. The attention I paid them did not feel like a transaction in the attention economy so much as an antidote, a challenge, a gift.
So again, I recommend them both, if only as a reminder to myself that the ultimate point of weekly curation is not to promote a product, create teams, or “drive engagement,” but rather to advocate for the possibility of other, different, new encounters.
ben tapeworm
A couple more things—
I have several more print editions left that I’d love to give away. It’s a hand-bound booklet with a print-only piece I wrote for the fourth November issue. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written for this project, and I’m happy with how it turned out. It also includes brief contributions from other writers, about everything from listicles to Jim Morrison to ghost stories. If you want one, reply to this email or bentapeworm@gmail.com, and I’ll put one in the mail.
on the turntable
on the screen
The Turin Horse (2011) dir. Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky
on the bookshelf
The Oval Window by J. H. Prynne
from my incoming texts
“Im getting Mitski from all angles”
“Chicago vibe is there’s never a line for the bar lol”
“I am trying not to bust on a zoom call”
weekly wiki
Read back about the death of storytelling, the death of Joan Didion, and the end of 2021. Email me for a print issue. Share this post with friends. Join us on Discord and Twitter.