I wrote a while ago that I never wanted to write in the summertime, and then proceeded to write quite a bit. Well, the old feeling’s back. So here’s another entry in what I began last month:
The Occasional Annals of Idleness and Augury. No. 2. July 12, 2022.
Each day at breakfast, I hear mourning doves but see only starlings. I never imagine the right bird when I hear one. There are sounds and there are bodies. There are words and things. For instance, I know the word nightjar but not the bird it means. The word is dark glass and sky. The bird is something else—a whippoorwill? Another word. My small ignorances feel like an unwitting practice of detachment.
At a fiction reading last night, an author says the word bobolink. I can’t picture it. The story isn’t very good but it is filled with birds. They make good portents. Observing their movements was a form of fortune-telling in antiquity, though even then it was mocked as foolishness. Cicero: “What, then, is the nature of an art which makes prophets out of birds that wander aimlessly about — now here, now there — and makes the action or inaction of men depend upon the song or flight of birds?”
The world is full of inputs and noise. Some of these are birds. My brain, dazed each morning, stirs slowly to them, picks out a low coo beneath the clamor of the City. I’d like to think of it as something more, something depended upon. But it’s a foolish thought. Nightjar, bobolink, mourning dove—a foolish augury, fumbling around with words. Foolish to think a dove could be mourning rather than just seeking a mate. Foolish, at least, until the falcon snatches it, and dares you not to give meaning to all things suddenly gone.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
from the US
Jill Biden, whose Hispandering has given us one of my favorite videos of all time, is at it again:
from the UK
Some good commentary on Boris Johnson’s resignation, for The Fence:
If and when he is finally relieved of his post, he will be endlessly remunerated and quickly rehabilitated as the cuddly face of inane privilege he has occupied since time immemorial. It would be a very, very, ambitious prognosticator who ruled out his returning to the summit of British politics again.
and for Dirt:
How can I take this seriously? I’m trying, but on Twitter I’m seeing that a dangerously right-wing MP in a fluorescent yellow dress has just emerged before a booing crowd and shouted, in complete deadpan sincerity, ‘Those who laugh last laugh the loudest.’ What does it even mean? What do you want from me?
And some surreal news clips—thanks, apparently, to Hugh Grant:
from my incoming texts
“Uh oh you did call it a ‘receding plague’ in may 2020”
“I’m in the ‘basshole lounge’”
“So convinced the Shivon Zilis is an android and those Elon babies are fake”
“Yeah but instead of her being a reclusive guru in a cave, she’s on a moped in Paris with her hot french husband.”
weekly wiki
Read back about cicadas, whales, and birds. Share this post with your friends. Follow @bentapeworm on Twitter.