1
In the Midwest, on a bus, a man takes large pulls from a bottle of whole milk. An erratic dinging sound: someone bumping up against the REQUEST STOP button. I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees, she’s saying, What is that supposed to mean?
2
The afternoon is wide and blue and fringed with prairie flowers. Everywhere go blackbirds shouldered with red. I can whistle the first two sounds but not the third. Tweet, tweet, [???]. Con-ka-lee. Poo-tee-weet. Who-who-weee. Another blackbird alights on some rosinweed and regards the improbable Lake, the City so immensely assembled beside it. The day is all distance, its white sails like feathers, blades, shapes cut from paper. An ice cream vendor tinkles and clangs his cart across the horizon. Reggaeton drifts over from a nearby hammock. They’ve got these Dont Swim signs but they’ve got a perfect ladder! cries an older man, who frontflips into the water with a smack. Who, who, we. Hard as I try, I can never quite whistle the third.
3
He holds up his guitar, wordlessly counting time between strums. The sound of cicadas in the trees, the summer holding its breath. My head spins in this caesura. And then—a thunderstorm of static—crashes down through our bodies—
IT ISNT SOMETHIN YOU CAN CHOOSE / BE / TWEEN
IT ISNT COMIN IN TWOS / AND / THREES
ALWAYS LOOKIN FOR THAT ONE / SURE / THING
OH YOU WANT IT SO DES / PERATE / LY
ben tapeworm1
on the turntable
from the discourse
Christian Lorentzen on Christopher Hitchens for Harper’s:
The lifespan of writing is perhaps the central question of literary journalism. One of the ironies of the craft is that in the relentless culling of time, it may be the form that’s the first to go.
Jared Marcel Pollen on Mallarmé, McLuhan, and the waning of the novel for LA Review of Books:
As the next Trump novels and pandemic novels begin to roll out, it’s worth thinking about what will become of them. Will they touch anything that hasn’t already been touched? Will we even have the patience to read them, to revisit their events? By the time they arrive, will they already be passé by virtue of simply being late? And will they bring with them any epiphanies? More likely, they will simply be plugged in with the rest of the code, as the novel itself now seems but one datapoint in an all-encompassing and ever-accelerating process of updates and incorporations[.]
Alissa Wilkinson interviews Erich Schwartzel on China and Hollywood for Vox:
[Schwartzel:] So what they decided to do was to launch a string of schools called Disney English, which would essentially teach young Chinese children English, but using Disney characters: Mickey wants an apple, or Luke Skywalker is 30 years old. I walked by one of these schools when I was there, and I remember that Toy Story 4 was coming out that week; all of the teachers were wearing Toy Story 4 T-shirts.
from my incoming texts
“The witching hour of talking shit”
“But a better while of very recent, I think”
“Last call, baseball tomorrow!”
“Oh yes come eat these sweets”
weekly wiki
Read back for Rockaway vibes, a New York City triptych, and the disappearance of the Aral Sea. Follow @bentapeworm on Twitter. If you’re enjoying this almanac, share it with friends!
1 — Friday night / CTA bus after The National performance
2 — Thursday afternoon / regarding Lake Michigan near Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary
3 — Saturday evening / Low performance / Pitchfork Music Festival