I never seem to want to write in summertime. Particularly in New York City, which for most of the year contracts into a cold labyrinth of small rooms and tunnels, summer is a long-awaited season: refulgent, permissive, ecstatic. The world—so suddenly blue, so suddenly green—calls away from the office, away from the screens. The parks and streets, long dormant, blaze and teem and reek. We wish ourselves away from the drafting-desk of language and instead into our bodies, into music, into revelry and togetherness.
The summer brings torpor, too, its satisfactions mingling with disaffection like sweat and sunscreen. In the papers and on Twitter, the clamor to eulogize and explain grows ever louder, the sound of a country trying to write itself out of barbarity. I want ever more to turn away. Like a pilgrim or a coward. To turn away from writing and into summer. Into its snapshots, its oceans, its overripe fruit. Its refusals, its feasts, its thunder. I want to leave writing in the magazines at the beach, the grocery lists and recipes, the abandoned novels, the occasional annals of idleness and augury. And so—
The Occasional Annals of Idleness and Augury. No. 1. May 31, 2022.
On the rooftop of my apartment building last week, we saw a peregrine falcon swoop past, clutching a pigeon in its talons. It settled atop a nearby building and slowly ripped the bird apart. A few days later, four F-15s roared over the same roof, flying low and loud, banking around Manhattan and disappearing in the heat. It was late in the day but the sun was high. Summer in the City, in America. Its arsenals, its immensities. Its fearsome postponements of dusk.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the bookshelf
Published in French in 2008 and translated into English by Amanda DeMarco in 2020, Nathalie Léger’s Expositions is a wonderful enigma. Part archival quest, part historical study, part autobiographical divagation, part discourse on womanhood, Expositions is a brief foray into the life of the Countess of Castiglione, the Italian aristocrat who famously wished to be the most photographed woman of the century. The narrator digs through the archives in an attempt to grasp, not merely La Castiglione herself, but the narrator’s own elusive fascination—notions about photography, beauty, and vanity that only gradually take shape. The book unfolds like a cryptic exhibit: each scrap of text, each description, each thought or quotation, gathers meaning and intensity from that which Léger places around it. As Léger herself writes at one point: “[…] the project of any exhibition: merely to arrange some secretly abandoned thing, with a noun as a subject. Only that which can be written (displaced, evaded, blurred) in its disorder and even in its order” (106-7).
from the discourse
In his Unpopular Front newsletter, John Ganz writes about the assault-rifle-ification of American life:
For many, this is the American ideal itself: the rugged individual at the border of anarchy, able to defend his own. But the cowboy with his six-shooter or his shotgun, his cynical good humor, his alternation from cruelty to innocence and basic decency suggestive of primitive man, has been replaced with a more sinister figure: the cowled special forces operator, the death squad member, silent, cold, impersonal, almost a robot, programmed to slaughter.
from my incoming texts
“I have a funny story from therapy today”
“I would like your cat”
“(hoping to find some good cherries or strawberries…)”
weekly wiki
Read back about the inauguration of daiquiri season, NYC summers, and Pliocene visions at the beach. Share this post with friends. Follow @bentapeworm on Twitter.