Wolf number 1155, which had lived in Yellowstone National Park for about seven years and had been banded by biologists in 2018, wandered out of the Park this past April. He was trapped and shot by the governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, who would later receive a written warning for declining to attend a mandatory training session prior to his hunt. In 2016, Gianforte had crowed that “the effort to stop trapping in Montana is an attack on our heritage.”
Last week, I saw The Mountain Goats at a small concert venue in Bushwick. Before playing “Wolf Count,” frontman John Darnielle explained that the song was inspired by a Borges poem he’d read many years ago. “The king wanted to ‘acabar con los lobos,’ to be done with the wolves,” Darnielle said as he sat at the electric keyboard. “I finally decided to stop crying about it and write a song.”
Borges’s poem concerns “el último lobo de Inglaterra”—the last wolf in England. (Humans drove English wolves to extinction by the beginning of the 16th century.) It is an ineluctable elegy for the last, doomed wolf: “Ya forjado / ha sido el fuerte hierro de tu muerte”—“the fierce blade of your death has already been forged.”1
From the early 20th century until 1995, there were no gray wolves in Yellowstone at all. Wolves were hunted to local extinction in the contiguous US, and were only reintroduced from Canada in the 1990s. They currently occupy only about 20 percent of their former range. Last year, the US Fish and Wildlife Department removed them from the list of endangered species.
Shortly after wolf number 1155 was shot, Montana and Idaho increased their annual quotas for wolf hunts and allowed more controversial methods of trapping, such as neck snares. In Montana, a State Fish and Wildlife Commissioner who voted in vain against the changes, said that “My largest concern is that we are selling our souls and our fair chase in order to provide methods that are unnecessary and more likely to have repercussions.”
The end of the Borges poem goes:
Mil años pasarán y un hombre viejo
te soñará en América. De nada
puede servirte ese futuro sueño.
Hoy te cercan los hombres que siguieron
por la selva los rastros que dejaste,
furtivo y gris en la penumbra última.
A thousand years will go by and an old man
will dream you in America. It will not
be of any use to you, that future dream.
Today they surround you, the men who followed
through the wilderness the traces you left,
furtive and grey in the final twilight.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the bookshelf
Ostensibly about Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the World Trade Center, Justin Beal’s Sandfuture is a collage of biography, autobiography, architectural theory, and urban history. The construction of 432 Park, the tubercular origins of modernist architecture, the history of (not) treating migraines—Beal covers much ground without ever merely rattling off facts. Rather, his book is a deliberate and almost mournful attempt to divine in buildings the signs of a changed and changing world.
Many thanks to Lucas for giving me this book—it’s one of my favorites of the year. Particularly if you’ve enjoyed the more wide-ranging tapeworm posts, you should get your hands on a copy.
on the screen
I recently watched this long, mesmerizing video that Vic Berger did with VICE News as part of a series called Filling the Void. “America’s Big Fat Mess” is a dizzying archival mishmash of America’s obsession with weight loss and workaholism. Dr. Oz yelling about miracle cures, women on talk shows holding yellow models of human fat, people handling tapeworms (heyo!), Jeff Bezos recounting his old habit of eating a can of Pillsbury rolls every morning. It’s overlong and perhaps heavy-handed but worth at least watching parts of.
weekly wiki
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All translations are mine.