A few weeks ago, at the Rockaways, I saw a plane pulling a banner across the sky. Below, beachgoers sat staring into the ocean as if faithlessly awaiting some spectacle. It was early in September and idyllic. A beautiful boat traced the coastline not too far from shore. The banner said: FREEZE YOUR SPERM. YES YOUR SPERM. The one before that had read: HAVE COURAGE — CARRY HOPE — SAY NO TO ABORTION. I can’t imagine anyone taking them seriously, particularly being pulled as they were by those airplanes. Besides, its audience seemed too hot, too drunk, too determined to escape the nearby City that loomed hazily on the horizon.
Last summer at the same beach, a nearly identical banner read: ROCKAWAY AND BREEZY POINT SUPPORT THE NYPD. When we returned the next weekend, BREEZY POINT was gone without the sentence being fixed, so it read: ROCKAWAY SUPPORT THE NYPD. I still think about that every time those little planes buzz back and forth. Its glaring stupidity, its anachronism, its weird paternalism that paled in comparison to all the police helicopters already flying loud and low.
That was last summer, the summer that the City burst open. That was the summer that nights exploded with fireworks from unseen rooftops and evening cheers for essential workers gave way to marchers shouting names of the murdered. That was the summer the heat and despair broke open the inertia of a housebound people. That was the loneliest summer; that was the summer of solidarity. People were inside, hunched and bingeing and desperate for reprieve. People were outside, on the march, sick of it. That was the summer of empty gestures, the summer that an enormous medical ship sat pointlessly at a pier in Manhattan. That was the summer that everyone wore masks except for the cops, the summer that people were beaten and pepper-sprayed and knocked over by police cruisers. That was the summer when televised death finally tilted farther into public outrage than private despair. Though it tilted that way, too.
Tomorrow marks the last day of this summer. Was something wrong with it? People on the internet and people in New York—there is a difference, one presumes—seemed to think so, even if they thought what was wrong was just other people asking the question, the ceaseless complaining about the nature of this summer’s “vibes.”
At the beginning of summer, I purchased a small, handsome notebook in Lower Manhattan. Pages made of mulberry paper, a yellow quarter-circle stamped on the front. I decided this would be my summer journal, hoping that by extracting it from the procession of gray, clothbound notebooks I keep, it might be looser, that it might better capture the season.
I am not sure that it did. At one point I call July “a bloated month of Sundays.” At another I call it “crammed and interminable.” Everywhere I am describing the heat. Rockaway Beach is “a place to feel one is thinking but not to think at all — you feel a kind of thinking, covered in sweat, sun ablaze.” In Prospect Park: “heat slowing down the mind, encouraging a dreamy kind of yielding.” In Central Park: “the nights grow hotter & shall remain so […] it smells like lemonade and piss.” At the beach in Georgia: “outside heavy & humid so much so that notebook paper becomes instantly wavy, a kind of bad omen […] today, I am told, it rained at Greenland’s summit for the first time on record.”
This fixation is only apparent as I flip back through it now. If vibes are the unseen but constant emotional frequency of a person, it would seem from these pages that mine were off. (Though now that the word really means the opposite—the seen, the vague, the approximated genre of an atomized person—my vibes were probably just fine.) Sitting there on a beach beneath the blazing sun and ominous exhortations of sperm-freezing, drinking rum until my heart began to twitch, I was still grateful for this summer’s difference from the last.
Perhaps my fretting about the heat reveals a certain fear: that a world without seasons will be a world without time, which only seems to pass at the thresholds between them. Fall is a thing to be grateful for, a thing to breathe in, a change in the outer world to stir the inner one. I am not sure what I would feel if my life were one long summer. Clearly a journal would be of little help. Clearly the vibes would be off.
This summer, at the beach in Georgia, my girlfriend and I came across a strange thing in the shape of a lemniscate. It looked like a lugworm or a snake with a bulging eyeless head. A slick snakelike infinity, here on this hot, flat beach. It looked like the kind of thing one is visited by in dreams. We were repulsed but we had no idea what it was. It was dead and the tide was rising and we walked on.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
I made a playlist at my friend Lucas’s behest—a sequel to one called bright blue fall that I’d made around this time two years ago. Listen in order if you can.
on the screen
In The Card Counter, Paul Schrader’s new film, a veteran of the War on Terror rides the casino circuit, a closed-loop neon purgatory of modest winnings and windowless rooms. At night he drinks and writes in blank motels, performing a kind of endless deferral of atoning for past misdeeds. A confrontation with his past—with the war—forces him to break this routine, to attempt something that might redeem him.
Schrader is interested in men who attempt to change their lot and in doing so—even if they may seem to succeed—are spiritually thwarted, are unable to find grace, are unable to truly make things right. This would be sad enough were the implications merely the fate of one man. But as Richard Brody writes of the film, as well as its spiritual predecessor First Reformed (2017), “The two movies are animated by revulsion at the prevalent American ethos and an absolute existential despair over the possibility of any corrective or practical redress.”
One of the people I saw the film with hated it. She felt it was tonally awkward, woodenly acted, tacky to look at, with strange slippages in the audio sync. She was totally right, though I felt that those qualities gave the film a slow-burning horror. To me, that’s much closer to the American ethos than a film that’d be pleasant to watch: a feeling that our glowing desert of hotel casinos and weapons expos is sustained by the same pulsebeat of vengeful confusion that plays out in desert prisons half a world away. The film, with its score filled with sounds of breath and breathing, inhabits the claustrophobic space between the two, closes the space between them.
on the bookshelf
Joy Williams’s new book, Harrow, is the best book I’ve read all year. It is also the most punishing book I have read in about as long as I can remember. A hilarious, uncompromising, despairing book that drifts and divagates through a world that we have ruined. It is a sign of its power that the book is incredibly difficult to write about. At any rate, it follows Williams’ own maxim: “The writer trusts nothing he writes—it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control. It should want to live itself somehow.” Though this book, perhaps unlike her others, does not quite seem to want to live.
(Also, for whatever it’s worth, I would recommend starting with her short stories.)
weekly wiki
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