Staggering down the sidewalk with my groceries, trying to kill a spotted lanternfly that flits from my feet, I go haphazardly toward summer’s end. I finally crush it, leave it next to the other three lanternfly corpses someone else has left. Passersby regard me as an idiot or not at all.
Last year I wrote meanderingly about lanternflies and the City’s attempts to contain the threat. The invasive planthoppers threaten fruit trees and, in turn, economies and agricultural prospects. The threat has only grown. “Summer is the perfect time to relax outdoors with a nice New York Riesling,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer in a recent request for federal funding, “but the rapid spread of the invasive Spotted Lanternfly threatens to suck the life out of our vineyards, agriculture, and great outdoor tourism industry.”
I have no way of knowing the official count, but I’ve seen many more this summer. I killed a nymph in Prospect Park, dismounted my bike at a crosswalk to squash an adult, crushed one on Pier 45 as it crawled up my shirt. They litter downtown sidewalks like half-crumpled shapes made from origami paper.
Lanternflies meeting their end on New York sidewalks is the result of international supply lines, eggs brought from Asia in shipping containers. But as global warming makes itself known in enormous catastrophes—one-third of Pakistan is flooded; the Colorado River is disappearing; the Northeast is heating faster—these small, ghostlike bugs make fitting harbingers of general disaster.
The lanternfly’s favorite tree, also invasive, is the Ailanthus altissima, which was brought to the US from Asia via Europe. A nasty consequence of 18th-century chinoiserie, its flowers reek of rotting meat, it secretes toxins into the soil to keep other plants from growing, and it puts out huge networks of root suckers, from which it can clone itself indefinitely. It must be uprooted by hand. Its common name is the Tree of Heaven.
Walking up to my apartment, I see a lanternfly on the outside of the stairwell window. I can’t reach around the window bars to kill it, so I just stand there, looking at it. I imagine reaching through the window somehow, the pane going viscous at the touch. Or smashing through it and snatching the insect in a fistful of forewing and glass. Those things, of course, I cannot do. So I stand there, sweating and futile, staring at damage and its dull, gray wings.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
on the bookshelf
Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole is an exercise in atmosphere. A slim, opaque novel about a woman who quits her job and moves to the country when her husband is promoted, it builds an eeriness that’s difficult to define. Though there are Murakamian apparitions and Freudian anxieties about motherhood and marriage, it is far more subdued than, say, “The Yellow Wallpaper.” As with her second novel, The Factory, Oyamada’s talent is in attenuating her fictional worlds to the point that they resemble ours: nondescript jobs, nameless companies, interchangeable phonescreens, vapid talk, impenetrable and stalled-out feelings. The book’s sparseness—a kind of atmospheric defeatism, a sense that details would make no difference—is even eerier than its strange and striking happenings.
from the city
NYC Parks has a wonderful, interactive map of all the street trees in the City (including 1,156 trees of heaven), with species info, metrics on benefits, and even daily maintenance updates (“The Thornless Honey locust near 346 Tompkins Avenue was cleared of litter/waste”).
from the discourse
Benjamin Kunkel weighs in on historicism in literary criticism for New Left Review:
After all, the same historical forces that are massively present but not immediately perceptible in most novels, poems or plays are at least equally in operation—and if anything even more difficult to make out—in the life of any individual reader and that of his or her family and friends, not to speak of familiar places, gatherings and institutions. A major task in the cultivation of any radical sensibility would surely be to read one’s own life as a historicist critic reads a novel, alert at all times to the pressure of global history upon ostensibly private and isolated goings-on.
from my incoming texts
“Did you ever read Tristram shandy”
“How many oats”
“My hips could use some percussive therapy today”
“This daybreak my purpose was made clear to me”
weekly wiki
Read back about last summer’s end, always April, and Florentine floods. If you’re enjoying this almanac, subscribe and share it with friends.