ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry. To get new entries in your email inbox, please request to be added to the mailing list here. To buy a print booklet, click here.

April 2025

show notes

They played songs from Appalachia, mostly. “The Wild Goose Chase,” “Sally Ann,” “Jenny Put the Kettle On,” things like that. Cleek Schrey on fiddle and organ and Nora Brown on banjo. “That was beautiful!” exclaimed an older British woman after the first song. “That was beautiful again!” after the second. The rest of the audience shifted and groaned but she was right. No need to stop saying it. The music had that glint of genealogy, in the sense of stewardship rather than inheritance. The songs like old apple cultivars, still around to taste. Cleek said he’d learned one tune from a man who was born in 1920. After they played that one, no one said it was beautiful, not out loud at least, but it was.

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March 2025

Anchorage triptych

It sounds like a whippoorwill with its throat cut. Whip whoop. Whip whoop. Over my shoulder, past a sign that says IMAGE HAIR DESIGN, a raven perches on a streetlight. It arches its neck as it calls, as if trying to swallow something. Whip whoop. Whip whoop. It takes me a second; I have to whistle it first. The raven is singing the crosswalk signal back to me.

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Jan—Feb 2025

and his name shall be in their foreheads

In the last days of last year, as I walked the dog through the Park in the snow, a man in a yellow reflective vest appeared on a moped, two silver thermoses dangling from his belt like capsae. He rode slowly alongside us, playing an audiobook on a portable Bluetooth speaker, the words of which I wasn’t paying attention to until it said girt about the paps with a golden girdle. Girt about the what?

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Oct—Nov 2024

keep calm and gobble on

At his final Turkey Pardoning as President, he wore his signature aviators and presented a 41-pound turkey named Peach. He joked that Peach “you know, dreams to see, yuh, uh… the real dream he has is to see the Northern Lights, I’m told. He lives by the mo, the motto, Keep calm and gobble on.” He rambled on a little longer, before turning to a “more serious note,” thanking the country for electing him president, the “honor of my life.” He closed out the speech the same way he always does: “And may God protect our troops.”

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Aug—Sept 2024

the machine continues

The text appears on my screen as it always does, letter after letter, but it’s far too fast to be human. Words rush along after a small black circle. After a while they stop. Please continue!, I type into the window and it does, the black hole speeding on. Again: Please continue! The machine continues and the machine stops.

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Jun—July 2024

frozen empire

Whenever I walk to pick up lunch from the market near my office, I pass Hook & Ladder Company 8, the fire station where Ghostbusters (1984) was filmed. Every day there are tourists taking selfies under a sign of the movie’s logo, apparently donated by fans, that hangs above the garage door.

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Apr—May 2024

ambient attention

A saxophone exhales like a train, like an owl. A harmonica warbles over pulsing synthesizers. “Penny, did you hear that train whistle? / Theo, did you hear that owl Hoo? / Anders, can you mute the commercials?” Nicholas Krgovich’s voice appears like a bouncing ball in an old singalong video, indicating each syllable before dropping out of the frame and into a rippling pool of sound.

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Feb—Mar 2024

it must be painful to watch

Here are two aerial photographs, taken an indeterminate amount of time apart. A thin white line wipes the photos back and forth. After. Before. After. Before. In After, the desert is strewn with heaps of ash. The line wipes back to Before: a view of square roofs, the hard outlines of human dwelling, green treetops. When it wipes back to After, the greens are smudged and bleeding, the squares cratered. The animation goes on endlessly, like a clock with two times of day. Then and gone.

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January 2024

laundromat television special

In January, the laundromat television speaks excitedly of warm weather, of new records breaking highs from “way back in 2023.” Way back in 2023? Wasn’t that last year? Isn’t that a problem? No, it’s something to look forward to, and then it’s on to the next thing, cops and arrests, cops and arrests, and the washing machine beeps that it’s done.

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December 2023

a year in four saxophones

A saxophone is a city. Or a small synecdoche, another valve in that artificial heart. Its sound surmounts the City while also gathering up its ambience, screeching with the subway through tunnels and coiling with chitchat through crowds. Perhaps because the instrument is less than 200 years old, it sounds more contemporary than other woodwinds. It hits our ears already modern, already urban.

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November 2023

New York anagogy

The galleries are full of statues of the Virgin, wrought in walnut and birch, sandstone and pot-metal glass. Over centuries they have lost heads and arms and whatever they once held. I linger next to one made of terra cotta. Only a bust remains: cloaked shoulders, tilted head, and a crown atop it, its leafy trefoils pliable and veined. The faded paint on the pupils skews the Virgin’s eyes, which look down at some lost object while also blindly glancing somewhere else. The plaque says Bust of the Virgin, Bohemian, ca. 1390–95. M is across the room, looking at figures in colored glass.

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October 2023

in the land whither wee goe to possesse it

Two weeks before boarding a plane to the Middle East, where he would visit seven countries in almost as many days, the Secretary of State was on stage at an official function, singing “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” by Muddy Waters. “Well you know I’m the hoochie coochie boy,” sang the Secretary, woodenly plucking an electric guitar, “The whole round world know we here.”

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September 2023

a presence of departed acts

If you knew how to look, which we did not, you could read the building’s face. In different combinations, parts of the facade of the Independence Palace—the latticework, the balconies, the porticos, even the flag—approximate Chinese characters like 王 (king) and 興 (prosperity). Auspicious architecture for an ill-omened state: Vietnam’s President, Ngô Đình Diệm, commissioned the new palace in 1962, after the old French one was bombed by two dissident pilots. He would not live to see it finished.

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May—Aug 2023 (ii)

time is not a school, just a burning

Here’s one. Vogue, May 1963, pages 116-7. On the verso page, a photograph taken by Art Kane at the Antigua Beach Hotel. A model in a Sacony bathing suit languishes against a horse on a beach. Dusk or dawn, perhaps? The sky looks gray but there are no shadows. It doesn’t matter. All black and white photographs of the beach in summer are of the same beach, a nowhere inlet on some faraway moon. Nothing quite as it should be. Water like collodion, air like static. Heat like a secret, like skin. All things dim or glowing as if newly born in fire or just about to burn.

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May—Aug 2023 (i)

the summer will not write itself

I always complain about writing in the summertime, so this year I will not. That season most prohibitive to writing. Pollen stinging your face, fingers slick with sweat, phones overheating into useless slabs of glass. Head sluggish in the heat like a poisoned rat staggering across the sidewalk. The heat the slow creep of summer’s kingdom.

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May 2023 (iii)

honeysuckle future

At first, I don’t notice that I know what I’m smelling, running through the boggy Nashville afternoon. I have smelled it my whole life. Tasted it, too. Citric, sweet, like overripe honeydew. It isn’t until I round the corner and see an old couple foraging flowers that I think about it at all. The woman holds a bulging plastic bag of white and yellow against the wall of green, and the air suddenly has a name: honeysuckle.

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May 2023 (ii)

hearing loss and the cinema

When we stumble out of the dancehall, I look at my friend Vita in shock. I can’t hear anything. That’s what I’m saying, at least. I can’t hear anything. It sounds far away, like I’m eavesdropping on myself. I’ll be fine, of course. We’re laughing, we’re delirious, we’ve been dancing. But I hear the City through a thick shroud. The rumbling train I used to ride to work clicks softly overhead. Sounds evacuate my head like spirits from a broken vessel.

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May 2023 (i)

roaches at the Met Gala

At the Met Gala, a cockroach crawls toward a photographer in a tuxedo. He’s hungry! someone yells, off-camera. Get a photo! Get a photo! Kevin, get a photo! Kevin, get a photo! You think the photographer is going to bring his foot down on the insect, but he doesn’t. Why put an end to a viral moment in the making?

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April 2023 (iii)

is there a Biden Era?

Whether this Era will continue through 2028 depends on whether Biden succeeds in his reelection campaign, which he kicked off today with an announcement video. Like a trailer for a Netflix docuseries, the video is masked and filtered to look like it was shot on celluloid and other retro formats, presumably in an attempt to present Biden’s age (80) as a source of pride and nostalgia rather than decay.

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April 2023 (ii)

idleness and augury no. 4

I wake to knocking at the window. Turning over in bed, I see a robin glaring at me from the far side of the sill. On the window is a history of knocking: a large round smudge made of smaller ones, scratches and blurs from talon and beak, a record of its flailing against the pane.

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April 2023 (i)

statue gardens of history

It is a strange painting. No one looks as dignified as you might expect them to. All this wealth and influence between them, and they look like leaders of a Boy Scout troop or retirees on a fly fishing trip, with ugly footwear to match. Crow looks droopy and uncomfortable, like he forgot to bring his sunglasses. Thomas looks dour, as always.

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March 2023 (iv)

film edits for my 29th birthday

A documentary editor in my office was telling me about cutting on film, actual film, when she was younger. She said that when you used to edit films, you had to live with your mistakes longer. Making edits was a more laborious process, so you’d store up several changes in your mind before making them. You’d know a cut was wrong or that things needed to be moved or eliminated, but you wouldn’t rush back to correct each mistake || , editing not with a compulsion to perfection but with a deferral towards completion. ||

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March 2023 (iii)

Climate Change is a paint color

The graph, a barcode of deepening red, looks like an illustration of the end of the color blue. Or like a plaque in a natural history museum, color-coding ancient extinctions: trilobite to triceratops, Cretaceous to Paleocene, millions and millions of years. In fact, the colors represent degrees centigrade, zero to four.

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March 2023 (ii)

a different kind of documentary

On this remote beach, you can hear the filmmaker explain how, in the dark, you can find the right side of the film by putting it to your mouth. The emulsion side, covered in the silver halides that will record the world in light, sticks to your lips. The other side does not.

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March 2023 (i)

the artificial archive dreams itself

The program runs for several seconds. Doors and windows appear in black and white, next to or nestled in each other, looking into messy rooms and out onto barren worlds or blackness. I tweak my instructions, often in vain, trying to better approximate the old photograph. But it’s too late. The old photograph was just a beginning. I am passing through a tunnel of open and imaginary doors.

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February 2023 (iv)

logorrhea in paradise

Hardly surprising that, after a long afternoon of shitting liquid, the mind tries to summon some solidity, to summon the thoughts that most resemble language, the thoughts that try to make shapes in and of the world, to fix the world more firmly in the mind, even invent things about it, make up facts where it doesn’t know things or can’t recall them. . .

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February 2023 (iii)

winter triptych for an NC roadway church

I can hear, on too-warm days like this, old ladies sing their praises. Of the sun, the glorious weather. That minor Southern mode of glory. A lightly cursed and consecrated smalltalk. Glory be. Glory land. They’ll take the winter with them when they go.

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February 2023 (ii)

the airborne toxic event

From far above, they look like cigarette butts or spent whippets, discarded on a road verge by a derelict building. In fact, they are train cars, stubbed out in East Palestine, Ohio, on their way from Illinois to Pennsylvania. Loaded with highly toxic chemicals, the train encountered a mechanical failure, leapt the tracks, and exploded into a staggering fire that burned for three days.

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February 2023 (i)

at the Anahuacalli

In its cool stone halls, between trapezoidal doorways, beneath mosaics set by Rivera and O’Gorman, figurines and idols are arranged in glass cases set into the walls. The artifacts are arranged by theme and form more than period or region, their provenances and contexts unknown or deliberately withheld. A few signs, added more recently, give generalized explanations. After a while I stop reading them. They interrupt the structure’s underworldly effect.

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January 2023 (iv)

Sakamoto, night sky

In my ears is “20220214,” from Ryuichi Sakamoto’s latest record, 12. The dozen songs are all dates, formatted in that most efficient way: YYYYMMDD. As final songs, rather than mere drafts or voicenotes, the dates are deliberately indexical, calling attention to their place in time, as if the music exists to stand for or surpass the days themselves. YYYYMMDD: a day at its simplest. Ready to be processed, arranged.

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January 2023 (iii)

Ephesus at the après-ski

No one seems quite sure if they are dentists or doctors or dermatologists, but they gather nonetheless, with all these other aging men, bent and boasting like decomposing fratboys, faces rouged with alpine winds and red wine, around the TV at the ski-lodge bar. One enormous man bellows something about Philadelphia.

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January 2023 (ii)

subway ad tautologies

TODAY IS LADIES DAY says the sign, lit up in pink above the carwash, whose sloped sidewalk is slicked with presoak acids and foaming agents, specialized washes for specialized brushes, triple foams blooming in unnatural blues, detergents and protectants, waxes and polymers, bubbles and froth all spilling from the drive-thru to the gutter, a technicolor sluice that curdles at the curb into a thick gray discharge.

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January 2023 (i)

on Stella Maris

Alicia Western sits in a mental hospital, talking to a psychiatrist. She confides in him, but not for any hope of help or cure. Such things are beyond the abilities of this agreeable doctor. This is a Cormac McCarthy novel, after all. Such things are beyond us all.

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December 2022 (iii)

2022 ends

The year began. Friends would come and go and I would remain here. Staring out my window, making coffee, trying to see, trying to keep time. The bluejay screeching morning from the thin dead tree. The yellowed nights becoming yellow dawns.

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December 2022 (ii)

ten years after Sandy Hook

If hope is a thing stockpiled and spent, if it is a thing stoked and snuffed like a flame, shielded or surrendered like a childhood keepsake, kept like a secret and lost like innocence, then I gave it all up, all hope, all hope for this country, whatever I had left, ten years ago almost to the day, in front of a television in a college dormitory basement, as I read on chyrons the news of the murdered children.

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December 2022 (i)

insects where you least expect them

When Albrecht Dürer painted his Cervus Lucanus in 1505, when his stag beetle reared its antlered mandibles and crawled from his mind to his parchment, he set in motion a technological frisson that I would experience, over half a millennium later, scrolling through screenshots on my phone.

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November 2022 (v)

Asheville triptych

The sky spends the early morning in the valley, nestled below the blue, billion-year-old peaks. When the clouds lift, they leave behind a city.

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November 2022 (iv)

singing a song of angry men

The livestream begins again. The input is tinny and full of static, so it takes a while to recognize the song. An official march of some kind? No. It is “Do You Hear The People Sing?” from Les Misérables. He walks out with his wife to cheers and iPhone cameras. The song cuts off abruptly, a voice introduces him as “the next president,” and another song comes on: Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” What follows we have all already seen.

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November 2022 (iii)

avoidance, anxiety, apocalypse

The great crisis of our time had forced 250,000 people from work and into the street, and a contingent of people most positioned to care closed their office doors, complained about the noise, and swiveled their chairs back to their deadlines.

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November 2022 (ii)

in the unseasonable city, a dream of wasps

Yesterday the temperature in the City—80ºF at JFK Airport—broke the previous heat record, which was set in 2020. Again the mundane fact: the past eight years have been the hottest ever recorded, and will be among the coldest of the rest of our lives. Never has a fate so foretold been so sealed. We bow our heads to pass beneath each season’s smoldered lintel.

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November 2022 (i)

names and stones of New York state

A name, a span. The numbered progeny. Wives nameless unto nothing. I walk by it again, a plaque fixed to stone:

THOMAS DAVENPORT
1682 1759
PIONEER SETTLER, BUILT HIS LOG HOUSE AND REARED HIS TWELVE CHILDREN HERE ABOUT 1729

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October 2022 (iii)

other people’s photographs

A cat slinking through a riad. Vapor rising from water. A woman beneath a clock. A man in a mirror. A thumb in the way.

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October 2022 (ii)

looking for Jackie

Having died, she could not have been there, but the President seemed to think she might be. At the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, two weeks ago, Biden thanked “bipartisan elected officials,” among them Jackie Walorski, the Indiana congresswoman who died in a head-on collision in August. Biden: “Representative— Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? I didn’t think she was going to be here. . .”

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October 2022 (i)

idleness and augury no. 3

City-hued doves sleep in the rain outside my window. They perch on a dead tree so dead it looks like it was planted that way, all strung up with dead vines. Outside it rains and rains and rains. I sit here, listening to Kurt Wagner sing: “Across the interstate the world is like another world.”

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September 2022 (iv)

the soundtrack of stuck culture

The culture industry forging shamelessly ahead by reanimating icons of yesteryear (stuck culture) creates a dissonance that borders on madness (stuckness). This dissonance is exacerbated by an analogous one in American politics. In an era that cries out for new solutions, new statesmen, and new propositions, we are met with increasingly zombified versions of the old. The current administration is a doddering and belated sequel to the Obama years; Trump’s political career is itself a cynical reboot of his career on TV.

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September 2022 (iii)

trees of heaven in the heat

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.

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September 2022 (ii)

the King of Redonda is dead

“I have never said that I am the king of Redonda or signed anything other than my name, Javier Marías. I have never been monarchic. I am rather a republican,” Javier Marías told the Paris Review in a 2006 interview. “I said that if something this novelistic intrudes in my life and I don’t accept it, I should not be considered a novelist. So I accepted.”

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September 2022 (i)

my bygone, half-bootlegged music library

One of my first favorite albums, given to me fifteen years ago on a silver Maxell CD, with the title and artist written on the flap of its paper sleeve, was John the Wolfking of L.A. The first solo record from John Phillips, leader of The Mamas & the Papas, it came out in 1970 and was a commercial flop. A 2006 CD reissue, which included eight additional tracks, rehabilitated it somewhat, though it remains obscure. Its obscurity endures in part because it’s hard to find online.

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July 2022 (iv)

horror or comedy? Nope.

Halfway through Jordan Peele’s latest film, Nope (2022), a character is trapped in his truck. He cracks the door, peers outside, and closes it. “Nope,” he says, and punches the lock of the door. There’s a beat. Then something large comes crashing through the windshield.

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July 2022 (iii)

Chicago triptych

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?

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July 2022 (ii)

idleness and augury no. 2

Each day at breakfast, I hear mourning doves but see only starlings. I never imagine the right bird when I hear one. There are sounds and there are bodies. There are words and things. For instance, I know the word nightjar but not the bird it means. The word is dark glass and sky. The bird is something else—a whippoorwill? Another word. My small ignorances feel like an unwitting practice of detachment.

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July 2022 (i)

bending history with hotdogs

“There will be a day,” cries the emcee in the straw boater hat, “that is the end. The collapse of time and all that stood within it. A day of nothing, of no one, of nowhere. But that day is not today! Today we burn bright! Today we blind the earth with our desire! And while it is still ours, we will bend history to witness this moment! to witness this man!” A nondescript man emerges on the platform of a scissor lift, which slowly rises above the stage.

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June 2022 (iv)

no shield despite its guarantees

Soon after the reversal of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court on Friday, Democratic members of the House gathered on the steps of the Capitol Building. They were not there to seethe or to console. No, they were there to sing! And sing they did: “God Bless America.”

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June 2022 (iii)

notes toward a Biden rhetoric

Embalmed in old charm, mumbling his way through this timid interregnum, doing things slowly as if reverent at his own demise, the President appears. Sometimes he seems surprised not to be a former version of himself, that young senator from Delaware. Other times, he looks like a eulogist gone soft and quiet, standing by the lectern as if thinking of words at a wake.

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June 2022 (ii)

you may be living in hell

Announcing the new plans for Penn Station last week, Gov. Kathy Hochul emphasized her favorite aspect, a “460-foot high atrium and a skylight that reminds you that, yes, the heavens are out there still despite the feeling that you may be living in hell.” She laughed awkwardly and went on.

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June 2022 (i)

no phone

No camera, no map, no weathervane. No calendar, no alarm. No boarding pass, no car services. While I was traveling on Friday, my smartphone suddenly bricked. A white apple blinked on black, over and over again. I couldn’t figure out where my friends were, couldn’t get on the AirBnb WiFi, couldn’t check the news, couldn’t tell what time it was or when the rain was going to stop.

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May 2022 (iii)

idleness and augury no. 1

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.

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May 2022 (ii)

there is that leviathan

At a bar in Manhattan last week, a friend and I drank beer out of green bottles and talked about the film we’d just seen, Wong Kar-wai’s melodrama, 2046. We also talked a bit about another melodrama: this newsletter. My friend suggested that, rather than filtering the grim world through my diaristic perspective each week, I should think of some prompts. What about A prayer for hard times, he said.

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May 2022 (i)

inspiration / inspo

Inspiration, from the Latin to breathe into, has always sounded churchy and false to me, dismissive of the hard work of writing. What else, though, to call what I’ve been missing? My thoughts are all scattered onto various devices and scraps of paper: books, social media feeds, Wikipedia articles, pirated PDFs, post-it notes with things I forgot at the grocery. My mental landscape is an apartment rooftop strewn with broken satellite dishes. Hardly breathed into, I feel like a windtunnel of content, inert in the rush of the world.

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April 2022 (iii)

deaths by fire, at the Met and elsewhere

In a hall of devout and dead-eyed faces, it is the hands that seem most human. Rendered in wood and stone and pigment and thread, hands clutch crosses and croziers, attributes and scrolls. There are hands impaled with stigmata, hands with annulated or amputated fingers, hands making cryptic signs of the cross. Some statues have lost whatever it was they were holding, whatever they were pointing at. A wooden figure of the Virgin Mary no longer has hands at all. These are rooms of lost indexicals; the hands are all gesture, no place.

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April 2022 (ii)

endless endless notebookery

“Yes, I will force myself to begin this cursed year,” wrote Virginia Woolf in her first diary entry of 1938. There were many reasons for her to find the year already cursed: bouts of crippling depression, a book to finish, an ailing husband, and lingering grief over the death of her nephew, Julian, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War. And yet, was the new year any more cursed than the last? Her final entry from 1937 reads: “Oh this cursed year 1937—it will never let us out of its claws.”

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April 2022 (i)

another April, as always

April is like this: as soon as it arrives in the City, every day has always been April. March may have existed, but can you be sure? How could it have been different? Every day has been windy as far as I can remember. Surely every day has been April.

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March 2022 (iv)

snapshots are the new screenshots

When Garry Winogrand said that “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed,” he still had to wait a while for the result. Winogrand, who famously roamed New York City with a 35mm Leica camera, wouldn’t see his street scenes emerge until the chemical revelations of the darkroom. Now, nearly 40 years after Winograd’s death, we find out what things look like photographed far more quickly and easily.

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March 2022 (iii)

notes from the Lands Between

Somewhere nearby, a bell tolls so loud it shakes the earth. Cresting a hill, you realize you have it backwards: the earth is moving the bell. An enormous, four-legged rock plods through the valley, a large church-bell on its underside and a stone chapel on its back. The bell swings as it moves. You can walk over and stand beneath it, letting its funereal tone reverberate around your head. But the creature takes no heed of you and walks on. In the distance, a pale gold tree the size of a skyscraper gleams with mystery. It begins to rain.

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March 2022 (ii)

a war diary’s haunting, half-real time

The video pauses so that we can see the small, dark pixels in the sky. It resumes so that we can see them fall and explode into fire and death. On maps, the red circles stand for captured cities, the blue lines for defenses. The borderlines bleed with red as troops advance. The updates are swift, the updates are merciless, the updates are in real time.

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March 2022 (i)

widespread adverse impacts

The ocean draws near. It is warm and dark. Can you hear it? It sounds like ice calving in your head. It sounds like putting a plastic cup to your ear and listening to the ambience roar. It sounds like leaning against the window of an airplane and hearing all that power and fuel go mad in your skull.

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February 2022 (iii)

What Does It Mean? What Should We Do?

Can It Happen Again? Can It Make a Comeback? Could This Speed It Up? What’s Its Secret? Is It Funny for the Jews?

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February 2022 (ii)

old friends, new fun, and the limits of nostalgia

At Questy’s arcade, a band of animatronic creatures plays “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” A many-armed monster plays drums, a couple of penguins hold down guitar and keys, and a dog howls to the tune. Suddenly the lights go out and a sign goes up: CLOSING FOREVER. Good times can’t last; the band is hauled away; the dog finds himself staring out of a Pawn Shop window.

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February 2022 (i)

“I am your proudest frog” and other rhetorical devices

When the enormous governor of West Virginia hoisted an enormous English bulldog named Babydog into the air, brandished its asshole, and told Bette Midler and all the haters to “kiss her heinie!,” the audience cheered and the internet went insane and I went to go find the transcript.

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January 2022 (iii)

Difficult and Defeated on the road in Tennessee

The road sign says ← DIFFICULT. Down past Difficult is Defeated. They’re hardly towns, unincorporated clusters of buildings that appear and are gone as we pass. Signs welcome us to places that seem only half-convincingly to exist, memorial highways and business districts. Everywhere barns kneel in different stages of unmaking: faded red, lurched and stripped of ruddle, hammered flat as if in anger or bad weather.

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January 2022 (ii)

Q&A with Steven Leftovers

Walking around the City the past couple weeks, feeling mired in the gray notion of a new year, I found myself returning over and over to “Futurebrother,” a song by Steven Leftovers. A voice says I don’t know if I can go constantly. Hands begin to clap. Another voice: That’s good, just like that. The plunk of two guitar strings. Then, after a few measures, the song snaps into focus. I couldn’t stop listening to it. Something calming in the unrehearsed clapping, something revelatory in its turn to sudden clarity.

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January 2022 (i)

Joan Didion, eulogist

When she died, two days before Christmas, everyone seemed to have something to say. The black and white photographs of her in the 1969 Corvette Stingray, the personal encounters with her writing, the paeans to her bicoastal coolness, her sangfroid and skill. Pre-written eulogies go to press, names start trending, tweets proliferate, the parade of awkward acknowledgment begins. There should be a word for whatever the media churns with after the deaths of notable people; it is more like furor than grief, a circus of envy and nostalgia.

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December 2021 (ii)

what was 2021?

The card was the King of Cups—a noble idea, though hopes were hardly high. The bottle was emerald and sideways and slowly leaking Becherovka from its screwcap into my freezer. It was perfect before going out, a small shot to clarify the cold. The City was shut down, was opened up, was forever stuck between.

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December 2021 (i)

New York tryptich

You guys have three days! Until I destroy the earth! I am the Sun God! Perfect! Release! Perfect! Release! Perfect! Release! He counts aloud to thirteen and stops. A man selling shirts by the Washington Square Arch mocks him—Why stop at thirteen?—and starts to count jeeringly from fourteen. The Sun God stands in the dead fountain, flipping him off. Nearby a woman dances on a large white piece of paper, smearing and swirling black ink with her feet and hands.

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November 2021 (iii)

if you see it, squish it

At work last week, I killed a cockroach with my left boot. I hit it twice, hard. A headless roach can live for weeks. Yesterday, another one was playing dead beneath my desk. My boot made it dead dead, dead for real, and I scraped it off on the metal edge of the wastebasket.

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November 2021 (ii)

against storytelling

When David Saunders, a 98-year-old WWII veteran, died of Covid-19 in August, his body was donated to science in accordance with his wishes. His remains, however, ended up at a Marriott, where attendees of the Oddities and Curiosities Expo paid up to $500 a ticket to watch his corpse get dissected on a table by a retired anatomy professor. His widow was horrified: “Five hundred a seat for people to watch—this is not science, this is commercialism.” The description for the event suggested that “we will find new perspectives on how the human body can tell a story.”

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November 2021 (i)

to be done with the wolves

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.”

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October 2021 (iv)

weather reports from the Patriot Double Down convention

Early this morning, the City disappeared into a storm. Low, gray clouds leveled the skyline. The rain whooshed and pounded and made loud metallic plinks on AC window units. The governor declared a state of emergency and Twitter blinked nervously with weather alerts, people anxious from recent memories of flooding.

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October 2021 (iii)

a loose tooth in Tim Leary’s papers

In the archival box there are two folders: August 63 ORDERED and Random 8-63. In both are letters and documents from August, 1963. What separated them? Was the sorting interrupted or were some contents deemed more important than others? Too late to know now. Once the future begins to build upon the past, the past is stuck as it was. Uncertain, half-sorted.

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October 2021 (ii)

witnesses at the Hop Along show

Language is an instrument the voice whips about. A line is sung, then shouted, then it disappears into the surprise of the next one—or into silence, into the churn of guitar and drums. Frances Quinlan’s voice tears the air with words. Watching them sing is like watching someone possessed and yet totally in command, a wild interplay of tension and release.

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October 2021 (i)

deeply impactful Deep Impacts

The dead birds began washing ashore in the early morning. On Sunday, five miles off the coast of Huntington Beach, California, 120,000 gallons of crude oil leaked from a Beta Offshore pipeline. Martyn Willsher, the CEO of Beta Offshore’s parent company, said that “We’re all deeply impacted and concerned about the impact on not just the environment, but the fish and wildlife as well.”

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September 2021 (iv)

after fire

Running down Franklin Ave on Sunday, I found the street crammed with five firetrucks, two of them with their long ladders extended to the top floor of an apartment building. The units were unwindowed holes that gaped into burnt-out rooms. A firefighter with an enormous black and yellow coat walked out the front door, touching the brim of his helmet.

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September 2021 (iii)

airplane banners at the beach

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.

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September 2021 (ii)

memory is our business

My mom called me to say that her brother had found her voice from the day their parents died. Four days before her nineteenth birthday, my mom had called her parents and left a voicemail. She already felt that something was wrong, but left one anyway. By the time the tape reels sprang to life to record her message, her parents—my grandparents—were dead in a plane crash somewhere in rural Virginia.

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September 2021 (i)

mud angels

On November 4, 1966, the Arno River leapt its banks, flooding the streets of Florence. Over a hundred people died, centuries-old frescoes and paintings were damaged, and cars were strewn about like empty oilcans. Thousands of illuminated manuscripts were unbound and scattered, their pages slick with slime and stuck to street and stone.

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August 2021 (v)

a burning readiness to die

In Mississippi, the governor drags a weary world toward afterlife. Last Thursday, Gov. Tate Reeves dismissed concerns over low vaccination rates and crowded hospitals by saying that “When you believe in eternal life—when you believe that living on this earth is but a blip on the screen, then you don’t have to be so scared of things.”

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August 2021 (iv)

resurrection and repetition

Anyone who has played a video game knows that death is not the end. Your character’s death may bring you great frustration and the loss of in-game riches or real-life time; but generally you respawn, your game begins at your most recent save, and you continue on your journey. Sometimes there is some kind of added penalty. Sometimes, as in games like Hades and Dead Cells, it’s an integral part of the game’s structure. But regardless—you die; you reappear.

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August 2021 (iii)

livestreaming defeat

By the time the president appeared, it was around four o’clock, fifteen minutes or so after he was scheduled to speak. Did he appear then because he had arrived late or did the livestream begin after introductions? No idea. Like this entire war, this 20-year-long fiasco that has played in the background of my adolescence and adulthood like an always-on airport television, it was a thing entirely mediated by cameras.

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August 2021 (ii)

things we lost in the fire

There is that famous story of the king who bought three books for the price of nine. An old woman offers King Tarquinius of Rome nine books of prophecy for a preposterous sum. The king laughs in her face. So the woman sets three of the books on fire before him and offers the same price for the remaining six. Again the king laughs; again three books burn; again the price is the same.

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August 2021 (i)

memories and grief in gray and silver

I have been slowly unpacking things from boxes and ordering more things in more boxes: a kitchen knife, a drill, a deck of cards. Today during lunch I put small plastic pieces into drywall. The windows still have no curtains. My memory is warped and cavernous, as if made of that silvery paint that unevenly coats the neighboring rooftops.

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July 2021 (iii)

city summer inventory

It is probably more related to the process of packing my belongings into boxes than some larger New York City zeitgeist but July has felt like a thick fog of black trash bags steaming in the sun, dog-day cicadas, falling pollen, banda tubas in the park, sidewalk cookouts, busted bicycle tires, scorching heat, flooded subways tunnels, inarticulateness, inaudible subway announcements, Unhealthy Air Quality for Sensitive Groups, cool air spilling out of subway cars. . .

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July 2021 (ii)

endings and inheritance at the Great Pyramids

I have come here to get a last-minute COVID test and the medical office is empty. The front door is open and the floors are made of concrete. There is no one at either of the two large front desks. There is no bell to ring. I wait for what feels like ten minutes for a person in a lab coat to appear. There is a large television to my left playing a program about the Pyramids of Giza.

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July 2021 (i)

KEEP THIS FAR APART

The signs look like they’re melting. The now-iconic and now-useless KEEP THIS FAR APART signs—six-foot-wide red plastic banners erected by NYC Parks at the onset of the pandemic—are still posted throughout the City. In Prospect Park the other day, I noticed that some of the white lettering on one sign—FAR AP—was starting to blur into the red background. The sign looked tired, its neat municipal sans-serif sagging in the heat.

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June 2021 (iii)

requiem for a roadkill cat

During the pandemic, many homebound shoppers throughout China ordered mánghé (盲盒), or blind boxes, online. Each box costs the same amount, but the contents—usually toys and trinkets—remain a mystery until the box is opened. Some blind boxes, however, contain live animals—many of which, by the time they arrive, are dead ones.

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June 2021 (ii)

the fever dreams of Adam Curtis

A soldier pets a wild bird and picks it up. A helicopter descends into a bright blue cloud of smoke. A garish clown tumbles out of a cardboard box. A British soldier takes a retinal scan of an Afghan villager while the man holds his left eyelid open with his fingers. The soldier says nothing as he points a black machine at the man’s face. We see what the camera saw.

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June 2021 (i)

dead lungs from past pandemics

When they examined his lungs, 80 years after he died, it looked as if he’d drowned. On September 20, 1918, a twenty-one-year-old Army private from New York who was stationed in South Carolina fell ill with influenza and pneumonia. Six days later, he was dead and pieces of his lungs were shipped to Washington in a jar filled with formaldehyde

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May 2021 (ii)

not Tom Cruise, not Tom Cruise, not Tom Cruise

The first time I saw Tom Cruise who was not Tom Cruise was on Bill Hader’s face. In a video that went viral a couple years ago, Hader is on the Late Show, telling David Letterman about meeting Cruise at a read-through for Tropic Thunder. Each time he does an impression of Cruise, his face seamlessly morphs into Cruise’s, as if possessed.

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May 2021 (i)

notes on TikTok

On TikTok, there is a person in a penis costume flailing around in a bike lane. There is a man with a BE THE CHANGE tank top feeding raw meat to alligators. There is an old man playing the word YEET in Scrabble and flipping the board on his opponent. There is a shirtless man whose nipples are clothes-pinned to two napkins that are underneath two tall Jenga towers topped with full wine glasses. There are lots of teenagers and cats and boobs. There are lots of dad jokes and Walmarts and drive thrus.

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April 2021 (iv)

the banality of Controversial Ideas

The New York Times announced that they are no longer calling op-eds op-eds. They are calling them “guest essays.” Great! Now I can finally stop complaining about op-eds and start complaining about guest essays. Essays? Why not call “Why Biden Must Watch This Palestinian Movie” what it is—clickbait.

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April 2021 (iii)

watching the world disappear

Yesterday I watched the Aral Sea disappear. It had been disappearing for a while. In 1960, Soviet agricultural projects began diverting water from its inflowing rivers, and what was then the fourth-largest lake in the world is now little more than a desert. Yesterday I watched Dubai burst forth from the desert and its artificial palms emerge from the sea. I watched Bolivian forests recede into soybean farms. I watched Greenland melt and glaciers retreat.

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April 2021 (ii)

Prince Philip of Tanna

In the Vanuatuan villages of Yaohnanen and Yakel, on the island of Tanna, some say that long ago a man journeyed across the ocean in search of a powerful bride. They say he will return to the island and bring prosperity and celebration. “If he comes one day,” said Jack Malia, a village chief, in 2017, “the people will not be poor, there will be no sickness, no debt and the garden will be growing very well.”

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April 2021 (i)

Q&A with Eric Hurtgen

A few weeks ago, my friend Eric and I were talking about this newsletter and he half-jokingly texted me, “when are you gonna let me design a weird logo for it.” Eric’s a graphic designer I had the pleasure of working with and getting to know (and leaning on for photo-editing help, design advice, and general advice) when I lived in Charlotte.

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March 2021 (ii)

the years the locusts have eaten

I’m not one to go to the Bible for comfort—it is much better for violent tales of dream-interpretation and punishment—but this spring, as the earth thaws and people emerge from their torpor, I guess I can take some heart in the phrase: I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.

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March 2021 (i)

cycleurs of the city

In “Manifesto à velo,” a brief piece from her collection of essays, Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli updates the 19th-century character of the flâneur—a sort of contemplative, urban street-wanderer—for the 21st century. As cities have grown too immense and chaotic for strolling à la Benjamin or Baudelaire, she offers the cycleur: “riding a bicycle is one of the few street activities that can still be thought of as an end in itself.”

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February 2021 (iii)

R.IP.

Before Super Bowl LV began, teaser trailers encouraged viewers to “tune in for a special moment before kickoff.” I joked that it was going to be a hologram of Vince Lombardi. It was a hologram of Vince Lombardi. More accurately: it was an NFL commercial with a CGI version of the famous coach spreading hope in a pandemic-ravaged country before arriving at the stadium and giving a speech straight out of the uncanny valley.

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February 2021 (ii)

groundhogs of America

In America we look to woodchucks. Every February 2, in Punxsutawney (from the Lenape Punkwsutènay, “mosquito-town”), white men in top hats who call themselves the “Inner Circle” gather around Punxsy Phil’s burrow to see if he sees his shadow or not. It looks like Christmas caroling on acid.

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February 2021 (i)

a strong nor’-easter’s groaning

On Sunday, the governor tweeted that “New York is directly in the path of a major storm set to become a nor’easter as it approaches the East Coast later tonight,” which had me thinking about the word nor’easter, which to me looks anachronistic and silly (like e’en or ne’er).

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January 2021 (iv)

bye-bye Trump

It’s probably telling that I accidentally dated last week’s issue 2020 instead of 2021, as the first few weeks of January were a rather unfortunate appendix to a rotten year. In the past week, though, we finally saw the departure of Trump (“Have a good life. We will see you soon!”), the brief life of the 1776 Report, and the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

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January 2021 (iii)

waiting for a train and another train and another train

Ok so there’s this song called “Waiting for a Train” by this Australian new wave band called Flash and the Pan. It was released on their 1982 album Headlines and is not to be confused with the Jimmie Rodgers song of the same name that was covered by Johnny Cash twice (though most of Cash’s later covers are really him covering his own cover, like his two, tellingly distinct versions of “Streets of Laredo”) and that was also covered by John Denver, in which the yodeling is very Mason Ramsey and the way he sings “water tower” very 1997, and Boz Scaggs, which stands out mostly because I didn’t even know he made music before his cornily-sleazy-but-undeniably-groovy yacht rock records of the 70s.

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January 2021 (ii)

American heraldry, January 6

One of the many maddening aspects of the Trump Era is the seemingly proportional relationship between how bad things get and how stupid they look. On Wednesday, we all watched a horde of Trump fans break into the US Capitol Building in what the New York Times called a “siege” but which looked more like a white-nationalist yard sale or a NASCAR tailgate.

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January 2021 (i)

skinning gators in RDR2

RDR2, which in 2018 had the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, is an open world game in which you roam the ever-shrinking American frontier with a band of outlaws. The primary storyline—a series of quests that acquaint you with the territory and other gang members while you rob stagecoaches and shoot up dens of ex-Confederates—often seems more like a vehicle for exploring the game’s vastness than a series of tightly crafted plots.

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December 2020 (iii)

2020 finally ends

By far the worst thing about 2020, the second-hottest year on record, was that many, many people died who should not have. It was made worse by the way in which nobody and nothing seemed to make it better. 2020 was a year of doomsday op-eds and absent leadership, of despondent memes and woke infographics, of corporate power and quarantinis.

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December 2020 (iii)

the great conjunction

According to different astrologists, the alignment heralded “mass third eye awakenings,” “new developments in space travel,” “the power to manifest our dream world,” and the acceleration of time.

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December 2020 (ii)

keeping up with America’s mayor

I’ve been wanting to get in a few words about Rudy Giuliani, a man whose long decline (America’s mayor falls into vat of radioactive goo; emerges as farting, sweating mascot of national humiliation) has been a great source of joy for me as a sort of slapstick mirror-narrative to the whole tragicomedy of Trump.

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December 2020 (i)

here begins the almanac

Welcome to the first issue of ben tapeworm’s almanac. Farmer’s almanacs, of course, were compendia of information for farmers, though they often had little to do with actual farming

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ben tapeworm’s almanac is amateur apocalypse pamphletry.

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