The Occasional Annals of Idleness and Augury. No. 4. April 15, 2023.
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.
Half-asleep, I do not think of April, of the probable nest and its new, paleblue eggs. Half-asleep, I do not think that the bird must be attacking its reflection. No. Half-asleep, my first thought is that it wants to come in. My second thought is that someone must have trained this bird to wake them up. The robin flits back to its tree. I plummet back into sleep. Until the robin wakes me, I dream of robins.
And wake me it does, again and again, from six until nine in the morning. I fall back asleep, it attacks the window, I wake, and we regard each other through the widening blur of its delusions. The knocking is not a beaklike tapping but a loud, scattered clunking. It is April in Upstate New York, but it sounds like the walnuts that fell on the roof, forever ago, in September in the South.
I dreaded that first Robin, so, begins one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. The robin is the harbinger of spring’s bright doom, the procession of seasons that one will never get used to and can never stop. I do not dread the robins but suffer similar delusions:
I thought If I could only live
Till that first Shout got by —
Not all Pianos in the Woods
Had power to mangle me —
One robin I dream of is mangled, smashed against the pane but still alive. Radial and many-winged, like a starfish or a seraph. Perhaps I am dreaming the robin and its window-work into one unnatural thing. All things seem as messengers to the cracked-open mind. I had had a very bad week.
The next morning I woke at the same time. But not to knocking. The bird was not there. I woke to the thought of it, perhaps the hope of it. If I could only live. The pane was silent all morning and silent all the next. I could only squint through the scratchmarks of that agitated splatterwork in the center of the pane.
Guarding its skyblue future against the threat of the thought of itself, the robin marks its anguish, writes its poem. I am struggling to write mine. I guess I kept waking to see if it was there, on that second silent morning, because I had decided, after all, to let it in.
ben tapeworm
on the turntable
from the discourse
☞ For NYR, Garry Wills has a brief polemic about the recent Clarence Thomas affair (which I wrote about last week):
He did Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society a favor by helping them reduce the American Bar Association to a bystander of their feigned search for legal scholarship. He did the National Rifle Association a favor by making the Second Amendment a door-opener for gunmen at school after school. He did Amy Coney Barrett a favor by making her look like a more respectable Catholic zealot than his wife, Ginni Thomas. She returned it by defending him against his critics, saying that no Justice is really a partisan hack. And he did Ginni Thomas a favor by claiming she was not a scavenger for Harlan Crow’s money, just an extraordinarily adhesive family friend of Crow.
☞ Chris Kraus interviews Gary Indiana for Interview:
INDIANA: Alexander Kluge told me many years ago something that has always stuck in my head. People hate reality, and they will do anything to defend themselves against it. But the reality we are in right now is so daunting. People feel so vulnerable and powerless, that maybe that kind of honesty has become intolerable, because they need to defend themselves against everything now.
☞ Lauren Oyler goes on a Goop cruise for Harper’s.
☞ A Spanish woman spends 500 days alone underground. “In fact,” she said, “I didn't want to come out.”
from the Anthropocene
☞ For his newsletter Construction Physics, Brian Potter looks into the history of the solar cell and the lowering costs of solar power:
Bell Labs announced their “Solar Battery” in a press conference in April of 1954, to great fanfare. The announcement made the front page of the New York Times, and an article in US News and World Report speculated that “The [silicon] strips may provide more power than all the world’s coal, oil, and uranium.”
☞ In leaked messages, Axel Springer CEO said he was “all for climate change,” a reminder that some people aren’t just ignoring climate change but cheering it on:
In one of the messages quoted verbatim in Die Zeit, from 2017, Döpfner says: “I am all for climate change,” seemingly arguing that human civilisation in periods of warm climate was always “more successful” than during cold-climate periods. “We shouldn’t fight climate change but adjust to it.” The comments are part of a longer message in which Döpfner sums up his foreign policy views as “Free west, fuck the intolerant Muslims and all the other riff-raff.”
from my incoming texts
“Ryan is sausage czar”
“bone, ground, horse”
“It’s only seventy pages long and it’s an essay about painting and time - focusing on one small Dutch still life - written by a poet from Tennessee”
“UUUU”
“Reading this feels like I am being hit in the head”
weekly wiki
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