Micah ☔️ > Recent Status Updates

Even when his advice is good, King can’t help but link merit with commercial success. From an otherwise solid section on the art of description: “If you can do this, you will be paid for your labors, and deservedly so. If you can’t you’re going to collect a lot of rejection slips and perhaps explore a career in the fascinating world of telemarketing”

“The night had a cold, phantasmal beauty that intensified as we ascended. More stars than I had ever seen smeared the frozen sky. A gibbous moon rose… washing the slope beneath my boots in ghostly light, obviating the need for a headlamp” -John Krakauer, Into Thin Air (1996, Outside)

My criteria for evaluating individual entries in an anthology is asking myself, “how likely would I be to read this author’s other writing off the strength of this piece”. It’s a fun (albeit frustrating) twist that some of the writers here are more or less lost to history aside from their story in this collection

This is such a land mine of an audiobook to produce with a single narrator lol. The author is white and there are chapters where she talks at length about her whiteness. But most important characters are black. So they had to decide whether to have a black woman read the first person white lady chapters or have a white woman struggle thru chapters of blaccented dialogue (they went with the latter)

One of just five fictional Micahs listed on Wikipedia. The other four are nerd bullshit (the bad guy in Red Dead Redemption 2, character in six issues of Wonder Women from the 90s, etc.)

The part where Paul has to go to a dumbass play about why the company he works for is good . . . Holy Shit! What a beast of a chapter! Reminds you that it’s not really a Kurt novel until you get to the metatextual “story within the story”. But because it’s his first novel, Vonnegut doesn’t yet realize this about himself, so you have to sit thru two thirds of a book to get to a key strength of his writing

Dawg… you’re not gonna believe how “late-Obama/early-Trump era” this book is. Everything down to the central premise is antiquated. A secret government agency of gay spies is the kind of shit libs were on in 2018. By 2020 I think even most of them were over the idea that secret, deep-state progressives would save us. Who does this even appeal to at this point? God help me, it appeals to me

For the most part this anthology displays an impressive breadth of subject matter. But I could have done with fewer pieces about a washed up baseball legend who’s now staring down leaving the game behind for good.

I get it man, mortality comes for us all.

Reading the Billy Conn profile (“The Boxer and the Blonde”), it’s so funny that as recently as 1985 the father in law of a famous athlete could be the de facto villain in a profile for being angry that an adult man started dating his daughter when she was 16.

If any Frank Deford superfans read this. Yes I know his articles are penetrating character studies that defy the simple morality of most sportswriting

If any other deceased hero opened a book by quoting Dylan and contemplating their death, it would make me cry and ruin my day. But I don’t think Norm would be capable of ruining my day if he tried.

The considerations of how a toddler would process a fantasy environment are beautifully realized.

The sense of mortality that Collins fixates on is common enough in YA (The Hunger Games), but a breath of fresh air in a middle grade novel

Bobby going to a screening of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor with his Japanese gf, being overcome with emotion and loudly applauding when the heroic Americans get their revenge . . . Look, all I’m saying is there’s a very thin line between “story about a racist idiot”, and “very promising Curb Your Enthusiasm premise”

When the biography has a chapter called “The Wilderness Years >>>>

William F. Buckley on the March on Washington: “Solomon himself could not come up with a law of the land which would drain the resentments of James Baldwin”. Every accusation by a conservative pundit is a confession, always has been

Reacher’s cellmate is a finance guy who he refers to as a “yuppie asshole”, but he still talks like Jim from Huck Finn like every other Georgia native

“You can’t be serious. This crap is as welcome as a pile of severed dog cocks. Oh come on, I could sell the dog cocks to the knackers at least”

When a fantasy shopkeeper gets a little Angry Video Game Nerd with it >>>

First two chapters put me at ease. Third chapter more in keeping with what you would expect from a debut novel. Scenes of the protagonist getting drunk and having an ill-advised hookup. Written in a way the convinces me the author has never gotten drunk, and never had sex

“their acts will ultimately accommodate history with or without their understanding”

I’m impressed so far. Fishbach is earning his Vonnegut epigraph. I appreciate Beck’s initial chapter, and how her defense of reality TV’s narrativizing as helping people self-actualize through storytelling, feels like a tender take on Ned Beatty’s Network monologue. Existing at the razor’s edge of haunting realism and surprising sentimentality.

When you’re a curmudgeonly jedi and you have to hide your frustration with a smug, soft bureaucrat out of respect for Supreme Chancellor Palpatine 🤦‍♂️ <<<

Put it down for a movie review and stumbled into this from Jean-Luc Godard which would fit into a book about democracy quite nicely:
“Knowledge of the possibility of representation consoles us for being enslaved to life. Knowledge of life consoles us for the fact that representation is but shadow”

Reading this book on the bus and alternating between nodding and shaking my head so people know I support female rock critics, but disagree with “The Stomach-Churning Sexual Assault Accusations Against R. Kelly”

Kind of incredible that for all the dudes who are obsessed with this, its basically walked between the raindrops of “red flag book” discourse. Elroy heads, if we want that free publicity, we need to take a hard look in the mirror, and get more annoying

Franken being able to come across convincingly dewey eyed about such a broad an array of characters as lefty mavericks (Paul Wellstone), centrist party lifers (Amy Klobuchar), and commercialist conservatives (Toby Keith), is one reason he was such an effective politician in his day

I’ll fully cop to being a little slow for detail dense murder plots such as this. But I know of few writers who can make a gut punch surreptitiously trail you then engulf you the way French can

Hillary modeling her campaign launch on FDR is like the Katy Perry video where she dreams she’s Joan of Arc

The jaded, middle aged executive getting his first erection in months when he visits a sister band is basically Paul Thomas Anderson working with Haim

Rainer going from flexing his impressive bonafides of reading all the right people as a young man (Agee, Farber, Sarris) and curating Kenji Mizoguchi for his university film society. To writing that Wong Kar-wai is “a pop schlock aesthete” is more evidence for my theory that the worst thing that can happen to a promising critic is a stable, prestigious magazine gig

“In the mythology of American militarism that has taken hold since George W. Bush’s disastrous wars… the action of his father, George H.W. Bush, are often held up as a paragon of prudence… But the road to Baghdad ran through Panama city, with the 1989 invasion inaugurating the post—Cold War age of unilateral intervention” (p. 201)