Links for January 1st
Marvel, Mexico, what it's like to get COVID three times, Joan Didion, Drive My Car (2021) and Haruki Murakami
Happy new year! Let’s hope it’s a wild, almost unfathomable improvement on the last two.
I wrote a little take on the Marvel MCU and what it feels like (or doesn’t) when the world ends. (That sounds grim but I enjoyed many Marvel properties in 2021!)
Links
My colleague Ema O’Connor has had COVID three times. She wrote a great piece about that; it’s funny, informative, and thoughtful about moral judgments.
This Washington Post story deals with an economics problem, namely tourists’ demand for coke in Cancun and Tulum, how that demand’s getting met, and when violence becomes too much. But it also has a short story in two sentences:
After a few minutes of confusion, the armed men, realizing they had accidentally stopped two foreign tourists, tried to calm them down. “No problem, no problem,” one of the armed men said, and patted one of the tourists on the back, offering him a hug.
Here’s another short story in two sentences:
Then she hung up.
Or she thought she did.
The “she” is Dr. Oz’s wife, and that’s from Olivia Nuzzi’s look at Dr. Oz’s Senate campaign in Pennsylvania.
Reuters photographer Leah Mills describes here how she took the famous photo of the Capitol — the flash bang grenade photo — on Jan. 6.
Faye Webster wrote a song about a “baseball player” on her album last year… that’s about an actual baseball player! Fun story with some excellent quotes about being a fan.
Light book commentary
So very briefly on one of the greatest there ever was, Joan Didion, one thing interesting about reading different tributes is thinking “well, that’s not right at all” — as though I’m some leading expert on Joan Didion, in unique tune with what her writing meant to someone else. (Not from Bun B; he’s right.) Which is pretty clearly a sign of someone’s reach and import, that so many people can walk away with different views, all orbiting around the one thing everyone agrees about, which is the pure excellence on the sentence level.
Anyway, for as much talk as there is about the coldness of Didion, a. The Year of Magical Thinking is, I think, a much warmer and more open book than it’s sometimes described as, b. this also leaves out how funny some of Didion’s pieces can be. And that’s even more of an achievement, given how hard it is to balance a piece being serious and funny, without one disrupting the other, or feeling gratuitous.
The introductory section of “Sentimental Journeys,” for instance, works through a lot about the sorry state of New York in the early 1990s, the brutal crime at the center of the Central Park jogger case, the press treatment of the victim, the police treatment of the accused teens (Didion famously questioned the verdict), and a murder across 6,000 words. Then you get to the break.
The next section opens like this:
Perhaps the most arresting collateral news to surface, during the first few days after the attack on the Central Park jogger, was that a significant number of New Yorkers apparently believed the city sufficiently well-ordered to incorporate Central Park into their evening fitness schedules.
That’s in a piece about a brutal crime and nightmarish verdict! And there’s a thousand such little things you could pull out of pieces and laugh at or think mysteriously about the rest of the day — one of the greatest there ever was.
Lastly, I caught Drive My Car, and while it maybe fell into the category of movies I wanted to like more than I did (but maybe it’s just marinating), one thing that was super cool about it: The film is inspired by the plot of a Haruki Murakami short story (also called “Drive My Car”), but the film actually incorporates a second short story (“Scheherazade”) from that same collection (Men Without Women), in a way that comments on the story, too. The multiverse lives! The other thing I will say about Drive My Car is, in part because it’s three hours long and probably 40 percent takes place in that car, gradually as it goes, you stop worrying that someone will die in a car crash (something about the way parts of it are filmed suggests it’s coming) and relax into the nighttime rides, the way you might with a driver whom you trust. Presumably that was intentional, and it was also cool.
A note on all this
Thanks for subscribing. Hope you enjoy. The goal here is just to offer up some links you may have missed, and maybe the occasional commentary on something in politics or a book I may have read that you, the reader, might enjoy. If you have thoughts on any of this, hit me up at katherinemillernyc@gmail.com or just tweet at me.