Monday Miscellany: The stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart

Notes from March 17 - 23

Mar 24, 2025

It’s a new week and spring has finally arrived for real where I am! This morning was grey and drizzly, serving up the perfect vibes for couch snuggles and coffee and the last bit of a book. And now, the clouds having cleared a little, an occasional breeze is bringing down showers of tiny white petals that almost look like snow. For the moment, I really love it here.

Currently reading

My book selections this week were fully guided by external forces, which felt fun and serendipitous. Mickey17 came out in theaters and I planned to see it with some friends, so I picked up Mickey7 to read before our movie date. Michelle Tea mentioned How to Write an Autobiographical Novel in the McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern I finished last week, so I took that as encouragement to pluck it from my unread shelf. These were very different reading experiences, but I really enjoyed both.

Mickey7 by Edward Ashton is set in a near future where Earth has become mostly uninhabitable and humans have started spreading out and colonizing other planets. Protagonist Mickey Barnes joins an expedition to Niflheim as the ship’s Expendable, a position that requires doing the most uncertain and dangerous jobs and then being recreated as a clone if and when he dies as a result. When the story begins this process has already happened quite a few times and we’re introduced to Mickey7, who has just fallen into an icy crevasse and is declared a lost cause. Though he manages to survive and return to the ship, a new version of him has already been created to replace the one presumed dead and he arrives back to his room to find Mickey8 in his bed—a huge problem, since societal norms and the laws around human replication don’t take kindly to multiples. The rest of the novel follows the two Mickeys as they come up with a way out of this pickle and try to keep their simultaneous existence a secret in the meantime.

What I loved most about this book was the tone. It’s smart yet snarky, aware of the high stakes but also not taking itself too seriously; the voice reminded me of The Martian by Andy Weir.

It’s a trueism that every new technological advancement in human history has been applied first to advance the interests of the horny. The printing press? Some Bibles, mostly porn. Antibiotics? Perfect for treating STIs. The ocular? Don’t get me started on what those were first used for. (254)

At the same time that he’s describing icy alien worlds and unpredictable fact-finding missions, Ashton is exploring friendship, romantic love, and the interpersonal dynamics aboard a ship like this one.

There’s no such thing as a perfect friend, any more than there’s any such thing as a perfect anything, and if you slag everyone in your life for their many and varied failings, you’re going to miss appreciating the good stuff they bring to the table. (81)

Adventure, humor, hijinks, and feelings—a little something for everyone. The film changes the tone and takes things in a different direction, and I wasn’t the biggest fan of it as an adaptation. But it does have some pretty excellent things going for it— stunning visuals, a great soundtrack, weirdly cute alien creatures, and Toni Collette among them—and it’s enjoyable in its own right. I do need more people to read the book, though, and then come talk to me about it, please.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee is a nonfiction collection of essays and memoir all about Chee’s years as a young gay man in San Francisco and New York, his time as a cater waiter, his experiences learning and teaching writing, and the process of composing his first novel.

One of my favorite sections focuses on his time studying with the writer Annie Dillard:

Don’t worry about being original, she said dismissively. Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise, it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible. (50)

You can invent the details that don’t matter, she said. At the edges. You cannot invent the details that matter. (52)

Really, all of the parts about writing struck a chord. They were woven throughout, and I wrote down so many quotes. Here are a few:

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success. (118)

I tell my students all the time: writing fiction is an exercise in giving a shit—an exercise in finding out what you really care about. (202)

The difficulties are many, even if you truly want to be a writer. What seems to separate those who write from those who don’t is being able to stand it. (255)

Another memorable essay, “The Rosary,” is all about a rose garden that Chee tends in the small yard of an apartment he lives in for a few years. I was completely struck by how he ties together gardening advice, plants as metaphors for human growth, and the role of roses in the etymology of rosary beads—it’s masterful.

Chee also writes extensively about sexual abuse, money and wealth, sexuality and gender, mixed race identity, the process of unearthing his own memories, the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, the climate crisis, the 2016 election, and why art and fiction will always matter. I made my way through his words slowly and they’ve left me with a lot to mull over.

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Currently listening

Our homie Alex Melton dropped “Go/Down/Violence Mashup” on Monday, combining a few of his favorite Blink-182 tracks into one epic five-and-half-minute mega-cover, and I love it. He hits some of the best melodic moments of all three originals, but he sands down the edges and drops the tempo just a little to make the whole thing into something of an emo power ballad. And what a blend—the seams are invisible. As a bonus, we also get covers of Matchbox Twenty’s “3AM” and a newer Blink-182 song, “One More Time” on the single.

Obviously, I couldn’t listen to Alex’s mashup without immediately running to the source material, Blink-182 by Blink-182 (2003). For whatever reason I never got as deeply into this album as I did Enema of the State (1999), Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (2000), or California (2016). I was aware of it and knew the hits, but I didn’t feel like it was mine—maybe because I didn’t have the CD and couldn’t play it over and over again as I drove around as a high school kid with nowhere to be, the way I took in the ones before it. Whatever the case, I rectified the situation this week with a few play-throughs. My favorite tracks are “Down” and “I’m Lost Without You.” I’ve always been a sucker for the sad ones.