michal k-c > Recent Status Updates

never realized Knausgaard was such a big Deleuze fan but it totally tracks. huge W for struggleheads and Deleuzians

the most focused i’ve ever seen Knausgaard be

five billion years of Hell-engineering

criminologists have failed to consider demons

“oil cannot be politically distilled”

farewell to earth, hello poromechanical earth and the “logic of hole-agencies”

esoterica time

everyone’s always saying something about how “orwellian” the times are, but never how Cooverian the times are

prose moving at terminal velocity

Jews and Bosnians can agree, God is a cruel joker

coover really gets the absurdity of America positioning itself as this scrappy underdog while simultaneously being a global hegemon

while it’s about a lot of things, primarily this novel is about how psy-ops are irritating because they distract you from the things that really matter: chilling out and watching baseball

Coover’s Nixon is so good

we all know imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. but what is the highest stage of diplomacy? the marital threesome

personally i think it’s funny that people tried to slander Kundera for outing a western spy back in the old regime days (he has categorically denied this happening but nonetheless). western people love to pretend they would have been the bravest person in the former soviet union

crazy energetic prose, love to see it

mister bread

bill clinton getting name dropped right before the conclusion chapter like a damn Marvel post-credits cameo introducing a new supervillain

so during the Minsk accords Yeltsin calls Bush and lies that all four former Soviet nuclear republics were in agreement re: Union Treaty, even though Nazarbayev didn’t find out about the accords until after the event. and then over a decade later Borat happens. the beautiful people of Kazakhstan deserve better

honestly pretty sick move for the Ukrainian gov officials to immediately threaten Yeltsin’s russia (vis-à-vis Rutskoy) with nuclear war using nuclear weapons they were trying to illegally appropriate from the Soviet Union. surely a promising sign that relations between the two countries would always be strong and cooler heads will always prevail

i know Zubok can’t editorialize too much but lol cmon now. it’s true that Kravchuk had to walk a semantic tightrope, but let’s not sugarcoat why: you could not win an election in Ukraine if you appeared too sympathetic to Jews, simple as. it’s why he doesn’t cite the holocaust or antisemitism at the UN address, but rather makes vague gestures towards genocide.

currently securing financing for a buddy comedy about Gorby and Bush

it’s a shame there’s a bunch of batshit insane conspiracies about George Soros circulating out there. makes it a lot harder to talk about the actual real world evil Soros has inflicted on so many unwitting populations (in this case aggressive deregulation and privatization of former state industries in the russian fed)

of course, being part of “the West” is really about mindset. grind hard enough and you can be the West. just look at Australia. Jean-Luc Nancy was right, geography is deterritorialized in the age of NATO

the regime if Andropov hadn’t died 📈📈

back is so sore today i moved the wrong way and yelped like a small dog. anyway the title story of this book is great

it’s cool that william vollmann has talked to real people before. not many contemporary fiction writers can say the same

i wonder if Gorbachev ever asked George Bush where he was during the Kennedy assassination

god forbid someone sully the good name of the Nobel Peace Prize committee