Radio Free Mike

Khuê Phạm’s first novel Brothers and Ghosts deals with a Vietnamese family scattered across three continents, from Saigon to Germany to Southern California. It was translated last year from German into English, and it’s met with a great deal of critical praise, including from Ocean Vuong, who called it “a groundbreaking work in German literature.” On the podcast we talk about the Vietnamese diaspora in Berlin and Orange County, about our mutual friends who translated the novel, and about why it might be too controversial for a translation into Vietnamese.

The brothers in question are called Sơn and Minh, and the narrator’s name is Kiều. Fair warning: Khuê’s audio wanders in and out a little. Engineers at Radio Free Mike have worked furiously to mitigate the problem, but if her sound seems to fade sometimes we promise it will come back in a matter of seconds.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts, etc.

Resources:

Brothers and Ghosts, by Khue Pham

A review of Brothers and Ghosts, NPR

Mike’s visit to Cambodia to visit some former-hostage friends, in The New Yorker

Khue interviews Michael about pirates, Die Zeit

The Desert and the Sea, by Michael Scott Moore

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

Jessa Crispin’s new book, What Is Wrong With Men, studies American masculinity through a close reading of Michael Douglas’ movie roles from the mid-’80s through the late ’90s. The son of Kirk Douglas, who played Spartacus and Ulysses in the mid-20th century, Michael Douglas arguably dramatized the crisis of American men after the Sixties, because his characters are so startled by what they find sitting across from them at the dinner table.

Jessa’s a sharp-tongued critic and nonfiction writer who runs the arts & commentary website The Culture We Deserve. She originated one of the first online book blogs, called Bookslut, in the early 2000s; she’s a feminist as well as a critic of feminists, and her new book is not just fun, but also a rigorous exploration of the economic aspects of the “masculinity crisis” and what Jessa calls the Zombie Patriarchy.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

What is Wrong With Men, by Jessa Crispin

My Three Dads, by Jessa Crispin

Bookslut is Dead, Long Live Bookslut, a commemorative essay on LitHub

“The Rushdie Narrative,” Mike’s piece about Salman Rushdie on The Culture We Deserve

Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone (1985):

At the bottom of this page you may see Jessa’s Substack bio, which is Bartlebyesque and reads “no thank you.”

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

Thad Ziolkowski is a poet, novelist, and memoirist who has written a fascinating book about surfing and addiction called The Drop. He’s no stranger to difficult themes, and I have a feature in the current issue of The Surfers Journal (issue 34.2) that explores not just trauma and surfing, not just Somalia and my father’s suicide, but also the Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation, a fabulous group in the Los Angeles South Bay that has pioneered ocean therapy in the U.S.

I knew Jimmy in high school; Thad and I have both written about the Foundation. So we talk about the water that keeps us afloat.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Podcast Addict, Pocketcasts

Resources:

The Drop, by Thad Ziolkowski

On a Wave, by Thad Ziolkowski

“Blue Antidote,” by Michael Scott Moore, in Issue 34.2 of The Surfers Journal — not online, but the whole issue is terrific

The Jimmy Miller Memorial Foundation (JMMF)

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Meghan Daum is a an essayist and author who lives in L.A. but lost her home in the Eaton Fire in January. She also has a new book out called THE CATASTROPHE HOUR. She insists the title is a coincidence, because she named the book before the fires started. We talk about the fires, being “problematized,” and about Ezra Pound’s basic standards for writing in the age of under-edited writing platforms. You can also listen in real time while Mike discovers a decent segue sound for this podcast. We’re just making it up as we go here, folks.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Pocketcasts

Resources:

The Catastrophe Hour, by Meghan Daum

The ABC of Reading, by Ezra Pound

First mention of “woke” in America, during a live version of “Scottsboro Boys,” by Leadbelly. Perfectly good usage.

Radio Free Mike (original website)

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Mark Sundeen is an accomplished novelist and essayist, author of The Man Who Quit Money, a bestselling biography of Daniel Suelo, who sold all his things to live in a Utah cave. Now Mark has published a collection of similar nonfiction portraits of people who inhabit the American West, the drifters and dreamers who once populated L.A. and San Francisco before those cities got too expensive. His book, Delusions + Grandeur, also turns out to be a chronicle of American masculinity in the age of Trump.

Mark and I were both slightly disaffected teenagers in an L.A. beach town back in the day, so the conversation moves everywhere. We talk about Alta California before 1849, the Standing Rock protests in 2016, and Jack London’s adventures as a famous-but-somehow-obscure American writer. Oh, plus his contributions to surfing.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Podcast Addict, Pocketcasts

Resources:

Delusions and Grandeur, by Mark Sundeen

The Man Who Quit Money, by Mark Sundeen

A BBC video on the man who quit money, also by Mark

Sweetness and Blood, Mike’s peripatetic history of surfing

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Antoine Wilson is the author of three fine novels, including The Interloper and Panorama City, and his latest book, Mouth to Mouth, is about a man who rescuscitates a stranger on the beach in Santa Monica, but afterwards can’t resist intruding on the saved man’s life.

We talk about the unreliable nature of narrative, but for the first ten minutes we also discuss the L.A. wildfires and surfing, so if you don’t want to hear about that please skip to 9:30, where you can hear Antoine explain the personal sources of Mouth to Mouth, if he can be trusted. We chat about writers we like (W.G. Sebald, Patrick Modiano), and, at the end, some bonus material — tips for young writers!

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Podcast Addict, Pocketcasts

Resources:

Mouth to Mouth, by Antoine Wilson

An essay by Antoine on “the pleasures of the teetering stack,” at LitHub

Antoine’s website

Radio Free Mike website (off Substack)

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Jeanne Carstensen was in Greece as a reporter for The World when an overfilled boat chugging across a narrow part of the Aegean foundered and sank. The disaster brought the island of Lesbos together, in part because its residents remembered even older surges of migration, including the one caused by the Greco-Turkish War in 1922. Now she’s written a compelling and humane book about the disaster from as many points of view as possible — Greek, Syrian, Afghan, Iraqi, Turkish; her own — and it’s a stark reminder that people are still dying on the water. We talk about the nature of human smuggling on the edges of Europe and, finally, its effect on EU politics.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Podcast Addict, Pocketcasts

Resources:

A Greek Tragedy, by Jeanne Carstensen

“A Lethal Farce in the Aegean Sea,” one of Jeanne’s first reports on the story

“The Libyan Coast Guard is Not What it Seems,” by Michael Scott Moore, a reported essay from the central Mediterranean

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

Peter Theroux has started to publish a two-volume memoir about his career in US intelligence. He’s an excellent writer, from a family of them — his brothers are Paul and Alexander — and In Obscura describes his government work in the Middle East and suburban Washington with a sharp sense of detail and a lively sense of humor. Peter also describes Syria with so much obvious affection that I thought it might be interesting to hear from him about the old Ba’athist regime that fell in December, as well as the unreadable Islamist who’s now in charge.

Upgrade to a paid subscription, and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Podcast Addict, Pocketcasts

Radio Free Mike original website

Resources:

In Obscura, by Peter Theroux

Translating L.A., by Peter Theroux

Sandstorms, by Peter Theroux

Soraya Simi was hand-picked by Angela Madsen to direct a film about her last major ocean-rowing voyage, a solo attempt to row from L.A. to Honolulu in 2020. Angela was a professional ocean rower and paraplegic, an Olympic gold medalist, a Guinness world-record holder in several categories, and a former U.S. Marine. Soraya’s new film about the ill-fated voyage is named after Angela’s fiberglass boat, THE ROW OF LIFE, and the story behind the film is almost as tense and tough as its subject. We talk about the ocean, the indie filmmaking business, and those big-wave surfers at Nazaré.

Upgrade to a paid subscription if you like the podcast!

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Resources:

ROW OF LIFE upcoming schedule

Soraya Simi’s website

Mike’s book on surfing, Sweetness and Blood

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit michaelscottmoore.substack.com

American journalist Jacob Kushner is the author of a fine new(ish) book about a series of crimes by a neo-Nazi gang in Germany called LOOK AWAY: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants. I was still at Spiegel Online when the cops closed in on the “National Socialist Underground,” as the group was called, and arrested a woman called Beate Zschäpe. Her partners — both named Uwe — destroyed themselves in fiery Wagnerian fashion. Jacob talks to me about this weird story as well as the German elections coming up this weekend, and, yes, Elon Musk’s Nazi salute.

Upgrade to a paid subscription and listen to the whole episode.

Platforms: Apple, Spotify, YouTube

Resources:

Website for Jacob’s book, Look Away, or White Terror in the UK

Jacob’s feature about the AfD in BerlinMike’s essay, “Was Hitler a Man of the Left?”, basically a review of Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg

Mike’s essay “The Lying Press,” about Elon Musk and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels

Notes by Elon Musk’s former colleague on that Nazi salute.

Radio Free Mike is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.