Two hours ago, if you’d asked me to predict the subject I’d keyboard-scrawl into a Ulysses document, I literally would never have guessed it would be Taylor Swift. I finished Miss Americana, Lana Wilson’s documentary about Taylor Swift, half an hour ago. After finishing the film, I texted a friend who told me a few days ago I should watch it, and the following thoughts spawned in the text thread, now recapitulated and slightly elaborated here: 1) I’ve never loved Taylor’s music, which is entirely okay. As an equalizing disclaimer, I write music, and I don’t love most of it either. That’s creativity for you, and the unpredictability of the audience’s response to art is precisely what makes art something distinct and of neurological consequence. (For more on that, I’d read Eric Kandel’s The Age of Insight.) 2) I’m no stranger to the occasional fanboy-ish celebrity fascination, but I definitely don’t feel that way about Taylor Swift. She doesn’t grab my attention in any nonstandard way—and this I mean not as a denigration, but as a humanization. And yet, I enjoyed the documentary. What I appreciate about it is that I closed the Netflix tab filled with a bellyful of visceral pride, personal-level pride, real pride, at Taylor’s growth over her 15-year career. Here she is, a musician I don't listen to, in a genre I don't care for, with 127M Instagram followers as of this writing, and I’m proud of her? It’s perplexing! Her fame is blasé to me. She’s a human, who’s done things, and changed, and my brain’s treating her like any other human, and that’s why Miss Americana is pretty brilliant, I’d say. It’s a story about a person who I feel normally about, but who’s had an absolutely abnormal life.