PODCAST

I posted Episode 682 of my Virtual Memories Show yesterday! After a 12-year Virtual Memories gap, Katie Skelly is back to celebrate her fantastic new graphic novel, HEAVEN (Fantagraphics)! But that’s not all: she’s also got the Bad Girl Tarot II (Kickstarter closing July 16, 2026), her horror comics anthology, Viscere, and the Thick Lines podcast! We talk about how she restructured her life and creativity post-lockdown, how she wound up marrying Jaime Hernandez, moving to LA, abandoning the Mets, and finding a community of cartoonists (spoiler: community is the thread that runs through Katie’s art and life), the funny tweet about The Weeknd that inspired HEAVEN, why she designed this new tarot deck to be like a prop for a movie you’d want to live in, and why she didn’t learn from my example and avoid making her own podcast. We get into how writing Ed Piskor’s obituary broke her, and the episode in Ed’s life that she takes as a cautionary note, the festival that drew her into the comics world, how she measures herself against her yearly Nabokov read, why she’s pretty much done with social media, the flight delay that led to her next comics project, and more! PLUS, Katie reads my tarot as we talk about what it’ll take for me to finish my book! Give it a listen! And go read HEAVEN!

Recent podcast episodes: Colin Asher • Kate Maruyama & Me • Heather Cass White • Paul Gravett • Luis Mendo • Benoit Denizet-Lewis • Clare Carlisle

Every book (non-comics) that I’ve finished since 1989.

BIRDY!

I gave her a bath last Friday, and she was all fluffy after:

INSTAX

I haven’t run any of the actual prose pieces from my Instax book in this newsletter, but I finally got back to writing last weekend, so I figured I’d share this draft as a tease:

She found her grandfather Konrad’s manuscript, nearly complete, in a deco cabinet the Bercovici family called “The Tarambula.” There’s so much more in its drawers, she told me, a multi-generational legacy of art that she wants to transmute into books and theater and TV.

Konrad’s book told stories from his 25 years around the Algonquin Round Table. They reminded me of the Vienna coffeehouses that Clive James celebrated in one of my favorite books, Cultural Amnesia.

If you squint, the Virtual Memories Show is a sort of salon, but it isn’t my first attempt at gathering people for cultured conversation.

Around the turn of the century, I occasionally hosted Smart Guys Salon. My writer-pals and I usually met for brunch at the Hi Life on the Upper West Side, but one time we met at the WWF Restaurant in Times Square, because I never took things too seriously.

I always liked being around writers, for the same reason I always liked reading the Paris Review’s Writers At Work interviews; they made me feel like writing was possible.

But I wish this book had been waiting for me in a tarambula or some other cabinet of curiosities, rather than flaying me alive and extracting my blood and memories. I wish it was left for me and not what I’ve left for you.

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are a couple of links for you

• RIP Herbert Lust . . . RIP Louise Lasser . . . RIP Penelope Keith . . . RIP Mike Wallace . . .

• NEIL THE SEAL IN TASMANIA.

• I too am extrapolated to some higher dimensionality.

• I too am less well suited to more perishable items. (Also, I call BS on Twinkies only having a 65-day shelf life.)

• Who’s got a tiny little dustpan & broom?

• Funny interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard about Norway’s World Cup team, Erling Haaland, and all the viking props. We cheered for them over Brazil.

• Howard Fishman interviewed John Byrne; Howard & I both grooved on Claremont-Byrne-Austin-Orzechowski’s X-Men comics in our youth.

• Daniel Mendelsohn tackles Iliad vs. Odyssey.

• Speaking of classics, here’s a conversation with Mary Beard comparing the current U.S. administration to Ancient Rome (+ an Odyssey quip at the end).

• The new Pope talked about the importance of writing/writers.

A GEOGRAPHIC MEMORY

“This road is cursed,” said my father on his final drive down Rt. 17 S. It was July 3, 2025, and if I had run into any holiday traffic on the way to Hackensack University Medical Center, there’s a good chance he’d have died in my car, rather than in the ICU ward a week later.

In the year since, I’ve mourned the relationship we didn’t have. There are plenty of memories, good, bad, & ugly, and many of them triggered by roads, highways, shops, some from my youth, others from countless drives to doctors and hospitals in his later days. It’s one of the drawbacks of my staying in the same place almost my entire life; the landscape charts my memories, and I can’t escape it.

But on Sunday I drove into NYC to record next week’s show in the Stuy Town apartments on the Lower East Side.

Taking the 23th St. exit from the Harlem River Dr., passing light after light as I approached 14th, I thought of those Sunday nights I brought Amy back to the city after our weekends together in NJ.

And after I parked — street parking! — and walked up to the Ave. B entrance, I remembered the evening 20+ years ago when I made that drive with total clarity of purpose, the evening when I got on one knee, and asked her to marry me.

There’s no escaping Rt. 17 S., but we’ll always have Stuy Town.

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list. US postage rates go up on July 12 — domestic postcard stamps go from 61 cents to 65, international from $1.70 to $1.75 — so I ordered a ton of forever stamps yesterday.

EXPENSES

If you want to help out with Virtual Memories Show expenses — this email runs $29/month, podcast-hosting is $25/month, and the remote recording account is $20/month — or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can make a one-time contribution of any size via Stripe, or a recurring one via Patreon. Or maybe save your money for when I launch the Kickstarter for my Instax book.

NEXT TIME

Thanks for reading this far. See you next time, I hope.

Some call it magic / The search for the Grail,