Cheesecake, Penguins, Bucks
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Intro
I’d offer up something profound, but this is already a day late & I’ve got advocacy letters & an article to write for work, so instead you get a little lunchtime update this week.
Oral surgery last Friday went fine: both impacted lower wisdom teeth are out & I seem to be recovering okay. Apparently, the first thing I asked the surgeon after coming out of sedation was whether it was okay to drink coffee. I was more judicious about the pain pills they supplied this time. I got back to solid food (a little) 2 days ago, but am still being careful with eating. This morning, I weighed in 0.1 lbs. above My Target Weight, which is pretty funny, because it means I dropped almost a dozen pounds since Aug. 7.
I felt good enough by Monday morning to visit [REDACTED] at their offices in Hudson Yards. After, I stopped in Jose Andres’ Mercado Little Spain before heading back to the ferry to NJ. Rather than risk any of the amazing lunch fare, I figured I should stick with semisolid foods, so I got a slice of Basque cheesecake (no crumbs/crust).
That cheesecake sure was great. I guess that’s as profound as it gets.
And now, on with The Virtual Memories Show!
Podcastery
This, I posted Episode 551 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. Jerome Charyn rejoins the show to celebrate his new novel, RAVAGE & SON (Bellevue Literary Press), a fantastic noir about the Lower East Side in 1913. We talk about his love for the LES and the Bintel Briefs in The Forward, why he wanted to write a Jewish Jekyll & Hyde story, and how adopting a cat changed the course of this amazing novel. We also get into the music of the sentence, life on the page, and the self-revelation of writing, why so many of his characters attend Harvard, the holiness of books and why he reads so little of others’ books nowadays, treating writing as an apprenticeship rather than a career, and how he got overwhelmed for a year after writing in Abe Lincoln’s voice. Plus we discuss his reverence of Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy (and ambivalence toward Henry James, who makes an appearance in Ravage & Son), the sense of being transported by the ballet performances of Allegra Kent, how it felt to write a character who’s in love with destruction, why gender fluidity is essential to human nature, and the one advantage to living long enough: understanding that nothing remains and everything disappears. Give it a listen! And go read RAVAGE & SON (& go listen to our 2019, 2021, and 2022 conversations!)
Last week, I posted Episode 550 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. Ron Rosenbaum. With the release of IN DEFENSE OF LOVE: An Argument (Doubleday), Ron Rosenbaum offers up a series of essays to save love from scientizers & pseudoscientists, the extremists, the jaded, and anyone else who doubts whether Amor Vincit Omnia. We get into why love needs a defense and how it’s not reducible to chemical surges on an fMRI scan, the overwhelming emotion of Linda Ronstadt’s Long Long Time, the beauty of Philip Larkin’s poem An Arundel Tomb and why Larkin may have been embarrassed by the honesty of its last line (“What will survive of us is love.”), and the ways bullshit science can lead people ridiculously astray. We talk about the first and last times Ron fell in love, why he included a chapter on his own experiences of love & regret, whether dangerous passion outweighs a moderate marriage, why Tolstoy adopted an anti-love extinction agenda in his later work, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read IN DEFENSE OF LOVE (& go listen to our 2013 and 2014 conversations!)
Other recent episodes: Karl Stevens • Howard Fishman • Christopher Brown • Rian Hughes • Eddie Campbell
Links & Such
RIP Jerry Moss . . . RIP Michael Parkinson . . . RIP Inga Swenson . . . RIP Most Expected Death Of 2023 . . . RIP Terry Funk . . .
Sure, I’ve goofed on my alma mater, Hampshire College, in the past, but this initiative — providing automatic admission to New College of FL refugees and giving them reduced tuition costs — is balls-out A-W-E-S-O-M-E.
Raise the roof, post-Vanity Fair style.
Pretty sure I posted it a year ago when it came out, but I really love this Paris Review piece by the poet Henri Cole about James Merrill, so go read it.
This lovely interview w/Lynda Barry was from around then, too. I have a lot of open tabs on my browsers.
Neat article on the complexities of Borges’ literary estate.
Gary Shteyngart on why Tokyo is The Best. (Our last trip before lockdown was a week in Japan — Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto — and we’re dying to get back.)\
Now that I’ve dropped ~12 lbs. in 2 weeks, I’m back near my prime running weight, so maybe I’ll go back to that until my body breaks down again. Here’s some data on how much time I have before it all falls apart.
Congrats to Sir Nils Olav III, Baron of the Bouvet Islands, on his promotion to Major General!
Current reading
Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon
Three Rocks: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created Nancy - Bill Griffith
Art
I made a tree postcard with a brush-pen, for a show supporter. On Sunday, I sketched a deer from a photo I took that morning. It was neat/weird series of challenges: I used a mini-easel for the first time, rather than drawing flat on the table; I used a thick piece of watercolor paper, so it was a little flexible; and I had my contact lenses in, so I couldn’t work too close up. It all added up to my using a really light touch with the pencil, and it somehow came out better than I expected. I’ll ink or paint or whatever sometime. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Haven’t worked out since Aug. 4 because of all this tooth stuff, but I’m back to my daily floor routine, for the most part. I also managed a 6.5-mile walk on Sunday morning, which was probably the longest I’ve walked in a long time. I think I’ll try working out on Friday, if the oral surgeon followup goes well, and get back to Swole Gil.
Until Next Week
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back next week with a new podcast, some great links, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.
We’ll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa,
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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