PODCAST

No new podcast this week. I had family obligations, and it’s August.

Last week, I posted Episode 686 of my Virtual Memories Show, featuring the first installment of The Hampshire Tapes! Halstead York (F88) joins the show to talk about his experience at Hampshire College, how the news of its impending closure hit him, how the spirit of the school and its grand experiment of student-driven education has stuck with him all these years, how the school’s structure taught him how to pitch projects, how the cover of an unstructured “hippie-trippy” college (my words) masked intense competitiveness and the need to be a self-starter, how reflecting on his time there has helped him maintain his techno-utopianism, and plenty more. Give it a listen!

Recent podcast episodes: Sarah Minor • Ali Trotta • R Sikoryak • Katie Skelly • Colin Asher • Kate Maruyama & Me • Heather Cass White

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

BIRDY!

She was panting so much yesterday morning after our walk that it looked like she was smiling:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are some links for you:

• RIP John Crowley (no full-scale obit yet, which is a goddamned travesty, so a tribute; more below) . . . RIP Don Nelson . . . RIP William Orbit . . . RIP Lou Koller . . . RIP Ursula Hegi . . . RIP Abbe Lane . . . RIP Jon Cypher . . . RIP Geraldine de Haas . . . RIP Rep. Cooter . . . RIP Sydney Towle (a whole lot of everything that’s good and terrible about social media is wrapped up in this obit) . . .

• Sheila Willams and her family could use some help with healthcare $, so please give.

• Some critics on the 25 most important sculptures since 1945. I think the only one I’ve seen is Felix Gonzales Torres’ “Untitled,” when it was at the Art Institute of Chicago.

• Jill Lepore on The Artificial State and the way the techbros misread science fiction.

• Related, a good piece by Cory Doctorow on the sociopathic mess that is Mark Zuckerberg. (The whole techbro thing of calling other people “non-player characters” (NPCs) is a real tell about what shitty human beings they are.)

• Speaking of sociopathic messes, it’s the manosphere-grift! (Still wish they went with broösphere, but hey)

• After that blech, we need a palate cleanser, so here’s a new poem by Henri Cole!

• Caleb Crain wrote about Lewis and Clark, and about posting a thirst trap that went viral.

COMMONPLACE

I added this to my online commonplace book after watching ENO last week:

It separates you from the fear of death that you always feel in an airport. I started thinking about airports a long time ago and thinking about what kind of music they play. And the music they play is designed to sort of paper over the cracks of your naked fear. To sort of tell you that everything’s going along all fine and so on.

I thought it might be better to actually change people’s mental conditions so that they didn’t mind the idea of dying so much. So what I was trying to do here was to make something that put you into a different state of mind where you weren’t clinging so desperately to the idea of being alive, and where the threat was reduced.

I think it’s a very good idea, the idea of reducing your own importance in your own eyes, of creating a context where you shrink somewhat in importance and have a sense of the feeling of being in a big world where you don’t matter so much.

—Brian Eno, interview about Ambient 1: Music for Airports

Climacteric Obscura

On Sunday, we held the stone-setting service for my father’s grave. My brother flew in for a few days to conduct it, and his niece and her bf came out from NYC that morning. We prayed, said some words, and placed stones on the grave marker.

My brother stayed with us that night, and we went out to his favorite cliff that evening so he could try to get a good picture of the sunset through the verdure.

On Friday, I went for my quarterly oncology check-in, and was told my WBC and other numbers were fine and I could go back to semi-annual check-ins.

On Saturday, I learned that John Crowley died, and I remain heart-struck. I knew it was coming, but we’re never ready.

John was one of America’s greatest novelists (don’t sleep on his short stories or his criticism, either), but I’m incapable of characterizing that greatness, because it encompasses so many genres, brings so much imagination to every page, captures so much of what it means to live in our unenchanted age, and what it means to remember or desire something more.

When I was in Amherst the previous weekend, I saw a signed copy of Engine Summer in a bookstore. It’s one of my faves and I considered buying it, but passed. I’d thought about letting John know I’d be in the area, but from what our mutuals had told me in recent months, I knew he wouldn’t be up for a visit.

Maybe my next extracurricular reading will be a return to his AEgypt cycle. I wasn’t too young when I read them (37), but suspect the battering of middle-age and the notion of a climacteric year will make those books resonate with me more now. (The first book, and the first third of the next book, are among the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read.)

Start reading Crowley, and you’ll see: the further in you go, the bigger it gets.

One by one the bulbs burned out, like long lives come to their expected ends. Then there was a dark house made once of time, made now of weather, and harder to find; impossible to find and not even as easy to dream of as when it was alight. Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories. It was anyway all a long time ago; the world, we know now, is as it is and not different; if there was ever a time when there were passages, doors, the borders open and many crossing, that time is not now. The world is older than it was. Even the weather isn’t as we remember it clearly once being; never lately does there come a summer day such as we remember, never clouds as white as that, never grass as odorous or shade as deep and full of promise as we remember they can be, as once upon a time they were.

—John Crowley, Little, Big

John was one of the first real pantheon-level guests on the podcast. We recorded three times over the years: 2013, 2017 and 2022.

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list.

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.

Seagulls circle endlessly / I sing in silent harmony / We shall be free,