Death & Seltzer-Bottles
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Intro
On Saturday, I visited the funniest cemetery ever. I had just finished recording this week’s podcast with Ross Benjamin about his new translation of Franz Kafka’s diaries and went to nearby Oak Hill Cemetery to find the grave of Edward Hopper. (Many thanks to FindAGrave for getting me the exact GPS coordinates.)
I brought my sketchpad & pencils along, hoping to draw the grave & its environs, but it was a cold, windy morning with snow flurries, so I only made a quick sketch of the gravestone shared by Hopper & his wife Josephine, and took this picture.
It was on the walk down to my car that the laughs began. I won't post any pictures, out of respect for the dead & not wanting to get beaten up by their families, but going from a Borscht Belt entertainer who may as well have had a seltzer bottle carved into his headstone — his inscription reads, “He Was Funny With A Wicked Slice Of Spice And Surprise.” — to an Italian magician whose tomb has his image intricately carved into a black slab of marble, tuxedo’d with a pair of flames rising from his hands, and a glow-effect around his body, I thought that I’ll probably wind up with a carving of a microphone on my headstone, & an epitaph like, “So, tell me where death began for you,” or a guest-quote like, “Relaxed, erudite, jaw-droppingly well-prepared, notably gracious in a graceless age.” [Just kidding: I’m too cheap for long inscriptions.] I felt cheered and almost giddy in that field of the dead.
A few mornings later, this Substack post by Dan Drezner about the deaths of his mother-in-law and a colleague continued to rejigger my death-mind. In this case, he got me thinking about the self-pity/abnegation I subjected myself to after the late 2019 memorial for my closest friend, Tom Spurgeon. I came away from that experience beating myself up for not knowing Tom as well as I should have, after hearing all the stories his friends told about their experiences with him, their versions of him. I felt, as I wrote a while ago in relation to the only good part of Martin Amis’ terrible last novel, “I barely knew him.” And as someone who asks questions of people every week for the show, I didn't ask Tom enough, didn't know him as well as I should have.
But in a few lines, Dan Drezner helped me realize that I should have been celebrating Tom’s fullness, with the understanding that only death brings together so many threads of a person’s life:
One of the beautiful, frustrating things about death is that the process of collective mourning often yields new ways of looking at the person who just passed away. This can be wonderful in seeing all sides of a person, and not just those aspects most directly related to family or work or whatnot. What can be vexing, however, is that one wishes those perspectives had been observable while that person was still alive.
He’s exactly right. Instead of castigating myself, I should have been celebrating that Tom’s life was even greater than the one I experienced, while admitting I never could have experienced the other parts that added up to so much more.
That ties back into this week's podcast with Ross Benjamin, specifically when we talked about the role Max Brod played in shaping Kafka's legacy, and the ascetic/monk Kafka-persona Brod forged. (Brod was Kafka's friend and literary executor, and the person who famously did not follow through on Kafka's wishes that he burn all his papers after death.)
When I asked Ross about that monk-persona and Brod's editing of the diaries to hide the more earthy, social, sexual, public-facing Kafka, Ross said that he thought it wasn't deliberate on Brod’s part, at least not in terms of “branding” or marketing his late friend. Rather, he speculated, that was the Franz he knew. Others had different experiences with K., and the diaries display a whole lot of layers, but maybe that editing and shaping was more about Brod trying to get K.’s afterlife to conform to the K. he was friends with, without admitting to himself, “I didn’t know him so well after all,” as opposed to, “We can make a posthumous career for Franz by framing him as a martyr to literature.”
I’d prattle more, but I need to wrap this up and prep for the quarterly meeting of my board of trustees this afternoon. I might write a second piece this weekend about more death-y stuff, or maybe I'll be more upbeat. You know: Funny With A Wicked Slice Of Spice And Surprise.
And now, on with The Virtual Memories Show!
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 522 of The Virtual Memories Show, featuring the return of Ross Benjamin to celebrate the publication of his translation of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Books). We get into the twisted history of the diaries, Ross’ monumental achievement of bringing them into English, how ambiguity and circularity pervade Kafka’s very language, and whether one can be qualified for this sort of task before actually doing it. We also talk about how this edition restores a fuller, living Kafka, what it was like to translate the private writings of someone who was the personification of ambivalence, and what it’s like to catch Kafka in the act of writing. Plus, we discuss what it’s like to accomplish a dream project like this by the age of 40 and Ross’ sense that he’s served the purpose he was meant for (which leads to the question of What Comes Next), the blurbs that made him plotz and the post-pub tribute from his daughter that brought him to tears, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read The Diaries of Franz Kafka! (& go check out our 2016 conversation)
Last week, I posted Episode 521, featuring the return of Sara Lippmann. We talk about her debut novel, LECH (Tortoise Books), and how. We talk about how she had to move out of her comfort zone of short fiction to write a novel, the research that went into writing about the Catskills in decline, and what it means to find the right container for a story. We get into how LECH’s plays off of both the Biblical notion of Lech Lecha (“go forth”) and the tradition of novels named after their protagonists’ last names (Herzog, Stern, Jernigan). On top of that, we discuss the silliness of “literary immortality” and what it means that almost no one reads Saul Bellow anymore, how Sara took up running at 40 to combat depression, the moment she learned to stop caring about external validation, and more. Give it a listen! And go read LECH! (& go check out our 2014 conversation)
Links & Such
RIP Jeff Beck . . . RIP Tatjana Patitz
If you're on Twitter, you should be following Hanif Kureishi's feed, because he's suffered a terrible health issue but is somehow dictating absolutely beautifully written updates to his family to post there. Here's an article about What's Going On
If you meet the 88-ton Buddha on the road, help him stand up.
Ron Slate reviews Robert Pinsky's memoir (which reminds me that I need to re-pitch Pinsky on recording a podcast)
Lovely review by Sebastian Smee of the Cy Twombly exhibition at MFA in Boston, Making Past Present
Here are a couple of media articles that jumped out at me last week: Interview with FX chief Jon Landgraf about streaming TV, a profile of Bela Bajaria, Netflix’ head of TV, a postmortem on Penguin Random House’s failed takeover of Simon & Schuster, and past guest Ben Schwartz’ piece on streaming platforms vis-a-vis the movie Babylon and the history of Hollywood’s treatment of labor. The through-line could be about how consolidation and data-driven practices can screw over artists, but read for yourself.
Rebecca Mead reviews Spare, the memoir by Harry Sussex
The weekly e-mail from the Frenchtown Bookshop has some neat observations about the ghost writer who worked on Spare, JR Moehringer
Calvin Reid is retiring after 36 years at Publishers Weekly: congrats, Calvin!
New Jersey: we got your big trees right here
I mail out a postcard every (mail-)day. If you’re interested in being on the
victimrecipient list for that, just drop me a line with your mailing address.
Current reading
Septology, book III - by Jon Fosse
Boundless As The Sky - by Dawn Raffel (listen to our 2019 talk)
Art
I didn’t draw or paint anything worth sharing this past week. I’m still having a hard time getting motivated & focused to draw, or really accessing that drawing-mind, and now I’m in danger-spiral mode, where I fear that when I try I’ll be so bad that it’ll discourage me more. But I made a really beautiful line last week. It was with a watercolor pencil, and maybe it was supposed to be a branch or the beginning of a tree, but it just had this sort of life to it, made me think of a Mattotti drawing. Then I went over it with a brush and washed away anything that was special about it. You should go to the Flickr album of all the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I actually managed the whole 5-day circuit of alternating weights & yoga from Friday-Tuesday! Kept thinking I’d miss a day at some point, but I surprised myself. In fact, Monday was almost a miss, because I got home from a business meeting down in Cranbury, NJ at 5:15 p.m., but decided I’d just get to it and try to stretch out my sitting-in-a-car muscles & joints. Also got in a ~4-mile walk Sunday morning with my pals. Gonna have to figure out if my lungs etc. can handle light jogging soon.
Until Next Week
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back next with a new podcast (probably; I don’t have anyone scheduled yet and it’s already Wednesday), fun links, some art (I promise!), & maybe a little profundity or something.
Blink and you just might miss it,
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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