PODCAST

This week, I posted Episode 688 of my Virtual Memories Show, featuring a Five-Timer Club Alert! Essayist Phillip Lopate rejoins the show as we celebrate his wonderful new book, A WASHINGTON IRVING SKETCH BOOK (Princeton)! We talk about the origins of the biography, incl. how he wound up with a 12-volume set of Washington Irving’s complete works, his choice to write the bio in the form of sketches, how Irving as America’s first professional writer is a precursor/trailblazer for Phillip’s career, and how well Irving understood the fickleness of literary fame. We get into 19th Century American lit and its tensions with Europe, Irving’s fixation on Spain, why he wrote under pseudonyms even late in his career, and how Phillip’s affection for Irving deepened over the course of the book. We also discuss Phillip’s complicated relationship with his brother, Leonard Lopate, why personal essayists tend not to write autobiographies, and how Leonards’s death has spurred him to write a memoir, his passion for visiting writers’ homes (including Irving’s Sunnyside and Montaigne’s tower), his career-long goal of passing along the writing that’s worth keeping (whether through teaching, editing essay anthologies, or appearing multiple times on some guy’s podcast), our shared exhilaration over the Knicks’ championship (and how we can’t get excited about baseball this season), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go get A WASHINGTON IRVING SKETCH BOOK!

(And listen to my 2013, 2017, 2020, and 2023 talks with Phillip!)

Recent podcast episodes: Ida Kao • Halstead York • Sarah Minor • Ali Trotta • R Sikoryak • Katie Skelly • Colin Asher

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

BIRDY!

She barks hard, she sleeps hard.

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are some links for you:

• RIP Dolly The Queen (live and give more like her) . . . RIP Tim Curry . . . RIP Jaye P. Morgan . . . RIP Yayoi Kusama (I like the dots, but, man, the racism) . . . RIP Len Brown . . . RIP Janie Bradford . . . RIP Ted Smart . . . RIP Shelley Fabares . . . RIP Leslie Parrish . . . RIP Soraya Roberts . . .

• On the plus side, Ratko Mladic died.

• I had a dream last week where a past guest had died a week earlier, and I felt sad not just because he was dead but because I forgot to include it here (the guest is alive and well) . . .

• I wondered about all the Fisker Ocean EVs I’ve been seeing in NYC in the past year+. Since they all have taxi/livery plates, I assumed someone bought a block of them during bankruptcy. I was right: someone bought THREE-THOUSAND of them at $13k/each, which is quite a markdown, and rents them out to Uber/Lyft drivers. How they get software updates and do maintenance, I have no idea.

• Smart piece about Christopher Brown’s first novel, Tropic of Kansas.

• Peter Trachtenberg wrote about Lindsay Clancy’s case, its parallels to Andrea Yates’s case, and their parallels to Greek tragedy.

• Here’s a flash fiction flex from Caleb Crain.

• I missed the NYT/Marchese interview with Danny McBride from a few months ago. It’s a hoot, so give it a read.

• Looks like those German neo-nazis have . . . no new tale to tell.

• “I trained as best I could, walking four or five hours a day on a walking pad in my parents’ basement, wearing a weighted vest — preparing for a 1,000-year-old pilgrimage by cosplaying as a hamster.”

• Speaking of, you should read On The Camino, by Jason.

COMMONPLACE

Among other stuff, I added this to my online commonplace book:

A weight rested upon my mind,—there was a soreness of heart as if I had committed some hideous crime and all mankind were justly irritated at me. I went about with a guilty look and sought to hide myself. It was not without some effort that I occasionally threw off this weight and recollected that my only crime had been an unsuccessful attempt to please the world.

—Washington Irving, journal entry after a couple negative reviews

Everybody’s Coming To My House

I’m a little late with this week’s newsletter; it’s going out on a Thursday even though I got the new episode out on Monday. Thing is, I posted that conversation with Phillip Lopate from a lounge at Newark Airport, then got the web-page finished in a hotel room outside Detroit that night. It was an accomplishment, considering I got walloped by a fast-run case of gout the night before my flight (it mysteriously passed by the next morning).

Since then, I’ve been at a client event, attending sessions & a dinner, putting on The Gil Show for my day 2 kickoff presentation, and visiting one of their high potency API facilities. I did such a bang-up job that they dragooned me into speaking at another event they’re holding in Toronto in 3 weeks, which is going to complicate my already batshit crazy Sept-Oct travel schedule.

Before my flight home yesterday, I got to make a side-trip to John K. King Used Books, but I was too fried to enjoy the return visit. (I did buy some books, don’t worry.)

And yesterday I got to enjoy the sunrise

and the play of morning light in my hotel room

and the sunset a few miles from my house.

I never called it my house before. It’s always the house, or where I live (though I often repeat that I’ve been here most of my life, that my parents built it in 1968 when the street was a dirt road, etc.).

THE house because it’s always been in my father’s name, and I try to be exact about language. But he left me the house in his will, and that slow-motion process wrapped up a few weeks ago, a little more than a year after his death, with a notice from the NJ Dept. of Treasury waiving estate/transfer inheritance tax.

Shortly after, the municipal water bill and the next year’s quarterly real estate tax coupons arrived with my name on them instead of his, which made it more real, made it my house.

Don’t ask me how I feel; any sense of relief is wrapped up in the complex of the deranged relationship we had.

But I thought you should know. Maybe I’ll have a party.

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list. Because of travel, I’m a couple days behind and need to catch up.

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.

Sue, the clinic called / The X-ray’s fine / I brought you home / I just said home,