PODCAST

Happy Pride! Episode 678 of my Virtual Memories Show gets Queer As Comics! Writer, critic, curator, and publisher Paul Gravett rejoins the show to talk about curating a fabulous new exhibition, Queer As Comics, to help launch the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration! We talk about what makes comics queer (it’s not just an issue of sexuality), the artists and comics he wishes he could have included in the show, the challenges of exhibiting comics as opposed to paintings, and why Queer As Comics’ survey of 65 artists covering 80 years of history “starts with the Finnish” (as in Tom of Finland and Tove Jansson). We also get into the endlessness of Tove Jansson’s life & creativity (and why Paul’s committed to writing a big book about her anyway), his first exposure to queer comics (and again, why all comics are queer), how it feels to see the Quentin Blake Centre come to life and to see Quentin still making art in his 90s, and more. Give it a listen! And check out Queer As Comics!

Recent podcast episodes: Luis Mendo • Benoit Denizet-Lewis • Clare Carlisle • Josh Alan Friedman • Andrew Durbin • Dean Haspiel & Doug Latino • Rachel Tzvia Back

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

BIRDY!

Here she is the day after her grooming last month, looking classy:

and the moment before I left for last week’s trade show in Philadelphia, standing at the top of the stairs:

KADDISH

From May 29, 2026:

Per Jewish custom & Hebrew calendar (per my observant brother), today is the last daily recitation of the mourner’s Kaddish for my father. I’ve been reciting it every morning at home (post-exercise, pre-coffee), not at shul or with a minyan or even wearing a kippah, as is my half-assed devotional way.

All year, I did what I could to come up with a decent memory of dad before each prayer, rather than the bad stuff or The Final Week. While I was meditating yesterday, I found myself reflecting on how much time we spent on Rt. 59 in New York, driving to flea markets, comic shops, malls, & the like, in my pre-into-early-teen years.

This morning, I drove out to the memorial park to recite the prayer over his grave. I hadn’t been there in a few weeks, and was glad to see that they’d filled in new earth and grass seed to compensate for the subsidence of the past year.

I read the prayer and then sat by the grave and talked for a bit. On the drive there, I thought I might record a video-monologue of that, but why?

The park will install the marker I ordered in the next month or so, I hope in time for the first anniversary of his death (Julian calendar). I don’t know what he would’ve thought of any of this, but that’s the point, I guess; all those drives up and down Rt. 59 and beyond, and we never got to know each other.

COMMONPLACE

Some items from my new commonplace book/page:

“But as things are, the gods set no clear line
between good men and bad.
Life goes rolling on,
exalting only money.”
—Euripides, Herakles (tr. Anne Carson)

*

“The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality — and he was concerned with nothing else except the contemplation of reality — could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of his staring at it. The act of looking was like a form of prayer for him — it became a way of approaching but never being able to grasp an absolute. It was the act of looking which kept him aware of being constantly suspended between being and the truth.”
—John Berger, Portraits

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are a couple of links for you

• RIP Marjane Satrapi . . . RIP Anthony Head . . . RIP Peabo Bryson . . . RIP Rick Adelman . . .

• Here’s a video interview with me (+ b-roll!) that the organizers shot during last week’s trade show. Wish my hair was more under control, but hey; you get to see me ride an escalator AND walk down the street holding an impossibly hot cup of coffee.

• I was talking about All This Business Travel during the trade show last week, and someone asked, “Do you have kids?” Rather than make an exaggerated display of laughter at the absurdity of such a question, I said, “No, but at least I haven’t shortchanged a kid’s life.”

• Big NYT writeup about David Baerwald and the history & art that went into his new novel, The Fire Agent! (I’m hoping to catch up with him this summer for a followup podcast.)

• The Basque cheesecake at Little Spain is one of my fave treats; for some reason, I thought they were traditional, not a 1980s creation.

• These fucking longevity/life-extension assholes are still at it.

• Also, this fucking longevity/life-extension asshole is still at it.

• Come for the phantasmagoria about taste and our cultural death, stay for the pics of Socialist Modernism in Former Yugoslavia.

• I’d never heard of the satirical Jerry Gogosian until her death in May, but this article about her paints a pretty sad picture of niche-fame addiction and other mental health issues. As ever, I’m glad I have an audience, but not a giant audience.

• I’m glad that Barnes & Noble is having a renaissance now that it’s off the public market, but the private equity owners have to have an exit strategy that’ll involve going public again or selling to another PE that might be more of a strip-miner.

• The career span of great athletes, and particularly their decline, has been a mortality-touchstone for me since Patrick Ewing and David Cone went off their respective cliffs. Top-tier tennis might be the least forgiving, or at least most scrutinized, version of this, as the all-time greats can’t hide their age, no matter the training regimens or meds. Of the last men’s era’s three greats, I was a Federer guy, because his game was predicated more on grace than power, but this piece about Nadal’s monomania, suffering, and sadistic uncle is pretty compelling.

• Anyway, time for the men’s final of the French Open!

WHAT I’M READING

• Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder - Salman Rushdie

• Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides - Anne Carson

• red doc> - Anne Carson

• The Man Who Read Everything: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom - ed. Heather Cass White (podcast coming next week!)

• On the Calculation of Volume (Book III) - Solvej Balle (tr. Sophia Hersi Smith & Jennifer Russell)

THE SAINT

I usually only shoot these when I’m in midtown NYC for the DCAT Week conference, but I was in that area last weekend, so you get a bonus Saint Gil:

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list. Yesterday, I caught up on the 10-day backlog from my May trip, along with the dailies since I got back. Some mornings I just don’t have it in me.

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.

One town’s very like another / When your head’s down over your pieces, brother,