Ghost in the Machine
A new episode about Anton LaVey, reflections on an autumn hike, an Instax breakthrough, some art, & more!
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 609 of The Virtual Memories Show, where we get into spooky season as writer/editor Doug Brod joins the show with his fantastic new biography, BORN WITH A TAIL: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, Founder of the Church of Satan (Hachette). We talk about the line between huckster and believer, the history of the Church of Satan, why Doug didn’t want to puncture the mythology LaVey built around his life, and the fun of writing a chapter about Sammy Davis Jr. exploring Satanism. We also get into how LaVey’s philosophy of self-deification and aesthetics managed to penetrate American culture, how Doug balanced reporting & cultural history for the book, the people he wishes he could’ve interviewed, how LaVey reveled in spreading his gospel to the post-punk/’zine generation in the ’90s, what it takes to create one’s own aesthetic world while still going out to Olive Garden, Doug’s first book about ’70s hard rock, what it means to consider Satan as metaphor rather than incarnated being, and more. Give it a listen, and go get BORN WITH A TAIL!
Last week, I posted Episode 608, with author & essayist Sven Birkerts returning to the show to celebrate his fantastic new essay collection, The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (Arrowsmith Press). We talk about the estrangement of the everyday, the problem of other minds, how serendipity tells us something about who & where we are, authors’ photos and self-mythologizing, moving house (& turning 70) during COVID, and the inspiration of Cortazar’s Around the Day in Eighty Worlds. We get into the threat of AI to writing, reading, and thinking, opening up to ambivalence, why people find it so tough to say the word “soul”, Kierkegaard & Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer & being on The Search, and wondering what Bob Dylan is like in the kitchen in the morning. We also discuss writers’ homes & graves and the myth of inspiration, how we build circles of affinity, how his father’s career as an architect influenced his eye (but not his writing), why people find it so tough to say the word “soul”, and more. Give it a listen, and go get The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing!
(And go listen to our 2017, lockdown, and 2021 conversations!)
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Ghost In The Machine
Yesterday morning I decided to bail on finishing this week’s podcast and went for a hike instead. The fall colors are gorgeous and I wanted to get up to Ramapo Lake and Van Slyke Castle to take it all in. The weather was supposed to get very warm during the day (80°+), so I put down the headphones, drove up The Mountain at 8am, and set out.
(When I say “hike”, I don’t mean anything like those Catskills fire tower hikes my pal & I did these past few months. This one came out to 4.7 miles, with only 628’ of uphills, & an 18:10/mile pace.)
It warmed up pretty quickly, but I did fine. Got up to the top via the Castle Loop trail, luxuriated in the morning sun on the yellow leaves, shot some pictures, and didn’t see the black bear a pair of hikers warned me about. I trail-ran the steep route down to Ramapo Lake, with only one slip early on, courtesy of a dust-covered rock. If I wasn’t a superhero, I guess I could have fallen and cracked my fool head, but I made it down without incident.
From there, I walked around the back of the lake, entranced as I watched leaves lightly flutter down from high branches. Once a small bluejay glided down the same way, and for a moment I couldn’t tell it was a bird until it swerved and veered away.
I let the woods breathe and breathed with them, and then I took another trail back to the parking lot, and drove home. There was a lot of work to get done, so I didn’t finish the podcast until that night.
*
Around the corner from my home, there’s a little tree or shrub that I started paying attention to after I took up drawing.
In spring, its leaves erupt in pairs, tapered and folding out so for the first few weeks they look like birds in flight, until they grow heavy and sag toward the world. I’ve often tried & failed to draw them in that state these past few years, and each time I start hearing that line from Secret Journey, “I strained to understand him / I chased his thoughts like birds.”
*
Shortly after posting the episode last night, I got an email from a past guest who wrote to say how much he enjoys these newsletters, and to semisorta suggest a direction for me to take my writing. I was pretty gratified to read it, because I regard him as a real writer and it matters to me that someone gets what I’m trying to do here, the voice-tone-persona-self I cultivate.
Of all coincidences, he grew up nearby and used to hike around Ramapo Lake, AND he blurbed this week’s guest’s book. That’s my idea of a social network.
Outside the breeze is stirring the ghosts in the trees, and the leaves drift down on gentle diagonals. In a few more weeks, the woods and hills will be gray and bare. The bluejays will still be here. The starkness has its own beauty, opening up new views.
Instaxery
A funny thing happened regarding the Instax prints for my GUEST/HOST book. I hit up past guest Steve Prue to see how he reshoots his Instax prints for reproduction, and it turns out he just scans them on a flatbed scanner. I had assumed the glossy finish of the prints would preclude them from being scannable, so I never even tried to scan them, and came up with all sorts of photographic tricks to shoot the prints with no light/reflection. So I scanned a bunch of the early ones and they came out fine; I’ll take care of the rest this weekend, so I’ll have all those ready for color correction and print-readiness. That’s what I get for overthinking things. Anyway, on Sunday I recorded two in-person shows and here are the Instax from those, scanned on my flatbed:
Artistry
I’ve been keeping up with my daily sketch-journal, just a rollerball pen and something that catches my eye each day. I didn’t get much drawing in this week otherwise, just a postcard of a tiger lily. I was going to do it in color, but I liked the Micron 01 line by itself. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Postcardery
Let me know if you want to be on my postcard-a-day list. (Financial supporters of the podcast get a hand-drawn/painted postcard as a thank-you, like that one above.) A postcard-sending pal told me that my recent Return To Sender problem is more likely because I put the ZIP code on a separate line than city/state, rather than excessive emotional openness, so I’ve fixed that. Today’s postcard had a weird revelation in it, so we’ll see if that bounces back or not.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workout-craziness, and on Wednesday with a new episode, and maybe some art, maybe some Instax, though I don’t have any in-person shows scheduled. (But I do have a work-dinner in NYC Monday evening, so I might see about stopping in on some past guests before/after.)
And as the world was turning / It rolled itself in pain / This does not seem to touch you / He pointed to the rain,