PODCAST

This week, I posted Episode 690 of my Virtual Memories Show, featuring the return of Jonathan Ames as we celebrate his fantastic new crime novel, A PAST WITHOUT PICTURES (Mysterious Press). We talk about his obsession with pulp fiction, how he found the character of Maria Cole and her tortured relationship with her father after setting out to write a companion to You Were Never Really Here, how hard (and rewarding) it is to craft page-turning prose, and how he compares the experience of reading Death in Venice to reading a Parker novel. We get into how his Buddhist interests are under the surface of this book and are on the surface of his Happy Doll novels (including the one he’s working on!), how writing is a form of seeing, and how good writing helps the reader create a movie in their mind. We also discuss his samsara of not reaching out to people, the bit from Our Town that guides him to be more loving and present in the world, the shock of seeing his lengthy letters from the ’80s and ’90s, why LA is so weird for me, why he reads different translations of the Tao, how Marc Maron gives us a model of how to learn to listen, and more. Give it a listen! And go read A PAST WITHOUT PICTURES!

(And go listen to our 2018, 2022, and 2025 conversations)

Recent podcast episodes: Dash Shaw • Phillip Lopate • Ida Kao • Halstead York • Sarah Minor • Ali Trotta • R Sikoryak

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

BIRDY!

Birdy is very curious about spooky season:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are some links for you; not too many this time, but I offered up plenty last week:

• RIP Shirley Glaser . . . RIP Latimore . . . RIPie Noël Godin . . . RIP Jon Small . . .

• Don’t go chasing waterfalls.

• NYer review of Brian Dillon’s new memoir, Ambivalence; I’m hoping to record with him about this, but nothing confirmed.

• Reminder: these people are fucking nuts. (Also the notion that this administration cares about the “spiritual implications” of anything is hilarious.)

• Reminder: these other people are also fucking nuts.

• As far as AI goes, I’ve used ChatGPT exactly once, and that was as a joke: I asked it to give me questions for my podcast with Vauhini Vara for her book about using AI. The questions it provided were vapid. The podcast is created with zero AI. I mean, I do use Adobe Audition’s Noise Reduction effect to clean up background noise for the podcast, but that’s an application of machine learning that predates the whole AI LLM craze. I met a guy at a trade show who told me, “Editing’s easy; I just feed the audio files into AI and it puts the show together for me,” and I tried to keep the look of revulsion off my face. Trust that your Virtual Memories Show is hand-made.

• Along those lines,, I have never hit the Unfollow button faster than earlier this week when Kurt Andersen posted on Bluesky, “Hey, look, it’s my first political cartoon ever!,” with an embedded AI-generated image. I was amazed that someone with a career in editorial and creative fields would opt for AI instead of thinking, “I should pay a cartoonist to draw [x].” I hope someone uses AI to generate an Andersen-esque podcast or novel so he can see how that feels.

• Fall’s coming, so here’s a lookbook.

COMMONPLACE

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

Redemption is a journey. It’s not a destination. It’s not a place. You know, you don’t arrive at redemption—“I’m redeemed!” You’re living from second to second and moment to moment. So you could be in the midst of redeeming, right? Yeah. But it’s not a place to arrive at because it’s day by day. You live breath by breath, moment by moment, day by day. All of us do. All of us.

That’s what the Buddhist practice is: You focus on the breath. You live in one breath at a time. With the sobriety, the mantra is one day at a time. But you really live in one breath at a time, one moment at a time. OK? So in this moment, we’re trying to make amends for the fucking shit, for the people we’ve hurt and things we’ve done wrong, actively in the moment that we’re living, to help us to get to another moment.

—Abel Ferrara, Bright Wall Dark Room interview

HIDE ME

When I recorded with Sarah Minor about her wonderful & weird book Carousel recently, I joked about how during Zoom, Teams, etc. video calls, we always end up looking at our own faces. Okay, read “I” for “we,” and “was being brutally honest” rather than “joked.”

I told you that I got my hair cut in July for the first time in 6+ years. While I’m happy with the results, this means that I have to get my hair cut regularly, and this means that I now have to look at my face.

Sure, I’m vain af; I post plenty of selfies here & on social media, but there’s an art to that, in terms of finding the best angle, lighting, etc. In the barber’s chair — sorry, stylist’s chair — my face is my face, in all its flaws and aging decline. No slight tilt to improve my angle or hide my turkey-neck, when the stylist needs me to keep my head straight.

It’s been a good, solid kick in my vanity’s ass.

But after that talk with Sarah, I realized there was something I could do about it. I decided to stop Zoom, Teams, etc. from showing me myself, so I could focus on the other people, not sneak furtive glances in a tiny mirror-tile.

In Teams, that option is “Hide me,” and that sounds like a mantra a dream a magic wish.

SOUND BODY, FRACTURED MIND

I haven’t written about exercise and meditation this year, because I feel like my body and mind are a mess. I started running again a few days ago, trying to ease into it so as to build the habit but not injure myself or get too sore too soon, and making time for shavasana + Music for Airports; as Abel put it above, you live one breath at a time.

I have a lot of work travel and hectic activity in the next 6 weeks, so I’m trying to get myself into a rhythm that’ll drive me down to the hotel fitness centers and get my days started with something other than meh coffee and tedium.

Oh, and when I talk about selfies being an art, here’s one from yesterday’s yoga session —

— where angles, lighting, etc. make me look like yoga-Hulk.

INSTAXERY

My last few podcasts have been virtual, so no new Instax photos.

It was torture, but I wrote a really good page of my Instax book on Sunday, for an image that I’d been struggling to write something for for a long time. A couple pals read it and plotzed, but I don’t want to share it here.

On Labor Day, I got another one written. I had a bunch of dumb notes for that one, but no real idea of what to write. Then I started looking at the picture and really trying to understand what it was that I shot, and what it meant. A little Wikipedia action, and I was off to the races.

I still have ~20 photos (out of 78) that have basically nothing written for them, but this weekend made me believe it’s possible for me to write them. I’d been doubting that and loathing myself pretty hard lately, so whew.

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.

We said let’s name thirty good reasons / Why we shouldn’t be together / I started by saying things like ‘you smoke,’ ‘you live in New Jersey’,