Hitting The Links: 11/12/23
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Lest We Forget
GIL: Are you prepared for the first anniversary of Diane’s death? I’m one of those date-fixated people.
BILL: It’s not of great importance to me. I’m not big on artificial dates like that. All my life, I thought, ‘Christmas has nice aspects, but why is it always on the same day?’ You have the dread before it and the shopping and you have to make the card. Why can’t it just be when you feel like it should be? ‘It’s time for Christmas! Let’s do Christmas!’ . . .
A funny aspect of having a daily strip is that I have to be five weeks ahead on the daily and six weeks ahead on the Sunday. So I’m always doing strips and putting dates into them that are a month or two in the future. So I already did September 1 a month or so ago.
GIL: This would have been the greatest therapy for me in the world, if I’d just taken up a daily strip!
—me & Bill Griffith, from our podcast last August
“I’m one of those date-fixated people.” The past week, for example, held the anniversaries of buying my car, of stumbling across Emily Dickinson’s grave after recording a podcast w/Michael Lesy, of my closest friend’s death. I wish I could let those things go, that I could stop treating them like objects in orbit (or aspects of an object around which I orbit). The future’s tough enough to deal with, so why this fetish for the recurrence of dates past?
Perhaps it keeps me moored, (somewhat) stable in knowing when things happened. Perhaps ‘moored’ too in keeping me from drifting into the unexplored. Do these dates and notes help me reconstruct who I was, or merely what I witnessed? Should the impendingness of Tom’s deathiversary have made me think of him more — relive that phone call, the tears, the memorials — or is Bill right and should Christmas be whenever we want it?
I told Amy a funny observation of Tom’s last night. She hadn’t heard it before, and I thought of telling her it was the 4th anniversary of his death, but I guess that’s the point: he’s still here when we remember him, and all these other moments can live with us, not just occasioned by a square on the calendar.
And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell
RIP Frank Borman . . . RIP Davide Renne . . .
Barbara Nessim’s got an exhibition opening this week in NYC! Go check it out! (Opening reception Nov. 16)
This 10-years-in-the-making post about DAK catalogs reminds me of when the internet was its best, and people did deep-dive blogs on the things that interested them.
Thoughtful piece by Craig Mod on aloneness & the benefits of therapy (scroll down to the Aloneness header).
Neat piece on how Joan Kroc bequeathed $230 million to NPR & what they’ve done with it.
Check out this BMI interview with Gary Clark, one of my all-time fave guests. And check out the new movie Gary worked on with John Carney, Flora And Son!
Speaking of, one of my fave cartoonists, Jason, posted a tribute sketch of the cover of Meet Danny Wilson, in his haunted-anthropomorphic style. I plotzed. Also, I don’t know if Bluesky links actually work, so here’s the image:
You know I’m a mark for how much $ the White House is putting toward rail/Amtrak infrastructure improvements.
But it looks like it’s gonna be a while until the new Acela trains start rolling.
I’m intrigued enough by this Billy Joel / Bruce Springsteen book that I’m going to pitch the author.
Among the many great joys the podcast has brought me, getting to sit down with George Lois was among the tops. You should buy his home.
I fully endorse Christoph Niemann’s 10 rules for drawing, and just wish I observed ’em more. But I made a really good piece this week, so I’m happy about that.
You don’t really need to read this gigantic piece on the dissolution of the Gimlet podcasting studio by Spotify. My grumpy TL;DR is that cheap tech money led to a flood of funding for ever more podcasts that couldn’t find an audience and sounded a lot alike, the money congregated to Big Names, the economics were never real, and management will always mistreat Black people. I guess it’s yet another reason why I make my podcast with no expectation of making a dime. (I know, I know: interview/conversation shows like mine are different from the reporting-based ones that this article is about.)
Speaking of not making a dime, if this OnlyFans farm has a good library, maybe I’ll finally open my own page! (As noted previously, my hypothetical OnlyFans page would consist of pix/video of me tastefully attired, on my Eames lounge chair, reading classic literature, while running my fingers through my hair.)
The story of that pilot who freaked out on mushrooms & tried to take down a passenger plane while he was in the jump seat? The NYT did some great reporting on it, and it’s an awfully sad story about grief at the loss of a friend, unaddressed mental health issues for airline pilots, and ego-destruction from psychedelics.
This David Marchese interview of literary agent Andrew Wylie is GLORIOUS, so read the whole darned thing. Speaking of ego-destruction, it contains this fantastic bit, which captures how I see myself & the Virtual Memories project [if it weren’t so long, I’d add it to the Mission Statement of my homepage]:
DM: I have seen you refer to yourself as a hollow person. [Wylie, speaking in Harvard Magazine in 2010, said: “I feel I do not have a personality of my own, so I am constantly in search of a personality. This might be why I am such a dedicated agent! A writer arrives with a fully formed personality and set of beliefs, powerfully expressed. I become so enraptured by their interests, knowledge and means of expression that nothing can distract me.”]
AW: Yeah. A number of people I know have objected to that. But it’s fundamentally, to me, true. I actually see it as not just a lack of personality. I used to interview people because I didn’t know what to do with my life. I thought: I’ll talk to Mick Jagger. I’ll talk to Andy Warhol, and I’ll try to figure out what to do.
DM: I understand the impulse.
AW: If you’re a good interviewer, as you are, you have to take yourself out of it and insert yourself in the person you are conversing with so what they have to say becomes powerfully significant in the course of the conversation. What if your entire life is based on entering the other person’s perspective? We represent about 1,500 writers. It’s a field of dreams. You’ve abandoned yourself, which is of no interest, it’s tedious, and you enter into their perspective and it’s totally enriching.
DM: I find that line of thinking both intriguing and hard to understand.
AW: Well, it could be logically seen as a deficiency. You got nothing to offer, so you crawl inside the other guy’s suit.
DM: Is that how you feel?
AW: Yeah. It’s not a bad feeling, I’d hasten to add. It’s a good feeling. If you interact with people in a way that implies that you know everything and they know nothing, relatively nothing changes. Every day is the same. You know the whole picture all the time. That’s less interesting to me than being on an intellectual rotating belt in which today you have this person’s perspective, tomorrow you have that person’s perspective, and you don’t have them remotely. You’ve actually entered that person’s perspective. The image I had: Susan Sontag. We would have supper, always at a restaurant that she found suitable — I didn’t know about restaurants — and my impression after supper was when we walked out on the street, you couldn’t tell the difference between Susan Sontag and the other. I was accompanying Susan Sontag? I was Susan Sontag.
Current/Recent Reading
Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon - I finished last Sunday! I had 100 pages left, & rather than read from my Kindle version, I went back to my 1998 hardcover.
Piranesi - Susanna Clarke - Decided to take a brief break from my Pynchon re-read-through, and HOLY COW IS THIS AN AMAZING NOVEL.
Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon - And now back to my regularly scheduled Pynchon. I decided to skip Against the Day this time around, since I read it last year. I’m hoping I’ll make it through this & Bleeding Edge by the end of the year, and open up 2024 with some other reading project, calendars being what they are. Maybe it’ll be that Uwe Johnson Anniversaries project
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I got my full 5-day workout routine in last week, Fri.-Tue.! Clap now. I’m currently three days into that routine, and also got in a 5.3-mile (slow) run on Saturday. No pain or soreness from that, so I really should try to get some running miles in each week, and rebuild my cardio stamina, along with all the strength, flexibility, and swoleness I get from my home exercise.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back Wednesday with a new podcast, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something, and Sunday with more great links, current reading, and this broken down ol’ body of mine.
Oh God, save the human cannonball,
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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