Here I Am In Arcadia

Yesterday brought the news that Sir Tom Stoppard died (obits below). I consider his play Arcadia one of the greatest pieces of theater, writing, art of all time. In his newsletter, Benjamin Dreyer quoted one of the great passages from Arcadia in his newsletter.

If you haven’t read Arcadia or seen it performed, I hope you get to, and I envy you getting to experience it the first time.

Stoppard was, of course, on my Dream List of podcast-guests. I pitched him once, using my Clive James credentials, but his people turned me down. With his death, I had to revise this piece that’ll run in the 3rd issue of Haiku for Business Travelers (which I will finish any time now):

People ask me who my dream podcast-guests are. Here’s a list of a dozen living ones (some of whom may be in poor health and wouldn’t be able to record with me even if they were willing) and a dozen who have died since I started making the podcast in 2012:

THE LIVING

• Robert Caro

• Alan Moore (he said no)

• David Hockney

• Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (we’ll count them as one)

• Fran Lebowitz

• Errol Morris (we’ve talked about doing one, but.)

• Richard E. Grant

• Art Spiegelman

• Thomas Pynchon (I know, but that’s why it’s a dream list.)

• R. Crumb (see the Links section for more on that)

• Nick Cave (the musician, but maybe also the artist)

• My podfather, Marc Maron

THE DEAD

• Philip Roth

• John Le Carré (he said no)

• Tom Stoppard (he said no)

• Donald Hall (he said no)

• Richard Sala (he said no)

• Richard Thompson (the cartoonist, not the musician)

• Joan Didion

• David Carr

• Charles Portis

• Aline Kominsky-Crumb

• Ricky Jay

• Robert Hughes

Birdy Of The Week

She’s still a radiant gal.

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And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

• Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Glenn Kurtz • Jennifer Hayden • Rian Hughes • Josh Neufeld • Dean Haspiel & Whitney Matheson • Ron Rosenbaum • Lance Richardson

• RIP Tom Stoppard. More obits: BBC, NYT, NPR, Variety

• (He gets his own RIP tier.)

• RIP Robert A.M. Stern (here’s a really good interview with him just a few weeks before his death) (I pitched him, too, via Witold Rybczynski, but also a no-go) . . . RIP Viola Ford Fletcher . . . RIP Jimmy Cliff . . . RIP Udo Kier . . . RIP J.D. King . . . RIP Skye Gyngell . . . RIP Pam Hogg . . . RIP Dharmendra . . . RIP Joan Branson . . . RIP David Lerner . . . RIP Ellen Bryant Voigt . . . RIP Ruth Thorne-Thomsen . . . RIP Ethan Browne . . . RIP Fuzzy Zoeller . . . RIP Colleen Jones . . .

• In his new newsletter, Dmitry Samarov writes about art, commerce, and the need to make a living. When I was visiting a pal in NYC last weekend, I had to talk yet again about why I have my day job/career, how it subsidizes my art (newsletter, podcast, etc.), and how I have no illusions about any of this becoming self-supporting. Even WHEN-not-if I finish making my Instax book, and then crowdfund its production, I am under no illusions that it will yield any financial gain. Work creates a lot of demands on me, but none of what I make would exist if my career didn’t give me a significant degree of security.

• In that vein, NYRB interviewed Andrew Durbin about the photographer Peter Hujar, and he said, “I don’t know if we’ve ever lived in a moment when artists were as self-conscious about the state of their own markets; that’s just horrible for art. Look at the discourse around painting. It’s almost entirely oriented around its market position and the security it provides galleries. As a result, so much looks the same.” (I’m hoping to record with Andrew next year for his book on Hujar & Paul Thek, The Wonderful World That Almost Was.)

• Fifteen years, man.

• Great piece on taking Amtrak’s 53-hour California Zephyr route from Chicago to San Francisco.

• I really gotta get down to Philadelphia to see the new Calder Gardens (and visit the Rodin, the art museum, etc.).

• DUDE. (Via Steven Heller)

• Caleb Crain wrote about AI and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• Ross Benjamin wrote about resistance, acquiescence, and compliance vis-a-vis translating Daniel Kehlmann’s novel, The Director.

• Sammy Harkham interviewed R. Crumb & George DiCaprio. Also, I got Crumb’s new comic, Tales of Paranoia, this week, and given the antivax/pharma-COVID conspiracism of several of the strips, I’m gonna go out on a limb and write off any chance that he’d sit down for a podcast with this pharma industry lobbyist. (That said, I mentioned this to a couple of mutuals, and they both disagreed and said I’m exactly who he’d wanna sit down with.)

• Benjamin Dreyer interviewed Elizabeth McCracken about her new book, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction: “I absolutely love being copyedited, to the level of kink; if there were copyediting bars I would go willingly and submit.”

Current/Recent Reading

Shadow Ticket - Thomas Pynchon

The Invention of Solitude - Paul Auster (recommended by a pal after my dad’s death; I’m not a big Auster reader, but there are a lot of resonances here with My Whole Situation)

On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) - Solvej Balle (tr. Barbara J. Haveland) (forgot to mention this one last week, because I was rushing to get the newsletter out)

+ the mourner’s Kaddish every morning

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I did manage a full 5-day workout cycle last week (Wed.-Sun.), so yay! I missed Thu. yoga this week because of Thanksgiving, but got a ‘quick’ 1-mi. run in on Wednesday on the most boring length of street from my old running circuit with the guys. That felt good, and I’m going to try to get in a few miles each week, though it’s growing cold out and that makes it tough to get motivated. I also joined them this morning for a 4-mile walk, which was good. Weights this afternoon, and I might feel like I’m getting back in a rhythm.

I have a hot af post-workout picture from one year ago, so after Friday’s workout I posed the same way and took a pic, so I can document my decline. Turns out it’s not that bad. I can see the extra 8-10 lbs. in my gut/waist, but my arms & shoulders are actually kinda bigger, and for going-on-55, I don’t look so grotesque. This one’s from a day later, post-yoga, when the light was awesome.

I meditated a few times, but not in any transcendent way. It helped still things in my head, which is important, but I need to get back to it as a daily practice.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll back on Wednesday, with a new episode, no new Instax, but maybe some art. On Sunday I’ll be back with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.

They make no mention of the beauty of decay,