Hitting The Links: 2/16/25
A mind-map covers the world, an intern reads The Secret History, a bunch of links blow your mind, a back flexes, and we learn how to get nowhere
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Maps and Legends
This morning, a pal of mine zapped me this excerpt from a piece by Donna Ashworth (who I’d never heard of, and looked up to make sure there’s no terrible transphobic or racist controversy, but if I missed anything, my apologies):
“If every single person who has liked you in your lifetime, were to light up on a map, it would create the most glitteringly beautiful network you could imagine. Throw in the strangers you’ve been kind to, the people you’ve made laugh, or inspired along the way and that star-bright network of you would be an impressive sight to behold. You’re so much more than you think you are. You have done so much more than you realise. You’re trailing a bright pathway that you don’t even know about. What a thing. What a thing indeed.”
I wrote him, “When I went on a 2-week adventure trip to New Zealand back in 2003, it occurred to me that if you said my name to every person in the southern hemisphere, maybe a half-dozen would know who you were talking about. Nowadays, that’s a lot different.”
Now, “know who you were talking about” is different than “like,” I admit. I was once introduced at a trade show as “that pain in our ass, Gil Roth.” (I earned it, and have no regrets.)
But yeah, the constellation of my friends, acquaintances, listeners/readers, pod-guests who remember our conversations with some degree of fondness but aren’t in touch with me, work-pals, et al.: it’s become this beautiful example of what it means to put oneself out in the world. [Standard disclaimers re all the privilege I have, and how the internet has enabled me to do a lot of this.]
I keep a mind-map of where all of my guests “come from,” in terms of who connected me to them. Like the time David Gates recorded with me up at Bennington’s low-res MFA program 10+ years ago, which led to my meeting/recording with/becoming friends with Phillip Lopate, Sven Birkerts, Peter Trachtenberg, & more. And some of them led to more people.
I update the mind-map every few months — I’d publish it, but it might be a little privacy-infringing, in terms of revealing connections among people and PR names & such — and the funny thing is how many of them are singletons: people I reached out to, with no prior connection, who didn’t necessarily lead to any other guests. There are a lot, and they’re a marker of sorts of how I reach out of myself.
Which, lest you be fooled, is not the easiest thing for me. Sure, I make 50 episodes of the show a year, but every pitch is like asking for a date (I think; I’ve been off the market for more than 20 years, thankfully). I’ve learned not to take rejection personally, and I’ve also gotten better at turning down PR pitches for guests I’m not interested in or won’t have time to read.
The world — and my world — has grown bigger and more intimate, and I want to thank all of you for it. I hope your map is beautiful, too.
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I made my first Washington, DC lobbying trip since before the 2024 election this week, and that was . . . something. I won’t go into any details, except for this weird literary detail.
My lobbyist (& friend) & I were sitting in the cafeteria at the Cannon Building (House offices), and an intern at the next table was reading a book over her lunch. I glanced over, as is my wont, and noticed that it was a paperback of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. When she left, I mentioned it to him. He’s not a lit-fic reader, so I told him what it was about — “A bunch of classics students at Bennington-but-not form a study group/orgy with a charismatic professor and someone winds up getting killed” — and told him I’d read it back in college when it came out in 1992. I said it was weird to see someone like 21 reading a book I read at 21, thirty-plus years later, and that maybe it was weird to read something that came out 10-15 years before you were born, as opposed to long-ago classics.
Like, The Secret History was a blast, but it’s not contemporary fiction, exactly? And it’s pre-internet, but not postwar, or Vietnam/Watergate, or even an ‘80s novel, so I have no idea how it winds up on a Congressional intern’s radar. Maybe a feeder from The Goldfinch? Or there’s some BookTok mania for it? Or a bookseller rec?My lobbyist looked on me with kindness and pity, and we headed off to our last meeting of the day.
On the train home, I remembered reading V., which came out 8-9 years before I was born, back in high school, and that maybe I wasn’t that different from the intern. I thought of the very moment I came across V., in an issue of Alan Moore & David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta, and how Pynchon would lead me to so many other authors. I hope that Donna Tartt leads that intern down some twisted literary paths.
(FTR, here’s the page with every book I’ve finished since 1989, although it doesn’t have the same associative properties as my pod-guest mind-map.)
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski • Matt Madden • Fred Kaplan • Mia Wolff • Damion Searls • 2024 Recap
RIP Tom Robbins . . . RIP Walter Robinson (tribute by Jerry Saltz) . . . RIP Mel Bochner . . . RIP Gyalo Thondup . . . RIP Maria Teresa Horta . . . RIP David Edward Byrd . . .
This week brought the awful news that the musician David Johansen needs help with medical bills (cancer, brain tumor, now a broken back). You can help by donating or buying merch through the Sweet Relief site.
Last night we watched Personality Crisis: One Night Only, a documentary about David centered around a performance at the Cafe Carlyle in the persona of his alter ego, Buster Poindexter. It’s a bit too long (2:07), but he’s had an amazing life and the vignettes of the New York City of his artistic upbringing are fantastic. (It’s on Showtime/Paramount+ at present.)
Speaking of Goggins, Jacques Berlinerblau makes the new season of The White Lotus sound like something I’d actually watch. We bailed 40 minutes into the premier a few years ago because the characters were almost uniformly uninteresting rich/privileged shitheels. I said to Amy at the time, “If the opening had a dozen caskets rolling off the plane instead of just one, I might stick around, but.”
[Note: this is not an invitation to tell me that it gets better, nor to offer up other shows I should be watching. In fact, forget I mentioned it.]
Speaking of over-the-top extravagance, this review of a $56,000 mattress reminded me of Kate Carew’s 1904 comics-prose piece about sleeping in the $10,000 bed at the St. Regis (courtesy of Eddie Campbell’s book about Kate).
The Reply All saga to the book launch for the Lorne Michaels bio is hysterical.
I enjoyed this profile of Studs Terkel, but I’m also embarrassed that I’ve never read any of Terkel’s books.
Shalom Auslander + Superbowl commercials = The Whore-ror.
For The New Yorker’s 100th anniversary ish, they’ve got a 4-page comic/appreciation of Rea Irvin by Seth (2013, 2017, 2019).
It also has this neat prose piece by Roz Chast (2014, 2018) about George Booth.
Go read this week’s FIELD NOTES from Christopher Brown (2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, 2024), and go get his new book, A Natural History of Empty Lots; it’s a marvel.
Current/Recent Reading
Death Trip: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir - Seth Lorinczi
Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women - by Vanda Krefft
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa (this has been my nightly Kindle reading, a few pages before sleep)
“We ourselves fulfill nothing. Life lobs us into the air like a stone, and we fly along, saying as we go: ‘You see, I’m moving.’”
The Man Without Qualities (tr. Wilkins/Pike; this has been my morning ritual, one chapter a day). Here’s a piece from yesterday:
“Well, themselves excepted, of course,” Count Leinsdorf interjected. “I know all about that; I hear it all the time too. The big industrialists grumble that the politicians don’t give them enough protective tariffs, and the politicians grumble about industry for not coming up with enough money for their election campaigns.”
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I got back to my Wed-Sun weights/yoga cycle, but had to skip Thursday’s yoga due to work travel. My weight’s not great, but I’m working on the neurotic compulsive eating, and I still look fine.
Meditation has been up and down. I still do my ~15-min. of corpse-pose zoning out each day, but lately it’s been leading to strange images less and evoking memories more. Early in the week I remembered being like 10 years old in the back of my mom’s car in the Jamesway parking lot on Rt. 23 in the cold, listening to Tommy on my Walkman. (Yes, that might be too young to be melting one’s brain to The Who.) Or a couple days ago when I saw myself 20 years ago at a park & ride, reading Proust while waiting for Amy’s train. I went into that session a bit overwhelmed by or at least preoccupied with some personal life/family stuff, and while trying to come up with a mantra to empty my mind, I found myself thinking, “This isn’t getting you anywhere,” and I repeated that with each breath until the moment it gave way to, “This is getting you nowhere,” and I was at peace.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, some Instax throwbax, & maybe some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.
It took so long for me to realize how strong your heart is / And all this time my mind was working in strange ways,