Hitting The Links: 2/23/25
This one's got a ton of great links, + a 13th pod-iversary and an 88th birthday, the end of my Pessoa-reading, the invisible gift of a corpse-pose, & more
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
88, 54, 13
My father turned 88 on Friday. I dropped in yesterday with some KFC (at his request). He’d just gotten back from getting a haircut and a new phone.
When I was visiting him during his hospitalization last month, a chaplain-rabbi came dropped in. He was younger than Dad, curly white beard rolling out from under his mask, sporting a British or German-to-British accent. He asked some questions and said he’d offer a prayer for a speedy recovery. They talked about various Old Countries. Dad said he came over from Israel “to find his fortune.”
The rabbi looked over to me and said to him, “It looks like you found one!”
I thought about that while my car was filling with the smell of extra-crispy wings and thighs. I posted this picture on IG when I got home.
Friends left nice comments and I thought about how we’ll never have enough time to tell our stories in full.
But that doesn’t mean we should stop trying! In fact, today’s the 13th anniversary of the very first podcast-interview I ever recorded!
Feb. 23, 2012, I sat down with my college pal Ann Rivera at my dining room table, with a Blue Yeti mic between us, and that’s where I started learning how to listen.
No picture to share from that one. I’m pretty sure Amy shot a couple, but they’re probably on long-archived hard drives. I’d go search, but I have to prep for today’s remote podcast. Still, THIRTEEN YEARS! and you continue to unfold with me. What a blessing.
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Martin Mittelmeier • Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski • Matt Madden • Fred Kaplan • Mia Wolff • Damion Searls • 2024 Recap
RIP Patsy Grimaldi . . . RIP Lynne Marie Stewart / Miss Yvonne . . . RIP Special Agent Hurricane . . . RIP Kim Sae-Ron . . . RIP Paquita la del Barrio . . . RIP Anne Marie Hochhalter . . . RIP Souleymane Cissé . . . RIP Violetta Wallace . . .
GO READ this essay about self-portraits (and a lot more) by Celia Paul (2020, 2022), excerpted from her upcoming monograph (which you should pre-order). I wish I could get out to London for the opening of her new exhibition next month.
One of the highlights of — we’ll say, this phase of — my life was visiting Celia a few years ago in London and getting to see her face while we were sketching each other. (It was her idea.) I was transfixed by how she was transfixed, and the ways her face changed as she took me in and found me on a sketchbook page.
Hugh Ryan wrote about erasing trans people from the Stonewall National Monument.
My One True Love doesn’t post newsletters as frequently as I do, but she makes them count.
Vis-a-vis my 13th anniversary of pod-conversations: sure, NYT and NPR can tell me how to start making a podcast, but no one’s willing to tell me how to STOP making one.
Speaking of people being bored silly by conversations, I haven’t been very interested in David Marchese’s interviews since the NYT revamped the format, but I quite enjoyed this one with Ed Yong. (I was also put off when they started doing video of these interviews & I saw that Marchese was conducting face-to-face interviews with a laptop open in front of him, but that’s just me.)
I’M NOT SEEKING ATTENTION; I’M CROWDSOURCING MY SELF ESTEEM. (via Warren Ellis)
Mark Wunderlich’s winter wunderland.
Books are hawt, apparently.
Current/Recent Reading
Expect Great Things!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women - by Vanda Krefft
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa • I finished it this week and I’m sad that it’s done, but I’ve picked up a few collections of Pessoa’s poems, so I hope to recapture some of that experience. Here’s a bit from near the end:
The dull old man with dirty gaiters I often used to pass at half past nine in the morning. The lame lottery salesman who pestered me without success. The plump, rosy old gentleman with the cigar, who used to stand at the door of the tobacconist’s. The pale-cheeked tobacconist himself. What has become of those people who, just because I saw them day after day, became part of my life? Tomorrow I, too, will disappear from Rua da Prata, Rua dos Douradores, Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I, too—this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself—yes, tomorrow I, too, will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague ‘I wonder what’s become of him?’ And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passerby on the daily streets of some city or other.
The Man Without Qualities (tr. Wilkins/Pike) • This has been my morning ritual, one chapter a day:
“I wouldn’t like to expose this to ridicule in the presence of your cousin,” Arnheim went on, changing the subject, “but I would like to be able to make you feel something you would hardly come upon by yourself, far away as you are from such things: the connection between business and poetry. Of course, I mean business in the largest sense, the world’s business, such as I have been fated to conduct by the position to which I was born; it is related to poetry, it has irrational, even mystical aspects. I might even say that business is quite particularly endowed with those aspects. You see, money is an extraordinarily intolerant power.”
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I got my Wed-Sun weights/yoga cycle going, as long as I get weights in today, so yay. I’ve been putting on winter/anxiety weight, so I may invite the Hunger Artist for a residency, to help with some of this flab.
I’ve been keeping up with meditation every day, to varying . . . benefit? I’m not sure how to characterize what I’m doing, and what occurs during these ~15-min. sessions of corpse-pose isn’t consistent, but at a minimum, they get me out of myself & the present moment, so that’s good.
What’s funny is that it took weeks & weeks of these sessions before my undermind finally led me to the only corpse-pose I’ve seen in person: Michael Denneny in his bed, three days dead, his torso bloated with the gas of decomposition — mine was bloated from a reaction to Augmentin — and his wrists bent & his fingers curled above his sternum like he was holding an invisible gift, which he was.
(Here’s my monologue the day after finding Michael, and another a week later, from 2023.)
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.
Deep inside the heart of this troubled man / There’s an itty bitty boy tuggin’ hard at your hand / Born bitter as a lemon, but you must understand / That you’ve been bringin’ me joy,
Gil, I thought the object of meditation was to bring you into the present, not take you out of it. ?