Hitting The Links: 2/9/25
Would you give me the time of day if you knew how much time you had left? (+ a ton of great links, some reading, some workout & meditation stuff & more)
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Last Call
If you were terminally ill, would you give me the time of day?
Last week I mentioned that Joe Monninger died. He was dying of lung cancer when we recorded in mid-2023; I pitched him on a Thursday for a session that Saturday, crash-reading his cancer memoir, Goodbye To Clocks Ticking, in hopes of turning around the episode before he was gone. I didn’t realize until partway through the book that he was having an unexpectedly great response to Tagrisso, and would be around longer than that weekend.
Still, he knew his time was short, and he gave me an hour or so of what he had left. So did DG Myers, who thought he had 2 years before his recurrent prostate cancer would kill him, but died 6 months after we recorded.
You could add Peter Schjeldahl (we recorded 15 months before his death) and maybe Clive James (4+ years before his, but he’d had several close calls and knew there was no cure on the horizon) to the terminally ill guests who chose to spend some of their remaining time with me.
I thought about Joe during one of my meditation sessions this week, then DG & the others. I thought about the honor they’d bestowed on me, whether or not it was about me or about them wanting one more/last opportunity to talk on the record, as it were. They saw the end coming and decided to take an hour to talk with a stranger.
Would you? Would I? (haha jk: I would keep gabbing until my last breath)
Sorry to focus on that sorta thing, but it’s a cold Sunday morning, and a few inches of snow (& some ice) fell last night, and the stillness, man, the stillness. (Until the snowblowers come out.)
I was supposed to drive out to Long Island to record a podcast today, but we’ve agreed to do it remotely instead. Maybe we’ll get to meet face to face sometime.
Here’s some morning Birdy:
*
This email setup runs $29/month, so if you want to help out with it or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can support the Virtual Memories Show with a contribution of any size, one-time or recurring.
And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Witold Rybczynski • Fred Kaplan • Mia Wolff • Damion Searls • 2024 Recap • The Guest List • Benjamin Swett • Ken Krimstein
RIP Fay Vincent . . . RIP George Tice . . . RIP Aga Khan IV . . . RIP Alonzo Davis . . . RIP Barry Goldberg . . . RIP Amy Lau . . . RIP Gene Barge . . . RIP Irv Gotti . . .
You can’t post your way through this, so GO READ and then DO SOMETHING.
Go read this Sebastian Smee piece about an exhibition of nude paintings and what the body & art tell us. (First WaPost link I’ve posted since they did Ann Telnaes wrong; I cancelled my subscription, but it’s paid through Oct.)
Good piece by Fred Kaplan about the Pentagon’s Unit X.
Apparently, Real Men Meditate. I do mine in the afternoon instead of the morning, lying down in corpse-pose, with some ambient Brian Eno music on, but as the link says, there’s no one-size-fits-all method.
FWIW, I got some dress shirts made in the past year or so, for trade shows & Congressional visits, after going with suit+fancy-polo-shirt for the first few years post-lockdown.
I found this article about the collapse of the diamond trade kinda fascinating.
Gotta be honest: apples, peanut butter and rotisserie chicken would lure me, too.
I’m gonna miss Hubie Brown’s NBA calls.
For all those observing today’s Super Bowl, Bill Griffith offers a reminder of the true spirit of the holiday:
Current/Recent Reading
The Man Nobody Killed: Life, Death and Art in Michael Stewart’s New York - Elon Green
The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa
“We are death. This thing we consider to be life is just the sleep of a real life, the death of what we truly are. The dead are born, they do not die. The two worlds have been switched. When we think we are alive, we are dead; let us live while we are dying.”
Plus my daily chapter of The Man Without Qualities (tr. Wilkins/Pike). Here’s a piece:
“Truly, it is art that should first reflect the unity of existence and its inner order. But we know the picture art presents today. Fragmentation everywhere; extremes without connections. Stendhal, Balzac, and Flaubert have already created the epic of the new mechanized social and inner life, while the demonic substrata of our lives have been laid bare by Dostoyevsky, Strindberg, and Freud. We who live today have a deep sense that there is nothing left for us to do.”
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I felt so blech after the previous week that I started my weights & yoga cycle on Monday instead of Wednesday. I skipped weights on Wednesday because I tweaked my back on some ice in the backyard, but that’s better now, and if I get in weights today (after shoveling out the snow/ice-covered driveway), that’ll be 6 workouts in 7 days. I’ve been eating compulsively/badly, so my weight’s up a bit, but I’ll try to get that down. Here’s a Friday Flex:
I’ve been keeping up with daily meditation, sometimes using a mantra to try to drive the everyday out. A couple days ago I had this amazing instance of decreation, where there was no I and everything was empty white space. Sure, maybe I’d just fallen asleep, but that moment was blissful and it carried over as self-consciousness returned. Coincidentally, my internal mantra that session was “you are not”. Anyway, I’ll continue exploring.
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.
Terminal one, two, three, four / Can I have a little more?,