Hitting The Links: 3/2/25
This one's got a visit to the Uni-Mind, a ton of great links, a doggo-graduation, a doppelgänger or two, my very simple writing tip, & more!
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
At The Desk
I wrote yesterday, which is something. I sat at my new desk with a notebook and wrote a few pieces for my GUEST/HOST book, along with notes for a few more pieces. [Piece = 100-200 words, each facing one of the Instax photos I took last year]
Every morning, I turn on the midcentury-looking lamp on that desk and leave it on into the evening, as a reminder to sit down and write. But most every day I just let that light illuminate my anxiety, self-loathing, and inertia, with nary a word getting written.
But as it turns out, sitting at a desk and not having any goddamned distractions around is a good way to write! The things you learn in your 50s, man!
(It’s an analog setup, except for my reMarkable 2 tablet; I type up the pieces on that after the longhand writing, and it cloud-syncs so I can get the text on my computer later.)
These pieces may not be full of profundity or lyrical flair, but they were ones that need to be written, and now they have been. I can clean them up later.
I want to finish the writing this spring, then figure out production costs, crowdfunding, etc.
In other news, Birdy graduated from obedience class this week. We’ve all learned a lot in the 2+ months since she joined our family.
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Seth Lorinczi • Martin Mittelmeier • Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski • Matt Madden • Fred Kaplan • Mia Wolff • Damion Searls
RIP Gene Hackman and Betsy Arakawa . . . RIP Roberta Flack . . . RIP Al Trautwig . . . RIP Michelle Trachtenberg . . . RIP David Johansen . . . RIP Boris Spassky . . . RIP Rose Girone . . . RIP Jerry Butler . . . RIP Chris Jasper . . . RIP Frankétienne . . . RIP Roberto Orci . . . RIP Eleanor Maguire . . .
We rewatched The Royal Tenenbaums on Friday, and reveled in all of Gene Hackman’s sonofabitchness. As always, I teared up a little at the end of the big tracking shot when Ben Stiller cracks & Hackman offers him comfort, because of my own dad issues. But my recent growth allows me to embrace that in all its complexity. Here’s Stiller about working with Hackman.
Big Work of Art-esque piece by Adam Moss about Lisa Yuskavage’s new direction in painting.
Henry Wessells has a new collection of short stories coming out. It’s a limited edition, so get on that.
Bruce Sterling is the subject of this week’s Shelfies newsletter by Lavie Tidhar; it’s an . . . interesting shelf.
Speaking of shelfies, I don’t know how my bookshelf is going to contain the gorgeous, mammoth 50-year monograph of Celia Paul’s art that arrived this week; it’s a big ’un, with beautiful production. (Still bums me out that I can’t get out to London to see her new exhibition this month. I semisorta worked out all the planning & logistics for a 24-hour trip to London next week for the private opening, but Celia talked me off of that ledge, thankfully.)
Virginia Heffernan considers the morality of writing a book review for The Washington Post, and the nature of collaborationism. (She published that consideration on Substack, a platform with its own collaboration/Nazi-platforming issues, so there’s a larger question of how sullied/complicit we’re willing to be in any of these spheres.)
Boy, even WSJ wants white men to chill the f out.
Despite my monologue about doppelgängers in this week’s show, one of my friends wrote me to say that her husband looked over her shoulder while she was looking at this IG post of Brandon Boyd and said, “Wow, Gil looks great!”
I mean, I’ll take it, sure.
Current/Recent Reading
Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life - Dan Nadel
Epic of the Earth: Reading Homer's Iliad in the Fight for a Dying World - Edith Hall
How We Got Here: Melville Plus Nietzsche Divided by the Square Root of (Allan) Bloom Times Žižek (Squared) Equals Bannon - David Shields
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Man Without Qualities - Robert Musil (tr. Wilkins/Pike) • This has been my morning ritual, one chapter a day. I’ve got another 50 chapters left in vol. 1.
But high-mindedness is the mark of every professional ideology. Hunters, for instance, would never dream of calling themselves the butchers of wild game; they prefer to call themselves the duly licensed friends of nature and animals; just as businessmen uphold the principle of an honorable profit, while the businessman's god, Mercury, that distinguished promoter of international relations, is also the god of thieves. So the image of a profession in the minds of its practitioners is not too reliable.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I’m 4 days into my 5-day weights/yoga cycle; here’s hoping I get weights in today. (I skipped last Sunday for dumb reasons that cover for laziness.) I got in a mini run-walk-run with a pal during the week, and want to get back to a regular running routine in the spring. My morning pre-coffee 15-min. routine also continues unabated. I’m at my heaviest since last summer, and really need to work on my compulsive-neurotic noshing, but I look alright.
I’m meditating daily, but it’s been tough to get under myself as I’d been doing early on. Not sure if I’m going in too anxious, or if I’m setting up expectations and otherwise predetermining my mindset, or if it’s just that I need to find another piece of background music (most often, it’s track 1 of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports while I corpse-pose on some yoga mats). I still manage to decompress over those ~15 minutes, but I don’t find myself losing myself, if you get me. The best sessions were ones where language would drop away and there’d be no narration of myself, no reasoning, but lately I’ve been drifting more into memories, some recriminations, sources of tension, and sure, some of that is useful when it helps me reconsider or defuse Things That Bother Me, but I hope to get back to a lack of me, a brief negation of self, some sorta decreation.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode (if today’s pod-session works out), some Instax throwbax, & maybe some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.
Pull me out of the aircrash / Pull me out of the lake / ‘Cause I’m your superhero / We are standing on the edge,