May 18, 2025

Hitting The Links: 5/18/25

This one’s got a ton of links, wedding pix, aporia and wound-it-forward, my longest run in 3+ years, moral ambition & (in)effective altruism, some Rilke, Barthes & Herzog, and more

The Virtual Memories Show News

A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life

Stingray

Here are some pix from my niece’s wedding 2 months ago: me accompanying my mom (and carrying her cane), me using telekinesis to make sure the cup-handoff between mom & rabbi goes well, and Amy in 4” heels still dwarfed by groom, bride, husband, and brother-in-law.

Wish I’d gotten these last week, so I could have included the Mom pix for the Mother’s Day newsletter, but hey.

On the plus side, plunging back into Barthes’ Mourning Diary after getting back from Amsterdam on Mother’s Day led me somewhere, in which my jokey bitterness/archness was zapped by aporia’s stingray. I realized that I focus so much on the wounds I’ve received that I don’t think about the wounds that I inflict.

It reminded me of one of my early oncology visits, when I brought Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations with me to read in the waiting room, as some sort of obscurely witty statement. Then a mother came in with her early-teen son, and I realized there is no wittiness in the oncology waiting room.

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Birdy Of The Week

On Friday afternoon, she fell over on her back on the sofa & demanded rubbies.

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And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

• Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Peter Kuper • Vauhini Vara • Craig Thompson • Ari Richter • Dan Nadel • See Hear Speak • Peter Trachtenberg

• RIP Joe Don Baker . . . RIP Jack Katz (missed it a couple weeks ago) . . . RIP Morris the Alligator . . . RIP Sabu . . . RIP Emperor of Crawfish . . . RIP Charles Strouse . . . RIP Nora Aunor . . . RIP Koyo Kouoh . . . RIP Joe Louis Walker . . . RIP José Mujica . . . RIP Elizabeth Pochoda . . . RIP William H. Luers . . . RIP Johnny Rodriguez . . . RIP Robert Benton . . . RIP Paul A. Strassmann . . . RIP Sharpe James . . .

• Man, that’s a lot of dead pepople.

• Great obit for Mark Zingarelli by John Kelly. He also did one for The Mad Peck recently.

• Read all about/listen to why I was at that trade show in Rotterdam last week, if you’re interested in that part of my life.

  

• Apparently, being Gen X financially sucks, but lucky for us we’re too cool to acknowledge that.

• And, sure, The System is built to grind you down, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have some agency.

• Which sorta dovetails with this NYT interview with Rutger Bregman, about his work in moral ambition, and why the “best & brightest” should develop some moral values and eschew Number Go Up moneymaking as a life goal.

• That conversation put me in mind of when I saw Bill Gates speak last year at the New York Economic Club (yeah, I know). He talked about the founding of the Gates Foundation, how he reached a point where he looked at the fortune he’d amassed, how little of it his descendants could ever possibly spend, and started reading up on the charitable work the Robber Barons did when they were in that position a hundred years before. He figured all that money could help solve some of the world’s problems.

• Also in keeping with this interview, Gates admitted that the work they did in education never worked out, or when it did, it wasn’t transferable or scaleable. The healthcare portion, on the other hand, saved millions of lives. I contrast that with the Effective Altruist folks who contend that saving a couple people NOW isn’t worth as much as building a planetary shield against asteroids or other things that aren’t focused on poor people’s lives.

• That said, the heat-death of the universe does have to be taken into account when it comes to long-term plans.

• I missed this Andre 3000 interview from 6 months ago; it’s awfully good about the ways artists age.

• Coffee habits of (retired) pro athletes: revealed!

• I guarantee whatever you think an air traffic controller looks like, he does not look like this guy. I appreciate the work these folks do, but with all the equipment/tech failures going on, I think I’m gonna stay on the ground a while. (Next couple trade shows are in Philadelphia and Boston, and we don’t have to go to Toronto this summer.)

• Steven Heller (2018, 2019, 2022) interviewed this week’s guest, Peter Kuper, about his new book, INSECTOPOLIS. (Or, as I accidentally called it in the beginning of our conversation, INSECTOPIA. Which I think is a really good title.)

• Michael Dirda (2012, 2014, 2015) wrote about his reading slump and how he got out of it. (Includes mention of Henry Wessells’ new book, The Elfland Propositions.)

• I missed this February interview with Michael about his decision to semi-retire from the Washington Post’s Book World. He was the first real Get of my podcast-career, and I’m awfully glad I reached out to him all those years ago. I’m also glad that the interview includes this semi-parallel to my own experience of cold-calling pod-guests (not that I consider any of them/you elderly):

  “Let me add that when I first came to Book World, it was my practice to telephone elderly men and women of letters to ask them to review, but mainly because I simply wanted to talk to Sir Harold Acton, Malcolm Cowley, Kenneth Burke, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Morley Callaghan, Peter Quennell, Rex Warner, Eleanor Clark, Richard Ellmann, Robert Giroux. Later on, I enjoyed chatting or exchanging letters with eminent literary scholars such as Harold Bloom, Joseph Frank, Roger Shattuck and, still with us, Victor Brombert.”

• Really good piece by W. David Marx on cultural decline and the critical collapse of treating mass culture as Art. If you’ve suffered through my show long enough, you’ve a) picked up on the theme of greatness in art (as opposed to entertainment), and b) heard me say something to the effect of, “I don’t make art; I just make conversation.” Guests often shoot that down and say that what I do with the podcast is art, but this is what I mean when I say it’s not.

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Current/Recent Reading

Where the Paths Do Not Go - Rainer Maria Rilke (tr. Burton Pike)

Only one who has already lifted the lyre 
among shades as well, 
may tentatively proclaim 
praise of the infinite.

Only one who has eaten 
poppy with the dead, of theirs,
will not again lose 
the softest sound.

Even if the reflection in the pond
often seems blurred to us:
know the image.

Only in the double realm 
will the sounds become 
eternal and mild.

Mourning Diary - Roland Barthes (tr. Richard Howard)

In me, life struggles against death (the discontinuity and so to speak the ambiguity of mourning) (which will win?) — but for the moment a stupid life (trivial involvements, trivial interests, trivial encounters).

The dialectical problem is for the struggle to lead to an intelligent life, not a screen-life.

Every Man For Himself And God Against All - Werner Herzog (tr. Michael Hoffmann)

I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis — along with quite a few other mistakes —that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I got my weights/yoga workout cycle back on track, despite the fact my back went ZOTZ! when I picked up my dumbbells early on in Wednesday’s workout. It’s feeling better now. Next week’s trade show travel will screw up my schedule again, but I’ll do my best, maybe a treadmill run in the hotel Wednesday morning, in lieu of weights.

I didn’t get any running in all week, but joined The Guys for their Saturday morning long run, which led to my longest run since December 2021: 11.4 miles. They do walking breaks every mile-ish on the long runs, but it still wore on me. My legs were done by mile 9, but the good thing about running w/friends is that you Just Keep Going. Or as I put it on Strava: “NO LEGS, NO QUIT.”

The humidity was so bad, I doffed my shirt 5 miles in, lest I chafe the crap out of my boobs. Also, I sweated so much that I weighed 4.5 lbs. less when I got home. I rehydrated as best I could throughout the day.

(How I managed a full 45-min. yoga workout that afternoon, I don’t know.)

Meditation’s still proving weird/problematic. Maybe I need to change up the music that I use. I spent a lot of time just trying to get out from under myself, rather than just roaming. I’m too preoccupied with It All, having drawn-out conversations in my head, or planning, or composing emails I’ll never send, instead of letting all that collapse into the infinite moment. Maybe it’ll be different today.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, maybe a new Instax, & some art, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.

I was afraid I’d eat your brains / Because I’m evil,