Hitting The Links: 6/9/24
Lots of links, a minor update & a major banner, Kafka's 100th deathiversary, and Prelude To Part Two Of The Catskills Fire Tower Challenge
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
A Banner Day
Forgive me, but I don’t have much to share with you from the inner station this time. I’ve had some thoughts and impressions that I’m trying to funnel into art, and writing about them in this format might wreck that.
I will say that I’m looking forward to bringing you more podcastery starting this week. I’ve got 3 episodes recorded, with more scheduled, and I’m optimistic I can do all the reading & prep, while taking care of The Big Stuff going on in my professional life. (Which will have me traveling to Boston for an overnight this week, DC next week.)
I was going to settle in to edit this week’s show yesterday afternoon, but some sorta trepidation/anxiety got to me, so instead I remade the banner for the Virtual Memories Show. My site crops it a bit, but here’s the full image:
I had to reverse-engineer the crop-proportions/resize settings in Photoshop for the headshots; a bunch of them were from the old banner, but I wanted to bring in some new guest-faces. Every one that I swapped out felt like a betrayal.
*
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.
And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Jim Moske • Adam Moss • Randy Fertel • D.W. Young • Jen Silverman • Leonard Barkan • Emily Raboteau
RIP John Ronan . . . RIP William Anders . . . RIP Christophe Deloire . . . RIP Chet Walker . . .
Oh, hey: New Vessel Press is having a summer sale through June 12! 40% off everything w/code “SUMMER24”! I really enjoyed reading Moving the Palace and What’s Left of the Night (and interviewing Charif Majdalani and Ersi Sotiropoulos about them), so go check out their catalog!
Go read this interview with Darryl Pinckney, occasioned by his NYRB review of the Harlem Renaissance exhibition at the Met.
Speaking of NYRB, here’s Jonathan Lethem on Charles Portis.
We watched/enjoyed Hit Man last night; here’s David Marchese interviewing the director, Richard Linklater.
Man, this documentary (semi sorta) about Flipside Records sounds right up my alley.
Kafka’s 100th deathiversary was last week. Here’s Michael Dirda (2012, 2014, 2015) on Kafka-adjacent reading, and you should also check out my Kafka-related episodes: Ross Benjamin on translating Kafka’s diaries, and Andreas Kilcher & Judith Butler on Kafka’s drawings.
We’ve all been there, Franz
Current/Recent Reading
Feh: A Memoir - Shalom Auslander
“Was art only an inner phenomenon? Something that moved within us and between us, all that which we couldn’t see but marked us, indeed, which was us? Was this the function of landscape painting, portraits, sculptures, to draw the external world, so essentially alien to us, into our inner world?”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard (tr. Don Bartlett), My Struggle: Book 5. ~180 more pages and then it’s on to the gigantor final book (~1,200 pages).
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
After last week’s travel, I restarted my exercise routine: Friday was my first weights workout in 10 days, and yesterday was my first yoga in 12 days. But I came through okay, even though I didn’t even get to do my morning 15-min. routine for that travel week. My body’s sore, but in a good way. I also got in a 4-mi. walk with one of my pals yesterday, which was good for body & mind. Saw my first tiger lily of the year, but didn’t take a picture. Next Saturday I’ll be going on hike #2 of 5 in the Catskills Fire Tower Challenge with my old friend. It looks like a 2,000’ climb over ~2 miles, which means the following Mon/Tue lobbying trip in Washington, DC should prove . . . challenging. Doing lots of calf-stretches now.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode (at last!), and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & sure maybe a little profundity or something.
I used to be a big shopper ‘round the world / Big credit cards, they don’t matter anymore / ‘Cause I can’t pay any money that I owe / To these cards anymore,