Hitting The Links: 7/14/24
This one's got a passel of great links, my new audio engineers from Brindle & Brindle, some top 10s, my return to the scene of the crime, and more
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Brindle & Brindle & The Top 10
I’m at Readercon in Quincy, MA this weekend; since almost none of my pals came this year, I’m treating it more like a base of operations than a festival itself. (I booked the hotel before learning that my regular Readercon pals all had other stuff going on this year.) Here’s a pic of the sky at 5:45 on Friday morning from the NY Thruway, as I started A Very Long Day:
I don’t have any podcasts scheduled for Readercon itself, I’ve already recorded episodes in Hull and Somerville, and this morning I’m heading off to Amherst to record another, and to take an Instax pic with a past guest, before heading home. I also got together for my annual dinner in Framingham with a college friend, & had dinner with Scott Edelman, which was not recorded for his great podcast, Eating the Fantastic. Here’s Ribby, the sound engineer for my Hull pod-session:
I needed another audio engineer for Saturday’s podcast in Somerville, so Brindle & Brindle Audio sent Naji over:
I’ve been doing a lot of driving with more ahead of me. Lucky for me I can relax next weekend with another one of those Catskills Fire Tower Hikes.
Yes, I should slow down. No, it’s probably not going to happen.
Anyway, no fake profundity from me today, but here’s the NYT list of the ‘100 Best books of the 21st century‘ (whatever: lists are for suckers) (except the list of every book I’ve finished since I started college in 1989), and here’s a bunch of authors & celebs on the 10 they each picked for the list.
Okay, fine, here are my 10 faves from this century, at this exact moment in time. (Alphabetically by author, otherwise Cultural Amnesia would be #1):
Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan
Piranesi - Susannah Clarke
Gould's Book of Fish - Richard Flanagan
Carter Beats The Devil - Glen David Gold
Essays After Eighty / A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety - Donald Hall (I’m counting them as one)
Cultural Amnesia - Clive James
Letters to Gwen John - Celia Paul
Against the Day - Thomas Pynchon
Everyman - Philip Roth
Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018 - Peter Schjeldahl
If you want to share yours, go to the web version of this email and put something in the comments.
After yesterday, I’m FOUR weeks ahead on the podcast, which is kinda insane. Today’s session in Amherst will be held for mid-October, which means I have to keep going until then, I guess (haha it’s not like I can stop).
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Laura Beers • Robert Pranzatelli • Bob Fingerman • Swan Huntley • Stan Mack • Jim Moske • Adam Moss • Randy Fertel
RIP Dr. Ruth . . . RIP Shelley Duvall . . . RIP Richard Simmons . . . RIP Michael Zulli (I was a big Puma Blues fan back in college) . . . RIP Dorothy Lichtenstein . . . RIP David’s Cookies . . . RIP Benji Gregory . . .
Also, Sen. James Inhofe died. I once asked a lobbyist who the dumbest person in Congress is. They weren’t sure about the House, but felt sure that Inhofe was the dumbest senator at that point in time.
Fascinating article by Taffy Brodesser-Akner about trauma, survival, and the time her dad’s friend got kidnapped.
Mark Wunderlich wrote a lovely piece about The Changing Light At Sandover while staying at the James Merrill House in Stonington.
I enjoyed this piece by David Moore on the provenance of a pair of Van Eycks at the Met.
Sofia Warren (with whom I have to record sometime soon) wrote/drew a lovely piece about her friendship with Mort Gerberg.
Ben Schwartz wrote about Comedy Central and The Daily Show getting memory-holed.
Since I’m at Readercon this weekend, here’s a science fiction piece about rich people setting up their finances so they can stay rich after their death, cryogenic suspension & resuscitation. I mean, it’s a tired concept but — oh, wait, this isn’t a SF piece, it’s actually real?
Speaking of SF scams: Here’s Tony Robbins saying, “You had me at ‘quantum reformers’; here’s $200 million.” Stick around for, “We need to heat the material to half the temperature of the sun, but we have a process to do it without creating greenhouse gases.”
Also, speaking of bizarre science fiction premises, here’s a rambling profile of Jean Giraud / Moebius by Sam Thielman. (In my conversation with Robert Pranzatelli two weeks ago, I mentioned my lack of an entry point into M’s comics.)
Current/Recent Reading
The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing - Sven Birkerts
The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years with the Legends Who Lunch - Konrad Bercovici, ed. Mirana Comstock
“The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar.”
Alternately,
“When the imperative of craftsmanship in art was abolished, it was because the idea that art should be about reproducing the world as exactly as possible was deemed old-fashioned and therefore no longer necessary. So it was abolished. But one doesn’t have to think too hard in order to understand that this wasn’t the reason that painters and sculptors spent all their time during their crucial formative years of youth copying others or mechanically reproducing models or objects. They weren’t doing it so they could learn to copy reality, because the reproduction of reality has a cutoff point any reasonably talented student would achieve fairly quickly. They were doing it so as to learn how not to think. This is the most important thing of all in art and literature, and hardly anyone can do it, or even realizes it is the case, because it is no longer taught or conveyed. Now everyone thinks art is to do with reason and criticism, that it’s all about ideas, and the art schools teach theory. Which is decay, not progress.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard (tr. Don Bartlett, Martin Aitken), My Struggle: Book 6
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Everything’s pretty much off the rails, what with the travel, work, etc. But I’m in the hotel where I first started running back in 2018, so I returned to the scene of the crime at 5:45 this morning to get in a light 5k on the treadmill.
IN MY DEFENSE, the last 2 minutes were the cooldown after I hit 5k, so my ACTUAL time was 28:15 or 9:06/mi, which is terrible unless you haven’t done any running in a very long time. (I started at 6.0/mph and increased by 0.1 each minute for 11 minutes, then went back from 7.0 to 6.0 and did it again. And again.)
Maybe on Monday I’ll get back on track with my regular exercise. Or we can pretend I’m going to get back to running.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new episode, and on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, & sure maybe a little profundity or something.
Paulie caught a bullet, but it only hit his leg,