Hitting The Links: 7/28/24
We've got a whole ton of links, new books by past guests, the weirdness of Heraclitus, my return to running, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
You Find Me In Fragments
I’ve been reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle before bed for months now; on a whim I decided it would be my extracurricular reading project, like last year’s reread of Pynchon’s novels, inspired by my finally getting around to Against the Day in 2022.
My Knausgaard reading flowed well until Book 6, the 1,200-page finale of the 3,600-page opus. I admit I’ve been dragging through his ~400-page digression, The Name And The Number, currently deep in a textual exploration of The Straitening, a poem by Paul Celan. Sometime after this part, from what I gather, he finally gets to explaining why he named this series of novels after Mein Kampf, so that should be fun.
Here’s a fragment of Heraclitus he cited in last night’s reading. I’m turning it over in my head today:
Man kindles a light for himself in the night-time, when he has died but is alive. The sleeper, whose vision has been put out, lights up from the dead; he that is awake lights up from the sleeping.
—Heraclitus, Fragment 26
I admit that my Heraclitus begins and ends with the now-cliché “we never step into the same river twice,” but the sheer strangeness and almost-zen quality of that fragment K. cited got me to look up the actual line about The Same River.
Turns out there are two of them. “You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you,” [12] which largely fits the bill about the ever-changingness of the natural world, but there’s also, “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not,” [49a] which adds a whole ‘nother level of reality, or maybe contemplates the split between what we consider reality and what the world is without us.
Makes me think I need to read more Heraclitus. Maybe that’ll be my next extracurricular bedtime-reading project after Knausgaard, or after I finish Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (2 pages every morning, before journal & postcard-writing).
I also feel like I should hit up John Porcellino and see if he knows some analogs to these fragments from his study of Zen Buddhism.
I’d explore this more, but it’s time for me to hit the hiking trails with an old friend, because for all that changes, some things should stay the same.
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Shalom Auslander • Maurice Vellekoop • Laura Beers • Robert Pranzatelli • Bob Fingerman • Swan Huntley • Stan Mack • Jim Moske
RIP Lewis Lapham (great tribute by Michael Gerber) . . . RIP Duke Fakir . . . RIP John Mayall . . . RIP Dave Loggins . . .
Hey! Dmitry Samarov’s new book is out! Go get Making Pictures is How I Talk to the World.
For those of you keeping track, Dmitry's been on the show 6 times (7 if you count our COVID Check-In, but those aren't canon): 2014, 2015, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022.
I always enjoy Christopher Brown’s FIELD NOTES emails, but this week’s edition in particular is lovely/a doozy. (And go pre-order his new book, A Natural History of Empty Lots!)
Chris, too, has been on the show a bunch: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2023, + COVID Check-In.
Not only will I always post links about overnight rail travel, but that goes double for European capitols, and triple for ones written by someone named Evan Rail.
Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar has NOT been woefully neglected in THIS household. It immediately became part of our annual Thanksgiving week rotation.
Really enjoyed this piece on Junior Bridgeman and his post-NBA business fortune.
Reminder: limit your gorilla’s screen time.
What if Space Oddity but we just forgot they were up there?
Current/Recent Reading
A Doorway To Joe: The Art of Joe Coleman - Joe Coleman, et al. (because we’re supposed to record next weekend!)
“In Faulkner the past is like a void and unclear, differing radically from Joyce’s past, which above all is the past of culture, that which is devised and created, Odysseus and Circe, Dante, and Shakespeare, a past to which one relates through the intellect, whereas the past in Faulkner’s work is nameless and without language, and may only be sensed or felt.”
—Karl Ove Knausgaard (tr. Don Bartlett, Martin Aitken), My Struggle: Book 6
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I’ve started to get rolling again. I was too lazy/busy to work out last Sunday, but joined The Guys to run 5k of their 10k weekday runs on Monday and Thursday, and rejiggered my weights-yoga workout routine to start on Wednesday, so I’ve got 4 days of that cycle done. Today’s the postponed Catskills Fire Tower Hike, which I’ll begrudgingly accept as a replacement to Sunday’s workout. (Also, Wednesday was my first weights-workout in 15 days and holy crap was I feeling that Thursday/Friday.)
Depending on how my legs are after today’s hike, I’ll join The Guys again Monday or Tuesday morning and see if I can start stretching past 5k (the drop-off points near my car are 5k, 5.3mi and 6.3mi.). Between my new muscles and my fat/lazy ass, I’m about 15-18 lbs. heavier than when I was running 130 mi./month with The Guys, so I’m trying to be careful about stress on my knees with the added weight.
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.
You can mend the wires / You can feed the soul apart,