Hitting The Links: 7/6/25
We’ve got a bunch of links, some pix, & some reading selections, but also bad medical news that means I’m putting the podcast on hiatus.
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
On Hold
I have to put the podcast, and maybe the newsletter, on indefinite hiatus. My 88-year-old father is back in the hospital, after a diagnosis of severe dehydration and pneumonia. I’m not sure if we saved his life so much as forestalled his death, but we got him there in the seeming nick of time on Thursday night.
The daily 6- or 7-hour visits, combined with the heavy responsibilities of my job, means something has to give. In this case, ‘something’ is the thing that gives my life meaning.
If I’ve got the time & focus, I’ll try to keep the newsletter going, because I’m desperate to communicate with the outside world, but I have no idea whether that’s feasible.
Birdy Of The Week
She made a friend during walkies on Friday:
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And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Rachel Cockerell • Paul Karasik • Kate Maruyama • David Denby • Peter Stothard • Cecile Wajsbrot • Keiler Roberts
RIP Jim Shooter (with quotes from the late Tom Spurgeon and Danny Fingeroth) . . . RIP Michael Madsen . . . RIP Mikayla Raines . . . RIP Bobby Jenks . . . RIP D. Wayne Lukas . . . RIP Diogo Jota . . . RIP Richard Greenberg . . . RIP Julian McMahon . . . and a great tribute to Lalo Schifrin . . .
Also, Jimmy Swaggart died.
I stayed at the Roosevelt many years ago during a conference in NYC. I also recorded my first podcast with Vanda Krefft there in 2017.
Speaking of decaying properties, here’s a piece by Dan McQuade about his childhood mall shutting down.
Jerry Saltz wrote about the Vermeer mini-show at the Frick.
Someday, I hope to take Amtrak to or from New Orleans.
One of the nice things about this new season of Somebody Feed Phil is that it confirmed the unspoken preference that Amy & I hold never to visit Georgia or other Eastern European countries.
New York Review of Books has a novel review by Anahid Nersessian, an art review by Jarrett Earnest, and a paean to/plea for NYC’s trees by Benjamin Swett.
Current/Recent Reading
Authority: Book 2 of The Southern Reach - Jeff VanderMeer
Mourning Diaries - Roland Barthes (tr. Michael Wood)
p. 31. Letter to Georges de Lauris, whose mother has just died (1907):
‘Now there is one thing I can tell you: you will enjoy certain pleasures you would not fathom at present. When you still had your mother you often thought of the days when you would have her no longer. Now you will often think of days past when you had her. When you are used to this horrible thing that they are forever cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible. Let yourself be inert, wait till the incomprehensible power (. . .) that has broken you restores you a little, I say a little, for henceforth you will always keep something broken about you. Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.’
The Man Without Qualities, Vol. 2 - Robert Musil (tr. Wilkins & Pike)
But their guide, Friedenthal, could see even in the dark, and pointing to various beds, he explained: “That’s idiocy over there, and over here you have cretinism.”
Stumm von Bordwehr pricked up his ears. “A cretin is not the same as an idiot?" he asked.
“No,” the doctor said, “there's a medical distinction.”
For bonus reading, I thought yesterday about the opening of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, by Danilo Kis, translated by Duska Mikic-Mitchell. I can’t find my copy, which is a sign of how distracted I am, but I did find the William Gass essay collection in which he quotes the transcendent opening paragraph in its entirety:
The story I am about to tell, a story born in doubt and perplexity, has only the misfortune (some call it the fortune) of being true: it was recorded by the hands of honorable people and reliable witnesses. But to be true in the way its author dreams about, it would have to be told in Roumanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, or Yiddish; or, rather, in a mixture of all these languages. Then by the logic of chance and of murky, deep, unconscious happenings, through the consciousness of the narrator, there would flash also a Russian word or two, now a tender one like telyatina, now a hard one like kinjal. If the narrator, therefore, could reach the unattainable, terrifying moment of Babel, the humble pleadings and awful beseechings of Hanna Krzyzewska would resound in Roumanian, in Polish, in Ukrainian (as if her death were only the consequence of some great and fatal misunderstanding), and then just before the death rattle and final calm her incoherence would turn into the prayer for the dead, spoken in Hebrew, the language of being and dying.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
I got in weights on Wednesday, and then everything went south with Dad, so I haven’t exercised. Some mornings, I haven’t even gotten to my 15-min. stretch/startup regimen, which is a bad sign that I’m Letting It Get To Me, and punishing myself by letting things slide, which could lead to a vicious cycle.
But here’s a post-workout flex from Wednesday:
Daily meditation was thrown off kilter, too, but I’ve gotten back into the routine of doing it shortly after returning from the hospital each day, and that’s been helpful, the disconnection, the reflection, the peace. On Wednesday, I had some crazy 2001-like experience.
After I tried to write it down: “something happened at the end some sort of emerging into something my eyelids were a projection screen and repeatedly I'd zoom in on something like a mushroom cloud an exploding that I was traveling into deeper with each iteration maybe like the door or portal at the bottom of the tower in annihilation maybe something else a sort of pink light was I heading toward something.”
My mantra derived from a text Dad’s wife sent me earlier, about his delirium and how he was going on about “mushrooms and Sherman tanks.”
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I don’t know if I’ll be back on Wednesday, but if I am, there won’t be a new episode, but there will be a new Instax, & some art, and maybe on Sunday I’ll be back with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something, but I wouldn’t count on any of that. It might be the last you hear from me for a while.
So will you please say “Hello” / to the folks that I know? / Tell them I won’t be long / They’ll be happy to know that / As you saw me go / I was singin’ this song,