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July 7, 2024

Hitting The Links: 7/7/24

This one's got our bug-out to Toronto & life on the islands, + a ton of links and some other ruminations.

The Virtual Memories Show News

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

Doing The Islands

We celebrated July 4th with friends from Cyprus, France, Japan, and Hungary. Then we left for Toronto.

When the customs agent asked the purpose of our visit, I said, “Just thought it’d be a good idea to get out of the US for a couple days.”

I skipped the Toronto Comic Arts Festival last May, but still wanted to get up here and maybe see what it’s like to visit without the parameters of a festival schedule. For one thing, it means we didn’t have to get a hotel room near the TCAF venue, so I booked us a place by the lake instead.

Photo of the view from a Toronto hotel room beside Lake Ontario, with lots of boats in the water
The view from our hotel room. Whole lotta boats, ferries, & such

It’s been fun, although I could do without the humidity. We’ve had a good time seeing friends, accidentally finding The Beguiling’s new location & catching up with the owner, visiting Ward’s Island & environs, and having some lovely dinners. Plus I recorded a pair of podcasts, took some Instax for My Book Project, and made some friends.

Photo of the storefront of The Beguiling comic shop in Toronto
Best comic shop in North America

Visiting the islands and getting a walking tour was a blast, because it’s such a circumscribed life there, with a whole set of parameters dictated by its very nature: access to the mainland, the tiny community, seasonal tourists, the absence of cars or stores, the trials of winter, the schedule of the ferry/water-taxi, etc.

Of course, I say this as the guy who lives in the not-quite-woods, pretending that NYC is “only 25 miles away”. Everywhere has its trade-offs, but it was fascinating to walk with our host, Maurice Vellekoop, who’s lived there ~30 years, and hear about the lives he and his neighbors have made for themselves. It’s a whole world.

I never imagine living somewhere else — I’ve always been the caretaker, after all — but it was a joy to step into other people’s lives for a day.

Photo of 3 white people standing by the high grass on Algonquin Island, with the mainland of Toronto in the background
Amy, Maurice, and some monster: view from Algonquin Island

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And now, let’s hit the links!

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Links & Such

  • Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Robert Pranzatelli • Bob Fingerman • Swan Huntley • Stan Mack • Jim Moske • Adam Moss • Randy Fertel • D.W. Young

  • RIP Robert Towne . . . RIP Ismail Kadare . . . RIP Bruce Bastian (I was a PerfectWrite guy) . . . RIP June Leaf . . . RIP Munchtyv

  • It’s the 50th anniversary of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, and he celebrated it on someone ELSE’s podcast rather than mine, even though I didn’t even pitch him.

  • $74k will buy a lot of purple drank.

  • SLEEPER TRAINS OF EUROPE! (You know me by now: I will post links to passenger train articles every. single. week.)

  • Whoops rocket launch.

  • Nick Cave received a peculiar 100,000th question on his Red Hand Files, but he has some good thoughts on the ?s that follow it.

  • Warren Ellis wrote about getting offline, or at least out of the walled gardens.

  • GO READ this piece on Norman Maclean, whose writing contains the world, and at least 2 out of 4 elements.

  • Amending one of last week’s links: while Vienna is a hotbed of spies, it also waits for Gen Z girls who are just discovering Billy Joel.

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Current/Recent Reading

The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing - Sven Birkerts

“‘What’s happened in our time is that restlessness is no longer translated into action. Restlessness doesn’t produce anymore. We live in the age of therapy. Restlessness isn’t wanted, we try to remove it by talking about it. We’ve got one Vision Zero after another, trying to live immaculate lives in immaculately happy families, and our explicit aim in life is to eliminate road traffic deaths. But it’s a chimera, a great big lie. It’s ridiculous that we even believe it. But we do. Harmony, happiness, and no more deaths in traffic. Give me a useless dad who doesn’t give a shit! Give me a godforsaken awful childhood! Because something comes of that. Something gets created there. In the disharmony and the dissonance.’

“‘I can agree to that in theory, but not in practice. I look at my kids and the only thing I want is for them to be happy. To have as good a life as possible.’”

It was either that or

“Death is not the abyss, but exists in the living, in the space between our thoughts and the flesh through which they pass.”

—Karl Ove Knausgaard (tr. Don Bartlett, Martin Aitken), My Struggle: Book 6

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

It’s all a blur, but: last week was 4 days of my 5-day weights-yoga cycle (Fri-Mon), skipping the last day because the kitchen renovation guy was here, and then I needed to record the intro to the show, and tbh I needed a rest. No workouts yet this weekend, just a ton of walking: 9 miles each day we’ve been here. Because I don’t trust the floors of hotel rooms, no morning stretch-yoga-etc. routine since I got here, either. I’ll try to get back to it all tomorrow. I feel pretty gigantic & bloated, but that’s body dysmorphia for you.

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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.

Lit up like a firefly / Just to feel the living night,

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