Hitting The Links: 9/21/25
We’ve got a whole lotta links, Matthiessen’s cameo in Knight of Cups, a fur-lorn Birdy, the view from The Magic Mountain, & more
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Just As It Is
I’ve got a podcast coming up in mid-October with Lance Richardson (here’s our 2018 talk) about his amazing new biography of Peter Matthiessen, True Nature, in which I learned that PM appeared briefly in Terrence Malick’s movie Knight of Cups.
Since Malick’s Tree of Life is one of my all-time favorite movies, and since Amy was going to be out on Thursday night, I decided I’d give Knight of Cups a viewing.
It’s no Tree of Life, but it’s gorgeous to look at and I did okay with the voiceovers and muted dialogue (fine: I used closed captioning). Plus, there were lots of gorgeous women.
Matthiessen shows up around 80 minutes into the movie, when Christian Bale and his girlfriend of that minute are visiting a zen garden. PM died a year or so before it came out; I have no idea how close he was to death when his part was filmed.
His character talks about an experience very much like Matthiessen’s trek through the Himalayas that led to The Snow Leopard. He tells Bale about the monks:
“Don’t forget: their life is so circumscribed. If you’re living in a cave, eating nettles, it’s not so difficult to keep your life simple. You don’t have honking horns and your wife running in, saying, ‘Hey, you screwed up, you didn’t do this right.’ The distractions are very few. And that’s the great attraction of the monk’s life.
They laugh, and then we hear PM’s voiceover while the camera pans through the garden:
“Teaching now, I only teach one thing. I just teach this moment. Pay attention to this moment. Everything is there. Perfect. And complete. Just as it is.”
It was sorta worth it to grind through the vacant decadence of the movie — I get that that’s the motif of the tarot’s Knight of Cups — to reach that moment, even if the message is one I know already. It was good to be re-minded.
Birdy Of The Week
Birdy’s dog-groomer came over while I was headed up to Boston on Wednesday; our girl is still fur-lorn about it all.
*
This email setup runs $29/month, podcast-hosting is $20/month, and the remote recording setup is $20/month, so if you want to help out with these expenses or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can support the Virtual Memories Show with a contribution of any size, one-time or recurring.
And now, let’s hit the links!
Links & Such
Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: M.L. Rio • David Leopold • Dmitry Samarov • Ask Me Anything • Dan Goldman • David Levithan/Jens Lekman • Sacha Mardou • Oliver Radclyffe
RIP Robert Redford . . . RIP Bobby Hart . . . RIP Hermeto Pascoal . . . RIP Marilyn Hagerty . . . RIP Brett James . . . RIP Agnes Gund . . . RIP Marian Burros . . .
I would read this article, but I’m too busy staring at the beautiful guy in the surface of this pond.
In contrast, check out this person’s Life At A Glance journal system.
Speaking of ponds, Mimi Pond got profiled in the NYTimes for her new book on the Mitford Sisters, Do Admit. I was hoping to record with her during SPX last weekend, but we’ll have to settle for a remote session once her book tour’s over.
Steven Heller interviewed Tom Gauld at his Daily Heller. (One of my friends emailed me during SPX to see if I could get Tom to sign a copy of his new book for him, which involved my being the “hey, can you do ONE MORE?” guy after Tom’s signing line ended, because I couldn’t just stand on line like normal people.)
Elon Green wrote an epic piece about Me & Bobby McGee and the woman who inspired it.
Boris Fishman almost lost his marriage on TV.
At least his wife didn’t resort to ChatGPT.
I’m with Leslie Stein on this one: Oasis sucks.
New Air Mail has an interview with Gay Talese and Ed Sorel about “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” (Within a few lines, three more of my legend-level past guests — Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, and George Lois — come up, and man do I have a blessed life.)
Oliver Radclyffe writes, “The reality that I don’t want to face is that being trans may soon become incompatible with living in America.”
During my 2023 biz-trip to Barcelona, I wrote you, “I didn’t tell him about my dream. That night, sleepless and feverish, as I began to come down with what I hope is just a cold, I had a lucid dream in which the organic shapes of the Nativity facade began to shift in color and grow even more immense in scale. The true nature of the Sagrada Familia was clear to me as I stared at the maw of the entrance: it wasn’t a church but a machine for capturing souls. Gaudî, the only person buried there, was its first victim. I had an absolute conviction that my only courses of action were to flee Barcelona or to blow up the building.” Or, y’know, maybe the Sagrada Familia is kitsch.
Current/Recent Reading
Death In Trieste - Jason
Clutter: A Scatterbrained Sexual Assault Memoir - Ariel Bordeaux
So Buttons #15 - Jonathan Baylis et al.
Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism – Anna Kornbluh
The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann (tr. John E. Woods)
“In response to much begging, he was kind enough to allow his patient to view his own hand through the fluoroscope. And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness — and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while. . . . [H]e beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music—a rather dull, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open.
“The director said, ‘Spooky, isn’t it? Yes, there’s no mistaking that whiff of spookiness.’”
+ the mourner’s Kaddish every morning, in Aramaic
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Last week was an absolute no-go as far as exercise goes, and I missed this Wednesday’s start of the weights-yoga cycle because of the biz-trip, but I did manage to get in a full 45-min. yoga workout on Thursday after driving back from Boston, and did my weights workout on Friday for the first time in 2 weeks, + full yoga workout on Saturday. More work-travel this week — Minnesota, so I get to cross another state off of my “never visited/stayed overnight” list — which means I’ll need to figure out some sorta exercise, because if I continue to let things go, it’ll be bad/worse for my body & mind.
Haven’t been able to meditate every day, but the times I have got a little weird, in indescribable ways.
Until Next Time
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll back on Wednesday, with a new episode, a bunch of Instax, and some art. On Sunday I’ll be back with links, books, & workout craziness, & maybe a little profundity or something.
So, take that gun out of your hand / ‘Cause all will be well, say the bells / It’s Sunday morning and I’m holding your hand,