PODCAST

This week, I posted Episode 693 of my Virtual Memories Show, feat. cartoonist Karl Christian Krumpholz! With his amazing IN THE CITY comics (self-published), Karl manages to capture the ephemerality and dynamism of urban life and the joy of a night on the town, fueled by the stories of bar and club patrons. We talk about how he began In The City and how it unfolded and grew over five parts, how he learned to let his minor characters breathe and have their own stories, why his stand-in plays the Harpo-ish role of mute observer, and why The City isn’t a specific city (but isn’t Chicago). We get into Orwell’s 10 rules for a perfect pub and why his new coda to In The City is (tentatively) named Moon Under Water, why it’s better for his characters to embody flâneur-hood instead of his trying to seem smart by being explicit about it, how he began drawing cityscapes to get over how much he hated drawing backgrounds and then fell in love with that mode, how Evan Dorkin’s Milk & Cheese was his gateway drug into indy comics, how it took him quite a while to find his voice and comics-mode, and why he hopes to keep making comics about The City for a long time. We also discuss his fashion choices and hat fixation, and how led to him getting (visually) mistaken for Seth (or cosplay-/stunt double Seth), the importance of showing up at comics events, getting stories from his adventures in different cities (esp. the bars, of course), how he’s the second guest of mine named Karl who has a comic about his cat, and more. Give it a listen! And go read IN THE CITY!

Recent podcast episodes: Alison Fensterstock & Michael Tisserand • Emil Wilson • Jonathan Ames • Dash Shaw • Phillip Lopate • Ida Kao • Halstead York

Or how about every single episode, alphabetically?

Every book (non-comics) that I’ve finished since 1989.

BIRDY!

On the sofa this morning:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are a couple of links for you:

• RIP Pete Byrne . . . RIP Jackie Jackson . . . RIP Bruno Kramm . . . RIP Chuck Varga . . . RIP Morris Ballen . . . RIP Dennis Haskins . . . RIP Gordon Johncock . . . RIP Brooke Eby . . .

• Dog bites bear. (~20 years ago, in the even more forested town next to ours, a dude tackled a bear because it was attacking his dog. Took some pretty gnarly wounds, but saved his dog.)

• Calder’s Clouds rise again.

  

• When people are nervous about public speaking, I tell them, “No one is here to see you fail. They want you to succeed. It’s not like stand-up comedy.”

• This article about why so many generic drugs are made in India is part of what my job is about, esp. that every-5-years 6-10-month negotiation with FDA over generic drug user fees. (One of my association’s member companies is prominently quoted & discussed.)

• Louis Menand writes about punctuation; I am on board.

• Here’s a piece on attention and everyday awe, and one of my favorite recent movies, Perfect Days.

• Alan Hollinghurst reviewed Andrew Durbin’s biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, so go read that (and listen to my talk with Andrew).

• Only six billion years left? Not even enough time to take up the piano.

• Reporter goes 48 hours without a smartphone in a digital city; the joy and anxiety of aimlessness ensue.

• Neat brief interview with David Byrne about his new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, which of course means it’s time to bring in one of Stoppard’s greatest moments — and maybe one of the great passages from all literature —, from Arcadia:

  “We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?”

COMMONPLACE

Among other stuff, I added this to my online commonplace book:

When I glanced up a moment ago, the branch of lilac in the fading light looked like a distant hill of blossoming trees merging into the dusk. It was disappearing.

The walls of the house are thick, for the winters are cold. On the window embrasure, close to the windowpanes, hangs a shaving mirror. As I look up now, I see reflected in the mirror a sprig of the lilac branch: each petal of each tiny flower is vivid, distinct, near, so near that the petals look like the pores of a skin. At first I do not understand why what I see in the mirror is so much more intense than the rest of the branch which, in fact, is nearer to me. Then I realize that what I am looking at in the mirror is the far side of the lilac, the side fully lit by the last light of the sun.

Every evening my love for you is placed like that mirror.

—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos

I also came across a notebook I was using 5 years ago, and there were a ton of lines from a collection of Peter Scjheldahl’s art criticism, so I added those to the site.

And then there’s the line from Berger that walloped the living crap out of me and may have given me an ending to my book:

The dead are the imagination of the living.

—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos

MILANMARCH

I’m off to Milan tomorrow evening for a big trade show, basically the Super Bowl of the pharma services/ingredients sectors, with like 50-60,000 people in attendance. I get one day off after that, which I plan to spend in Parma with past (& upcoming!) pod-guest Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, before heading back to NJ.

This show used to rotate among several European cities — Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Brussels — but as it’s grown it had to settle into the two cities that can accommodate it: Milan and Frankfurt. I’ve been to both too often.

This morning, I remembered 2007’s trip to Milan; Amy came along and we made a little vacation of it, meandering around the city, traveling up to Como, and generally having fun.

Also, reading. In those pre-Kindle days, I brought a couple of books along for the trip, but wound up finishing them with a few days left. I hunted down the one bookstore within a few blocks of our hotel that was open after I got back from the Fiera, and was disappointed to find that it only had one shelf of English-language books. They were mostly Penguin editions, and I couldn’t decide what to buy for the last days of the trip & the flight back.

Then I thought, “You always said you were gonna tackle Middlemarch after crashing out of it in college; no better time than the present.”

There never is.

SOUND BODY, FRACTURED MIND

I’ve shed some pounds, which is nice. Haven’t gotten to run all week, and some of my weights and yoga workouts have been derailed by work-stuff, vaccination KTFO, etc., but my body’s feeling okay. I won’t subject you non-consensually to yesterday’s post-workout pic, so you’ll have to click through if you’re in the mood for my shirtless mid-50s physique.

My mental health isn’t great. The work stuff is running me down; there have been some frustrations and reversals lately, and there are times I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall. Anxiety and sleeplessness are doing a number on me. I try not to let it get to me, but I’m a one-man show and I go stretches without talking to anyone about all this, and that can really leave me feeling isolated and wrapped in self-defeat.

I haven’t given myself any meditation time for a while, but it was a beautiful morning today, nice and cool and sunny, and when I took Birdy out for walkies, she was in sniff-everything mode, and while I often get frustrated by that, today I just let her express her doggo-nature, and embraced her embracing the moment.

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be in the rotation for that. Probably won’t mail any from Milan, as that’d involve buying postage and finding a post office when I’m going to be at the Fiera from morning to evening each day.

EXPENSES

If you want to help out with Virtual Memories Show expenses — this email runs $29/month, podcast-hosting is $25/month, and the remote recording account is $20/month — or otherwise Contribute To The Cause, you can make a one-time contribution of any size via Stripe, or a recurring one via Patreon. Or maybe save your money for when I launch the Kickstarter for my Instax book.

NEXT TIME

Thanks for reading this far. See you next time, I hope.

He can show you / The silence from the sound / The gift he brings you / Cannot be found / What could have made a man turn so hard? / What could have made a child want to run so far?,