Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 667 of my Virtual Memories Show, closing out 2025’s conversations with graphic memoirist and comics journalist Jonathan Sandler! We talk about his childhood secret origin in comics, the comics course in 2017 that brought him back to the form, the process of turning his grandfather’s WWII memoir into a comic, THE ENGLISH GI (with art by Brian Bicknell), and how he really became a comics aficionado after publishing his first graphic novel. We get into how he started the Graphic Memoir blog and began reviewing comics, interviewing cartoonists, visiting exhibitions, and spreading the comics gospel, and why this very podcast has provided him with a ton of inspiration. We also discuss what he’s learned from and about interviewing, why he’s started drawing his own comics, why he’s glad he dived into making The English GI instead of researching all the other WWII graphic novels out there, what the late Tom Spurgeon meant to me and everyone else he met, why the most difficult thing about making comics is choosing what to put in the panels, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE ENGLISH GI and subscribe to Graphic Memoir

Last week I posted Episode 666, feat. Morten Høi Jensen and his new book, THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS: Thomas Mann and the Making of The Magic Mountain (Yale University Press), a masterful biography of one of the great novels of the 20th century. We talk about Morten’s history with Mann’s novel, how it and its author speak to our present moment, Morten’s weeks of research in the sanatoria of Davos and his discovery of how much of The Magic Mountain‘s world is intact a century later, and how Mann’s novel changed for him in the process of writing this book. We get into Mann’s political transformation from a nationalist into an antifascist, how art & politics can make for a disastrous mix, Mann’s rivalry with his novelist brother Heinrich, and what it was like to write about a novel about life in a TB clinic while in the middle of a pandemic. We also discuss the weird connection I draw between Mann and Thomas Pynchon, how Morten became a literary biographer via the biography of another novel, spiritualism before and after WWI, how he came around on the chapter of The Magic Mountain that bored him in his earlier readings, why Robert Musil resented Mann, whether it’s okay to write margin notes and never look at them, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MASTER OF CONTRADICTIONS

Recent episodes: Prue Shaw • Glenn Kurtz • Jennifer Hayden • Rian Hughes • Josh Neufeld • Dean Haspiel & Whitney Matheson • Ron Rosenbaum

Mismemory

This weekend I was trying to remember something my dad said to a rabbi who came to visit him when he was in the hospital last Jan/Feb. I looked in my journal from the next morning, and while I’d made note of the rabbi’s visit, I hadn’t written down this exchange.

They were talking about their respective migrations — the rabbi’s accent was English — and my father’s story wound up with a lighthearted, “And then I came to America to find my fortune.”

The rabbi gestured to me and said, “And you DID.” I think Dad replied, “TWO fortunes,” referring to my brother, but now I can’t remember if he said two or three, in which case he’d also have been referring to his first son, back in Israel. I doubt it, for various reasons, but I’m unsure.

And so it’ll be lost forever, merest mismemory.

Looking at those journal pages reminded me of how difficult that hospital stay was for him (and me), and how rough this whole year has been. I’m glad I kept some track of it.

Tracks: now I’m on another early morning train from Newark to Baltimore to catch another Lyft to Silver Spring, MD for another negotiating session with FDA followed by another Lyft to another hotel in Washington, DC for another set of Hill meetings tomorrow.

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Instaxery

No new Instax pix this week. Here’s one from the Nick Cave exhibition I went to in NYC last January.

Artistry

Didn’t draw anything, sorry. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Postcardery

Let me know if you want to be on my postcard-a-day list. (Financial supporters of the podcast get a hand-drawn or painted postcard as a thank-you.)

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far. I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workout-/meditation-craziness, and on Wednesday with a new episode, but probably no art nor a new Instax.

It happens in the smallest ways / It happens all the time / And if you’ve never had your sight / What’s it mean to be blind?,