Opening Day
This one's got a new podcast with David Shields, thoughts on Opening Day and old friends, a chatty Lyft, an Instax & some art
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 631 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. David Shields‘ return to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE, and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon (Sublation Media). We get into how the world moved from the death of God to the death of essence to the death of truth, and how deconstruction, once the province of left-wing academia, was weaponized by right-wing authoritarians for political aims. We talk about how much blame he bears for all this with his 2010 book Reality Hunger, how it feels to be a radical with deep skepticism of radicals’ language, his affinity for Werner Herzog’s notion of the ecstatic truth in documentary films, what he learned from interviewing nonfiction writers about the nature of truth, and how he feels about going to his first WWE event. We also discuss nonlinear warfare and the endless deconstruction of reality, how writing can “build a bridge across the abyss of human loneliness” (per DFW), what he’s learned from the collaboration of making documentaries, his fixation on hamartia (the tragic flaw), Walter Benjamin’s notion of pursuing the truth even if we’ll never reach it, bringing the public, social and personal worlds together in his writing, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon and A Christian Existentialist and a Psychoanalytic Atheist Walk Into a Trump Rally!
Last week I posted Episode 630, and it’s a weird one. I didn’t have a guest that week, so I recorded a (thankfully) brief monologue from a hotel room in Weehawken, NJ during a business conference for my day job. I talked about mental health, oblique mythology, Charles Crumb, comics and pharma friends, the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and more. Give it a listen!
Recent episodes: Elon Green • Vanda Krefft • Seth Lorinczi • Martin Mittelmeier • Jonathan Ames • Witold Rybczynski • Matt Madden
Opening Day
Baseball season starts today. Yankees are on at 3. I’ll likely watch a couple innings before getting bored and tuning out. My friend John, the one who died of a brain tumor last year, was a huge Yankees fan. I wore a Jeter jersey to his memorial last summer.
I think about John a lot, especially as we’re headed into the big, every-five-years user fee negotiation with FDA where we met in 2015. All my industry-side counterparts from the first two negotiations are gone (fired, retired, or died, in John’s case), which makes me the old hand in the upcoming negotiation. That doesn’t seem possible, but in my magazine days I used to joke that I led a career-by-attrition, with people ahead of me either quitting, getting fired, or dying.
I’ll miss him today, and mid-season, and during the negotiations, and all the other days.
In My Feelings
4:30 a.m. Monday:
“You’re going to LaGuardia? You from New York? I’m going there in June. My father’s turning 92, so we’re going to have a party.
“My son in the Air Force tracked him down after 37 years. He’s living in Brooklyn: Flatbush.
“Guess how many children he has? TWENTY-THREE. Guess we know what he was doing all those years since he left my mom. Youngest one is 28 years old.
“We started talking again. I didn’t think I’d be in my feelings, but I am. I told my sisters I’m talking with Dad again, but not my mom. She’s mostly checked out, but I know she wouldn’t take it well.
“Twenty-three kids and who knows how many wives. Gonna be a hell of a party.”
To be fair, I could have requested a quiet ride on the Lyft app.
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Instaxery
Here’s a new Instax I shot at a podcast last week:
Artistry
I draw a daily sketch with a rollerball pen in a cheap notebook, and some were okay. Problem is, yesterday was the last page of the notebook. Do I start a new one? Go back to Real Drawing now that I proved I can do this for ~6 months w/out a missed day? I’ve got so much other stuff to do — work, podcast, reading, newsletters, writing, postcards, dog-walking — that I don’t know if I can squeeze in more art-making. Anyway, here’s a squinting Birdy from the final week:
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, and maybe some art, and an Instax outtake.
Wanna be the Captain of the Enterprise / Wanna be the King of the Zulus / Let's meet and have a baby now,