PODCAST

This week, I posted Episode 692 of my Virtual Memories Show, where Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand join me to celebrate a New Orleans legend with their fantastic new book, BUNNY MATTHEWS: HIS LIFE, ART, AND OBSESSIONS (New Orleans Historical Society)! We talk about the role Bunny Matthews played in shaping New Orleans’ identity with his comics, music reviews, art, and cultural criticism, how Alison & Michael found their collaborative voice for the book, their first encounters with Bunny’s work, his satirical comic about David Duke that thankfully never got published, and how Vic and Nat’ly became a cultural phenomenon (and how Bunny drew the grossest po’boys ever). We get into Bunny’s role in parsing Yat culture and promoting music, the lengths they went to find his earliest writing and drawings, Bunny’s influences (and the shadow of Stan Mack in the alt-weekly world), how he quoted Cab Calloway next to Balzac, his transition to painting, and the masterpiece of his Nint’Wardica canvas, in response to the BP oil disaster. We also discuss the decline of alt-weeklies, the obit pre-write that led to this project, how thrilled they are with the design and production of the book, what it means to be a New Orleanian, and a lotmore. Give it a listen! And go read BUNNY MATTHEWS: HIS LIFE, ART, AND OBSESSIONS!

Recent podcast episodes: Emil Wilson • Jonathan Ames • Dash Shaw • Phillip Lopate • Ida Kao • Halstead York • Sarah Minor

Or how about every single episode, alphabetically?

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

BIRDY!

Sniffing the big rock in the backyard:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are a couple of links for you; I haven’t been online much this week:

• RIP P.C. Vey . . . RIP Bob Pettit . . . RIP Wayne Lawson . . . RIP Bill Giles . . .

• Also: Exit, chewed by bear.

• Amy’s been trying to get me to go to her Pilates class down the street. I like to think I’d handle it better than the gym bros. in this article.

• Neat interview with Patti Harrison, especially that part about the early internet, and what it meant for a weird kid in a rural area to find a bigger world online. And how much it all sucks now.

• Here’s a harrowing excerpt from Evan Gershkovich’s memoir about his arrest & imprisonment in Russia.

• Guitar Center helped me kit out my recording setup in the early days of the podcast, so I’m glad they’re managing a post-bankruptcy renaissance now.

• Ooh: Scott Schomburg interviewed John Berger’s biographer, Tom Overton!

COMMONPLACE

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

Doris said to her that people always think the way they didn’t take was the way they should have taken. The grass is always greener, Doris said. We are always supposing that the path we didn’t take was our real destiny; we think it must have been, because we think that this one, which we did take, certainly isn’t.

But we will always feel that way, Winnie saw, no matter what path we choose. And so if we had taken that other way, then we would surely by now be harking after this way, and yearning for its consequences, and knowing it was the one we should have taken: and we did take it, this is it.

So we have always taken the path we most wanted, the path that, if we had not taken it, we would now be longing to have taken. And we did. We took the right path. We always do.

—John Crowley, Love & Sleep

POSTAL SERVICES

The week began with Yom Kippur and so I fasted for ~24 hours, stayed offline for that span, read, napped, went to the local Chabad shul mid-day to say Yizkor for my dad, visited his grave, contemplated the new year and any changes I’d like to make to my life, and had one mystery resolved and a new one revealed.

I wrote here a while back about my Griffin & Sabine situation, where someone I didn’t know was writing me postcards from a somewhat exotic location, and signing only with their first name. On Yom Kippur, having decided that getting the mail wouldn’t count as “letting the world in,” by my arbitrary rules, I received an envelope from [somewhat exotic location]. Inside was a card from That Very Person, briefly explaining who they are, mentioning their passion for postage, thanking for me what I do, and giving me their return address. Mystery solved!

I did feel a little bad that they must have read this newsletter and felt compelled to write, but at the same time I’m glad to have a new correspondent, someone I can share postcards and ‘zines with. I wrote them the next morning.

Later in the day, I visited my father’s grave and recited Kaddish, then lay back in the grass beside it and gabbed to the sky so long that the grass kept an impression of me after I got up, a memory more substantial than the words that spilled from my fast-thickened tongue.

After, I walked around the immediate area, a wider zone than I usually do. On a previous meander, I noticed that three of the graves in the row behind my father’s had women with the same name as his mother, which I found funny. Another time, a man named Posthumus.

This time, near a sculpture of children at play, I came across a marker that raised a new mystery: two people, different last names, born five years apart, both dead the same year (at 31 and 36). There were a couple of small, faded butterfly stickers attached to the plaque, and a golfball on a tee carved in relief beside the man’s name.

I thought about how Tolstoy (apocryphally) began Anna Karenina from the seed of a story about a woman throwing herself in front of a train. I wondered what I would do with the story of those two people, if I had any imagination. “They were engaged, and died in car accident,” I thought. “Maybe they were on their way to a golf outing.”

I took a photo of the marker to remind myself to figure out this new mystery once I re-engaged with the world. (Honestly, this did feel like cheating, because it meant thinking about What Comes Next. One of the things I try to do during Yom Kippur (and during meditation) is to stop planning, stop thinking about what I’m going to do, about what comes next, and just breathe through each moment.)

That night, I looked up one of the names and “obit” and instead of anything as prosaic as a car accident, I learned that they were “two of the four victims of a revenge-motivated spree killer who died in prison on 23 Sep 1996 of natural causes.”

🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯

As you can imagine, this led me down a rabbit hole, searching pre-internet records and archives. In 1991, I was off at college, and home was my mom’s place in Pennsylvania, so I would’ve missed any local news coverage about this, though it seems they lived and were murdered two towns away from here.

I’ve been busy, so it was a few days before I conjured the correct series of search terms to unravel this new mystery. What I found was more horrifying than I could’ve imagined, taking the “disgruntled postal worker” trope to terrible depths. [You can read all about it, but it’s graphic.]

Just a random grave marker in a park full of them, a story alongside so many others. If I were a novelist, maybe I could make it make sense.

SOUND BODY, FRACTURED MIND

I had a trade show on Thursday in New Brunswick, NJ, and slept like crap in the hotel Wednesday night, so at 5:15 the next morning I was on the treadmill in the fitness center. I had more energy & endurance this time around. I went about 3.4 miles, could have done more, but was still bored silly.

On Wednesday morning, I got an echocardiogram per my inobservant cardiologist’s orders. The tech saw my attire and asked, “Are you in for a stress test, too? We don’t have you down for that.”

I said, “No, this is just how I dress at home.”

(I mean, I was wearing my shirt at the time.)

I’ve dropped a few pounds in the past week, and am trying to balance a target weight with muscle, tone, flexibility, and “running shape,” but anyway, this was me after Wednesday’s exam.

No idea what the echo-results are. I’m not a doctor, so I don’t open those “We have your lab results!” emails/texts.

INSTAXERY

No new pix, but here’s a not-too-high-res spread from my book about Yom Kippur in 2024/5785, from the picture I took after recording with Roland Allen. I tried to enclose a PDF of it, but I’m not sure how that works with this newsletter client:

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list. Now that the mystery of that one postcard-writer is solved, I hope the rest of you provide a return address if you write me!

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.

I am a visitor here; I am not permanent / And the only thing keeping me dry is / Where I am,