PODCAST

I posted Episode 685 of my Virtual Memories Show this week, featuring Sarah Minor and her amazing new book, CAROUSEL: An Essay On Seeing (Yale University Press), which offers a multi-threaded exploration — lecture, memoir, and art criticism — of how we see and are seen, how our language changes with our vantage points, how all these goddamned screens are changing human consciousness (and physiology). We talk about the history of the panorama painting and how it presages today’s phone-panopticon, the COVID-era constraints that sparked the book (and the other constraints she needs for writing), and how she struggled with a conventional literary nonfiction structure for Carousel after years of crafting visual essays, then found its shape and voice after a live reading. We get into the comfort of white space, the humor of the Bayeux Tapestry (not a tapestry), the benefits of having a mother who was a late-breaking medievalist, finding live performance modes, and what happened when a student heard her read from Carousel and asked, “How do you balance historical context with reader fatigue?” We talk about how (some) students prefer lectures over discussion and how she almost made it through college without reading a contemporary writer, her shadow-performance collaboration and why it’s important to have artistic offshoots, and more. Give it a listen! And go read CAROUSEL!

Recent podcast episodes: Ali Trotta • R Sikoryak • Katie Skelly • Colin Asher • Kate Maruyama & Me • Heather Cass White • Paul Gravett

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

BIRDY!

For a brief moment on a morning walkie, she was a Goldendoodle:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are some links for you:

• RIP Betye Saar . . . RIP Guy Tudor . . .

• Here’s John Kelly’s long-awaited (and long) obit/tribute to Jerry Moriarty. And here’s Pamela Hyman’s tribute to James Burrows.

• I really dug this essay on this era’s decadence-without-pleasure.

• “I Impaled Myself On The Way To Froze-To-Death Plateau!” is the new “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!”

• “That’s not tears; it’s just steam from the engine.”

• I was glad that this NYT piece about the long-standing accumulation of literary writers in Syracuse, NY starts out by focusing on how terrible the winters are up there. My girlfriend in the ’90s was from there, and Christmas visits were rough.

• Even business class, my 14-hr. flights this May were pretty exhausting; some of these seem pretty awesome, though.

• To quote Ebn-Ozn, “Languages and dialects. . . .”

• I didn’t get to visit the Princeton University Art Museum while I was down there last week. This piece isn’t on view, but I find it captivating.

  

INSTAX

A couple of Instax pix from recent pod-sessions. I hope to get some writing in this week, but heh.

COMMONPLACE

Here’s one from my online commonplace book:

“[I]s one’s deepest desire always the same as one’s greatest regret?”
—Geoff Dyer, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room

Shave and a Haircut

As threatened/promised/teased last week, I got my first haircut in 6.5 years. I decided to shave off my beard, too, and either Gillette has put a time machine among all those goddamned blades, or I just look 10-12 years younger, but either way, I’ll take it.

I’m on the train home from a yo-yo trip to Washington for a White House-adjacent meeting. With all the hubbub and street closures due to Lindsey Graham’s funeral and the presence of both Zelenskyy & Netanyahu, I barely made it to my train back to NJ, but I raced through Union Station with my overnight bag (I was prepared in case I had to stay in DC), zooming past National Guardsmen who must’ve figured I wasn’t a well-dressed terrorist. Good thing I got that haircut.

And now the train bears me back, through engine trouble and mechanical assessments, through flash flood and tornado alerts, through toddlers in the Quiet Car, through platforms that are the high-speed hints of towns, through intermittent internet, through green skies, we can reach our destination / but we’re still a ways away. . .

POSTCARD

I mail out a postcard every day, so let me know if you want to be on my list.

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.

Magically bored on a quiet street corner / Free frustration in our minds and our toes,