Taking a Breath
A new episode feat. Benjamin Swett, some great Instax, a Metropolitan Club photobomb, limping into 2025, finishing one reading project & starting another, and more
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 617 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. author/photographer Benjamin Swett as we talk about THE PICTURE NOT TAKEN: On Life and Photography (NYRB), his subtly beautiful series of essays that explore memory and identity and what we really see in the viewfinder. We talk about the role of photography in his life, how Musil, Sebald, and Knausgaard and taught him to trust digressions, the freedom to be found in the essay, how working in the NYC Parks Dept. led him into some strange career choices, and the challenge (& reward) of photographing trees. We get into our respective rebellions against our fathers and linearity, the loss of his daughter and how her shadow looms over the book, his idea for a negative-autobiography and my own photo-text project, how his family felt about being included in the essays, and the moment he felt comfortable moving from film to digital. We also discuss his 9/11 and what it revealed to him about himself, how the constraint of Instagram captions can lead to good storytelling, the ~30-year gap he took to finish his MFA, the benefits of leaning in to awkwardness and self-revelation, and a lot more. Give it a listen, and go read THE PICTURE NOT TAKEN: On Life and Photography!
Last week, I posted Episode 616, a live conversation from Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ with artist and vulgarizer of history (in the French sense) Ken Krimstein as we celebrated his new book, EINSTEIN IN KAFKALAND (Bloomsbury)! We talked about the mystery of the 15 months Einstein & Kafka overlapped in Prague, how the two of them invented the modern world, what Ken has learned about graphic storytelling after 3 books, how the theory of relativity bedeviled him since childhood, and how he managed to make a graphic novel about Jews in Prague and not include a golem. We got into all the research and rabbit-holes of this project, including his monthlong research-stay in Prague, the challenges of portraying Einstein’s professional and personal struggles, and his discovery that readers would follow his phantasmagoric flights and surreal episodes. We also discuss Ken’s fixations on Mitteleuropa, Sam Gross‘ observation about his art, Kenny Werner‘s concept of effortless mastery, why he wants to bring some joy to his next project, and more. Give it a listen, and go read EINSTEIN IN KAFKALAND!
Recent episodes: Eddie Campbell • Caitlin McGurk • Frances Jetter • Roland Allen • Eric Drooker • Simon Critchley • Doug Brod
Taking a Breath
I left off Sunday’s newsletter with the line, “I wish I could tell you more about it, but we have to drive back into Manhattan now for a client’s holiday luncheon at the Metropolitan Club (!).” That event turned out to be absolutely wonderful, but I go into it a bit in the introduction to this week’s episode, so I’m not gonna recount it here, except to share my wife’s photobomb.
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Much of my professional-side 2024 was focused on two things: Congress’ BIOSECURE Act & a mega-merger in my industry that took a ton of regulatory scrutiny (I wasn’t involved in the merger, but I did have to talk to the FTC about it, and fielded a LOT of calls about it). The Act failed to pass (after the larger pharma sector spent 8-10 months trying to rearrange its R&D services supply chain because we were told this was ‘must-pass’ legislation due to NatSec issues), and the merger just closed this morning.
Next year — new administration, new Congress, new FDA & other appointed officials, major user fee negotiation — will be hectic, but for a minute, I’ve got some room to breathe. No one’s emailing me, and no one’s replying to my emails, so I suspect there’s some extended vacation-time happening among my contacts.
And that got me thinking I’d go into the city today to see the KAWS Collection at the Drawing Center, esp. for the Joe Coleman piece on display, and also try to shoot a couple more Instax for The Book while I’d be in the city.
But once I took care of some straggling work and checked the increasing traffic into NYC, I thought, “JFC, you idiot, just take a goddamned day and rest.”
So that’s what I’m gonna do. And I’ll try to look good doing it.
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Oh, also, I finished the undated poems in my Emily Dickinson collection yesterday, so that daily project is over. Lucky for me I’ve got something else to replace it.
Instaxery
On Saturday, I went into Brooklyn to record a pair of 2025 episodes and shoot a bunch more Instax. I like what I came away with, and tried not to just shoot “something on the guest’s shelf/mantel”. Knowing that these will run chronologically in the book, I try to keep some variety in terms of color, composition, etc., lest I wind up with a half-dozen consecutive near-identical pix.
The book, as I’ve mentioned, will be photo on the left, text on the right, even though I still have no idea what the text will be yet. I’m uncertain about whether I should identify which person each pic is associated with, or just put an alphabetical list at the beginning or end naming everyone, while the photos just have dates and maybe city information. Would that be infuriating?
Here are some outtakes from Saturday. There are from digital files, as opposed to the above scans of printed Instax:
Artistry
Still nothing except the daily crappy sketch of something I saw that day, in a cheap notebook with a rollerball pen. 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-craziness, and on Wednesday with a new episode, and I hope some more Instax.
I brought you something close to me / Left for something you see though you’re here / You haunt my dreams / There’s nothing to do but believe,