PODCAST

This week, I posted Episode 691 of my Virtual Memories Show! With his fantastic debut graphic novel, THE NIGHTINGALES (Avid Reader Press), Emil Wilson tells a heartbreaking and beautiful coming-of-age story of the AIDS era. We talk about his father’s decision in 1985 to bring a work-friend with AIDS into their home (in a small town in Oregon), how he fictionalized his family and the story well enough to make the fiction true, how he figured out the amazing sketchbook style of the book, and how he only came to comics in his 50s, following a 25-year career as an at director an ad agency. We get into his experiences at The Center for Cartoon Studies, where he was older than most every other student, the Nora Krug book that was his gateway drug into comics, my advice when he began this project, his work as an AIDS buddy for Gay Men’s Health Crisis in the ’80s and how younger people he meets have no knowledge of the AIDS era, how making The Nightingales changed his understanding of his family, and how it felt to make a “user’s manual” for his father. We also get into the contrast between advertising and comics, how making comics can feel a bit like making films or videos, how the language to describe comics may need to evolve just as the language for gay life had to, why this book isn’t a memoir but is full of faces, how kindness can be complicated, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE NIGHTINGALES!

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

Or how about every single episode, alphabetically?

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

BIRDY!

You deserve an out-take, just to know she’s not always gorgeous:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are some links for you; lots of folks died:

• RIP Bob Mackie (we watched the 2024 doc about him, Naked Illusion, a few weeks ago; it’s awfully good0 . . . RIP Peter Max . . . RIP Duncan Sheik . . . RIP Annie Dillard . . . RIP Barry Melrose . . . RIP Jay Maisel . . . RIP Rose Friedman . . . RIP Lucien Smith . . . RIP Gerrit Graham . . . RIP Pam Fortner (drink a Hand Grenade in her honor) . . . RIP Cat Frazier . . . RIP Cheetah Chrome . . . RIP Michael Sweetney . . .

• Jarrett Earnest wrote about Dolly Parton. Also, a de Kooning exhibition.

• New York Review Comics’ editor Lucas Adams gets interviewed by NYRB. Also at NYRB, Anahid Nersessian has a neat review of a novel about a man having a midlife crisis. (Hope to get her back on the show for her new book next year.)

• New annual Mundo Mendo book coming from Luis Mendo! Here’s a 20% off code for membership; members get the book free. (The first one was fantastic, with incredible production quality, so I’m looking forward to year 2.)

• Trailers from Hell covered one of my all-time favorite movies, Kung Fu Hustle.

• Ooh! Peter Trachtenberg & David Gates are holding a six-week mixed-genre writing workshop, starting Nov. 2!

• Shalom Auslander makes some Polymarket bets.

• Virginia Heffernan chronicles Steven Pinker’s decline.

• Mark Wunderlich checks out Rilke’s notebooks.

• Christopher Brown wrote about paddling the Freshkills over Labor Day Weekend, and about the anniversary of 9/11.

• Speaking of, Spencer Ackerman wrote about what came after 9/11.

• I was skeptical when I first heard about Anthony Jeselnik’s “men don’t read enough” book club, but this NYT Q&A makes him sound somewhat thoughtful and not just pursuing guy books, so good for him.

• Play guess-the-famous-writer with Lucy Sante.

COMMONPLACE

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

There was not one Grail; there were, or will be, or have been, not one Grail but five, five Grails for five Percevals to find. There were Grails of earth, water, fire, air: there was a stone, a cup, a crater or furnace, and the basin borne by Aquarius, who is a sign of air. And another, the Grail of the quintessence. Unless that Grail be not truly the whole seven-ringed cup of heaven itself, containing all things, contained within all things, the cup from which, willy-nilly, every soul must drink.
—John Crowley, The Solitudes

THE FIFTH HOTEL

Sorry this edition is late. I had a personal-then-business trip that resulted in my staying in four hotels over six nights, culminating in a 4+-hour drive home from FDA headquarters after a public meeting in which I gave a brief speech and then held court for a couple of reporters.

For the record:

• 9/11-12 - Bethesda North Marriott for the Small Press Expo (SPX)

• 9/13 - Washington Dulles Airport Marriott because I had an 8:30am flight to Toronto on the 14th

• 9/14 - Toronto Marriott Markham to give a presentation at a client event on 9/15

• 9/15-16 - Courtyard Silver Spring North/White Oak because of that FDA meeting on the 17th; I’d have stayed somewhere in DC proper the night of the 15th because of the next day’s Capitol Hill meetings, but there wasn’t a room available anywhere for under $1,200/night, because everyone was in town for Capitol Hill meetings.

I drove down from NJ to MD/DC, so I could get rolling right out of FDA. The various stages of this trip required three different sets of bags: casual gear + pod-stuff for SPX, one suit/polo + dress shoes for Toronto, two suits/dress shirts etc. for DC/FDA. Carrying all that around together made no sense, so most of it stayed in my car until the final hotel, when I brought most of it into my room for security.

I had a good time at SPX, catching up with friends, recording a couple of podcasts, getting sorta-stood-up by a late-added guest, buying some comics and books, schmoozing, and reaching the firm conclusion that one of the best purchases I’ve made in years was the YOKO ONO T-shirt from the Broad Museum’s gift shop. People go nuts when they see that: real conversation starter.

I had an off-site lunch/coffee with a past guest/friend and that was some emotionally intense stuff. Not just “Gil does shtick about his response to his dad’s death,” but more honest stuff about our lives and how we see each other.

On Friday night, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Fantagraphics, publishers of the world’s greatest cartoonists, and when a pal mentioned that he was reading Tom Spurgeon’s history of Fanta, I was struck hard by how much I missed Tom Spurgeon. The pain was acute, but when I shared that with mutual friends, they told me they were feeling the same thing, and were glad that we could talk about it.

The next night I had Vietnamese with a bunch of cartoonists and journalists, so I got to be a fly on the wall, which was nice.

The client visit, on the other hand, was strange. I wrote the following on Bluesky:

I’m in Downtown Markham, ONT (DTM) for an overnight and it is weird af. The area consists of 8 or 9 blocks of fancy architecture condos, and then there's just kinda prairie beyond that. There are some high-end stores, a couple restaurants, THREE eyewear shops within 50 feet of each other, three sportswear shops slightly more distant front each other, a bunch of cafes, the usual lash/spa/hair places, and a big movie theater, but there is NO supermarket, convenience store, or the like. Also, almost every person I've seen is Chinese. The main business here seems to be the development company. I can’t tell if DTM is just beginning to build up, or if all the storefront businesses have failed already.

I feel like I'm in a video game that's only 15% built.

At dinner that night, one of the people said to me, “I went for a walk yesterday. This place is so weird; it reminds me of Sim City,” which pretty much nailed it.

Our six-person party ate steak and drank wine and talked about concerts we’ve seen, and I gave my US federal policy presentation the next morning, then headed back to the airport for Dulles.

The only real hiccup of the trip was engine trouble on the Embraer-175 from YYZ to IAD, which meant a 90-minute maintenance delay. That resulted in my landing at 5:15pm, which meant I spent more time driving in traffic from Dulles to Silver Spring/White Oak than I spent in the air from Toronto to DC.

My DC and FDA meetings went fine, though I’d been running on fumes for days. I don’t sleep well in most hotels, and the constant changes of environment didn’t help. At one point I saw myself as part of the kelippot, the husks left behind in the absence of the divine, filled only with dead light.

It didn’t help that this trip overlapped with the beginning of the Jewish new year / Days of Awe, which I sometimes use to trigger changes in behavior. I was too in-transit all week — physically and emotionally — to really consider any of that, and the culmination of this period starts tonight with Kol Nidre on erev Yom Kippur, so I should get cracking: Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

But can I lie to myself and say it would have been any different if I’d been at home for those six days?

To the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t angered Poseidon, but the GPS kept extending my time of arrival at home anyway. On the Garden State Parkway, ~50 miles out, I turned off the GPS, surrendered, and embraced the traffic to take a side trip to visit my father’s grave, where I read the kaddish, took a picture of his marker and the tree for my brother, and sat down in the grass to talk.

So much to say and no one living to say it to. I patted the marker and watched the bugs scurry over it and I knew this was the fifth hotel.

SOUND BODY, FRACTURED MIND

I ran a few times on hotel treadmills during my road trip: just 2.65-2.75 miles. My routine is to start at 6.0mph and increase by 0.1mph every minute. Whenever it’s too much, drop back down to 6.0 and start over. This time, I managed 7.2mph the first cycle, and 7.0 the second time. I need to get my legs and lungs back, and was glad I managed to get these runs in, because I didn’t get much exercise otherwise.

Somewhere in the midst of that travel, probably at dinner in the weird Sim City build of DTM, I got a cut in my mouth that’s led to inflammation, facial nerve pain, and all sorts of aggravation. I haven’t had solid food for two days while I let it heal (dentist’s orders), and tonight-tomorrow is my Yom Kippur fast, so I may accidentally hit my target weight in pretty short order.

Oh, and I had a cardiologist appt. right before this trip, because my PCP is concerned about a wave on my ECG. The cardiologist saw the same wave and wants me to get an echo. He also sat 3 feet away from me, with my records in his hands, and asked, “Do you exercise?”

I didn’t want to pull a Jersey Shore thing and say, “Do you think I got this body by accident?” but after that moment, I was skeptical that he’s doing much besides prescribing to the numbers.

INSTAXERY

Some recent ones:

POSTCARD

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EXPENSES

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NEXT TIME

Thanks for reading this far. See you next time, I hope.

I don’t want to look away / I don’t want to be the one denied / It ain’t no fault of mine / Someone somewhere told you lies / We don’t talk about it / We just become shadows of ourselves,