PODCAST

I posted Episode 686 of my Virtual Memories Show this week, featuring the first installment of The Hampshire Tapes! Halstead York (F88) joins the show to talk about his experience at Hampshire College, how the news of its impending closure hit him, how the spirit of the school and its grand experiment of student-driven education has stuck with him all these years, how the school’s structure taught him how to pitch projects, how the cover of an unstructured “hippie-trippy” college (my words) masked intense competitiveness and the need to be a self-starter, how reflecting on his time there has helped him maintain his techno-utopianism, and plenty more. Give it a listen!

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

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

BIRDY!

She tried to keep me from heading out on my trip Friday by giving me Those Eyes, the weirdo:

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are some links for you:

• RIP Glen Hansard . . . RIP Big Pussy . . .

• It’ll never be a post-postcard age while I’M around.

• I subscribed to Down The Rabbit Hole a couple weeks ago, though like everyone else I get Too Many Newsletters. This week’s had a link to this video about a guy who was an abstract mathematician but threw that over to live in a jungle in Hawaii. One of the many things I found interesting about his story is that he succeeded Ted Kaczynski at Berkeley, so there are parallels in how they rebelled against academia, but obvs they went in VERY different directions. Anyway, there’s a lot of beauty in this, and I hope you give yourself ~40 min. to watch it.

• It also had this link about the ways we perform for a world that is not watching us.

• Boris Fishman wrote about going on a silent retreat and finding the uncanniness of his soul (my words, not his).

• I’ve taken to hitting the “hide self” button in Zoom, Teams, etc. meetings, though as you’ll see below, I do take my fair share of selfies.

• Nice interview with Rian Hughes about the 30th anniversary of his Device Fonts foundry.

• I’ll stick with coffee, thanks, you cardiac episodemaxxxxxers.

• To any of my NZ readers/listeners, you oughtta adopt a greyhound, now that they’ve banned racing there.

• That Hans Moravec interview I mentioned in this week’s show.

INSTAX

I took an Instax pic while I was visiting Hampshire on Saturday:

COMMONPLACE

Here’s one from my online commonplace book:

You might as well take all your own literature and everyone else’s and toss it into one of those big garbage trucks of the Sanitation Department, so long as the people with the top-cream minds and the “finer” sensibilities use those minds and sensibilities not to make themselves more humane human beings than the average person, but merely as means of ducking responsibility toward a better understanding of their fellow men, except theoretically—which doesn’t mean a God damned thing.

—William Carlos Williams, Paterson

Undefeated

I hiked up a (minor) mountain on Saturday morning, then met up with an old friend for our last visit to the campus where we met and did not fall in love ~35 years ago.

The Mt. Norwottuck hike isn’t as steep as some of the Catskills Fire Tower hikes my pal & I did back in 2024, but I’m also 2 years older and 10-15 lbs. heavier than I was back then.

I started around 6:30am, and when I got to the top (1106’), the fog below was so thick it was like looking out an inland ocean rather than a Happy Valley, and I felt blessed.

Also, it was mid-60°s and 100% humidity at that hour, and I sweated plenty by the time I got back to my car.

Later that morning, my friend and I met up so we could walk Hampshire’s campus one last time. It was a good day, and she shared a lot of aspects of her life with me — what her time at Hampshire meant to her, who she was before, what she’s learned since —, things we never talked about back then because we didn’t have the vocabulary or the perspective or the trust.

We lamented the loss of this place, and what it means when there’s nowhere for weirdos. I shared what I could about my time there, trying to avoid the cover of glibness. But I was better at evoking episodes, rather than an overarching sense of change. I think my real change, my “formative years,” came a little later, but I’m contemplating that after the combo of this visit and this week’s podcast.

There’s a lot I’m not telling you, for personal, trivial, private, ineffable reasons. But two old friends revisited the place they met and reconjured the time and revealed themselves to themselves.

I drove home thinking about how I hiked through the fog and reached the sun.

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.

Some nights he’s weightless / He has to travel / His mouth is gravel / And there’s an empty feeling within his heart,