PODCAST

This week, I posted Episode 689 of my Virtual Memories Show, featuring the return of Dash Shaw, whose new book, LIKE SWIMMERS (New York Review Comics), brings us a supernatural murder mystery set in COVID-era Richmond, VA. We talk about how he uses that story to explore memory, identity, art, marriage, and the social breakdown in America, how a murder mystery helped him reflect on the losses of COVID, LIKE SWIMMERS‘ pamphlet comic-feel and how that pay tribute to a lost friend who liked very different comics than what Dash usually makes, and how writing this story in the middle of COVID helped him capture details he’d never have recalled after the fact. We get into how we uncover different versions or aspects of the people we’ve lost, why he eschews three-act structures to find new shapes of storytelling, his use of Richmond as a character (and the very bizarre Kroger that he couldn’t fit into the book), and what it was like to go jogging in 2020 when there were snipers on rooftops. We also talk about his peripatetic project management style, what he thinks about Roy Lichtenstein’s art and what it means to love cliches, getting inspiration from an unfinished Winsor McCay cartoon, working with New York Review Comics for several books, how coloring his comics is almost as tough as writing them, and more. Give it a listen! And go read LIKE SWIMMERS!

(And go listen to our 2021 and 2024 conversations)

Recent podcast episodes: Phillip Lopate • Ida Kao • Halstead York • Sarah Minor • Ali Trotta • R Sikoryak • Katie Skelly

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

BIRDY!

The groomer came by yesterday. As usual, Birdy nervous-peed (outside) when we greeted him, but now she’s a velveteen doggo.

HITTING THE LINKS

Here are some links for you:

• RIP Gloria Steinem . . . RIP Wendell Berry (here’s a 2022 NYer piece about him). . . RIP Cassandra Wilson . . . RIP Chen Kuan-Tai . . . RIP King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV . . .

• Also King Harald V died.

• Jerry Saltz wrote about early Yayoi Kusama.

• Michael Dirda wrote about The Count of Monte Cristo! Michael’s long-awaited (by me) book, The Great Age of Storytelling, is coming out later this year, and we’re planning to sit down for an episode about it.

• Rhonda Garelick wrote about Dolly Parton’s glamour.

• One of my old friends on our weekend hike/meander proposed that the three of us quit our jobs and hike the Appalachian Trail, but I figure we’ve got time.

• Booksellers calls BS on the latest death-of-reading article.

• Here’s a strange but positive review of Lance Richardson’s wonderful biography of Peter Matthiessen, True Nature. That is, it spends most of the time recounting/writing about Matthiessen, without really mentioning the biography, before praising the heck out of Lance’s work in the final paragraph.

• Good piece in The Baffler about the end of Hampshire College. Gotta record with more alumni for my Hampshire Tapes this fall.

• Here’s the New Yorker review of Phillip Lopate’s new book on Washington Irving (check out last week’s episode for more about that).

• Apparently, AI didn’t tell this guy that the market can remain irrational longer than he can stay liquid.

• Nobody’s gonna invite me to the Met Gala anyway, but it was interesting to see both NYT and WSJ report tick-tock stories about how Anna Wintour’s plan to celebrate John Galliano fell apart over his hatred of Jews.

• In 2024, I posted a link to a Washington Post essay about whether Galliano deserves forgiveness, but can’t access it because I won’t give the Post a dime of my money.

• Hunter Prosper has been recording longer-form videos for a new series of his Stories From a Stranger conversations. I’m in this one talking about loss and my cure of cancer. I talk about my father in this one. I have to warn you, I say some pretty terrible, honest, and raw stuff in that second one. I was in very bad shape emotionally in the wake of Dad’s death when we recorded these (Nov. 2025). It was just a few days before I made a real turnaround, which I wrote about here. Maybe this conversation was part of the catalyst for that, which I didn’t think of at the time, but that’s what distance gives us.

• I don’t feel as much resentment as I did at that point, so please don’t take this as the be-all and end-all of Gil’s feelings about his old man, but it’s who I was in that moment. I wasn’t trying to impress Hunter or be edgy, but this is what happens when someone asks me questions and listens to my answers.

• (An aside: I was recording with a past guest recently, and when we talked off mic, he said that from a distance it looked like I was doing well, handling work, making podcasts, etc. And I thanked him and said, “. . . I don’t show the despair.” Maybe this pulls the curtain back a little.)

• My clips are also parts of longer episodes with other strangers, and those pieces include Hunter’s commentary. If you wanna check those out: Surviving the Impossible, and Love, Harm and Family.

• And hey: the setting — Washington Square Park on a cool, breezy autumn morning — is beautiful. Hunter wanted me to leave my hair down.

  

COMMONPLACE

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

[E]very story that he had once been inside of lay still inside him, larger inside smaller, dream inside waking, all there to be recovered, just as a dream is recovered when you wake, from its latest moments backward to its earlier.

—John Crowley, The Solitudes

UNDERWORLD HIVE

I was walking Birdy around the yard yesterday when I noticed a roughly dug hole in the backyard, near the edge of the woods. The slope of it and the jaggedly torn roots attested to it being the work of an animal, not someone with a shovel. Bear, I figured, but what the heck was it digging for?

The hole had some gnats flying above, so after I brought Birdy inside, I went back out to investigate.

And that’s when I saw that he bottom of the hole was filled with a mass of bees and the white remains of some nest-structure. I was flummoxed. I wondered whether a hive had fallen from a tree above, but it made no sense as to why it would be embedded nearly a foot deep in the earth.

Which is how I learned that some bees live underground, and also that my pool of suspects expanded from bears to include raccoons and skunks.

I’ve lived in this house and walked around this yard most of my 55 years, and I’m amazed to still be discovering new and strange aspects of my tiny ecosystem.

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.

Sharpening stones, walking on coals / To improve your business acumen,