Winter-Wall
A new podcast with Jonathan Ames, some winter doldrums, an Instax outtake, & BIRDY!
The Virtual Memories Show News
A 2x/week email about a podcast about books & life
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 625 of The Virtual Memories Show, in which we ask: Can LA private detective Happy Doll live up to the Four Noble Truths and escape the cycle of Samsara? Jonathan Ames returns to the show to help answer that question and celebrate his new novel, KARMA DOLL (Mulholland Books)! We talk about the joy of reading (& writing) page-turners, how his lead character Happy Doll has evolved over three novels (so far!), what it’s like bringing Buddhism into a detective novel, and how his (& Happy’s) LA has changed since he began this series. We get into how he managed to avoid writing about the worst days of the pandemic while keeping Karma Doll contemporary, how writing the Doll novels has affected his understanding of Buddhism, and how he’s living up to the lesson he always gave students: write what you love. We also discuss TV writing and how it took him away from prose-writing for a decade or so, the need to make art and the transitoriness of bliss, how the LA fires left him driving all over the place like he was in a Lew Archer novel, his fave reads & TV shows, how we both played with dolls as kids in the woods of northern NJ, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read KARMA DOLL! (And listen to our 2018 and 2022 conversations!)
Last week, I posted Episode 624, feat. architect and architecture & design writer Witold Rybczynski as we talked about his latest book, THE DRIVING MACHINE: A Design History of the Car (Norton). We got into how cars evolved from their earliest days through the befuddling styles of today’s EVs, how the design language of cars had no true precedent, why European styles were so different and varied than America’s, and the differences between writing about cars and writing about buildings. We talked about the cars in his life and how he integrated them into The Driving Machine‘s narrative (including the Mercedes that lasted him 25 years), what he learned by drawing the book’s car-illustrations himself, and how drawing all those cars brought him back to his youth. We also discussed the new book he’s writing about his dissatisfaction with contemporary architecture, how it resulted from a Chat-GPT ‘hallucination,’ the cycles of architecture & the death of architecture criticism, the (sorta) imaginary house he designed for himself, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE DRIVING MACHINE! (And listen to our 2015, 2019, and lockdown conversations!)
Recent episodes: Matt Madden • Fred Kaplan • Mia Wolff • Damion Searls • 2024 Recap • The Guest List • Benjamin Swett
Winter-Wall
I don’t even have faux-profundity to share with you this time around. I’ve been kinda busy and Amy & I both admitted this morning that we’ve kinda hit a winter-wall. It’s all been a little too bleak these past few weeks, and the return of snow & ice hasn’t helped.
I’ll put it this way: I think the most emotion I experienced in the past week was getting all teary during Hubie Brown’s final NBA game-call (at 91 years old).
On the hahaha plus side, I’m off to DC tomorrow for meetings with Congressional staff, if the weather permits. That oughtta raise my spirits.
But you’re a good sport, so here’s a Birdy picture from this morning. She brings us joy:
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Instaxery
Here’s another Instax Outtake, from July 2024 in Amherst, MA. I only wrote a little for the book in the past week, and it was a sorta low-hanging fruit entry, although I found some magic once I started writing it. Re above, I’m kinda paralyzed by depression or anxiety or whatever, but maybe I’ll get some writing done on the train to DC tomorrow.
Artistry
Didn’t make any art this past week, just a daily sketch with a rollerball pen in a cheap notebook. Thought of making a watercolor this morning, because I was kinda inspired by a friend’s IG post, but didn’t get started. Maybe I’ll do it for next week. 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-/meditation-craziness, and on Wednesday with a new episode, and maybe some art, maybe some Instax or an outtake.
Do I need someone here to scold me / Or do I need someone who’ll grab and pull me / Out of this four-poster dull torpor / Pulling downward,