The Virtual Memories Show News

Greytest Generation

My father lives a few miles from me, but he doesn’t get out much. My brother is visiting from the midwest and he got Dad out for a little drive today. They came by the house and Dad got to see Bendico for the first time since Thanksgiving 2019.

I asked Amy to take a pic of father, sons and grand-dog:

Yes, we all wore black sweatpants. We wanted to show our solidarity with Benny.

Mister Lister

When I recorded the audio for The Guest List yesterday and gave my own reading-hopes for 2024, I forgot to go back and see how I did against my 2023 aspirations. Here’s what I listed, per the 2022 Guest List:

Mourning Diary – Roland Barthes
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
A Room of One’s Own – Virginia Woolf
Fortunes of War: The Balkan Trilogy – Olivia Manning
Fortunes of War: The Levant Trilogy – Olivia Manning
MOAR DONALD HALL ESSAYS
Forms of Enchantment: Writings on Art and Artists – Marina Warner
The Poems of Emily Dickinson – Emily Dickinson
MOAR POEMS

How’d I do? NOT GREAT, BOB. Of everything on that list, I read a few pages of the Barthes, and have worked my way at random, 2 pages a day, through Emily Dickinson’s poems, AND THAT’S IT.

Of course, going into 2023, I had no idea my podcast with Stevan Weine would trigger a re-read of all of Thomas Pynchon’s novels (except Against the Day, which I read in 2022), nor that I’d spend/waste quite so much time on Jon Fosse’s Septology. This time around, I didn’t make too many predictions for non-podcast-reading, but I still expect to be re-chastened next December.

Art

I gained another new paying subscriber this week, so now I need to make two postcard drawing/paintings as thank-you gifts. Better go make one right now! How you do like it? (The scan looks so much worse than the real thing; sorry!) You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back on Sunday with links, books, & workout craziness, and Wednesday with a new episode, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.

Inside the fire’s on and every friend I own is singing my favorite song,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(I deactivated my Twitter acct., so don’t look for me there)

Hitting The Links: 12/17/23

Sun, 17 Dec 2023 15:29:46 GMT

Numbers Game

Can I tell you something? It can all get a little Much, no matter what your circumstances are. Job/$$, health, family, pets, art, friendships/relationships, The World At Large: it can get to you. I mean, it gets to ME, and I figure I’m not that different from the rest of you.

That’s what I wrote about in my previous post, after my 6-month oncology check-in & crisis of faith. What I didn’t tell you last week is that, for a brief moment, part of me thought, “What if I just SAY that my blood-test numbers were worse than they were?”

I mean, everybody thinks I know medicine for some reason, so I could’ve made up some blather about a pre-treatment protocol where my condition didn’t warrant pharma-intervention but did require that I take several months off from All This, and I could’ve gone into 2024 with an empty slate.

Except, of course, I’m a big goddamned boy scout, and can’t lie like that. So I let myself get wallow in self-pity and doubt for a few days, went through the motions of my workouts Monday & Tuesday, and put off reading. Then a bunch of January 2024 pod-guests came through in rapid succession, and I thought I’d better confirm those sessions because I can’t let [the guests, the publishers, the audience, the universe] down.

And then something neat happened. On Friday, I had an idea for a new, year-long art-project! It riffs off last week’s episode with Jarrett Earnest, but I won’t tell you more about it until it progresses (here’s hoping it outpaces my next blood test in March). Still, I find myself charged up by the idea that another year’s worth of podcasts might just lead me to having a piece of art to share with [the guests, the publishers, the audience, the universe].

I also recorded the first 2024 guest episode yesterday afternoon, with cartoonist & writer Ed Subitzky, and our conversation turned out to be fun, subtle, and an absolute treat.

Which is to say, I will admit I was pretty down earlier this week, and envisioning All This as a burden or duty, instead of the soul-feeding joy it should be.

Not that any of this interests Bendico, who got so tired of my blathering this week that he put a bolster on his head to cover his ears.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Jarrett Earnest • Christian Wiman • Danny Fingeroth • Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein
RIP Andre Braugher . . . RIP George McGinnis . . . RIP Michael Bishop . . .
Go read this year-end cultural wrap-up by W. David Marx (and go buy/read his Status & Culture).
Meatwääd make the money, see; Meatwääd get the honeys, G.
My fave Dylan album: Bull On The Tracks.
Jerry Saltz interviewed Sharon Stone about art & death.
Funny piece by Dana Brown about Casa Cruz, a new NYC club for wealthy people ($250k membership), and clubs in general. I don’t know much about clubs, but I enjoyed visiting the Metropolitan Club in advance of that Bill Gates event I wrote about last week. That said, I didn’t take in much of the ambience; our group just hung out in the bar area. Bathroom was really nice, though.
Not sure there are two people whose Second/Next Acts are less interesting to me than Jon Corzine & Steve Aoki, but you do you, BusinessWeek TV.
Related, because that article ends with Aoki holding out hope that non-fungible tokens will return to presumably bilk more suckers, is news that someone got hacked and lost all his Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. I only bring this up because it led to a very funny post on Bluesky, from Viktor Winetrout: “Yeah I stole your ape pics. What are you gonna do, draw some police”.
Yesterday would have been Tom Spurgeon’s birthday. I would have gotten him a book or something.
Tom Spurgeon & me, 2014 at Toronto Comic Arts Festival, photo by Amy Roth
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Current/Recent Reading

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

Poor Helpless Comics! - Ed Subitzky

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

Last week, I managed 5 weight/yoga workouts by doubling up on Sunday. I also got in a 6.3-mi. run with The Guys on Monday morning before my oncology check-in, but I don’t count runs as workouts, because I’m stupid. This weekend, I managed weights on Friday, but missed yoga yesterday, because I ran 10+ miles with The Guys. I’ll try to double up yoga then weights today, but holy crap I ran 10+ miles on Saturday! It was a slow run, with walking breaks each mile or so, but TEN MILES. The fact that I felt fine all day (and today) is actually not a good thing, because it means I can Go Long. Which has me thinking about finally getting to my belated first marathon in 2024, and that can only lead to disaster.

Here’s a pic from my yoga-thang:

Yoga, pre-cobra pose

Until Next Time

Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back Wednesday with a new podcast, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something, and Sunday with more great links, current reading, and this broken down ol’ body of mine.

You don't know where and you don't know when, But you've still got your words and you've got your friends,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(no Twitter anymore, so don’t look for me there)

Transient, not Ephemeral

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 14:25:18 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 567 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. the last guest-episode of 2023! Art critic Jarrett Earnest joins me to celebrate his beautiful new book, VALID UNTIL SUNSET (Matte Editions), which brings together his Polaroids and a second-person narrative to create a bewitching trip through memory, art, grief, friendship, and more. We talk about how the sudden death of his father paralyzed and then catalyzed him, the importance of making art before fully recovering from a bad experience, how the artist’s job is to be a question mark, and how a Nan Goldin exhibition started him on taking pictures of the people and places that mattered to him. We get into his friendships with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Schjeldahl, and Genesis’ imprecation to do/make/be the Most Fabulous Imaginable Version, the importance of road trips and pilgrimages, what he learned from interviewing a series of art critics, the freedom & addictiveness of writing in the second person, why we need to make an argument about why any art matters at all today, and why he loves writing about artists he knows. Plus, we discuss the value of public-facing life in NYC, the importance of having a really good analyst and really dumb personal trainer, why you don’t need to be part of Barbenheimer, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Valid Until Sunset

This week, I posted Episode 566 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. poet Christian Wiman as we celebrate his amazing new book, ZERO AT THE BONE: Fifty Entries Against Despair (FSG), a fusion of essay, poem, memoir and anthology that explores how the act of writing a poem is a gesture of faith. We talk about the varieties of despair and joy, the question of whether the world is governed by chaos or order, and whether the relationship between art and life is a tension or antipathy. We also get into the urgency of mortality and the rare cancer that almost killed Christian on three separate occasions, the notion of having a calling and the difference between given and earned callings, who we’re really trying to reach when we write a poem, whether Philip Larkin’s Aubade is a poem of pure despair, and what he’s learned from teaching at Yale Divinity School. We also discuss The Void & how to tune it out, his thoughts on faith and Christ and how the incarnation of God in Jesus sacralizes the physical world, where poetry began for him, whether joy is passed down epigenetically like trauma (allegedly) is, coming around on poets in translation like Yehuda Amichai, the meaning of existence, and a lot more (I mean, if you can have a lot more after the meaning of existence). Give it a listen! And go read Zero At The Bone

Recent episodes: Danny Fingeroth • Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman

(White) Blood (Cells) Will Out

When a podcasting pal recently asked me whether changes at twitter had affected my audience-download numbers, I reminded him that, ever since my CLL diagnosis in mid-2021, the only number that matters to me is my white blood cell count. “You don’t even look?” “I don’t even care.” [Since then, I quit twitter.]

I went to my 6-month oncology check-in on Monday, and it was . . . okay. My WBC is up, but not so drastically that they need to start treatment. (The practice is that if WBC doubles in a 6-month span, then the disease is getting out of control and they should start treatment; this one was up ~40%.) Still, they want to move me up to a 3-month interval to see if yesterday’s jump is an outlier or if I’m heading in a bad direction. Some of the secondary results also were trending . . . not-so-great.

I’m fine in terms of energy, adding occasional 6+-mile runs to 5 days a week of weights/yoga workouts, and finding the time for all the other stuff you’ve come to know, love, resent, etc.: podcast, newsletter, reading, a little art-making, all overshadowed by that heavy-ass day job/career I always allude to.

But Monday’s results left me in a crisis of faith. Or it helped crystallize the crisis that’s been ongoing much of this year. I don’t want to go into it too much, for a variety of reasons, but the “why bother?” vibes have been strong, offsetting the “Gil feels a responsibility to produce something virtually no one listens to or reads, and acts like it’s his sacred duty” vibes. [Along those lines, both of those podcasts above form a really good through-line for What This Year’s Been Like; I hope you’ll listen to them.]

Which I wrote about to a pal who’s in my boat — diagnosed w/CLL at 50 (a few years older than me), experienced with the semiannual check-ins & their unexplainable fluctuating results, the thrown-ness of pre-check-in anxiety, the way it compels you to evaluate your life and what you’ll do if your number’s up, as it were — and he shared his experiences with me. We’re dealing with our situations differently, but it helped to know that someone — an artist, to boot — understands from the inside. It also helps that CLL is over-represented in Ashkenazi Jews, because we have a shared sense of anxiety & neurosis about everydamnthing.

That same day, I got the weekly email from the CLL Society, “a patient–centric, physician–curated nonprofit organization focused on patient education, support, and research”. There was a bit about the co-founder’s blog, and on a whim I decided to check that out. The most recent entry, reflecting on the impact of his work even when some of the initiatives didn’t last — like a COVID protocol for CLL/SLL patients that took a lot of work but didn’t survive more recent mutations by the virus — struck a chord with me:

The bigger question is: Does short or long even matter when making an impact? Maybe not. Not lasting doesn’t mean it is not worthwhile. I think a positive impact does change the world in a way that can’t be fully understood. Quoting another Greek: “You can’t step into the same river twice.” It’s the impact, not its durability, that counts. Though it may be transient, it is not ephemeral. It is fixing the world [that] matters, even if it’s only a temporary fix for a minority of those with an orphan cancer, such as CLL / SLL. Switching from Greek to Aramaic, Rabbi Tarfon says in the Talmud: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

Astute/stalker-y readers will recall I cited that same line of Rabbi Tarfon a couple of weeks ago, but that’s not why this resonated with me. It’s because that whole paragraph is what I have to believe to keep going.

I’d go on, but I have to get back to work.

Art

Didn’t give myself time to make any real art last week; sorry! After taking a blow to the head on Wednesday evening, I did spend some time experimenting with a fine brush-pen & a photo of Leonard Cohen in his prayer-robes. I made a terrible pencil drawing of this once, & thought I’d see how I could just work on some of the drapery with this tool. Came out super-stylized. I gained a new paying subscriber this week, so I need to make a postcard drawing/painting for them. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Give me a Leonard Cohen afterlife / So I can sigh eternally,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(I deactivated my Twitter acct., so don’t look for me there)

Hitting The Links: 12/10/23

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 14:57:44 GMT

Gates of Heck

It was a tiring week, but at least the podcast I had scheduled for today had to postpone to next weekend, so I can ‘relax’ (and just get in 2 workouts, write this email, edit this week’s show, try to finish reading a novel, and maybe make some art). I did receive a late invite (yesterday) to a Christmas Luncheon Feast at the Metropolitan Club in NYC today, but I just can’t, even though it’d likely be a fun opportunity to schmooze with all sorts of people I’d never meet in my day to day.

Lucky for me I got to do satisfy my schmooze-quotient on Thursday. The owner of one of my member companies owns a whole network of industrials and belongs to a bazillion clubs and social groups (in addition to being a trustee in my association), and he occasionally invites me to events like last Thursday’s Economic Club of New York dinner to honor Bill Gates. Before the event, my trustee held a get-together at the Metropolitan, so I headed out to the city that afternoon in “business elegant” attire. (Turns out this is code for the gap between business casual and black-tie, so suit-and-tie worked just fine.)

He was holding court in the club’s bar area, introducing us all, telling funny anecdotes of how he met each of us, and otherwise making it easy for everyone to gab, no matter what field we were in. I felt at ease enough to tell the story from last week’s e-mail about the cafe car server on the Amtrak, his collection of exotic currency, and his plans for world travel. They seemed charmed, and my trustee mused that we ought to set up an exchange program or something to get people out into the world.

The story came up because one of the attendees, Faanya Rose, whom our host introduced as “the first female president of The Explorers Club,” was also instrumental in building the Heathrow Express line, and has A Thing About Trains. So we bonded over that, and then talked about our family roots. She was convinced that we’re related, between our Ukrainian Jewish heritage and my resemblance to her dad.

I was mostly at ease throughout that part of the evening, never pushing too hard, trying to learn more about the other guests, not feeling too out of place. Of course, there are moments one realizes one is in A Different World, and mine came on the way out of the Metropolitan Club, when I asked one of our cohort if he had a few bucks I could use for a tip at the coat-check counter, as I only had $20s on me. He said, “Oh, you don’t tip here,” without any explanation, and while I was thankful not to commit a faux pas, I was reminded how out of place I was.

But I did my best. Over the course of the evening, I met and/or gabbed with a doctor at Yale, an M&A banker from Ireland by way of Switzerland, an economist from Charlotte who forgot to grab a tie when he left the house for this NYC trip, a CNBC anchor, and the president of that pharma manufacturing company that my trustee owns.

The Economic Club event was at a nearby Sheraton, where Bill Gates was presented with the Peter G. Peterson award, and then got interviewed onstage by one of the club’s trustees. She suffered The Interviewer’s Nightmare when Gates answered the first question with a 10+-minute response. The topic was climate change, and he went DEEP on it, with no room for her to interject. I felt bad for her, but at the same time, I was impressed that Gates had internalized so much on this topic, and that he wasn’t just spitting out bullet points, but had real thoughts on carbon emissions and where change has to occur if we want to avoid climate apocalypse.

From there, they had more of a back-and-forth, and I was struck by some of the stories he told about the global health successes of the Gates Foundation. He admitted their work on education in the US hadn’t yielded measurable improvement, but when he talked about the impact they helped make on malaria, rotavirus, and maternal mortality, and the multiple millions of lives that have been saved, I found myself thinking that he’s put the next generation of tech-billionaires to shame.

That is, when I read about this Effective Altruism movement that many of them subscribe to, and the idea that it’s better to make investments that will save TRILLIONS of future lives — by protecting the earth from asteroids or angry AI or something — it sure feels like a dodge from doing something for people and the world here and now. That is, Gates focused on saving humans, rather than “humanity.” And since a lot of the work the Gates Foundation has done has saved the lives of non-white people, maybe there’s a race-connotation in who the EA folks really want to save.

From there, Gates talked about AI, which is what most people want to hear about, but he also had a funny aside about the development of the internet, and how he & his peers thought it would usher in a new age of rationalism, where people could look up factual, scientific articles about their topics of interest, and learn via Socratic debate. He said that they didn’t reckon with people with ‘crazy ideas’: “There were a lot of them out there. They were just not finding each other. And now, with digital tools, they said: ‘Oh, YOU think that crazy thing? Me too! Let's get together and have a critical mass of crazy people. Let's, you know, call ourselves QAnon.’”

So that got a (nervous) laugh.

ANYWAY: I enjoyed the conversation, the dinner itself wasn’t bad (by hotel banquet standards), and I got to meet all sorts of neat people, although I regret not going over to the table next to ours and introducing myself to Hank Azaria (!), who was immersed in conversation with a neighbor.

I’d love to roll it back for today’s luncheon, but I’m just too beat, and it’s for the best: no one should ever have to watch me eat.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Christian Wiman • Danny Fingeroth • Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer
RIP Norman Lear . . . RIP Denny Laine . . . RIP Benjamin Zephaniah . . . RIP Ryan O’Neal
My town got written up in the NYT Real Estate section, which is just weird. They repeat the creation myth that our town was the source of (some of) the iron for the chain that blocked British boats from coming down the Hudson during the Revolutionary War. When I mentioned this during a tour of West Point a few years ago, the retired general leading the tour assured me that was incorrect. (West Point being the west point from which the chain stretched across of the Hudson, is how it came up.)
Some of The Chain, from my West Point visit in Dec. 2021
In September, I heard a new single from Peter Gabriel on Sirius, then discovered he has a Bandcamp subscription page, on which he’s been releasing a song each month from his upcoming album (2 mixes of each song). The full album, i/o, came out Dec. 1, and I’ve been enjoying it (as well as a whole ton of other songs & live shows that subscribers get to download/stream). Anyway, here’s a profile of him & the record.
New short story in The New Yorker from Caleb Crain.
Neat comic by Jesse Lambert of his Art Fair Nightmare.
“We’ve done some focus testing, and I haven’t seen such a unanimously negative response since the Frasier spinoff Hey, Roz.”
This Elizabeth Bishop postcard exhibition sounds pretty awesome.
Speaking of, it’s almost 2 years since I started my postcard-a-day practice, and I’m still going strong with that. If you want to be among my recipients/victims, drop me a line w/your mailing address. For the paying subscribers of this Substack, I send a hand-drawn/-painted postcard, if that’s an incentive for you to send me money & Support The Cause. Just added a new paid subscriber this week, so I gotta go make their card for them.
I will try this addition to my coffee-making practice, but if it screws up my Baratza Encore grinder, I will never trust a volcanologist about coffee again.
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Current/Recent Reading

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa (Christian Wiman mentioned it when we were recording last weekend, & I had it on my Kindle, so that’s a night-time reading)

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

Things got weird with my workout routine last week, but I’m trying to get back on track this week. I missed last Saturday’s yoga because of a podcast-trip, so I doubled up on Sunday with yoga then weights. Monday, on little to no sleep, I ran 6.3 miles with the guys, but was so busy & beat that I didn’t do yoga that day. Tuesday was my yo-yo trip to FDA and back, so no time for weights that day. I was hoping to get in a run with The Guys on Thursday morning, but an accident Wednesday afternoon left me with maybe a mild concussion, so I decided not to risk it. Anyway, I got back to weights on Friday, missed yoga on Saturday because i was spending the day in Princeton with Everett Glenn to celebrate his birthday, so I’ll try to double up both workouts today, run + yoga on Monday, weights on Tuesday. Monday’s also my 6-month oncology check-in, or as I like to call it, my rebirthday, so we’ll see how the rest of the week/life progresses from there.

Until Next Time

The Earth, it moves too slow / But the Earth is all we know,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(no Twitter anymore, so don’t look for me there)

Strange Currencies

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 15:00:30 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 566 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. poet Christian Wiman as we celebrate his amazing new book, ZERO AT THE BONE: Fifty Entries Against Despair (FSG), a fusion of essay, poem, memoir and anthology that explores how the act of writing a poem is a gesture of faith. We talk about the varieties of despair and joy, the question of whether the world is chaos or has order, and whether the relationship between art and life is a tension or an actual antipathy. We also get into the urgency of mortality and the rare cancer that almost killed Christian on three separate occasions, the notion of having a calling and the difference between given and earned callings, who we’re really trying to reach when we write a poem, whether Philip Larkin’s Aubade is a poem of pure despair, how literature has taken the place of sacred texts, and what he’s learned from teaching at Yale Divinity School. We also discuss The Void & how to tune it out, his thoughts on faith and Christ and how the incarnation of God in Jesus sacralizes the physical world, where poetry began for him, whether joy is passed down epigenetically like trauma (allegedly) is, what it’s like having a Ninja Blender for a brain, coming around on poets in translation like Yehuda Amichai, the meaning of existence, and a lot more (I mean, if you can have a lot more after the meaning of existence). Give it a listen! And go read Zero At The Bone!

This week, I posted Episode 565 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. writer & editor Danny Fingeroth as we celebrate his new biography, JACK RUBY: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin (Chicago Review Press), following the 60th anniversary of the assassinations of JFK & Lee Harvey Oswald. Danny & I talk about what drew him to Ruby’s story, how many JFK conspiracy rabbit-holes he had to avoid, the challenges of separating Ruby’s life from myth & speculation, and how the bio began as a graphic novel before its prose incarnation. We get into the people he would have loved to interview for this book, what Ruby’s siblings & their kids went through in the aftermath of Jack’s moment of infamy, the circus of Ruby’s murder trial, and the danger of treating Ruby’s life like a sitcom. We also discuss Danny’s dizzying résumé, including his 20-year run as a writer & editor at Marvel Comics, discovering himself as a biographer with Stan Lee: A Marvelous Life, the complexity of the (working) relationships of Lee, Jack Kirby & Steve Ditko, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin

Recent episodes: Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton

Strange Currencies

Yesterday was one of my yo-yo trips to FDA in Silver Spring, MD. I haven’t done one of these in a long time. Getting there & back from NJ meant

Up at ~3:30am
0:45 drive to Newark Penn Station
2:50 Amtrak NE Regional to BWI
0:40 Lyft to FDA
Negotiate negotiate negotiate 9:30am-4:30pm
0:40 Lyft to BWI
2:40 Amtrak to Newark Penn
0:45 drive home
In the door at 9:00pm

All told, ~8:20 of travel time, not incl. waiting rooms, train platforms, etc. A glamorous life, I know.

Me at 5:22 a.m. in Newark Penn Station, and me at 5:41 p.m. on the NE Regional

On the evening train, I walked to the cafe car to get a snack & some water. After I made my order, I noticed some crazy-bright bills in the tip tray behind the plexiglass. I asked the counterman what country they were from, and he put them on the counter to show me: “This one’s Barbados, and this one’s Costa Rica!”

While I reveled in the vivid inks and art, he took out his wallet, and fanned a stack of exotic currency. It was all so beautiful, an array of colors and images and scripts and denominations from across the world. I asked him if I could take a picture of it all, and he laid it out on the counter.

He smiled and said, “The funny thing is, I’ve never been to any of these places. But I just got my passport, so now I need to get some time off!”

I put some ugly-ol’ American dollars in the tip tray, and wished him safe travels.

Art

Another week where I didn’t really draw anything, so this morning I decided to draw a postcard out of a photo of Frederic Tuten that I saw on IG last night. I’ll send it to him as a belated 87th birthday present, even though the knit cap looks like he has a bowl haircut. After I scanned it, I added a little watercolor for the hat & scarf, but meh. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

I light candles in a daze since I found God,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(I deactivated my Twitter acct., so don’t look for me there)

Hitting The Links: 12/3/23

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 14:52:20 GMT

Rabbi, Poet, Psycho-Man

“It is not required of you that you complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
—Rabbi Tarfon, quote by Harold Bloom from our 2016 conversation

I’ve been listening to stillness the last few days, probably a side effect of reading three of Christian Wiman’s books of essays-poems-memoir in the past two weeks for yesterday’s pod-session (it’ll post this week, coinciding with his new book, Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair).

In my previous installment, Minimal Wage, I mentioned how crappy the pay was in publishing when I was starting out in 1995, why I went into business-to-business magazine editing in NJ rather than trying to make something of myself in NYC, and never really regretted not pursuing The Arts outside of a moment in the FSG lobby.

I’m not sure how much of that was my lying to you vs. lying to myself, but the important thing is the lying. My dilettantism and lack of focus in my art — writing, drawing, making conversation — wasn’t driven by finances but by a hit off the Psycho-Man’s iPad —

Psych-Man should have had a 4th button for ANXIETY

— good ol’ fear, doubt & hate (if you count self-loathing in the latter). I’m not fishing for pity, compliments, or encouragement, so DON’T; rather, I’m laying out the truth from the inside: I had a calling and I debased it.

That notion of calling & purpose permeates Christian’s books — at least, the three that I read in my typically rushed way of preparing for a conversation with an artist — and has me confronting the choices I’ve made and how I do/don’t approach the world and art.

Late in his new book, in an essay on life’s lack of culmination & our desire for meaning, Christian writes, “The contemporary reaction to this state of affairs [scientific materialism] is mostly either willful obliviousness, frenetic activity, or despair.” I went for the easy laugh and asked, “Can’t it be all three?!”, but the subtext of every nervous word out of my mouth yesterday was that I was meant for something different and shirked that.

I desisted, to quote Tarfon/Bloom, replacing rigor/refinement with half-assery, submitting first drafts over polish, skating by on those gifts with which I’ve been blessed. Wallowing in the immanent at the expense of the transcendent, the concrete over the metaphor. And it’s because I’ve always doubted that I would ‘measure up’ to whatever standard.

Which isn’t to say that I haven’t created beautiful things, but as with my painting, the good stuff happens mostly by accident.

And which isn’t to say I’m not particularly good at the weird form of the podcast-conversation; I am, and I got better with reps and that very refinement I criticize myself for. (My failures within every episode sting as a lack of readiness, or empathy, or nerve on my part.) But it’s a second-rate form of art (at best), and perhaps what Christian referred to as an earned calling rather than a given one: still valuable, but maybe not what you were intended for.

Thus reaching for stillness, and clarity, and maybe a voice under all the other voices.

Depressing fare for a rainy Sunday morning, I admit. To make up for it, here’s a pic I snapped on the drive up to Christian’s place yesterday, of a good boy who was very much enjoying the ride on the Merritt.

We were going around 60, and there was a curve just when we reached this moment, so I hope you appreciate that I risked my life and others’ to bring you this moment of doggo bliss.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Danny Fingeroth • Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton
RIP Shane MacGowan . . . RIP Sandra Day O’Connor . . . RIP Charlie Munger . . . RIP Marty Krofft . . .
Also, Henry Kissinger died.
Nick Cave wrote about Shane MacGowan (& Sinéad O’Connor) in his Red Hand Files. (Summer In Siam is on the mix-CD wedding favor we gave out. I should post that as a playlist sometime.)
Brett Martin wrote a neat NYT piece about the Punk Rock Museum in Vegas.
Go buy Whitney Matheson’s 2023 diary comix!
Read Nicole Rudick’s piece on Joanna Russ and go buy that Library of America edition of Russ.
Library! Of! Taxidermy! (Paging Kate Lacour)
Drycleaning photo essay!
This WSJ piece about an influencer/self-help couple and the pressures of Being On(line) shares a lot of vibes with that OnlyFans farm piece I linked to a couple weeks ago, but with a much sadder ending and an ass-walloping final line.
I cry just a little bit every morning for the last few weeks, as the new Mutts email shows up at 6am and Patrick McDonnell tells the story of Guard Dog getting freed after all these years. Glen David Gold tells the story of his rescue Shiloh Shepard, Coco.
Speaking of Glen, and his memoir I Will Be Complete, WHICH YOU SHOULD GO READ, here’s a LONG profile of Michael Stipe not quite getting around to making a solo album. The parts I enjoyed the most are when he interacts with younger musicians, all of whom plotz around him, but I also dug his impostor syndrome issues and the ways he finds not to make the new songs.
Share The Virtual Memories Show News

Current/Recent Reading

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair - Christian Wiman

He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art - Christian Wiman

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

Last week I only got in 4 days of my 5-day workout routine due to post-Thanksgiving stuff (Sat.-Tue, alternating yoga & weights), but did join The Guys for their Monday morning run, so technically 5 workouts total. I thought I’d bail at the 3.1- or 5.3-mile marks on our route, but found I could run the whole 6.4 miles without a break, which was a pleasant surprise. We didn’t go hard (avg. 9:48/mi., as they took it easy for once), but the physical & mental endurance was important to me. This week’s cycle is going to be a mess. I joined The Guys for 5.4 miles of their long run yesterday, but didn’t have time to do my yoga workout. I might double up today with that and weights, but Tuesday’s workout is already written off, as I’ll be getting up at 4am so I can get to a day-long FDA meeting in MD. Let’s hope next week/end gives me more exercise opportunities. (I do my morning stretch-yoga-plank-pushup-clamshell-leg raise routine every goddamned day before I make my coffee, so at least that baseline is in place.)

Until Next Time

Peacocks wandered aimlessly / under an orange tree. / Why can’t she see me?,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(no Twitter anymore, so don’t look for me there)

Minimal Wage

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 18:51:18 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 565 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. writer & editor Danny Fingeroth as we celebrate his new biography, JACK RUBY: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin (Chicago Review Press), following the 60th anniversary of the assassinations of JFK & Lee Harvey Oswald. Danny & I talk about what drew him to tell Ruby’s story, how many JFK conspiracy rabbit-holes he had to avoid, the challenges of separating Ruby’s life from myth & speculation, and how the bio began as a graphic novel collaboration with Rick Geary (!) before its prose incarnation. We get into what he learned from talking to Ruby’s rabbi, the figures he would have loved to interview for this book, what Ruby’s siblings & their kids went through in the aftermath of Jack’s moment of infamy, the circus of Ruby’s murder trial, and the danger of treating Ruby’s life like a sitcom. We also discuss Danny’s dizzying résumé, including his 20-year run as a writer & editor at Marvel Comics, discovering himself as a biographer with Stan Lee: A Marvelous Life, the complexity of the (working) relationships of Lee, Jack Kirby & Steve Ditko, the surreal of experience of meeting Gabe Kaplan (!!) while promoting Jack Ruby, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin

Last week, I posted Episode 564 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. cartoonist & editor Matt Bors. With The Nib, Matt helped build a venue for political satire, graphic journalism and non-fiction that featured some of the best names in comics and gave space to a bazillion up-and-comers. We sat down to talk about his decision to close down The Nib after 10 years, how it felt to bring together the best political cartoonists under a single online umbrella, how tech money giveth and taketh away, and what this fall’s farewell tour means to him. We get into what comes after The Nib (like his Justice Warriors comic), the challenges & rewards of building a diverse roster of cartoonists, and how mainstream comics and dystopian science fiction have always held an appeal for him (and why he’d love to do more with his Wasteland characters). We also discuss how it feels to have traded America for Canada and how the move has changed his perspective, the ways his post-Nib self spends less time getting mad online, how he plans to catch up on all the comics he’s missed in the last decade, what it’s like having his first two-week stretch as an adult without immediate editorial deadlines, and more! Give it a listen! And go read Justice Warriors and check out The Nib’s archives!

Recent episodes: Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes

Minimal Wage

There was Some Discourse on my Bluesky feed this week about whether people in the arts need to rely financially on family, spouse, partner to make a go of things, or should also get jobs and make art in their “spare time”. (This can be writing, fine arts, comics, whatever.)

Never having tried to make a go of life in the arts, I am not qualified to give an opinion on how to do that. WHAT I CAN DO is tell you about what happened when I finished grad school in 1995 (without college debt, thanks to the kindness and efforts of my parents) and tried to find a job in publishing in NYC (magazines, trade books, etc.). Because I was going to be A Writer, remember?

So, 1995: before much by way of internet, no craigslist, Monster, job-search sites, etc., just the newspapers’ classifieds. The highest paying entry-level gig I could find in a New York publishing house paid $18,000/year. Before tax. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index calculator, that comes out to about $36,000/year today ($30,000 in 2019 $, before recent years of wage inflation/growth). I will not tell you what my father said when I told him about those wages, but suffice to say,

it was offensive to certain ethnic groups, and
I looked for something higher paying (business-to-business magazines, northern NJ), which took me on my strange career path — Juvenile Merchandising & Auto Laundry News magazines, to Happi, Cosmetic Packaging & Design, and Contract Pharma magazines, to whatever the heck it is I do now.

Again, I have zero idea how anyone in the arts makes a living, or how much they have to rely on family/spouse/partner, and what tensions & dynamics accrue from those decisions. I tacitly gave up on all that 28 years ago, choosing a career + dilettantism.

(The B2B route started at $24,000/year, and when the (son of the) owner of the company promoted me from Editorial Assistant to Assistant Editor, I asked, “Do I get a raise with that?”, and he replied, “I believe in roses, not raises.” I left that co. after 18 months, ~17 years at my next co. (starting at $28,000/year in 1997 bucks!), and next Jan. will be 10 years since I gave notice there for my self-run gig.)

I never really looked back, except for the time I recorded with Jonathan Galassi, when I looked around the lobby of Farrar Straus & Giroux and the amazing display of its authors’ Nobel, Pulitzer & other prizes, and thought, “Man, I wonder if I could’ve given this a go.”

Art

Speaking of my dilettantism, I felt like a heel for not making any art this week, beyond a couple of unusable sketches of Bendico, so this morning I sat down with a photo by Marie Mutsuki Mockett of an oriental magpie on Jeju Island, South Korea, and tried to make a postcard out of it with a brush-pen (+ a Micron 01 for talons/legs). The blacks are SO black in the photo that it was a challenge to give it some highlights. I decided to go with vague cross-hatching for the shading on the left breast of the magpie’s tank-top, which didn’t come out great. With this pen, it’s a real challenge to stay patient enough to keep a light touch for those little, slight lines, and not leave a big splotch of ink. But hey: I made something this week, just for you. (Actually, it’s for my New Paying Subscriber, as I figure that’s a nice thank-you. Pony up $50 for a year, and I’ll make you one, too.) You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Fox the fox / Rat on the rat / You can ape the ape / I know about that,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(I deactivated my Twitter acct., so don’t look for me there)

Hitting The Links: 11/26/23

Sun, 26 Nov 2023 15:36:55 GMT

Either/Oar

I was writing my daily postcard on Friday, when it occurred to me that it was 20 years since I semi-celebrated Thanksgiving in New Zealand. I had booked a two-week adventure tour spanning Nov.-Dec., during which I engaged in all sorts of craziness: jet boating through river canyons, helicoptering over a rainforest onto a glacier, my one and only bungy jump, and drinking with Australian men.

I wrote to my friend about how odd it was to be on to the other side of the planet during Thanksgiving, in a place where nobody would ever think to prepare turkey for a meal. (Also football has a different meaning in NZ, and they contended that their rugby players were tougher than US football players, because “your guys wear pads.” I struggled to convince them that if “our guys” played rugby, their combination of size and speed would have led to the sport being banned due to fatalities, but neither here nor there.)

Just 2 or 3 of us on the tour were Americans, and we pretended to have a little Thanksgiving dinner in one of the roadside cafes our bus, The Wahine Machine, stopped in. But really, we were out of context, in a place that didn’t know our rituals, and the memory of that put me in mind of Odysseus’ Next Quest, the one he has to take after the events of the Odyssey, on the advice of the dead prophet Tiresias. In Book XI, during Odysseus’ visit to the underworld, the soul tells him that he must make amends to the sea god Poseidon and — well, I’ll let Samuel Butler translate it —

‘When you get home you will take your revenge on these suitors; and after you have killed them by force or fraud in your own house, you must take a well-made oar and carry it on and on, till you come to a country where the people have never heard of the sea and do not even mix salt with their food, nor do they know anything about ships, and oars that are as the wings of a ship. I will give you this certain token which cannot escape your notice. A wayfarer will meet you and will say it must be a winnowing shovel that you have got upon your shoulder; on this you must fix the oar in the ground and sacrifice a ram, a bull, and a boar to Poseidon. Then go home and offer hecatombs to the gods in heaven one after the other. As for yourself, death shall come to you from the sea, and your life shall ebb away very gently when you are full of years and peace of mind, and your people shall be prosperous. All that I have said will come true.’

[No, I didn’t write all that in the postcard, but the gist was there, & my pal went to St. John’s College, so he’ll get the overarching vibe.] Sitting at The Analog Desk that morning, I couldn’t really imagine that 20 years had gone by since that trip. I thought about that un-Thanksgiving, spent with people I didn’t know, in a hemisphere of the planet where maybe a half-dozen people had ever heard my name.

I wasn’t carrying an oar on that trip, but at some point it occurred to me that I wasn’t carrying any other baggage, and for a little while there I was free of everything.

Except gravity.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes
RIP Rosalynn Carter . . . RIP Bob Contant . . .
Bob was the cofounder of St. Mark’s Bookshop, where Amy & I met on our very first date (the 31 Third Ave. location), just a few weeks after my NZ trip. Separately, I bumped into Wallace Shawn there. I loved that bookstore.
Sebastian Smee reviewed the gorgeous John Singer Sargent exhibition in Boston. You will plotz at the paintings included in the piece.
Steven Heller (2018, 2019, 2020, 2022) has a lovely writeup about the new Leo Lionni exhibition at the Rockwell Museum.
You should also check out Steven’s interview with Christopher Payne about his Made In America book, and his piece about the first-ever exhibition of the children’s books of Seymour Chwast.
Continuing the theme of psychosis from recent emails, apparently magicians are less prone to it than the general population as well as other creative folks. Or they deceive the doctors better.
Mortal clay.
I really enjoyed this Matt Zoller-Seitz interview of Philip Kaufman about directing The Right Stuff.
Thinking about the lights-out main cast members of The Right Stuff got me wondering about what movie has the highest slugging average for a casting director, and I settled on ALIEN, because that movie only has 7 actors (besides the alien & the cat), and they managed to cast Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, John Hurt, Ian Holm, and Yaphet Kotto (okay, and Victoria Cartwright). That’s a heck of a lineup.
Speaking of batshit-crazy stories about directors, this one about the 47 Ronin guy’s meltdown is A-W-E-S-O-M-E.
The Wolfening.
I enjoyed this morning’s newsletter from Warren Ellis, for reasons that will become obvious 1 pullquote in.
Which also reminds me of the quote from near the end of 20,000 Days on Earth, which I cited earlier this year:
“All of our days are numbered. We cannot afford to be idle. To act on a bad idea is better than not to act at all, because the worth of the idea never becomes apparent until you do it.”

Current/Recent Reading

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer - Christian Wiman

Zero At The Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair - Christian Wiman

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I did my full 5-day workout routine last week, Fri.-Tue. weights & yoga on alternate days, + a 5.5-mile slow run w/The Guys on Saturday. I missed weights this past Friday, as we had guests staying over from Thanksgiving, & that meant driving them back to Princeton, & then Amy & I meandered around Princeton for a bit, then home to nap & then eat & by then it was just too darned late in the day to throw my dumbbells around. But I got my yoga workout in on Saturday, and will get to weights later today. I might even join The Guys for a few miles of their faster run on Monday or Tuesday, to make up for missing Friday’s workout. (I could have doubled-up on Saturday, but Bendico the greyhound called an audible on our morning walkies around the corner, instead leading me on a 1.7-mile walk/hike up his favorite trail to a cliff; it was 28°F and I was in a t-shirt & light hoodie, so by the time we got back, I was just trying to get myself warm for a while. But that all counts as some sorta exercise, I figure.)

Benedict, KTFO after our impromptu morning hike

At a party last Sunday, one of my past guests / listeners / readers brought up last week’s email, and asked me to send him a detailed writeup or even video of my workout, so he can start a dumbbell routine for himself. He’s an artist & a little older than me and can feel the creaks. Maybe I’ll shoot that today, and shoot one of my first-thing-in-the-morning stretch-yoga-plank-pushup-clamshell-leg-raise routine. I don’t wanna go all Kriota Willberg on you, but if you’re in the arts and you’re at a drawing table or keyboard or something all day, I implore you to get in some physical activity, okay? (In fact, artists oughtta read & implement Kriota’s Draw Stronger exercises.)

Until Next Time

This tornado loves you / What will make you believe me?,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Thanks

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 13:46:47 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 564 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. cartoonist & editor Matt Bors. With The Nib, Matt helped build an online (and print!) venue for political satire, graphic journalism and non-fiction comics that featured some of the best names in comics and gave space to a bazillion up-and-comers. We sat down to talk about his decision to close down The Nib after 10 years, how it felt to bring together the best political cartoonists under a single online umbrella, how tech money giveth and taketh away, and what this fall’s farewell tour means to him. We get into what comes after The Nib (like his Justice Warriors comic), how it felt to see one of his comics displayed on the floor of the House of Representatives, the challenges & rewards of building a diverse roster of cartoonists, why he always wanted a print companion of The Nib, and how mainstream comics and dystopian science fiction have always held an appeal for him (and why he’d love to do more with his Wasteland characters). We also discuss how it feels to have traded America for Canada and how the move has changed his perspective, the ways his post-Nib self spends less time getting mad online, how he plans to catch up on all the comics he’s missed in the last decade, what it’s like having his first two-week stretch as an adult without immediate editorial deadlines, and more! Give it a listen! And go read Justice Warriors and check out The Nib’s archives!

Last week, I posted Episode 563 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. master essayist Phillip Lopate in a conversation about his new collection, A Year And A Day: An Experiment In Essays (NYRB). We get into how he adapted to a short, time-constrained blog-form for The American Scholar, what it was like revisiting those 2016-17 pieces for this book, and whether an essayist can truly write about anything. We talk about Phillip’s integration of the private and public self in his writing, how his wife & daughter felt about being included in A Year And A Day, and how editing the three Great American Essay collections allowed him to leave a canon behind for students & readers. We also discuss how his books and essays add up to a fragmentary, lifelong memoir (and why he’ll likely never write an actual memoir or autobiography), why his multiple myeloma diagnosis was more of a psychological hit than a physical one, how he found himself working on a biography of Washington Irving, his thoughts on present-day personal essay tropes, the career validation of being inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read A Year And A Day!

Recent episodes: Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir

Thanks

It’s Thanksgiving here in the US tomorrow. Some friends are coming over: Amy’s fantastic cooking will be devoured, wine will be consumed (by everyone but me), belts will be loosened, and breeze will be shot.

As far as being thankful, I try to demonstrate that every day, but just in case:

I’m thankful that Amy, listeners, readers, guests, and PR people allow me to make this whole Virtual Memories thang. I’m thankful my health has held up (pending my onco-check-in next month). I’m thankful my trustees and client companies appreciate the work I do for them and cut me some slack on occasion. I’m thankful my racing pals occasionally hit me up to go for walks & hikes in my semi-retirement from running. I’m thankful for people who send me postcards. I’m thankful for friends, old and new. And this week I’m especially thankful for the garage attendant who decided to do the impossible on Monday (the story is in this week’s show’s intro).

I’m not super-thankful for Sunday night mega-traffic getting to the GWB, but it was in service of seeing old friends, so I’ll take it.

Anyway, time to get to a couple of errands and then extensive house-cleaning.

Art

I didn’t get to draw much this week, for a variety of self-inflicted reasons. But on Monday night, I tried to sketch David Leopold during his Hirschfeld’s Music event at City Winery in NYC. The first one came out okay until I got to the head/face (the lights were down, I had my contacts in, excuses, etc.), so I tried again, and didn’t bother giving him a head. Here it is. I did also spend some time this weekend trying to figure out how to approach a weird concept I came up with. That is, it started as a fragment of a poem, and now I think it’s either the title of a big ol’ canvas or the gallery exhibition I will never have. I’d tell you what it is, but you’d either laugh or steal it. So I’m still cogitating, and maybe I’ll make a postcard and see if it grows from there. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Gonna strike all the big red words from my little black book,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee
(I deactivated my Twitter acct., so don’t look for me there)

Hitting The Links: 11/19/23

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 13:33:05 GMT

Priors Authorization

I didn’t tell him about my dream. That night, sleepless and feverish, as I began to come down with what I hope is just a cold, I had a lucid dream in which the organic shapes of the Nativity facade began to shift in color and grow even more immense in scale. The true nature of the Sagrada Familia was clear to me as I stared at the maw of the entrance: it wasn’t a church but a machine for capturing souls. Gaudî, the only person buried there, was its first victim. I had an absolute conviction that my only courses of action were to flee Barcelona or to blow up the building.
—me, here, a few weeks ago (although now that I reread it, it could be the start of a short story)

I was really . . . touched? affected? . . . by this piece by on his LSD-induced manic psychosis and multiyear recovery from it. He goes heavy into some of the symptoms and pathways of this sort of breakdown, and the ensuing depression as it ebbs.

The piece reminded me of my experience quoted above, the night after seeing the Sagrada Familia during my Barcelona business trip in October. At the time (a day-plus later), I wrote about how I was able to receive it as a revelation, while recognizing the unreality of the whole situation.

The lucidity of the dream made it feel more like a revelation than the product of exhaustion, anxiety and fever, and were I a more psychotic man, I’d have taken it as The Truth. Fortunately for all involved, I have too much work to do to just bail on reality, so I can laugh all this off, as long as I Never Sleep Again.

With time, I know it wasn’t simply a dream-state, or at least I retained its intensity and mystery post-dream, but it was as though I had a dual self, allowing me to experience it as a reality while being able to keep my distance from that vortex. Like a virtual machine, emulating another operating system while the main OS keeps operating outside it, or that Kabbalah notion of tzimtzum, that the universe is God’s withdrawal of his being, a bubble created within the divine fluid, or even the trap-twist at the end of Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell’s Zenith comic.

(Don’t mind me; I just read widely. Also note that unlike the Mr. Goodbird, I’ve never tried hallucinogens. I did however, have a bad response to an antibiotic that led to a paranoia-episode; that was No Fun.)

But what he describes — not just the revelation, but the “burst of dopamine and adrenaline [from] a sudden feeling that you’re on the verge of a fantastically important discovery . . . It feels like you’ve broken through into a new world, or like you’ve been let in on some cosmic secret” — that’s what I had lying in my hotel bed, the Secret Knowledge and the (self-)importance that comes from being an initiate.

The rest of what the piece is worth reading, and makes me glad that I’ve never tipped too far from my priors, as it were, so go read it.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir
RIP A.S. Byatt . . . RIP Kevin Wynn . . . RIP George ‘Funky’ Brown . . .
Lovely profile of Geddy Lee around his new memoir.
Don’t get me any of this coffee-making gear; I’ve optimized my whole setup already. (The new issue of my Haiku for Business Travelers ’zine includes a piece on my coffee-making routine/practice; let me know if you want a copy.)
Michael Dirda writes about 22 books he wants to reread and one of them is . . . a Dave McKean-illustrated edition of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities?! [SMASHES BUY BUTTON].
What Dublin was to Joyce, the malls of northern NJ were to me.
Neat TinyLetter by Ali Trotta about Ted Hughes. It reminded me a little of my Ezra Pound/Donald Hall mini-exegesis from last year, but then I suppose I’m more interested in madness than love.
Did you think about your bills, your deadlines, or when you think you’re gonna die? (via of )
Good piece by Virginia Postrel / about the “Techno Optimist Manifesto” and its author’s manifest misreading of the myth of Prometheus.
I think the real moral of the Prometheus myth is that if you have a chronic condition like eagles devouring your liver, it helps to have medical coverage or the ability to regenerate your organs.
Speaking of the ridiculous worldviews of techbros, Elon Musk’s most recent antisemitism-is-free-speech flareup was enough to get me to finally deactivate my Twitter account, so don’t look for me on that platform. There are other links at the bottom of this e-mail where you can find me. No, I didn’t post a going-away message, or make a grand statement. I’d already deleted all my tweets before then, and for months now was only posting to promote new podcast episodes and new Substack e-mails.
You know, you can always send me a postcard! Zap me your mailing address and I’ll send you one, and maybe we’ll correspond in a slower, more decorative version of DMs. I mail out a postcard every mail-day — it started as a 2022 New Year’s resolution, and has stuck — and sometimes they’re even hand-made drawn/painted ones.
The funny thing about Musk jumping aboard the Hitler-was-right train is that I mentioned The Columnist’s Curse in this week’s podcast with Phillip Lopate, a term I coined for when a pundit/columnist runs out of easy material and strays into “I’m not saying Hitler was right/the Holocaust was a good idea, but . . .” territory. (Commendably, Phillip never ran into that problem when writing the 2016-2017 weekly blog-essays that comprise his wonderful new book.)

Current/Recent Reading

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon

Jack Ruby: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assassin - Danny Fingeroth

Valid Until Sunset - Jarrett Earnest

My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer - Christian Wiman

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I managed another full 5-day workout routine last week, Fri.-Tue. alternating weights & yoga, even though there were times I didn’t want to (also included a 5.3-mile run w/The Guys). I’m currently two days into that routine (weights later this morning, I hope), and also got in a 5.5-mile (slow) run on Saturday, as well as a 4.5-mi. hike on Friday. I’m hoping to add one more run/week, maybe on the morning of my ostensible rest day of Wednesday. Here’s a pic from Friday’s hike, the peak of which was the ruins of Van Slyke Castle.

Last Sunday, after my weights workout and weekly Accountability photo, I took a pic of my back while I flexed, and my shoulders look so stupidly jacked up that I laughed. It’s funny what you can do with some dumbbells and a couple of yoga mats, if you keep at it. (If you ask nice, I’ll send it to you, but I wouldn’t post Shirtless Gil in a family email like this one.)

For those of you asking, “Yes, Gil, but are there any practical benefits to all this exercise?”, LET ME TELL YOU: I managed to smoothly lift a ~200-lb. man off the floor yesterday and, outside of a slight lower back soreness this morning, I felt virtually no strain. So yeah, the strength & flexibility come in handy.

Until Next Time

Love is the drug,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Like It's 1999

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 13:41:35 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 563 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. master essayist Phillip Lopate in a conversation about his new collection, A Year And A Day: An Experiment In Essays (NYRB). We get into how he adapted to a short, time-constrained blog-form for The American Scholar, what it was like revisiting those 2016-17 pieces for this book, and whether an essayist can truly write about anything. We talk about Phillip’s integration of the private and public self in his writing, how his wife & daughter felt about being included in A Year And A Day, whether he’s fulfilled as a writer, why he hides his journal, and how editing the three Great American Essay collections allowed him to leave a canon behind for students & readers. We also discuss how his books and essays add up to a fragmentary, lifelong memoir (and why he’ll likely never write an actual memoir or autobiography), why his multiple myeloma diagnosis was more of a psychological hit than a physical one, how he found himself working on a biography of Washington Irving, the benefits of a fragmentary unitary self, his thoughts on present-day personal essay tropes, the career validation of being inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read A Year And A Day!

Last week, I posted Episode 562 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. the return of cartoonist Leslie Stein. With her wonderful, hilarious & heartfelt new graphic novel, Brooklyn’s Last Secret (Drawn & Quarterly), Leslie brings us the story of Major Threat, a getting-over-the-hill indy band on tour. We talk about how she mined the raw material of her own rock & roll tour experiences (and those of her friends) to make a comedy about touring life, why she started it during COVID lockdown in 2020, and how serializing it on Instagram served as an antidote to doomscrolling. We also get into the evolution of her cartooning style and how she finds new modes to work in, the expectations vs. the reality of artistic life, the experience of going viral with a comic about Nirvana T-shirts (and her time playing in a Nirvana cover band). We also discussed why it’s important to be an entertaining panelist at cons & festivals, the role of music in art-making, why it’s best not to open up emotionally to your bandmates when on tour, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Brooklyn’s Last Secret!

Recent episodes: Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell

Like It’s 1999

I had a call with a prospective client yesterday. He’d been in the industry even longer than I have, and we traded stories about people and companies. It was a fun conversation, and his company is likely going to join my association next year, so yay.

At one point, we were recounting famous flameouts in our industry, companies that went under in spectacular fashion, including one where employees arrived to the building only to find a big padlock on the front door and a notice from the US Marshals office saying the company owed ~$20 million to the bank and was closed until it paid up. (It never paid up, and all the biosamples inside went to waste as staff weren’t allowed in for monitoring.)

We tried to remember one company that melted down shortly after I began covering the industry for the trade magazine I accidentally helped launch, but neither of us could recall the name, although we remembered it was based in Kansas and that they threw a huge hospitality event during a trade show in New Orleans, only to misjudge the turnout and ran out of food & drink pretty early on.

I gestured to the door in the background and told the guy, “I have every issue of Contract Pharma in that storeroom back there, and I promise, once we're done, I'll go through those until I find the company.”

After we wrapped, I went in, started hauling out the first stack of issues in manageable groups, until I got to the bottom of the stack and pulled out Contract Pharma Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1999.

Flipping through the pages, I was walloped with memories. Advertiser after advertiser long gone to merger, rollup, rebrand, or business failure, a million stories to share with colleagues who’ve been around (seriously, only like 2 companies in the ad index still exist under the same name and haven’t been acquired). Page after page of news items, at a time when PR was still transitioning to the web. Half of the article contributors and advisory board members are people I still work with today.

I thought about the gamble of two publishers coming to our company with the idea for this magazine, unable to convince their editor to come with them and getting saddled with the weirdo who was editing the cosmetic packaging magazine (me). We built something special over the ~15 years we worked together, and I’ve made a difference with my second act in this industry, but seeing this premiere issue again reminded me of how little I knew, how we were flying by the seat of our pants. I finished a chunk of that issue while spending the weekend with friends up in Granville, NY.

I didn’t see any ads or news items with the name of the company I was looking for, but it turned out that we ran a list of all the exhibitors from the big trade show where the magazine would debut, so I started going through that line by line. Finally, I hit it: OREAD!

I emailed my prospective client with the name, and he wrote back, “THAT’S IT! (Mt. Oread is the name of the hill on KU’s campus in Lawrence, btw.)”

In 2 months, it’ll be a decade since I gave notice at the magazine. Looking back at 1999, I can’t imagine what 28-year-old Gil thought the future held. Most likely he took it one issue at a time.

Art

I made something good this week. For a while now, I wanted to do something with a photo that Marie Mutsuki Mockett posted on IG of two red-topped cranes in a mating dance, but never knew how to approach it. Then one evening I Had This Idea, which involved throwing out the white background of the photo, and finally using the gouache paints that Dmitry Samarov got for me a year-plus ago. That night, all I did was paint a black(ish) background on a watercolor postcard. The next morning, I painted the bird on the left side of the photo, discovering how white gouache interacts with a black background, how much water I can use, what can and can’t be lifted with paper towels. I let that dry, then returned in the evening to work on the more challenging crane on the right side. Lastly, I figured out a muted color to use for their beaks, so as not to distract from the red tops, and I was done. The piece, small as it is, represents a couple of big steps for me: first time w/gouache, painting directly without drawing the figures first, making the leap of imagination (this is significant for me) of just changing the background. I want to work with those birds again on a larger piece sometime, but as a proof of concept, I love what I managed to do here, even as I’m sure I’ll be embarrassed by it a year from now if I keep up with things. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Life is just a party, and parties aren’t meant to last,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Hitting The Links: 11/12/23

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 13:36:37 GMT

Lest We Forget

GIL: Are you prepared for the first anniversary of Diane’s death? I’m one of those date-fixated people.
BILL: It’s not of great importance to me. I’m not big on artificial dates like that. All my life, I thought, ‘Christmas has nice aspects, but why is it always on the same day?’ You have the dread before it and the shopping and you have to make the card. Why can’t it just be when you feel like it should be? ‘It’s time for Christmas! Let’s do Christmas!’ . . .
A funny aspect of having a daily strip is that I have to be five weeks ahead on the daily and six weeks ahead on the Sunday. So I’m always doing strips and putting dates into them that are a month or two in the future. So I already did September 1 a month or so ago.
GIL: This would have been the greatest therapy for me in the world, if I’d just taken up a daily strip!

—me & Bill Griffith, from our podcast last August

“I’m one of those date-fixated people.” The past week, for example, held the anniversaries of buying my car, of stumbling across Emily Dickinson’s grave after recording a podcast w/Michael Lesy, of my closest friend’s death. I wish I could let those things go, that I could stop treating them like objects in orbit (or aspects of an object around which I orbit). The future’s tough enough to deal with, so why this fetish for the recurrence of dates past?

Perhaps it keeps me moored, (somewhat) stable in knowing when things happened. Perhaps ‘moored’ too in keeping me from drifting into the unexplored. Do these dates and notes help me reconstruct who I was, or merely what I witnessed? Should the impendingness of Tom’s deathiversary have made me think of him more — relive that phone call, the tears, the memorials — or is Bill right and should Christmas be whenever we want it?

I told Amy a funny observation of Tom’s last night. She hadn’t heard it before, and I thought of telling her it was the 4th anniversary of his death, but I guess that’s the point: he’s still here when we remember him, and all these other moments can live with us, not just occasioned by a square on the calendar.

Later that day, I would pick up a copy of Dickinson’s collected poems, and now I start every morning by reading 2 pages from that, as well as the previous day’s 2 pages

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell
RIP Frank Borman . . . RIP Davide Renne . . .
Barbara Nessim’s got an exhibition opening this week in NYC! Go check it out! (Opening reception Nov. 16)
This 10-years-in-the-making post about DAK catalogs reminds me of when the internet was its best, and people did deep-dive blogs on the things that interested them.
Thoughtful piece by Craig Mod on aloneness & the benefits of therapy (scroll down to the Aloneness header).
Neat piece on how Joan Kroc bequeathed $230 million to NPR & what they’ve done with it.
Check out this BMI interview with Gary Clark, one of my all-time fave guests. And check out the new movie Gary worked on with John Carney, Flora And Son!
Speaking of, one of my fave cartoonists, Jason, posted a tribute sketch of the cover of Meet Danny Wilson, in his haunted-anthropomorphic style. I plotzed. Also, I don’t know if Bluesky links actually work, so here’s the image:
You know I’m a mark for how much $ the White House is putting toward rail/Amtrak infrastructure improvements.
But it looks like it’s gonna be a while until the new Acela trains start rolling.
I’m intrigued enough by this Billy Joel / Bruce Springsteen book that I’m going to pitch the author.
Among the many great joys the podcast has brought me, getting to sit down with George Lois was among the tops. You should buy his home.
I fully endorse Christoph Niemann’s 10 rules for drawing, and just wish I observed ’em more. But I made a really good piece this week, so I’m happy about that.
You don’t really need to read this gigantic piece on the dissolution of the Gimlet podcasting studio by Spotify. My grumpy TL;DR is that cheap tech money led to a flood of funding for ever more podcasts that couldn’t find an audience and sounded a lot alike, the money congregated to Big Names, the economics were never real, and management will always mistreat Black people. I guess it’s yet another reason why I make my podcast with no expectation of making a dime. (I know, I know: interview/conversation shows like mine are different from the reporting-based ones that this article is about.)
Speaking of not making a dime, if this OnlyFans farm has a good library, maybe I’ll finally open my own page! (As noted previously, my hypothetical OnlyFans page would consist of pix/video of me tastefully attired, on my Eames lounge chair, reading classic literature, while running my fingers through my hair.)
The story of that pilot who freaked out on mushrooms & tried to take down a passenger plane while he was in the jump seat? The NYT did some great reporting on it, and it’s an awfully sad story about grief at the loss of a friend, unaddressed mental health issues for airline pilots, and ego-destruction from psychedelics.
This David Marchese interview of literary agent Andrew Wylie is GLORIOUS, so read the whole darned thing. Speaking of ego-destruction, it contains this fantastic bit, which captures how I see myself & the Virtual Memories project [if it weren’t so long, I’d add it to the Mission Statement of my homepage]:

DM: I have seen you refer to yourself as a hollow person. [Wylie, speaking in Harvard Magazine in 2010, said: “I feel I do not have a personality of my own, so I am constantly in search of a personality. This might be why I am such a dedicated agent! A writer arrives with a fully formed personality and set of beliefs, powerfully expressed. I become so enraptured by their interests, knowledge and means of expression that nothing can distract me.”]
AW: Yeah. A number of people I know have objected to that. But it’s fundamentally, to me, true. I actually see it as not just a lack of personality. I used to interview people because I didn’t know what to do with my life. I thought: I’ll talk to Mick Jagger. I’ll talk to Andy Warhol, and I’ll try to figure out what to do.
DM: I understand the impulse.
AW: If you’re a good interviewer, as you are, you have to take yourself out of it and insert yourself in the person you are conversing with so what they have to say becomes powerfully significant in the course of the conversation. What if your entire life is based on entering the other person’s perspective? We represent about 1,500 writers. It’s a field of dreams. You’ve abandoned yourself, which is of no interest, it’s tedious, and you enter into their perspective and it’s totally enriching.
DM: I find that line of thinking both intriguing and hard to understand.
AW: Well, it could be logically seen as a deficiency. You got nothing to offer, so you crawl inside the other guy’s suit.
DM: Is that how you feel?
AW: Yeah. It’s not a bad feeling, I’d hasten to add. It’s a good feeling. If you interact with people in a way that implies that you know everything and they know nothing, relatively nothing changes. Every day is the same. You know the whole picture all the time. That’s less interesting to me than being on an intellectual rotating belt in which today you have this person’s perspective, tomorrow you have that person’s perspective, and you don’t have them remotely. You’ve actually entered that person’s perspective. The image I had: Susan Sontag. We would have supper, always at a restaurant that she found suitable — I didn’t know about restaurants — and my impression after supper was when we walked out on the street, you couldn’t tell the difference between Susan Sontag and the other. I was accompanying Susan Sontag? I was Susan Sontag.

Current/Recent Reading

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon - I finished last Sunday! I had 100 pages left, & rather than read from my Kindle version, I went back to my 1998 hardcover.

Piranesi - Susanna Clarke - Decided to take a brief break from my Pynchon re-read-through, and HOLY COW IS THIS AN AMAZING NOVEL.

Inherent Vice - Thomas Pynchon - And now back to my regularly scheduled Pynchon. I decided to skip Against the Day this time around, since I read it last year. I’m hoping I’ll make it through this & Bleeding Edge by the end of the year, and open up 2024 with some other reading project, calendars being what they are. Maybe it’ll be that Uwe Johnson Anniversaries project

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I got my full 5-day workout routine in last week, Fri.-Tue.! Clap now. I’m currently three days into that routine, and also got in a 5.3-mile (slow) run on Saturday. No pain or soreness from that, so I really should try to get some running miles in each week, and rebuild my cardio stamina, along with all the strength, flexibility, and swoleness I get from my home exercise.

Until Next Time

Oh God, save the human cannonball,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Mr. President

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 18:23:01 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 562 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. the return of cartoonist Leslie Stein. With her wonderful, hilarious & heartfelt new graphic novel, Brooklyn’s Last Secret (Drawn & Quarterly), Leslie brings us the story of Major Threat, a getting-over-the-hill indy band on tour. We talk about how she mined the raw material of her own rock & roll tour experiences (and those of her friends) to make a comedy about touring life, why she started it during COVID lockdown in 2020, and how serializing it on Instagram served as an antidote to doomscrolling. We also get into the evolution of her cartooning style and how she finds new modes to work in, the expectations vs. the reality of artistic life, the experience of going viral with a comic about Nirvana T-shirts (and her time playing in a Nirvana cover band). We also discussed going back to cons & festivals, why it’s important to be an entertaining panelist, the role of music in art-making, why it’s best not to open up emotionally to your bandmates when on tour, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Brooklyn’s Last Secret

Last week, I posted Episode 561 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with cartoonist Josh Bayer. With his new graphic novel/memoir, UNENDED (Uncivilized Books), Josh explores family trauma, memory, art, and more. We get into how he spent five years trying to adapt his late father’s unfinished play into a comic, the ways it did & didn’t help him come to terms with his father’s life and his mother’s death, and why he blurs out his character’s face on the page. We talk about the influence of punk on his writing and art, the systems he uses to pull him out of storytelling morasses and how he learned to teach them to his students, coping with ADD, studying at SVA in his 30s, and why he pursued comics over fine art. We also discuss mental health and treatment and how we deal with our father-issues, Josh’s recent stint working at Carol Tyler‘s Ink Farm, why it’s tough to be Rollins, the question of whether he’s forgiven his dad, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read UNENDED

Recent episodes: Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight

Push the Sky Away

I’ve gotta host a meeting of my Board of Trustees in 90 minutes, and am putting the finishing touches on my President’s Report for them, so there’s no time to write anything even semi-profound for you this time. Sorry, but duty calls.

Instead, here’s a view from my walk with The Guys this morning. They came up to my neighborhood, and I took ’em to The Cliff so we could take in the autumn landscape. It was cool & breezy & clear, and the sky just went on.

The view from Ringwood, NJ.

Would it be slightly profound to say, “Get out with friends & take in the world”? If not, come back Sunday and I’ll try to do better.

Art

I didn’t make too much art last week, but I was happy with what I made. First I made a postcard of the seagull who hopped up on the terrace of our hotel room in Barcelona as we were getting ready to check out. Started w/Micron, then watercolor pencil, then brush. By the time I was done, he looked kinda menacing, so I added those words. I didn’t lay out the text in advance, so it looks disjointed, but sue me. After that, I started yet another study of the statue of Montaigne in Paris. I’d like to make that the cover of the next Haiku for Business Travelers, but we’ll see. I was really happy with how I got the drapery of his cloak going (another Micron 01 on sketchpad). I feel like I could do something with this, but it’ll take real time, and not just sketchpaper. But maybe I’ll have time & focus soon. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

You can be the President / I’d rather be the Pope,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Hitting The Links: 11/5/23

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 15:49:52 GMT

Unitard

I got to record with Phillip Lopate yesterday. That episode will air in a few weeks — in the meantime GO READ his new essay collection, A Year And A Day (NYRB) — but I just figured I’d gab about it now, because he’s one of my all-time favorite guests (2013, 2017, 2020), and because our conversation helped me in my ongoing struggle to explain — to myself if not you — what I’m actually doing with this podcast.

What I think I’m doing is a biographical/autobiographical project, encompassing the lives of my guests and myself. I know I do a good job capturing/conveying a little of my guests’ psyches in our conversations, but I remain uncertain as to how real my own persona is, and whether what I shudder to call “the real me” comes out in these talks and my intros.

Phillip & I had A Moment — or two or three — where we talked about life’s work, our responses to mortality, the unitary self and the fulfillment of purpose. He’s spent his adult life writing personal essays and wondered whether a memoir or autobiography is feasible, because it’d mean finding a greater pattern than the ones he’s already rendered in his essays, that Jamesian figure in the carpet. I imagine I’ll talk more about it when I record the intro to that episode.

For my part, I considered my own terminal point for this project, what constitutes fulfillment. I know there’s no “if I just get THIS guest” that will fulfill my purpose and give me call to end it. I know that, as long as I last, I’ll remain like Diogenes with microphones, searching for a good conversation. (Yes, this is an idea I had for a tattoo.)

Which, I suppose, may be the true persona I’ve been searching for, a half-self occasionally made complete by talking with another.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Josh Bayer • Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight
RIP Ady Barkan . . . RIP Bobby Knight . . . RIP Frank Howard . . . RIP Thomas K. Mattingly II . . .
Happy NYC Marathon, to all who observe! I started running 5+ years ago (I don’t run much now), & I laugh because on my best day I could never run at the top runners’ average marathon pace even for one mile, much less 26.2. As it turns out, you also can’t drive at that pace on a weekday in NYC.
I haven’t read very much by Jeanette Winterson, but I really enjoyed this NYer interview with her.
Dan Clowes got interviewed by John Kelly in TCJ. John’s interviews are phenomenal, and this one’s no exception.
Brett Martin profiled Chris Stapleton, so obvs go read.
It has never occurred to me to keep my phone in my bedroom.
Speaking of borders, Marina Warner writes about them in a NYRB review.
This co-op newsletter model sounds pretty neat. Maybe you should contribute to their Kickstarter.
Looks like there’s a new staging of my fave modern play, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, in NYC! Which led me to this 2013 appreciation on the play’s 20th anniversary, which you oughtta read.
Speaking of things to do in NYC, Molly Crabapple has a new exhibition opening on Nov. 11!
Scott Meslow wrote about some WAY meta aspects of video game universes. Last week, re Matthew Perry’s death, I noted that I’ve never seen an episode of Friends and “there’s a lot of the ’90s I skipped out on.” Well, I also have zilch to offer as far as video games, on console or computer. I think the last thing I played was NBA2K w/my late buddy Sang, so that’s like 20 years ago. Given my compulsive personality, I long ago figured it’s for the best to avoid that entire world. That certainly leaves me with some blind spots — my episode with Cassandra Khaw about her game-writing experience was pretty theoretical on my side — but just like when I quit drinking in 2012, it gives me a lot more hours in the day than other people have.
My pal went to see Duran Duran a little while back. Nile Rodgers & CHIC opened, and they played a medley of JUST the #1 hits that Nile Rodgers wrote. He (my pal) texted each song title to me and the list just blew my goddamned mind. I mean, LE FREAK, dayenu. So here’s half an hour of Nile & CHIC on Tiny Desk Concert.

Current/Recent Reading

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon - 100 pages left!

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I got in 4 days of my workout routine last week, Sat.-Tue., and so far I’m on schedule for my full Fri.-Tue. routine. Didn’t want to do my weights workout on Friday evening — tired, felt blech from overeating or something — but I had just gotten back from taking my dad for some vaccines, and talked myself into it. Felt good after, which is the point. I was feeling shot out of a cannon this morning, what with the extra hour for the return to Standard Time, so I got my weights in at 7:30 a.m. It was rough, working out before breakfast, but I did fine.

Here’s me in a new shirt & sweatpants, with a lot of books:

Shirt by BLUE BLUE JAPAN, sweats by L.L. Bean.

Until Next Time

AWWWW, FREAK OUT!,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Analog Digital

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 13:43:13 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 561 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with cartoonist Josh Bayer. With his new graphic novel/memoir, UNENDED (Uncivilized Books), Josh explores family trauma, memory, art, and more. We get into how he spent five years trying to adapt his late father’s unfinished play into a comic, the ways it did & didn’t help him come to terms with his father’s life and his mother’s death, and why he blurs out his character’s face on the page. We talk about the punk rock inspiration in his writing and art, the systems he uses to pull him out of storytelling morasses and how he learned to teach them to his students, learning to cope with his ADD (and wondering whether I have it too), studying at SVA in his 30s, and why he pursued comics over fine art. We also discuss mental health and treatment and how we deal with our father-issues, Josh’s recent stint working at Carol Tyler‘s Ink Farm, the impact of the Masters of 20th Century Comics exhibition on his career, why it’s tough to be Rollins, the question of whether he’s forgiven his dad, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read UNENDED!

Last week, I posted Episode 560 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with biographer Adam Sisman about his new book, The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper). Adam reveals the secrets he couldn’t publish in 2015’s John le Carré: The Biography, and explores how serial deception & betrayals — through the multiple affairs le Carré (a.k.a. David Cornwell) conducted during both of his marriages — can provide a key to understanding the late, great spy novelist. We get into how Adam became a detective-psychoanalyst-confessor during his work on the biography, how he learned of le Carré’s messy private life, why he decided to wait until after the author and his wife had died before publishing this new book, and why these revelations ought not to diminish le Carré’s literary stature. We talk about le Carré’s monumental achievements chronicling the Cold War and Britain’s decline (& his top 3 le Carré novels), how he felt when le Carré published a memoir after Adam’s biography came out, and the ways in which le Carré’s upbringing — abandoned by his mother, reared by a con man father he struggled to escape from — may have contributed to his devotion to duplicity & seduction. We also discuss the moment Adam realized that biography is a human process, his thoughts on the new Errol Morris documentary with le Carré, what it means to put le Carré behind him, and plenty more. Give it a listen! And go read The Secret Life of John le Carré!

Recent episodes: Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight • Brett Martin

The Return of Mad Mix

I made a mix-CD for the first time in a bazillion years. I used to make those all the time for friends, under the name Mad Mix. Before that, it was mixtapes, because I’m old. I still have a box of audio cassettes in my attic, and somewhere up there is an old college notebook with handwritten playlists, so I wouldn’t repeat myself.

This one had been percolating for years, but I finally found the last 2 songs for it last night, cut another one so that it’d fit on a CD, and away I went. When my pal gets it in the mail, she’ll plotz, then happydance, then maybe cry and laugh when she listens to it.

That’s assuming she has a CD player somewhere in her home or car. I don’t, except for the Superdrive that plugs into my Mac. For some reason, the CD wouldn’t play back in Apple Music, so I had to download another app to test it and make sure I wasn’t sending her a horrible tease of an unplayable CD.

I know, I know: why not just share a playlist on one of the streaming apps? Maybe I’ll do that and share it with the rest of you sometime. For now, even though CDs are a digital medium, I’ll keep it analog, a physical gift to share with a friend.

I guess it’s like my postcard-a-day habit (which I’m still doing; zap me your mailing address if you want to be on the receiving end), or my print-only Haiku for Business Travelers ’zine, or my art being on paper: even/especially while so much of what I do is on a computer and I’m as seduced by e-immediacy as the rest of you, I still treasure the physical artifact, the slowness of mail, the irreversibility of a line on paper.

Anyway, I’ve prattled about that before, but I’m glad that I finally got off my ass and let Mad Mix take care of business. Now I just have to find my old cardboard CD-mailers in the storage space. . . .

Art

Yesterday was the first anniversary of a pretty wonderful day; last Halloween I was in London and visited the artist Celia Paul (2020, 2022) for a few hours (then I went off to record with Marina Warner). We gabbed, I told her a story that I’ll try to share with you in the year-end episode, she showed me her latest art, I took in the amazing light of her studio, and then she said, “We should draw each other,” which was SO not fair. I did my best, but I’d never even tried to draw in person before. She sent me her sketch of me; I’ll never show another soul. I drew Celia from photos a couple of times — Nov. 2021, April 2022, a week before that visit, and in an aborted project in Jan. 2023 — and decided I’d try another last night. Failed again, but that’s art. On the plus side, after that, I added the hull and mast to a postcard of a sailboat I started in Barcelona, where I tried to learn something about negative space. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

All wet / Hey, you might need a raincoat / Shakedown / Dreams walking in broad daylight,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Hitting The Links: 10/29/23

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 15:54:30 GMT

Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down

We made it back safe & sound from Barcelona on Friday, then spent Saturday in Princeton where I hosted a talk with Patrick McDonnell (I’ll post the audio in a few weeks; here’s our recent talk). Today my plan is pretty much to watch the rain fall on the remnants of autumn & decompress after a pretty busy ~~week-plus~~ 3-month sprint.

It’s not the view of the Porto Vell from Mountjuic, but it’s home

Barcelona was wonderful, even though I spent the last 3 days of the trip schmoozing at the gigantic trade show. Amy entertained herself without me during that stretch, and was accommodating when I came home from day 1 (Tuesday), following an hour-and-forty-five-minute wait at the taxi line, stared at the wall for a while, and said to her, “I’ll ask you how your day went tomorrow.”

(TBF, I got hit w/some sorta head cold the night before that, and so was already run down before the taxi debacle. I used the metro the next 2 days of the show, even though that necessitated climbing up 350+’ of stairs to get back to the hotel.)

A few of my clients at the conference convinced me that I went about this trip backwards; I should’ve come in the day before the trade show, and done the vacation/sightseeing stuff over the weekend after the show (or traveled on to somewhere else, as several were doing). I may try that next year, when this show is in Milan. Sure would love to get out to Rome on that trip, esp. after that Scott Samuelson conversation this year. I hope to see The Boxer At Rest in the flesh/bronze someday, and maybe try to make some new drawings of it. We’ll see in due time.

But yesterday, man. After the talk with Patrick (which went well!), he had a signing/drawing line for people buying his books. While that was going on I caught up with a few listeners who came to the talk (they know who they are), along with past-guest & pal ES Glenn & his partner. Then a young (I can’t gauge the age of anyone younger than me, so bet. 18-50) student came up to introduce herself and tell me how much she enjoyed the talk. I started praising Patrick, and she said, “I don’t know him or his work, and I’ve never read comics, but it sounds like he’s a big deal. I came because I saw you were going to be interviewing him.”

No, dear reader, not a stalker situation, nor did she serve me with a subpoena or anything. Turns out she listened to the episode I did with Princeton professor Jeff Nunokawa and wanted to let me know how much she loved it. She’s majoring in history, not literature, but she’s done interviews for her work over the years, and was interested in what I’ve learned about interviewing people.

Which was weird, but fun. I mean, it always disconcerts me when someone tells me that they actually listen to the podcast, much less praises it, and I was in full “celebrate Patrick” mode for this event, so I wasn’t expecting anything like this conversation. Enjoyed the heck out of it, though, and gave her one of my Roz Chast postcards, which are like currency.

But that wasn’t the best thing of the afternoon. See, at the very end of the signing line, there was this little kid who brought their sketchbook (and their mom). As they were at the table getting Patrick’s sketches in a book or two, he saw the sketchbook and asked them if he could look at it. He saw the child’s drawings, asked them about drawing and making cartoons, then asked, “Can I draw something in there?”, and they gave him the sketchbook. He drew Earl & Mooch, his lead characters from MUTTS, beside the kid’s Lucky Cat drawing.

The gentleness of Patrick's demeanor & tone of voice talking to them was an absolute wonder to me, the way he totally put the kid at ease and treated them with respect. Gave me a great feeling just watching them interact.

Everett, on the other hand, fair lost his mind and said, “WE JUST SAW A CARTOONIST BEING BORN, BROTHER!” Which is probably true.

I saw kid & mom on the way out of the library and asked if it would be okay to take a pic.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Adam Sisman • Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight • Brett Martin
RIP Richard Roundtree . . . RIP Matthew Keenan . . . RIP Matthew Perry . . .
I never saw a single episode of Friends. There’s a lot of the ’90s I skipped out on. I did see The Whole Nine Yards, though.
Speaking of places I need to visit, here’s a piece about the new Celia Paul (2020, 2022) art exhibition in Venice, her residency there, and the role the city has played in her art in recent years.
Don’t even try to roll them oats.
Eee! Tess Lewis (2020, 2021) will receive the Friedrich Ulfers Prize at FNL next month!
William Deresiewicz writes about what art is for.
In the ’90s, I attended a low-rider festival in San Antonio, and some of those were works of art. Anyway, low-riders are no longer illegal in LA.
The day before my Barcelona trip, I was invited to an event in NYC where the dress code was “business elegant”. It took me a few minutes to figure out that just meant “suit & tie”, or “between ‘business casual’ and ‘black tie’”. I think “alpine black tie” is an alp too far.
Uh-oh, everybody: Kaptain Ketamine thinks the world is headed in a bad direction!

Current/Recent Reading

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

A Year And A Day: An Experiment In Essays - Phillip Lopate (finished last week)

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I didn’t get to work out from Oct. 17 (weights) to Oct. 28 (yoga), because of the Barcelona trip. Because I don’t trust hotel floors, I didn’t get to do my morning exercise routine from Oct. 21 until the 28th, but I don’t seem to have suffered too much, even with 10+ hours in the plane on Friday. The first 3 days of the trip, Amy & I walked 8-9 miles/day, along with the occasional 350’ climb back up to our hotel (usu. stairs, but occasionally our Maps app would send us up dirt/rock/root trails). During the trade show, I did more walking, but intermittently and in dress shoes. Glad I was able to get back to my yoga workout on Saturday, and looking forward to weights today. I’m hoping to get back to my 5-day Fri.-Tue. routine next week. Might go for a run with The Guys at some point this week. In reference to last week’s note, I did in fact drop 4-5 lbs. during this trip.

Until Next Time

The falling leaves drift by the window / The autumn leaves of red and gold / I see your lips, the summer kisses / The sun-burned hands I used to hold,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

The Secret Sharer

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 05:55:58 GMT

Keeping up appearances

I’ll be interviewing Patrick McDonnell about his new book, The Super Hero’s Journey (Abrams ComicArts), at a live event on Oct. 28 at 3:00 p.m. EDT at the Princeton Public Library in Princeton, NJ, in conjunction w/Labyrinth Books. Hope to see you there!

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 560 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with biographer Adam Sisman about his new book, The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper). Adam reveals the secrets he couldn’t publish in 2015’s John le Carré: The Biography, and explores how serial deception & betrayals — through the multiple affairs le Carré (a.k.a. David Cornwell) conducted during both of his marriages — can provide a key to understanding the late, great spy novelist. We get into how Adam became a combo detective-psychoanalyst-confessor during his work on the biography, how he learned of le Carré’s messy private life, why he decided to wait until after the author and his wife had died before publishing this new book, and why these revelations ought not to diminish le Carré’s literary stature. We talk about le Carré’s monumental achievements chronicling the Cold War and Britain’s decline (& his top 3 le Carré novels), the man’s undeniable charm & his self-mythologizing, the times when he thought the biography might not happen, how he felt when le Carré published a memoirafter Adam’s biography came out, and the ways in which le Carré’s upbringing — abandoned by his mother, reared by a con man father he struggled to escape from — may have contributed to his devotion to duplicity & seduction. We also discuss the moment Adam realized that biography is a human process, his thoughts on the new Errol Morris documentary with le Carré, the limits of interviews in general (NO!), what it means to put le Carré behind him with this new book, and plenty more. Give it a listen! And go read The Secret Life of John le Carré!

Last week, I posted Episode 559 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with Lisa Morton as we celebrate spooky season & the release of her new book, The Art of the Zombie Movie! We talk about the fun of researching the history of zombies in pop culture and folklore, the challenge & joy of assembling the 500 illustrations in the book (including one-sheets, stills, alternative art, and more), and how she got messed up at an early age by Dawn Of The Dead. We also get into her history of horror (it was all over once she saw The Exorcist), how she found herself as a writer and wound up with 6 Bram Stoker Awards®, her take on fast vs. slow zombies, and what she found researching the George Romero papers at UPitt. We also discuss her experience as a bookseller in Los Angeles (go, Iliad Bookshop!), LA’s writer-culture, getting her heart broken by screenwriting, her work to bring the classic Fantasmagoriana anthology to a new reading public, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read The Art of the Zombie Movie!

Recent episodes: Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight • Brett Martin • Peter Rostovsky

The Soul Cage

A station of the cross on the Passion side of the Sagrada Familia, or me getting back to the hotel from the trade show yesterday.

I’m in Barcelona for a big trade show. Amy came along and we spent the first few days sightseeing, taking in the tapas, etc. On Monday, we took a tour of the Sagrada Familia, which began construction ~140 years ago and is allegedly closing in on its completion.

The Nativity facade

The amazing design and countless pieces of iconography by architect Antonio Gaudî blew our minds, as did the flexibility of the building to continue accommodating and incorporating new elements, changes in artistic style, advances in technology. I told a pal at the show yesterday that one of the things that amazed me was just the in-process-ness of it all. That is, we’d been to the Duomo in Milan and read about its 6 centuries of construction, but that’s all safely in the past (albeit ending in 1965). The idea that we’re in a building that’s been in process for nearly a century and a half, in our current era of instant gratification, is something else.

Looking up, inside the church

I didn’t tell him about my dream. That night, sleepless and feverish, as I began to come down with what I hope is just a cold, I had a lucid dream in which the organic shapes of the Nativity facade began to shift in color and grow even more immense in scale. The true nature of the Sagrada Familia was clear to me as I stared at the maw of the entrance: it wasn’t a church but a machine for capturing souls. Gaudî, the only person buried there, was its first victim. I had an absolute conviction that my only courses of action were to flee Barcelona or to blow up the building.

The golden ratio steps leading down the Nativity tower and/or an interdimensional vortex intended to capture the souls of the unwary.

The lucidity of the dream made it feel more like a revelation than the product of exhaustion, anxiety and fever, and were I a more psychotic man, I’d have taken it as The Truth. Fortunately for all involved, I have too much work to do to just bail on reality, so I can laugh all this off, as long as I Never Sleep Again. For now, it’s back to the trade show. . . .

Afternoon light through stained glass, Nativity side.

(But if you’re ever here, book the tour, because it’s fantastic. Our tour guide looked and talked like a Spanish Steve Buscemi, c.1994, and had a lot of fun trying to explain hyperbolic paraboloids to us.)

Art

I made some art in the past week! Below is a postcard I did in gray pocket-brush & watercolors of a tree in my backyard I call The Archer. I should’ve put more of a curve in that right-hand limb to get that across. I was drawing from memory / a drawing of it I made two years ago. Here’s a study on sketch paper, to figure out how the postcard should go. The same afternoon, I was in NYC as a luncheon guest at the Economic Club of New York and made a quick sketch of the guy across the table from me, because I was trying to catch the slump of his arm & elbow on the table. On our second day in Barcelona, I drew a postcard of a seagull who was standing on the railing of our terrace, in ink & watercolor pencil, then took out the water-brush and gave it a wash. Proportions & such are wrong, but I was drawing from life, not a photo, and was just hoping the seagull wasn’t going to move or fly away. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.

Until Next Time

Where is the fisherman? Where is the goat? / Where is the keeper in his carrion coat?,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

Hitting The Links: 10/22/23

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 10:02:53 GMT

He’s from Barcelona

I’m in Barcelona for a trade show this week. We got in yesterday morning, waited ~45 minutes on line at passport control, and got to our amazing last-minute hotel. Our plan for accommodations fell through on Thursday evening, necessitating finding a hotel during a massive trade show; I opted for scenic over ease-of-access to mass transit, which I’m sure I’ll regret during the 50-minute walks in dress shoes & suit back from the Fira in the evenings, but that’s my stylish cross to bear.

“We” as in, Amy came along on this trip. For some reason, she wasn’t interested in coming along to last year’s version of this show, which was in Frankfurt. (That said, she’s already checked off the calendar for next year’s edition in Milan.) Because she actually plans things, it means I’ll get to see some of the interior of the Sagrada Familia on this trip, unlike the last time I was here.

“Last time I was here” as in the 2016 of this trade show, which is funny because my only last-minute “I should take this” bit of packing (I mean, I packed 1 hour before leaving the house, but this was the thing I grabbed at the top of the stairs) was A Year And A Day, the new book of essays by Phillip Lopate. That one collects Phillip’s year-long blog experiment for The American Scholar, from 2016, and one of the first questions I wrote down was, “What was it like revisiting your 2016 self for this book?”, and now I have to try to recall who I was when I was last walking this city. It was early October, so pre-election, which means my brain was wired differently.

If I start really diving into that snapshot of Gil, instead of just looking at my snapshots from that trip, this email will grow into something far longer but much more boring than Proust, so here’s a pic from last night’s view of Porto Vell from our terrace.

And now, let’s hit the links!

Links & Such

Recent Virtual Memories Show podcasts: Lisa Morton • Daniel Clowes • Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight • Brett Martin • Peter Rostovsky
RIP Suzanne Somers . . . RIP Burt Young . . .
Remembrance of Louise Glück from a passel of writers, incl. Henri Cole.
EEE! New Celia Paul has a new exhibition in Venice! I should change my flight back from Barcelona so I can attend the opening! (I won’t but I should.)
“Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change.” Interesting piece by Jason Farago on the cultural stasis of this century. The hero turns out to be Amy Winehouse. Before you read this, you should listen to my conversation w/W. David Marx and read his Status And Culture.
Also, I’ll note that when he says he can’t see any differentiating fashion of the present moment while looking at Met-goers, he might be not be noticing my biggest fashion bête noire of our fallen time: sneakers (dress or otherwise) with suits.
Speaking of politicos, this piece on the fashion choices of the politicians in NZ’s Maori Party make me feel like we’re in a William Gibson novel, but I guess it’s more resonant with Pynchon’s depictions of the Hereros adopting the garb of their German genocidaires.
Also speaking of fashion, I liked reading about Nick Wooster’s morning routine.
Apparently, Barnes & Noble is getting freaky w/store design & branding. (The article also mentions that they’re opening a big-ol’ store in Paramus, NJ, near where their great one with the used books section closed.)
Neat interview with James McMullan about his contribution to the 60th anniversary issue of the New York Review of Books.
Liz Hand wrote about Shirley Jackson in the Guardian. Liz & I were supposed to record another go-’round this summer at Readercon in advance of her new novel, A Haunting On The Hill, which is an authorized sequel to Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, but a weather emergency meant she had to head home early. Grr, because it’s an awfully good novel and I’d have loved to talk with Liz about that project and Jackon’s influence on her career. We still can, but it would’ve been cool to do that before Halloween, y’know?
A former Marine sniper interviews a Ukrainian sniper about the morality of killing. It’s fascinating and may, on multiple levels, also be triggering.

Current/Recent Reading

Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

A Year And A Day: An Experiment In Essays - Phillip Lopate

Sound Body, Fractured Mind

I managed 4 out of 5 workouts last week, missing day 1 (Friday) because of travel. I’m currently nowhere on this week’s cycle: too busy with work, packing and other stuff on Friday to get in my weights, too busy trying to stay awake Saturday after getting into Barcelona on the redeye, although Amy & I did manage 8+ miles of walks that day. Unless I can make something happen in the hotel fitness center today, I think we’re just gonna write this week off, as well as next Friday, while I’m in transit. Hope I don’t turn into a blob, but I suspect I’ll be doing so much walking, especially once the trade show starts, that I’ll come home 5 lbs. lighter than when I left.

Until Next Time

Open your heart, open your mind / A train is leaving all day,

—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Bluesky • Instagram • Flickr • YouTube • Linktr.ee

The Analog Desk

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 14:54:26 GMT

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 559 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with Lisa Morton as we celebrate spooky season & the release of her new book, The Art of the Zombie Movie! We talk about the fun of researching the history of zombies in pop culture and folklore, the challenge & joy of assembling the 500 illustrations in the book (including one-sheets, stills, alternative art, and more), and how she got messed up at an early age by Dawn Of The Dead. We also get into her history of horror (it was all over once she saw The Exorcist), how she found herself as a writer and wound up with 6 Bram Stoker Awards®, her take on fast vs. slow zombies, and what she found researching the George Romero papers at UPitt. We also discuss her experience as a bookseller in Los Angeles (go, Iliad Bookshop!), LA’s writer-culture, getting her heart broken by screenwriting, her work to bring the classic Fantasmagoriana anthology to a new reading public, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read The Art of the Zombie Movie!

Last week, I posted Episode 558 of The Virtual Memories Show, feat. a conversation with cartoonist Daniel Clowes about his amazing, haunting, hilarious new graphic novel, MONICA (Fantagraphics)! We talk about how MONICA it grew out of his attempts at trying to figure out his childhood, the ways in which the book is haunted by the deaths of cartoonists Richard Sala and Gary Leib (oh, and those of Daniel’s brother and mom), what art, community and mortality have come to mean to him, and how Clowes has pushed the limits of his storytelling and art to make one of the great graphic novels of the decade. We get into what he’s learned from using multiple genres within a single book, the artists who influenced him and the ones he had to escape, the 7-year gap from his previous book, PATIENCE, and his late-stage depression at finishing MONICA. We also discuss how he was always awaiting the shift from pamphlet-comics to hardcover original books, how thankful he was to not be good enough to get work at Marvel or DC in his youth, his only takeaway from writing for movies, why he prefers drawing over writing even though A) he’s a really good writer and B) would never draw from someone else’s script, the only advice he would ever give young artists, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read MONICA!

Recent episodes: Rachel Shteir • Patrick McDonnell • Keith Knight • Brett Martin • Peter Rostovsky • Bill Griffith

Get a LIFE

This morning I finished writing a journal. That is, I wrote the last page of it. As is my routine, I wrote the closing date on the cover, opened the drawer of The Analog Desk, and put it in the stack.

When I reached for a new notebook to start tomorrow’s journal, I realized I only have four of them left. Before getting started on today’s postcard, I went to the site where I order them and discovered Calepino is out of stock of my No. 2 Papier Quadrillé. I am, as you can imagine, ridiculously specific about this.

I began hand-recording my banalities daily on July 10, 2019, according to the one at the bottom of the stack. There are no great revelations about my life contained in all those notebooks, unless “Man, he was boring,” counts as a revelation. Each one accounts for 5-6 weeks of a near-complete lack of introspection and almost no comment on the world at large. An investigator or biographer would likely conclude that there’s no way I’d spend time every day recording such tedium, and that there must be a cipher in place, or a steganographic secret, a mundane Voynich.

(I suspect my postcard-a-day habit, begun in 2022, reveals more of my secrets and persona/e, but I don’t keep track of them and have sent them to so many unrelated people that there’s no way anyone can put the picture together.) (Least of all me.)

So I put in my email to get an alert when they’re back in stock, but 4 blank journals means I only have ~22 weeks left ~~to live~~ to write. It was an irony when I ordered ~18 months’ worth of these notebooks shortly before my CLL diagnosis in 2021, but just like that whole experience, I’ve outlived it and have to keep making plans for the future.

Tucked behind the last 4 Calepino notebooks is my emergency backup: an A6 5mm grid notebook. It’s stitched, rather than stapled, with a smoother cover and slightly larger dimensions. I picked up in a Tokyo stationers in February 2020, and it reminds me of another time just before this one. It’s called LIFE, and clearly I should get more of that (haha).

Art

Not a goddamned thing to share with you. I made a couple of sketches during my meeting in Michigan last week, but nothing worth scanning. I’ll bring a pad & some pens along to Barcelona for next week’s business trip, and I hope to draw something worth sharing, but you never know. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.