Guests & Greys

Continuing the annual Guest List tradition, meeting grand-dog, & a fast flower

Podcastery

This week, I posted Episode 568 of The Virtual Memories Show, featuring our annual Guest List show! Seventeen of this year’s podcast-guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2023 and the books they hope to get to in 2024! Participants include Ho Che Anderson, Josh Bayer, Howard Fishman, Priscilla Gilman, Bill Griffith, Dean Haspiel, Sara Lippmann, Patrick McDonnell, James McMullan, Lisa Morton, Jonathan Papernick, Andrew Porter, Dawn Raffel, Paul B. Rainey, Peter Rostovsky, Scott Samuelson, and Karl Stevens (+ me; those are most of my 2023 reads up above), so give it a listen and READ MORE BOOKS IN 2024!

Last 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 Polaroids 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, 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, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Valid Until Sunset

Recent episodes: Christian Wiman • Danny Fingeroth • Matt Bors • Phillip Lopate • Leslie Stein • Josh Bayer

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
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