One More Mailbox
New podcast w/Joseph Monninger, Angel's food, + links & more
Intro
Man, the longest day of the year and I still didn’t make the time to finish this week’s newsletter. I’ve got a lot going on with work, esp. with a quarterly meeting of my board of trustees on Friday, but that’s no excuse.
I wrote a little about anxiety last week, and of course every word I write or utter is fueled by / tinged with anxiety, so I don’t feel uptight telling you that it’s plaguing me a bit now. I’m having trouble seeing past date-milestones, like, if I just make it past X-event, I’ll be okay. But then Y-event is on the horizon, followed by Z & all the others.
It reminds me of when I took up running in 2018. In the early days, on I could only get over some of the hills by telling myself, “One more mailbox,” and trying to keep from quitting after each one, because I knew I’d never restart. Then, when I began running with The Guys a few months later, I learned to go slower, to take quitting out of the equation, to trust myself to Just Keep Going. That carried over when I ran solo. Metaphorically, I suppose I’m trying to say that learning from others and sharing the route changed how I approached running. And/Or life.
I don’t have a show scheduled for next week. I’ve been pushing too hard with some things, a few guest-postponements in the past few weeks meant I scrambled to get new shows lined up in a big hurry, and I just don’t have the time & focus to read and prep to record with someone this weekend. I hope to have a new episode ready for July 4th week, but that’s not guaranteed either. I’ve got a whole ton of guests lined up for the rest of the summer, and have made some headway on those, but in the short term, I maybe need to let up on the gas a little. (Of course, I may wind up recording with someone this weekend and providing a show next week; I’m just not planning on it.)
Looking back, I suspect this current sense of unraveling began in mid-April when I found that week’s guest, Michael Denneny, dead at his apartment. Since then, I’ve been scrambling, lining up guests late, finishing reading a few hours before recording, and other derelictions of self-imposed duty, while maintaining the façade that I was cruising along.
On Monday, I attended Michael’s remembrance in NYC, and got to hear wonderful stories from his friends & colleagues. After the slate of speakers, they opened the floor to anyone else who wanted to speak. I didn’t know if I should, but did, moved by all the lovely stories people told about Michael and his role in their lives.
As the accidental witness to his death, I felt like a specter at the memorial, or maybe the undertaker, or the older man in Katherine Mansfield’s story, “Her First Ball,” cited by this week’s guest, Joseph Monninger, in his memoir about his terminal NSCLC diagnosis, Goodbye To Clocks Ticking. The figure that reminds everyone death is always near.
I barely ate that day, and was crashing from low blood sugar by the end of the event, when I joined the impromptu speakers to give thanks to them and to try to appreciate the conversation that was Michael’s life. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was well received, and the family was recording the event, so maybe I’ll find out soon.
The lack of food was semisorta deliberate. I was thinking of something Rabbi Zvi said years ago, during Yom Kippur. He said one reason Jews fast on that day is to emulate the angels, who neither eat nor drink, and are closer to God.
I’ve joked before that I fast on Yom Kippur not because I’m religious but because I just want the affliction, but I thought about Zvi’s words that day, and what it means to get closer to something greater than yourself. Through community, through enlightenment, through sharing.
There’s been a lot of death and death-in-life for me this year, and I suspect this anxiety and last-minute-ness is a misguided attempt at asserting life through frantic, spastic activity. But this past week — esp. Michael’s memorial, recording with Joe —has me trying to find something different, maybe a reset.
I’m gonna quiet down now and see if that helps. Hope to see you next week.
And now, on with The Virtual Memories Show.
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 543 of The Virtual Memories Show feat. writer and professor Joseph Monninger, who received a stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis only 3 days into his retirement in 2021, and has lived to write a new memoir, GOODBYE TO CLOCKS TICKING: How We Live While Dying (Steerforth). We talk about how he’s navigating life on borrowed time, his notion of legacy and how it plays out in his books and his students, and what he’s learned about impatience and regret. We get into the books that brought him solace, the comforts of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, how Wilder’s Our Town inspired the memoir’s title, and his desire to take the world in while he’s still in it. We also discuss the origins of his writing life, his Peace Corps stint in Burkina Faso and the big novels that he and the other volunteers traded, whether there are any books he wants to get to before he dies, what we each learned about oncology waiting room etiquette and the grace & goodwill of oncologists, the issue of assisted suicide, and a LOT more. (Plus, I talk about this week’s NYC memorial for Michael Denneny.) Give it a listen and go read Goodbye To Clocks Ticking
Last week, I posted Episode 542 of The Virtual Memories Show feat. Andrew Porter, whose wonderful new short story collection, THE DISAPPEARED, explores the intricacies of loss in day-to-day life, and all that vanishes as we grow into middle age. We talk about why he set (almost) all the stories in The Disappeared in San Antonio and Austin, how he had to adjust his writing life once he became a dad, and why he loves writing about artists. We also get into his path into writing, and his lessons learned from teaching fiction for more than 20 years: how student sensibilities around genre have changed, the stories he’s had to retire from teaching, and Marilynne Robinson’s influence of his teaching style. Plus, the changes in the lit-mag scene, his newfound penchant for flash fiction, how he lost all his writing in an apartment break-in 20+ years ago (and my twisted idea for a story about that), and plenty more. Give it a listen and go read The Disappeared
Other recent episodes: Jonathan Papernick • Scott Samuelson • Brian Dillon • John Wray
Links & Such
RIP Robert Gottlieb (appreciation by David Remnick, tribute by Cynthia Ozick) . . . RIP Glenda Jackson . . . RIP Daniel Ellsberg (appreciation/history by Fred Kaplan, a past guest) . . . RIP Carol Higgins Clark . . . RIP Richard Snyder . . .
Reverse RIP Bookforum is BACK! Go subscribe!
Re Fathers’ Day, I really enjoyed this piece on fatherhood and great painters, by Sebastian Smee.
Nice Washington Post piece on keeping it analog, with input from David Sax. I mean, you know me: I mail out a postcard every day, just made the 2nd ish of my print-only ’zine (speaking of, HMU for issues 1 & 2 of Haiku for Business Travelers), and draw on paper. I like being an analog kid (apologies to Rush).
Speaking of, Brian Dillon has a neat piece about reading print magazines past cover to cover: “Old magazines are cheap time machines, archaeologies of collective desire.”
A few weeks ago, I noted my disdain for sneakers-with-suits, esp. when one is meeting with the President, but apparently the Sneakerhead lobby wants to take things even farther.
One of my dream novel ideas was about an NGO trying to rebuild the Buddhas of Bamiyan that the Taliban destroyed in 2001, and finding a ghost in the caverns. I’ll never write it, but it’s nice that the Taliban are giving tours now.
Speaking of literary careers and things that will never happen, this piece argues that structural changes to the publishing world (and the focus on elite MFA programs) would make Cormac McCarthy’s career impossible.
Amber Sparks had a great piece about this on Slate recently, which incl. the lines, “The study’s authors found that about 40 percent of prize winners between 1918 and 2019 went to an Ivy League school. A particularly shocking number to me was this one: Graduates of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop are 49 times more likely to win a major literary prize compared with those of any other MFA program since 2000.”
And speaking of Cormac McCarthy, Gary Fisketjohn wrote about editing him.
If you want to hear business-Gil, here's a podcast I did with CPHI Online on bio/pharma outsourcing and manufacturing trends.
Yesterday, as mentioned at the top, was the summer solstice. Here’s a pic of one of the tiger lilies in my yard that afternoon
Current reading
Goodbye To Clocks Ticking - Joseph Monninger
The Black Locomotive - Rian Hughes
Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Art
I only made a few sketches, but I did reconfigure my office/library so I can comfortably get a drawing/drafting table down here. I’m hoping the dedicated space will free me up. You should go to the Flickr album of most of the art I’ve made & find something you like.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
Technically, I did get in my 5-day weights/yoga routine. Because of work + the memorial for Michael on Monday, I didn’t get that day’s yoga in, so I did a yoga-workout Tuesday morning, then weights after work. For that last weight-workout, I decided to change things up a little. I’ve been stagnating on the dumbbell weight I use, so I decided to add 5 lbs. to set 1 & see how many reps of each exercise I could do on that circuit. Then I dropped 2.5 lbs. with each set. The first 2 were pretty close to the 10 reps I do for most exercises, and set 3 — at my usual weight — went fine. When I dropped below my usual weight for sets 4 & 5, I increased the reps for each exercise, going to 15 for set 4 and 20 for set 5. I was a sweaty, grotesque mess by the end, but also felt way more swole than a typical weight workout. So, yes, I should’ve added weight earlier and built up; sue me.
Until Next Week
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back next week, maybe with a new podcast, definitely some great links, maybe some art, & who knows maybe a little profundity or something.
Too many hands on my time / Too many feelings / Too many things on my mind,
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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