The Analog Desk

New podcast with Lisa Morton, getting a LIFE, but no art

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.

Until Next Time

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

A vague sensation quickens / In his young and restless heart / And a bright and nameless vision / Has him longing to depart,

—Gil Roth
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