The Secret Sharer
New podcast with Adam Sisman, Barcelona psychosis, & some art
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
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 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.
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 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. . . .
(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
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.
Where is the fisherman? Where is the goat? / Where is the keeper in his carrion coat?,
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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" it wasn’t a church but a machine for capturing souls."!!
Thanks GIL for taking us along. Your photos and comments revealed lots of stimulating new points of view. Wallis