Two Gentlemen With The 'Rona
New podcast ep., lots of links, some art, & more
Intro
Welcome to the first Substack edition of my Virtual Memories Show e-mail! I put up a post last week about why I’m trying this platform instead of sticking with MailChimp; basically, I’d like foster more of a community among my listeners/readers, and Substack seems to have tools that can facilitate that. Which is to say, leave comments! (I’ll also start discussion threads in future, and I’ll get the paid tier stuff going once I’ve backlogged enough material that I’m not scrambling to post bonus material every week or two.)
For those of you who are coming to this via Substack and not from my existing e-mail list, here’s a quick intro: I’m Gil Roth, and I make a weekly cultural conversation podcast called The Virtual Memories Show. We celebrated the 500th episode last summer, and my archives a filled with lots of great talks with writers, artists, cartoonists, critics, musicians, translators, publishers, and many more culture-making people. You can learn more about me at my site (& check out the archives of every episode).
I’ll write more in future, but I’m still a little whomped by COVID (my first time; tested positive Christmas Eve) and now getting back into the swing of my day job. For now, on with The Virtual Memories Show!
Podcastery
This week, I posted Episode 520 of my Virtual Memories Show. Instead of the usual format where I interview a guest, this one is our second annual “Gil gets interviewed” episode, with my pal Aaron Finkelstein returning to check in on the changes a year has wrought. Because was about a month past his first bout with COVID and I’d turned up positive with mine just 3 days earlier, and given our shared love of Shakespeare & bad puns, I subtitled this one Two Gentlemen With The ’Rona.
In the episode, we get into how a Yom Kippur fast sent me on some strange paths this fall, how our cultural touchstones mark us, what it means to be fair to our college-aged selves, and the identity of the one Watchmen character I never identified with. Along the way, we work through some of my personal failings and my ego-vanity complex, the analog/digital tightrope, whether bookishness is something we need to get over, and a LOT more, so go listen! (And go check out the first one we recorded, at the end of 2021, when we had a lot more pep.)
The last episode of 2022 was my annual Guest List show, where a whole bunch of the year’s pod-guests chime in about the favorite books they read in 2022 and what/who they hope to read in 2023. Participants include Jonathan Ames, Richard Butner, Howard Chaykin, Joe Ciardiello, Darryl Cunningham, Eva Hagberg, Kathe Koja, Ken Krimstein, Glenn Kurtz, W. David Marx, Dave McKean, Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, Jim Ottaviani, Celia Paul, Nicole Rudick, Jerry Saltz, Dmitry Samarov, David Sax, Ruth Scurr, Sebastian Smee, Peter Stothard, and Marina Warner (+ me!), so go check that one out and find some great additions to your TBR pile! (And visit The Guest List archive page for all 10 years of this annual feature.)
Links & Such
RIP Pele . . . RIP Vivienne Westwood . . . RIP Barbara Walters
This 2-part Radley Balko interview of a retired criminal defense investigator will blow your goddamned mind: part 1 and part 2
Travel tips from Jerry Saltz
Loved this piece about the US ambassadors to Japan & China going gaga over their respective high-speed trains
Nice interview with Simon Callow around his review of the new Paul Newman memoir
I enjoyed this profile of editor Robert Gottlieb, whom I've tried but failed to get on the show a few times
I liked this Sebastian Smee piece on Warhol's silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe
I also dug this review of Charles Ray’s Met exhibition by David Salle. I use a quote of Salle’s (from Janet Malcom’s profile of him) in my “mission statement” on The Virtual Memories Show’s website:
“Then why do you give all these interviews?”
Salle thought for a moment. “It’s a lazy person’s form of writing. It’s like writing without having to write. It’s a form in which one can make something, and I like to make things.”
Ruth Scurr noted that quote during our podcast last year when she was checking out my work before our session, and she intuited/deduced some of my motivation for making The Virtual Memories Show, and that’s when I concluded I should never do a podcast with a biographer as good as Ruth Scurr.
The Thing About Charles Ray is that seeing one of his pieces at the Art Institute in Chicago in 2013 inspired me to write a short story for the first time in like 20 years. Here’s a PDF if you want to subject yourself to THAT nonsense.
Speaking of art, NPR did a feature on the 99-year-old artist Jonah Kinigstein. Go listen to my 2 sessions with Jonah, from 2015 and last summer
New Year's resolution: Choke out a mountain lion
New Year's anti-resolution: Piss in my fiancee's fireplace
The only real New Year’s resolution I have is to keep up the one I made in 2022: mail out a postcard every (mail-)day this year. If you’re interested in being on the
victimrecipient list for that, just drop me a line with your mailing address.
Current reading
Septology - by Jon Fosse
Francis Rothbard: The Tale of a Fastidious Feral - by Thomas Woodruff
Art
I knew I was starting to recover from COVID when I had the idea for an art project on Dec. 30. I would draw every author whose book I finished in 2022! Then I went to The Big List Of Every Book I’ve Finished Reading Since 1989 & realized that would entail 57 sketches (well, 56, as there’s a punchline), but I committed, and broke out a 12”x9” pad & my pencil sharpener.
I have 16 of them done so far, & I’ll be interested in seeing how/whether I get better at drawing faces over the course of this. I can only hope the living will forgive me.
Set 1: Virginia Woolf, David Thomson, Raman Sehgal, Ford Madox Ford, Glenn Kurtz, Scott Meslow, Italo Calvino, and Donald Hall
Set 2: Nicole Rudick, David Sipress, Mark Prins, Anna Della Subin, Cormac McCarthy, Rebecca Mead, Sebastian Smee, and Nicholas Delbanco
I’ve started on set 3, & hope to post the rest of these in subsequent e-mails. You can find (pretty much) all the art I’ve made since I took up drawing & painting in Jan. 2021 (just after I turned 50) over at this Flickr album. It’s chronological, which means you can see how terrible I was when I started.
I plan to draw 2023’s authors over the course of the year, so I don’t have to overwhelm myself with this sorta project next December/January.
Sound Body, Fractured Mind
As you’d expect, COVID whomped my ability to exercise, but I restarted my routine on Saturday, getting in a 40-minute yoga set, followed by weights on Sunday, yoga Monday, and an abbreviated set of weights on Tuesday. I’ll rest Wed/Thu, and try to restart the full 5-day routine on Friday. Throughout, I kept up my first-thing-in-the-morning routine: 2 minute palms-on-the-floor jackknife stretch, 4 sun salutations, & 75-sec. plank. Even with the heavy congestion that wrecked my breathing, I managed to start each day with that, so yay me. And I got in a 5k walk with a rehabbing pal of mine this morning, my longest walk since this started.
Until Next Week
Thanks for reading this far! I’ll be back next with a new podcast, fun links, some art, & maybe a little profundity or something.
—Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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