Virtual Memories Show: Recent Episodes
Gil Roth
Virtual Memories Show 607:
Christopher Brown
“I wanted to combine the nature writing style I had been riffing on in my FIELD NOTES newsletter, with the potential for lyrical, descriptive translation of the richness of the world into language, and also provide an effective information delivery vehicle, like classic American non-fiction, and then telling a story in a way that a novel or a good memoir tells a story.”
With his phenomenal new book, A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMPTY LOTS: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and Other Wild Places (Timber Press), Christopher Brown shifts from novels into a new mode and I am HERE for it. We talk about the eco-cosmos of East Austin, TX, the years of observation that opened him to the hidden pockets of wildness in urban environments, why solitude in nature is a myth, what we have to gain from taking a long walk, Long Time vs. the short presence of Anglos in Texas, how 2020’s lockdown turned off global capitalism and showed how society might truly change, and how this book mutated from when we talked about it at Readercon 2023. We get into Bruce Sterling’s unforgettable critique of his writing, the process of turning a narrative of colonization into one of decolonization, (eco)psychogeography & the Situationists, why he (begrudgingly) brought the personal/memoiristic into the book and how it helped him come to terms with himself, and what a workshop with horror writers taught him about the truth-telling power of non-redemptive storytelling. We also discuss the design flaws of the agricultural revolution, how his readers in different regions respond to his FIELD NOTES newsletter, the nature of mysticism and writing a narrative about transcending the self, hiking a Massachusetts marsh in summer with Jeff VanderMeer, and plenty more. Give it a listen! And go read A NATURAL HISTORY OF EMPTY LOTS!
“Solitude in nature is a myth. What you find in nature is a much deeper connection with all this other life around you, a connection that precedes language and the alienation that’s embodied in language.”
“To me, the most dramatic lesson of COVID wasn’t how much of nature was out there, hiding in plain sight, but the possibility of change, the immediate, sudden change in how we live and work, the idea that global capitalism could be completely turned off for weeks at a time.”
“Preoccupation with planning for the future is tied up with that preoccupation with accumulating surplus to survive the season and all the unhealthy things that produces, even if that’s the killer app of our civilization.”
“The narrower the aperture, the more plausible the ambition.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Christopher Brown is the Philip K. Dick, World Fantasy and John W. Campbell Award-nominated author of the novels Tropic of Kansas, Rule of Capture and Failed State. Also an accomplished lawyer, he has worked on two Supreme Court confirmation hearings, led the technology corporate practice of a major American law firm, and been the General Counsel of two public companies.
Follow Christopher on Bluesky, Instagram and Mastodon, and subscribe to his FIELD NOTES newsletter. (And go listen to our 2018, 2019, lockdown, 2020, and 2023 conversations.)
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Christopher by Gina Grande. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 606:
Dmitry Samarov
“I start the book out with the statement that somebody else should be writing and publishing this thing, but nobody did, so I had to do it.”
Artist Dmitry Samarov returns to the show to bail me out after a stressful couple of weeks and to explore his fantastic new book, MAKING PICTURES IS HOW I TALK TO THE WORLD, a survey of his art from the ’80s to today. We talk about the process of selecting pieces for the book, what artistic legacy means to him, finding roots of his work in his childhood, and why the notion of ‘progression’ doesn’t apply to his work. We get into the transformative experience of working at Tangible Books and how it’s inspiring his new ‘zine project, why he’s culling a lot of his library and how he’s deciding which books to keep, how his bookshelf paintings started to open him to abstraction, and why literary folks like Magritte but painters don’t. We also discuss our monastic devotion to art and Antonio López García’s devotion to painting his quince tree, why artistic memoirs tend to be no good but why not-great artists can be good critics, what it means to see his own books in thrift stores, how moving some furniture can change one’s perspective, why he’s against starting art with An Idea, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go get Making Pictures Is How I Talk To The World!
“There’s change, but progression implies you start at the bottom and head to the top. There may be that in my work, but it’s not my place to judge.”
“I’ve been trying to reconcile the visual art with the verbal art, but I’ve been drifting back to the visual.”
“My life is laser-focused on getting me to do this work. Everything else is noise and chores.”
“If you lead a life of endless repetition, what you start noticing is these subtle differences.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Dmitry Samarov is a painter and writer living in Chicago, IL.
Follow Dmitry through his newsletter and his podcasts, HU U NO and THAT HORRORCAST, and go listen to our previous conversations: 2014, 2015, 2018, 2020, lockdown, 2021, and 2022.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Dmitry by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 605:
Stephen B. Shepard
“I wanted to tell the story of his life in seclusion, and why he became famous for not wanting to be famous.”
With Salinger’s Soul: His Personal & Religious Odyssey (Post Hill Press), author and retired journalist/editor Stephen B. Shepard explores the life of JD Salinger and the hidden core of an author who became famous for avoiding fame. We get into why Stephen decided to chase this elusive ghost, why Salinger didn’t make it into his previous book about Jewish American writers, whether he believes Salinger’s unpublished writing will see the light of day, and why it was important that he approach the book as biography and not literary criticism (although he does bring a reader’s voice to the book). We talk about the lack of sex in Salinger’s fiction, the uncanniness of Holden Caulfield’s voice, Salinger’s WWII trauma, his rise to fame, search for privacy, abandonment of publishing, embrace of Vedanta & ego-death, and his pattern of pursuing young women, and how it all maybe ties together. We also discuss Stephen’s career as a journalist and how it influences his writing, what he learned in building a graduate program in journalism at CUNY, the ways we both started out in business-to-business magazines (he went a lot farther than I did, editing Newsweek and Business Week), how journalism has changed over the course of his career, Philip Roth’s biography and what it means to separate the book from the writer, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Salinger’s Soul!
“I think the material [Salinger’s unpublished writing] is there, but the question is how good is it going to be. I’m not too optimistic because his last published works weren’t very good.”
APPLE PLAYER TK
“What I learned building the curriculum for my journalism program was that everything I had learned wasn’t quite right.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Stephen with a copy of the galleys of Ian Hamilton’s never-published version of Salinger’s biographyStephen B. Shepard is the Founding Dean Emeritus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He served as a senior editor at Newsweek, the editor of Saturday Review, and editor-in-chief of Business Week. From 1992 to 1994, he was president of the American Society of Magazine Editors. Shepard was also a faculty member at the Columbia Journalism School, where he was cofounder and first director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowships, a mid-career program for working journalists. A native New Yorker, Shepard graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, then received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York and his master’s degree from Columbia University.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Stephen’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Stephen by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 604:
Benjamin Dreyer
“When I started the book, what I was doing was trying to replicate everything that I’ve ever read in somebody else’s style manual into my own voice. I realized a) ‘No, you don’t,’ and b) ‘What is your voice anyway?'”
Benjamin Dreyer joins the show to talk about the joy of good writing. We talk about his career as managing editor and copy chief of the Random House, his post-retirement perspective on that role, the authors he enjoyed working with, the success of his first book, DREYER’S ENGLISH: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style (Random House), and his plans for the followup, DREYER’S FICTION (!). We get into why he’s leaving NYC and looking forward to Santa Monica (and talk about the books that he can leave behind and those he can’t), the way that writing a Substack newsletter has made him a better writer, how the copy-editor’s role is to enhance the writer’s work, not to reshape it, whether his online persona changed after retirement, his love of digressive footnotes, how he feels about “weird” catching on this election season, whether the success of Dreyer’s English surprised him, the moment he KNEW it was a hit, and what his authors had to teach him about the process of writing his first book. We also discuss the tension within the pronoun section of DE (c.2019), how he hopes to revise it, and why the mind needs to catch up with the soul sometimes. All this & a lot more, so give it a listen! And go read DREYER’S ENGLISH!
“The habit of being a writer has made me a better writer, but it’s also made me a better reader.”
“Whenever you get your hands on a new manuscript, read the first 30 or 40 pages with your hands very much behind your back (except for turning the pages).”
“Indolence doesn’t suit me at all, and it never has.”
“There’s always going to be something that someone younger than you does that you hate.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Benjamin Dreyer, author of the New York Times bestseller Dreyer’s English, is the retired managing editor and copy chief of the Random House division of Penguin Random House. Benjamin began his publishing career as a freelance proofreader and copy editor. In 1993, he became a production editor at Random House, overseeing books by writers including Michael Chabon, Edmund Morris, Suzan-Lori Parks, Michael Pollan, Peter Straub, and Calvin Trillin. He has copyedited books by authors including E. L. Doctorow, David Ebershoff, Frank Rich, and Elizabeth Strout, as well as Let Me Tell You, a volume of previously uncollected work by Shirley Jackson. A graduate of Northwestern University, he lives in New York City for another week or two.
Follow Benjamin on Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram, and subscribe to his Substack.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Benjamin’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Benjamin & Sallie by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 603:
Nicholas Delbanco
“More and more I measure success in terms of the distance between intention and execution.”
Nicholas Delbanco returns to the show to celebrate his 32nd book and his first true foray into memoir (or ME-moir), STILL LIFE AT EIGHTY (Mandel Vilar Press)! We talk about how the rediscovery of the 40-page history of art he wrote at eleven years old (!) sparked this project, how he built the book as a mosaic, why he centers it around the homes, totem-objects, and writers in his life, and why he wanted his first memoir to be an act of gratitude rather than a list of gripes. We get into decision to part with some of his library and the books he regrets selling, his long-term interest in literary and artistic reputation and how its study helped him navigate the transition from “promising” to “distinguished” writer, his writing practice and process, and what he learned when recently revising a series of his early novels. We also discuss his embrace of compression and restraint in his later writing, why he’ll write a fictional character’s poetry but doesn’t write poetry on his own, what his family’s history and business taught him about the balance between the dutifulness and risks of art, his surprise at how quickly John Updike’s reputation waned, what he’s learned in his 80s, and a a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Still Life At Eighty: A Memoir!
“I think this book is a record of contentment, rather than complaint.”
“The good news is that I’m a better writer than I once was, and the bad news is the same.”
“My mother taught us that if it’s in your head, it doesn’t have to be on your shelf.”
“If you are fortunate enough to live to your 80s, your sell-by date is past.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Nicholas Delbanco is the author of more than thirty works of fiction and non-fiction. At the University of Michigan — from which he retired as the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor in English — he was Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and, for twenty-five years, the Hopwood Awards. As the founding Director of the Bennington Summer Writing Workshops, he created the low-residency MFA program. He is a recipient of the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and was twice awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Prose Fiction. He has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, and as a judge for the Pulitzer Prize. With his wife, Elena, he divides his time between Manhattan and Cape Cod.
Go listen to our 2017 and 2022 conversations!
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Nicholas’ home on Cape Cod on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Nick & Elena & violoncello case by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 602:
Dash Shaw
“Someone told me that reading this book after COVID felt like being a crowd of people again, and that felt great.”
Cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw returns to the show to celebrate his phenomenal new graphic novel, BLURRY (New York Review Comics). We talk about the decompressed mode he brought to this book, the turning points we encounter in the most mundane situations, his focus on the microscopic moments of doubt we have between two very similar things, and how he settled on the idea of structuring the book around nested stories (& figured out to thread them together by the end). We get into the 2×2 panel regularity of every page of Blurry and how that allowed him to build the book, how the experience of making a Clue miniseries changed his comics-making process, and how Blurry felt like he’d been playing a video game for a long time and then discovered a bonus level. We also discuss his film-making process and how that contrasts with the isolation of making comics, the ways his work tends toward collage, why naturalistic dialogue is another form of stylization, what it was like to grow up in a comics-friendly house, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read BLURRY!
“Making films, you can go back and forth about whether you should use take 3 or take 4 of a scene, and I’ll bolt up awake at night 4 years later thinking, ‘Why did I choose take 3 instead of take 4?’
“I like it when there’s something about the differences of things being as heightened as their similarities.”
“A lot of cartoonists had an older sibling to bring them into comics, but I had a dad.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Dash Shaw is the author of several graphic novels, including Bottomless Belly Button and Discipline, published by New York Review Comics in 2021 and named one of the best graphic novels of that year by The New York Times. He has written and directed two animated feature films, the most recent of which, Cryptozoo, won the Sundance Film Festival’s NEXT Innovator Prize and was nominated for the John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. He lives in Richmond, VA.
Follow Dash on Instagram. And go listen to our 2021 conversation!
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Dash by me. My friend shot us at a funny angle so it looks like I’m a bunch shorter than Dash. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 601:
Jess Ruliffson
“I started talking to some of my friends who were veterans with the idea of ‘what do you do when come home, after you’ve done your job but also been exposed to some weird stuff?'”
Comics journalist Jess Ruliffson joins the show to talk about the origins of INVISIBLE WOUNDS (Fantagraphics), her collection of stories from veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we wind up talking about guys’ butts, among other things. We get into her focus on male vulnerability, the Tim Hetherington photos that led her to make Invisible Wounds, the differences between soldiers who enlisted pre-/post-9/11, what it’s like to come home from war with no idea what to do next, and the new comics she’s making with her husband, Ernesto Barbieri, about his work as an ICU nurse. We talk about her upbringing in Mississippi, what she’s learned about interviewing and how stories sometimes take shape in retrospect, whether it’s “permissible” to tell stories about people in a different demographic, the common thread of moral injury in her work, how she met her husband through an MFA open house, and how she found her way into comics and journalism. We also discuss her frustration at not drawing the butts she wants to draw, her experiences teaching comics and learning to give her students permission, what she’s learned from making the Terrible Anvil podcast with Tom Hart, why her therapist insisted she never make a memoir, and more! Give it a listen! And go read Invisible Wounds!
“I’m really excited about the work my husband and & I are doing about the ICU, because there are a lot of things people don’t understand about healthcare and end-of-life care, and how medicine doesn’t really serve making people well some of the time.”
“What I learned from interviewing is that I’m an interrupter, but out of enthusiasm, not rudeness.”
“I guess all roads in my life lead toward trying to impress men.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Jess Ruliffson is an Eisner-nominated cartoonist. Her debut graphic novel, Invisible Wounds, was published by Fantagraphics Books in 2022. Her comic, Tenderness and Brutality, was nominated for an Online Journalism Award in 2023. Her work has appeared in The Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, Freeman’s Tale of Two Americas, The Gainesville Sun, The Nib, The Oxford American, Pantheon Books, VQR, Wildsam, and Wilson Quarterly. She teaches courses on the creative writing and the graphic novel at Boston University and comics studio practices at The Sequential Artists Workshop.
Photo by Jackie Ricciardi Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Jess’ home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Goofy photos of Jess by me; studio photo of Jess by Jackie Ricciardi. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 600:
Joe Coleman
“I don’t step back that often when I’m in there, because I’m inside this tiny bit of the universe. For me, that’s what living things are: endless world within world within world within world.”
For my 600th episode, the great artist Joe Coleman joins the show to celebrate his phenomenal new career-spanning retrospective book, A DOORWAY TO JOE: The Art of Joe Coleman (Fantagraphics). We talk about art, mortality, mythography, history, the corruption of the flesh, the nature of evil, his Odditorium & the power of relics, Dr. Mombooze-o‘s send-off for his dead parents, playing Whac-A-Mole with T-cell lymphoma, getting arrested for being an Infernal Machine, taxi-driving in NYC’s Travis Bickle era, the inspiration of the Hubble telescope, the pagan Celtic roots in Irish Catholicism, what it’s like to work on one square-inch of a painting for 8 hours at a time, our respective appearances on the Uncle Floyd Show, playing in the Steel Tips with Patrick McDonnell & Karen O’Connell, and how he found his love and muse in Whitney Ward. (Also, this one’s got an interminable intro, so jump to the 15:45 mark to start the conversation.) Give it a listen! And go lose yourself in A DOORWAY TO JOE!
“Even when my paintings are based on a historical subject, I still approach it like a self-portrait.”
“An afterlife? You gotta concentrate on this life, that’s what I need to do. I’ll find out about the other stuff when I need to.”
“I work on wood, not canvas, because I want the surface as smooth as glass. Any texture would prevent the information I could uncover.”
“It’s the corruption of the flesh that makes us all one, and it is holy as well.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Joe Coleman is a world-renowned painter, writer, and performer who has exhibited for five decades in major museums throughout the world including one-man exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the Barbican Centre in London, and Tilton Gallery and Dickinson Gallery in New York. His collectors have included Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Anthony Bourdain, Leonardo DiCaprio, and H.R. Giger. He was the subject of an award-winning feature length documentary, Rest in Pieces: A Portrait of Joe Coleman (1997) and lives with his wife Whitney Ward in upstate New York.
Follow Joe on Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Joe & Whitney’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of me, Joe & Whitney by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 599:
Mirana Comstock
“This is the first book in 70 years that can conjure up that era, and there will never ben another book that can, because everyone connected with that era is gone.”
This one’s all about legacies: familial, literary, cultural & institutional! Mirana Comstock joins the show to celebrate the publication of The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years with the Legends Who Lunch (Excelsior Editions/SUNY Press), by her grandfather, the late literary lion Konrad Bercovici. We get into how Mirana discovered this manuscript, what it meant to edit it & write the intro, what it was like to help bring the Algonquin scene & Konrad’s writing to life for a new generation of readers, and the experience of growing up in a multigenerational household of compulsive artists & writers. We talk about why her grandfather’s immense literary stature diminished, the nature of charisma and The Aura, the scandal of Chaplin stealing Konrad’s script for The Great Dictator, how the Algonquin habitués were the influencers of their time (only with something to say), how the Algonquin scene was like Vienna café society transposed into New York & American capitalism, Mirana’s discoveries as she researched the figures in the book, and why there’ll never be another book like this one. We also discuss the New-York Historical Society‘s acquisition of Konrad’s papers, her New York and how it’s changed, her idea for transforming her family’s writing into a meta-stage production, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read The Algonquin Round Table: 25 Years with the Legends Who Lunch !
“I’m not a book writer. I’m a published poet, I write lyrics, I’m a singer-songwriter, I’m an advertising writer, I’m screenwriter; I’ve written everything but books. It’s like I left that for the family to do.”
“These people at the Round Table were more alive when they were around each other.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Konrad Bercovici was a celebrated author and journalist, and friend of many leading 20th century figures, including John Reed, Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, and Paul Robeson. His granddaughter Mirana Comstock is a screenwriter, poet, and musician who has recorded and performed in New York and the Boston area, where she now resides. She is currently adapting one of her grandfather’s books as a miniseries.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Mirana’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Mirana in banner by someone else; other photos by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 598:
Anita Kunz
“It’s a whole different experience from making the paintings to see everything on a wall. That’s the only way to understand where you’ve been and where you’re going.”
Artist & illustrator Anita Kunz returns to the show to talk about how art saved her life, as we catch up on her fantastic books, ORIGINAL SISTERS and STRIKING A POSE: A Handy Guide to the Male Nude (Pantheon and Fantagraphics, respectively). We talk about Anita’s passion for figure drawing, how disconcerted some male viewers were by Striking A Pose, the difference between drawing women and men and all the tension and dynamics that go into making art from each gender, and why Winston Churchill’s granddaughter was none-too-pleased by his appearance in her book. We get into how her 2020 lockdown project of painting one portrait of a badass woman every day evolved into her Original Sisters series, how it feels to be closing in on 500 portraits (!), and how she keeps finding more badass women to paint. We also discuss her transition from an acclaimed illustration career into big art projects, how Barbara Nessim helped her find a gallery (and how she had to get over her fear of gallery owners), the book of parables & fables she’s making, how it feels to see her Original Sisters in museum exhibitions (and how much she’s looking forward to their big show at the Norman Rockwell Museum), the burden of having to be A Nice Girl In A Small Town growing up, how she makes great art while being racked with self-doubt, the importance of mentors and art-friends, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go get ORIGINAL SISTERS and STRIKING A POSE!
(And go listen to our 2021 conversation!)
“Because I wasn’t allowed to speak, I put it into my art.”
“My problem is I keep finding more and more badass women to paint. But I have to stop at 500.”
“My audience for Striking A Pose seems to be gay men, which I’m 1,000% happy about.”
“When I was writing up a commencement speech, I went through a lot of my old stuff, and the one thing I realized was that art saved my life.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Anita Kunz is an acclaimed illustrator and painter whose work has graced the covers of the New Yorker, Time, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and many other mass circulation periodicals. She was named one of the 50 most influential women in Canada by the National Post. She was the first woman and the first Canadian to have a solo show at the Library of Congress. She has been appointed Officer of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor. She lives in Toronto.
Follow Anita on Instagram, check out the Original Sisters site, and listen to our 2021 conversation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Anita’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Anita by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 597:
Shalom Auslander
“You are not born hating yourself; someone puts that in there. What would the world be like if they hadn’t?”
With his amazing new book, FEH: A Memoir (Riverside Books), Shalom Auslander explores how the judgmental disgust of FEH infected his life, and what it meant to get sick & tired of the disgust and outrage FEH-stival and look for a way out. We talk about the sense of shame, disgust and self-loathing at the core of our common story, why every bookstore should be called, ‘You Suck’, his friendship with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and how they bonded over FEH, and how hard he’s worked to find the un-FEH for his kids. We get into how story is our operating system (but what happens when there are bugs in the OS?), how the FEH machine came after his psychiatrist, the notion of misotheism, and his video series UNGODLY where he reads the Bible and asks, ‘What if God is the antagonist?’. We also discuss his ultra-orthodox upbringing, how “Jewish heritage” has been subsumed by Holocaust memorials, his antipathy toward the pop-culture Anne Frank and how he rewrote her for HOPE: A Tragedy, his time in the advertising industry and how it led to his TV show Happyish, his bleak Peanuts parody strip that got Jeannie Schulz’s approval, the neurological condition where blind people believe they can see and how it parallels our existential state of FEH, the realization that cynicism doesn’t mean you’re smart (just lazy), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read FEH: A Memoir!
“The story at the root of everything is, ‘You suck.’ . . . . Once you start to see the story, it’s a very easy story to see through. . . . And one of the things that needs fixing is the story that tells us there’s no fixing this.”
“It’s not that I’m an optimist; it’s that pessimism has let me down.”
“The more money there is in the creative industry, the shittier the work.’
“Writing this book, I found that I didn’t have to be pro-earnestness; I could just be anti-misery.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Shalom Auslander was raised in Monsey, NY. Nominated for the Koret Award for writers under thirty-five, he has published articles in Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Tablet magazine, and The New Yorker, and has had stories aired on NPR’s This American Life. He is the author of the short story collection Beware of God, the memoir Foreskin’s Lament, and the novels HOPE: A Tragedy and Mother for Dinner. He is the creator of Showtime’s Happyish. He lives in Los Angeles. His new book is FEH: A Memoir.
Subscribe to Shalom’s Substack.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at a generic hotel in New York City on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Shalom by Radiance Photography; other photo by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 596:
Maurice Vellekoop
“For me, sex and love was too complicated and scary, so I would draw it rather than experience it.”
Artist & illustrator Maurice Vellekoop joins the show to celebrate his amazing new graphic memoir, I’M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER (Pantheon). We talk about the midlife crisis that led to the memoir (and the subsequent crisis that almost made him give up), the joy and pain of putting his life on the page, his process of self-discovery as a gay man and an artist, and why his mother hoped she wouldn’t live to see the book come out. We get into his (editor) partner’s sigh that told him the first draft needed a drastic rewrite, the role sublimation has played in his art & sex life, his accidental technique for drawing himself crying, how the AIDS crisis did & didn’t affect his life, his decision on how to depict sex in the book, the incredible color palettes he uses throughout the work, and the realization that he had a 500-page book on his hands. We also discuss life on Toronto Island and what it was like during lockdown, why he’d like to try stage design (just once), his Pride tradition, why publishing a book of erotica was a great stepping-stone for making a memoir, and more! Give it a listen! And go read I’M SO GLAD WE HAD THIS TIME TOGETHER!
“I realized that maybe a 20-page essay on Wagner’s Tannhauser was not the best way to end a memoir.”
“I’ve been telling people: if you’re going to publish a memoir, it’s a good idea to publish a book of erotica first, because then you’ve already exposed your most personal fantasies to an audience. So it’s just a small step from there to memoir.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Maurice Vellekoop was born in Toronto in 1964. Upon graduating from Ontario College of Art in 1986, he joined Reactor Art + Design, an agency for illustrators. In a more than 35-year career, he has worked for top international editorial and advertising clients, published numerous zines and comics, created art for animated films, and participated in art shows around the world. His books include “Vellevision”: A Collection of Comics and Pictures; Maurice Vellekoop’s ABC Book: A Homoerotic Primer; and Maurice Vellekoop’s Pin-Ups. He lives on Toronto Island with his partner, writer and editor Gordon Bowness. I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is his first full-length graphic work.
Follow Maurice on Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Maurice’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Maurice by Lito Howse; photo of Maurice, Amy and Monster by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 595:
Laura Beers
“I came to Orwell interested in him as a political historian and how he can help us understand our modern politics.”
Historian, professor & author Laura Beers joins the show as we celebrate her important new book, ORWELL’S GHOSTS: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century (Norton). We talk about her course on Orwell and the making of the early twentieth century, how the post-Jan. 6 misuse of “Orwellian” inspired her to write this book, and her own path into Orwell. We get into Orwell’s balancing act between freedom of speech and obligation to truth, what he meant when he wrote that he was “for democratic socialism, as I understand it,” his family’s history with Empire and his hatred of inequality, why my favorite of his essays, Inside The Whale, may be the most misunderstood Orwell piece of all (!), and why The Road To Wigan Pier might have the most influence on her. We also discuss the ways to reckon with Orwell’s prejudices and especially his misogyny, why students are still coming into college with Animal Farm under their belt, Laura’s trip to Barcelona to follow Orwell’s steps in the Spanish Civil War, how her chapter on gender involved some deep, critical reading and writing, how we should look at the “blacklist” Orwell provided to the Information Research Dept., how Laura’s next book on the politics of infertility sort of dovetails with Orwell’s Ghosts, and more! Give it a listen! And go read ORWELL’S GHOSTS!
“There’s a lot of value in using an Orwellian lens: not just ‘censorship bad, free speech good,’ but to actually look at the writing and the more nuanced things that it says about national identity and patriotism in modern life, about the role of class, about the role of group-affinities. There’s a lot more to his writing than the knee-jerk caricatures that most people go to when they hear the word ‘Orwellian.'”
“I give the caveat that I’m not seeking to psychoanalyze Orwell, and I’m interested less in his personal life than in how that manifests in the way he writes about women and writes about gender.”
APPLE PLAYER TK
“Orwell’s early awakening to the corrupting influence of arbitrary power comes not from his experience in the Spanish Civil War, but his experience in Empire.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Laura Beers is a professor of British history at American University and the author of Orwell’s Ghosts, Your Britain, and Red Ellen, which received the Stansky Award. Her writing has appeared in the New Republic and Washington Post, among other publications, and on CNN.com. She is also a co-host on the Progressive Britain Podcast. She lives in Washington, DC.
Follow Laura on Twitter and BlueSky.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Laura by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 594:
Robert Pranzatelli
“This book is about the balance between art and life and trying to capture that vitality in both.”
Author, publicist and partially involved narrator Robert Pranzatelli joins the show to celebrate his amazing new book, PILOBOLUS: A Story of Dance and Life (University Press of Florida). We talk about the origins of the legendary Pilobolus dance company, his transformational first experience seeing them in 1997, the workshops he took with them and the friendships they engendered, and the “itchy fingers” moment when he realized he had to write their history. We also get into Pilobolus’ unique melding of improvisation and dance technique, the joyful challenge of describing their dance pieces on the page, the importance of capturing the time capsule of Pilobolus’ ’70s roots (and covering All The Affairs, along with the friendships and fallings-out), how Pilobolus was taken seriously by dance critics long after audiences flocked to them, the company’s through-line in its 50+-year history and how they managed to continue the tradition of something that was based on overthrowing tradition. Plus we discuss Robert’s history as a writer, how Metal Hurlant & Moebius blew his mind as a teen, how he became a book publicist at Yale University Press, his narrow-focus mode of reading, his greatest eBay score, why he got choked up while reading a text he sent Pilobolus’ artistic directors after a performance, and more. Give it a listen! And go read PILOBOLUS: A Story of Dance and Life!
“How do you continue the tradition of something that was based on overthrowing tradition?”
“You can’t go to a workshop as a paying customer and expect the instructors to want to be friends with you for the rest of your lives. But somehow we crossed that line.”
“I’m not a fan who wrote a book; I’m a literary guy who wrote a book. It was an artist writing about other artists.”
“I was surprised by the number of sources whose first question to me was, ‘You know about the affairs, right?'”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Robert Pranzatelli is the author of a number of essays published by the Paris Review and other literary journals, and a longtime staff member of Yale University Press.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Robert’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Robert by me; cartoon version by Onsmith; art on the wall by Moebius. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 593:
Bob Fingerman
“My artistic goal before I die is to have one complete book to look as loose as the way I draw background characters. Then I’ll feel like I’ve achieved Feiffer-hood.”
With That’s Some Business You’re In (Zoop), cartoonist-humorist-author Bob Fingerman has created a career retrospective to celebrate (lament?) his 40th year in comics (with an intro by Bill Sienkiewicz!). We got together in LA to talk about that milestone, what it meant to him to bring together decades of his comics, art, and illustration into a single volume, the challenges of writing the narrative to his work-life, and what he learned from looking at the arc of his career. We get into the ‘maybe someday’ vibe of the big projects he wants to tackle, the process of getting over his younger shame at making comics for, um, ‘lower-prestige’ (but well-paying) magazines, the distance he needed on his best-known comic, Minimum Wage, the artist’s retrospective he really wants to see, why he enjoys creator-owned work instead of someone else’s IP, and his true artistic goal. We also discuss the life-changing stuff — like addressing the tension between narcissism and imposter syndrome, the nature of change, the toxicity of NYC, and the need to leave a better memory — while we talk about life in LA, the writers who blew him away and how he can’t begin to emulate them, the way his characters changed from punching bags to people, the joy of hummingbirds and small dogs, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read That’s Some Business You’re In!
“Looking back with kinder eyes than I’ve had, for most of my life I’ve been a very — not just self-critical — self-excoriating person. The older I get, I see less and less value in that.”
“We live in a golden age of preserving stuff, but it’s not all the stuff I wish was being preserved.”
“I never realized New York was to me until I got out. Because I thought feeling shitty and anxious and depressed all the time is just how I am. Getting away from it I started to feel physically different.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
BUGSY!Internationally published and critically acclaimed cartoonist, illustrator and author, Bob Fingerman, is best known for his cult comic series Minimum Wage. In 2018 he realized his childhood dream to become one of MAD’s “usual gang of idiots.” Alas, MAD was soon thereafter essentially euthanatized. Bob accepts only partial blame for that. His latest books are the comical graphic novel Dotty’s Inferno (Heavy Metal/Virus) and the radically revised “author’s edition” of his novel Pariah, now Pariah Redux.
His clients include Dark Horse Comics, Fantagraphics Books, DC Comics, Marvel, IDW, Image Comics, Tor, Les Humanoïdes Associés, Fluide Glacial, Tapages Nocturnes, Sony/Columbia Pictures, RiffTrax, Heavy Metal and Z2 Comics.
Follow Bob on Instagram.
This one’s by BobCredits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Bob’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Bob & Sherlock by someone else. Photos of Bob, Bugsy, et al. by me, except where indicated. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 592:
Swan Huntley
“I write all my books in first person because I’m very interested in denial, the space between what the character knows and what the reader knows about them.”
Author & illustrator Swan Huntley joins the show to celebrate her two new books, I WANT YOU MORE (Zibby Books), and YOU’RE GROUNDED: An Anti-Self-Help Book to Calm You the Fck Down (Tarcherperigee). We talk about how ghostwriting a memoir for a Real Housewife of New York led her to write I Want You More, a thriller novel about fame, identity, and murder, why she uses the first person in fiction and loves the challenge of lying to the reader, how we’re seen by others and how we want to be seen, and the fun of writing thrillers and melding character with a big plot. We also talk about how You’re Grounded took shape as a melding of words and drawings, how she settled on “anti-self-help”, how her various addictions shaped her identity and what it meant to be herself as she overcame (some of) them, how taking up drawing in a writing lull helped bring out different voices, and the need to calm the fck down. We also discuss the creation of identity vs. the discovery of identity, why she biked the El Camino pilgrimage solo, the memoir she’s working on, the nature of celebrity & our reactions around famous people (& her upcoming essay, “My Best Friend Is Famous”), how she found her place in Los Angeles, and more. Give it a listen! And go read I WANT YOU MORE and YOU’RE GROUNDED!
“When you get into a relationship and you’re falling for somebody, you sort of fall INTO them, in a way. There’s a blurring of lines as you fall into someone else’s life.”
“I feel like my job is to be a professional eavesdropper.”
“I realized the everything I do is a conversation with myself that I’m letting other people in on.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Swan Huntley is a writer and illustrator living in Los Angeles. Her books include Getting Clean with Stevie Green, The Goddesses, We Could Be Beautiful, The Bad Mood Book, I Want You More, and You’re Grounded. She earned an MFA at Columbia University and has received fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo.
Follow Swan on Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Swan’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Swan by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 591:
Stan Mack
“To do them one week at a time is one thing, all you have to do is hit that darned deadline. But to look at 20 years in front of you . . . it’s such a wide span of what New York was in those days.”
Legendary cartoonist & artist Stan Mack pioneered documentary comics and bought New York’s multitudes to life with Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies (RLF) in the Village Voice, and now he joins the show to celebrate the publication of STAN MACK’S REAL LIFE FUNNIES: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995 (Fantagraphics)! We talk about winnowing down 1,000+ RLF strips to 275 for this book, the comic’s secret origin and how we share some Milton Glaser conceptual DNA, what he learned about cartooning and storytelling, the creeping realization that people were actually reading RLF, and how he and the comic grew over 20+ years. We get into whether Real Life Funnies and its snippets of street dialogue could work today when everybody just stares at their phones, how his pre-Voice stint as art director at the New York Herald Tribune made an editor out of him, the moment he realized he was a New Yorker, how he became an activist and used RLF to highlight the squatters’ rights movement, the AIDS crisis, and more in NYC, how important the Village Voice was to the city and to America in the ’70s and ’80s and why we need to bring it out of the pre-digital memory hole (a la DW Young & his new documentary, UNCROPPED), Stan’s failure as a backup dancer for Lionel Richie, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read STAN MACK’S REAL LIFE FUNNIES: The Collected Conceits, Delusions, and Hijinks of New Yorkers from 1974 to 1995!
“In art school, I was fascinated by the idea of people covering the world from the street.”
“Every street-corner had its own character. Every part of the city was grist.”
“Could my strips have been the roots of the nonfiction graphic novels of today?”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Stan Mack pioneered a documentary style of cartooning with his notorious New York comic strip Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies, which ran in The Village Voice. His Stan Mack’s Out-takes for Adweek magazine and Stan Mack’s RealMAD for the online publication Mediapost covered the world of media. He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, was a graphics specialist in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and is a former art director of the New York Herald Tribune‘s Book Week, The New York Times Sunday Magazine and The New York Times Book Review.
Follow Stan on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Stan’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Stan & Susan Champlin by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 590:
Jim Moske
“One of the major themes in the book is the dichotomy in the artistic field between fame – leaving a lasting mark on the culture — and oblivion.”
With his amazing new book, DEATHS OF ARTISTS (Blast Books), archivist Jim Moske explores art, mortality, media, fame and our secret lives. We talk about his chance discovery in the Met Museum’s archives of century-old scrapbooks filled with artists’ obituaries, his attraction to the obits’ brutal tabloid poetry, and how he fell down the rabbit-hole of figuring out the scandalous, redemptive life of their compiler, Arthur D’Hervilly. We get into what these obits — and D’Hervilly’s life — can teach us about art and artistic reputation, the challenges of working with 100+-year-old newsprint, the aesthetic pleasure of historical records, and why Jim considered doing this project as a ‘zine (just like last week’s guest!). We also discuss how he got started as an archivist, his favorite phases of the Met’s history, how artists have responded to his book, his archive of illegible historical documents (!), the impact of digitization and electronics on the archivist field, what we lose when materiality goes away, the oblique influence of Bolaño’s 2666 on Deaths of Artists, and how D’Hervilly’s art-obit collection became a chronicle of the democratization of art. Give it a listen! And go read Deaths of Artists!
“I’m often asked about what’s the coolest thing I’ve ever found in an archive I’ve worked in, and I never really had a good answer to that, until now.”
“I love it when I find something that’s historical value has been destroyed and is now just a visual piece.”
“One of my dreams is that one of Arthur’s descendants will come up with a cache of documentation that will fill this story out.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Jim Moske is an archivist and writer based in New York City. He served as Managing Archivist of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2008 to 2023 and previously was Archivist of the New York Public Library. Deaths of Artists is his first book.
Follow Jim on Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Jim’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Triptych photo of Jim by Sara Heinonen; double-selfie pic by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 589:
Adam Moss
“My whole career had been based on a dialogue with others, and I didn’t know how to talk to myself, how to listen to myself. So this book was a way to try to understand the artist’s head.”
With his amazing new book, THE WORK OF ART: How Something Comes From Nothing (Penguin Press), hall-of-fame magazine editor Adam Moss explores the artistic process by interviewing more than 40 creators about the evolution of a piece of their art. We talk about the archeology of early drafts and sketches, why he took up painting and how its vexations drove him into making this book, what it’s like to tour artists’ heads, the creative benefits of “the bounce,” the differences between collaborative and solo art-making, and the dizzying iterations of a single artwork by Amy Sillman. We get into where his 40-year magazine editing career began (and where it ended), the process of figuring out how to write and edit his own prose for this project, the incredible design project of bringing The Work Of Art to life as a museum of creativity (& its early life as a ‘zine), what happened when he pitched Warren Beatty on this project, and his ongoing attraction to the artifacts of artists in the midst of artworks. We also discuss why I may be the ideal reader for this book, how the introspection of COVID & lockdown influenced The Work Of Art and its subjects, what he learned about interviewing (& which subject intimidated him the most), how he finally learned to stop waiting for a catharsis and learned to take joy in the making of art rather than the finished artwork, and plenty more. Give it a listen! And go read THE WORK OF ART!
“In my magazine career I was constantly trying to figure out ways to make images and text work together in different ways to tell stories.”
“I’ve only ever known how to edit for myself, and all the magazines I ever edited were governed by my matrix of interests.”
“The book taught me the most obvious lesson: it really is about the work, not about the thing you’re making.”
“My experience of these conversations is that they were all transferential; I became in love with all of them, one by one.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Adam Moss was the editor of New York magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days. As editor of New York, he also oversaw the creation of five digital magazines: Vulture, The Cut, Daily Intelligencer, Grub Street, and The Strategist. During his tenure, New York won forty-one National Magazine Awards, including Magazine of the Year. He was an assistant managing editor of The New York Times with oversight of the Magazine, the Book Review, and the Culture, and Style sections, as well as managing editor of Esquire. He was elected to the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2019.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Adam’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Adam by Todd Heisler / The New York Times / Redux; regular one by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 588:
Randy Fertel
“The paradox of spontaneity is that it’s rhetorical while claiming to be free of rhetoric.”
With WINGING IT: Improv’s Power & Peril in the Age of Trump (Spring Publications), author, professor & philanthropist Randy Fertel explores the role of improvisation & spontaneity in the arts, sciences & culture. We talk about what drew him to the conflict between reason and intuition, the importance of “Yes, And” in more than just a comedic context, the neuroscience of Hot and Cold Cognition, and the moment in graduate school that started him down this path 50 years ago. We get into what improvisation really is, how it underlies creativity and innovation, how Trump embodies its dark side, and how his upbringing in New Orleans may have contributed to his improv-epiphany. We also discuss how canonical authors & works began as outsiders, why the essence of improv is disruption, the importance of ego death and unmediated experience (and why he futilely took heroic amounts of hallucinogens to prepare for a conference panel), the relationship of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to his archetypes, his love for Jon Batiste’s 2023 Jazz Fest set, his next project exploring the emergence of global pop culture, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read WINGING IT!
“New Orleans didn’t invent improv, but it did bring improv into popular culture.”
“Getting lost in a novel is the surest way to reset myself.”
“This is the only book I’ve written where I never entered a library. I improvised!”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Randy Fertel is a writer and philanthropist dedicated to the arts, education, New Orleans, and the environment. He holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard University and is the author of A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation, and The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir. Randy has taught English at Harvard University, Tulane University, LeMoyne College, and the New School for Social Research. He specializes in the literature of the Vietnam War and the literature of exile. In addition to his writing, he is president of the Fertel Foundation and the Ruth U. Fertel Foundation, named for his mother Ruth Fertel, founder of Ruth’s Chris Steak House. He lives in New Orleans and New York.
Follow Randy on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Randy’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. B/W photo of Randy by . . . someone else. Color one by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 587:
D.W. Young
“From his time at the Village Voice, there were tremendous stories, there were tremendous adventures, but there was tremendous Work, above all.”
For more than 40 years, the breathtaking pictures of photographer James Hamilton have chronicled New York City and America (and a couple of war zones), and now the amazing new documentary UNCROPPED (Greenwich Entertainment) by director D.W. Young has launched a rediscovery of James Hamilton’s work, life & times. D.W. rejoins the show to talk about how James’ career at the NY Herald, Village Voice, and NY Observer opened the door to a a bigger story about NYC, arts/culture and media, how NYC has changed and how the culture adapts, and how young viewers react upon learning about the city’s vibrant newspaper & alt-weekly scene that preceded the internet. We get into the difference between empathy & formality in photography, how after D.W.’s previous movie (The Booksellers) he really didn’t want to make another NYC film but wound up making the MOST, James’ shift from film to digital (and why some of UNCROPPED is shot on film), why sit-down interviews in documentaries get a bad rap but why they can be so valuable, and how Wes Anderson ended up being interviewed in the movie in a largely empty room. Plus we discuss D.W.’s first post-lockdown movie-theater viewings, the relief of making a short narrative film (Dancing on the Silk Razor) in the midst of making Uncropped, what he learned from making The Booksellers (and what he had to unlearn), why it’s a travesty that the Village Voice archives aren’t digitized, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go see UNCROPPED!
(And go listen to our 2020 conversation!)
“I don’t think of films as story so much as experience. Story may be part of the experience.”
“Uncropped comes off like a time-travel movie to younger people. It’s the experience of something they know of, but don’t know how to come to terms with, because they have no first-hand experience of it.”
“The Booksellers was about the importance of printed matter . . . and I think the same thing is there in the publications we cover in Uncropped.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
D.W. Young’s previous documentary The Booksellers, a behind-the-scenes look at the rare book world, premiered at the New York Film Festival in 2019. His other features include the award-winning documentary A Hole In A Fence and the narrative The Happy House, and his shorts include Dancing on the Silk Razor, Not Interested, A Favor For Jerry and A Body of Language. His work has screened at festivals around the world including NYFF, SXSW, DOC NYC, Woodstock Film Festival and more.
Follow UNCROPPED on Instagram and listen to my 2020 conversation with D.W.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed NYC location on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of D.W. by me; b/w photo in Coney Island by James Hamilton. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 586:
Jen Silverman
“I didn’t set out to write a political novel. I wrote a novel about people who are finding themselves embroiled in the politics of their moments.”
Author-playwright-screenwriter-poet Jen Silverman returns to the show to celebrate their amazing new novel, THERE’S GOING TO BE TROUBLE (Random House). We get into how Jen accidentally stumbled into the 2018 Gilets Jaunes protests in Paris and triggered this new book, the ways we’re shaped by our parents’ failures and secrets, the many routes of radicalization, and the theatricality of protests, how they draw people in (with a boost from Théâtre du Soleil), and how they contrast with theater itself. We also talk about the role of art in understanding the times, how Jen’s stories start with character, their work on Tokyo Vice and how TV writing differs from other storytelling modes, what it means to protest alongside someone whose politics you disagree with, and what the pandemic era has taught them about community. Plus we discuss the nirvana of MacDowell Colony, learning to use research without being beholden to it, ways to be an effective, engaged human (not just engaged/enraged), the contrast between book and theater critics, the existential question of the past few years, and, oh yeah, whether or not people can change. Give it a listen! And go read THERE’S GOING TO BE TROUBLE!
And go listen to our 2021 conversation!
“When there are questions I’m circling in my life, the way I get to them — not necessarily to answers, but to a better set of next questions — is by interrogating them inside the structure of a book, or a play, or or or.”
“Anytime I look around the corner and I see crazy puppets, I’m going toward them.”
“I think of myself more as an observer than an activist, and for a long time that felt like a shameful thing.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Jen Silverman is the author of the novel We Play Ourselves, a Lambda Literary Award finalist; the story collection The Island Dwellers, longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction; and the poetry chapbook Bath. Their honors include fellowships from the National Endowment For the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Follow Jen on Instagram. And go listen to our 2021 conversation!
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Jen’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. B/W photo of Jen by Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo Davis. Photo of me, Jen & their partner by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 585:
Leonard Barkan
“Engaging in reading, body & soul, present & past, is an insurance policy against loss.”
With Reading Shakespeare Reading Me (Fordham), professor Leonard Barkan blends memoir and deep reading of Shakespeare’s greatest plays to explore his lifelong relationship with literature and the way(s) we use art to construct our identities. We get into what it means to read, hear, perform, direct, teach Shakespeare, why it took him a lifetime to get to this book, how he contrasts himself with a radically naive reader (and why it’s important to try to capture our naïveté), the gayness of Shakespeare’s two Antonios, the stories he couldn’t tell until his folks were gone, and the role Shakespeare played in Leonard’s gay coming of age. We also talk about Narcissism vs. Wissenschaft, his next book about the WWII loss of 434 paintings by the Great Masters (!), Cervantes’ role as Shakespeare’s literary peer, the on-stage therapy session he held at his career-celebration, and his stint as a theater director and what it taught him about teaching. Plus we discuss the strangeness of King Lear’s opening scene, the eerie humor of Hamlet, the fraught subject of having kids, the glory & limitations of mimesis, how it felt to see his book The Hungry Eye on a bookshelf in The Bear, the lifelong struggle of living up to his promise, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Reading Shakespeare Reading Me!
“What does it mean to hypothesize that for Shakespeare’s audience for, say, King Lear, they didn’t know what was going to happen?”
“I didn’t want freedom; I wanted acceptance.”
“Making tragedy fun and making comedy profound: that’s the background work you have to do with students.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches comparative literature, art history, English, and classics. His many books include The Hungry Eye: Eating, Drinking, and the Culture of Europe from Rome to the Renaissance (Princeton, 2021), Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion (Chicago, 2016), Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), Satyr Square: A Year, a Life in Rome (FSG, 2006), and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Leonard’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Leonard by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 584:
Emily Raboteau
“The flipside of despair about everything we could lose from climate change is there’s so much worth saving, so much beauty, so much precious.”
After a ~10-year gap, Emily Raboteau rejoins the show to celebrate her amazing new essay collection, LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” (Holt). We talk about her sparkbird and the Audubon Mural Project in Washington Heights that center the book, her transformation into a climate activist, the joy of the flaneuse, her scavenger hunt for Justin Brice Guariglia‘s environmental art, and the idea of pain with a purpose. We also get into the differences between mothering & motherhood, the reason she put “the Apocalypse” in quotes in her subtitle, how COVID lockdown made her realize her kids’ lives had been overscheduled (and how lockdown gave them some room to breathe), and the nor’easter-battered book-event in Princeton that corroborated her book’s community-thesis. Plus we discuss her dream of interviewing Vivian Gornick, how we need to overcome pandemic-amnesia, the place her children really want to visit, how she’s changed as a writer since we last talked, what the difference is between surviving and living, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read LESSONS FOR SURVIVAL!
“During the early pandemic, a lot of New Yorkers got into birding. The air was full of two sounds: birdsong, and ambulance sirens.”
“The book is about this altered world that our children are inheriting and that our parents weren’t able to prepare us for.”
“We should all think about mothering as a kind of action, an example of radical nurturing care that is required to meet the moment we’re in.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Emily Raboteau writes at the intersection of social and environmental justice, race, climate change, and parenthood. Her previous books are Searching for Zion, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the novel The Professor’s Daughter. She is a contributing editor at Orion Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing in the English Department at the City College of New York (CUNY) in Harlem, and lives in the Bronx. Her new book is Lessons for Survival.
Follow Emily on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Emily’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Emily solo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Photo of the two of us by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show Bonus Episode:
Trillian Stars and Kyle Cassidy
“We want to give Lizzie that book she never got when she was alive.”
Photographer and writer Kyle Cassidy and actor and model Trillian Stars join us for a Bonus Episode to talk about their new Kickstarter, THIS IS ONLY EARTH, MY DEAR – POEMS & PHOTOS (closing May 4, 2024)! We get into their inspiration to make a book combining the poems of Pre-Raphaelite muse-model-artist Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal with photos of Trillian (in a Pre-Raphaelite mode), how the project changed once they began shooting in East London, how they found enough costumes for all the photos they wanted to take, and why Lizzie Siddal was dismissed by the peers of her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. We also get into what they’ve learned from nearly a dozen Kickstarters, what stretch goals they’re hoping to reach for this one, how modeling and acting overlap and differ (and why Kyle prefers shooting with actors), how the ghost of old London lives in modern London, and what a gift Lizzie Siddal’s poems are. Give it a listen! And GO PLEDGE!
(& go listen to my 2012, 2017 and 2020 conversations with Kyle!)
“My best advice for Kickstarter is: have a realistic goal.”
“You bring your skills, and your time, and your equipment, and then the plan is met by the environment. All those things shape what comes out on the other end.”
“My photography is making up a story that doesn’t exist, making up a movie or a play that has one frame.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Trillian Stars is a Philadelphia- and New York-based performer whose work on stage and in film includes both classical theatre and world premieres. Follow Trillian on Instagram.
Kyle Cassidy is an award-winning photographer from Philadelphia. In addition, he’s been a contributing editor to Videomaker magazine for more than a decade. In 2007 his documentary photo book “Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in their Homes” was voted one of the ten best art books by the editors of Amazon.com. In 2012 he published a book about veterans body art called “War Paint: Tattoo Culture and the Armed Forces.”in 2014, photographing the book “Geek Knits” he crossed the country photographing geek celebrities modeling knitwear. In 2016 he started photographing Librarians which lead to the 2017 book “This is What a Librarian Looks Like.” Follow Kyle on Instagram and LiveJournal(?!).
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Trillian by Kyle; photo of both of them probably by Kyle. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 583:
Leela Corman
“My positionality when I work with the Holocaust is not insular; it is my way of carrying my little corner of humanity’s coffin at the funeral.”
At long last, artist Leela Corman joins the show as we celebrate her breathtaking new graphic novel, VICTORY PARADE (Schocken Books)! We talk about how the book brings together the women welders of WWII-era Brooklyn Navy Yards, professional wrestling, and her lifelong obsession with the Shoah, how discovering her watercolor style was like the portal between life and death opening, the art school experience that derailed her, and how the artistic ground start shifting beneath her as she got serious about her comics. We get into her life-defining visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the sacred responsibility of teaching, the influence of New Objectivity (& a bazillion other styles and modes of art & storytelling) on her work, why she brought characters from her earlier GN Unterzakhn into Victory Parade, her twin polestars of Primo Levi & Lisa Carver, and her music-comics collaboration with Thalia Zedek. Plus we discuss the Gen X practice of warts-and-all autobio comics, transgenerational trauma and the next book in her ‘Birnbaumiad’ triptych, the BS of artist’s statements, the revelation of Neko Case’s music, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read VICTORY PARADE!
“RAW made me realize how much I wanted to make comics, and WEIRDO made me realize I could.”
“I didn’t make this book because of the 2016 election or of fascist politics on the rise; it was already percolating. But things can converge sometimes.”
“I love performance, and backstage, and costumes, and the weird intersection of the pubic and private that performance is.”
“Fuck permission. The world should consider itself lucky that I’m here to tell these stories.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Leela Corman is a painter, educator, and graphic-novel creator, working in the realm of diaspora Ashkenazi culture and third-generation restorative work. Her books include Unterzakhn, which was nominated for an Eisner Award, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Le Prix Artémisia; won the 2015 Romics Prize for Best Anglo-American Comic; and received a 2023 MoCCA Arts Festival Award of Excellence, and the short comics collections You Are Not a Guest and We All Wish for Deadly Force. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Believer, Nautilus, and The Nib. She is a founding instructor at Sequential Artists Workshop and an instructor at Rhode Island School of Design. Her new book is Victory Parade.
Follow Leela on Bluesky and Instagram, and support her work on Patreon.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Leela’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Leela by Dena Rosenberg. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 582:
Keith Mayerson
“I loved comics growing up; I was too young and stupid to appreciate fine art.”
How did an eBay search lead to the discovery of a lost classic of comics? How can art help us build a better America? Artist and teacher Keith Mayerson joins the show to talk about co-editing the amazing new book, Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics, Vol. 1 (Fantagraphics) and his multi-decade “wordless novel” in paintings, My American Dream (Karma). We get into how Frank Johnson made thousands of pages of comics in private, never published, and may have created the first American comic-book in history, whether he constitutes an Outsider Artist, how his creative legacy contrasts with Henry Darger‘s, and what it means to make a lifelong body of work with no sense or expectation of a readership. We also get into Keith’s My American Dream project, its roots in 9/11 & the GWBush era, how his paintings play off of each other like panels in a comic (and how the curation of art exhibitions is a form of comics), the mash-up of key cultural figures of modern America, his art-subject trinity of James Dean, Elvis, and Keanu Reeves (and his story of meeting Keanu), how My American Dream works to synthesize aspects of Warhol & Rembrandt (& Haring), and the vitality of his painting of Kermit the Frog on a bicycle and the significance of the Muppets in his vision of America. Plus we discuss Keith’s art & comics upbringing, the process of building comics programs at SVA and USC, his cult classic queer horror graphic novel with Dennis Cooper, the artistic act of suturing in to his subjects, why the job of art is keeping hope alive, how he felt when he found a parallel, secret history of comics taking place solely in one person’s mind, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Frank Johnson: Secret Pioneer of American Comics, Vol. 1 and ogle My American Dream!
“If good comics take you on a journey, then Frank Johnson’s comics do it. They really send you into this other space where you really get to know the characters.”
“Comics really kept me from getting hit by lightning, because comics are for everybody. I’ve had a wonderful art career, where my paintings talk to each other, like panels.”
“With the big painting of the Muppets, I think of all of us in America, all put together on this continent, and the hope that we can all get along. And if we stay ever hopeful, and don’t give up, then maybe we can transcend this moment and reach a brighter future.”
“I was more interested in rendering ideas than making people laugh, so I thought maybe it’s just as easy to be a fine artist as to be a New Yorker cartoonist.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Keith Mayerson has professionally exhibited his art in galleries and museums since 1993. His exhibitions are often installations of images that create larger narratives. His long-running, non-linear narrative “My American Dream” has been presented in separate exhibitions as “chapters” and the ongoing series continues through today and has recently been published as a 428-page “wordless novel” and monograph by Karma. His graphic novel Horror Hospital Unplugged, a collaboration with the writer Dennis Cooper, is well-known among graphic artists and the queer community. A graphic novel biography of James Dean is forthcoming, to be published by Fantagraphics.
Follow Keith on Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Society of Illustrators on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Keith Mayerson by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 581:
Edith Hall
“I was kept in ignorance of everything that made my mother who she was, by her. It was a sort of conspiracy of silence. I felt a little like Oedipus going out on a journey to find out who he was. . . . This book turned out to be a posthumous love song to my mother.”
Classicist Edith Hall joins the show to talk about her fantastic, important new book, FACING DOWN THE FURIES: Suicide, the Ancient Greeks, and Me (Yale University Press). We talk about the taboo of talking about suicide, how that taboo can lead to transgenerational damage, how that compares to the family curses in Greek tragedies, and what the Tragedians have to teach us about life (and death) today. We get into her grandmother’s suicide and her mother’s conspiracy of silence around it, her own suicidal ideation and how Heracles Mad helped her through her worst phase, the way Facing Down the Furies sprung from Edith’s previous book, Aristotle’s Way, the process of researching her family history after her mother’s death, and how Philoctetes embodies It Gets Better. We also get into the gender difference of existentialists and the crappy behavior of male philosophers, the gender difference in our readings of Alcestis, why she’s Team Iliad (and supports my reading of Achilles’ tragedy), the one Greek tragedy that she wishes survived to reach us, and a lot more. Also, I go LONG in the intro about some family stuff that came up in the lead-in to this episode. It should go without saying: content/trigger warning if discussions about suicide are a problem for you. Give it a listen! And go read FACING DOWN THE FURIES!
“Isn’t it interesting that these terrible times we’re living in make these mythical figures of revenge and memory such a potent metaphor for our times?”
“While my mother and I never got intimate, there’s a peculiar, vicarious intimacy about phone-calls about semicolons.”
“The Iliad is about how we’re all going to die, and death is horrible, as Achilles says. It’s the great human condition poem. “
“One of the most vulnerable groups are middle-aged men who have been passed over in one way or another, whose wives have left them, because men find it so much more difficult to ask for help, to admit vulnerability.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Edith Hall is a professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is the author of more than thirty books, including Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life. She lives in Cambridgeshire, UK. Her new book is Facing Down The Furies: Suicide, The Ancient Greeks, and Me.
Follow Edith on Twitter and YouTube.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Edith by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show Bonus Episode:
Dean Haspiel
“What if Spider-Man became Peter Parker?”
LEAN INTO DEAN! Cartoonist, playwright, schmoozer, etc. Dean Haspiel returns for a Bonus Episode to talk about his new Kickstarter, THE RED HOOK X DEAN HASPIEL (closing March 28, 2024, so GO SUPPORT IT)! We get into why he’s making the plunge into Meta-Mem-Noir and bringing Dean Haspiel as a character into his New Brooklyn comics universe, what it’s like to be part of the story, and how this podcast is also becoming more autobiographical with each passing week. Plus, we talk about getting old and not being able to stay out all night (even though he gave it his best shot this weekend), what it’s like to treat comics as a reductive art rather than a rendering one, the play Dino’s working on, what he’s learned from his previous Kickstarter projects, Covid Cop and Billy Dogma and Jane Legit, why he’s holding off on reading the finale of Howard Chaykin‘s Time² project, and more! Give it a listen! And go support The Red Hook X Dean Haspiel! (before 3/28/24!)
“I like to draw comics, I like to write plays, I like to make movies every once in a while, and I always think about how to apply the virtues of each medium. Sometimes the same story can be applied to different mediums and find different stories from the same source material.”
“I would hazard that Kickstarter is the third largest comics publisher in America.”
“Comics encompasses it all: it’s theater, it’s cinema, it’s music, it’s literature, it’s art, it’s got it all. And all you need is a blank piece of paper.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Emmy & Ringo Award winning NYC cartoonist, playwright + Yaddo fellow Dean Haspiel is the creator of Billy Dogma, The Red Hook, & Covid Cop. He has worked for Marvel, DC, Archie, Image, Webtoon, etc., etc.
Follow Dean on Substack, Instagram and . . . LiveJournal!?
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Dino by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 580:
David Small
“With old age I’ve abandoned the self-consciousness and insecurity that has kept its bony little fingers on my shirt collar. I don’t feel it anymore. I don’t care. I don’t need to do what I’m doing; I do it out love.”
With his brand new collection, THE WEREWOLF AT DUSK and Other Stories (Liveright), David Small brings us a trio of stories about the beast within (that is, within the heart, within the psyche, and within the body politic). We talk about the on-and-off 40-year history of this collection, the themes of transformation and aging that suffuse these stories, and the schism in Leonora Carrington’s estate that nearly derailed the whole project. We get into the the challenges of adapting prose fiction into comics, his move from graphic novels (think Stitches and Home After Dark) to short stories, why he’s come to love drawing digitally, and just how bad most surrealist fiction can be. We also discuss the decline in kids’ books, our respective life changes from 2020’s COVID check-in, his Truman Capote kick, how we deal with monstrous artists, how hard he has to work to make his drawings look like they were done in 15 seconds, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read The Werewolf At Dusk!
“Printmaking back in college — where if you make a wrong line it takes you a week to get rid of it — taught me to either live with my mistakes, or not to make them in the first place.”
“Doing kid’s books all those years really prepared me for doing something more concise.”
“This dream was about how to handle old age: you’ve got to be in denial to get though it, as your body and your mind begin to fall apart.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
David Small is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Stitches and the recipient of the Caldecott Medal, the Christopher Medal, and the E.B. White Award. He and his wife, the writer Sarah Stewart, live in Michigan.
Go listen to our 2018 conversation and our 2020 COVID check-in.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of David by Gordon Trice. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 579:
Brad Gooch
“Sonny Mehta told me, ‘People who read biographies really want to know what the silverware was on the table, or what the curtains were like in the parents’ house.’ That was great advice, because it was about getting grounded.”
With RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (Harper), Brad Gooch brings us the biography of Keith Haring, an artist who transformed public art & the art world in the 1980s and whose work has become part of global culture in the three decades since his untimely death from AIDS. We get into Brad’s common threads with Haring, the parallels between this book and his biography of Rumi, how fatherhood helped Brad better understand Haring, and his surprise at discovering what a serious artist Haring was. We talk about why Haring’s work makes more sense now than in the ’80s, what he would have made of social media, the fire that drove him to make more than 10,000 pieces of art in his decade-plus career, the relationship of Haring to artists of color (among other race issues), where the Radiant Baby image came from, and what the younger gay population doesn’t know about the AIDS crisis. We also discuss the incredible memorial of Keith and Howard Brookner at a recent Madonna concert, why 60 is a great age to start having kids, how Instagram reminds him of ’80s social life, the parallels between the AIDS crisis and the early months of COVID, what Brad’s learned in the course of writing four biographies, why Barbra Streisand’s memoir reminds him of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (!), and more. Give it a listen! And go read RADIANT: The Life and Line of Keith Haring!
“Keith wasn’t pretending to be a graffiti artist; he was a fan, and he found ways to respect their art while making his own statement.”
“Biography is always informed by a novelistic intent.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!
About our Guest
Brad Gooch is a poet, novelist, and biographer whose previous books include Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a New York Times bestseller; City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara; Godtalk: Travels in Spiritual America; the memoir Smash Cut ; and Rumi’s Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love. He is the recipient of National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, and lives in New York City.
Follow Brad on Instagram and listen to our 2015 and 2017 conversations, and check out the Nakamura Keith Haring Collection.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Brad’s wrirting lair on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Brad by Jack Pierson. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 554: Brett Martin “The arc of Difficult Men involved this moment where the interests of business and art were in confluence. The fragmentation of media meant that in order to survive, you needed to have an identity. And in order to have an identity, you needed to have original programming. And that … Continue reading "Episode 554 – Brett Martin"
Virtual Memories Show 553:
Peter Rostovsky
“I was trained in this notion that art should tend toward a kind of inhumanity, a kind of neutrality. It can have political messaging, but we should mute the expressive nature But as I grow older – not necessarily wiser – I’ve grown okay with myself as an artist. I’ve discovered lyricism, poetry, imagination: all of those things that I once forbade myself from.”
How did a hangover in 2015 lead to an award-winning debut graphic novel in 2023? Find out as Peter Rostovsky joins the show to celebrate the release of DAMNATION DIARIES (Uncivilized Books)! We get into the origins of his gorgeously & grotesquely drawn social satire about Hell (& Hell’s therapist, Fred Greenberg), what he had to learn about comics in the process of making his first one, how comics allowed him to wed his polemical nature to a deeply personal story, and why his version of Hell bears an awful lot of similarities to life in NYC. We also talk about what it was like emigrating from Russia to the Bronx as a 10-year-old kid in 1980, how comics helped him learn English, his strategies for blending in as a teen, and how he found redemption & maximalism in heavy metal. And we discuss his history in the worlds of fine art, art theory, internet utopianism, and teaching International Art English, the time he broke up a fight between a sculptor and a painter, whether AI is a McLuhan-esque ‘prosthesis’ for art, his mother’s recent death and how he feels about rendering her in Hell in Damnation Diaries, why I think he needs to write about his occasional childhood exile in a garden in the Hermitage, how giving up his solo studio and joining Dean Haspiel & others in Studio CLOACA gave him a community, and more. Give it a listen! And go read DAMNATION DIARIES!
“I was a comics nerd, but I left it behind for a long time. It turns out I had from childhood an archived sense of the medium.”
“The delicacy of drawing, of painting, confronts you with the fragility of people’s efforts.”
“We are constantly grappling with transience: transience of thought, of memory, of all our artistic efforts. And we make art to gain communion with our fellow travelers.”
“AI takes the gift of imagining away from you.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist and writer who emigrated from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee in 1980. His paintings and fine art have been shown widely in the US and abroad and exhibited at museum venues such as PS1/MoMA, The Walker Art Center, MCA Santa Barbara, Artpace, The Blanton Museum of Art, S.M.A.K., as well as a host of private galleries. His writing — often under the pen name David Geers — has appeared in the magazines October, Fillip, BOMB, The Third Rail Quarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Unbag, and Frieze, and spans cultural criticism, art writing, and fiction. Meanwhile, his illustrated fiction and comics-based work has appeared in the Third Rail Quarterly, Unbag, Topic, and in Devil’s Due’s much-publicized “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Freshman Force” where his contribution was highlighted by the New York Times, Vice, and other media outlets. He teaches at NYU, Parsons New School, and Lesley Art + Design. His new book is DAMNATION DIARIES.
Follow Peter on Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Peter’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Peter by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 552: Bill Griffith “What attracted me to NANCY wasn’t the characters, or the stories, or the humor: it was the lettering.” Legendary cartoonist Bill Griffith returns to celebrate his fantastic new book, THREE ROCKS: The Story of Ernie Bushmiller, The Man Who Created NANCY (Abrams ComicArts). We get into his lifelong history … Continue reading "Episode 552 – Bill Griffith"
Virtual Memories Show 551: Jerome Charyn “It’s a very sad tale about a sad time, but out of sadness comes an extraordinary beauty, and this is what I wanted to write about: the beauty that came out of all the pain.” “The word is far more real than the world”: Jerome Charyn rejoins the show … Continue reading "Episode 551 – Jerome Charyn"
Virtual Memories Show 550: Ron Rosenbaum “We’re in an age where machines — AI, big data — are taking over human emotions and endeavors.” With the release of IN DEFENSE OF LOVE: An Argument (Doubleday), Ron Rosenbaum offers up a series of essays to save love from scientizers, extremists, the jaded, and anyone else who … Continue reading "Episode 550 – Ron Rosenbaum"
Virtual Memories Show 549: Karl Stevens “I think of my books as films on paper, so once I got into this project, it was a lot easier than I thought it’d be.” With MOTHER NATURE (Titan Comics), artist Karl Stevens adapts a graphic novel from an eco-horror screenplay by Oscar™-winner Jamie Lee Curtis & Russell … Continue reading "Episode 549 – Karl Stevens"
Virtual Memories Show 548: Howard Fishman “It’s incredible to me how close Connie Converse and all she did came to completely vanishing from the face of the earth.” Writer, musician and composer Howard Fishman joins the show to celebrate his amazing new book, TO ANYONE WHO EVER ASKS: The Life, Music and Mystery of Connie … Continue reading "Episode 548 – Howard Fishman"
Virtual Memories Show 547: Christopher Brown “I’m trying to contribute something to imagining different ways we could live in the future, and different ways we could think about our relationship to nature.” During Readercon weekend, Christopher Brown rejoined the show for our first conversation since the 2020 release of his novel Failed State. We talk … Continue reading "Episode 547 – Christopher Brown"
Virtual Memories Show 546: Rian Hughes “The word ‘graphic’ means explicit, and graphic design at its best has that straightforward, punchy, explicit aspect to it. That’s the kind of bold design that appeals to me.” Writer, graphic designer, typographer, illustrator, comics writer/artist, and photographer Rian Hughes rejoins the show to celebrate the US release of … Continue reading "Episode 546 – Rian Hughes"
Virtual Memories Show 545: Eddie Campbell “There’s probably a memento mori that runs through all my work, including The Fate of the Artist & The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell. The reminder that life is short and don’t take it for granted.” With the publication of The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell (Top … Continue reading "Episode 545 – Eddie Campbell"
Virtual Memories Show Bonus Episode: Remembering Michael Denneny No show this week, but here’s a bonus episode with my impromptu speech at the remembrance-memorial for the late Michael Denneny, recorded June 19, 2023. Michael & I were supposed to record a podcast on April 15 about his collection, On Christopher Street (U of Chicago), but … Continue reading "Bonus Episode – Remembering Michael Denneny"
Virtual Memories Show 544: Mitchell Prothero “If you deregulate the global economy to the point where you can move whatever you want, wherever and whenever, and you deregulate financial controls so that it’s easy to shift money around and hide it, then you’re going to get a massive amount of cocaine. It’s a natural capitalist … Continue reading "Episode 544 – Mitchell Prothero"
Virtual Memories Show 543: Joseph Monninger “I think we go from asking as young people, ‘What does life mean?’, and we sit around drinking beer & talk late into the night. As we get older, we ask, ‘What did life mean?’, and go to bed by 8 o’clock. We’re never in that one place where … Continue reading "Episode 543 – Joseph Monninger"
Virtual Memories Show 542: Andrew Porter “I felt like a lot of my 20s and 30s were about accumulating things, adding things to my life, acquiring. Then I began to notice after I got married and had kids that those things from earlier in my life began to disappear.” With his new story collection, THE … Continue reading "Episode 542 – Andrew Porter"
Virtual Memories Show 541: Jonathan Papernick Author Jonathan Papernick joins the show to celebrate his fantastic new short story collection, Gallery of the Disappeared Men, and new novel, I am my Beloveds (Story Plant). We talk about his writing life, the weirdness & joy of retracing the footsteps of his characters in Israel, his move … Continue reading "Episode 541 – Jonathan Papernick"
Virtual Memories Show 540: Scott Samuelson “Rome itself can totally scramble one’s sense of what is transcendent and religious and what is earthly and political.” Let’s visit the Eternal City! Philosophy professor Scott Samuelson joins the show to discuss his wondrous new book, ROME AS A GUIDE TO THE GOOD LIFE: A Philosophical Grand Tour … Continue reading "Episode 540 – Scott Samuelson"
Virtual Memories Show 539:
Brian Dillon
“The idea of affinity said something about not just my relationship with art & artists that I love, but something about the way artists treat their own relation with what we call influence.”
With AFFINITIES: On Art & Fascination (NYRB), Brian Dillon completes a “loose trilogy” of books revolving around his connections to art, writing & the world, this time through a series of amazing essays about photography, dance, video, and other art forms, as well as the drift-nature of affinity itself. We get into the tendrils of influence (and how he has to shake himself loose of the reticence of Barthes & Sebald), the act of close looking. the way metaphors & images enable to him to explore art, and why he embraces mood over argument in his essays. We also talk about the ways his recent books (Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, & Essayism) have served as a reboot of his writing, the challenges in wedding the critical/analytic & the memoiristic, his decision to rewrite by hand the previously published pieces for this book to see if new connections revealed themselves, and how he never knows what to ask an artist in the studio. Plus, we discuss how much personal info is too much in an essay, the parallels between his aunt’s descent into paranoia with his own pursuit of close looking/reading, the writers he discovered late, what comes next, why he doesn’t shy away from calling Affinities an essay collection, and more! Give it a listen! And go read AFFINITIES!
“With a writer whose work you love, in addition to all the things they enable you to do, there are also ways they can hold you back.”
“I didn’t quite realize that I was so attached to images in which there were blurred or protean bodies & substances.”
“Most my writerly influences are not writers who are looking at art. But they may be looking at the world in exactly the way you require for looking at a video or a photograph.”
“I’m trying to insist on the drift between images, and how we all relate to images that build & accrue around us inside us.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize), and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for nonfiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, frieze, and Artforum. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and teaches creative writing at Queen Mary University of London. His new book is Affinities: On Art & Fascination.
Follow Brian on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location in the Upper West Side on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Brian by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 538:
John Kropf
“Coloring with crayons is a near-universal experience. Just about everyone can remember opening that first box of crayons and getting that crayon-high from that waxy smell.”
With his new book, COLOR CAPITAL OF THE WORLD (University of Akron Press), John W. Kropf explores the history of the American Crayon Co., Sandusky, OH, and his own family, while telling a bigger story about America. We get into the family stories & lore that led him to write the book, the toughest parts of researching it, when he realized that the story would involve the history of American immigration, innovation, chemistry, industry, public education, labor, and the rapaciousness of finance, and why he made sure to get a Gordon Lightfoot reference into its pages. We also talk about what crayons meant to American kids, whether he still draws with them, why his family sold out of the company, and how he met the challenge of including personal memoir in the story of a company town. Plus we contrast his multi-multi-generational history in America with my rootless cosmopolitanism, reflect on his writing life, and figure out who he’s been reading lately. Give it a listen! And go read Color Capital of the World!
“Landscape is a storehouse of memory for community, and once the landscape is changed, once the factory is demolished, there’s that risk that memory is going to be erased.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
John Kropf serves as the Global Chief Privacy Officer for a Fortune 500 company. John previously worked as an Attorney-Advisor and policy director for various U.S. Government Agencies including the Departments of Justice, State, Homeland Security, and USAID. He also teaches as an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School. John has also published a travel-adventure book based on his two years living in Turkmenistan, Unknown Sands: Travels in the World’s Most Isolated Country, and a second book, Color Capital of the World: Growing Up with the Legacy of a Crayon Factory. He lives in the Washington, DC. area with his wife Eileen, their cat Poppy and dog, Caia.
Follow John on Twitter and Instagram, and read his blog.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of John by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 537:
John Wray
“Metal bands are often referenced ironically or in a campy sort of way by pop culture. But I was interested in writing a novel that was really a celebration of this world and an investigation without prejudice.”
With his A-W-E-S-O-M-E new novel, GONE TO THE WOLVES (FSG), John Wray explores the metal scene of the 1990s, from Gulf Coast Florida to LA to the wilds of Norway. We get into his history with metal (starting with AC/DC), why he wanted his lead characters to be fans with no aspirations to be musicians themselves, the coolness fallacy of authors writing about rock music, the brief era where a band like Cannibal Corpse could sell hundreds of thousands of records, and why this was his most fun book to write. We also talk about the theology of Norwegian black metal, this book’s relationship to Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, his favorite drummer, and how he settled into Graham Greene’s writing practice of having a word count for each day. Plus, we discuss his recurring neurotic breakdown when a book is in galleys, his realization that his parents did not take his writing seriously (when he was an 8th grader), the process of renovating a brownstone in Prospect Park and renting out rooms to other writers (like Nathan Englander), becoming a dad in recent years (and failing to teach his son how to fly a kite), the tension between writing the books he wants to write and selling more copies, the risk of getting sued by Vince Neil, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Gone To The Wolves!
“I’ve never encountered a novel about popular music where it didn’t feel like the author was trying to be cooler than he or she really was, and using music and the rock stars in them for their wannabe projections.”
“There’s far more of my own youth in this book than in any other book I’ve written.”
“After 20 years of writing books, I came to the conclusion that if you have fun writing the book, the reader might have fun reading it.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
John Wray is the author of Godsend, The Lost Time Accidents, Lowboy, Canaan’s Tongue, and The Right Hand of Sleep. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Cullman Fellowship from the New York Public Library, and a Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007. A citizen of the United States and Austria, he lives in New York City. His new novel is Gone To The Wolves.
Follow John on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at John’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of John in black jacket by Julio Arellano. Photos of John w/bitchin’ scar by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 536:
Ho Che Anderson
“I think when most people go to a big sci-fi spectacle, they’re not expecting to have to wade through tons of dialogue about philosophy and theology. But that’s the stuff that I’ve always gravitated toward. It’s the minutia of conversation that I’m most fascinated by.”
With GODHEAD Vol. 2 (Fantagraphics), Ho Che Anderson has fulfilled a graphic novel science fiction adventure 20 years in the making. He rejoins the show so we can talk about how GODHEAD changed over the years, where the idea of a device that lets users commune with God came from (and how it kinda sorta mirrored his grandmothers’ war for his soul), and what the process of making this book taught him about writing and comics storytelling. We get into why he loves science fiction on the screen, his experiences writing for film, prose & comics, the experience he had at Marvel with a controversial Luke Cage miniseries that got cancelled at the last minute, and our Frank Miller experiences & some of the visual cues of RONIN in GODHEAD. We also discuss the need for religion, his fascination with the ocean, finding himself as a screenwriter (even with overlong drafts), why he donated his pages & materials from his MLK biography to the Billy Ireland library, his notion of legacy, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read GODHEAD Vols. 1 and 2!
(And go listen to our 2019 conversation!)
“I see the need for religion, to some extent, and I think it does some good. It allows people to become part of something greater than themselves. But I feel very strongly that we created God because we needed to.”
“Every creative, once they’ve put something out in the world, mostly what they see are the mistakes. But of all the work I’ve published over the years, this is the one where I can look at it and cringe the least.”
“I feel like our society has really suffered as a result of the pandemic. I feel levels of aggression that I didn’t feel before. I didn’t feel this disquiet in the world like I do now.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Ho Che Anderson is a Canadian cartoonist living in Toronto. Anderson was launched into the comics scene with the publication of his erotic story I Want To Be Your Dog in 1990. He next embarked on the project he is best known for, KING, his 3-part comic series on the life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. His other works include the graphic novels Black Dogs, Miles from Home, Scream Queen and Sand & Fury. His new book is Godhead Vol. 2, from Fantagraphics.
Follow Ho Che on Instagram & go listen to our 2019 conversation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Drawing of Ho Che Anderson by The Man Himself. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show Bonus Episode:
After Michael
Last week I talked about finding Michael Denneny dead at his apartment when I showed up for our podcast session (here’s his Washington Post obit). This brief (11+ min.) bonus episode covers the week since then, the response from his friends, colleagues, and loved ones, and how I’ve been doing since then. Give it a listen and go read Michael’s final book, On Christopher Street (and go listen to last week’s 50-min. monologue about finding Michael, & more)
Check out the archives for more episodes
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Michael Denneny was a longtime book and magazine editor who played an outsized role in promoting openly gay writers from the mid-1970s onward. In 1976, he cofounded Christopher Street Magazine, one of the first gay literary magazines. He was a freelance editor and consultant living in New York City.
Credits: This episode was recorded at my home on a Blue enCore 200 microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Michael by David Morgan. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 535:
Finding Michael Denneny
This week’s guest, gay author and editor Michael Denneny, was found dead when I arrived at his apartment to record our session on Saturday, April 15, 2023. This episode consists of a monologue of my experience that day, my appreciation of his amazing and important new collection, ON CHRISTOPHER STREET: Life, Sex and Death After Stonewall (University of Chicago Press), my thoughts on legacy, identity, mortality, the AIDS crisis, what it means to bear witness, and more. Give it a listen, and go read On Christopher Street.
My notes for the conversation:
Check out the archives for more great episodes.
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show: iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Michael Denneny (1943-2023) was a longtime book and magazine editor who played an outsized role in promoting openly gay writers from the mid-1970s onward. In 1976, he cofounded Christopher Street Magazine, one of the first gay literary magazines. He was a freelance editor and consultant living in New York City. He recently published ON CHRISTOPHER STREET: Life, Sex and Death After Stonewall (University of Chicago Press).
Credits: This episode was recorded at my home on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Michael by David Morgan. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 534:
Noah Van Sciver LIVE
“I have to put my humility aside, because to me there’s no other book like Joseph Smith And The Mormons. I feel like I did something that nobody else has done.”
Live from MoCCA Fest 2023, it’s an Artist’s Spotlight feat. Noah Van Sciver! I host a live session with Noah (with audience Q&A) to talk about his career in comics, his return to autobiography with his new Maple Terrace comic (Uncivilized Books), what his graphic biography of Joseph Smith taught him about comics, when he realized/accepted he was Alt and not Mainstream, and the great wisdom his father gave him about comics (and how his dad named one of his sisters about a character from a Conan comic). We also get into looking at 40 and how it compares to the comic he did about turning 30, why ex-Mormons appreciate his Joseph Smith bio, the challenges of getting work done as a father, how the American Splendor and Crumb movies set him on his path, the influence of Kerouac and the Beats on his writing and art, the original comic art that made him plotz, his sense of obligation to share the work of older artists, and a lot more. Give it a listen!
(And go listen to our 2022 conversation!)
“The line that came out of my pen was Alternative.”
“You never know how long 30 minutes is until you have a kid.”
“I had such lofty dreams for myself when I started out in comics. And I worked hard and managed to achieve them all.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Noah Van Sciver is widely considered one of the most notable cartoonists of his generation, and first came to national attention in 2006 with his critically acclaimed anthology comic book series Blammo, which earned him three Ignatz Award nominations. His work has appeared in MAD magazine, the Comics Journal, Best American Comics, and The Stranger, as well as numerous anthologies. Van Sciver is the author of multiple critically acclaimed graphic novels, including The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln, Youth Is Wasted, Saint Cole, One Dirty Tree, Fante Bukowski, As A Cartoonist, and Joseph Smith and The Mormons. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina. His latest comic book is Maple Terrace.
Follow Noah on Instagram and YouTube and support his Patreon, and listen to our 2022 conversation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at MoCCA Festival at the School of Visual Arts on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Noah by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 533:
Stevan M. Weine
“This book goes back to my interest in poetry and my interest in understanding suffering and trauma. I’ve been on my own journey to understand the place where those things intersect, and when I found Allen Ginsberg’s poetry in junior high school, it really spoke to me.”
With BEST MINDS: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry From Madness (Fordham University Press), Dr. Stevan M. Weine has written an amazing, illuminating and important new book. We get into the nexus of poetry, suffering and trauma that enveloped Ginsberg’s life, what it took for him to write Howl, and his mother Naomi’s schizophrenia and what it meant for him to wrestle with it in Kaddish. We talk about the history of psychiatry, the legacy of some truly terrible practices (like prefrontal lobotomization), and what lies ahead for the field, while also exploring Stevan’s mid-’80s interviews with Ginsberg and the discoveries he made in the family’s psychiatric records, the power of self-mythology and how it can elide the facts (like how old Allen was when had to sign the consent form for his mother’s lobotomy), and how Ginsberg balanced on the fine line between madness and great art. Plus, we discuss Ginsberg’s activism and advocacy (including a controversial endorsement), the impact of his best-known poems on the public’s understanding of mental illness, what it meant to Stevan to discover Ginsberg’s poetry in junior high, whether he’s got some poems of his own, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read BEST MINDS!
“Allen doesn’t just tell the story of an individual, but of an era, of a society gone mad.”
“Is it possible to know someone like Naomi Ginsberg as a full human being, and as someone who had an illness? Yes, it is. That’s one of the most important tasks of the book, just as much as understanding Allen.”
“In many ways I think that Allen Ginsberg and his system of belief has had an impact on psychiatry and is part of what’s led to changes.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Dr. Stevan M. Weine is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, where he is also Director of Global Medicine and Director of the Center for Global Health. He is the author of two previous books: When History Is a Nightmare: Lives and Memories of Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Testimony and Catastrophe: Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence. His new book is Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness.
Here’s a drawing I did of Allen Ginsberg in 2022, in honor of the anniversary of his death (April 5, 1997):
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Stevan by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 532:
Priscilla Gilman
“I didn’t want to turn the reader off by going on and on about my father’s biography, but it was extremely important to me to convey my father’s power in two realms: his power in the world as a writer, critic, and teacher, and his power in my private world as my father.”
With her new memoir, The Critic’s Daughter (Norton), Priscilla Gilman explores her relationship with her father, Theater Critic and Yale Drama professor Richard Gilman (as well as with her mom, literary agent Lynn Nesbit). We get into the perils of literary-kid memoir, the NYC book-scene she grew up in, her parents’ divorce and how it led to her learning way too much about her dad’s sexuality at 10 years old, and the challenges of capturing her early selves without jarring the reader. We also talk about how much she enjoyed recording her own audiobook, the role of the critic and the golden age of literary reviewing, what she’d ask her dad if he were around now, the disconnect between her parents’ public & private personae, and the lessons she had to learn for herself about love, marriage, and parenthood. Plus, we share a literary lightning round, some football talk, and our Thurman Munson memories! Give it a listen! And go read The Critic’s Daughter!
“I think that writing about grief and writing about someone who’s gone, you get that person back.”
Here’s that quote from Henri J.M. Nouwen she mentions: “When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Priscilla Gilman is the author of the memoir The Anti-Romantic Child and a former professor of English literature at Yale University and Vassar College. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, O, the Oprah Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City. Her new book is The Critic’s Daughter: A Memoir.
Follow Priscilla on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Priscilla by Gail Albert Halaban. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 531:
Timothy Goodman
“I’m not a researcher, or a scientist, or a psychologist; I’m just an artist, a guy interested in what it means to challenge my being, to dive deeper into what it means to be human.”
Artist (& SO much more) Timothy Goodman joins the show to talk about his gorgeous new graphic memoir: I ALWAYS THINK IT’S FOREVER: A Love Story Set in Paris As Told By An Unreliable But Earnest Narrator (Simon Element). We get into how his murals and online posts coalesced into a memoir, the nature of attachment disorder and heartbreak, Timothy’s penchant for social experiment, what drove him to spend a year in Paris in 2019, and why he used a variety of mediums to tell a single story (& in the process tell a much bigger story). We also talk about his artistic history & influences, the drive to fill every inch of the canvas, using art for social good, the musicality of his art & art-making process, how he graduated from house painting to design to art, and his Excalibur moment of discovering the Sharpie. Plus we discuss toxic masculinity & therapy, the difference between traveling the world and depaysement, our favorite NBA teams, and more. Give it a listen! And go read I ALWAYS THINK IT’S FOREVER!
“All my work is about a canvas or wall of discovery that I need to fill up. I’m really about filling up every inch of the canvas.”
“At first I was really hesitant to call this a memoir, but I wanted to create something that I never saw before.”
“I don’t take any of this for granted. I had a Nike shoe come out a few months ago for Kevin Durant, one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Are you kidding me?”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Timothy Goodman is an award-winning artist, graphic designer, author, and public speaker. His art and words have populated walls, buildings, packaging, shoes, clothing, books, magazine covers, and galleries all over the world for brands such as Apple, Nike, Google, MoMA, Netflix, Tiffany & Co., Samsung, Yves Saint Laurent, Sundance, Uniqlo, Target, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He regularly partners with not-for-profit organizations and schools to create art for communities in New York. He’s the author of Sharpie Art Workshop and the cocreator of several projects including the viral blog and book 40 Days of Dating. His first solo gallery exhibition, I’m Too Young to Not Set My Life on Fire, was on view in Manhattan in 2021. Timothy’s work often discusses mental health, therapy, manhood, race, politics, heartbreak, and love. He teaches at School of Visual Arts, regularly speaks around the world at creative conferences, and enjoys sharing his life on Instagram. He lives in New York City.
Follow Timothy on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Timothy by someone else, for Zappos. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 530:
Christopher Bollen
“I feel like every novel I write is a reaction to the previous one. With The Lost Americans, I felt like I needed to get away from cafe society and the art world and dive into politics.”
Christopher Bollen returns to the show to celebrate his thrilling new crime novel, The Lost Americans (Harper). We talk about his childhood obsession with ancient Egypt and how it led him to set the novel in Cairo, what’s gotten easier & tougher after 5 novels, what it was like to write this one while under lockdown, and why he dived into politics and the global arms trade this time around. We also get into our respective (and multiplying) midlife crises, the tarot reader who told him he’d only write 9 books (!), the reading education he got from judging the PEN Faulkner awards, the debts he owes past writers (& the time he bought a plant for Robert Stone), and why he’d like to learn to paint. Oh, and we discuss our share postcard fetish, the horror novel he’s writing, his rediscovery of Philip Roth, the loss of artistic reputation, and a LOT more. Give it a listen! And go read The Lost Americans!
(And go listen to our 2015 conversation!)
“One thing about living in New York — at least until recently — is that you had access to all of these intellectuals. Their lives were here. You could meet your idols; they weren’t just faraway people who rolled through town at a Barnes & Noble.”
“I wonder sometimes how this generation, coming up watching TikTok, will change the novel.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Christopher Bollen is the author of the critically acclaimed novels A Beautiful Crime, The Destroyers, Orient, and Lightning People. He is frequent contributor to a number of publications, including Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and Interview. He lives in New York City. His new book is The Lost Americans.
Follow Christopher on Twitter and Instagram and listen to our 2015 talk.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Christopher by Danko Steiner. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 529:
Dean Haspiel
“What’s interesting about comics storytelling, compared to stage and film, is that it’s a sort of shorthand where you have to earn the next panel. How do you exploit the real estate of the blank page?”
Artist, writer, cartoonist, playwright, director etc. Dean Haspiel rejoins the show to talk why he’s launched his first Kickstarter (open through 3/30/23) to support a new comic, COVID Cop (think “unholy but hilarious combo of Judge Dredd, The Toxic Avenger, Sin City, and Marshal Law“)! We get into how his approach to storytelling has changed in recent years, how he felt about the COVID-delayed debut of his play The War Of Woo, the thrill of making his short movie There Is No Try, and what it’s like to work in hyper-collaborative mediums like theater & film. We also talk about the experience of drawing Superman at Yaddo, why he needed to revisit his pitch for COVID Cop now that we’re semisorta past the worst of the pandemic, returning to his fave character, Billy Dogma, and wrapping up one phase of his The Red Hook series, the influence of Kyle Baker’s Why I Hate Saturn on his upcoming work, the experience of mentoring comics artists at Atlantic Center for the Arts last month, his take on AI art for comics, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go support COVID Cop!
(And go listen to our 2018 and 2020 conversations!)
“There’s a lot I hope I’ll be remembered for, but really, I’m the guy who took of his shirt at the Comic-Con, and that’s my fault.”
“My COVID Cop is trying to save humanity, but he’s also trying to save his marriage.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Emmy and Ringo Award-winning cartoonist Dean Haspiel is best known for creating The Red Hook and Billy Dogma, collaborating with Harvey Pekar, and Jonathan Ames, and illustrating for HBO’s “Bored to Death.” His published work includes writing and drawing for Marvel, DC/Vertigo, Archie, Image, and Webtoon. In addition, Haspiel is an accomplished playwright, emerging filmmaker, and Yaddo fellow. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Follow Dean on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, and support his Patreon. And listen to our 2018 and 2020 conversations.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Dino by Whitney Matheson. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 528:
Willard Spiegelman
“Anyone whose primary allegiance is to libraries, encyclopedias, museums, reading is going to have a life that is best reflected or best measured by what she reads and how she reads, and what she does with her reading, and how the reading weaves itself into the fabric of her art.”
Author, critic, professor and now biographer Willard Spiegelman rejoins the show to talk about his amazing new book, NOTHING STAYS PUT: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt (Knopf). We get into his winding history with Amy Clampitt, why he thought a biography of her would be impossible and why he decided to write it anyway, what made her poems so special, and what it was like to have such a late-blooming career (she first published at 58). We talk about the learning curve of writing his first (and only) biography, why he thinks Clampitt stubbornly stuck with prose instead of poetry for decades (and why she stuck with a terrible play about the Wordsworth circle in her last few years), how coastal Maine helped her write about her home prairies of Iowa, and why Willard choose to use the poems to expand on phases of her life from decades earlier. Plus we discuss Clampitt’s resonances with Emily Dickinson, the epiphany she had at the Cloisters that started her on the path to poetry, her spiritual and political engagement and how she felt about being a “female poet”, and her enthusiasm for enthusiasm. Plus, Willard looks back at the 10 years since we first recorded! Give it a listen! And go read NOTHING STAYS PUT!
(And listen to my 2013, 2016, and 2018 conversations with Willard!)
“You could say the launch of her career was fast work, but it was fast work that took 40 years.”
“I firmly believe that if one is a rational, sensible, common-sensical person, all of life’s important decisions should be made on impulse and whim.”
“Looking back with nostalgia is the inevitable balm that old people have: ‘when I was young, when I was strong, when I was in my prime, oh, the deeds I could do.’ Looking back can make you sane, but it can also make you grouchy.”
“The pandemic? If what you like doing is reading and writing and watching television and listening to music, what could be better than 2 years of house arrest?”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Ken + WillardWillard Spiegelman was for many years the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and the longtime editor of the Southwest Review. Since 1987 he has written about books and the arts for The Wall Street Journal. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Bogliasco Foundations, he is the author of eight books of literary criticism and personal essays, and the editor of Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt. He currently lives in Stonington, CT, and New York City. His new book is Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt.
Listen to our 2013, 2016, and 2018 conversations.
Me + Willard Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Willard’s home in NYC on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Willard by me. Photo of Amy Clampitt uncredited, from her site. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 527:
Matt Ruff
“There’s not just one Lovecraft Country; there’s really as many as you want to take the time to tell.”
Author Matt Ruff rejoins the show to celebrate his fantastic new book, THE DESTROYER OF WORLDS: A Return To Lovecraft Country (Harper). We talk about his reason for doing a sequel to his best-known novel, Lovecraft Country, why he’d love to continue the story for a few more books, and what it means to carry on his characters’ stories. We also get into the experience of seeing Lovecraft Country adapted into an HBO series and how its departure from his book thrilled him, the importance of not letting the present influence his writing of the past (and whether the George Floyd protests influenced his writing of his African-American protagonists this time around), and the many ways he could have died while visiting the Great Dismal Swamp to research for this book. Plus, we discuss screenwriting, the different structure this novel has from its previous one, why the quiet moments of conversation are the most important in the book, whether it’s unfair that it takes him 3-4 years to write a book that takes me 3-4 hours to read/devour, and more. Give it a listen! And go read The Destroyer of Worlds! (And Lovecraft Country!)
(And go listen to our 2017 and 2020 conversations!)
“I love the way fiction lets me play different worldviews off against each other and explore different peoples’ and different cultures’ thoughts from the inside. I take an outsider’s perspective and put it inside, and see what it looks like.”
“With my publisher I tend to need to prove what I have in mind and why it can work.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Matt Ruff is the author of the novels Lovecraft Country; 88 Names; The Mirage; Bad Monkeys; Set This House in Order; Fool on the Hill; and Sewer, Gas & Electric: The Public Works Trilogy. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Follow Matt on Twitter and go listen to our 2017 and 2020 conversations.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Matt by Lisa Gold. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 526:
James McMullan
“If I can teach people to pay attention to the human figure, they will start paying attention to life in general, in a more intense way.”
Legendary artist and illustrator James McMullan joins the show to celebrate his new book, HELLO WORLD: The Body Speaks in the Drawings of Men (Pointed Leaf Press). We talk about James’ three-plus decades of posters for Lincoln Center Theater, the importance of the human figure in his art, how drawing with color opened a more expressive channel for him, and why Hello World is his most personal project (even more than his memoir). We get into the intersection of illustration & fine art and whether he resented being overlooked by the museum set, the experience of making more than 90 (!) posters for Lincoln Center Theater over the decades and helping define NYC theater (despite being neither “a New York guy” nor a hardcore theater-goer), how he makes his art in a perpetual state of risk and being willing to let that risk show, the ways his literary reading feeds his art and vice versa, and how he invested $11,000 in a supply of his favorite paper a dozen years ago and how it feels to reach the last of it. Plus, we discuss his High Focus Drawing approach, the gestalt between model and artist, how it felt to be a ‘sissy kid’ who found power in art, why he shows feet when everyone else is focused on the intimacy of close-up faces, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go get HELLO WORLD!
“As a good, successful illustrator you probably have more effect on the culture you’re working in than a lot of fine artists do.”
“When people want to talk about or teach drawing, they want to make it a system, and treat the human figure like a piece of furniture.”
“I’m not the miracle; the figure I’m looking at is the miracle.”
“One of the miracles was that the people at Lincoln Center just Got It immediately.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
James McMullan’s 90 posters for Lincoln Center Theater include Anything Goes, Carousel, The Front Page, and My Fair Lady. His paintings of a Brooklyn disco for New York Magazine became the visual inspiration for the movie Saturday Night Fever. With his wife Kate he has created many children’s books, including the perennial favorite, I Stink! His other books include Revealing Illustrations, The Theater Posters of James McMullan, and the illustrated memoir of his WWII childhood, Leaving China. He taught drawing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for more than 20 years. His newest book is Hello World.
(There’s a more extensive bio at his site.)
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at James’ apartment on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of James by me; all the artwork by him. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 525:
Paul B. Rainey
“I was 11 or 12 when my grandma said, ‘What does Paul want to do when he grows up?’, and my mum said, ‘He wants to be a comic artist,’ and my grandma said, ‘Yes, but what’s he want to do when he grows up?'”
With his fantastic new graphic novel, Why Don’t You Love Me? (Drawn & Quarterly), cartoonist Paul B. Rainey has crafted a deeply human story out of a deeply weird premise, taking the reader from bleak, black humor to the most heartfelt moment of connection. We get into the challenges of serializing this story over 6-plus years, the ways in which science fiction can help us reframe our day-to-day lives, the midlife meltdown that led to the creation of My Imaginary Band, and the ways Why Don’t You Love Me? explores what it’s like to look at one’s life and ask, “How did I get here?” We also talk about the perils of writing a story with such a great twist that it’s difficult to talk about (spoiler alert!), the amazing experience of being published by D&Q after years of self-publishing his comics, the amazing experience of getting a blurb from Neil Gaiman, why he’s never watched Groundhog Day, how Planet of the Apes either ruined or fulfilled his life, how he finally came around on Krazy Kat, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Why Don’t You Love Me?!
“I always thought I should be a pop star, even though I went bald at an absurdly young age.”
SPOTIFY PLAYER TK
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Paul B. Rainey is a British cartoonist who has been making comics for decades. In 2015, his graphic novel There’s No Time Like the Present was published by Escape Books. He has been a regular contributing cartoonist to Viz since 2013. His creations include Peter the Slow Eater, 14 Year Old Stand–Up Comedian, and Audrey Pemberton. He won the Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize in 2020 with the strip Similar to But Not. In it, he recounts meeting Madonna in his local pub in 1985. He has written, drawn, and self-published many comics, including Pope Francis Goes to The Dentist, Journey into Indignity, and Gripe Night. His new book is Why Don’t You Love Me?
Follow Paul on Twitter and Instagram and check out his shop.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Drawing of Paul by Paul. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 524: Thomas Woodruff
“You have to say, ‘I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it beautifully,’ which is kind of a queer sensibility: I want ornaments on everything. It was a challenge and you need a lot of sharp pencils, but I would just go at it.”
Artist and illustrator Thomas Woodruff joins the show to celebrate his amazing new graphic opera, Francis Rothbart! The Tale of a Fastidious Feral (Fantagraphics). We get into how Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan floored him and inspired him to make this 300-page extravaganza, what it was like to finally make a comic after decades of critiquing them in his role at the School of Visual Arts, and how living through the AIDS crisis forced an emotionalism into his art. We talk about the terrible glamour of his art, his predilection for making series of works (like his 365 paintings of apples and his ongoing series of apocalyptic, graceful dinosaur paintings), the virtues of carbon pencil and his hunt for the last supply of his favorite paper, and why he treats teaching drawing is like a religious rite. We also discuss his legacy vis-a-vis the students he taught and the programs he built, his philosophy of using the same model for a full year of drawing classes, the story of his first tattoo and the apotropaic act, the difference between having a sensibility vs. a style, why he retired from SVA after 20 years of chairing the Illustration and Cartooning departments, how students changed over that span, the mind-melting experience of watching Diver Dan as a child, The Next Project, and more! Give it a listen! And go read Francis Rothbart! The Tale of a Fastidious Feral!
“A drawing is a map of where the eye has been.”
“I’m always amazed when someone refers to my art style, because I don’t think I have one. And if I thought I had one, I would probably change it.”
“Gay people of a certain age almost feel like they were raised by wolves, because their parents were not terribly accepting.”
“You have to be very obsessive about art to have a career. Some people just want to have it because of a lifestyle.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
“I always say I’m kinda like the kid putting on a puppet show in his basement, except I don’t even want my parents to come down and see it.”
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Mr. Thomas Woodruff is an artist who loves to draw and tell stories, and make lots and lots of pictures of lots of unusual things. His right hand has had a pencil or a crayon or a brush clenched in it from a precociously early age. Like any honorary member of the Corvidae family, Woodruff has always been attracted to shiny things. In his long, varied, and eccentric career he has had thirty one-person exhibitions of his paintings; cerated hundreds of illustrations for books, periodicals and television; designed for the opera; and curated gallery exhibitions. Woodruff is Chair Emeritus of the Illustration and Cartooning Departments at the School of Visual Arts, where he held the post for 20 years. He spends half of his time in New York City, and the other half in the Hudson Valley observing the weeds, sparrows, rabbits, and skunks.
Francis Rothbart! Is his first work of comic art, and this “graphic opera” was seven years in the making.
Follow Thomas on Instagram and at Vito Schnabel Gallery.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Mr. Woodruff’s studio on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Mr. Woodruff by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 523:
Dawn Raffel
“For me, the most interesting about the whole process of writing isn’t sentence-making (although I could spend a year reworking the same sentence); it’s finding unexpected connections.”
Author Dawn Raffel rejoins the show to celebrate her wonderful new book, Boundless As The Sky (Sagging Meniscus Press), a gorgeous series of stories & a novella that take us from Invisible Cities to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. We talk about how Dawn’s previous nonfiction book, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, led into this new book, how she became obsessed with the Century of Progress World’s Fair (and how she wishes she could have asked her parents about visiting it in their youth), why Chicago was always her Emerald City, and how NYC has transformed over the decades she’s lived here. We also get into the strong influence of Invisible Cities on her book and how she felt about writing a feminine/feminist response to Calvino, how the two parts of Boundless As The Sky — stories, novella — talk to each other, the twin writing-joys of unexpected resonances and sentence-building, and how incorporating Yoga Nidra offers new approaches to writing workshops. We also get into her recent trip to Kenya for International Literary Seminars, her pandemic Zoom writing-accountability partners, how she finally got around to reading Moby-Dick (and what she made of it), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Boundless As The Sky!
(And go listen to our 2019 conversation!)
“With the traditional writing workshop, it’s so much from-the-neck-up, and by the time we sit down to workshop a piece, it’s already a fact, it’s something on paper. With embodied writing workshops, it’s a way of asking people to tap into deeper layers of consciousness, to try to tap into the things you know in the body, on a deeper level.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Dawn Raffel is the author of five previous books, including The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How a Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies. Other books include two short story collections, a novel, and a memoir. Her stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including NOON, BOMB, Conjunctions, Exquisite Pandemic, New American Writing, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Best Small Fictions, and more. Her new book is Boundless As The Sky.
Follow Dawn on Twitter and Instagram and go listen to our 2019 conversation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Dawn & Pierre The Terrier by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 522:
Ross Benjamin
“My kids have never known me to be doing anything else. This is my entire job to them. My daughter found it easier to remember that I ‘do Kafka’ than ‘translation’ as my career. If people ask what I do, she chimes in, ‘Daddy does Kafka!'”
Acclaimed translator Ross Benjamin returns to the show to celebrate the publication of his translation of The Diaries of Franz Kafka (Schocken Books). We get into the twisted history of the diaries, Ross’ monumental achievement of bringing them into English, the how ambiguity and circularity pervade Kafka’s very language, and the question of whether one can be qualified for this sort of task before actually doing it. We also talk about how this edition restores the bodily, sensual, sexual, and public-facing Kafka (& speculate on why K’s literary executor, Max Brod, bowdlerized the diaries in their initial incarnation), what it was like to translate the private writings of someone who was the personification of ambivalence, what the process taught Ross about his own life and how it revealed new aspects of Kafka to him, and what it’s like to catch Kafka in the act of writing. Plus, we discuss the feeling of accomplishing a dream project like this by the age of 40 and having the sense that he’s served the purpose he was meant for (which leads to the question of What Comes Next), the blurbs that made him plotz and the post-pub tribute from his daughter that brought him to tears, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read The Diaries of Franz Kafka!
(And go listen to our 2016 conversation!)
“You have to translate something that’s baffling to you, and if it at the end it’s less baffling, then you feel you haven’t done it justice.”
“As an editor, I think what Max Brod did was a travesty, but in terms of his motivations, I understand them very well.”
“Even when Kafka was writing entries that seemed private, everything was potentially a literary piece.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Ross Benjamin‘s translations include Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion, Joseph Roth’s Job, Daniel Kehlmann’s You Should Have Left, and Tyll. He was awarded the 2010 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his rendering of Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on Franz Kafka’s diaries.
Follow Ross on Twitter and Instagram and go listen to our 2016 conversation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Ross’ home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Ross by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 521:
Sara Lippmann
“All we’re doing is telling stories and getting them out, and if one person on the other end is there to receive it and have an experience that shifts them in some small way, then you’ve done your fucking job.”
Author Sara Lippmann returns to The Virtual Memories Show after almost a decade to celebrate her debut novel, LECH (Tortoise Books). We talk about how she had to move out of her comfort zone of short fiction (see her collections Doll Palace and Jerks) to write a novel, whether she felt guilty teaching a course on novel-writing before she’d finished her first one, the research that went into writing a book about the Catskills in decline, and what it means to find the right container for a story. We also get into the book’s title, and how it plays off of the Biblical notion of Lech Lecha (“go forth”) and the tradition of novels named after their protagonists’ last names (Herzog, Stern, Jernigan), and how LECH looks at those books through a feminist lens. On top of that, we discuss the silliness of “literary immortality” and what it means that almost no one reads Saul Bellow anymore, my absolutely ingenious idea for changing the nature of my podcast, how she took up running at 40 to combat depression, the moment she learned to stop caring about external validation, and the new novel she’s working on. Oh, and I stupidly ask her for a writing prompt. Give it a listen! And go read LECH!
(And go listen to my 2014 conversation with Sara!)
“I consider myself a short story writer. I think everyone has a narrative sweet spot, in how they conceive of story and narrative. The danger is becoming complacent with that comfort level.”
“Running and writing are linked for me, metaphorically: endurance, stamina, getting comfortable with discomfort, the banality of repetition. . . .”
“I gave up worrying about external validation, waiting for a gatekeeper to let me in, some patriarchal daddy to say, ‘Good job!'”
“There’s an event that happens in the novel, but what’s interesting to me isn’t what happened but the various interpretations of what happened and how it attains a mythological quality.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Sara Lippmann is the author of the story collections Doll Palace, re-released by 713 Books, and Jerks, from Mason Jar Press. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Best Small Fictions, Epiphany, Split Lip and elsewhere. She teaches with Jericho Writers and lives with her family in Brooklyn. Her new novel is LECH.
Follow Sara on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Sara’s sister’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Color photo of Sara by me; b/w photo by m.price. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 520:
Gil Roth and Aaron Finkelstein
“There’s no sense of who I am without this show. Between the relationships I’ve built and the humanity I’ve learned to mimic through interacting with so many people, it’s been great!”
Let’s kick off 2023 with . . . me! I My long-time pal Aaron Finkelstein returns to interview me for what we’ve decided to make an annual Virtual Memories tradition. Listen to Two Gentlemen With The ‘Rona (okay, he’s recovering, but I tested positive a few days earlier) check in on the changes a year has wrought. We get into how a Yom Kippur fast sent me on some strange paths, how our cultural touchstones mark us, what it means to be fair to our college-aged selves, and 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, including an intro about my end-of-year COVID experience. Give it a listen!
(& go listen to our end-of-2021 conversation, where we started this tradition, and frankly had a lot more pep)
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Aaron Finkelstein is a writer, sound designer and musician living in Seattle, Washington.
He has for more than a decade played the role of Trickster Uncle to his young nephews, Kai and Kenji. He teaches them board games, iambic pentameter, pop music trivia, comic strip history, theoretical and applied geekery, and the power of the written word.
Mr. Finkelstein has held the job titles of Coal Scuttle, WebMonkey, Don Juan’s Feckless Tobacconist, Sprinting Cubicle Troglodyte, Copyflogger, Phonics Monkey, Tritagonist, and the Much-Maligned Voice of Reason. Currently, he is seeking gainful employment as a Luftmensch, License Plate Alphabetizer, or Color Swatch. He no longer accepts appointments as a Social Creature, Stage Foot, Perhaps Man, or Peacekeeper.
Follow Aaron on Instagram
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Fink from … 2006? … by my wife. Photo of Fink by himself. Same with my solo one. It’s on my instagram somewhere.
Virtual Memories Show:
The Guest List 2022
It’s time for our year-end Virtual Memories Show tradition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary: The Guest List! I reached out to 2022’s pod-guests and asked them about the favorite book(s) they read in the past year, as well as the books or authors they’re hoping to read in 2023! Twenty-two guests responded with wonderful, idiosyncratic, and illuminating book recommendations: 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 (and me)! This great episode of The Virtual Memories Show offers up a huge list of books that you’re going to want to read in the new year, so give it a listen, and get ready to update your reading lists!
You can listen to The Guest List episode here, but if you visit our special Guest List 2022 page, you’ll find the list of all our respondents and all the books they cited (w/links!).
Also, go check out The Guest List archive page, which has links to all of the previous annual editions of The Guest List, dating back to 2013!
Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guests
The guests who participated in this year’s Guest List are 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, Marina Warner, and me, Gil Roth!
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The episode was recorded at stately Virtual Memories Manor on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of my 2022 reads by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 518:
Dmitry Samarov
“Art is made out of art, and you model your art and/or your behavior after other people. Then time goes on and you meet some of them, and they’re not what you thought they were. And that makes you question what it was that you were after all those years.”
For the final interview episode of 2022, artist & author Dmitry Samarov rejoins the show to talk about his new book, PAINT BY NUMBERS, the disastrous experience he had trying to profile a pair of renowned artists, and why he chose to chronicle (& fictionalize) it years later in this book. We get into the conflict of art & commerce, fame & failure in America, and the relationship of artist, artwork, and audience. We also talk about the Lynda Barry class that opened his eyes to his own art-making process, what he’s learned from making a podcast of his own, the surprise bliss of holding a book-event with no audience, how he’s changed through the newsletter he’s been keeping up regularly for a dozen-plus years, what his ongoing collage-art has unlocked for him, whether there’s such a thing as an artistic dead-end, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Paint By Numbers!
(And listen to our 2014, 2015, 2018, 2020, COVID Check-In, and 2021 podcasts)
“I’m 52, and I can very confidently say that at 10 or 12, art was a very important part of my life.”
“I had times where I tried to be inspired by ideas or memories as a spur for a piece of visual art. I’ve tried repeatedly. . . . That kind of thing is not a way I ever had any success in.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Dmitry Samarov paints and writes in Chicago. He is the author and illustrator of seven books, including Old Style and Soviet Stamps. He sends out a newsletter every Monday. An absurd amount of his work is collected at his website, dmitrysamarov.com, which is around 20 years old. His new book is Paint By Numbers.
Follow Dmitry at his newsletter and on his podcast, hu u no.
Dmitry & me, Jan. 31, 2018 Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Drawing of Dmitry by the man. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 517:
Steven Heller
“I don’t have outside interests. I try to make design and life as holistic as possible. I don’t go out hunting or fishing, or collect stamps. I don’t have other passions that many people do have.”
Author, design guru, blogger, instructor, graphic designer and treasure Steven Heller rejoins the show to celebrate his wonderful new book, Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York (Princeton Architectural Press). We get into why he was ready to dive into memoir after 200 (!) books on design, how he found his voice for this book, what it was like revisiting his life from the mid-’60s to ’70s, and how he wed his personal development with his growth as a graphic designer & art director. We also talk about his literary influence (go, Team Orwell!), the question of legacy, the artist he wishes he could have worked with in his storied career, and how he reassessed his past design work via captions in the book. Plus, we discuss AI images & the future of art direction, fascist symbology & whatever’s going on with Ye, the joy of an empty New York City, his ongoing battle between hubris & neurosis, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York!
(And go listen to our earlier conversations from 2018, 2019, & 2020!)
“If I can’t do something as well as I like, or think I should be able to, then there’s strength in numbers. Doing four books a year deflects the criticism of one book.”
“I think about friends — this year has been the worst — who have passed away, and what they had to show for themselves and what will remain.”
“I figured the time was right to get my few stories down.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Steven Heller was an art director at the New York Times for thirty-three years, originally on the Op-Ed page and for almost thirty of those years with the New York Times Book Review. Currently, he is co-chair of the SVA / NYC MFA Design / Designer as Entrepreneur program, and he writes Printmag.com’s Daily Heller column, which Wired magazine has called a “must-follow feed in the world of design.” He is the author or coauthor of two hundred books on graphic design, satiric art, and illustration. He lives in New York City.
Follow Steven on Twitter and at The Daily Heller and listen to our earlier conversations: 2018, 2019, & 2020.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Steven’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Steven by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 516:
Drew Friedman
“The underground cartoonists are not serious people, which is appealing. You want to be around people who are funny.”
Artist Drew Friedman rejoins the show to celebrate his wonderful new book, Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix (Fantagraphics). We talk about his mind-blowing portraits of the legends of the Underground era, how he pared his list of subjects to 100 (from ~3000), why he decided to paint everyone in their prime years rather than present-day old (and the good stuff his subjects have said about their portraits), the research that went into writing biographical sketches of his subjects (and the challenges in getting photo reference for some of them), this book’s departure from his Heroes of the Comics and Old Jewish Comedians paintings, and why he’s not planning to do another book about Alt-comics artists of the ’80s & ’90s. We get into how Robert Crumb convinced him to draw people he doesn’t like, the griping Marc Maron made about writing the foreword, how he came around on certain artists while working on the book, and his complaints about having to paint so many men with ’70s era long hair and shaggy beards (and why he wants his next book to be all bald men). We also discuss how painting changed him as an artist, how he wound up recreating his early stippling effect with the brush, his realization that he was over a lot of his youthful grudges and resentments, his bucket list of people he hasn’t gotten around to drawing, why Harvey Kurtzman is his most controversial subject in the book, and a LOT more. Give it a listen! And go read Maverix and Lunatix: Icons of Underground Comix!
(And go listen to my 2013 and 2014 conversations with Drew!) (While you’re at it, you should also listen to my episodes with his brothers, Josh Alan and Kipp, and my conversation with their dad, the late, great Bruce Jay Friedman)
“I don’t like drawing foreheads, because they’re mostly the same. Except for old people. Old people are interesting because you see the history of their lives etched into their faces.”
“I wanted to be a Mad magazine contributor. I wanted to work for Topps. I accomplished both of those goals. But the underground comics just threw me for a loop.”
“Crumb reminds me of Chaplin. When talkies came in, and everybody switched over to making talking pictures, Chaplin continued to make silent films. Crumb was the same: underground comix were over, but he continued to put them out.”
“Art Spiegelman thinks I’ve mellowed. I just think I don’t have an agenda anymore. If I have grudges against anybody, I’ve forgotten them.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Drew Friedman’s comics and illustrations have appeared in Raw, Weirdo, Heavy Metal, National Lampoon, Spy, Mad, The New Yorker, The New York Observer, Snarf, Honk!, Blab!, Bad News, Mineshaft, Air Mail, and many other publications that no longer exist. In his New York Times review of Drew’s Old Jewish Comedians, Steven Heller wrote, “A festival of drawing virtuosity and fabulous craggy faces. Drew Friedman might very well be the Vermeer of the Borscht Belt.” The Society of Illustrators hosted a main gallery showing of Friedman’s Old Jewish Comedians portraits in 2014. The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum at Ohio State University held a major exhibition of his All The Presidents portraits in the fall of 2019.
Drew and his wife Kathy Bidus live in semi-seclusion with their retired AKC grand champion beagle, Dela.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Drew’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Drew from a screen cap of a documentary on Jared Kushner. Artwork by Drew Friedman (pencils & then completed paintings of Art Spiegelman and Skip Williamson), from this article on The Comics Journal. Photo of R. Crumb holding Drew’s book by Pete Poplaski, also from that TCJ article. Photo of Dela by me. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 515: David Sax “In the future, digital technology is going to continue evolving in new, unforeseen, incredible, maybe scary maybe wonderful ways, some of which we’re seeing now. But also, no matter how much that happens, we’re still human beings. We’re still flesh and blood creatures on this earth, and we have … Continue reading "Episode 515 – David Sax"
Virtual Memories Show 514: Jim Ottaviani “He was a terrible husband and a terrible father. And maybe only a so-so friend to most people. At the same time, he did fundamentally change the way we look at the universe.” Writer Jim Ottaviani rejoins the show to celebrate his new graphic biography, EINSTEIN (First Second)! We … Continue reading "Episode 514 – Jim Ottaviani"
Virtual Memories Show 513: Peter Stothard “There’s more of Crassus in modern politics than there is Caesar or Pompey.” Classicist, editor, and writer Peter Stothard joins the show to celebrate the publication of his amazing new book, CRASSUS: The First Tycoon, the first in Yale University Press’ Ancient Lives series. We get into what drew … Continue reading "Episode 513 – Peter Stothard"
Virtual Memories Show 512: Michael Lesy “The Wisconsin Death Trip was a holocaust without Jews. It was a shitstorm. And if you don’t acknowledge the shitstorm, you’re not entirely alive. Walker understood that.” Photographic historian & writer Michael Lesy joins the show to celebrate his amazing new book, WALKER EVANS: LAST PHOTOGRAPHS & LIFE STORIES … Continue reading "Episode 512 – Michael Lesy"
Virtual Memories Show 511: Marina Warner “In my old age I’ve become haunted by my parents.” Writer, professor & critic Marina Warner joins the show to talk about her new book about her parents, Esmond and Ilia: An Unreliable Memoir (New York Review Books). She gets into the memory of her father’s Cairo bookshop getting … Continue reading "Episode 511 – Marina Warner"
Virtual Memories Show 510: Jerry Saltz “I never stepped back. I always felt caught right in the middle of the hurricane — in the best sense of the word to the most terrifying — from 2001, when everyone said everything changed.” Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Jerry Saltz joins the show to celebrate his new collection, … Continue reading "Episode 510 – Jerry Saltz"
Virtual Memories Show 509: Darryl Pinckney “It’s meant to be funny, but it makes me sad to remember it, because it’s a lost time.” Literary & cultural critic Darryl Pinckney rejoins the show to celebrate his new memoir/memorial, Come Back In September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (FSG). We get into Darryl’s … Continue reading "Episode 509 – Darryl Pinckney"
Virtual Memories Show 508: Tom Gauld “There are all these tiny little pushes and pulls that the audience don’t even notice but feel like big changes for me.” Cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld rejoins the show to celebrate the publication of his new book, Revenge of the Librarians (Drawn & Quarterly), a collection of his … Continue reading "Episode 508 – Tom Gauld"
Virtual Memories Show 507: W. David Marx “I realized I had three questions: How does status affect the behavior of individuals? How did the status struggles of certain groups lead to the creation of new cultural forms? And why does culture change and why does it stick?” With his new book, STATUS AND CULTURE: How … Continue reading "Episode 507 – W David Marx"
Virtual Memories Show 506: George Prochnik “This book is a bit of an intellectual Coney Island. It’s a rollercoaster or funhouse ride through a number of thinkers and themes I’ve been concerned with for years.” George Prochnik rejoins the show to celebrate his new book, I Dream With Open Eyes: A Memoir About Reimagining Home … Continue reading "Episode 506 – George Prochnik"
Virtual Memories Show 504: Eva Hagberg Author & architecture writer (& secret agent of PR) Eva Hagberg rejoins the show to celebrate her new book, WHEN EERO MET HIS MATCH: Aline Louchheim Saarinen and the Making of an Architect (Princeton University Press). We get into how Aline built the narrative around Eero Saarinen’s greatest buildings, her … Continue reading "Episode 504 – Eva Hagberg"
Virtual Memories Show 503: Jonathan Ames “I would tell my writing students that it’s okay to be deeply influenced. I was struck when I was watching Ken Burns’ documentary on jazz; every great jazz musician would talk about their influences, like Miles Davis saying he heard Charlie Parker play and wanted to make a sound … Continue reading "Episode 503 – Jonathan Ames"
Virtual Memories Show 502: Jerome Charyn “Once you have the voice, you have the novel.” Author, critic and film scholar Jerome Charyn rejoins the show to celebrate his new book, BIG RED: A Novel Starring Rita Hayworth & Orson Welles (Liveright Books). We get into how Hollywood created Jerome’s childhood & youth, his fascination with … Continue reading "Episode 502 – Jerome Charyn"
Virtual Memories Show 501: William Deresiewicz “I like to say that our age is characterized by two kinds of phenomena: things that can’t get worse, but keep getting worse, and things that can’t happen, but happen.” Author & critic William Deresiewicz joins the show to celebrate his new book, THE END OF SOLITUDE: Selected Essays … Continue reading "Episode 501 – William Deresiewicz"
Virtual Memories Show 500: ALL The Guests FIVE-HUNDRED EPISODES of The Virtual Memories Show?! Let’s celebrate this milestone episode with tributes, remembrances, jokes, congrats, non-sequiturs, and a couple of songs (!) from nearly 100 of my past guests, including Maria Alexander, Jonathan Ames, Glen Baxter, Jonathan Baylis, Zoe Beloff, Walter Bernard, Sven Birkerts, Charles Blackstone, … Continue reading "Episode 500 – ALL The Guests"
Virtual Memories Show 499: Hayley Campbell “Nobody ever sees all of death, so what I was doing — attempting to see all of it — was quite unusual. I don’t think anyone is supposed to see all of it.” Author, broadcaster, and journalist Hayley Campbell returns to the show to celebrate her fantastic new book, … Continue reading "Episode 499 – Hayley Campbell"
Virtual Memories Show 498: Jonah Kinigstein “I’m not making art for anyone but myself, hoping that maybe somebody will understand, that they felt like I did at a certain time.” At 99 years old, unrepentant artist Jonah Kinigstein rejoins the show to celebrate his new book, UNREPENTANT ARTIST (Fantagraphics Underground)! We talk about how it … Continue reading "Episode 498 – Jonah Kinigstein"
Virtual Memories Show 497: Dave McKean “Everything I see as making up my sense of self is about individual humans having a passion to create something, reaching out to me through their work. I get to see the world through their eyes, full of intent, full of the history of them, the emotions of them, … Continue reading "Episode 497 – Dave McKean"
Virtual Memories Show 496: Noah Van Sciver “The only faith I had was that I grew up in this church, but how much did I even know about this church? If I reinvestigated that, would I be able to reclaim that faith?” Cartoonist Noah Van Sciver joins the show to celebrate the release of two … Continue reading "Episode 496 – Noah Van Sciver"
Virtual Memories Show 495: Ruth Scurr “Part of my understanding of what I’m doing as a biographer involves openness to the idea that it’s a relationship; the biographer and the subject both in a sense are bringing something to the project.” With her wonderful new biography, Napoleon: A Life Told In Gardens And Shadows (Liveright … Continue reading "Episode 495 – Ruth Scurr"
Virtual Memories Show 494: Brian Doherty “The only through-line that unites every single person in this book is that they drew, published, or distributed what the mores of their time considered dirty pictures.” Author Brian Doherty joins the show to celebrate his fantastic & important new book, Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, … Continue reading "Episode 494 – Brian Doherty"
Virtual Memories Show 493: Joe Ciardiello – LIVE! “A blank piece of paper is still the most intimidating thing.” It’s our first live episode since The Before Time! The great illustrator Joe Ciardiello rejoins the show for a conversation at ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ! We talk about ArtYard’s exhibition of his art from A Fistful … Continue reading "Episode 493 – Joe Ciardiello"
Virtual Memories Show 492: Howard Chaykin “I’ve always had an absolute obsession for the demimonde of sleaze, and New York had particular kind of demimonde-itude when I was a kid.” Legendary comics creator Howard Chaykin rejoins the show for a WIDE-ranging talk to celebrate the conclusion of his Time2 opus, soon to be released in … Continue reading "Episode 492 – Howard Chaykin"
Virtual Memories Show 491: Andrew Jamieson “Jung said exhaustion can be a great window into the unconscious, and it certainly was. One day, around 47, I just couldn’t get out of bed, and I remained in bed for two or three months.” Psychotherapist Andrew Jamieson joins the show to talk about his new book, MIDLIFE: … Continue reading "Episode 491 – Andrew Jamieson"
Virtual Memories Show 490: Alexandra Lange “A lot of people try to think about the geography of the mall in the context of the outside. The outside is not important. Ignore the outside and get into the center and work your way out from there.” With her fantastic new book, Meet Me At The Fountain: … Continue reading "Episode 490 – Alexandra Lange"
Virtual Memories Show 489: Ira Nadel “Roth left so many instructions and prescriptive statements about how things should happen after his death, that he was really trying to — to use a phrase uttered by the gravedigger in Everyman — square the hole.” Professor & biographer Ira Nadel joins the show to talk about PHILIP … Continue reading "Episode 489 – Ira Nadel"
Virtual Memories Show 488: Andreas Kilcher and Judith Butler “Kakfa was drawing in a very individual, very idiosyncratic way. I think that’s the source of his boldness, just to draw and not to think.” To celebrate the publication of the groundbreaking Franz Kafka: The Drawings (Yale University Press), contributors Andreas Kilcher & Judith Butler join … Continue reading "Episode 488 – Andreas Kilcher and Judith Butler"
Virtual Memories Show 487: Alvin Eng “With so much of life, you need to be prepared out the wazoo, but once you’re in the moment, you have to improvise.” Playwright, performer and acoustic punk raconteur Alvin Eng joins the show to celebrate his new memoir, Our Laundry, Our Town: My Chinese American Life from Flushing … Continue reading "Episode 487 – Alvin Eng"
Virtual Memories Show 486: Charlie Porter “For someone like Agnes Martin, she wore utilitarian garments. And those utilitarian garments became a way of actually existing, of having utility in your life. By wearing them, she could live. Functional clothing allows you to function, full stop.” Fashion critic, journalist and author Charlie Porter joins the show … Continue reading "Episode 486 – Charlie Porter"
Virtual Memories Show 485: Kathe Koja “Making Dark Factory was like trying to put together the puzzle without the picture on the box.” Storyteller Kathe Koja rejoins the show to celebrate the launch of her new project, Dark Factory (Meerkat Press)! We talk about how Dark Factory combines a fantastic new novel with immersive fiction … Continue reading "Episode 485 – Kathe Koja"
Virtual Memories Show 484: Julie Phillips “When you have kids, you can find yourself really interested in writers and artists who leave their children. It’s not usually about wanting to leave your own children, but about wanting to have your old self back. Author & biographer Julie Phillips joins the show to celebrate her amazing … Continue reading "Episode 484 – Julie Phillips"
Virtual Memories Show 483: Celia Paul “Letters and paintings are both in the constant present.” Painter Celia Paul rejoins the show for the US debut of her new book, Letters To Gwen John (NYRB). We talk about how Celia found herself through corresponding with the late artist (d. 1938), the parallels between her life and … Continue reading "Episode 483 – Celia Paul"
Virtual Memories Show 482: John Crowley “One thing age and experience bring you is an accumulation of ability to create minds at work. It’s the hardest thing to do in writing.” Legendary author John Crowley rejoins the show to celebrate his new novel, Flint And Mirror (Tor Books), as well as his just-before-the-pandemic collections, And … Continue reading "Episode 482 – John Crowley"
Virtual Memories Show 481: Anneli Furmark “There shouldn’t be any difference between a landscape drawn in a book in a story and one in a frame; it’s still my vision of a landscape.” Swedish cartoonist (okay: serietecknare) Anneli Furmark joins the show to celebrate the publication of Walk Me To The Corner (Drawn & Quarterly, … Continue reading "Episode 481 – Anneli Furmark"
Virtual Memories Show 480: Nicholas Delbanco “As you grow older, you become an amalgam of so many separate influences and so many voices that you tried to learn how to copy that you become in effect your own original, rather than a slavish adept.” Author & MFA teacher Nicholas Delbanco rejoins the show to celebrate … Continue reading "Episode 480 – Nicholas Delbanco"
Virtual Memories Show 479: Sebastian Smee “There’s a tendency with everything being online to think of images — infinitely reproducible and tweetable — but to actually be at the museum and have this space between you and the physical object, there’s a charge that happens between you and the artwork, and that simply doesn’t exist … Continue reading "Episode 479 – Sebastian Smee"
Virtual Memories Show 478: Rebecca Mead “There’s a sense of layered history in London, and you can see it written into the streets. You can walk in London and see a skyscraper on one side of you and the Roman wall of the city on the other.” New Yorker contributor Rebecca Mead joins the show … Continue reading "Episode 478 – Rebecca Mead"
Virtual Memories Show 477: Anna Della Subin “Something that was so important was how to write other people’s stories, how to write about all these different ideas, from traditions so different from my own.” With her fantastic new book, Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine (Metropolitan Books), Anna Della Subin explores how deification has … Continue reading "Episode 477 – Anna Della Subin"
Virtual Memories Show 476: David Sipress “Ever since I was a kid, if I’m holding a drawing implement in my hand and I’m touching a blank page, I get a feeling of peace.” With his brand-new book What’s So Funny?: A Cartoonist’s Memoir (Mariner Books), New Yorker staff cartoonist David Sipress explores the family dynamics … Continue reading "Episode 476 – David Sipress"
Virtual Memories Show 475:
Mark Prins
“There’s an enchantment in the idea that we can experience the consciousness of people who have died thousands of years ago, through writing and poetry. That never ceases to amaze me.”
With his debut novel, The Latinist (WW Norton), Mark Prins has created a fantastic, Highsmith-ian novel of Oxford intrigue. We talk about the failed novel that led to The Latinist, his background in classics & poetry (Latin/Roman & otherwise), metamorphoses (Ovidian & otherwise), the challenges of (& resources for) writing across gender, the Blake poem that transformed him, and why it’s important to Be Kind To Your Reader. We also get into Ovid’s telling of the myth of Daphne & Apollo & how/why he subverted it for The Latinist, the need to balance character & desire with plot, how he uses academic themes to illuminate his characters, the question of who decides what gets preserved and represented in history, the fun of creating a fictional Roman poet & writing their choliambic verses (& the joy of reciting Latin poetry), his literary influences, the importance of his time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the one thing you should REALLY consider before entering an MFA program, his interest in the metaverse, synthetic realities, and capitalism, and more! Give it a listen! And go read The Latinist!
“I could never have written this novel without my MFA at Iowa. I needed a lot of time and space to write.”
“Translations are most interesting to me as snapshots of the time and place in which they were being translated.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Mark Prins is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. His debut novel is The Latinist.
Follow Mark on Twitter and Instagram.
Photo by Nina Cochran Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Mark by Nina Cochran. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 474:
Nicole Rudick
“Who qualifies for biography was always the romantic notion of the Lone Genius, who was always white and male. Women were not taught to think of themselves in that individualistic way.”
Author, critic and editor Nicole Rudick joins the show to celebrate the publication of her amazing book, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Siglio Press). We get into Niki de Saint Phalle’s word-paintings & what they tell us about the arts of revelation and concealment, Nicole’s shifting concept of biography & the tyranny of the archives, the role of the audience/reader in art, and why Nicole’s first big post-pandemic trip will be to Niki’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany. We also talk about the role of women in biography and how women have to write themselves into history, Nicoles own history with art, how she found herself in NYC, the copy of Gary Panter’s Jimbo that blew her mind, why she kept Ruth Scurr’s book on John Aubrey beside her throughout the time she wrote the book, her post-lockdown aesthetic overload at the Art Institute of Chicago, and how Niki de Saint Phalle continues to reach us decades after her death. Give it a listen! And go read What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle!
“I knew enough of Niki’s work to understand that she put her life into it and that you could use it to tell a story.”
“I love all of her work. I love the way that it progresses and changes. She never wanted to repeat herself; she kept moving forward.”
“As with an artwork, the person who’s looking at this book has to participate in it. There’s thinking, there’s looking, there’s reflection.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Nicole Rudick is an independent writer and editor based in New York. She has been an editor at The Paris Review, Artforum, and Bookforum. In 2018, she served as interim editor of The Paris Review. She edited the Spring and Summer issues and hosted the first season of the magazine’s podcast. Nicole’s writing has appeared in a wide variety of publications: in periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, T Magazine, The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Bookforum, and The Paris Review; online at The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and Boston Review; and in catalogues published by the New Museum, RISD Museum of Art, and Karma and Canada galleries. In 2015, Nicole won the prestigious ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for editing Sam Stephenson’s Paris Review essay on John Coltrane’s biographer, Dr. Cuthbert Simpkins. Her new book is What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle.
Follow Nicole on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at my house on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Author photo of Nicole by Matteo Mobilio. Drawing of Nicole by Lauren Weinstein. Photos of Nicole in my library by me. It’s all on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 473:
Darryl Cunningham
With Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator (Drawn & Quarterly), cartoonist Darryl Cunningham undertook the most intense and difficult process of all of his nonfiction books. We get into Putin’s postwar upbringing in Leningrad, his KGB career and the fall of the USSR, and how those key elements play into his strategy and tactics for Russia on the world stage. We talk about how this book was an outgrowth of his previous Billionaires, what it was like transitioning from the .01% to the REALLY wealthy, the ways in which money is weaponized, the challenges of visually representing Putin and of conveying some of his atrocities on the comic page, the need to push back against authoritarianism, and why he wants people to understand his book is not anti-Russian. We also discuss how he’s taking a break from nonfiction to work on his longform supernatural story, Far Beyond Midnight, on his Patreon, the influence of Dark Shadows on his young mind, what it’s like posting pages online as soon as they’re done and how it affects his creative process, and more! Give it a listen! And go read Putin’s Russia!
And go listen to my 2021 conversation with Darryl about Billionaires!
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Darryl Cunningham is the cartoonist of six non-fiction books, including Supercrash: How to Hijack the Global Economy, Billionaires, and most recently, Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator. His comics explore subjects as diverse as mental health, science, economics, and politics. He has given talks at the London School of Economics and the City of Arts and Lights, Valencia. In 2015 he was one of 30 world-renowned photographers, painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers and musicians who were invited to contribute to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Art of Saving a Life project, to promote vaccination in the developing world. In 2018 he was awarded an Honorary Degree of Master of Arts from Leeds Arts University.
Follow Darryl on Twitter and Instagram and support him on Patreon.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Darryl by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 472:
Scott Meslow
Let’s pre-celebrate Valentine’s Day with a conversation with Scott Meslow, author of the brand-new book, From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy (Dey Street Books)! We get into how Scott defines RomComs, what inspired him to chronicle their history, what these movies say about audiences & audience expectations, the entertainment industry, criticism, gender, and diversity trends, and plenty more. We talk about how he winnowed down his mega-list of key RomComs to 15 (+1 unmade movie), the one movie he hated having to cut, what led to the aforementioned rise-fall-rise of the genre, which movies haven’t aged well and which have grown better, the ways in which self-aware subversion of RomCom tropes degenerated into self-conscious excuses for making the same old movie, our shared love for Judy Greer, and why he’s pulling for a Netflix RomCom Cinematic Universe to rival Marvel’s. We also discuss his accidental entry into journalism and his interest in culture writ large, my love for Hudson Hawk, how fandom has taken over the entertainment industry, the actor he thinks should have been a bigger hit, how he ended up with John Wick’s trunk, and more! Give it a listen! And go read From Hollywood With Love!
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Scott Meslow is a writer, editor, and critic with over 10 years of experience on the entertainment and culture beat. He writes for publications including GQ, Vulture, The Atlantic, and The Week. His portfolio includes profiles, Q&As, reported features, film and TV reviews, podcasts, and pretty much anything else you might need somebody to write. His first book is From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy.
Follow Scott on Twitter.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Scott by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 471:
Glenn Kurtz
“You can show what’s lost by showing how rich some tiny little fragment was.”
With Bianca Stigter’s documentary, Three Minutes: A Lengthening, on the festival circuit, author and inadvertent historian Glenn Kurtz joins the show to for a conversation about his 2014 book, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (FSG). We talk about the vibrant prewar Jewish life in Nasielsk captured by his grandfather’s camera, the process of restoring the home movie, his Grail-like quest to find the few surviving Jews from the town to record their stories and find out what was really in that brief movie. We get into how long it took him to recover from writing Three Minutes in Poland, what it was like returning to it for the documentary, how the book changed his approach to memory, and the fearsome responsibility and wonderful gift of restoring to the survivors a few moments of their childhoods. We also discuss what interviewing Holocaust survivors taught him, how he learned to accept that there are so many stories he’ll never know, how it felt to visit Poland as part of his research, and some non-Holocaust topics, like how music led to Glenn’s literary career, what he learned from his interview series with writers about their writing practice, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film!
(Also, here’s the documentary’s trailer, an ABC News item on it, and a NYT review.)
“The urgency to understand ‘What are we looking at?’ in this pre-Holocaust view of Jewish Poland is what motivated me. What am I seeing? It’s a silly question, but if you ask it often enough, it’s unanswerable in the end. The film just keeps opening and opening to you as you ask that question.”
“So much can be excavated if you just pause and focus on something.”
“It demanded an openness and strength to listen to the stories that people had to tell me, and to bear witness to their inconceivable pain.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Glenn Kurtz is the author of Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, and Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film. He was the host of Conversations on Practice, a series of public conversations about writing held at McNally Jackson Books in New York City.
There’s a more extensive bio on his site.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Glenn by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 470:
David Thomson
“We will sit in the dark and we will contemplate the worst scenes of violence and cruelty, and if we were to see them in real life, we’d feel horrified and compelled to try to intervene. But the movies tell you you don’t have to brave. It’s only a movie.”
With his new book Disaster Mon Amour (Yale University Press), legendary film critic & writer David Thomson explores the intersection of disaster-as-entertainment and disaster-as-real-life. We get into how the imminent destruction from catastrophes like the pandemic, climate change, and authoritarianism have made us more cynical, why we thrill to CGI’d destruction, how his book evolved from his 2019 pitch, and how it pairs with his previous Murder And The Movies. We also talk about what we lose when we stop seeing movies in theaters, why romantic/screwball comedies of the ’40s and not noir are the best American films, his Pauline Kael story, the decade he most adores, and whether after 45 years in the US he’s ever felt quite American. Plus, we discuss whether he’ll do another revision to The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, his upcoming essay about The Godfather and whether he’ll pretend the third one didn’t happen, his literary upbringing and the radio adaptations that set him on his literary path, my lightning-round questions of Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy and Bleak House vs. Middlemarch, and much more! Give it a listen! And go read Disaster Mon Amour!
“This is a book over which I had intense pleasure and fun. I’m not ashamed to say it; I think it’s part of the mystery of it.”
“Screwball comedies of the 1940s are the most pleasant and beguiling films I know, and I love them and I love the idea there was an era when films were made for fun.”
“We shouldn’t be ashamed about having a good time. Having a good time — whatever form it takes — is a very precious, essential part of human society.”
“I always had a slightly abnormal in how things were done in the movies. As a kid, my friends were totally caught up in the story, but I was already focused on how those effects were achieved.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
David Thomson is one of the great living authorities on movies. He has written more than twenty books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Murder And The Movies, and biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles. His new book is Disaster Mon Amour
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of David by Michael Lionstar. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 469:
Raman Sehgal
With his new book, The Floundering Founder: 24 Lessons To Refocus Your Business and Better Yourself, marketing entrepreneur (& longtime pal) Raman Sehgal explores what it really means to learn from your mistakes. We talk about the failures and missteps that helped him build a successful marketing & design agency in ramarketing, what he learned from good (and bad) business books, the process of writing his first book, and whether he has anxiety over running a company with ~60 employees. We get into how easy it is to get lost in the day-to-day and not step back to see the big picture, the importance of having some big (and shareable) goals, what it’s like when there’s an external valuation put on your business, the value of schmoozing, and the realities of imposter syndrome. Plus, we discuss what he’s learned from hosting the Molecule to Market podcast, the importance of being/having a nemesis, his dream of taking his company & their families to see the northern lights, and more! Give it a listen! And go read The Floundering Founder!
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Raman Sehgal is the founder of several niche companies, including ramarketing, a multimillion-dollar international marketing agency that helps companies get noticed in the global life science space. An entrepreneur from a very young age, Raman embarked on a business journey that ultimately spanned the Atlantic —from a spare room in the Northeast of England to the bustling streets of Boston, MA, where he lives with his wife and three sons. Raman authentically shares his knowledge, mistakes, and learnings around the world as a keynote speaker, podcaster, blogger, Forbes Agency Council member, and guest university lecturer.
Follow Raman on Twitter and LinkedIn
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Raman by someone else. It’s on my instagram.
Virtual Memories Show 468: Wallis Wilde-Menozzi
“A book about silence has to have silence in it.”
Author, poet and translator Wallis Wilde-Menozzi returns to the show to explore her new memoir/meditation, Silence & Silences (FSG). We talk about the uses and abuses of silence, the magic of herons, what it takes for the voiceless to find a voice, the nature of censorship (both external and self-driven), whether “home” is where you live or where you’re buried, and how she developed the mosaic mode of her new book. We also get into feminine writing vs. masculine writing, her distrust of the authority of words, the differences between American and Italian culture when she started exploring family history, her accidental career, and the experience of editing the “final” draft just as the pandemic began, and finding there was more to write. She also explains why she doesn’t keep out-takes of her writing, why some experiences are too personal for social media, and what it meant to be a woman writer when she was coming up. Give it a listen! And go read Silence & Silences! (& listen to our 2013 and 2017 conversations)
“There are major women writers now who are articulating things that one could recognize but was waiting for someone to put words to.”
“The pandemic and the environmental crisis shows me that we’re in a transition that’s going to be very deep, and we’re not going to recognize a lot of things when it’s over.”
“By chance: that’s the way my writing life went.”
“I think it’s very important to see that women are as varied as men, but also that they not be afraid to show non-male qualities.”
TUNEIN PLAYER TK
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TuneIn, Tumblr, and RSS!
About our Guest
Wallis Wilde-Menozzi is the author of Mother Tongue, The Other Side of the Tiber, and Toscanelli’s Ray. Her poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in Granta, The Best Spiritual Writing, Words Without Borders, and Tel Aviv Review. A collection of her essays was published in Italian as L’Oceano e’ dentro di noi. She lives in Parma, Italy and occasionally Bronxville, NY. Her new book is Silence & Silences.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Wallis’ Bronxville, NY home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones feeding into a Zoom H5 digital recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Cloudlifter CL-1 and a Mackie Onyx Blackjack 2×2 USB Recording Interface. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos of Wallis & Paolo by me. It’s on my instagram.