Episode 646 - Eulogy
The Virtual Memories Show
No conversation this week, unless you count me talking to myself. This episode, I share some thoughts and memories about my father, following his death last week at the age of 88 — or 87, depending on who he was lying to — along with the eulogy I gave at his funeral. • More info • Support The Virtual Memories Show via , , or , and subscribe to
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Episode 645 - Rachel Cockerell
The Virtual Memories Show
How did Russian Jews wind up migrating to Galveston, Texas in the early 1900s? How did the image of America as melting pot come into existence? How did a family memoir evolve into a forgotten history of Zionism? Find out during my conversation with about her amazing new book, (FSG)! We talk about the tightrope walk of composing a history solely out of primary sources and why she eschewed the author's voice for this book, her grudging acceptance of Robert Caro's maxim to , and how her perspective on Jewishness changed over the course of writing the book. We get into the once-titanic literary...
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Episode 644 - Paul Karasik
The Virtual Memories Show
Thirty-plus years in the making, the graphic adaptation of (Pantheon) is here at last! rejoins the show from to talk about the process of adapting Auster's postmodern crime novels into comics, how he collaborated with David Mazzucchelli (CITY OF GLASS) and (GHOSTS) on the first two and how he wound up drawing the third book, THE LOCKED ROOM, how these novels possessed him for decades, and the moment when he understood what each novel was really about. We get into how he met Auster at a parent-teacher conference shortly after the New York Trilogy came out, the moment of truth when Auster...
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Episode 643 - Kate Maruyama
The Virtual Memories Show
One of my fave guest/friends, , rejoins the show to celebrate her wonderful new novel, (Running Wild Press)! We talk about the book's long gestation/publishing history, Kate's love of old Hollywood & costume design, closeted movie stars and how she told the story of a gay relationship in the '30s & '40s, and how it felt to write a non-horror horror story. We get into her own Hollywood experience in the '90s, how it informs Alterations, and how it felt to repeatedly smash into the glass ceiling, as well as how ghosts creep into everything she writes, how older people become invisible...
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Episode 642 - David Denby
The Virtual Memories Show
With his fantastic new book, (Holt), writer and critic explores the impact on American culture of Jews Unbound through profiles of Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. We talk about how he selected his four subjects, how each of them came of age in an environment that Jews hadn't experienced in millennia, the ways each handled the responsibilities of family against their careers, the difference between "Jew" and "Jewish," and which one unfolded the most to him over the course of writing the book. We get into why Bernstein's greatest role may have been as a...
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Episode 641 - Peter Stothard
The Virtual Memories Show
Can we find the poet in their poems? With (Yale University Press), explores how the life of the great Roman poet unfolds though his art and the histories. We talk about why he wrote this biography through a critical study of Horace's poems (and why that's been a controversial approach), how Horace embodied the artist-as-madman long before the Romantic era, and why it was important to show the alienness of Horace's verse and how nervous Peter was about translating him into English to show how the Latin works. We get into Horace's place in Rome's history, how he bridged Greek poetic modes into...
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Episode 640 - Cecile Wajsbrot
The Virtual Memories Show
With her bewitching and beautiful novel (Seagull Books, translated from French by , who joins our conversation), takes us on a tour of Chenobyl's Forbidden Zone, the High Line in NYC, Dresden, Paris, under the shadow of the Time Passes section of Virginia Woolf's . We talk about the challenges of writing a first-person novel about translation, the strange ways Woolf has followed Cecile throughout her careers as author & translator, and how it felt to see her novel about translating Virginia Woolf into French get translated into English. We get into her literary career, how Time...
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Episode 639 - Keiler Roberts
The Virtual Memories Show
She may be able to quit cartooning (for a while), but can't quit The Virtual Memories Show! With her wonderful new book, (Drawn & Quarterly), Keiler returns to comics with a collection of (mostly) hilarious vignettes about domestic life, middle-age, the impact of multiple sclerosis, and having too many pets. We talk about why she walked away from comics and how she came back, how she avoids memoir in favor of memory (and humor), how she still has anxiety over drawing but is way too tired to have social anxiety anymore, and why she branched into kitschy craft-modes that no one would...
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Episode 638 - Peter Kuper
The Virtual Memories Show
With his new graphic novel, (WWNorton), brings us the 400-million-year history of insects in their own words as they take a post-human tour of the New York Public Library. We talk about how Insectopolis began when he was around 4 years old and saw the 17-year cicada brood, how Peter needed a new mode of comics-making for this book, and how he made the NYPL a key character in the project. We get into mankind's dependence on insects, the stories of forgotten entomologists (and why they were forgotten), his experience getting a at the NYPL during COVID and how he found all the great &...
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Episode 637 - Vauhini Vara
The Virtual Memories Show
With (Pantheon), tech writer explores how our sense of self has been co-opted, quantified, and exploited by big tech as a way of selling us more stuff or selling us to third parties. We talk about what we talk about when we talk about our Google searches (& Amazon purchases, Twitter subject preferences, etc.), the interface of exploitation and self-expression, what selfhood means to tech companies vs. what it means to us, and what she learned when she fed chapters of her book into ChatGPT. We get into agency vs. coercion, how the promise of tech so often gets inverted, how ChatGPT tried...
info_outlineWith his latest book, THE DRIVING MACHINE: A Design History of the Car (Norton), architect and architecture & design writer Witold Rybczynski explores how cars evolved from their earliest days through the befuddling styles of today's EVs. We get into the design language of cars and how it had no true precedent, why European styles were so different and varied than America's, his favorite era for car design, and the differences between writing about cars and writing about buildings. We talk about the cars in his life and how he integrated them into The Driving Machine's narrative (including the Mercedes that lasted him 25 years), the lives of the engineers & car-company founders he explored for the book, what he learned by drawing the book's car-illustrations himself, and how drawing all those cars brought him back to his youth. We also discuss the new book he's writing about his dissatisfaction with contemporary architecture, how it resulted from a Chat-GPT 'hallucination,' the cycles of architecture & the death of architecture criticism, the (sorta) imaginary house he designed for himself, and more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter