The Virtual Memories Show

No guest? No problem! It's time for another impromptu monologue episode: this time, Gil sorts through family legacies of the genetic and Larkinesque variety, as occasioned by taking his dad for cataract surgery and getting a call from an old & previously deceased friend ! Follow Gil on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe , Patreon , or Paypa...

With his amazing new book The Twilight of Bohemia: Westbeth and the Last Artists in New York (Black Sparrow Press), Peter Trachtenberg explores the 50+ years of history for Westbeth Artists Housing in the far West Village, the role of the arts in New York City, and the ways we build & sustain community. We get into his long -term history with Westbeth, how this book's was born from an essay about...

Author David Shields returns to the show for a conversation about his new documentary, HOW WE GOT HERE , and the companion book, HOW WE GOT HERE: Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of Allan Bloom times Žižek squared = Bannon (Sublation Media). We get into how the world moved from the death of God to the death of essence to the death of truth, and how deconstruction, once the provin...

Uh-oh! Gil doesn't have a guest this week, so he recorded a monologue from a hotel room in Weehawken, NJ during a business conference for his day job! He talks mental health, oblique mythology, Charles Crumb, comics and pharma friends, the St. Patrick's Day Parade, and more! Follow Gil on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe , Patreon , or Pa...

With THE MAN NOBODY KILLED: Life, Death, and Art In Michael Stewart's New York (Celadon Books), author Elon Green brings us an investigation into a terrible episode of police brutality and its aftermath in mid-'80s NYC. We talk about what drew him to the story of Michael Stewart , a 25-year-old black artist-model-DJ who died at the hands of transit police in 1983, his amazement that no one else ha...

Biographer Vanda Krefft returns to the show to celebrate her wonderful & illuminating new book: EXPECT GREAT THINGS!: How the Katharine Gibbs School Revolutionized the American Workplace for Women (Algonquin Books). We talk about the turn of the (20th) century origins of Katharine Gibbs & her school, the legacy of her executive secretarial course for generations of women, "Gibbs Girls'" descendant...

With DEATH TRIP: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir (Spiral Path Collective Press),  Seth Lorinczi explores how trauma can be transmitted over generations, and how an ancient (& new) form of treatment can help overcome it. We talk about finding his family's story of the Holocaust, trying to understand why so much of it stayed hidden, how badly it warped his life, and how he & his wife found answe...

With NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory (Yale University Press, tr. Shelley Frisch), Martin Mittelmeier traces the roots of the Frankfurt School in southern Italy. We talk about the epiphany on the lip of a volcano in Lanzerote that brought this book to life, the years he spent poring over Theodor Adorno's writing (and the temptation to mimic Adorno's style), h...

Can LA private detective Happy Doll live up to the Four Noble Truths and escape the cycle of Samsara? Jonathan Ames returns to the show to help answer that question and celebrate his new novel, KARMA DOLL (Mulholland Books)! We talk about the joy of reading (& writing) page-turners, how his lead character Happy Doll has evolved over three novels (so far!), what it's like bringing Buddhism into a d...

With 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 c...

Cartoonist Matt Madden rejoins the show to celebrate his new collection, SIX TREASURES OF THE SPIRAL: Comics Formed Under Pressure (Uncivilized Books). We talk about the liberation to be found in formal constraints, his history with OULIPO and its OUBAPO offshoot, how structure can inspire story, and the formal and thematic challenges in sequencing the stories in the collection. We get into how he...

After 4+ decades as a reporter and with a half-dozen nonfiction books under his belt, Fred Kaplan rejoins the show to celebrate his first foray into fiction, A CAPITAL CALAMITY (Miniver Press)! We talk about how lockdown got him to start A Capital Calamity , how his history in national security and the defense sector informs the novel (& its accidental march torward WWIII), how his protagonist is...

With THE EMPTY LOT (Fantagraphics Underground), artist Mia Wolff brings together 100 paintings from more than 40 years of her oeuvre. We talk about how she found the thread & structure for the book, the patterns that emerged as she re-ordered the pieces and stitched them together with new illustrations, comics and prose pieces, and how you can make a joyride of a monograph by introducing your cat...

Translator & author Damion Searls kicks off our 2025 season with a talk about his amazing new book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRANSLATION (Yale University Press). We talk about how all writing — translation or not — involves constraints, he balanced the book between philosophical argument and concrete examples of translation, and how he came to define translation as "reading one thing and writing somethin...

It's the end of the year, so let's take stock of 2024 with a big ol' year-in-review monologue! Your intrepid/decrepit host, Gil Roth , gets personal while talking about what he's learned from the podcast & his guests this year, how they continue to change each other's lives, the moment he found his Spirit Jacket , his communion with a Roman sculpture , the validation of his year-long photo-book pr...

Twenty-two of this year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2024 and the books they hope to get to in 2025! Guests include Roland Allen, Shalom Auslander, Laura Beers, Sven Birkerts, Mirana Comstock, Leela Corman, Nicholas Delbanco, Benjamin Dreyer, Eric Drooker, Randy Fertel, Sammy Harkham, Frances Jetter, Ken Krimstein, Jim Moske, Robert Pranzatelli, Jess...

With The Picture Not Taken: On Life and Photography (NYRB), Benjamin Swett brings us a subtly beautiful series of essays that explore memory and identity and what we really see in the viewfinder. We talk about the role of photography in his life, how Musil, Sebald, and Knausgaard and taught him to trust digressions, the freedom to be found in the essay, how working in the NYC Parks Dept. led him i...

LIVE from Labyrinth Books , artist and vulgarizer of history (in the French sense) Ken Krimstein returns to the show to celebrate his new book, EINSTEIN IN KAFKALAND (Bloomsbury)! We talk about the mystery of the 15 months Einstein & Kafka overlapped in Prague, how the two of them invented the modern world, what Ken has learned about graphic storytelling after 3 books, how the theory of relativity...

Cartoonist & historian Eddie Campbell returns to the show with his fantastic new book, KATE CAREW: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist (Fantagraphics Underground), which explores turn-of-the-(20th)-century artist, cartoonist, illustrator, caricaturist, interviewer & journalist Kate Carew . We get into how Eddie discovered Kate's work while researching The Goat-Getters , how Kate wound up interv...

Comics librarian and curator Caitlin McGurk returns to the show to celebrate her amazing new book, TELL ME A STORY WHERE THE BAD GIRL WINS: The Life and Art of Barbara Shermund (Fantagraphics). We talk about Caitlin's shock at her 2012 discovery of Barbara Shermund's incredible gag-comics and illustrations in the archive of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum , how her interest in Barbara e...

Artist Frances Jetter joins the show to talk about her amazing new book, AMALGAM: An Immigrant, His Labor Union, and His American Family in Brooklyn (Fantagraphics Underground). We talk about how the book both expanded and narrowed in scope during its 12-year process, how her grandfather's story bleeds out into American, Jewish and labor history, and how she integrated her trademark linocut prints...

With THE NOTEBOOK: A History of Thinking on Paper (Biblioasis), Roland Allen explores how the proliferation of paper & binding changed culture, business, and maybe the nature of human consciousness. We talk about how keeping a diary got him obsessed-ish with notebooks, how he found a narrative and protagonists as he delved into the history of notebooks, and what it means to see the notebook as a p...

With his new graphic novel, NAKED CITY (Dark Horse Books), artist/activist Eric Drooker finishes the New York trilogy begun in Flood! and Blood Song . We talk about how Naked City started with the image of a beleaguered squeegee-man and wound up a love letter to New York and especially Tompkins Square Park, the challenges of using word/thought balloons and captions after making wordless comics for...

With his fantastic new book, MYSTICISM (NYRB), philosopher Simon Critchley explores mystic traditions from medieval Christianity to the present. We talk about the evolving definition of mysticism, its female-centric history, how it's not just the moment of revelation but the adoption of a form practice (like Julian of Norwich's half-day of revelations and ~40 years of theological examination of th...

Hail Satan! It's spooky season, and writer/editor Doug Brod joins the show to celebrate his fantastic new biography, BORN WITH A TAIL: The Devilish Life and Wicked Times of Anton Szandor LaVey, Founder of the Church of Satan (Hachette). We talk about the line between huckster and believer, the history of the Church of Satan , why Doug didn't want to puncture the mythology LaVey built around his li...