The Virtual Memories Show (general)

Thirty of this year's Virtual Memories Show guests tell us about the favorite books they read in 2021 and the books they hope to get to in 2022! Guests include Jonathan Baylis, Zoe Beloff, Jacques Berlinerblau, Anne Cattaneo, Michael DeForge, Shary Flenniken, Sophia Glock, Heywood Gould, Glenn Head, Ron Hogan, Kate Lacour, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Matt Madden, Kate Maruyama, Robert McCrum, Robert Meagher, Anahid Nersessian, Scott Newstok, Weng Pixin, Alta Price, Keiler Roberts, Dmitry Samarov, Nadine Sergejeff, Dash Shaw, Jen Silverman, Edward Sorel, Rosemary Steinbaum, Karl Stevens, Andi Watson, and Heather Cass White (+ me)! • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_465_-_The_Guest_List_2021.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 6:19am EDT

Artist, illustrator & author Nora Krug rejoins the show to talk about her work on the new Graphic Edition of Timothy Snyder's ON TYRANNY: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Ten Speed Press). We get into how the project originated and how illustrating On Tyranny compelled her to live up to its lessons, her approach to illustrating the book and how a visual experience can create a new reading of it, her use of personal photographs from the Third Reich, and how this project serves as a companion to her award-winning graphic memoir BELONGING. We talk about her concerns about misread propaganda imagery, the assumptions she had to make about readers' visual literacy and what illustrations and design could constitute "hijacking" Snyder's text, the ways photographs can make people accountable, what it means when governments censor photos, and the contrasting perspectives she and Snyder brought to the book: an American facing Europe and a European facing America. We also discuss how the text was updated post-January 6 and which of its lessons are "nice" vs. "critical", the optimism that lies in the midst of the book's dire message, what she & Snyder have learned from each other during their virtual book tour, Nora's realization that she has an artistic mission for the rest of her life, and more! Follow Nora on Twitter and Instagram, and listen to Nora's 2018 episode • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_464_-_Nora_Krug.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 5:37pm EDT

With her wonderful new YA graphic memoir PASSPORT (Little, Brown Young Readers), Sophia Glock recounts a key moment from her teenage years: the discovery that her parents were intelligence officers for the CIA. We talk about the need to tell her story and that of the lives that touched her in the city of [REDACTED], the choice of writing for a YA audience, and what she learned to show vs. tell. We get into the challenge of maintaining the voice of adolescent Sophia without letting contemporary Sophia intrude, what embarrassed her most about revisiting those years, what it's like to have created the only comic to be reviewed by the federal government for classified material, how her parents' secret lives affected her, and how she managed to make the longest book of her career (and the most deeply personal one). We also discuss her love of the X-Men in the mid-90s and how it launched her into comics (and my own history with those Children of the Atom), how she's balanced art, work, a newborn, & family mid-pandemic, some tradecraft her parents taught her & the other traits they instilled in her, our respective control issues, what it's like talking to me without a festival table between us, and more! Follow Sophia on Twitter and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_463_-_Sophia_Glock.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:16pm EDT

Legendary artist, illustrator, cartoonist, & author Ed Sorel joins the show to celebrate the publication of his memoir, Profusely Illustrated (Knopf). We get into his remarkable career (and "unremarkable life"), the rage that drove his political cartooning for more than a half-century, the illustrations that made him realize he had come into his own as an artist, the origins of Push Pin Studios & his stories of working with Seymour Chwast and Milton Glaser, the terrible lessons in abstractionism that beat figurative drawing out of him for years, and his need to look at his past work to remind himself that he does know how to draw. We talk about whether political cartooning is intended to change minds or provide comfort, how writing is like a pastel drawing, how he balanced art, commentary, and commerce over his career, why he refused to sell his drawings to certain hated people, how he learned to harness the nervous energy of his line to create a unique style (and why he hates tracing), why this (secular) patron saint of late starters got around to a memoir at 92, and more! Follow Ed on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_462_-_Edward_Sorel.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:33am EDT

With his new book, Ex Libris (Uncivilized Books), cartoonist Matt Madden takes readers on a post-modern, formalist dive into comics. We talk about the challenge of tinkering with story structure while still delivering an entertaining story, the work involved in jumping from style to style throughout Ex Libris (and in his past comics), the joy & terror of a notional library of potential books, and the inspiration of Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, & all his literary, cinematic & comics influences. We get into his comics upbringing, his work teaching comics and developing comics textbooks, being in a two-cartoonist household — he's married to Jessica Abel – and his kids' attempts at keeping him (somewhat) culturally up to date, the perils & rewards of canonical thinking, and his use of Alison Bechdel's comics-writing process. We also discuss the world that Factsheet Five opened up to him, his "welcome to comics" moment (courtesy of Bob Burden), Lewis Trondheim's challenge to him to make a comic without formal commentary, the supply chain hiccup that postponed Ex Libris, and plenty more! Follow Matt on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_461_-_Matt_Madden.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 3:26pm EDT

With TUNNELS (Drawn & Quarterly, tr. Ishai Mishory), Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan has created a fantastic, thoughtful, wonderful, hilarious, complex, cinematic thrill-ride of a story about a search for the Ark of the Covenant in modern-day Israel and the West Bank. We get into the true-life origin of the story, the otherwise boring results of Israeli archeology, the research that went into TUNNELS, and what it taught Rutu about her own upbringing and how the Bible is taught to Israeli children. We talk about her cartooning and storytelling influences, her less obvious tributes to Herge, her use of actors in costume for drawing reference and how they influence the characters in her books, TUNNELS' use of location as protagonist, and what it was like to draw a book with so many outdoor scenes, instead of the urban settings of her previous books, Exit Wounds and The Property. We also get into the growth of the Israeli comics scene over the course of her ~30 years in comics, her time with the Actus Tragicus comics collective and her secret origin as a cartoonist (she comes from a family of doctors, so being an artist was not an easy path), whether she considers herself an Israeli cartoonist or a cartoonist who happens to be from Israel, why she tries not to think of her audience beyond one trusted reader, her first pandemic trip to . . .Siberia (!?), our flashback to when I interviewed her in 1998, and more! Follow Rutu on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_460_-_Rutu_Modan.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:27am EDT

They were among the last people I recorded with before lockdown, and now translators Tess Lewis and Alta L. Price are back to talk about co-curating the Festival Neue Literatur 2021 (which runs from November 11 to 14, 2021), and how the theme they developed for the postponed 2020 edition, TURN AND FACE THE STRANGE, became even more appropriate for the pandemic era. We get into the cliffhanger of rescheduling FNL and the offsetting challenges of virtual vs. in-person author attendance, the rise of nationalism and closed borders, how literature from other languages can become the fallback to let us understand the world from another person's perspective, and the act of translating when people refer to the pandemic in the past tense. We get into the German-language authors (and two American ones) who are participating in this year's FNL — Anna Baar, Joshua Cohen, Isabel Fargo Cole, Judith Keller, Helen Phillips, Benjamin Quaderer, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, and Ivna Žic — and how their works approach questions of identity and belonging through strange means. We also get into what Tess and Alta have learned about the world and themselves over the past 20 months in Pandemia, why the seclusion of a translator's life prepped them for some of the worst of it, what themes they'd love to curate for future FNLs, and whether Hölderlin would have used DoorDash. (Listen to my 2020 episodes with Tess and Alta) • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_459_-_Tess_Lewis_and_Alta_Price.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:50am EDT

With Albert Camus and the Human Crisis (Pegasus Books), professor Robert Emmet Meagher distills a half-century of reading and teaching Camus' work to show us how the writer and thinker continues to resonate 60+ years after his untimely death. We get into his accidental origins with Camus and how Camus speaks to us today, the Human Crisis speech Camus gave in 1946 and how it remains relevant, why no one paid attention to Camus' protests that he wasn't an existentialist, Camus' uneasy pacifism and Bob's own antiwar activism (and how it affected his career). We also talk about why I was a dummy not to take Bob's class on Camus when I was an undergrad at Hampshire (I did take his Sense & Spirit class in 1992), the Camus novel Bob had to grow into, his speculation on how Camus & his writing would have developed had he not died so young, and mortality, deathfulness, & how, as Camus put it, philosophy used to teach us how to die, but now teaches us how to think. In addition to Camus, we discuss Bob's work with veterans and healing moral injury, why exactly Achilles in the Iliad is "swift-footed" and the moment my mythic/tragic view of him gets dashed on the rocks of Bob's experience with soldiers, his draft-dodging conundrum and the deus ex machina that kept him out of Vietnam, his decision to teach & write about the subjects that interest him, rather than following academic trends, his status as a professor-in-waiting (but not retired!), how he's been coping with the pandemic, and how this book was his melodramatic Final Class. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_458_-_Robert_Emmet_Meagher.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 9:58am EDT

Cartoonist and animator Dash Shaw joins the show to celebrate his new book, Discipline (New York Review Comics), a Civil War-era story about a Quaker who joins the Union army. We get into how Dash's upbringing as a Quaker in Virginia led him to this book, the New York Public Library fellowship that exposed him to letters and diaries from the time, the artwork of the era and how it influenced the "floating" visual style of Discipline, and his urge to depict the moments that are left unchronicled. We also discuss the Quaker debate over paying a military tax during the Civil War, the sense of growing up in an area haunted by that period of history, the multi-year layering process of making this book and how it converged and diverged with the making of his amazing new animated movie, Cryptozoo (Magnolia Pictures), and how story dictates form & style. We also reminisce about a bookstore panel he did with Frank Santoro once upon a time, and how their tooth-and-nail arguments over the nature of comics gave him hope that there's plenty of room for comics to grow. Follow Dash on Instagram and Twitter • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_457_-_Dash_Shaw.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:20am EDT

With Parade Of The Old New, artist Zoe Beloff has created a panoramic history painting documenting the depths of the Trump years. We get into the impetus for that project, its enormous scale (140 feet long), its Brechtian roots, and its reproduction as a 19-foot accordion book (available only from Booklyn). We talk about notions of rights and responsibilities for artists, the debate over displaying Philip Guston's work, the angry e-mail Zoe received from a white male Marxist that critiqued her for "her own benefit", and why Parade Of The Old New is getting exhibited in Europe & Russia but not America. We also dive into her fascination with artists and thinkers of the interwar era, like Bertolt Brecht & Walter Benjamin, her family's refugee history and why it left her feeling like a Rootless Cosmpolitan, the ways she interweaves painting, film, installation, picture-storytelling (or cartooning) and other forms, the vision of NYC that brought her to the city in her 20s from Scotland, and why being a story-scavenger rather than an inventor means she gets to live in the worlds of her art. Also, we talk about her new multimedia project to celebrate essential workers, my no-fly list for pod-guests, why telling her mother and grandmother's refugee story is the closest she'll come to autobiography, and a LOT more. Follow Zoe on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal

Direct download: Episode_456_-_Zoe_Beloff.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 2:27pm EDT