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I walked around the yard at 4:30 this morning and listened to the birds waking up. I thought about Philip Larkin's Aubade. I'm being pulled in a lot of directions right now. I'm lucky I have a little time during lunch to put this week's e-mail together
How are you? I've been wondering
And now, 17 Things I like or am otherwise Going Through:
 1) I posted Episode #442 of the Virtual Memories Show, featuring a conversation with artist and cartoonist Weng Pixin (a.k.a. Pix) about her new graphic novel Let's Not Talk Anymore (Drawn & Quarterly). We talk about how Pix built a multigenerational history of her family through silences, how she reverse-engineered her way into making comics, the challenges of growing up in an emotionally repressed environment and figuring out how to make art out of it, and how Singapore’s money-driven culture makes it difficult to build art communities, and plenty more. Give it a listen & pick up Let's Not Talk Anymore
2) Last week, I posted a conversation with cartoonist Andi Watson about his new graphic novel The Book Tour (Top Shelf). We get into the Waugh-meets-Kafka-via-Atget vibe of The Book Tour, Andi's genre-jumping career, the joy of the blank page, his YA & middle-reader work and how it contrasts with his 'grown-up' comics, and plenty more. Give it a listen & pick up The Book Tour
3) You can find every episode of my Virtual Memories Show at my site, and via iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, TuneIn, Podbean, or on your podcatcher of choice by plugging in the RSS feed
 4) Tomorrow (July 8), Bill Kartalopoulos is interviewing/Q&A-ing Dave McKean for a Society of Illustrators event, celebrating the exhibition of Dave’s art from Black Dog, a book that has haunted me since I read it a few years ago
5) I never played Angry Jew, but I did go to the opening day matinee of Inglourious Basterds so I could get a jump on watching Jews scalp Nazis
6) Fred Kaplan reviews a book on the history of the Iraq invasion and in the process further convinces me that In The Loop was a documentary
7) Off-mic, Howard Chaykin & I marveled over Betty Gilpin in G.L.O.W. I enjoyed this interview with her
8) Another of my California pals, Michael Gerber, has some thoughts about improv, comedy, and the legacy of Del Close
9) This obit bummed me out, because of all the circumstances in her life and the sheer capriciousness of getting run over while bicycling
10) Maybe it's just my being a middle-aged-man, but I got into this lengthy piece by Adam Tooze about the economic history of WW II
11) Neat up-and-down review of John Lanchester's new collection of ghost stories, because the first half is a sorta survey of his books up to now, and he's written some good ones, starting with The Debt To Pleasure
12) Langdon Hammer writes about the New Haven of Wallace Stevens
13) Yeah, yeah, I know: more Roth. This time, Sven Birkerts (2017, 2020, 2021) writes about the scandal around Philip Roth's biographer
14) I keep making art every day. The one evening I didn't get to do a watercolor, I did get in the sketch that I painted the next morning, so I count that as keeping the streak alive. On July 4th, I tried to make a watercolor of a photo posted by a pal of mine in Osaka. It was her birthday weekend. Here's how it came out:
15) The day before, I tried to draw Kafka's face for his birthday, but it was my first face and it wound up looking like a combo of Kafka, Marcello Mastroianni and Christopher Reeve. The day after, I drew the Japanese maple in Clive James' back garden, from February 2015 (he died in November 2019). He had published a poem about the tree and death a few months earlier, and maybe my drawing looks a little too circulatory, but I miss bare trees
16) I post my drawings & watercolors at Instagram & Twitter, but it's easier to check 'em all out in this Flickr album
17) I ran ~25 miles with The Guys last week. I joined them for part of their Saturday long run, but left them at the 5.25-mile mark and ran 2 miles back to my car in the rain (they had another 8 miles ahead of them). I pushed the pace for the last mile, and sprinted the last quarter-mile, and felt great after. I'm still on pace to lift my pushup average back to 100/day in time for my 1-year anniversary of doing my first pushup in a bazillion years
Send me an e-mail, write me a letter or a postcard, or call my Google Voice # (973) 869-9659 and leave a message about what you like or don't like about the podcast, who you want to hear me record with, what book-movie-music-comic-series you think my audience should check out, etc.
See you next week.
Think about my soul but I don't need a thing just the ring of the bell in the pure clean air,
Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
Twitter • Instagram
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