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People ask me who my dream podcast-guests are. Here’s a list of 10 living ones (some of whom may be in poor health and wouldn’t be able to record with me even if they were willing) and 10 who have died since I started making the podcast in 2012 and who I never got to record with:
The Living
- Robert Caro
- Peter Schjeldahl
- Tom Stoppard (pitched, said no)
- Gillian Welch & David Rawlings (we’ll count them as one)
- Fran Lebowitz
- Joan Didion
- Errol Morris (pitched, said yes, never responded to followups)
- Richard E. Grant
- Thomas Pynchon
- My podfather, Marc Maron
The Dead
- Philip Roth
- John Le Carré (pitched, never heard back)
- David Carr (pitched, busy, "we'll do it sometime")
- Donald Hall (pitched, said no)
- Charles Portis
- Richard Thompson (pitched, too sick to record, hooked me up with Matt Wuerker as a fill-in)
- Richard Sala (pitched, said no in an extraordinarily long & apologetic DM)
- Ricky Jay
- Robert Hughes
- Philip Kerr
If you've got connections and want to hook me up with any of the Living, let me know. Heck, if you can set me up with a podcast with any of the Dead, we can try that, too.
How are you? Staying on the right side of that line up there?
And now, 15 Things I like or am otherwise Going Through:
 1) I posted Episode #426 of the Virtual Memories Show, featuring Finnish author Laura Lindstedt. We talk about her dazzling & strange new novel, My Friend Natalia, literary life in Helsinki, Nathalie Sarraute's theory of Tropism, the challenges of translation & more! Give it a listen and pick up My Friend Natalia (Liveright, translated by David Hackston)
2) Last week, I posted a conversation with legendary writer, memoirist, critic, essayist and feminist Vivian Gornick. You should go give it a listen and pick up her new career-spanning collection, Taking a Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time (Verso Books), along with all her previous books, like Fierce Attachments, Unfinished Business, The Odd Woman and the City, The Situation and the Story, and The End of the Novel of Love (seriously: she's SO good)
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) Interview with the CEO of Amtrak. As long-time readers will recall, A) I'm a sucker for this stuff, B) I'm bummed that I can't share this piece with Tom Spurgeon, who was also a sucker for this stuff
5) Sometimes I wonder how much Tom would goof on my pandemic-hair
6) Steven Heller (2018, 2019, 2020) continues his series of interviews w/the assistants of great designers & illustrators. This time, he talks with Camille Murphy, assistant to Seymour Chwast
 7) This weekend, I gasped with joy when I saw some of these little guys blooming in my backyard
8) I enjoyed this Choire Sicha review of some novel about internet ennui much more than I'd likely enjoy said novel
9) I also really enjoyed this Substack e-mail by Walter Kirn, about rediscovering serendipity after a year without chance (I subscribed to his e-mail after reading it)
10) In Mark Ulriksen's latest e-mail (SUBSCRIBE!) he does a step-by-step on how he painted some dog portraits
11) The Because Language podcast interviewed Jesse Sheidlower about the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction that he edits (I really oughtta get Jesse back on the show to talk about that & his life in Pandemia)
12) Chris Bollen has a neat piece on a wonderful beach house, built with that sweet, sweet Captain Kangaroo money
 13) I keep drawing trees. Some are from my yard, some are from the neighborhood. I don't know what I'll do when the leaves come in, because I seem to prefer the starkness of their winterselves, the essence conveyed by the limbs and branches, the leaves only an implication. But then, for the longest time my favorite Springsteen record was Nebraska.
14) The ones I drew here are a three-in-one. I call them the Norns, or the Fates, depending on my mood. They're right behind the house, so I see them every morning, even when I walk about before dawn and they're just darker registers of black against the night sky. Soon their base will be obscured by the out-of-control forsythia. I tried drawing the tangled stalks of forsythia before they bloom, but they're too complex and my outline-method doesn't work with that. I'll have to go with single lines of various widths if I want to render them before they bloom.
15) As far as my meatself goes, I managed to get in 3 runs with The Guys last week: 2 x 6.3mi and 1 5mi. Nothing fantastic, but I'm trying to get my wind back without aggravating the gastric soleus condition that shelved me last winter. Yesterday, the spreadsheet I started keeping when I began Matthew Rhys' pushup challenge — Don't spreadsheet shame me! It's a tool for keeping some semblance of order in my life! — reached 250 days and 24,500 pushups. Which meant I could have gotten back to my average of 100/day if I'd just squeezed in 500 pushups that afternoon. (Twelve straight days of zeroes last month while I was recovering from costochondritis walloped my average.) I did not even attempt such a thing, but it was nice to know that I'm in shooting distance of that magic number again. Just like with the drawing, there's no end or goal for all this, of course.
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-series you think my audience should check out, etc.
See you next week. To quote Sun Ra,
Love for everybody,
Gil Roth
Virtual Memories
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