The Virtual Memories Show

With his fantastic new book, EMINENT JEWS (Holt), writer and critic David Denby 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 teacher, how Mailer's magnetism persisted way beyond its expiration date, how Friedan changed the world but was always challenged by her midwest upbringing, and whether Brooks was being disingenuous when he made musical numbers of our the Inquisition and Hitler. We also discuss judgements David made over the course of his career as a movie critic, what he did when he finally gave up reviewing and how he eased back into the cinema, why he revisited the Lit Hum course at Columbia a few years ago, after previously revisiting it 30+ years ago for Great Books, his take on my my lightning round of classic lit questions, his non-Le Carré experience in East Berlin, his reaction to my parents taking me to History of the World: Part 1 when I was 9, and more. Follow David on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Can we find the poet in their poems? With HORACE: Poet on a Volcano (Yale University Press), Peter Stothard 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 Latin, the variety of genres Horace worked in (and invented), and why the poet was cancelled early and often over the centuries. We also discuss mortality and legacy, how Horace & I each reacted to not getting killed by falling trees, why a certain Great Books program is so Athens-centric, how Peter's secondary school introduced him to "INCIPE!," "Sapere Aude," and "Carpe Diem," among other Horace-isms, and more! Follow Peter on Bluesky • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With her bewitching and beautiful novel NEVERMORE (Seagull Books, translated from French by Tess Lewis, who joins our conversation), Cécile Wajsbrot 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 To The Lighthouse. 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 Passes became a stand-in for her fascination with destruction, why she's translated Woolf's The Waves three times over thirty years (and whether the first one got her into the bad graces of the editor of Le Monde de Livres), what it was like to subvert the translator's typical role of invisibility with this novel, and the language she wishes she had. We also discuss mourning and the ways we try to keep conversation alive with those we've lost, the time I impressed the Princess of Yugoslavia by transliterating the Cyrillic on her family's jewels, and more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

She may be able to quit cartooning (for a while), but Keiler Roberts can't quit The Virtual Memories Show! With her wonderful new book, PREPARING TO BITE (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 mistake for art. We get into why she wants her kid to read her journals when she's gone, how MS taught her how to be bored, how men have no idea what perimenopause is like, what it means to be the best appointment of her doctors' day, and the reward of teaching comics to her friends and her mom. We also discuss how Karl Stevens helped her back into comics with this book (& encourages her in every other artistic idea she has), how weird it is to see two of Karl's super-detailed pages beside her sparse drawings in Preparing To Bite, and why she loved collaborating with her brother on the grownup fairytale Creepy. Plus, she teaches me the difference between living more and doing more, and I read you guys a Rilke poem in the intro. Follow Keiler on Instagram, Bluesky and Blogspot • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With his new graphic novel, INSECTOPOLIS (WWNorton), Peter Kuper 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 Cullman fellowship at the NYPL during COVID and how he found all the great & secret rooms while the place was near-empty, the INterSECTS exhibition that evolved from the fellowship and how it grew in scale, and his realization that entomologists are like comic fans. We also discuss his wife's great advice going into this project, the fun of getting experts to vet every chapter of Insectopolis, the alchemy that happens when people's passions overlap, how he harnesses the dread of imminent apocalypse to make his art, and more. Follow Peter on Bluesky, and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With SEARCHES: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon), tech writer Vauhini Vara 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 & failed to express her grief from her sister's death from cancer, why she brought memoir into SEARCHES alongside its other experimental modes, how her husband serves as a low-tech foil in the book, and whether or not we have a say in how the online era plays out. We also discuss why she doesn't post about her personal life, how the book's multiplicity of voices offsets the corporate voice of ChatGPT, what she got out of Bill Gates' biography, the importance of non-VC-funded technology to help us escape exploitative models of information, whether an essayist ever really changes over the course of an essay, and more. Follow Vauhini on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Artist Craig Thompson joins the show at long last to celebrate his new book, GINSENG ROOTS: A Memoir (Pantheon). We talk about how he spent ten summers of his childhood helping farm ginseng, how that herb connects rural Wisconsin with China and South Korea, how he balanced history, journalism, economics, and memoir in the pages of his book, and why he chose to make Ginseng Roots as a serial comic rather than a standalone book and how that affected his creative process. We get into how the book serves as a sort of midlife revision of his breakthrough book, Blankets, how the last chapter of the book had to happen in near-real-time, how a degenerative condition in his hands became a unifying theme to the book while almost derailing it, how he found the design language of the book and obsessed over a two-color process (to amazing results), and whether this is his swansong for comics (spoiler: it's not!). We also discuss what home means to him, 8 months into being on the road, what it was like discovering that he had a global audience, his ongoing relationship with his evangelical Christian upbringing, his editor's concerns that Ginseng Roots could open him up to accusations of cultural insensitivity (and how he got over it), all while geeking out over our fave cartoonists from the '90s indy period (go, Dylan Horrocks!), and more. Follow Craig on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Artist, professor and now like-it-or-not cartoonist Ari Richter joins the show to talk about his fantastic book, Never Again Will I Visit Auschwitz: A Graphic Family Memoir of Trauma & Inheritance (Fantagraphics). We talk about how he he began this project in the wake of the Tree of Life massacre in 2018, how it helped him exorcise the demons of his imagination after a lifetime of hearing his family's stories about the Holocaust, and how the book centered around intergenerational trauma and collaboration. We get into how he incorporated his grandfathers' holocaust memoirs into the book, why he found different styles for each section of the book, what he had to learn about comics storytelling after a career in fine arts, the revelation of reading Miriam Katin's memoirs and why he avoided rereading MAUS during the 5 years he worked on this book. We also discuss how drawing comics has changed his brain, why he was stunned by the commercialism of Auschwitz, why he's glad he got a German passport, why comics folks seem friendlier than fine arts people, the insanity of composing his comics pages in Photoshop (and what happens when he forgets to label his layers), and a lot more. Follow Ari on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Author and curator Dan Nadel joins the show to celebrate the publication of his amazing new biography, CRUMB: A Cartoonist's Life (Scribner). We get into Robert Crumb's significance in American art, comics, and culture, Dan's first experience with a Crumb comic (it was an ish of American Splendor), the challenge of capturing the underground comics scene of the '60s & '70s, and what it took for him to get over the "R. Crumb" persona and realize how integrated Robert's personality is. We talk about Crumb's role as nexus in the history of comics, the book's focus on Crumb's drawing and how different tools opened him up artistically, what it means to see Crumb as part of tradition and not just a conceptual outlier, how his Crumb differs from the Crumb of Terry Zwigoff's documentary, and the one detail he's still dying to find out about Zap Comix. We also discuss Dan's comics and art upbringing, how he found his place as a publisher then gallery & museum curator, how he was affected by the death of Crumb's wife Aline in 2022, how his museum experience prepared him for writing about the racist and sexist aspects of Crumb's comics, the only cartoonist biography he could tackle after Crumb, whether Crumb's Book of Genesis succeeds as comics, and a lot more. Follow Dan on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

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 Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter