The Virtual Memories Show

Cartoonist Matt Madden returns to discuss his new collection, Six Treasures of the Spiral. He delves into the liberation found in formal constraints and shares his experiences with OULIPO. Madden reflects on how these structures can spark creativity and storytelling. He also talks about his residency in France, the influence of Hergé on his work, and balancing comics-making with family life. Additionally, he highlights the importance of maintaining heart within constraints and maintaining accessibility in avant-garde storytelling.

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 & isn't a Fred-Not-Traveled, and what it was like to make things up after a career spent reporting the facts. We get into the moral quandaries of being an insider in Washington, his experience working for Les Aspin in the '70s, the early morning storytelling revelations that opened up the novel to him, and why he set a major scene of the book above The Comedy Cellar in NYC. We also get into whether we're slow-walking into WWIII, the lessons learned from the 2017-2021 era and how they may affect his coverage of the new administration, his jazz recommendations, the fun of dissecting Washington cocktail party culture, the pros & cons of a multipolar world, and more. Follow Fred on Bluesky, Facebook and Twitter • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

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 into the scene. We get into her dream of catspiders that inspired her for decades, the game of exquisite corpse she's been playing with Jim Woodring, and her history in art and side trips into a trapeze act with a circus and teaching martial arts. We also discuss the graphic novel she's working on and how that art parallels her painting, why The Empty Lot has an afterword in the form of a page-by-page tour-conversation with Samuel R. Delany, her love of transparency & translucency and why her paintings of water are so magical, the tension of her pitch meeting with Gary Groth, and a lot more. Follow Mia on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

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 something else." We also get into where all the languages — German, Dutch, Norwegian, French — started for him (+ his lockdown project of teaching himself modern Greek), how the business of translation has changed during his career and the problems with the English market's dominance, how a 'book report' led to him becoming the translator of Nobel-winner Jon Fosse, how he edited an abridged version of Thoreau's (7000 pages of) journals, and why he only put one negative example in The Philosophy of Translation. Plus we discuss how he doesn't look over his own translators' shoulders, why he resents critics' bias against translation and the notion of "a 'faithful' translation" or "getting it right," how he & his peers fought for royalties over fee-for-service and the days when translators treated like typesetters, and plenty more. More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

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 project, the joy of hiking the Catskills with an old friend, a big work-anniversary, the thrilling circumstances of his debilitating neck injury, the best non-clinical moment you can have in an oncology setting, the new addition to the Virtual Memories family, his 2025 wants, and above all, the question of whether a person can really change (and okay, above that, the question of what 'change' means). Follow Gil on Bluesky, Instagram, and LinkedIn • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

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 Ruliffson, Dmitry Samarov, Dash Shaw, David Small, Benjamin Swett, Maurice Vellekoop, and D.W. Young (+ me)! • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

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 into some strange career choices, and the challenge (& reward) of photographing trees. We get into our respective rebellions against our fathers and linearity, the loss of his daughter and how her shadow looms over the book, his idea for a negative-autobiography and my own photo-text project, how his family felt about being included in the essays, and the moment he felt comfortable moving from film to digital. We also discuss his 9/11 and what it revealed to him about himself, how the constraint of Instagram captions can lead to good storytelling, the ~30-year gap he took to finish his MFA, the benefits of leaning in to awkwardness and self-revelation, and a lot more. Follow Benjamin on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

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 bedeviled him since childhood, and how he managed to make a graphic novel about Jews in Prague and not include a golem. We get into all the research and rabbit-holes of this project, including his monthlong research-stay in Prague, as well as the chapter he had to cut on Kafka's love of Yiddish theater, the challenges of portraying Einstein's professional and personal struggles, and his discovery that readers would follow his phantasmagoric flights and surreal episodes. We also discuss Ken's fixations on Mitteleuropa and scenes & salons, Sam Gross' observation about his art, Kenny Werner's concept of effortless mastery, why he wants to bring some joy to his next project, and more. Follow Ken on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

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 interviewing the likes of Mark Twain, Picasso, the Wright Brothers, and other celebs (& non-celebs) of her time, how her self-caricatures serve as a sorta graphic autobiography (and precursor to the whole world of graphic memoir storytelling), her support of women's suffrage, and how I accidentally semi-sorta inspired Eddie to make this book. We also talk about how Kate's story evades sentimentality, how Eddie & Audrey Niffenegger formed the Digital Art Burglars firm™, what he's learned from exploring the early history of American cartooning, why his next book is about the Midwest school of cartooning, how he wound up writing the comics histories he wanted to read, and why he had to pull a page from this book due to a complaint from the printer. Plus we discuss his new graphic novel about how he met Audrey, how his comic strip of the Pajama Girl, a murder victim in Sydney, led to him working with Alan Moore on From Hell, his life-lessons about making every pitch & taking every job that was offered, and why Kate Carew was such an enormous outlier in the world of cartooning. Follow Eddie on Bluesky • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter

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 evolved from blog posts to a museum exhibit to a book, the challenge of writing about someone who did no interviews or press and had no close relatives, and how easily women get erased from history. We get into the gestalt of Barbara's fantastic linework and washes and her wry sense of humor, why Caitlin wound up writing an academic press version of the book before rewriting it for a trade publisher, the challenges & rewards of designing a book to showcase so much art, how Barbara helped create the look of The New Yorker in its early years, why Caitlin speculated (but not too much) about Barbara's sexuality. We also discuss the malleability of history, how the Billy Ireland has changed in the 10 years since Caitlin & I last recorded, the pep talk she wished she could have gotten from our late friend Tom Spurgeon, time Al Capp (!!) advocated for allowing women into the National Cartoonists Society, the incredible story of tracking down Barbara's remains and giving her a proper funeral 35 years after her death, and a lot more. Follow Caitlin on Instagram and the Billy Ireland blog • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Patreon or Paypal and via our e-newsletter