The Virtual Memories Show is a weekly interview podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. Every Tuesday, you can expect a fascinating conversation with a fascinating person. The quotes below are the closest it comes to having a mission statement. Hit the arrow to check them out. Salle thought for a moment. It has nothing to do with strategy, calculation. I sometimes think that I have interviewed people simply because I have such a hard time listening to anybody, and this is a way of enforced, regimented listening.
You can help keep the fine art of conversation alive by supporting The Virtual Memories Show! But you CAN support this show by telling other people about it, and by sending me postcards, letters 10 Alta Vista Dr. Messages have a 3-minute time limit.
Check out the praise The Virtual Memories Show has received from guests and listeners over the years. Gil Roth does a remarkable job of pulling out the stories from his guests, and avoiding the obvious. Where has it been all my life? Just listened to my first, and it would appear Gil has the stuff. Alphabetical list over here. We talk about the liberation to be found in formal constraints, his history with OULIPO and its OUBAPO offshoot, how structure can inspire story, and the formal and thematic challenges in sequencing the stories in the collection.
Young and me! 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. 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 talk about how keeping a diary got him obsessed-ish with notebooks, how he found a narrative and protagonists as he delved into the history of notebooks, and what it means to see the notebook as a piece of technology or hardware. We get into their influence on art and the Renaissance and the theory that sketchbooks allowed artists to move toward realism , how diaries created a new, private persona distinct from the public self, how he discovered a new reading for a line of Hamlet , and how digital options never manage to replace the paper notebook.
