“I think mythology and fairy tales provide a good baseline, because almost everyone has read a subset of those stories, and the symbolism is something most people can reach for and relate to.”

With her debut poetry collection, OFFERINGS FOR ORDINARY GODS (Clash Books), Ali Trotta brings myth, magick, tarot, and ritual to bear on the eternal & primal struggle of women. We talk about those roots and how tarot and ancient myth inspired her work, where tarot began for her — ’90s, The Craft — and how past guest Katelan Foisy resparked her interest and showed her new depths in the cards, and her focus on revising ancient myths to retell the stories of wronged women like Persephone, Medusa, and Dido. We get into how she feels at seeing her work collected and how to look at her development as a poet without cringing at her younger selves, how everything is fair game and poetry can serve as exorcism, and how confession can be deeply coded in a poem. We also discuss the teacher who gave her the tools to read poetry deeply, her Very Online-ness and how she’s built relationships and writer communities online (and how it’s good to be part of the Group-Chat), her online #tinypoem flurries and how rockstar she felt when someone got a tattoo of one on their arm, the project(s) she’d love to write, and more. PLUS: She reads a few of her poems and gives me my second tarot reading of the summer! Give it a listen! And go read OFFERINGS FOR ORDINARY GODS!

“I know I’ve done my job as a writer if I’ve made someone cry or made someone angry.”

“We get stuck in the everyday bits of life. You forget the things that are worth living for, the things that matter. You can sacrifice yourself as much as you want to earning a living and paying taxes, but you can’t forget to live. Don’t sacrifice the pieces of yourself that you shouldn’t.”

“I think in poems. That’s how I look at the world and figure the world out, and figure myself out.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Ali Trotta is a poet, writer, editor, word nerd, and unapologetic coffee addict. Her poetry has been published in Uncanny, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Small Wonders, The Deadlands, Fireside, Enchanted Living, Strange Horizons, Cicada, Nightmare, Mermaids Monthly, The Best of Uncanny Magazine (Subterranean Press), and several of the Rhysling Anthology compilations. She lives in New Jersey with a rescue cat named Thor, who is part Maine Coon and part gremlin.

Follow Ali on Bluesky, Instagram and Tumblr, and subscribe to her newsletter.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Ali’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Ali by her; cover art of book by Katelan Foisy; selfie of us by me. It’s on my instagram.

“By contrasting the Declaration with the Emancipation Proclamation, I was showing some of the evolution that also happens in the Constitution.”

Let’s celebrate (or commemorate) America’s independence with an amazing new double book, DECLARATION ILLUSTRATED / EMANCIPATION ILLUSTRATED (Drawn & Quarterly). R. Sikoryak rejoins the show to talk about adapting foundational American documents (verbatim!) with a mind-blowing array of comic art parodies, ranging from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers to Jump Start to Check, Please! to Thanos! We talk about how this project spun out of his CONSTITUTION ILLUSTRATED in 2020, why he decided to include the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address alongside the Declaration of Independence, how he gave himself some pretty strict rules about which artists and characters he could and couldn’t use, including not re-using artists he used in his Constitution (which meant employing 200 different artists’ styles over the course of these books), and his goal of trying to bring the whole history of American comics into these books. We get into what it’s all taught him about America, the ways these documents show how America changed, why he doesn’t take offense at being a called a rip-off artist, and why he conceives of these books like a quilt. We also discuss whether he’s more sensitive about parodying art by living artists or dead ones, why he wants to get back to comics-parody adaptations of classic books and plays, the ways that access to comprehensive digital comics archives is both good and bad for his work, the artists he wishes could have included in these books, why he brought in many African-American artists and characters in the Emancipation portion of the book, but still found room for Barney Google & Snuffy Smith, the page that almost broke him (okay, it was his Emil Ferris parody), his series of 8-page comics stories for Tom Hanks’ first novel (!), and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read DECLARATION ILLUSTRATED / EMANCIPATION ILLUSTRATED!

“All my work is about constraints.”

“There’s so much history referenced in the grievances of the Declaration that I just didn’t know and had to learn.”

“If someone else did these books, they could have chosen entirely different artists for every single page. Anybody could do this, and they’d be different. When I was young, I thought about making the definitive parody of a certain comic, but I got over that.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Cartoonist R. Sikoryak is the author of Constitution Illustrated, Masterpiece Comics, Terms and Conditions, and The Unquotable Trump. He’s adapted the classics for various anthologies, including The Graphic Canon and RAW. His comics and illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, The Onion, MAD, and more. He’s done storyboards and character designs for Augenblick Studios on various animated projects. He teaches in the illustration department at Parsons School for Design and previously at The Center for Cartoon Studies. Since 1997, he’s presented his live comics performance series, Carousel, around the United States and Canada. He lives in New York City with his spouse, Kriota Willberg.

Listen to my 2012 and 2020 conversations with Bob.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Bob’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of me & Bob by me. It’s on my instagram.

“I was on twitter and saw someone say, ‘The Weeknd makes music for haunted strip clubs,’ and that idea is something my brain kept coming back to.”

After a 12-year Virtual Memories gap, Katie Skelly is back to celebrate her fantastic new graphic novel, HEAVEN (Fantagraphics)! But that’s not all: she’s also got the Bad Girl Tarot II (Kickstarter closing July 16, 2026), her horror comics anthology, Viscere, and the Thick Lines podcast! We talk about how she restructured her life and creativity post-lockdown, how she wound up marrying Jaime Hernandez, moving to LA, abandoning the Mets, and finding a community of cartoonists (spoiler: community is the thread that runs through Katie’s art and life), the funny tweet about The Weeknd that inspired HEAVEN, why she designed this new tarot deck to be like a prop for a movie you’d want to live in, and why she didn’t learn from my example and avoid making her own podcast. We get into how writing Ed Piskor’s obituary broke her, and the episode in Ed’s life that she takes as a cautionary note, the festival that drew her into the comics world, how she measures herself against her yearly Nabokov read, why she’s pretty much done with social media, the flight delay that led to her next comics project, and more! PLUS, Katie reads my tarot as we talk about what it’ll take for me to finish my book! Give it a listen! And go read HEAVEN!

“I started to incorporate tarot into my daily practice of life. Not in a way that restricts anything, but just in a way that gets a little bit more perspective or think about things that are just out of my control. It’s about a getting a bigger picture.”

“You have this idea in your head and you feel like you can project it out of your mind onto the wall and define exactly what it is, and you can’t! You can’t! You just have to work through it.”

“In my way, I’m going to honor Ed Piskor’s life by just being happy with everything I get: The win doesn’t matter if you don’t feel it.”

“Making an anthology was like, ‘I’m gonna outsource all my pain and get OTHER people to draw!'”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Katie Skelly is the author of Maids, The Agency, and My Pretty Vampire. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1985 and holds a B.A. in Art History from Syracuse University. Katie lives in Los Angeles with her husband Jaime and their two cats.

Artists in (my) residence

Here’s the tarot spread Katie laid out for my reading:

And heck, here’s the three of us, because those two are adorable:

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the AC Hotel in Beverly Hills on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Publicity photo of Katie by someone else; other ones by me. It’s on my instagram.

“The creation of culture is what marks us as human beings, and the fact that everybody has that desire connects us to each other.”

With his amazing new book, THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: The Secret Prison History of American Music (WW Norton), author Colin Asher explores how the criminal justice system changed the course of twentieth century music. We talk about how Elmo Hope’s Sounds from Rikers Island album inspired the book, how he chose the five artists to focus on — Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, Elmo Hope, Johnny Cash, Ike White, and Tupac Shakur —, the history of the carceral state, criminality and the popular images of Black and white “outlaw” artists, and how many artists’ careers were shaped, derailed, inspired by prisons. We get into the tightrope act of using Johnny Cash as a counterpoint to the racial dynamics of the book (as well as the work Cash did for prison reform), why he had to close the book with the story of Tupac and his mother, Afeni Shakur, and how hip-hop developed in response to America’s mass incarceration movement, how the philosophy of incarceration shifted from rehabilitation to punishment, Musicambia‘s work to bring music education into prisons, and what it means to pursue the arts for personal growth, even when you’re on death row. We also discuss how some arts writing can suck the joy out of the arts, why he prefers discussing art in relation to society rather than in relation to other works of art, why he made playlists for The Midnight Special, how playing vinyl records makes music a choice instead of wallpaper, the “burn the world down and replace it with an utopia” phase of his youth, the secret origins of his writing career, his dream projects (incl. the novel he’s noodling on), and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL!

“The problem isn’t that Johnny Cash was granted any sort of grace from the law, it’s that everybody isn’t granted that sort of grace.”

“If I’m beating the drum for a cause, it’s that music makes people better, that the skill of learning an instrument is going to make people more productive outside. That may well be true, but my core belief is that it doesn’t matter.”

“In my 20s I did a bunch of working-class jobs — bike messenger, drove a truck, worked in a warehouse — and at some point people stop taking you seriously if you have no education at all and look like you make 12 grand a year.”

“Three things I know a good deal about: literature, music, and politics, specifically political conflict. . . . I’d love to write a book about people who dedicate their lives to political movements and then outlive those movements.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Colin Asher is the author of THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: The Secret Prison History of American Music. He also wrote Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, a literary biography written as a work of creative nonfiction. That book was celebrated in The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. It was named “One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2019” by Apple Books, a “Book of the Week” by Publishers Weekly, and an “Editors’ Choice” selection by the New York Times Book Review. Both Publishers Weekly and Booklist gave it starred reviews.

Born in Morgantown, WV, and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Colin dropped out of high school and spent a decade in California, working as a bike messenger, stocking shelves in a warehouse, and driving a truck. Eventually he started working in homeless services, then enrolled in the City College of San Francisco. Later, he received a Bachelors of Science from Northeastern University, and a Master of Arts from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Despite the fact that he wrote a book about musicians, Colin has no musical talent – but that didn’t stop him from spending one of the best years of his life playing in a band with Spencer Ackerman.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at my home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Colin by Nora Carroll; photo of us by me. It’s on my instagram.

BLARDY BLARDY BLARDY

During my recent LA weekend, I asked author, pal, and past guest Kate Maruyama if she’d be interested in interviewing me, and for some crazy reason, she said yes! So this time around you get me doing my best not to ask the questions, and just letting it fly, as we talk about the history of the podcast, my dream list of pod-guests, my semi-fake erudition, why we should practice arts we’re no good at, my thoughts on mortality and progeny, the gentle change of years, the legend of the fire defenses of the Beinecke Library at Yale, and a ton of stories. Give it a listen! And go read Kate’s newsletter and check out our conversations from 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2025!

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Kate Maruyama is the author of Alterations, The Collective, Bleak Houses, and Harrowgate and her novella Family Solstice was named Best Fiction Book of 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine. Her short work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and she is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and winner of the Uncharted Short Story Prize.

She served on the working Board for Women Who Submit, and is currently on the Board of Directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Kate’s home on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Shure Beta 58A mcrophone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photos by me. It’s on my instagram.

“This was the most fun I ever had making a book. I got to sit on the attic floor, going though Harold’s papers and books, and there were a lot of surprises.”

“A letter is a joy of Earth — It is denied the Gods —,” sez Emily Dickinson (#1672), and THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom (Yale University Press) proves it! Heather Cass White rejoins the show to talk about editing Harold Bloom‘s letters for the book, her history with him and what she learned about him over the course of the project, and how the letters revealed a less determined Bloom and how she empathized with the struggles he went through in his career. We get into the people whose correspondence she included — Alvin Feinman, Northrop Frye, AR Ammons, John Hollander, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Henri Cole, and Ursula K Le Guin — and all the writers and critics she wishes she could have included, the books and projects Bloom proposed but never completed (or started) over the years, the fun she had writing the footnotes, the one person Bloom was intimidated to meet, Bloom’s role in the Canon Wars 30-40 years ago (and my practice of checking off books from The List at the end of The Western Canon), where he fell on Ashbery vs. Ammons, and whether marriage is the true subject of literature. We also discuss how her next book on the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore is the opposite of this one, her go-to books to teach American fiction, why she dropped out of Knausgaard before the finish line, how students have & haven’t changed over a quarter century of teaching, her late arrival to Surfjan Stevens’ music, how I solved her long-standing question about a moment from Bloom’s memorial, and a lot more. (Also, I talk about the Knicks A LOT in the intro; jump to 14:20 go to right to the conversation.) Give it a listen! And go read THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom!

“The real fun of being an editor, to me, is that it turns into a de facto literary detective.”

“Bloom didn’t want acolytes. He didn’t want students who agreed with him. He liked being challenged. Not that ever admitted that he was wrong.”

“I’m sure if someone were to write my one-word epitaph, it would be: READER.”

“It’s hard to overstate how pernicious the use of AI is in the classroom. . . . It’s like students are being trained into helplessness.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Heather Cass White is an English professor at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Books Promiscuously Read: Reading as a Way of Life, among other volumes.

Go listen to my 2021 conversation with Heather and my 2016 talk with Bloom.

Me & Harold Bloom in 2016

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location in Manhattan on a pair of Shure Beta 58a microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Harold Bloom by Jim Wilson; photo of Heather by Crosby Thomley; double-selfies by me. It’s on my instagram.

“We’re so used to organizing society by male/female and other binaries and age, and so many things that slot you into places, and comics perfectly avoid those things. They’re a maverick medium or art form that’s never been respected.”

Happy Pride! Let’s get Queer As Comics! Writer, critic, curator, and publisher Paul Gravett rejoins the show to talk about curating a fabulous new exhibition, Queer As Comics, to help launch the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration! We talk about what makes comics queer (it’s not just an issue of sexuality), the artists and comics he wishes he could have included in the show, the challenges of exhibiting comics as opposed to paintings, and why Queer As Comics’ survey of 65 artists covering 80 years of history “starts with the Finnish” (as in Tom of Finland and Tove Jansson). We also get into the endlessness of Tove Jansson’s life & creativity (and why Paul’s committed to writing a big book about her anyway), his first exposure to queer comics (and again, why all comics are queer), how it feels to see the Quentin Blake Centre come to life and to see Quentin still making art in his 90s, and more. Give it a listen! And go check out Queer As Comics at the QBC!

Also, I couldn’t resist sharing this pic of Quentin Blake’s watercolor palette from an exhibition at the QBC:

“So much of the curation process is searching and searching, and connecting, and trying to dig deeper into archives.

“We have to find our identities somewhere.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Paul Gravett is a writer, critic, curator, publisher and broadcaster who has been working in the comics industry since 1981. He is author of many books about comics, including Mangasia: The Definitive Guide to Asian Comics, Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life and Comics Art, and was general editor of 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, and has also written on Tove Jansson and Posy Simmonds. He is co-director of Comica, the London International Comics Festival.

Listen to my 2014 and 2017 conversations with Paul!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Paul by Etienne Gilfillan; photo of Queer As Comics display by Rich Johnston, from his article about the opening of the QBC. It’s on my instagram.

“Mundo Mendo is like the world of Mendo. It’s my world, and you need a spaceship to arrive here.”

Welcome to Mundo Mendo! I visited artist and writer Luis Mendo in Karuizawa, Japan for a wide-ranging conversation about art, creativity, community and more. We talk about how he left design and embraced drawing and illustration, why he created the Mundo Mendo platform so fans/members can support his art and stories (and get an annual print edition of his work), the limits of money and the joy of making art, and how artists can escape “working for Mr. Zuckerberg” and stop chasing likes on Instagram. We get into how internal change has to be accompanied by an external change, the challenge of not having a client, his critique of AI “art”, and the tension between world of numbers & metrics and the world of serendipity. We also discuss the creative residency he & his wife ran, Almost Perfect, his love of old movies, how the creative life can be a chain of projects, what brought him to Japan and what keeps him there (even if he feels like a foreigner wherever he is), his newsletter that highlights other illustrators and artists, why I should be a male model in Japan, and a lot more. (Plus, after the conversation I share a story about my Japan business trip and some Kafkaesque flop-sweat moments.) Give it a listen! And go support Mundo Mendo!

“I’m greedy for making something interesting, it’s a healthy greed.”

“Why are we all working for Mr. Zuckerberg instead of working for ourselves?”

“My first art influences were comics, women’s magazines, and bullfighting on the TV.”

“If you choose the right people, they attract the right people.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Luis Mendo is an artist and author based in Japan. He studied graphic design in Spain and The Netherlands. After working as an editorial designer and creative director for 20 years in Amsterdam, Luis moved to Tokyo and changed his career to drawing. His illustrations can be found on books, websites, magazines, advertising and clothing worldwide. His artworks have been shown in art galleries in Spain, France, Japan, South Korea and the USA.

His preferred subjects include sensory-driven stories, city/urban life, interiors, objects, animals and people in context. Also travel, narratives, feelings and human interactions. Luis’s illustration signature is to make mundane things look special and make visible the invisible. He can’t avoid impregnating positivism to everything he draws.

Luis was the Creative Director and co-founder of creative residency Almost Perfect together with his wife Yuka, from 2018 to 2025. In 2024 Luis launched Mundo Mendo, a membership program where he shares art, stories and thoughts that subsequently and annually become printed books. In the newsletter, The Illustrated, Luis shares and promotes his favorite illustration talent.

Follow Luis on Instagram and Bluesky, and support MUNDO MENDO.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Luis’ home in Karuizawa on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Drawing of us by Luis. It’s on my instagram.

“We choose our identities based on what’s available, and those choices are not just about what is true for ourselves. We take on identities because we need a purpose.”

Can people change? How continuous is identity? With YOU’VE CHANGED: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation (William Morrow), Benoit Denizet-Lewis explores the concepts of personal change and change-in-the-world, the ways we find identities and community, and the peril of changing into our parents (haha). We talk about how we define change and transformation, what happens when we think we’ve changed but the people in our lives don’t notice any difference, how his husband feared that he would change too much in the writing of the book, and how the American narrative of change equals “overcoming one’s problems.” We get into how he made his own story of change and addiction part of the book (while guarding his privacy), whether change involves finding a core self or something new, whether redemption is possible for people who committed heinous crimes, what happened the time he got scientifically tested about his sexual preferences, and the chapter he wishes he could’ve included in the book. We also discuss who he’s reading, whether the therapy that works for him now would have helped when he was younger, how one can prioritize one’s own happiness while the world is (let’s say) ending, his hallucinations in Esalen, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read YOU’VE CHANGED: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation!

“The core question that comes up throughout the reporting for this book is: What changes and what stays the same?”

“We change in community; we need buy-in from other people. Most profound changes need other people to validate them.”

“A lot of the change we experience is unintentional and we don’t notice it happening.”

SPOTIFY PLAYER TK

“To not be gentle with myself is like booing a sunrise.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Benoit Denizet-Lewis is an associate professor at Emerson College and a longtime contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has written three previous books, including America Anonymous and the New York Times bestseller Travels With Casey. A New America Fellow and NEH Public Scholar, he divides his time between Boston and Prague.

Follow Benoit on Instagram and Bluesky.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at a NYC hotel on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. B/W photo of Benoit by someone else; double-selfie by me. It’s on my instagram.

“I was interested in that relationship between philosophy and art, between philosophy and life-writing, philosophy and narrative form: it’s really at the heart of this project.”

Philosopher and biographer Clare Carlisle converses & communes with me over her new book, TRANSCENDENCE FOR BEGINNERS: LIFE WRITING AND PHILOSOPHY (NYRB). We talk about her existential moment of being invited to give the Gifford Lectures on natural theology and how it led her wonder what she could say about the knowledge of God, how writing biographies raised philosophical questions on the nature of a life in its entirety, how flexible the notion of transcendence is (and why it doesn’t have to be “rising above” the world so much as “spreading out” into it), and how the lecture mode offered her an opportunity for a different writing voice. We get into the possibility of communion and transmission, the tension between biography and philosophy, the harmfulness of the notion of attainment and what that implies of the seeking of wisdom, and what happens if you’re like Kierkegaard and you hear The Call but don’t know what it’s calling you to do. We also discuss her philosophical love affair with Spinoza and his philosophy of interconnectedness, the bridge she discovered between Spinoza and Indian traditions, the influence of past guest Celia Paul on the lectures, and more. Give it a listen! And go read TRANSCENDENCE FOR BEGINNERS!

“I’d written biographies of thinkers, but with these lectures I felt I needed to say something myself rather than just interpret another thinker.”

“For Spinoza, on a metaphysical level, each of us is completely interconnected with everything else, and each of us is a singular manifestation or expression of the whole.”

“There’s the ongoing yet diffuse effect of the books we read the thinkers we encounter; they become part of our way of thinking.”

“That idea of necessity, that ‘you have to do this,’ interests me. What kind of necessity is it? No one’s forcing you. It’s not even the Kantian moral law. Not logical necessity. So what is it? What is that necessity that we sometimes feel, that THIS is something I have to do.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Clare Carlisle is the author of eight books on philosophy and philosophers, including Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard and The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, which won the 2024 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Clare grew up in Manchester, England; studied philosophy at Trinity College, Cambridge; and now lives in East London. She is a professor of philosophy at King’s College London.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at the Nassau Inn in Princeton on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Clare by someone else; photo of Katy Mouse by me. It’s on my instagram.