Month: May 2013

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You Must Change Your Life

For the last two years, I’ve been beating people over the head to read Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard. It’s one of my all-time faves and it turns out that E.M. Forster loved it, too. Here’s the opening of a piece he wrote in an intro to Lampedusa’s short works:

This prefatory note is a meditation rather than an introduction. Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has meant so much to me that I find it impossible to present him formally. His great novel The Leopard (Il Gattopardo) has certainly enlarged my life — an unusual experience for a life which is well on in its eighties. Reading and rereading it has made me realize how many ways there are of being alive, how many doors there are close to one, which someone else’s touch may open. The authors was born after me and he has died before me — an unexpected sequence. He is my junior. I like to fancy that he has left me a personal legacy.

It’s one of the few books that I felt “changed my life,” and I count myself lucky that I can still have that experience in my forties. I’m glad to discover that Forster had the same experience at twice my age.

Now go read The Leopard, consarnit!

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Podcast: Little Suicides, Little Fish

Lori Carson on The Virtual Memories Show (3/3)

Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 11 – Little Suicides, Little Fish

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“There’s this misconception that something born of the imagination is less true. It’s more true, if you do it right.”

TheOriginal1982 PB CLori Carson joins us to talk about her debut novel, The Original 1982 (published by William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins). Lori’s one of my all-time favorite musicians, so the conversation also covers her singer-songwriter career and her time with the Golden Palominos, where she recorded two phenomenal albums, This Is How It Feels and Pure. It’s a really fun talk about the blurring of fact and fiction, the differences between songwriting and prose-writing (and album vs. book launches), how the music industry changed over the course of her career, her favorite authors and the books that sustained her through her first novel, why she made this life-jump from music to books, and more!

“Many people get to a point where they say, ‘I’ve done this all my life; what’s next?'”

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(And there’s a book launch at The Corner Bookstore on Madison and 93rd St. in New York City on Thursday, May 30, starting at 6 pm.! If you’re in the area, check it out! Also, here’s a video of her reading the book’s prologue.)

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

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

About our Guest

Carson-Lori-ap1Lori Carson is a critically acclaimed singer/songwriter whose albums include Shelter, Where It Goes, Everything I Touch Runs Wild, Stars and Another Year. A former member of the seminal band Golden Palominos, she has contributed to the soundtracks of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days, Keith Gordon’s Waking the Dead, and others. The Original 1982 is her first novel.

Credits: This episode’s music is Little Suicides, Souvenir, and Stars by Lori Carson and/or Golden Palominos. The conversation was recorded at the Harper Collins offices (thanks, Leah!) on a pair of Blue enCORE 100, feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB mic into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by Lauren Cook (thanks, Lauren!). There are a few more pix of us up at the Virtual Memories Show flickr set.

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All is silence

Here’s a picture from my trip to the Art Institute of Chicago last month.

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It’s Le silence, by Auguste Preault. You can click through it for more information. If I ever publish a book, that’d make for a good cover.

I’m just finishing up some revisions on the short story that that trip inspired. Put a dollar (or more) in the tip jar (that donation button on the right side of the page) and I’ll send you a PDF of it.

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Podcast: Eternity is Music that Plays

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi on The Virtual Memories Show (2/2)

Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 10 – Eternity is Music that Plays

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“Americans who come to Italy want to get its beauty, its art, its delicious food. They move very fast through Italy. They’ll see 8 or 10 cities in two weeks.”

Poet, novelist, memoirist and all-around wonderful writer Wallis Wilde-Menozzi joins us on this episode of The Virtual Memories Show to talk about her two new books, The Other Side of the Tiber: Reflections on Time in Italy and Toscanelli’s Ray: A Novel. It’s a great conversation about the American experience in Italy over 40 years. Ms. Wilde-Menozzi possesses both a poet’s sensibility for beautiful language and a keen eye that carefully observes the character of Italy, its populace, and its art. I highly recommend The Other Side of the Tiber; it’s a gorgeous, haunting book (I haven’t read Toscanelli yet, so I can’t vouch for it).

“I felt the enormous power of what Michelangelo was doing, but also this sense of process, the fact that we’re becoming, that nothing is quite finished.”

Enjoy the conversation! Then check out our archives for more great talk!

Follow The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, Facebook, Tumblr, and RSS!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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About our Guest

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi grew up in Wisconsin amid stability and quiet natural beauty. After graduating from the University of Michigan, she lived in Oxford, England, NYC, London, Rome, Palo Alto, California and finally, Parma, Italy. Her Midwestern accent has never been replaced, even by learning other languages. She teaches in Europe and the U.S., lectures widely, and is a founding member of the Ledig-Rowohlt International Writers Residence in Lavigny, Switzerland, where she has read the work of more than 500 writers from 65 countries. She is the author of Mother Tongue: An American Life in Italy.

She writes, “The decades I have lived in Italy brought me to the door of different ways of seeing. I knocked, not without trepidation, and have never gotten through half of the rooms. I write about our times in poetry, essays, memoir, nonfiction, and fiction.”

Credits: This episode’s music is Her Hollow Ways by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi. The conversation was recorded at Wallis’ New York pied-a-terre on a pair of AT2020 mics, feeding into a Zoom H4n recorder. I recorded the intro and outro on a Blue Yeti USB mic into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by Amy Roth.

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A Little Updatery

Here’s a short post to keep you apprised of things, dear reader/listener!

  • The Virtual Memories Show (VMS) podcast just had its most successful month yet, busting the previous monthly record for downloads by 13%. I don’t chase numbers, but I admit that it makes me happy to know that people are downloading (and maybe listening) to the show.
  • I wrote my first short story in 20+ years last week, after a trip to the Art Institute in Chicago. It’s called Loesser and the Six-Faced Conqueror of Death on a Buffalo. If you want to read it, make a donation of at least $1 in the tip jar! I added a Paypal “donate” button to the site; it’s also at the end of the Podcast Archive page.
  • I put that in place because it’d be nice to get a little money specifically for VMS-related stuff. My day job subsidizes the show (and gives me opportunities to travel and interview guests), and I don’t have any illusions about making a living based on the podcast, but it’d be nice to know if people put any monetary value on the work I do to bring out the show.
  • About Jason Collins: I’m very glad that he felt ready to come out. I was a Nets fan when he played for them, and in those days I was conflicted about cheering for Jason Kidd, despite the fact that Kidd’s arrival turned the team around and propelled them to two NBA Finals appearances. That’s because Kidd got traded to NJ because he beat his wife. But they won, so I rationalized.
  • This is one of those lists. I read 31 of them.