Virtual Memories – season 3 episode 30 – On Cats and Calamities
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“Love is usually the end of the sentence, the end of the riddle. But what does love call forth from you? What are the faculties that come into play? It’s one of those questions that we think is settled.”
What does the search for a lost cat have to tell us about the nature of love and marriage? Peter Trachtenberg joins The Virtual Memories Show to try to answer that question and to talk about his work, including The Book of Calamities: Five Questions About Suffering and Its Meaning and Another Insane Devotion: On the Love of Cats and Persons! We discuss the tension between non-fiction and fiction, how to search for a lost cat, where the line is between the private and the public, how he stumbled into the lyric essay form, how the process of getting clean and sober influenced his writing, how marriages fall apart and how they (maybe) come back together, and more!
“Art is high-level lying.”
I’m not going to lie; our conversation jumps all over the darned place, because Peter happens to have an even more discursive mind than your scatterbrained host’s. But it’s a great talk about the nature of non-fiction writing, Buddhism, the relationship of facts to truth, respecting intuition, and how to navigate memory’s internal landscape. Sadly, we didn’t yet have the news that Another Insane Devotion received the 2013 Golden Purr Award for excellence in cat writing from Cat Wisdom 101, but there’s still some cat-talk.
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About our Guest
Peter Trachtenberg is the author of 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh
Credits: This episode’s music is Stray Cat Blues by The Rolling Stones. The conversation was recorded at the home of a friend of Peter on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
. It’s a great conversation about the uses and abuses of glamour, the nerd fixation on space travel, the first known symbol of glamour, how people get seduced by IT glamour, how Barack Obama’s first election campaign was heaven-sent for Ms. Postrel’s book, and more!
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. Processing was done in Audacity and Garage Band. Photo of Virginia Postrel by me.
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, and his work has appeared in Weirdo (where he served as managing editor), The Stranger, New York Press, Entertainment Weekly, Details, Seattle Weekly, Screw, and more. He is also the author of 
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Photo of Drew Friedman and Jerry Lewis courtesy of Jay Ruttenberg 
, published by Fantagraphics in 2010. His collection of portraits, 
, was published by Blast books in 2011. He has published three collections of paintings of Old Jewish Comedians (
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), but none of Old Episcopal Comedians. He also raises champion beagles with his wife, K. Bidus. You can find his full bio and buy his art at 
. The book includes more than 100 of his amazing photos, including 32 pages in color (so you can see 
, as well as how he began teaching cartooning, what he learned from trying to win the art job on 
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, was published in March 2013 by Pantheon Books. 
into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by 
. In 2007, he published 
. We spoke one day after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, so our conversation began with a discussion of gun culture(s) in America.
, the 1980′s art scene in NYC, the sea change in the acceptance of comics as art and entertainment, the (un)importance of having an individual drawing style, and more!
