Virtual Memories Show:
Ron Hogan & Josh Alan Friedman – It Came From Gen X!
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“You grow up imagining all these writers live in mansions and have their private, elegant writing rooms. But the working reality for most writers is not that different from the working reality for working class to middle class people.”
Editor, book-blogger and podcaster Ron Hogan joins the show to talk about his 20-year history with the literary internet, launching Beatrice.com, interviewing his favorite writers, podcasting Life Stories, taking the wrong lessons from the work of Harlan Ellison, defending Hudson Hawk, retaining his inner fanboy, discovering romance fiction, overcoming gender/race imbalances in publishing (and podcasting), using Foucault as cover for being a pugnacious asshole, getting to meet James Ellroy, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Cornel West, and generally trying to overthrow the hegemony. Give it a listen!
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“We severely underestimated the ability of corporate media to assimilate challenges to it.”
But first, Josh Alan Friedman offers us his reminiscences and reflections on the great Joe Franklin, who passed away last weekend at the age of 88. Josh wrote a wonderful piece on Joe in 2012, so I called him down in Texas and invited him to tell us about this legendary celebrity fixture of New York. (That’s “Handsome Dick” Manitoba” with Joe in March 2014.) (Oh, and check out our first Josh Alan Friedman episode over here!)
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
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About our Guest
Ron Hogan helped create the literary Internet by launching Beatrice.com in 1995. He is currently an editor at Regan Arts, acquiring both fiction and nonfiction titles. He maintains an active presence in New York City’s literary scene, hosting and curating events such as Lady Jane’s Salon, the first monthly reading series dedicated to romance fiction. (Previously, he curated a series of conversations between authors and bloggers at Brooklyn’s Greenlight Bookstore.)
He was a columnist at Shelf Awareness, and has written book reviews and feature stories for publications like Tor.com, the Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed and The Daily Beast. He spent several years writing about the business side of publishing as a senior editor for GalleyCat, then briefly worked with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt as their director of e-marketing strategy. He speaks frequently at book festivals and publishing conferences about how to make the best use of social networking tools, advances in digital publishing, and other transformative trends in the publishing industry.
Credits: This episode’s music is Here and Now by Letters to Cleo, on account of all the Gen X references we made. The conversation was recorded on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
. Her Illustration work has appeared in The SD Reader, OC Weekly, The Village Voice, SPIN, Guitar Player, Musician, and Entertainment Weekly, as well as projects like 
, 
(CD box set), 
(the James Brown CD box set), Carlsbad Museum of Making Music – “Hands on the Future” exhibit, and CD covers for The Insect Surfers and Buddy Blue. Her paintings have been exhibited at La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Track 16, David Zapt Gallery, Laguna Beach Art Museum Annex, LACE (Los Angeles), COCA (Seattle), Southwestern College, Patricia Correia Gallery, Sushi Gallery and Ducky Waddle’s Emporium. She also enjoys making hand-built ceramics and wheel thrown functional pieces that she glazes and fires in her own kiln. She enjoys painting on velvet, that which we all consider the King of Kitsch, but which also makes her color and “cubismo” style of drawing even more dramatic and mysterious on the plush background of black velvet. She lives is in Encinitas, CA, with her husband, a dog, a cat, and lots of stringed instruments. They have a band called The Wigbillies.
(Amazon/New Harvest), profiles a dozen New Yorker cartoonists. We talk about the genesis of that project, lament the dearth of cartooning in print and online, bond over Abe Vigoda, and ponder why it is that so many New Yorker cartoonists had teachers or educators for parents. We also get into Richard’s history in the arts-journalism racket, the joys of Robert Walser, his time in the Boy Scouts with Matt Groening, how he built a career out of his oddball enthusiasms, and the most mind-blowing “Which celebrity did you totally melt down around?” story in the history of this podcast. (Seriously.) 
and co-authored 
with the Vermont quartet. His new book is 
, and why he thinks Thomas Pynchon understood things about the world that people are only now coming to grips with. (BONUS: I clean up some loose ends from last week’s podcast with Merrill Markoe)
, 
and 
— between 1990 and 2002. He’s written songs for plenty of acts you know, and he wrote many of the songs on 
, which is a story he gets into in our conversation. He’s also done a lot of work in movies and TV, both scoring music and writing songs. David’s 
, and has produced translations of Plato’s Timaeus and Statesman for Focus Philosophical Library. He is also author of two texts that have been used in the St. John’s music program, On the Measurement of Tones and Elements: A Workbook for Freshman Music.
(Counterpoint), but we talked about a lot more in our hour! Listen in to learn how she and her husband began recording literary readings by authors like James Baldwin, Philip Roth, John Updike, William Styron in the ’60s, and how they’ve 
, was nominated for a National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award. Her other novels include 
; 
; 
; and 
, nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She and her husband Harry have launched 
. The intro and outro were recorded on 
, is the third Friedman brother I’ve interviewed, as part of my “Capturing the (Other) Friedmans” series of podcasts. (I really gotta rename that.) Josh is an accomplished author and guitarist, and has plenty of stories of New York at its most sordid. We met up at a cafe in Times Square to talk about his old days writing for Al Goldstein’s Screw magazine, why it took him more than 30 years to write Black Cracker, his “Lewis & Martin” theory about his estrangement from his brother Drew, his parents’ successful divorce, and more!
, a cult classic. Josh’s latest book is 
. He has also written 
, and 
(with Al Goldstein), and co-edited 
. Josh also set off satirical fires and lawsuits as writer-half of the Friedman Bros, the most feared cartooning duo of the late ’70s and ’80s. Two anthologies remain in print, featuring the art of Josh’s brother, Drew Friedman: 
, and 
. On the music front, as “Josh Alan,” he barnstormed the state of Texas for 20 years, rocking whole arenas with his Guild D-40. Copping three Dallas Observer Music Awards for Best Acoustic Act, he released four albums: 
, 
, 
(the title of which became a documentary on Josh’s life) and 
.
(Atlantic Monthly Press), joins the Virtual Memories Show to show to talk about the many notions of “home” for black people. Along the way, we talk about the many notions of what constitutes a black person. As Ms. Raboteau discovered in the travels chronicled in her book — encompassing Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana and America’s deep south — there are a lot of ideas about who’s black and what blackness means.
(Henry Holt, Picador), and a work of creative nonfiction, 
