Virtual Memories Show #169:
David Mikics
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“These days, we tend to think of identity as something chosen; we put on certain masks or we identify as this or that, culturally, ethnically or politically. Bellow is interested in something much more basic: who we really are.”
David Mikics joins the show to talk about his wonderful new book, Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art (Norton). We get into Bellow’s legacy, his fall from academic favor, his transmutations of life into art, David’s humorously accidental introduction to his work, what Jewishness meant to Bellow, whether Philip Roth was right when he told Bruce Jay Friedman, “Saul Bellow am de daddy of us all,” and more! Give it a listen! And go read Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life Into Art.
“Bellow once said that the reason writers had such messy personal lives is because they didn’t know what to do with the afternoon.”
We also talk about David’s experience as a professor, why writing is harder for today’s students, what it’s like to teach course called, “Is Life Worth Living?” and “The Human Situation”, which science fiction novels warped him as a youth, why we need Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
“Canonicity is not where you find it, but where you make it.”
There’s a BIG list of books we talked about, but it’s only available to supporters of The Virtual Memories Show, so go to Patreon or Paypal and make your contribution to this podcast!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Spotify | TuneIn | RSS | More
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes! You might like:
- Rachel Hadas (2014 and 2016)
- Bruce Jay Friedman
- Jules Feiffer
- Harold Bloom
- Langdon Hammer
- Edward Mendelson
- Willard Spiegelman
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About our Guest
David Mikics grew up in Carteret, New Jersey and Atlanta. He went to college at NYU and earned a Ph.D. at Yale. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Victoria and son Ariel, and teaches every year at the University of Houston, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English. He is the author of six books, including Slow Reading in a Hurried Age
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at David’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
(Little, Brown and Library of Congress, 2014), 
(W.W. Norton, 2012), 
(W.W. Norton and LC, 2009), 
(HarperCollins and LC, 2009), 
(Abrams and LC, 2006), 
(Library of Congress, 1999), and 
(Knopf and LC, 1997). His work has been featured in such magazines as American Heritage, National Geographic, Civilization and Smithsonian.
(with photos by 
, and is a syndicated newspaper columnist. John is an avid home cook and lives in Jersey City, where his exit is 14C.
(Simon & Schuster). (We last talked 
, 
, 
, and, most recently 
, which was a New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist. A former Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The Boston Globe, he graduated from Oberlin College, earned a PhD from MIT, and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, 
I recorded the intro and outro on the same setup. Processing was done in Audacity and Logic Pro. Photo of Mr. Kaplan by Carol Dronsfield.
(Grove Press). We discuss the evolution of comedy over the century (from vaudeville to comedy podcasters) and how he got started chronicling it, American comedy’s twin themes of struggle and influence, the connect-the-dots game of comedic lineage, the stories that didn’t make it into the book, comedy’s role in the civil rights struggle, Kliph’s autodidactic background and how it shapes his pursuit of history, the story of how he got kicked out of high school, and more! 
! We explore how her nihilistic, burned-out, drug-addicted post-punk-scene photographer-protagonist has grown over the course of three books of increasing mayhem and murder. (Hint: she doesn’t decide to become a nurturing mom and validate herself with a rich husband.) 
(Knopf), joins the show to talk about the thirteen years he spent working with the great artist 
(Fantagraphics, 2008); 
Hirschfeld’s Hollywood
(Abrams, 2001). He also authored a number of monographs on underappreciated artists for various museums.
joins the podcast on way too little sleep to talk about transgressing borders: national borders, panel borders, and familial borders. We talk about Diary’s hybrid structure and why it would have been unpitchable to a publisher (luckily, she had a two-book contract), the tightrope of portraying a 15-year-old girl’s affair with her mother’s 30-something boyfriend without making her strictly a victim or “asking for it”, and some audiences’ obsession with “the facts” of the book. We also get into her ongoing, decade-long multi-media project to recreate a life in Juarez, Mexico, her place in the comics scene (too young for the undergrounds, too old for the alternatives), her unrepeatable approach to making art, and more! 
, as well as many short stories, illustrations, and comics which have appeared in a variety of publications over the last 25 years. She has a master’s degree in Biomedical Communications from The University of Texas at Dallas, and was an undergraduate at San Francisco State University. She also studied at Charles University in Prague and L’Unversité D’Aix-Marseille in France. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. Phoebe is currently working on a multi-media novel based on the lives of several families living on the outskirts of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. She has traveled frequently to Juárez over the last 10 years to research the project.
! We discuss the societal bias against aging, what she learned by dyeing her hair gray, the decision to “self”-publish This Chair Rocks, why she doesn’t want to think about writing another book for at least a decade, the potentials of an all-age-friendly world, and more! 
and referred to by Alan Kay as “the first piece of digital “content” worth criticizing”; and the first electronic books — Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Trilogy and Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in 1992. After that there were a bunch of years spent on tool-making and in 2004 the Macarthur Foundation gave me a huge five-year grant to explore the question of what might happen to publishing in the internet era. with that grant I started 
, was published by HarperCollins in 1997. Ms. magazine called it “rocket fuel for launching new lives,” and it landed me on Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum enemies list. It also got me invited to join the board of the nascent Council on Contemporary Families, a group of distinguished family scholars. I belonged to the Artist’s Network of Refuse & Resist group that originated the anti-Iraq-invasion slogan and performance pieces titled “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War.” As a contributing editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine, I went to Laos to cover a village getting internet access via a bicycle-powered computer. Since 2000 I’ve been on staff at the American Museum of Natural History, where I write about everything under the Sun. The catalyst for Cutting Loose was puzzlement: why was our notion of women’s lives after divorce (visualize depressed dame on barstool) so different from the happy and energized reality? A similar question gave rise to my new book,