Virtual Memories Show #150: Molly Crabapple
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“I always like smart, rebellious young people who feel like the world has done them bad.”
Artist Molly Crabapple joins the show to talk about writing her new memoir, Drawing Blood
“The world hates refugees. I’m convinced that if there was a major crisis in Canada and we had 10 million white refugees, we’d still think of some reason to keep them out. People hate impoverished people fleeing over borders.”
We also talk about Charlie Hebdo, the Occupy movement, Molly’s success at bypassing the gallery model and whether her path is replicable, the scariest place she’s ever visited as a journalist, her biggest artistic, literary and journalistic influences, and more! (And if you want to find out who she’s reading nowadays, join our Patreon and become a monthly contributor to The Virtual Memories Show!)
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About our Guest
Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer in New York. She is a contributing editor for VICE, and has written for The New York Times, Paris Review, and the Guardian, among other publications. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Follow her on Twitter and Tumblr.
Credits: This episode’s music is Nothing’s Gonna Bring Me Down by David Baerwald, used with permission of the artist. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Crabapple’s studio on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones
(Knopf)! We talk about his history (and future) in publishing, how he wound up a publisher-hybrid of Roger Straus and James Laughlin, how he learned to shut off his editor-self in order to get in touch with writer-self, why he took the challenge of writing a character’s world-changing poetry, and more. 
, 
and 
, as well as translations of the Italian poets Eugenio Montale and Giacomo Leopardi. He has served as a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, and as executive editor and later president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In 2008 he received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award, which recognizes an editor, publisher, or agent who “has discovered, nurtured and championed writers of fiction in the U.S.” A former Guggenheim Fellow and poetry editor of the Paris Review, he also writes for the New York Review of Books and other publications. He lives in New York City. His new novel is 
(New York Review Books), which profiles Lionel Triling, Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, William Maxwell, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, WH Auden, Frank O’Hara. We discuss the role of individuals in mass culture, the intellectual’s temptation to be a leader, the outdated figure of the Beloved Professor, Orwell’s misinterpretation of Auden, the writer he was terrified to meet, the failures of identity politics, the purpose of Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, his lack of nostalgia for the era of public intellectuals, the way certain books need a year off from teaching in order to recharge, and more. 
is a study in self-pity, and more! Go listen!
(1999) is a sequel to his 
(1981). His book, 
, was published by Pantheon in 2006. His new book is 
. He has prepared editions of novels by Hardy, Bennett, Meredith, Wells, and Trollope, the first five volumes of a complete edition of Auden, and selections of Auden’s poems and prose. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, TLS, the New York Times Book Review, and many other journals and collections, and he wrote an introduction for a new edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. He has also written about computers, music, and the visual arts. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was the first Isabel Dalhousie Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
(Bloomsbury), life in rural China compared to suburban MN, the country’s changes in the past two decades, the flexibility of the Communist party, China’s uses and abuses of history, the tortured history of the Manchuria region, the need to explode Americans’ myths about the country and its people, our favorite jet-lag remedies, and the Chinese use of “uh” as a conversational placeholder. 
. He first came to China in 1995 with the Peace Corps, and for over a decade has contributed from there to The New York Times, Time, the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Architectural Record, Reader’s Digest, Slate, Smithsonian, This American Life and many other outlets.He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing, as well as residencies at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. He recently taught Literary Journalism at Hong Kong University’s Journalism and Media Studies Center, and wrote the foreword to The Inmost Shrine: A Photographic Odyssey of China, 1873, a collection of Scottish explorer John Thomson’s early images. He is a current member of the National Committee on United States-China Relations‘ Public Intellectuals Program, and an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches Nonfiction Writing. Michael’s new book, 
Educator (and high school pal) 
. We talk about edutainment’s bad rep, developing good games for students, getting getting buy-in from faculty, administration and — most importantly — students, the subjects that benefit most from game-based learning, and why Pandemic is the best game he’s ever used to teach. I also vent about how primitive the technology was when Matt & I were in school, compared to having 3-D printers in the classroom nowadays. Oh, and we get around to dismissing Roger Ebert’s claim that games are not art! 
(I had some weird distortion/flutter on my usual 
. The intro and outro were recorded on 
, an inventive and gorgeous retelling of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It’s a fun conversation about our public and private selves, the ways we define evil, the mechanics of storytelling, the luck of human evolution, and more! 
and 
, the short story collection, 
, about owning his niche (once described as “smart-but-self-destructive-white-American-middle-class-male-in-crisis”), teaching fiction and non-fiction writing, why he left the east coast for Montana, how he feels about the end of Newsweek, what it was like to make his start as a writer in his 30s.
, was published in March 2013 by Pantheon Books. 
, feeding into a 
into Audacity. All editing and processing was done in Garage Band. Photo by 