Virtual Memories Show

Virtual Memories Show 627:

“There’s this idea that every third generation, someone comes to upend the family myths, the things that say, ‘This is who we are and this is how we move through the world.’ My book is very much about uncovering those stories so that I, and my family, and the people who come after me, can have a different experience of life.”

With DEATH TRIP: A Post-Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir (Spiral Path Collective Press), Seth Lorinczi explores how trauma can be transmitted over generations, and how an ancient (& new) form of treatment can help overcome it. We talk about finding his family’s story of the Holocaust, trying to understand why so much of it stayed hidden, how badly it warped his life, and how he & his wife found answers in psychedelic medicine (MDMA, ayahuasca, toad (!)). We get into the long-term damage of unmetabolized trauma and untouched grief, how psychedelics allowed him to recognize patterns in his life, family history, and the universe, the challenges of researching his family’s Holocaust experience in Hungary, how his experiences led to a memoir (& a saved marriage), why Death Trip is a series of surrenders, how his close and distant relatives responded to the book, and why he thinks I should leapfrog therapy and try psychedelics first. We also discuss growing up in the punk scene of Washington, DC (and writing his next book about that), how coincidence becomes important after psychedelic experiences, how some married couples take up salsa dancing but he & his wife took up ayahuasca, how his daughter responded to all this, whether a person can change, how once you get the message you should put down the phone, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read DEATH TRIP!

“What are we handed by the actions or inactions of those who came before us?”

“One of the great gifts of psychedelics is that they’re utterly impersonal. They’re just a lens — albeit sometimes a very challenging lens — to look through and observe the patterns and the storytelling that we all do on a daily basis.”

“All I wanted my entire life was to feel like I was part of the conversation.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Seth Lorinczi is a Portland-based writer who focuses on psychedelics, music, and culture. His writing appears in The Guardian, Maggot Brain, DoubleBlind, Narratively, Portland Monthly, the San Francisco Chronicle and Portland Oregonian, as well as entries in anthologies by Hozac Books and Akashic Books and other publications. Death Trip is his first book.

Follow Seth on Instagram and subscribe to his Dispatches From The Fringe newsletter.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location on the Lower East Side on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Seth by someone. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 626:

“I always had the feeling that if I understood Adorno’s texts, then everything would be clear . . . I would understand how society works, how fascism came into being, how we can get to a better society.”

With NAPLES 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer That Made Critical Theory (Yale University Press, tr. Shelley Frisch), Martin Mittelmeier traces the roots of the Frankfurt School in southern Italy. We talk about the epiphany on the lip of a volcano in Lanzerote that brought this book to life, the years he spent poring over Theodor Adorno’s writing (and the temptation to mimic Adorno’s style), how Walter Benjamin’s principle of porosity arose from both the tuff stone & the way of living of Naples, and the challenge of evoking the Naples of a century ago and how it led to a theory of society. We get into Critical Theory’s attempts at understanding populism and oligarchic takeovers and why Adorno is having A Moment in Germany, the fun of speculating about meetings among great thinkers — yeah, I get into George Orwell, Henry Miller, and Inside the Whale —, the utopian aspect of local life in Naples and Capri, the complexities of reputation and destiny, and whether Critical Theory can hold up during the hyper-internet era. We also discuss the difficulties of translation with critical theory’s associative language and how translation is only the first interpretation of a text, why I need to read Hernán Diaz’ Trust, his new work about Thomas Mann working with Adorno on Doctor Faustus in Pacific Palisades (a.k.a. Weimar Under The Palm Trees), how he’s changed in the decade-plus since writing the book, and more. Give it a listen! And go read Naples 1925!

“The interesting challenge is to reconstruct what could have happened at this meeting, only with what they did before and what they did after.”

“Like everyone who tries to read Adorno, the fascination was that I didn’t understand him, really.”

“I find it cool that critical theory could give you techniques or instruments to have categories to think about what’s happening at this moment, and perhaps to fight against it.”

“There are no boundaries anymore; there is nothing that is fixed; there is always something else that you can imagine. That was the social utopia of Naples.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Martin Mittelmeier, an editor and author, is honorary professor at the Institute for German Language and Literature at the University of Cologne. His books include Dada: A Century’s Tale, and Freedom and Darkness. He lives in Cologne, Germany.

His translator Shelley Frisch’s acclaimed translations from German include biographies of Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, and Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl. She lives in Princeton, NJ.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Martin by Marie Kallenberg. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 625:

“My primary reading for a while now has been private detective novels and various Buddhist philosophical tests. So when Happy expounds on these things, in a way it’s that I love reading these sorts of books.”

Can LA private detective Happy Doll live up to the Four Noble Truths and escape the cycle of Samsara? Jonathan Ames returns to the show to help answer that question and celebrate his new novel, KARMA DOLL (Mulholland Books)! We talk about the joy of reading (& writing) page-turners, how his lead character Happy Doll has evolved over three novels (so far!), what it’s like bringing Buddhism into a detective novel, and how his (& Happy’s) LA has changed since he began this series. We get into how he managed to avoid writing about the worst days of the pandemic while keeping Karma Doll contemporary, how writing the Doll novels has affected his understanding of Buddhism, and how he’s living up to the lesson he always gave students: write what you love. We also discuss TV writing and how it took him away from prose-writing for a decade or so, the need to make art and the transitoriness of bliss, how the LA fires left him driving all over the place like he was in a Lew Archer novel, his fave reads & TV shows, how we both played with dolls as kids in the woods of northern NJ, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read KARMA DOLL! (and A Man Named Doll and The Wheel of Doll!)

(Oh, and go listen to our 2018 and 2022 conversations!)

“If I was an actor, Happy Doll would be a character I’m playing. He might sound like me, but he’s his own guy.”

“Here I am, 61 years old, still playing with my doll.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Jonathan Ames is the author of several books, including Wake Up, Sir! and, most recently, The Wheel of Doll and A Man Named Doll. His novels The Extra Man and You Were Never Really Here have been adapted into films, and he’s the creator of two television series, Blunt Talk and Bored to Death. His new book is Karma Doll.

Follow Jonathan on Bluesky, and listen to our 2018 and 2022 conversations!

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Jonathan & Fezzik by Anne Thornton; photo of Jonathan solo by me; photo of me & Fezzik by Jonathan. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 624: Witold Rybczynski

“As an architect, if you write about buildings, you don’t just write about what they look like, but how they work, the plans, how they’re built, how they function. But most books about cars focus on the styling, not all the other aspects, and that’s what I wanted to get at.”

With his latest book, THE DRIVING MACHINE: A Design History of the Car (Norton), architect and architecture & design writer Witold Rybczynski explores how cars evolved from their earliest days through the befuddling styles of today’s EVs. We get into the design language of cars and how it had no true precedent, why European styles were so different and varied than America’s, his favorite era for car design, and the differences between writing about cars and writing about buildings. We talk about the cars in his life and how he integrated them into The Driving Machine‘s narrative (including the Mercedes that lasted him 25 years), the lives of the engineers & car-company founders he explored for the book, what he learned by drawing the book’s car-illustrations himself, and how drawing all those cars brought him back to his youth. We also discuss the new book he’s writing about his dissatisfaction with contemporary architecture, how it resulted from a Chat-GPT ‘hallucination,’ the cycles of architecture & the death of architecture criticism, the (sorta) imaginary house he designed for himself, and more. Give it a listen! And go read THE DRIVING MACHINE!

(And listen to our 2015, 2019, and lockdown conversations!)

“If you write about architecture, you’re going to wind up writing about architects.”

“When you get to my age, you think about the past much more than the future. You have a limited future, but you have a long past.”

“You can make a drawing a better explanation than a photograph.”

“If you live a long life, you realize you’ve lived a life no one has lived.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Witold Rybczynski is an architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of twenty-two books, including the best-selling Home, Charleston Fancy, and The Story of Architecture. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. He lives in Philadelphia.

Listen to our 2015, 2019, and lockdown conversations.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Witold’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Witold by David Graham; other ones by me. It’s on my instagram.

Virtual Memories Show 623:

“I like the whole idea of creating art by setting yourself a rule to follow, especially one that’s weird and unexpected.”

Cartoonist Matt Madden rejoins the show to celebrate his new collection, SIX TREASURES OF THE SPIRAL: Comics Formed Under Pressure (Uncivilized Books). We talk about the liberation to be found in formal constraints, his history with OULIPO and its OUBAPO offshoot, how structure can inspire story, and the formal and thematic challenges in sequencing the stories in the collection. We get into how he tried to make the most of a multi-year residency at La Maison des Auteurs in Angouleme, the unwitting influence of Hergé on one of his favorite stories, the changes in his art & storytelling since publishing Ex Libris in 2021, and the “director’s commentary” he added as back matter for Six Treasures. We also discuss Lewis Trondheim’s challenge to him to make a comic without a formal rule or constraint, his Substack-goal of sharing OUBAPO rules, the balance of comics-making with child-rearing, the fun of making foldy-comics, why it’s important not to let the formal constraints overwhelm the heart of the stories, and more. Give it a listen! And go read SIX TREASURES OF THE SPIRAL!

(And listen to our 2021 conversation!)

“Nabokov describes writing as a kind of game between — not the characters and the page, but the readers and the author. I love that idea and think of it as a very participatory, playful thing, not as talking down to the reader.”

“I’d like to see people drop the whole Imposter Syndrome discourse. I would never have become a cartoonist or artist if I had let that sense of not being qualified stop me from making minicomics. It’s why the ‘zine culture was so great; it was such a welcoming, forgiving and accessible way to work.”

“I’m suspicious of traditional narratives, but at the same time I employ them. Working with constraints brings attention to the artifice, but there’s a story that I’m connecting with.”

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

Lots of ways to follow The Virtual Memories Show! iTunes, Spotify, BlueSky, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, and good ol’ RSS!

About our Guest

Matt Madden is a cartoonist, educator, and translator. His best-known book is 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style, a comics adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style. His recent work includes the comic books Drawn Onward and Bridge and the graphic novel Ex Libris. He has been living in Philadelphia since 2016.

Follow Matt on Instagram and YouTube, subscribe to his Substack, and listen to our 2021 conversation.

Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Matt’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Nice photo of Matt by R Carter Studios. Goofy photos by me. It’s on my instagram.