With his amazing new book, THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL: The Secret Prison History of American Music (WW Norton), author Colin Asher explores how the criminal justice system changed the course of twentieth century music. We talk about how Elmo Hope's Sounds from Rikers Island album inspired the book, how he chose the five artists to focus on — Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, Elmo Hope, Johnny Cash, Ike White, and Tupac Shakur —, the history of the carceral state, criminality and the popular images of Black and white "outlaw" artists, and how many artists' careers were shaped, derailed, inspired by prisons. We get into the tightrope act of using Johnny Cash as a counterpoint to the racial dynamics of the book (as well as the work Cash did for prison reform), why he had to close the book with the story of Tupac and his mother, Afeni Shakur, and how hip-hop developed in response to America's mass incarceration movement, how the philosophy of incarceration shifted from rehabilitation to punishment, Musicambia's work to bring music education into prisons, and what it means to pursue the arts for personal growth, even when you're on death row. We also discuss how some arts writing can suck the joy out of the arts, why he prefers discussing art in relation to society rather than in relation to other works of art, why he made playlists for The Midnight Special, how playing vinyl records makes music a choice instead of wallpaper, the "burn the world down and replace it with an utopia" phase of his youth, the secret origins of his writing career, his dream projects (incl. the novel he's noodling on), and more. Follow Colin on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

During my recent LA weekend, I asked author, pal, and past guest Kate Maruyama if she'd be interested in interviewing me, and for some crazy reason, she said yes! So this time around you get me doing my best not to ask the questions, and just letting it fly, as we talk about the history of the podcast, my dream list of pod-guests, my semi-fake erudition, why we should practice arts we're no good at, my thoughts on mortality and progeny, the gentle change of years, the legend of the fire defenses of the Beinecke Library at Yale, and a ton of stories. Follow Kate on Bluesky and Instagram, and subscribe to her newsletter • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

"A letter is a joy of Earth — It is denied the Gods —," sez Emily Dickinson (#1672), and THE MAN WHO READ EVERYTHING: The Literary Letters of Harold Bloom (Yale University Press) proves it! Heather Cass White rejoins the show to talk about editing Harold Bloom's letters for the book, her history with him and what she learned about him over the course of the project, and how the letters revealed a less determined Bloom and how she empathized with the struggles he went through in his career. We get into the people whose correspondence she included — Alvin Feinman, Northrop Frye, AR Ammons, John Hollander, John Ashbery, James Merrill, Henri Cole, and Ursula K Le Guin — and all the writers and critics she wishes she could have included, the books and projects Bloom proposed but never completed (or started) over the years, the fun she had writing the footnotes, the one person Bloom was intimidated to meet, Bloom's role in the Canon Wars 30-40 years ago (and my practice of checking off books from The List at the end of The Western Canon), where he fell on Ashbery vs. Ammons, and whether marriage is the true subject of literature. We also discuss how her next book on the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore is the opposite of this one, her go-to books to teach American fiction, why she dropped out of Knausgaard before the finish line, how students have & haven't changed over a quarter century of teaching, her late arrival to Surfjan Stevens' music, how I solved her long-standing question about a moment from Bloom's memorial, and a lot more. Follow Heather on Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Happy Pride! Let's get Queer As Comics! Writer, critic, curator, publisher and broadcaster Paul Gravett rejoins the show to talk about curating a fabulous new exhibition, Queer As Comics, to help launch the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration! We talk about what makes comics queer (it's not just an issue of sexuality), the artists and comics he wishes he could have included in the show, the challenges of exhibiting comics as opposed to paintings, and why Queer As Comics' survey of 65 artists covering 80 years of history "starts with the Finnish" (as in Tom of Finland and Tove Jansson). We also get into the endlessness of Tove Jansson's life & creativity (and why Paul's committed to writing a big book about her anyway), his first exposure to queer comics (and again, why all comics are queer), how it feels to see the Quentin Blake Centre come to life and to see Quentin still making art in his 90s, and more. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Welcome to Mundo Mendo! I visited artist and writer Luis Mendo in Karuizawa, Japan for a wide-ranging conversation about art, creativity, community and more. We talk about how he left design and embraced drawing and illustration, why he created the Mundo Mendo platform so fans/members can support his art and stories (and get an annual print edition of his work), the limits of money and the joy of making art, and how artists can escape "working for Mr. Zuckerberg" and stop chasing likes on Instagram. We get into how internal change has to be accompanied by an external change, the challenge of not having a client, his critique of AI "art", and the tension between world of numbers & metrics and the world of serendipity. We also discuss the creative residency he & his wife ran, Almost Perfect, his love of old movies, how the creative life can be a chain of projects, what brought him to Japan and what keeps him there (even if he feels like a foreigner wherever he is), his newsletter that highlights other illustrators and artists, why I should be a male model in Japan, and a lot more. (Plus, after the conversation I share a story about my Japan business trip and some Kafkaesque flop-sweat moments.) Follow Luis on Instagram and Bluesky, and support MUNDO MENDO and subscribe to The Illustrated • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Can people change? How continuous is identity? With YOU'VE CHANGED: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation (William Morrow), Benoit Denizet-Lewis explores the concepts of personal change and change-in-the-world, the ways we find identities and community, and the peril of changing into our parents (haha). We talk about how we define change and transformation, what happens when we think we've changed but the people in our lives don't notice any difference, how his husband feared that he would change too much in the writing of the book, and how the American narrative of change equals "overcoming one's problems." We get into how he made his own story of change and addiction part of the book (while guarding his privacy), whether change involves finding a core self or something new, whether redemption is possible for people who committed heinous crimes, what happened the time he got scientifically tested about his sexual preferences, and the chapter he wishes he could've included in the book. We also discuss who he's reading, whether the therapy that works for him now would have helped when he was younger, how one can prioritize one's own happiness while the world is (let's say) ending, his hallucinations in Esalen, and a lot more. Follow Benoit on Instagram and Bluesky • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Philosopher and biographer Clare Carlisle converses & communes with me over her new book, TRANSCENDENCE FOR BEGINNERS: LIFE WRITING AND PHILOSOPHY (NYRB). We talk about her existential moment of being invited to give the Gifford Lectures on natural theology and how it led her wonder what she could say about the knowledge of God, how writing biographies raised philosophical questions on the nature of a life in its entirety, how flexible the notion of transcendence is (and why it doesn't have to be "rising above" the world so much as "spreading out" into it), how the lecture mode and how it offered her an opportunity for a different writing voice, and how she adapted those pieces into this book. We get into the possibility of communion and transmission, the tension between biography and philosophy, the harmfulness of the notion of attainment and what that implies of the seeking of wisdom, and what happens if you're like Kierkegaard and you hear The Call but don't know what it's calling you to do. We also discuss her philosophical love affair with Spinoza and his philosophy of interconnectedness, the bridge she discovered between Spinoza and Indian traditions, the influence of past guest Celia Paul on the lectures, and more. • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

Pull up a chair, enjoy a kasha varnishke, and listen to me and Josh Alan Friedman talk about his kaleidoscopic novel, ALL ROADS LEAD TO GREAT NECK (Wyatt Doyle Books/New Texture)! We talk about the momentous years he spent in Great Neck as a kid and why he set his novel in 1970, the ne'er-do-wells and drug addicts he knew (and emulated) in school, how Great Neck has changed since his "glory days," and the larger-than-life Yiddishkeit ghost who haunts the novel. We get into how he managed to weave Irving Berlin, Floyd Patterson, and Leslie West into the story, how his wife got him to finish the book by putting up post-it notes in their kitchen about each chapter, and how he reconstructed 1970 Great Neck from his collection of the notes girls used to pass in schools and the letters his friends sent him from reform school. We also discuss life after losing his dad, Bruce Jay Friedman, in 2020, how he used to take his 14-year-old pals to see showings of Bruce Jay's play Steambath so they could catch the nude scene, how it felt to see pieces of his childhood transformed in his dad's stories (incl. a visit to Las Vegas), what's left of the New York of his heyday and why he misses Joe Franklin, the play he's writing about his chauffeur days, his retirement from his lifelong guitar career after a carpal tunnel diagnosis, and more. Follow Josh on Instagram and Facebook • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With THE WONDERFUL WORLD THAT ALMOST WAS: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (FSG), Andrew Durbin brings us a masterful biography of a pair of artists, their art, gay life pre- and post-Stonewall, and more. We talk about his first exposure to each of their art, why he restricted the biography to the years Paul and Peter were together/around each other (1956-1975), how queer lives are often oriented around death and why he wanted to affirm life with this book, when a biographer can let his subjects go, and why he prefers Thek over Hujar. We get into the ephemerality of much of Thek's art installations, Hujar's dissatisfaction with commercial photography and the struggles with getting photos taken seriously as art, the triangle they formed with Andrew's hero, Susan Sontag, Thek's belief that marrying the right woman (Sontag, at one point) would have "fixed" him, his regret at not getting to interview Joseph Raffael for the book, and how meeting Ann Wilson changed the course of the book. We also discuss how Andrew became an art-writer/-editor by accident, how NYC has changed since he left 6 years ago, why young people are enthusiastic about his Thek and Hujar, why he needs to decompress from writing about history, how art criticism feeds his fiction and poetry, and more. Follow Andrew on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter

With REAL LIFE COMIX: ONLY IN NEW YORK (Cosmic Lion Productions), editors Dean Haspiel and Doug Latino bring together 66 fantastic cartoonists and writers to tell 51 autobiographical comic stories about NYC . . . and I'm among them! We got together to talk about the book & its publishing history, the incredible lineup Dean and Doug have assembled (including ~20 of my past pod-guests — like Roz Chast, Drew Friedman, Jonathan Ames, Karl Stevens, Jennifer Hayden, Ben Katchor, and Moby — and a ton of other great cartoonists!), why no one's made a New York City-centric autobio-comics anthology before, what makes for an "Only In New York" story & why I went with a tough one for my 2-page comic, and why YOU NEED TO SUPPORT THE KICKSTARTER (ending May 8, 2026) to help bring it to print! (Yes, we talk about other stuff, like My Joe Franklin Story, what I've learned on hiatus, what Doug & Dean have learned about editing, the challenges of bringing non-comics-writers into the book, why I don't 'think' comics, my favorite Deadly Sin, and more.) Follow Dean on Bluesky and Instagram, and subscribe to his Substack • Follow Doug on Bluesky and Instagram • More info at our site • Support The Virtual Memories Show via Stripe, Patreon, or Paypal, and subscribe to our e-newsletter