Unheard
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1945, Ralph Ellison went to a barn in Vermont and began to write Invisible Man. He wrote it in the voice of a black man from the south, a voice that changed American literature. Invisible Man is a novel made up of black voices that had been excluded from the historical record until, decades earlier, he’d helped record them with the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. What is the evidence of a voice? How can we truly know history without everyone’s voices? This episode traces those questions — from the quest to record oral histories of formerly enslaved people, to Black Lives Matter and the effort to record the evidence of police brutality.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin |
| 0:07.0 | My first book, Lyer's poker, told the story of my time in Solomon Brothers, which was then |
| 0:15.8 | one of the world's most powerful banks. In three years, I went from trainee to successful banker. |
| 0:21.8 | It felt back then like a modern day goal rush. |
| 0:25.0 | I thought at the time I was documenting an unprecedented event that would never repeat itself. |
| 0:30.6 | It turned out it was just the beginning of an era that never ended. |
| 0:33.5 | I've recorded for the first time a full audiobook version of Liar's poker. |
| 0:38.5 | You can get it now at pushkin dot FM. |
| 0:48.3 | Imagine there's a place in our world where the known things go. |
| 0:53.0 | A quarter of the mind. Unfortunately, it's a mess in here. |
| 0:55.0 | Half the time I can't find what I came for. |
| 0:58.0 | Dewey Decimals, something. |
| 1:00.0 | This place could do with some kind of an organizational scheme. |
| 1:04.0 | Also, jeez, it's so noisy in here. |
| 1:07.0 | What with this Crystal radio set and the old record player running? |
| 1:11.0 | What would the preacher preach about that thing? |
| 1:14.0 | I don't know. I let you go. |
| 1:16.0 | This place, this chamber of knowledge, it stores the facts that matter and matters of fact. |
| 1:22.0 | The sounds that matter and matters of fact, the sounds that matter. |
| 1:27.0 | The sign on the door reads, The last archive. |
| 1:31.0 | Step through the door and into an apartment in Harlem where the writer Ralph Ellison is |
| 1:38.3 | packing a suitcase while listening to the radio. This is the mutual broadcasting system. |
... |
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