Way back in 2019, Elizabeth and John were already thinking about collaboration. Here they speak with Jared Green and explore The Electro-Library, a podcast he co-created.
Elizabeth, Jared and John play snippets from a recent Electro-Library episode on the decidedly non-podcasty topic of photographs, and use it as a springboard to discuss the different aesthetic experiences of radio, television, film, reading, audiobooks, and podcasts. Which are the easiest and which the hardest artworks to get lost in? Would Frankenstein’s monster be more popular as a podcaster than as a YouTuber? (The answer to that one seems most likely to be yes).
The conversation then turns to the difference between artworks that slide in at the ear and those that come in by eye. What kind of world-building is going on on Recall This Book? Which podcasts are like a Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk and which are more Schubertian, semi-detached and conversational? Then, in Recallable Books, Jared recommends Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Elizabeth recommends the work of Sarah Lewis, and John recommends the Habitat podcast.
Discussed in this episode:

Lapham’s Quarterly


The Lover, Marguerite Duras

“The Photograph,” Umberto Eco


Various audiobooks, John Le Carré


Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, Robert Frost


The Most of P.G. Wodehouse, P.G. Wodehouse

“The Dead,” James Joyce


Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel


Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes


Aperture 223, “Vision and Justice,” ed. Sarah Lewis

The Habitat


Read the episode here.
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