Literate Sleep

Tonight I'll read Part Three of Ivy Compton-Burnett's acid-washed comedy of manners, her 1955 award-winning novel Mother and Son.

Tonight I’ll read Part Two of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s 1955 novel Mother and Son.

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) is one of the great geniuses of fiction. Her novels, while seeming to be constrained and small, are in fact the opposite: they freely explore and reveal the wide intelligences and feelings among people. Reading them is a deep and addicting pleasure. Compton-Burnett is a novelist one wishes were still alive to write another book. 

Mother and Son is the only one of her 20-odd novels to have received a prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, upon its publication in 1955. It is one of my favorite novels.  

Tonight I’ll read my anti-celebration of Father’s Day, a text I’ve compiled over many years that was inspired by the late works of novelist David Markson. “Fathers and Sons” presents fathers and fatherhood at their worst. I realize, of course, that not all fathers are execrable and a precious few are exemplary if not even virtuous. I am blessed to have an unofficially adopted father who has saved my life countless times and is the person I go to for answers when I’m most at a loss. He has never failed me, and I salute Dennis Snell in Dayton, Ohio. He has my lifelong devotion and love. I hope you, too, have a good father figure in your life. Biological fathers in my own experience have been more trouble than they were worth, and the text I’ll read now proves it. I hope you’ll enjoy the story even if there’s little in it that’s enjoyable. It’s meant, among other things, to be funny. So I invite you to lie down and get comfortable, settle in, close your eyes, and get some good, literate sleep.

To celebrate Pride month worldwide, tonight I’ll read two short essays by Quentin Crisp from his 1984 book “Manners from Heaven.” I had dinner once with Mr. Crisp many years ago, so I can attest that he was as well-mannered in life as he still is in print. I recall him asking few, if any, questions and listening attentively while focusing on the meal that was provided to both of us for free. He had just given a talk at the New York Public Library, and it was I who had urged the director of the series, a close friend, to invite him. It was a pleasant evening. 

I wouldn’t normally bother to celebrate Gay Pride, but nowadays one must do what one can to kick against the pricks. 

Tonight I’ll read “The Widower,” my own unfinished novel about the American poet Hart Crane. It is narrated by an imagined character who purports to have been Hart Crane’s lover in the months just before Crane’s death in 1932. So I invite you now to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself by taken off to sleep: literate sleep. 

Tonight I’ll read an excerpt from the late John Ashbery’s book-length poem FLOW CHART, one of the great monuments of late-20th-century poetry. If you’re unfamiliar with Ashery’s poem, you’re in for a unique experience. It will certainly not bore you, but it might exhaust you with its unrelenting expression so that before long you’ll want to be lying down so you can close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself by taken off to sleep: literate sleep. 

Tonight I’ll read (with the author's permission) the first part of Cheryl Mendelson’s “Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House” published in 1999. I had heard long ago that “Home Comforts” was the only modern literary book about housekeeping that was not only useful but beautiful. Friends urged me to read it. I’m ashamed to say that I did not, until recently. Now, at last, I am a devotee of this remarkable (and, at nearly 900 pages, remarkably long) book. Tonight, I’ll start by reading the introductory essay. I’ll read some other chapters later. Now, as I read from THE American book on housekeeping, I invite you to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and instead of cleaning your bathroom or kitchen, let yourself be taken away to sleep: Literate Sleep.

This podcast is intended to help you fall asleep. Do not listen to it while driving. It’s best to listen while lying in bed, as comfortable as you can get, and without the likelihood of being interrupted until it’s time to wake up. 

I’m Rick Whitaker, and this is Literate Sleep. 

Tonight, I’ll read “Human Relations,” an essay by the great Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg, published in 1953. Since I expect you’ll be asleep when I read the end of Ginzburg’s essay, I’ll now read the final sentence of it, which should not be missed: “We’re hurt and aggrieved, we whisper suspicious questions, all the while knowing so well how the long chain of human relations takes its course, making its long and inevitable parabola, the whole long road we have to travel to feel, at last, a bit of compassion.” Now I invite you to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself be taken away to sleep: Literate Sleep. 

Tonight I’ll read two tales created with assistance from Claude Sonnet 3.7, the AI chatbot from Anthropic. The stories were composed with minimal prompting: 

Please write a story that would be ideal for my new podcast called Literate Sleep, in which I read literary texts aloud to help listeners fall asleep. It shouldn’t be boring but also shouldn’t lead to a climactic ending.

Claude dutifully wrote a story called "The Gentle Harbor," which featured a character named Eleanor and a lighthouse, but it had no charm nor style. 

Try writing it in the style of W.G. Sebald.

I did some editing and found that I was very pleased with the story. 

Excellent. Please write a second story in the style of Sebald that I’ll read as a companion to this one.

Out came "The Archive of Sand," which I carefully edited. 

Can you provide a black and white photo to accompany the two stories?

After some back and forth, Claude referred me to the Library of Congress, where I found a photograph I liked, in color.

I make no grand claims for these stories, which are undoubtedly inferior to anything written by Sebald himself. But Sebald is long gone, sadly, and I, for one, am grateful for a chance to read something even vaguely like Sebald’s prose. So I invite you to lie down and close your eyes, calm yourself down, relax completely, and let yourself be taken away to sleep as I read two new Sebaldian tales, The Keeper of Light and The Archive of Sand. I trust that the sound of my voice will lull you right to sleep: Literate Sleep.