This page contains a sampling of my audio and narrative compilations. Please bring your own headphones.  

Just like The Library, this page is a work in progress with the added caveat that there is not quite as much material available.

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Warren Weaver on Noise

I have always been fascinated by the limits to our knowledge.  Gödel’s articulation of those limits is well known; and, in some circles, so too are Shannon and Weaver’s.  Where Weaver’s writing was more prosaic, Shannon worked out the details in mathematics.  Here I read an excerpt from their classic The Mathematical Theory of Communication.


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Hobo Wanderings

This is a program of readings and recordings rooted in a compilation from Joe McGasko of WFMU.  It was originally broadcast on KFAI‘s Wave Project.  We had some engineering challenges in that live effort, so I present here a cleaned up, reedited version. It includes bits from Harry Partch, Jack Kerouac, Moondog and others.


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On Bullshit

In 2005 Harry Frankfurt published a classic bit of philosophy.  I heard about it on the Daily Show.  In short, Frankfurt argues that bullshit is the complete disregard for truth and is much more pernicious than simply lying.   Following here is a key passage:

It is pretty cool that Fareed Zakaria has caught up with the perniciousness of Donald Trump’s candidacy…

The roots of racism…

Souls of Black Folks

I am trying to understand our current challenges wrt racism and I my propensities lean toward the historical, so I have gone back to WEB Du Bois ’cause I should have read him long ago.  And boy am I glad that I have.  Here is chapter 1 where he lays out many things that will be only too familiar today…

In Chapter 2 (not yet recorded) Du Bois documents a policy failure on par with US water policy in the West (also yet to come…).

Parchment Farm

The folks at Dust to Digital are amazing.  And one of their cool bits that I have acquired is a set of Lomax recordings from Parchment Farm in Mississippi.  And it is clear from these notes that the observations that Du Bois records are institutionalized in the penal system of Mississippi…

Hollow Hyatts

Here is a short number from Hunter S. Thompson.  My choice was inspired by my kid’s stay at a similar establishment in Bethesda, Maryland.