The Electro-Library

Short Circuits #5: Eileen Myles

January 8th, 2023  |  Season 5  |  46 mins 55 secs

art, eileen myles, literature, pandemic, poetry

Prof. Amra Brooks and multi-genre author Eileen Myles in conversation

Short Circuits #4: Ross Gay

November 25th, 2021  |  Season 4  |  58 mins 47 secs

body, delight, gratitude, mushrooms, music, poetry, presence, ross gay

A wide-ranging interview with poet, essayist, and professor Ross Gay.

E-L Live: Ross Gay

November 19th, 2021  |  Season 4  |  1 hr 7 mins

basketball, delight, poetry, ross gay, writing

Short Circuits #3: Conversation with Layli Long Soldier

November 10th, 2020  |  Season 3  |  46 mins 42 secs

apology, dakota, forgiveness, lakota, layli long soldier, motherhood, native american, oglala, pandemic, poetry

Layli joins Amra over Zoom for a wide-ranging conversation about life, art, politics, human connection, and parenting in complicated times.

E-L Live: Layli Long Soldier

November 1st, 2020  |  Season 3  |  1 hr 6 mins

apology, dakota, forgiveness, lakota, layli long soldier, native american, oglala, poetry

Poet, essayist, and activist Layli Long Soldier joins us via Zoom for a reading from her collection, Whereas, followed by a question-and-answer session.

Quarantine

August 7th, 2020  |  Season 3  |  49 mins 54 secs

abigail donovan, carlos josé perez samano, chinese hermits, clarice lispector, da powell, don delillo, fiction, franz kafka, john keats, maira kalman, medicine, poetry

Perspectives on the experience of quarantine across cultures and historical periods. Guest: Maira Kalman.

E-L Live: Ocean Vuong and Rickey Laurentiis

March 24th, 2020  |  Season 3  |  1 hr 23 mins

america, ethnicity, gender, language, love, ocean vuong, poetry, queerness, race, rickey laurentiis, vietnam, violence

Recording of poets Ocean Vuong and Rickey Laurentiis from the Chet Raymo Series at Stonehill College.

Short Circuits #2: Conversation with Fred Moten

January 10th, 2020  |  Season 3  |  37 mins 58 secs

blackness, community, fred moten, identity, jazz, literature, performativity, philosophy, race, resistance

Jared interviews poet and philosopher Fred Moten.

E-L Live: Fred Moten

November 3rd, 2019  |  Season 3  |  51 mins 57 secs

live, moten, poetry, reading

On October 16, 2019, Fred Moten was the 2019 Chet Raymo Series speaker at Stonehill College in Easton, MA.

Short Circuits #1: Conversation with Teju Cole

May 21st, 2019  |  Season 2  |  26 mins 20 secs

creativity, freedom, hunger, identity, nigeria, race, teju cole, writing

Photography (Part Two)

May 8th, 2019  |  Season 2  |  41 mins 45 secs

amra brooks, camera, ethan canin, italo calvino, john berger, memory, orson welles, photography, roland barthes, september 11, time, vladimir nabokov, wislawa szymborska

Part two of our two-part series on photography.

Photography (Part One)

April 4th, 2019  |  Season 2  |  44 mins 32 secs

balzac, camera, daguerreotype, eco, emerson, italy, joanna mcnaney stein, memory, photography, sontag

What happens when we take a photograph? What happens when we capture light on paper, in emulsion, or in pixels and look, across a gulf of time, at these fragments of the past? What gets in the frame and what lies just beyond? If, as John Berger notes, “photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a certain situation,” then what can photographs tell us about the choices we make and why we make them?

Memory

May 23rd, 2018  |  Season 1  |  40 mins 28 secs

death, forgetting, homer, loss, memory, proust, time, virgil

Where is a memory? Is it stored inside of us, entire and complete, like a volume in a cellular archive, awaiting retrieval and rereading? Or is it a mosaic of experience fragments re-collected from bits and pieces of sensory input? Is it a feedback loop, folding now into then, truth into fiction?

Storytelling

December 13th, 2017  |  Season 1  |  32 mins 7 secs

charles baudelaire, infinite monkeys, joan didion, liver, lynda barry, storytelling, student writing, walter benjamin

What do we do when we tell a story? What happens when we listen to a story told? Is storytelling simply an offer of entertainment or a deeply empathetic act that connects us to what it is to be the human animal? Is it a vanishing art or is it something that will always define who and what we are? And could infinite monkeys really tell a tale from Shakespeare, given infinite time?