Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlowski, 1978. Photo by Herbert Rusche.
Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlowski, 1978. Photo by Herbert Rusche.
Historic Audio from the Archives of Charles Ruas
Hosted by Charles Ruas

A collection of recovered and restored programs produced by Charles Ruas at WBAI-FM, the Pacifica station in New York, in the seventies. Ruas is the author of Conversations with American Writers, a Fulbright scholar, and a distinguished French translator. He is also a frequent contributor to ARTNews and Art in America. This series is produced in partnership with Charles Ruas, The Pacifica Radio Archives, The Yale Beinecke Library, The Columbia University Rare Book & Manuscript Collection, and numerous restorers, archivists and collectors.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Monday, October 10th, 2011

A treasure of a conversation illuminating the filmmakers' techniques, the participants' social game, and the ambient legal wrangles surrounding making of the brilliant documentary. With the Maysles, Ellen Hovde, Little Edie, and a surprise call home.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Monday, August 8th, 2011

A rare recording of the Andre Serban production of Bertolt Brecht's Good Woman of Setzuan performed at La MaMa in 1976 with a score by Elizabeth Swados. Recovered from the original WBAI tapes by the Pacifica Archives and touched up by ARTonAIR.org.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Monday, July 25th, 2011

American poet Susan Howe and author Charles Ruas interview award-winning biographer Leon Edel, as he leads a very stimulating conversation about the most famous authors seen through a practiced biographer's eyes.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Monday, July 11th, 2011

Leon Edel on the discipline of writing and how he got started, his work as a journalist, a soldier and a professional biographer and discusses the writers he has known from Edith Wharton and James Joyce to Edmund Wilson and Edna Saint Vincent Millay.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Monday, March 28th, 2011

This excerpt of Ed Friedman’s performance piece, which took place on May 5th and 6th, 1977 at The Kitchen, features four Orient-obsessed New Yorkers who tell their life stories over a game of Mah Jong. The music is by Peter Gordon.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Thursday, February 24th, 2011

In an interview from the mid-70s, Emily Sunstein discusses A Different Face, her biography on Mary Wollstonecraft. Sunstein explains her subject's proto-feminism and life long battle for independence in mid 18th century Britain. Fascinating.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Thursday, February 17th, 2011

Musical Director Rob Wynne describes this ballad opera as “structured chaos.” The third incarnation of San Francisco’s Burning by Helen and Pat Adam is an experimental radio drama that depicts the city’s odd inhabitants in 1906.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Monday, February 14th, 2011

Sexless/Half A Family is constructed around Bowe's experiences while writing a Hollywood screenplay and includes voices of Mary Barnan, Elizabeth Canon, Vito Acconci, Joan Schwartz, others. Unheard for decades, our crew restored it.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Wednesday, January 26th, 2011

Janet Hobhouse, who read almost everything written about and by Gertrude Stein, sat down in 1976 for a conversation with Charles Ruas about her biography of Gertrude Stein--Everybody Who Was Anybody--published when she was just 23 years old.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Friday, January 14th, 2011

From a series of broadcasts and vinyl releases from the mid-seventies, American poet and performance artist John Giorno muses with co-producers and interviewers Charles Ruas and Linda Perry over the pragmatic-yet-existential dilemmas faced by poets (

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Saturday, January 1st, 2011
In this second half of an event held in Newark in 1968, 41-year-old Allen Ginsberg introduces his 72-year-old father, Louis, who wryly comments on current affairs of the day and reads his own poetry. The segment ends...Read More
Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Friday, December 17th, 2010
After ten minutes of chanting, Allen Ginsberg reads from and comments on selections of his poetry at an event recorded in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey on January 19, 1968, and first broadcast on WBAI radio in New...Read More
Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Saturday, November 27th, 2010
SAVE ALLEN GINSBERG! We are raising funds to digitize and preserve dozens of deteriorating recordings made by legendary radio producer and scholar Charles Ruas. In collaboration with archives and libraries and,...Read More
Hosted by Charles Ruas
Originally aired on Tuesday, October 12th, 2004

James Laughlin founded New Directions with anthologies of new poetry, prose and plays which produced one of America's finest independent publishers for new and experimental writing. Hear the man tell the story of New Directions in his own words.

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Hosted by Charles Ruas
Recorded at the time of this extraordinary novel's initial publication, E.L. Doctorow reads from Ragtime and speaks with author Charles Ruas. This recording was originally broadcast on WBAI-FM New York in 1975,...Read More
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