Episode 6

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Published on:

28th Apr 2025

Two Stories in the Style of W.G. Sebald: "The Keeper of Light" and "The Archive of Sand"

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. 

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About the Podcast

Literate Sleep
A nocturnal podcast by Rick Whitaker
Rick Whitaker, author and host of the nocturnal podcast Literate Sleep, reads aloud from literary texts that you can enjoy while falling asleep. These are not cliffhangers or thrillers. They’re citizens of the low country, content to amble along to see whatever happens to be there--fabulous but fully self-evident literary landscapes without the promise of climax, epiphany, or resolution. These texts could go on, it seems, forever, which is not to say that they’re boring. They're not. Among the writers whose work will be featured in future episodes are, for instance, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Lynch, W. G. Sebald, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Richard Howard, Ronald Firbank, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Marcel Proust, Toni Morrison, William James, Edith Hamilton, and the list could go on and on--you could be put to sleep by the list itself. But as a reader with a severe allergy to boredom, Rick Whitaker will always strive to put you to sleep with texts that will not bore you. In his quiet readings without music, these literary texts will lull you, pacify you, and induce you to sweet, smart dreams. The first episode is a reading of a 1913 story by the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Born in 1878, Walser was a dropout from school at 14. In his 50s he retired to a sanatorium where, he said, he went “not to write, but to be mad.” "Kleist in Thun" is his homage to the German poet Heinrich von Kleist. Following the Walser story, a page from James Joyce's famously inscrutable novel Finnegans Wake. But you’ll be sound asleep by then. Literate sleep.

About your host

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Rick Whitaker

Rick Whitaker is an author and producer in New York City. He created the podcast "Read Me to Sleep, Ricky" in 2022-23. He directs Everybody Sing, a community choir, and works at Columbia University's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies.