Podcast Intellectuals Podcast Panel #1 with Benjamen Walker and Fanny Gribenski

March 12, 2026·53 min·4 clips

A tape found in a box in Ivoryton the previous day captures Elda Godenzie — a 90-year-old former piano key polisher — admitting she thought about elephants while working, and asking 'I wonder if they'd paint?' before learning the animals were killed before their tusks were removed.

A former ivory key factory sits at the center of the excerpt. The repeated introduction of Ian Basselham makes him sound half like a character and half like a scholar, a young emotional historian trying to build a museum in a town where industrial memory has not gone anywhere. Music is treated as evidence. A song about Ivorytown connects piano manufacturing to the Congo coast, wages, photographs, elephant death, and a whiteness that cannot shrug off what it came from. The question is practical, but also a little impossible. The host asks how material like that can go into a book, and the guest answers by pointing to the joy of podcasts. That answer opens up the larger problem. Audio can keep performance, repetition, voice, and local feeling alive in ways a written source may smooth out. The town stays physical: old mill, clock tower, forests, factory buildings, settled generations. This is the ground under the difficult inheritance. The guest sounds unsure in a useful way. He talks about meeting people, taking notes, learning from their generosity, and then realizing those encounters changed how he read documents and books. Casual conversation becomes part of the history. What starts as a tour through a town becomes a way to understand the sources. The podcast can keep the song's cadence while the guest thinks aloud about how testimony turns into writing. No tidy ending arrives. The pull comes from hearing economic survival, colonial extraction, and animal death share the same story. By the end, gratitude has weight. The generous guide and the conversations are no longer background. They have entered the story.

As heard by us

A patient look at how place, song, and research become history.

The episode ties together a former ivory key factory, a new museum project, and a sea chanty community in a clear account of material history. It is at its best when it stays close to buildings, objects, and songs, especially the Ivorytown song, instead of moving on too quickly.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a history listen built around a former ivory key factory, where song and memory do the heavy lifting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from New Books in Music