Bloggasm

I’m not a regular listener of talk radio, but I’ve always wondered why they use a one-person format. It seems like they could keep the conversation going more smoothly if a talk radio host had another host to talk to. To me, it just seems so unnatural for a guy to basically talk to himself for hours straight; the few times I have listened to the medium I noticed that there seems to be no flow.

I’m currently reading an article about right-wing radio that was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly. It’s written by David Foster Wallace and is titled “Host.” Now, I usually hate it when bloggers simply block quote huge chunks of text, but I really need to in this instance.

In this particular passage, Wallace describes the difficulty of being a talk radio host:

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want — with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential — a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying — which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking. Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself — your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech or speech’s ticcy pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English — the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.

Excerpted from The New Kings of Nonfiction

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