[chris] some notes on Round 4

Jennifer, I completely understand what you mean about media consumption habits in this modern world. Popular news and information often come in bite sized, jejune, market tested portions (like Chicken McNuggets, I suppose) and what I'm proposing here does require that people pay fairly close attention for more than just a few minutes. However, there are so many examples of works that have successfully broken through the attention span barrier, and I'm emboldened by them all. TAL is a hugely popular show, and often contains subtle material that takes twenty minutes or so to unfold. Selected Shorts has a devoted following, and it's a show which really, really requires that you listen from the very beginning of each piece. And hyperactive, soda-jacked kids are spending hours poring over Harry Potter books these days.

As for the possibility of building a following, I think here of The Talking Heads' David Byrne who was asked in an interview to explain his band's early success and replied that they just never underestimated their audience. He just put his heart into crafting the best songs he could, didn't worry too much about what people said was marketable, and succeeded precisely because people grew to understand that what at first glance might appear heady and obscure was actually authentic, fresh and unique.

Also, I think that even though some of the texts I'd deal with would be difficult (Calvino and Borges are about as tough as they get) people respond so favorably to the ideas in these books once they are shown a way to approach them. For example, I began my demo by talking about something which I'm sure everyone can relate to (imagining a city before you travel to it), and by then focusing on what these imagined cites can tell us about ourselves and how we perceive "the other", I've set up our basic line of enquiry, all without having to delve into theoretical academic gobbledy-gook. In the bulk of the rest of the episode, instead of boring ourselves to tears with textual analysis, we instead just hang out with some interesting people, and talk about the ideas in the books as they relate to their real lives. While whenever possible or necessary, I will tie in these conversations with the texts, my goal is more to show that the ideas in these seemingly distant and obscure books actually pervade our real lives, and to me that'll be a great way to get people engaged -- to work our way back towards the theory by way of experiences with real people, rather than striving to completely understand the theory first, and then afterwards wondering how real people fit in.

Not to yammer on here, but I do think there's one more very important aspect of my approach that deserves mentioning: I'm no expert in literature. It's flattering that some people on this site have referred to me as erudite or whatever, but more than anything I'm just interested. What I'm getting at here is that when I approach a book, when I talk about it with the experts, I'm learning. The questions I will ask will be sometimes naive, I'll respond to books in one way, then discover that I totally misunderstood what was going on, or completely missed the subtext. I think that people will enjoy listening to a guy who's not afraid to put himself out there, who like themselves will misunderstand things, who will share what he learns as he learns it from the street or ivy-clad academia, and who is wholly sympathetic to the fact that sometimes these books are just hard to understand.

I do not think what public radio needs is a lofty, overly-erudite cultural program; what it needs is a show which helps bridge the gap between the high falutin' world of literature and real people -- people for whom these books were actually written.

Thanks, Jennifer for your thoughtful response here. I really do appreciate it. I know that my idea can work on the radio, but I am aware that there is much I don't yet know. Your thought provoking questions are really helpful to me as I try to figure out how to make my show fit in to the world of public radio without losing sight of its vision.

The point you make that thrills me the most is,"never underestimate your audience".

Onward, ho!