Michael Wendling is a writer and producer. He is currently producing From Our Own Correspondent for the BBC World Service, and is working on a novel.
Pretty much every form of media gets slammed in IJ, even the forms that don’t actually exist. The students at Enfield T.A. and the addicts at Ennet House mong out in front of mind-numbing cartridge-eating TPs. Video telephones are on the shelves for five sales quarters before, in one of the funniest riffs in the book, human paranoia and insecurity crush the whole industry. Movies – well, one in particular – kill. And yet radio, that good old wireless, is somehow still around, unchanged, strangely and hopefully connective.
I’m talking mostly here about the scene which begins on page 181. Joelle/Madame Psychosis is hosting Sixty Minutes More or Less on WYYY. There’s fresh air in the studio and Madame Psychosis gets paid for doing a midnight slot with ‘solid’ ratings on a student run station, cushiness which stretches things a bit even by IJ standards.
Anyway, the point is that Sixty Minutes +/- is soothing, comforting, familiar to anyone who’s ever listened to the radio late at night pretty much anywhere in the world. MP shouts out to tortured M.I.T. geeks and U.H.I.D. freaks. Up the hill Mario is listening “the way other kids watch TP, opting for mono and sitting right up close to tone of the speakers with his head cocked dog-like” while the rest of the family gathers for dinner. Leaving aside the weird UV plant lights and the connections between the radio host and the people around the table, it could be a scene from decades ago – or “three generations past”, to be specific. The frantic pace of the novel slows for a while as MP rattles off deformities in a grotesque, hypnotic intermission.
Radio’s not really a main theme in IJ, but it does tie a few plot strands together (if you’re reading for the first time you haven’t got to that bit yet so I won’t give it away). It’s also a subject Wallace returned to later, most notably in his Atlantic profile of right-wing jock John Ziegler.
But here’s the interesting thing. These days, radio in general is on a bit of a winning streak. It’s not dying like newspapers, or inane and shouty like television. Corporate stations are dull as ever, but now we can listen to underground podcasts, news from foreign countries, hipsters telling stories, community broadcasting. And that wasn’t really the case when Wallace was writing the book. In the mid-90s, US radio was in a perilous state. Anodyne, heavily formatted music stations were, in Thom Yorke’s phrase, “buzzing like a fridge.” Clear Channel had started gobbling up stations and installing geography-less robo-DJs. Cash-strapped NPR was constantly under threat of becoming even more cash-strapped by a hostile Republican Congress. There were few breaks in the clouds and only a very small inkling of how technology would soon transform not only the way we access auditory information but indeed the whole idea of what we think of as radio.
I think it’s reaching to credit Wallace with any sort of prescience in this area – after all, WYYY is old-school, the ‘Largest Whole Prime on the FM Band’. And when Madame Psychosis is gone from the airways, Mario and the rest of her audience is bereft: “The disappearance of someone who’s been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better.”
Still, at least for a few pages, Wallace taps into a pretty fundamental idea: radio is the only medium that can be as simple as one human being speaking to another. And sometimes, that’s just enough.
Comments
10 responses to “Michael Wendling: Good Old Wireless”
“inane and shouty like television?”
oh please. television-bashing is so, like, 1990. There are as many if not more great tv shows than radio shows. Dismissing an entire medium because “Everybody Loves Raymond” sucks is silly.
Good point, Michael. And I love that section, too, for much the same reason you discuss here. But I don’t know how prescient DFW is here. He may be tuned in to the right radio and banked on it going nowhere, but in a good way. Right radio, by the way, equals college radio, which WYYY most certainly is.
Almost every college I’ve been associated with, as student or teacher, has had a great station. Loyola U in Chicago had WLUW, still does, where an old roommate of mine used to go around to different clubs, digitally record bands’ shows (national acts, even, like Cat Power, New Pornographers, etc.) and then play them on his own show late at night. At Western Michigan U, where I’ve taught for awhile now, in the very real Kalamazoo, MI, there’s WIDR, “Radio Evolution”. For many years, every Wednesday night, there’s been a great show called SWAG that in some ways is similar to MP’s show: obscure music of all types with a nod to old garage rock and 50s & 60s avant garde, rare spoken passages, and an older, non-student DJ named, mysteriously enough, Bat Guano.
My point is only that MP’s show, which I would listen to with Mario religiously, no doubt, kinda did exist and still does. On independent college radio stations across the country. And online. And via podcast et al.
Cheers.
“It’s not dying like newspapers, or inane and shouty like television.” Great line!
And three cheers for NPR. “This American Life” has become a hit HBO series, and “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me,” plays to sold-out crowds nationwide. Even good old Garrison Keillor’s PHC is making big bucks touring around.
On another note, this quote — “And when Madame Psychosis is gone from the airways, Mario and the rest of her audience is bereft: ‘The disappearance of someone who’s been only a voice is somehow worse instead of better.’” — pretty much captures how I felt when I got 9/12/08’s horrible news on the morning of 9/15/08.
Great post.
TAL’s on Showtime. And that’s sort of an interesting side note about the mystery of radio. Not only does the audience not see MP, neither do the engineers in the studio. Whereas with tv crossover from radio, there’s a loss of some of the level of intimacy, somehow.
“Radio is the only medium that can be as simple as one human being speaking to another.”
I love this idea because at some point in college, when I couldn’t stand tv at all, I started listening to the radio, a lot. All the time. Becoming obsessed with Leonard Lopate (WNYC) and later with Ira Glass, for example. And it was intensely comforting, and still is, though I no longer live alone, as I did then.
I also think that reading this book is an example of the power of another medium (literature) that has a similar but different power for me, and has long provided a way out of loneliness: it often feels as simple as one human being (DFW, Virginia Woolf, etc) speaking to another.
We are big time fans of our community radio stations in our house. Our area is actually lucky; we have NPR, classical, and opera on the college station and our beloved “far left” of the dial eclectic station that has a dj I imagine vividly as Joelle.
A couple of weeks ago as I read this section of the book her once a week night time show was hilariously on target. E-Luv (the dj goes by this name) played some trance music for a while and then a few moments later was calmly and hypnotically interviewing a pet-psychic of all things. And then talking about something else entirely a little while later over the sound of hand drums.
Sound waves minus the light waves (of TV) are somehow like an invisible halo that circles your ears and head. They seem much more a part of reality to me because of how you can move around the room, the house, the roads, the various destinations of life, and there the ear-and-head-halo is still with you, unlike TV where you have to be sitting still in the same room that is a constant.
I’m a long-time radio fan, as I appreciate the way it calls to the imagination in ways that t.v. and other visual media don’t. The Madame Psychosis radio show reminded me of a droney, peculiar show on KPFA, monologues by Joe Frank called “Tales from the Urban Jungle.” Back when I first heard it, I imagined something more like MP – some vague anonymous person spontaneously muttering captivating weirdness. Turns out JF is award-laden and his monologues worked out systematically, but they don’t have that feel at all.
Oh, yes! I love those late-night Joe Frank monologues (which I’ve heard on WBEZ). That’s the best link to MP that I’ve heard yet.
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