Awright, ladies. Let’s get this show on the road. It’s time for The Morning Hoo-Hah, no over-thinking, no editing till time’s up, and then only minimal motherscratchin’ editing, you got that? Let’s get the ball rollin.’ Let’s shove off.

Let’s roll.

This morning upon waking I read half an essay by David Foster Wallace. It was on the Fresh Air (or maybe the NPR) website that I’d left open on this computer yesterday. And I saw it, so I read it. Then my tea. My tea was ready. So I got up, thinking about tea, made my way to the stove, and [there should be a moment of reflection here, for the story’s sake… you’ll see what I mean] I poured it, then brought it out here to the table, where I now type. Or write. Or write-type.

Ira Glass and the building blocks of story telling

There are, according to This American Life host Ira Glass two “building blocks” of storytelling. The first is narrative, and that involves the relating of a sequence of events, peppered with, if I remember correctly, questions. (I’ll have to look that up) Suspense is created due to the momentum built of the laying down of these blocks. This happened, then this happened, then THIS happened, then... you get the idea. The listener is on  a train, chugging along, and they’re expecting another event, another sentence, another building block to carry them to the next level. Like going up stairs, or like the eye watching a river or a waterfall, adjusting to the sequence of images it’s receiving, adjusting its intake in anticipation of more of the same. It would mess it up to NOT have more river come or water fall. Same with the brain. Once the momentum of a story is built, more story must follow. But it’s peppered with something. (Why pepper I don’t know. Good word, though, pepper.)

Peppered with questions which arise verbally or not, implying answers forthcoming. And then there’s the other building block: moments of reflection. That is, why we’re relating this story in the first place.

Moments of reflection. Glass (in an interview about storytelling conducted by Mike Daisey) seemed insistent about that. Moments of reflection. Why the story is being told. Is that just saying “here’s the interesting part,” or “I told you that to tell you this“? Or stepping out, clumsily, and saying “this is the point where you have to ask yourself, why would someone blah-blah-blah?” (I’d have to look into that.) But that’s what Glass says. Sequence of events peppered with questions (implied and direct?) + moments of reflection = good narrative. And he won an Edward R. Murrow Award, so….

No small feat. Glass changed the ways stories are told now. On the radio, at The Moth, probably in print, etc. Gladwell and all those guys are probably influenced by Glass and TAL. And now it’s become a little trite, a little rote. The rhythm is expected now (though so is the rhythm of a waterfall or a river and no one’s bitchin’ about that), and that can be kind of… what? Annoying? Dull? Self-parodic? Whatever. I’ll tell you what, though, those smug clowns on Radio Lab are all of the above, with that crappy scripted banter and —

(tea break)

— and the silly bada-badada-badada-ba-doop of their little back-and-forth in that sort of talk-overy style of Aaron Sorkin or whoever wrote the West Wing and the Newsroom and those other shows where everyone’s tlaking-talking-talking all the time. Hey, what the heck. the guy has a style.

And here’s the thing (moment of relflection): a person’s style isn’t supposed to be for everyone. If it clicks with someone, great. If not, no harm done. But some people notice the phoniness of styles and tire of them. Others just tire of them. Even Ira Glass laughed about the rhthym of NPR stories and how after a certain point, you could just know when the reporter would say “Lisa Glockenspiel, NPR news, Cairo” and wrap it up.

But whoop-de-doo. Why criticize? I mean, these people are just doing their jobs (which at least they have) and not hurting anything. Unless they are. Unless, through their triteness and the dishonesty of their rote ways, they’re not telling the Truth and actually ARE hurting the media consuming public. But, hey, isn’t it incumbent upon the consumer to find better media, to ingest more wisely, to vary his diet? Not the nanny-state’s job, is it? Does that make sense?

Which brings us back to David Foster Wallace. For some reason I’ve been on a DFW kick lately. I guess it’s his interviews that get me, particularly a 2003 one he did for a German woman. a student, I think, interviewing him for a doc she was doing for German TV. It’s on YouTube, and Wallace is very intelligent and kind and patient with her, and on occasion he asks things like “does any of this make sense?” or appends a pretty interesting thought with “which sounds really dumb” and things like that. Pretty self-conscious, sure, but also humble, in a way. Humble as a wise man is. A man who knows that what he doesn’t know could fill the Grand freaking Canyon. No… not quite that. A man who knows that there are a LOT of ways to see reality out there, and his is just one, and who wants to get that reality over to someone else and try to give them a peek into his thoughts, but the only tools in his box are WORDS. Just crummy old words, and these are big, weird, globulous, foggy (sometimes) ideas that he’s trying to grab onto, and not only grab onto, but sometimes find and shape and trap and mold with the bare hands, and it’s dark around these ideas and it’s damp and it’s like trying to grab one chunk of the fog on a cold evening in San Francisco or something.

Does this make sense? Am I making any sense?

It’s hard, but he’s been knocking these thoughts back and forth in his brain for weeks–years maybe–trying to relate them, trying to flesh them out, trying to hang meat on a skeleton that’s constructed from a feeling or a remnant of a feeling that itself is barely translatable into words, because it’s so part of the condition.

“How’s the water, boys?” asked the old fish of the young.

“What the hell is ‘water?'”

We’re in it.

Time’s up. And that’s The Morning Hoo-Hah.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5IDAnB_rns