Unstable Platforms #3: Podcasts and Martian meanderings
In one of my first creative writing courses at the University of Nevada, on the day my short story was to be reviewed, I had the unexpected luxury of a guest reviewer: the Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka. It was merely coincidental his being there on that day, as I was later told that he only agreed to be in the University’s creative writing program because he liked being in Las Vegas, and because he anticipated being jailed so often in Nigeria that actually coming to campus would be impossible anyways. Still, he was there that day.
To prepare for Soyinka’s feedback, I read everything of his in our library: novels, short stories, and the many, many plays. But for most of the workshop, Soyinka sat silent in our discussion circle, letting the other students critique my short story about a man who accidentally falls into a mall fountain, and then proceeds to buy as many eggs as he can from a nearby stall. I was seventeen, the youngest person in the room, and to the other students, my story had style, but was otherwise inane drivel. “What did the eggs represent?” They asked. “Eggs, I guess,” I replied. After the many responses, Soyinka finally turned to me and asked: “Just what kind of imagination is able to produce something of this magnitude?”
How could I respond? The “bad kind” of imagination? I gave a shady answer, listing off the many forms of art that have always inspired writers — paintings, symphonies, poetry. Wole gave a nod, but seemed unsatisfied, perhaps, knowing that I had given him the writer’s typical answer.
But there was another form of art just as meandering and frivolous as my story, a form that has influenced many fiction authors and poets who are recently coming of age, especially those who specialize in flash fiction or slipstream. This strange form of storytelling, of course, is the podcast.
Voices
I started listening to podcasts during University, when the lack of substance from lectures brought me to online courses and book guides. Even as I overloaded on undergraduate courses, I still felt that my real education was happening through podcasts. I listened to anything I could get my hands on, from hour-long interviews with authors to history stories that could take dozens of hours to complete. Hearing long and often unguided talks on a book somehow opened ideas in a way that University courses did not. I was able to form an intimacy with the hosts’ untamed voices, as they powered through my headphones in loud stammers and soft whispers. They had no big degrees, and most earned no money. They were fans speaking to fans, nerds speaking to nerds, and their passion for the subject was infectious.
Compare this to my 100+ student college classrooms, where professors slowed down at every keyword, and desperately sought shortcuts to “eat up time” (I know, I’m a teacher, I’ve been there).
One of the most popular podcasts known for expressing a meandering form, is WTF with Marc Maron, one of dozens (perhaps hundreds) of comedy-based interview shows that relies heavily on storytelling. As with most podcasts, WTF began in a very niche market, and listeners had to be familiar with the host Marc Maron (who was obscure at the time), as well as his comedian guests, all of whom had been burned or betrayed by Maron in some way. The small market allowed guests to go into grandiose detail, and without the need to provide background and context, interviews became deeply personal. Maron goaded his guests to open up by divulging his own flaws. The wrecking-ball of a host was so utterly full of self-pity, and constantly pined about his addictions and the people he hurt throughout his life. His long confessions caused his guests to try and outdo him by disclosing their most shameless moments.
Scholars have written about podcasting only as an educative tool, a way to relay information to students in the style of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Few have sought to account for the artistic form of podcasts as a medium, one that appeals to nerds or fans, and that stresses individual intimacy with the viewer (through headphones and uncompressed audio, as I went over in my last installment on video blogs). I too once relied on podcasts for information, but now I enjoy the whimsical and arresting voices — voices that, left unobstructed by time or subject, wander into bizarre, spiritually-fulfilling nonsense.
Hardcore History
One of the most highly acclaimed storytelling podcasts has been Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, which has remained one of the top ten podcasts for years. At first glance, HH has very little appeal. Topics can range from a two-hour long episode comparing Alexander the Great to Hitler, to a 30-hour long series on the waning Roman Empire. Carlin’s amateur, non-certified approach to history allows him to think of “Martian ideas” about how history impacts the present, which Huffington Post called Carlin’s own “hard-to-pigeonhole approach that criticizes all corners of power.”
Part of the lure of Carlin’s podcasts is his untamed voice. “Untamed” here meaning uncompressed and unfiltered. Carlin’s conspiratorial tone has incredible range, an effect that was filtered out when he was a radio host. As Carlin has pointed out, he thinks of his voice as a painter’s palette:
“As a storyteller, loud is my “red” color…and speaking softly equivalent to “black” in my painting palette. To compress to[o] much is to shrink the color palette to more muted tones. It’s a trade off. Speaking is a weird art form…”storytelling” (as we do in the HH show) an even weirder sub-genre of speaking. To limit the colors I play with is to homogenize the vocal style somewhat. I can experiment with this and hear the difference. I prefer the extreme “colors” to the subtle “tones” of a more compressed version.
With only a bachelor’s in History, Carlin’s “Martian perspective,” as he calls it, risks no intellectual standing for him. Instead it permits him to take on strange analogies as extended metaphors. He calls the development of atomic weaponry a form of “logical insanity” that he then traces (in story form) through the early twentieth century. In a show about empire, he brings up the “what if we found an untouched island with native people” analogy, and then runs with it, sometimes broaching into science-fiction inspired endings. He comes at topics with out-of-the-box questions, as when he attempts to understand racism in European colonial history by proposing the question: “Are white people special?” (which can mean special good, or special bad). His unexpected snaking narratives are made not for historians, but for, as Carlin says, “the group that sat around a pizza and some beers after history class and got into the weird, fun questions on history.” Carlin connects these analogies with a love for detail, and has as many as fifty books cited in some episodes.
My own Podcast and Fiction
In 2013 I turned from fan to participant, and began hosting my own podcast, New Books in Asian American Studies for the New Books Network. Anyone familiar with podcasts has likely seen these podcast sites, which pair scholarly hosts with authors to inspire detailed conversations. Rather than have one “know it all” host speak to every guest and ask basic questions, the New Books Network matches guests with scholars who really know their work, and who have already “paid their dues” in the field. This experiment has yielded over 2,000 interviews, with over 300,000 downloads per month.
Like the others in the Network, my podcast has garnered a world wide audience, who all (I expect) have some background knowledge of Asian American studies. With no restrictions on time, I have been able to focus on details without ever having to turn the conversation into an “Asian American Studies 101” segment. As barriers to online broadcasting barriers have dropped, I can now use free programs like Audacity and free recording software to share stories. The “host,” in the traditional sense, is no longer needed. We are both guests brought on the show for our expertise — or better yet, we are fans and nerds, geeking out to what drives us. Like Carlin’s show, I shoot for a style of cozy expertise to shape each interview as a narrative, structuring questions to speak to an arc that may or may not emerge within the details. In my last podcast with Eric Tang, for example, Tang dove into the story of a Cambodian refugee that spoke to the structures and politics set in place to manage (and exploit) refugees years following their arrival.
These days, podcasts are becoming more integrated into online literary journals, with popular podcasts emerging from The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Space Squid (Drabblecast), and Pseudopod, along with short story podcasts like The Moth. But in this range, podcasts are still seen as a supplement to “real” literary art, and merely express “real” literary prose in audio form. Yet still, my writing style was in many ways shaped just as much by podcasts as other literary arts. Podcasts have a way of expressing “Martian perspectives,” as speakers get lost in the power of their own drivel. Often I would listen to a storyteller on a podcast for a couple days, and then write mimicking their meandering style and obscure subject. My story Seattle Freeze considers a fashion-forward hamster inside a plastic bubble ball. My story Strange Gifts was inspired by multiple podcasts on Cold War propaganda, which often roamed into pure speculation. My story in Untoward is about two girls listening to a podcast while trapped in an iron pipe. Perhaps the stories come from an overactive imagination, or perhaps it’s the unusual sources, with their tendency to ramble and become frivolous wastes of time, that have been my wellsprings.
