Talk-Radio

I haven’t listened to talk-radio in 35 years but I remember its seductiveness, the sense that you alone, late at night in a darkened room, are plugged into something momentous, your whims and gripes beamed into the black void, what Tom Waits called “the dark warm narcotic American night.” Every man an autodidact, every man his oracle – UFO enthusiasts, John Birchers, flat-Earthers, apostles of Marcus Garvey and George Lincoln Rockwell. Nineteen-sixties talk-radio had a lot in common with blogging, though it usually had better manners.

Three works devoted to talk-radio come to mind. Stanley Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show, maybe the funniest book in the language, was published in 1971, and comes closest to my memories. Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly,” from the 1982 album of the same title, captures the taste of populist paranoia I remember:

“I'm Lester the Nightfly
Hello, Baton Rouge.
Won't you turn your radio down,
Respect the seven-second delay we use.
So you say there's a race
Of men in the trees.
You're for tough legislation.
Thanks for calling,
I wait all night for calls like these.”

The most recent is Irving Feldman’s poem “Interrupted Prayers,” included in The Life and Letters (1994). Of the three works I’ve cited, Feldman’s is the most profound and moving, a fragmented conversation between the talk-show host, Larry, and his caller, “Don in Cleveland.” It’s a long poem, running five and a half pages in Collected Poems: 1954-2004, and appears not to be available online, but here’s the opening:

“The sun goes, So long, so long, see you around.
And zone by zone by zone across America
the all-night coast-to-coast ghost café light up.
Millions of dots of darkness – the loners,
The losers, the half-alive – twitch awake
under the cold electronic coverlet,
and tune in their radios’ cracked insomnia.
A static craziness scratches and buzzes
Inside the glowing tombstones of talk
-- some crossed wires’ hodgepodge dialogue,
or Morse and remorse of garbled maydays
of prayers shot down by Heaven’s deaf ear.
Heaven itself is crashing tonight.
The signal breaks up, it fades. Silence.
Then static, then chatter. Then silence. And still
-- poor peeves and griefs, poor spirits – from all
the alien area codes we phone in
Our cries . . .”