Do you recall my blessing you, a couple of weeks ago, with about 1,300 words on podcasting and its relevance to the practice of struggling authorship?
Tom Bodett. I don’t think he looks like he sounds. What do you think? Image from Brattleboro Community TV, licensed under CC BY 3.0.
Maybe not enough was said.
In that post I mentioned that podcasters are the Arthur Godfreys of today. I could have gone on to call them latter-day Tom Bodetts, as well. But for once, I exercised restraint. (Please count that in my favor, come the Final Tabulation.)
Ben Patterson, Motel 6 ad for Roswell, New Mexico. Fair use.
You may or may not know Tom Bodett as the guy from Motel 6 who says “we’ll leave the light on for ya.” The motel chain’s ad agency hired him because somebody heard his voice on NPR and thought he sounded like a guy who would stay at Motel 6. You know, a regular joe.
First edition cover of The Body Snatchers, illustrated by John McDermott. Fair use.
But I digress. What I was going to say is that podcasting makes me think of pod people, as in, you know, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Actually, the locus classicus of the species was just The Body Snatchers, a 1955 book by Jack Finney (one of Your New Favorite Writer’s favorite writers, by the way). When they made it into a movie in 1956, they added “Invasion of.”
Kevin McCarthy prods a pod in the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Fair use.
Finney’s book was a sweet little story of spores or seeds or something that drift in from outer space, ripen into duplicate human beings inside large pods, and systematically replace the actual people they have emulated. Pretty soon the protagonist catches on, and then it’s a race to prevent all of Mill Valley, California, being replaced by a colony of soulless avatars. Once the premise is developed, Finney pretty much leaves off any pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo and just tells the thrills and spills of the human resistance movement fighting off the invaders. The book has been criticized for its want of Heinleinian (Asimovian? Clarkeian?) authenticity, but once Jack Finney starts spinning a yarn, it’s hard not to get tangled in its web . . . or pod, or whatever.
Which brought to mind the fact that podcasting is one of those arcane disciplines that rely on the development of modern, computer-based technology in order to have any basis at all. That’s only one of the things that makes it daunting to yours truly—a Twenty-first Century Man with the technical know-how of the Tooth Fairy.
I am firmly convinced, for example, that when my telephone dims its screen to 90 percent darkness without my commanding it to do so, it is exercising a purblind, autonomous, malicious will of its own.
A Rube Goldberg machine: “Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin (1931). Soup spoon (A) is raised to mouth, pulling string (B) and thereby jerking ladle (C), which throws cracker (D) past toucan (E). Toucan jumps after cracker and perch (F) tilts, upsetting seeds (G) into pail (H). Extra weight in pail pulls cord (I), which opens and ignites lighter (J), setting off skyrocket (K), which causes sickle (L) to cut string (M), allowing pendulum with attached napkin to swing back and forth, thereby wiping chin.” Public Domain.
And yet, Jack Finney stands as a shining example. A man with only a general liberal arts background, and some experience in the advertising business, he made a good living—as well as contributing to American mid-century culture—by writing stories that often fell under the science fiction rubric. He pulled it off by never letting pesky scientific details get in the way of a good story. His Time and Again stands as one of the great time-travel novels despite its resolute refusal to offer even a Rube Goldberg-style explanation of how time travel was supposed to have worked. He just massaged his protagonist’s psyche until he found himself in the 1890s.
Some chutzpah.
This is enough to give a techno-klutz renewed hope. If Jack Finney can do science fiction, surely Larry F. Sommers can wiggle cyberspace enough to snag a few guest shots on literary podcasts.
Stay tuned for further developments, but don’t stop the presses. Yet.
You’ve been sweating over something for weeks or months, and all of a sudden you see it from a new angle. One thought breaks in and lights up a bevy of questions, the answers to which bounce off one another in ways you never suspected. It can be profound when that happens.
It doesn’t happen to me much. But yesterday morning, it did.
I’d been thinking about podcasting. I don’t mean I had considered doing a podcast. In fact, I don’t even know what “doing” is, where podcasts are concerned. Rather, what I mean is, I’ve been pondering the whole subject of podcasting.
It’s a bugaboo for writers. We are told to become a guest on somebody’s podcast, because podcasts are the best avenue to increased book sales. You must pitch podcasters with . . . well, with whatever it is you do, or what you have to contribute to the conversation, or . . . something.
Did I mention, Dear Reader, I was born in the twentieth century? The year 1945, to be precise. Almost eighty years ago. So what do I know from podcasting?
Tens of millions of people make podcasts and listen to podcasts, often with great regularity and brand loyalty. According to Pew Research—which, as you know, researches every social trend worth researching—large portions of a podcast’s audience will buy something, read something, or take an action because they heard it on their favorite podcast.
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Gutenberg. Public Domain.
But I don’t understand why someone would listen to podcasts in the first place. I am mostly a printed word guy. To me, Gutenberg invented the latest reliable technology. I watch very little TV, listen to very little radio, and take in nearly zero podcasts.
Those things seem like giant time-wasters to me. You have to wait for someone to speak, or in the case of video, to act, before you can learn that which you could already have grasped by skimming a line or two of prose. And it’s inconvenient, sometimes even impossible, to go back and re-check something that was said a while back. Why would a person want to do this?
“Yes, but—” I hear you cry. “But you can ingest a podcast while doing something else—driving or jogging or washing dishes.”
Maybe you can, but I am no multi-tasker. I have to pay attention to every single thing. I guess they call that a one-track mind. It leaves me no way to pay attention to something else.
That’s not absolute, Gentle Reader. I can, for example, talk with someone while driving a car. I won’t run over any pedestrians, but I’m almost certain to miss my turn-off.
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So why do I need to pay attention to podcasting at all? Because podcasters are powerful influencers. The folks who subscribe and listen to podcasts become attached to the voices they hear repeatedly. They invest great authority in their pronouncements. That’s what makes podcasting a valuable vehicle for promoting a book.
Still, I—antedeluvian creature I am—bridle at the idea of pursuing podcast appearances. It is unseemly. It is very now. Therefore I hate it.
But I was mulling over the authority listeners invest in the podcaster, and suddenly—Fair Reader, you might recognize that this is where you came in—A LIGHT BULB WENT ON above my head, just like we used to see in the funny papers.
When I was a boy, in the 1950s, there was a man in whom listeners invested great authority. So much authority, in fact, that you could buy time from him at an expensive rate . . . but if you paid, oh, ten times that rate, the great man himself would deliver your message, in his own voice.
His name was Arthur Godfrey.
Arthur Godfrey at a CBS microphone in 1938. Public Domain.
He was a creation of radio, and by his own audacity, he became king of the medium. While recovering from a near-fatal car crash in 1931, Godfrey spent a lot of time listening to and analyzing commercial radio broadcasts. He noted, according to Wikipedia, “that the stiff, formal style then used by announcers could not connect with the average radio listener. The announcers spoke in stentorian tones, as if giving a formal speech to a crowd and not communicating on a personal level. Godfrey vowed that when he returned to the airwaves, he would affect a relaxed, informal style as if he were talking to just one person.”
That’s just what he did. Jim Ramsburg says: “In their 1963 book, It Sounds Impossible, former CBS executives Sam Slate and Joe Cook describe Godfrey’s return. ‘. . . Listeners heard for the first time the casual, unhurried speech . . . the ruminating, hesitant pace . . . the purring growl that has since opened the doors to millions of American homes.’ ”
Godfrey’s informality extended even to adlibbing and joking while delivering on-air commercial scripts that sponsors had paid good money for. Godfrey sometimes appeared to be mocking the very product he was selling. But sales zoomed, and canny sponsors realized that having your commercial butchered by “the Old Redhead” was better than having it read meticulously by an ordinary announcer.
He hit his stride on April 30, 1945, when CBS gave him a half-hour coast-to-coast slot at 9:15 a.m., Monday through Friday, under the title Arthur Godfrey Time. Eventually it expanded to ninety minutes.
The Old Redhead delivered long, unscripted monologues; interviewed celebrities; introduced and sometimes interrupted or joined in with musical selections by his own in-house orchestra and regular vocalists. It was all spontaneous and informal.
He got beyond the scripted sound of commercials by inserting adlibbed comments. I recall his reading a commercial for Bufferin that was filled with Madison Avenue catch-phrases. He stopped ten seconds in, paused, and said, “So forth and so on. To tell you the truth, folks, I don’t know what’s in this stuff, but I’ve used it myself and it works.”
He was the ultimate pitchman because it never seemed he was pitching—he was simply commenting, in a folksy, down-to-earth way, on the passing scene. According to Ramsburg, he realized that radio was a personal medium and he spoke directly to the individual listener.
People listened to Arthur Godfrey every day. They knew him, they trusted him, and they were loyal.
Aren’t these the same reasons podcasters are said to be so influential?
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So when the light bulb went off over my head, it said: “Podcasters are the Arthur Godfreys of today.” Even an old wreck like me can understand that.
Few podcasters enjoy as big an audience as Godfrey commanded. That’s just as well, because anyone whose book is not yet on the New York Times Best Sellers list is unlikely to get a foot in the door of those giant podcasts.
The media scene today is fragmented. Many podcasters have only a few followers, or a few hundred, or a few thousand. That’s where I ought to start.
And the first thing to do is to pick a few likely candidates and listen to their podcasts. When pitching somebody, it never hurts to know what they’re all about.
You can help me, Dear Reader. Do you subscribe, or listen regularly, to any podcasts that seem related to the theme of this blog—“Seeking new meanings in our common past”? If so, drop me a line at larryfsommers@gmail.com, or just add a comment to this post.
