Through prose-tinted glasses

People are looking (and listening) for something new, agrees Ira Glass, the nerd-sexy host of National Public Radio’s quirky-intellectual program This American Life.

Why radio? “I didn’t have any other prospects,” admits the lovably nerdy Glass. Photo ©2006 Nancy Updike

“Whether they’re looking for us is the real question,” he muses dryly.

For anyone who’s missed the buzz of recent months, after more than a decade of weekly radio broadcasts featuring irony-tinged stories from the back streets of contemporary culture, Glass and company signed a deal with Showtime to air a televised version of TAL. And so far it’s been a hit.

“The press about the TV show is just insane,” says Glass. “There’s so much interest … Our TV show—the audience is so much smaller than for our radio show. Anything on cable television is so much smaller than anything that’s on NPR.”

He adds: “I feel like it points to radio’s place in our culture.” That place? Often taken for granted. But perhaps Glass’ TV presence will, counter-intuitively, change radio’s Cinderella status—at least among non-radio listeners. And that’s exactly who he hopes to reach with his April 15 speaking engagement at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium.

The same taste at the same time

In a way, any conversation with Glass is a bit like being hit up by a Public Radio fund drive. “I feel like what we do is still such a minority business on the radio. Most radio is something else—it’s not Public Radio.

“Most radio,” he explains, “is music—because it’s cheap to make and it reaches a lot of people. Why go to the trouble of spending the millions and millions of dollars that you need to make the original programming on Public Radio? Public Radio reaches a crazy-huge audience, but what a lot of trouble!”

This is the place where your public station should cut in with a toll-free number where you can make a donation. In fact, Glass’ fund-drive episodes of TAL are especially poignant, and likely do more than most programs to get listeners to ante up—while also allowing them to feel like part of a fairly elite club.

“I don’t know if what we do is ever going to be a bigger force in radio culture, and I’m actually totally okay with that,” Glass allows. “I feel like we’re at a moment in the culture where there’s actually a lot of interesting work being done everywhere—on TV, on the Web and on the radio there are little pockets where people can do interesting work—and I’m not sure it matters if this stuff ever takes over the culture.”

He says that, but Glass has more than half his life invested in NPR. In fact, his whole career—since an internship at age 19, in 1978—has been there. He’s worked at every position from tape-cutter and desk assistant to newscast writer, editor and substitute host. Surprisingly, Glass admitted in an interview with The Transom Review, “I wasn’t competent at writing and structuring my own stories until I was 27. I’ve never met anyone who took longer, and I’ve met hundreds of people who work in radio.”

To Xpress, he’s quick to point out that even though the structuring part of the job took time, he came to radio with an innate understanding of the editing process, which kept him hanging on. “That, and I didn’t have any other prospects,” he quips.

Now, almost 30 years later, Glass sets the standard for telling personal stories unflinchingly and with enough hipster cachet to separate TAL from folklore circles. His droll delivery, the last-minute interjection of observation (for which TAL is sometimes accused of smugness), seem so natural, a listener can only assume Glass goes through life in nasally narration mode.

“I wish the answer to that was yes, because it’s such a beautiful image,” he laughs. That style—the intimate conveying of events just left of mundane—is (at least partly) responsible for jump-starting a nationwide love affair with personal essayists (and TAL alums) like David Sedaris, David Rakoff and Sarah Vowell. Not that Glass is taking credit.

“I feel like our taste isn’t so special,” he says. “Everyone had that taste at the same time.”

In fact, talking to Glass, it’s easy to get the impression that he’s more surprised when people don’t relate to the TAL aesthetic.

“The notion of ‘let’s just do stories, but they’ll be on the radio, but they won’t be corny old radio-drama stories, they’ll be contemporary stories [and] they’ll hold you in a way that a drama can hold you’—the notion that that’s groundbreaking is a weird phenomenon,” he says. “When radio became popular in the ‘20s and ‘30s, it was widely understood [that] this is the thing that radio is really great at.”

Ira Glass speaks at Thomas Wolfe Auditorium on Sunday, April 15. Tickets for the 7:30 p.m. show run $27.50-$54.50. Info at 259-5544. Tickets for a pre-show reception are $25, and can be purchased through local public-radio station WCQS at wcqs.org (210-4800).