Lit on the radio
Geography of Hope author Chris Turner has recounted, on the Random House Canada blog, a humbling moment from his recent book tour. It was the morning after his official book launch, when he hauled his hungover self to the University of Toronto campus radio station for a live interview.
[…] no one really properly greets us on arrival, and I’m so bleary-eyed that you could walk me out a second-story window and I’d be picking gravel out of my chin before it occurred to me to ask where the hell we were going.
Anyway, so somehow I get ushered into this airless vault of a studio in the attic and seated in a folding chair off in a corner, and then I’m left alone in there until, presumably, the host sitting there begins our interview. Except he doesn’t even look up at me. He’s leaning in tight to the mike, an earnest undergrad in a hipster t-shirt, delivering a steady stream of words to the airwaves in a clipped monotone. For awhile I just sit there in a hungover haze, and then maybe five minutes in it occurs to me that he’s just reading a pile of news stories. Wire-service pieces about incidents of animal cruelty. One after another after another. In their entirety. Verbatim.
As it turned out, Turner had been ushered into the wrong studio. Luckily, someone noticed the screw-up in time and sent him to the right one. This didn’t stop Turner from claiming in his blog, however, that he’d have “killed the kid with his bare hands” if he’d been given the chance.
Dude, it’s campus radio … be thankful for the folding chair.
