I want to talk about continuous narrative.

Commuting, for me at least, means listening to radio. For as long as I've been aware, radio has been divided into 3- or 4-minute segments. That's the length of songs, of news casts, and of interview segments. An exception is sports broadcasts, which have even shorter narratives: in baseball, it's the at-bat; in football, the down.

That programming probably fits the needs of the mass of commuters, who probably spend 20-30 minutes behind the wheel. (The average for my line of work is about 19 minutes in Austin). For those of us looking at a minimum of 80 minutes each way, it doesn't fill the bill.

I want a narrative that develops over a minimum of 30 minutes. Something like "Harry Nile" on XM, or some of the documentaries on BBC. I thought I had found a reliable source of such narratives on C-SPAN, but that was because I first caught them in off-hours. When congress is in session and politicians are speaking live, both they and the network understand the value of the sound bite: listen some time when a witness at a concressional hearing tries to give an extended answer; the questioner will inevitably say he is running out of time and must move on to other matters.

As evidence of how bad things have got, consider that National Public Radio _brags_ about (and asks donations because of) news stories that last 8 minutes. (I donate to KUT anyway, and I encourage you to do so, too.)

A light in the wilderness, as far as I am concerned, is the Bob Edwards show on XM 133. Edwards is more interested in his attention span than in yours, and I have come to trust his judgement. This morning, for example, he spent an hour with Michael Chabon discussing a scifi-mystery novel set in a Jewish community transported to Sitka, Alaska (where in fact the Hassidim are currently represented by one family). It was a strange conversation, but I enjoyed following it for an hour. Bob Edwards does not structure interviews as question-answer soundbites, but as extended conversations. If the interviewee isn't blathering or repeating himself, Edward lets him talk.