About Me
- Xerxes
- New Orleans, Louisiana, United States
- Admire John McPhee, Bill Bryson, David Remnick, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr and James Martin (and most open and curious minds)
31.3.07
Descartes
It's the birthday of the man who wrote, "I think, therefore I am," René Descartes, (books by this author) born in Touraine, France (1596). Though he's often been called the father of modern philosophy, he considered himself more of a mathematician and a scientist than a philosopher. He conducted all kinds of experiments. He studied refraction and the properties of rainbows. He dissected animals and wrote about how they were constructed like machines. He invented analytic geometry, a precursor to calculus. And he worked for a long time on a theory of science that was similar to what became the scientific method.
Descartes only got into philosophy after he learned that Galileo had been persecuted by the church. He worried that some of his scientific ideas could be similarly controversial, so he decided to write a book to prove that skepticism about the laws of nature was a necessary step in understanding nature. And that book became his Discourse on Method (1637), in which he described his own experience of coming to doubt everything, even his own existence, until he realized that the one thing he could not doubt was the existence of his own thoughts. He decided that if he was able to think then he must exist, and he so he wrote the famous line, "I think, therefore I am."
René Descartes said, "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Descartes only got into philosophy after he learned that Galileo had been persecuted by the church. He worried that some of his scientific ideas could be similarly controversial, so he decided to write a book to prove that skepticism about the laws of nature was a necessary step in understanding nature. And that book became his Discourse on Method (1637), in which he described his own experience of coming to doubt everything, even his own existence, until he realized that the one thing he could not doubt was the existence of his own thoughts. He decided that if he was able to think then he must exist, and he so he wrote the famous line, "I think, therefore I am."
René Descartes said, "If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
30.3.07
ROOTS
Roots are for trees. That was once a distinctly leftwing argument: the idea was that the political right had a vested interest in people staying, geographically and psychologically, in their place. When, during the second world war, General de Gaulle approached the philosopher Simone Weil to write down her ideas about the future of France, she called the resulting book Enracinement – Rootedness (though the English translation, a little plonkingly, calls it The Need for Roots). Her ideas were seen as conservative, expressing a nostalgia for a world in which people did not move from where their feet were firmly planted in the soil. When T.S. Eliot argued against “rootless cosmopolitans” – in his lexicon, a code phrase for Jews – he was making a similar point. People should be where they are from.
Now, curiously, the politics of rootedness seem to have reversed. It is the left that argues for protection from the forces of modernity, for the importance of the local, while the right argues that mobility and transience are simply unavoidable conditions of modern economic reality. The slogans of globalisation are “get on your bike” and “the world is flat”. People who want to get on have to be willing to move, often and unhesitatingly, at the behest of their employer or to seek work.
Now, curiously, the politics of rootedness seem to have reversed. It is the left that argues for protection from the forces of modernity, for the importance of the local, while the right argues that mobility and transience are simply unavoidable conditions of modern economic reality. The slogans of globalisation are “get on your bike” and “the world is flat”. People who want to get on have to be willing to move, often and unhesitatingly, at the behest of their employer or to seek work.
CONSCIOUSNESS
From PROSPECT
One day I'll be dead. The thought swirled by on a summer's evening in Crete. There was cold beer at my elbow and my sandalled feet were up against the trunk of a pine. A book lay open in my hands but I wasn't reading. I was noticing colours: the bark running blue-grey to rust, the red geranium. I was noticing insects and animals: the tiny green bug on my forearm, the microscopic orange thing that dropped on to the book, no bigger than a full stop, the ginger cat stretching in the shade. The air was filled with the din of cicadas and Mediterranean scents. I sipped my beer and savoured the moment. The open book was Nicholas Humphrey's Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness. I'd stopped reading by the second page, derailed by Joe King's email. Joe is 20 years old and severely disabled. He is writing to tell Humphrey of his concern that, when he dies, "this crippled body might be all I have." Yes, Joe, I'm afraid so. "Do u believe consciousness can survive the death of the brain?" he writes. No, Joe, it can't. Why kid ourselves? These were my answers, not Humphrey's. I turned them over as the sun sank. I could imagine Joe's disappointment. Humphrey would give us his reply in due course, but, for now, he was focusing on the young man's question because it revealed something important about the nature of consciousness, which is that consciousness matters to us. It matters more than anything. Of course it does. Yet the fact of its mattering so much goes mostly unremarked by scientists and philosophers of mind.
One day I'll be dead. The thought swirled by on a summer's evening in Crete. There was cold beer at my elbow and my sandalled feet were up against the trunk of a pine. A book lay open in my hands but I wasn't reading. I was noticing colours: the bark running blue-grey to rust, the red geranium. I was noticing insects and animals: the tiny green bug on my forearm, the microscopic orange thing that dropped on to the book, no bigger than a full stop, the ginger cat stretching in the shade. The air was filled with the din of cicadas and Mediterranean scents. I sipped my beer and savoured the moment. The open book was Nicholas Humphrey's Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness. I'd stopped reading by the second page, derailed by Joe King's email. Joe is 20 years old and severely disabled. He is writing to tell Humphrey of his concern that, when he dies, "this crippled body might be all I have." Yes, Joe, I'm afraid so. "Do u believe consciousness can survive the death of the brain?" he writes. No, Joe, it can't. Why kid ourselves? These were my answers, not Humphrey's. I turned them over as the sun sank. I could imagine Joe's disappointment. Humphrey would give us his reply in due course, but, for now, he was focusing on the young man's question because it revealed something important about the nature of consciousness, which is that consciousness matters to us. It matters more than anything. Of course it does. Yet the fact of its mattering so much goes mostly unremarked by scientists and philosophers of mind.
GERMANS VIEW the US
Forty-eight percent of Germans think the United States is more dangerous than Iran, a new survey shows, with only 31 percent believing the opposite. Germans' fundamental hypocrisy about the US suggests that it's high time for a new bout of re-education.
A German man carries a banner with a picture of Bush as Hitler during a 2003 demonstration against the Iraq war in Leipzig. Bush-bashing is something of a national sport in Germany.The Germans have believed in many things in the course of their recent history. They've believed in colonies in Africa and in the Kaiser. They even believed in the Kaiser when he told them that there would be no more political parties, only soldiers on the front.
Not too long afterwards, they believed that Jews should be placed into ghettos and concentration camps because they were the enemies of the people. Then they believed in the autobahn and that the Third Reich would ultimately be victorious. A few years later, they believed in the Deutsche mark. They believed that the Berlin Wall would be there forever and that their pensions were safe. They believed in recycling as well as in cheap jet travel. They even believed in a German victory at the soccer World Cup.
Now they believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran. This was the by-no-means-surprising result of a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular -- 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise -- said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran
A German man carries a banner with a picture of Bush as Hitler during a 2003 demonstration against the Iraq war in Leipzig. Bush-bashing is something of a national sport in Germany.The Germans have believed in many things in the course of their recent history. They've believed in colonies in Africa and in the Kaiser. They even believed in the Kaiser when he told them that there would be no more political parties, only soldiers on the front.
Not too long afterwards, they believed that Jews should be placed into ghettos and concentration camps because they were the enemies of the people. Then they believed in the autobahn and that the Third Reich would ultimately be victorious. A few years later, they believed in the Deutsche mark. They believed that the Berlin Wall would be there forever and that their pensions were safe. They believed in recycling as well as in cheap jet travel. They even believed in a German victory at the soccer World Cup.
Now they believe that the United States is a greater threat to world peace than Iran. This was the by-no-means-surprising result of a Forsa opinion poll commissioned by Stern magazine. Young Germans in particular -- 57 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds, to be precise -- said they considered the United States more dangerous than the religious regime in Iran
29.3.07
White wine in the Morning
A charming interview with Gerard Depardieu.
Have a glass yourself and ....................read!
The Spectator.co.uk
Have a glass yourself and ....................read!
The Spectator.co.uk
The TIME 100 | The People Who Shape Our World
Here is an interesting way of determining whether one is au courant. The list is updated every year and note from year to year how few repeat.
Compare this to the list of 100 published by The Atlantic in January (you know.......the one that excluded John Kennedy).
The TIME 100 The People Who Shape Our World
Compare this to the list of 100 published by The Atlantic in January (you know.......the one that excluded John Kennedy).
The TIME 100 The People Who Shape Our World
Richard Rogers
Three decades after his Pompidou Center in Paris turned the architecture world upside down and brought him global fame, the British architect Richard Rogers has been named the 2007 winner of the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s highest honor.
In the citation accompanying its decision, to be announced today, the Pritzker jury saluted Mr. Rogers for his “unique interpretation of the Modern Movement’s fascination with the building as machine, an interest in architectural clarity and transparency, the integration of public and private spaces, and a commitment to flexible floor plans that respond to the ever-changing demands of users.”
In the citation accompanying its decision, to be announced today, the Pritzker jury saluted Mr. Rogers for his “unique interpretation of the Modern Movement’s fascination with the building as machine, an interest in architectural clarity and transparency, the integration of public and private spaces, and a commitment to flexible floor plans that respond to the ever-changing demands of users.”
28.3.07
ASSYRIAN READING
The stylized images of ancient Assyrian kings, with their braided beards and Art Deco muscles, riding out in chariots to hunt lions or men, are now familiar, but until the 19th century nothing was known of them. All evidence had been buried for more than two millenniums under the soil of what is today Iraq. How we came to uncover that world, and how that world reached out toward our own, is part of the story David Damrosch tells in “The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh.”
But the kingdom of ancient Assyria held other secrets, even older, and Damrosch is telling that story too. One of the last Assyrian kings, Ashurbanipal, had the literary skills and interests of a scribe. To warfare and lion hunting he added reading, building a great library in his capital city of Nineveh and filling it with thousands of inscribed clay tablets, including several copies of “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” a story already ancient in Ashurbanipal’s time. When Nineveh fell in 612 B.C., the library, loaded with the cultural heritage of ancient Mesopotamia, fell too, its contents lost until the middle of the 19th century, when British archaeologists dug up its remains and British scholars cracked the cuneiform code of the tablets. “Gilgamesh,” the oldest work of great literature we have, sprang back to life, surrounded by the shards of a prebiblical culture that challenged assumptions about the primacy of biblical authority, a concept already crumbling fast in Victorian England
But the kingdom of ancient Assyria held other secrets, even older, and Damrosch is telling that story too. One of the last Assyrian kings, Ashurbanipal, had the literary skills and interests of a scribe. To warfare and lion hunting he added reading, building a great library in his capital city of Nineveh and filling it with thousands of inscribed clay tablets, including several copies of “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” a story already ancient in Ashurbanipal’s time. When Nineveh fell in 612 B.C., the library, loaded with the cultural heritage of ancient Mesopotamia, fell too, its contents lost until the middle of the 19th century, when British archaeologists dug up its remains and British scholars cracked the cuneiform code of the tablets. “Gilgamesh,” the oldest work of great literature we have, sprang back to life, surrounded by the shards of a prebiblical culture that challenged assumptions about the primacy of biblical authority, a concept already crumbling fast in Victorian England
NO MORE LIFE
THERE was a sad inevitability to Time Inc.'s announcement that Life magazine will cease publication. The first American newsmagazine built around photojournalism has lingered in a kind of half-life for the last three years as a weekly color supplement distributed by subscribing to newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. That was the third incarnation the title had undergone since it stopped independent weekly publication in 1972 to be followed by occasional and, then, monthly issues. No other general interest publication has ridden the wave of popular taste in media for quite so long, but this time the tide was too strongly against it.The middle ground between pictures that move and still photographs that stand as art has been eroding for some time, and that space in between is where Life always lived. Paradoxically, the end comes at a time when the visual storytelling that once was the magazine's franchise innovation has become a ubiquitous cultural property. Digital technology, color reproduction and the unlimited space on newspaper websites have made this something of a golden age for newspaper photojournalism, when the level of ambition and achievement never has been higher.Life always lived in the moment, and its history is a chronicle of journalism's adaptation to popular taste. As such, it's also a rather remarkable list of firsts. We tend to think that the title began in 1936, when Henry Luce launched the country's first all-photo newsmagazine to accompany Time and Fortune. In fact, Luce acquired a by-then moribund magazine founded in 1883, sold off its subscriber list and gave it a makeover. At its peak, the old magazine was one of the nation's most celebrated illustrated weeklies, the place where Charles Gibson first drew his celebrated Gibson Girls and where Norman Rockwell got his start.
27.3.07
EINSTEIN
When youthful and frisky, Albert Einstein would refer to himself as “the valiant Swabian,” quoting the poem by Ludwig Uhland: “But the valiant Swabian is not afraid.” Albert—the name Abraham had been considered by his unreligious parents but was rejected as “too Jewish”—was born in Ulm, in March of 1879, not long after Swabia joined the new German Reich; he was the first child and only son of a mathematics-minded but financially inept father and a strong-willed, musically gifted woman of some inherited means. A daughter, Maria, was born to the couple two and a half years later; when shown his infant sister, Albert took a look and said, “Yes, but where are the wheels?” Though this showed an investigative turn of mind, the boy was slow to talk, and the family maid dubbed him der Depperte—“the dopey one.”
26.3.07
An occasion for redo economics
Mr. Summers may have left Harvard, but he has not lost his edge.
THREE MONTHS AGO, I was able to write in this space that, in economics, "the main thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself." This is no longer true. With clear evidence of a crisis in the subprime U.S. housing sector, risks of its spread to other credit markets, sharp increases in market volatility and signs of slowing economic growth, there is enough apprehension to go around.Although it would be premature to predict a U.S. recession, there are now strong grounds for suggesting that the U.S. economy will slow significantly in 2007. Whether, in retrospect, 2007 will prove to have been a "pause that refreshed" nearly a decade-long expansion (like the growth slowdowns in 1986 and 1995) or whether it will end that expansion is not yet clear.What is clear is that the global economy has been relying on the U.S. as an importer of last resort; that the U.S. economy has been relying on the consumer for its primary impetus, and that until now consumers have been enabled and encouraged to spend their incomes fully or more than fully by their ability to access the wealth in their homes.This growth syllogism has appeared fragile for some time, but American consumers have kept spending even after the housing market peaked. And foreigners, particularly those in the official sector in Asia and the Middle East, have continued financing the United States, on very attractive terms, as it imported nearly 70% more than it exported.
Los Angeles Times: An occasion for redo economics
THREE MONTHS AGO, I was able to write in this space that, in economics, "the main thing we have to fear is the lack of fear itself." This is no longer true. With clear evidence of a crisis in the subprime U.S. housing sector, risks of its spread to other credit markets, sharp increases in market volatility and signs of slowing economic growth, there is enough apprehension to go around.Although it would be premature to predict a U.S. recession, there are now strong grounds for suggesting that the U.S. economy will slow significantly in 2007. Whether, in retrospect, 2007 will prove to have been a "pause that refreshed" nearly a decade-long expansion (like the growth slowdowns in 1986 and 1995) or whether it will end that expansion is not yet clear.What is clear is that the global economy has been relying on the U.S. as an importer of last resort; that the U.S. economy has been relying on the consumer for its primary impetus, and that until now consumers have been enabled and encouraged to spend their incomes fully or more than fully by their ability to access the wealth in their homes.This growth syllogism has appeared fragile for some time, but American consumers have kept spending even after the housing market peaked. And foreigners, particularly those in the official sector in Asia and the Middle East, have continued financing the United States, on very attractive terms, as it imported nearly 70% more than it exported.
Los Angeles Times: An occasion for redo economics
A mid-life milestone for Europe
A mid-life milestone for Europe
In Berlin, after fifty years.
Europe emerges as a true federation. One cannot argue with peace and the fifty years of the Union and its forebears have clearly been less bloody than the first half of the twentieth century. This alone is a massive accomplishment.
From the IHT
In Berlin, after fifty years.
Europe emerges as a true federation. One cannot argue with peace and the fifty years of the Union and its forebears have clearly been less bloody than the first half of the twentieth century. This alone is a massive accomplishment.
From the IHT
25.3.07
OUR CONFUSED BRAINS
Games Without Frontiers
A while ago, the science writer Steven Johnson was looking at an old IQ test known as the "Raven Progressive Matrices." Developed in the 1930s, it shows you a set of geometric shapes and challenges you to figure out the next one in the series. It's supposed to determine your ability to do abstract reasoning, but as Johnson looked at the little cubic Raven figures, he was struck by something: They looked like Tetris.
A light bulb went off. If Tetris looked precisely like an IQ test, then maybe playing Tetris would help you do better at intelligence tests. Johnson spun this conceit into his brilliant book of last year, Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he argued that video games actually make gamers smarter. With their byzantine key commands, obtuse rule-sets and dynamic simulations of everything from water physics to social networks, Johnson argued, video games require so much cognitive activity that they turn us into Baby Einsteins -- not dull robots.
I loved the book, but it made me wonder: If games can inadvertently train your brain, why doesn't someone make a game that does so intentionally?
A while ago, the science writer Steven Johnson was looking at an old IQ test known as the "Raven Progressive Matrices." Developed in the 1930s, it shows you a set of geometric shapes and challenges you to figure out the next one in the series. It's supposed to determine your ability to do abstract reasoning, but as Johnson looked at the little cubic Raven figures, he was struck by something: They looked like Tetris.
A light bulb went off. If Tetris looked precisely like an IQ test, then maybe playing Tetris would help you do better at intelligence tests. Johnson spun this conceit into his brilliant book of last year, Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he argued that video games actually make gamers smarter. With their byzantine key commands, obtuse rule-sets and dynamic simulations of everything from water physics to social networks, Johnson argued, video games require so much cognitive activity that they turn us into Baby Einsteins -- not dull robots.
I loved the book, but it made me wonder: If games can inadvertently train your brain, why doesn't someone make a game that does so intentionally?
23.3.07
QUITE a DAY!
On this day in 1989, a mountain-sized asteroid passed within 500,000 miles of Earth. According to NASA, this was a very close call. It would have hit with the strength of 40,000 hydrogen bombs, created a crater the size of the District of Columbia, and destroyed everything within 100 miles in all directions.
It was on this day in 1775 that Patrick Henry gave the speech that made his name to the Second Virginia Convention, proposing that the colony arm itself against the king to fight for independence. At a time when most members of the Virginia House of Burgesses wanted to wait and see if the conflict with England could work itself out, Patrick Henry argued that the time for waiting was over, and at the end of his speech he said, "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" The resolution passed by a narrow margin.
It was on this day in 1806 that Lewis and Clark pulled up stakes, after having spent the winter on the Pacific coast, and began their journey back East to report on what they'd found during their expedition. They had traveled about 4,000 miles since they'd left St. Louis, Missouri, and they'd been on the road for almost two years.They knew that merchant ships occasionally sailed up the Pacific Coast, and they hoped that one of these ships might pick them up and take them back home by sea, so they wouldn't have to make the arduous overland journey again. But no ships arrived. So after a wet, miserable winter, they finally set out for home on this day in 1806. When they had left St. Louis in 1804, they'd been loaded down with blankets, tobacco, whisky, flour, salt pork, corn, writing desks, tents, and all kinds of tools. For the trip home, all they carried were the clothes on their backs, some food, a few of their tools, a lot of gunpowder, and their rifles. And by that time, they had spent 95 percent of their budget. It took them just six months to get back to St. Louis.
It was on this day in 1743, that George Frideric Handel's oratorio ''Messiah'' had its London premiere. The first performance of "The Messiah" was at a charity concert in Dublin. It got great reviews, but Handel wasn't satisfied with it, and spent almost another\nyear revising parts of the score. It finally had its London premiere, in the audience of the king, on this day in 1743, and it was a great success. During the famous Hallelujah Chorus, King George II was so moved by the music that he involuntarily stood up from his seat. The audience, out of respect for the king, also stood up. Ever since, it has been a tradition that the audience rises during the singing of the Hallelujah.
It was on this day in 1806 that Lewis and Clark pulled up stakes, after having spent the winter on the Pacific coast, and began their journey back East to report on what they'd found during their expedition. They had traveled about 4,000 miles since they'd left St. Louis, Missouri, and they'd been on the road for almost two years.
They knew that merchant ships occasionally sailed up the Pacific Coast, and they hoped that one of these ships might pick them up and take them back home by sea, so they wouldn't have to make the arduous overland journey again. But no ships arrived. So after a wet, miserable winter, they finally set out for home on this day in 1806. When they had left St. Louis in 1804, they'd been loaded down with blankets, tobacco, whisky, flour, salt pork, corn, writing desks, tents, and all kinds of tools. For the trip home, all they carried were the clothes on their backs, some food, a few of their tools, a lot of gunpowder, and their rifles. And by that time, they had spent 95 percent of their budget. It took them just six months to get back to St. Louis.
It was on this day in 1743, that George Frideric Handel's oratorio ''Messiah'' had its London premiere. The first performance of "The Messiah" was at a charity concert in Dublin. It got great reviews, but Handel wasn't satisfied with it, and spent almost another year revising parts of the score. It finally had its London premiere, in the audience of the king, on this day in 1743, and it was a great success.
During the famous Hallelujah Chorus, King George II was so moved by the music that he involuntarily stood up from his seat. The audience, out of respect for the king, also stood up. Ever since, it has been a tradition that the audience rises during the singing of the Hallelujah Chorus.
It was on this day in 1775 that Patrick Henry gave the speech that made his name to the Second Virginia Convention, proposing that the colony arm itself against the king to fight for independence. At a time when most members of the Virginia House of Burgesses wanted to wait and see if the conflict with England could work itself out, Patrick Henry argued that the time for waiting was over, and at the end of his speech he said, "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" The resolution passed by a narrow margin.
It was on this day in 1806 that Lewis and Clark pulled up stakes, after having spent the winter on the Pacific coast, and began their journey back East to report on what they'd found during their expedition. They had traveled about 4,000 miles since they'd left St. Louis, Missouri, and they'd been on the road for almost two years.They knew that merchant ships occasionally sailed up the Pacific Coast, and they hoped that one of these ships might pick them up and take them back home by sea, so they wouldn't have to make the arduous overland journey again. But no ships arrived. So after a wet, miserable winter, they finally set out for home on this day in 1806. When they had left St. Louis in 1804, they'd been loaded down with blankets, tobacco, whisky, flour, salt pork, corn, writing desks, tents, and all kinds of tools. For the trip home, all they carried were the clothes on their backs, some food, a few of their tools, a lot of gunpowder, and their rifles. And by that time, they had spent 95 percent of their budget. It took them just six months to get back to St. Louis.
It was on this day in 1743, that George Frideric Handel's oratorio ''Messiah'' had its London premiere. The first performance of "The Messiah" was at a charity concert in Dublin. It got great reviews, but Handel wasn't satisfied with it, and spent almost another\nyear revising parts of the score. It finally had its London premiere, in the audience of the king, on this day in 1743, and it was a great success. During the famous Hallelujah Chorus, King George II was so moved by the music that he involuntarily stood up from his seat. The audience, out of respect for the king, also stood up. Ever since, it has been a tradition that the audience rises during the singing of the Hallelujah.
It was on this day in 1806 that Lewis and Clark pulled up stakes, after having spent the winter on the Pacific coast, and began their journey back East to report on what they'd found during their expedition. They had traveled about 4,000 miles since they'd left St. Louis, Missouri, and they'd been on the road for almost two years.
They knew that merchant ships occasionally sailed up the Pacific Coast, and they hoped that one of these ships might pick them up and take them back home by sea, so they wouldn't have to make the arduous overland journey again. But no ships arrived. So after a wet, miserable winter, they finally set out for home on this day in 1806. When they had left St. Louis in 1804, they'd been loaded down with blankets, tobacco, whisky, flour, salt pork, corn, writing desks, tents, and all kinds of tools. For the trip home, all they carried were the clothes on their backs, some food, a few of their tools, a lot of gunpowder, and their rifles. And by that time, they had spent 95 percent of their budget. It took them just six months to get back to St. Louis.
It was on this day in 1743, that George Frideric Handel's oratorio ''Messiah'' had its London premiere. The first performance of "The Messiah" was at a charity concert in Dublin. It got great reviews, but Handel wasn't satisfied with it, and spent almost another year revising parts of the score. It finally had its London premiere, in the audience of the king, on this day in 1743, and it was a great success.
During the famous Hallelujah Chorus, King George II was so moved by the music that he involuntarily stood up from his seat. The audience, out of respect for the king, also stood up. Ever since, it has been a tradition that the audience rises during the singing of the Hallelujah Chorus.
The Biographer's Tale
The Lying Tongue
by Andrew Wilson
"Wherever I went I saw a question mark at the heart of the city."This evocative opening line, which begins Andrew Wilson's TheLying Tongue, provides a telling metaphor for an extraordinarywork of imaginative genius, meshing Dickens's gothic atmospherewith Hitchcock's suspenseful creepiness.The novel opens in Venice with a travelogue of shimmering historicaldescription dappled with poetic detail. The narrator, Adam Woods,a recently graduated and troubled student, tells us he has takenleave of England to start anew after an unseemly end to a relationshipwith his girlfriend. He has a job offer to tutor a 16-year-oldboy and aspirations to write a novel.
by Andrew Wilson
"Wherever I went I saw a question mark at the heart of the city."This evocative opening line, which begins Andrew Wilson's TheLying Tongue, provides a telling metaphor for an extraordinarywork of imaginative genius, meshing Dickens's gothic atmospherewith Hitchcock's suspenseful creepiness.The novel opens in Venice with a travelogue of shimmering historicaldescription dappled with poetic detail. The narrator, Adam Woods,a recently graduated and troubled student, tells us he has takenleave of England to start anew after an unseemly end to a relationshipwith his girlfriend. He has a job offer to tutor a 16-year-oldboy and aspirations to write a novel.
22.3.07
So, Don't Read it All
But let's remember that even one of the greatest readers of literature, Samuel Johnson, admitted that "Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is." In fact, Johnson seemed to have made quite a career of not reading. He once lamented to his friend Mrs. Thrale, "Alas, Madam! How few books are there of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page." And reacting to advice that once started, a book should be read all the way through, he opined, "A book may be good for nothing; or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?"
Is it always a good thing to read an entire book? When I was a graduate student, it dawned on me that I often had the most intelligent things to say about books I'd only half- or quarter-read. I was surprised by my observation — it didn't seem to make sense. But it just seemed to work out that professors preferred my insightful and trenchant comments on, say, the first part of Tristram Shandy than on the whole wandering thing.
In that way, a little knowledge can be a practical thing.
Is it always a good thing to read an entire book? When I was a graduate student, it dawned on me that I often had the most intelligent things to say about books I'd only half- or quarter-read. I was surprised by my observation — it didn't seem to make sense. But it just seemed to work out that professors preferred my insightful and trenchant comments on, say, the first part of Tristram Shandy than on the whole wandering thing.
In that way, a little knowledge can be a practical thing.
21.3.07
Hollywood Decameron
In her Huffington Post blog, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley describes her 12th fictional outing as a 'remake' of Boccaccio's Decameron. 'Not in 657 years has there been a novel like Ten Days in the Hills!' she quips, before pushing on with the sales pitch. 'As you may know, Boccaccio was not shy about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and I do love The Decameron!'
If it's been a while since you visited the 14th-century classics section of your local library, let me remind you that Boccaccio's allegorical work featured 10 folk who fled to rural Fiesole as the black death prowled the streets of Florence. In 10 days they tell 100 stories - many of which Boccaccio makes significantly more complicated than they appeared in their traditional forms.
advertisementSmiley has shifted the scene to Hollywood, 2003, the day after Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine won an Oscar. In retreat from news that America and her allies have just invaded Iraq, a screen siren, a New Age guru, an unsuccessful agent, a militantly vegetarian daughter, an old friend who supports the war, a laconic Jamaican former mother-in-law and her Hollywood anecdotalist pal, a girlfriend and her off-the-rails son converge at the sprawling hillside mansion of a has-been movie director called Max.
If it's been a while since you visited the 14th-century classics section of your local library, let me remind you that Boccaccio's allegorical work featured 10 folk who fled to rural Fiesole as the black death prowled the streets of Florence. In 10 days they tell 100 stories - many of which Boccaccio makes significantly more complicated than they appeared in their traditional forms.
advertisementSmiley has shifted the scene to Hollywood, 2003, the day after Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine won an Oscar. In retreat from news that America and her allies have just invaded Iraq, a screen siren, a New Age guru, an unsuccessful agent, a militantly vegetarian daughter, an old friend who supports the war, a laconic Jamaican former mother-in-law and her Hollywood anecdotalist pal, a girlfriend and her off-the-rails son converge at the sprawling hillside mansion of a has-been movie director called Max.
The Sun Never Sets on the Celestial Kingdom
A New Show at the British Museum
Fittingly, the most interesting section of the exhibition tackles Britain’s relationship with China. The Georgians were fascinated by all things Chinese. William Chambers’s pagoda at Kew and Brighton Pavilion, both seen here in etchings, testify to that. We see the fine English porcelain that its makers boasted was as good as the original article and ideal for replacing broken items from a China service. Ostentatious gold clocks made by James Cox have been lent by the Palace Museum, which has a much larger horde of Cox’s pieces than anywhere else, including Britain.
A watercolour of the grand arrival of the Qianlong Emperor at the audience that he granted to Macartney’s delegation was by William Alexander. He was the official draughtsman to the Macartney embassy but had to create this picture from his imagination and briefings by those who were there as he had been elsewhere, organising the gifts for the Emperor. Later he took a job that could be said to have played a role in ensuring that 200 years later this form of 21st-century cultural diplomacy was possible. He served as the first Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
Fittingly, the most interesting section of the exhibition tackles Britain’s relationship with China. The Georgians were fascinated by all things Chinese. William Chambers’s pagoda at Kew and Brighton Pavilion, both seen here in etchings, testify to that. We see the fine English porcelain that its makers boasted was as good as the original article and ideal for replacing broken items from a China service. Ostentatious gold clocks made by James Cox have been lent by the Palace Museum, which has a much larger horde of Cox’s pieces than anywhere else, including Britain.
A watercolour of the grand arrival of the Qianlong Emperor at the audience that he granted to Macartney’s delegation was by William Alexander. He was the official draughtsman to the Macartney embassy but had to create this picture from his imagination and briefings by those who were there as he had been elsewhere, organising the gifts for the Emperor. Later he took a job that could be said to have played a role in ensuring that 200 years later this form of 21st-century cultural diplomacy was possible. He served as the first Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum.
20.3.07
CRITICS
In one of his essays, Robert Lowell speaks of the 1930s, the heyday of the New Critics, as a time "when criticism looked like winning." When you read Clive James, it still does. Mr. James is one of those rare writers who convinces you that criticism is not necessarily a handmaiden in the palace of the arts — that it can be transformed, Cinderella-style, from drudge to princess, given the energy and style of a first-rate fairy godmother (or godfather). In a time when criticism is dominated by the theory-sick monographs of academics, and when the future seems to belong to amateur and professional blurbists, it is more than entertaining to read Mr. James's lucid, passionate, erudite essays. It is heartening, and seems to promise that the critical role once played by a Samuel Johnson or an Edmund Wilson is still possible in the 21st century.
It is especially fitting, then, that Mr. James first won renown in 1972 as the author of a long essay on Wilson, titled "The Metropolitan Critic." The piece, which ran in the Times Literary Supplement in the days when contributors were anonymous, caused a sensation, and left people gossiping about the identity of the author. Soon Mr. James, who was born in Australia in 1939, had himself become a metropolitan critic, in the best sense. He positions himself at the intersection of cultures and languages, and makes possible the traffic between them that constitutes civilization.
He is universally curious, with an unflagging interest in fiction, poetry, history, politics, film, television, dance, painting, and just about any other expression of human creativity. And he is as unprovincial as any critic could be. An Australian living in Britain who frequently writes for American publications, he also reads French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, and keeps abreast of developments in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
All of those qualities and attainments go into the making of Mr. James's latest book, which might turn out to be his most lasting testament. The book is so rich that any title might have seemed inadequate to the contents. Still, "Cultural Amnesia" (Norton, 768 pages, $35) feels like the wrong way to introduce it to readers. From the title alone, one might expect the kind of screed against the dumbing-down of the younger generation than retired professors are fond of writing; or, at best, a Harold Bloom-type canon, designed as a vaccine against the loss of cultural memory. Such books usually leave an unpleasant taste: The ignorant don't read them, and the cultured who do read them — or at least buy them — do so primarily to congratulate themselves.
"Cultural Amnesia" is not that kind of book — it has too much charm and genuine, unscolding enthusiasm. Rather, it could be described as three books in one. First, and most obviously, it is a collection of essays, organized alphabetically by subject, about more than 100 writers, artists, and other cultural figures, mostly but not entirely from the 20th century.
The table of contents alone makes clear that Mr. James is no canonizing purist. In the "M" section, for instance, we find not just Thomas Mann, and not just his brother Heinrich, and his son, the historian Golo, but the movie director Michael, of "Miami Vice" fame. "G" brings Edward Gibbon, Terry Gilliam, and Josef Goebbels; "C," Tony Curtis and Ernst Robert Curtius.
Once you start reading the essays themselves, however, even this eccentric organizational scheme starts to break down. For the subject of each essay is not necessarily the name in the title. Mr. James always starts off with a quotation from that figure, but where he goes from there is brilliantly unpredictable. Sometimes he does stick to the subject, offering a brief assessment of, say, the Australian writer Alan Moorehead: "He was one of those colonials who, though being hard to place, can place themselves anywhere as long as they are given a few minutes to dust their shoes and straighten their ties."
Especially when Mr. James's subjects are, like Moorehead, not well known in America, such letters of recommendation are indispensable. I closed "Cultural Amnesia" with a new list of books I want to read: Moorehead's "African Trilogy," Golo Mann's history of modern Germany, and the journals of Witold Gombrowicz, to name just three. The fact that many of Mr. James's favorites have not been translated into English feels, for a moment anyway, like a minor obstacle. "Cultural Amnesia" is full of offhand remarks about how Mr. James taught himself Italian by reading Croce, or French by reading Saint-Beuve, with just a dictionary by his side.
That leads us to the second book inside "Cultural Amnesia": a piecemeal memoir of Mr. James's life as a reader and writer. The trails opened up by his favorite quotations frequently lead into his past. The essay on Tony Curtis, for instance, begins with the actor's infamous line, "Yonder lies the castle of my father," which in his Bronx accent sounded like "Yonder lies duh castle of my fuddah." It is a locus classicus of Hollywood silliness, but as Mr. James recalls, "Back there at the Rockdale Odeon in Sydney, I heard him say it, and I didn't laugh." The memory leads to an evocation of postwar Australia, hungry for American glamour, where Mr. Curtis's Jewishness read as quintessentially American: "Nothing mattered except the enchanting way that the tormented phonemes seemed to give an extra zing to the American demotic."
As Mr. James shows in this essay, a real intellectual is secure enough not to be worried about the height of his brow. Mr. James's principled eclecticism comes out in an essay on G.K. Chesterton, which, true to form, is really an essay about high and pop culture, provoked by Chesterton's definition of the critic's role: "To set a measure to praise and blame, and to support the classics against the fashions."
This sounds noble enough, but as Mr. James argues, such a defensive attitude toward the fashionable is dangerous. Puccini's contemporaries, he reminds us, scorned him as merely popular — a good example of how yesterday's fashions sometimes become tomorrow's classics. "Either in life or in the mind," Mr. James writes in what could serve as his motto, "there can be no such rigid division of the classical and the fashionable. A work of art has to be judged by its interior vitality, not by its agreed prestige."
That is why Mr. James feels no incongruity in moving directly from Tony Curtis to the German literary scholar E.R. Curtius: Both are part of his own inner life. The essay on Curtius, however, raises a more complicated set of issues, and leads us to the third and most important component of "Cultural Amnesia." Curtius, a great scholar of medieval humanism, lived in Germany through the Nazi period, and had to try to reconcile his intellectual calling with his responsibilities as a citizen. To Mr. James, Curtius's determination to stay quiet about contemporary politics points up one of the intellectual's most dangerous temptations — the forlorn hope "that there could be a cultural unity in conditions of political barbarism."
The problem of culture's responsibility in an age of barbarism, and the various ways it was met by writers and others in the 20th century, is the subject of the third book hidden inside "Cultural Amnesia." Many of the figures Mr. James includes were chosen as examples, for good and ill, of the way intellectuals responded to totalitarianism. Thus he writes about sainted figures like Anna Akhmatova — "a vamp by nature," forced by history to become a heroine — and Czeslaw Milosz. But he is perhaps even more interested in the century's villains — like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who edited the Nouvelle Revue Française during the German Occupation, and Alexandra Kollontai, whose feminist convictions led her to support a Bolshevik regime that starved and killed millions of women.
In these cases and many others, Mr. James is especially concerned with the temptations that ideology and power place before the intellectual. "Cultural Amnesia" can be read as an extended meditation on those temptations, driven by a genuine concern — which every thoughtful person must share — about how he would have behaved under similar circumstances. For every Marc Bloch, Mr. James reminds us, there was a Robert Brasillach, for every Nadezhda Mandelstam a Kollontai. The 20th century permanently cured us of the illusion that being well-read has any connection with being good.
That is why Mr. James, in his elegy and autopsy of the 20th century, always remembers that there is something more important than talent and erudition: that complex of beliefs and values that he calls humanism. Mr. James's definition of humanism is as good as any ever proposed: It is "a propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it." In this book teeming with variety, he offers proof that such a humanism is still our best chance for a rich, happy, and decent life.
It is especially fitting, then, that Mr. James first won renown in 1972 as the author of a long essay on Wilson, titled "The Metropolitan Critic." The piece, which ran in the Times Literary Supplement in the days when contributors were anonymous, caused a sensation, and left people gossiping about the identity of the author. Soon Mr. James, who was born in Australia in 1939, had himself become a metropolitan critic, in the best sense. He positions himself at the intersection of cultures and languages, and makes possible the traffic between them that constitutes civilization.
He is universally curious, with an unflagging interest in fiction, poetry, history, politics, film, television, dance, painting, and just about any other expression of human creativity. And he is as unprovincial as any critic could be. An Australian living in Britain who frequently writes for American publications, he also reads French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, and keeps abreast of developments in Asia, Europe, and Latin America.
All of those qualities and attainments go into the making of Mr. James's latest book, which might turn out to be his most lasting testament. The book is so rich that any title might have seemed inadequate to the contents. Still, "Cultural Amnesia" (Norton, 768 pages, $35) feels like the wrong way to introduce it to readers. From the title alone, one might expect the kind of screed against the dumbing-down of the younger generation than retired professors are fond of writing; or, at best, a Harold Bloom-type canon, designed as a vaccine against the loss of cultural memory. Such books usually leave an unpleasant taste: The ignorant don't read them, and the cultured who do read them — or at least buy them — do so primarily to congratulate themselves.
"Cultural Amnesia" is not that kind of book — it has too much charm and genuine, unscolding enthusiasm. Rather, it could be described as three books in one. First, and most obviously, it is a collection of essays, organized alphabetically by subject, about more than 100 writers, artists, and other cultural figures, mostly but not entirely from the 20th century.
The table of contents alone makes clear that Mr. James is no canonizing purist. In the "M" section, for instance, we find not just Thomas Mann, and not just his brother Heinrich, and his son, the historian Golo, but the movie director Michael, of "Miami Vice" fame. "G" brings Edward Gibbon, Terry Gilliam, and Josef Goebbels; "C," Tony Curtis and Ernst Robert Curtius.
Once you start reading the essays themselves, however, even this eccentric organizational scheme starts to break down. For the subject of each essay is not necessarily the name in the title. Mr. James always starts off with a quotation from that figure, but where he goes from there is brilliantly unpredictable. Sometimes he does stick to the subject, offering a brief assessment of, say, the Australian writer Alan Moorehead: "He was one of those colonials who, though being hard to place, can place themselves anywhere as long as they are given a few minutes to dust their shoes and straighten their ties."
Especially when Mr. James's subjects are, like Moorehead, not well known in America, such letters of recommendation are indispensable. I closed "Cultural Amnesia" with a new list of books I want to read: Moorehead's "African Trilogy," Golo Mann's history of modern Germany, and the journals of Witold Gombrowicz, to name just three. The fact that many of Mr. James's favorites have not been translated into English feels, for a moment anyway, like a minor obstacle. "Cultural Amnesia" is full of offhand remarks about how Mr. James taught himself Italian by reading Croce, or French by reading Saint-Beuve, with just a dictionary by his side.
That leads us to the second book inside "Cultural Amnesia": a piecemeal memoir of Mr. James's life as a reader and writer. The trails opened up by his favorite quotations frequently lead into his past. The essay on Tony Curtis, for instance, begins with the actor's infamous line, "Yonder lies the castle of my father," which in his Bronx accent sounded like "Yonder lies duh castle of my fuddah." It is a locus classicus of Hollywood silliness, but as Mr. James recalls, "Back there at the Rockdale Odeon in Sydney, I heard him say it, and I didn't laugh." The memory leads to an evocation of postwar Australia, hungry for American glamour, where Mr. Curtis's Jewishness read as quintessentially American: "Nothing mattered except the enchanting way that the tormented phonemes seemed to give an extra zing to the American demotic."
As Mr. James shows in this essay, a real intellectual is secure enough not to be worried about the height of his brow. Mr. James's principled eclecticism comes out in an essay on G.K. Chesterton, which, true to form, is really an essay about high and pop culture, provoked by Chesterton's definition of the critic's role: "To set a measure to praise and blame, and to support the classics against the fashions."
This sounds noble enough, but as Mr. James argues, such a defensive attitude toward the fashionable is dangerous. Puccini's contemporaries, he reminds us, scorned him as merely popular — a good example of how yesterday's fashions sometimes become tomorrow's classics. "Either in life or in the mind," Mr. James writes in what could serve as his motto, "there can be no such rigid division of the classical and the fashionable. A work of art has to be judged by its interior vitality, not by its agreed prestige."
That is why Mr. James feels no incongruity in moving directly from Tony Curtis to the German literary scholar E.R. Curtius: Both are part of his own inner life. The essay on Curtius, however, raises a more complicated set of issues, and leads us to the third and most important component of "Cultural Amnesia." Curtius, a great scholar of medieval humanism, lived in Germany through the Nazi period, and had to try to reconcile his intellectual calling with his responsibilities as a citizen. To Mr. James, Curtius's determination to stay quiet about contemporary politics points up one of the intellectual's most dangerous temptations — the forlorn hope "that there could be a cultural unity in conditions of political barbarism."
The problem of culture's responsibility in an age of barbarism, and the various ways it was met by writers and others in the 20th century, is the subject of the third book hidden inside "Cultural Amnesia." Many of the figures Mr. James includes were chosen as examples, for good and ill, of the way intellectuals responded to totalitarianism. Thus he writes about sainted figures like Anna Akhmatova — "a vamp by nature," forced by history to become a heroine — and Czeslaw Milosz. But he is perhaps even more interested in the century's villains — like Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, who edited the Nouvelle Revue Française during the German Occupation, and Alexandra Kollontai, whose feminist convictions led her to support a Bolshevik regime that starved and killed millions of women.
In these cases and many others, Mr. James is especially concerned with the temptations that ideology and power place before the intellectual. "Cultural Amnesia" can be read as an extended meditation on those temptations, driven by a genuine concern — which every thoughtful person must share — about how he would have behaved under similar circumstances. For every Marc Bloch, Mr. James reminds us, there was a Robert Brasillach, for every Nadezhda Mandelstam a Kollontai. The 20th century permanently cured us of the illusion that being well-read has any connection with being good.
That is why Mr. James, in his elegy and autopsy of the 20th century, always remembers that there is something more important than talent and erudition: that complex of beliefs and values that he calls humanism. Mr. James's definition of humanism is as good as any ever proposed: It is "a propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it." In this book teeming with variety, he offers proof that such a humanism is still our best chance for a rich, happy, and decent life.
VERY SAD NEWS ABOUT AN OLD AND GOOD FRIEND AND TRULY A GENTLEMAN
The Last Gentleman
In the late afternoon in the late forties, young George William Swift Trow Jr. would stand in front of the window of his parents’ living room in Cos Cob, Connecticut, watching and waiting. He did not watch television, of course, he watched the street, until he saw the form of his father, crowned by a fedora. They would wave at each other, and then his father, a city editor of the New York Post, would come in, put down his stack of newspapers, hug his wife, and put his fedora on his son’s head. Everyone knew who was an adult and who was a child in this kingdom; everyone knew the rituals. Another: From the time Trow was 7 years old, his father made sure that he read (at least) the Herald Tribune and “knew how to follow the story over from page 1 to page 32, folding the newspaper while existing in a small confined space,” as in the subway that Trow would one day take to his own job in New York City.
And in fact Trow did wear a fedora for a while—to the great amusement of his colleagues—when he was a young writer at William Shawn’s New Yorker. “This is the sixties, so to wear a fedora is some kind of a big statement,” says Jonathan Schell, who, like Trow, graduated from Harvard in 1965 and was swiftly hired by Shawn. “Since Kennedy didn’t wear one, it was like a high wind blew through the country and took off all the hats. For George, the hat had something to do with being an adult, but some kind of mockery of being an adult. The fedora was like a flag of our fathers: No one else wore a fedora except William Shawn.”
There was much of Trow in that hat: his Shawn worship, his interest in considered and dapper self-presentation (something he shared with his friend Diana Vreeland), the fact that his father and his father’s world and, most important, the loss of his father’s world were never far from Trow’s mind. “I know he was sort of engaged in a conversation with his dad in his thoughts, and that he was very, very influenced by his dad’s view of the world—either to argue for it or against it,” says Ian Frazier, Trow’s New Yorker colleague and close friend for many years.
Nothing was ever just what it was to Trow. “He was always thinking behind his own back,” Alison Rose wrote in her memoir, Better Than Sane (the title is taken from a comment Trow made to Rose when they were New Yorker colleagues in the eighties and formed a little club he called “Insane Anonymous”). Trow made a life out of deconstructing “Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts,” as he put it, searching for meaning in Eisenhower’s Rolodex, the layout of Life magazine, his own hat. “Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned—not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me,” Trow wrote in his famous essay “Within the Context of No Context,”first published in its entirety in The New Yorker in 1980 and later republished as a book. “It turns out that while I am at home in many strange places, I am not free even to visit the territory I was expected to inhabit effortlessly. To wear a fedora, I must first torture it out of shape.”
“Within the Context of No Context” is a tale of the fall. It divided the world into a time when the world was whole, made sense, and after, when life was still possible but the culture had been ruined. Many factors were to blame, but perhaps the most poisonous force was television—certainly the most representative of all that had brought the kingdom of history and learning and liberal arts and newspapers and fedoras to its knees. The book made sense of people’s sense of loss, especially that of well-educated young people who by other measures might be said to have lost nothing. Stylistically, it was remarkable, a hypnotic procession of aphorisms that was probably the most extreme work of nonfiction The New Yorker hasever published; some readers questioned the sanity of a man who could produce such a shriek.
Trow’s colleagues took note of his increasing eccentricity, but The New Yorker in that period forgave, even rewarded, a temperament like Trow’s. It was a safe place—for Trow, possibly the last one. Shawn was fired in 1987. With Tina Brown’s arrival in 1992, the barbarians had sacked the castle.
Trow spent the last years of his life living the radical rootlessness he’d prophesied in “Within the Context of No Context”: “at home in many strange places.” He sold the house he had designed and built in Germantown, New York, and cut off almost everyone he knew. He drove his pickup truck to Alaska, Texas, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, where some friends of his came to get him after neighbors complained that he’d taken to going outside without any clothes on. They found him very thin, living on Scotch and sardines, and checked him into McClean Hospital, the famous psychiatric institution outside Boston. After Trow got out, he moved to Naples, Italy, popping up once in a while as a voice on the answering machine of an old friend, never leaving a number. Twice, he was visited by DeCourcy McIntosh, his best friend from Exeter, and told him that he was never coming back.
Trow’s body was discovered by the Italian police in his apartment in late November last year, days after his death.
In 1999, Trow wrote (again) about what he saw as the protective function culture had once served in people’s lives. “Well, we don’t have that,” said Trow. “People fall off the high wire invisibly. There is no net; they crash.”
“More than his words, it is his face I remember from Exeter,” Trow’s classmate John Irving wrote in a review of “Context” when it was republished in 1997. “I used to feel that there was something arrogant or smug in George’s smile.” In his yearbook photo, Trow looks “more than a little superior to the rest of us,” and, again, in the group photo of Exeter’s literary magazine, of which Trow was the president, Irving detects in Trow “a weary impatience.” But after contemplating the intensity of insight in “Context” many years later, Irving comes to a different conclusion: “What I mistook for smirking was instead something prescient in his smile; it was as if the unfathomable powers of precognition were already alive within him.”
“George and I used to roar over the fact that we were both called arrogant and supercilious at Exeter,” says DeCourcy McIntosh in his office on the top floor of the Knoedler gallery on East 70th Street. “We used to argue over who was more arrogant and supercilious.” (Sitting on McIntosh’s desk above two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is his brown fedora.) Upon graduation from Exeter, Trow and McIntosh and 59 of their classmates—about half the class—made it to the next destination on the road-more-traveled to success: Harvard. “We arrived en bloc in Harvard Yard,” says McIntosh. “I think the other students were aghast.”
“George was from the very preppy end of Exeter, in terms of how he conducted himself, how he dressed, how he spoke, and how he saw himself, how he was trying to pass,” says Jacob Brackman, who, after his own stint at The New Yorker, later became Trow’s friend and neighbor in the Hudson Valley, where they ran a theater together for a while with Tim Mayer. Mayer, who was in the class below them, was very involved with the theater and became a playwright after Harvard; he wrote the book for the Broadway production of Gershwin’s My One and Only, starring Twiggy and Tommy Tune. Mayer and Trow became close when they wrote the 1964 Hasty Pudding show together. But Trow’s real home at Harvard was the Lampoon, the magazine he wrote for throughout his Harvard years, and edited as a senior.
Though Trow fetishized the aristocracy and was fluent in their mores and markers, he was not actually quite one of them. He was half-Irish, and not from old or big money. “But he had paid a lot of attention to New York aristocracy, of which his parents were a poor relation,” says Hendrik Hertzberg, who lived in Pennypacker Hall with Trow freshman year. “He was pickled in it.”
Trow wasn’t attracted to the revolutionary spirit of his era the way his friends were. “George was hoping this whole episode in our cultural history would pass quickly,” Brackman says. Trow didn’t get involved with the War Resisters League as Hertzberg did, he didn’t campaign for Bobby Kennedy, or go down to Mississippi, or march on Washington. Trow was, in Brackman’s memory, striving to be part of the “10 percent of people at Harvard who wear tuxedos to their own little events in their own little buildings and you can see them out on their balconies with their tuxedos and their often very beautiful girls who are also similarly there from the Vanderbilts and the Astors.”
Harvard is funny. Only people who went to Harvard say things like, “Oh, he was famous at Harvard,” or “We were both famous undergrads,” just because they happened to write for their school newspaper. But then those articles in the Lampoon and the Crimson did get many members of Trow’s circle hired by Mr. Shawn (as writers, not interns) almost as soon as they graduated, and many of them actually did become famous in New York. Besides Shawn’s son Wally and Brackman (who, after writing for The New Yorker, wrote the screenplay for The King of Marvin Gardens and the lyrics for Carly Simon’s hits “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” and “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”), Trow was at Harvard with Alger Hiss’s son, Tony, who also wrote for The New Yorker upon graduation and lived on Waverly Place for a time with the New York City mayor’s son Bobby Wagner (an Exeter classmate of Trow’s) and Hendrik Hertzberg, whom Shawn hired in 1969. (For many years, Hertzberg was mad at Brackman for stealing his college girlfriend Faye Levine, the author of Splendor and Misery: A Novel of Harvard.) Dr. Andrew Weil was a classmate and wrote for the Crimson (where he helped to expose then-professor Timothy Leary’s experiments in psychedelia), as did Jonathan Schell, who joined The New Yorker in 1967, and was often discussed as a possible Shawn successor.
And then, a few classes behind Trow, was one of his best friends and fellow geniuses, Doug Kenney. Kenney (along with Henry Beard, class of ’67) became enormously successful spinning off the Harvard Lampoon to create the magazine National Lampoon, to which Trow was a frequent contributor. Kenney ultimately moved to Hollywood, where he wrote Caddyshack and Animal House, which brought in more money than any comedy had before it and helped fuel both his cocaine habit and his friendship with John Belushi. “They were a triumvirate; they were the three Harvard guys,” says Kathryn Walker of Kenney and Trow and Tim Mayer. Walker, an actress, was Kenney’s girlfriend, and later married James Taylor. (Trow wrote a “Talk of the Town” piece called “Kathryn and James” when they were courting: “James Taylor appeared at Radio City without an opening act. This, we feel, is the opening act: Kathryn Walker in front of a gold mirror.”) “George was the one who called Doug ‘the Marilyn Monroe of humor,’ because he was fetching,” Walker says. “George had great taste for what he called ‘natural aristocrats.’ I mean, he was obsessed with genealogies and all that sort of thing, but also taste and style.”
Though Kenney was Irish and used to say that at the Lampoon, the Catholics were “taking comedy back from the Jews,” Tim Mayer once told a reporter that when he first met Kenney at Harvard “I thought he was the most perfect Wasp I had ever encountered. He was flawless.” Like Trow, Kenney was fascinated by his fantasy of a clubby old world of crisp haircuts and close shaves that was rapidly succumbing to a culturewide toga party. They were both a little in love with the idea of a society being sunk, the romance of what falls away. And neither was ever entirely sure what he wanted to do more: go back in time or explode what little authority remained.
Trow was not the only member of the triumvirate to die early or mysteriously. In 1980, at 33, Kenney was found dead at the bottom of Hanapepe cliff in Hawaii after a vacation with Walker and Chevy Chase. (Kenney left a note in his hotel room that read, “These are the happiest days I’ve ever ignored.”) Mayer, who had first battled lung cancer at Harvard, died from it after years of hard drinking, smoking, and coke-snorting in 1988. After Mayer died, Trow essentially adopted his live-in girlfriend; they were roommates for about a year. Brackman describes her as a “lower-class hash slinger … It was strange enough that Tim was with her, but when George took up with her?”
But then Trow had always had a soft spot for the troubled and the criminal—the flip side of his attraction to the top of the heap was his interest in the bottom of the barrel. Though many of his closest friends never met a lover or boyfriend of Trow’s, the one several recall was a man named Gerald who was in and out of Rikers Island. “He delighted in trying to shock me with stories about this outlaw boyfriend, this almost thug of a black guy,” says Ken Kleinpeter, who met Trow upstate shortly after Mayer died, when Kleinpeter had just left a career as a musician in Manhattan to become a farmer.
“George didn’t like guys who were like him; he liked rough trade,” says Brackman. “He had a completely other life, which was his homosexual life, which was the Anvil and Rikers Island characters that he never brought around. When we were at Harvard, nobody was out of the closet. George, even twenty years out of Harvard, still wasn’t talking about it.”
T row was in the Coast Guard after Harvard, but in many ways his adult life began when he was hired at The New Yorker. Trow started out writing “casuals” and “Talk of the Town” pieces, and in doing so he met—and charmed—some of the most interesting people of his era. Once he was at a party at Katharine Graham’s house and she said, “Go ask Jackie to dance. No one ever does.” Trow danced with Jacqueline Kennedy, and they remained friends until her death.
“It was such fun, I can’t tell you,” says Jamaica Kincaid of her early days in New York City, when Trow was her mentor and social guide. Trow would take her to the parties and events he covered in “Talk of the Town,” and he found Kincaid so amusing he decided that she too should write for The New Yorker. “George took me to lunch with Mr. Shawn at the Algonquin. I was always hungry, I had no job, and I didn’t know when I would eat again, so I ordered the most wonderful, expensive thing on the menu. Mr. Shawn ordered a slice of toasted pound cake and I thought, Oh, gosh, I’ve spent all his money; I’ve reduced him to toasted pound cake,” she says. “I went to the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn and I made some notes and gave them to George, and I thought he would rewrite them and make them into something proper. George gave them to Mr. Shawn and he printed it just as it was written.”
Trow took similar care of their colleague Ian Frazier, guiding the Midwesterner through the details and difficulties of Manhattan. When Frazier was looking for an apartment, it was Trow who handled the arrangements. “I wanted to get a loft; that was my vision of how I wanted to live here. I found this place and I told George about it, and he went down and talked to my landlord, who was this very recent immigrant, a Romanian Jew who’d escaped the Holocaust. George had a way … like if you’ve ever seen Angier Biddle Duke, who used to be the State Department director of protocol and was this totally unflappable, old-school white guy. George could take on that persona, become that guy. And people do what that guy says. ‘This is my young associate, and we’re going to be needing some space to do some projects; please tell me what you need in terms of a security deposit.’ ” The Romanian was dazzled. Frazier got a very good deal.
Trow lived on Grand Street for many years, and later in Hell’s Kitchen. As reclusive as he was in later years, in those days he was a blue-eyed social butterfly, dressing in a way that added to the powerful effect of his intellect. “George had really fabulous clothes that you couldn’t even believe because they were just so perfect,” says Frazier. “I remember he had a coat, some fabulous coat from somewhere, it was like a gray-and-black tweed herringbone, and I thought it was so cool that I went and got one. I called George from Brooks Brothers and said, ‘I just bought a herringbone coat.’ He said, ‘Oh, great!’ Then he paused. ‘Is it big herringbone?’ I said yes. George said, ‘Definitely not.’ ”
Trow delighted in the way Vreeland whitewashed the bottom of her shoes; he showed Frazier the silky insides of his jacket pockets. He was “aesthetic to the tips of his toes,” as Jonathan Schell puts it (although, Trow later wrote, “I was always very careful in my relationship with Diana Vreeland to distance myself from these men,” who were her walkers).
“He loved courts—like a king’s court,” says Schell. “The New Yorker had that aspect to it. I remember once being with him on Martha’s Vineyard at Kay Graham’s house, and he just loved a situation like that. It had to have something about it of distinction—intellectual distinction or distinction of style, where standards were formed and maintained and articulated.”
Authority was, of course, enormously interesting to Trow—where it came from, how it was exerted, the ways in which it was eroding. In 1978, Trow wrote an extraordinary profile of Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, in which he repeats the phrase “no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting” as a kind of refrain, to describe, variously, the décor in a room at the Carlyle hotel, popular music, the celebrity assemblage at a party. The piece is compelling because Trow recognizes in Ertegun (or projects onto him) something that was also fundamental to his own human project: that he “was made restless by the thought he had missed it, that authority had drained from the figures he most admired and from the aesthetics he most wanted to master.” It was also fascinating because as much as Trow was dissecting celebrity and the vulgarity of American culture, the piece—titled “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse”—happens to include some pretty divine descriptions of limousine rides with the Rolling Stones, a party at the Café Russe for Bette Midler, Andy Warhol’s commentary at a Trammps concert, and the birthday party Halston gave for Bianca Jagger that culminated in her riding a horse with two naked people into “one of the new breed of discotheques,” Studio 54. Already, Trow was toying with the themes that animate his masterpiece, “Within the Context of No Context”: the decline of the intellectual elite, the rise of a fame-based hierarchy, the end of adulthood.
Reading that essay now is a little like driving through a really intense blizzard. Beautiful, scary, dizzying. Scary because you know that the conditions in which you are traveling may be terminal, but also because everything is so surreal you can’t be entirely sure you aren’t already dead.
Trow told us that we had “a third parent—television.” And that the function of television is “to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.” Television is neutral, it is the referee, not distinguishing between the war against wrinkles and the war in Iraq. Over time, Trow suggested, this would scramble people’s brains and lead us to our current situation: “Of all Americans, only they”—celebrities—“are complete.”
He’s extremely persuasive, partly because he’s right, and partly because his writing is utterly unique: arch but trippy. Every few paragraphs of “Context” get a title like “The Adolescent Orthodoxy” or “The Authority of No-Authority” or “The Cold Child” or “Defacement.” Some of them make perfect sense. Some seem nuts.
It’s possible, of course, to think that all Trow’s elegant ranting amounted to cultural elitism. That of course he mourned the end of Wasp hegemony with its wisdom and history and moral clarity and—by the way—ethnic and economic exclusivity: He was its embodiment. Though not the son of a Vanderbilt or an Astor, he was still the great-great-grandson of a prominent New York City printer named John Fowler Trow (who invented a kind of early version of the phone book, the Trow City Directory). He still went to Exeter and Harvard, where he wrote his thesis about Edith Wharton and her treatment of social hierarchy. And he is now, as they say, a Dead White Male.
But as much as a certain kind of contemporary academic likes to try, it’s silly to dismiss Trow as a nostalgic snob. It misses the point. Trow’s rather amazing accomplishment was to make a whine about decline thrilling instead of boring, shocking instead of predictable. And while the intensity and singularity of Trow’s work had everything to do with his talent, it was also inseparable from another truth: that George Trow was slowly going crazy.
Up in Hudson, with his long gray hair and his rainbow crocheted hat, Jacob Brackman makes the following observation: “ ‘Within the Context of No Context’ is like a half-mad piece already. There’s a New Yorker tradition of that, of half-mad New Yorker writers who Mr. Shawn nurses along and knows when they have to go to the hospital and rest up, maybe not worry about what they’re writing for a while.” “Context” is partly a meditation on the conditions of a world gone wrong, a world that will make you crazy if you think about it too much, and partly the record of a mind starting to unravel from doing just that.
There were always things about George Trow that were unusual. He had always been a bit manic and extravagant in his gestures; there was that famous laugh. “It was high and piercing, much too loud and alarming, and it became a way of punctuating his conversation,” says Kathryn Walker. “It was high style, à la Vreeland.” He had always been very sensitive, and not so much easy to antagonize as peculiar in what would infuriate him.
Trow liked to go on road trips with Ian Frazier. Once, after they hiked through Glacier National Park, Frazier drove them down the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which goes along a precipice over the Continental Divide. As Frazier drove his van, clutching the wheel, buzzing with anxiety, Trow attempted to remember the lyrics to a Noël Coward song, reciting, over and over again, “I’ve been to a marvelous party, with Nounou and Nada and Nell ... ”
“He was driving me crazy,” says Frazier. “When we got down to the bottom I was just shot; I was just totally in pieces. So I bought a six-pack and drank four in one shot and George got very angry. He thought I shouldn’t have drank those beers.”
Often, when they traveled, Trow would ask Frazier to take photographs of him to send to his sister, Ellen, who was mentally handicapped and spent much of her life in an institution. “He always had the same pose, a very sweet pose,” says Frazier. “When I took my first dust-jacket photo I tried to do that pose.” Ellen died in her early forties.
“George had a real tenderness for her and loved her dearly, in a way,” says Ken Kleinpeter, who saw Trow at least once a week for about ten years. “I helped him build a woodshed; that was the kind of stuff he loved to do with me. I was like his country buddy, you know what I mean? And if I were going to be absolutely honest, I think he had a crush on me and at first he was really trying to seduce me in a way. I often felt like a good-looking woman must feel sometimes when a guy is giving her attention: I’m thinking, Why is this guy trying to be friends with me? He can go and have dinner with Jackie Onassis. Why is he calling me to go to some little dive?” Trow propositioned Kleinpeter rather boldly one Fourth of July as part of a disquisition on independence.
Trow seems never to have quite made peace with his own sexuality. “I think that he had an old-fashioned discomfort with the subject and with the application to himself,” says McIntosh. “In many ways, George longed to be absolutely normal.” He had been taught certain rules, certain rituals with which to pursue happiness—the folding of the newspaper, success in the world of letters—and they were failing him.
“These straight guys, like Kenny the sheep farmer—George, with a couple of drinks, would try to horse around with them,” says Brackman. “I could name six guys like that. They’d had some alcohol, and it was always this very adolescent kind of locker-room snap-the-towel-at-the-butts kind of horsing around: so unsmooth, so juvenile, so jocky—which George was not in the least.”
In Trow’s last book, My Pilgrim’s Progress, he wrote, “My father had, let us call it, a tendency toward schizophrenia. If all the fragments he claimed made up a Perfect Whole did not make a Perfect Whole in me, then he was going to have to look at some things he did not want to look at.”
“He both desperately needed his father’s love and attention but also despised him in some way,” says Kleinpeter. “I don’t think George ever felt he got his due from his father; he felt that it was just not enough.”
For all of Trow’s fascination with his father’s world, it wasn’t one he could inhabit. “George’s father was kind of a pressroom guy,” says Frazier. “I just remember him coming up to me and saying, ‘So what the hell’s the matter with those Mets!’ and thinking, That’s not what I would’ve expected from Mr. Trow.” Once, Alison Rose asked the elder Trow what he made of his son’s genius: “ ‘Oh,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I could never get anywhere near it.’ ” George Trow the first and George Trow the second were destined to remain mysterious to one another.
“I knew George’s father as a very nice, funny man,” says Jamaica Kincaid. “I remember us making lunch for his parents in the house in Germantown. George found him difficult; he thought that he had disappointed his dad, probably because he hadn’t married and had children. There was tension about his sexuality.”
Unlike so many others, Kincaid never felt abandoned by her former mentor Trow. “We remained very close friends for a long time, but then, as everybody knows, after Mr. Shawn was fired from The New Yorker he grew estranged from many of us.”
Many friends say that the departure of Shawn was the fundamental trauma of Trow’s adulthood. It was not unusual for Shawn’s writers to be enormously attached to him—he coddled them, made them feel they were engaged in something noble and profound—but Trow had important things in common with his legendary editor besides talent. Like Trow, Shawn had a mentally handicapped member of his immediate family, his autistic daughter, Mary, who has spent the majority of her life in an institution. And like Trow, Shawn had, if not something to hide, then an aspect of otherness that he was not comfortable with. “He seemed to distance himself from people who loudly proclaimed their Jewishness,” writes Shawn’s son Allen in his memoir Wish I Could Be There. William Shawn “seemed to shrink from identifying himself in any open way with a group that had been despised,” and it is little wonder. If a person imagines there is safety and sanctity in the world of traditional literary New York (or any traditional sphere), it simply wouldn’t do to focus too finely on being Jewish or gay.
Perhaps most significant, Shawn and Trow shared a sense of their magazine as a haven, a promontory of moral and intellectual value. Shawn was Trow’s perfect father, supportive, sensitive, seeing the same thing when he looked out at the world. Trow did not leave The New Yorker immediately after Shawn’s dismissal, as some of his colleagues did. He continued to write under editor Robert Gottlieb, whom he thanked extravagantly in the acknowledgments of My Pilgrim’s Progress. It wasn’t until Tina Brown was brought in from Vanity Fair that Trow really gave up. In the same way that the coming of Diana Spencer represented the passing of an old order to Elizabeth in The Queen, the coming of Tina represented that to George Trow. When she enlisted Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue, for instance, Trow was aghast: It was the infiltration of the emptiness and inanity of America into his own temple.
Trow saw Brown seeking to steal the tacky glow of fame (buzz!) from celebrities, and, according to DeCourcy McIntosh, Trow believed Brown was also attempting to use him as a liaison to the gilded world of old New York. Trow wrote Brown a furious letter of resignation, likening her to someone selling her soul “to get close to the Hapsburgs—1913.” “He felt she was trying to exploit him,” says McIntosh. “And in terms of the Hapsburg comparison, I think he was saying, ‘Not only are you selling your soul, but your timing is bad. Not only are you immoral, you’re incorrect.’ ”
Brown notoriously replied, “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”
Trow moved up to his weekend house in Germantown full time, and eventually sold it and had a rather strange new place built to his specifications. Whereas the first house sits up on a hill looking out at pastures spread at the base of the Catskills, the second house Trow built is tucked into a hillside, its view obscured by trees, half-underground. Essentially, it is a bunker.
During this period, Trow began severing contacts with many of his old friends without explanation. “George stopped speaking to me eighteen years ago,” says Ian Frazier. “I don’t know why. I assumed I would find out.”
This was very common. “I think he left a bitter taste in a lot of people’s mouths when he ended relationships,” says Kathryn Walker. “I haven’t talked to George for years. But one does wish George had been sane and could have talked for another twenty years. His issues had become chronic and dangerous.”
These were his Insane Anonymous years. In 1992, Trow got some money from a producer to write a script about a fire in a chicken-processing plant in North Carolina, and he took Alison Rose along on a road trip through the South. “I can’t think of when I had more fun with any living person than I did with George driving around,” she writes. But it was on that trip that Trow made the following complaint about life: “The ongoingness of it is, frankly, a real problem.” By the time they got to Memphis, Trow was finished with Rose. “After the trip there were changes. He began referring to himself as Coldy Woldy. When he’d call and say, ‘Darling, it’s Coldy Woldy—get it?,’ the irony was so high it was almost unreachable … He said Coldy Woldy had replaced George, and he wasn’t kidding.”
Quite near to Trow’s houses and the one Tim Mayer used to occupy and the great rambling one where Jacob Brackman still resides is the home of Bim Chanler, someone who Trow thought “had it all figured out,” as Brackman puts it. Before Trow left on his wanderings, he had been coming over regularly for many years to visit Chanler and his wife, Evie, in their house with its glorious views of the Hudson and the Catskills and the many paintings of Venice Chanler’s mother collected. “George naturally felt comfortable being around; he was very sort of cozy with my Wasp background, because he sort of grew up with it himself,” says Chanler. “Sort of.”
Chanler has a speech pattern you don’t often hear outside of a movie theater. “Jawdge was a college roommate of my cousin Winty Aldrich, and so natchrahlly he brawt him round to Rokeby,” the Aldrich family estate just a few miles up the road. In the front foyer of Chanler’s house there are two maps of the way the Hudson Valley used to be organized: estate after estate, Chanler, Astor, Delano, Chanler … “George was part of a social scene out here, which is nowadays pretty thin. It used to be much livelier when all of these houses were full of interesting people,” says Chanler, sitting on a white sofa in front of a black-and-white photograph of his grandmother and her family with a Scottish nobleman, the Earl of Moray. “These houses have been sold off, in some cases turned into institutions, and in other cases sold off to rich financiers, people like that who didn’t have anything to do with the old social Wasp community. But it used to be very important out here in the time of the Livingstons and the Astors and all those people; it was a very swell place. Anyway, as I say, the society around here got pretty thin and we all sort of clung to each other.”
Like the Chanlers, Trow went to the church of St. John the Evangelist in Barrytown, and he became close to the rector there; he used to tape-record every sermon. For a time, Trow sought in church what he would later seek on the road. “I have a son who when he was about 18 or 19 became mentally ill, and we had a terrible time before we could get him squared away with medication, and there were hospital stays and all that,” says Chanler. “George, more than anybody, took an interest, you know, in trying to help him. He may have always had some suspicion he was on a slippery slope himself, so he had great sympathy with really badly troubled people.”
“He disappeared!” says Evie Chanler. “He didn’t want us to know where he was.”
“He was obviously looking for something that he hadn’t found,” says her husband. “Then he finally ended up in Naples! Naples was always considered a rather louche city—he may have been somewhat drawn to that side of it, I’m sure I don’t know. I mean, we all knew that when Shawn left The New Yorker he kind of collapsed. Poor George.”
Brackman talked to him occasionally during his last months in Naples. “The last conversation I had with George, he said things like, ‘Right at this moment my cock is in the mouth of a beautiful boat boy,’” says Brackman. “It’s the sort of thing he never in a zillion years would have said ten years earlier. It was part of his madness, his mania.”
According to the American Embassy in Naples, on Trow’s death certificate the cause of death is “acute vascular episode.” All other information about the case is being kept confidential at the request of Trow’s next of kin, his 88-year-old mother, Anne, who still lives in Connecticut.
“You know, I was a small writer in a short way myself before I was married and had a son name George William Swift Trow,” she says. “I remember going out and interviewing Lillian Hellman; she had a very husky voice, and I went to the door at Hardscrabble farm and she said, ‘You know, I’m very hard to interview.’ I’ve always been proud of George. I’m just getting over the shock. I walk from room to room and he’s with me every minute. I had a little girl, and she died too, you know. For every victory there is a downside.”
In the late afternoon in the late forties, young George William Swift Trow Jr. would stand in front of the window of his parents’ living room in Cos Cob, Connecticut, watching and waiting. He did not watch television, of course, he watched the street, until he saw the form of his father, crowned by a fedora. They would wave at each other, and then his father, a city editor of the New York Post, would come in, put down his stack of newspapers, hug his wife, and put his fedora on his son’s head. Everyone knew who was an adult and who was a child in this kingdom; everyone knew the rituals. Another: From the time Trow was 7 years old, his father made sure that he read (at least) the Herald Tribune and “knew how to follow the story over from page 1 to page 32, folding the newspaper while existing in a small confined space,” as in the subway that Trow would one day take to his own job in New York City.
And in fact Trow did wear a fedora for a while—to the great amusement of his colleagues—when he was a young writer at William Shawn’s New Yorker. “This is the sixties, so to wear a fedora is some kind of a big statement,” says Jonathan Schell, who, like Trow, graduated from Harvard in 1965 and was swiftly hired by Shawn. “Since Kennedy didn’t wear one, it was like a high wind blew through the country and took off all the hats. For George, the hat had something to do with being an adult, but some kind of mockery of being an adult. The fedora was like a flag of our fathers: No one else wore a fedora except William Shawn.”
There was much of Trow in that hat: his Shawn worship, his interest in considered and dapper self-presentation (something he shared with his friend Diana Vreeland), the fact that his father and his father’s world and, most important, the loss of his father’s world were never far from Trow’s mind. “I know he was sort of engaged in a conversation with his dad in his thoughts, and that he was very, very influenced by his dad’s view of the world—either to argue for it or against it,” says Ian Frazier, Trow’s New Yorker colleague and close friend for many years.
Nothing was ever just what it was to Trow. “He was always thinking behind his own back,” Alison Rose wrote in her memoir, Better Than Sane (the title is taken from a comment Trow made to Rose when they were New Yorker colleagues in the eighties and formed a little club he called “Insane Anonymous”). Trow made a life out of deconstructing “Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts,” as he put it, searching for meaning in Eisenhower’s Rolodex, the layout of Life magazine, his own hat. “Irony has seeped into the felt of any fedora hat I have ever owned—not out of any wish of mine but out of necessity. A fedora hat worn by me without the necessary protective irony would eat through my head and kill me,” Trow wrote in his famous essay “Within the Context of No Context,”first published in its entirety in The New Yorker in 1980 and later republished as a book. “It turns out that while I am at home in many strange places, I am not free even to visit the territory I was expected to inhabit effortlessly. To wear a fedora, I must first torture it out of shape.”
“Within the Context of No Context” is a tale of the fall. It divided the world into a time when the world was whole, made sense, and after, when life was still possible but the culture had been ruined. Many factors were to blame, but perhaps the most poisonous force was television—certainly the most representative of all that had brought the kingdom of history and learning and liberal arts and newspapers and fedoras to its knees. The book made sense of people’s sense of loss, especially that of well-educated young people who by other measures might be said to have lost nothing. Stylistically, it was remarkable, a hypnotic procession of aphorisms that was probably the most extreme work of nonfiction The New Yorker hasever published; some readers questioned the sanity of a man who could produce such a shriek.
Trow’s colleagues took note of his increasing eccentricity, but The New Yorker in that period forgave, even rewarded, a temperament like Trow’s. It was a safe place—for Trow, possibly the last one. Shawn was fired in 1987. With Tina Brown’s arrival in 1992, the barbarians had sacked the castle.
Trow spent the last years of his life living the radical rootlessness he’d prophesied in “Within the Context of No Context”: “at home in many strange places.” He sold the house he had designed and built in Germantown, New York, and cut off almost everyone he knew. He drove his pickup truck to Alaska, Texas, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, where some friends of his came to get him after neighbors complained that he’d taken to going outside without any clothes on. They found him very thin, living on Scotch and sardines, and checked him into McClean Hospital, the famous psychiatric institution outside Boston. After Trow got out, he moved to Naples, Italy, popping up once in a while as a voice on the answering machine of an old friend, never leaving a number. Twice, he was visited by DeCourcy McIntosh, his best friend from Exeter, and told him that he was never coming back.
Trow’s body was discovered by the Italian police in his apartment in late November last year, days after his death.
In 1999, Trow wrote (again) about what he saw as the protective function culture had once served in people’s lives. “Well, we don’t have that,” said Trow. “People fall off the high wire invisibly. There is no net; they crash.”
“More than his words, it is his face I remember from Exeter,” Trow’s classmate John Irving wrote in a review of “Context” when it was republished in 1997. “I used to feel that there was something arrogant or smug in George’s smile.” In his yearbook photo, Trow looks “more than a little superior to the rest of us,” and, again, in the group photo of Exeter’s literary magazine, of which Trow was the president, Irving detects in Trow “a weary impatience.” But after contemplating the intensity of insight in “Context” many years later, Irving comes to a different conclusion: “What I mistook for smirking was instead something prescient in his smile; it was as if the unfathomable powers of precognition were already alive within him.”
“George and I used to roar over the fact that we were both called arrogant and supercilious at Exeter,” says DeCourcy McIntosh in his office on the top floor of the Knoedler gallery on East 70th Street. “We used to argue over who was more arrogant and supercilious.” (Sitting on McIntosh’s desk above two volumes of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is his brown fedora.) Upon graduation from Exeter, Trow and McIntosh and 59 of their classmates—about half the class—made it to the next destination on the road-more-traveled to success: Harvard. “We arrived en bloc in Harvard Yard,” says McIntosh. “I think the other students were aghast.”
“George was from the very preppy end of Exeter, in terms of how he conducted himself, how he dressed, how he spoke, and how he saw himself, how he was trying to pass,” says Jacob Brackman, who, after his own stint at The New Yorker, later became Trow’s friend and neighbor in the Hudson Valley, where they ran a theater together for a while with Tim Mayer. Mayer, who was in the class below them, was very involved with the theater and became a playwright after Harvard; he wrote the book for the Broadway production of Gershwin’s My One and Only, starring Twiggy and Tommy Tune. Mayer and Trow became close when they wrote the 1964 Hasty Pudding show together. But Trow’s real home at Harvard was the Lampoon, the magazine he wrote for throughout his Harvard years, and edited as a senior.
Though Trow fetishized the aristocracy and was fluent in their mores and markers, he was not actually quite one of them. He was half-Irish, and not from old or big money. “But he had paid a lot of attention to New York aristocracy, of which his parents were a poor relation,” says Hendrik Hertzberg, who lived in Pennypacker Hall with Trow freshman year. “He was pickled in it.”
Trow wasn’t attracted to the revolutionary spirit of his era the way his friends were. “George was hoping this whole episode in our cultural history would pass quickly,” Brackman says. Trow didn’t get involved with the War Resisters League as Hertzberg did, he didn’t campaign for Bobby Kennedy, or go down to Mississippi, or march on Washington. Trow was, in Brackman’s memory, striving to be part of the “10 percent of people at Harvard who wear tuxedos to their own little events in their own little buildings and you can see them out on their balconies with their tuxedos and their often very beautiful girls who are also similarly there from the Vanderbilts and the Astors.”
Harvard is funny. Only people who went to Harvard say things like, “Oh, he was famous at Harvard,” or “We were both famous undergrads,” just because they happened to write for their school newspaper. But then those articles in the Lampoon and the Crimson did get many members of Trow’s circle hired by Mr. Shawn (as writers, not interns) almost as soon as they graduated, and many of them actually did become famous in New York. Besides Shawn’s son Wally and Brackman (who, after writing for The New Yorker, wrote the screenplay for The King of Marvin Gardens and the lyrics for Carly Simon’s hits “Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” and “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be”), Trow was at Harvard with Alger Hiss’s son, Tony, who also wrote for The New Yorker upon graduation and lived on Waverly Place for a time with the New York City mayor’s son Bobby Wagner (an Exeter classmate of Trow’s) and Hendrik Hertzberg, whom Shawn hired in 1969. (For many years, Hertzberg was mad at Brackman for stealing his college girlfriend Faye Levine, the author of Splendor and Misery: A Novel of Harvard.) Dr. Andrew Weil was a classmate and wrote for the Crimson (where he helped to expose then-professor Timothy Leary’s experiments in psychedelia), as did Jonathan Schell, who joined The New Yorker in 1967, and was often discussed as a possible Shawn successor.
And then, a few classes behind Trow, was one of his best friends and fellow geniuses, Doug Kenney. Kenney (along with Henry Beard, class of ’67) became enormously successful spinning off the Harvard Lampoon to create the magazine National Lampoon, to which Trow was a frequent contributor. Kenney ultimately moved to Hollywood, where he wrote Caddyshack and Animal House, which brought in more money than any comedy had before it and helped fuel both his cocaine habit and his friendship with John Belushi. “They were a triumvirate; they were the three Harvard guys,” says Kathryn Walker of Kenney and Trow and Tim Mayer. Walker, an actress, was Kenney’s girlfriend, and later married James Taylor. (Trow wrote a “Talk of the Town” piece called “Kathryn and James” when they were courting: “James Taylor appeared at Radio City without an opening act. This, we feel, is the opening act: Kathryn Walker in front of a gold mirror.”) “George was the one who called Doug ‘the Marilyn Monroe of humor,’ because he was fetching,” Walker says. “George had great taste for what he called ‘natural aristocrats.’ I mean, he was obsessed with genealogies and all that sort of thing, but also taste and style.”
Though Kenney was Irish and used to say that at the Lampoon, the Catholics were “taking comedy back from the Jews,” Tim Mayer once told a reporter that when he first met Kenney at Harvard “I thought he was the most perfect Wasp I had ever encountered. He was flawless.” Like Trow, Kenney was fascinated by his fantasy of a clubby old world of crisp haircuts and close shaves that was rapidly succumbing to a culturewide toga party. They were both a little in love with the idea of a society being sunk, the romance of what falls away. And neither was ever entirely sure what he wanted to do more: go back in time or explode what little authority remained.
Trow was not the only member of the triumvirate to die early or mysteriously. In 1980, at 33, Kenney was found dead at the bottom of Hanapepe cliff in Hawaii after a vacation with Walker and Chevy Chase. (Kenney left a note in his hotel room that read, “These are the happiest days I’ve ever ignored.”) Mayer, who had first battled lung cancer at Harvard, died from it after years of hard drinking, smoking, and coke-snorting in 1988. After Mayer died, Trow essentially adopted his live-in girlfriend; they were roommates for about a year. Brackman describes her as a “lower-class hash slinger … It was strange enough that Tim was with her, but when George took up with her?”
But then Trow had always had a soft spot for the troubled and the criminal—the flip side of his attraction to the top of the heap was his interest in the bottom of the barrel. Though many of his closest friends never met a lover or boyfriend of Trow’s, the one several recall was a man named Gerald who was in and out of Rikers Island. “He delighted in trying to shock me with stories about this outlaw boyfriend, this almost thug of a black guy,” says Ken Kleinpeter, who met Trow upstate shortly after Mayer died, when Kleinpeter had just left a career as a musician in Manhattan to become a farmer.
“George didn’t like guys who were like him; he liked rough trade,” says Brackman. “He had a completely other life, which was his homosexual life, which was the Anvil and Rikers Island characters that he never brought around. When we were at Harvard, nobody was out of the closet. George, even twenty years out of Harvard, still wasn’t talking about it.”
T row was in the Coast Guard after Harvard, but in many ways his adult life began when he was hired at The New Yorker. Trow started out writing “casuals” and “Talk of the Town” pieces, and in doing so he met—and charmed—some of the most interesting people of his era. Once he was at a party at Katharine Graham’s house and she said, “Go ask Jackie to dance. No one ever does.” Trow danced with Jacqueline Kennedy, and they remained friends until her death.
“It was such fun, I can’t tell you,” says Jamaica Kincaid of her early days in New York City, when Trow was her mentor and social guide. Trow would take her to the parties and events he covered in “Talk of the Town,” and he found Kincaid so amusing he decided that she too should write for The New Yorker. “George took me to lunch with Mr. Shawn at the Algonquin. I was always hungry, I had no job, and I didn’t know when I would eat again, so I ordered the most wonderful, expensive thing on the menu. Mr. Shawn ordered a slice of toasted pound cake and I thought, Oh, gosh, I’ve spent all his money; I’ve reduced him to toasted pound cake,” she says. “I went to the West Indian Day Parade in Brooklyn and I made some notes and gave them to George, and I thought he would rewrite them and make them into something proper. George gave them to Mr. Shawn and he printed it just as it was written.”
Trow took similar care of their colleague Ian Frazier, guiding the Midwesterner through the details and difficulties of Manhattan. When Frazier was looking for an apartment, it was Trow who handled the arrangements. “I wanted to get a loft; that was my vision of how I wanted to live here. I found this place and I told George about it, and he went down and talked to my landlord, who was this very recent immigrant, a Romanian Jew who’d escaped the Holocaust. George had a way … like if you’ve ever seen Angier Biddle Duke, who used to be the State Department director of protocol and was this totally unflappable, old-school white guy. George could take on that persona, become that guy. And people do what that guy says. ‘This is my young associate, and we’re going to be needing some space to do some projects; please tell me what you need in terms of a security deposit.’ ” The Romanian was dazzled. Frazier got a very good deal.
Trow lived on Grand Street for many years, and later in Hell’s Kitchen. As reclusive as he was in later years, in those days he was a blue-eyed social butterfly, dressing in a way that added to the powerful effect of his intellect. “George had really fabulous clothes that you couldn’t even believe because they were just so perfect,” says Frazier. “I remember he had a coat, some fabulous coat from somewhere, it was like a gray-and-black tweed herringbone, and I thought it was so cool that I went and got one. I called George from Brooks Brothers and said, ‘I just bought a herringbone coat.’ He said, ‘Oh, great!’ Then he paused. ‘Is it big herringbone?’ I said yes. George said, ‘Definitely not.’ ”
Trow delighted in the way Vreeland whitewashed the bottom of her shoes; he showed Frazier the silky insides of his jacket pockets. He was “aesthetic to the tips of his toes,” as Jonathan Schell puts it (although, Trow later wrote, “I was always very careful in my relationship with Diana Vreeland to distance myself from these men,” who were her walkers).
“He loved courts—like a king’s court,” says Schell. “The New Yorker had that aspect to it. I remember once being with him on Martha’s Vineyard at Kay Graham’s house, and he just loved a situation like that. It had to have something about it of distinction—intellectual distinction or distinction of style, where standards were formed and maintained and articulated.”
Authority was, of course, enormously interesting to Trow—where it came from, how it was exerted, the ways in which it was eroding. In 1978, Trow wrote an extraordinary profile of Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun, in which he repeats the phrase “no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting” as a kind of refrain, to describe, variously, the décor in a room at the Carlyle hotel, popular music, the celebrity assemblage at a party. The piece is compelling because Trow recognizes in Ertegun (or projects onto him) something that was also fundamental to his own human project: that he “was made restless by the thought he had missed it, that authority had drained from the figures he most admired and from the aesthetics he most wanted to master.” It was also fascinating because as much as Trow was dissecting celebrity and the vulgarity of American culture, the piece—titled “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse”—happens to include some pretty divine descriptions of limousine rides with the Rolling Stones, a party at the Café Russe for Bette Midler, Andy Warhol’s commentary at a Trammps concert, and the birthday party Halston gave for Bianca Jagger that culminated in her riding a horse with two naked people into “one of the new breed of discotheques,” Studio 54. Already, Trow was toying with the themes that animate his masterpiece, “Within the Context of No Context”: the decline of the intellectual elite, the rise of a fame-based hierarchy, the end of adulthood.
Reading that essay now is a little like driving through a really intense blizzard. Beautiful, scary, dizzying. Scary because you know that the conditions in which you are traveling may be terminal, but also because everything is so surreal you can’t be entirely sure you aren’t already dead.
Trow told us that we had “a third parent—television.” And that the function of television is “to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.” Television is neutral, it is the referee, not distinguishing between the war against wrinkles and the war in Iraq. Over time, Trow suggested, this would scramble people’s brains and lead us to our current situation: “Of all Americans, only they”—celebrities—“are complete.”
He’s extremely persuasive, partly because he’s right, and partly because his writing is utterly unique: arch but trippy. Every few paragraphs of “Context” get a title like “The Adolescent Orthodoxy” or “The Authority of No-Authority” or “The Cold Child” or “Defacement.” Some of them make perfect sense. Some seem nuts.
It’s possible, of course, to think that all Trow’s elegant ranting amounted to cultural elitism. That of course he mourned the end of Wasp hegemony with its wisdom and history and moral clarity and—by the way—ethnic and economic exclusivity: He was its embodiment. Though not the son of a Vanderbilt or an Astor, he was still the great-great-grandson of a prominent New York City printer named John Fowler Trow (who invented a kind of early version of the phone book, the Trow City Directory). He still went to Exeter and Harvard, where he wrote his thesis about Edith Wharton and her treatment of social hierarchy. And he is now, as they say, a Dead White Male.
But as much as a certain kind of contemporary academic likes to try, it’s silly to dismiss Trow as a nostalgic snob. It misses the point. Trow’s rather amazing accomplishment was to make a whine about decline thrilling instead of boring, shocking instead of predictable. And while the intensity and singularity of Trow’s work had everything to do with his talent, it was also inseparable from another truth: that George Trow was slowly going crazy.
Up in Hudson, with his long gray hair and his rainbow crocheted hat, Jacob Brackman makes the following observation: “ ‘Within the Context of No Context’ is like a half-mad piece already. There’s a New Yorker tradition of that, of half-mad New Yorker writers who Mr. Shawn nurses along and knows when they have to go to the hospital and rest up, maybe not worry about what they’re writing for a while.” “Context” is partly a meditation on the conditions of a world gone wrong, a world that will make you crazy if you think about it too much, and partly the record of a mind starting to unravel from doing just that.
There were always things about George Trow that were unusual. He had always been a bit manic and extravagant in his gestures; there was that famous laugh. “It was high and piercing, much too loud and alarming, and it became a way of punctuating his conversation,” says Kathryn Walker. “It was high style, à la Vreeland.” He had always been very sensitive, and not so much easy to antagonize as peculiar in what would infuriate him.
Trow liked to go on road trips with Ian Frazier. Once, after they hiked through Glacier National Park, Frazier drove them down the Going-to-the-Sun Road, which goes along a precipice over the Continental Divide. As Frazier drove his van, clutching the wheel, buzzing with anxiety, Trow attempted to remember the lyrics to a Noël Coward song, reciting, over and over again, “I’ve been to a marvelous party, with Nounou and Nada and Nell ... ”
“He was driving me crazy,” says Frazier. “When we got down to the bottom I was just shot; I was just totally in pieces. So I bought a six-pack and drank four in one shot and George got very angry. He thought I shouldn’t have drank those beers.”
Often, when they traveled, Trow would ask Frazier to take photographs of him to send to his sister, Ellen, who was mentally handicapped and spent much of her life in an institution. “He always had the same pose, a very sweet pose,” says Frazier. “When I took my first dust-jacket photo I tried to do that pose.” Ellen died in her early forties.
“George had a real tenderness for her and loved her dearly, in a way,” says Ken Kleinpeter, who saw Trow at least once a week for about ten years. “I helped him build a woodshed; that was the kind of stuff he loved to do with me. I was like his country buddy, you know what I mean? And if I were going to be absolutely honest, I think he had a crush on me and at first he was really trying to seduce me in a way. I often felt like a good-looking woman must feel sometimes when a guy is giving her attention: I’m thinking, Why is this guy trying to be friends with me? He can go and have dinner with Jackie Onassis. Why is he calling me to go to some little dive?” Trow propositioned Kleinpeter rather boldly one Fourth of July as part of a disquisition on independence.
Trow seems never to have quite made peace with his own sexuality. “I think that he had an old-fashioned discomfort with the subject and with the application to himself,” says McIntosh. “In many ways, George longed to be absolutely normal.” He had been taught certain rules, certain rituals with which to pursue happiness—the folding of the newspaper, success in the world of letters—and they were failing him.
“These straight guys, like Kenny the sheep farmer—George, with a couple of drinks, would try to horse around with them,” says Brackman. “I could name six guys like that. They’d had some alcohol, and it was always this very adolescent kind of locker-room snap-the-towel-at-the-butts kind of horsing around: so unsmooth, so juvenile, so jocky—which George was not in the least.”
In Trow’s last book, My Pilgrim’s Progress, he wrote, “My father had, let us call it, a tendency toward schizophrenia. If all the fragments he claimed made up a Perfect Whole did not make a Perfect Whole in me, then he was going to have to look at some things he did not want to look at.”
“He both desperately needed his father’s love and attention but also despised him in some way,” says Kleinpeter. “I don’t think George ever felt he got his due from his father; he felt that it was just not enough.”
For all of Trow’s fascination with his father’s world, it wasn’t one he could inhabit. “George’s father was kind of a pressroom guy,” says Frazier. “I just remember him coming up to me and saying, ‘So what the hell’s the matter with those Mets!’ and thinking, That’s not what I would’ve expected from Mr. Trow.” Once, Alison Rose asked the elder Trow what he made of his son’s genius: “ ‘Oh,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I could never get anywhere near it.’ ” George Trow the first and George Trow the second were destined to remain mysterious to one another.
“I knew George’s father as a very nice, funny man,” says Jamaica Kincaid. “I remember us making lunch for his parents in the house in Germantown. George found him difficult; he thought that he had disappointed his dad, probably because he hadn’t married and had children. There was tension about his sexuality.”
Unlike so many others, Kincaid never felt abandoned by her former mentor Trow. “We remained very close friends for a long time, but then, as everybody knows, after Mr. Shawn was fired from The New Yorker he grew estranged from many of us.”
Many friends say that the departure of Shawn was the fundamental trauma of Trow’s adulthood. It was not unusual for Shawn’s writers to be enormously attached to him—he coddled them, made them feel they were engaged in something noble and profound—but Trow had important things in common with his legendary editor besides talent. Like Trow, Shawn had a mentally handicapped member of his immediate family, his autistic daughter, Mary, who has spent the majority of her life in an institution. And like Trow, Shawn had, if not something to hide, then an aspect of otherness that he was not comfortable with. “He seemed to distance himself from people who loudly proclaimed their Jewishness,” writes Shawn’s son Allen in his memoir Wish I Could Be There. William Shawn “seemed to shrink from identifying himself in any open way with a group that had been despised,” and it is little wonder. If a person imagines there is safety and sanctity in the world of traditional literary New York (or any traditional sphere), it simply wouldn’t do to focus too finely on being Jewish or gay.
Perhaps most significant, Shawn and Trow shared a sense of their magazine as a haven, a promontory of moral and intellectual value. Shawn was Trow’s perfect father, supportive, sensitive, seeing the same thing when he looked out at the world. Trow did not leave The New Yorker immediately after Shawn’s dismissal, as some of his colleagues did. He continued to write under editor Robert Gottlieb, whom he thanked extravagantly in the acknowledgments of My Pilgrim’s Progress. It wasn’t until Tina Brown was brought in from Vanity Fair that Trow really gave up. In the same way that the coming of Diana Spencer represented the passing of an old order to Elizabeth in The Queen, the coming of Tina represented that to George Trow. When she enlisted Roseanne Barr to guest-edit an issue, for instance, Trow was aghast: It was the infiltration of the emptiness and inanity of America into his own temple.
Trow saw Brown seeking to steal the tacky glow of fame (buzz!) from celebrities, and, according to DeCourcy McIntosh, Trow believed Brown was also attempting to use him as a liaison to the gilded world of old New York. Trow wrote Brown a furious letter of resignation, likening her to someone selling her soul “to get close to the Hapsburgs—1913.” “He felt she was trying to exploit him,” says McIntosh. “And in terms of the Hapsburg comparison, I think he was saying, ‘Not only are you selling your soul, but your timing is bad. Not only are you immoral, you’re incorrect.’ ”
Brown notoriously replied, “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”
Trow moved up to his weekend house in Germantown full time, and eventually sold it and had a rather strange new place built to his specifications. Whereas the first house sits up on a hill looking out at pastures spread at the base of the Catskills, the second house Trow built is tucked into a hillside, its view obscured by trees, half-underground. Essentially, it is a bunker.
During this period, Trow began severing contacts with many of his old friends without explanation. “George stopped speaking to me eighteen years ago,” says Ian Frazier. “I don’t know why. I assumed I would find out.”
This was very common. “I think he left a bitter taste in a lot of people’s mouths when he ended relationships,” says Kathryn Walker. “I haven’t talked to George for years. But one does wish George had been sane and could have talked for another twenty years. His issues had become chronic and dangerous.”
These were his Insane Anonymous years. In 1992, Trow got some money from a producer to write a script about a fire in a chicken-processing plant in North Carolina, and he took Alison Rose along on a road trip through the South. “I can’t think of when I had more fun with any living person than I did with George driving around,” she writes. But it was on that trip that Trow made the following complaint about life: “The ongoingness of it is, frankly, a real problem.” By the time they got to Memphis, Trow was finished with Rose. “After the trip there were changes. He began referring to himself as Coldy Woldy. When he’d call and say, ‘Darling, it’s Coldy Woldy—get it?,’ the irony was so high it was almost unreachable … He said Coldy Woldy had replaced George, and he wasn’t kidding.”
Quite near to Trow’s houses and the one Tim Mayer used to occupy and the great rambling one where Jacob Brackman still resides is the home of Bim Chanler, someone who Trow thought “had it all figured out,” as Brackman puts it. Before Trow left on his wanderings, he had been coming over regularly for many years to visit Chanler and his wife, Evie, in their house with its glorious views of the Hudson and the Catskills and the many paintings of Venice Chanler’s mother collected. “George naturally felt comfortable being around; he was very sort of cozy with my Wasp background, because he sort of grew up with it himself,” says Chanler. “Sort of.”
Chanler has a speech pattern you don’t often hear outside of a movie theater. “Jawdge was a college roommate of my cousin Winty Aldrich, and so natchrahlly he brawt him round to Rokeby,” the Aldrich family estate just a few miles up the road. In the front foyer of Chanler’s house there are two maps of the way the Hudson Valley used to be organized: estate after estate, Chanler, Astor, Delano, Chanler … “George was part of a social scene out here, which is nowadays pretty thin. It used to be much livelier when all of these houses were full of interesting people,” says Chanler, sitting on a white sofa in front of a black-and-white photograph of his grandmother and her family with a Scottish nobleman, the Earl of Moray. “These houses have been sold off, in some cases turned into institutions, and in other cases sold off to rich financiers, people like that who didn’t have anything to do with the old social Wasp community. But it used to be very important out here in the time of the Livingstons and the Astors and all those people; it was a very swell place. Anyway, as I say, the society around here got pretty thin and we all sort of clung to each other.”
Like the Chanlers, Trow went to the church of St. John the Evangelist in Barrytown, and he became close to the rector there; he used to tape-record every sermon. For a time, Trow sought in church what he would later seek on the road. “I have a son who when he was about 18 or 19 became mentally ill, and we had a terrible time before we could get him squared away with medication, and there were hospital stays and all that,” says Chanler. “George, more than anybody, took an interest, you know, in trying to help him. He may have always had some suspicion he was on a slippery slope himself, so he had great sympathy with really badly troubled people.”
“He disappeared!” says Evie Chanler. “He didn’t want us to know where he was.”
“He was obviously looking for something that he hadn’t found,” says her husband. “Then he finally ended up in Naples! Naples was always considered a rather louche city—he may have been somewhat drawn to that side of it, I’m sure I don’t know. I mean, we all knew that when Shawn left The New Yorker he kind of collapsed. Poor George.”
Brackman talked to him occasionally during his last months in Naples. “The last conversation I had with George, he said things like, ‘Right at this moment my cock is in the mouth of a beautiful boat boy,’” says Brackman. “It’s the sort of thing he never in a zillion years would have said ten years earlier. It was part of his madness, his mania.”
According to the American Embassy in Naples, on Trow’s death certificate the cause of death is “acute vascular episode.” All other information about the case is being kept confidential at the request of Trow’s next of kin, his 88-year-old mother, Anne, who still lives in Connecticut.
“You know, I was a small writer in a short way myself before I was married and had a son name George William Swift Trow,” she says. “I remember going out and interviewing Lillian Hellman; she had a very husky voice, and I went to the door at Hardscrabble farm and she said, ‘You know, I’m very hard to interview.’ I’ve always been proud of George. I’m just getting over the shock. I walk from room to room and he’s with me every minute. I had a little girl, and she died too, you know. For every victory there is a downside.”
OVID
It's the birthday of the poet Ovid, (books by this author) born in the village of Sulmo, just east of Rome (43 B.C.). After having written many light, popular works, Ovid began his masterpiece, The Metamorphoses (c. 8 A.D.), a collection of all the Greek and Roman myths that deal with transformation, told in chronological order from the origin of the universe to the death of Julius Caesar. It begins,
"Of bodies changed to various forms I sing:
Ye gods, from whom these miracles did spring."
Ovid wrote:
"There's nothing constant in the world,All ebb and flow, and every shape that's bornBears in its womb the seeds of change."
"Of bodies changed to various forms I sing:
Ye gods, from whom these miracles did spring."
Ovid wrote:
"There's nothing constant in the world,All ebb and flow, and every shape that's bornBears in its womb the seeds of change."
VERNAL EQUINOX
Vernal equinox, the lovely little Latinate term that means “equal night of spring,” is used to indicate the March-based equinox even in the southern hemisphere, where the event is really the start of autumn. “It’s a very Northern-centric view of things,” said Dr. William Blair, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University. “Then again, most of Earth’s land mass is in the Northern Hemisphere, so what are you going to do?”
For many cultures throughout history, people got ready to start tilling the fields. Ancient peoples may not have understood orbital mechanics, but they were tireless observers of the Sun, stars and planets and noted with enviable precision how the position of the sunrise shifted on the horizon throughout the year. By tracking solar motions, they kept track of time and could estimate with some security when the last frost had passed and it was safe to plant crops.
For many cultures throughout history, people got ready to start tilling the fields. Ancient peoples may not have understood orbital mechanics, but they were tireless observers of the Sun, stars and planets and noted with enviable precision how the position of the sunrise shifted on the horizon throughout the year. By tracking solar motions, they kept track of time and could estimate with some security when the last frost had passed and it was safe to plant crops.
19.3.07
'Cultural Amnesia' by Clive James
'Cultural Amnesia' by Clive James - Los Angeles Times:
"In 'Cultural Amnesia,' the prodigious critic Clive James succumbs to a mighty ambition: In 100-plus alphabetically arranged essays, he pays homage to the vast western humanist enterprise (writing, filmmaking, music, philosophy, theater), defending it from myriad enemies. I don't fault his intelligence or erudition: This Australian omnivore has read, traveled and thought more than perhaps any critic alive. An eclectic master of the high/low, he writes on German metaphysics as fluently as on TV sitcoms (he's a former TV critic and sometime broadcaster), swiveling from poetry to novels to history with authority and conviction."
"In 'Cultural Amnesia,' the prodigious critic Clive James succumbs to a mighty ambition: In 100-plus alphabetically arranged essays, he pays homage to the vast western humanist enterprise (writing, filmmaking, music, philosophy, theater), defending it from myriad enemies. I don't fault his intelligence or erudition: This Australian omnivore has read, traveled and thought more than perhaps any critic alive. An eclectic master of the high/low, he writes on German metaphysics as fluently as on TV sitcoms (he's a former TV critic and sometime broadcaster), swiveling from poetry to novels to history with authority and conviction."
London's Skyline
The Sunday Times Magazine said last year that London was taking over from New York as the world’s financial centre. Glance at the skyline of cranes and girders, and you’re inclined to agree. And if there’s one thing a preeminent financial centre loves, it’s talk of new skyscrapers. As the economic graph goes zinging upwards, so do the plans of ambitious developers and their ever-eager architects. Nobody can ignore a skyscraper. Which is why a public inquiry is taking place into designs for one that looks like a giant walkie-talkie. Just how desirable are these things, and where should we put them?
We Brits aren’t natural tower-erectors, cathedrals apart. We build them with bad grace. Until Norman Foster and his then sidekick Ken Shuttleworth produced the unexpectedly lovable 590ft “Gherkin” at 30 St Mary Axe, in the heart of the City of London, in 2004, we were bumping along in the wake of the Americans. They knew how to build tall, from Manhattan to Chicago. In contrast, we produced lumpen, ill-proportioned things. Manhattan had the Empire State and Chrysler buildings by the early 1930s; we weren’t allowed to build taller than 100ft in London until the end of the 1950s, on the principle that firemen’s ladders wouldn’t go any higher. We didn’t get our first true skyscraper — the 600ft NatWest Tower, now Tower 42 — until the close of the 1970s. We just didn’t have the knack.
Small wonder that we took a breather for a decade after that. Skyscraper service resumed with the stainless-steel obelisk of César Pelli’s 771ft Canary Wharf tower (1991). And when the IRA blew up the old Baltic Exchange in the City, thus providing a convenient excuse to build a new tower, Foster stepped up to the mark. His first attempt was a graceless super-scraper like a giant stick of celery. That was thrown out. But his second was the Gherkin. And it works well because it understands that it is part of a larger urban composition.
For towers to work in a great city, they can’t be plonked down just anywhere. Parisians were so traumatised by the arrival of the ghastly 689ft Tour Montparnasse at the start of the 1970s — stuck out awkwardly to one side of the centre — that they forthwith corralled all new towers in the western La Défense business district, an antecedent to our Canary Wharf. Better, perhaps, to have allowed a second small cluster of towers at Montparnasse to cloak the thing somewhat. Because, with skyscrapers, one-off buildings really don’t work too well. They need a companionable huddle. And this, despite all our make-do-and-mending down the years, is what we have in the City of London.
Go to Parliament Hill or Alexandra Palace, and take in those glorious vistas across the whole of London. There is the cluster of towers developing in the City, the Gherkin stuck like a marker pin right in the middle of everything. And there, out east, is the less satisfactory cluster of Canary Wharf. They’ve really packed ’em in down there. The towers are too close, too similar, too regimented. In contrast, the City benefits from having a radial, medieval street pattern. Take a look at its towers closer in, from Waterloo Bridge. They execute a stately dance. It’s a glorious sight, plainly a world-class capital. But it is, of course, about to change again.
They’ve just started work on Richard Rogers’s tower at 122 Leadenhall Street, aka the “cheese grater”. This tall, narrow wedge of a building, near the Gherkin, will comfortably outstrip both it and Tower 42, rising to 737ft. It will be finished by 2010. But two others will be taller: the Heron Tower will come close to 800ft, while pride of place in the City cluster will go to the spiralling 945ft Bishopsgate Tower, hopefully dubbed the Pinnacle.
Both are by the US architects KPF, who could be described as a class commercial outfit. KPF may not have anything like the international standing or originality of a Rem Koolhaas or a Zaha Hadid or a Foster, but they know how to build towers. It’s what they do. They have another pair — slimmer residential ones, 525ftand 470ft — planned for the gargantuan Victoria Transport Interchange development, perilously close to Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster. Ooer: cue heritage hand-wringing.
But hang on. Building those means getting rid of the hatefully banal 330ft Portland House from 1962: a reminder of just how bad we used to be at building skyscrapers. I’d rather have two good, taller, slimmer towers than one stumpy, horrible one. On the basis of the crude consultation models I’ve seen so far, it’s too early to make a judgment on the merits of the emerging Victoria mini-cluster of skyscrapers. We need to see the detail.
We’re transfixed by height — how about Renzo Piano’s proposed “Shard” at London Bridge, for instance? If it is built, it will finally breach the 1,000ft barrier in London. But the arguments about such buildings are nearly always stupid — they are about height rather than quality. Never mind how tall it is: is it any good? What’s it like at street level?
The view from the people who determine these things in London — which means Ken Livingstone’s cluster of architectural advisers and the well-meaning but usually rather hopeless bureaucracy known as Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment — is that tall is good, so long as it is in the right place. So long as the towers don’t get in the way of the complex of “viewing corridors” of the drum and dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. There are plans to narrow those corridors. Then there is English Heritage, the conservation quango headed by Simon Thurley, which tends to resist the new wave of ’scrapers, usually fruitlessly.
What’s exercising English Heritage at the moment is the public inquiry for the the Uruguayan-American architect Rafael Viñoly’s “walkie-talkie” tower proposal at 20 Fenchurch Street, for one of London’s most active commercial developers, Land Securities, the firm behind the Victoria proposals. It will impinge on views of the Tower of London, but that’s not the point. So does the Gherkin. The point is not whether you’ll be able to see it, it’s whether you will want to.
Viñoly has letters of support from Foster, Rogers, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and others. They stick together, top architects. It’s just as well he didn’t ask me. It’s a tower that gets wider towards the top, its facade curling forwards alarmingly. Forget “walkie-talkie”, they should call it the Hunchback. It may well have a marvellous conservatory-like viewing gallery on top. But compared to the Gherkin, the Cheese Grater, the Pinnacle, the Shard, even Tower 42 — all of which have the sense to slim down on the upper levels — it is perverse. It looks slightly better if you turn the picture upside-down, but not much.
The Hunchback is scarcely elegant, then, but it gets one thing right. It is not trying to be top dog in London. Its height — if not its shape — is appropriate for its position. It would be on the edge of the stately dance, a peasant gazing enviously at the more graceful moves of the gentlefolk at the centre of the floor.
The world’s best skyscraper cities tell us that the ensemble is what matters, not the individual building. Close up, the Empire State Building is horribly crude; from afar, Manhattan is magic. When Canaletto painted (and carefully doctored) his views of London with all its spires, it was the overall composition that mattered. Nothing has changed. We need a new Canaletto to appreciate the possibilities of our new wave of tower-building.
We Brits aren’t natural tower-erectors, cathedrals apart. We build them with bad grace. Until Norman Foster and his then sidekick Ken Shuttleworth produced the unexpectedly lovable 590ft “Gherkin” at 30 St Mary Axe, in the heart of the City of London, in 2004, we were bumping along in the wake of the Americans. They knew how to build tall, from Manhattan to Chicago. In contrast, we produced lumpen, ill-proportioned things. Manhattan had the Empire State and Chrysler buildings by the early 1930s; we weren’t allowed to build taller than 100ft in London until the end of the 1950s, on the principle that firemen’s ladders wouldn’t go any higher. We didn’t get our first true skyscraper — the 600ft NatWest Tower, now Tower 42 — until the close of the 1970s. We just didn’t have the knack.
Small wonder that we took a breather for a decade after that. Skyscraper service resumed with the stainless-steel obelisk of César Pelli’s 771ft Canary Wharf tower (1991). And when the IRA blew up the old Baltic Exchange in the City, thus providing a convenient excuse to build a new tower, Foster stepped up to the mark. His first attempt was a graceless super-scraper like a giant stick of celery. That was thrown out. But his second was the Gherkin. And it works well because it understands that it is part of a larger urban composition.
For towers to work in a great city, they can’t be plonked down just anywhere. Parisians were so traumatised by the arrival of the ghastly 689ft Tour Montparnasse at the start of the 1970s — stuck out awkwardly to one side of the centre — that they forthwith corralled all new towers in the western La Défense business district, an antecedent to our Canary Wharf. Better, perhaps, to have allowed a second small cluster of towers at Montparnasse to cloak the thing somewhat. Because, with skyscrapers, one-off buildings really don’t work too well. They need a companionable huddle. And this, despite all our make-do-and-mending down the years, is what we have in the City of London.
Go to Parliament Hill or Alexandra Palace, and take in those glorious vistas across the whole of London. There is the cluster of towers developing in the City, the Gherkin stuck like a marker pin right in the middle of everything. And there, out east, is the less satisfactory cluster of Canary Wharf. They’ve really packed ’em in down there. The towers are too close, too similar, too regimented. In contrast, the City benefits from having a radial, medieval street pattern. Take a look at its towers closer in, from Waterloo Bridge. They execute a stately dance. It’s a glorious sight, plainly a world-class capital. But it is, of course, about to change again.
They’ve just started work on Richard Rogers’s tower at 122 Leadenhall Street, aka the “cheese grater”. This tall, narrow wedge of a building, near the Gherkin, will comfortably outstrip both it and Tower 42, rising to 737ft. It will be finished by 2010. But two others will be taller: the Heron Tower will come close to 800ft, while pride of place in the City cluster will go to the spiralling 945ft Bishopsgate Tower, hopefully dubbed the Pinnacle.
Both are by the US architects KPF, who could be described as a class commercial outfit. KPF may not have anything like the international standing or originality of a Rem Koolhaas or a Zaha Hadid or a Foster, but they know how to build towers. It’s what they do. They have another pair — slimmer residential ones, 525ftand 470ft — planned for the gargantuan Victoria Transport Interchange development, perilously close to Buckingham Palace and the Palace of Westminster. Ooer: cue heritage hand-wringing.
But hang on. Building those means getting rid of the hatefully banal 330ft Portland House from 1962: a reminder of just how bad we used to be at building skyscrapers. I’d rather have two good, taller, slimmer towers than one stumpy, horrible one. On the basis of the crude consultation models I’ve seen so far, it’s too early to make a judgment on the merits of the emerging Victoria mini-cluster of skyscrapers. We need to see the detail.
We’re transfixed by height — how about Renzo Piano’s proposed “Shard” at London Bridge, for instance? If it is built, it will finally breach the 1,000ft barrier in London. But the arguments about such buildings are nearly always stupid — they are about height rather than quality. Never mind how tall it is: is it any good? What’s it like at street level?
The view from the people who determine these things in London — which means Ken Livingstone’s cluster of architectural advisers and the well-meaning but usually rather hopeless bureaucracy known as Cabe, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment — is that tall is good, so long as it is in the right place. So long as the towers don’t get in the way of the complex of “viewing corridors” of the drum and dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. There are plans to narrow those corridors. Then there is English Heritage, the conservation quango headed by Simon Thurley, which tends to resist the new wave of ’scrapers, usually fruitlessly.
What’s exercising English Heritage at the moment is the public inquiry for the the Uruguayan-American architect Rafael Viñoly’s “walkie-talkie” tower proposal at 20 Fenchurch Street, for one of London’s most active commercial developers, Land Securities, the firm behind the Victoria proposals. It will impinge on views of the Tower of London, but that’s not the point. So does the Gherkin. The point is not whether you’ll be able to see it, it’s whether you will want to.
Viñoly has letters of support from Foster, Rogers, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and others. They stick together, top architects. It’s just as well he didn’t ask me. It’s a tower that gets wider towards the top, its facade curling forwards alarmingly. Forget “walkie-talkie”, they should call it the Hunchback. It may well have a marvellous conservatory-like viewing gallery on top. But compared to the Gherkin, the Cheese Grater, the Pinnacle, the Shard, even Tower 42 — all of which have the sense to slim down on the upper levels — it is perverse. It looks slightly better if you turn the picture upside-down, but not much.
The Hunchback is scarcely elegant, then, but it gets one thing right. It is not trying to be top dog in London. Its height — if not its shape — is appropriate for its position. It would be on the edge of the stately dance, a peasant gazing enviously at the more graceful moves of the gentlefolk at the centre of the floor.
The world’s best skyscraper cities tell us that the ensemble is what matters, not the individual building. Close up, the Empire State Building is horribly crude; from afar, Manhattan is magic. When Canaletto painted (and carefully doctored) his views of London with all its spires, it was the overall composition that mattered. Nothing has changed. We need a new Canaletto to appreciate the possibilities of our new wave of tower-building.
17.3.07
SCIENCE & RELGION
Almost 14 billion years after the big bang, and 3.5 billion years since the first bacteria appeared on Earth, humans occupy just one branch of the tree of life.
We share an evolutionary limb with other eukaryotes, creatures whose membrane-bound cells carry genetic material. Our biological neighbors developed over time just as we did, by the evolutionary forces of mutation and natural selection. They include plants, fungi, and slime molds.
Despite that humble company, said Martin A. Nowak, Harvard professor of mathematics and biology, humans have a profound "claim to fame" — language. He called the acquisition of complex expression "the only truly interesting thing to happen in the last 600 million years," and the most important of all evolutionary events.
Language is as little as 100,000 years old, said Nowak in a March 8 lecture at Harvard Divinity School. But it is the evolutionary gift that accelerated cultural development, allowing us to become "hopeful, generous, and forgiving," he said. "We are as different from animals as any theologian wants [us] to be."
"Evolution and Christianity" was the ninth in a series of lectures sponsored by the Evolution and Theology of Cooperation Project at Harvard University. The three-year project, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, is directed by Nowak and Sarah Coakley, Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor of Divinity.
In most of the 4 billion years of life on Earth, gene sequences were the only way information was encoded for evolutionary purposes, said Nowak, who is the director of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Then along came human language, an ever-growing repertoire of signals that evolved from adapting ancient regions of the primate brain once only used to decipher sounds and control facial muscles.
Language propelled evolution out of a purely genetic realm, where it still operates, into the realm of culture, Nowak said. "There's a structural evolution of the brain going on, in a very, very fast timescale."
Language accelerates cooperation, an evolutionary feature that — starting with the first multicellular creatures — is present in robust organisms. "You move to higher levels in evolution whenever you manage to get cooperation," Nowak said.
Cooperation made even social organisms more robust, said Nowak, and allowed humans to rapidly evolve into "the world champions of cooperation."
In cultural terms, cooperation evolved first as kin selection, by which close relations have the highest social importance. Nowak quoted the late British evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "I will jump into the river to save two brothers — or eight cousins."
Cooperation spread out to include groups, clusters of groups, and finally to humanity at large. "Indirect reciprocity," for instance, is the closest that evolutionary cooperation comes to what might be called altruism. It means helping others simply because you've observed others being helped. "That's really what people are always about," said Nowak.
In mathematical terms, he said, kinship selection and other mechanisms of the evolution of cooperation show a favorable cost-benefit analysis. In social terms, "the winning strategies have nice attributes," said Nowak. That's where being "hopeful, generous, and forgiving" comes in, he said, along with the evolution of religious feeling.
The evolution of cooperation lays out common ground for the scientist and the theologian.
"Religion, like language, is a human universal," said Nowak, and should not threaten scientists. In turn, he said, evolution should be "as little problem for religion as [the concept of] gravity."
But in the public arena, evolution is still an issue that keeps scientists and theologians apart, and creates undeniable tensions.
Religious opposition has coalesced into three camps. Creationists hold that the Book of Genesis is a scientific account of historical events on an Earth just 6,000 years old, and therefore evolution is impossible. That's "bad science," said Nowak. And perhaps bad theology, too, since it runs counter to the idea, adapted by Thomas Aquinas and other theologians, that God is best explained in terms of analogy.
Proponents of "intelligent design" hold that evolution is largely correct, but that some living structures are so complex they require the hand of God to create. "Weak science," said Nowak — and weak theology, since it posits a God "who is sometimes here and sometimes away."
Scientific atheism holds that science provides everything needed to understand the world. It's the strongest challenge to religion, said Nowak. "But to say science disproves God," he said, "goes beyond what science really says."
Science and religion provide analogous functions, said Nowak. They allay human suffering by offering guidance through a mysterious world, while simply occupying "different ecological niches in the brain," he said. "Science and religion are two essential components in the search for truth. Denying either is a barren approach."
By itself, intellectual (scientific) life is "inherently unstable," and is unable to answer the kind of questions religion can — like the meaning of life, said Nowak. "There are no equivalent questions in science."
To illustrate the instability of relying on science alone, he used the analogy of Mr. Spock on "Star Trek." He was "only a scientist — hyperrational," said Nowak. "And that's always funny."
Science and religion fulfill separate roles, like two languages always searching for the right word. "Even as a scientist, I am free to assume the best possible world," said Nowak, who is content with the parallel lexicons of the two realms. "That makes perfect sense."
We share an evolutionary limb with other eukaryotes, creatures whose membrane-bound cells carry genetic material. Our biological neighbors developed over time just as we did, by the evolutionary forces of mutation and natural selection. They include plants, fungi, and slime molds.
Despite that humble company, said Martin A. Nowak, Harvard professor of mathematics and biology, humans have a profound "claim to fame" — language. He called the acquisition of complex expression "the only truly interesting thing to happen in the last 600 million years," and the most important of all evolutionary events.
Language is as little as 100,000 years old, said Nowak in a March 8 lecture at Harvard Divinity School. But it is the evolutionary gift that accelerated cultural development, allowing us to become "hopeful, generous, and forgiving," he said. "We are as different from animals as any theologian wants [us] to be."
"Evolution and Christianity" was the ninth in a series of lectures sponsored by the Evolution and Theology of Cooperation Project at Harvard University. The three-year project, supported by the John Templeton Foundation, is directed by Nowak and Sarah Coakley, Edward Mallinckrodt Jr. Professor of Divinity.
In most of the 4 billion years of life on Earth, gene sequences were the only way information was encoded for evolutionary purposes, said Nowak, who is the director of Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. Then along came human language, an ever-growing repertoire of signals that evolved from adapting ancient regions of the primate brain once only used to decipher sounds and control facial muscles.
Language propelled evolution out of a purely genetic realm, where it still operates, into the realm of culture, Nowak said. "There's a structural evolution of the brain going on, in a very, very fast timescale."
Language accelerates cooperation, an evolutionary feature that — starting with the first multicellular creatures — is present in robust organisms. "You move to higher levels in evolution whenever you manage to get cooperation," Nowak said.
Cooperation made even social organisms more robust, said Nowak, and allowed humans to rapidly evolve into "the world champions of cooperation."
In cultural terms, cooperation evolved first as kin selection, by which close relations have the highest social importance. Nowak quoted the late British evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "I will jump into the river to save two brothers — or eight cousins."
Cooperation spread out to include groups, clusters of groups, and finally to humanity at large. "Indirect reciprocity," for instance, is the closest that evolutionary cooperation comes to what might be called altruism. It means helping others simply because you've observed others being helped. "That's really what people are always about," said Nowak.
In mathematical terms, he said, kinship selection and other mechanisms of the evolution of cooperation show a favorable cost-benefit analysis. In social terms, "the winning strategies have nice attributes," said Nowak. That's where being "hopeful, generous, and forgiving" comes in, he said, along with the evolution of religious feeling.
The evolution of cooperation lays out common ground for the scientist and the theologian.
"Religion, like language, is a human universal," said Nowak, and should not threaten scientists. In turn, he said, evolution should be "as little problem for religion as [the concept of] gravity."
But in the public arena, evolution is still an issue that keeps scientists and theologians apart, and creates undeniable tensions.
Religious opposition has coalesced into three camps. Creationists hold that the Book of Genesis is a scientific account of historical events on an Earth just 6,000 years old, and therefore evolution is impossible. That's "bad science," said Nowak. And perhaps bad theology, too, since it runs counter to the idea, adapted by Thomas Aquinas and other theologians, that God is best explained in terms of analogy.
Proponents of "intelligent design" hold that evolution is largely correct, but that some living structures are so complex they require the hand of God to create. "Weak science," said Nowak — and weak theology, since it posits a God "who is sometimes here and sometimes away."
Scientific atheism holds that science provides everything needed to understand the world. It's the strongest challenge to religion, said Nowak. "But to say science disproves God," he said, "goes beyond what science really says."
Science and religion provide analogous functions, said Nowak. They allay human suffering by offering guidance through a mysterious world, while simply occupying "different ecological niches in the brain," he said. "Science and religion are two essential components in the search for truth. Denying either is a barren approach."
By itself, intellectual (scientific) life is "inherently unstable," and is unable to answer the kind of questions religion can — like the meaning of life, said Nowak. "There are no equivalent questions in science."
To illustrate the instability of relying on science alone, he used the analogy of Mr. Spock on "Star Trek." He was "only a scientist — hyperrational," said Nowak. "And that's always funny."
Science and religion fulfill separate roles, like two languages always searching for the right word. "Even as a scientist, I am free to assume the best possible world," said Nowak, who is content with the parallel lexicons of the two realms. "That makes perfect sense."
TONY JUDT
“We probably face a world that is divided much more horizontally than vertically. We have a class of world travellers - as the medievals might have called them, 'clerks' - who speak Latin, or English, and feel at home in Tokyo, New York or Singapore. Underneath are the 'villains', the serfs, who don't speak English, who don't travel - beyond the occasional cheap vacation flight abroad - and who are still very much in a national, local cultural world. They are as much separated from their own airport people as from serfs of other countries.”
It is the gaps between cultures that concern Judt most, and especially the division between America and Europe.
One aspect of that rift is their attitude to Israel. On October 3, Judt was due to give a talk to an independent think- tank, called Network 20/20 about the “Israel lobby” in the US. The event was being held at the Polish Consulate in New York. Hours before he was scheduled to stand up, the consulate cancelled the talk, under pressure, Judt alleged, from influential Jewish groups in New York such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.
The cancellation brought outraged support from a roster of Judt's fellow academics and intellectuals. They said there had been an attempt to intimidate and shut down free debate - seeming to prove the point that Judt had wanted to make. A 114-signature letter was written to Abraham Foxman, the prominent national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and published in The New York Review of Books. But it is still not clear who telephoned whom, when, and to apply what sort of pressure during the incident, which The New York Observer called “l'affaire Judt”.
Judt says he doesn't lie awake at night worrying about his critics. But, still, he seems to me to carry a sense of anger and despondency about him. He admits that although he likes many Americans, he does not altogether like America. “Tom Friedman is talking through his hat. The world is not flat at all. The world is shaped still in many ways as it was in my generation by culture, by the place you grew up, by the assumptions you make about the place of religion in public life, about the relative importance of the state and the individual.”
As the breach with Europe widens - “Now we are passing through a period of America's simultaneous withdrawal and resentment at the world,” he says - he knows for sure which side he wants to be on.
“I am tempted at least twice a day to go back to Europe,” he says.
It is the gaps between cultures that concern Judt most, and especially the division between America and Europe.
One aspect of that rift is their attitude to Israel. On October 3, Judt was due to give a talk to an independent think- tank, called Network 20/20 about the “Israel lobby” in the US. The event was being held at the Polish Consulate in New York. Hours before he was scheduled to stand up, the consulate cancelled the talk, under pressure, Judt alleged, from influential Jewish groups in New York such as the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.
The cancellation brought outraged support from a roster of Judt's fellow academics and intellectuals. They said there had been an attempt to intimidate and shut down free debate - seeming to prove the point that Judt had wanted to make. A 114-signature letter was written to Abraham Foxman, the prominent national director of the Anti-Defamation League, and published in The New York Review of Books. But it is still not clear who telephoned whom, when, and to apply what sort of pressure during the incident, which The New York Observer called “l'affaire Judt”.
Judt says he doesn't lie awake at night worrying about his critics. But, still, he seems to me to carry a sense of anger and despondency about him. He admits that although he likes many Americans, he does not altogether like America. “Tom Friedman is talking through his hat. The world is not flat at all. The world is shaped still in many ways as it was in my generation by culture, by the place you grew up, by the assumptions you make about the place of religion in public life, about the relative importance of the state and the individual.”
As the breach with Europe widens - “Now we are passing through a period of America's simultaneous withdrawal and resentment at the world,” he says - he knows for sure which side he wants to be on.
“I am tempted at least twice a day to go back to Europe,” he says.
HAMLET DEADLOCKS JURY
Is He to Be Guilty, Or Not to Be Guilty?
By Peter Marks
Washington Post
Poetic justice is not so easily meted out, as a distinguished gaggle of lawyers and psychiatrists found out when gathered on Thursday night to consider the sanity of Hamlet.
After two hours of mock-trial arguments at the Kennedy Center -- presided over by no less a jurist than Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy -- a jury of Washingtonians deliberated over whether Hamlet was in his right mind when he stabbed Polonius to death. In elegant tribute to Shakespeare's enigmatic masterpiece, the jurors deadlocked, 6 to 6.
Sitting on the Eisenhower Theater stage under a towering portrait of Shakespeare, Kennedy told Joshua Drew, the young actor playing the sullen defendant, that the verdict "leaves us no choice but to remand you to the pages of our literary heritage."
With that, the exercise -- applying modern legal and psychological standards to a character who must qualify as the most tirelessly scrutinized in Western literature -- was complete. "The Trial of Hamlet," the brainchild of Justice Kennedy and the Shakespeare Theatre Company, proved to be a diverting showcase for some incisive analytical thinkers. But the mind that remained the most penetrating was the one that inspired the proceedings.
The trial became such a hot ticket that the Kennedy Center was compelled to move it from the 500-seat Terrace Theater to the 1,150-seat Eisenhower -- which it proceeded to sell out. (This being, after all, the deposition-and-affidavit capital of the world.) Over the course of the 2 1/2 -hour event, participants and audience got to ponder the implications of this legal end-around: What if the melancholy Dane had survived the blood bath in Act 5 and had to answer to the criminal justice system?
The hypothetical placed "Hamlet" somewhere between Elsinore and the set of "Law & Order." The defense team -- trial lawyer Abbe D. Lowell and Court TV personality Catherine Crier -- had the familiar job of getting their client off, which in this case meant proving that he was mentally incapacitated and thus not capable of standing trial. The prosecution (attorneys Cristina Arguedas and Miles Ehrlich) was compelled to mine the "record" for evidence of Hamlet's soundness of mind -- that he was perhaps, as Shakespeare put it, "noble in reason."
Back and forth the debate went, with an expert witness testifying for each side: Jeffrey Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, spoke of a delusional Hamlet; Alan Stone, professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard, described a wholly rational Hamlet. (The defense, by the way, chose not to call the defendant.) To bolster their points, the expert witnesses pointed to the ideas and experiences of a variety of real people, from Lincoln and Kierkegaard to John W. Hinckley Jr. and Son of Sam.
Strategically, this led to an intriguing division: The defense had to argue that Hamlet's lyrical monologues were not timeless soliloquies but rather examples of a crazy person talking to himself -- and that his encounters with the ghost of his murdered father, imploring him to avenge his death, were "command hallucinations." (Lieberman officially gave the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type.)
It became, oddly enough, the prosecutors' job not to attack the defendant as much as to hold him up as a complex and eloquent figure. To refute, for example, the defense's suggestion that the "To be, or not to be" speech was delivered by a confused man contemplating suicide, the prosecutors argued that those were among the most beautiful lines ever uttered on the human condition.
"This was method, not madness," Arguedas declared.
"Just a sick boy who needs help," countered Lowell.
The facts of the case are well known: During a heated argument with his mother in her bedchamber (for those following the transcript: See Act 3, Scene 4), Hamlet hears a voice from behind an arras, or wall hanging, draws his dagger and, before bothering to identify the source, stabs at it through the fabric.
The lawyers resourcefully looked for support at the crime scene. To Crier, for instance, Hamlet's first utterance after killing Polonius -- responding "Nay, I know not" to his mother's "What hast thou done?" -- suggested a psychic breakdown, a lack of control over his actions.
Among the attorneys, Lowell was the most theatrical. He went after Stone, the prosecution's expert. Isn't it true, he asked the professor, that "those who can, do -- and those who can't, teach?" He got a bigger laugh when he slid in an allusion to the 2000 presidential election -- and a bigger one still with a dig at Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
Although the jurors (three high-school students, three college students and six local arts donors) were escorted offstage to render judgment, Kennedy and the other participants sat at the lip of the stage and talked some more. That attempt at a casual colloquy proved a little strained -- it would have provided a perfect opportunity to take questions from the eager audience -- but it did yield the most telling response of the evening.
Kennedy wanted to know whether anyone thought Shakespeare's intention was to foster debate over Hamlet's madness, and when he turned to Stone, the professor offered up his own powerful defense of Shakespeare and the more profound sorts of issues the play explores.
"It's suffering, as in the human condition," he said. "He doesn't want us to see a madman. He wants us to see ourselves, in the mirror held up to nature."
By Peter Marks
Washington Post
Poetic justice is not so easily meted out, as a distinguished gaggle of lawyers and psychiatrists found out when gathered on Thursday night to consider the sanity of Hamlet.
After two hours of mock-trial arguments at the Kennedy Center -- presided over by no less a jurist than Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy -- a jury of Washingtonians deliberated over whether Hamlet was in his right mind when he stabbed Polonius to death. In elegant tribute to Shakespeare's enigmatic masterpiece, the jurors deadlocked, 6 to 6.
Sitting on the Eisenhower Theater stage under a towering portrait of Shakespeare, Kennedy told Joshua Drew, the young actor playing the sullen defendant, that the verdict "leaves us no choice but to remand you to the pages of our literary heritage."
With that, the exercise -- applying modern legal and psychological standards to a character who must qualify as the most tirelessly scrutinized in Western literature -- was complete. "The Trial of Hamlet," the brainchild of Justice Kennedy and the Shakespeare Theatre Company, proved to be a diverting showcase for some incisive analytical thinkers. But the mind that remained the most penetrating was the one that inspired the proceedings.
The trial became such a hot ticket that the Kennedy Center was compelled to move it from the 500-seat Terrace Theater to the 1,150-seat Eisenhower -- which it proceeded to sell out. (This being, after all, the deposition-and-affidavit capital of the world.) Over the course of the 2 1/2 -hour event, participants and audience got to ponder the implications of this legal end-around: What if the melancholy Dane had survived the blood bath in Act 5 and had to answer to the criminal justice system?
The hypothetical placed "Hamlet" somewhere between Elsinore and the set of "Law & Order." The defense team -- trial lawyer Abbe D. Lowell and Court TV personality Catherine Crier -- had the familiar job of getting their client off, which in this case meant proving that he was mentally incapacitated and thus not capable of standing trial. The prosecution (attorneys Cristina Arguedas and Miles Ehrlich) was compelled to mine the "record" for evidence of Hamlet's soundness of mind -- that he was perhaps, as Shakespeare put it, "noble in reason."
Back and forth the debate went, with an expert witness testifying for each side: Jeffrey Lieberman, director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute, spoke of a delusional Hamlet; Alan Stone, professor of law and psychiatry at Harvard, described a wholly rational Hamlet. (The defense, by the way, chose not to call the defendant.) To bolster their points, the expert witnesses pointed to the ideas and experiences of a variety of real people, from Lincoln and Kierkegaard to John W. Hinckley Jr. and Son of Sam.
Strategically, this led to an intriguing division: The defense had to argue that Hamlet's lyrical monologues were not timeless soliloquies but rather examples of a crazy person talking to himself -- and that his encounters with the ghost of his murdered father, imploring him to avenge his death, were "command hallucinations." (Lieberman officially gave the diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type.)
It became, oddly enough, the prosecutors' job not to attack the defendant as much as to hold him up as a complex and eloquent figure. To refute, for example, the defense's suggestion that the "To be, or not to be" speech was delivered by a confused man contemplating suicide, the prosecutors argued that those were among the most beautiful lines ever uttered on the human condition.
"This was method, not madness," Arguedas declared.
"Just a sick boy who needs help," countered Lowell.
The facts of the case are well known: During a heated argument with his mother in her bedchamber (for those following the transcript: See Act 3, Scene 4), Hamlet hears a voice from behind an arras, or wall hanging, draws his dagger and, before bothering to identify the source, stabs at it through the fabric.
The lawyers resourcefully looked for support at the crime scene. To Crier, for instance, Hamlet's first utterance after killing Polonius -- responding "Nay, I know not" to his mother's "What hast thou done?" -- suggested a psychic breakdown, a lack of control over his actions.
Among the attorneys, Lowell was the most theatrical. He went after Stone, the prosecution's expert. Isn't it true, he asked the professor, that "those who can, do -- and those who can't, teach?" He got a bigger laugh when he slid in an allusion to the 2000 presidential election -- and a bigger one still with a dig at Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
Although the jurors (three high-school students, three college students and six local arts donors) were escorted offstage to render judgment, Kennedy and the other participants sat at the lip of the stage and talked some more. That attempt at a casual colloquy proved a little strained -- it would have provided a perfect opportunity to take questions from the eager audience -- but it did yield the most telling response of the evening.
Kennedy wanted to know whether anyone thought Shakespeare's intention was to foster debate over Hamlet's madness, and when he turned to Stone, the professor offered up his own powerful defense of Shakespeare and the more profound sorts of issues the play explores.
"It's suffering, as in the human condition," he said. "He doesn't want us to see a madman. He wants us to see ourselves, in the mirror held up to nature."
Sr. Chavez & Pan-Latin America
What We See in Hugo Chávez
By LUISA VALENZUELA
Buenos Aires
THE fervent welcome that greeted President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela during his visit to Argentina a week ago was inexplicable to some Argentines and left others indignant. Many here tend to mistrust populism and demagoguery, finding them redolent of Peronism. But even among the wary, a window of hope has opened, with Mr. Chávez as its symbol.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since Juan Perón’s time. And it was the expansive waters of our own broad river that defined the vectors of force last weekend. For once, the tensions in the American hemisphere flowed on an east-west axis along the Río de la Plata — which means “River of Silver” and by extension, very appropriately in this case, “River of Money.”
The struggle was about energy, both concrete and metaphorical, and equally combustible in both forms. Across the river in Uruguay’s capital, Montevideo, the presence of President George W. Bush caused red-hot passions to flare, along with sizable protests like those he faced in Brazil. In Buenos Aires, my city, on the opposite bank of that river of money, red abounded as well, though in our case it had a very different connotation. Red was the color of President Chávez’s jacket and of many of the flags brought by the masses who flooded into a stadium to hear the president of Venezuela speak.
Unlike the homogenous rallies of Peronist times, the 30,000 people in this crowd came from very diverse backgrounds. In Argentina, the economic crisis of December 2001 significantly altered not only our social dynamic but our semantics. We no longer talk about the “pueblo” — which means town or village as well as people. Now we talk about the “gente,” which also means people, but with a different nuance, derived as it is from the Latin gens meaning race, clan or breed.
The new vocabulary transcends distinctions of class: the middle classes have now merged with the poor to demand their rights. Hence many students and professionals were in attendance that day, not necessarily attracted by the figure of President Chávez himself so much as by the anti-imperialist opportunity he symbolized. We Argentines, who once imagined ourselves more sophisticated, or more European, than the citizens of neighboring states, were brought closer to the rest of the continent by our impoverishment, and we find ourselves more open to the idea of pan-Latin American solidarity.
Perhaps last week’s crowd also recognized the part that President Chávez’s monetary aid played in our recuperation of that illusion known as “national identity.” For Argentina had virtually disappeared as an autonomous country during the presidency of Carlos Menem from 1989 to 1999, the era of our “carnal relations” with the United States, which took the form of spurious privatizations and a fictitious exchange rate.
While many in Argentina would, nevertheless, not hesitate to call the Venezuelan president a clown or a madman, it’s worth keeping in mind that a very heady dose of megalomania is a prerequisite for even dreaming of confronting a rival as overwhelmingly powerful as the United States — which is also led by a president viewed, in many quarters, as a clown and a madman.
President Chávez’s weapons of seduction are his superabundance of petrodollars and his obsession with a shared Latin American project. His plan is to realize the dream of Simón Bolívar, the old utopian vision of Latin American integration that today seems more viable than ever before.
It may be that President Bush chose to venture into these forgotten Southern latitudes to counter that vision. In Brazil, he tried to draw attention to the production of ethanol, an ecologically correct rival to petroleum that nonetheless depletes the earth. And in Uruguay, all Mr. Bush seemed to be trying to do was irritate the other governments of South America by promoting a Free Trade Area of the Americas project in opposition to Mercosur, the southern common market formed in 1991 by Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and, somewhat later, Venezuela.
These things sometimes backfire. President Bush found himself repudiated on one bank of the Plata while President Chávez was getting ovations on the opposite one: each contender in his corner and the moral triumph to the last man left standing, as in a boxing ring.
Some Argentines severely criticized President Nestor Kirchner for providing his Venezuelan counterpart with such a platform, complaining that President Chávez bought and paid for his visit by showering Argentina with dollars and benefits. Not so. The bargain seems fair — oil in exchange for agricultural technology and experts — and since he came to power, President Kirchner has made his country the platform for several other presidents from the Americas: Fidel Castro, Michelle Bachelet, Evo Morales and President Chávez himself, on previous occasions.
Two major Argentine characteristics are in play here: intrinsic distrust and the need for immediate gratification. Mr. Chávez awakens both of these inclinations, and it’s interesting to see them balance each other out. The dream of a single-currency Latin American Union, modeled on the European Union, to create, insofar as possible, a buffer against the hegemony of the United States no longer seems so impossible.
I’m no political analyst; I have delved into politics only as a fiction writer. But I’m an optimist by nature, and the feeling of empowerment that President Chávez instills, and that various South American governments are endorsing, strikes me as a good engine for further progress — a means of upgrading ourselves from the status of someone’s backyard into that of a truly autonomous region, beyond Mr. Chávez, Mr. Bush and every other form of demagoguery.
Luisa Valenzuela is the author of “Black Novel With Argentines” and “The Lizard’s Tail.” This article was translated by Esther Allen from the Spanish.
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