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| George Trow. |
The New Yorker photo
Putting 90 years of the New Yorker magazine in context
GUEST BLOG By Konstantin Kakaes, Fellow, New America
Foundation--I spent the final summer
of the 20th century cutting up The New
Yorker with a razor. Though the dot-com boom was in full swing, the
magazine still kept an internal paper archive sorted by date and author. The
protocol I was to follow as an unpaid intern working in The New Yorker’s
library called for me cut the three columns of prose into strips and then paste
those strips into alphabetized scrapbooks. We also cut out the cartoons and
indexed them by keyword so that the editors might search past cartoons to avoid
repeating a joke.
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My other task, once the
week’s issue had been duly cut and pasted, was to respond to letters to the
editor. A surprising number of these were requests, often vaguely worded, for
copies of an article the letter-writer had read decades before. I had no hard
deadline for clearing the backlog of such letters, and so, even as I continued
assembling the archives each week, I had the leisure to browse the past.
… a young staffer took notice
of my browsing appetites and told me that I should really read George W.S.
Trow, whose article “Within the Context of No-Context” I photocopied that
summer and have carried around with me since.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
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| Konstantin Kakaes |
Konstantin
Kakaes is a program fellow with the International Security Program at New
America. He was a summer intern at The
New Yorker.
I could, and did, read Joseph
Mitchell and AJ Liebling, John Hersey and John McPhee, Hannah Arendt and Frank
Sullivan. There was of course far more worth reading than I could read, and I
read more than I remember now. But my lasting lesson of that summer came when a
young staffer took notice of my browsing appetites and told me that I should
really read George W.S. Trow, whose article “Within the Context of No-Context”
I photocopied that summer and have carried around with me since.
The opening sentences of
Trow’s piece still floor me:
“Wonder was the grace of the
country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in.
Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built
so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the
marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment’s quiet. What
was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be
wonder in that? The size of the con?”
I’m not going to try and
summarize the essay here; it does not lend itself to meaningful summary. If
those first sentences don’t make you want to run to your nearest Internet Kiosk
and download a copy for yourself, then stop reading now.
What was it now that was
built so big?
ABOUT GEORGE TROW
George William Swift Trow, Jr.
(September 28, 1943 – November 24, 2006) was an American essayist, novelist,
playwright, and media critic. He worked for The New Yorker for almost 30 years,
and wrote numerous essays and several books. He is best known for his long
essay on television and its effect on American culture, "Within the
Context of No Context," first published in the November 17, 1980 issue of
The New Yorker, and later published as a book. This was one of the few times
that the magazine devoted its central section to one piece of writing.—Wikipedia.
It’s difficult, in writing
this appreciation, to suppress the temptation to just keep on typing, to repeat
Trow’s essay here. The world has changed since Trow’s essay was published in
1980, and changed more since I first photocopied it in July of 2000. At the
time, it was easier for me to find the essay than it would have been for almost
anyone else. It took me five minutes. Anyone else would have had to find a good
library with back issues of The New Yorker going at least 20 years back. This would
take, likely as not, hours, perhaps days. Not impossible, but requiring some
effort.
Today, in February 2015, 90
years after the first issue of the magazine, it’s so very easy for you to
download images of the pages on which Trow’s words were printed, in giant
offset printing presses, 35 years ago. You don’t need to go to an Internet
Kiosk, which is precisely the point. How does the fact that the Internet is
most everywhere jar and nudge and bewitch us? So many things are easy now.
This ease illustrates a
profound dislocation. Trow’s essay interrogates that ease, pushing beautifully
past the slaphappy idea that this ease is an improvement that simply makes life
better. In “Within the Context of No-Context,” he is writing largely about
television, and not of the Internet. But his “mirages of pseudo-intimacy” are
not to do solely with television, and boy does the essay read well today.
Among his concerns, salient
this week as we reflect on The New Yorker’s 90th birthday, is what magazines
do:
“[M]onth after month, year
after year, a beneficial thing will occur; a rhythm and a trust will be
established between the editors and the readers, and both groups will begin to
bring more to the exchange than they did at the start, which is to say that
each will bring the history of the relationship to the relationship as it
unfolds. For the editors, the gift of history will be the natural formation of
a certain authority; for the readers, the gift will be the comfort of trust.
Nothing like this will occur in the case of the magazine based on a deceptive
or convoluted agreement.”
There is more, but I will let
you read him at your own pace. Pages later, he returns to the question of the
authority of magazines: “Consider it: all transactions involving authority
involve an attempt to alleviate the sense of loneliness that is a condition of
life.”
What Trow did was to sculpt a
grammar with which to discuss the amorphous effects of technological change on
our society and our psyches. He did this without resorting either to
sentimentalizing, or to some reductive social science that takes a poll of our
feelings about these changes. Nobody gave Trow this authority. With the
virtuosity of his prose, he seized the right to make such statements. His
detachment gives him power.
“So when popularity is the
measure things that were popular in the past can give a comfort. This works two
ways. Very different. Not to be confused. But arising out of a single cause:
the hunger for history.”
And so we turn to
retrospectives on 2015 as seen today, and 2015 as seen in Back to the Future
Part II. I’ll spare you the links here,
since hypertext would rather deflate the spirit of praising Trow, but there’s
been a slew of articles, starting at the end of 2014, that have tripped over
one another trying to parse how are present-day reality measures up the
imagination of a 1989 movie. I clicked on many of these links; I too remember
thinking hoverboards were cool when I was nine. Things that were popular in the
past can give a comfort.
“The idea of choice is easily
debased if one forgets that the aim is to have chosen successfully, not to be
endlessly choosing.”
Trow is calling out the
intoxicating fantasy of having endless choices for numbing us to what it means
to choose.
Trow is calling out the
intoxicating fantasy of having endless choices for numbing us to what it means
to choose. Tinder, anybody? Netflix?
It is not my purpose here to
claim that Trow was some sort of prophet, before his time. But he endures.
“The message of many things
in America is “Like this or die.” It is a strain. Suddenly the modes of death
begin to be attractive.”
I’ve thought of this passage
often when discussion of Uber, or Kickstarter, or any number of other
innovations. To be skeptical of innovation, of any innovation—to suggest that
novelty is not, in and of itself, virtue, is, at this moment in time, to be out
of touch with what it is to be a right-thinking American.
Related: Why we need a New
York Times in every state.
When celebrating the
anniversary of a magazine like The New Yorker, there is certainly plenty more
to celebrate in its half-million or so published pages. Many of the articles
worth celebrating are exquisitely skillful executions of a formula of
journalistic attentiveness. Some, like Frank Sullivan’s Mr Arbuthnot, are just
damn funny. But still, among writers from E.B. White to Jill Lepore, Trow’s
essay stands apart. It’s confusing, and repetitive, and full of wonder.
“It followed that people were
comfortable only with the language of intimacy. Whatever business was done had
to be done in that language.” And so, our business here is this: let me whisper
in your ear now, gently, the advice given to me fifteen years ago: read George
Trow.
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