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December062006

Four on George W.S. Trow

Filed under: In Memoriam   Tagged: , , , , ,

Scott McLemee writes in his Inside Higher Ed column: “Nobody was smarter than George Trow about the bad faith that comes with being ‘plugged in’ to streams of randomized data. He once defined a TV program as ‘a little span of time made friendly by repetition.’ (Friendly, the way a con man is friendly.) That was long before most of us started spending ever more of our lives in front of another kind of screen.”
 
In The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg writes a moving tribute. “His impact on the magazine was as noticeable as it was, at first, anonymous. His unsigned Talk of the Town stories—chronicling popular music, the remnants of Edith Wharton-era “society,” Harlem flash, and the new culture of marketing and strobelike celebrity—broke the mold of fusty “visits” and facty catalogues. The pieces were jazzy, telegraphic, emphatic.” As noted earlier, selections from “In the Context of No-Context” and other Trow pieces, including a report (with Hertzberg) from an animated conversation about a Bob Dylan concert, are online. (And while you’re there, listen to the vintage WBAI Bob Fass and Dylan extravaganza. It will blow your mind.)

Mark Feeney wrote Trow’s obituary for The New York Observer: “Mandarin prose and mandarin pose often coincide, of course. What’s rare is their sharing the page with an abiding sense of civic virtue. That idea of patriotic engagement sets him apart from Henry James, with whom one might think Trow would neatly align. James often seemed slightly pained at being American. Trow would have fit right in as a James character, except that he would have terrified James.”
 
And Greg Bottoms wrote about Trow in the September 2005 Believer: “He’s a cranky conservative in a way, a modernist at heart, some kind of neo-New Critic trafficking in the language and outré fragmented and self-conscious structures of ‘literary postmodernism,’ especially its accent on how narrative and meaning are constructed, in an effort to take grand swings at the mores and effects of postmodern culture, as if it were a smiley-face piñata.”

2 comments

Comments

Who else did any of the heavy lifting McLuhan’s insights beg for. Trow’s print-bias made him the perfect foil.

David LightbourneDecember 09, 2006

Also check Alison Rose’s book (Better than sane). Trow is one of the main characters there.

Jan de JongDecember 11, 2006

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