The Amphibium, pt. 3
The Amphibium, pt. 3
This is Vol. 3 of the Amphibium.
A little more context
The April issue of Harper’s Magazine has an essay by Christian Lorentzen about the current state of book criticism. Many of you will have already read or heard about it. To those of you who haven’t, I recommend it. The essay’s title, “Like This or Die,” is drawn from a quote by George W.S. Trow:
"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."
The quote comes from “Within the Context of No Context,” an essay about (broadly speaking) the transition from print culture to televisual culture, which occupied most of the November 17, 1980 issue of the New Yorker.
If you’re at all familiar with Trow—who is a cult figure in certain quarters of the literary world but relatively unknown everywhere else—you are familiar with this essay. There are lots of “one book” writers, but I can't think of another writer as well regarded as Trow whose reputation rests as singularly on one piece of magazine writing as Trow’s does. (It is, admittedly, a long piece of magazine writing, but not quite book-length; it has been published a few times in book form but always padded out with some other writing.)
Trow was actually fairly prolific, at least before things went south for him toward the end of his life. He was a staffer at the New Yorker for three decades. (He eventually quit in protest when Tina Brown handed the reins of one issue to Roseanne Barr.) He wrote a huge number of the magazine’s more ephemeral pieces—Talk of the Towns (should that be Talks of the Town?) and the short, humorous fiction they used to publish under the rubric "Casual"—during a time when these pieces ran without bylines. His one other really monumental piece appeared a few years before Context: a 1978 profile of Atlantic Records chairman Ahmet Ertegun, which ran over two issues under the wonderful headline, “Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse.”
I highly recommend this profile—which, unlike Context, is available in full online—to readers who know Trow only from that more famous essay, or even as an introduction for people who’ve never heard of him before. One of the people from whom I learned the most about magazine writing and editing, Luke Mitchell, once made the case to me that “Eclectic, Reminiscent” was, in fact, a better piece of magazine writing qua magazine writing than "Context," because it has just as many smart things to say about the cultural moment but says them while actually conforming to all the genre constraints of the magazine profile. (Yes, these are the kinds of conversations that editors have.)
Anyway, to give you some flavor of Trow’s writing, here is how he introduces Ertegun:
At lunch, Ahmet was not entirely comfortable with me, or I with him. We had known each other for several years. I first met him at a time when his hegemony in the music business had reached a climax. For some time after that, I tried to find the locus of his authority and could not. I was by turns infatuated and disappointed. In time, I learned that this was appropriate—that Ahmet was himself always infatuated and always disappointed, and that at the heart of his achievement there was no answer stated or question posed but, rather, only this: the rhythms of infatuation smartly expressed. Then I found that to notice the manifestations of infatuation (which I had perceived at the start as ephemeral) was instructive. At the moment when I met Ahmet, at the beginning of this decade, it was assumed that the style of the years to come would derive from the principal styles of the nineteen-sixties—and this expectation has not been disappointed entirely—but then as I saw Ahmet together with important custodians of the style of the nineteen-sixties and noted his greater power and presence, I began to understand that it would be his style (eclectic, reminiscent, amused, fickle, perverse) that would be the distinctive style of the first years of the new decade, that Ahmet would achieve this new importance as exemplar precisely because he lacked the inflexible center I had confusedly looked for, and that he would achieve it through his intuitive, obsessive mastery of the modes of infatuation, this mastery having made it possible for him to absorb into himself the power of several archetypal American styles that had fallen into disuse among Americans but still had great power when they were expressed in a manner that the contemporary public could accept, which is to say when they were expressed in a manner that divorced style from substance and had no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting. There was something moving about this—that so much was possible through restlessness—but there was something disturbing about it, too, and the fact that my approach to Ahmet had become as unstraightforward as his own mode (to which I had adapted myself) made it difficult for the two of us to see one another without some embarrassment.
Almost everything of any length that Trow wrote could be described as an ambivalent lament for the passing of a mid-20th-century hetero-normative masculine ideal of authority or “seriousness.” (Trow himself was gay.) There are certainly elements of this attitude that haven’t aged well, but much of what he had to say about television in Context goes a hundred-fold for Internet culture, and the governing sensibility he's describing here—the rhythms of infatuation, restlessness, style divorced from substance, with no reference to any authority that could be perceived as inhibiting—now seems ubiquitous, which makes Trow a surprisingly astute guide to our own age.
How many more?
Trow was also a very funny writer—he was one of the founders of the National Lampoon—and the Ertegun profile has a great comic foil in the part of Stephen Stills, who was a central part of Ertegun's 1960s roster. (Stills' first band, Buffalo Springfield, was signed to Atlantic Records, and when they broke up, Ertegun helped along the formation of Crosby, Stills & Nash; it was Ertegun's suggestion that fellow Buffalo Springfielder Neil Young join the band for their second album.) In Trow's profile, Stills is depicted as too earnest and unsophisticated—too Sixties, basically—to make the transition to the eclectic, fickle, perverse Seventies that people like Ertegun and Mick Jagger made so naturally.
My early musical education took the not-un-Trovian form of listening to my Baby-Boomer parents' records, and the music that mattered to me growing up was their music, not the music of my own generation. Events like the death of Prince or the release of the Michael Jackson documentary Finding Neverland remind me of the formative role that these figures had for so many people my age. For me, that role was played by bands like CSNY, who stopped mattering to the culture at large years before I was born.
As it happens, there is a new "biography" of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, by the music journalist David Browne, coming out in a few weeks, and I've been looking through an advance copy of the book. Those who have read the first few Amphibiums may have gathered that I have an abiding fascination with the way that culture responds to politics, even as I've committed to making this newsletter cultural rather than political. This fascination led me to skip straight to the pages where Browne discusses the legendary recording and release of the song "Ohio."
The story goes like this: On the morning of May 19, 1970, the band was rehearsing in San Franscisco when someone went out for groceries and bought a copy of Life magazine. The shootings at Kent State had happened two weeks earlier, and the cover of Life showed students leaning over one of the victims, with the headline "Tragedy at Kent." After seeing the cover, Neil Young picked up his guitar and wrote "Ohio" on the spot. A few days later, the band recorded the song in a couple of takes, and Ertegun rushed it out as a single. It was on the radio a month after the events that inspired it.
In the last Amphibium I wrote about the risks of the "aesthetics of velocity," but here is one great example of velocity as a virtue. The song became a central part of the process by which a generation expressed their outrage over the fact that their own government had shot and killed unarmed student protesters. Of course, the incantatory repetition of the phrase "four dead in Ohio" is not a piece of considered political analysis but an expression of primal outrage, which is precisely the kind of thing velocity is good for. What's remarkable is that it still holds its power fifty years later. And unlike certain protest songs written by Young's bandmates, it's never been made into a beer commercial. It still sounds too angry to sell anything.
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