http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/obituaries/01trow.html
he died like 2 weeks ago but i didnt see the times obit til today
had no idea he was living in naples!!
my pilgrims progress is one of my favorite books, mixing genuine 1st-person cultural/political/journalist history with batshit contrarianism (naming ‘my best friends wedding’ the greatest american movie of the last 20 years or something like that ‘because it understands america better than all others’)
within the context of no context is great for actually making the argument that tv news is banal & deadening without sounding like a out-of-touch asshole—hes so funny & likeable & weird
but like what was that thread about old cranks, where people quoted from crotchety geniuses like e.m. cioran & beckett & r crumb?? trow was a virtuoso at that shit too
heres the first part of within the context of no context http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/articles/061204fr_archive01
I tried to read “Context of No Context” but it seemed phony to me, like a kind of lite-Zen approach to all this “postmodernism” stuff that he figured nobody properly understood anyway, so why not clean up on it. That was like 10 years ago, at the zenith of the second-wave post-structuralist academia that I was embroiled with at the time, and I think what I despised was what I perceived as a lack of RIGOR.
everything I know about him came from the Michael O’Donoghue bio describing their collaborations around the early Nat’l Lampoon days.
the lack of rigor is the best part!! my favorite thing in the times obit is about how his most-used phrase was ‘youll have to trust me on that one’ and among the things you have to trust him on is everything that has to do with his thesis
the best ideas in WtCoNC are obfuscated by a lot of (to me) completely uneccessary layers of attempts to be clever about dumb stuff.
the NYer excerpt just reminded me of why I don’t feel bad about giving up on it 60% through