(This is a stub.)

This book is fundamental. It's challenging to tackle on its own. This episode of The Relentless Picnic did a deep dive into its world and helped me understand it a lot more. Now often find myself seeing in Trow's "contexts." ( )

George Trow's "Within the Context of No Context", an essay originally published in the New Yorker, is a long complaint about the vulgarization of American culture by the mass media interspersed with anecdotes from the author's past. The former is what made the essay's reputation, but it's the latter that is more revealing. Like many hell-in-a-handbasket types, Trow combines a refined sensibility with a profound solipsism, leading him to misdiagnose his personal sadness as a generalized cultural malaise.

As for the malaise, you've heard it all before. According to Trow, in recent decades (meaning the 60s and 70s, since the essay was published in 1981), a tranquil, contemplative, and authentic American cultural scene has been poisoned by a loud, crass, celebrity-worshiping, bauble-shilling rot promulgated by tabloids and television. To his credit, he manages to find a novel way to package this time-worn complaint. Much of the essay consists of brief (ranging from a few sentences to a few pages) aphoristic sections in which Trow's terse newspaper-like diction is put into the service of a weirdly compelling vagueness, a sort of lobotomized New Journalism. His metaphors skitter right up to the edge of making sense, then slink teasingly away, leaving a sympathetic audience plenty of space to read in their own desired meanings.

Of course a lot of American mass culture really is vulgar, so along the way Trow can't help but make some cogent observations. For example, he keeps returning to the idea of a gap between the "grids" of "two-hundred million" and "intimacy". Reading charitably, he seems to be making a valid observation about how strange it is that people gossip about celebrities as if they were acquaintances. Elsewhere Trow breaks out of his navel-gazing funk to interview an editor from People who describes the way that magazine tries to maximize sales by timing its cover photos to be just behind the zeitgeist. It's a fascinating bit of media anthropology, but it's also the only place where Trow steers the focus away from his own curmudgeonly obsessions. Mostly he just ambles around bemoaning things, oblivious to the fact that others have advanced the same complaints under the heading of "alienation" or weltschmerz years before anyone even dreamed of television.

This book contains another essay, "Collapsing Dominant", written fifteen years later as a kind of follow-up. Though essentially the same stuff (the world is still going to hell, though Trow is surprisingly fond of Quentin Tarantino), this one feels more honest because it is openly autobiographical. Trow talks at length about his family, a New York publishing dynasty, and his distress at watching the eastern WASP establishment culture they represented fall out of favor in the 1960s just as he was becoming an adult. The free-floating anguish of the earlier essay now shows itself as originating in Trow's sense of being denied his birthright. This is hopeless snobbery, of course, but Trow comes off better here for being forthright about his frustrated sense of entitlement, and spells out more of the personal details that lie at the heart of his angst. Perhaps most revealing is an aside about his time at Exeter in the late 1950s, when he belonged to a clique who called themselves "negos", because they had a negative attitude towards the world that sprung from the deep well of disaffection known only to the most bright, sensitive, and privileged young men. Perhaps this is the secret of Trow's enduring appeal: he speaks to the clever adolescent so many of us once were. ( )

Although the book is framed as a critique of media culture — the replacement of history and facts with celebrity — it is in fact a description of the obliteration of tradition and meaning in America — of substantial and deep ritual.

Trow employs the backdrop of Television as a means of uncovering the spirit of the age — the goat and the adding machine. He captures, in a very short span, the winds from European universities that swept across America in the 70's. Trow was partying at Studio 54, riding the cusp of a wave that swamped the country. This little book is a descriptor of the zeitgeist.

Trow is careful to style the book in such a way as to mirror the snapshot-anecdotal nature of the media storm, and so the structure serves the content. A well crafted analysis, written in a broken, poetic form that brings home the disparate and fragmented nature of contemporary living in the USA.

An important and necessary book for anyone who wants to understand this country and the climate in which we breathe: post-modern nihilism. You have to know where you are, in order to get where you want to go. ( )

This is an embarrassing attempt to criticize television culture. A victim of its own criticisms, perhaps Trow's incoherency is an attempt to illustrate what happens to the critical faculties of individuals who watch too much television... but I have a feeling the author is actually under the impression that he is a sharp thinker with a mighty pen. ( )

On odd days I think this essay is facile crap, no better than what it criticizes*; on even days I think it's profound, an astute analysis of what's gone wrong. But I do continue to think about it, fully a quarter- century after reading it. And while I don't think it's an *important* book, it sure as hell is an *interesting* book.
(This reprint includes an even more self-referential essay nominally *about* the title essay - which only amplifies my ambivalence.)

*One of the founders of the "National Lampoon" then decries the vulgarization of American culture?!? ( )