Aaron had literally done nothing in his life “to make money.” He was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good. He was brilliant, and funny. A kid genius. A soul, a conscience, the source of a question I have asked myself a million times: What would Aaron think? That person is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”
In that world, the question this government needs to answer is why it was so necessary that Aaron Swartz be labeled a “felon.” For in the 18 months of negotiations, that was what he was not willing to accept, and so that was the reason he was facing a million dollar trial in April — his wealth bled dry, yet unable to appeal openly to us for the financial help he needed to fund his defense, at least without risking the ire of a district court judge. And so as wrong and misguided and fucking sad as this is, I get how the prospect of this fight, defenseless, made it make sense to this brilliant but troubled boy to end it.
Fifty years in jail, charges our government. Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you” ethics that dominates our time. That begins with one word: Shame.
“How was The Hobbit?” my wife asks.“It was actually OK,” the youngest one says.
“Are you kidding?” I say. “It was awesome.”
“Seriously?” says the oldest one.
“It was great!” I say. “Rocks fighting each other, people all flying on eagles everywhere.”
“Should I go see it?” the middle one asks, narrowing his eyes sceptically.
“You should go tomorrow,” I say. “The only problem I had is that people speaking Elvish makes me drowsy. I slept through this whole, like, elf board meeting in the middle, but then, when I woke up, there were…”
“Hang on,” the middle one says. “Are you recommending a film that you fell asleep in?”
“I fall asleep in most films,” I say. “It’s not necessarily a criticism.”
“How can they make three whole films out of such a short book?” the oldest one says.
“It’s not that short,” I say.
“How would you know?” my wife says. “You’ve never read The Hobbit.”
I turn to look at her. “You’re goddam right I haven’t,” I say.
[Lionel Trilling’s] last book, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), is a battlefield report from the conflict between his private and public selves, in the form of a history of the “moral idioms” that art deploys to conceal and reveal personality. He ends by contrasting the demonic madness of someone who fantasizes he is Christ—a madness praised by the psychiatrist David Cooper as a doorway to truth—with the responsible sanity of the real Christ, who accepted “the inconveniences of undertaking to intercede, of being a sacrifice, of reasoning with rabbis, of making sermons, of having disciples, of going to weddings and funerals, of beginning something and at a certain point remarking that it is finished.”Trilling, as he saw it, had accepted all these “inconveniences,” interceding in campus disputes, sacrificing himself to his wife and (in her words) “to decency,” reasoning with professors, making lectures, training academic disciples, attending public functions. The last words of his book were Christ’s last words from the cross: “It is finished.” Trilling had at last united his warring “Olympian” and “sacrificial” impulses in a single straight-faced claim that his life and career had been Christlike.
A few chapters earlier he had mentioned “the peculiar bitterness of modern man, the knowledge that he is not a genius.” As in all his generalizations about what “we” know and believe, he may have made a silent, tentative exception for himself.
But when it comes to the style of a great man’s discourse, I can speak with a great deal less prejudice, and maybe with somewhat more competence, for I have earned most of my livelihood for twenty years past by translating the bad English of a multitude of authors into measurably better English. Thus qualified professionally, I rise to pay my small tribute to Dr. Harding. Setting aside a college professor or two and half a dozen dipsomaniacal newspaper reporters, he takes the first place in my Valhalla of literati. That is to say, he writes the worst English I have even encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.But I grow lyrical.
Apted has said that the subject with whom he most closely identifies is Nick, the precocious farm boy who goes to Oxford and thereafter moves to America with dreams of making an advance in nuclear physics, only to abandon his research and become a university professor. Apted left England for Hollywood and, like Nick, married and divorced and remarried. But the story of intelligent, ambitious, thoughtful Nick is a story about failed aspiration and the dawning, mortal recognition of limitation. While apparently content—or at least not discontent—with his work and his second marriage, Nick has not done what he once meant to do. I wonder whether Apted—who, beyond the singular accomplishment of the “Up” series, has made films that have been successful, workmanlike, and unremarkable—feels anything of Nick’s sense of resignation, too. And this would be the point to acknowledge that, having moved from a provincial English town to America by way of Oxford, I feel my own painful kinship with Nick, who, in “56 Up,” articulates the loss experienced after self-imposed exile: the sense of distance from the beloved landscape of one’s birth; the remaining visits, so few as to be counted on one hand, that will be made back home to one’s elderly parents in decline.It’s Nick who, in “56 Up,” best sums up Apted’s achievement. The self he sees represented on the screen, changing and growing over time, isn’t him, exactly, he suggests. His story, like that of any individual, is too broad to convey with a twenty-minute segment every seven years. But, Nick says, it’s a portrait of someone. “It’s a picture of everyman,” he says. “It’s how a person—any person—how they change.” He’s right, of course. This is a series about us as much as it is a series about the individual fates of the children plucked from their classrooms in the early sixties. Apted’s achievement, it turns out, has been quite different from that which the project originally proposed. Rather than revealing the pressures of exterior social forces, the series shows the gradual inner development of empathy and sympathy—on the part of its participants and on the part of its maker. It demands the same enlarging sympathy from its audience. It’s strenuous viewing. It insists that we care, deeply, as we watch Apted and his subjects grow up, and as we follow them down.
Can you imagine if our clothes were Internet-enabled? Can you imagine if you lost a sock? You could send out a search and sock No. 3117 would respond that it’s under the couch in the living room. But maybe that’s not a good idea because you could tell your wife you’re at work but then she texts you to say your shirt says it’s down at the bar.
When I first saw Gibbons’ work in close quarters … I nearly came out in hives. I was so astonished by the flamboyance of his modelling, and by the fineness of his cutting and undercutting. And then I went back to my workshop in upstate New York and stood at my desk — I remember, with my hands on my hips — and I looked at my own work almost with a sense of despair.
Even today, the archetype is so fixed and commonplace as to be thunderously obvious: Long-haired men in tight pants, playing crushingly loud music on guitars and drums in front of tens of thousands of people, and held upright by groupies, mounds of blow, and the luxury of deluxe tour buses and multimillion-dollar record contracts.And yet this archetype has all but disappeared from pop culture. “Mainstream rock” barely exists anymore. To understand how we got to this point, we’re not going to learn anything by examining for the umpteenth time how the Velvet Underground invented alternative music, or watching all of the approximately 214 documentaries on punk, or talking to Ian MacKaye about why Fugazi never sold T-shirts at shows. What we need instead is a Winners’ History of Rock and Roll that tells the stories behind some of the biggest bands of all time. If we can learn how and why those bands became popular, and what those stories tell us about a larger narrative taking place in American culture over more than 40 years, we can track the fissures and failures that eventually caused rock to slouch toward irrelevance — and determine whether it can (or should) wage a comeback.
“The way Hope builds his House” by Emily Dickinson.Amherst Library recently made her complete manuscripts available online.
Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is a truly remarkable book.