Dear Jack Slain, who fled Cravath, Swain and Moore in the late ’70s for the comforts of teaching corporate law at NYU, also taught accounting for lawyers. In that class he often cited a compelling example of looming obsolescense: the buggy whip manufacturer, circa 1915. Not a trade for the dawn of the Model T era, nor ever again to provide the least prospect for business success.
I have often reflected on buggy whips over the last quarter century as I watched successive loves undermined, left behind, and overtaken by technology or changing tastes: Amtrak; record players; post cards; letter-writing ; home-baking; card catalogues; newspapers; books.
So it is with dread, recognition, and grief that I read this requiem for literary criticism in The Nation. So I’ve chosen a “slowly dying” profession! Another venture in buggy-whip production. Literary criticism joins the museum rooms of my now-middle-aged life.
