Auchincloss Named ‘Ambassador’ at 88
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

“Let us toast his good taste and important position as observer of New York life,” said Schuyler Chapin, toasting his friend Louis Auchincloss, who was named “Ambassador to the Upper East Side” on Tuesday by the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts.
Mr. Chapin said Mr. Auchincloss, 88, was the natural successor of Henry James and Edith Wharton. A former Houghton Mifflin executive, Joseph Kanon, remarked of Mr. Auchincloss’s works, “His concerns are moral.”
To audience amusement, Mr. Kanon said the author was so prolific that even his publisher didn’t know how many books he had written. The flap copy of his book “East Side Story” said he had written 58 books, but inside there were 60 other books listed. The audience further chuckled when Mr. Kanon said he had logged onto Amazon.com, which listed 102 titles. Then a self-deprecating Mr. Auchincloss approached the microphone. He said, given the emphasis that evening on the multiplicity of his output, he made note that Emily Bronte wrote only one novel.
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GRACEFUL PARTY As an events coordinator for Borders, Carol Hoenig is used to assembling crowds for others. But in the library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, friends had gathered to celebrate her own novel, “Without Grace,” (iUniverse), about a daughter’s search for a mother who abandoned her family. Seen were Carmine De Sena, co-author of “The Air Down Here: True Tales from a South Bronx Boyhood” (Chronicle Books); Newmarket Press president Esther Margolis; Philip Rose, author of “You Can’t Do That on Broadway” (Limelight Editions); movie producer Sue Pollock; ethnomusicologist Henrietta Yurchenco, author of “Around the World in 80 Years” (Music Research Institute). The party was sponsored by iUniverse and the Small Press Center, where Ms. Hoenig is on the advisory committee.
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SECOND HELPINGS Yale writer in residence Anne Fadiman, editor of “Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), took part in a discussion with authors David Michaelis and David Samuels on Tuesday. The panel was moderated by Andre Aciman at the New York Public Library. (The Knickerbocker served as a contributing editor at the American Scholar, the quarterly magazine that Ms. Fadiman previously edited.)
Ms. Fadiman likened the rereading of a book to meeting up with an old lover: “We wonder with anxiety if the encounter will be less exciting; less exciting, maybe, because perhaps we’ve become less exciting with age.”
She later mentioned how in childhood one reads to “lose yourself” in a text, while later in life one may reread the same to text to “find yourself.”
The audience laughed when she noted, “I looked into Bartlett’s Quotations” to see what others had said on the subject of rereadings, and there “I found but one quotation – it was by my father,” the late man of letters, Clifton Fadiman, relating to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.”
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FROM PAC-MAN TO THE PATRIOT ACT University of Chicago law professor and former dean Geoffrey Stone and Judge Richard Posner debated the Patriot Act last week at the New York Public Library. Seen in the crowd were Ronald Collins, author of a book on Lenny Bruce, and Columbia University historian and sociologist Jonathan Cole.
Fighting terrorism, Judge Posner said, differs from routine police enforcement by focusing a larger scope on prevention. Mr. Stone countered by saying that gathering information on American citizens in a wide net is generally “not innocuous.”
The two differed over the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Stone praised it, while Judge Posner said it was an advocacy organization “with no inner gyroscope” and was “preoccupied with trivia.”
Judge Posner discounted the importance of cases involving the Ten Commandments in and around courthouses. He went on to describe one explanation for the abundance of displays of the Ten Commandments around courthouse squares and city halls that he had read. The audience laughed when he said that director Cecil B. De-Mille, while promoting the movie “The Ten Commandments,” “thought it would help if they were better known,” and worked with the Fraternal Order of Eagles in encouraging their distribution.
Another entertaining moment – surely a milestone of highbrow meeting pop culture – occurred when Judge Posner, the former Microsoft antitrust mediator and author of a book on intellectuals, discussed a case where an Indianapolis City Council ordinance restricted the access of minors to video games. Judge Posner doubted that violent video games were linked to increased levels of violence in youth. “Fairy tales are full of violence,” he told the audience. But Judge Posner recalled how, during the appeals process, he had gone and tried video games himself – for the first time.
The audience laughed when he said, “I thought, I like them, actually.” He enjoyed one in which “zombies come and then more come,” approaching at faster intervals. But Judge Posner said he distinguished these from “more sinister” video games such as one with a sniper on an upper story of a building shooting at passers-by below.