On an evening in October 1986, two well-dressed men approached Dan Rather on Park Avenue, began asking him, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” and then started pummeling him. They were never identified or caught, and the motive behind their question and their attack was never explained.
In a 2002 article in Harper’s magazine, however, Paul Limbert Allman “solves” the riddle. The answer: New Yorker short story writer Donald Barthelme.
As his analysis unfolds, and hypothetical interactions between Rather and Barthelme become bitter vengeance. Allman begins to sound more than a bit like Charles Kinbote, the protagonist of one of my absolute favorite novels ever, Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. Which is not who you want to sound like if you’re really gunning for credibility.
Pale Fire is structured an eponymous epic poem by a dead poet named John Shade, and the increasingly unhinged footnotes added by Kinbote, Shade’s self-deluding neighbor/colleague/groupie/stalker.
So if the Pale Fire logic holds, then [calculates on fingers] I think that means Allman attacked Dan Rather. Or that Allman is a figment of Rather’s imagination. It could go either way.
The frequency: Solving the riddle of the Dan Rather beating [harpers.org via jessamyn]
“Kenneth, what is the frequency?” [wikipedia]
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the making of, by greg allen