The Paris Review

Jean-Francois Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure (detail), 1855, oil on canvas.

Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs.

M. J. Hyland: From the age of eighteen to twenty-one, I worked any job I could get my hands on. One of these jobs was selling fake paintings door-to-door. There were four of us in the crew. We were taken out each night in the company car—a white minivan—and dropped on suburban street corners with black folio bags. I’d been instructed to pretend I was the artist.

My first night was the one I remember best. The suburb was a newly built estate, each house a mirror of its neighbor. The grass hadn’t grown on the front lawns yet, and there were cars in all the newly paved driveways—not flashy cars, but not beat-up Holdens either. I walked to the door of a house and knocked.

“Sorry to bother you at teatime,” I said, “but my name’s Marcia Bradshaw and I’m an art student at university. I’m going from door to door to see if I can sell some of my work.” I unzipped the bag and took out a painting. “I need to raise some money so I can finish my degree,” I said. “My parents have no money and my scholarship only lasted two years.”

Life is ruthless, and its bestowal of fortune arbitrary and capricious. I’d been born to morons and mine was a shabby life. I stood on this woman’s doorstep and told the lie about the paintings as easily as I did because, although it was a lie, it was also true. I believed my own lies and told them well. I wanted money, and, like my criminal father, I wanted it the easy way. Read More »

Jean-Fracois Millet, Peasant Spreading Manure, 1855, oil on canvas.

Most dust jackets list only literary accomplishments, but I’ve always been a fan of offbeat author bios. So I asked some of my favorite writers to describe their early jobs.

Wells Tower: When I was nineteen, I worked briefly as a garbage man. My boss’s name was Puddn’. He was a vast, sunbaked person with such a pronounced Southern accent that I couldn’t understand much of what he said. The job’s oppressions were what you’d expect: maggots, smells made worse by the summer heat. By the end of each day, I hated everyone who owned a garbage can. I did not hate Puddn’, though, who made many gifts to me of the wonders he found in the trash: penknives, silver cutlery, old watches, some of which I keep with me still.

DBC Pierre: I once worked in an advertising agency in Trinidad. My biggest triumph was masterminding a soft-drink campaign with a live Amazon parrot, which said the drink’s name. We scoured the island for a parrot that could sit still and look great and speak. It took a while, but I was determined. Eventually, we found a gentle young man from the coastal provinces whose only friend in the world was an Amazon parrot. The parrot spoke and sat on his shoulder and looked great. The parrot and the man were like a couple in love. The soft-drink client was impressed, and the campaign went ahead: money was invested, the bird photographed. But in between the photo shoot and the film shoot, we stopped the car to buy drinks at a service station and the bird fell out. A clattering old truck actually swerved to run it over. Such was the world of advertising.

Tobias Wolff: I made a living—a very good living—the summer of 1962 guessing ages and weights in the carnival section of the Seattle World’s Fair. One thing I learned: lowball the women’s stats. Sometimes it’s better to lose than to win.

Chris Flynn is the books editor at The Big Issue and the fiction editor at Australian Book Review.

“Liz Taylor knows it, the president knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.” —Andy Warhol

Evel Knievel on the set of Viva Knievel, 1977.

Coca-Cola is the brand par excellence, the marca di tutti marche, the brand the other brands dream about being (even though the brands never sleep). Nothing else is even close. When it comes to what a brand is, Coke, as they say, is it. According to the branding consultancy Interbrand, Coke has a “brand value” of seventy billion dollars, which is twelve billion more than its nearest competitor, IBM. That’s a strange measurement, brand value, because it takes several nebulous things into consideration, including probably love. While many people are fond of Coke, some of them to the point of addiction, who even likes IBM?

Coke’s status is not merely economic or pop cultural or emotional or psychological. Coca-Cola transcends those categories to compete in the broader realm of speech, of monosyllables. We’re told that Coke is the second most recognized word in any language, after okay.

There are 6.9 billion people in the world, and according to The Coca-Cola Company they drink 1.6 billion Cokes a day. I don’t have the figures for this, but it may be that right now the only thing people on this planet are doing more than breathing is drinking Coke. There may be more people drinking Coke this very minute than sleeping. There may be more people drinking Coke than awake.

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In Mad Men Unbuttoned, Natasha Vargas-Cooper sheds light on the reality that inspired everyone's favorite TV show. Drawing on references from John Cheever, Mary McCarthy, Coco Chanel, and Draper Daniels (the real-life Don Draper), she illustrates the challenges of making another cultural period come to life. She recently answered my questions via e-mail from her home in L.A.

How did this book come about?

Last year I had quit my job in labor politics, left my boyfriend of five years, fled from Brooklyn and moved back in with my parents. Then my dog ran away. After a bout of some well earned wallowing, I sprang up at 4 A.M. and decided I’d rewatch the show. I popped in the DVDs, started a blog for kicks, figuring I’d be putting my degree in history to work. I got a call from HarperCollins about a month later.

Can you talk about the themes that give the book its structure?

I think the show depicts the social fissures that began to appear during the late 1950s and eventually entered the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s. The show has three main prisms through which it examines these changes: advertising, domestic life, sex. (I'm specifically interested in Peggy’s sex life since she is at the mercy of all the shifts in sexual mores given her age.) So the main themesof the book are the anxieties and exuberance that come with such accelerated change.

Why are people so delightfully geeky about the details and cultural theory behind Mad Men?

We’re watching the foundation of out modern taste come together—that’s fascinating! The show lends itself to a gleeful analysis. Its use of culture is deliberate. References to pop culture or politics aren’t thrown in to be cute or suggestive, but to enhance the themes of the show or our understanding of the characters. I think the audience appreciates not being treated like a mope so they get jazzed about it.

In the chapter on the books of Mad Men, you use original artwork as stand-in covers for classic literature (see below). Did you commission these specifically?

Yes I did. I saw Christina Perry’s Mad Men posters floating around online and I instantly fell in love with them. When we were trying to get the rights to reprint the covers like Atlas Shrugged and The Group and I thought, "These aren’t really in line with the mood of the show. I’d like to have some original art work, so why not get the poster lady?"

Have you ever tried to sneak onto the set of the show? Hunt down Matt Weiner in one of the coffee shops near the studio?

Nope, I’m big on dignity.

Do you dress up or throw Mad Men parties? Read More »