April 14, 2015 Books The Sam Weller Bump By Nina Martyris Dickens the authorpreneur. Bigger than the Zuckerberg Bump, bigger even than the Colbert Bump or the Oprah Bump—arguably the most historic bump in English publishing is the Sam Weller Bump, triggered not by a tastemaker with a megaphone but a sharp-talking, warm-hearted servant. In June 1836, Charles Dickens published the fourth installment of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, one of the many shilling monthlies that were the backbone of Victorian publishing. Printed on low-cost acidic paper and sold in pale green wrappers, they were aimed at the middle and newly literate working classes on the lookout for entertaining fare. But many of these readers had grown accustomed to the gobbets of melodrama offered by the cheap press—they were utterly uninterested, then, in the picaresque misadventures of Mr. Pickwick and his chums as they bowled through England collecting scientific information for the betterment of mankind. The first three installments of Pickwick barely sold four hundred copies. But that June, sales began to grow by orders of magnitude: from four hundred to four thousand to an astounding forty thousand as the serialization drew to a close in November 1837. Everyone up and down the social ladder began to devour Pickwick, from butchers’ boys to John Ruskin, who read Pickwick so often he claimed to know it by heart. Copies were passed from hand to hand and read aloud as family entertainment. The critics effused with praise. Dickens, who was twenty-four and expecting his first child, had become a household name. Read More
April 14, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Leavened by Absurdity By Sadie Stein Innocuous leavening agent, or terrorist threat? Before today, I’d never done my citizen’s duty by reporting a suspicious package to authorities. I guess I’d never seen anything suspicious enough. And in a place like New York, the bystander effect sometimes doesn’t seem to obtain—even if you did see, say, a smoking suitcase riding the subway, three hundred people would have already called it in by the time you managed to get your phone out, each one of them surely going home to announce to friends and family that he, personally, had averted a bombing. But today, I acted. I was in the security line at JFK when I spotted it: an orange can of Davis baking powder. It was unmistakable to anyone who’s done any baking, even if you sometimes buy Clabber Girl because you like the packaging. There it was, standing on the floor, right next to a security cordon and looking, to my eyes, very suspicious indeed. Read More
April 14, 2015 On the Shelf Flunking Derrida, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Derrida’s instructor pans his style. Oh, and his substance. “It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians … It was also a pickup scene. Edward Aveling, a science lecturer, playwright, and political activist—and a notorious flirt—described the reading room as ‘in equal degrees a menagerie and a lunatic asylum’ and made a tongue-in-cheek proposal that it be segregated by sex so as to bring about ‘less talking and fewer marriages.’ ” (If you’re getting any ideas—don’t. The reading room has since closed.) As an adult, Derrida transformed English and humanities departments around the world; as a student, he had struggles of his own. When he was twenty, he submitted a paper on Shakespeare that earned him a failing grade, along with such (arguably prophetic) remarks as “quite unintelligible” and “totally incomprehensible”: “In this essay,” the instructor wrote, “you seem to be constantly on the verge of something interesting but, somewhat, you always fail to explain it clearly.” Dickens’s nighttime constitutionals gave him a chance to “see through the shining riddle of the street,” as G. K. Chesterton put it—but they also granted him a chance for emotional escape. “It seems as if they supplied something to my brain,” Dickens wrote, “which it cannot bear, when busy, to lose.” This month marks Trollope’s bicentennial, and though his renown is taken more or less for granted today, it wasn’t always so: Tolstoy found “too much that is conventional” in his work, and Henry James called him “mechanical.” Today in teens: they’re still out there, they are legion, they are wild, oppressed, they are everything you fear and want to be. “Teens are the only true nihilists left. Teens can use guns and have sex but their brains aren’t even fully formed. This is an amazing fact … Teens only care about the immediate culture. They are not stuck in dead-time nostalgia. They have never heard of Missy Elliot. They do not care. That is OK. Teens plow their carts over the bones of the dead.”
April 13, 2015 Correspondence Sailing with Faulkner By Dan Piepenbring Eudora Welty watering in her garden. A letter from Eudora Welty to Jean Stafford, September 2, 1949. Faulkner and Welty had met once before, when she presented him with the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction. William Faulkner took us sailing on his sailboat on a big inland lake they’ve cut out of the woods there—waves and everything, big. We were late getting there—got lost and went to Blackjack, Miss.—and then when we found the lake there was Faulkner, cruising around, and headed right for us, through the dead cypresses and stumps and all, pulled down his sail and took the oar, and hollered, “You all better take your shoes off and get ready to wade,” which we did, sinking—got pulled on board and then we all sailed around, all quiet and nice—what a wonderful person he is, the most profound face, something that nearly breaks your heart though, just in the clasp of his hand—a strange kind of life he leads in Oxford, two lives really. We never, either time I’ve been with him, talked about anything bookish of course—it’s his life, not his opinions,—that seems to be with you all the time. He can do or make anything, and can sail beautifully. We got in his 20 year old Ford touring car which he hunts and fishes and goes over the farm in, with holes in the floor (“well, I know where all the holes are”) and when we couldn’t open a back door he said, “There’s a cupboard latch on it,” you ought to see that car.
April 13, 2015 The Revel Remembering the Revel By Dan Piepenbring Norman Rush receives the Hadada Award. Our Spring Revel was last Tuesday, and it was, as Gay Talese put it simply, “a real party,” a party for the ages. About five hundred of us gathered at Cipriani 42nd Street to honor Norman Rush with the Hadada Award, presented by James Wood, who recited one of my favorite jokes from Subtle Bodies: “Pinot noir meant don’t urinate at night.” Hilary Mantel took the stage to award Atticus Lish the Plimpton Prize for Fiction; “I am extremely fortunate to receive this award,” Lish said, “as is anyone who receives recognition in any field. Few people get much of a gold star no matter what they do in life.” Mark Leyner received the Terry Southern Prize for Humor—which he has publicly promised to hang above his bed, like a mobile—from Donald Antrim. Never in recorded history have the words Sugar-frosted nutsack been uttered before so large and so gracious a crowd. Last, The Paris Review bade a fond farewell to our longtime publisher, Antonio Weiss, who has absconded to Washington to serve as the counselor to the Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. Our loss is the nation’s gain. It was a spectacular evening, as the photos below attest. You can read accounts of the fun from Womens Wear Daily, New York Social Diary, and Page Six—and you can see even more photos of the revelry here. Happy spring, and see you next year! Photos by Clint Spaulding / © Patrick McMullan / PatrickMcMullan.com Read More
April 13, 2015 Our Daily Correspondent Testimony of Simplicity By Sadie Stein Quaker in disguise? “Personal pride does not end with noble blood. It leads people to a fond value of their persons, especially if they have any pretense to shape or beauty. Some are so taken with themselves it would seem that nothing else deserved their attention.” —William Penn “Upside Down” was the lead single on Diana Ross’s 1980 disco record Diana. The song, written by Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers, topped the charts for a month, and it’s one of the great late-era disco dance hits: catchy, unexpected, propulsive, feisty. The plot is simple. A boy is turning her upside down, inside out, round and round, et cetera. And then: Read More