The Paris Review's Blog, page 644

Assorted Hijinks: An Interview with Dick Cavett

Cavett on the cover of Brief Encounters.

Forty years ago, The Dick Cavett Show was a place where luminaries sparred (e.g., Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer), where reclusive stars lowered their guard (Marlon Brando, Katharine Hepburn, Laurence Olivier), and where musicians were actually interviewed about their music (David Bowie, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon). Cavett’s show put an early spotlight on the Watergate scandal, even taping a special episode with the senators in the very chambers where the hearings were taking place. It’s hard to imagine today’s major-network late-night shows doing anything similar.

The Nebraska-born Cavett began in New York as a broke Yale grad attempting an acting career while working as a copy boy at Time magazine. One afternoon, with a Time envelope in hand, he bluffed his way into The Tonight Show studios and handed said envelope, filled with jokes, to Jack Paar, who was then the show’s host. Paar used some of the material that night; Cavett was hired, and booked talent for Paar, briefly, until a writing staff slot opened up. Later, he wrote for fellow Nesbaskan Johnny Carson before going out on his own, so to speak.

Cavett, at seventy-seven, keeps busy—for the past several years he’s moonlighted as a columnist for the New York Times, and earlier this year he starred in Hellman v. McCarthy, a play off Broadway at the Abingdon Theater Company that explores the legal fallout from a time in ’79 when Cavett had the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy on his show. McCarthy lambasted Lillian Hellman: “She really belongs to the past. As I said in an interview, she’s such a dishonest writer that even her ands and thes are lies.” Cavett plays himself in the play. “The funny thing is,” he told the Times when it debuted, “I was the second choice for the role.”

In July, Cavett made a popular video with Dave Hill and Malcolm Gladwell about the Amazon-Hachette dispute; he followed this with an op-ed in Time about the prevalence of depression in show business (“Robin Williams Won’t Be the Last Suicidal Star”). That same week, PBS aired a special, “Dick Cavett’s Watergate,” about his role in having publicized the scandal.

Finally, last week saw the publication of Cavett’s new memoir, Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic Moments, and Assorted Hijinks , with a foreword by Jimmy Fallon. To discuss the book, late-night television, and his writing process, I rang Cavett at his house in Montauk.

In Cavett, your book from 1974, you quite vehemently said you had no interest in being a cultural critic.  But that ’s an arguably accurate descriptor for you.

I would never think of that as a description of me. It has a nice sound, I like the alliteration, but other than that, it surprises me when I’m  called that. Honestly, I don’t think it would have ever occurred to me to think of myself as a writer/commentator/ cultural critic /columnist. Especially for The New York Times. I’ve had op-ed pieces in the Times over the years when I was pissed off about something. But I always felt alien to friends who knew exactly what they wanted to be. I’m still wondering.

Anyway, the Times offer came over the transom—or out of the blue. (Is it National Cliché Week?) and I took the dive. (Another one.) I’ve been told I write well, maybe thanks to two English teacher parents who wrote well, so I took the job. It’s not for the money, I assure you. Someone said, do you want to try a column for the Times? And I thought, Sure, I guess. How much. And they said two days a week. Most writers would have meant how much money, I guess. And I said, that seems easy enough, and it was—for about three weeks when I was doing two a week. Then I started to get desperate, because I felt I had said everything I would ever be able to say in a column of any kind. It’s always nice when someone remembers a line correctly from something you’ve written. In a Sarah Palin column, I said, “She seems to have no first language.” And this is much remembered to this very day, I find. Strange.

You ’ve said that when you were writing for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson you were very prolific, that it just came out of you. But then when you turned to write for yourself, for your nightclub act, you struggled and sweated, as Woody Allen had warned you you might, since writing for yourself is the hardest of chores.

That was a real shock—to learn that I could fill a page and annoy the other writers on the staff of The Tonight Show by having my stuff ready and handed in before they were half finished. But it is that essential thing, you’ve gotta hear the person you’re writing for in your head accurately with his or her—dreadful phrase, isn’t it?—intonations, phrasing, punctuation, rhythm, all of those essential things so that you don’t hand a Jack Benny joke to Bob Hope. (Need asterisks, young folks, on those names?) So imagine the awfulness of learning that I can’t just put my name at the top of the page and write stuff for my nightclub act at zip speed. It was like—this is a little overdramatic—C. S. Lewis’s book about his wife’s death, where you turn to God for help and you have a door slammed in your face. I had the awful realization, I don’t know what I sound like. Eventually, mercifully, you learn, because you have to.

Has that voice changed? Do you find it easier to write in your voice now?

I don’t think so, but sometimes I wonder what my “voice” may consist of or what in it might be unconsciously borrowed. Sometimes I think, Hey, that sounds like my old friend, Jean Stafford—flattering myself. A former-producer friend of mine, Ron Fried, said he keeps seeing overtones of S. J. Perelman in my columns. I’ve never tried to sound like S. J. Perelman, and yet sometimes I too see the influence, at least. But no one could come near that lapidary comic genius of Uncle Sid. I asked him once if he—or I—had thought up the title “Down by the Old Maelstrom.”  His “I wish I had” warmed me to the toes.

Let ’s talk about late night. The people who are able to do the types of interviews you used to do —with authors, senators, intellectuals —are the comedians, people on Comedy Central, or the product of it. Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, et cetera. Mainstream late-night shows on traditional networks are pure entertainment talk shows now. Yours sort of straddled the line between the two.

Well, as you will readily agree, Stewart and Colbert and Kimmel and Bill Maher and Conan would be all over Watergate if they’d have been lucky enough to have been there at the time. As for a long-form show, I keep hearing people say that we don’t seem to have those any more, of the kind, they’d say, that I did with Katharine Hepburn or George Harrison or Brando and Welles and so on. I love doing a long-form interview—it’s much easier than doing seven minutes.

Your show faced criticisms about having so many commercial breaks, or issues with plugging a movie that you didn ’t personally like —but shows now seem to be in and of themselves commercials for their guests.

To be avoided. Between commercials, a starlet, as we used to say, comes on with a very short dress and visible gam, makes a joke about it, and then uses the word excited four times in the next four sentences. About how excited she is about her producer, and excited about the script, and the exciting towel she got at the gym. And she’s super excited to be there. As if all of life strives for a state of perpetual excitement. Excitement isn’t necessarily a good thing for the blood pressure. So you sit through a bewildering, out of context film clip for a movie that will go right past movie theaters on its way to limbo and will badly need the applause sign at the end. And then, with a snap of her gum, she’s off, and you’re on to somebody else. Anybody.

Excited is almost as overused as amazing and the misused literally. News correspondent—“The senator literally exploded with anger.” Yeah? Well, who cleaned up the mess?

Elliott David is a writer and artist living in New York. 

Emma, Cover to Cover

Margaret Sullivan’s new book, Jane Austen Cover to Cover, collects dozens of the covers that publishers around the world have concocted for her six major novels; it’s “two hundred years of publication, interpretation, marketing, and misapprehensions.” These six examples of Emma indicate Austen’s singular place in the canon: the covers range from the lurid to the leather bound—highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow, every brow—with Emma Woodhouse taking on a new look and mien to suit every era. The art provides a fascinating glimpse into a variety of publishing cultures, and it reminds that even our classics are mutable, pitched to appeal to any number of sensibilities, their literary status in constant flux per the dictates of the market.

Hugh Thomson Illustrated Edition, ca. 1895–1903. Photo: The Henry and Alberta Hirshheimer Burke Collection and the Winn Family Collection, Goucher College Special Collections

Laurel Leaf Edition, 1971. Photo: The Henry and Alberta Hirshheimer Burke Collection and the Winn Family Collection, Goucher College Special Collections

Edizioni Sas, 1956.

Harper Teen, 2011.

Abbey Classics, ca. 1950

John Murray’s three-volume first edition, 1816.

The Glad Game

In the immortal words of Winston Churchill, “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” 

Pollyanna Whittier would agree. The once popular novelist Eleanor H. Porter wrote the original children’s book Pollyanna in war-ravaged 1913. It concerns a destitute, orphaned young girl who’s taken in by her grim Aunt Polly. The girl wins Polly over with a good attitude—the Glad Game—all the while touching the lives of those around her. It was a best seller, and over the following decades, various authors went on to write thirteen sequels chronicling Pollyanna’s life.

Pollyanna grows up, has a family, moves around the world, but is always encountering lost souls and helping them develop a sunnier outlook. The books, while lurid—you may have heard about Pollyanna’s miraculous recovery from paralysis—are less treacly than the 1960 Disney adaptation, and considerably stranger. (Did World War I–era children enjoy seeing characters miraculously rise from their wheelchairs? Hard to know; Downton Abbey fans certainly do.) The books are certainly no more sentimental than most of the escapist titles on current fiction best-seller list, let alone YA.

To the extent modern kids know Pollyanna, it’s probably via Hayley Mills in that Disney adaptation, and possibly through the eponymous pejorative. But if by some chance you’re a die-hard fan, you should make your way to Littleton, New Hampshire—Porter’s birthplace—where there’s a bronze Pollyanna statue, erected in 2002, and even an official Glad Day. (Glad Clubs enjoyed a brief popularity all over America.)

The Pollyanna mentality kind of works, too. The other day, having just reread Pollyanna in the stacks of the library, I set myself the experimental challenge of casting a rosy light on everything I saw in a five-block New York City street. No mean feat. People rushed past panhandlers, an elderly woman with dementia punched her nurse (feebly, at least), the front page of the paper’s international section recorded nothing but suffering.

But then a motorist leaned on his horn, and a bunch of others followed suit, and it became a cacophony. And suddenly, this thought intruded: How inspiring that, despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary, these drivers still have the idealism to believe their honking will make a difference! When you thought about it that way, it was sort of a triumph of the human spirit. Sort of. 

I wonder if Churchill—nearly killed by New York City traffic in 1931—would agree.

Coming Soon: More Vengeful Deities, and Other News

The wrath of God.

Everyone’s going nuts for Serial, an impeccably reported (and very self-aware) true-crime podcast spun off from This American Life. But Janet Malcolm was up to something similar many decades ago, wasn’t she?
Then again, this should come as no surprise. “Hasn’t it all been done before? Perhaps better than anyone today could ever do it?” Why should any of us bother with the new when so much of the old is out there waiting for us?
Actually, why should any of us leave our houses at all? We’re just going to encounter the absurd—a bunch of loony scholars, for instance, tooling around town with a life-size statue of Jane Austen in tow …
And even the best literature offers no respite from the absurd and the terrifying. Quite the opposite. “In August a man in the Bronx tied a chain to a pole, wrapped it around his neck, got behind the wheel of his Honda and stepped on the accelerator. The chain severed his head from his body, which crashed through the windscreen and landed on the street when the Honda slammed into a parked car … It put me in mind of a passage early in Donald Antrim’s first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World.”
But it’s all right. As the world grows more confused and tempestuous, we’ll at least find ourselves with more righteous, awesome, angry gods. A new study finds that “belief in moralizing high gods is ‘more prevalent among societies that inhabit poorer environments and are more prone to ecological distress’ … In societies that exist in places with violent monsoon seasons or periods of extreme drought, cooperation is more important than it is in temperate areas … And what better way to promote cooperation and fair play than the idea of an all-seeing god who demands it?”

Security Guard

Duane Hanson, Security Guard, 1990, autobody filler, polychromed in oil, mixed media, with accessories, 71" x 26" x 13". © The Estate of Duane Hanson. Photography by Robert McKeever. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Duane Hanson’s Security Guard is on display at Gagosian Gallery’s Park and Seventy-fifth Street location through December 3. Hanson, who died in 1996, is known for his doggedly realistic sculptures of Joe and Jane Sixpack: the paunchy, unremarkable janitors, shoppers, joggers, tourists, and deliverymen of the world. Hanson’s working-class men and women are always in some form of repose, wearing expressions that range from the melancholic to the merely phlegmatic. These are people with whom the world has had its way—people used to being seen through. They have body hair. They have hangnails and bruises, varicose veins.

Hanson’s sculptures, given the commonness of their subjects, are almost suspiciously accessible, and so the temptation is to dismiss them as condescending or facile—or just tacky, a bid for the same kind of gee-whiz mimesis on display at Madame Tussaud’s. They are, after all, uncanny likenesses, and it’s easy to get tripped up on that, or to marvel at the painstaking craftsmanship. Hanson made casts from real people, and for maintenance he’d send envelopes of human hair to museums with instructions on how to attach it properly; he went to great lengths to produce convincing skin tones. All that’s very impressive, but it’d have you think the sculptures are just workmanlike forays into photorealism.

And in the wrong setting, they may well be. I could imagine how a roomful of Hanson’s work might register as taunting rather than haunting—in aggregate, the statues could lose their subtlety, all but daring you to appreciate their lifelikeness. But Gagosian Gallery has done a shrewd thing with Security Guard: they’ve put him on his own. He’s leaning against the wall of an otherwise empty space, patrolling nothing, alone. You can see him in there from the street.

“My art is not about fooling people,” Hanson once said. “It’s the human attitudes I’m after—fatigue, a bit of frustration, rejection. To me, there is a kind of beauty in all this.”

By himself, hand in pocket, walkie-talkie at the ready, surrounded by white walls and looking at none of them, Security Guard evokes the whole spectrum of Weltschmerz. Stare at him for sixty seconds and you see a bored, stoical man, an intimate of blankness, maybe solving a Rubik’s Cube in his head or thinking about supper. Stare at him for three minutes and you think, Maybe a widower. Stare at him for five minutes and you want to jot down the number of a suicide hotline, press it into his breast pocket. Take lunch, you want to say with a clap on his shoulder, Go out and get some air.

But he won’t move. As the critic Sebastian Smee wrote of another Hanson piece, “He is not waiting for death, exactly. But death sure is what his life has in mind for him. And for us.”

Food for Thought

From the jacket of the first hardcover edition of The Supper of the Lamb.

Recently, I was putting together a list of good food writers for a group of students. I didn’t have Robert Farrar Capon on the list, then I added him, then I removed him again. He seemed not just too religious, but too—specific, somehow.

Capon, who died last year, was an Episcopal priest, and he wrote a lot about his high-church beliefs, but you don’t need to be devout to read him. Believe me: the sum total of my theological training took place ten years ago, when I attended the introductory session for a Christian education class at a large Manhattan church. It was held by the parish theologian in a halogen-lit room that bore very little resemblance to the Gothic house of worship. It contained a circle of music-class folding chairs, an industrial coffee urn, a handful of engaged couples, and at least one mentally-ill person. I was doing a little half-assed spiritual seeking at the time, trying to redress what I then saw as my parents’ joint educational neglect. (It was the same impulse that had led me, several months prior, to become the class dunce in Introduction to Yiddish at the 92nd Street Y.)

I don’t know what I expected, although I’m sure my fantasy involved no actual religion; I was probably hoping for Barbara Pym–like busybodies, homemade cake, and very possibly a secret religious awakening that didn’t actually infringe on my life or challenge anything I already thought. I’m sure I wore some kind of demure costume. In actual fact, a man wandered in, took a large handful of animal crackers, and left. Another woman in a faux fur rested her chin on her bosom and promptly fell asleep. One guy asked a lot of really stupid questions. The teacher did a good job fielding them, actually, and I told myself I’d come back and knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t. I still get e-mails announcing lectures on Ecclesiastes or C. S. Lewis, and I can’t bring myself to get off the mailing list. I mean, no one made me go there.

But this is beside the point. Back to Robert Farrar Capon. At the end of the day, he was an amazing food writer—he had a column in the New York Times and his white fruitcake is excellent—and his prose is beautiful. I didn’t end up leaving him off the syllabus because he was religious—and a Thomist, to boot—but because it can’t be denied that even his most secular writing has the whiff of the sermon about it. I don’t just mean that he’s habitually didactic—although he is—but that he is both questioning and reassuring in the way of someone used to taking a larger view. He is also given to aphorism. This lends itself curiously well to recipe writing, but at other times, Capon is not afraid to use his authority to rebuke:

We live in an age in which saving is subterfuge for spending. No doubt you sincerely believe that there is margarine in your refrigerator because it is more economical than butter. But you are wrong. Look in your bread drawer. How many boxes of cute snack crackers are there? How many packages of commercial cookies reeking of imitation vanilla badly masked with oil of coconut? How many presweetened breakfast cereals? Tell me now that you bought the margarine because you couldn’t afford butter. You see—you can’t. You bought the bread drawer of goodies because you were conned into them; and you omitted the butter because you were conned out of it. The world has slipped you culinary diagrams instead of food. It counts on your palate being not only wooden, but buried under ten coats of synthetic varnish as well. Therefore, the next time you go to check out of the supermarket, simply put back one box of crackers, circle round the dairy case again, swap your margarine for a pound of butter and walk up to the checker with your head held high, like the last of the big spenders. This is no time for cost-counters: It is time to be very rich or very poor—or both at once.

As one might imagine, he has strong feelings about the generally poor caliber of American Communion wines, saying, “Unless I am mistaken, it was Mr. Welch himself (an adamant total abstainer) who persuaded American Protestantism to abandon what the Lord obviously thought rather kindly of.”

One of his oddest books (well, I guess not by the standards of his catalog) is the 1978 rarity Party Spirit: Some Entertaining Principles. I’d call this a gateway text, but no one is claiming RFC is going to appeal to everyone. And I will confess, I have read from him much more than I have cooked from him. Many of his processes sound involved, and he never pretended the results were easily obtained. To place him in any other “food-writing” tradition feels artificial: he requires a completely different level of concentration. As he wrote in The Supper of the Lamb, “What is good is difficult, and what is difficult is rare.”

A Necessary Novel

Atticus Lish. Photo: Shelton Walsmith

Our current issue features Atticus Lish’s story “Jimmy,” an excerpt from his new novel, Preparation for the Next Life. The novel is out this week, and we’re elated to report that it’s just received a rave review from Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

This is an intense book with a low, flyspecked center of gravity. It’s about blinkered lives, scummy apartments, dismal food, bad options. At its knotty core, amazingly, is perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade … Atticus Lish has written a necessary novel, one with echoes of early Ken Kesey, of William T. Vollmann’s best writing and of Thom Jones’s pulverizing short stories.

Many congratulations to Atticus on the well-deserved praise. Read a brief excerpt from “Jimmy” here, and pick up a copy of Preparation for the Next Life here.

Everyday Blasphemies

Dubliners at one hundred.

An illustration by Stephen Crowe for de Selby Press’s new edition of Dubliners.

It was a priest who first convinced me to read Dubliners. On the face of it, this might seem strange. Joyce had a lifelong hatred of clergymen, and claimed the sight of one made him physically ill; in “The Sisters,” the opening story of Dubliners, he chose a senescent priest as the first, and arguably most disturbing, of the many images of decay and paralysis that pervade the book. But in the Dublin of my teens, the priests were running the show; it was even possible for priests to be celebrities, and it was the most famous of these who took my class on retreat at the end of Transition Year, in June 1991.

Joyce writes about a religious retreat in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which an unnamed preacher terrifies the boys with a lengthy description of the torments of hell. Ours wasn’t like that. There were beanbags and unlimited biscuits; the celebrity cleric, who had become famous in the sixties as the singing priest and latterly hosted a hugely popular radio show, spoke to us like we were his friends. Even though the retreat consisted for the most part of the usual list of prohibitions—don’t do drugs, don’t have sex—his gravelly voice and inner-city accent gave him a convincing authenticity. Then, for reasons I still can’t quite understand—modernist literature was not at that point high on our list of temptations—he started talking about James Joyce. According to the singing priest, Joyce was one of the greatest hoaxes ever to be perpetrated on the Irish people. Far from being a genius, he was a charlatan, a phony, a false prophet. Furthermore, the priest continued, nobody in the world had actually read his famous novel Ulysses, and anyone who claimed otherwise was a liar.

Well, this came as a surprise. My father was a professor of Irish literature at Joyce’s alma mater, University College Dublin; in his study at home he had multiple copies of Joyce’s books, including Ulysses, as well as innumerable books about Joyce’s books. Had he been pulling the wool over our eyes for all these years?

That night, I went home and told my dad what the singing priest had said. My dad assured me that he had, in fact, read Ulysses; so had a lot of people, he said. I was relieved to hear that he had not been practicing a deception on us. Still, I remained confused. Back in 1991, the idea that a priest would lie was genuinely shocking. Even stranger, though, was that he would lie about this.

Up until then, I had had little interest in Joyce. I knew who he was, of course: in Dublin he was inescapable. He popped up as a statue on North Earl Street, in paintings on the walls of pubs, in an unflattering green hue on the old ten-pound note; once a year the city was taken over by gangs of bizarrely-attired middle-aged men, wearing straw hats and blazers and spouting reams of gibberish apparently in homage to the author. There was a bridge named after him, designed by a famous architect, and a dark and rather threatening street. He had always seemed completely irrelevant to me and my life in the suburbs—a historical artifact, like the Viking settlements uncovered on the quays, which my parents had dragged me in to see before they were demolished.

But now, thanks to the singing priest—whose own secret hypocrisies would emerge in the years that followed—I began to wonder. Why would a writer elicit that kind of hatred? What kind of threat did he pose? I asked my dad if I could borrow a copy of Ulysses, went to my room and began to read. An hour later I came back downstairs. Is there an easier one? I asked. That’s when he gave me Dubliners.

Two weeks later, I took the book with me on a French exchange. I didn’t get all of it, or even most of it. And yet, while I read it, I felt my agonizing homesickness abate, and I realized the city he presented was one that I knew. There were some cosmetic differences (shillings and half crowns, trams instead of cars) but the characters themselves—the machinating mother, the pitiful daydreamer, the two ironically named gallants, the slithering, monstrous “old josser”—I had encountered before. And the pervading sense of frustration and entrapment, that was familiar, too. This was a book about people who felt just like I did, in my teenaged disenchantment—that nothing of significance could ever happen in a second-rate city, that love, heroism, any kind of self-definition was impossible on its pokey, crowded stage. Joyce’s Dubliners wished they were somewhere, anywhere, else—the Wild West, London, Argentina; they squandered their time in illusions and alcohol and other doomed efforts to escape. Paralyzed by homesickness, hiding out in the spare bedroom of that little house in Paris, it was very clear to me how misguided these efforts were.

And it didn’t matter that the nuances escaped me. Dubliners is one of those books that tracks you through life, that you return to again and again, finding something new every time. Though Joyce had written most of these stories by the age of twenty-three, he did so with the understanding and forbearance of someone much older. He often portrayed himself as sitting in judgment on his fellow Dubliners, whom he once described to a friend as “the most hopeless, useless and inconsistent race of charlatans I have ever come across,” yet what gives the stories their tremendous power is precisely their refusal to judge. The men and women depicted are a shabby bunch: drunkards, wife-beaters, narcissists, hypocrites. But Joyce is careful to show the forces that have made them who they are, the exigencies that constrict them, the disillusionments that have sapped their will to act differently. He believed that by showing us ourselves, he could help us understand each other, forgive each other, break out of our holding patterns and begin to change. He believed that redemption was something we could achieve for ourselves, and that was what terrified the singing priest.

A hundred years down the road, a lot has changed in Dublin. Even more has stayed the same. The British are gone and the Church is on the wane, but the city is still controlled by outside agents: tech firms, hedge funds, shadowy acronyms based in Europe and further afield. Landlords, publicans, bankers, politicians remain major players, and the economic havoc these entities have wreaked between them has paralyzed the city quite as efficiently as their counterparts did a hundred years before. But there are positives. Joyce, the polyglot, would surely have delighted in the many-­stranded tapestry of language—Polish, Cantonese, Yoruba, Tagalog—to be overheard nowadays at the bus stop or in the supermarket queue. And having left in disgust, never to return, he would surely be amused to see how engrained he and his works have become in almost every element of Dublin life. That these days even politicians are quoting him might be a little too much, but I think he might have taken pleasure in the noncanonical manifestations that appear throughout the city—the crappy murals, the deeply specious James Joyce Pub Award. In the space of a century, he has been transformed from godless pariah to artistic sacred cow to national tchotchke, something to be hawked to tourists like Guinness hoodies and lucky leprechaun hats. But for Joyce, this pirating, not to say grave robbing, makes a kind of sense. Profaning the sacred is what Joyce’s Dublin is all about, and the role of art, as he saw it, is to take these everyday blasphemies and make them sacred again. If Chandler brought murder back in the alleyway, Joyce put genius back out on the street; he is there still, amid the replicas, holding up his nicely ­polished looking ­glass to the shifting crowds. Turn the page, and find yourself.

This essay is adapted from Paul Murray’s introduction to a new edition of Dubliners by de Selby Press, with illustrations from Stephen Crowe. Used with permission of de Selby Press.

Paul Murray lives in Dublin. He is the author of the novels An Evening of Long Goodbyes and Skippy Dies. His story “That’s My Bike!” appeared in The Paris Review’s Winter 2011 issue.

Getting at the Gothic, and Other News

From Matthew Lewis’s Tales of Terror, published 1808.

In France, 40 percent of TV programming comes from America, which means dubbing is a major industry, and voice-over actors have enough work to collect a following of their own: meet the French Jennifer Lawrence and the French Daniel Radcliffe, for instance.
The Brothers Grimm published seven editions of their famous tales—the last edition is best known today. But the first edition sounds a lot more fun: “Rapunzel is impregnated by her prince, the evil queen in Snow White is the princess’s biological mother, plotting to murder her own child, and a hungry mother in another story is so ‘unhinged and desperate’ that she tells her daughters: ‘I’ve got to kill you so I can have something to eat.’ ”
In the nineties, Bob Dylan pursued a gutsy alternative career: “After binge-watching Jerry Lewis movies on his tour bus, Dylan came to the conclusion that slapstick comedy was where he wanted to put his artistic stamp … ‘We finally wrote … a very elaborate treatment for this slapstick comedy, which is filled with surrealism and all kinds of things from his songs and stuff.’ ” HBO bought the show, but Dylan’s interest waned soon after.
The Gothic is “having a moment” now—and a new exhibition at the British Library explores 250 years of the Gothic tradition. But what does it mean to be Gothic, anyway? “The term suffers from its implicit pluralism: Are we talking about novels, horror films, flying buttresses, Alice Cooper, black-painted fingernails or a specific period in North-European history? On the one hand, it seems fair to say that John Ruskin’s famous comments on the architecture—that most of us know Gothic when we see it, without being able to identify exactly what makes it so—still have something to say about the thing as a whole. On the other, the Gothic really does just mean the spooky and the titillating.”
“I’m not a cynic. I prefer irony, which depends on the ability to hold contradictory ideas, which probably springs from ambivalence. People confuse and conflate irony with insincerity and dishonesty; they believe an ironist isn’t serious. But saying the opposite of what is meant allows for at least two meanings to fly. Irony couples and uncouples statements, while revealing the hidden agendas of language and its conventions.”

Veterans Day

Photo: Davidd, via Flickr

Little green army men—they don’t have a more specific name—are now in the National Toy Hall of Fame, which exists, in Rochester, and held its 2014 induction ceremonies last week. For those of you who have never played Marble War or seen any part of the Toy Story franchise, I give you Wikipedia:

Army men are sold in plastic bags or buckets, and often include different colors such as green, tan, or gray, to represent opposing sides. They are equipped with a variety of weapons, typically from World War II to the current era. These include rifles, machine guns, submachine guns, sniper rifles, pistols, grenades, flame throwers, and bazookas. They may also have radio men, minesweepers, and men armed with bayonets. The traditional helmets are the older M1 “pot” style that were given to US soldiers during the middle to late 20th Century. Army men are sometimes packaged with additional accessories including tanks (often based on the M48 Patton tank), jeeps, armed hovercraft, half-tracks, artillery, helicopters, jets, and fortifications. Their vehicles are usually manufactured in a smaller scale, to save on production and packaging costs. Army men are considered toys and not models due to this fact historical and chronological accuracy are generally not a priority.

Invented in 1938, little green army men went out of fashion during Vietnam, but they’ve never been off shelves. If you haven’t looked lately, they can be readily found at any dollar store. They’re mostly made in China. 

At the 2014 induction, the men in uniform were joined by sort-of-toy bubbles and five-time nominee Rubik’s Cube. It frankly would have been an outrage had the Rubik’s Cube lost out to either the Slip ’N Slide—one of the least fun things in existence and also not a toy—or the craven commercialism of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But who knows? It’s a cruel game. Flexible Flyer has never won because of its lack of snow-related geographical distribution, and the soon-to-be-discontinued sentimental favorite Hess Truck just lost out in its final run. But in the words of a Hess spokesperson, “We are honored that Hess Toy Truck was nominated.” I don’t think he or she was joking. 

If next year’s Nobel Prize is anything like the National Toy Hall of Fame, we hope Philip Roth proves a Rubik’s Cube, and not a Hess Truck.