N(exctly)P - Valley of the Dolls

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

I read /Valley of the Dolls/ as a teenager in German translation; it was 
on one of the less available shelves of my mother's library, along with 
works of Henry Miller and Erica Jong.

 > For example, it is Pynchon who gets on The Simpsons and whose book is 
read by Don Draper.

Actually it is Peter Campbell who's reading /The Crying of Lot 49/!

http://mikedellaquila.blogspot.de/2012/05/why-hell-is-peter-campbell-reading.html

On 03.07.2016 11:25, matthew cissell wrote:
> Hi all,
>
>     NPR has a piece ( 
> http://www.npr.org/2016/07/02/484384679/valley-of-the-dolls-still-sparkling-at-50 
> ) on Jacqueline Susann's "Valley of the Dolls" that is "still 
> Sparkling at 50".  Apparently Candace Bushnell was inspired by it and 
> calls it a "darn good read". Must have been because it was at the top 
> of the NYT Best Seller List for a long time, about a year. That was 1966.
>
>     You know what came out in May '66, right? Yep, The Crying of Lot 
> 49. And TP's little novel didn't make it to the NYT BS list. But which 
> book would you say has the greater cultural capital now? Which do you 
> think has "performed" better over time? If you guessed CL49 then eat a 
> cookie.
>
>    By using Amazon book rankings, I have tracked and compared 
> Pynchon's novels over and against other novels that came out at the 
> same time. I did this for about two years. The numbers clearly lean in 
> Pynchon's favor.
>
>   Now if you think that focuses too much on book sales, I would urge 
> you to look in other areas. For example, it is Pynchon who gets on The 
> Simpsons and whose book is read by Don Draper.
>
>    Also, perform a survey of people around you (better yet with 
> undergrads and grad students and profs) and ask them if they recognise 
> the names (TP, Jacqueline Susann, etc.) and then ask them if they can 
> name any works by those authors.
>
> In Greece at the IPW I asked attendees how many had read "Valley of 
> the Dolls" and of course John Krafft's hand went up and a few others 
> but clearly a number of Pynchon scholars didn't recognise the author 
> or her novel. (That is in no way a criticism; I myself have not read 
> VotD nor a number of other books that came out at the same time as 
> Pynchon's novels.) This gives us an idea of the authors' respective 
> amounts of capital.
>
>    We see at work two economic logics that give rise to two different 
> production cycles, one short and the other long. The "Best Seller" 
> garners immediate economic profits but it is not widely read as time 
> goes on. The other is oriented towards the pole of restricted 
> production that disdains immediate success and economic profit in 
> preference for cultural and symbolic capital. (See Pierre Bourdieu 
> "The Rules of Art" p142-145.)
>
> Someday I'll present that information in a more complete manner.
>
> ciao
> mc
>
>

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