nicholson baker

He invented a new narrative device which you might call 'microscopic'. He pays attention to apparently insignificant details, observations about paper clips and the origami of milk cartons or the way his thought process has been altered by John Updike, and finds deeper significance in them.

I could relate this to fractals. Matmos and wabi sabi but someone would pounce on me with a sharpened stick, uttering blood-curdling cries. Suffice to say his books are elegant, thoughtful, funny and sexy.

Do read 'The Mezzanine' though. And maybe 'The Fermata' (which covers the dirty side of obsessive male daydreaming).

Destroy: everything else.

The Mezzanine is great, but it's a book that can be written exactly once. (Room Temperature the follow up is bleh. Vox is worse (NB has a very adolescent attitude to sex: see also the one about that guy who can stop time and look at people naked). And the slope of decline ends with the Never-ending Story of Nory (or whatever it's called) for pity's sake. 'U&I' escapes the cull because it is non-fiction (NB is completely unsuited to plot, characterisation, any of that story business - I suspect his collection of essays, 'Lumber - or the size of thoughts' may be pretty good, if a little anal), and is a brilliant and funny illustration of the anxiety of influence.

The Mezzanine is easily the best, because although the protagonist is probably the least sympathetic (I find the narrator a complete asshole, but this may be because I identify far too much with him) the style works extremely well. I can't see the insane thing at all, but then I was expecting intricate nothingness.

Vox I like despite my better judgement- it's quite simplistic, but I think the fact that it is actually kind of sweet wins me over. Even though I usually hate things that are sweet.

Dunno about The Fermata, really, its obsessions don't seem as fervent as that of The Mezzanine, but it sits well between the other two- sexual and fixated...

I read somewhere quite a funny parody of him as a porno website writer...

The Everlasting Story of Nory at least breaks out of the mundanity-analysis of the middle-class adult male and does a little work toward capturing the mundanity-analysis of the middle-class pre- teen female. I think this is the most honorable move Baker's ever made, insofar as it represents not his trying to get in touch with mental analysis of another, very different human being, but to get in touch with that human being herself, to break out of the claustrophobia of pinging self-conscious alertness and into the world where other people have their own selves.

Complaining aside, though, I enjoy reading Baker -- although I think The Mezzanine is basically enough for the casual reader. Its conclusion also made me proud to work for an academic publisher, I must admit. The Fermata gets at something worthwhile as well -- clumsily, but then it's a difficult "something" to get at any other way.

Gareth: If you enjoy Antrim, there is a good chance you will enjoy The Mezzanine at the least. The Antrim comparison is valid in terms of form -- both stretch hours of "real" time into hundreds of pages of exposition and intense focus on various minor details and interior connections and etc. The difference is that Antrim's focus is always people and how they relate to one another. Baker is not soulless or hideously solipsistic -- pretty solipsistic, but not hideously so -- but there's a wall of self-consciousness that keeps both him and his characters from getting to anything as great as I'd sometimes like them to. I used to be very interested in this wall, because I had problems with it -- I was interested in naming it and feeling it out and thinking about it. But at some point, which happened to coincide with my readings of Baker, I started to realize how much naming and dwelling on that wall verges on celebrating it -- whereas I would be better off striving to break it down.

I am still in favor of self-consciousness. But human interaction requires a certain amount of presumption, and self-consciousness inevitably swallows up that presumption until interaction becomes impossible. Baker's books are tangentially about this. But they merely point it out and look at it, and hey: being self-conscious of self-consciousness isn't really going to help, now, is it? Cf The Fermata? These are good books that it makes me a worse person to read. They should be shipped to overconfident people everywhere, in the hopes that they will suddenly "get" Baker and realize their own prickishness.

I suspect this is my chief criteria by which I judge books (and I don't really read them anymore). Comedy value. I don't read books to make me think. If I want to think, I go to the pub with Edna, The Pinefox and Tim.

Oh hang on - that might be drink.

Nitsuh - lighten up and revel in the self-loathing power of masturbation.

don't tell me you've never wanted to sit on a dildo whilst mowing the lawn?

Reading the Mezzanine now for a book club. Brilliant descriptions, although it's a bit painful to read on the way to and from an office job.

the way his thought process has been altered by John Updike

that's one way of putting it

Anyone else see his piece in the New Yorker about LCD displays? A bit of a dull topic and the piece never really makes it off the ground. Nice observation of the smell of the vents on the back of old TVs though.

Paul Chowder returns in Traveling Sprinkler

'Deluxe' edition includes 10 songs by written and sung by Baker (?!)

“Traveling Sprinkler” is a middling thing with sensational bits. But the songs? Like the cigars Paul is after, they blow your disbelieving head off. I want to delete them from my iTunes account, hold a cleansing ceremony and pretend they never happened.

He's on Twitter! @nicholsonbaker8

tweet vmic

Shocked to see how selectively harsh I was on NB back in 2002. Think it was The Anthologist that won me back over. I even like ...Nory now.

Great news. I think the medium is a good fit for his style

I'd be way harsher on him these days, tbh. The only one I'd still rep for is the Mezzanine.

Room Temperature is excellent too. So is A Box of Matches. U and I is maybe even better than those, although probably not as good as The Mezzanine.

Dude followed me back. Month made

At least in my memory, mezzanine and u & I were his standouts.

Human Smoke is slept on.

house of holes is hilarious imo though also not very good, kind of inconsequential throwaway but I still enjoyed it

and of course I had to follow him on twitter

Nicholson Baker (@nicholsonbaker8) is now following you on Twitter!

lmao

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/my-brain-on-cable-new.php/

https://i.imgur.com/ByNsSyS.jpg

tfw nicholson baker has seen your insta story

Wanted to be enthusiastic about his new book about drawing but I learned out he just traces

surely there's still some good stuff in there? bummer about the tracing news though i guess!

a nice overview & review of the new one https://www.bookforum.com/print/3004/nicholson-baker-learns-to-draw-25332