The Little Nicholson Baker In My Mind

February 24, 2023 7:41 PM

"If you think about things too much, you become like a thing—stare too long at a grocery receipt on the sidewalk, and see for yourself. To keep walking, you need a story about what you are doing, and why—going out for cigarettes, running away from home. And things in themselves aren’t a story, any more than envelopes are a message. To tell a story you need imagination, which, precisely because it is outside (or inside, if you prefer) the envelope of experience, gives you a perspective from which to understand that there’s more to envelopes..."
posted by blue shadows (6 comments total)

A nice appreciation with some lovely insights. Thanks for sharing.

Baker seems to have fallen out of favor - or at least gets viewed askance - in recent years. Yet his prose is a monument to the art of attention. The novels are great, but I think my favorite is the essay collection “The Size of Thoughts.”

I saw him read once at a bookstore and he was so dear. Tweedy, nebbishy, kind, introverted, smart, ruefully funny.
posted by Miko at 8:02 PM on February 24, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm a big fan of Baker, although I've skipped some of the nonfiction and can't really read the porny stuff without cringing. The Mezzanine, though. I read that more or less when it came out and a bunch of times since then, and little bits of it are lodged in my brain forever. There's a brief diatribe about hot-air hand dryers in public restrooms that I think about almost every time I see one ("Come to your senses, World!") and whenever I use one of those newfangled high-powered Dyson dryers that you have to stick your hands into and I watch the little ripples it makes on the loose skin of the backs of my hands as it blasts away every molecule of moisture, I think, "I wonder what Nicholson Baker thinks about these?" (And at least half of the times that I think about The Mezzanine in connection with my own hand-drying, I have a brief recursive reverie where I try to figure out just how often that is, because there's another little bit in the book where the main character calculates how often he thinks about certain things (one of those things being the phrase from the Grateful Dead song "Truckin'," "livin' on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine," so now about half the time that I'm led down this hand-drying thought calculation, I end up having that song stuck in my head for the next half-hour or so.))
posted by Daily Alice at 5:25 AM on February 25, 2023 [12 favorites]

This is an interesting essay for sure, and made me want to seek out the latest from Baker. I loved The Mezzanine, was bored by Room Temperature, and giggled behind my hand at the Penthouse Forum trilogy (Vox, The Fermata, and Holes). I stopped paying attention to him then, except for the occasional essay bubbling up through the noise. I think he may have fallen further out of fashion when he wrote a "just asking questions" piece about the origins of Covid that focused on the lab-leak theory.

Oh, and I really liked U&I which I read when it came out. Sort of dread going back to that since U has been completely keelhauled in the meantime and the Suck Fairy has no doubt done her business on the rest of it.
posted by chavenet at 5:26 AM on February 25, 2023

d'oh I just went to look and realized "A Box of Matches" was published in ... 2003 as was this article!
posted by chavenet at 5:38 AM on February 25, 2023 [1 favorite]

The narrator was right not to touch his friend's tonsil stones; from unfortunately personal experience of my own, they smell terrible.
posted by Earthtopus at 3:37 PM on February 25, 2023

Oh great, now I'm singing "Chicago, New York, Detroit, and it's all on the same street"
posted by Morpeth at 4:46 AM on February 26, 2023 [1 favorite]