nicholson baker

Haiku-muezzins at dawn

Poetry!

Have you seen the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Tool? Do we have Ruth Lilly’s gift to thank for this? It’s totally awesome: poetry-as-database. Now I want a poetry API. I want poetry data viz.

The tool brought me to some terrific stuff. I love the opening of this poem from Anne Waldman…

I was living in San Francisco
My heart was in Manhattan
It made no sense, no reference point
Hearing the sad horns at night,
fragile evocations of female stuff
The 3 tones (the last most resonant)
were like warnings, haiku-muezzins at dawn
The call came in the afternoon
“Frank, is that really you?”

…mostly just for “haiku-muezzins,” which is so, so correct. What kind of brain comes up with haiku-muezzins? Amazing.

I liked this one by August Kleinzahler, too, which is fully continuous and heavily enjambed and therefore unblockquotable. The language is just terrific, though, and Kleinzahler uses the construction “the world entire,” as in:

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

Is there a name for that? The little reversal—“the world entire”? It’s one of my favorite things.

I read Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist recently, which is (on the surface) all about poetry, and I absolutely 100% loved it. I wish there existed the technology to do a quick brain-link so you could feel how much I loved this book. Some things worth noting:

  • It’s very short; you could read it in an evening. I think it would work great on the Kindle, too.
  • Baker’s voice is just something else. I’m a real sucker for this—a strong fluent first-person voice—and his is the best, the most immediately winning, I’ve read in a long time.
  • (Actually: in parts, it reads like a book narrated by Tim.)
  • You actually learn a lot about poetry! At least I did. I guess I didn’t know much to start with, so there was significant upside potential.
  • The Anthologist is part of the 2010 Tournament of Books! Get a head start! Or something?

If we here at Snarkmarket had a vast endowment supplied by some rich heiress, I would name Nicholson Baker our poet laureate, and I would pay him handsomely to write a post or so every week.

 

Pluck the day!

Oh. Oh oh oh, this is good.

January 7 was not just Gerald Durrell’s birthday; it was Nicholson Baker’s, too! (N.B. previously on Snarkmarket.) So here’s a character of Baker’s talking about Horace’s most famous phrase: Carpe diem! Seize the day! Well, er, actually:

…here’s the thing. Horace didn’t say that. “Carpe diem” doesn’t mean seize the day—it means something gentler and more sensible. “Carpe diem” means pluck the day. Carpe, pluck. Seize the day would be “cape diem,” if my school Latin serves. No R. Very different piece of advice.

There’s more, and it’s sooo good, over at Varia:

Don’t freaking grab the day in your fist like a burger at a fairground and take a big chomping bite out of it. That’s not the kind of man that Horace was.

Varia sorta blogs like David Markson might blog—which I intend as a high compliment.

 

Nicholson Baker can blog here anytime

I absolutely love the voice Nicholson Baker uses in his review of Ken Auletta’s new book, Googled. For instance:

One unnamed “prominent media executive” leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: What real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?

Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google’s movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché 19th-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth? Are you not signed up for automatic Google News alerts on several topics? I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two.

“I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two.” He sneaks it in, and it’s so cutting, but not without a wink. Snark at its best and most palatable. Then, there’s this:

Surely no other software company has built a cluster of products that are anywhere near as cleverly engineered, as quick-loading and as fun to fiddle with, as Google has, all for free. Have you not searched?

“Have you not searched?” I don’t know—maybe it’s the residual tryptophan in my brain mixing with the second cup of coffee and anything would seem delightful at this moment—but I really think that, in terms of language and logic alike, Nicholson Baker hits this one spot-on.

And it’s notable because so many of the spot-on assessments of new media, culture and technology have come, lately, from Nicholson Baker. Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia. Nicholson Baker on the Kindle. He’s neither a booster nor a troll; he seems to approach it all with curiosity—the curiosity of an actual user, no small thing—and amusement. And he’s always surprising. This is Nicholson Baker, the guy who wrote about “the assault on paper.” And he’s “fond of Google”? Why, sure. He’s a thinker, not a pundit; a working brain, not a billboard hawking the same idea, over and over.

Seems to me Nicholson Baker might be a bookfuturist, whether he knows it or not.

See also: The Nicholson Baker Tapes.

(Via @tgoetz.)

 

Notes on writing (or) The Nicholson Baker Tapes

Over at Kickstarter, I wrote up a few things I learned while writing Annabel Scheme. I will also use this as an excuse to link to this great WSJ round-up of writers’ habits. Nicholson Baker’s routine is almost mystical:

Most days, Nicholson Baker rises at 4 a.m. to write at his home in South Berwick, Maine. Leaving the lights off, he sets his laptop screen to black and the text to gray, so that the darkness is uninterrupted. After a couple of hours of writing in what he calls a dreamlike state, he goes back to bed, then rises at 8:30 to edit his work.

Black screen, gray text! Stay in the dream! Actually, all of Baker’s methods are totally inventive and awesome:

He wrote his first novel, “The Mezzanine,” by dictating to a voice recorder during his commute to work. For his recent novel “The Anthologist,” a first-person narrative by a frustrated poet who’s struggling to write the introduction to a new anthology, he grew out a beard to resemble his character, put on a floppy brown hat, set up a video camera on a tripod and videotaped himself giving poetry lectures.

You know, there’s a surprising amount of voice and transcription in these snippets. For instance, Richard Powers

[…] wrote his last three novels while lying in bed, speaking to a lap-top computer with voice-recognition software.

I need to try this… because it sounds like torture. I think I write very graphically—I think about how words appear, how they’re laid out. Often I’ll consider a sentence and realize the problem is that it just doesn’t look right.

Partially it’s habit, but partially it’s a deeper conviction about how words work on the page. Yeah sure, the natural rhythm of the human voice is great—but when we read, we don’t speak the words in our head. (Most of us don’t.) Words on the page (or the screen) get processed in a different way. It’s faster, flightier, nonlinear. There’s a buffer that’s always looking ahead and looking back, trying to recognize whole chunks of language at a time. All together, it’s very different from listening to someone speak.

So, truth be told, I’m a little suspicious of the writing-by-dictation strategy. Although that doesn’t mean I’m not going to dress up as a character and give fake lectures at some point.