Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Baker
Nicholson Bakeris an American novelist and essayist. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. He often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness. Baker has written about poetry, literature, library systems, history, politics, time manipulation, youth, and sex. He has written about libraries getting rid of books and newspapers and created the American Newspaper Repository. He received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his nonfiction book Double...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 January 1957
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
What sugar-packet manufacturer could have known that people would take to flapping the packet back and forth to centrifuge its contents to the bottom, so that they could handily tear off the top?
I'm a sucker for interiors and carefully, beautifully filmed people sitting in a big room. My appetites are simple.
Just as the people who lived through the Second World War thought different things on different days, I think everybody who goes through that period carefully now thinks different things on different days.
When I really want to be soothed and reminded of why people bother to fiddle with sentences, I often read poetry.
Writing has to do with truth-telling. When you're writing, let's say, an essay for a magazine, you try to tell the truth at every moment. You do your best to quote people accurately and get everything right. Writing a novel is a break from that: freedom. When you're writing a novel, you are in charge; you can beef things up.
The great thing about novels is that you can be as unshy as you want to be. I'm very polite in person. I don't want to talk about startling or upsetting things with people.
I blush easily. I have difficulty meeting people's eye, difficulty with public speaking, the normal afflictions of the shy, but not to a paralysing degree.
From my music training, I knew that, some Spanish rhythms apart, 5/4 is a time signature used only in the modern era. Holst's Mars from the Planets is 5/4. But if you speak lines of poetry in that pattern you just end up hitting the off-beats. It's only when you add a rest - a sixth beat - that it sounds as it surely should sound.
Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts.
E.B. White's essays are the best things I've read about Maine - especially the one in which he's not sure if he can go out sailing any more in his sloop.
The music wasn't going to happen, and I realized I had read so little. I didn't know my way around any century. I was very under read.
That was the problem with reading: you always had to pick up again at the very thing that had made you stop reading the day before.
So I really began as a failed poet - although when I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.
I was very shy and somewhat awkward. I studied too hard. And to have this exciting dorm life was a whole new thing.