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"Baker, Nicholson"
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Finding a likeness : how I got somewhat better at art
\"Nicholson Baker's journey into the craft of painting before and through the COVID-19 pandemic, as he sets out to learn how to paint via books, workshops, and tutorials, alongside personal reflections on past artists he admires\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Metalepses and Shoelaces: Advanced Narrative Resources in Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine
Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine (1988) bends narrative boundaries to the extreme. This article analyses the novel’s postmodern metatextuality, its confrontation of high culture and mass culture, its exploration of recursive thought processes, its inclusion of constantly shifting time references, and the function of its autodiegetic narrator. Special attention is given to the use of the footnote as a narrative device as it allows Baker to develop Gérard Genette’s concept of narrative metalepsis. Because of the unique way these advanced narrative resources are interwoven, the novel deserves wider academic attention as a milestone in contemporary literature in English.
Journal Article
The Vibrating Wire: Nicholson Baker's Vox and the Art of Analog
There is a lack of critical understanding of Nicholson Baker's “phone sex novel” Vox (1992). Chiefly overlooked is the exact function of Vox's complex system of outmoded telecommunications technology, which the novelist uses in order to experiment with erotic possibilities of the human voice. Viewed historically, Baker's embrace of analog technology occurs out of sync with the concurrent development of the ARPAnet into the public Internet. His strategic disruption of the Internet's potential for communication foregrounds personal voice as a more intimate mode of sexual mediation than sterile and deterministic digital models. Understanding the full nature of Baker's analog-directed perspective is essential for unpacking Baker's recurring interest in idiosyncratic sexuality.
Journal Article
Pursuing Biological and Chemical Weapons Details through FOIA
McKinley reviews Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker.
Journal Article
New Directions in Contemporary American Nonfiction /Çagdas Amerikan Kurmaca-Disi Yazininda Yeni Yönelimler
This study explores contemporary American nonfiction's relationship to the twentieth century journalistic phenomenon of muckraking and to the more recent New New Journalism through a discussion of the acclaimed American novelist Nicholson Baker's selected works of nonfiction. Baker's nonfiction demonstrates serious and in-depth research, and in his refined, innovative treatment, investigative writing yields a narrative that is at once storytelling and ethical reflection as well as an expression of serious social, cultural, and political problems. This study contends that Baker inherits a commitment to the artistry of journalistic investigation and that he redefines the art of nonfiction through his subjective and ethical journalism that is conveyed through a refreshing literary reportage.
Journal Article
PERIODIZING THE '80s: \THE DIFFERENTIAL OF HISTORY\ IN NICHOLSON BAKER'S \THE MEZZANINE\
This essay examines how Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine shifts engagement with the details of the material world consistently onto the axis of temporality. It also examines how, in so doing, Baker’s novel fashions a theory of periodization in which historical and social trends and events are relegated in importance. Asking how the detail or moment might both alter an understanding of the general and spread time to infinite proportions, The Mezzanine casts doubt on the process of periodizing by way of metonymy and synecdoche and offers instead a contingent and improvised version of the 1980s.
Journal Article
Libraries without paper?
You may not need to be a bibliophile to run a library but bibliophobia should have no place, yet over the years librarians everywhere have become fearful about all paper stored in bound form. Budgets are too small; shelves are not long enough; paper is fragile or worse; and bindings and covers are breaking down. These fears, money apart, have been exaggerated, [Nicholson Baker] argues, and the technical solutions offered worry him. Acid paper, the result of rosin and aluminium sulphate impregnation of paper pulp, is more resilient than its detractors claim. The much-vaunted double-fold test, achieved by turning the comer of a page back and forth until it tears, has led to some wild estimates of the proportion of library stock that is vulnerable. Microfilming is unsatisfactory, being difficult to read and impermanent. Moreover, it involves guillotining the binding and often disposal of the folios once the cameras have done their work.
Journal Article
Among School Children
Many novelists have among their works a tour de force -- a startling or unlikely achievement or a brilliant triumph against self-imposed odds or an immodest display of skill for its own sake. Nicholson Baker is a writer of tours de force who has yet to write a novel. Perhaps that's too stringent or exclusive a judgment, considering the present baffling and baffled state of ambitious novel-writing, but certainly every definition of the tour de force fits Vox (book-length phone sex) or Mezzanine (endless office trivialities) or The Fermata (goofy porno fantasy) and his others, not because of their subjects or modes but because of the exhilarating success they achieve. His new book is one more. The Everlasting Story of Nory is a few months in the life of Eleanor, or Nory, who would be in the fourth grade if she were in America but who is spending a year with her parents and baby brother in England and going to a blazer-and-rep-tie cathedral school. The book is written in the third person, but the language and the ethos are pervasively those of a smart (but not prodigious), strong (but not fearless), and imaginative (but not poetic) girl of 10, who has many interests and is apprehensive about bad dreams: Nory's language is a mass of wonderful malapropisms, often ones that suggest mistaken but not so unlikely shadow meanings that the phrases will probably retain throughout Nory's everlasting life: a crude awakening, kitten caboodle, bump on a rug, par none, totally made up from scrap. But it's not just the language that Baker reproduces -- or recreates -- but the coarse weave of childhood thought, the leaps of memory, apprehension and association. Only lengthy quotation would do it justice.
Newspaper Article
An Author's Multifarious Images Joined By a Child
Both, and neither, might be true, said the 41-year-old Mr. Baker, stopping in London recently on the occasion of the publication of his latest book, ''The Everlasting Story of Nory,'' yet another departure. The novel, which describes the relatively uneventful life of an imaginative 9-year-old American girl spending a year in England, represents another facet of what Mr. (Nicholson) Baker hopes is a multifaceted writerly personality, one that has produced novels, nonfiction books and essays on such diverse subjects as the author's obsession with the writer John Updike and the origins of the word ''lumber.'' ''Every book I've written I've tried to make very different from the one before,'' he said. ''I'd like to have all my books make the same point -- and it's kind of a stupid point, really -- that a single human being can think about a lot of different things. There can be nerdy parts and sordid parts and, with some luck, noble parts and morally nuanced parts. Although Mr. Baker says he didn't want to ''sound like I was doing some sort of home movie,'' he modeled the protagonist of ''Nory'' almost precisely on his own daughter, Alice, who was 9 when he wrote the book during a year in which the Baker family moved from Berkeley, Calif., to live in the English cathedral town of Ely. Although a number of details have been changed -- ''I've never liked books that pretend to be nonfiction but aren't,'' Mr. Baker said -- many of the fanciful stories Nory tells, many of the words she uses and many of the things that happen to her are direct from Alice.
Newspaper Article
Take a journey with a sub in 'Substitute'
Excuse my cynicism and weariness here. I've seen so many of these memoirs come into the store, heavily promoted by the book publishers. Despite the marketing blitz, the response to these books is usually absolute silence. The books languish on the shelves. One notable exception: local author Bob McLaughlin's \"A Crisis in American Education.\" Nicholson Baker's memoir \"Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids\" takes this worn-out formula and is just iterative enough in its execution to be fresh. Refreshingly, Baker doesn't editorialize his experiences. The day's events are simply allowed to unfold, and it's up to the reader to decide if what they are reading is madness or sanity.
Newspaper Article