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
Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants.
First, if you love the Kindle and it works for you, it isn't problematic, and you should ignore all my criticisms and read the way you want to read.
I don't do all that well in the writerly world. I'm happier being outside the flow.
Of course, individuals are responsible for individual actions - the pilots who flew over Pearl Harbor and dropped bombs on those ships did a terrible thing as part of an attack on a military base.
Many good poets are really essayists who write very short essays.
While I was writing I assumed it would be published under a pseudonym, and that liberated me: what I wrote was exactly what I wanted to read.
Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism.
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.
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.
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.
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It is fact-encirclingly huge, and it is idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking and full of simmering controversies - and it is free, and it is fast.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
People don't like to read text on computer screens (and reading a lot of text on iPod screens gets very tiring very soon, just about as soon as running out of battery power).
It's troubling to see how often Winston Churchill is a proponent of massive programs that are really aimed at civilians - starvation blockades and chemical warfare stockpiles and so on.