Notes from a talk given by Nicholson Baker, February 2011

I wrote these notes earlier this year, when Nicholson Baker came to speak at Columbia—a great talk by an early member of the EP pantheon. (My former student Andrew Eisenman gave the wonderful introduction.) The words are in black ink on both sides of a yellow bank receipt. The handwriting is messy, at times nearly indecipherable; the chronology is unknown, as entries are written horizontally, vertically, every which way. There are some arrows, brackets, and lines of demarcation. (Mostly I am posting this so I can throw away this piece of paper, which has been taunting me for most of this year, daring me to transcribe.)

Dizzies challenge: What book (or what anything) does "DWYDWTD" refer to?

*

[Reverse side of receipt]

GGM [ = Gabriel García Márquez]

DWYDWTD [ = ?]

bassoon}

early NB compos[itions]}

I love chronology

Heap of self

_____

I forget whole books

[Reminds me of passage in U&I about how little we retain from even the books we like.]

carpet remnants

pillowsize

_____

keep it short)

Copy out good stuff)

Geo. Saintsbury

This American

stiffness,

kind of

Lego [?]

mov[eme]nt

What it's like

to be sitting

in a room

thinking

Churchill [?] magpie/maniac

____

speak-typing

____

DB [= Donald Barthelme] — @50,

starting to count

_____

You gotta face down yr demons! —————> 400 pp. ———> down [???]

—beard [?]

———> There's something fake about a long book.

sign language [There was a woman to his left, relaying the talk in sign language.]

Simp[le?]/complet[ist?] [?]

[Or more likely: "Simple/complexity"]

_____

I thought it was my friend, then remembered my friend was dead. [I have a feeling this could be a note to myself about some story I was working on, or else a line wanted to use in a story.]

Korean actress story [This was definitely a note to myself, to get back to a story I had started/was working on.]

*

[Front side of receipt]

bassoon: some ridiculous novelty item

Strav[insky], Bartok, Brahms

______

Rubbing brow—

Schumann var. #9

"I wanted it not to be modern."

("Jeez, Eddie Money's not bad.")

_____

Beat your brains (ASL mimic head morts[?]) ["American Sign Language signer mimics head mortifications"?]

Dick Francis is a great comfort to me. First person. Horses. Every single book.

_____

[The] M[e]z[zanine]: The book was aiming at the list

Panasonic 3 wheel vacuum cleaner, greatness of

What a brutal thing to say—& I was probably wrong [? about what?]

If I can surround

it w/words to make it OK. (vid) [??]

____

Every day that I)

write is a new file)

[NB starts a new computer file for each day—title is the date]

____

Boringness is really

an interesting thing

____

[On the editing process:]

The places where I fell

asleep I took out

______

The most modern I

ever got, I think,

was Geo. Eliot

_____

Maeve Brennan [what he was reading lately]

The actual sequence

I. Sam Tanenhaus on Daniel Bell:

In this sense Bell was heir to the vanishing tradition of systematizers or master builders — Hegel and Marx, Durkheim and Weber, Freud and Nietzsche, Dewey and Veblen. All were required reading for the mid-20th-­century intellectual. But Bell seemed to regard them as rivals. He had digested even their most obscure writings and was not afraid to anatomize and correct them, fussily at times. His footnotes betray a hint of George Eliot’s pedant Casaubon: “Quotations have been transposed to compress and strengthen Schumpeter’s description. The actual sequence of quotations is: pp. 137, 147, 151, 147, 145, 154.” —NYT Book Review

II. This hair-raising story had a primo "Dizzies" moment:

The breakthrough occurred about 8:30 a.m., when two witnesses reported seeing Mr. Gelman on a southbound No. 1 train between 137th and 96th Streets in Manhattan. One called 911. The other, a woman, was reading a newspaper when a man, apparently Mr. Gelman, moved close.

Mr. Kelly related, “He knocks the paper out of her hand and says, ‘Do you believe what they’re writing about me?’ ” —NYT

III. I went to hear Nicholson Baker speak at Columbia last Thursday; among the many gems was this bit, on Dick Francis, which I then related to Jenny (the only Franciscan I know).

IV. At Desert Island in Brooklyn: a window display by Jing Wei:

Labyrinths, bakeries, and more

1. William Gibson on Borges's Labyrinths (via Ed of the Ranting)—definitely my pick if I could only take one Borges book to a desert island.

Speaking of which, I figured out what I would say if I were allowed only one book, period, to take to a desert island. I would ask for a ukelele (or guitar) chord book, if I were also able to take a uke or guitar as well.

(Wait—why am I thinking I'm about to be marooned on a desert island?)

2. Dizzyhead Mollie's on a roll over at Restricted View: How one publisher mangled Middlemarch.

3. UPDATE: Time to check out the latest issue of Cinema Scope, featuring B. Kite on Rivette, Jessica Winter on Idiocracy . . . (Alas, these pieces aren't available online.)

* * *

4. Brit in Brooklyn was on the scene yesterday after the collapse of Ward Bakery. (Visit the site for more photos.)

* * *

5. Congrats to Dizzyhead Sarah—recipient of the 2007–8 Rome Prize!

6. Have you seen The Norman Rockwell Code?

7. Tomorrow there's a Believer Nighttime Event at the New School. It's part of the PEN World Voices—participants include Miranda July, Uzodinma Iweala, and John Hodgman. (Eric Bogosian is MCing.)

8. Any Humbert Wolfe fans out there?

9. This article about ravens is great!

Their skills when it comes to tricking and cheating, for example, have not been thoroughly explored. Ravens are cunning enough to set up mock hiding places in order to distract their thievish fellows from their real food stores. They're generally very inventive when it comes to tricking those who would snatch away their food. But how much truth is there to reports according to which ravens play dead next to carcasses in order to simulate a case of food poisoning?

(Via Arts & Letters Daily)