Customer Reviews

The Size of Thoughts - essays & other lumber

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Nicholson Baker writes about important stuff; not things like affirmative action or the cumulative effect of the Marshall Plan on Postwar Europe, but essential little things like fingernail clippers and Testor paints.
In his new book of essays, "The Size of Thoughts," Baker deals with such weighty issues as the machinery of movie projectors and the relationship between rarity and writing on rubber. But don't get the idea that Baker's book is a frivolous rambling; included in this collection of essays is a careful mini-history of punctuation, a report on the computerization of library card catalogs, and a hundred pages devoted to an exacting essay on the word "lumber."
Arranged under six headings (Thought, Machinery, Reading, Mixed, Library Science, and Lumber), the essays in this collection range from playfully comical to earnest and sentimental. Among Baker's more informal offerings are a recipe for chocolate sauce, a collection of mistyped sentences put in poetic form, and excerpts written under the influence of "nearly a hundred dollars' worth of marijuana."Baker's sentences are rolling and pun-laden, his vocabulary sharp even under a cloud of THC. A good part of his talent rests in his ability to articulate the quirky joys and silly idiosyncrasies that we all share but are shy to admit. His "Model Airplanes" may well put many readers in toy store aisles looking for the biggest B-17 on the shelf and three little jars of olive drab. His "Clip Art" will have readers closely inspecting the chrome plating of their fingernail clippers, searching for tiny clues to their origins.
These essays and others reveal an amateur's curiosity, a dabbler's impatience, and a romantic's simultaneous love of and disappointment with the new. Baker's writing, both here and in his earlier works, evidences a mind in motion; his prose jumps flaming hoops and juggles chainsaws. His observations are sharp and smart, frequently pushing up a good laugh. "The Size of Thoughts" is full of closet-size thoughts, and maybe some house-size ones, too.

After reading this book, you will never clip your toenails again without marvelling at the fine and delicate engineering that went into the noble toenail clipper. You will develop a nostalgia for flipping through the card catalog, and for the days when consumer items did not come in fashion colors and an overwhelming number of forms. We are unaccustomed to the results of such honed and loving attention paid to the quotidian. Who knew such pleasure could be gotten from the history of film projectors, or the semantic evolution of the word "lumber?"

Which brings us to the book of the month: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber by Nicholson Baker. With all this travel and displacement, I didn't read that much in the past month except for a few scant pages of this or that book, or leafing though New York Girls, or the Doris Kloster book, or flipping through pages of The Complete Reprint of John Willie's Bizarre. Baker's book was sort of a meditative book after enjoying the "over the top" quality of a Kern or a Kloster. Baker is a very intelligent man as an essayist and this sober and funny book reminds me of the thoughtfulness of his previous novels, The Mezzanine or The Fermata.

In fact, Nicholson Baker has been assaulted once or twice in the past by a reviewer or two for being a minor pornographer on the last two novelistic outings, and I guess that he is now asking for our forgiveness. He portrays himself here as a regular guy, with a great interest in the most minute particles. The careful essays are about simple things: changing your mind as opposed to making decisions, the size and shape of thoughts, and rarity in life and experience. Baker is also a physical guy and likes his hands on the machinery, so he devotes a word or two about typewriters, model airplanes, clipping your nails, and the movie projectionist.

He is a severe literary critic (refer to U and I), and Baker here elaborates his views on the literary profession which include the art of reading aloud, the history of punctuation, thoughts about Alan Hollinghurst and J. E. Lighter's The Historical Dictionary of American Slang. Things read at weddings, typos, a recipe, dewey decimal system, and books as furniture are thrown in the shuffle; glue keeps it all together. And finally a long essay about the history of lumber, where he comes out in favor of lumber, is his most strongly political. I say that I love lumber! Ever since I was hit on the head by a two by four as a child.

"So what size are they?" I heard a voice asking. Blinking in the Queensland sunshine I looked up from my book and smiled when I realised what my questioner meant. "There's only one way to answer that question" I said, and proceeded to read the opening paragraph of the book aloud, while my questioner listened, spellbound.

Back in rainy Britain I'd woken up with a dry mouth and aching head after one of my farewell parties in a friends house. Desperate for something to read I spied this book upon a shelf. Attracted by the tasteless pink and orange cover adorning this particular edition I picked it up and immediately disappeared, enthralled, into the lumber-room of someone else's mind. This charming book is filled with some of the irrelevant bits and pieces that somehow sneak into our brains. We turn them over from time to time, pulling them out of our subconscious like a paper covered boiled sweet from a fluff-filled pocket.

The author leads you down the byways and alleys of his thought processes, challenging and amusing you by turn and always asking questions that you wish you had thought of. This gentle philosophical meandering leads you to look at your surroundings with fresh eyes and broadens your horizons because you suddenly understand how at least one other human being thinks. It's a charming book to suit a wistful mood, a beach, a cloud, a river. Pack it in your holiday suitcase and wander gently through it at a holiday pace when the mood takes you. You won't be disappointed.

A weirdly eclectic mix of topics, each of which stays with you.

The essay on card catalogs makes me want to scream and tear my hair out. I have a few friends who are librarians. I have raised Baker's issue with them, and they are to-a-t EXACTLY how he would have predicted. "Well, we're not really archivists."

Wonderful, compelling stuff here.

This is a brilliant book. It consists of several short essays on varied subjects; fingernail clippers, a review of a slang dictionary, and the demise of card catalogues to name a few, and one long essay on the history and usage of the word 'lumber'.

Nicholson is a master of finding the sublime in the mundane and his essays bring into focus the understated beauty of everyday objects. Eccentric and and at times almost comically over-erudite? Sure, but you'll find yourself nodding in silent recognition at his apt descriptions of the minutiae of daily life.

Credit where it's due, there's a sense in which this collection of essays merits a 5-star rating: it displays the author's impressive breadth of learning; it is, throughout, terrifically well written; it is interesting, if for no other reason, for its unconventionality. NB is a very fine essayist. Then why only 3 stars? Simply because my attention wasn't held from start to finish. There are some brilliant essays in this collection. And there are some less engaging pieces. Depends what you're interested in, I guess. Perhaps no one besides NB shares all of NB's interests. But each of NB's interests is probably shared by some reader(s) out there. So, it's probably safe to say that TSoT has something for 'everyone'. I'm glad I read it, and I'd definitely read NB again.

I am re-reading this collection and I am reminded of just how much Baker has to offer readers. The essay "Books as Furniture" is a masterpiece of whimsy, sociology, tangent hunting, and joy in observations that lead to adventures for the mind.

Based on reading just half this book I scrambled back to Amazon and ordered everything else he's written. (Then I went back and finished the rest of SIZE OF THOUGHTS; the brilliance never dimmed. Baker's amazing agility with words never stopped surprising and tickling.)

Those other books are coming in now, and I've skimmed three or four and they are no-less unique amazements. MEZZANINE, as an example, immortalizes some guy's thoughts on a 135-page escalator ride. All, an inner monologue of comments and perceptions that made me feel I'd slipped into an alternate universe that exceeds description by anyone by Baker. (Consider a format where there's as much copy in the footnotes as in the narration.)

Nicholson Baker can see and describe anything and make it readable, interesting and insightful. Wish I could write like that.

True to form, Nicholson Baker delights with curious arcane tidbits about everything from the making of model airplane kits to the sad fate of card catalogues. Most of it is humorous and wonderful --(in one essay, he looks up the books used as accessories in catalogues like Pottery Barn and gives us synopses on these tomes chosen only for their covers)-- but the five-part "Lumber" truly lumbers along, and should've been kept to one better-edited essay. No doubt that's why it's saved to last. Still, a good read.