Nicholson Baker
I pitched a piece recently explaining that I wanted to approach the topic in question the way Nicholson Baker or Henry Petroski might. The editor is interested, so I decided to refresh my memory of Baker's writing. I love his obsessive attention to the minutiae that surrounds us everyday, but I had forgotten just how good a writer he is. You can find a number of his best essays in The Size of Thoughts. "The History of Punctuation" is the one I lit upon for a Nicholson Baker refresher course, but I thought about using "Books as Furniture."
posted by Derrick @ 1:17 PM
1 Comments:
Ah Mr. Baker. I once had the pleasure of speaking with him on the phone for about 20 minutes — a sort of odd and disjointed conversation about the future of motion-pictue archives, he was researching for a New Yorker article, on how they might be digitized for preservation as even with the best of cold-storage their nitrogen-based chemistry would eventually fail. While I was out of my element (my expertise on rare books and manuscripts), I enjoyed pondering the possibilities with him. We even discussed David Packard's work at both: endowing the Motion Picture Association of America file archives, and about the preservation of early 20th-centrury cinema as reconstructed in the Stanford theater — which later I in fact had the opportunity to discuss directly with Mr. Packard at my imaging studio. But truly the honor was mine when Nick Baker shared with the audience of KQED's City Arts and Lectures that from his experience the only advancement in the preservation of significant documents was coming from my work at Octavo. I'm just trying to make a contribution, I shared with him. Thanks Derrick.
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