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Topic: Nicholson Baker

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	Voice Literary Supplement: The Paper Chase
		Indeed, the best of Baker's fiction is nothing but: U and I's autobiographical protagonist spends the book brooding on his entirely imaginary relationship with John Updike; The Fermata's likeably creepy Arno Strine uses his magical time-stopping powers for little else but stealing glimpses of women with their clothes off.
		Baker's trademark minutiae here just pile up like so much ballast for his rhetorical dreadnought; his trademark wit stiffens into sarcastic potshots at the book's designated villains, a motley crew of 20th-century library-policy gurus whom Baker almost succeeds in bringing to life on the page but can't quite bring himself to humanize.
		Baker at one point hits the nail on the head: "The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas," he writes, explaining his conviction that libraries should aspire to be museums as much as databases.
	www.villagevoice.com /vls/174/dibbell.shtml (1041 words)

	The Great Newspaper Caper: Backlash in the Digital Age (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Nicholson Baker is already well known to librarians because of his previous article on the destruction of original card catalogs as automated systems replaced them [2], another bit of manna from heaven for an educator trying to stimulate thinking by his students about even the most cherished assumptions.
		Baker admits that there is "nothing intrinsically wrong with microfilming," except that right from the beginning, it has been "intimately linked" with the destruction of newspapers [23].
		Baker also seeks sympathy in his revelation that he is, at great personal expense, buying newspapers and storing the originals in order to save these original newspapers [26].
	firstmonday.org /issues/issue5_12/cox (8507 words)

	Salon.com Books \| "Double Fold" by Nicholson Baker (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Baker could have written a wholesome, boring, respectable tome about how the fate of the nation's books and newspapers hangs perilously in the balance.
		Baker cuts to the bone, layer by layer, of a secret tragedy that has been insidiously playing itself out in libraries across the nation since the 1950s.
		Baker has always been the sort of writer who builds strata of odd details; he's the guy who notices the little curlicue in the corner that everyone else misses.
	www.salon.com /books/review/2001/04/27/baker (654 words)

	Guardian Unlimited Books \| By genre \| Particular obsessions
		Baker has made a virtue of celebrating daily existence, whether it is the kaleidoscopic detailing of a single lunch hour in The Mezzanine (1988), the labyrinthine sexual obsessions of The Fermata (1994), or the critical mirages of U and I (1991), Baker's exposé of literary aspiration disguised as a study John Updike's work.
		Baker's celebrity status was further enhanced when Vox turned out to be one of the books presented to President Bill Clinton by Monica Lewinsky during their affair.
		Baker's last novel, a rather downbeat account of a year in the life of a nine-year-old girl called The Everlasting Story of Nory, certainly surprised critics once more with its earnestness and total lack of gimmickry or stylistic pyrotechnics.
	books.guardian.co.uk /departments/generalfiction/story/0,6000,872378,00.html (2878 words)

	Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint: The Reactions and Reviews - the complete review Quarterly
		Nicholson Baker chose to offer a book of great immediacy, but it looks like in these impatient times he wasn't fast enough: the noise surrounding what was trumpeted as the idea behind his novel drowned out the much softer and more complex murmur of the book itself.
		Baker's statements in interviews further muddied the waters: for a text that so many were ready to denounce because they felt they knew exactly what it was about, Checkpoint has proven to be amazingly amorphous.
		Baker's book, by discussing real events and people, perhaps invites this approach but Wieseltier seems unable (or, more likely: unwilling) to allow for the possibility that a fictional treatment of the subject-matter may have other goals than merely to present anti-Bush sentiments in fictional trappings.
	www.complete-review.com /quarterly/vol5/issue4/checkpt.htm (7411 words)

	John's Book Reviews: The Everlasting Story of Nory (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		In 1990's Room Temperature, Nicholson Baker wrote of the thoughts passing through is head as he cradled his new baby in his arms.
		Baker's flair for minutae is well suited for the almost obsessive view of the world that little children have as they learn their ways in life.
		Baker has gone very far toward capturing the workings of the child's mind (though based on my own childhood recollections, I didn't entirely relate to Nory, but did relate to her little brother).
	sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu /~jmcd/book/revs2/eson.html (272 words)

	Checkpoint - Nicholson Baker
		Baker writes from a height nearly as removed as Wieseltier's, a very comfortable perch where inhumanity is something to be clucked over, not an abyss that must, at some point, be stared into.
		Nicholson Baker doesn't make us care about his characters or their actions, and as to the arguments contra Bush, one leaves the novel exactly where one came in." -
		It seems a reasonable, almost laudable conclusion, but only because Baker has taken the most outrageous of actions -- assassination (made all the more real because, at the time the book was published the target, the junior Bush, was still in office) -- which is per se beyond the pale.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/bakern/cpoint.htm (3077 words)

	SAA: Responding to Nicholson Baker's Double Fold
		Baker may be way too creative a writer for his own good when he tries to figure out how and why these decisions were being made.
		Baker holds onto his newspaper repository long enough so that he learns about the daily decisions and complicated choices that librarians and archivists have to make, but I have already heard rumors that he is negotiating the sale of his holdings to a major research library.
		Baker provides a lot of anecdotal evidence (mostly from his own personal experience and observation), some of it quite compelling, but we need to examine in analytical, if not scientific, fashion the extent of deterioration of paper.
	www.archivists.org /news/doublefold.asp (5420 words)

	eye - Books - 07.09.98
		Nicholson Baker is a writer who likes to take risks.
		Baker's main theme concerns childhood's restricted memories and greatly expanded experience of the passage of time.
		Baker is to be congratulated on successfully completing another risky venture.
	www.eye.net /eye/issue/issue_07.09.98/art/books9.html (713 words)

	SALON Features: Nicholson Baker (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Nicholson Baker discusses the public trials of writing about sex and the private joy of writing on rubber spatulas with a ballpoint pen.
		icholson Baker gained notoriety and numerous fans with his inventive erotic novels "Vox" -- transcribing a deliriously imaginative phone sex marathon -- and "The Fermata" -- the tale of an office worker who can stop time and uses his powers to undress women.
		Baker's most fervent literary admirers, however, swear by his first novel, "The Mezzanine," which takes place on an escalator, and "U and I," a book-length essay detailing the author's obsessive admiration for John Updike.
	www.salon.com /10/features/baker1.html (306 words)

	JS Online: In celebration of everyday musings (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Baker made a splash in the early '90s with his naughty and readable "Vox," about phone sex, which he followed up with the lyrical and funny "U and I," about his obsession with John Updike - sort of a "Roger and Me" for the Lit set.
		Baker glides as easily to the profound, with observations on a parent's unexpected grief at his boy's growing too big to have his hair washed for him - "the loss is enough to make you lose composure" - or a son's heartbreak at his father's encroaching dementia.
		Like his earliest novels, "The Mezzanine" and "Room Temperature," Baker's newest book is a grand work on life's minutiae, as warm and glowing as the embers in Emmett's fireplace.
	www.jsonline.com /enter/books/reviews/jan03/109609.asp (490 words)

	The Christian Science Monitor \| csmonitor.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		But, as novelist Nicholson Baker discovered, some of the world's greatest libraries - such as the British Library and the Library of Congress - have been destroying their collections of bound newspapers and brittle books in the process of "preserving" them on microfilm.
		As Baker observes, one of the pleasures of reading through bound volumes of old newspapers is seeing the overall arrangement of each page - just as the paper's original readers did.
		Baker argues that both the space crisis and the acid crisis have been grossly overstated by various "experts," whose pronouncements have been blindly accepted.
	www.csmonitor.com /durable/2001/04/05/fp20s1-csm.shtml (683 words)

	UW Libraries - Preservation - Nicholson Baker (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Baker’s conclusions, we welcome the attention he has focused on the preservation challenge.
		Baker is particularly concerned about newspapers which offer special challenges since they are not issued for permanency, don’t hold up well to use, and, with a few exceptions, are difficult to access since indices to them are lacking.
		Baker’s concerns for the poor quality of early microfilm done before the preservation community developed standards for film stock and microfilming.
	www.lib.washington.edu /Preservation/nicbaker.html (1015 words)

	The Tufts Daily - Stop at the "Checkpoint" (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Angry at the current administration, and even angrier at the war in Iraq, Baker sought to come to terms with his woes the only way he knew how: by writing a story about two old friends, one of whom is bent on committing high treason.
		With anger like that you can imagine Baker himself transformed into a literary lone gunman: wild-eyed and over-caffeinated, poised at a typewriter surrounded by yellowing newspaper clippings, plotting his revenge with a red pencil clinched between his teeth.
		Baker became too blue in the face tallying miseries to ever arrive at a point.
	www.tuftsdaily.com /vnews/display.v/ART/2004/09/09/413fe8900f6c6 (925 words)

	The Seattle Times: Books: "Checkpoint": Giving voice to political outrage of times
		In a recent interview with Newsweek, Baker revealed he wrote the novel's first draft during the siege of Fallujah in April: "It was as if I was mourning the war, the stupidity and the wastefulness of what we did.
		At the same time, Baker distanced himself not just from Jay's views ("I don't actually think it would be such a hot idea for somebody to assassinate the president") but from both characters in the novel.
		The volatile nature of their conflict ensures, to my mind, that "Checkpoint" works as a novel — not Baker's best novel perhaps ("The Mezzanine" and "The Fermata" strike me as his masterpieces) but certainly a serious attempt to address feelings that are running high in our charged political atmosphere.
	seattletimes.nwsource.com /html/books/2002004480_checkpoint15.html (734 words)

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		Nicholson Baker, as by now everyone who reads knows, thinks that the destruction of America's publishing heritage is the fault of librarians.
		Baker also observes that the varying content of different daily editions of a given newspaper is lost through the slash-and-film school of "preservation."
		Baker does not condemn microfilming and digitization out of hand: He asks, simply, that these activities, which are crucial to wider dissemination of the materials ordinarily owned only by research libraries, not result in the physical destruction of those materials.
	www.newpages.com /unclefrank/Number02.htm (2336 words)

	NPR : Nicholson Baker: A Life in Detail (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Baker tells NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr that he wrote his latest novel, A Box of Matches, only by the light of a fire.
		Nicholson Baker says he plans to alternate between fiction and non-fiction, "continuing to examine those ordinary things that most people overlook, and helping to introduce his readers to the familiar," Freymann-Weyr says.
		May 12, 2001: Nicholson Baker talks to Weekend Edition Saturday guest host Melinda Penkava about his campaign to prevent libraries from destroying books after they are recorded onto microfilm.
	www.npr.org /display_pages/features/feature_921674.html (567 words)

	A Novel's Plot Against the President (washingtonpost.com)
		In Nicholson Baker's new novella, "Checkpoint," a man sits in a Washington hotel room with a friend and talks about assassinating President Bush.
		Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," in which assassination is discussed but never acted upon, will be published in August.
		The critically admired Baker is a master of written-from-a-weird-angle fiction.
	www.washingtonpost.com /ac2/wp-dyn/A13374-2004Jun28?language%3Dprinter (877 words)

	"Checks And Balances" - Collin Kelley reviews Nicholson Baker's CHECKPOINT
		While Bush is the intended target of the flying saws and magic bullets, Baker’s condemnation of Vice-president Dick Cheney and his wife Lynne (who sat on the board of directors of Lockheed-Martin, the builders of bombs and planes) is painted in even broader strokes.
		Baker also lobs in prescient comments on America’s out-sourcing of jobs and industry that the Bush administration has allowed to go un-checked.
		Either way, his time will pass in a twinkling.” While this is true, Baker also offers a compelling argument for why Bush should be out of office a little sooner than later.
	www.subtletea.com /collinkelleycheckpointreview.htm (845 words)

	R A I N T A X I o n l i n e (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Despite (or maybe because of) its brevity, it is well-paced and compelling, and Baker's ear for the rhythms and nuances of dialogue remains unparalleled.
		But Baker's earlier work, obsessed as it is with apparently meaningless minutiae, makes it easy to conclude that Baker himself supports Ben's position from a more general perspective.
		Baker has always written about the peripheral--things we're embarrassed to admit we think about (like disrobing a coworker, as in The Fermata), or things that we don't think much about but that hover on the edges of our consciousness (like shoelaces and straws, as in The Mezzanine).
	www.raintaxi.com /online/2004fall/baker.shtml (2017 words)

	Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: A Response (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The borrowed term "double fold" refers to a qualitative test, which Baker argues against, that is sometimes used to assess the relative strength of brittle paper and help inform preservation decisions.
		In a sidebar critique centered on the Library of Congress, Baker identifies a number of problematic effects that the use of the volatile chemical diethyl zinc had on early attempts to develop a process for the deacidification of collections of books and paper en masse.
		Despite its limitations, Baker's argument has stimulated reviews and discussions within and beyond the library profession regarding the importance of our print culture and the need for care and collaboration in the selection of preservation strategies.
	www.nd.edu /%7Eladvance/access/issues/2001/Fall/doublefold.htm (1341 words)

	Public spurns novel about man who wants to kill Bush: 8/ 31/ 2004
		Nicholson Baker's new book, "Checkpoint," has sold fewer than 6,500 copies from a first printing of 60,000.
		Baker is known for such unorthodox narratives as "Vox," which consists entirely of an erotic phone conversation, and "The Mezzanine," set mostly on an office escalator.
		Baker also wrote the nonfiction "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper," a National Book Critics Circle prize winner in 2002.
	www.southcoasttoday.com /daily/08-04/08-31-04/b01li169.htm (524 words)

	Baker plumbs liberals' darkest fantasies in play-like novel about plot on president's life
		In "Checkpoint," Nicholson Baker's sly, slender but important one-act play masquerading as a novel, the new stock question about presidential mortality gets asked in polite company for the first time.
		The question for Baker, as always for a writer of his restless virtuosity, is "Where to from here?" If it were up to me, alongside his customarily compact novellas, essays and now a play, I'd have him working on something serial, long-term and huge.
		Baker has an elastic talent that could probably benefit from working on front-burner and bottom-drawer projects simultaneously.
	www.sfgate.com /cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/08/19/DDGGA89LJI1.DTL (952 words)

	JS Online: Targeting Bush (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Nicholson Baker, whose hip, inconsequential little novels have built him a large following as a serious novelist, has now written what will surely be the most talked-about novel of the summer, and of this political season.
		But Baker, who in addition to being a canny conceptualist is a genuine storyteller, works two very effective turns for the novel's climax/anticlimax.
		In large part, this is a novel about the helplessness of the individual in the face of the daily news.
	www.jsonline.com /enter/books/reviews/aug04/250365.asp (484 words)

	Observer \| Rusted hulks and zombies
		Nicholson Baker, who began his literary career as the inspired miniaturist of The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, was pitched into the political arena when it emerged during Monicagate that his phone-sex novel, Vox, was Clinton and Lewinsky's favourite reading.
		Checkpoint is also, in part, a meditation on the past 50 years of the American presidency and on the progressive failure of America's political class to define America's global role in the world properly.
		Checkpoint is certainly an oddity among the fiction which has been published during this election year, but it also demonstrates Nicholson Baker's command of dialogue, his sure way with American vernacular and his instinctive gift for attracting attention.
	observer.guardian.co.uk /print/0,3858,5008512-102280,00.html (230 words)

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