Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Chowder speaks:

The history of poetry began, quite possibly, in the year 1883. Let me write that date for you with my Sharpie, so you can have it for your convenience. 1883. That’s when it all began. Or maybe not. Could be any year. The year doesn’t matter. Forget the year! The important thing is that there’s something called the nineteenth century, which is like a huge forest of old-growth birch and beech. That’s what they used to make clothespins out of, birch and beech. New England was the clothespin-manufacturing capital of the world. There was a factory in Vanceborough, Maine, that made eight hundred clothespins a minute in 1883. Those clothespins went out to England, to France, to Spain, to practically every country in the world. Clothes in every country were stretched out on rope to dry in the sun and held in place by New England clothespins. Elizabeth Barrett Browning probably used New England clothespins. I’m not kidding.

Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist (2009) is a novel in the form of a monologue by Paul Chowder, a poet struggling to write an introduction for an anthology of rhyming poetry. Chowder is genial, klutzy, and lonely. He is a dispenser of writing tips, a proclaimer of truths (like many poets, he knows what he knows, and he knows it’s the truth), and a slightly cracked theorist of meter. His taste in poetry is, well, his own: he loves Sara Teasdale and never “really cottoned” to John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Chowder’s skills in digression and procrastination go hand in hand: witness the sample above.

At one point in his monologue, Chowder mourns the death of good light verse. The Anthologist might be described as a good light novel: it’s a delight to read, funny and entertaining.

A related post
About the clothespins

From Lena to Rena

[“Hello Rena — Did you cut down that stump yet? Has the grass growed up again? Lena.” Postmarked August 10, 1907. Click for a larger view.]

The Railway Exchange Building, now known as the Santa Fe Building, opened in 1904. I found this postcard in an antiques store. The message — from sister to sister? — sold me.

Brian Wilson, judged by history

From an interview with Brian Wilson:

Q. How do you think you’ll be judged by history?

A. I think as a musical genius, probably.

A related post
Brian Wilson at the movies (from another interview)

Federer v. Nadal

David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Wimbledon 2006:

Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver. Righty and southpaw. Nos. 1 and 2 in the world. Nadal, the man who’s taken the modern power-baseline game just as far as it goes, versus a man who’s transfigured that modern game, whose precision and variety are as big a deal as his pace and foot-speed, but who may be peculiarly vulnerable to, or psyched out by, that first man. A British sportswriter, exulting with his mates in the press section, says, twice, “It’s going to be a war.”

Federer as Religious Experience (New York Times)

At the French Open, Federer is down two sets to none as I’m typing.

11:31 a.m.: Federer won the third set.

12:06 p.m.: Nadal won the fourth set and the match.

[Disclaimer: I know zilch about tennis.]

Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, complete

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume, 28,000-word Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is complete. Started in 1921, the dictionary was created over the years by about 85 employees writing on millions of index cards in up to five large offices at the school’s Oriental Institute at University Avenue and 58th Street.

The school of course is the University of Chicago. The work’s official title: The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The twenty-one volumes are available as free downloads.

A related post
Beginning with A (other lexicographic long hauls)

“Housewife Headache”

[“Making beds, getting meals, acting as family chauffeur — having to do the same dull, tiresome work day after day — is a mild form of torture. These boring yet necessary tasks can bring on nervous tension, fatigue and what is now known as ‘housewife headache.’ For this kind of headache you need strong yet safe relief. So take Anacin®. Anacin is a special fortified formula. It gives you twice as much of the strong pain-reliever doctors recommend most — as the other leading extra strength tablet. Minutes after taking Anacin your headache goes, so do its nervous tension and fatigue. Despite its strength Anacin is safe, taken as directed. It doesn’t leave you depressed or groggy. See if you don’t feel better all over with a brighter outlook after taking 2 Anacin Tablets.” Life, December 20, 1968.]

I found this advertisement while searching for something else. It’s the first in a brief series of Life ads touting Anacin as the cure for “Housewife Headache,” and one of two that characterize housework as “a mild form of torture” — from which there’s no respite, only a tablet that offers temporary relief from pain. Note the tactful reassurance about Anacin: “It doesn’t leave you depressed or groggy.” In other words, it’s not a tranquilizer. The active ingredients if you’re wondering: aspirin and caffeine.

Lists at the Morgan Library

At the Morgan Library: “Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.” No photographs on the Morgan website, but there’s a nice sampling at the Smithsonian.

A related post
A review of Liza Kirwin’s Lists (the book of the exhibit)

Clarice Taylor (1917–2011)

From the New York Times:

Clarice Taylor, an actress who was best known as the endearing, self-possessed grandmother on The Cosby Show and who also won an Obie Award for her Off Broadway portrayal of the vaudeville comedienne Moms Mabley, died on Monday at her home in Englewood, N.J. She was 93.

I think of her as Granny Ethel in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster’s Smoke (1995).

Happy v. right

Jonathan Kaplan:

“It’s better to be happy than to be right. (It’s hard for driven people to realize this.)”

It’s certainly not always the case that it’s better to be happy than right. But sometimes it is. Often it is. Oh heck — Jonathan Kaplan is right!

[Jonathan Kaplan founded Pure Digital Technologies, the company that made the Flip camcorder. His latest venture is a line of grilled-cheese-and-soup restaurants.]

Patrick Leigh Fermor’s eye

In the 1950s Patrick Leigh Fermor spent time as a guest in French Benedictine and Trappist monasteries, seeking not God but a cheap and quiet place to write. Here he is shown into his room in the Abbey of St. Wandrille de Fontanelle:

The monk opened a door and said, “Here is your cell.” It was a high seventeenth-century room with a comfortable bed, a prie-dieu, a writing-table, a tapestry chair, a green adjustable reading-lamp, and a rather disturbing crucifix on the whitewashed stone walls. The window looked out over a grassy courtyard, in which a small fountain played, over the grey flank of the monastery buildings and the wall that screened the Abbey from the half-timbered houses of the village. A vista of forest flowed away beyond. In the middle of the writing-table stood a large inkwell, a tray full of pens and a pad into which new blotting paper had just been fitted. I had only time to unpack my clothes and papers and books before a great bell began ringing and the monk, who was the guest-master, returned to lead me to the refectory for the midday meal. As we walked, the buildings changed in period from the architecture of the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries to Gothic; and we halted at length by the piscina in an ogival cloister of the utmost beauty, outside a great carved door where several other visitors had also been assembled. The guest-master shepherded us into the refectory in which the Abbot, a tall, white-haired, patrician figure with a black skull-cap and a gold pectoral cross on a green cord, was waiting to receive us. To each of the guests he spoke a few words; and some, sinking upon one knee, kissed the great emerald on his right hand. To me he addressed a polite formula in English that had obviously been acquired at some remote period from a governess. A novice advanced with a silver ewer and a basin; the Abbot poured a little water over our hands, a towel was offered, and our welcome, according to Benedictine custom, was complete.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time to Keep Silence (1957)

What an eye — for architecture, for the contents of a room, for the bits of detail that suggest the Abbot’s character. I especially like the way the eye takes in the room (saving that crucifix for last), looks through the window, and then zooms in on the details of the writing-desk. A Time to Keep Silence, Leigh Fermor’s account of his monastic travels, is available from New York Review Books (2007). I picked up the book by chance in a bookstore last week. I’ve yet to meet a NYRB book I haven’t liked.

[Is Patrick Leigh Fermor still writing? I hope so. In 2007, at the age of ninety-two, he was learning to type.]