Has anyone read Nicholson Baker?

[Lubichev]

If so, what did you think? I just finished reading The Fermata after finishing VOX and The Mezzanine. Utterly lewd and hilarious.
From a review: The Fermata is the most risky of Nicholson Baker's emotional histories. His narrator, Arno Strine, is a 35-year-old office temp who is writing his autobiography. "It's harder than I thought!" he admits. His "Fold-powers" are easier; he can stop the world and use it as his own pleasure ground. Arno uses this gift not for evil or material gain (he would feel guilty about stealing), though he does undress a good number of women and momentarily place them in compromising positions--always, in his view, with respect and love. Anyone who can stop time and refer in self-delight to his "chronanisms" can't be all bad! Like Baker's other books, The Fermata gains little from synopsis. The pleasure is literally in the text. What's memorable is less the sex and the sex toys (including the "Monasticon," in the shape of a monk holding a vibrating manuscript) than Arno's wistful recollections of intimacy: the noise, for instance, of his ex-girlfriend's nail clipper, "which I listened to in bed as some listen to real birdsong."

Such an entertaining writer.

[Jonathan Bogart]

I skimmed The Fermata once and read Vox several times in the library. (Yes, I was just looking for the cheap thrills.) I remember thinking that Vox had slightly more going for it than just the erotic, but not quite enough. I think I'd be more interested in his non-erotic fiction these days.

Lately, Baker's become a Mecca for old newspaper-strip enthusiasts and reprinters. Upset with the way libraries have been ditching their paper archives in favor or microform or electronic archives, he's been going around the country buying up the paper stock the libraries would have just thrown away. Anyone interested in the contents of those old newspapers and magazines (me! me! me!) has found him a generous resource. I believe his archives have helped Fantagraphics put together the complete Krazy Kat and Peanuts volumes that are now being published.

A couple of years ago, I remember reading an article by a librarian basically yelling at him for preferring the paper versions. ("A librarian's mission is to preserve information. The medium of that information makes no difference.") Which makes no sense to me. Aside from the aesthetics at issue (microfilm has got to be about the worst-looking "preservation" medium ever), there's the obvious fact that unless he rescues these archives, they will be lost forever. Microfilm doesn't exist for some of these archives. And to my knowledge, only the New York Times and the New Yorker have digitized their entire archives. Any newspaper or magazine which isn't still in print (which is most of them) will never get that chance, unless some philanthropist like Baker is willing to give these back issues — a major, indeed fundamental part of our history — a home.

Anyway, kind of weird digression there, but it dovetails with my own recent interests.

Nicholson Baker: okay writer, great great great humanitarian.

[Lubichev]

Thanks for the information. I didn't know that.