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d8e9589
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Why are things beautiful? I don't know. That's a good question. Isn't it pleasing when you ask a question of a person, a teacher, or a speaker, and he or she says, That's a good question? Don't you feel good when that happens?
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questions
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Nicholson Baker |
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f267596
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in repairing the object you really ended up loving it more, because you now knew its eagerness to be reassembled, and in running a fingertip over its surface you alone could feel its many cracks - a bond stronger than mere possession.
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wabi-sabi
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Nicholson Baker |
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9ed98d1
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One day the English language is going to perish. The easy spokenness of it will perish and go black and crumbly -- maybe -- and it will become a language like Latin that learned people learn. And scholars will write studies of and and and and and , and everyone will see that the sitcom is the great American art form. American poetry will perish with the language; the sitcoms, on the other hand, are new to human evolution and ther..
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television
poetry
sitcom
language
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Nicholson Baker |
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7ba3bcb
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So the first thing about the history of rhyme . . . is that it's all happened before. It's all part of these huge rhymeorhythmic circles of exuberance and innovation and surfeit and decay and resurrectional primitivism and waxing sophistication and infill and overgrowth and too much and we can't stand it and let's stop and do something else.
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Nicholson Baker |
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3688ed4
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As it happened, the first three major advances in my life--and I will list all the advances here-- 1. shoe-tying 2. pulling up on Xs 3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying 4. brushing tongue as well as teeth 5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed 6. discovering that sweeping was fun 7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make billpaying more efficient 8. deciding that brain cells ought to die --have to do with ..
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Nicholson Baker |
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ddc3336
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Boswell, like Lecky (to get back to the point of this footnote), and Gibbon before him, loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of "ibid.'s" and "compare's" and "see's" that are the shield for the pure flow of argument..
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reading
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Nicholson Baker |
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f462380
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The great scholarly or anecdotal footnotes of Lecky, Gibbon, or Boswell, written by the author of the book himself to supplement, or even correct over several later editions, what he says in the primary text, are reassurances that the pursuit of truth doesn't have clear outer boundaries: it doesn't end with the book; restatement and self-disagreement and the enveloping sea of referenced authorities all continue. Footnotes are the finer-suck..
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Nicholson Baker |
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01444a3
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Abelardo, my manager, emerged from a stall. "What do you think, Howie?" he said; it was his standard greeting --one I was fond of. "Abe, I don't know what to think," I said; my standard response." --
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Nicholson Baker |
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b36a4ae
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Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory? Will I reach the point where there will be a good chance, I mean a more than fifty-fifty chance, that any random idea popping back into the foreground of my consciousness will be an idea that first came to me as an adult, rather than on..
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childhood
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Nicholson Baker |
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6e797e3
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sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren't.
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Nicholson Baker |
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6b278d3
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anthology knowledge isn't real knowledge.
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Nicholson Baker |
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56f9216
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one above their individual homes about a quarter of an inch, and most would fall back in place; but some, the loosest, would loft higher and often land irregularly, leaving one graspable end sticking up--these you used for your drink.
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Nicholson Baker |
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585f67f
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The thing about life is that life is an infinite subject matter. At any one moment you can say only what' before your mind just then. You have some control over what comes before your mind - you can influence the influx by reading, or by looking through your old notes, or by going to movies, or by talking to people, and you can choose what room of the house or what corner of the yard to sit in, and you can choose to write before or after yo..
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writing
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Nicholson Baker |
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18ee0cc
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The address of the Tip O'Neill building is 10 Causeway Street. It may be torn down soon, because it is one of the most wonderfully unsightly buildings ever constructed. In the eighties they blew up a grand hotel that had gone seedy, and in its place they built this shrine to Congressman Tip O'Neill. It houses all the federal offices - the office of Social Security, and the Firearms Legitimization Bureau, the Bioshock Informant Management Co..
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Nicholson Baker |
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bad24de
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Used with care, substances that harm neural tissue, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle-solving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around them, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents. After a night of poison. your brain wakes up in the morning saying, "No, I don't give a shi..
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the-brain
trivia
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Nicholson Baker |
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d3ab3c4
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They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of 'ibid.'s' and 'compare's' and 'see's' that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind...
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Nicholson Baker |
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f676e7b
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Literary friendship is impossible, it seems; at least, it is impossible for me. Indeed, all male friendships outside of work sometimes seem to be impossible: you look at each other at the restaurant at some point in the conversation and you know that each of you is thinking, man, this is futile, why are we here, we're wasting our time, we have nothing to say, we're not involved in some project together that we can bitch about, we can't flir..
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writing
masculinity
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Nicholson Baker |
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35d6728
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Perforation! Shout it out! The deliberate punctuated weakening of paperand cardboard so that it will tear along an intended path, leaving a row of fine-haired white pills or tuftlets on each new edge! It is a staggering conception, showing an age-transforming feel for the unique properties of pulped-wood fiber. Yet do we have national holidays to celebrate its development? Are festschrift volumes published honoring the dead greats in the fi..
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Nicholson Baker |
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21a1768
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The meanness that first bothered me, though, when I encountered it a decade ago, long before I was married, was in a short story in in which a young husband returns with hamburgers and eats them happily with his family in front of the fire, and thinks lovingly of his wife's Joyceanly "smackwarm" thighs, and then, in the next paragraph, says as narrator (the "you" directed at the narrator's wife), "In the morning, to my relief, you are ugl..
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Nicholson Baker |
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bd04508
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You float like a feather," sings Radiohead, "In a beautiful world." I've listened several times to the Radiohead songs, because it was nice of Raymond to say he heard a bit of them in what I sang. I'm not sure I hear it myself, but I am pleased and touched. Sometimes that's what you need, just a quick casual word of knowledgeable encouragement. Radiohead reminds me a little of the songs in Garden State soundtrack. Now, that's a soundtrack. ..
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music
songs-lyrics
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Nicholson Baker |
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9299b90
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bavardage.
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Nicholson Baker |
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e1b2889
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But now, after the news of Barthelme's death, this simple fact of or , which I had begun to recognize in a small way already, now became the single most important supplemental piece of information I felt I could know about a writer: more important than his age when he wrote a particular work, or his nationality, his sex (forgive the pronoun), political leanings, even whether he did or did not have, in someone's opinion, any talent. -- ..
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writing
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Nicholson Baker |
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90c5241
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The nice thing about putting on your glasses in the dark is that you know you could see better if it were light, but since it is dark the glasses make no difference at all.
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Nicholson Baker |
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14a92df
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The Bombay Chronicle asked Mohandas Gandhi what he thought of the fact that the United States was now in the war. It was December 20, 1941. 'I cannot welcome this entry of America,' Gandhi said. 'By her territorial vastness, amazing energy, unrivalled financial status and owing to the composite character of her people she is the one country which could have saved the world from the unthinkable butchery that is going on.' Now, he said, ther..
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Nicholson Baker |
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7ae6e58
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sometimes it's hard to tell the truth because you the truth is hard to see, because it exists in a misty, gray non-space between two strongly charged falsehoods that sound true but aren't.
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Nicholson Baker |
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efa135a
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Subject of Thought Number of Times Thought Occurred per Year (in descending order) L. 580.0 Family 400.0 Brushing tongue 150.0 Earplugs 100.0 Bill-paying 52.0 Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, greatness of 45.0 Sunlight makes you cheerful 40.0 Traffic frustration 38.0 Penguin books, all 35.0 Job, should I quit? 34.0 Friends, don't have any 33.0 Marriage, a possibility? 32.0 Vending machines 31.0 Straws don't unsheath well 28.0 Shine o..
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Nicholson Baker |
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8ce7532
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At that age I once stabbed my best friend, Fred, with a pair of pinking shears in the base of the neck, enraged because he had been given the comprehensive sixty-four-crayon Crayola box--including the gold and silver crayons--and would not let me look closely at the box to see how Crayola had stabilized the built-in crayon sharpener under the tiers of crayons.
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Nicholson Baker |
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aca05d1
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I am not proud of the fact that major ingredients of my emotional history are available for purchase today at CVS.
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Nicholson Baker |
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44a347e
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Reading is itself a state of artificially enhanced loneliness.
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Nicholson Baker |