The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  “You know what a Maltese cross is?” an itinerant projector-repairman with questionable toilet habits asks an incompetent projectionist near the end of Wim Wenders’ mammoth film-fleuve, Kings of the Road. The projectionist takes a guess: Some kind of drink? The repairman shakes his head sadly and tries to explain it to him. “Without this little thing, there’d be no film industry!” he says. The projectionist is unimpressed, and (because Kings of the Road is a semi-comprehensible art movie) he casually inhales the flame from a cigarette lighter to close out the scene. But the workings of the true star system, though they may take a moment to grasp (Fig. 2), repay meditation: seldom has a mechanism so simple, so unexpectedly heraldic, persisted without modification at the center of a ruthless business that has otherwise undergone continuous technical, artistic, and financial upheavals.

  The Simplex projector, which many hold to be the finest, is built in Omaha by a company called Ballantyne, which also makes theatrical spotlights and high-tech chicken cookers. The Maltese cross within the Simplex projector, however, is manufactured in Glendale Heights, Illinois, the work of a privately held company called La Vezzi Precision Incorporated, run by fifty-one-year-old Al La Vezzi. Al La Vezzi’s grandfather, Edward La Vezzi, got his start, during the First World War, by milling the worn teeth off projector sprockets and sweating new brass ones on. Now, in a sort of benevolent monopoly, La Vezzi’s company makes sprockets and intermittent movements for Simplex, Century, and Ballantyne projectors (all three brands are co-owned, and based in Omaha), and also for several companies in Europe and Asia, and for Christie projectors made in Cypress, California. For Christie, La Vezzi developed a sealed, belt-driven intermittent movement, called the Ultramittent, that never needs oiling. La Vezzi Precision is also responsible for the legendary VKF sprocket—the Very Kind to Film sprocket, that is—whose teeth are smoothed in meaningful ways by computer-controlled four-axis machining centers. The manufacture of the VKF sprocket is a “no-brainer,” however, according to Mr. La Vezzi, compared to making the Maltese cross, where serious flaws are measured in millionths of an inch. “The slot of a star has to be perfect,” he says, pronouncing “perfect” with inspiring plosiveness.

  Will there always be intermittent sprockets, and the projectors they serve, at work in the world? Will later generations of movie watchers know how similar a projector sounds to an idling VW Beetle? Will they, when viewing that superb early scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, realize that, though Chaplin is ostensibly dragged down into the bowels of a huge “Electro Steel Corp.” machine, he is really miming a piece of flexible film and threading himself through the sprockets of a movie projector? I’ve watched quite a few projector-movies recently (including one that I haven’t been able to splice in anywhere here, called The Smallest Show on Earth, in which Peter Sellers plays an old projectionist who disrupts a Western when he gets drunk in the booth), but I watched every one of them on videotape. I paused, rewound, fast-forwarded, played, and paused again so much in studying the last scene of Desperately Seeking Susan, for instance (Aidan Quinn kisses Rosanna Arquette against a Simplex projector playing a sci-fi movie about mutant attackers—Rosanna’s back arrests the winged chariot of the movie reel and the film frame melts on the screen), that the black plastic housing of the rented video gave off an unusually strong and pleasing smell of miniature VCR servomotors and hot printed-circuit boards when I at last, having subjected the lovers’ frame-melting embrace to a level of scrutiny it was never meant to bear, ejected it.

  Fig. 2. The cam turns (1) until the pin engages the Maltese cross (2), giving it a quarter turn and pulling the film down one frame (3). At (4), the pin releases the cross.

  But that single 35-mm. rectangle of color film contains, it is estimated, the equivalent of forty megabytes of digital information: forty megabytes, the contents of an entire small hard disk, in every frame of a movie. Even if one assumes all sorts of clever data compression, it is difficult to imagine digital storage systems matching the Van Eyckian resolution of the chemical grains on a strip of 35- or 70-mm. movie film anytime soon. Projectors, and the durably whirling Maltese crosses inside them, may still be around when, in another thirty years, a third, magnificently reimagined Blob oozes into the projection area of the local eight-plex and begins stirring up trouble. And by then, perhaps, horror-film makers will be brave enough to show us a few platters.

  (1994)

  Clip Art

  Professional men can’t wear much in the way of jewelry. The gemless wedding band, the watch, the belt buckle, the key chain—possibly the quietly costly blue-enameled pen in a shirt pocket—are among the few sanctioned outlets for the male self-embellishing urge. Occasionally permissible are the shirt stud, the cufflink, and the nautical brass blazer button. Bas-relief suspender clasps, various forms of tie and collar tackle, and chunky nonmarital fingerware are allowable on men who make a living by commission. The demotion of smoke has eliminated the ornate cigarette lighter. Neck and wrist chains are inadvisable. Metalwork for the male nostril, tongue, ear, or foreskin is an option only in outlying areas.

  But fingernail and toenail clippers—the unworn but elegant accessories to all men’s fashion, since no man has ever looked presentable with long nails (long being anything over three-sixteenths of an inch)—continue to glitter legitimately in an otherwise unpolished age. Like fancy pens and pocket watches, these palmable curios have a function—that of severing corneous shrapnel from key areas of the human form with a bracing abruptness, a can-do metallic snap, that leaves their user with the illusion that he is progressively, clip by hardened-steel clip, gaining control of his shambling life. They offer some of the satisfactions of working out on exercise machines without the sweat and gym shorts; some of the pleasures of knuckle manipulation without the worry of arthritic deformity; some of the rewards of cracking a nut without having to eat it. You may crouch over the wastebasket while you operate, but there is happily no assurance that anything clipped will end up there; for just as certain insects will hop or fly off so fast that they seem not to displace themselves physically but simply to disappear on the spot, so the clipper chip vanishes at the very instant the jaws meet and chime, propelled toward a windowsill or on some other untraceable tangent, never to trouble anyone again unless a bare foot happens to rediscover it.

  The market for clippers is apparently unsaturable. This year, millions of men will buy one, as they have for decades, despite the fact that these maintenance tools almost never wear out and are entirely unnecessary. You can cut your nails just fine with a decent pair of scissors, assuming a rudimentary ambidextrousness; in fact, from one point of view a scissor cut is less labor-intensive than clipping, since, despite the helpful curvature of the clipper jaws, it often takes three angled snips to approximate the arc of a given fingernail. (The cut facets thus formed are surprisingly sharp the first time you scratch an itch, but they wear away in a day.) Clippers sell steadily because, like clippings, they disappear (in the backs of drawers, in glove compartments) and must be replaced, and because they are beautiful and cheap. A big clear drum of ninety-nine-cent Trim-brand clippers sitting near the drugstore’s cash register like a bucket of freshly netted minnows is an almost irresistible sight. They are the ideal weight and smoothness; they exploit the resiliency of their material both to maintain their assembly without rattling and to hold their business edges apart. They appear to have aerodynamic virtues. And, once bought, they can alter their profile in a single puzzle-solving flip-and-pivot of the lever arm, without excessive play or roughness or torn rotator cuffs, from minnow shape to grasshopper shape and back again. They were our first toy Transformers: metallic dual-phase origamis that seem triumphantly Japanese and yet happen to be, in their perfected form, a product of the small town of Derby, in southern Connecticut, near the Sikorsky helicopter plant.

  In the forties, the W. E. Bassett Company made “washers” for the rubber heel pieces on men’s shoes (these stopped nails from piercing through to the foot a
rea) and artillery components for the Army. After the war, William E. Bassett, founder, retooled his equipment in Derby, and devoted himself to the production of a superior jaw-style nail clipper, the Trim clipper. The jawed design had been around since the nineteenth century, but Bassett was its Bernini. He added, for example, two thoughtful nibs near the base of the tiny (and, in the experience of some, unused) nail file that together keep the lever arm aligned in its closed position; and he replaced the unsatisfactory pinned rivet with the brilliant notched rivet. (The Chinese still use pinned rivets in their mediocre but cute baby-nail clipper, manufactured for Even-flo.) The stylish thumb-swerve in the Trim’s lever (patent pending) was Bassett’s idea, too.

  According to William’s brother Henry (who died, as the chairman of the board, in May of 1994, at the age of eighty-four), the best fingernail clipper Bassett ever made was the Croydon model of the late forties. It was stamped with a clipper-ship emblem and was promoted in Esquire for the jewelry-store trade. (It flopped—a case of overqualification.) But William Bassett’s sons William C. Bassett, now the president and treasurer, and Dave Bassett, now the company’s manufacturing engineering manager, continue the work of innovation and cost-manicuring. Despite some exciting recent work by the Koreans, who manufacture all Revlon’s more expensive but not quite so well-finished clippers, along with the Gem line, the Trim clipper by Bassett continues its reign as the best on the planet. (Clippers are chrome-plated after being assembled. The finished Revlon clippers frequently betray their undercoating in those areas where one part obscured another in the electrolyte solution; Trim clippers, designed to minimize this shadowing, almost never do.)

  In fact, all Bassett’s grooming aids—from emery boards to tweezers—earn high marks among power users. This past August, for example, Jerry Lewis’s secretary called the company directly to order a dozen five-inch triple-cut Trim nail files (with accompanying blue vinyl protective sheaths), because Mr. Lewis couldn’t obtain them locally. “The tweezer is a very fussy item,” Dave Bassett said recently; each Bassett tweezer tip (its inner edge ground “to help grab that hair”) is inspected manually, under a magnifier. The company makes nail clippers plated in gold as well as in chrome; its Heirloom line offers gift sets like the Saddlebag, which includes scissors, a bottle opener, and folding nail files, along with an anchor pair of clippers. This Christmas, Bassett will be selling the Holiday Family Manicure Kit, with a fingernail clipper and a toenail clipper, two wooden cuticle pokers, some emery boards, and a pair of tweezers, displayed against a background of falling snow and rising reindeer. (What better way to spend Christmas morning with one’s loved ones?) For Dr. Scholl’s, Bassett has created an extraordinary matte-black and gold-plated piece of toenail-cleaving insanity that would not be out of place dangling from the rearview mirror of a new forty-valve 3.5-liter Ferrari 355.

  It won’t do to labor the parallels between caring for a fingernail and manufacturing a fingernail clipper. Making a clipper is considerably more complex. Still, it is striking how reminiscent of human clippings are the spurned little pieces of scrap metal exiting from the side of the deafening Minster stamping press. Once cut (from rolls of Midwestern steel, at an impact force of roughly fifteen tons), the clipper “blanks” must be cleaned of oil, spot-welded, racked, hardened for two hours in a massive furnace, then oil-quenched, cleaned again, tempered in a second furnace to limber them up a little, and finally revolved in huge barrels with sixty thousand of their fellows for several days in a slurry of metal slugs, abrasives, and lime, to smooth away unhandy burrs. Vibrating bowls dither the components into sequential position, preparing them for a definitive riveting, which is accompanied by a Fred Astaire-like volley of air-cylinder taps and flourishes. Each clipper gets a sharpened cutting edge; a digital image system checks the finished edges for truth. Eyelets, shot in at the caudal end, affix the nail files; then the entire splayed clipper, racked on hooks, proceeds through the plating sequence—ten minutes in a warm nickel bath, a minute or two of chrome. A nimble piece of pneumatics straightens the akimbo file and closes the lever. At last the basic Bassett fingernail clipper is ready for action. You can determine the year your clipper was made by referring to the inside of the lever arm.

  Nail care has been weighing on my thoughts recently, I confess, because the great Stephen King, in an introduction to his recent short-story collection, Nightmares & Dreamscapes, describes one of my books as a “meaningless little fingernail paring.” Are we to infer from “paring” that the Bard of Bangor doesn’t possess or know how to operate a Trim (or a Gem, or a Revlon, or even a La Cross) clipper of his own? Does he envision himself as the heir of Joyce’s artist-hero, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, who was “refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”? Does he still whittle? (Bassett’s sales are “really taking off” in Ireland right now, according to Barbara Shannon, the company’s marketing manager; it seems that the Irish are through with Joyce’s manual methods and insist on taking, with Trim’s help, the shortcut to artistry.) Or is Mr. King rather implying that someone like me disdainfully pares and fiddles while he, market-wise progressivist, hacks on with the latest technology?

  If so, I can assure Mr. King that I, too, clip—not as often as I should, perhaps, but with genuine enthusiasm. When I want a really authentic experience, I sometimes use a toenail clipper on my fingernails, shuddering with the thrill of fulcrumed power; and then, for my toes, I step on up to Revlon’s veterinary-gauge Nipper, a parrot-beaked personal-pruning weapon that, despite its chrome plate, looks as if it should be stored in the toolshed. A dense, semiopaque shard cut by this nineteen-dollar piece of spring-loaded Brazilian craftsmanship recently rose from what was left of my ravished toenail and traveled across the room, landing in a box of tax records, where it remains.

  We can say with some certainty (and sadness) that Nabokov did not use nail clippers. That is, John Shade, Pale Fire’s poet, did not:

  The little scissors I am holding are

  A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.

  I stand before the window and I pare

  My fingernails.…

  The cutting of a fingernail is important in Nabokov: it may constitute for him the act of self-liberation from annotative servitude, since he is demonstrably aware of the traditional scholarly use of the nail’s edge as a marginal place-inscriber. In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Tatiana learns about Onegin’s mind by studying his library, and she notices (in Nabokov’s translation) that

  Many pages preserved

  the trenchant mark of fingernails.

  Nabokov’s commentary to these lines mentions Sheridan’s The Rivals (dismissing it in passing, with his usual harshness, as a “singularly inept comedy”), in which someone “cherishes her nails for the convenience of making marginal notes.” Nabokov adds, puzzlingly, “The art is a lost one today.” Hardly so: even with a closely clipped and manly thumbnail, the reader can and very often does, today, in America, score a visible double line to mark an interesting passage, if it appears in a book that he is prevented for one reason or another from defacing. In those midnight moments of the misplaced pencil, too, a nail impression is a less destructive and more spatially precise aid to memory than a turned-down corner. Moreover, the pressure of the reader’s nail, deformed by its momentary trenchancy, against the tender hyponychial tissues it protects, creates a transient thumbwide pleasure that is, or can be, more than literary.

  But the most troubling feature of Stephen King’s assessment of my alleged “nail paring” of a novel is his apparent belief that a bookish toe- or fingernail scrap can be justifiably brushed off as meaningless. Last September, Allen Ginsberg sold a bag of his beard hair to Stanford. Surely Mr. King ought to be saving for the ages whatever gnarled relics he clips or pares? And the Master Spellbinder, of all people, should be able to detect the secret terrors, the moans of the severed but unquiet soul, that reside in these disjecta. Think of the fearful Norse ship of the apocalypse, Naglfar, made of
dead men’s nails, which will break loose from its moorings during the Monstrous Winter, when the Wolf has swallowed the Sun—“a warning,” in Brian Branston’s retelling, “that if a man dies with his nails unshorn he is adding greatly to the materials for Naglfar (a thing both gods and men would be slow to do).” Gertrude Jobes’s mythological dictionary cites a related Finno-Ugric tradition in which the Evil One collects any Sunday nail parings and “with them builds the boat for transporting the dead.” Lithuanian folklore contends (per Stith Thompson) that “from the parings of man’s nails devils make little caps for themselves.” I didn’t have a chance to ask any of the employees at the factory in Derby, Connecticut, many of whom are first- or second-generation Polish, whether they had heard similar tales.