The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  Lest someone unknowingly aid the devils in their hattery (would a fingernail hat resemble a miniature wicker knick-knack basket, one wonders, or would the snippets be sewn or glued on, like sequins?), the Bassett Company, in 1990, launched the Easy Hold clipper. The Easy Hold line features an unusual pair of either-handed cuticle scissors, with forefinger-rests that aid fine work (U.S. Design Patent No. 331,867); a foam emery-board holder; and an enhanced tweezer that makes the removal of other people’s splinters even more of a wicked joy than it always has been. But the new nail clippers go further: in addition to a considerate plastic thumb element, they include a housing for the jaw that catches nearly every snippet the moment it is clipped.

  Eric Rommerdale, the head of laboratory technology at the University of Mississippi School of Dentistry, in Jackson, is the principal figure behind the development of all the Easy Hold grooming products. Mr. Rommerdale, fifty-two, a white-mustached ex-Navy man, is no stranger to inventive self-care, having in his off-hours developed Sunbeam’s triple-brush, hands-free toothbrushing system (now sold by DKI Inc.) and the mouth-stick-activated urine-bag release valve, both for the wheelchair set. His big fingernail moment came in November of 1987, in a Stop-n-Go, while he was watching a man in his seventies with “hands the size of baseball mitts” trying to clip his nails. Three times the clipper fell to the floor. Out of polymer resin (often used in dental work) Rommerdale built a pair of add-on clipper grips and tried to interest Revlon in them. Revlon said no, unequivocally. But in 1988 William Bassett the younger listened to a pitch by Rommerdale in the lobby of the Bridgeport Hilton, liked what he heard, and asked the inventor to rethink the graspability of the entire manicure line. The University of Mississippi Medical Center then evaluated and refined the prototypes (under a grant from the Bassett Company), videotaping and surveying a group of talkative elderly beta-testers.

  Although Rommerdale’s original rounded design gained, in its final, blister-packed form, a few unwelcome projections and some squared-off edges that call out for smoothing (“We could have done a better job on that,” William Bassett admits), it is nonetheless heartening to find that the stylistic history of the clipper—one of the great bureau-top products of the century—is not over. This coming January, all plastic Easy Hold fittings, at present colored a battleship-gray, will turn teal-green, after extensive mall-site interviewing. Eric Rommerdale, using his patent royalties, recently expanded his backyard workshop, and he is currently developing safer tools for meat cutters and a jar opener for the disabled. It looks as if there will still be time for us to clip our nails closely and carefully, as if nothing else mattered, before the coming of the Monstrous Winter, when Naglfar will set sail.

  (1994)

  Reading Aloud

  A few years ago I did my first reading. It was at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, under a tent. Several others read, too; we all sat on independent sections of a biomorphic orange modular couch, our heads bowed as we listened, or half listened, to each other. Eventually my turn came, and the words that I had written in silence (an earplug-enhanced silence, as a matter of fact, that amplified the fleeting Chiclety contact of upper and lower incisors, and made audible the inner squirt of an eyeball when I rubbed it roughly, and called to my attention the muffled roar of eyelid muscles when my eyes were squeezed shut in an effort to see, using the infrared of prose, whatever it was that I most wanted at that moment to describe)—these formerly silent words unfolded themselves like lawn chairs in my mouth and emerged one by one wearing large Siberian hats of consonants and long erminous vowels and landed softly, without visible damage, here and there in the audience, and I thought, Gosh, I’m reading aloud, from Chapter Seven!

  Things went pretty well until I got to a place near the middle of the last paragraph, where I began to feel that I was going to cry. I wouldn’t have minded crying, or at least pausing to swallow down a discreet silent sob, if what I’d been reading had been in any obvious way sad. When people on TV documentaries tell their stories, and they come to the part where the tragedy happens and they have to say over again what, in silent form, they adjusted to years earlier, and they choke up, that’s fine, they should choke up. And I’ve heard writers read autobiographical accounts of painful childhood events and quaver a little here and there—that’s perfectly justifiable, even desirable. But the sentence that was giving me difficulty was a description of a woman enclosing a breakfast muffin in bakery tissue, placing it in a small bag, and sprinkling it with coffee stirrers and sugar packets and pre-portioned pats of butter. Where was the pathos? And yet by the time I delivered the words “plastic stirrers” to the audience, I was in serious trouble, and I noticed a listening head or two look up with sudden curiosity: Hah, this is interesting, this American is going to weep openly and copiously for us now.

  Why that sentence, though? Why did that image of a succession of small white shapes, more stirrers and sugar packets and butter pats than I needed, and in that sense ceremonial and semi-decorative rather than functional, falling, falling over my terrestrial breakfast, grab at my grief-lapels? There were a number of reasons. In college I had once competed for a prize in what was called the “Articulation of the English Language,” for which the contestants had to read aloud from set passages of Milton and Joyce and others. I got to the auditorium late, having bicycled there while drinking proudly from a shot bottle of Smirnoff vodka that I’d bought on an airplane, and, as planned, I read the Milton in a booming fake English accent and read the Joyce excerpt—which was the last paragraph of “The Dead”—first in a broad bad Southern accent, then in a Puerto Rican accent, and then in the Southern accent again, and to my surprise I’d found that the Joyce suddenly seemed, in my amateur TV-actor drawl, extremely moving, so that the last phrase, about the snow “faintly falling … upon all the living and the dead,” was tragic enough to make it unclear whether my rhetorical tremor was genuine or not—and my voice box may have remembered this boozy Joycean precipitation from college as I read aloud from my own sugar-packet snowfall.

  Also, a version of the chapter I was reading in Edinburgh had appeared in The New Yorker, and I’d had a slight disagreement, a friendly disagreement, with a fact checker there over the phrase “tissue-protected muffin.” She’d held that the word “tissue” implied something like Kleenex, and that it should be a “paper-wrapped muffin,” and I’d said I didn’t think so. On the way home from work the next day I’d stopped in a bakery and spotted a blue box of the little squares in question and I’d seen the words “bakery tissue” in capital letters on the side; and, exulting, I’d called the manager of the store over, a Greek man who barely spoke English, and offered to buy the entire box, which he sold me for nine dollars, and I called my editor the next day and said, “It’s tissue, it is tissue,” and as a compromise it became in their version a “tissue-wrapped muffin”—but now, reading it aloud in Scotland, I could turn it into a “tissue-protected muffin” all over again; right or wrong, I was able in the end to shield the original wordless memory from alien breakfast guests with this fragile shroud of my own preferred words. It had turned out all right in the end. And that might have been enough to make me cry.

  But it wasn’t just that. It was also that this tiny piece of a paragraph had never been one that I’d thought of proudly when I thought over my book after it was published. I’d forgotten it, after writing it down, and now that my orating tongue forced me to pay attention to it I was amazed and moved that it had hung in there for all those months, in fact years, unrewarded but unimpaired, holding its small visual charge without any further encouragement from me, and, like the deaf and dumb kid in rags who, though reviled by the other children, ends up saving his village from some catastrophe, it had become the tearjerker moment that would force me, out of pity for its very unmemorableness, to dissolve in grief right in the midst of all my intended ironies. That was a big part of it.

  Contrition, too. Contrition made its contribution to the brimming bowl—for these Edinburgh
audience members didn’t know how much pure mean-spirited contempt I had felt back in my rejection-letter days for writers who “gave readings,” how self-congratulatorily neo-primitivist I’d thought it was to repudiate the divine economy of the published page and to require people to gather to hear a reticent man or woman reiterate what had long since been set in type. Ideally, I’d felt, the republic of letters was inhabited by solitary readers in bed with their Itty Bitty Book Lights glowing over their privately owned and operated pages, like the ornate personal lamps that covertly illuminate every music stand in opera pits while the crudest sort of public melodrama rages in heavy makeup overhead. There was something a bit too Pre-Raphaelite about the regression to an audience—I thought of those reaction shots in early Spielberg movies, of family members gazing with softly awestruck faces at the pale-green glow of the beneficent UFO while John Williams flogged yet more Strauss from his string section. And there were the suspect intonation patterns, the I’m-reading-aloud patterns—especially at poetry readings, where talented and untalented alike, understandably wishing in the absence of rhyme to give an audible analogue for the ragged right and left margins in their typed or printed original, resorted to syllable-punching rhythms and studiously unresolved final cadences adapted from Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens, overlaid with Walter Cronkite and John Fitzgerald Kennedy. These handy tonal templates could make anything lyrical:

  This—is a Dover—edition—

  Designed—for years—of use—

  Sturdy stackable—beechwood—bookshelves—

  At a price you’d expect—to pay—for plastic—

  And yet, despite all this sort of easy, Glenn-Gouldy contempt in my background, there I was physically in Edinburgh, under that tent, among strangers, finishing up my own first reading, and, far from feeling dismissive and contemptuous before my turn came, I’d been simply and sincerely nervous, exceedingly nervous, and now I was almost finished, and I hadn’t done anything too humiliating, and the audience had innocently listened, unaware of my prior disapproval, and they had even tolerantly laughed once or twice—and all this was too much: I was like a crippled unbeliever wheeled in and made whole with a sudden palm blow to the forehead by a preaching charlatan. I’m reading aloud! I’m reading aloud! I was saying, my face streaming with tears—I was cripple and charlatan simultaneously. Evidently I was going to cry, out of pure gratitude to myself for having gotten almost to the end without crying.

  And then, as the unthinkable almost happened, and the narcissus bulb in the throat very nearly blossomed, I recognized that if I did break down now, the intensity of my feeling, in this supposedly comic context, would leave the charitable listeners puzzled about my overall mental well-being. At the very least I would be thought of as someone “going through a stressful time,” and it would be this diagnosis they would take home with them, rather than any particular fragment from what I’d read that they liked, and whenever I tried to write something light ’n’ lively thereafter I would remember my moment of shame on the orange couch and to counteract it I’d have to invent something bleak and brooding and wholly out of character. I couldn’t let it happen; I couldn’t let reading aloud distort my future output. I started whispering urgent ringside counsel to myself: Come on, you sack of shit. If you cry, people will assume you’re being moved to tears by your own eloquence, and how do you think that will go over? That was frightening enough, finally, to stabilize the nutation in my Adam’s apple, and I just barely got through to the last word.

  Since that afternoon in 1989, I’ve read aloud from my writing a number of times, and each time I’ve been a little more in control, less of a walking cripple, more of a charlatan. I’ve reacquainted myself with my larynx. When I was fourteen I used to feel it each morning at the kitchen table, before I had any cereal. It was large. How could my throat have been retrofitted with this massive service elevator? And what was I going to say with it? What sort of payloads was it fated to carry? First thing in the morning I could sing, in a fairly convincing baritone, the alto-sax solo from Pictures at an Exhibition—and as I went for a low note there was a unique physical pleasure, not to be had later in the day, when the two thick slack vocal cords dropped and closed on a shovelful of sonic peat moss. Sometimes as I sang low, or swung low, it felt as if I were a character actor in a coffee commercial, carelessly scooping glossy beans from deep in a burlap bag and pouring them into a battered scale—the deeper the note I tried to scoop up, the bigger and glossier the beans, until finally I was way down in fava territory. I was Charles Kuralt, I was Tony the Tiger, I was Lloyd Bridges, I was James Earl Jones—I too had a larynx the size of a picnic basket, I felt, and when you heard my voice you wouldn’t even know it was sound, it would be so vibrantly low: you’d think instead that your wheels had strayed over the wake-up rumble strips on the shoulder of a freeway. Just above the mobile prow of the Adam’s apple, just above where there should properly be a hood ornament, was a softer place that became more noticeable to the finger the lower you spoke or sang, and it was directly into this vulnerable opening, this chink in the armor of one’s virility, that I imagined disk jockeys secretly injecting themselves with syringes full of male hormones and small-engine oil, so that they could say “traffic and weather together” with the proper sort of sawtooth bite.

  And though my own voice has proved to be—despite my high secondary-sexual expectations, and even though I was pretty tall and tall people often have voice boxes to match—not quite the pebbly, three-dimensional mood machine I’d counted on, I do occasionally now like reading aloud what I’ve written. I get back a little of the adolescent early-morning feeling as I brachiate my way high into the upper canopy of a sentence, tightening the pitch muscles, climbing up, and then dropping on a single word, with that Doppler-effect plunge of sound, so the argument can live out its closing seconds at sea level. I feel all this going on, even if it isn’t audible to anyone else. And sometimes I know that my voice, imperfect medium though it may be, is making what I’ve written seem for the moment better than it is, and I like playing with this dangerous intonational power, and even letting listeners know that I’m playing with it. It’s not called an Adam’s apple for nothing: that relic of temptation, that articulated chunk of upward mobility, that ever-ready dial tone in the throat, whether or not it successfully leads others astray, ends by thoroughly seducing oneself.

  (1992)

  The History of Punctuation

  The nine basic marks of punctuation—comma, dash, hyphen, period, parenthesis, semi-colon, colon, space, and capital letter—seem so apt to us now, so pipe-smokingly Indo-European, so naturally suited in their disjunctive charge and mass to their given sentential offices, that we may forgivably assume that commas have been around for at least as long as electrons, and that while dialects, cursive styles, and typefaces have come and gone, the semi-colon, that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology, is immutable.

  But in fact the semi-colon is relatively modern. Something medieval called a punctus versus, which strongly resembled a semi-colon, though it was often encountered dangling below the written line, had roughly the force of a modern period; another sign that looked (in some scribal hands) exactly like a semi-colon was a widely used abbreviation for several Latin word endings—atque could appear as atq;, and omnibus as omnib;. But the semi-colon that we resort to daily, hourly, entered the picture with the first edition of Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna two years after Columbus reached America, the handiwork of Aldus Manutius the Elder (or someone close to him) and his tasteful punch-cutter, Francesco Griffo. The mark, we are told by Dr. Malcolm Parkes, its historian, took much longer than the parenthesis did to earn the trust of typesetters: shockingly, its use was apparently not fully understood by some of those assigned to work on the first folio of Shakespeare.

  And it is of course even now subject to episodes of neglect and derision. Joyce preferred the more Attic colon, at least in Ulysses, and Beckett, as well, gradually rid his prose of what must have see
med to him an emblem of vulgar, high-Victorian applied ornament, a cast-iron flower of mass-produced Ciceronianism: instead of semi-colons, he spliced the phrases of Malone Dies and Molloy together with one-size-fits-all commas, as commonplace as stones on a beach, to achieve that dejected sort of murmured ecphonesis so characteristic of his narrative voice—all part of the general urge, perhaps, that led him to ditch English in favor of French, “pour m’appau-vrir”: to impoverish himself.

  Donald Barthelme, too, who said that the example of Beckett was what first “allowed [him] to write,” thought that the semi-colon was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”—but he allowed that others might feel differently. And still the semicolon survives, far too subtle and useful, as it turns out, to be a casualty of modernism. It even participates in those newer forms of emotional punctuation called “smileys” or “emoticons”—vaguely irritating attempts to supply a sideways facial expression at the close of an E-mail paragraph—e.g., :-) and >%-(. The semi-colon collaborates in the “wink” or “smirk,” thus—;-).

  So our familiar and highly serviceable repertoire of punctles was a long time coming; it emerged from swarms of competing and overlapping systems and theories, many of them misapplied or half-forgotten. Petrarch, for example, used a slash with a dot in the middle of it to signal the onset of a parenthetical phrase. A percontativus, or backward question mark, occasionally marked the close of a rhetorical question even into the seventeenth century—Robert Herrick wrote with it. A punctus elevatus, resembling an upside-down semi-colon or, later, a fancy, black-letter s, performed the function of a colon in many medieval texts; when used at the end of a line of poetry, however, it could signal the presence of an enjambment. A nameless figure shaped like a tilted candy-cane served to terminate paragraphs of Augustus’s autobiography (A.D. 14), inscribed on his tomb. Around A.D. 600, Isidore of Seville recommended ending a paragraph with a 7, which he called the positura. He also advocated the placing of a horizontal dash next to a corrupted or questionable text (“so that a kind of arrow may slit the throat of what is superfluous and penetrate to the vitals of what is false”), and he relied on the ancient cryphia, a C turned on its side with a dot in the middle——to be used next to those places in a text where “a hard and obscure question cannot be opened up or solved.”