Baker found and read Tongues of Flame. It wasn’t a great book, he reported, but it was “more flavorful, perhaps, for having been found circuitously.” Then he subjected “tongues of flame” to a slightly repurposed RAM criticism methodology. What this revealed was that “tongues of flame,” too, was a phrase that occurred across history, from early eighteenth-century poetry to Eco’s The Name of the Rose. It had been pretty much exclusively used to describe a fire’s first hot licks of books doomed to burn.
Now to my mind the image of a burning book, whether in a library catastrophe or an ideological bonfire, is one that should simply and always spark in us a correspondingly fiery passion to extinguish the blaze. Burning books are the symbol of civilization’s tendency to implode, due to an obscenely willful devaluation of human intellect. As it happened I had a little pre-Baker experience with the fact that this devaluation of intellect is foreshadowed by books employed as decoration.
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IN 1992, AT ALMOST THE SAME TIME BAKER WAS TURNING HIS attention to truthful trifles, I visited my sister in Minnesota for Thanksgiving. The timing offered anthropological adventure: a visit to the Mall of America, the nation’s first megamall, which opened that August, on the occasion of its inaugural Black Friday, traditionally the nation’s heaviest shopping day. What better time or place, I thought, to reflect on the American devaluation of intellect? We braved the Midwestern cold and crowd, and then, in a shoe store as my sister was attended to by an already exhausted, crimp-backed salesman, I indulged in the first chance I’d had to soak in the atmosphere of the state-of-the-art sales milieu. What drew my attention? Books. As though they were marked with a reflective dye that glowed under the light of my vision, I saw books placed all about the store in an attempt to invest the sterile space with a bit of faux hominess. But what ugliness. Books doomed to remain unread. Books like unbaptized babes drifting through a frantic limbo, uncoddled and unnursed. One sat just next to my hand. I picked it up: a tattered, unjacketed collection of poems by E. E. Cummings. It was a first edition, I discovered, and on the title page, in a slightly wavering hand, someone had written “William Stafford.” William Stafford! Who else but William Stafford could possibly have written “William Stafford” in a book that had found its way to a glass-topped table in the Mall of America, placed there as garnish for a row of six chic boots? Unless some wacko had been going around writing “William Stafford” into every book he found, even valuable first editions, I had miraculously stumbled across William Stafford’s own copy of 95 Poems.
I stifled a victorious shriek and for anyone who might have been spying on me, I put on the literary collector’s equivalent of a poker player’s inscrutable visage: book face. And then in one smooth motion I reached down for my satchel and slipped the book inside—cool and clean as a glass of milk! Not even my sister noticed, and when her attendant shuffled off for another size of something she’d tried on, I leaned over and bragged of my conquest in a cocky whisper.
That was my undoing. My sister had only recently passed the Minnesota bar exam, and she panicked because were she to be caught in the company of a shoplifter she would be disbarred even before beginning to practice law. We fought a hushed battle there in the store. I tried to argue that you can’t steal something that’s not for sale, and that any sane judge would weigh the merits of the case and rule her crime, at worst, an instance of accessory to ethical theft. But even before I completed my argument, my sister began a core meltdown, hacking up fragments of spittle-flecked Latin, and flushing with such intensity that I feared an appearance of stigmata. I returned the book to the table, to my shame, and I did not achieve redemption until several years later when I liberated a first edition of Underworld from an Ikea in New Jersey. It was like cutting a barely breathing mouse from the gut of the serpent that had swallowed it alive.
It’s the righteousness of these memories that explains my initial reaction to the cheerfulness of “Books as Furniture.” Baker had linked mail-order catalogs to book burnings, but was he troubled by it? Not really. “Books as Furniture” insisted on seeing books in catalogs as evidence contrary to the argument that book culture was in decline. Tongues of Flame had triggered for Baker a happy stream of associations, so shouldn’t we be grateful for “reading suggestions that fall unsolicited through our mail slots”? Might not “a mail-order catalog be sending us to graduate school”? No! It mightn’t! “Books as Furniture” was entirely enjoyable, funny, and whip smart, and to readers of The New Yorker its stance in relation to the world around it was surely familiar: a kind of haughty imperviousness, a willed and ironic indulgence in the obliviousness of the frog whose bath will boil.
But here’s the thing. I’m not sure even Nicholson Baker bought this at this point. “Books as Furniture” appeared a year after “Discards,” the piece he’d hoped would remain cheerful but didn’t. In the larger context of Baker’s career, “Books as Furniture” reads like a forced laugh, a desperate attempt to keep light a story already turning dark.
“Discards” and “Books as Furniture” are about two kinds of catalog: card and mail-order. And the central difference between the two pieces is that the latter left Baker sitting at home as he’d always done, waiting for beautiful frivolity to fall into his lap, while the former shoved him out the door. In September 1993, Baker visited the private company in Dublin, Ohio, that had been tasked, almost exclusively, with converting the varied and widespread card catalogs of the country’s public libraries into a unified computer database of holdings. This process had begun in the late seventies when the New York Public Library blazed the trail of catalog renovation, and it climaxed in 1993 just as Baker locked on to it as a subject. What he found in Ohio was even worse than grunt work: It was a sweatshop of undereducated temp workers inundated daily with heavy boxes of cards destined to be destroyed and born anew as cereal boxes and insulation material. The company had good intentions, Baker allowed, but he found himself outraged at error rates of transcription. Each typo wiped a book from the library record, leaving it in a purgatory not so different from a shoe store.
“Discards” begins with a description of a 1985 junk-the-catalog party at a University of Maryland library: Attendees tied hundreds of cards to balloons and released them all at once in a rubber-and-helium debauch. One of the essay’s central mysteries is why so many people regarded catalog recycling as a cause for celebration. I had almost the exact opposite thought: Why had it been this, and not the Gulf War or the history of movie projectors, that finally ignited in Baker a burning core of passion and interest, the heat of which radiated out from his protest songs even many years later?
52
THE HISTORY OF CARD CATALOGS, AS BAKER TELLS IT, IS THE creation story of information retrieval technology, of search engines. It’s the history of how we look things up. This was Baker’s wheelhouse in that, experiments with memory criticism aside, he was a search engine. I’d begun to notice this as early as page sixteen of The Mezzanine: “I tried to call up some sample memories of shoe-tying . . .” What’s interesting about this otherwise innocuous line is that I initially read “call up” as an early instance of a hard-drive-as-memory cognitive analogy: A willed attempt to remember something is like keying into your computer a command to search its disk. This made complete sense as even then Baker was writing on a computer. But it was wrong. These days we certainly do use “call up” to describe hard-drive data retrieval, but that’s a metaphor too. Computers have always poached from books to help the uninitiated make sense of digital information (e.g., web “pages,” text “scrolling,” etc.), and what “c
all up” really is is a faint and fading reference to library searches, in particular to searches for rare or obscure books: Having found a book in a card catalog, you submit to the page desk a request that is sent down to a team of troglodyte librarians who elevate desired volumes via mechanical conveyor. “Call up” is a metaphor of the mind as a library.
The Mezzanine ends with just such a search: “Howie” ’s piqued interest in broken shoelaces sends him on a miniquest to a library to investigate whether anyone else in the world ever wondered over the same thing. To the extent that The Mezzanine can be said to have a climactic moment, it’s the instant when “Howie” ’s exhaustive thumbing-through of called-up materials turns up a study of shoelace breakage in an obscure Polish journal, conducted by a researcher named Z. Czaplicki. “Howie” admits that his joy in this discovery might be hard to understand, but I understood it just fine. He cares about shoelace breakage because the search for the study enables him to touch another active mind in the world. “Howie” repurposes the study (which is real: Z. Czaplicki completed a number of other studies as well, of yarn, of carbon-coated fibers, of composite filtration materials), making of it an unlikely source of comfort and solace. “I left the library relieved. Progress was being made.”
This explains the discomfited Baker of “Discards,” in that his investigation of card catalogs revealed that progress was not being made. Actually it was being unmade. The objets d’art of card catalogs contained a host of human information—from the handwritten suggestions of generations of librarians on subject catalog cards to the cards themselves, which after having been fingered for decades upon decades became a pleasingly fuzzy record of library user interests—but now they were all being junked. That was the flabbergasting part. Valuable records of minds at work in the world were slipping away, and people were happy about it. Baker took it personally because his own worldview, his career, owed everything to the idea that with a little effort you could look up even trifling information.
Which isn’t to say he didn’t give the new technology a chance. Beyond Baker’s experiments with RAM criticism, “Discards” records hours and hours spent dabbling with online catalogs that turned out to be sluggish and not very helpful. In comparison, a visit to a still extant catalog at Berkeley offered immediate, tactile reward: the wear on the “Censorship” and “Children’s Literature” cards revealed them to be common user topics, and for each subject Baker found a helpful handwritten list of “See Also” suggestions.
“Discards” doesn’t say it directly, but its central fear is that what information-retrieval technology actually automates is the basis of human intelligence: the ability to propose creative associations. To be fair Baker was reacting to a technology in its infancy, and he acknowledged that it would get better, but even a high-speed digital catalog wouldn’t make better suggestions than the librarians who crowd-sourced the originals. Card catalogs were a machine that had not needed repair, yet a vast national renovation of public holdings had been initiated without any kind of vote or debate, and the result was that generations of effort were tied to balloons and released to thermal whim. In reply, Baker struck an indignant tone not uttered since his initial reaction to the Gulf War. “What we have already begun seeing . . . is a kind of self-inflicted online hell.” “We should know better than to do this to ourselves.” He wasn’t alone in his distress. “Discards” quotes a medieval-studies historian who likened the junking of catalogs to the burning of the library at Alexandria. This inspired the grimmest statement of Baker’s career so far: Catalog conversion was “a kind of incidental book burning that is without flames or crowds and, strangest of all, without motive.”
He was right about all but the last. There was a motive—he just couldn’t yet bring himself to say it.
53
THE INSTANT CATHERINE AND I WALKED IN THE DOOR OF OUR Maine beach rental, I spotted a classically Bakeresque device on the kitchen counter: a corkscrew from fifty or sixty years before, a wood handled tool with a floppy cap to generate leverage and nothing more. It was elegant testimony to human ingenuity, and the fact that corkscrews had not stopped there, had continued to evolve away from elegance and simplicity such that these days you practically feel obliged to invest in unwieldy corkscrews that look like surgical rib spreaders and require sets of instructions to operate, illustrates a principle that Nicholson Baker had hinted at in “Rarity,” and played a supporting role in The Fermata, but didn’t truly get under his skin until “Discards” and then Double Fold revealed that the same awful thing was happening to books.
The Maine beach rental was a studio apartment above the detached garage of the home of a now-dead engineer, built on the ocean side of a precarious, peninsular squiggle of land that swooshed out from the coast of southern Maine like a graphological flourish at the end of a signature. There was a fat central fireplace, a great old hulking log-burning stove, furniture worn comfy through decades of use, and books on shelves hung in every available nook with a sailor’s sense of economy of space. The studio was itself a simple machine that had not needed improving, and no one had tried. The same was true of the town. Hidden a few miles north of the commercial vomit puddle of Kennebunkport and a few miles south of a giant litter-soiled sandbox—Maine’s Ocean City, Maryland—the little community was an ongoing experiment in autoRumpelstiltskinism, a groggy miniburb with one small grocery and a mysterious convent that every morning deployed a recon platoon of power-walking nuns. Maine too, or at least parts of it, was like an elegant machine that had avoided unnecessary renovation, and perhaps that explained why Nicholson Baker had moved here. The rental was only thirty-five miles from South Berwick. At that point, I still hadn’t decided whether I would try to meet Baker, and as far as I knew Baker was sitting at home writing as Catherine and I unpacked our bags, used the corkscrew to open a bottle of wine, and consummated Maine with the patient, syrupy tenderness that had flowed between us ever since we’d returned from Paris. We settled in for two weeks of beach walks and ocean sounds. It was in a place that appeared to have been overlooked by the apocalypse that I read Baker’s account of the calamity that befell everywhere else.
All of Baker’s writings about books and literature (a number of essays followed Double Fold, and as well there were the introductions to A Book of Books, which I’d now read in earnest, and The World on Sunday, a collection of newspaper images Baker had compiled with his wife) obliquely pinpoint the onset of bibliogeddon in the early nineties. This made complete sense. Reagan hadn’t undone all the progress of the sixties and seventies, but he did unleash an aesthetic end times, failing to repel and even abetting the attacks of Mallthra, the corporate beast that wiped away what remained of Main Streets and town squares nationwide, replacing them with gargantuan commercial hives and farted-out strings of giant slimy strip-mall eggs. The end of the Cold War heralded about ten minutes of peace—or actually less, as the USSR wasn’t officially dissolved until Christmas 1991—and at a distance of two decades the Gulf War now gives a report like the first sneezing fit of a global flu, an infection of schlock imperialism as the world’s last superpower desperately tried to go viral. Then the digital tsunami: Computers finally started getting smaller, and as a direct result everything else, stores, people, started getting bigger. We could see it all coming—the writing was on the screen—but no one did anything about it, least of all Nicholson Baker, whose career pinnacled at just this moment.
Or that’s not fair. From the perspective of his later work, Baker’s early books look like a fledgling attempt at an antidote, vaccination through minutiae, a desperate plea that we recall th
at life’s most intimate pleasures stem from inconsequential things. It was only when this started to go wrong, when Baker’s casual stroll through the card catalog of his mind tripped over a subject booby-trapped with consequence, that his career tacked hard toward the vulgar utility of history. He didn’t go down without a fight. Not long after “Discards,” Baker got a call from the Rochester Public Library, whose resources he had used as a child. They were junking their catalog. Did he want it? He said no. Then, a year later, he was contacted by a group of librarians at the San Francisco Public Library, far closer to where he’d been living since the beginning of U and I. Their catalog was going too, scheduled to be discarded as part of a move to a newer, much-celebrated facility. These librarians noticed what Rochester missed: Baker had come to look a bit like a wan Obi-Wan Kenobi, that desert mystic whose special warrior powers offered him no defense against a flattering plea.
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