McSweeney's Quarterly Concern #33

A year or two ago, I read Nicholson Baker's wonderful book Double Fold, which was about 'Libraries and the Assault on Paper', as the text beneath the title calls it.  In this book, Baker rails against recent library practice of disposing of tons of old and historic newspapers, replacing them with commercial (poorly) made microfiche, citing storage and space requirements.  Baker himself now owns a large collection of almost full early runs of such celebrated and wonderful papers as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World.  The descriptions that Baker furnished of large broad-sheet papers with detailed diagrams and loving illustrations, not to mention legendary comics sections, made me envious of people living in an earlier time.  We now live in a time of great newspaper poverty, as dailies suffer from endless cut-backs and diminished readership.

Into this dismal scene comes the 33rd issue of McSweeney's, Dave Egger's literary quarterly.  For this issue, Egger's et. al. constructed the San Fransisco Panorama, a one-time old-school newspaper of gigantic proportions.  The paper is a week-end edition, including two supplemental magazines, various sections, a generous and lovely comics section, and even a fold-up paper toy rocket ship.  The entire paper comes off as a labour of love and an almost forgotten sense of American journalistic craftsmanship.  It took me just about forever to read this thing.

The list of contributors to this thing is as impressive as the span of topics discussed and reported upon.  There is Baker himself (writing about paper mills in Maine); William T. Vollmann discussing mining issues in Imperial, an area about which he is most definitely an expert; Jesse Nathan on the marijuana growers of Mendocino; and J. Malcolm Garcia reporting from Afghanistan. 

San Francisco is the main topic of the paper, with various articles examining the state of the city and its inhabitants.  There is an eight-page section devoted to the new Bay Bridge, and all of the problems associated with that project, which features stunning illustrations and makes good use of the large-size format of the pages (this thing is much wider than today's newspapers).  The Sports, Food, and Arts sections represent the Bay Area a great deal.  There are also tons of human interest articles and interesting charts throughout.

The two magazines are very impressive.  The Panorama Magazine is modeled after the New York Times Magazine, with many long-form articles, some of which I've already reviewed.  Were this a weekly or monthly magazine, I would gladly subscribe.  The Panorama Book Review Supplemental was also very impressive, containing some great short stories from authors such as Roddy Doyle and George Saunders, as well as an interesting conversation between Dave Eggers and Junot Diaz.  The book reviews were wonderful in their variety, and I liked the way each review reproduced the first page of the book so potential readers could sample its style.

Of course, I wouldn't be me if I didn't say something about the comics section.  Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes, Michael Kupperman, Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Erik Larsen (!!), and many others contributed, and it was a very nice little compilation.  

It's a shame that this project is not to be repeated.  I doubt very much that there is a market anywhere in the world for a regular paper like this, and that is all of our loss.  Reading this allows you to imagine a time when people were very well informed (and not just up on the celebrities), and also had the leisure to read the damn things.  This is a truly unique and impressive work of art.

A Box of Matches

by Nicholson Baker

When you're in the mood for a quick, introspective novel after reading a gigantic, excessive non-fiction book, there's nobody better to turn to than Nicholson Baker.

A Box of Matches is a pretty typical Baker book.  Emmett, the narrator, gets up early every morning, makes a cup of coffee in the dark, and then lights a fire in his fireplace.  While he enjoys the fire, his mind wanders.  That's it, on the surface.  There is no plot.  Some stuff happens, like Emmett gets a cold, but the appeal of this book is the sameness of the chapter structure (each chapter opens with 'Good morning, it's _:__ a.m.').

What makes this book a novel, rather than a collection of writing exercises, is that our understanding of Emmett as a character accretes with each new section.  He has a wife, two children, a cat, and a duck.  The duck probably gets the largest chunk of the narrative devoted to it, aside from Emmett thinking about himself.  Baker has gifted his character with a very good life.

Of course, it's not hard to read a book like this without viewing the protagonist as a stand-in for the author.  Baker, like Emmett, is married with kids, has a thick beard, and an amazing ability to focus on the smallest things in life and imbue them with great significance.  This is Baker's greatest strength as an author, and I lost track of the number of times I smiled in recognition of something that, Proust-like, he digs up from memory.

What are some of these Bakersian topics?  The way thermometers feel in your mouth.  Picking up underwear with your feet.  The sideways flame that comes from a newly-lit match.  Peeing in the dark.  The feeling of washing dishes.  The list continues.

This is a quiet little novel, and it served as the perfect tonic for the lack of good fiction in my life lately.  Recommended.

Human Smoke

by Nicholson Baker

This book is a very engrossing read, detailing the events that led to the Second World War, and encompassing it up to the point of New Year's Eve, 1941.

The book is made up of a series of short descriptions (they aren't even vignettes), sort of like Eduardo Galeano's "Voice of Fire" trilogy. It is rare that a section lasts more than a page. They are arranged in exacting chronological order, and each contains within it at least one quote from a primary source.

The sections concern themselves with the moral, racial, and sometimes logistical concerns of the people orchestrating the war, attempting to stop the war, or simply trying to survive the war. It provides a profoundly human mosaic, and the reader quickly learns a great deal of information that is absent in the usual discourse on the war, to say nothing of it's portrayal in popular media.

This book is particularly damning of the heroes of the war. Churchill is portrayed as bloodthirsty and ignorant, while Roosevelt is shown to harbor a racial outlook not all that dissimilar to Hitler. The thing that shocked me most in reading this was the sheer casualness of peoples' (not simply Germans') Antisemitism, and racism towards the Japanese. It's remarkable to see how far people have come in the last sixty odd years.

Baker, as an author, is almost completely absent from this book, except through his right of exclusion. The writing, largely sourced from the New York Times, contains an impartial feel, reminding me more than anything else of the small articles often seen in newspapers that relate just the classic 5 W's. It is rare that Baker allows irony to bleed into the work, like when American leaders denigrate the Japanese for bombing Manila, Baker reminds us that two years later, Americans flattened the city.

In the afterward to the book, Baker allows his own voice to creep in for the first time, when he dedicates the book to pacifists who "tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and sto the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."

This book stands as a moving testament to what Baker calls on the cover "The end of civilization". It is a portrayal of warfare that, were it more common, might serve as a greater deterrent to generations with no real recollection of these events.

A New Page

by Nicholson Baker

When I saw that the New Yorker had Nicholson Baker reviewing the Kindle, the electronic reader being aggressively marketed by Amazon, I thought who better than the man who can almost fetishize small, everyday events (like in his brilliant article on nail clippers year ago).

Baker remains more objective than I would have expected. He is the guy who owns a warehouse full of old newspapers, because he didn't want them to be cut up or recycled. He does do a pretty solid job of explaining why the Kindle does not work as a replacement for reading old-fashioned books and magazines.

From the sound of things, the Kindle is too gray and bland to enjoy reading, and it suffers from a lack of ability to properly reproduce illustrations or charts. This makes me question the wisdom of comic companies like Archaia signing up to produce 'Kindle-only' comics.... Baker also discusses the aesthetics of the device, and the difficulty of using the buttons.

What I found most amusing is the way in which Baker goes about purchasing books on his Kindle. Perhaps there is a paucity of quality releases (he does list quite a few things that you can't buy on it), but as a former book-store snob, I loved his references to writers like Mary Higgins Clark.

If you're thinking about dropping the $400 to buy one of these, I recommend you read this article first.