Nicholson Baker: The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber

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)

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 area) 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.)