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

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 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.