David Quigg is a writer. David Quigg is a photographer. David Quigg lives in Seattle. David Quigg devours audiobooks. David Quigg is an armchair warrior and diplomat. David Quigg used to be a newspaper reporter. David Quigg resorts to satire. David Quigg is a dad.
These are their stories.
My tribute to the aforementioned Austin Kleon post and the worthwhile advice from Nicholson Baker that it brought to my attention.
For a typed version of the same passage, which comes from page 226 of Baker’s The Anthologist, see this post of mine from April 2010. It’s one of my favorite books.
This video is really just audio with a static photo of an excellent writer with an excellent beard, so please feel free to look away while you listen.
(via Austin Kleon’s post about Nicholson Baker’s advice to “Copy out things that you really love. Any book. Put the quotation marks around it, put the date that you’re doing the copying out, and then copy it out. You’ll find that you just soak into that prose …”)
- Nick Hornby, from the online excerpt of his latest “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column for The Believer
Three of the more than three things I’d add if I had time:
1) Anyone made crazy by the meanness of “The Problem With Memoirs” piece in Sunday’s NYTBR should check out Hornby’s columns. The column’s basic rule, which Hornby mostly follows, amounts to what so many of our parents taught us: If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. So it celebrates the books Hornby enjoys. I value it.
2) Like Hornby, I loved The Anthologist. Please click here and here if you’d like to read a couple of the posts I wrote about it.
3) Thanks to http://ourswimmer.tumblr.com/ for putting Hornby on my mind with this post.
If this were 1985 instead of 2010 and I had a Juki daisywheel printer instead of a blog, I might have interrupted The Anthologist to write letters to Nicholson Baker. Instead, I interrupted his novel to write this and this.
Without putting a return address on the envelope.
Without even using an envelope.
Also, I just want to note that I, at 37, cannot write sentences as long as Nicholson Baker wrote to John Updike when he was 28.
Instead, these fragments.
That will have to be OK.
Nicholson Baker
Twenty-five years ago, when I was twenty-eight and trying to write a novel, I sent this fan letter to John Updike. I lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, back then, and my girlfriend, now my wife, lived in Boston. I printed the letter out all on one page, with narrow margins, using my new Kaypro computer and Juki daisywheel printer. Updike didn’t answer—he couldn’t, because I didn’t put a return address on the envelope.
I’ve just finished my second consecutive listen to the audiobook of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist. It’s a rare event for me, this urge to listen, listen again, and probably listen a third time. Exceedingly rare, actually. The only precedent is Jeremy Irons’ reading of Lolita. That was different — simple awe at Nabokov’s deftness.
Baker’s book is a home for me right now. Maybe this “book is a home” thing will seem less sad, less deranged when you factor in that I like my real home, too, and treasure the people who share it with me. Whether or not it makes sense to call it a home, this novel is exactly the right book, saying the right things, and pointing — just as the best photographs do — at the sort of moments that are so easy to miss. Miss or forget.
Here, from page 226, is one such moment:
She lowered her head to the grocery bag she held and she breathed in. She said, “Don’t you love the smell of brown paper bags filled with raw vegetables?”
I leaned and smelled inside the bag. “Yes, I like it very much,” I said. Trying to stay on an even keel but feeling a lot of love for her and wanting to lie down on the sidewalk as a result.
- from Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist
So far, this book and its first-person narrator are so comfortable, so right, so resonant that I could happily spend the rest of the day typing out passages and trying to get you to read them. But vacuuming calls. This is just as well. It turns out every passage I would type out here as well as many other passages have been published as The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker, which can be borrowed from a library or purchased, read, and re-read.
Enjoying audiobook of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist while I walk the dogs. The “2X” means I’m listening at double speed. Usually, I do this for efficiency. In this case, it lends a winning, manic quality (think Jeff Goldblum) to somewhat sad-sack narration. It also may be causing me to miss the sad-sack essence of the story.
