The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other LumberNovelist Nicholson Baker, author of The Mezzanine and Vox and called by Vanity Fair "the best American writer of his generation", here collects over a decade's worth of essays and journalism, including his controversial and highly praised 1994 article on the destruction of library card catalogs. His subjects range from the internals of the movie projector to the emotional tribulations of reading aloud; from the disappearance of hybrid punctuation to the mechanics of changing one's mind; from the lexicography of dirty talk to the manufacture of the fingernail clipper. There is a wedding address, a study of the not-so-random books that are used as props in mail-order catalogs, and a recipe. The final essay, which appears in print here for the first time, pursues through several centuries of prose and poetry the vagaries of the word lumber as a metaphor for the contents of the human mind, in what becomes in the telling a dazzlingly pedantic case study of the fanaticism of scholarship and the beauty that can reside within a piece of ordinary language. |
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Page 331
... verse - frass in its husk . Wesley's Epistle was thus ideal for his purposes : it was cast in the very form ( metapoetical verse essay ) in which Pope wanted to dis- play himself , and the Reverend obviously had some talent , but , poor ...
... verse - frass in its husk . Wesley's Epistle was thus ideal for his purposes : it was cast in the very form ( metapoetical verse essay ) in which Pope wanted to dis- play himself , and the Reverend obviously had some talent , but , poor ...
Page 332
... verse as he went . Pope , on the other hand , only briefly mentions Roscommon at the end of the of that art . " ( John Nichols , Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century , ed . Colin Clair , p . 404. Nichols says that Wesley's ...
... verse as he went . Pope , on the other hand , only briefly mentions Roscommon at the end of the of that art . " ( John Nichols , Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century , ed . Colin Clair , p . 404. Nichols says that Wesley's ...
Page 333
... verse claim- ing that the slights to Wesley and Watts had appeared in “ sur- reptitious " editions ( in fact the surreptitious editions were entirely Pope's doing ) , and that both men were “ eminent for good life . " Wesley , Pope adds ...
... verse claim- ing that the slights to Wesley and Watts had appeared in “ sur- reptitious " editions ( in fact the surreptitious editions were entirely Pope's doing ) , and that both men were “ eminent for good life . " Wesley , Pope adds ...
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Common terms and phrases
A. E. Housman Alexander Pope American beautiful better butt plug called card catalog CD-ROM century Charles clipper close collection Concordance couplet Dictionary Disk Dispensary drawer Dryden Dunciad edition English Poetry Database Essay on Criticism fact film Garth Harvard Housman hundred Isaac Casaubon John Johnson large thoughts later learned lumber Lewis Theobald librarian Lighter literary Lombard look lumber-room mail-order catalog manuscript Mark Pattison meaning mind movie Nabokov never novel OCLC OCLC's online catalogs Oxford passage Pattison phrase piece plastic platter poem poet Pope Pope's projectionist projector prose Proust published punctuation quotation quoted record reel retrieve RETROCON Rolodex Samuel Johnson Samuel Wesley scholars semi-colon sense sentence Shakespeare shelves slang sort Store subject headings Theobald things thousand tiny tion translation turn University users verse volumes Wesley's word writes wrote
References to this book
Bioethics in Complexity: Foundations and Evolutions Sergio De Risio,Franco Orsucci No preview available - 2004 |