18.04.08 Nicholson Baker at The Bat Segundo Show
The Bat Segundo Show #200: a special 75-minute conversation with author Nicholson Baker.
Subjects Discussed: Baker’s antipathy for placing the date at the top of an entry, the blogginess of A Box of Matches and Human Smoke, the discrepancy between what Baker remembered and what Updike wrote in U & I, anchored time, the “Splunge” sketch from Monty Python, subjective vs. objective, ground rules, contradictory sources, America First, parallels between September 11, 1941 and September 11, 2001, repeating phrases, cutting out Churchill speeches, Howard Schoenfeld, trying to squeeze invents into an impacted timeline, sources, Baker’s father, the Treaty of Versailles, imbuing a history with a cast of characters, Roosevelt, Victor Klemperer, “The Charms of Wikipedia,” how text informs perspective, Human Smoke as a pointillism of fact, text as a mutable medium, the footnotes in The Mezzanine …
