Nicholson Baker on the Unsung Pleasures of the World

Nicholson Baker sits down with Jordan to discuss writing about the unsung pleasures and details of the world—things like the way your mother cuts up a banana, or the advertisements in your favorite magazine. Things that “live in this between area of noticing, they’re part of the background of life.”

“I want to make a fuss with a pencil over some piece of life that has not been drawn, which is similar to when I wanted to write my first book, [The Mezzanine]. There were things I wanted to celebrate! For instance, the Panasonic three-wheeled vacuum cleaner, the greatness of this invention that we happened to own, and I put it in the book and it gave me great delight. Or my mother’s technique of slicing a banana. My own use of earplugs. The escalator, the ways people stand on the escalator, the way the handrail moves quicker than the stairs do. All sorts of things I wanted to say that seemed more pressing to be said than the things that other novelists were writing about.”

Mentioned in the episode:

• Nicholson’s book about WWII, Human Smoke
• “Sock (Object Lessons)” by Kim Adrian
• “The Lab Leak Hypothesis,” New York Magazine

Nicholson Baker has written seventeen books, including The Mezzanine, Vox, Human Smoke, The Anthologist, and Baseless—also an art book, The World on Sunday, in collaboration with his wife Margaret Brentano. Several of his books have been New York Times bestsellers, and he has won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a James Madison Freedom of Information Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the Herman Hesse Prize.