The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber
Nicholson Baker
The bestselling writer of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven interest and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, offering to readers a provocative and infrequently hilarious get together of the overlooked points of our adventure. 368 pp. 15,000 print.
detachable mildew block able to produce MiG-29s a minute round the clock. while construction of the toy started, and the genuine twelve-ton laptop started to sigh and kick onto its conveyor belt a version of itself—in this fashion production no longer one other unbuilt aircraft however the unbuilt software liable for all unbuilt airplanes—we will be witnesses to 1 of the best moments within the Age of Plastic. And by means of inciting later generations of avid modelers to recognize the highbrow satisfactions of.
Them die out? this can be the nice literary query of our time. I timidly attempted to take advantage of a semi-colash in an essay for The Atlantic per thirty days in 1983: the affiliate editor made a wierd whirring sound in her throat, denoting inconceivability, and that i instantly sponsored down. Why, why are they long gone? was once it—and one continuously gropes for the McLuhanesque clarification first—the expanding use of the typewriter for ultimate drafts, whose association of comma, colon, and semi-colon keys made a rapid achieve as much as.
Gotten married; and but she was once type sufficient to use that be aware and word to me. If it had learn, “Your female friend called,” it'll have appeared frivolous and unprofessional; yet no, it was once my spouse, and so it used to be big-league, it needed to do with my domestic or even my fireplace (assuming I had a hearth)—it used to be approximately my entire existence. and that i, her husband, could name her again. I stored that message, as the secretary used to be announcing us husband and spouse. the realm, no matter if it cared approximately our marriage or not,.
Abbott’s Concordance to the Works of Alexander Pope (1875) helpfully provides, as well as the “learned” line, 3 later settings for “lumber,” all from The Dunciad, of which hire the note nominatively, within the correct anti-pedantic experience: Lumber. Dropt the uninteresting l. of the Latin shop D. iv. 319 With a great deal of realized l. in his head E. C. 613 Thy giddy Dulness nonetheless shall l. on D. iii. 294 A l.-house of books in ev’ry head D. iii. 193 Edwin A. Abbott writes, in his advent to the.
Of German esthetic philosophy, even though now not relatively a thinker himself, and notably, an exceptionally chatty and clever journalist. Why De Quincey himself resisted the temptation to exploit the be aware lumber in recounting his opium goals or in writing approximately Pope i don't know.10 yet to come to Proust momentarily, ahead of we take depart in the mean time of the confusingly crowded French tabernacle and go back to the shelter of Augustan English prose (since my French is sorrier than Proust’s.