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Ways of Seeing: Nicholson Baker learns to draw
Nicholson Baker learns to draw – Lisa Borst
(Baker’s descriptions of literal food are just as good: at a publishing party, he describes being “forced to eat sliced and stuffed things at traypoint.”) More broadly, the effect is an expansive, energizing sense of de- and re-familiarization, a psychedelic recognition that the built environment is linked to itself in all kinds of mysterious and pleasing ways. Vox, the first book in Baker’s loose erotic trilogy, contains some of the old emphasis on solitude and mediation; one character admits that an evening spent with a coworker, watching porn on VHS, was “probably the best sexual experience I’ve had, or at least one of the elite few.” But the novel, occasioned by a chance encounter via sex hotline, also registers real connection between strange minds casting about and alighting not just on objects and how they look but on people and how they feel. Baseless, in particular, veers between the global and the granular, placing Baker’s harrowing research findings—declassified CIA documents; evidence of inhumane epidemiological experiments conducted by the Air Force—alongside scenes from his daily life: Quaker meetings, dreams, funny stuff his wife says, updates on the couple’s dogs.
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