This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Nicholson Baker article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page. |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The following Wikipedia contributor may be personally or professionally connected to the subject of this article. Relevant policies and guidelines may include conflict of interest, autobiography, and neutral point of view. |
This article has been
mentioned by a media organization:
|
We read that Checkpoint "is unquestionably the most controversial work Baker has yet written." Presumably the controversy is over its subject matter (story, or non-story) rather than quality. Still, this surprises me. I haven't gone looking for controversy about it, and I'm sure that the more brain-damaged and right-wing of pundits are appalled, but I haven't seen any controversy at all. There was much more controversy, I think, over The Fermata. The latter has probably died down because most controversies do. Oh, and more controversy over Double Fold, and the pieces (and activities) leading up to it. There's a book about Double Fold. Have there been books, or even mere TV programs, about Checkpoint? Is there really no question that Checkpoint is the most controversial work Baker has ever written? (Incidentally, it struck me as extraordinarily mild.) -- Hoary 09:11, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)
Gotta agree with this. No doubt Checkpoint should have caused more controversy than it did. But Vox and Double Fold caused a hell of a lot of controversy, and we can point to acres of newsprint as evidence. Is there similar evidence for Checkpoint? Gamaliel 15:43, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I don't remember much controversy about Vox, and I'm not surprised. There was mild interest when the world heard that Lewinsky had given a copy to Clinton. (Well, so?) The Fermata, yes. -- Hoary 08:32, 2005 Mar 16 (UTC)
Since both 'Fermata' and 'Checkpoint' aroused significant controversy, I've removed the 'most controversial' line. Saagpaneer ( talk) 14:44, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
The article says that "A Box of Matches is in many ways a continuation of Room Temperature," but the reader has not been told what Room Temperature is. Richard K. Carson 04:43, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
It's pedantry time! Question: do the title pages of the novels announce "A Novel"? Below, I'll represent certain line breaks as colons, and ignore capitalization, but look at the title pages of all the hardback editions that come to hand.
A bit confusing. Even where they do announce "A Novel", should this be regarded as part of the title?
(ot that I mind either way myself.)-- Hoary ( talk) 10:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC) A bit confusing.
Just because it's the way libraries catalogue books doesn't mean it's the way an encyclopedia should treat their titles. It would be very unusual to include "a novel" in the title in a work for general readership such as Wikipedia. Saagpaneer ( talk) 14:46, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Is it just me or does the description of Human Smoke read like a straw man attack? I haven't read the book, but I'm sure that its argument isn't just that WWII was immoral because Britain was the first to use bombers. Brad the Raven ( talk) 04:56, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Agreed. One reviewer is quoted as referring indignantly to "praise from respected reviewers in distinguished publications." but we have no samples of that praise. Therefore I'm cutting back on the attacks. — ℜob C. alias ᴀʟᴀʀoʙ 17:38, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
This exploration of the insidious growth of potato sprouts and the potatofication of the protagonist was included in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 1994. I remember an eerie reading of it on the radio. It might be mentioned. -- Wetman ( talk) 18:47, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
I'm not a professor at the European Graduate School. I guest taught there for two days, once in 2006 and once in 2009. I like the place, I like the professors, but I'm no more a teacher there now than any other place where I've visited for a day. Could somebody make this change? Thank you. -- Nicholson Baker —Preceding undated comment added 10:05, 25 October 2010 (UTC).
Hello all. I wonder if the following passage should go from the beginning: "As a novelist, he often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness, and has written about such provocative topics as voyeurism and planned assassination. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. Baker's enthusiasts appreciate his ability to candidly explore the human psyche, while critics have charged that his subject matter is trivial.[1]" Last three books were about WWII, the history of poetry, and sex. The "subject matter is trivial" business seems out of date. --Nicholson Baker/ Wageless ( talk) 13:08, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't find his work at all trivial, but then this isn't about personal opinion. I'd imagine that with any high profile author like NB it's easy enough to find an RS that can support pretty much any point of view - funny, trivial, deeply philosophical, irreverant, serious. Span ( talk) 16:07, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
As a contribution to the discussion whether Bakers writing is trivial or not I would like to mention Giovanni Boccaccios Decamerone of Italian Rennaissance, dated about 1350 and its comparability to Bakers HoH. Both seem to be collections of single novellas, more or less linked or knotted to each other. Subject to the novellas is pornography, indeed, but on a fine, prose-poetic, artistical and ambitious level. Either topics are closed resorts in natural areas for wealthy clients on the run of life threatening epidemics generated by interpersonal, sexual contacts. Black Death or pestilence for ancient Tuscan nobility teenagers versus HIV for the todays all American girl / boy respectively adults only. It took us about 600 years to accept, but meanwhile Boccaccios Decamerone is looked upon as a style creating peace of litterature , a red light house, seminal. Baker must wait. Since he is no longer professor in Suisse poetry resort he is doing his job as college lecturer at the open university, seminal seminar of semen, quite well. Boys, did I laugh, when following the link. Dermotor ( talk) 11:24, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Glad to find my contributions to HoH accepted. What about the term "pornovella"? enotes uses it for the comparison of Decameron / HoH see footmark 13 in article. I would like to introduce this term to the article to describe the "avantgardening" (my claim) status of the author NB. Dermotor ( talk) 16:21, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
I was an English major at Haverford, not a Philosophy major. (In fact, I only took one philosophy class at Haverford, from the great Richard J. Bernstein.) Maybe somebody could correct this? Wageless ( talk) 16:42, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
N.Baker will receive the International Hermann Hesse price for literature and translation together with his german translator Eike Schönfeld on July,2 (Hesses birthday) in Calw, Southwest region of Germany, close to Stuttgart. source: http://www.hermann-hesse.de/archiv/2014/03/11/internationaler-hermann-hesse-preis-2014-nicholson-baker — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dermotor ( talk • contribs) 16:40, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
The more recent photo, which was substituted by wageless himself on January, 17 was deleted on April, 10. Any chance to find a photo, which fulfills all rules of wikipedia, the free eeetc.? - Dermotor ( talk) 21:02, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
Hi, this is Dermotor again, from overseas/abroad. While reading "Traveling sprinkler" and listening to some of Pauls samples on youtube, I noticed that Nick Baker is on air with 4-5 critical songs, first was "Jeju island", than followed by "Terrormaker", 2012; "When you intervene",2014; "Nine Women Gathering Firewood" and dedicated to Branning: "Whistleblower song", 2014. Should that be subject to his WP site? Dermotor ( talk) 14:09, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
I have commenced a tidy-up of the Bibliography section using cite templates. Capitalization and punctuation follow standard cataloguing rules in AACR2 and RDA, as much as Wikipedia templates allow it. ISBNs and other persistent identifiers, where available, are commented out, but still available for reference. Feel free to continue. Sunwin1960 ( talk) 22:48, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Nicholson Baker. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 00:25, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
ThatMontrealIP, and anyone else who's interested: Baker was born in NYC. In short: Wageless says so, and that's good enough for me.
Please see the recent edits, and particularly their summaries. Promoting one user's say-so above a published source may seem a terrible thing to do, violating policies and all that; however, Wageless is Baker. (And he's not just any old Wikipedia biographee who's occasionally stepped in to correct something within his own bio: he's an enthusiastic, skilled and appreciative editor of other articles too.) If he agrees with his mother that he was born in NYC, let's agree that he was born in NYC. -- Hoary ( talk) 13:40, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
I notice Sunwin1960's comment above (under " Bibliography") about info within lists of works, three years after the comment was posted. (Sorry, Sunwin1960!)
Back in the ancient history of this article, I added ISBNs for editions other than the sole edition that already happened to have an ISBN. Because, as we know, " ISBNs only identify a particular edition of a book, and a reader with only an ISBN will not see the full range of versions of the book". However, many WP editors subscribe to the myth that the ISBN that appears on the physical object that they happen to have in front of them identifies the work, and quite a number of editors like to splatter lists of works with Template:ISBN missing -- ignoring the template's documentation, which says that it "is an inline cleanup template for flagging a reference that is missing the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) of the source document" (my emphasis).
I suppose that back when I added the second and further ISBNs, I lazily assumed that (translations aside) for most of these works there'd be just four editions: US hard, US paper, GB hard, GB paper; but of course that's myopic. (And as for laziness, I didn't even complete the dubious job I'd started.)
I suggest adding a note at the top of each (sub)list saying that normally only first editions are mentioned; removing both any mention of later editions (including later paperback versions of the first, hardback editions) unless we have reason to believe that their content is revised, augmented or reduced;* and removing all ISBNs.
Since I spend a fair amount of time adding ISBNs to other lists of books ( example, example), suggesting that they should be removed here may seem capricious. But I think the usefulness/deceptiveness of providing ISBNs within lists of works depends a lot on the kind(s) of work that are listed, on the editions that have already appeared, and on the likelihood of further editions. -- Hoary ( talk) 23:10, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Nicholson Baker article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
This article must adhere to the biographies of living persons (BLP) policy, even if it is not a biography, because it contains material about living persons. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libellous. If such material is repeatedly inserted, or if you have other concerns, please report the issue to this noticeboard.If you are a subject of this article, or acting on behalf of one, and you need help, please see this help page. |
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The following Wikipedia contributor may be personally or professionally connected to the subject of this article. Relevant policies and guidelines may include conflict of interest, autobiography, and neutral point of view. |
This article has been
mentioned by a media organization:
|
We read that Checkpoint "is unquestionably the most controversial work Baker has yet written." Presumably the controversy is over its subject matter (story, or non-story) rather than quality. Still, this surprises me. I haven't gone looking for controversy about it, and I'm sure that the more brain-damaged and right-wing of pundits are appalled, but I haven't seen any controversy at all. There was much more controversy, I think, over The Fermata. The latter has probably died down because most controversies do. Oh, and more controversy over Double Fold, and the pieces (and activities) leading up to it. There's a book about Double Fold. Have there been books, or even mere TV programs, about Checkpoint? Is there really no question that Checkpoint is the most controversial work Baker has ever written? (Incidentally, it struck me as extraordinarily mild.) -- Hoary 09:11, 2005 Feb 14 (UTC)
Gotta agree with this. No doubt Checkpoint should have caused more controversy than it did. But Vox and Double Fold caused a hell of a lot of controversy, and we can point to acres of newsprint as evidence. Is there similar evidence for Checkpoint? Gamaliel 15:43, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I don't remember much controversy about Vox, and I'm not surprised. There was mild interest when the world heard that Lewinsky had given a copy to Clinton. (Well, so?) The Fermata, yes. -- Hoary 08:32, 2005 Mar 16 (UTC)
Since both 'Fermata' and 'Checkpoint' aroused significant controversy, I've removed the 'most controversial' line. Saagpaneer ( talk) 14:44, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
The article says that "A Box of Matches is in many ways a continuation of Room Temperature," but the reader has not been told what Room Temperature is. Richard K. Carson 04:43, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
It's pedantry time! Question: do the title pages of the novels announce "A Novel"? Below, I'll represent certain line breaks as colons, and ignore capitalization, but look at the title pages of all the hardback editions that come to hand.
A bit confusing. Even where they do announce "A Novel", should this be regarded as part of the title?
(ot that I mind either way myself.)-- Hoary ( talk) 10:23, 3 March 2008 (UTC) A bit confusing.
Just because it's the way libraries catalogue books doesn't mean it's the way an encyclopedia should treat their titles. It would be very unusual to include "a novel" in the title in a work for general readership such as Wikipedia. Saagpaneer ( talk) 14:46, 5 March 2008 (UTC)
Is it just me or does the description of Human Smoke read like a straw man attack? I haven't read the book, but I'm sure that its argument isn't just that WWII was immoral because Britain was the first to use bombers. Brad the Raven ( talk) 04:56, 20 March 2008 (UTC)
Agreed. One reviewer is quoted as referring indignantly to "praise from respected reviewers in distinguished publications." but we have no samples of that praise. Therefore I'm cutting back on the attacks. — ℜob C. alias ᴀʟᴀʀoʙ 17:38, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
This exploration of the insidious growth of potato sprouts and the potatofication of the protagonist was included in The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 1994. I remember an eerie reading of it on the radio. It might be mentioned. -- Wetman ( talk) 18:47, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
I'm not a professor at the European Graduate School. I guest taught there for two days, once in 2006 and once in 2009. I like the place, I like the professors, but I'm no more a teacher there now than any other place where I've visited for a day. Could somebody make this change? Thank you. -- Nicholson Baker —Preceding undated comment added 10:05, 25 October 2010 (UTC).
Hello all. I wonder if the following passage should go from the beginning: "As a novelist, he often focuses on minute inspection of his characters' and narrators' stream of consciousness, and has written about such provocative topics as voyeurism and planned assassination. His fiction generally de-emphasizes narrative in favor of careful description and characterization. Baker's enthusiasts appreciate his ability to candidly explore the human psyche, while critics have charged that his subject matter is trivial.[1]" Last three books were about WWII, the history of poetry, and sex. The "subject matter is trivial" business seems out of date. --Nicholson Baker/ Wageless ( talk) 13:08, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
I don't find his work at all trivial, but then this isn't about personal opinion. I'd imagine that with any high profile author like NB it's easy enough to find an RS that can support pretty much any point of view - funny, trivial, deeply philosophical, irreverant, serious. Span ( talk) 16:07, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
As a contribution to the discussion whether Bakers writing is trivial or not I would like to mention Giovanni Boccaccios Decamerone of Italian Rennaissance, dated about 1350 and its comparability to Bakers HoH. Both seem to be collections of single novellas, more or less linked or knotted to each other. Subject to the novellas is pornography, indeed, but on a fine, prose-poetic, artistical and ambitious level. Either topics are closed resorts in natural areas for wealthy clients on the run of life threatening epidemics generated by interpersonal, sexual contacts. Black Death or pestilence for ancient Tuscan nobility teenagers versus HIV for the todays all American girl / boy respectively adults only. It took us about 600 years to accept, but meanwhile Boccaccios Decamerone is looked upon as a style creating peace of litterature , a red light house, seminal. Baker must wait. Since he is no longer professor in Suisse poetry resort he is doing his job as college lecturer at the open university, seminal seminar of semen, quite well. Boys, did I laugh, when following the link. Dermotor ( talk) 11:24, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Glad to find my contributions to HoH accepted. What about the term "pornovella"? enotes uses it for the comparison of Decameron / HoH see footmark 13 in article. I would like to introduce this term to the article to describe the "avantgardening" (my claim) status of the author NB. Dermotor ( talk) 16:21, 1 June 2012 (UTC)
I was an English major at Haverford, not a Philosophy major. (In fact, I only took one philosophy class at Haverford, from the great Richard J. Bernstein.) Maybe somebody could correct this? Wageless ( talk) 16:42, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
N.Baker will receive the International Hermann Hesse price for literature and translation together with his german translator Eike Schönfeld on July,2 (Hesses birthday) in Calw, Southwest region of Germany, close to Stuttgart. source: http://www.hermann-hesse.de/archiv/2014/03/11/internationaler-hermann-hesse-preis-2014-nicholson-baker — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dermotor ( talk • contribs) 16:40, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
The more recent photo, which was substituted by wageless himself on January, 17 was deleted on April, 10. Any chance to find a photo, which fulfills all rules of wikipedia, the free eeetc.? - Dermotor ( talk) 21:02, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
Hi, this is Dermotor again, from overseas/abroad. While reading "Traveling sprinkler" and listening to some of Pauls samples on youtube, I noticed that Nick Baker is on air with 4-5 critical songs, first was "Jeju island", than followed by "Terrormaker", 2012; "When you intervene",2014; "Nine Women Gathering Firewood" and dedicated to Branning: "Whistleblower song", 2014. Should that be subject to his WP site? Dermotor ( talk) 14:09, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
I have commenced a tidy-up of the Bibliography section using cite templates. Capitalization and punctuation follow standard cataloguing rules in AACR2 and RDA, as much as Wikipedia templates allow it. ISBNs and other persistent identifiers, where available, are commented out, but still available for reference. Feel free to continue. Sunwin1960 ( talk) 22:48, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified one external link on Nicholson Baker. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
This message was posted before February 2018.
After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than
regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors
have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the
RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{
source check}}
(last update: 5 June 2024).
Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot ( Report bug) 00:25, 11 December 2017 (UTC)
ThatMontrealIP, and anyone else who's interested: Baker was born in NYC. In short: Wageless says so, and that's good enough for me.
Please see the recent edits, and particularly their summaries. Promoting one user's say-so above a published source may seem a terrible thing to do, violating policies and all that; however, Wageless is Baker. (And he's not just any old Wikipedia biographee who's occasionally stepped in to correct something within his own bio: he's an enthusiastic, skilled and appreciative editor of other articles too.) If he agrees with his mother that he was born in NYC, let's agree that he was born in NYC. -- Hoary ( talk) 13:40, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
I notice Sunwin1960's comment above (under " Bibliography") about info within lists of works, three years after the comment was posted. (Sorry, Sunwin1960!)
Back in the ancient history of this article, I added ISBNs for editions other than the sole edition that already happened to have an ISBN. Because, as we know, " ISBNs only identify a particular edition of a book, and a reader with only an ISBN will not see the full range of versions of the book". However, many WP editors subscribe to the myth that the ISBN that appears on the physical object that they happen to have in front of them identifies the work, and quite a number of editors like to splatter lists of works with Template:ISBN missing -- ignoring the template's documentation, which says that it "is an inline cleanup template for flagging a reference that is missing the International Standard Book Number (ISBN) of the source document" (my emphasis).
I suppose that back when I added the second and further ISBNs, I lazily assumed that (translations aside) for most of these works there'd be just four editions: US hard, US paper, GB hard, GB paper; but of course that's myopic. (And as for laziness, I didn't even complete the dubious job I'd started.)
I suggest adding a note at the top of each (sub)list saying that normally only first editions are mentioned; removing both any mention of later editions (including later paperback versions of the first, hardback editions) unless we have reason to believe that their content is revised, augmented or reduced;* and removing all ISBNs.
Since I spend a fair amount of time adding ISBNs to other lists of books ( example, example), suggesting that they should be removed here may seem capricious. But I think the usefulness/deceptiveness of providing ISBNs within lists of works depends a lot on the kind(s) of work that are listed, on the editions that have already appeared, and on the likelihood of further editions. -- Hoary ( talk) 23:10, 9 January 2020 (UTC)