Talk:Nicholson Baker

message: 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)
replies: text: I recall quite a few op-ed columns about the contents of Vox, which is pretty rare for a new work of fiction, and they pre-dated Clinton.  Gamaliel 09:03, 16 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: All right then, I concede. We were probably reading different papers at the time. I have to say, though, I can't think what could be controversial about Vox. -- Hoary 09:59, 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)
thread_title:  ''Checkpoint'' controversy 

message: 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)
thread_title: ''Box of Matches''

message: 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.
*The Mezzanine: A Novel (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
*Room Temperature: A Novel (Grove Weidenfeld)
*Room Temperature (Granta)
*Vox: A Novel (Random House)
*The Everlasting Story of Nory: A Novel (Random House)
*A Book of Matches: A Novel (Chatto & Windus)
*Checkpoint (Knopf)
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)
replies: text: Library cataloguing practice (MARC) seems to include "a novel" in the title: The everlasting story of Nory : a novel, etc. Also, consider the works of Graham Greene: The Ministry of Fear: an entertainment, similarly treated. Pinkville (talk) 19:15, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: "A novel"

message: 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)
thread_title:  Human Smoke 

message: 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)
replies: text: Snipped out with pleasure, Sir; and, however irrelevantly, before you disappear for another few months, let me say how much I enjoyed The Anthologist. Perhaps if you did want to moonlight as a certain kind of phonologist in some European graduate school, there'd be a job waiting for you (but no, no, think of all those committee meetings). -- Hoary (talk) 10:38, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Kind of you, Hoary, thank you.  I'm glad to know you're out here. --Wageless (talk) 01:16, 2 November 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not a professor at the European Graduate School 

message: 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)
replies: text: I was about to retort that no, the one about sex wasn't among the last three, but it then occurred to me that you might know more about NB's output than I do, so I checked in [blushes] Wikipedia. (Not a reliable source, I know.) Well well, he has a new book out; I greatly look forward to reading it. The second retort was going to be that if critics have charged this, then, however mistakenly, they have charged it -- but then I looked and found the link to just one ho-hum review in something called the Richmond Review, which may for all I know be a praiseworthy organ but which surely doesn't have an influence comparable to that of the NYRB. So anyway I didn't cut it but I did curtail it; I hope it's better now. ¶ Visitors [...] can [...] make love to trees, a blurb tells me. Ah. I'd always wished that A Melon for Ecstasy were actually funny, this promises to be the fix. -- Hoary (talk) 14:47, 8 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Delete sentence? 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Hermann Hesse Price, Germany 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Photograph 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Music 

message: 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)
thread_title:  Bibliography 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: , and anyone else who's interested: Baker was born in NYC. In short:  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)
replies: text: It still needs an independent source, which I did not have time to look for.  ThatMontrealIP (talk) 14:52, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: source added. That guardian article is from 2008. Wageless has made ten edits since 2008.ThatMontrealIP (talk) 14:56, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for sourcing it, . -- Hoary (talk) 22:07, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes the sources say different things (O'Mahony: Rochester, New York; McGrath 2011: New York City) so then it's good Wageless can advise on which source is correct. Mujinga (talk) 10:50, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Born in NYC

message: I notice '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.
: Do any of the later editions have revised, augmented or reduced content? (I don't know of any example.)
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)
replies: text: Comment on [what I perhaps mistakenly think are] details: Three years ago,  wrote: "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." I kind-of understand the value of cite templates when they're used for citations (though I rarely bother with them even then). I don't know what advantage they have when used, as here, for lists of works; as an editor, I tend to find them rather annoying, and think (or delude myself) that I can do well without them. I have no training in librarianship or experience as a librarian and therefore am unfamiliar with AACR2 and RDA. Rather, I have to depend for these matters on my Common Sense [hollow laugh]. -- Hoary (talk) 23:45, 9 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Hi Hoary, I've been doing a bit of work on the article and yes I saw that Sunwin comment. Since it was rather old and they had only done (if i remember correctly) three books, I decided to take out the cite template and standardise the fiction subsection to its most used format. I do note selected essays is still using cite. I'm personally unbothered which format to use but I do think it's messy to use different formats within a subsection. As regards ISBNs, I am again not that fussed, I used them because they were there already. On balance I think I like them, I might use the ISBN rather than the title if I was to search for the book on in internet and in a sense they are serving as a reference for the work. Mujinga (talk) 10:56, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: , U & I is shown as having five ISBNs, all of editions from the last century. I'd be surprised if there weren't also new editions, with new ISBNs, from this century. Do you really want seven or more ISBNs for each work, plus a feeling of built-in obsolescence as at any time there might emerge yet newer editions, with new ISBNs? Incidentally, over at the article U and I: A True Story an editor added a photo of an edition whose front cover mentions Vox and The Fermata (and therefore of course postdates these) to an "infobox" that specifies a single ISBN: that of an edition that predates either. -- Hoary (talk) 11:44, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  oh is that what you were talking about? five ISBNs does seem excessive, one for a first edition seems fine to me. For what its worth, ISBNs are included in Wikipedia:WikiProject Novels/ArticleTemplate Mujinga (talk) 12:08, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  A single ISBN. But you say "I might use the ISBN rather than the title if I was to search for the book on in internet". Your search would, of course, miss all copies of any edition other than the first.... Hoary (talk) 12:49, 10 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: ISBNs for editions/works