Threads really is the film of right now. Today we live at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions, when relations between the UK and Russia are strained to breaking point and the world’s leaders behave like spoilt children throwing toys out of their respective prams. So here we all are… but then the situation causes me to cast my mind back to Leeds in the early 80s, a time when my mum was involved with the Crossgates branch of CND and she was organising events and creating art to stave off the threat of imminent Nuclear Annihilation. Her paintings were based on my childhood drawings, and I feel that those early 80s protests inform my way of thinking today. By way of a Threads introduction, here’s a few artefacts from that time and place:

Louise Robinson – A Child Learns About Communication, 1987.

“This refers to a child’s early art but also about the lack of information the public was given post Chernobyl disaster. The work was done a year after the explosion which was in April 1986. It shows a child’s drawing together with the exact copy of the front page of the Guardian reporting the incident. My eyesight was a lot better then. I remember we were all very worried about contamination in the food chain. I believe some areas in the Lake district are still radioactive and a danger to grazing animals. The painting was selected for the New Art in Yorkshire show at Leeds City Gallery in 1987.

“The other work is titled The Inevitable Carousel and is about the Cold War. It was done in 1985.”

 

“The photos show you and Nick in front of the Crossgates CND dragon used in marches and demos. The other photo shows Crossgates CND posting Christmas cards to Russian peace activists.”

The world depicted in Threads is not so far removed from the one in these photos. Sheffield is just down the road from Leeds and they too had CND marches parading their streets. Meanwhile the film imagines a UK-Russia conflict that still seems all too real.

Threads has just been rereleased on DVD and Blu-Ray, and the entire film is available to watch online via a link at the bottom of this page.

Threads is a 1984 British television drama jointly produced by the BBC, Nine Network and Western-World Television Inc. Written by Barry Hines and directed by Mick Jackson, it is a docudrama account of nuclear war and its effects on the city of Sheffield in Northern England. The plot centres on two families as a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union erupts. As the nuclear exchange between NATO and the Warsaw Pact begins, the film depicts the medical, economic, social and environmental consequences of nuclear war.

Shot on a budget of £250,000–350,000, the film was the first of its kind to depict a nuclear winter. Certain reviewers nominated Threads as the “film which comes closest to representing the full horror of nuclear war and its aftermath, as well as the catastrophic impact that the event would have on human culture”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads

I know for a fact that I will never watch this again, as it’s probably the single most harrowing film I’ve ever seen. Beyond Come and See, beyond Salo, beyond Irreversible… more along the lines of how much Zero Day fucked me up because both subject matters are personally relevant; they’re events that I fear, that could possibly – but god, I hope not – tie into my own life. Threads might be the first film I’ve watched that I wish the filmmakers wouldn’t have checked their facts and gotten them right. But seeing as it played out in the same vein as Peter Watkin’s 1965 masterpiece of a short film, The War Game (which based its plot progression on actual emergency government plans), I had a feeling that Threads was probably crafted along similar lines. The cinematography and production design are some of the bleakest, emptiest representations of death out there. The film practically reeks of decaying flesh. For the first forty-five minutes to an hour, you’re sitting there in anticipation of the imminent fate that you know is to come, but when it finally hits, it’s something that nothing in the deepest abyss of your mind could have prepared you for. It goes beyond graphic; it stabs you right in the fucking chest and twists the blade, only to withdraw the knife and stab and twist some more. Toward the end of the film, I thought that the message might be moving in the direction of something along the lines of “life goes on,” but then the final scene came and I realized that I was approaching the idea backwards. What Threads is saying is just the opposite; life doesn’t go on. Life seizes on the floor, foams at the mouth and withers away. The darkest, scariest, hollowest and most mortifying cinematic experience that I think I have ever had.

Eli Hayes
https://letterboxd.com/film/threads/

In 1984, the BBC aired a TV movie so disturbing it would only repeat the broadcast once, a year later, on the 40th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan. That film was Threads, and anyone who’s seen it will never forget it. Those who haven’t, finally can with the recent release of a Blu-ray that’s restored the film in high definition.

Threads tells the story of the British industrial city of Sheffield and how it might fare during a sustained nuclear attack on the United Kingdom. It’s a visceral journey into a hellish world where society falls apart and the lucky die in the initial blast. The rest, including the film’s protagonists, are left to rot as they wander the bombed out British city.

The movie shocked the world on its release. Its creator thinks that was the point. “I’m glad I did it,” Mick Jackson, the director of Threads, told me over the phone. “If there’s anything I’m proud of, it’s this. Between Trump’s heightened nuclear rhetoric and North Korea’s entrance into the nuclear club, Jackson thinks the lessons of his film are more important than ever. “This sense of things…getting out of control very quickly is a lesson that we’ve forgotten,” he said. “I hope we don’t learn it in the wrong way. This is what you’re risking when you talk about fire and fury.”

For Jackson, it’s all a bit too much like the early 1980s. “That period had seen Reagan starting the Strategic Defense Initiative, the downing of the Korean Airliner by the Soviets, and [Reagan] calling the Soviet Union the Evil Empire,” he said. “It was perhaps the most dangerous time for the world since the Cuban missile crisis and…there was this feeling that BBC wasn’t dealing with this in any way. Everyone was very paranoid. The world was on the brink of nuclear war and no one knew anything about it.”

At the time, Jackson was a young producer at the BBC and he pushed to make something that would teach the public more about nuclear weapons. It was a touchy subject at the broadcaster, which knew it was an important issue but had screwed up a previous film tackling the subject. He wanted to research the effects of nuclear war and make a documentary explaining those effects to the public.

His bosses approved his proposal. “With some trepidation, the BBC let me make [a documentary] on a very small budget and they thought…this may be a way of getting them out of this awful bind they were in about The War Game,” he said. “They could do this and portray it as a politically neutral, factually based issue which was of concern to people.”

With the BBC’s blessing Jackson produced Q.E.D. A Guide to Armageddon , a 30 minute documentary that aired as part of the BBC’s documentary series. To make the program, Jackson talked to various experts and sought an answer to a simple question—what do nuclear weapons do?

The program was a success and a relieved BBC was ready to hear Jackson’s next pitch. “I had found, in researching the subject, that more interesting than will it burn you, will it break your bones, will it break your house, were…the effects on people psychologically and therefore the effects on society. It’s hard to do that with a documentary that’s not just interviews with experts. But one way of getting at those emotional and psychological consequences would be to do a drama. I took this idea into the BBC system and they said, go and do some research and come back to us with a proposal. That proposal was Threads.”

Jackson spent a year researching Threads before coming back with the proposal. He spoke with upwards of 50 experts. “Doctors, physicists, defense specialists, psychologist, agronomists, climate scientist, strategic experts, intelligence experts, investigative journalists, nuclear weapon scientists,” he said. “I made myself an expert on nuclear war.”

Again, it was the early 1980s and it felt as if the world might end in nuclear fire at any moment. “For the first time people were starting to question mutual assured destruction,” he said. Generals, politicians, and think tanks such as the RAND Corporation were discussing the possibility of a winnable nuclear war. He thought it was terrifying.

“It is unthinkable for most people. Nuclear war is so outside your everyday experience it’s hard to get your mind around it. And if you can’t get your mind around it, you can’t talk about it and have a meaningful debate.”

To make nuclear war thinkable, Jackson and writer Barry Hines constructed a story about normal people in Sheffield—a city in the middle of England. The movie follows Ruth Beckett and Jimmy Kemp, a young couple who decided to marry because they’ve gotten unexpectedly pregnant. “The idea was to take a movie which was about death…and use the iconography of life to tell the story,” Jackson said.

Jimmy dies in the blast, but Ruth survives to give birth months after the bombs have dropped and civilization has ended. She names the baby Jane and her life is medieval. The film ends with Jane giving birth to her own stillborn child at the age of 13. “I tried to put into Threads images that you couldn’t get out of your head,” Jackson said. “So that when you talked in this abstract language about first strike capability and kilotons, you would also think about those things and that might give you pause.”

In the years after its release, America and the Soviet Union backed away from nuclear war. Reagan and Gorbachev reached an arms control agreement and Reagan pursued disarmament in the later years of his presidency.

Jackson is worried that today’s politicians have forgotten what it was like to live on the brink. “What worries me at the moment is President Trump and many in his administration are using the same kind of language about winnable [nuclear war and] bloody-nose strike against North Korea without realizing the consequences of that,” he said. “They have a failure of imagination. They can not believe that it could be anything other than surgical. The lesson of everything in nuclear policy through the Cold War is that we’ve come so close to so many times to stumbling into war by miscalculation, by not knowing what the other side is thinking.”

He worries that North Korea might one day bait Trump into starting a nuclear war that draws in the whole world. “The thing could very rapidly get out of control,” he said “Trump has no interest in going there…he’s uncurious.”

Art helps put things in context. Stories help us understand the world around us and Threads is one of the great stories about nuclear war. It helped a generation understand its effects at a time when people were hungry to understand. Jackson is less sure a movie like Threads would do as well today. “We seem to be in a state of simultaneous fear and denial,” he said. “Fear that something awful will happen yet not wanting to go there to talk about it and what we might do to prevent it.”

Matthew Gault
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3wkpj/threads-bbc-mick-jackson-director-interview-nuclear-war-trump-north-korea

 

My boyfriend had been dogging me for months to watch this movie, which he (erroneously, I think) described as sci-fi. Now, I’ve never been a fan of sci-fi movies, as I think most of them are over-done, corny, etc. Add to that the fact that the movie was made 23 years ago, and I pretty much decided it wasn’t going to be my cup of celluloid tea.

Was I ever wrong. Not only was it the singular most horrifying movie I’ve ever watched, it’s timely as hell, and it’s done documentary-style, so there aren’t any overblown emotional scenes to detract from its realism. This movie scared me on such a profound level that I actually felt like I was having a panic attack and had to shut it off halfway through, during the “hospital” scene. Mind you, I’ve never in my entire life been so disturbed by a movie that I just couldn’t watch anymore. I sobbed, hard, for a good 15 minutes and couldn’t sleep for most of that night. I have yet to finish the second half.

That said, I can’t recommend it to the faint-of-heart. It will hit you on such a visceral level that everything in your reality will seem a little duller and less important after having watched it. I’m still amazed at how the events outlined in this movie are as much a threat to us now as they were in 1984. Twenty-three years later, we are no further from preventing a nuclear holocaust. If anything, the threat is more imminent.

If you can stomach it, you won’t regret it.

10/10
absolute insanity.
brrrnor 18 February 2008
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/reviews

As a 12 year old school boy in Leeds, England only 30 or so miles from Sheffield I was shown this film one afternoon at school. No warning of the viewing was given and strangely we were not asked to produce written work for English or discuss the theme of the film. Ever since viewing the film I have suffered from recurring nightmares of nuclear war and I have a morbid interest in the subject – hence me making this comment here! The film is accurately portrayed and researched and is nothing short of harrowing to watch. This is the most frightening film I have ever seen or wish to see, I strongly warn anyone contemplating viewing it to take heed. I was most relieved come the end of the cold war that we might have for the present moment avoided all out nuclear annihilation but the fact that nuclear weapons remain still makes me uneasy. As a direct result of seeing this film I did become a member of CND and I have been an activist both demonstrating against the U.S spy base at Menwith Hill only 20 miles from my home and in raising money for CND by volunteering as a steward at Glastonbury festival and demonstrations in London. I’d just like to mention my friend Mike Morris was an extra in the film Threads, obviously he was a little older than myself. Mike recently died of cancer and he is much missed by myself and many others. Peace and goodwill to all readers of my message. –

Johnny Parrish
10/10
Nightmare inducing, stomach churning post-nuclear conflict prophecy
gudstuff 14 January 2008
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090163/reviews

The only film I have been really and truly scared and indeed horrified by – in an intense and sustained way – is Mick Jackson’s post-nuclear apocalypse movie Threads, scripted by Barry Hines and originally made for BBC television. It was made and broadcast in 1984, although the film’s realistic content easily trumped whatever speculative Orwellian resonance was there to be noticed that year. That period was not as tense as the missile crisis of 1962, but after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the diplomatic tensions between the great superpowers could hardly be worse and the ability of artists and film-makers to think the unthinkable had evolved. The government’s Protect and Survive leaflets – themselves a blood-chilling promise of armageddon – had entered the general consciousness: the phrase was satirically transformed by CND into Protest and Survive. I attended a CND-sponsored screening of Peter Watkins’s The War Game in 1981, when it was still banned from the airwaves, and that magnificent film was upsetting enough, particularly its voiceover from nice, friendly, familiar Michael Aspel. But the intense discussion afterwards calmed us all – allowed us to channel and manage our fear.

It wasn’t until I saw Threads that I found that something on screen could make me break out in a cold, shivering sweat and keep me in that condition for 20 minutes, followed by weeks of depression and anxiety.

It’s about a couple in Sheffield living their normal lives, looking forward to being parents. They try to ignore the preamble to nuclear war by concentrating on decorating their flat. There’s a nuclear strike in the north of England and over weeks, months and years the focus is opened up with a kind of satanic grandeur into the general catastrophe: we see how society degenerates into violent nothingness.

Everyone who has seen Threads knows where the real payload of horror comes, and those squeamish about spoilers or thermonuclear birth defects can look away now. The baby is born in the post-nuclear hell. Beyond pain, beyond love, the mother looks into the dirty bundle and she sees …

She sees …

Well, I still don’t know exactly what. I was watching the film with my girlfriend and her sister in the manky basement of a pretty unsafe house off the Cowley Road in Oxford – a setting which seemed worryingly close to the film. At this moment, my girlfriend’s sister gave a cry or a gasp which I will never forget, and walked out of the room. I looked at her, as a way of not looking at the screen, and then I looked down at the carpet. I was genuinely scared to look up. Threads had flooded my body with the diabolic opposite of adrenaline. We all went to bed in utter silence. I have still never experienced anything like it in years of film-going, telly-watching, book-munching, culture-consuming activity.

I was really, really scared. Much later, I remember watching Lucy Walker’s admirable anti-nuclear documentary Countdown to Zero and almost trying to suppress the memory of Threads, to suppress the horror and despair so that I could concentrate.

It is a remarkable film, occasionally revived in film festivals. Jackson went on to direct the comparable A Very British Coup on television, and then more mainstream fare like The Bodyguard. Barry Hines had of course famously adapted his own novels A Kestrel for a Knave and Looks and Smiles for Ken Loach – mighty achievements. But I think Threads is the dark masterpiece for both.

Peter Bradshaw
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2014/oct/20/threads-the-film-that-frightened-me-most-halloween

“It seemed to me that people weren’t able to visualize the unthinkable, especially politicians,” Threads director Mick Jackson said in a 2009 interview. “So I thought that if I acted this out for them as a television drama—not as a spectacle or disaster movie—that would give them a workable visual vocabulary for thinking about the unthinkable.” Jackson had already explored the subject matter once before, in an episode of the BBC science series Q.E.D. titled “A Guide To Armageddon.” That had marked a dramatic reversal for the network that had previously banned 1965’s The War Game, a documentary-style depiction of nuclear fallout that had been deemed “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting” and scuppered for fear it would cause viewers to commit mass suicide. But when Jackson’s Q.E.D. episode didn’t end with people throwing themselves off buildings—and meanwhile, nuclear war only got more newsworthy—the BBC commissioned Jackson to take a crack at dramatizing it again, with a film that would capture this more go-go ’80s version of apocalyptic despair.

Like The Day After’s Nicholas Meyer, Jackson undertook the task with an unusually heavy amount of research, spending a whole year talking to scientists, defense strategists, doctors, and the like—even spending the week embedded in bunkers with the designated “official survivors” training to make sense of post-apocalyptic chaos. But of all his preliminary steps, Jackson’s most prescient was hiring screenwriter Barry Hines.

The author of novels like 1968’s A Kestrel For A Knave, which he then adapted for Ken Loach’s film version, Kes, Hines was a writer who was most passionate about people and the everyday, working-class tragedies they endured. Hines may have despised Jackson’s methods, his middle-class ways, and even his posh white shoes, according to Hines’ wife. But the tension between Hines’ kitchen-sink sensibilities and Jackson’s geopolitical ambitions resulted in a film that was horrifying precisely because of how remarkably small and human it was. Compared to The Day After’s nominally “real” yet slightly corn-fed clichés (Jason Robards’ noble country doctor; the good-hearted, Steve Guttenberg-ian lunk of a college kid), Threads’ characters feel like genuine people who’d just staggered straight out of the neighborhood pubs. You can tell, because you don’t really like them all that much.

Leading this pack of people you don’t particularly mind seeing annihilated is Reece Dinsdale as Jimmy, just your ordinary, aimless punter with nothing on his mind beyond sports and sex. When we first meet Jimmy, he’s thoughtlessly scanning past radio news broadcasts to find the football scores before clumsily putting the moves on his girlfriend, Ruth, played by Karen Meagher. (As with The Day After, Jackson sought to fill Threads with unknowns—though only after contract issues disrupted his plan to use the cast of British soap Coronation Street.) After their little romantic rendezvous turns into an unplanned pregnancy, followed by an equally rushed and fumbling engagement, the young couple suddenly finds themselves stripping wallpaper off their cheap new flat and preparing for a life neither are sure they want. Jimmy, meanwhile, spends his nights drinking with his sleazy work buddy, who prods him to make the most of the time he has left as a single man.

Nuclear war is brutal, ugly, and piss-yourself terrifying, Threads argues. Why should its movie depiction be anything different?

Threads makes explicit those parallels between Jimmy’s impending nuptials and looming Armageddon, both of which threaten to really put a damper on his shagging the local girls, as Jimmy and his friend repeatedly exhort that they “might as well enjoy ourselves.” Of the latter, his buddy even shrugs that, if the bomb does fall, he wants to be “pissed out of my mind and straight underneath it.” Meanwhile, Jackson cleverly frames Jimmy and Ruth’s petty domestic dramas with the nuclear brinksmanship ratcheting up behind them, cutting away to the white-shirt bureaucrats in their shelters, readying supply chains and pushing blast radius charts around, as well as interstitial animated segments from the government’s risibly optimistic “Protect And Survive” series that explained, with calm British politesse, how to store a dead body in plastic until it’s safe to come out.

Again—as in The Day After, as in Miracle Mile—there is the portrayal of people living in hapless ignorance, watching these various warning signs unfold but not knowing what to do about it, so mostly they just put it out of their minds. (Ruth even assures Jimmy that they’re going to have a great future together: “I just know it.”) Threads, at least, depicts anti-nuke protesters taking to the streets, but even these are shouted down by hecklers asking what about factory jobs. Their more single-minded personal concerns are ironically underscored by the film’s constant use of churning, telex-style overlays, rattling off cold statistics about chief local exports and expected casualty counts. The apocalypse approaches slowly and businesslike.

The actual attack, on the other hand, is about as chaotic as has ever been committed to film. A bludgeoning montage of mushroom clouds, panicked rioters, exploding buildings, and faces and milk bottles melting in the flames, it’s a far more graphic affair than The Day After’s tasteful, X-ray freeze frames. Questionably, Jackson even includes a man who’s caught squatting on the toilet (“Bloody hell!”), as well as an extreme close-up of urine pouring from a terrified woman’s pant leg. Still, who can consider matters of taste in the middle of a massacre? Nuclear war is brutal, ugly, and piss-yourself terrifying, Threads argues. Why should its movie depiction be anything different?

For as merciless as that bombing scene is, Threads is primarily remembered for its relentlessly cruel depiction of the aftermath—a grim, hopeless trudge through broken streets littered with grinning corpses and smoldering dead cats, trembling women holding the black, charred remains of tiny babies. As the text dispassionately informs us, burying the bodies is deemed to be impractical, so they’re just left to the rats. Cholera and other diseases run rampant, while radiation-burned victims slop through blood and pus at the local hospital, where the best that doctors can do is saw their limbs off as they bite down on rags.

Later, the military rounds up the able-bodied to work in “reconstruction” camps, while the old and infirm starve to death; in the apocalypse, only the cockroaches and the British class system are guaranteed to survive. And as the food supplies dwindle and atomic dust blots out the sun, Ruth and her fellow refugees (Jimmy is assumed to have died in the blast, though his idiot friend sticks around) stumble off into nearby farm towns, reduced to eating rotting sheep carcasses raw in the freezing cold. Ruth, at least, manages to keep her strength long enough to give birth to her daughter, gnawing the umbilical cord off herself.

As Threads skips over months and years, the population dwindling to medieval levels, the sunlight eventually returns, though the increased levels of ultraviolet radiation leaves Ruth blinded with cataracts and dying of cancer. Her daughter, Jane, like the other children of the apocalypse, grows into a sullen, near-feral creature, capable of only caveman grunts of “Work!” and other bits of broken English. And because there are still a few minutes left in the runtime to squeeze in as much misery as possible, Jane is soon raped, eventually giving birth to her own unplanned baby—a stillborn deformity, whose face causes Jane to scream as the film cuts mercifully to black.

Whereas The Day After provided the salve of pretending that the preceding were just a cautionary tale—John Lithgow’s “Is anybody listening?” benediction an urgent call to heed the film’s dire warnings—there was an aura of bleakly resolute acceptance to Threads that, like its characters, seemed to suggest that we were already fucked. Sure, like Nicholas Meyer, Mick Jackson claimed that Ronald Reagan also watched his film, saying years later that he “likes to imagine” it similarly factored into Reagan’s attempts to broker peace with the Russians. (Though unlike Meyer, he never received a telegram telling him as much.) But its real impact was arguably on the British temperament: Some time after Threads’ premiere, journalist Sue Lloyd Roberts looked at the nation’s dwindling volunteers for civil defense exercises and concluded, “After watching The Day After and Threads, anyone might be forgiven for taking the ‘better to die than to survive’ attitude. So why bother?”

There was an aura of bleakly resolute acceptance to Threads that, like its characters, seemed to suggest that we were already fucked.

That attitude can be extrapolated to the living, too. Threads’ opening narration, delivered as a spider unspools its light and silvery web, reminds us that civilization only exists thanks to the gossamer human connections that bind it together. Three years after Threads aired, Margaret Thatcher would famously be quoted as saying, “There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.” Threads seemed to argue that this tapestry was all just an illusion, its individual threads easily torn asunder by a sudden hot wind. Or even slowly picked apart, like the blankets being disassembled by Jane and her fellow neo-Neanderthals, by the gradual erosion of our empathy for each other.

The burden of that knowledge—of seeing how flimsy this whole human race racket really is—could explain our persistent attraction to seeing it all blown to shit, time and time again, in the apocalypse films that have become as common a genre as slashers or movies where sports teams lose until they don’t. After all, there’s something undeniably cathartic about just dropping the pretense and reveling in the hopelessness of the modern human condition; like Jimmy and his pal shrugging off World War III in favor of another pint, hey, it’s not like we can do anything about it. The best we can hope is to be drunk and snug inside the blast radius when our own death from above arrives.

But that wasn’t what Jackson or Hines intended, of course. They wanted Threads to spur the international outcry for nuclear disarmament, to become activists for the cause the same way Ruth’s portrayer Karen Meagher did. They wanted us to put down the pint and go do something, to recognize that the ties binding us together needed to be tightened immediately, before they were forever torn. For all its grim hopelessness, Threads had a subtextual faith that people would understand all this before it was too late.

Watching Threads now, in 2017, when the ones holding those strings in their tiny hands only seem to care about yanking them for their own ego-gratifying amusement, well… With apologies to the charred babies and incinerated cats, maybe the scariest thing about Threads is how grimly, hopelessly naive that seems.

Sean O’Neal
https://www.avclub.com/threads-served-up-a-bleakly-british-depiction-of-our-im-1819231394

The complete film at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/threads_201712

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Today we are thoroughly gifted via this mega-guest-post by renaissance artist, editor and dude Ben ‘_Black_Acrylic_’ Robinson, and you are in — and hopefully down — for a real treat, so treat yourselves, and let _B_A aka Ben know you did the self-treating thing and what transpired thereby in your comments today. Thanks, everybody, and thanks beyond thanks to you, Ben! ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. Interesting, the Kaufman comparison, yes, that’s something. It does seem like Huppert is almost chain-acting these days. No, I haven’t met her, but I know people who’ve worked with her, all of whom say she’s as tough as nails and does not suffer fools. I don’t think I’m a fool, so I hope I’ll get a chance to do the paths-crossing thing with her. ** Chris Cochrane, Hi, Chris! Thanks a lot, bud. Good luck with what seems like a lot of surprise ‘Them’ stuff to figure out. Let me know if you need me. Love, D. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yes, well, we seem to be of similar minds and inspirational allures, which is obviously cool. The book you found was ‘MLT’? Nice. I feel like that novel of mine gets kind of lost, so I’m happy it magically wound up there. I’m going to be in LA, and also out of LA but generally around there, from tomorrow until I arrive back in Paris on the 10th. So the blog will go into all-restored-posts-and-no-p.s.es mode starting on Monday, and I’ll be back here in the saddle with new posts and p.s.es again starting on the 11th. The actual contract signing was quick and easy. The payment thing is infuriating. I won’t go into the boring mess, but we were supposed to be paid our initial fees ‘on signing’, i.e. yesterday, and then paid a second fee on ‘delivery of the script’, which we will be delivering today, and all we got from our producer was very vague noises that we’ll be be paid ‘soon’ and I don’t think ‘soon’ means soon. So basically I’m going to have badger her constantly and probably go on strike to get paid. Not good. The script meeting went well. Zac and I will be sending Gisele the finished script today, and, assuming she’s okay with it, and I’m about 90% sure she will be, it’ll get sent to the producer later today. Then sometime in the next week or so, she’s supposed to come back to us with her notes and edits, and then we’ll need to either agree with her suggestions or battle with her about them until she thinks the script is ready to deliver to ARTE. Blah. I keep forgetting it’s almost Easter. I don’t think I’ve celebrated or even paid attention to Easter, other than noticing that all the stores are closed, since I was a kid. My day was … well, I told you. My back is tinily better. Today I just have to get ready for the trip tomorrow. Not too exciting. How was yours? ** James Nulick, Hi, James! Good to see you, man! Like I think I said yesterday, our dummy is kind of scary but not in an evil way. I have heard that phrase, and I go dark too. Well, except for sticking my head out long enough to do the p.s. and then plunging back into the dark. I salute your darkness! Thanks, buddy! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. ‘Claire’s Camera’ intrigues me based on your description. Rohmer is usually a magic word for me. I’ve heard about ‘Revenge’. Curious to hear if it’s all that. Mixed reports from those over here who’ve seen it. Big congratulations on the gig with The Nation! That’s awesome news! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben, and thank you mano a mano for the incredible post today! Sure, about the blurb. Let me know when you need it. I’m going to be away and basically indisposed until the 11th. Really, really best of luck with the screening tonight! I hope the response is deafening or stunned or some other maximally pleasing thing. And I can’t wait to see it for myself, obviously. ** Jesse, Hi, Jesse. I know, right? About the datedly relevant status and effect. I did really like your track a bunch, actually. I’m going to be off asap to get to know your sonic work generally. Thank you! Cool, see you soon then, and take care. ** Misanthrope, Hi, G. Good lord, that’s quite the effect. I should patent whatever I wrote. Yep, tomorrow I get on a plane and fly for fucking ever and land 9 hours in the past with horrid jet lag. That’s my tomorrow right there. Thanks for the good vibes. I’ll definitely need them tomorrow and at least for the first couple of no doubt brain-dead days. ** Bill, Hi, B. I haven’t read any Baker since ‘The Fermata’. The earliest books are still my favorites, but he’s pretty much always a really good writer of sentences, and I do love a good sentence. You’re right, I almost never read on planes. But if I bring a book, I’ll usually start reading it while on my trip, so it works that way. I like reading books on trains a lot, but on planes … maybe it’s the plane air or something. On planes I just want to chain-watch the shittiest, most expensive and superficial films I can find. Thanks a bunch, Bill! ** Okay. Ben has you guys very covered today, so take cover. See you tomorrow.

 

‘The technique of art is to make things “unfamiliar,” to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception. The act of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.’ — Viktor Shklovsky

‘All good art does this to a certain degree, but some art makes a fetish of it, and one of the books I would hold in that category is Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine. With all of its elaborate examinations of everyday objects like shoelaces and escalators, the book that seems to anticipate David Foster Wallace is portraying these objects in rarely seen (and perhaps not-previously seen) ways that makes them seem fresh and new.

‘The great art in Baker’s novel is the variation he pursues across his digressions. Sometimes they read almost like a riff off of Barthelme, a very postindustrial/economic account of the history of a particular aspect of an object. Other times these items become inherently personal (nostalgia is constantly invoked here, as is childhood/adulthood), other times they are simply humorous or entertaining. What unites them all is a great ability to defamiliarize those things that most of us probably have lost any ability to take any pleasure whatsoever in. And so we are lucky to have Baker’s good art to help us to liven up our world.

‘Part of the brilliance of this book is that Baker defamiliarizes those things about life that are so familiar that they go completely unnoticed; e.g., broken shoelaces, the unspoken norms of public restrooms, the form and feel of a cardboard milk carton. Whereas someone like Proust would first have to draw our attention to a detail of life that we might not have been aware of (effectively familiarizing it before defamiliarizing it), Baker has chosen those things that are part of our common consciousness. Thus, first we feel the strange deja vu that comes when were reminded of some part of life that we know intimately but have probably stopped noticing, and then, only after that has been established, Baker places this moment into an entirely new context.

‘At the same time as he defamiliarizes, Baker puts his digressions into a highly original narrative voice that sounds very authentic and is generally consistent to my ear. Baker dribbles out little bits of humanity en route to making his protagonist a likable person, someone about whom we can be persuaded to follow along for 135 meandering pages that maintain just enough semblance of plot to stake the claim that The Mezzanine is a book with a plot. More than that, though, I’d say that it’s a book about the passage of eras (and Baker calmly layers a number of them into this narrator’s life), as well as about evoking a very particular time in the history of the United States by discussing the life and death of pop cultural technology.’ — CR

 

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Further

Nicholson Baker Website
Nicholson Baker: The Mad Scientist of Smut
Nicholson Baker @ Twitter
‘There Has To Be Less School’: An Interview with Nicholson Baker
Consciousness on the Page: A Primer on the Novels of Nicholson Baker
NICHOLSON BAKER NAVIGATES THE BUFFET
Wrapping Sentences Around Things
Nicholson Baker: How I Write
Le sexe sans le soufre : lecture de deux romans de Nicholson Baker
Everything Is Interesting
Why is Nicholson Baker so obsessed with sex?
Nicholson Baker: Inside the author — and his alter ego
Nicholson Baker Inteview: Master or Masturbator?
Nicholson Baker on his literary career and how he came to write about sex
THE LITTLE NICHOLSON BAKERIN MY MIND
How I fell in love with Wikipedia [1], by Nicholson Baker
Can the Kindle really improve on the book?, by Nicholson Baker
Dallas Killers Club, by Nicholson Baker
Buy ‘The Mezzanine’

 

____
Extras

Nicholson Baker. Words as Cotton Candy (An autobiography). 2015

Nicholson Baker on Bookworm [1992]

Nicholson Baker: Delighting in the Details

Nicholson Baker: “Wrapping Sentences Around Things”

 

______
Interview
from The Paris Review

 

Let’s start with a very basic question. How do you write? With a pen? A pencil?

I edit with a pen, I write on a computer. I’ve always had trouble with pencils because they get dull so quickly, or they just break, and then there’s that ­awful shuddery feeling when you’re trying to write with a couple of scraps of wood poking out.

What about a mechanical pencil?

Sure, but the leads in mechanical pencils have the problem of bending. They give and then they snap. And they don’t offer the pleasures of sharpening. That was always a big moment for me in grade school, to walk to the side of the classroom where the pencil sharpener was mounted on the wall and imagine the two-geared cylinders going around, gnashing away at the cone of wood. The pencil sharpener was probably the best thing about school back then, actually—a little chrome invention under your control. It had a ­thundering sound, a throat-clearing sound, that I especially liked—Ticonderoga is almost onomatopoetic. And of course I oversharpened and broke the point, so I got to stand there for a while making that sound, ticonderoga … oga … oga.

Then there was a while, when I was starting out as a writer, when I really needed to have a certain kind of pen. It was before the golden age of roller­ball pens and gel pens and pens with rubber grips—there’s such a bewildering array now. It had a red barrel and I can’t remember the name of the manufacturer, which troubles me. It had an unusually smooth, fine-point roller.

So you would use that.

That’s what I wrote with. And then I decided that a real writer typed his drafts. My mother had a Sears typewriter. Starting in seventh grade, I tried typing once in a while on that. I memorized the keys by taping over them with black electrician’s tape. Later, when my father dropped me off at college, he bought me this postmodern-looking, low to the ground, Italian-designed, beautifully minimalist typewriter, a black Olivetti electric, that had a deep hum. I took it to Paris with me, and I wrote a couple pieces on it that ended up being published. Once I’d been published, I thought, Okay, let’s get serious now, you’re going to have to write on a manual typewriter. So I bought a hundred-twenty-five-dollar green Olivetti manual, which was very light, and I carried that around with me in a zippered case.

When I moved to Boston, in 1983, I typed at night on my green Olivetti manual, and during the day I made a living as a word-processing operator. Somewhere along the way—I think it was 1985—I got a Kaypro, one of the first portable computers. You clamped the keyboard to the front and these little simple clips went clonk. It had two floppy drives and looked like a small, portable piece of medical equipment. It was really a lovely machine. Every so often it would make a little grinding sound, like worn brake pads. I wrote my first novel on it, The Mezzanine. I love typing, actually—the sensation of typing on a keyboard or on an old-fashioned typewriter.

How did The Mezzanine come about?

My twenties weren’t terribly productive. I wasted a lot of time. I had a mental deadline that I would finish a book by the time I turned thirty. I blew the deadline. I had a job doing technical writing, which was really consuming me. I wasn’t sleeping. So my wife and I figured out that we could live for six months, mostly with the money she had saved up. I quit the job and wrote as hard as I’ve ever written. I would get up at eight in the morning and write until seven at night.

My wife was working two days a week, so I would take care of our daughter, Alice, on those days, and she took care of Alice on the other days. When you have a child, you get a surge of ambition, or a surge of hormonal urgency, to get something done, something worthy of your new station in life. I gave myself a new deadline: Finish the novel while you’re still thirty. Do something your child might be able to read when she grows up.

My code name for the book was “Desperation.”

What was the writing process like?

It was totally absorbing, the feeling of being sunk in the midst of a big, warm, almost unmanageable pond. I could sense all these notes I had, all these observations I’d saved up to use, finally arranging themselves in relation to one other. Somewhere in chapter three, I thought, my God, it’s a genuine chapter! And then later I got to chapter eight and a few things had happened—not much had happened, but something had happened.

I retyped the whole book. I was always a believer, even with word processing, that there’s something useful about having to retrace your steps from the beginning. And you have to print it out, too—you only get so far if you work by staring at a screen, because the resolution of the paper page is much higher. Your eye actually takes in things on paper more efficiently. I can fiddle around with something on a screen for days and think I’m getting somewhere, and it won’t be right. Then I’ll print it out and take it to bed, and instantly it’s obvious what’s bad about it, and I’ll cross out, cross out, cross out.

It’s an unusual book—especially for a debut. Was it easy to find a publisher?

Publishers didn’t really get it. It was rejected a lot of times, by nine or ten publishers. They all said they thought it wasn’t a novel. They didn’t get the footnotes—nobody was doing footnotes back then.

That must have been heartbreaking.

Not really. I knew it was a book that was a little bit different from what was going on at the time—I had De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in mind as I wrote, because of the way it swirls around and revels in its digressions. A piece of my book had already appeared in The New Yorker. I figured that at some point someone would publish it. Once it came out in hardcover, a paperback editor at Vintage, Marty Asher, read it and liked it. He brought it out as a Vintage Contemporary, and that was tremendously exciting. I felt like I had been accepted into some strange club. Bright Lights, Big City was a Vintage Contemporary at that same time, and A Fan’s Notes and The Sportswriter.

 

___
Book

Nicolson Baker The Mezzanine
Grove Press

‘In his startling, witty, and inexhaustibly inventive first novel, Nicholson Baker uses a one-story escalator ride as the occasion for a dazzling reappraisal of everyday objects and rituals. From the humble milk carton to the act of tying one’s shoes, The Mezzanine at once defamiliarizes the familiar world and endows it with loopy and euphoric poetry. Nicholson Baker’s accounts of the ordinary become extraordinary through his sharp storytelling and his unconventional, conversational style. At first glance, The Mezzanine appears to be a book about nothing. In reality, it is a brilliant celebration of things, simultaneously demonstrating the value of reflection and the importance of everyday human human experiences.’ — Grove Press

 

_____
Excerpt

At almost one o’clock I entered the lobby of the building where I worked and turned toward the escalators, carrying a black Penguin paperback and a small white CVS bag, its receipt stapled over the top. The escalators rose toward the mezzanine, where my office was. They were the free-standing kind: a pair of integral signs swooping upward between the two floors they served without struts or piers to bear any intermediate weight. On sunny days like this one, a temporary, steeper escalator of daylight, formed by intersections of the lobby’s towering volumes of marble and glass, met the real escalators just above their middle point, spreading into a needly area of shine where it fell against their brushed-steel side-panels, and adding long glossy highlights to each of the black rubber handrails which wavered slightly as the handrails slid on their tracks, like the radians of black luster that ride the undulating outer edge of an LP.

When I drew close to the up escalator, I involuntarily transferred my paperback and CVS bag to my left hand, so that I could take the handrail with my right, according to habit. The bag made a little paper-rattling sound, and when I looked down at it, I discovered that I was unable for a second to remember what was inside, my recollection snagged on the stapled receipt. But of course that was one of the principal reasons you needed little bags, I thought: they kept your purchases private, while signaling to the world that you led a busy, rich life, full of pressing errands run. Earlier that lunch hour, I had visited a Papa Gino’s, a chain I rarely ate at, to buy a half-pint of milk to go along with a cookie I had bought unexpectedly from a failing franchise, attracted by the notion of spending a few minutes in the plaza in front of my building eating a dessert I should have outgrown and reading my paperback. I paid for the carton of milk, and then the girl (her name tag said “Donna”) hesitated, sensing that some component of the transaction was missing: she said, “Do you want a straw?” I hesitated in turn-did I? My interest in straws for drinking anything besides milkshakes had fallen off some years before, probably peaking out the year that all the major straw vendors switched from paper to plastic straws, and we entered that uncomfortable era of the floating straw;1 although I did still like plastic elbow straws, whose pleated necks resisted bending in a way that was very similar to the tiny seizeups your finger joints will undergo if you hold them in the same position for a while.

So when Donna asked if I would like a straw to accompany my half-pint of milk, I smiled at her and said, “No thanks. But maybe I’d like a little bag.” She said, “Oh! Sorry,” and hurriedly reached under the counter for it, touchingly flustered, thinking she had goofed. She was quite new; you could tell by the way she opened the bag: three anemone splayings of her fingers inside it, the slowest way. I thanked her and left, and then I began to wonder: Why had I requested a bag to hold a simple half-pint of milk? It wasn’t simply out of some abstract need for propriety, a wish to shield the nature of my purchase from the public eye-although this was often a powerful motive, and not to be ridiculed. Small mom and pop shopkeepers, who understood these things, instinctively shrouded whatever solo item you bought-a box of pasta shells, a quart of milk, a pan of Jiffy Pop, a loaf of bread-in a bag: food meant to be eaten indoors, they felt, should be seen only indoors. But even after ringing up things like cigarettes or ice cream bars, obviously meant for ambulatory consumption, they often prompted, “Little bag?” “Small bag?” “Little bag for that?” Bagging evidently was used to mark the exact point at which title to the ice cream bar passed to the buyer. When I was in high school I used to unsettle these proprietors, as they automatically reached for a bag for my quart of milk, by raising a palm and saying officiously, “I don’t need a bag, thanks.” I would leave holding the quart coolly in one hand, as if it were a big reference book I had to consult so often that it bored me.

Why had I intentionally snubbed their convention, when I had loved bags since I was very little and had learned how to refold the large thick ones from the supermarket by pulling the creases taut and then tapping along the infolding center of each side until the bag began to hunch forward on itself, as if wounded, until it lay flat again? I might have defended my snub at the time by saying something about unnecessary waste, landfills, etc. But the real reason was that by then I had become a steady consumer of magazines featuring color shots of naked women, which I bought for the most part not at the mom-and-pop stores but at the newer and more anonymous convenience stores, distributing my purchases among several in the area. And at these stores, the guy at the register would sometimes cruelly, mock-innocently warp the “Little bag?” convention by asking, “You need a bag for that?”-forcing me either to concede this need with a nod, or to be tough and say no and roll up the unbagged nude magazine and clamp it in my bicycle rack so that only the giveaway cigarette ad on the back cover showed-“Carlton Is Lowest.”

Hence the fact that I often said no to a bag for a quart of milk at the mom-and-pop store during that period was a way of demonstrating to anyone who might have been following my movement that at least at that moment, exiting that store, I had nothing to hide; that I did make typical, vice-free family purchases from time to time. And now I was asking for a little bag for my half-pint of milk from Donna in order, finally, to clean away the bewilderment I had caused those moms and pops, to submit happily to the convention, even to pass it on to someone who had not yet quite learned it at Papa Gino’s.

But there was a simpler, less anthropological reason I had specifically asked Donna for the bag, a reason I hadn’t quite isolated in that first moment of analysis on the sidewalk afterward, but which I now perceived, walking toward the escalator to the mezzanine and looking at the stapled CVS bag I had just transferred from one hand to the other. It seemed that I always liked to have one hand free when I was walking, even when I had several things to carry: I liked to be able to slap my hand fondly down on top of a green mailmen-only mailbox, or bounce my fist lightly against the steel support for the traffic lights, both because the pleasure of touching these cold, dusty surfaces with the springy muscle on the side of my palm was intrinsically good, and because I liked other people to see me as a guy in a tie yet carefree and casual enough to be doing what kids do when they drag a stick over the black uprights of a cast-iron fence. I especially liked doing one thing: I liked walking past a parking meter so close that it seemed as if my hand would slam into it, and at the last minute lifting my arm out just enough so that the meter passed underneath my armpit. All of these actions depended on a free hand; and at Papa Gino’s I already was holding the Penguin paperback, the CVS bag, and the cookie bag. It might have been possible to hold the blocky shape of the half-pint of milk against the paperback, and the tops of the slim cookie bag and the CVS bag against the other side of the paperback, in order to keep one hand free, but my fingers would have had to maintain this awkward grasp, building cell walls in earnest, for several blocks until I got to my building. A bag for the milk allowed for a more graceful solution: I could scroll the tops of the cookie bag, the CVS bag, and the milk bag as one into my curled fingers, as if I were taking a small child on a walk. (A straw poking out of the top of the milk bag would have interfered with this scrolling-lucky I had refused it!) Then I could slide the paperback into the space between the scroll of bag paper and my palm. And this is what I had in fact done. At first the Papa Gino’s bag was stiff, but very soon my walking softened the paper a little, although I never got it to the state of utter silence and flannel softness that a bag will attain when you carry it around all day, its handheld curl so finely wrinkled and formed to your fingers by the time you get home that you hesitate to unroll it.

It was only just now, near the base of the escalator, as I watched my left hand automatically take hold of the paperback and the CVS bag together, that I consolidated the tiny understanding I had almost had fifteen minutes before. Then it had not been tagged as knowledge to be held for later retrieval, and I would have forgotten it completely had it not been for the sight of the CVS bag, similar enough to the milk-carton bag to trigger vibratiuncles of comparison. Under microscopy, even insignificant perceptions like this one are almost always revealed to be more incremental than you later are tempted to present them as being. It would have been less cumbersome, in the account I am giving here of a specific lunch hour several years ago, to have pretended that the bag thought had come to me complete and “all at once” at the foot of the up escalator, but the truth was that it was only the latest in a fairly long sequence of partially forgotten, inarticulable experiences, finally now reaching a point that I paid attention to it for the first time.

In the stapled CVS bag was a pair of new shoelaces.

**

My left shoelace had snapped just before lunch. At some earlier point in the morning, my left shoe had become untied, and as I had sat at my desk working on a memo, my foot had sensed its potential freedom and slipped out of the sauna of black cordovan to soothe itself with rhythmic movements over an area of wall-to-wall carpeting under my desk, which, unlike the tamped-down areas of public traffic, was still almost as soft and fibrous as it had been when first installed. Only under the desks and in the little-used conference rooms was the pile still plush enough to hold the beautiful Ms and Vs the night crew left as strokes of their vacuum cleaners’ wands made swaths of dustless tufting lean in directions that alternately absorbed and reflected the light. The nearly universal carpeting of offices must have come about in my lifetime, judging from black-and-white movies and Hopper paintings: since the pervasion of carpeting, all you hear when people walk by are their own noises-the flap of their raincoats, the jingle of their change, the squeak of their shoes, the efficient little sniffs they make to signal to us and to themselves that they are busy and walking somewhere for a very good reason, as well as the almost sonic whoosh of receptionists’ staggering and misguided perfumes, and the covert chokings and showings of tongues and placing of braceleted hands to windpipes that more tastefully scented secretaries exchange in their wake. One or two individuals in every office (Dave in mine), who have special pounding styles of walking, may still manage to get their footfalls heard; but in general now we all glide at work: a major improvement, as anyone knows who has visited those areas of offices that are still for various reasons linoleum-squared-cafeterias, mailrooms, computer rooms. Linoleum was bearable back when incandescent light was there to counteract it with a softening glow, but the combination of fluorescence and linoleum, which must have been widespread for several years as the two trends overlapped, is not good.

As I had worked, then, my foot had, without any sanction from my conscious will, slipped from the untied shoe and sought out the texture of the carpeting; although now, as I reconstruct the moment, I realize that a more specialized desire was at work as well: when you slide a socked foot over a carpeted surface, the fibers of sock and carpet mesh and lock, so that though you think you are enjoying the texture of the carpeting, you are really enjoying the slippage of the inner surface of the sock against the underside of your foot, something you normally get to experience only in the morning when you first pull the sock on.

At a few minutes before twelve, I stopped working, threw out my earplugs and, more carefully, the remainder of my morning coffee-placing it upright within the converging spinnakers of the trash can liner on the base of the receptacle itself. I stapled a copy of a memo someone had cc:’d me on to a copy of an earlier memo I had written on the same subject, and wrote at the top to my manager, in my best casual scrawl, “Abe-should I keep hammering on these people or drop it?” I put the stapled papers in one of my Eldon trays, not sure whether I would forward them to Abelardo or not. Then I slipped my shoe back on by flipping it on its side, hooking it with my foot, and shaking it into place. I accomplished all this by foot-feel; and when I crouched forward, over the papers on my desk, to reach the untied shoelace, I experienced a faint surge of pride in being able to tie a shoe without looking at it. At that moment, Dave, Sue, and Steve, on their way to lunch, waved as they passed by my office. Right in the middle of tying a shoe as I was, I couldn’t wave nonchalantly back, so I called out a startled, overhearty “Have a good one, guys!” They disappeared; I pulled the left shoelace tight, and bingo, it broke.

The curve of incredulousness and resignation I rode out at that moment was a kind caused in life by a certain class of events, disruptions of physical routines, such as:

(a) reaching a top step but thinking there is another step there, and stamping down on the landing;

(b) pulling on the red thread that is supposed to butterfly a Band-Aid and having it wrest free from the wrapper without tearing it;

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, sir. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Nice that Strand picked up ‘Zama’. It still doesn’t have a distributor in France, which seems quite strange, but the sales agency says it will. How was the Hong Sang-soo? Yes, in the last year or two, Huppert seems to have finally become a marketable name of sorts in the States. Thanks for the link to the short film! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. I got the pdf, thank you. I’ve only had time to glance at it, but it looks great. No, as expected, and I’m sorry, I can’t write a foreward. I’m just too overwhelmed between work on the TV series, the imminent 10 days traveling days/events, dealing with the ‘PGL’ roll-out, the new film script, and what’s likely to be full-time continuing work on the TV script into the summer. The YnY book deserves a thoughtful, thought-out foreward, and I’m incapable, I apologise. Of course I’ll write a blurb if you want. ** JM, Hi. Hm, I’ll hunt around see if there’s anything concrete on the McElroy pub time. ** Wolf, Uh, lets see … have I already done Wow-lf! (?) Okay, gotcha, yeah, about Amazon. Unfortunately, here in the big P, ordering the kind of small press books I like through local bookshops isn’t so easy, but luckily Amazon doesn’t carry most of them anyway. Oh, McNally Jackson — link — is a good NYC bookshop in upper east Soho, and Lynne just did an event there, so they should definitely have her book. Ha, actually I don’t have enough money in the bank right now to pay my rent, so I won’t be able to splurge. The first installment is not in any way, shape, or form a windfall amount. Grr. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Yeah, exactly. His confession is really one of the most amazing and powerful ‘monologues’ I know. Listening to it literally inspired my whole novel. God, I wish my back were improving at a much higher speed than it is. I’m regretting that I didn’t see a chiropractor, but I’ll just have to hope it survives the flight. Luckily, I got an aisle seat so I can get up walk up and down the aisles a lot. It so sucks to be powerless re: an internet connection, especially these days when there should no excuse. I’m so sorry. I guess you’ll just get used to its weird, unpleasant rhythms, or I hope so. Yes, the contract signing is very shortly. It should be smooth other than the part where I’ll need by necessity to be a demanding jerk and say I need my payment transferred today because, as I told Wolf, I won’t be able to pay my rent on the 1st without it. Eek. And then a final meeting on the TV script which should be finished and ready to submit tomorrow, although it’s just the beginning as I’m sure we’re going to need to keep working on it to get it into an ARTE-pleasing form for weeks and months to come. Nice day you had. Mine was quiet, a bit physically painful (back), but okay. It’s really beautiful here today. The most insanely clear blue sky, and the clouds look VR. I hope your day was excellent. Was it? ** Jamie, Hi, Jamie! Oh, no, you’re feeling bad. Man, fuck God, the fates, biology itself and the horses they rode in on. Do whatever it takes to get your body pristine again. If I were there, I would knock gently on your door with a large bowl of hot split pea soup in my mittens. It’s the cure for everything, don’t you know. Thank you ever so much again for the exquisite construction yesterday. I’m still swooning. Skyrocketing love, Dennis ** Misanthrope, G-thang! Sinus infections are underrated monsters of maladies, and I’m so sorry. Okay, very nice turnaround. If I believed in angels, I would believe LPS has one. Well, he does: you. Awww. ** Bill, Hi, B. It should go okay. The proceedings. But even right now, a couple of hours before the proceedings, there are still messes and battles going on. But they should. I need a plane book. Maybe the Johnson. That’s a book that might even not be impossible to find in the English bookstores hereabouts. Good day to you, pal. ** Okay. I realised I had never done a Nicholson Baker post, so I decided to do one just to see what happens. I picked ‘Mezzanine’ because it and ‘Room Temperature’ are my favourites of his novels. That’s the whole story right there. See you tomorrow.