Reality Hunger (15 page)

Soul is the music people understand. Sure, it’s basic and it’s simple, but it’s something else ’cause it’s honest. There’s no fuckin’ bullshit. It sticks its neck out and says it straight from the heart. It grabs you by the balls.

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof shit detector.

Ichiro Suzuki, the first Japanese position player in the major leagues, has unusually good eyesight and hand-eye coordination and works extremely hard at his craft, but his main gift is that he’s present in reality. If he’s chasing a fly ball, he doesn’t sort of watch the ball; he really, really, really watches the ball. When sportswriters ask him questions, he inevitably empties out the bromide upon which the question is based. Once, after running deep into foul territory to make an extraordinary catch to preserve a victory, he was asked, “When did you know you were going to catch the ball?” Ichiro replied, “When I caught it.”

Don’t waste your time; get to the real thing. Sure, what’s “real”? Still, try to get to it.

Jennicam first went up in 1996; it went offline several years later. Every two minutes of every hour of every day, an image from a camera in Jenni’s apartment was loaded onto the web. In her FAQ, Jenni said, “The cam has been there long enough that now I ignore it. So whatever you’re seeing isn’t staged or faked. While I don’t claim to be the most interesting person in the world, I do think there’s something compelling about real life that staging it wouldn’t bring to the medium.”

Act naturally.

Somewhere I had come up with the notion that one’s personal life had nothing to do with fiction, whereas the truth, as everybody knows, is nearly the direct opposite. Moreover, contrary evidence was all around me, though I chose to ignore it, for in fact the fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.

People often ask me when I’m going to make “real movies.” These are my real movies. Nothing could be more real than the movies I make.

I’ve always had a hard time writing fiction. It feels like driving a car in a clown suit. You’re going somewhere, but you’re in
costume, and you’re not really fooling anybody. You’re the guy in costume, and everybody’s supposed to forget that and go along with you.

Only the truth is funny (comedy is not pretty; definition of comedy: pulling Socrates off his pedestal).

Nicholson Baker is a comic personal essayist disguised, sometimes, as a novelist. His work is most appealing when he lavishes more attention upon a subject than it can possibly bear: broken shoelaces, say, in
The Mezzanine
or an innocuous line of Updike’s in
U and I
. It wouldn’t work if, instead of a shoelace, it was the Brooklyn Bridge, or if, instead of Updike, it was Proust: Baker’s excessive elaboration wouldn’t be funny or interesting. His style feeds upon farcical and foppish topics (e.g., his essay on the history of the comma). Baker is an unapologetic celebrant of gadgets, appliances, contraptions, machines, feats of engineering. His pseudo-scientific lyricism serves him well—seems oddly illuminating—when he’s over-analyzing the physics of straws or the opening of
Pigeon Feathers
. His point appears to be that nothing is beneath interest.