How Authors Write: The technologies of composition, not new media, inspire innovations in literary styles and forms.
Early in Nicholson Baker’s slim first novel, The Mezzanine (1988), whose entire action takes place during an escalator ride at lunchtime, the narrator describes buying milk and a cookie, and then pauses to consider, in a page-long footnote, the “uncomfortable era of the floating drinking straw”:
I stared in disbelief the first time a straw rose up from my can of soda and hung out over the table, barely arrested by burrs in the underside of the metal opening. I was holding a slice of pizza in one hand, folded in a three-finger grip so that it wouldn’t flop and pour cheese-grease on the paper plate, and a paperback in a similar grip in the other hand—what was I supposed to do? The whole point of straws, I had thought, was that you did not have to set down the slice of pizza to suck a dose of Coke while reading a paperback.
Baker speculates about how the straw engineers had made “so elementary a mistake,” designing “a straw that weighed less than the sugar-water in which it was intended to stand”; pardons the engineers who had forgotten to take into account how bubbles of carbonation might affect a straw’s buoyancy; explains how such unsatisfactory straws came to be sold to restaurants and stores in the first place; and, in a kind of musical resolution, concludes by remembering the day when he noticed a plastic straw, “made of some subtler polymer,” once again anchored to the bottom of a soda can.
The point of this footnote and 49 like it is to subject everyday objects to such close attention that they will, in the words of Sam Anderson in the Paris Review, “start to glow with significance.” Justifying the footnotes (in another footnote), Baker writes that “the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics, and foreign languages, a whole variorum crust of ‘ibid.’s’ and ‘compare’s’ and ‘see’s’ that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for the moment in one mind.”