U and I by Nicholson Baker

Author:Nicholson Baker [Baker, Nicholson]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-80750-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2077-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

[and in Updike’s real version:

Then Sally flew; she became a bird, a heroine. She took the sky on her back, levelled out on the cloudless prairie above the clouds—boiling, radiant, motionless—and held her breath for twenty pages of Camus while the air-conditioner nozzle whispered into her hair.]

which I remember simply because I was distressed in 1987 to come across the throwaway mention of the air nozzle in Updike after I had resolved to write in detail about my own reverence for it. (The only other mention I knew of was in John Dickson Carr’s 1951 The Nine Wrong Answers, in which it’s called a “little ventilator” that sends “a shaft of cool air on [the hero’s] face.”) But this sky-Marry Me connection led me nowhere useful. Or I could make an imperious sort of modern transition by first citing Updike’s mention of something that John Hawkes had once told him, which was (approximately), “When I want a character to fly, I just say, ‘He flew’ ” (see, I would never have taken this piece of advice to heart if Hawkes himself had said it to me, because Hawkes’s fictional imagery is too gruesome for him to be a possible friend, but transmitted through Updike I have found it very useful), and by then announcing that I was adapting Hawkes via Updike by saying “When I want to make a transition, I just say, ‘I’m making a transition’ ”—but again there was no promise of riches beyond the pass. Or I could simply rattle on about influence, but I felt that I badly needed a break from that.

So I was left with the word “sky”—and as everything I had still to say crowded tighter around this sudden hole in my essay, shouting advice and pointing urgently off in different directions, I began to notice that the sensation of tumbling into a word like “sky” was not much different from the sensation I had experienced already several times in thinking over one or another of Updike’s phrases: set off on three-by-five cards, they now constituted my universe, or rather my dictionary, and consequently each was prone to an alarming inflation. On one card I have a slightly garbled version of Updike’s Picked-Up Pieces politesse toward his fact checkers: “Many the untruth quietly curbed, the misspelling invisibly mended.” Quietly curbed—simple, beautiful, beautiful, simple! I have reduced Updike’s millions of words to these few flash cards, and like the disembodied idioms that are projected behind the Talking Heads in Stop Making Sense, the isolates I have rubber-banded together can rapidly become too incantatory to retain their standing as exemplars of grace.

But I can always stop flipping through them; I can always leave the rubber band undisturbed: really it is only the physical availability of the three-by-five stack, the fact of it at my elbow, that I need, since it sustains the temporarily pleasurable illusion that I am a graduate student in some delightfully narrow (but fully accredited) course of study and research. As a

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