Nicholson baker the anthologist pdf

I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, poetry lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Great book, The Anthologist pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to fiction, adult fiction lovers. Your Rating:. Your Comment:. Home Downloads Free Downloads Vox pdf. And what if I just let go? What if I just loosened my grip, and fell to one side, and just—fffshhhoooooow.

Let go It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now. An anthology is another kind of competition that puts him in the difficult position of the jury. Nope, nope, nope. Solitary time-passing activities are tried out in a denial of the impending assignment and are enjoyed inasmuch as they distance the player from his writing.

Do you do that? Where you try as hard as you can to look up with your eyeballs, rolling them back in your head, but with your eyes closed [ The fleeting solace derived from those recreations does not delude the narrator as to their escapist nature. The waste is also social, for the pleasure players derive from games is usually connected to their social function, a truth that is at the core of all theories on play.

Playing by oneself or with a machine is bound to turn the game into despair. This is yet another area where he proves incompetent. His failure is the implicit theme of the badminton scene in the novel. Ogling the joyful party of his neighbors playing outdoors, Paul Chowder first seeks a chance to connect with the group.

But the episode further exacerbates his loneliness and marginalization. The act turns the means of social play and exchange—the racket—into the instrument of a sinister solo and fails to generate laughter on the part of his neighbors. Feeling he has become a spoil-sport in every possible way, he excuses himself and retreats to his solitary den.

There ensues from the narrative of this social failure a fanciful analysis of the rhythm of ball- games including badminton, but also tennis and ping-pong. The failure at social interaction is successfully turned into another game: play-write.

Scriptor Ludens 13 Only by substituting creative writing for the trial of agonistic play can the narrator modify his unsatisfying relation to the ordinary life. The idea of replacing a frustrating world with a more acceptable one thanks to the potentialities of fiction is not new. The actualizing power conveyed by creativity is part of the ontological virtues of play. It is the very notion of play and the freedom it involves that liberates the creativity of the narrator.

The character stops being played by external events prizes, rivalry, pressure from the editor only when he starts designing his own play world, setting his own rules to the game. Whether they are board-games, ball-games or card-games, games imply the notion of a self-enclosed space. The situation is eminently metafictional.

His reflexive writing foregrounds language to show that language plays us, that we are played by words and that it might prove fruitful to gain authority over its arbitrary rules. Therefore Chowder takes the liberty of altering the English lexicon, overtly distancing himself from the use of words or expressions that he deems inadequate or untrue.

They have two eyes. You have to choose one. But Chowder also invents words when an adequate one is missing. This narrator stands in some transitional realm where the old rules of the game are wearing out and need a replacement. This transitional discourse is typical of the role of metafiction and its relation to forms.

I am not fully in agreement with Paul Chowder about the evils of modernism, especially since one of his targets is the popularity of 'haiku' , a form of expression I actually love, but he makes a very good argument in favor of rhyme and meter. And he is fair enough to recognize some of the best poems today are written in free verse.

Paul's own poems are mostly free verse, by his own admission. He calls them flying spoon poems. I tried to translate in English one of my favorites, by Nichita Stanescu, as an example of what I like about the modern approach: tell me, tell me true wouldn't you, if I were to catch you one day and kiss the sole of your foot, wouldn't you stumble around for a while afraid of crushing my kiss?

Can anybody be a poet? The easy answer is that yes, especially if you are young and you want to impress a new girl with how sensitive and romantic you truly are or how well you can quote from your favorite poet. What about older men, disillusioned men, cynical men who have seen too much of the world and of the publishing industry in particular?

Paul's writer block and prolonged procrastination may be a symptom of getting old, of having nothing especially interesting to say, of being burned out by his previous efforts. He quotes Amy Lowell: "Poetry is a young man's job. Poetry is like math or chess or music - it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kind of brains don't last.

Say you want to be a poet? How will you go about it? Start by reading a lot, of course, but sooner or later you have to get down and put some effort into it: 'You can't force it. If it isn't there you can't force it'. Then I thought: You can force it. My whole life I've been forcing it. You throw yourself against the weight of the massive sliding door to the barn, that does not want to move, and you lean and you wag your hips and you haul on the metal handle, and you strain, and you grunt, and you point your face at the sky and say bad wrds, and it starts to move and rumble, and then it moves a little more easily, and then a little more easily still, and finally, the barn door is open wide enough that you barely fit through, taking care not to scrape your back on the broken-off lock flange.

My favorite passage in the whole novel is such a reference, about the right priorities in life. She bought three things: a bar of soap, a new fountain pen, and a bottle of whiskey. And then she still had two dollars and fifty cents left over, after buying these three things - the pen to write poems with, the bottle of whiskey to drink in order to write the poems, and the soap in order to take on the world as a newly clean, thinking, feeling poet.

She weights whether she should buy some fancy food, but no: she remembers a certain recently published anthology that she'd heard good things about. So she rushes over to the Holiday Bookshop. And she writes some of her best poems after this point. Including the first stanza of "Roman Fountain". This is probably the best, happiest moment of her poetic life, right here, while she's writing the letter to Ted Roethke, knowing she's got new poems waiting inside her.

In fact the letter may be better than any poem she wrote, though she wrote some good ones. But we wouldn't be interested in reading the letter unless she's written the poems. So once again it's terribly confusing. You need the art in order to love the life.

And you need to love life in order to create art. How could I not love somebody who would spend her last dollars on buying a new book? Another name to check out later is Elizabeth Bishop, an artist who can look at a fish and see the whole of existence reflected in its cold eyes.

Paul Chowder is one of her champions: You have to return reality to itself after you've struggled to make a poem out of it. Otherwise it's going to die. It needs to breathe in its own world and not be examined too long. She knew that. The fish slips away unrhymed. Why is it easier to read poetry than prose? One argument offered by Paul, besides the one about rhyming taking us back to the first lessons in language and meaning, is this: One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you are at a beginning.

I guess the same applies for short story collections and for those big fat science-fiction and fantasy anthologies. There's no excuse for not dipping your feet in, finding a book of poems on the library shelves and trying one or two out for size, to see if they will fit your mood.

The trouble starts more often when you try to make the transition from reading to writing, and here's where Paul Chowder is the most vulnerable, the most truthful, the least sarcastic or pedantic: You can start anywhere. That's the thing about starting. If you start, you're in motion. If you don't start, you're nowhere. If you stop you're nowhere.

I have reached a crisis where I don't know where to start. It's arbitrary. Happy in a nondespairing way. I wish that I could spill forth the wisdom of twenty years of reading and writing poetry. But I'm not sure I can. Let's call his current status 'enjambment'.

It's a technical term from poetry, one of the discoveries of those pesky modernists although it was in use by many poets before the twentieth century, like Milton. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped. Paul finds more appeal in the popular songs from Broadway musicals that some people call the Great American Songbook: I've locked my heart I'll keep my feelings there I've stoked my heart With icy frigid air He gives credit here to Marilyn Monroe, but I think she only played the tune, not wrote it.

Anyway, the point was that poetry is music - it should sing. It should entertain you, like the light verse of Newman Levy: If you stick a stock of liquor in your locker, it is slick to stick a lock upon your stock Or some joker who is slicker's going to trick out of your liquor Though you snicker you'll feel sicker from the shock.

Who is the best poet to illustrate the musicality of rhyme and meter? According to Paul Chowder, we should take a closer look at Swinburne: If you were queen of pleasure And I were king of pain We'd hunt down love together, Pluck out his flying-feather, And teach his feet a measure, And find his mouth a rein; If you were queen of pleasure, And I were king of pain. Here's a singular critical note, more like an observation than a valid complaint: Paul Chowder doesn't claim to write here a comprehensive study of poetry.

He narrows down his focus to the last two centuries and to the English language. Poets writing in French, Spanish, Latin, Japanese, etc. Free verse is mostly ignored, because Paul's anthology is mostly about the rhyming of English poems and the private lives of some of these poets.

It was like being a poet in that you had indivisible units that you could string together in certain rhythms. You can't alter the nature of a given bead, or a given word, but you can change which bead you choose, and the order in which you string them on their line. Some poets are gloomy and downbeat, some are wild and raucous, some dreamy, some fiery.

It all comes down to saying that poetry is life, in all its innumerable forms. Looking at all the suicides and depressions among poets will give you the wrong impression about the art form: Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars. It's a mistake of emphasis.

Should I try to bring my review to a conclusion? I'm not sure how. I lost the thread of my thoughts many paragraphs ago, if ever there was one to follow. Maybe it's better to read my lines like an anthology or a collection of poetry - start anywhere you like, in the middle, at the end or at the beginning. Paul Chowder will be waiting there to hit you over the head with a rhyme or two. But what was the point of the exercise?

Is rhyme better than free verse or not? I'll throw the ball back to you, Paul: It was a mistake to supress rhyme so completely, a mistake to forget about the necessary tapping of the toe, but it was a useful mistake, a beautiful mistake, because it taught us new things. It loosened people up and made other discoveries possible. This, my first novel by Nicholson Baker, did just that : showed me a lot of new, intriguing possibilities and paths though the wilderness.

The closing line I will also borrow from Paul, to thank the author for opening my doors of perception a little wider: "Suddenly, there is lots to read" Will I ever become a writer myself? Like any rookie I asked once an author where does he gets his ideas in my defense of poor interview skills, I was nineteen, and I was writing short sketches and free verse in notebooks. I'll put Paul's answer in spoiler brackets, because I hope you will get to it the right way, reading from page one to page last of this novel: view spoiler [ Well, I'll tell you how.

I ask a simple question. I ask myself: "What was the best moment of your day? View all 12 comments. How true it is a poem should rhyme! For who among us prefers lemon to lime? Baker defends the rhyming verse, in prose both chaste and terse. For those au fait with his minimal writings, buy this today for liminal sightings. Who says poems should be lucid? Erudite essays on Fenton, Teasdale and Millay, so good you should buy it to-day. Can I keep this up for the whol How true it is a poem should rhyme!

Can I keep this up for the whole review? I almost certainly can, but that I will not do. I like Nick Baker. View all 9 comments. Aug 11, Richard rated it it was amazing Shelves: america , favorites , literary-theory , reviewed , humour , poetry , books-and-reading , no-longer-own. This is a very humorous exploration of the world of poetry.

The narrator is such a well-crafted character that the reader must remind him- or herself occasionally that s he is not reading Nicholson Baker's autobiography. Instead we have the diary of a wimpy writer, Paul Chowder, who is stuck in a rut and can't seem to climb out.

Faced with the task of writing an introduction to an anthology of poetry, Paul will do almost anything to avoid the chore. He helps the neighbours, whines about the fac This is a very humorous exploration of the world of poetry. He helps the neighbours, whines about the fact that his girlfriend Roz who couldn't stand all the procrastination has left him him, or sits in his barn letting his thoughts rove hither and yon. Interlaced with all this gripping human drama are eccentric and sometimes very astute reflections on versifiers and their verse.

This seems to be one of those books that readers either loved or hated. Even though I'm not steeped in the world of poetry, I loved this novel. View 2 comments. Feb 22, Alan rated it it was amazing Shelves: american-lit. And what I did was drive to poetry readings.

I can't teach. It killeth me. Those nice kids stunned my brain. I'll never recover from that year My own dear students were destroying 'I' for me. A real Charlton Hestonian face, one of those hellishly handsome poets.

James Merrill was another Crew models before there were J. Crew models. It reads as if it's written by a cleverly programmed random-phrase generator. For this, he knew just the voice, urbane With insouciance, juicy and wasted, not to be believed, a street-wise guy, the Voice of the Village. Go back and look I say, seated.

Many have missed the cotillion. But I wish them well from the alley or first floor. It is never too late for the opera. It is always too late for the Big Bang. Oct 04, Ruth rated it it was amazing. It helps if you like poetry. There are a lot of references to poets and poetry gossip. Sad, funny, and wonderful. Feb 26, switterbug Betsey rated it it was amazing. Paul Chowder is a minor poet and a perennial procrastinator. Although recognized at one time for a few brilliant poems, he has waned from the public eye.

He is given the opportunity to resurrect his name and his bank account by writing an introduction to an anthology of poems, but he dawdles and delays the project.

Paul spends his days reflecting on his career; the recent departure of his girlfriend, Roz who left him due to his dilatory ways ; the need to organize his office; his neighbors; and Paul Chowder is a minor poet and a perennial procrastinator.

Paul spends his days reflecting on his career; the recent departure of his girlfriend, Roz who left him due to his dilatory ways ; the need to organize his office; his neighbors; and the mundane.

He provides a stunning and critical analysis of select poetry and other poets, but continually fails to write his introduction. Eliot for their antisemitism. He makes a tidy space near his pillow for the poetry of Mary Oliver, who he cherishes. To rhyme or not to rhyme? He probes and ponders the fine points of meter and the minutiae of quotidian distractions, and continually obstructs his own forward momentum. He resorts to lengthy rambling and self-flagellation, yet his constant need for approval is disarming.

This story is narrated like a memoir written by a rueful humorist teaching us the power of verse. It is a droll and touching examination of a consummate lyric scholar who happens to be a stubborn boondoggler. I came away from this book with a renewed vigor and love for verse. Through Paul's extolling of meter and rhyme, his preoccupation with the definition of iambic pentameter, and the virtues of almost every aspect of verse, I received a revitalized education on the art and aesthetics of poetry.

He contemplates the meaning of various poems without dislodging the reader's own sense of discovery. He leads you to the brink, but you get the satisfaction of plumbing the poignancy with him.

It never comes off as pompous. His fertile eloquence, as he shares his shuddering love of the immediacy of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "The Fish," left me breathless and aroused--a poem that never had any particular effect on me before. Baker's protagonist expounds on what Horace really meant by "carpe diem. That notable paradox, and the fecundity of Bishop's poem, typify the fetching delight of this novel.

The Anthologist is brimming with poetic enchantment. The loitering, melancholy journey of Paul Chowder and his sublime salvation through meter and verse is smart, beguiling, and tenderly irresistible. Nov 28, Nancy rated it it was amazing. Well, this may be the most delightful book I have read this year. Paul Chowder's life isn't going particularly well. Sometime poet and current anthologist, he is struggling to write an intro to his anthology of poetry, Only Rhyme.

But his chronic procrastinating has left him without a girlfriend, without cash, and, it sometimes seems, without hope.

Paul longs to win Roz back by completing the intro, but instead he seems to spend a lot of time sitting on his driveway in a plastic chair. But Paul i Well, this may be the most delightful book I have read this year. But Paul is not your ordinary embittered failure. In fact, he is neither embittered nor a failure - just a genuinely kind and sincere fella who still gets pretty wound up when he's talking about poetry. His first-person narrative is funny, humble, sweet, and rambling - because he can't talk long without telling you something pretty neat about poetry, about meter, about enjambment or Edgar Allen Poe or Swinburne or what a good idea it is to to dance about in waltz steps to iambic pentameter.

Nicholson Baker really? That's really his name? I loved this: "Let's have a look at this poem. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. They were willing to make the sacrifices that I'm not willing to make.

They were so tortured, so messed up. I'm tortured to the point where I don't sleep very well sometimes, and I don't answer mail as I should. Sometimes I feel a languor of spirit when I get an email asking me to do something. Also, I've run up significant credit-card debt. But that's not real self-torture. Lovely, lovely book. And the cover is beautiful, too. Oct 15, Libbie Hawker rated it really liked it Shelves: literary-fiction , poetry.

Okay, I admit it. I really didn't like this book at first. I found the narrative to be distracting and gimmicky with its forced "look how charming I am! Aren't I charming? I am using charming because I hate the Q-word and avoid it at all costs.

I was fully prepared to hate this one, to rip into it when I finally finished it and got to write my review. To my surprise, somewhere around the middle I realized the distracting gimmick was all part of a brilliant master plan, and I found myself Okay, I admit it.

To my surprise, somewhere around the middle I realized the distracting gimmick was all part of a brilliant master plan, and I found myself rather reluctantly in love with this book. The only thing that stumps me is why so many people who don't write love it. If I weren't a writer, if I didn't recognize the agonized compulsion of procrastination all throughout this book, the destructive terror of deadlines, the self-loathing and the self-loving, I would hate it. It would have continued to drive me nuts at full speed and I would have eventually set the damn thing on fire.

Readers who are not also writers, what the hell is the draw to The Anthologist? It seems to me the special and awful experience of total creative stumped-ness, even when one is losing everything due to being creatively stumped, is such a unique experience to those who work in the creative field.

And yet pretty much everybody on the planet loves this book. We're not all writers or painters or underwater basketweavers. What gives? Talking purely about the charming book itself, let me say that I loved the way narrator Paul Chowder imagines these fantastical interactions with dead poets.

And although I am making a conscious effort to study and write more poetry I am convinced that poetry makes writers better at all forms of writing, from novels to essays , I don't know enough about the history of poetry to know whether some of the characterizations and facts were true or pure inventions on Nicholson Baker's part.

Did some of these intense romantic relationships really happen between famous poets, or was it another fictional mirage, as in Chowder's fancy of bumping into Poe or whoever it was at the bead store? I hope he was. Pound was a fellow native of Idaho, and we need a blush of badassery in the Gem State. While the book was mostly "talky" and clipped in its narrative style, contributing to my initial dislike of it, it had occasional moments of pure loveliness that left me weak in the knees.

Entangled in the distraction and the avoidance of things that must be done and must be discussed were rare moments of pure sight and feeling that really showed what Nicholson Baker is capable of: Yes, I sometimes have terrifying dreams in which a cat I've never seen before attacks a mouse and bites it and bites it, until I can hear its tiny neck make a popping sound. I pull the cat gently away and I take my shirt off and ball it up, and I prop the hurt mouse up against a balled-up shirt, and the mouse turns into a wan woman who talks to me in a laborious cheerful whisper in her brokenness.

I want her to live.