How Authors Write The technologies of composition, not new media, inspire ­innovations in literary styles and forms

Jason Pontin:

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.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at November 6, 2012 4:28 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas