Recently I decided to give Baker another chance. I’ve started The Anthologist. So far my expectations are being confirmed. I find I enjoy Baker’s books like I do surfing through cable TV the few times each year I find myself before a cabled TV, remote in hand. It’s like gorging on junk food. I’m pretty sure that I will continue to indulge myself with Baker for many years to come, maybe one Baker each year, each September as part of my return-to-school self-pampering psychological management. Like cable TV I enjoy them as a guilty pleasure but I wouldn’t want them as my only diet—my mind would shrivel up. But I can’t help but notice some of his nonfiction looks like half-respectable stuff, books on books and libraries and even a left field demythologizing of World War II. I’ve gotten my own image of him now. He is an errant member of that small but peculiar and perpetually dying-off tribe: The Used Bookstore Owner. You either know the type or you don’t. He’s used to being broke and has all sorts of off-kilter notions, often a uniquely strange political blend of the right and the left, an anti-progressive, anti-government, New Englandish, gently homophobic, anti-war, anti-abortion, but all for liberal decadence of the Amsterdam variety. This is all part of his arrested development: a fan of cartoons and early pop cultural artifacts decades extinct, curling black light posters as serious art, an on-paper lover of things Victorian or American Gothic—he’s never thought that Edgar Allan Poe is not great. Back then he was too nerdy for hippies (he might have been a science major in a decent college) and now he somehow represents the last of the True Hippies. He spends all his time at home (or the bookstore) lurching around unbathed in a witty political t-shirt that reminds everybody he’s still young at heart, his sweathog girlfriend smoking cigarettes and laughing hoarsely on the couch next to their old lumpy dog at shows beneath him, but he partakes less frequently those trips to his closeted sixties bong because of heart palpitations that bring home his mortality. He has hemorrhoids. Late at night if he hasn’t fallen asleep in the recliner he watches porn on cable TV as if he has again come across it accidentally but has a back-up libertarian philosophy to justify it. He has lapsed and now slightly old-fashioned religious notions and keeps yellowing Hesse and Thomas Merton volumes on his shelf for the day when he’ll recapture his quasi-mystical belief systems which should be any day now because he’s getting old and has lots of depressing doctor’s appointments. Thus Baker: the used book store owner as successful author. Maybe it’s that full beard. Maybe I’m totally off, but this is at least how my brain has settled on him.
And as a writer Baker makes book-writing look easy, one of those I-could-do-that illusions that good writers produce. And I confess I have been keeping a document of Bakerian notes, everyday witty observations that could someday grow up to be my own slender volume of meandering postmodern miscellanea—Seinfeld for the graduate student.
I’ve just finished The Anthologist and Baker is redeemed in my book. I am surprised to find that what saves this novel (at least in comparison to the others of his I have read) is its more conventional plot. Now understand this does not mean in any way predictable or formulaic, but simply a little structure, a little going-somewhere. Giving the usual Bakerian tangents even the slightest context and direction makes it all so much more meaningful and worthwhile. And none of them seem a stretch or done artificially or are unintelligent if at times ironic. Such a cure is it that I like the contemporaneousness of his references, that he watched back-to-back episodes of Dirty Jobs or that scholars in the future will study sitcoms like Larry Sanders or Friends the way people have looked back to Latin. At the same time he is critical of the stupidity of our culture and the symptomatic decline of its poetry. Then there’s the inexhaustible theme of a teacher’s frustration dealing with clueless college students “these days”, of the torment of having to read their god-awful writing. Chowder relates how one spat of teaching inevitably crashed and burned in that moronic inferno of contemporary academia or as he puts it, “It was death on toast.”
They all handed their week’s work in, and I lifted the pile of fresh poems in the air to feel its weight. It was unusually heavy because one of the poems was twenty pages long. I knew who it was by. It was called “Pythagoras Unbound”, and it was by an overeager boy who talked a lot about Czeslaw Milosz. I skimmed the first page and I saw the word “endoplasm” and I went cold, like I’d eaten a huge plate of calamari.
That kind of stuff had me laughing to tears. Much of The Anthologist exposits on the subject of the title: the understanding and appreciation of English poetry. Paul Chowder is the anthologist who must only write the introduction to the anthology he has put together. The book is really a neurotic avoidance mechanism, his diaristic jumble of nerves and reflections on the bigger picture, as if revolving around a blind spot of whatever fears are causing his writer’s block. This is what makes up the plot: how having to write this introduction practically destroys his life and how he overcomes it. The meandering observations expected from Baker are his avoidance of confronting the Introduction, his exposed subconscious working out the kinks and questions. Oh, it also turns out to be a very good introduction to English poetry along the way.
In other Baker news I stumbled across a movie on Netflix streaming which completely steals from that beast of gratuitousness The Fermata. It goes by the awful title Cashback the logic of which I still can’t figure out. It actually wasn’t a horrible movie for a kind of romantic comedy, maybe because it had some British intelligence to it. (I tend to dislike a majority of comedies and all romantic comedies.) Actually I’m amazed at how audaciously it steals from The Fermata, shamelessly and recklessly so. And its not pornography—not even close! The nerve of some people.
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