The essay is so generously larded with explanatory references to slime — from medieval usages to the appearance of one Chevy Slyme in the hardly-ever-read Martin Chuzzlewit — with assists from the likes of Jonathon Green and Nicholson Baker — that I tread here with trepidation into the annals of ...

As the essayist and novelist Nicholson Baker has noted, the suffix -ball has become an important resource for the slangy smart-alecks of our time. Think of the belittling butterball, cheeseball, cornball, dirtball, goofball, hairball, nutball, oddball, sleazeball, slimeball, and weirdball. Trump has occasionally ...

“We like to think of ourselves as the paper of record, but then it's important that we actually keep those records.” (Somewhere, Nicholson Baker is laughing — and here's an archive.nytimes.com article page to prove it.) POSTED April 12, 2018, 10 a.m.. SEE MORE ON Reporting & Production. SHARE THIS ...

Davenport Central, 44.69; 4. Dubuque Senior, 44.70; 5. Dubuque Wahlert, 44.80; 6. Burlington, 45.92. 1,600 relay -- 1. Bettendorf (Smith, Nicholson, Baker, Porter) 3:26.45; 2. Muscatine, 3:33.27; 3. Dubuque Senior, 3:33.68; 4. Dubuque Wahlert, 3:34.17; 5. Cedar Rapids Xavier, 3:39.70; 6. Clinton, 3:41.22 ...

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has announced that it is awarding 173 fellowships, including two joint fellowships, to a group of scholars, artists, and scientists. The recipients were chosen from a pool of three thousand applicants and were selected based on their prior achievements ...

Favorite writers are Jennifer Egan, Jeff Vandermeer, Haruki Murakami, Nick Cutter, Joe Hill, Nicholson Baker, Patrick McGrath, Sarah Waters, Tom Spanbauer, Donald Ray Pollack, Patrick DeWitt [and] Kelly Link, to name a handful. WCT: As someone who has been described as an exhibitionist, was there ...

A list of Sterne's digressive progeny would be as stylistically varied as it is long: Think Herman Melville's deep-dive asides, Marcel Proust's streams of involuntary memory, Henry Miller's perpetual spirals of free association, Nicholson Baker's meandering meditations stretching like taffy a character's small ...

Cleaves continued to gain notice with his follow-up album, 2004's Wishbones, appearing on the ESPN2 show Cold Pizza, and his music is praised by Nicholson Baker in his 2009 novel, The Anthologist. “Rust Belt Fields,” from 2011's Sorrow & Smoke: Live At The Horseshoe Lounge, is the first one I recall ...

Two more that tempted: a copy of famous book hunter and author Vincent Starrett's Brillig (1949) with a neat bookplate, seen in Jeff Bergman's booth, and the advance reading copy of the first British edition of Nicholson Baker's novel, A Box of Matches (2002), complete with a promotional book of matches, ...

Teaching Professor Blog I've been reading Substitute by Nicholson Baker, an account of 28 days of substitute teaching undertaken by the author who “sought out the teaching job because I wanted to know what life in classrooms was really like.” He taught classes from kindergarten through the 12th grade.

The nonfiction of Janet Malcolm. The novels of Renata Adler. Tim Lott's “The Scent of Dried Roses.” Marion Coutts' “The Iceberg.” Edmund White's “The Farewell Symphony.” James Hannaham's “Delicious Foods.” Coetzee's “Waiting for the Barbarians.” Nicholson Baker's “U and I.” John Banville's “The Sea.

[BOOKS & THE ARTS]. In “Night Vision”, Nicholson Baker explores the forgotten theory of dreams that inspired Vladimir Nabokov chronicled in Nabokov's never before published dream diary, Insomniac Dreams: Experiments With Time By Vladimir Nabokov. In “Silicon Valley's Origin Story”, Jacob Silverman ...

But none of that stopped writer Nicholson Baker from signing up to be a substitute teacher in Maine, where he lives. His book, "Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids," chronicles 28 days he spent filling in for elementary, middle and high school teachers. For Studio 360, Baker read an excerpt ...

Nicholson Baker has always been an outlier in American letters. Born in 1957, he is more or less contemporary with the celebrated literary generation of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Mary Karr, Colson Whitehead, George Saunders, and Helen DeWitt. Like them, he marries a postmodernist ...

Some poor sap, disheveled and half-asleep, would arrive in your classroom, indifferent or scared, and incapable, usually, of reining in the inevitable maelstrom of misbehavior. For Maine writer Nicholson Baker 59, such memories remain fresh. All these years later, he can still recall his school-days “subs.

In his new book, a postmodern novelist reports from the front lines of elementary school. By Malcolm Harris. August 30, 2016. Watching a calm classroom is usually intolerable. Think of Ben Stein playing an economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off: His character is an icon of protracted boredom, but Stein's performance ...

With the publication of Nicholson Baker's “Substitute,” a meticulously detailed account of his 28 days working as a K-12 substitute teacher in a Maine public school district, I have a new name to add to the list. Baker, too, is often lost — “sick with shame” one day, a “hopeless jackass” another — but he ...

In his 1991 book, U & I, Nicholson Baker describes “book reviews, not books” as “the principal engines of change in the history of thought”; because no one has time to read all the books they want to, reviews must sometimes stand in for the thing itself. The more contentious point, about influence, can be ...