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The Thrills of Good Suction, and Other News

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On the Shelf

antique-vacuum

(Nicholson Baker, Bissell Zing not pictured.)

  • Gay Talese has held on to his address book for fifty years, and he’s never erased a name. It has just the kind of history and pedigree that makes documentarians salivate—so, sure enough, it’s soon to be the subject of a documentary. “ ‘Do you really think you can make a film out of this?’ Talese asked me, somewhere around the F’s. Absolutely, I told him.”
  • William Zinsser has died at ninety-two. His On Writing Well belongs on the shelf next to Strunk and White—a clear, well-styled guide to clear, well-styled writing. A classic Zinsserism: “There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”
  • In which Nicholson Baker, a vacuumer as much as a writer, contends with the utility and beauty of true suction: “So strong is the Zing’s suction that it has a volume dial in its forehead that you can adjust on the fly from gentle to area-rug-ravaging. I vacuumed several rooms before a dinner party last week and found myself singing Irish drinking songs loudly as I worked.”
  • Hannah Arendt is still at the center of the argument: “Like so many Jewish texts throughout the ages, Eichmann in Jerusalem is an invitation to an auto-da-fé. Only in this case, almost all of the inquisitors are Jews. What is it about this most Jewish of texts that makes it such a perennial source of rancor among Jews, and what does their rancor tell us about Jewish life in the shadow of the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel? What does the wrongness of Eichmann’s readers reveal about the rightness of its arguments?”
  • Lynda Barry on drawing and storytelling: “People think if you’re writing a story that you have to follow story structure … it’s like thinking the only reason we have teeth is because there are dentists.”