February 3, 2012
Nicholson Baker /// The Fermata Baker’s erotic lucid dreamscapes get praised as generous and compassionate despite their Joycean filth, which is an ass-backward defense of pornographic material: one presumes his sex novels are rather a reclamation of ecstatic bodily awareness, a rescuing of the term “masturbatory” from its epithetty throne in lit-crit surely no less indulgent than the pretentious tomes under review. He does not dress intercourse up in metaphysical wonder to render it art, but means to make us see the art of the act itself, a statuesque thing nonetheless occurring over zillions of vaporous frames. The distinction is essential if we are to allow, as The Fermata smartly does, how joy grades darkly into a perversion of pleasure, a gluttony that in its own accrual saps our power—that essential ability—to love any single instant of it.     

Nicholson Baker /// The Fermata

Baker’s erotic lucid dreamscapes get praised as generous and compassionate despite their Joycean filth, which is an ass-backward defense of pornographic material: one presumes his sex novels are rather a reclamation of ecstatic bodily awareness, a rescuing of the term “masturbatory” from its epithetty throne in lit-crit surely no less indulgent than the pretentious tomes under review. He does not dress intercourse up in metaphysical wonder to render it art, but means to make us see the art of the act itself, a statuesque thing nonetheless occurring over zillions of vaporous frames. The distinction is essential if we are to allow, as The Fermata smartly does, how joy grades darkly into a perversion of pleasure, a gluttony that in its own accrual saps our power—that essential ability—to love any single instant of it.     

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