The Anthologist

I am very fond of Nicholson Baker. I like how his mind works and you can see it working away in his books. It's like one of those clocks with the transparent backs where you can see all the inner workings clicking away (although now with digital clocks who knows what the inner workings look like.). Anyway The Anthologist has him ruminating about poetry. The story is pretty slim: a poet must write the introduction to an anthology and his girlfriend just left him. But he goes on about enjambments, rhyme and iambic pentameter (which he says comes from French and is not natural to our language, ditto with Haiku only with Japanese this time)  with such fervour and enthusiam you're carried throughout the whole book without realizing there's not much story. I still am very fond of Nicolson Baker.