zlacker

Nicholson Baker's _The Mezzanine_ is a meditation on innovations of the post-industrial world, the inanities of corporate culture, and a humorous look at a somewhat neurotic obsessive who identifies points of personal hygiene as major milestones in his personal development.

A quote from my well-worn copy:

  | I tried to call up some sample memories of shoe-tying to
  | determine whether one shoe tended to come untied more often
  | than another. What I found was that I did not retain a single
  | specific engram of tying a shoe, or a pair of shoes, that dated
  | from any later than when I was four or five years old, the age at
  | which I had first learned the skill. Over twenty years of empiri-
  | cal data were lost forever, a complete blank. But I suppose this
  | is often true of moments of life that are remembered as major
  | advances: the discovery is the crucial thing, not its repeated
  | later applications. As it happened, the first three major advances
  | in my life--and I will list all the advances here--
  | 
  | 1. shoe-tying
  | 2. pulling up on Xs
  | 3. steadying hand against sneaker when tying
  | 4. brushing tongue as well as teeth
  | 5. putting on deodorant after I was fully dressed
  | 6. discovering that sweeping was fun
  | 7. ordering a rubber stamp with my address on it to make bill-
  |    paying more efficient
  | 8. deciding that brain cells ought to die
  | 
  | --have to do with shoe-tying, but I don't think that this fact is
  | very unusual.

The novel begins as the narrator, Howie, returns to work after purchasing new shoelaces to replace the ones which broke as he was tying his shoes.

The novel is fantastic if you enjoy meditative digressions regarding everyday inventions. I recommend it highly.

EDIT: add recommendation, fix OCR mistakes, punctuation.