I'm Christopher Leiden and this is open source.

We're taking a drawing lesson this time with Nicholson Baker.

Yes, the multifarious Writers Writer, Nick Baker,

the COVID Lab Leak Detective, the pacifist historian of World War II in his book, Human

Smoke. He's also the cherubic pornographer in VOCs about phone sex,

and he's the podcaster and performer of his own protest songs.

You're a marvel, Nick Baker.

And this big new book is a life changer titled Finding A Likeness, how I Got Somewhat Better at Art.

I'm going to start drawing lessons again because of this book and I think a lot of people will. There are life

lessons here too. Before we're done I want listeners to hear you drawing and

growing in the making of this book.

Start if you will with your pen and ink rendering of that stony street in Pulia in the boot heel of Italy.

You say you learned 87 things about stones as you drew and you thought

about nothing but stones for an hour and a half. I did. That was a drawing by Ian Fennelie who's one of those wonderful sketch artists who just

sets himself up in a certain corner and then makes a drawing and this particular one was just so stony. I think the trick of

imitating the cobblestony or the broken texture of stones is just a

tremendous gift so I tried to learn it and the whole aim is to

lose yourself in whatever you're looking at. I mean to look at one thing and not have to think about the fact that life is not just stones.

Maybe you're looking at a stapler or a person's face or something, but that thing that you are absorbedly looking at expands to fill the

entire horizon.

Done with in that case with a fairly fine line consistent line drawing in ink. That in itself is a trick. It's not sketched, it's

meticulously reproduced somehow. I want to say thank you for saying nice things about me and I also want to say that I don't

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