He's at it again

• Nicholson Baker's latest revisits the bedroom.

Among other things.

Baker's OCD style is an acquired taste, but not many other writers out there have an iota of his exuberant linguistic playfulness.

So to speak.

One of the ways Baker surmounts this particular technical difficulty is by describing the innumerable, odd sexual encounters in a new language. He invents an ebullient, evolving slang that itself becomes the subject of the book: It is the play on words, the creation of a crazy, babbling new idiom that staves off any feeling of repetition or monotony. He is, at points, writing exclusively in made-up terms, an energetic, playful jargon that bears no resemblance to the words people actually use for sex: "I was bouncing up and down like a horse thief." "Ice my cake, dickboys! I want to feel like a breakfast pastry." "She twizzled her riddler." "She DJ'd herself," he "angled his Malcolm Gladwell." In a way, Nicholson Baker has more in common with the Lewis Carroll of " 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves" than conventional dirty book writers like Henry Miller or Philip Roth. The obscene subject matter is somehow subjugated to the sheer energy of expression: One suspects he could just as easily be riffing on plastic straws or shoelaces as blow jobs.

What do your words look like?

• Slate asks writers which font they write in.

This is fun. Luminaries like Jonathan Lethem, Nicholson Baker, Andrew Vachss, Richard Posner and others chime in. Courier's the reigning favorite but a few interesting choices pop through. Dushko Petrovich's, for example:

My first job out of college was in the career-services office at Yale. It was oddly civilized in there: People smoked, we had very nice carpets, and the dean looked out for everyone. So much so that one day she sat behind her beautiful desk and personally revised my résumé for me. The first thing she did was change the font. "Which one's that?" I asked. "Palatino," she said. And then, after drawing in the cigarette: "You can change it if you don't like it."Out of admiration, out of superstition, out of habit, in chivalrous devotion, on too many computers (for how many thousands of words?), on three continents, at all hours of the day and in every single human mood, I have remained completely loyal to this font. Fourteen point, to be precise.

I'm a Book Antiqua boy, myself.