Nicholson Baker’s “A Fourth State of Matter,” in this week’s
issue, does something very cool, very inspired. It takes an item most of us
use, but have no clue about, namely, the ubiquitous LCD screen, and traces it
to the source of its production, in South Korea. It’s essentially a “visit” piece,
sort of like a long Talk story, about Baker’s attendance at the International
Meeting on Information in Seoul. It’s absolutely brilliant! I devoured every
line. Baker is an LCD poet. He says, “Liquid crystal’s aim is basically
peaceable – it wants to give eyes what eyes want to look at.” In another
memorable line, he says, “This was a liquid that could make light perform a
pirouette.” My favorite part of “A Fourth State of Matter” is Baker’s splendid
description of his visit to LG Display’s factory in Paju:
We gazed through the glass at the Piranesian vastitude of
one part of the factory – an ultra-clean metropolis of automated modules,
silver ducts, and rectilinear interconnections, all lit by a straw-colored
light, in the midst of which a multiply jointed robot the size of a tree was
nimbly sliding six-foot-long slabs of almost paper-thin mother glass into and
out of the narrow inlets in something that looked like a pizza oven, except
much bigger. The robot arm, fitted with what seemed to be faintly hissing
suction cups, never hesitated, never paused to consider its next move. Inside
the pizza oven, the glass received its subpixel matrix of color filters, using
a photolithographic process of masking and deposition and removal. Each glass
sheet shuddered slightly as it was turned this way and that, in the impossibly
fragile manner of airborne soap bubbles, and my own arms kept going out toward
it, as if to save the sheet from crashing to the floor – but, of course, no
glass crashed. This was the place that made all Best Buys possible.
“A Fourth State of Matter” beautifully displays Baker’s
awesome descriptive powers. Reading it is rapture.
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