Baled Hay: A Drier Book than Walt Whitman's "Leaves o' Grass" — A Reader’s Guide

Explosive Setups and Anticlimactic Payoffs

Throughout the excerpts, Nye repeatedly builds a scene toward a violent or dramatic climax, only to undercut it with a mundane or ridiculous outcome. In the sketch about the bottled beverage, the narrator receives a gift of beer that, when opened, detonates, spraying foam across the composing room and destroying a typeset article on yellow fever. The promised debauch becomes a cleanup operation. Later, a telegram reveals the bottle was actually a trap for tramps, filled with dynamite. This pattern—elaborate preparation followed by anticlimax—recurs in pieces like “The Infernal Machine” and “Snowed Under,” where political defeat is described as a wardrobe crisis. The humor depends on the reader recognizing the gap between the grandiose language and the trivial consequences.

The Composing Room as Comic Stage

Nye frequently sets his sketches inside a newspaper office, using the physical space of the composing room as a backdrop for chaos. In “The Chinese Compositor,” he describes a printer who must walk between floors to gather type characters, turning typesetting into a marathon. The office boy, the editor’s desk, and the typesetting cases become props in a theater of mishaps. The bottle explosion happens in the composing room, and the pied type becomes a metaphor for disorder. This setting allows Nye to blend occupational detail with slapstick: the tools of journalism—type cases, proof sheets, telegraph wires—are treated as sources of comedy rather than instruments of serious work. The office is a place where things go wrong with mechanical regularity.

Movement Between Scales: From the Local to the Cosmic

Nye’s sketches often begin with a small, specific detail—a bottle of beer, a typesetting task, a political defeat—and then expand into hyperbolic, almost cosmic language. The beer bottle that explodes is said to “shake the dome” of the office and “escape into space.” The Chinese compositor’s walk becomes a journey through the building’s floors, described as if it were a trek across continents. This technique of scaling up the mundane gives the prose a mock-epic quality. The narrator’s voice remains colloquial and self-deprecating, but the imagery reaches for grandeur, creating a tension between the ordinary subject and the inflated description. The effect is to make the reader see the absurdity in both the small event and the grand language.

Recurring Images of Physical Disintegration

Bodies and objects in Nye’s sketches are prone to sudden collapse, explosion, or dissolution. The bottle “opened itself” and its contents “escaped into space”; the narrator fears the brewer might “meander through the atmosphere” if he continues bottling such volatile goods. In “Snowed Under,” the narrator imagines himself wrapped in a bed-quilt, his clothes scattered across states. These images of fragmentation echo through the collection: things fall apart, substances fizzle, and people are reduced to absurd remnants. The physical comedy is often linked to the act of consumption—drinking, eating, reading—as if the very act of taking something in leads to its violent expulsion. This pattern reinforces the book’s subtitle: Baled Hay is indeed a drier book, one where moisture (beer, tears, ink) is always threatening to escape or evaporate.

Readers approaching Baled Hay should expect a collection that rewards attention to its structural quirks: the abrupt transitions, the repeated deflation of dramatic setups, and the way Nye uses the newspaper office as a laboratory for comic experiments. The book does not build toward a unified argument or narrative; instead, it offers a series of discrete moments where language and situation collide. Paying attention to how Nye moves between scales—from the local to the cosmic—and how he deploys images of explosion and collapse will reveal the craft beneath the apparent randomness.

I found myself thinking of Baled Hay the other day, the way its absurd little explosions lingered with me long after I put it down. It reminded me of a quieter sort of dissection I once read, where character flaws are peeled back with the same gentle, unsparing humor, though with more introspection than gunpowder. That feeling—recognition without ridicule—is what linked them. It’s all there in Twelve Types — A Closer Reading, a different kind of warmth altogether.