Baker is very funny but also a little melancholy. He sighs a lot. He is modest to a fault, so polite and decorous that he would never dream of employing in conversation the kind of vocabulary that lights up "House of Holes," a blue-flaring plume of smut-talk. Baker is a classically trained musician who listens to trance and electronica, a retiring, mild-mannered person given to strong feelings and passionate obsessions.