Marginalia

Any nominations for scholarly articles with really entertaining notes? For some years I’ve been using Geertz’s Balinese cockfight paper in a class, and one of my assignments is to read just the notes and write about them — but those are unusually rich notes, some containing entire folktales.

Spivak’s _Critique of Postcolonial Reaseon_ has some great long footnotes, some of them mini-essays.

I dimly remember seeing references to a book called _Noten Ohne Text_.

The old British _Dictionary of National Biography_ was a good browsable reference work, tightly written and full of the sort of incident that never makes it into standard histories.

As a young and voracious reader with limited access to good books, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations was like being taken to a sweet-shop, given a fiver and told to go wild. My old edition of Fowler — thanks, abebooks.com for freeing us from revisionitis — is a lovely thing, though.

Footnotes? Pope’s Dunciad has a wonderful mock-critical apparatus. But these days, sadly, the demands of the MLA style book have largely killed off the art of the footnote in favour of dry, unsatisfying endnotes.

I came across a “[1] This is the only footnote in this book.” recently.

Surely Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman represents the apogee of pedal memoranda. The footnotes on the life and works of that most overlooked of savants De Selby overwhelm the story, flooding successive pages and forcingthe narrative to bob slenderly at the top of the page like a raft.

Pray peruse this by no means unrepresentative example:http://www.hellshaw.com/flann/deselby.html

They make me laugh, but I also think O’Brien perfectly nails the compulsion to not leave anything out, which is often disguised and excused by a tone of leaden whimsy. It takes a rare talent to make readers enjoy footnotes more than the writer.

But what to do with such pearls? Barbara Tuchman admits somewhere to including a whole chapter in The Guns Of August on the Russian staff headquarters, just so she could work in the detail that one officer was so tall his aides had to stick a paper fringe on door lintels to remind him to duck his head.

Rich – in which book?

I recently read Dolorosa Soror by Florence Dugas, which makes liberal use of fictional endnotes in the style of a third party (who features only briefly in the narrative) editing each chapter.

I found it an incredibly awkward device and felt at times that the author clumsily relied on it to convey background and context that she couldn’t otherwise supply.

But most annoying was the fact that you were required to turn continuously to the end of the chapter in order to fully follow the plot. Why not footnotes, at least? I gave up eventually and stopped reading them.

Hi, btw – first time commenter

A recent favourite of mine in fiction is Jose Carlos Somoza’s The Athenian Murders.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest uses lots of footnotes. The best I can say for them is that I generally found the footnotes not to be any more irritating to slog through than the rest of the text. Someone who actually enjoyed that book might have a different view, of course.

Two notes about footnote books:

(1) Anthony Grafton’s book on the footnote managed to be simultaneously boring and irritating. I deeply wish that someone else would write a better book on the footnote than this one.

(2) As for Infinite Jest, I think it can be accurately described as “None ever wished it longer”. Like tom t., I did not enjoy it, and felt that the footnotes were neither better nor worse than the main text.

Lawrence Norfolk’s ‘In the Shape of a Boar ‘ has footnotes written by the rival to the novel’s central character in the story within a story where the memory of the central character is imperfect.

My own favourite academic footnote comes from Martin Weitzman’s 1998 QJE article “Recombinant Growth”.

After using a “clutter of algebra” to turn one horrible equation into another slightly less horrible equation, he explains in a footnote, that a “clutter is the universal measure of just enough yuckiness to deter referees and editors from reading proofs of lemmas.”

Are there funnier footnotes around? Sure. But you’ve got to give the guy credit: getting anything even remotely amusing out of an economics article is like drawing blood from a stone.

There’s a chapter in Robert Grudin’s Book in which the footnotes rebel against a post-tenure review letter.

I realized how few people actually read footnotes when I started to plant references to fictional works or Simpson’s jokes in my academic papers, but no one ever seemed to notice.

Jack London’s _The Iron Heel_ is a straight dystopia, with the eventual happy ending concealed in the footnotes.

AJP Taylor had a nice line in footnotes ‘It becomes tedious to write ‘except the Italians’ continuously – the reader must take it as present from this point on.’ Or something like that.

At certain points in Jack Vance’s work, the footnotes have outshone the main text. I’m a particular fan of the reactionary sociologist Unspiek, Baron Bodissey, author of _Life_.

Favorite footnote:

Regarding transcription of Lyndon Johnson in the White House, the text reads, “The few transcripts compiled by Johnson’s secretaries proved unrealiable: one had Johnson refer to a ‘pack them bastards’ waiting outside his office; it turned out to be the Pakistani ambassador.” The footnote remarks that in fairness, “Packs of bastards were more likely to appear in Johnson’s conversation than Pakistani ambassadors.” Bruce Schulman wrote the article.

Favorite reference work to browse: B. H. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics. Yep, well, you’ve never experienced real reference-work degradation until you find yourself plowing aimlessly through columns of numbers.

If I might try to offer a notably puerile footnote from the annals of science, an article from the Journal of the American Chemical Society (Waymouth, et al. “Trinuclear Zr2,Al mu-ketene Complexes Containing Bridging Ligands. Implications for Transmetallation Reactions and CO Reduction Chemistry,” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1986, 108, 1427), which describes the use of a metal complex to perturb a methyl group (-CH3) away from its normal pyramidal configuration to a planar arrangement of the constituent atoms by the action of two metal atoms on the central carbon, contains as footnote #46 “Waymouth, R. M.; Pierre, L.; Grubbs, R. H. unpublished results.” The first and third authors in this citation are real people, the second, in reference to the fact that the methyl group in the paper is “getting it from both ends,” pays tribute to that old joke about the three French-Canadian brothers (?), specifically the lucky one named Pierre.

Juvenile (as are many organometallic chemists), but pleasingly arcane.

Ordinary footnotes are a form of hypertext, though a rather primitive version compared to the printed Talmud or even Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary.

— Oops, I just noticed that Henry’s earlier post (which he links to) is actually about the Hazel Bell book. Well, let me heartily second his recommendation of Bell, then — and recommend Jackson to anyone who liked the Bell book.

Nice to see VanderMeer mentioned. Here’s a footnote loaded review of City Of Saints And Madmen:

http://www.locusmag.com/2002/Reviews/Lalumiere03_VanderMeer.html

A work with both its proponents and detractors here, but which I believe had some rather amusing footnotes, was Sokal’s “Transgressing the Boundaries” article.

I too love Jack Vance’s use of footnotes. I seem to recall one in which a famous tale-teller is brought low by his claim of the uniqueness of a certain planet owing to the sun’s rising in the west there.