The Devil's Details by Chuck Zerby Read Free Book Online Page A

1981.) Lest anyone think this has lent a bias to my view of the newspaper, let me say that the two reviews of The Footnote shared a serious failing: Neither one of them picked up on the unconscious hostility toward the footnote exhibited by Anthony Grafton (see chapter 1, “The Endangered Footnote”).
More recently The Times footnote campaign has remained enthusiastic but has become rather clumsy, perhaps. A prominent, front-page story recounts sympathetically the bold attempt of some American lawyers and judges to remove citations from within legal texts and affix them to the bottom of the pages. Such sensible depositions of notes should be applauded; unfortunately, the whole affair associates in the public mind the footnote with a profession held by the general public in quite low esteem. The O.E.D . informs us that lawyer refers—in an English dialect—to “a long bramble” and in New Zealand to “certain creeping plants.” Enemies of the footnote are masters of guilt by association; they easily would stoop to making an association by way of lawyers between the footnote and scratchy, creepy low life. (See William Glaberson,
The New York Times
, Sunday, 8 July 2001, p.1).
The reader might also want to take a look at Jennifer Dunning, “Dance Review: An Incomprehensible Work? How About Some Footnotes?” The New York Times , Monday, 15 January 2001, p. B10. The review says Gabriele Kroos’s dance program in Soho “tackled large themes, complete with the dance equivalent of footnotes.” Dance, of course, cannot present footnotes in any literal sense without appearing simply silly; that Dunning finds the footnote analogy compelling, however, suggests that “annotation” is a very useful metaphor in these days of Postmodern thought and art. One of the dances, Dunning claims, “… proved that the incomprehensible can be made enticing”; no better summary statement of the Postmodern program can be made. The apotheosis of the footnote took place on April 17, 2001. On that date a clue to The New York Times Crossword Puzzle was “Where a star might lead?” The answer to this poetic hint will come as no surprise to the reader—a footnote. Notice also should be taken of The Times ’ urban neighbor, The Nation . This outspoken magazine is not given to either qualifying or footnoting its arguments. The contested presidential election, though, so stimulated it that at least one of its articles sputtered into notes. See Vincent Bugliosi, “
None Dare Call It Treason
,” The Nation , 5 February 2001. A cursory search through recent copies of the right-wing counterpart to The Nation , do not convince conservatives that the footnote’s defense is solely a left-wing cause.

* Collateral , of course, has several meanings. This reader assumes Amis’s use is synonymous with “accompanying,” “auxiliary,” “additional,” “secondary,” and synonymous with each of those, not just one of them. It seems unlikely he could mean “collateral” in any narrower sense; that would make him a much less sophisticated annotator than is plausible given the other literary skills he demonstrates.

* The one unquestionable Eggers footnote is part of what amounts to a book promotion. The text offers to send five dollars to the first two hundred readers of A Heartbreaking Work on receiving a proof of purchase. The note then declares the obvious and rubs it in: “It should go without saying that if you’ve checked this book out from the library, or are reading it in paperback, you are much, much too late.” See Dave Eggers,
A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
(New York, London, Sydney, and Singapore: Simon & Schuster, 2000), p. xxv. Even now, in this time of escalating commercialization, a time when Madison Avenue types eye lustfully any blank space on television or magazines or the Internet or popcorn bags