Re/Re/Rewrite March 2022: The Footnote Technique
Hello Rewriters!
Footnotes, considered the hallmark of academic precision – and possibly pretension and perhaps even pedantry – are a frequent target of derision. Some argue that they’re outdated annoyances of a bygone era and should be abandoned. Plus they’re a pain to format, and reading them? Ugh, right? Noel Coward once noted, “Coming across a footnote is like going downstairs to answer the doorbell while making love.”
1
Well, we beg to differ. We think they’re actually quite a nice way to jump around in a text. They add layers of meaning. An extra voice. More info. “More than a trick, footnotes can be
technique,”
enthuses Jonathan Russell Clark.
2 That’s right: a
technique!
And we love a good technique.
Our invitation this month:
Join the likes of Jenny Boully (see
The Body: An Essay
),
Roni Horn (see pictured above
Another Water: The River Thames, for Example
)
,
and David Foster Wallace (see
Infinite Jest
)
and, bolstered by their inventive use of the humble citation, add some notes to the foot of a text. Or an image
3. Or a video, painting, knitted thing, or what have you.
As always, post early and often, borrow and revise, write or make, and
put your footnoted items here
.
We’ll regroup
April 10, 2022
, 4:00 pm Pacific / 7:00 pm Eastern to read the fine print.
-Holly
See Bruce Anderson, “The Decline and Fall of Footnotes,” Stanford Magazine, January/February 1997. https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-decline-and-fall-of-footnotes
Jonathan Russell Clark, “On the Fine Art of the Footnote,” Literary Hub, June 3, 2015. https://lithub.com/the-fine-art-of-the-footnote/
Here’s the first footnote from Roni Horn’s Another Water: “In the waiting room of a doctor’s office some years ago I overheard a mother talking about how her kids were afraid of it. If they couldn’t see into it, they wouldn’t go into it. It’s like being dismembered. When you wade into this dark fluid, and kind of milk with nurture, you disappear.”