About Dracula’s footnotes

Any author or editor will understand the tension that exists between telling the reader what needs to be told, and insulting said reader’s intelligence. And it’s a tension that will likely never be resolved. When my Leonard Cohen books was published, a reviewer on Amazon complained that I blithely chucked around words like “solipsistic” while feeling the need to explain that sake is Japanese rice wine. Which is, amusingly enough, a rather solipsistic argument, because it’s only valid when the critic shares the same grab bag of knowns and unknowns.

In the same vein, while reading the Wordsworth Classics edition of Dracula, I’m quite grateful that the editor, David Rogers, is helpful enough to gloss archaic Whitby dialect (“crammle aboon the grees”) and the minutiae of central European history (Honofoglalas) and at the same time wonder why I’m being told about Thor and Medusa, the Danube, the British Museum and the Battle of Waterloo. I mean, we all know what they are. Don’t we?

Yet another thing that really should have gone into my dissertation, I suppose.

PS: Two fragments from the text:

It was not alone that it was composed of all the ills of mortality and with the pungent, acrid smell of blood, but it seemed as though corruption had become itself corrupt.

And a line from Van Helsing, who regularly drifts into comedy-foreigner-speak:

It is a new experience to me to find a lunatic who talk philosophy, and reason so sound.

About footnotes

I ruddy love footnotes, I do, and have been told off by more than one editor for using too many of them. Apparently their presence disturbs readers, presumably because it reminds them that for every book they do read, there are several hundred more waiting round the corner to ambush them. Which to me would be a lovely feeling, but what do I know?

That said, I do share the frustration of absolutely knowing something’s true and yet not being able to find a reference to validate it. Which is why I love this passage:

I have in my head an assertion that a friend once told me was written by Whitney Balliett, the jazz critic and exemplary listener-describer. The assertion was that there were only two absolute virtuoso figures in jazz: Sarah Vaughan and Art Tatum. When did Balliett write it? I can’t say. Neither can I be sure that he did write it. Once you get inside a writer’s voice, you can imagine things he didn’t actually write. Once I troubled Whitney, in his old age, about a phrase of his I swore I had read — something about Lester Young playing “wheaty” notes. He said it sounded possible, and went to look it up. He searched for a couple days and came up-handed. I might have dreamed it.

Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen to Music Now (London: Allen Lane, 2016), p. 81.

About footnotes

At the beginning of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine, about the ills of social media:

In writing this book, I set out to avoid burdening it with references and scholarship. I want it to be read as an essay, rather than as a polemic or an academic work. But for anyone who wants to know more, or simply finds themselves asking, ‘How does he know that?’ there are bibliographical notes at the end. If you find yourself itching to research a quote, statistic, or fact, simply skip to the end and search under the page number for the relevant phrase.

You see, I’ve never understood this hostility to footnotes, but every time I’ve written a book, I’ve been encouraged by editors to rein in my enthusiasm, because they put people off, apparently. When did references and scholarship become a burden? (There are notes in the Seymour book, but they're tucked away at the back, so as not to scare the more fragile reader.)

Hanbury Street: who nose?

Not entirely sure what to make of this. An LA graffiti artist, Mear One, has painted a mural in Hanbury Street, east London, which, according to how you choose to interpret it is either an attack on global capitalism or a collision of several different bonkers conspiracy theory tropes with a distinct stench of anti-semitism. “Oh, but those big-nosed guys on the Monopoly board aren’t meant to be Jewish,” say the picture’s defenders. “They’re just, y'know, capitalists. With big noses.” The fact that the mural appeared in a predominantly Muslim area has escaped nobody’s attention.

Without wanting to descend to a pointless game of whataboutery, maybe those Danish cartoons were just pictures of some bloke. With a turban. Oh, and while we’re there, check out Amazon’s Dachau jigsaw; and, from a free speech perspective, William Saletan at Salon. My view? None of these things should be banned; but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s sensible to do them either.

Meanwhile, on a cheerier note: over here, I write an entire blog post about one footnote.

PS: Panic over. The mural’s going. But not before it becomes the victim of another moment of impromptu street art.

Helene Hegemann and the sincerest form of self-flattery

The controversial German author Helene Hegemann is interviewed in The Observer and (inevitably) on the agenda are the accusations of plagiarism that surrounded her novel Axolotl Roadkill. Apparently she lifted a total of 14 sentences from a blogger called Airen, but the act is pretty explicitly flagged up because the lines in question are specifically about the whole ill-defined area of theft and appropriation and cultural sampling:

Berlin is here to mix everything with everything, man… I steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels my imagination… because my work and my theft are authentic as long as something speaks directly to my soul. It’s not where I take things from – it’s where I take them to.

And then, just in case we haven’t got the joke, the English translator interpolates the exchange:

“So you didn’t make it up?”
“No, it’s from some blogger.”

Hegemann defends herself further, pointing out that Airen half-inched the disputed lines from the film director Jim Jarmusch, who took them from Jean-Luc Godard and a sign in a gallery. (Do bloggers operate under a laxer moral code than published authors have to endure, one wonders? And if so, is it OK to lift from them even if they’ve lifted, or is that a bit like receiving stolen goods?) Ultimately, though, she questions the very basis on which such finger-pointing is founded: “But I’ve said it again and it’s still my best defence: there’s no such thing as originality, just authenticity.” And she certainly has said it many times already, and was saying it over a year ago when I first wrote about her. Which does prompt the question of whether it’s permissible to plagiarise oneself, in which case any number of writers (Paul Auster, Nicholson Baker, Haruki Murakami all come to mind, and I’m sure you’ve got a few candidates of your own) should be thrown into the mix alongside Hegemann. In any case, new editions of Axolotl Roadkill will come with detailed footnotes attributing all the borrowed material, even if that flies in the face of her own contention that everything’s borrowed anyway.

There have, of course, been footnotes in works of fiction before, but they tend to occupy the same fictional universe as the main text (eg Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell or The Third Policeman); a real-world reader won’t be able to toddle off to the library and check the references. Even when a writer appears at first glance to be playing fair (I’m looking at you, Mr Eliot), the notes usually provoke further puzzlement on top of the questions they sought to answer. I can see why Hegemann and her publishers feel the need to clarify matters; ultimately though, they should ask if the footnotes are just to keep the lawyers off their backs, or whether they actually make for a better book.

Citation not required

So, where were you when Wikipedia went off on its 24-hour strop? The inevitable one-liners about journalists and students suffering emotional meltdown in the absence of their fountain of facts did raise a few questions. I mean, is it OK to use Wikipedia as a source provided you attribute and cite appropriately? Or has the haranguing pedantry of the Wiki editors forced us into a state of neurotic overcitation?

I’ve succumbed to this foible in the past, desperately ploughing through some arcane text that I haven’t really read so as to give a vaguely credible sheen to my inane ramblings. A little Adorno or McLuhan goes a long way. But Simon Reynolds has a better tactic, acknowledging that something is moderately interesting, but not important enough for a full-blown footnote. As he says in Retromania: “‘Plus/and’, a philosophical term of uncertain origins (I’m told Deleuze and Guattari used it), is the buzz concept.” The vague “I’m told...” is the clever bit. The Wikipedants would insist that he identify the person who told him.

The Gaddafi/Westlife memorial blog post

...and suddenly, when I really ought to be preparing light artillery to repel looters, something leaps unbidden into my head about a piece I wrote for Careless Talk Costs Lives, about going to see the LA band The Warlocks in some smelly back room in London, and how a drunk and/or mad man singing Eddie Cochran songs (or was it Hank Williams?) on the station platform on the way home seemed to act as a sort of digestif to the whole gig, and there were discursions about the Velvet Underground and the Grateful Dead (both of whom had been called The Warlocks at some stage or another) and Beavis and Butt-head (who weren’t, so far as I know) and the article had 17 footnotes, and when they used it in the magazine, it appeared that the designer couldn’t really cope with that sort of thing, but in any case I can’t find a copy of it anywhere, but while I’m in that frame of mind I try to find some songs by The Warlocks and they aren’t nearly as good as I remember, and I start to doubt whether the missing article was all that great in the first place.



Every time I use footnotes, it seems that there’s someone in the publishing chain who can’t cope. They cut them back, or shove them to the end of the book, or both. They really ought to read this article, by Alexandra Horwitz.

Incidentally, thanks to everyone who has expressed concern about the flooding in Bangkok. We’ve been untouched so far, but the run-off is expected to reach the canal nearest us in the next few hours. Our luck may well continue, but if in the event that it doesn’t, we have plenty of food, water, improving reading material and other necessaries, and also the advantage of a second storey if things do get damp down below. The most likely forecast is a few days of grumbling inconvenience at worst. And if the next blog post washes up on your shore in a bottle, think of it as part of the analogue revival I was talking about last week. But in the meantime, this is pretty damn fabulous:

Printernet

Jeffrey R Di Leo argues, in the US Chronicle of Higher Education, that The Book As We Know It is not necessarily dead, but at the same time is certainly no longer integral to the educational process. Indeed, his point is much the same as the one made by that disgruntled Simpsons fan on Amazon, although Dr Di Leo quotes Barthes rather than Bart (a joke that was a tad creaky when first made in the Modern Review in the early 90s, and rigor mortis was setting in by the time Stephen Bayley got hold of it, but I still like it).

Di Leo types:

Many concerns about the intellectual quality of digital publications are valid, and digital content can be easier to plagiarize. But those concerns are historical, not permanent. There is nothing intrinsically inferior about spreading knowledge on a screen rather than on a printed page, and plagiarism is an ethical issue, not a material one. Words may look better in print, and a book may feel better in your hands than a Kindle or an iPad, but the words are the same.

Most of which is true, but I’m not sure it’s wise to dismiss so brusquely the *feel* of a book. Even in academia, where books are often read to a purpose other than pleasure, they still provoke an emotional response – a relationship, even – that transcends the mere process of getting facts into the reader’s brain. The words may be the same, but that’s not always the point.

Moreover, while the potential for digital books to enhance the reading experience is obvious, I’m not that sure the punters will actually go for it. There have been many innovative experiments in digital publishing, such as Geoff Ryman’s 253, a hypertext novel about a Tube journey, and Train Man (Densha Otoko), which began life on a chat forum, but neither of them achieved anything more than a niche reputation until they were remastered in more conventional formats (Train Man became not only a book, but also a TV show and a movie). Di Leo would argue that this was the fault of critics and consumers, who failed to seize the opportunities that the digital versions offered. And this hesitancy persists.

I’ve always been a big fan of footnotes in dead-tree books, and when, over a decade ago, I first encountered the hypertext version of The Waste Land – which offered annotations to Eliot’s own annotations – I squealed with delight. This, surely, was the way forward for writers and publishers: not a reference was too obscure, not a word too difficult, because anything could be explained, elucidated, glossed, translated, without breaking the flow of the text. I think I’ve discussed before some of the other books that might benefit from such treatment (Nabokov’s Pale Fire; Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates; Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual; Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman) but there seems to have been very little action on this front. The received wisdom is that today’s multi-tasking youth, who can simultaneously play Grand Theft Auto, message their friends, watch The Inbetweeners and roll aggressively towards policemen will have no problem flitting between text and notes. But few, it seems, want a book that’s anything other than linear in structure. I’ve been informed in no uncertain terms by several publishers that readers (of print books) find too many notes distracting, and that they should be a) reduced in number and b) sent to the back of the text. I can’t see that they’ll be any more keen to have their leisure reading interrupted by hyperlinks.

Although I adore conventional books, I don’t object to their being challenged by digital versions: as Di Leo says, the words are the same. But it would be something of a pity if the only reason e-books succeed is because they’re cheaper to distribute, and easier to take on holiday, and nobody wants to take advantage of their other possibilities.

Bloody awful poetry

I've finally read Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, at the third or fourth attempt. Which, if nothing else, allowed me to savour for the first time such linguistic dim sum as "...an old but unused pocket diary optimistically maturing there until its calendric correspondencies came round again" or "...when I hear a critic speaking of an author's sincerity I know that either the critic or the author is a fool." And it's not even his first language, the bastard. Now I start to understand why the likes of Martin Amis turn into swooning schoolgirls at the merest whisper of Nabokov's name, and why his long-awaited posthumous novel is provoking such drooling anticipation; it's not just the one about James Mason being a nonce.

It's important to explain Pale Fire's unusual structure: it consists of a foreword; a four-canto, 999-line poem, 'Pale Fire', by the late John Shade; a wildly discursive commentary on the poem, by Charles Kinbote; and a brief index. In the course of the commentary (by far the longest section of the text), we learn that the three-way relationship between Kinbote, Shade and reality is not as it may seem, although the fine details of what the internal truth may be are still getting thrashed out by Nabokovians.

So how did I manage to get through it this time? Simple: I skipped the poem, which is where I came to grief at previous attempts. As I've said before, I seem to have lost the ability to process poetry; but 'Pale Fire', the poem, as far as I can deduce, is a MacGuffin, a framework upon which Kinbote hangs his delusions. The notes are the important bit.

As Shane Richmond pointed out a few months back, Tolstoy's historical ruminations in War and Peace are sometimes excised from the main text and put in their own appendix, which is surely an implicit admission of skippability. But is this justifiable? Isn't it like reading a Reader's Digest Condensed Book, or going into an exam with nothing but CliffsNotes in your head?

David Frum, sometime speechwriting wonk to the soon-to-be-ex-President of the United States, developed an intellectual defence of such superficiality:

When I was in law school, I devised my own idiosyncratic solution to the problem of studying a topic I knew nothing about. I'd wander into the library stacks, head to the relevant section, and pluck a book at random. I'd flip to the footnotes, and write down the books that seemed to occur most often. Then I'd pull them off the shelves, read their footnotes, and look at those books. It usually took only 2 or 3 rounds of this exercise before I had a pretty fair idea of who were the leading authorities in the field. After reading 3 or 4 of those books, I usually had at least enough orientation in the subject to understand what the main questions at issue were - and to seek my own answers, always provisional, always subject to new understanding, always requiring new reading and new thinking...

Except that the last bit sounds like wishful, rather than new thinking.

So, what's the biggest thing you've read or seen or heard or done, without really doing it properly?