David Foster Footnote
I usually rely on The Atlantic Monthly (alongside any New Yorker issue featuring Sy Hersh) for most of my long-form news. This month, The Atlantic Monthly featured an article discussing political talk radio in America written by David Foster Wallace. One would think a respectable political rag like The Atlantic Monthly would have better judgment than to work with this poster child for pretension, but hey, the magazine biz is tough these days I guess. They gambled instead to capitalize on his gimmickry.
Evidently, in order to accommodate his “writing style,” the layout department at The Atlantic Monthly decided to place his footnotes in easy-to-read color-coded boxes. The end result is the King of Self-Indulgence’s pinnacle achievement. The only thing not pretentious about the article is its ironically succinct title: “Host.”
The 23 page article includes:
(a staggering and heartburning number)
Footnote contents include:
1. A footnote about how bananas are good for ulcers.
2. A footnoted “!?” to add emphasis.
3. Over 15 tons of self-indulgent pseudo-academic English major sludge.
4. Footnoted editorial corrections made by the author.
5. A self-effacing footnote where Wallace questions his own interviewing skills.
6. Dozens of footnoted descriptive phrases which could have easily been included in the body of the article. (example: begin footnote “who really is a gifted mimic” end footnote)
I enjoy reading the well-written sausage party known as The Atlantic Monthly (this issue features ZERO women writers, again, in the main political sections). But for Christ’s sake, most of your readership has already graduated from college. We don’t want to read this Creative Writing 101 BS. Stick to journalism.
You should read Harper’s instead.
and the article wasn’t especially interesting, either.
The Atlantic has really slippped in the past few years. I agree with the previous poster–read Harper’s instead. The Atlantic’s only saving grace is perhaps James Fallows, but with PJ O’Rourke unfunny hackery and Christopher Hitchens’ increasingly impenetrable book reviews, I rarely get into much of it, whereas I read every single word of every issue of Harper’s.
He’s so good you just have to hate him.
>(a staggering and heartburning number)
‘. . .’
>3. Over 15 tons of self-indulgent pseudo-academic English major sludge.
I got 14. How do you figure?
Footnoting footnotes? How sad. Sounds like he’s trying desperately to add weight to something weightless. I know I won’t be reading it.
If you have read David Foster Wallaces book – “Infinite Jest” you would be familliar with his footnoting style. That book has hundreds of footnotes which vary from a few words to a few pages long. I only made it to chapter 2.
Although the format was a bit wierd the information about Talk Radio today was spot on.
I want my 30sec back.
You’re a fucking twat.
And Infinite Jest used endnotes, but still very nice sentiment Style Sheet. One should know what they’re talking about before they say something stupid.
Shame on you, Free Williamsburg. Shame.
Heard DFW was autistic. Or does he have a better excuse for being an a-hole?
Atlantic Monthy content quality has diminished significantly and taken a strange turn to the right in the last few years…now it sucks more than ever. i didn’t renew my subscription, and the last issue i bought off the rack SUCKED!
Wow. I couldn’t disagree with you less. The pretentiousness with which you dismiss the article greatly overshadows the percieved pretentiousness of the writer.
And I find it odd that you have nothing at all to say about the actual content of the article aside from the style in which it was written. Did you even bother to read it?
And then to give the Atlantic’s editors a hard time because of the very intelligent way in which they chose to format the article… I have to agree with Sean here. Shame on you.
Has a surfeit of irony occluded your ability to identify a genuine idea or sentiment when you see one? I’m just sayin’.
I read and enjoyed Infinite Jest, I really did. But fatigue set in with all the endnotes. I started to feel that Wallace was testing me, as a reader, and I didn’t, in the end, feel that I gained anything from all that work (flipping to the back of the book, then back to my bookmark). The guy can write, but the conceit with endnotes, footnotes, whatever, is just that. It adds little–if anything–more than the sense that you are reading a Very Very Smart Writer And You Should Be Impressed.
I think those footnotes might be a joke. Don’t worry–DFW _is_ smarter than you are. He just doesn’t care about it as much as you do.
I wish he would just footnote his footnotes and skip the text. Who cares what he has to say? Footnoting the blank page is now the edge. DFW will figure out how to divide infinity. What a sell out!
a staggering number, maybe, but what’s up with heartburning?
You know, the cool thing about footnotes is that you DON’T have to read them. It’s like, extra, n’junk. In case you want more information, you can take it. If not, keep reading.
I tried to plow through the article; didn’t quite make it before my partner threw out the magazine. I was at least as ambivalent about the subject matter as the writing style. Actually, the footnotes were the best part. What is odd about DFW’s writing is that sometimes the same approach that works really well in one instance is annoying overkill in others. This can change from one paragraph to another.
The design of the piece was brilliant. It’s ridiculous for you to trash that–the designer has nothing to do with the author, and I think he/she did an excellent job.
Also, the point of Wallace is the self-indulgence, as it is with Sedaris, Eggers, Hemmingway, Joyce. Compared to the boring crap The Atlantic Monthly has been churning out for the past few years, a scholarly essay on Elvie and the Tree Weasels would seem exciting.
I’m about as bored of the David-Foster-Wallace backlash as I was of the David-Foster-Wallace-will-save-the-novel craze of the late 90′s.
So your basic complaint was that there were too many footnotes of dubious functional necessity. Find me a review of Infinite Jest that didn’t cover this already. Or rather, find something new to say about his writing that hasn’t been covered to death.
(
Uh, Harper’s has published DFW plenty.
I think the author of this article is not complaining about the footnotes, per se, but about the fact that the article was published by The Atlantic Monthly. I too rely on AM for news and think this article is annoying. Leave this shit for McSweeneys. AM is supposed to be journalistic
It’s a tough call; Harper’s, with its knee-jerk, unthinking leftism and Lewis Lapham’s rambling, senile screeds every month, or the Atlantic’s not-so-slow slide into crypto-right-wing rag-dom. The best option is probably to slide a hot knitting needle up under your left eyelid, to make the pain go away once and for all.
Pretention is the false appearance of great importance: there’s nothing false about Wallace’s importance in American letters. His style is a response to growing up in the age of television and multimedia and multiple streams of thought; and his footnotes are just that: bits and pieces that need not be included in the main body text, but which might be interesting. And if his writing contains too much “pseudo-academic sludge” for your taste, you can always just skip the piece, or try another magazine. I, for one, enjoyed the piece and thought it was a refreshing change from more traditional writing.
“Footnoting the blank page is now the edge.”
…if you are still living in 1963 maybe. That stuff was done years ago. See Oulipo’s Paul Fournel. His “Suburbia” has both footnotes and an index (as well as a foreword, an afterword, an ‘any resemblance’ disclaimer, two epigraphs, a dedication, a table of contents, introductory notes by the author and the publisher, a supplement for school use, an errata list, and a biographical note), but has no text–just blank pages–aside from these paratexts.
I think the point is, this type of writing is fine for novels and zines, but annoying for political stories
Annoying for political stories? What better way to communicate the complexity of the questions DFW is asking about talk radio and the relationships between its listeners, advertisers, staff, competitive hosts, and corporate owners? That’s the sort of thing that, if you read an unfootnoted essay about it, you’d criticize it for being too linear.
Bashing DFW for pretension: you’re on the edge with this position. Next, you should write something witty about Bush’s poor public speaking! That’ll rock the boat.
dude, where’s my comment from yesterday? Why ya gotta delete stuff? Cant handle real commentary? Not like I said Fuck or anything.
As has been suggested in previous comments, criticizing DFW for writing footnotes is a little like criticizing Faulkner for writing long sentences. That many people dislike his writing style never surprises me, but I think considering his use of footnotes merely a gimmick is a mistake. All writing is an attempt to record ones thoughts and transmit them to another, and DFW’s use of footnotes is a way for him to more closely reflect his thought processes and to impose another dimension of organization on his writing. His style attempts to capture nonlinear thoughts of various types: tangential thoughts, emotional reactions, elaborations, self-doubts and uncertainties, etc. It’s quite an organizational accomplishment, I think. The result is stream of consciousness writing without rambling incoherence. Rambling incoherence would be my own forte. The effect, I think, is quite different in his fiction and in his non-fiction, but what I think is particularly interesting about “Host” is the contrast between the styles of the subject and of the author. If you want to criticize DFW for being pretentious, it might be interesting to contrast the quite different types of pretension displayed by DFW and Mr. Zigler. Mr. Zigler’s communication, in the style that is suited to success in talk radio, requires judgements made in broad strokes with no concessions. Analysis of fine points, open-minded consideration of opposing viewpoints, any admission of self-doubt: apparently these do not sell in his market. So I found it interesting to see this person (or persona) and the talk radio product considered in just the way one would be unlikely to hear on the radio station in question. I’m not one to claim DFW’s writing is above criticism, but there are surely more thoughtful ways of evaluating it than to count the number of footnotes.
Plus you’re a fucking twat.
i don’t mind foster wallace’s pretension. do you prefer chick lit to franzen, vollmann and foster wallace? perhaps a false dichotomy, but where are their female counterparts? writing about shopping and relationships, that’s where. shopaholic, my ass.
Diana,
Very well-said, particularly the ‘twat’ part.
Reading DFW can, at times, feel like what I’d imagine it feels like to have your ear literally chewed off. But there is so much lazy, righteous reaction against his work I can’t help but guess that he’s being blamed–and resented–for being the best we’ve got, like people wish our best were constituted differently than he is. He is gadflyish, smart-alecky, and self-indulgent. But he is also a patient and almost ridiculously acute observer and compiler, a deep and sensitive thinker, an unmatched literary nailer of physical gesture, demeanor, gait and carriage and tics and all that other hard-to-describe stuff that even the best writers, journalistic or otherwise, so seldom really nail. (Pauline Kael is/was one of the only writers of comparable gifts in that regard).
The whole “smarter-than-thou” charge is so effing tired. He IS brainy, and he does exhibit said braininess–what a crime!–but those critics who deploy this stale critique get to insinuate that he is overly concerned with how he comes off in his work, without explicitly saying that. Because, if they did make that point explicitly, they’d be laughed off the page…DFW’s in-print persona is by no means preening or self-satisfied. It’s actually better described as uncertain–lot’s of unattractive, insecure, unmanly qualifiers and argument-hedging. Dave Eggers, David Sedaris, and a host of other past-and-present literary it-boys and girls spend far more time and effort cultivating an attractive persona than DFW does.
Most of these people are just embarassed that they didn’t finish Infinite Jest, and have decided to turn a by-all-means-forgivable lapse–it’s hardly a crime–into a bogus and–irony!–smart-alecky and snot-nosed rebel pose.
Didn’t care much for “Host”, though.
Wow, everyone here is so much smarter than each other.
I am sorry that Wallace’s vocabulary exceeds our own and that this upsets you. But I find his footnote parodies hilarious and not in anyway tiresome. He is clearly ridiculing the pretentions of liberal arts educated pseudo- intellectuals who like to make a habit of feeling intellectually superior to almost everyone around them. In other words, he bites the hands that feed him.
Additionally, Wallace, unlike many of his more perfectly ironic literary cohort, still produces texts with an underlying moral outrage. He does not ridicule the subjects he writes about. He generally paints sympathetic portraits of his flawed protagonists. Instead he aims indirect, but rather relentless critique at the voyeuristic stance of his likely readers.
I know, how dare he.
Oh, and I liked Diana’s “twat” remark as well.
Nice hat, though. I want one.
You’re just jealous because your lit major girlfriend cries out my name at the height of climax (in footnote form nonetheless).
.
No. I’m jealous because I like your hat.
There’s nothing wrong with DFW. The issue is with Atlantic. It is no longer its job “to report.” (Was it ever?) Rather, it’s to stimulate. By choosing DFW Atlantic has opened the door to a new generation of readership. If it has soured you in the process, you must be dispensible. Probably because you’re getting older. DFW, if anything, is too perceptive and thorough for most people. Complaining about it is like a six year old complaining that Woody Allen films are boring. You are simply too lazy to ingest DFWs nutrition and so am I. But I’m glad to know it’s there, and I think the decision to employ elusive and overwhelming reportage toan elusive and overwhelming topic might be apropos. There’s no hope to make sense of it, only to enjoy the endless analysis of its fibers, which as you know, vibrate and oscillate in at least 11 dimensions simultaneously.
The beard is kind of creepy, though.