The Devil's Details (15 page)

60. Available:
http://www.britannica.com
[26 February 2001].

61. S. S. Van Dine,
The Benson Murder Case: A Philo Vance Story
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), p. 112, note.

1. John Updike, “
Notes
,”
The New Yorker
, 26 January 1957, p. 28.

2. Ibid., p. 29.

3. John Updike, “
Notes
,”
The New Yorker
, 26 January 1957, p. 28.

4. Ibid.

5. George Crabbe,
The Works of The Rev. George Crabbe
, vol. II (London: John Murray, 1823), note 2, p. 17.

6. Ibid., note 1, p. 89.

7. George Crabbe,
The Works of The Rev. George Crabbe
, vol. III (London: John Murray, 1823), p. 76.

8. Ibid.

9. These details of Crabbe's life, and the ones that follow, have been lifted (as in
shoplifted
, perhaps) from a consistently amusing thumbnail sketch of him by Michael Schmidt. See Michael Schmidt,
Lives of the Poets
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 340-5.

10. Michael Schmidt,
Lives of the Poets
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 340.

11. Quoted in ibid.

12. George Crabbe,
The Works of The Rev. George Crabbe
, vol. III (London: John Murray, 1823), p. 197.

13. Ibid., p. 201.

14. Ibid., p. 202.

15. Ibid., p. 201.

16. Quoted in Michael Schmidt,
Lives of the Poets
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 340.

17. Marianne Moore,
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
(New York: Macmillan, Viking Press, 1958), p. 262.

18. John Updike, “
Notes
,”
The New Yorker
, 26 January 1957, p. 27.

19. See Marianne Moore,
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
(New York: Macmillan, Viking Press, 1958), p. 284.

20. See Marianne Moore,
The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore
(New York: Macmillan, Viking Press, 1958), p. 162.

21. John Updike,
Museums and Women and Other Stories
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 159.

22. John Updike,
Roger's Version
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), p. 3.

23. Ibid., p. 157.

24. Ibid., p. 169. Nor is the plot furthered by a later footnote of twelve lines of sprawling Latin in small print. A still later note simply confirms what is already abundantly clear: The narrator's mind is hospitable to bawdy thoughts in two languages. See ibid., pp. 175-6 and 190.

25. John Updike,
A Month of Sundays
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 15.

26. Ibid., p. 5.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 180. See also pp. 14, 117, 180, and 201.

29. Christopher Ward,
The Saga of Cap'n John Smith: Being an account of His Service in the Warre in Hungaria with the Turks; his Single Combats with three Turkish Champions, wherein he was victorious, and how he was taken Prisoner by the Turks and Sold for a Slave and of his Escape therefrom. Also his Expedition into Virginia and his Adventures there among the Savages; being in Peril of his life, but saved by an Indian Princess. Furthermore his Observations in New England
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928), p. 24.

30. See David Jones,
In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledf ym penn mameu
(New York: Chilmark Press, 1961), p. 191, note 4; p. 195, note 15; p. 193, note 5; p. 191, note 1; p. 196, note 2; p. 203, note 11; p. 205, note 17 (for two of the references); p. 204, note 15; p. 192; and p. 194, note 12.

31. David Jones,
The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments
(London: Faber & Faber, 1974), p. 48.

1.
The Boston Globe
, Monday, 27 November 2000, p. 1. Some readers may question whether a note at the bottom of a headline instead of at the bottom of the page constitutes a proper footnote; however, this writer believes a certain latitude should be given the trailblazing editors at the
Globe
.

2.
The New York Times Magazine
, Sunday, 26 November 2000, p. 131. See also the “footnotes” in “Men's Fashions of the Times,”
The New York Times Magazine
, Part 2, fall 2000.

3.
The New York Times Magazine
, Sunday, 26 November 2000, p. 140.

4. The New York Times Magazine, Part 2, spring 2000, p. 16.

5. Ibid., p. 20. For the record, Ms. Viladas is also listed as editor of the magazine; I am curious as to whether she originated the
Times
footnote page, and how much (if any) encouragement she received.

6. Ibid., in order of appearance above, pp. 78, 100, 92. No art form is without its awkward moments, and this is one for the footnote. The page numbers all appear in the paragraph above; nevertheless, some readers intending to check sources may expect to find the numbers in a citation. This writer prefers to risk the slight annoyance of redundancy rather than take the larger risk of inadequate annotation.

7. Michiko Kakutani, “
Books of the Times: For Writers, Father and Son, Out of Conflict Grew Love
,”
The New York Times
, Tuesday, 23 May 2000, p. B1.

8. Martin Amis,
Experience
(New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 245.

9. Ibid., note.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., p.246, continuation of note.

12. Ibid., p. 246.

13. Ibid., note, marked by an asterisk and directly below the continuation of the previous page's note; it is easy to overlook, which may be intended by Martin Amis as part of the joke.

14. Ibid., p. 7.

15. Ibid.

16. Martin Amis,
Experience
(New York: Hyperion, 2000), p. 62.

17. Ibid., p. 195.

18. John Lanchester, “
Be Interesting
!”
London Review of Books
, 6 July 2000, p. 6.

19. Ibid., note.

20. Ibid., note to first note. Of course, it might be the
LRB
editors' doing; they may have seized the chance for a free plug for an upcoming is sue. Money talks, and even
The New Yorker
, which normally keeps its page bottoms immaculate, may listen: An ad in a recent issue asserts: “Money management is what we do.” And a large, easily visible, red asterisk floats above the period; it leads the reader to the next page and below a photo of a white-haired Odysseus type hugging a surfboard. The note says: “Technically speaking, we can also make dreams come true.” See
The New Yorker
, 12 February 2001, pp. 14, 15.

21. Ibid., first note.

22. Ibid., note.

23. Ibid.

24. Jenny Lyn Bader, “
Forget Footnotes. Hyperlink
.”
The New York Times
, Sunday, 16 July 2000, Section 4 (Week in Review), p. 1.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. Joseph Conrad (no date),
Heart of Darkness
[Originally published in
Blackwood Magazine
in 1899, February, March, and April. Subsequently published in 1902 in
Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories
.] Available:
http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/csicseri.com
[10 February 2001]. For the most part the annotation's format follows the suggestions of Xia Li and Nancy B. Crane,
Electronic Styles: A Handbook for Citing Electronic Information
(Medford, N.J.: Information Today, 1996). Nothing shows the growth and seriousness of the hyperlink challenge to the footnote more clearly than a comparison of this recent edition of
Electronic Styles
with an earlier one. A 1993 edition ran to 65 pages; the 1996 edition needed 213 pages.

28.Philip M. Davis and Suzanne Cohen, “
The Effect of the Web on Undergraduate Citation Behavior 1996-1999
,” available:
http://www.people.cornell. edu/pages/pmd8.com
/ [14 February 2001]. The article should also be available in vol. 52, no. 4 (15 February 2001), of
The Journal of the American Association for Information Science
. This author wishes to thank Nancy Thompson for bringing this article to his attention as well as for her many other helpful e-mailed suggestions—and yes, this author, for all his worries about the Web, appreciates its convenience and speed.

29. Personal communication (e-mail) to this writer, available only on nonvellum paper insecurely filed.

30. Personal communication (e-mail) to this writer.

Note: Readers desiring a bibliography to this work should look for my next book,
A History of Bibliographies
.

^*
An adequate history will be a humanistic history: one that does not restrict the footnote to the bare-bones function of referring the reader to cited material. Such a restricted view of the footnote is as inadequate as would be the notion that an X ray of the human body reveals the full import of the human being.

^*
Academics and workmen may lack understanding of each other. Every so often I have heard one faculty member complain to another about the amount of time custodians or electricians or security guards or—less often—student dishwashers spend just standing around “doing nothing,” this while standing around waiting for a meeting or a class or lunch to start. It seems to escape them that work requiring hands and backs also can require the planning and coordinated efforts that necessitate standing around and talking. Workmen, of course, often show a reciprocal disdain for academics. Talking to students, lecturing, writing and reading, staring off into space in search of an idea do not look like “real work.” I sometimes tell them that a study once compared occupations and calorie expenditure; writers proved to have used up more calories per hour than longshoremen. Disbelief is the usual reaction and, because I cannot “access” the study, the disbelief usually remains. Both sides misunderstand each other's work, I think, but as academics write much more about workers than workers write about academics, the former lend permanence to their errors and bear a heavier responsibility to generalize with care. See D. F. McKenzie, “
Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices
,”
Studies in Bibliography
, vol. 22, 1969, note 17, p. 11.

^*
Historians are always suspicious of the kind of “color commentary” supplied in this paragraph. Assertions that are not based on firm evidence or, at least, derived from a plausible argument are not admitted to Clio's noisy court. And this author readily admits there is no evidence Jugge saw, smelled, or thought what is attributed to him, nor that he worried or sniffled on the day he arrived at a solution for the overcrowded margin. However, to present the invention of the footnote as if it were achieved in a disembodied mind, a vacuum, would also be a distortion. We must not let our admiration for the abstract acrobatics of brilliant minds allow us to overlook the pull, the dragging down of daily life. Thought must contend with gravity sooner or later. Einstein had to have his wisdom teeth pulled. Newton once in a while must have had a runny nose, a sore throat. Charles Dickens took long compulsive walks and hid out with a mistress. We know for a fact that Archimedes took baths. Their genius was to defy gravity, not escape it. If the particular details we have supplied Jugge hang on him like a misfitted suit, well, we mustn't let him walk the streets naked. He must be seen to have invented the footnote with his feet on the ground and his head filled with distractions if we are to honor him properly.

^*
Just as astronomers know that earlier and earlier stars will be found, we expect someday our research will be superseded by the discovery of an earlier footnote. The exploration of the bottom of early book pages should be encouraged. This author with the cooperation of Simon & Schuster is offering a modest but appropriate recognition for the first discoverer of a qualified footnote that appears in history prior to the (f), and which is used in any future edition of this book: A footnote will record the name of the discoverer, who will be given a celebratory dinner at a restaurant of his or her choice for up to one hundred dollars.