The Decade's Best Notation
By and large, notation took a beating during the '90s, as a slew of nonfiction pop-history books like "The Professor and the Madman" abandoned scholarly documentation for the sake of readability. And while it would be a healthy, fun exercise in cynicism to award "Best Notation" to something like Edmund Morris' largely fictional "Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan" (whose author actually did include some secret, hidden end notes without numbers or symbols to refer the reader to the back of the book), a nod certainly has to be made to one author's almost single-handed champion of notation ... in his fiction.
The end notes to David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" are a literary achievement unto themselves. Existing with the text and on their own, the 97 pages of "Notes and Errata" at the end of Wallace's 1,079-page epic weave narratives, crack jokes and offer insight both into the oddities of modern day medicine and science, as well as into the minds of the novel's stimulus-addicted rogues' gallery.
Folks who have read the book will likely confess having made a conversational, scholarly or critical allusion or two to "IJ's" footnotes. Indeed, it's cause for wonder whether anyone has tried to take a plot structure hinted at in Wallace's notes and create an entirely new work of fiction. So vast is the area covered by the footnotes, Wallace could conceivably re-release it as a catalog, auctioning off the ideas inside.
Though there are a full 388 notes to chose from, ranging from a word to several pages in length, the one that most stands out is note #24: "James O. Incandenza: A Filmography."
Not only does the filmography contain several references to a film that shares a title with Wallace's book — a point that begins to have significance several hundred pages into the book — it also contains these choice nuggets, among others:
Fun with Teeth. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Herbert G. Birch, Billy Tolan, Pam Heath; 35 mm; 73 minutes; black and white; silent w/ non-human screams and howls. Kosinski/Updike/Peckinpah parody, a dentist (Birch) performs sixteen unanesthetized root-canal procedures on an academic (Tolan) he suspects of involvement with his wife (Heath). MAGNETIC VIDEO, PRIVATELY RELEASED BY LATRODECTUS MACTANS PROD.
Cage III — Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P.A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE 357-65-65
Very Low Impact. Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad. Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited. Marla-Dean Chumm, Pam Heath, Soma Richardson-Levy-O'Byrne; 35 mm.; 30 minutes; color; sound. A narcoleptic aerobics instructor (Chumm) struggles to hide her condition from students and employers. POSTHUMOUS RELEASE Y.W.-Q.M.D.; INTERLACE TELENT CARTRIDGE #357-97-29
— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)
