Fractals

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Part 1: DFW

1. Let me tell you a story about something that happens to me. Maybe it happens to you?
2. This same thing has happened probably a dozen times, if not more, over the last couple of decades. I’ll be in a group some kind, where the membership is not entirely optional—classmates, coworkers, other parents at the kid’s school—and the most irritating, obnoxious member of the group, the one I have the least in common with and would be the least likely to spend time with outside of whatever it is we’re doing, will turn to me, face brightening, and say “Hey! I bet you’re a huge fan of David Foster Wallace.”
3. I’ve learned that the correct answer to this is a succinct “you know, he didn’t invent footnotes.”^A
4. Because reader, they do not bet correctly. To be very clear: I have never¹ read any of his work. I’m aware he exists, and there was that stretch in the late 90s where an unread copy of Infinite Jest seemed to spontaneously materialize on everyone’s shelves. But I don’t have an opinion on the guy?²
5. I have to admit another reaction, in that in addition to this behavior, most of the people⁴¹ you run in to that actually recommend his work are deeply obnoxious.^α
6. So, I’ve never been able to shake the sense that this is somehow meant as an insult. There’s a vague “attempted othering” about it; it's never presented as “I liked this and I bet you will too,” or “Aha, I finally found a thing we have in common!” it’s more of “Oh, I bet you’re one of those people”. It’s the snap of satisfaction that gets to me. The smug air of “oh, I’ve figured you out.”
7. And look, I’m a late-era Gen-X computer nerd programmer—there are plenty of stereotypes I’ll own up to happily. Star Wars fan? Absolutely. The other 80s nerd signifiers? Trek, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Monty Python? Sure, yep, yep. Doctor Who used to be the outlier, but not so much anymore.³ William Gibson, Hemmingway, Asimov? For sure.
8. But this one I don’t understand. Because it cant just be footnotes, right?
9. I bring all this up because Patricia Lockwood⁴ has written a truly excellent piece on DFW: [Where be your jibes now?].⁷ It’s phenomenal, go read it!
10. But, I suspect I read it with a unique viewpoint. I devoured it with one question: “am I right to keep being vaguely insulted?”
11. And, he nervously laughed, I still don’t know!
12. She certainly seems to respect him, but not actually like him very much? I can’t tell! It’s evocative, but ambiguous? It’s nominally a review of his last, unfinished, posthumously published book, but then works its way though his strange and, shall we say, “complicated” reputation, and then his an overview of the rest of his work.
13. And I have the same reaction I did every time I hear about his stuff, which is some combination of “that guy sounds like he has problems” (he did) and “that book sounds awful” (they do).
14. “I bet you’re a fan”
15. Why? Why do you bet that?
16. I’m self-aware enough to know that the correct response to all this is probably just to [link to this onion article] And I guess there’s one way to know.
17. But look. I’m just not going to read a million pages to find out.

Part 2: Footnotes, Hypertext, and Webs

1. Inevitably, this is after I’ve written something full of footnotes.^B
2. Well, to expand on that, this usually happens right after I write something with a joke buried in a footnote. I think footnotes are funny! Or rather, I think they’re incredibly not funny by default, a signifier of a particular flavor of dull academic writing, which means any joke you stash in one becomes automatically funnier by virtue of surprise.^C
3. I do like footnotes, but what I really like is hypertext. I like the way hypertext can spider-web out, spreading in all directions. Any text always has asides, backstory, details, extending fractally out. There’s always more to say about everything. Real life, even the simple parts, doesn’t fit into neat linear narratives. Side characters have full lives, things got where they are somehow, everything has an explanation, a backstory, more details, context. So, generally writing is as much the art of figuring out what to leave out as anything. But hypertext gives you a way to fit all those pieces together, to write in a way that’s multidimensional.^D
4. Fractals. There’s always more detail. Another story. “On that subject…”^E
5. Before we could [link] to things, the way to express that was footnotes. Even here, on the system literally called “the web”, footnotes still work as a coherent technique for wrangling hypertext into something easier to get your arms around.^F
6. But the traditional hypertext [link] is focused on detail—to find out more, click here! The endless cans of rabbit holes of wikipedia’s links to other articles. A world where every noun has a blue underline leading to another article, and another, and so on.^G
7. Footnotes can do that, but they have another use that links don’t—they can provide commentary.¹³ A well deployed footnote isn’t just “click here to read more”, it’s a commentary, annotations, a Gemara.^H
8. I come by my fascination with footnotes honestly: The first place I ever saw footnotes deployed in an interesting way was, of all things, a paper in a best-of collection of the Journal of Irreproducible Results.⁹ Someone submitted a paper that was only a half-sentence long and then had several pages of footnotes that contained the whole paper, nested in on itself.¹² I loved this. It was like a whole new structure opened up that had been right under my nose the whole time.^J
9. Although, if I’m honest, the actual origin of my love of footnotes is probably reading too many choose your own adventure books.¹⁷
10. I am also a huge fan of overly-formalist structural bullshit, obviously.^α

Part 3: Art from Obnoxious People

1. What do you do with art that’s recommended by obnoxious people?⁴⁰
2. In some ways, this is not totally unlike how to deal with art made by “problematic” artists; where if we entirely restricted our intake to art made exclusively by good people, we’d have Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and not much else. But maintaining an increasingly difficult cognitive dissonance while watching Annie Hall is one thing, but when someone you don’t like recommends something?³⁸
3. To be fair, or as fair as possible, most of this has very, very little to do with the art itself. Why has a movie about space wizards overthrowing space fascists become the favorite movie of actual earth fascists? Who knows? The universe is strange. It’s usually not healthy to judge art by its worst fans.³⁶
4. Usually.
5. In my experience, art recommended by obnoxious people takes roughly three forms:³²
6. There’s art where normal people enjoy it, and it’s broadly popular, and then there’s a deeply irritating toxic substrate of people who maybe like it just a little too much to be healthy. ³⁰
7. Star Trek is sort of the classic example here, or Star Wars, or Monty Python, or, you know, all of sports. Things that are popular enough where there’s a group of people who have tried to paper over a lack personality by memorizing lines from a 70s BBC sketch comedy show, or batter’s statistics from before they were born. ²⁸
8. Then there’s the sort of art that unlocks a puzzle, where, say, you have a coworker who is deeply annoying for reasons you can’t quite put your finger on, and then you find out their favorite book is Atlas Shrugged. A weight lifts, aha, you say, got it. It all makes sense now. ²⁶
24. And then, there’s art²⁴ that exclusively comes into your life from complete dipshits.
23. The trick is figuring out which one you're dealing with.^q

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Part 4: Endnotes

1. What never? Well, hardly ever!
2. I think I read the thing where he was rude about cruises?
3. And boy, as an aside, “I bet you’re a Doctor Who fan” has meant at least four distinct things since I started watching Tom Baker on PBS in the early 80s.
4. Who⁵ presumably got early parole from her thousand years of jail.⁶
5. In the rough draft of this I wrote “Patricia Highsmith,” and boy would that be a whole different thing!
6. Jail for mother!
7. In the spirit of full disclosure, she wrote it back in July, whereupon I saved it to Instapaper and didn’t read it until this week. I may not be totally on top of my list of things to read?³⁵
8. "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" (1967)
9. The JoIR is a forum for papers that look and move like scientific papers, but are also a joke.
10. The bartender is a die-hard Radiers fan; he happily launches into a diatribe about what a disaster the Las Vegas move has been, but that F1 race was pretty great. A few drinks in, he wants to tell you about his “radical” art installation in the back room? To go look, turn to footnote ω To excuse yourself, turn to footnote 20
11. I knew a girl in college whose ex-boyfriend described Basic Instinct as his favorite movie, and let me tell you, every assumption you just made about that guy is true.
12. Although, in fairness, that JoIR paper was probably directly inspired by that one J. G. Ballard story.⁸
13. This was absurdly hard²¹ to put together.³⁹
14. The elf pulls his hood back and asks: “Well met, traveller! What was your opinion of the book I loaned you?” He slides a copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men across the table. To have no opinion, turn to footnote d. To endorse it enthusiastically, turn to footnote α
15. Or is it five?
16. You’re right, that bar was sus. Good call, adventurer! To head further into town, turn to footnote 20. To head back out into the spooky woods, go to footnote 22.
17. You stand in the doorway of a dark and mysterious tavern. Miscreants and desperadoes of all description fill the smoky, shadowed room. You’re looking for work. Your sword seems heavier than normal at your side as you step into the room. If you... Talk to the bartender, turn to footnote 10. Talk to the hooded Elf in the back corner, turn to footnote 14. To see what’s going on back outside, turn to footnote 16.
18. "Glass Onion” from The Beatles, aka The White Album
19. Superscript and anchor tags for the link out, then an ordered list where each List Item has to have a unique id so that those anchor tags can link back to them.²³
20. You head into town. You find a decent desk job; you only mean to work there for a bit, but it’s comfortable and not that hard, so you stay. Years pass, and your sword grows dusty in the back room. You buy a minivan! You get promoted to Director of Internal Operations, which you can never describe correctly to anyone. Then, the market takes a downturn, and you’re one of the people who get “right sized”. They offer you a generous early retirement. To take it, turn to footnote 25. To decline, turn to footnote 22.
21. But did you know that HTML doesn’t have actual support³³ for footnotes?²³

22. You journey into the woods. You travel far, journeying across the blasted plains of Hawksroost, the isles of Ka’ah’wan-ah, you climb the spires of the Howling Mountains, you delve far below the labyrinth of the Obsidian Citadel; you finally arrive at the domain of the Clockwork Lord, oldest of all things. Its ancient faces turns towards you, you may ask a boon.

    “Is this all there is? Is there nothing more?”: Footnote 27

    “I wish for comfort and wealth!” Footnote 25

23. I have no idea how this will look in most browsers.³¹
24. This usually still isn’t a direct comment on the art itself, but on the other hand, healthy people don’t breathlessly rave about Basic Instinct,¹¹ you know?

25. Good call! You settle into a comfortable retirement in the suburbs. Your kids grow up, move out, grow old themselves. The years tick by. One day, when the grandkids are over, one of them finds your old sword in the garage. You gingerly pick it up, dislodging generations of cobwebs. You look down, and see old hands holding it, as if for the first time. You don’t answer when one of them asks what it is; you just look out the window. You can’t see the forest anymore, not since that last development went in. You stand there a long time.

    *** You have died ***

26. And turnabout is fair play: I’ve watched people have this a-ha moment with me and Doctor Who.

27. The Clockwork Lord has no expression you can understand, but you know it is smiling. “There is always more,” it says, in infinite kindness. “The door to the left leads to the details you are seeking. The door to the right has the answer you are lacking. You may choose.”

    Left: Footnote a

    Right: Footnote 29

28. Other examples of this category off the top of my head: Catcher in the rye, MASH, all of Shakespeare.

29. You step through the doorway, and find yourself in an unfamiliar house. There are people there, people you do not know. With a flash of insight, you realize the adult is your grandchild, far past the time you knew them, the children are your great-grandchildren, whom you have never met. You realize that you are dead, and have been for many years. All your works have been forgotten, adventures, jobs, struggles, lost as one more grain of sand on the shore of time. Your grandchild, now old themselves, is telling their child a story—a story about you. A minor thing, a trifle, something silly you did at a birthday party once. You had totally forgotten, but the old face of the 6-year old who’s party it was didn’t. They’re telling a story.

    Oh. You see it,

    *** You Have Ascended ***

30. Fanatics, to coin a phrase?
31. This feels like it should have one of those old “works best in Netscape Navigator”, except Netscape would choke on all this CSS.³⁷

32. Björk: (over the phone) I have to say I'm a great fan of triangles.

    Space Ghost: Well, I have to say that I am a great fan of Chuck Norris, and he was in the Delta Force, and the delta was a triangle.

33. Instead you have to code¹⁹ them by hand.
34. Yeah, I see what you did there.
35. Okay, that's also a lie; I've actually been working on this on-and-off since July.¹³
36. Cases in point: I, II, III , IIII
37. Certified: “It works on my machine!”^α
38. Especially when they themselves don’t seem to like it?
39. I mean, the writing itself was tricky enough, with three¹⁵ interleaving essays.
40. Not annoying people, not assholes: obnoxious. Hard to define, but like pornography, you know it when you see it.
41. On the other hand, back in the 90s these people were asking about Robert Anton Wilson or saying “fnord” at me, so some things have gotten better, I guess.
42. That's not the problem. This is: Change. Read it through again and you'll get it.

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Part 5: No Moral.