Today I am inspired by a book discussion going on in the Boobooks Reading Room, where the selection is James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me, a work I have long since been recommending as required reading, especially for teachers of any kind. As I sated in one of my comments to the thread, I rely on it as a reference work all the time.
The discussion turned to footnotes, and I was reminded of a work I once wrote, when I came back, after nearly 10 yrs abroad, to post-Reagan America, and realized: Holy shit, I can’t write so much as one sentence in this country anymore without extensive footnotes. The result was an unpublished manuscript, about 200 pages, consisting of one 44-word sentence (see errata below, with seven footnotes): How to Win the Human Race: Re-Covering Our Wounded Humanity–The Cosmic Joke: Who Didn’t Get it and Why.
I’m a footnote lover. It’s one reason my blog is called what it is. I read footnotes. All the time. Professionally and for pleasure. I write footnotes. Professionally and for pleasure. Some days I feel like a footnote, and I like being a footnote in someone else’s work. I am, for example, a footnote in Daly’s Outercourse (see Index) and consider it something of a second phd! But it wasn’t until today that I thought of Lies My Teacher Told Me in terms of a footnote.
Actually, it can be seen as one big long footnote to any text or narrative of American history–one that even people who hate footnotes and never read footnotes: if there’s one footnote you can’t afford not to read, it is this one.
And in fact, if everyone in America were to read Lies My Teacher Told Me, my little self-help book, written at a time when I felt like the frog in the pot of boiling water (you know the story, right? if you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, he will jump out and be saved; however, if you leave him in a pot of cold water and put it on the stove, then it will not notice the increase in temperature and he will be fried), the entire 200-pages of footnotes in How to Win the Human Race would be rendered obsolete and I wouldn’t have a book!
So, I figured if I have ever hope of winning the human race, I better get started. I have retrieved the sentence from the files, and am at the moment trying to re-locate some of the missing footnotes.
Originally, the book also had a quiz in the end (and that was where the 500-word sentence came in: it was the answer to the quiz (answer to be posted on my office door 😉
So I thought I’d throw a pop quiz–Here is the sentence, with the placement of footnotes marked, but no text.
What do you think the footnotes said?
How to Win the Human Race: Re-Covering Our Wounded Humanity(1)
An innovative instruction manual which presents the unadulterated (2) Truth about how the West (3) was won and lost and how the Last Tribes (4) can win it back applying a theory of how-to-heal-the-human-race (5) based on a self-help (6) system of intellectual (7) exercises in thirteen steps to recovery.
Produced, coordinated and Composed by Adults Anonymous
Chair of the Bored,
Starkravinglunaticradical–God grant me the temerity to change the things I cannot accept.”–Adults Anonymous
©LMF.’93.
Please Note: This is the Readers’ Digestible Condensed Version of “The First and Second Coming of Henry the Fourteenth: The Cosmic Joke, or Who Didn’t Get It and Why.” The extensive use of footnotes in this volume is needed to clarify some of the basic assumptions underlying statements which may otherwise be misunderstood or misinterpreted by persons not privy to, or in disagreement with those basic assumptions.
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)Errata: In the original comment made at Boobooks, I mistakenly claimed it had been a 500-word sentence ending in a preposition. I was confusing my penchant for 500 wd sentences ending in prepositions with another of the sentence’s linguistic quirks (namely, that it was not grammatically correct, as stated in the original report posted at BooBooks). This stylistic anachronism was inspired by one of my undergraduate engl profs who told this joke (in an inimicable, entirely authentic and thick as the ass-end of a possum’s tail Arkansas accent):
So this Texan gets a scholarship to Harvard, arrives on campus and asks this guy in a pin-striped suit:
Can you tell me where the li’berry’s s at ?
Suit says: this is Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavard and at Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavard, we don’t end our sentences in prepositions.
Texan: Ok, then, can you tell me where the li’berry’s* at, asshole?
(*Note: In my adaptation of my best professor. ever.’s joke,
it’s “can you tell me where the lies is buried at, asshole?”
And that would be the Post-colonialist or post-Loewen version of the joke.)😉
Historical Footnotesregrets the error, but assures its readers it was a memory malfunction and not malfeasance or misdirection.
