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• 1 2016-12-05T15:46:21-08:00 Footpaths 12 plain 2016-12-08T22:33:01-08:00 Jonathan Lethem’s entry for The Thing the Book is in the form of footnotes on another reading.¹ The Thing the Book is a collection of artist essays all used to explore the codex form by playing in and around aspects like tables of contents, bookplates, book sleeves, and inserts. The book is published by The Thing Quarterly that is “an artist-run publication in the form of objects.  It’s like a magazine, except that each issue is conceived of by a different contributor and published as a useful object.” The Thing the Book is edited by the creators of the quarterly, John Herschend and Willl Rogan.
    
  1. Some footnotes are linked to other footnotes.²
  2. So which order are you to read?³
  3. Is the footnote a demand for immediate attention? Or is it chronological⁴
   
  
  
  4. When Lethem links footnotes within footnotes, he counters the traditional pull back to the body of the text. Instead Lethem chooses not to reference the body again, but to instead build a narrative⁶ within the footnotes. Still, containing multiple footnotes in one body of text (even if that itself is a footnote) highlights the possibility of path choice on the reader’s understanding of the text as a whole. One option is to read the entire body and then return to the footnotes, possibly missing related information in the first reading but keeping coherence in the main narrative. A second option is to read each footnote as it is reached in the text but then return to the body. This interrupts the narrative but to hopefully build on it with related, but not directly contextual knowledge. A third style is to read all the footnotes before the text, where the related knowledge is held in mind before reading the body, but it holds little meaning when unrelated at first. Each of these options is an effect the shape of the text has on the reader’s understanding of the piece as a whole. ⁵
   
  5. This simply highlights the affect of the traditional use of footnotes. However, Lethem chose to utilize the space to write his own essay.⁷
   
  6. Within the footnote he breaks traditional usage by creating a new narrative within the footnote space. We would expect a linking back to the main body of text with relating information to be incorporated, but instead Lethem weaves a story through anecdotes and memories.
  7. Think about this structure of a multiple narratives running tangent to each other but in different spaces.⁸
  8. Should we consider them tangent in that there are infinite crossover points and both paths can be considered woven fluidly together, much like Mallarme’s Un coup de des?⁹
  9. Or does the path in the footnotes have distinct crossovers with the body of the work like in Drucker’s The History of the/my wor(l)d?