Tuesday 2 September 2008

Thinking about it...

It wouldn't actually be all that interesting looking at photographs of soap or bikes. Perhaps I should compose these posts at times when I am not supposed to be sleeping, so that I retain some semblance of a grasp of what is interesting and what is not. That's something to think about.

4 comments:

Elizabeth McClung said...

Good to know you are blogging, your astrixs are kind of like OCD footnotes, I am sort of amused* and sort of intiegued. I want to read all the details, particularly how you kill a man with an organ.

*I always assumed that was the use of the parathetical aside? Do you really keep the extra bit in your brain the whole blog post and then sort them by number at the end? That's kind of amazing when you think about it!

Optistatic said...

It's fun, if a little overwhelming, to have comments! Thank you!

I shall have to do a post of musical disasters. That may be epic. Anyway, it was with a piano. More mobile, and all that ;-)

OCD? Me? Surely not. Actually, it's an organisation thing. I can't fit everything I feel needs to be said into the paragraph without interrupting the flow, so I interrupt the flow by sending interested people down to the bottom of the page.* The parenthetical aside has its uses, but I feel that I can't insert that much text into the paragraphs while maintaining anything that could even loosely be defined as style. I use them as well, though.

I do not store the information in my head, for my head is not good for that sort of thing. Perhaps I need more sleep. I generally stop mid-sentence and go straight to the bottom of the page to write it, then return and finish the sentence. As I seem to be writing posts in order, I just see how many asterisks I used last time. Problems arise when I go back and insert asterisks/footnotes - sometimes I don't get the numbers right.

*This is much more useful, and never annoys anyone.

Elizabeth McClung said...

Well thanks for explaining it, it is just I had not seen it used, (except as footnotes) and now I am seeing bloggers, not just you footnotes or sort of story noting thier thoughts and trying to figure out what that means. I'm still not sure what it means, but I imagine I will get used to it. I have parathetical asides which HAVE parathetical asides so I can hardly cast an organizational stone!

Well, I will read on and see how they go. Has this shown up in books yet, do you happen to know? I know that there was a book recently which had footnotes and one quite old one whose footnotes were longer and more detailed than the novel (I wish I could remember the name) - the poor novel was about three sentences atop the page while the footnotes ravaged on from the previous pages. It was sort of funny in a Italo Calvino way except you had emotionally signed up to read the novel and ended up discarding the novel to read the footnotes.

Optistatic said...

I think that the footnotes are often used when bloggers are trying to be funny. It often seems to work (for them at least), and goes well with the many half-formed thoughts competing to get out of my head.

Anyway, it seems to be a thing that happens nowadays, probably because people are grasping language and expression, and using them in their own ways. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in books, but I imagine many editors would be asking for bits to be re-written, rather than leaving them in.

I hate long footnotes in books. They always seem to interrupt the flow of what I was actually trying to read. It sounds like, in the book you described, the novel interrupts the flow of the footnotes.