Junot Diaz Is Footnoting His Own Footnotes at Rap Genius
Rap Genius, the line-by-line Wikipedia of hip hop lyrics, is uneven in its insights but reliable as an ever-expanding universe; the site has already branched out into Rock Genius and Poetry Genius, and surely other iterations (History Genius, News Genius) can’t be far behind. Currently, the most popular entry on Poetry Genius is T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which has been viewed over 80,000 times and explains the famous first line “April is the cruelest month” with a pop-up box that begins “It’s raining all the time, April is wack!” and continues by explaining the Canterbury Tales reference as something that “Eliot chops and screws.”
But in a bit of open-source Internet magic, that relative low point in the history of literary annotation sits alongside something great: Junot Diaz’s self-annotation of an excerpt (and a footnote itself, to boot) from his kinetic Pulitzer Prize winner The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. His footnotes on his footnote are casual, nerdy, unexpectedly personal, and the whole exercise seems like it opens up new territory for how authors could relate to and revisit their already-published work; imagine how sharply someone like Margaret Atwood would annotate parts of The Handmaid’s Tale or Oryx & Crake. Anyway, here’s Diaz’s most-meta annotation, attached to the little superscript number signifying the footnote in the original text.
This is one of my Melville footnotes, where I simply go buckwild. (“Get me a condor’s quill! Get me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkwell!”) The first editor I had on this novel wanted me to cut the footnotes. I’m so glad the second editor thought they were as important as I did to the book’s point about what narratives we authorize what narratives we don’t. In the end footnotes are not anything you want to fight about with your editor. I’ve been asked if I got my footnoting from David Foster Wallace — no disrespect to DFW but Jorge Luis Borges and Patrick Chamoiseau and William Vollmann were my inspirations, especially Chamoiseau.