Footnotes! Footnotes! Footnotes!
One of the most notable aspects of The Mezzanine would be its abundance of footnotes. The sight of a page long footnote inspired both feelings of dread and excitement when I read through the book. One phrase Howie uses that I liked was, “the luxuriant incidentalism of the footnotes” (Baker 121). Indeed, Howie’s footnotes seem like ramblings that, while tangentially related to the topic of the paragraph, offer insight to Howie’s view of life that some could consider to be “luxuriant”. I can’t bring myself to hate the footnotes since without them I wouldn’t have known the extent of Howie’s wonder for ice cube trays and detailed observations regarding staplers. Inside this particular footnote on page 121 lies one of my favorite ideas in the entire book. Howie describes how “the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph,” instead it is, “encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotations marks, italics, and foreign langua...