Still Life by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Still Life

Page 142

And in the Third World - the Intertextual Convergence - The Season of the Witch is a fusion of the mud. Prefaces become spells. Verses become maps. Every text is both commentary and conjuration. The witches here are called Marginals, and they believe that meaning is a living organism; one that mutates, reincarnates, and occasionally devours its own author. Cannibalism as religious rite.

Their sacred book is called "The Annotated Void," and it contains only footnotes. The original text? Lost, or perhaps never written. But the footnotes still glow.

David Foster Wallace, having misplaced the scaffolding of "Infinite Jest," emerges from the wreckage clutching only the footnotes like sacred relics. The novel itself has dissolved into vapor, but the footnotes remain; orphaned, obsessive, and oddly self-sufficient.

In this alternate reality, he launches a boutique imprint called Endnote Emporium, where readers subscribe to serialized footnotes delivered weekly, each containing the offer of a free trial subscription to Harper’s Magazine. Each one is a spiraling meditation on tennis shoes, addiction metaphors, or the semiotics of toothpaste commercials. Critics hail it as "post-