Helen Rittlemeyer explores the similarities between David Foster Wallace and Samuel Coleridge, which range from youthful fame to struggles with addiction. One revealing parallel? Their fascination with footnotes:
Contemporaries were skeptical of Coleridge’s protestations, just as many people today are skeptical Wallace’s, but anyone who criticizes them should first think why it makes sense that a man who overuses footnotes would also become dependent on drugs and alcohol. Coleridge and Wallace were both acknowledged as having immense native brainpower—a friend of DFW’s described him as receiving more frames-per-second than most people—and both of them were great readers with great memories. Coleridge was nearly a child prodigy, reputed to be able to recite long passages from books he’d read only once.
These men could not have a thought without twelve sidebars, citations, and quibbles popping up from their mental recesses. The result: footnotes and digressions. The other result: an overwhelming desire, when the stimulation became too strong, to power down the machine for a while. “He once said to me that he wanted to write to shut up the voices in his head,” Wallace’s best friend told a reporter. “He said when you’re writing well, you establish a voice in your head, and it shuts up the other voices.” And alcohol shuts up all the voices.
The Dish 