Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

30
As one who typeset books that are riddled with
footnote intrusions I can see the indolent advantage
for an intellectual writer whose time is so important
that he/she needs to enhance, strangle or smother
a throw-away mention of something trivial or
otherwise by referring to some giant tome which
attempts to explain the universe and is only
available in some specialist library. Then there are
those boorish readers who won’t consider any text
which is not punctuated with this pygmy fly-away
text as intellectual, will decry it as unsubstantiated
and will not accept points however well they are
made. For fuck sake, do we readers need to be
sent on a wild goose chase to verify some smug
author’s pandering to their own ego only to find
the source unavailable or merely a figment of the
author’s imagination in that it does not explain or
compliment his/her point.
If an author wants or needs to make a point which
is made elsewhere by another then this needs to
made in the text and, if needs be, explained in the
text. Of course, if points are fully explained and
credit for them given to another, this may make the
author’s assertions look feeble and will definitely
give the impression that the work is not entirely, or
even vaguely in some cases, their own. It might
even be said by some that a book riddled with
footnotes is at best an ambiguous bibliography with
the veneer of a guiding idea, rather uncharitable,
but a view with some merit surely?
There will be those, certainly, who can find a
reason for the industry and profusion of footnotes
in that they allow a text to be read as the argument
intended by the author without distraction or
tangental flights of fancy, and that the ‘notes’ which
congregate about the foot of a page are just there
as helpful indicators of reference … more like
‘tosh and camouflage!’ to cover the cracks, in my
opinion.
Afterthought
Joining that club of exclusive and deliberately
obscurest writing techniques are abbreviations.
Another feeble mind-fuck tool of the ‘busy/lazy’
intellectual. A nasty belch staining the page, where,
unless you are attuned to them, they leave the
reader second guessing the flavour-by-whiff …
or maintaining a jiggery-pokery library in their
head full of trite-useless alphabeti-spaghetti. These
manufactured and localised acronyms are then,
incredibly, given credence and weight by audiences
of similarly challenged people, who accept them
as actual words containing nuggets of ‘wisdom’ as
they tumble out from platforms, or spread their selfimportance
on a page, during the inane utterances
or dank scribblings of these ‘intellectual charlatans’.
If you have a valid point, ‘SPELL IT OUT!’, you lazy
fucker.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 3