But where's the margin in that?

David Foster Wallace has an extraordinary-formatted-even-for-him new thing in the current Atlantic. (It annoyed The Elegant Variation, is how I know.) If you don't have the .pdf power to see, it uses pastel blocks over phrases in the main text to link to notes on pastel blocks in a generous, and sometimes expanding, scholar's margin.

One obvious accusation is hyperlink-envy; the look is vaguely reminiscent of a children's encyclopedia circa 1996. Mr Wallace being Mr Wallace, he also makes quite clever use of the ability to emphasise blocks with his notes, rather than mere points -- he has been upgraded to Spanish punctuation.

But this design also embodies a preference for sidenotes that seems to crop up every time people try to rethink texts -- so much more graphic than footnotes, so much less hierarchical. (See also Gray, Alasdair, Prefaces, Book of, The.)

And so much less readable! If the notes append anything more than chapter and verse, you get competing vertical movements on the page, which makes concentrating on one thing harder, and keeping your place when jumping about harder still. The effect is exaggerated on screen -- especially if you are also having to cope with anti-aliased Linotype Didot -- but it is real on paper. There are reasons why footnotes won this historical battle, and they go beyond the simple desire to use all available space.

You want an opinion on the words? Strong. It's a sketch of a talk-radio host, and it puts back in the shabbiness and the marginal (yes, visual pun time) hourly-rate workers left out of more conventional, hyped exposes. Result is maybe an overcorrection -- too much of the pity, not enough of the power -- but the correction was necessary, and it's adroitly done.

Know your stereotypes

Here is Augusten Burroughs, moderately amusing serial autobiographer, in Dry, his second volume. He is talking to an Englishman called Hayden over breakfast at a rehab centre:

"These are delicious," he says of the reconstituted scrambled eggs, the same eggs that sit on my own plate, untouched.

So far I have lost almost ten pounds. Why do stars suddenly appear... "You're from London, what would you know?"

He laughs, "That's very true, actually. This is far better than anything my mother ever made."

I make a face. "Did you have that nasty, yeasty stuff they spread on toast, what's it called?"

His eyes brighten. "Vegemite! Oh yes, I love Vegemite."

"You'll enjoy dinner then," I promise him.

Now, I accept a bit of national caricature here and there, and this is a fairly affectionate case. The character would in real life probably go for Brit-in-New-York self-parody, so fine. But how difficult is it to get the details right? Australians like Vegemite. English people (some of them) like Marmite. It's an entirely different semi-repulsive yeast spread.

[Dry, by Augusten Burroughs (Atlantic, 2004). Memoir of an alcoholic young adman -- rehab to beer campaign -- and sequel to a memoir of traumatic-but-somehow-heartwarming childhood called Running with Scissors. Despite loud eccentricity, this feels more machine-finished than I would like; you can tell he's written screenplays.]