I’m not sure why, but I’m a bit obsessed with a piece of spam I got earlier today, one of the bajillions of “update your PayPal account” messages I get each week.  Perhaps it’s because most of these get sucked up by Postini, and so I never really see them, instead zapping them in large batches.  But this one slipped through the cracks, and so I got a close look at it.

What I’m fascinated by is a combination of things:  the message uses the kind of identity-theft prevention rhetoric that financial institutions actually use, but it does so in combination with seriously fractured grammar.  For instance:

Due to upcoming year 2006, and recent changes in PayPal’s Service Agreement you need to submit additional details on your PayPal account. Starting from 2006 all PayPal accounts will come with complete detailed information! Identity protection matters. And PayPal works day and night to help keep your identity safe.

Due to 2006?  All accounts will come with complete detailed information?  Wha…?

It gets better, though; scroll down and the message provides some of the details of the apparent identity protection services I’m being provided with:

New spoof tutorial
Learn how to spot and avoid fraudulent “spoof” emails and websites with PayPal’s handy 5-step spoof tutorial.

Protect yourself with tools
Guard yourself against “spoof” emails with the SafetyBar, and against fraudulent websites with the eBay Toolbar.

Checklist if you are a victim…
When you suspect a problem with your identity, you have to act fast. Use PayPal’s checklist for what you should do.

I do at times suspect a problem with my identity, but it has never occurred to me to protect myself with tools.  Where is that ball peen hammer, anyhow?

All kidding aside, unless you’re reading closely—not just spotting the weird grammatical issues but recognizing, for instance, that none of headings of the services the message describes are actually linked, and that the only link in the message goes not to paypal.com, but to paypal.com.us-securely-run.com—unless you catch that, it would be relatively easy to mistake this for an actual message about fraud-protection.  There’s nonetheless a kind of inadvertent poetry in it.  I want to be furious, and yet the phrases from this message keep running through my head…

Gee, spend one little day traveling and the blogosphere goes a wee bit bonkers over some article in the New York Times about how some professors seem to think that student use of email is hastening the end times.  And my pal meg winds up with an inbox full of vitriol, not to mention having to spend a day convincing our fellow academic bloggers that she’s not a power-mad despot in technophile’s clothing.

People, please!  Repeat after me:

First, the small point:  the much maligned “mainstream media” got maligned for a reason.  Have any of you, EVER, been quoted accurately in the newspaper? Really accurately?

Second, the bigger one:  no one heavily invested in an older media institution can analyze the workings of a newer media form objectively.  The anxiety of obsolescence that all media change breeds makes it impossible for such analysis to be carried out innocently, without an agenda driven by the desire to promote the virtues of the older form at the expense of the newer.  Any argument in print about the ways that electronic communication is leading us all down the primrose path really needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Have I mentioned, in my many rants about electronic scholarly publishing that one of the benefits of a new system such as ElectraPress would be that no one would ever have to build an index again? Searchable text and keyword tagging are the way of the future, man, reader-based tools that let you find the information you want yourself, rather than me, sitting here at my computer, attempting to divine what you might conceivably be looking for.

The indexing is finally beginning to move a bit faster.  Which is good as I’m running out of time.  Back to it.

Taking the opportunity to gloat about being in Louisiana while I can: last night, my parents took me and my sister, who was visiting this weekend, to the new location of Galatoire’s (this one called Galatoire’s Bistro), here in Baton Rouge. We had the kind of meal that demonstrates conclusively why such an alarming percentage of Louisianians die of obesity-related diseases: it’s less that the meal was terribly fattening (which, of course, it was) than that it was so damned good. It almost certainly ranks in my top five meals of all time. (The number one such meal has been so enshrined for years, protected by the haze of fading memory, but it was all but impeccable: the Grill Room at the Windsor Court hotel in New Orleans, 1993. This is followed closely by dinners at Nola in 2001 and Commander’s Palace in 2000. You may sense a theme here.)

Last night’s dinner was just fabulous. The atmosphere is quite different from the original Galatoire’s, but I wasn’t disappointed in it at all, given that I went with somewhat lowered expectations, having read a pretty mixed review. The dining room is slightly crowded, as it should be, but not unduly loud. We had two lovely Sonoma wines, a Matanzas Creek sauvignon blanc and a Rodney Strong pinot noir. And then there was the food. I started with really fine oysters Rockefeller. Their only downside was their intensity; I could have shared the appetizer with someone and been perfectly content. My sister and stepfather had the salad Godchaux, which was piled with marinated jumbo shrimp and lump crabmeat, and my mother had a small, nice house salad. Our entrees were also impeccable: my stepfather’s duck was perfectly roasted and came with the best parsnips (yes, parsnips) I’ve ever tasted; my sister’s crab Sardou had two beautiful whole artichoke hearts topped with crab, nestled on top of creamed spinach and topped with just enough hollandaise to add a bit of a kick; my mother’s trout meuniere was fabulous, and my stuffed eggplant—stuffed with a crab and shrimp dressing, of course—was absolutely perfect.

Dessert? I’ll just say this: bread pudding topped with a bananas Foster sauce, and chocolate crème brulée.

I’d say I may never eat again, but I’ve already eaten the leftovers for lunch today.

Surely there should be a Germanic compound word for this—not the shameful joy one takes in someone else’s suffering, but the feeling best captured by that Gore Vidal line, “Whenever a friend of mine succeeds, a little something in me dies.” The Times gets it, though their coinage—Erfolgtraurigkeit, or success-sadness—leaves much to be desired.  As the headline has it, though, the happiness of those around you can’t help but shine a klieg light on all of the depressing aspects of your own life.  Or maybe it’s not true for you.  Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe that, right there, is one of those awful bits of my life thrown into high relief by the success of my pals, for whom I insist that I really am ecstatically happy, even as I bear a flame in the gut that’s either excruciating jealousy or really bad heartburn.  Maybe it’s just evidence that I am, in fact, a bad person, one who doesn’t deserve those kinds of happiness.  And that’s where the little something in me dies, where the Vidal-factor comes in:  not in being jealous of my successful friends, but in the spiral produced by the conviction that I’m a jerk for being jealous.  Surely there’s a good solid eight-syllable word for the soul-killing mixture of happiness, jealousy, and shame produced by someone else’s good fortune?

I need help with a bit of phrasing, index-wise.  A bit of necessary background:  at one point in the book, I discuss at length the various pronouncements of the death of the novel.  These are indexed as:

death of the novel, pronouncements

Where I discuss the purposes that such pronouncements serve (the key turn in my argument), I’ve indexed them as:

death of the novel, pronouncements, function of

Various things that are blamed in such pronouncements for having killed off the novel are indexed as:

death of the novel, causes

Now I need to index my discussion of John Barth’s claim, in “The Literature of Exhaustion,” that “Whether historically the novel expires or persists seems immaterial to me; if enough writers and critics feel apocalyptical about it, their feeling becomes a considerable cultural fact…” How would you characterize that?  What’s coming to mind is

death of the novel, irrelevance of

but that’s not exactly right.  “Immateriality of” also totally misses the mark.  What the discussion focuses on is the fact that, for Barth, at least, the actual death of the novel is less important than the sense that the novel has died; “irrelevance of” makes it sound like the imagined death wouldn’t matter, either.  “Actual irrelevance of”?  “Irrelevance of reality of”?  “Imaginary importance of”?  “Feeling as creator of”?

Ack!  Help, expression of the need for!

Which is my complete and total inability to maintain focus on the index.  I am much too easily distracted.

The bad news is that I’m only up to page 28.  The good news is that the last five pages have introduced all of the major terms of the argument, and I’ve been doing searches as I encounter them, and have been painstakingly categorizing the results as I go.  So I really do suspect that things will get faster as I proceed.

You know, when I was younger, I thought the word was “pain-stakingly” rather than “pains-takingly,” and spent a fair bit of time imagining staking out the outlines of pain, as one would stake out the foundation of a house.  Which only ever made sense in the way that misheard song lyrics can often be forced to make sense, but which now seems vaguely clever, as dumb errors go.

See what I’m saying?  Too easily distracted.

I begin to suspect that, if anything, I’m too obsessive-compulsive for this job.

I’m on page 26 and I’ve already listed 153 items and sub-items.  I’m hoping that I’ll be able to do some crafting once it’s all been done, eliminating redundancies and using cross-references to streamline things.

But really, what I’m hoping is that I’ve already hit the hard stuff, and that this will get easier as I go.

Proper names, searchability of.

Titles, searchability of.

Keywords, searchability of.

Major concepts, pervasiveness of.

Major concepts, variable phrasing of.

Major concepts, searchability of, lack thereof.

Indexer, frustration of.

Am I completely nuts for attempting to do my own index?  Have any of you done any indexing?  Do you have advice on method?