The best news I’ve gotten in a long time: that the index, completed and submitted about an hour ago, is pleasing unto my publishers.
And that the next thing I’ll see from them is books.
Which means that this bloody project, begun a decade ago (and I wish I meant that a little less literally than I do), is DONE.
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.
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?
So the forthcoming book now has a page at B&N.com and Amazon. Which seems to suggest it’s actually going to come into physical being in the world at some point between now and May 30. Which is awesome.
But: I’m still waiting on the page proofs. Which means that said book still has no index.
And: I’m quite amused by B&N’s “more on this subject” classifications for the book. “American fiction -> History and criticism,” yes. “Popular culture -> United States,” of course. “Literacy -> United States,” by all means. But “Archaeology -> Guatemala”? Mighty curious what produced that link.
So I spent much of yesterday attempting to compile my meager thoughts about l’affaire Frey into something halfway worthy of a post. After all, this little crisis around the truth value of the memoir is hardly the first such I’ve encountered, but this particular one seems different, somehow, and not simply because the great and powerful O got personally involved last week, giving both Frey and his publisher, Nan Talese, the talk-show smackdown. Given my longstanding interest in Oprah’s interventions on the literary scene, I could hardly let the occasion go by.
For some months, I’ve had a project on hold, one that I wish I’d had the time, the energy, the funding, and the general wherewithal to push forward much sooner than I have, but… haven’t. My leave is now coming up, just around the corner, and I’m hoping to come back to this plan, to make it some kind of actuality. I’ve been spurred into revisiting this plan today by a couple of John Holbo’s posts at the Valve, in which he first clarifies some of the positions that he took in the recent Slate article, “Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs” and then goes on to ponder what a possible future for the academic blog—one in which it is taken seriously as a mode of scholarly publishing—might look like.
