I’m not sure I ever publicly admitted this, but over the last year-plus, while I was contemplating this past spring’s leave and the work that I’d do then, I’d pretty much concluded that my next major project was going to be more creative in scope than scholarly, in no small part because I’d come to the conclusion that, while I absolutely loved writing still, I hated doing research.  I hated running down sources, reading secondary texts, doing all the stuff that needed doing in order to piece through an argument.

In fact, at the time at least, I was pretty sure that I might not ever do any writing that one might consider “scholarly” again.

But somehow or another I agreed to write the article whose progress (or lack thereof) I tracked here over the last couple of months, and that required a bunch of research, of precisely the variety that I really didn’t want to do.  And it was extremely painful at moments, but I’d committed, and so I did it.

And now I’ve got two more articles ahead of me.  Which I’m doing the research for now.

And it occurred to me this morning, for the first time, that I’m seriously enjoying the research, in and of itself.  Reading new stuff.  Putting ideas together.  Figuring out what other stuff I need to read in order to deepen the point I think I might be trying to make.

And I’m beginning to suspect that the point I might be trying to make will extend across several articles.  And might, in fact, turn into something book-like.

It ain’t over yet—in fact, it’s barely begun—but I’m getting the slightest little glimmer that I might make it out of the sophomore slump.  That I might be in the right profession after all.

And that’s a really unexpected outcome for a sabbatical and summer that I thought would carry me, if anything, further away from scholarly terrain.

In preparation for the release of my book (also available here and here!), which should be out in something like a month, I’ve put some of the text online.  I’d love it if you’d check it out—The Anxiety of Obsolescence—not least because the site could use a bit more hard testing.  As the front page will tell you, I’ve optimized the site for Firefox 1.5 (for Mac), and it looks swell in Safari and Camino, too.  It’s a bit wonky in Netscape 7 for Mac (the footer wants to show up a mile down the page rather than right after the main text ends) and it’s absolutely, irretrievably broken in IE for Mac.  (Please tell me you’re not still using IE for Mac!) If some of you Wintel types wouldn’t mind giving me a bit of feedback here on what’s going on on your screens, I’d appreciate it.

And, if you’d like to comment on the text, there’s room for that over there.  I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

I confess to having a very bad case of ”yeah, but what have I accomplished lately,” something against which I’ve struggled pretty much my entire adult life.  And boy, there’s nothing like finishing a major project and taking the afternoon off to read a novel (and then the evening to watch television, but that’s another post) and then sitting at your desk the next morning thinking, well… now what?

But actually, I’ve managed to clear out a bunch of annoying little things that I really needed to have dealt with weeks ago, things that I’d put off until the index was done.  And now it is!  And they are!  (At least some of them.) And I’m feeling a bit more organized and generally ready to go.

So this afternoon I’m starting in on the book review that I owe RCCS.  And once that’s done, I’ve got two articles that I want to work on, one of which has a May deadline and the other of which is, I hope, looking forward toward the next big project.

And it’s just dreamy to have, at last, the kind of brainspace (not to mention clockspace) available for thinking about such things.

Where, exactly, did it go?

February 1, I returned from a five-day trip to New York.

February 8-13, I was in SoCal.

February 21-27, I was back in SoCal.

What this means is that I got to sabbaticalize—I mean really control the structure of my day, focus on work, go to the gym, etc.—14 out of 28 days last month.

That would not be so bad except that: (1) the relentless turning of the calendar pages is making my sabbatical disappear at a much faster rate than the work is going, and worse, (2) what work time I have had has gotten sucked up into the index, such that I’m still finishing an old project rather than making progress on a new one.

Grrr, and all that.  (And back to it, with hopes that March is both slower and better.)

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?