The Art of Indexing
I always thought it would be interesting to attempt to tell the story of your life purely in index form. I tried it once, without a whole lot of success. I'm sure there are others out there like me, though, people for whom the indexes of thick biographies are better and more fascinating reading than the books themselves.
I was actually obessed with indexing for a time. I acquired and pored over scores of books on the subject (H.B. Wheatley's How to Make an Index from 1902, A.L. Clarke's Manual of Practical Indexing from 1905, Robert L. Collison's Indexes and Indexing from 1959, among others). I even paid much too much money to acquire a copy of Der Index der Verbotenen Bucher (1899), which was in a language I do not speak, and appears to have no practical bearing on my own interest in the subject. The great indexers are legendary obsessives. In 1848 a man named William F. Poole published a book called An Alphabetical Index to Subjects Treated in Reviews and Other Periodicals to Which No Indexes Have Been Published.
In his more recent Explorations in Indexing and Abstracting, Brian C. O'Connor poses the single most relevant question regarding the indexer's art: "Can we design systems that detect the treasure for each user?" Perusing indexes it's clear that every indexer worth his or her salt brings to this question a deeply personal set of priorities and proclivities. Check it out some time; it's fascinating to see what sorts of bizarre minutiae an indexer will choose to extract from a book's tangle of detail and incident.
I've been collecting this minutiae for years. Here's just a small sampling:
From Margaret Drabble's Angus Wilson: A Biography:
Fear of falling, 556, 592; tendency to fall, 599, 601; lack of sense of balance, 603, 604; serious fall, 623-4; in nursing home, 642-3.
From Gerald Clarke's Capote: A Biography:
Dancing of, 58, 101, 102; eavesdropping and snooping of, 180-81, 206-7, 294; as love life advisor, 166, 168; sleepwalking of, 44; Montalban, Ricardo, 298.
From Donald Spoto's The Dark Side of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock:
Gastronomic Life: potatoes, 14; three-steak meal, 187; gulping, 412; Personal Life, Habits, Attitudes, and Traits: mustache, 95; woman in the back of a taxi, 162, 374, 432, 433, 531; destruction of crockery, 187, 192; interest in strangling, 353, 527; spiritual transvestism, 432-33.
From William Manchester's Winston Churchill biography, The Last Lion:
Silk underwear for skin sensitivity. 399; national crisis while bathing, 418-19; attitude while playing polo, 241-42; skin donation to wounded soldier with Kitchener, 283; bricklaying, 776, 883.
From John Baxter's Bunuel:
Death, fascination with, 15, 24; menagerie, 14; obsessive punctuality, 183; orgies, participation in, 116-17; phone, hating, 295; pistols, fascination with, 202-3.
From David Sweetman's Van Gogh: His Life and His Art:
Tooth trouble, 203, 262; wears candles in hat, 278; throws glass at Gauguin, 289; razor attack on Gauguin, 290, 306; kicks attendant, 307.
From Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's Jackson Pollock: An American Saga:
Beguiling smile of, 2, 4, 94, 808; dimples of, 2-3, 44, 161, 808; drunken binges of, 2-3, 6, 7, 117, 120, 168, 170, 197, 212-14, 247-48, 249-50, 255, 266-67, 294-95, 296-98, 302, 306, 310-11, 314, 335-36, 359-60, 448, 449, 491, 572, 669-71, 686, 844; fights provoked by, 6, 140-41, 145, 204, 212, 228, 247-48, 265, 267, 297, 302, 310, 350, 481, 488-89, 498, 570, 572, 715, 755, 900; mouth harp played by, 208, 220, 247, 833, 834; urinary habits of, 50-51, 469, 478, 489, 541, 612, 671, 753, 760, 762, 770, 788, 813, 818, 867, 876, 904; weeping of, 249, 297, 581, 740, 763, 770, 778, 782, 787, 901, 904; Ives, Burl, 170, 828.
From Mary Tyler Moore's After All:
Richie's rescued pigeon, 208-210; assassination threats, 269-71; Blue Chip stamp collecting, 382-83; crossword puzzles, 383; Gomer Pyle, 113; hitting bottom, 349-50; mother's addiction to pinball machines, 12-13; as inept liar, 279-82; O'Neill, Tip, 280, 281; Kershaw, Doug, 236; Busey, Gary, 207.
Night Shift
I had to learn to live with these truths: there was no dragon. Grandfather was a bird house. And unless I learned to live flat on my back with my eyes resolutely shut everything external to my own existence would have to be met with in space. That was the difficult first step. Faced as I was with an acute and painful case of rhinogenous concretion --that is, my nose produced what were more or less rocks, rhinoliths, and the obstruction of these resulted in breathing difficulties and frequent nose bleeds-- it was often hard for me to face the world outside my front door.
I thought perhaps I might save the more sturdy and pronounced of my nose stones and subject them to the transforming agitation of a rock tumbler. I envisioned making something shiny and beautiful out of these strange specimens, creating from them, perhaps, a necklace that I would present to a beautiful librarian. Alas, I was unhappy to learn that my rhinoliths --even the largest samples-- did not hold up to the rigorous glacial stimulation of my modest basement rock tumbler.
How can you accomplish anything when you want nothing less than the whole world, when you cannot bring yourself to settle down with one book, when all the books that ever were are waiting in the wings, piled around you everywhere you turn, noisy as birds in a covered cage?
A lost stretch in Lempriere's Classical Dictionary. Nox somehow leads to Discordia and ends up in Heliogabalus: "He raised his horse to the honours of the consulship, and obliged his subjects to pay adoration to the god Heliogabalus, which was no other than a large black stone....In the midst of his extravagances Heliogabalus married four wives, and not satisfied with following the plain laws of nature, he professed himself to be a woman, and gave himself to one of his officers, called Hierocles."
Hmmm. What do you think of the crow drinking all that whiskey? I knew an old wymyn who swallered a fly. Why? Beats my fat ass. The cow? Jumped over the fucking moon. Hey diddle diddle the cat played the damn fiddle. The camel walked right through the eye of a needle. A rich man waltzed straight through the gates of heaven. I'm not exactly sure what the bear did --went over the mountain, perhaps. The monkey cried for three straight days and refused to scratch his ass or climb into the hopelessly artificial tree. The rabbit conferred a blessing on all the beasts of the field. Someone tied the eagle to a rock and some bastard gouged out his liver with a can opener. The fish were completely indifferent unless and until there was big money involved --Disney money alone could coax tears of remorse from the lousy fish.
Three a.m. Plain as the nose on your face. Plain as the bum at the bottom of your back. The boy just sits alone in his room, listening to music. He doesn't believe you can dream your way out of the life you're given. The story of his life: liberal quotes from Television Personalities, Flipper, The Only Ones, Replacements, Minutemen, Husker Du, Warren Zevon (sure, why not), Yo La Tengo ("I hate feeling the way I do today...smarter than nobody"), Smog ("See, because alone in my room I feel like such a part of the community, but out on the streets I feel like a robot by the river").
Look, there's a satanist sweeping out his garage. Everywhere you turn there's some fleet, lovely creature lugging down a more plodding beast by the throat. The little band in the lobby bar was relentless and knew "Hotel California" inside and out. The lead singer was almost 300 pounds, and every night he'd venture out on to the dance floor to shake his ass with one lucky lady or another while the band choogled on without him. The big man could drink, and probably had a decent claim on the title of the world's greatest 300-pound tennis player.
Hand me my robe. I'm going back to the room to watch "Wheel of Fortune." Meatball sub? What the hell kind of an idea is that?
Sunny Murray is a train passing, rattling silverware in the drawer. Something crippled and almost recognizable crawls towards you down the back alley in the fog. God only knows, as the old woman was fond of saying. She wasn't kidding. Kiss your fat little fable goodnight and we'll just have to see if it wakes up resembling truth.
11:41:41 AM 
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