Comments on: Indexing as artform

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 16:20:05 +0000

Halmos could be pretty funny even in math. His Naive Set Theory ends something like: “Nothing includes everything. Or, to put it more dramatically, there is no universe”. This could have been said much more flatly, something like ‘There is no set which includes all sets, so it is an error to speak of “the universe of discourse”’. P.S. I’m faking the math, so maybe there’s a better paraphrase.

By: Owen

Owen — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 11:08:42 +0000

One anecdote not in Bell’s compilation is the Paul Halmos’s circular reference to a fellow mathematician in a classic textbook.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 04:23:03 +0000

I have always believed that Borges’ peculiar list was derived from the Buddhist list of 100 Dharmas, which was supposed to include all the important factors in reality. A sample of these: Ipseity, Spatiality, Otherwiseness, Time, Speed, Differentiation of species, Life-force, Concrete Form Analyzed to the Minutest Extent, Taste, Tongue, Tasting-consciousness, Torpor, Restlessness, Envy, Stupidity, Desire, Volition, Focusing, Sensory Contact. http://www.hm.tyg.jp/~acmuller/yogacara/outlines/100dharmas-big5.htm

By: Dr. Weevil

Dr. Weevil — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 03:04:33 +0000

I don’t know whether Dive into Mark was first (your link takes me to an error message) but I switched my blogroll to a Borgesian layout on March 20th (with a further post on the 31st). The only category name I still use is the last: “Those included in this classification”, but the rest include Puns, Pundits, Ranters, Imperatives and Interrogatives, and so on. It makes for amusing juxtapositions (e.g. Cathy’s World and Dean’s World, A Dog’s Life and Coyote at the Dog Show), but is still a bit confusing even to me, so I may change back to alphabetical order.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Thu, 16 Oct 2003 01:53:07 +0000

One of my favorite bad indices is in the Oxford edition of Hegel’s phenomenology of spirit. It has an entry for Hamlet, who is indeed mentioned twice in rather mysterious ways, but seems to lack entries for any of Hegel’s important concepts. No—I take that back—if you want to know about “dialectic,” apparently you need only read p. 124. Pale Fire is a good novel index. And Dave Barry’s books have good ones sometimes (actually, they look a lot like the Hegel).

By: Jeremy Osner`

Jeremy Osner` — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 20:29:42 +0000

One of the incidental characters in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is an indexer—she is travelling with the narrator to the island republic whose name I have forgotten and engages him in a conversation about indexing. All I remember of it is that she looks down on authors who attempt to index their own work.

By: Henry Farrell

Henry Farrell — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 17:15:05 +0000

Bell has a long, loving entry on the index for “The Stuffed Owl.” Ballard’s short story and Perec’s novel make it in there too. It’s really a lovely little anthology.

By: david

david — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:41:32 +0000

The bad indexes can also offer a laugh. Henry Kamen’s biography of Philip II, on whose empire the sun never set, makes the strange argument that Philip, whatever those apologists for universal empire were claiming, was not an imperialist. In the index, you find: Philip II: not imperialist. He left out the “damn it.”

By: --kip

--kip — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:36:09 +0000

I can’t remember where I first saw it excerpted, but I’ve always loved the index entries for Flaubert, Gustav from Geoffrey Wall’s biography of the same: bq. Æsthetic mysticism; alleged sadism; artistic intransigence; attitude to marriage; castration complex; celebrity and influence; chevalier de la Légion d’honneur; death; debts; dogs; fatness; hallucinations; interest in history; masturbation; modernity; pleasure taken in books; pleasure taken in travelling; realism; recitations; romanticism; sexual abstinence; sexual initiation; sexual passion; syphilis; use of prostitutes; views on book illustrations. Not a bad map of a life well-lived.

By: Andrew Edwards

Andrew Edwards — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 15:23:40 +0000

Let me just second PNH’s recommendation of the Stuffed Owl index. It’s utterly hilarious, top to bottom, and the very first thing I thought of reading this post.

By: jim in austin

jim in austin — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:58:20 +0000

You might enjoy the encyclopedic index as a novella, Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual...

By: Phersu

Phersu — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 14:42:17 +0000

This is not indexing but “cross-indexing” : in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encylopédie, the “Anthropophagy” entry has a link to the”Eucharist” entry.

By: Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Patrick Nielsen Hayden — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 13:43:23 +0000

Hugh Kenner's survey of Irish literature, A Colder Eye, has an index that, aside from providing page references, gives everyone mentioned in the book their Homeric epithet:

O'Casey, Sean, ventriloquist
O'Nolan, Brian, logician

etc., etc. Then of course there's The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, whose index contains entries like

Heaven, system of bookkeeping in, 32; vogue of Mr. Purcell's music in, 37; unexpected grandeur of its architecture, 48; knowledge of languages useful in, ibid.; blasted, 188; haloes the only wear in, 216 Hinds, salubrious, 14; athletic, 60. See also Swains Smile, Queen Mary's, its anticipated effect on national prosperity, 39; social, donned by rustic in leisure moment, 137. See also Corpse

By: tim

tim — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 13:26:48 +0000

In a well-known solid state physics book, one can find entries in the index like both cart, before horse horse, after cart and prose, page of unrelieved as well as a listing of every page in which there is an exclamation mark, including one page with two (noted with an exclamation mark that is also duly listed). I imagine she didn’t check any physics texts, though.

By: Nabakov

Nabakov — Wed, 15 Oct 2003 12:52:50 +0000

And J.G Ballard turned the concept of indexes into a complete short story entitled “The Index”, which closes with: Zileinski, Bronislaw, 742; commissioned to prepare index, 748; warns of suppression threats, 752; disappears, 761