The Art Of Indexing (Continued)

I’ve written previously about my love of indexes (or indices, if you’re so inclined), and my huge admiration for the people who make a living compiling these things. Many of these folks clearly have a perverse sense of humor and the souls of poets. Some of them are perhaps batshit crazy.

Check out the decidedly odd and obviously personal agendas at work in some of the examples cited in that previous piece and I think you’ll see what I mean.

I continue to scan the indexes of books for additional wonders, and I now have a pretty fat collection of utterly useless but nonetheless personally entertaining material. Eventually I’ll go to the trouble of posting some more of it here, but in the meantime I’ve stumbled across an index that is a pure and deliberate work of art.

Lisa Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture was one of my favorite books from last year, even though I read it late in December and so didn’t have a chance to include it on my end-of-the-year list of highlights. Robertson’s a hugely entertaining and aphoristic writer, a poet with a terrific eye, abnormal curiosity, and a gift for rambling far afield. Her prose style is sort of like Walter Benjamin meets Jane Bowles meets Djuna Barnes meets Anne Carson. She drives her words in and out of incredibly dense thickets, and yet time and again her paragraphs arrive abruptly at these unexpected vistas that leave you stunned.

Strangely enough, the first time I read the book I hadn’t even noticed the index, which was compiled by Stacy Dorris. I discovered this icing on the cake the other night when I picked up Occasional Work and was looking for a quote.

Here are some examples from Dorris’s index:

“Hey Cobweb,”, 237; Babylonian doilies, 13; Chili preferred, 92; Dandering here, 236; fountains that want us to act like knowledge, 58; frost-tolerant hermaphrodites seem capable of swallowing barns, 125; leaps the frame with a sack of narcissus bulbs, 104; mauveness, 15, 217; pie, 126; Placating foods appear, 241; primal shack-envy, 182; roofliness, 15, 96, 110, 177, 179, 181, 183, 277; scumble, 142; their nylon halos, 259; toilette ghosted, 27; We ate the cheese, 237; what a wall is without being a wall, 163.