Something is going awry with my writing today. I wrote a long post this morning, and just as I was finishing, the computer went through a scan and shut down. The post was lost. Now the blog platform will not allow me to type past the link I include here for Hazel Bell's book. I guess I will do all of my typing before the link. I am excited to read this book. It is definitely a treat for those of us who have indexed for years, and who, when asked, "What do you do?" draw blank stares, or, like utter rude, "Wow, that sounds boring, dull, awful" like the endodontist who had his fingers in my mouth, so I couldn't reply. I thought, you put your hands in people's diseased mouth's all day, and my work with books is boring? Hehe. Here is the quote from Swift on the back cover: The most accomplished way of using books at present is twofold: either, first, to serve them as men do lords--learn their titles exactly and then brag of their acquaintance' or, secondly, which is, indeed, the choicer, the profounder and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail. For to tenter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back door. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (1701). Here is the link. Indexers and Indexes in Fact & Fiction. 

I figure since the last time I posted was in July, I'd post a photo from July. I am not actively seeking indexing work, but if somebody happened by with a fascinating book that needs an excellent, smart and soulful index, I would love to do it. Bioethics or Health Care Reform, or anything related to interests on my twitter description. I am always thinking of relaunching the indexing, but then I think of Ebooks, and realize it is time to move on.

The puppy is 11 months old. She just chewed up an Italian notepad that my mother gave me. My mother is dead, and when I escorted Nell to her crate, I told her this. She also chewed a bottle of stamp pad ink. There is is red on the sheets and quilt and blanket and mattress. It has not been a good day in the pup department. It was an excellent weekend, warm and walks on the beach and in mud puddles and at the puppy park. Maybe it is her way of telling me she needs to be out and running in the woods.

Tomorrow is my poetry workshop. The prompt, and the workshop theme (which meets once a month) is to examine artifacts, objects, things. Joseph Cornell keeps cropping up in my mind --well, and the reality shows on hoarders. Still lives. As someone writing about Cornell the other day said, he borrowed other people's memories. My own are bogging me down. I have many objects infused with meaning and memory, of course, being old and attached to the sentiment the things evoke (See: notebook from dead mother chewed by dog), and when I examine them I drift into memory. I come back to the object and reject it as a still life, a dormant thing. There was just a story of Thomas Beller's on The New Yorker site that I tweeted, written when he was 25. It beautifully renders, he writes beautifully, of a boy home from Vassar for Christmas Vacation; brooding about a girl. It is his widowed mother's apartment. There are photographs and books, his dead father's books. No puppy. No puppy, chewing.

A collection guy called me from a Texas "law firm." He claimed to be a paralegal. He was collecting (a different sort of collecting) a debt for a visit to the Emergency Room in KW. A was dehydrated, and we were scared. Instead of having the doctor come to us, we visited the hospital, because we figured insurance would pay. The bill was for 1,800 dollars, and insurance paid $1,000.00. I paid a hundred dollar copay. The cab there and back was $80.00. She was tested for everything. A pregnancy test. All sorts of tests. She was given fluids and antibiotics, and that was that. Only, this bill. Her father's insurance, he stonewalled, refused involvement. So now, a year and a half later, an ill spoken guy calls and tells me he is a paralegal, only he is not, he is a collections dude. I think $1,1000 is enough for a bag or two of fluids. I offer a hundred bucks. No, $500.00. Nope, sue me. I am a stage IV cancer person. I owe my soul to hospitals and doctors. This came two months after our KW visit in June of 2010, after the dog died while we were in the Miami airport, and the vet called and said ol' Lil's stomach had twisted. No holding off until we returned. Then my mother that August, then my diagnosis in the fall, treatment a year ago. No evidence of disease. Yet, the bills, the hospital bills and medical bills, they continue. Is it illegal to claim you are a paralegal when you are not? I hear collections is big business these days. Pennies on the dollar, and bullying. But it is hard to be intimidated by someone who can't construct a sentence. I think he must have found me when I checked my credit reports, all three agency and a number, thinking I might survive by buying a foreclosed upon property, my rent so high here. Wanting shelter when the dough runs out. Maybe he found me here.

He called my cell phone. He had a NH area code although calling from Texas.
Is this interesting? Nah, but it feels good to write it out.

If I erase this site there will be an orphan site of my indexing business. I think there nothing worse than having abandoned identities all over the internet. Nothing worse than finding a dead site. I did erase the blogger blog written last year for my daughters when I thought I might not be around. Then I printed it in a booklet, and gave it to them. Maybe it is time to write in my blog again. Post treatment, NED, in debt. Alive.

Wikipedia entry on Book Indexing

This is from "The Sign of Jonas," a spiritual log of Thomas Merton's day-to-day life in the Trappist monastery where he was ordained as a priest. This is his entry regarding his INDEX for "The Seven Storey Mountain."

June 20, 1948 Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

Bob Giroux had somebody do an index to "The Seven Storey Mountain" --the most peculiar collection of names you ever saw. Starts off with Abbot, Father, and goes on to Advent; Adler, Alfred; Ellington, duke; Fields, W.C.; but Smith, Pete, is followed by Smith, Robert Paul, and there is Bob O'Brien the plumber at Olean House and Pierrot the teamster at Saint Antonin and the Privats at Murat and Brother Fabian who went to Georgia and Mary Jerdo, and Helen Freegood, and Burton, Jinny and Flagg, Nancy and Wells, Peggy. (Peggy wrote to me from Hollywood the other day. I can't figure out if she is acting as well as writing.)

I was fascinated. The index is beautiful. It is like the gathering of all the people I have known at a banquet to celebrate the publication of the book--and it is like a pledge that they we'll all belong to meet somehow as trophies in heaven--or I will belong to some of THEM as a trophy. Blake, William; Francis of Assisi, Saint; Bonaventure, Saint; Aquinas, Saint: Thomas... I think this index is a partial optimistic preview of the General Judgment with the four Marx Brothers among the sheep.

So God is very good. "Sanctus in omnibus operibus suis ("Holy in all His works."). Though the natural pleasure of success sickens me a  little and I get smoke in my eyes from thinking about how the book will look, still I have to take all that on the chin and stay as tranquil and detached as God's grace will grant me to do.

The Angels they've lost their desire for us, said they won't set themselves on fire for us...