Gilbert Highet (1906-1978) was a classicist, probably from infancy. Glasgow-born, he spoke with just a hint of Scottish burr (very handy for words like “terrific” and “pure”). Movie-star handsome, he was clearly meant to play the role of nothing less than a foreign secretary, though I think even Anthony Eden would have looked a bit raggedy-edged by comparison. I don’t recall him using his desk, unless as a prop. He demonstrated the art of teaching as performance by whipping around the class while describing some contemporary bounce of the living Classical Tradition, often through face-to-face enactments with randomly chosen students. Though he would often refer to his “own darling Catullus,” his infectious first love was his love of teaching. The Art of Teaching is his handy guide for those who would teach anything to anyone. Always affable and generous with his time, Highet was the easiest of professors to speak with. His wife, incidentally, was Helen MacInnes, also Glasgow-born, and my favorite spy and mystery novelist from high school on.

Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1894-1981), chairperson of the Graduate Department of English and Comparative Literature, was a woman of generous girth, convincing authority, and what I remember as profoundly grey eyes. A practitioner and fine tuner of the old historicism before it became the new historicism, she lectured from her desk on the thought and poetry of the seventeenth century (read her Breaking of the Circle or Newton Demands the Muse), but she could just as comfortably spend a New Critical hour in tracking down the simple subject and predicate of Milton’s “On His Blindness” or parsing one of the shorter poems of John Donne. Nicolson also taught the virtues of organization and clarity, not surprising for the daughter of a midwestern newspaper editor.

Maurice Valency (1903-1996) lived fortunately well into his nineties. Fortunately, because he had much more than an average lifetime of literary and allied accomplishments to work his way through. Although he was described as a theater master in Mel Gussow’s New York Times obituary (playwright, author, critic and professor of drama; known for his award-winning adaptations of the plays of Jean Giraudoux and Friedrich Duerrenmatt), Professor Valency was also a member of the New York bar, was fluent in at least seven languages, taught at Brooklyn College, was director of academic studies at Juilliard, and taught Spenser and Courtly Love at Columbia, where I had the mistaken notion that anyone who lectured so alluringly on sixteenth-century love poetry could hardly be doing much else. Valency had the air of a jaded patrician; he should have had one of those proud European names awash with prepositions. In the row behind me and a little to my right sat Charles Van Doren, one of Professor Van Doren’s two sons then at Columbia.

Mark Van Doren (1894-1972) had the aura of someone who might have received an Academy Award for his starring role in Civilization and who found no better way to express his thanks than to teach the plays of William Shakespeare. Van Doren’s Shakespeare classes are the stuff of legend. You would see very little note taking; there was too much in the way of thoughtful and easy-flowing talk to dwell on. Pick up his Shakespeare, indispensable and beautifully written, start reading on any page and you instantly get a sense of Van Doren. W. H. Auden is quoted in David Lehman’s foreword: “Professor Van Doren enlightens us, not because he has any special knowledge or private advantages, but because his love of Shakespeare has been greater than our own.” He was, in fact, a loving man who inspired love in others; it is not difficult to believe that if Lincoln had taught Shakespeare he would have spoken not unlike Illinois-born Mark Van Doren, whose son, Charles, was born on Lincoln’s birthday and given “Lincoln” as a middle name. Charles’s own story with regard to his role in the 1950s quiz scandals is available online in stacks of press coverage, but was best told in his own New Yorker article of July 28, 2008 entitled “All the Answers.”

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) walked briskly into his Literary Criticism class as the bell rang and departed aloofly while topping off his lecture, disappearing before his students had an opportunity to ask questions or close their brief cases. His grey flannel suit, striped tie, button-down blue shirt and precision-trimmed grey hair gave him the appearance of a spiffy John le Carre double agent. Read his one novel, The Middle of the Journey, for a sense of his spirit and his times.

Literary Criticism , I thought, was an enviable class hour for any teacher; it was the kind of course that could be called “Thoughts on Culture” or “What occurred to me as I was reading my morning paper.” Of course, it took Trilling’s aplomb and fluency, his intimacy with the complexities of large and small subjects to pull that off. He spoke on Cold War morality, death symbolism in modern poetry, the Freudian vision of instinct and civilization, the doctrinaire Left, the great novelists, the prevalence of mass cult, and the superiority of sociological thought over fiction in explaining contemporary times. Occasionally, Trilling would toss out an inexplicable “as everyone knows.” For instance: “As everyone knows, Brahms is too loud.” Embarrassing, I thought, to hear such nonsense from a person of his standing. Obsessed, I was tempted to bug him about Brahms during one of our brief elevator encounters at 620 West 116th Street, where we each lived and where he had a workspace on an upper floor, but he usually had about him an air of cheerless and unsmiling preoccupation that I rarely had the temerity to penetrate. Nonetheless he was, like many enclosed people, more self-revealing than even he might have realized. I remember sometimes how feelingly he read Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to his class, especially those lines about the world that “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light /Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. . .” and I am brought back to an understanding of the brilliant yet complicated man that he was.

Years earlier Trilling had turned from the hopefulness of Marx’s Divine Comedy to the despairing world view of Freud’s Paradise Lost. He regarded Freud as a towering figure, despite his disappointing personal analysis. Almost twenty years after Trilling’s death from pancreatic cancer his wife, Diana, wrote in The Beginning of the Journey (1993) that “it would have been better for him if he had railed against the failure of his therapy instead of blanketing it in his admiration of Freud.” His son, James Trilling, whose profession as an art historian fulfilled Diana’s own long abandoned career hope, concluded, controversially, in The American Scholar (“My Father and the Weak-Eyed Devils” ; Vol. 68 Spring 1999) that Trilling, like himself, had experienced lifelong Attention Deficit Disorder. He too found Trilling a complex spirit, living inside the myth of himself and not liking it. Read John Rodden’s “The Trilling family ‘romance’: report of a psychoanalytic autopsy” (The Free Library). But in the end, it really didn’t much matter how Trilling got the way he was, because neither I nor anyone I knew regretted for an instant attending his classes.

Edward Kalian, an Iranian law student well into his thirties, lived down the hall and, enviably, near the entrance door, which gave him an edge on privacy. We sipped on demitasses of his expertly prepared Turkish coffee while he spoke about the politically “overheated” mail he received from home. This was still many months before the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh.

Lionel Trilling, one of my more famous professors, lived on the first floor with his wife Diana, their infant son, James, and a young and attractive roomer who functioned as their domestic au pair.

I was happy to be living on 116th Street. Our apartment house was a little more than a block from my classes, and around the corner on Broadway were my favorite eating places: Tilson’s lunch counter for delicious tuna salad sandwiches; Chock Full o’Nuts for its justly famed doughnuts and coffee; and further southward the capacious West End Bar for rounds of cold draft beer, and thick burgers.

To help pay for my courses and cover expenses, I took a job as a page at Columbia’s Butler Library, working at the circulation desk or chasing down books in the dimly lit and cavernous stacks where I learned to use my thumbnail to gather enough light to read the Dewey decimal codes on the spines of books.

Life in the stacks was sometimes grimly boring, but I came to look forward to the hours of quiet isolation and the background gush of pneumatic tubes, through which call slips sped inside cylindrical capsules like the ones I’d seen in department stores. Besides, I had no end of assigned reading to cover, and I was of course surrounded by a zillion or so books, many of which I decided were never at all on anyone’s reading lists but had awaited decades for someone to open and breath their own particular dust.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t long before a pretty blonde page and I struck up a friendship with the principal aim of making the minutes fly, which we accomplished by smooching tirelessly in one or another of the small, secluded lavatories at the end of each tier; the lavatories were wisely equipped with lights that flashed whenever a capsule filled with call slips dropped into a nearby work station. Which caused, eventually, a temporary interruption in our incessant dalliance.

We did not take our romantic pastime on to the next level, so to speak. We had no relationship, and once beyond the purview of Butler Library we never saw each other unless by accident. I would return to my studies, say medieval love poetry, or to a dinner of pork and beans with a buttered muffin at Bickford’s Cafeteria on upper Broadway; but where she went I had no idea. And, curiously, there was never any sign that our amorous meetings were suspected by our fellow staff members, or the readers, or the chief circulation librarian, stately Miss Louise Stubblefield. I have since even toyed with the possibility that the entire experience might have been a fantasy, induced perhaps by inhaling some very odd book dust.

Cotlow came of age when a square jaw and a rucksack full of gumption could still do everything for a young man.  His lifelong wanderlust was given a swift kick forward when at 21 he went to sea for three years employed as a supercargo, charged with the care and commercial fate of his ship’s cargo, a Joseph Conrad job if there ever was one.  But it was as an aggressive insurance salesman that Cotlow grew rich enough to spend half a year away from home and business as film maker, author, and lecturer, carrying the identity card of an Explorer.

He lived in a large comfortable Park Avenue apartment near Bloomingdales, a likely source of its elegant decor, I imagined.  His den, however, was a stunning last resting place of the great beasts of the wild.  The floor was covered with a large, gleaming white polar bear rug, which I nimbly avoided stepping on.  An elephant’s foot served as an occasional table.  While I was  studying his collection of wall hangings–masks, shields, spears, a zebra hide, clustered arrows,  Cotlow removed a shoebox from a cabinet and asked me if I would like to see a shrunken head, an actual human shrunken head.  I told him that my nerves could manage a peep, and we soon settled down to our drinks and talk of the plight of the primitive world.

After two hours I left Cotlow, my briefcase bulging with a few of his previously published books, which he asked me to  draw ideas and inspiration from as I wrote the opening chapters of The Twilight of the Primitive.   I also carried abundant notes taken during our conversation, along with fresh tapes and transcripts from his recent travels among Brazil’s Xingu River people, who are now in the world news owing to the expected construction of a huge hydroelectric dam which will flood their lands and end their way of life.  And soon he would be off to the Arctic to learn how the Eskimos of Alaska’s North Slope were getting on with their new oil industry neighbors.  Meanwhile, I would be back at St. Marks Place writing and looking forward to a flat-rate check of $300.00 for each chapter, about two month’s rent in the 1970s. 

Before I could start typing away on my portable Olivetti, however, I needed to sort out how Cotlow thought about the people who were disappearing into a twilight of cultural extinction.  They were for him undoubtedly denizens of the dark , the Othermost side of the planet, known best by the plucky and adventurous.  That version sold well in the movie business. The trumpeting of elephants, chattering chimpanzees, and the ever ominous drums.

But Cotlow also wanted us to see the Primitives as not much different from his life insurance customers.  With his camera crew on hand his chummy relationship with the average Masai, Mangbetu, or  Watusi was transactional.  If you wanted to film them doing a ritual dance, he would say,  you first had to sell yourself.  They had to like you.  Another thing:  like the rest of us they had an urge to teach as well as learn, and they had much to teach, as his books attest.  He believed that their absence from the human neighborhood we would shortly and surely mourn.  He was right about that.

As for the index, not quite two week’s work,  it was as much fun to do as I had expected. At the end, Cotlow was generous; there was a bonus, a provision in his will earmarked for my son’s college expenses. That was fine. The only thing I still have difficulty getting over is that he did not understand how I could charge $150.00 for the index.  Indexers have their odd practices too, he must have thought.

Under my elbows is a desk drawer, a bordered chaos, unconnected to any of the larger chaoses that we ignore or deal with as each day begins, or ends.

(Note: chaos is a word not easily found pluralized in or out of dictionaries.  A website, “More Words” affirms that it is a valid word which has no direct anagrams, although there are many words that can be found within chaoses, like shoes or aches or ashes.)

First there is a packet of yellow Post-Its, which does not belong in this drawer but in the supply drawer on my right.  Done.  What else?  A small scissors that once belonged in a pocket sewing kit.  A pen light to be used in case of a sudden power outage.  A number of items that probably should also be in the supply drawer: several tins of paper clips, a Scotch tape roll, two small pencil sharpeners, two black Pilot pens still encased in the plastic packaging they came in.  Erasers, other pens, a box of very small and infrequently used staples.  It is difficult to throw anything out once it is tossed into this drawer.  Dental floss, both the waxed and the unwaxed kind, many band-aids, several alcohol swabs, useful for finger cuts caused by poking around in the drawer, and for removing ink stains from the white Formica desk top.  A power-drained AA battery.  Small plastic wrapped postage reply envelopes for returning empty printer cartridges.  Two outdated and therefore useless Metro North train tickets.  Nail clippers, tweezers, buttons, safety pins, coins,  including a film container filled with Sacajawea dollars.  Keys, some for locks of unknown whereabouts.   Several small magnifying glasses.  Some pretty stones and shells that sometimes provide an aesthetic jolt when I open the drawer and see them among the expected debris.  One amusing stone has the size, shape and color of a cigar which I have had for years and cannot yet throw away.  Of course all these items will one day find their way into a large black plastic bag.  That is altogether a tomorrow thing.  There is also a torn dollar bill (torn by rage, accident, or found that way?) which I had once hoped to restore to its now disappeared other half.

There is along with all the above a small puzzle that has survived in one drawer or another since my childhood, when it was bought for me by my aunt. I think it was originally called The Imp.  It is an approximately two and a quarter inch metal square with movable numbers–one to fifteen–which the puzzler arranges in the usual order horizontally (to the left or right),  or  vertically, or in spirals (also to the left or right), with the sixteenth (blank) space at the end.  Over the years, as one might suspect,  I have become pretty good at doing this little puzzle, especially when I am arranging the numbers from the left to the right, or clockwise.  I have kept it because solving the puzzle clears my mind and gives me a momentary illusion of exceptional competence,  which is something many sentient beings strive for in what ever small thing they do.

Christmas past:   During my childhood in Paterson, I lived in  a mostly freethinking Jewish family in which each member was given leave to observe the December holidays in his or her own way.  We agreed that it was a time of lights and gift-giving to light the inner person.  The public school I attended, P.S. 21,  pulled out all the stops and celebrated Christmas as a  national religious  event in which everyone was expected to participate in song or verse or become a silent knight.  My kindergarten teacher was Miss Sweeney who, during her doorway chats with Miss Donahue, maintained classroom decorum by striking  ominous chords on her piano.  At Christmas she lead her 30 charges to a vendor of trees; we helped select one and the entire class carried it , a 60-legged spruce, back to our room where it was decorated with totemic care–candy canes and apples and  baubles  brought from home.

I loved the Paterson Christmas.  I loved the way the city salted the air with anticipation.  It occupied only a few days, was minimally commercial, and thanks to my Aunt Ann,  it was a time for me of many small gifts and trips downtown to see the lighted trees behind the curtained windows along stately Van Houten Street, and best of all the largest of trees on Broadway glowing  with lights of  a deeply magical blue that I have not forgotten.  Overcoming my natural child’s skepticism, I came to believe that something unexpected and personally significant would occur at this time.

As the years passed, I visited Paterson rarely.  Although the times were improving, it seemed to me that the world’s heart had gotten colder and darker.  And so I chose January 10th as the quintessential “Paterson Day” when the last of the Christmas trees were abandoned on the sidewalks, some of them still smoldering, when the lights still glimmered faintly around the windows of neighborhood taverns, and the starlings that desecrated the statues in front of City Hall screamed insults at people rushing to their buses.   It was the Thirteenth Day of Christmas.  The January syndrome.  This is how it is, how it really is, I told myself.  And for me Christmas became a more closely held event with a friend or two in front of my own fireplace, toasting Light in December.

Christmas future:  Now I am back in a small town Christmas with occasional visits to the spectacular displays at or near  Grand Central Station.   This is the future.  I can understand the tension between those who want to make the public Christmas go away and those who want it to stay.  Christmas comes too soon and stays too long.  And then, once again the darkly ordinary, the ice storms and the penalty of Adam.

And we are, more surely as adults, subject to our child’s skepticism and propensity for disappointment.  With some difficulty we align and balance our givings and takings,  the self-indulgent  Saturnalias and the ascent of the spirit, while we seek if for only an hour the elusive light of our childhood’s perfect self.

Here’s another question: why are so many of us attracted to the famous?  For the same reason, many have said. The famous transcend the here and now.  They will live on, and we are enlarged by emotionally funding that transcendence. That is an engaging myth.  Allow me to personalize it.  But first a useful clarification.

There is a broadly held distinction  between heroes, people we greatly admire, and the famous–”celebrities” if they are presently alive.  Obviously, and here I am a relativist, one person’s hero might be merely famous to another ( or possibly not well known at all, for instance my grade school shop teacher, Mr. Steenstra, who taught me to love the fragrant ambience of shellac and freshly sawed white pine).

One example from recent history:  Churchill and Hitler were each heroes but not for the same people, and no one would disagree that each was famous.  Unlike heroism, fame is value-neutral, in theory anyway.  But in fact there have always been fame-worshippers as there have been hero-worshippers.  Sometimes it is not easy to see the difference: people who once  breathlessly reported a Garbo sighting; the swooners at a Presley or Beatles concert.  I had to steady a friend one day in a supermarket because she thought she saw an actor from the cast of As the World Turns.

(My Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-IV, has not cataloged the altered state induced by high-level celebrities, although I am inclined toward “Dissociative Trance Disorder.”  However, this trance disorder is not culturally sanctioned–which means they might put you away–but what I am describing here appears to be universally accepted.}

On the subject of fame one’s own experience is sometimes more helpful than cultural theory.   Because of my life in the word trades, I have met my fair share of celebrities: writers, actors, musicians, politicians and so on.  A few of them have been my heroes.  Approaching a hero requires an emotional steadiness that I have not always had at my command.  I am then like a young man who courageously introduces himself to the belle of the ball and stiffly asks for the next dance.

The poet W. H. Auden qualified as a hero for me.  This is how things went one evening when fate arranged for both of us to be smoking in the vestibule at the entrance to Manhattan’s 92nd Street YMHA where he was scheduled to read.

Do I just smile and nod affably, I asked myself, or do I say something, preferably brief and cannily sensible? Autograph? Never.  If he were a stranger one of us might have said something like, “Are you a fan of Auden?” and then go on to speculate about which poems he would be reading.  But when it is Auden himself what does one say? This was awkward.  Should I simply depart for the auditorium and look for a seat?  That would be cowardly.  And when would I have another chance to speak to him? I could tell him that I love his poems.  But he must know that, or why else would I be here?  Isn’t there some boilerplate expression for occasions like this? Yes there is. . .  Just say it.

“Mr. Auden, ” I said. “Reading your poems has given me much. . .very much pleasure.”

At first he said nothing; then Inhaling deeply, he tilted his head back and artfully expelled the smoke as at last he answered evenly, “Oh rilleh.”

That was my conversation with W. H. Auden.  But it wasn’t quite the end of our asymmetrical relationship, because fate slipped another wild card into my deck when some years later I discovered that we were living a few houses apart on St. Marks Place in the East Village, where we would often pass each other similarly burdened with bags of laundry or groceries.  I cannot say why exactly, but until he left his digs at No. 77, to return to England and soon to die, I never spoke a word to him.

It could have been that for a time his formidable craggy face blended too well into the St. Marks scene: the flower children, the rebels, the assorted fallen angels.  Or it may have been that in those days I thought that time had no end, and that I could always steel myself to say hello when next we passed.  I was wrong about that, but still I have always kept a copy of his poems close at hand.

Interesting. How often we find curious onlookers attempting to penetrate the mysteries of our seemingly humdrum craft. To them, good luck.  But now it was as though suddenly everyone had an irresistible urge to visit Cleveland.

It did not end there, however.  Since the author was Sarah Palin, whose name is catnip to the media, the Award story was retold unflaggingly by influential online magazines, political websites, and news blogs: Daily Kos, Huffington Post, and Slate, to name a few.  Their reader comments gave voice not only to a wide sweep of opinions on Going Rogue but also on indexing, a subject about which, it turned out, nearly everyone had something to say. For instance from The Daily Beast:

“Give me a data file of the whole text, a six-pack of interns and a reference copy of the bound volume for each of them to use, and I’ll get you an index for a book much thicker than Palin’s within one business day.  Honestly.”

And: “Adobe InDesign has the same thing. A couple hours, tops, and several mouse clicks and you have an index.  You can skip the interns.”

On the other hand: ” Software does not write indexes anymore than it writes books. PEOPLE write indexes–after reading and analyzing the manuscript.  And it does take days or weeks, not hours. Indexing is a profession.  Done by people.  Software simply helps.”

Meanwhile, the Pleasantville Diner crowd, disappointed with Harper’s no-index decision, was entertaining itself with the idea of inviting indexers at large to fill the empty pages in Going Rogue as a competition. June Bissell asked what the prize might be. “You could publish the winner’s index in your blog,” George Tuesday suggested.  “Not a good idea.” P. del Sorto, the indexing dean, said. “An index of two or three thousand lines would bust your blog.”  The issue was soon settled, because by the next day we were all talking about the raft of index parodies joyously satirizing Palin that were appearing on the Cybersphere.  They averaged around 200 not 2000 lines.

“One of the great moments in Indexing,” del Sorto said.  “And please pass the ketchup, George.”

“I know they could have just as well been written if Going Rogue had never been published.” George said.  “And they weren’t prepared with anything like grammatical observance, but . . . don’t you think they’re funny?”

“I’ll tell you when you pass the ketchup.”

Later, June Bissell was making the point that a comparison of the Rogue indexes showed the risk of having several indexers, even the speediest, work on the same book. “When they are done you might never know that they were working on the same book,” she said, examining some notes she had written on the back of an index card.

“Take ‘God’ for instance, a topic you might expect the political left to look for in a book inspired by the political right.  The New Republic indexed 48 references to ‘God’ with no subentries, but Slate only found nine, although each came with a subentry like ‘deliberate causation of premature birth of Trig of’ on page 195, and Huffington Post had not a single reference for the “God” or religion for that matter, whether out of respect or for religious correctness or what who can say?”

“Marvelous,” del Sorto said.  “But do you really think the Rogue indexes are worth the Higher Criticism?  Just another small skirmish in the American Culture Wars.”

As I got up to take the train back to Chappaqua I asked del Sorto if he had any idea of how to title our blog post on the no-index controversy.  “That’s above my pay grade,” he said.  “But I’ll think about it.”

There was a time when I could absorb excess attention by turning on a TV movie channel and finding a film, preferably one that I had seen many times, because there were no unexpected twists in the story that I would need to think about.  British films did the job well, especially wartime sea stories like In Which We Serve or The Cruel Sea, or any movie with Jack Hawkins for that matter. Comedies with Margaret Rutherford or Alistair Sim were also charming, sustaining company, and like a Rachmaninoff concerto they never wore out.  When the movie channels stopped showing films like these I felt I had been cut adrift; then I discovered YouTube.  It was something else.

YouTube covers the broadest of cultural and political spectra.  Since its birth in November 2005 it has grown hourly into a giant of incalculable size.  Acquired by Google, Inc. a year later, it now serenely delivers the entire Dantean gamut from blessed genius down through the depths of breathtakingly aggressive idiocy.  It tells us where we are, have been, and might be going.  Another infant of the Information Age stomping around like a disoriented brontosaur.

It is easy enough at any hour to find a video on YouTube that will serve as a work-friendly companion.  The thing is to observe a few cautions.  Settle on a piece that will answer to your mood, and be ready to navigate to parts two, three and beyond if the selected work is longer than five or ten minutes.  Do not be distracted by the comments of other viewers, which range from the occasionally helpful to the churlishly juvenile.  And unless your mood is adventuresome rule out travels through the labyrinthine linkages, the “related videos” that can drive your attention from composition to composer to performers to interviews and on to venues new and unrelated to your original plan.  But then again why not?  Take a few minutes to visit Earth.

For instance, I have stumbled on: an animated version of the Gypsy Chorus from Verdi’s La Traviata in which loping desserts march on and victoriously decorate an operatically guarded cake; a short and very funny play about tech help requested by a medieval monk; a ride through Barcelona in 1908 filmed from the front of a trolley; Helen Mirren playing the best of Rosalinds in As You Like It; Leonard Bernstein conducting Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G from the piano in a dazzling Parisian performance; Laurinda Almeida, the outstanding Brazilian classical guitarist, playing Manha De Carnaval, the jazz/bossa work featured in Black Orpheus; Vladimir Horowitz bringing tears to the eyes of Muscovites in playing Schumann’s reliably heart-rending Traumerei; and John Edwards doing not much else besides playing with his hair while we listen to “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story.  Bernstein again.

Below are the videos of the animated Gypsy Chorus and the last movement of Ravel’s Concerto in G, mentioned above.

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]]> http://www.indexinglife.com/the-intelligent-indexers-guide-to-youtube/feed/ 0 http://www.indexinglife.com/trivia-some-context-on/ http://www.indexinglife.com/trivia-some-context-on/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:48:33 +0000 SWC http://www.indexinglife.com/?p=114 Trivia. This is a topic that I have been meaning to write about for months.  Indexers collect trivia by the bushel: the oddments, scraps, crumbs, and often the unintentionally remembered leavings of their daily work.  They are known to inflict it on each other or anyone else who might be listening.

Trivia should not be confused with small talk, nor is it to be found in merely obscure facts; every obscure fact belongs to someone who may cherish it or at least find a professional use for it, and small talk is usually the right size for the occasion and the speaker.  Trivia is information that has lost its pertinence, gone astray.  It is a fact without context, prized only as a fact.

Trivia  is knowing for the sake of knowing, but  not understanding.  Trivia is a natural fit for board games, miscellaneous compilations, quiz shows, crossword puzzles, and bloodless knowledge duels.  It is information  liberated from the tyranny of thought.  It is the residue Q and the A of the Information Age.

Who was both the youngest and oldest secretary of defense?  With whom did Wendell Willkie have a romantic liaison in China?  Who was Britain’s longest serving prime minister?  What did Nixon do on this date (October 23) in 1973?  These are a few of the questions I have been asked by one indexer who, by the way, keeps a calendar listing anniversaries of historic events for each day.   Of course, I don’t always have an answer, but I am usually ready with a sly rejoinder like “OK, who invented the fountain pen?”  Trivia games.

Trivia questions are typically head-slappers, eliciting the “Oh I knew that ” response.  But there are many other questions that fill up books (sometimes called “nonbooks”) with information that might seem to the casual reader as appealingly useless as the characters in a Seinfeld episode.   I possess a pile of such books that I have been unable to give away and can’t bring myself to throw out.  One is Durations, subtitled “The Encyclopedia of How Long Things Take” ( Stuart A. Sandow et al., eds.) which  begins with the time it takes light to travel across a proton.  (Many many zeroes after the decimal point.)  A student of physics might be considering that datum even now.  For others it is microtrivia.   Further on, under “twenty minutes,”  the reader comes to the time required for death by hanging, an isolated piece of information which might only concentrate the mind of someone expecting to be hanged at daybreak.

“Ten to Fourteen days ” is the time a patient is advised to wait before resuming normal sex after a hemorrhoidectomy,  a fact obviously significant to those who have had or may soon have that  operation and who also engage in normal sex,  but not others for whom it is likely to be a  homeless fact, make of it what they will.

You can’t entirely blame indexers for spilling over with trivia .  Their baggage of scattered facts is a useful resource when every week or so brings a new set of topics to organize.  Still I find myself wondering–if an indexer in a forest should ask a trivia question and there were no one there to answer, would the indexer exist?

My friend and colleague for a time, Cleveland Amory was just such a player.  We met while I was doing editorial research.  I would spend several afternoons working at the New York Public Library doing what would now take an hour or two on the Internet.  Amory needed help with his third book on Society.  He took the view that the better, older names were giving way to the newer cheaper sort of publicity-driven celebrities.  The title of this book was Who Killed Society? Later we worked together with Earl Blackwell and friends on the Celebrity Register.  To be included in this biographical dictionary its subjects were required to be alive, not to have broken any serious laws (political troubles excepted), and to be sufficiently well known.

Amory’s nickname was “Clip,” but I preferred to call him by his two-syllable first name with just a touch of stress on the second syllable.  He once told me that the columnist, Westbrook Pegler said, “If you’ve got a Pullman-car first name like mine use it.”  Amory was a tall, affable man with baby-smooth skin who would sometimes bite on his handkerchief while studying the chessboard.

When we played chess in Central Park he would bring along his pet toy poodle, Tiger to whom he would offer comments on the key events of our game.  “He thinks he’s pinned our castle, Tiger, but that’s a big fat nothing.”  Tiger was small enough for Amory to hold closely snuggled against his cheek.  I kept a fawn Great Dane named Phoebe who I usually left at home in Brooklyn Heights.  There were times when I thought it might improve my game if Phoebe were at my side.  As it happened, Amory beat me more often than I beat him.  I expected that.  We eventually parted over the disappointments that are known to befall young people when they attach themselves to the glamored famous with expectations of future advancement.  But that is another story.

Our last game was held in the Harvard Club.  Norman Cousins and Amory’s other friends would drift by for a while, shake their heads as if they had something to tell us if they could and then drift off. This game was our longest.  I had a strong intuition that I was going to win, and when I discovered that I was looking at the game-ender I could scarcely conceal my excitement.  After I made the move, which soon put me considerably ahead in material, I stared at Amory expecting him to resign, but he did not turn his eyes away from the board, his handkerchief half in his mouth as if preventing the possibility that he might do harm to his teeth.  My thoughts were no longer on the game. Occasionally I would exchange smiles with those in the small cocktail-hour crowd that now clustered around our table.  And then Amory made his move.

Riding home to Brooklyn on the subway that evening I had plenty of time to put together the pieces of my disaster.  I had traded away my position for material advantage and left myself open to Amory’s unexpected and fatal counterattack.  Chess, I soon concluded, was a game that was not worth playing unless you could play it well, really well, a minority opinion I am aware.  I replayed that game in my mind for months after, but have long since mercifully forgotten it.  I have not forgotten Amory who died in 1998 and is remembered most famously as an animal-rights activist. A fellow Virgoan, he would have made, I suspect, an excellent indexer.