wandering on Planet Index

That’s why I’ve been away. It’s going relatively quickly this time, and relatively easily, but it still takes a considerable amount of time and attention.

Most painful index I ever did? No question, the one for my translation of Krämer’s History of Palestine. Indexing a historical book is brutal compared to a philosophical one– so many more details, proper names, and locations, all of whose entries must be analyzed in-depth to be of any use to the reader. The Largier whipping book would have been just as hard, but Zone had someone else do it for me, bless them. The Palestine history took just about the most miserable week of my life to index. I’d rather have taken a morphine overdose and just faded away with the sunset. It was awful.

With your own books, it can be kind of fun for reasons mentioned earlier… It’s a good last chance to hang out with your book before it goes into the world.

Also, it’s mildly amusing to see what terms end up next to each other in the index by purely alphabetical means. Best I’ve seen so far in this one is Judith Butler right next to George W. Bush.