It takes a certain sort of person to write a history of the Index and Dennis Duncan is the right kind of guy to write it: he’s smart and snarky! The subtitle to Index, A History of is A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age. Duncan takes the reader on a chronological adventure from the early times of scrolls to today’s ebooks.

Along the way Duncan shares plenty of juicy facts. Did you know the first English work printed on a printing press was William Caxton’s Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye in 1473. Did you know that William F. Buckley sent Norman Mailer a complimentary copy of his The Unmaking of a Mayor and in the Index next to Mailer’s name, Buckley wrote “Hi!” knowing Mailer would check his name first. Snarky, indeed!

Along with the history of the development of the Index, Duncan spices things up with references to how authors used the Index in various works. Vladimir Nabokov played plenty of Index games in his Pale Fire. Duncan shows where the Index is a key factor in “A Scandal in Bohemia” where Irene Adler outwits Sherlock Holmes.

Duncan deals with contemporary indexing by quoting Google engineer Matt Cutts who explains that “The first thing to understand is that when you do a Google search, you aren’t actually searching the web. You’re searching Google’s index of the web” (p. 1-2).

There was an old saying in Graduate School that if you could master the use of the Index, you would have access to all knowledge. That not far from true. Index, The History of is a great book filled with knowledge and fun! GRADE: A

Table of Contents:

Introduction 1

1 Point of Order On Alphabetical Arrangement 19

2 The Births of the Index Preaching and Teaching 49

3 Where Would We Be Without It? The Miracle of the Page Number 85

4 The Map or the Territory The Index on Trial 113

5 ‘Let No Damned Tory Index My History!’ Sparring in the Back Pages 136

6 Indexing Fictions Naming was Always a Difficult Art 171

7 ‘A Key to All Knowledge’ The Universal Index 203

8 Ludmilla and Lotaria The Book Index in the Age of Search 230

Coda: Archives of Reading 261

Notes 273

List of Figures 299

Acknowledgements 303

Appendix: A Computer-generated Index 307

Index 313

Diane decided that her deck needed an awning to protect her from the sun. She chose a local awning company and a crew arrived to install the piping that would support the awning. Now that the piping has been installed, the material Diane chose for the actual awning is being sewed and fitted. Another crew will show up in a couple of weeks and install the finished awning. What do you think?

Just when you think things couldn’t get worse…the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Sure, we all knew this was coming since the leak of Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion a month ago. But, now it’s Real.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas suggests this opens the door to overturning gay marriage, contraception, and transgender rights. With their super majority, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett can do whatever they want.

There are Dark Days ahead, my friends. Real Dark!

John M. Ford died in 2006 of a heart attack. He was 49 years old. Aspects, with a brilliant Introduction by Ford’s friend Neil Gaiman, consists of a 480 page novel that Ford’s death left unfinished.

John M. Ford won the 1983 World Fantasy Award for his novel The Dragon Waiting. Ford also won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1993 for Growing Up Weightless.

Aspects is being marketed as a fantasy novel, but it is much more than that. The main character, Varic, Coron of the Corvaric Coast, opens the novel with a duel. The politics of this world Ford invents is complicated with many factions including sorcerers.

As you might expect, there’s plenty of action, conspiracies, and skullduggery. I have other John M. Ford books and now I’d like to drop everything and read them. Have you read unfinished books? GRADE: B+

I’m still in the mood to listen to live performances on CD that I’ve had on my shelves for decades. VH-1 Presents Donna Summer Live & More Encore! came out in 1999. I bought it and never listened to it until last week. This live CD presents most of the Donna Summer hits like “She Works Hard for the Money” and “Bad Girls.” Some people hate her rendition of “MacArthur Park” but I think it’s okay. The final song, “I Will Go With You (Con Te Partiro)” sounds a lot like “Time To Say Good-bye” to me. If you’re a Donna Summer fan, you’ll enjoy this concert version of her hits. GRADE: B

TRACK LIST:

Diane loves Carole King and James Taylor which explains why I bought Carole King & James Taylor at the Troubadour. But, for some unknown reason, the CD/DVD set from 2010 remained unopened until last week. There’s some overlap with songs on both the CD and DVD. I tend to like Carole King’s songs better than James Taylor’s songs, but the two artists seem to be having a good time singing together. GRADE: B+

TRACK LIST:

I’m sad to admit I’ve had Neil Young Unplugged since 1993. I have no credible reason for not listening to this CD (or the other dozen Neil Young CDs on my shelf) before now. Unlike the two other CDs in this blog post, this Neil Young CD is NOT a greatest hits compilation. Neil Young includes “Harvest Moon” and “Helpless” but many of his other song choices must be personal favorites. In this MTV concert, the vocals, the acoustic guitar, Young’s harmonica have never sounded better. GRADE: A

TRACK LIST:

Isaac Asimov is best known as an iconic Science Fiction writer, best known for his Foundation trilogy. But Asimov also wrote SF novels with mysteries in them like Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun.

Asimov also wrote traditional mysteries. Starting in 1972, Asimov wrote more than a 100 mystery stories. His most popular mysteries involved the Black Widowers, a fictional men-only dining club for a series of sixty-six mystery stories.

Asimov uses the Black Widower stories to delve into aspects of science, history, culture and his other interests: for example, Goldbach’s conjecture in “Sixty Million Trillion Combinations“; Gilbert and Sullivan in “The Year of the Action”; and the origins of the name “Susan” in “The Intrusion”.

Isaac Asimov’s other mystery series, Union Club, features stories set at a club known as the Union Club, in which a conversation between three members prompts a fourth member, Griswold, to tell about a mystery he has solved. These are often tall stories, and often based on his time in US intelligence. The format is based on that utilized by P. G. Wodehouse in recounting his golf stories. Asimov wrote 55 Union Club stories.

If you’re a fan of Isaac Asimov, you might be familiar with some of these stories. Some of these stories were published for the first time in this collection. I found these stories clever and intelligent. GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• Black Widowers
  • “The Obvious Factor” — 3
  • “The Pointing Finger” — 20
  • “Out of Sight” — 36
  • “Yankee Doodle Went to Town” — 55
  • “Quicker Than the Eye” — 73
  • “The Three Numbers” — 90
  • “The One and Only East” — 109
  • “The Cross of Lorraine” — 126
  • “The Next Day” — 144
  • “What Time Is It?” — 162
  • “Middle Name” — 180
  • “Sixty Million Trillion Combinations” — 197
  • “The Good Samaritan” — 213
  • “Can You Prove It?” — 230
  • “The Redhead” — 247
• Union Club
  • “He Wasn’t There” — 267
  • “Hide and Seek” — 274
  • “Dollars and Cents” — 281
  • “The Sign” — 288
  • “Getting the Combination” — 295
  • “The Library Book” — 302
  • “Never Out of Sight” — 309
  • “The Magic Umbrella” — 316
  • “The Speck” — 323
• Other
  • “The Key” — 333
  • “A Problem of Numbers” — 366
  • “The Little Things” — 372
  • “Halloween” — 376
  • “The Thirteenth Day of Christmas” — 381
  • “The Key Word” — 386
  • “Nothing Might Happen” — 391

Partrick, Katie, and Diane knew how much I enjoyed Bob Dylan’s music so for Father’s Day weekend, they arranged an impromptu visit to New York City which included tickets to Girl From the North Country, a musical based on Bob Dylan songs.

The setting is Duluth, Minnesota in 1934. It’s winter and a band of desperate people stay at a boarding house on its last legs. Everyone has problems, everyone seems doomed. Music seems to be the only thing that can raise their spirits.

I found the Dylan music in Girl From the North Country an eclectic mix of songs that jump around from the Seventies and Eighties back to the Sixties. There are more songs in the Second Half of Girl From the North Country than in the First Half. And, the musical ends with “Pressing On,” a gospel song from Dylan’s 1980 album, Saved. You can listen to my favorite version of “Pressing On” here.

If you like Bob Dylan’s songs, you’ll enjoy this musical which celebrates his diversity of tunes. I’m sure touring companies of Girl From the North Country will be traveling around the U.S. in 2023. Are you a Dylan fan? GRADE: A

Jeremy Denk, a professional musician, writes a memoir about how he became a concert pianist. Denk tells us about his alcoholic mother and his workaholic father. Although Denk is a piano prodigy, he admits he has faults. Plenty of faults.

Denk routinely makes the same mistakes over and over again. Denk, both insecure and arrogant, admits he didn’t study or rehearse or prepare for key recitals. Most of the time when Denk does this, his performances crash and burn. You would think he would learn from this…but a chapter later, the same thing happens.

Jeremy Denk loves music, but he struggles with instruction. Denk’s teachers try to advise him, help him, show him how to improve his playing…but it’s an uphill journey with this guy.

I’ve known many gifted but wayward students like Jeremy Denk. They’re talented, clever, even brilliant. But, some of them become resistant to change believing they know more than their teachers.

Allowing the reader to see deep personal flaws borders on bravery. Denk didn’t have to share his failures in romance, various performances, and personal relationships but he does in Every Good Boy Does Fine. Those of you that have more musical knowledge–and maybe even play the piano–will get plenty of insights into the classical music Denk plays as he expounds on them.

If you’re interested in how someone from a dysfunctional background manages to overcome his situation to rise to stardom, Every Good Boy Does Fine shows how. Do you like classical music? GRADE: A

Looking like an aged Robert Redford, conservative Roger Scruton reveled in controversy and notoriety. Scruton died in 2020. This volume collects some of Scruton’s ephemeral writings.

“We live in troubling times for the conservative conscience. The West is adrift without leadership, anarchy is spreading through Asia and Africa, and the political process in Europe has been absorbed by the fantasy of European Union. Almost everywhere in the civilized world we encounter social decay: the decline in religious observance and local customs; the rise of crime and violence; the pornocratic culture of mass media; the description of love and marriage; the collapse of education and the retreat of the individual into his private pleasure dome.” (p. 31)

While Roger Scruton’s analysis is right on the money, his “solutions”–like those of most contemporary conservatives–are wide of the mark. Reducing the size of government and blaming the government for making problems worse are top strategies in the Conservative Playbook.

I enjoyed Scruton’s writings on music. Here’s a section that will delight Art Scott who used to attend the Proms every year! “The best thing about summer is the Proms, and this year especially on account of Daniel Barenboim’s wonderful performance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. I have studied that stupendous work for most of my adult life, ever more convinced of its greatness and the truth of its underlying vision.” (p. 24)

If you’re in the mood for short articles on a variety of topics from an intelligent–if wrong–conservative point of view, Against the Tide certainly holds its water. GRADE: B

Table of Contents:

Preface: The Work That Must Be Done — viii
Part One: Who Am I? — 1
My Life Beyond the Pale — 3
Roger Scruton Says ‘Put a Cork in It’ — 8
My Week: July 2005 — 10
My Week: January 2006 — 13
My Week: April 2006 — 16
The Flame That Was Snuffed Out by Freedom — 19
Finding Scrutopia in the Czech Republic — 23
Diary – August 2016 — 26

Part Two: Who Are We? — 29
The Conservative Conscience — 31
The Blair Legacy — 34
A Question of Temperament — 37
The Meaning of Margaret Thatcher — 42
Identity, Marriage, Family: Our Core Conservative Values Have Been Betrayed — 50
What Trump Doesn’t Get About Conservatism — 54

Part Three: Why The Left Is Never Right — 57
The Ideology of Human Rights — 59
Who is a Fascist? — 66
In Praise of Privilege — 69
A Hominist Homily — 72
In Loco Parentis — 75
McCarthy Was Right on the Red Menace — 79
A Focus of Loyalty Higher than the State — 82
The Art of Taking Offence — 85

Part Four: Intimations of Infinity — 89
De Anima — 91
A Matter of Life and Deathlessness — 94
Dawkins Is Wrong about God — 97
Altruism and Selfishness — 101
Memo to Hawking: There’s Still Room for God — 106
Humans Hunger for the Sacred: Why Can’t the New Atheists Understand That? — 109

Part Five: The End of Education — 113
The Virtue of Irrelevance — 115
The Open University and the Closed Mind — 118
The End of Education — 121
The Plague of Sociology — 124
Know Your Place — 128
Universities’ War against the Truth — 133

Part Six: Fraudulent Philosophy — 117
A Note on Foucault — 139
The Triumph of Nothingness — 143
Freud and Fraud — 146
If Only Chomsky Had Stuck to Syntax — 149

Part Seven: The West and the Rest — 153
In Memory of Iran — 155
The Lesson of Lebanon — 158
Decent Debate Mustn’t Be the Victim — 162
The Wrong Way to Treat President Putin — 165
Why Iraq Is a Write-Off — 168

Part Eight: Cultural Corruption — 173
The Art of Motor-Cycle Maintenance — 175
Temples of Anxiety — 178
The Modern Cult of Ugliness — 181
High Culture Is Being Corrupted by a Culture of Fakes — 185

Part Nine: Animal Rights, Pulpit Politics and Sex — 191
Male Domination — 193
The Pestilence of Pulpit Politics — 196
On the Eating of Fish — 199
Obligations of the Flesh — 202
Eat Animals! It’s for Their Own Good — 205
Sextants and Sexting — 208
Tally Ho! Let the Hunt Remind Us of Who We Are — 211

Part Ten: Annus Horribilis and Last Words — 215
Diary — 217
After My Own Dark Night — 220
My 2019 — 224

Index — 233