For generations, they have laboured in obscurity, combing through works of history, biography, botany and cookery for names that need mentioning and subjects that should be grouped together so that readers can look them up. The world scarcely knows they exist. Some readers assume authors themselves do the indexing (most farm it out to pros). Others think a machine is in charge. Indexers are accustomed to being asked: Doesn’t a computer do that?
Lately, though, indexers have been getting a few well-deserved minutes in the sun. A new book with a clever title – Index, A History of the – explores how this useful occupation came to be and why it still has value. Its author, Dennis Duncan, a lecturer at University College London, calls his book “a wreath laid at the tomb of these unknown readers.”
Flipping through an old photo album, I came across a picture of myself as a little girl posing in front of my television set. Standing in my red, white, and blue party dress, attempting to curtsy, I was the subject of a snapshot that curiously depicted TV not as a mass-entertainment medium, but as a backdrop for a social performance in an intimate family scene. Struck by the snapshot, I wondered if there were others like it. Searching at thrift stores and online sites, I’ve collected roughly 5,000 snapshots of people posing with TV sets in the 1950s through the 1970s. The snapshots depict a broad range of families across racial, class, and ethnic backgrounds. Like today’s selfies, TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people pictured themselves in an increasingly mediatized culture.
Rather than watch TV, in TV snapshots, people use TV as a prop and backdrop for the presentation of self and family. Snapshots turn the home into a theater of everyday life where people use TV to showcase themselves as celebrities of their own making. In snapshots, the empty space around the television set essentially becomes a posing place in which people play roles and engage in acts of everyday pretend.
For this pyramid, sheer size is not the real superlative; Vegas, after all, has its own, even larger tetrahedral hotel. What sets it apart is the fact that its cavernous interior has been converted into an outlet of Bass Pro Shops, the world’s largest hunting-and-fishing retailer, and the hotel rooms—set in the ring-shaped interior balconies that make up the pyramid’s two upper levels—overlook the store’s floor space. On the exterior of the pyramid, a 78-foot-tall re-creation of the company’s logo, featuring the eponymous fish in mid-leap, glows green above the Mississippi River at night.
The stature of this landmark is suggested by the fact that it’s a rare retail store—the only one, so far as I can tell—to appear on a U.S. driver’s license. When Tennessee officials designed a collage of iconic architecture to use as the background of state I.D. cards, they thought: What could represent Memphis better than this inexplicable shrine?
Shibata-san, the only woman in her office group, is tired of cleaning up after the men. One day, when her section head asks her why dirty coffee cups are still lying around hours after a meeting, she improvises an astonishing lie. "I'm pregnant. The smell of coffee ... triggers my morning sickness."
So begins Emi Yagi's debut novel, "Diary of a Void," a bleak, acerbic, melancholy story of a woman who fakes a pregnancy to fight back against a workplace culture that expects women to tidy up and do all the menial chores around the office.