"Get out your Richards!"

Now and again someone asks me why it is that I am a teacher rather than a full-time writer. There are all sorts of reasons, of course, but one easy answer is that three out of my four grandparents-by-blood were teachers (the fourth, my beloved English grandmother, did a certificate in social work at the London School of Economics at a time when that was quite unusual).

(My mother is a teacher, too - I grew up in a school, even more than most people do!)

My father's parents met at the teacher training college in Glasgow and both specialized in English (British!) literature, and my grandfather went on to become the headmaster of several different high schools (here, by the way, you can see two of his paintings of the town he retired in, North Berwick!).

My English grandfather never understood how my Scottish grandfather could live within walking distance of one of Britain's best golf courses and yet remain thoroughly immune to the charms of the green! I was less close to him than I was to my Scottish grandfather (or, indeed, than I am to the very dear adopted grandfather who is my regular theatergoing companion in New York!), but we had many points of interest in common.

The English grandparents moved to a smaller (but not much smaller!) house a few years before they both died, which entailed some massive cleaning out of the extraordinary house they had lived in for many years (I cannot find a good picture online, though I know I found one once of it standing in solitary splendor of a gothically Victorian kind before the other houses were built on that road in the later nineteenth century, but if you scroll down to the bottom right-hand picture on this site, you will find 16 Broadlands Road - it is the house that, while I stood on a stepladder next to my mother handing her down countless mysterious and useless and yet non-throw-away-able things from a high shelf in the pantry, caused me to utter the most heartfelt words ever heard from my mouth: "I never want to live in a house, I only want to live in an apartment!")

It pained my grandfather to get rid of anything at all, though he steeled himself and managed to part with a great mass of possessions. One thing he was very happy to give to me was a pair of notebooks from his undergraduate years. They contained (in his characteristically illegible writing) his notes on English political thought during the American and French Revolutions, including many pages on my particular favorite Edmund Burke.


(Here was the Guardian obituary by his dear friend Richard Robbins; here was my Uncle Patrick's for the Independent.)

I have saved the best for last: a very nice back-garden picture, taken probably c. 2000 (actually I have no idea!), of me and Granny and Gramp.

Speck

Too many books that changed the world.

The letter C

I have been wrestling with a virus (stomach, not computer) and an index - between the two of them, they have thoroughly eroded the quality of my life over the last few days...

But my health seems to be on the mend, and the index and book proofs are winging their way back to the copy-editor in New Jersey as we speak, so this is very good.

Official publication date is January 2009, but my editor had a vision of us having it for the MLA conference at the end of December that seems (barring unforeseen calamity) as though it will be realized - in retrospect, I am extremely grateful, as it was only the power and plausibility of her vision that made it possible for me to complete the final book revisions in January and February of this year. I was in a seriously exhausted and zombie-like state and had no spare will-power for self-motivated and seemingly non-essential book-finishing!

I had a funny bit of correspondence after the glimpse I gave last week of my indexing process. Old friend Steve Burt, whose Randall Jarrell biography contains some words of Jarrell's that speak to me more strongly than almost anything else I've ever read, commented mildly, with a link on his blog, "That’s not the way I did it…" A brief correspondence ensued:

JMD: I want to hear how you did yours! I fear that the way we tackle this sort of project is deeply revealing of thinking preferences/habits... And in fact I was looking at your Jarrell one, because my copy of the Chicago Manual of Style was at the office; I wanted to look at a Columbia UP example!

SB: I never look at Manuals of Style any more, just at models (same journal or same press).

I went through the proofs with three colors of highlighters, one for names of people, one for other proper nouns, and one for common nouns ("personhood," "totalitarianism," "squirrels") that I thought I wanted to index. Then I read through the highlighted MS and created a word file. This works for everything except the entry for the idea or person the whole book is about ("Randall Jarrell," "adolescence"), which editors insist you have, and which you have to create by flipping through the book rapidly after the rest of the index has been prepared.

I'm not sure what that reveals.

My mother, a longtime elementary-school teacher, always used to quote one particular sixth-grader's words when she asked him how that day at school had been. He said (of a strict and demanding but much-loved teacher), "Mrs. Hineline busted my brain!" It is in the nature of indexing that it busts the brain, that is its charm and its purpose.

(Well, perhaps that is hyperbolic, its purpose is not brain-busting - but you do want the index to sort of crack open the book in a disconcerting and unexpected way, it's one last shot at making your case!)

I got some truly wonderful corrections and comments from my overseas assistant; I have not asked his permission, I'm afraid, but I'm pasting in a sample page that includes the absolutely delightful query (on my use of hereditary as a subheading under inheritance) "a bit pleonastic?" (This also gives me the opportunity for an irresistible new post label below which I will endeavor not to make excessive use of in future.)

And here is the promised sample letter: