While we’re still in the middle of writing one catalog at the Gardner, we’re also wrapping up production on a book that is headed out for printing. Little did I know so much of the work of an art historian crosses with those in the publishing world. When the final proof of this catalog came in late Thursday afternoon, the pagination was finalized, which meant it was time for indexing. Thus I spent the first few hours of my holiday weekend combing through chapters of the book for any proper noun, be it a building or an obscure Austrian nobleman.
A certain kind of group energy manifests when everyone is working on deadline (something that doesn’t come up too often in this business) that is actually kind of exciting, even when the actual work isn’t as engaging as the research itself. At this very moment I’m waiting for the Boston Public Library’s historical periodicals department to pull an historical periodical for me. The building excitement is almost too much; oh mercy, fetch my smelling salts.
My 4th of July was actually crazy cool. A bunch of us went down to Harvard Bridge to watch the fireworks and listen to the Boston Pops. The setting was incredible; we’re sitting basically out in the water, surrounded by all of these private boats (and kayakers!) come to get as close to the fireworks barge as the BPD will let them. When the actual fireworks go off you can see the conflagration reflected back at you by the Hancock and Prudential and a dozen other smaller glass castles. Their gridded windows appear to pixelate the image and produce the impression that one is watching the fireworks show reproduced on JumboTrons hundreds of feet high. The city becomes a forest of fiery, fractured television screens, as if it were Turner’s Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons redone by Andreas Gursky. Oh, wait.
MFA tomorrow; El Greco to Velázquez. A little Spanish escapism is just the ticket to avoid this summer’s ubiquitous thunderstorms.
2 Comments
July 5, 2008 at 3:57 pm
You should write a little script to extract all of the proper names. I’m imagining something in Perl, with lots of intentionally obfuscatory regular expressions.
Also, there was recently a delightful special in Slate about procrastination, much of it discussing in more or less reverential terms that pre-deadline energy, and it’s power to motivate slackers of all stripes, including (or especially) academics and writers. I think the best part is this letter to a young procrastinator.
July 5, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Oh sure, but why miss out on the debate about when and where to index conceptual “love” vs. the allegorical “Love”?
Plus there’d be no excuse to drink Indexing beers. I mean, I WISH that we’d done that.