The Annotated Instead Indices
Review of "Instead Indices" (2025)
Peter Sotos. Instead Indices. Nine-Banded Books, 2025. 348pp.
Biology and situation feed into vulnerability, right?
And what have we learned in forty fucking years?
Be Top Boy. Top Puller. Keep Your Ganzer up!
Instead, Indices — I keep wanting to insert a comma, my own misunderstanding, my own gansering — operates on a tripartite scheme. 2+1=4.
Round One. Visual archive media mewl. Decades of splurge and headline gash. Class actions and pictures of Polly. Low end scum vigilantism, hapless lawmakers, inventive and entirely predictable pervs. The Paulsgrove experience. Crackdowns and castrations. A message from the foundations. Someone kept this stuff. Bought the papers, clipped the stories, annotated the dates. The huge financial resources and tabloid leg-overs brought to bear on hunted men kipping in caravans. The cops whining for more powers. Liberals will have to learn the hard way. The rights battle and competing claims of the oppressed and morbidly confused. And later, printing off the news stories from the World Wide Web (what a moniker!), the slight deviations in copy provided by the Press Association. Did I mishear you? Need your lugholes sorting? Make a wish and save a kid. Track and trace, sound familiar?