For The Love Of Lists
DIANE SCHOEMPERLEN
I've said it before and I'll say it again: "There are many ways to divide up the world. One of those divisions is between those who make lists and those who do not. To my way of thinking, this distinction has been sadly neglected in favour of the more usual demographic categories such as male and female, young and old, black and white, have and have-not. I am sure that a detailed investigation of the propensity to list or not to list would yield remarkable new insights into the deepest psychological crevices (or crevasses) of human nature. I am a veteran and inveterate member of the list-making faction and can hardly imagine how a person without a list ever gets anything done."
This passage is from my novel, Our Lady of the Lost and Found, a work of fiction in which these lines are presented as the words of the narrator. In fact, they come most deeply from my own heart and my own life. I have indeed always been a dedicated list-maker, both in my writing and my daily life.
From all my years in elementary school, the one assignment I remember most clearly now was an illustrated list of cloud formations: cirrus, cumulus, nimbus, cumulonimbus, stratocumulus, altostratus, and so on. This list is so lyrical and sibilant that it still strikes me as more of a poem than a scientific classification.
In 1977 when I was just 23 years old, I started keeping a list of all the books I'd read. It has continued for the thirty-some years since, and will continue until death do us part, I'm sure. Hand-written for the first dozen years in a beautifully bound hardcover notebook, it has been kept on the computer since I got my first Mac in 1989. I keep this reading list as a way to remember my younger self. Without my book list I might well have forgotten that in the first three months after my son's birth in July 1985, I read absolutely nothing.
After all these years of list-making, I seriously doubt whether I could function without my lists. At first glance, many of them would seem to be of a purely practical nature: grocery lists, errands lists, reading lists, Christmas shopping list, packing list when preparing to travel, projects list when feeling overwhelmed by too many things on the go at once, e-mail list when my correspondence has been sadly neglected yet again, home improvement list when imagining that someday everything in my house will be perfect, not-done-yet list when realizing that some of the things on my to-do lists have been there for years (clean oven, paint inside of hall closet, organize books, clean out basement, clean grout in bathroom, update will.) For those of us with slightly unreliable memories, a penchant for organization, and a moderate-to-severe addiction to the feeling of accomplishment engendered by checking off the items on any given list, these practical lists are indispensable. But of course there is much more to listing than that.
When Kim Jernigan first approached me with the idea of guest-editing a special Lists Issue of The New Quarterly, I jumped at the chance to share and showcase the work of other literary list-makers. I already suspected that the list was an infinitely expandable and flexible form, and editing this issue has more than confirmed my suspicions. It has been a truly delightful experience and has enlarged my own understanding of how lists work and what they say about knowledge, experience, order, infinity, human nature, and the ways we attempt to make sense of and navigate through this often-bewildering world.
While in the middle of editing this issue, Kim and I were very excited to learn that Umberto Eco had just published a book called The Infinity of Lists (in Europe called The Vertigo of Lists.) In conjunction with this lavishly illustrated book, Eco curated an exhibition at The Louvre, Mille et tre, tracing the evolution of the list through cultural history from antiquity to the present day. What better validation could we receive for our own project than discovering that one of the most influential thinkers of our time had been hard at work on the very same topic? I've often been teased about my list-making, but from now on, I will be able to point to Umberto Eco and smile.
In an interview about the book and the exhibition appearing in the German Spiegel Online, Eco asserts that "The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order-not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible?" Through lists, of course, through catalogues, inventories, collections, enumerations, and so on. Eco goes on to say: "The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions...In cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. And the list is certainly prevalent in the postmodern age. It has an irresistible magic...We like lists because we don't want to die."
This brings immediately to mind these lines from a poem by the late Bronwen Wallace, "Into the Midst of It": "You, who have lived your whole life believing/if you made enough plans/you wouldn't need to be afraid...." Plans. Lists. Lists of plans. All those names and times and details written into the blank white squares of the calendar (which is, of course, a list of days both past and future): surely if I have noted a visit to the dentist at 3:00 o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon six months from now, I will still be alive to keep my appointment.
Historically, there is no end to the number of literary lists that have made their way to us down through the ages. Consider Homer's list of ships' captains in the Iliad, Virgil's list of kings in the Aeniad, Ovid's list of trees in the Metamorphoses, Milton's list of fallen angels in Paradise Lost, and, my personal favourite, Sei Shonagon's 164 lists in her Pillow Book written more than a thousand years ago. If you aren't familiar with this book, a partial list of the titles of her lists will whet your appetite: Things That Make One's Heart Beat Faster, Things That Give A Clean Feeling, Things That Give An Unclean Feeling, Surprising and Distressing Things, Elegant Things, Embarrassing Things, Adorable Things (including "Duck eggs"), Squalid Things (including "Nervous people"), and Things That Give A Hot Feeling (including "An extremely fat person with a lot of hair.")
In our postmodern age, as noted by Eco, lists are everywhere. A glance through any magazine stand anywhere will offer an abundance of lists. Consider the cover of the January 2009 issue of Real Simple, for instance:
FEEL CALMER NOW:
20 essential lists to organize your life.
Smart strategies to:
make dinner faster
save on home repairs
find time to exercise
make your clothes last longer
simplify your beauty routine.
PLUS the ultimate not-to-do list.
Inside this Real Simple list issue there are dozens more including "10 things that would make men happier," "18 easy upgrades for your favorite convenience foods," "78 chairs for $100 or less," and "10 ways to rethink your lists" by Ben Schott, author of Schott's Original Miscellany, a popular compendium of hundreds of lists.
At the end of each year, lists of rankings become ubiquitous. Even a true-blue list-lover like myself has been known to grow more than a little tired of all the "Top 10 Best (or Worst) of the Year (or Decade)" lists that propagate relentlessly in every newspaper and magazine, on every television and radio program, rankings that cover everything imaginable from books to movies to scandals to cataclysmic weather events to designer dresses worn by various celebrities on various red carpets.
Just as I began to write this introduction, country singer Rosanne Cash released a new CD called "The List." I heard her interviewed on CBC, where she explained that when she was eighteen years old, touring with her famous father in the summer of 1973, he'd been alarmed to discover that she didn't know any of the classic standards. So right there on the tour bus, he made her a list called "100 Essential Country Songs" which included history songs, protest songs, early folk songs, Delta blues, Texas swing, and gospel songs. For this new CD, she has chosen twelve songs from his master list, and in the liner notes, to her father she says: "This is the first installment of your List."
Clearly the list knows no limits, nimbly crossing all boundaries between pop culture and more erudite artistic pursuits, while also steadfastly and stubbornly appearing in purses, pockets, and DayTimers everywhere, on fridge doors, paper napkins, and the backs of envelopes throughout the known world. I would hardly be surprised if, upon the eventual discovery of life on other planets, the aliens came forth clutching their lists in their little green hands.
I had only two criteria when making my selections for this issue: the quality of the writing and how "listful" each piece was. That's my new word for what I was after here. Listful, as in having a quality of "listiness" and bearing more than a passing resemblance to "lustful" and "lustiness"; listful, as in carrying some whimsical echoes of "fistful" and "wistful"; listful, as in being the polar opposite of "listless" because, of course, anybody caught without a list is bound to feel sluggish, rudderless, and dispirited.
The selections in this issue generously demonstrate that the impulses behind creating a list are many and varied. Poetry seems to lend itself particularly well to the list form (or vice versa.) Some lists here are archival in intent-a method of mapping where the writer has been, perhaps with the idea of looking at the list again down the road in order to assess how well (or poorly) this earlier version of oneself has been fulfilled. Shellie Troy Anderson, for instance, in her "Books Read in the Lamb White Days," catalogues the books she read from 1987 to the mid-1990s, accompanied by journal entries from the same period, telling the story of a young woman on the journey of self-discovery who comes to dream of writing herself someday.
Some lists seem mostly pragmatic in nature, more like traditional to-do lists, but even these divide out along the lines of tasks-at-hand and daydreaming lists, like Ben Murray's "Things To Do" and Lenore Rowntree's "Unlinked Instructions Composed While Listening to CBC Radio 3."
The list as inventory appears in various incarnations here, frequently as a way of tallying things lost, especially people. Hume Baugh's "The Things on the Wall," Colette Maitland's "Afternoon Visit to the Nursing Home/What I Bring," and Myrna Garanis' "Inheriting the Spoons" are all mourning lists, in which the writer attempts to capture someone through a catalogue of things owned.
Some are lists of warnings, to oneself or others, not so much "to-do" as "how-to." Others are lists of grievances, of prayers and invocations, of observations and instructions, of fears and lies, of creation and recovery. There is also the giddy delight in language that can only be expressed through a list of words, as in Patricia Young's poem, "Portal: A List of Navel Terms" in which she gives us a wonderful list of belly-button synonyms and in K. V. Skene's two found poems, "Money," a list of foreign currencies, and "From Alaska to Thunder," a list of colour names.
My own contribution here is a story called "A Nervous Race: 222 Brief Notes on the Study of Nature, Human and Otherwise." It follows in the tradition of the objet trouvé, especially found poetry, taking shape as a prose form that I've decided to call a found narrative. I have illustrated it with colour collages, a visual art form that seems to arise directly from the same impulse as list-making in that it involves selecting, ordering, arranging, and cataloguing, and, in the end, it results in something greater and more satisfying than the sum of its parts. It was not until I read Eco's book that I understood how my preferences in visual art, both as consumer and creator, are further manifestations of my love of list-making. The types of visual art that I have always felt naturally drawn to are, in fact, visual lists.
Another thing I learned from Eco relates to a familiar frustration experienced by list-makers and collectors alike-so many lists or collections must remain forever incomplete. Anyone who attempts to list all the stars in the universe or all the books in the world or all the things that make one's heart beat faster can only ever come up with a partial list, just as Dante was unable to name all the angels in the heavens. A collector of stamps, salt-and-pepper shakers, or ceramic figurines of elephants, can never amass all the stamps, salt-and-pepper shakers, or ceramic figurines of elephants in the world. Eco asserts that while such lists are necessarily finite in themselves, the very attempt at enumeration suggests infinity and leads us to imagine all that we cannot actually know. While such a list must remain anchored to the finite, at the same time its essential intention stretches out to embrace all infinity.
And so, in closing, I offer a list for those inclined to further reading beyond the covers of this special issue.
A WOEFULLY INCOMPLETE (BUT NONETHELESS INTRIGUING) LIST OF BOOKS OF AND ON LISTS
The Infinity of Lists by Umberto Eco
The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing by Robert E. Belknap
The List Poem: A Guide to Teaching and Writing Catalog Verse by Larry Fagin
Schott's Original Miscellany by Ben Schott
5 People Who Died During Sex and 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists by Karl Shaw
Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists
The Book of Literary Lists by Nicholas Parsons
The Book of Numbered Lists by Gwen Foss
Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases by Grenville Kleiser
Happy as a Clam and 9,999 Other Similes by Larry Wright
One-Letter Words: A Dictionary by Craig Conley
What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? and 100 Other Great Cultural Lists-Fully Explicated by Peter D'Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish
Trivia Lovers' Lists of Nearly Everything in the Universe: 50,000+ Big and Little Things Organized by Type and Kind by Barbara Ann Kipfer
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon
Everything I Ate: A Year in the Life of My Mouth by Tucker Shaw
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal
Things to Bring, S#!t to Do...and Other Inventories of Anxiety: My Life in Lists by Karen Rizzo.
