FoolsCap

I was thinking, as I am professionally obliged to do, about books and things.  In particular, I was thinking about Benjamin’s Arcades Project and hoping that Sinter Klaas leaves it under the tree for me in week and a half.  Bejamin led me to Barthes’ A Lover’s Discouse (also in regard to Herr Klaas) and the rhetorical value of fragments–since that’s what the final assignment on my syllabus is about.

JR and I briefly talked about the value of condensation/fragmentation in class Monday, and I’ve been thinking since about where we read fragmented texts on a regular basis.  Lists.  It occurred to me, as the year draws to a close, that we’ll soon start seeing (and have already in some places) the annual "10 Best/Worst/Most" lists that always pop up at year’s end.  I’ve also given lists some thought before, because I belong to two cultural niches that are obsessed with lists: music geeks (parodied in book/film High Fidelity) and film geeks.

Often, these lists are ranked, but sometimes you’ll get lists that aren’t; Magnet used to run a semi-regular feature called the "Buyer’s Guide" or the "Listener’s Guide" that described the Top Ten (unranked) albums in a given field of music–emo, glam rock, loungecore. . .whatever.  These lists are interesing to me for a number of reasons:

1. The presumed authority of the list format.  Every time Blender, for example, issues the "500 Songs to Download" type of list, there’s always readers who write in appealing for their favorite album/cut/track/artist who didn’t make the list.  Readers’ comments about these lists almost always fall into three camps: the "what about?" letters mentioned above; the "thanks for recommending x" letters"; or the "so what it’s all arbitrary letters."  What interests me is that the "so what" camp never questions the list format per se, just the assumption that the present list compiler is the assumed authority behind the list.  The form itself goes unquestioned: lists are valuable to these readers even if they don’t agree with the compiler’s judgment/authority.
2. The preponderance of lists in pop culture discourse.  Top 10s, Top 40s, Top 8, Top of the Pops, Best Dressed, Worst Dressed, Most Memorable, Bestseller Lists, Most Downloaded, Most Wanted. . .I’m not listing any more of them.  Of course, in the mid-late 1970s, the Book of Lists was a huuuge phenomenon, with books for just about every nice market you can think of.  They were the Chicken Soup for the X’s Soul of their day.
3. There is obviously an appeal in these lists, along with an assumption of authority.  So what’s the appeal?  Is it the appearance of organization?  Is it a desire to see how your favorite whatever is ranked?  They’re easy to read–unchallenging but engaging–and easy to write–ahem.
4. Why, in particular, are certain markets prone to listophilia.  I’ve mentioned two: music geeks and film geeks.  But I wonder if it’s not just symptomatic of larger pop cult concerns, since as mentioned above it’s not just films and music that get ranked and listed.

The list is also intriguing to me because it sort of (in a vastly reductive way) recalls Sirc’s notion of box-logic; it brings together items under a given rubric– "Best Albums of the 70s," say–and makes the claim that these items are indicative of that label.  I think the obvious difference between lists and box-logic is that (the way I understand it), the "label" comes from writing what is in the box (whatever form your box takes, textual, artifactual etc) rather than motivating the contents of the box. 

To make a slight shift in purpose here. . .all of this because I was thinking about how’d I like more experience writing through fragments.  A colleague very kindly praised my "Writer’s Discourse," but I still feel it’s lacking.  So I was imagining a venue in which I could write in fragmented form (assuming it wasn’t the blog itself) and I came up with the notion of a magazine/website/forum where the whole idea is fragmentation and its rhetorical value.  Of course, I know there plenty of sites already that work this way.  I didn’t say my idea was brand new.

But what is more interesting is an odd coincidence that followed.  I was thinking about all of this (Benjamin, Barthes, fragments, lists) on my way home from campus Thurs evening.  I’d even come up with possible names for my site: The Catalogue (another form of list) or The Arsenal (where you store things until you need them).  Later that night, as I was reading House of Leaves, I came across this passage from Edith Skourja’s essay Riddles Without:

It is beneficial to consider the origins of "riddle."  The Old English raedelse means "opinion, conjure" which is related to the Old English raedon "to interpret" in turn belonging to the same etymological history of "read."  "Riddling" is an offshoot of "reading" calling to mind the participatory nature of that act–to interpret–which is all the adult world has left when faced with the unsolvable.

"To read" actually comes from the Latin reri "to calculate, to think" which is not only the progenitor of "read" but of "reason" as well, both of which hail from the Greek arariskein "to fit."  Aside from giving us "reason," arariskein also gives us an unlikely sibling, Latin arma meaning "weapons."  It seems that "to fit" the world or to make sense of it reguires either reason or arms.

Riddle–opinion–conjure–interpret–read–calculate–think–reason–weapons: Arsenal?  Hmm.  I’m not wholly sure this has anything to do on a more than tangential basis with lists and fragments, but it is was odd, nevertheless, to suddenly find that "reading" and "arsenals" are, in fact, related.