William Gass is my current read. I’ve been slowly wandering through his 2002 collection of essays, Tests of Time. He’s kind of hard to follow in many places because he seems to consider himself a writer’s writer and makes way too many references to things that I’ve not (and probably never will) read. But nevertheless, I enjoy the stimulation of reading something more challenging than the newspaper, Time Magazine, and the journals of fourth graders. I go off on little mental side trips - free associations where I put new ideas together. Writing this stuff down makes it more real for me. Whether anyone else can use it is a different matter.

In “I’ve Got a Little List,” Gass muses on the place of lists in literature and in the modern psyche. The reason this caught my attention has a lot to do with this weblog. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about blogs as a literary genre - what kind of writing they are. I believe that the form is open to interpretation right now and that blogs can be anything we want them to be. Poetry, essay, journalism, commentary, letters; it all works. I came up with the idea a while back of using Lists as a category for some of my blog posts. I didn’t give it much thought, but it seemed like they might qualify as a literary form in and of themselves. And then here comes Gass with a 10 yard shitload - going on about lists, their meanings, and their uses. He has a whole lot of fun with the topic, and gets altogether carried away. I enjoyed the silliness because I love to play with logic and reasoning. I can’t go into more detail without getting bogged down. So I think it’s time to make a list of the things that Gass has to say about lists. In order:

  • Lists ought to head the list of rhetorical forms;
  • Lists are purposeful assemblies - like shopping lists, the 7 wonders of the world, and old girlfriends ;
  • Some lists are ordered hierarchies and some are neutral itemizations;
  • Lists detach their members from their normal contexts;
  • Most lists are minimal and terse;
  • Punctuation on lists is limited;
  • For every list, there is another list of things that are not on that list;
  • Crossing a listed item out does not really take it off the list;
  • All lists have requirements for membership;
  • Lists may be open (stupid things that I will do in my life) or closed (the number of beers I drank last week);
  • Lists are fundamental to narrative descriptions. You find them in books, newspapers, magazines, etc;
  • Because of the structure necessary for linguistic representations, lists impose an order on our perceptions that may not actually exist;
  • Lists are used as a literary form to suggest abundance, magnificence, grandeur.
  • It is impossible to make a complete list of lists;

There are several other facets of lists that Gass examined in this essay, but they don’t fit on my list.