for the love of lists

It’s been a week of lists. Reading about them, thinking about them, making them, being amused by them, wondering why they fascinate me so much.

[Comparative Analysis of Gluten, Starch, Fat, Air and Water in Various Vegetable Foodstuffs by William Sowerby (active .1892-96), Wellcome Collection]

I suppose, to stay with the theme, I should write this in list form.

1. I like a good list. I don’t necessarily mean my own lists (but see below for exceptions) but I do like literary lists eg in books by Proust, Dickens and Rabelais.

2. Umberto Eco is very good on lists. He talks of ‘coherent excess’, ‘lunatic eclecticism’, ‘the joyous science… of the plural and the unlimited’. My kind of list-appreciation.

[Boston Cremes (1962) by Wayne Thiebaud]

3. I went to the university library to re-read Eco’s book. I love going there, but am unhappy that the tea room (classic Cambridge name for the canteen/café) is still shut. It makes me more aware than ever of my need for a cup of tea and a Mars Bar as a reward for:

a) successfully negotiating the book ordering system

b) working out how to access an online-only book on one of the computers and read it on the screen - something I really dislike, and guaranteed to make me need that cup of tea after 5 mins min

c) understanding most of Eco’s book

4. I also read the intro and chapter on lists in If Not Critical by Eric Griffiths. He is very clear that lists in literature are not ‘just lists’ or ‘mere lists’, and that literature is more than just literary fiction. ‘A list, intelligently considered, can be a real eye-opener and give rise to extremely dramatic mental events’.

5. These pronouncements give carte blanche to anyone to read the label on a bottle of HP Sauce and call him/herself a reader. (Good list on the label, of course.)

6. ‘Dramatic mental events' are exactly why the tea room needs to reopen

7. This week I also:

[pots by Edmund de Waal]

i) went to my pottery class and have now officially added this to my list of creative fails (see list below). It does make me laugh, though, when one of my pots just collapses on the wheel like a cooling tower demolition job.

ii) went to the cinema to see Glass Onion. I liked the Daniel Craig campness and the great cameo appearances. As ever, I totally missed the plot.

iii) started reading The Lost Pianos of Siberia and am beginning to realise how enormous Siberia is, and to wonder how you’d even begin to look for a lost piano there.

{Fails list:

i) papier mâché

ii) painting on silk

iii) painting on anything

iv) resin jewellery

v) mokuhanga/Japanese woodblock printing

vi) basketry}

8. I’ve been thinking about lists I have loved.

[by felt artist Lucy Sparrow]

9. When the children were little and I wrote shopping lists on bits of paper, I would often get to the supermarket and find ‘puppy’ or something rude added in somewhere.

10. I wish I’d kept all the lists the children made. They were inveterate list-makers. (They still are, but now it’s Google Docs with places to go, countries to visit, cakes to bake, foods to eat. Still a hopeful ‘puppy’ in there, too, no doubt.)

[Still Life with Chip Frier (1954) by John Bratby, Tate]

11. Then I’d be able to mount an exhibition at home like the one I want to see at the Museum of Brands. (Review here.)

12. More recently I created a list of all the words in English I could make out of PROUST once I’d realised that it is an anagram of STUPOR. Then I did it in French, but the results were very limited in comparison.

13. In the summer, I also compiled a list of the Wordles I managed to do.

14. After doing the original English Wordle, it eventually it dawned on me that there would probably be a French one.

15. So I started with Le Mot, and went from there.

16. In a particularly indulgent but also very enjoyable week in August, I tried every language I could (the absolute joy of the list of possibilities on this website) and listed my successes as they happened.

18. The list currently stands at 26 different languages.

19. I speak French, learned Russian, Latin to ‘O’ level', and ein bisschen Deutsch when we lived Germany, tested the children for their Spanish exams, and have listened to Swedish being spoken. But as for the rest, I am clueless, so I work on the basis of which letters are most common and which are likely to appear together in a given language. Most of the time, I have no idea what the words mean.

20. I will say, though, that international words are very useful as starters. Hotel, metro, opera, polka. And penis.

21. I could spend all day doing Wordles, but I limit myself to:

• Wordle

• Le Mot

• Sutom

• Ordel

22. ….and sometimes Norwegian (Nynorsk) and Danish, maybe Spanish, Dutch, German, Portuguese. Italian and Latin on occasion.

23. Cornish and Modern Greek are beyond my letter-arranging capabilities. And so, ironically, is Esperanto, supposedly the no 2 universal language.

24. My most exciting list at the moment is the one which contains the new Elizabeth Line stations I want to visit:

Paddington>Bond Street>Tottenham Court Road>Farringdon>Liverpool Street>Whitechapel»Woolwich

25. It’s my version of the litanies of saints and devotional chants that Eco discusses.

26. I’m including images in this newslister because, as he says, they are another form of:

    1. enumeration, chaotic or otherwise

    2. collection

    3. congeries (nice, understandable rhetorical device - see above)

    4. amassment

    5. inventory

    6. archive

       and

    7. they convey the ‘effect of abundance’ and the ‘ineffability of variety’.

27. Eco also talks about the ‘poetics of the etcetera’, the impossibility of including everything, and the idea of what has to be left out.

28. Etc.