As newly-minted working adults in Bangalore with plenty of money to spare, we bought books. By day we’re rooted in the used piles of Blossom Book House, by night we hang out in Petromax-lit roadside tarp shops, dial-up for information and surf the toddler Internet. I looked around. I came across Borges’s 1942 essay. He said of a Chinese encyclopedia entitled: Heavenly Empire of Mercy: “The remote page says that animals are classified as follows: (a) Emperor’s, (b) Embalmed, (c) Domesticated. , (d) suckling pig, (e) siren, (f) wonderful, (g) stray dog, (h) included in the current classification, (i) frantic, (j) innumerable, (k ) painted with a very fine camel hair brush, (l) etc., (m) a pitcher that has just been drained, (n) looks like a fly from a distance.”
The grumpy yet funny outsider has finally proven my love for lists. I was shocked.
We’re not new to the Eastern list. In fact, we value them very much. Please wait and see. Bhagavad GitaThe most intense part of India’s great epics mahabharatawill open.
Battlefield of Kurukshetra. It is the war to end all wars. The Pandavas and Kaurava armies are arrayed for battle, and legendary warriors, each with a name, appear one after another, each in terrifying preparation. Sanjaya, a minister temporarily endowed with clairvoyant powers, is given the task of providing step-by-step narration to the blind Kaurava king Dhritarashtra. On the Kaurava side, the great chief Bhishma blows a huge conch shell, roars like a lion, and sounds horns, trumpets, cymbals, and drums, announcing what is to come. On the Pandavas side, Krishna blows the conch Pānkajanya, and his five brothers, Arjuna, Devadatta, Yudhisthira, Anantavijaya, Bhima, the mighty Paundara, and Nakula and Sahadeva, their Sugosha and Manipushpaka. A great sound resounds in the earth and sky, breaking the hearts of the hundred sons of Dhritarashtra.
list. And the epic poem that includes all and parts of life is interspersed with lists. This form does a lot with a little. Build the scene layer by layer. It accumulates, enhances and expands emotions. There is a thrilling awe and power here. There was fear, helplessness, and disappointment. Joy and victory are elsewhere. It allows story after story to enter through osmosis and establish a grand architecture in your mind until you always know it and you never knew it. Masu. “No Indian hears the Mahabharata for the first time,” says AK Ramanujan, a famous poet and scholar.
Mr. Panini Ashtadhyay, a list of eight chapters, the foundational text of Sanskrit grammar that has influenced all of linguistics and computer programming.Patanjali’s famous yoga sutrais a list.of Sutra A form is like a bead on a string and is the basic unit of a list. The Buddha himself was an extraordinary list maker. Look at the door stopper in this book. The form works.
We all make lists just to buy bread and milk. But we know how mythical and subversive (as we have just seen), amusing and infuriating, fascinating and solemn, and downright chilling the lists are, and what they are. It’s easy to forget what it brings. To love a list is to participate in letters and words, shapes and changes. To make a list is to join a long line of list makers, to indulge in a timeless art, to create the artificial divide between thinking and doing, between thinkers and doers. It’s about breaking down that wall.
We like lists because we don’t want to die (Umberto Eco, interview) SpiegelNovember 2009)
Make a list to understand infinity and secure immortality! This interview successfully shines a spotlight on the list format by exploring the mind and work of one of its most radical and vocal enthusiasts. For Eco, a philosopher, semiotician, and novelist whose works are full of Liszt, Liszt is the creator, administrator, and arbiter of culture and, by extension, civilization. He points out how Homer tried to convey the size of the Greek army. Iliad“Unable to find a suitable metaphor, he asks for help from the Muse. Then he comes up with the idea of naming so many generals and their ships.” As we saw earlier, Infinity ambitious mahabharata7 times longer than Iliad and Odyssey We combine the same techniques to express what cannot be expressed.
Lists are the origin of culture. It is part of the history of art and literature. What does the culture want? Making the infinite understandable. We also often, but not always, want to create order. And as humans, how do we face infinity? How do you try to understand what you don’t understand? Through lists, catalogs, museum collections, encyclopedias and dictionaries. It’s fascinating to list how many women Don Giovanni slept with. At least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, the number was 2,063. We also have fully functional lists, such as shopping lists, wills, and menus, which are themselves cultural achievements.
What if… Listicles were actually an ancient form of writing and storytelling? (James Vincent, lit hubNovember 2022)
This informative essay introduces this list as “one of humanity’s oldest writing systems.” Although ancient oral (and enumerative) traditions exist around the world, written language seems to have its origins in the Mesopotamian civilizations of Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, China, Egypt, and especially Sumer, and the essay takes a gentle stroll through it. To do. The earliest uses of lists were lexical and administrative. Nevertheless, naming, counting, and cataloging all fed our big brains. Eco agrees, in a way reminiscent of facet analysis: Essential definitions are primitive compared to lists. ” Let’s hope the foul-mouthed discomfort of the word “riskle” isn’t a measure of our supposed progress.
Lists may not seem like cognitive dynamite, but their widespread use seems to have helped early societies develop new modes of thinking, encouraging them to think analytically about the world. “Lists rely more on discontinuity than continuity,” wrote anthropologist Jack Goody. “[I]Encourage items to be arranged numerically, by first letter, by category, etc. The presence of external and internal boundaries also makes the categories more abstract while at the same time increasing their visibility.
As Goody argues, the process of creating thematic lists “leads to an increase in knowledge and an organization of experience.” It was the forerunner of an organized system of philosophy and, ultimately, of science.
The Literary List is a Record of Women’s Desire (Cynthia Grala, electrical literatureOctober 2019)
Eco-san infinity of lists Because the subject is vast and varied, list questions are always addressed. But as Gulara rightly points out, where are the women? And I must add, where is the other half of the world? Covers only the West. I think half of infinity is still infinity. Literature loves lists, so there’s a lot to cover. This sensitive essay states: list “Like, desire, choose” is a cognate with German. Gerüsten“A list is an itemization of desire,” says the author, who explores women writers, protagonists, and women across a field dotted with Japanese court literature, French erotica, contemporary poetry, novels, and memoirs. I ask. their various desires and obsessions.
In fact, literature enumerates all forms of catalog desire. One of the most famous examples is Casanova. my life story, a compendium of conquests highlighted through the male gaze. In such texts, the list can correspond to the fragmentation of the beloved’s (usually female) body, an additional twisted conquest that complements the one created from the page.
Are literature lists for women inherently different from lists for men? It is tempting to see these works as part of a larger effort by women writers to assert agency over the centuries through diaries, letters, and other fragments. Unlike a collection, which encompasses the parts into a whole, a list is interested in each item and respects its heterogeneity. For many women litterers, the catalog hopes to transform both authors and readers through its longings.
Georges Perec: User’s Manual (Matthew Gidley, FreezeJune 2000)
In France in 1960, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnay created the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, known as Olipo, with the stated purpose of using rules and constraints, often mathematical ones, in literature. (Workshop on Latent Literature). Lists are a useful formal constraint. Italo Calvino, a member of Uripo, took advantage of this. invisible city“Now let’s make a list of products that you can buy here at a good price.” [in Anastasia]: Agate, onyx, chrysoprase and other types of chalcedony… “and Traveler on a winter night. But it was Georges Perec who brought his “love of taxonomy’s passionate reduction” into this work. Life: User’s Manual. Mapping his 10×10 chessboard with a series of lists, or “schedules of duties” attached to each cell, on an elevation of a Parisian townhouse, creating a “knight’s tour” of moves, It later became a novel. This incisive essay examines his cataloging mind.
… Staying true to his favorite theme of classifying and schematizing places and objects (such as an alternative to “techniques and methods of arranging books”), Perec created a list. The contents include a catalog of all the different beds he slept in, a detailed account of the evolution of Villain Street over 12 years, and an inventory of the liquid and solid foodstuffs I swallowed in 1996. It even led to an infamous attempt. Course of the Year 1976 (1976) – “1 Thrush pâté… 14 cucumber salads… 7 pig’s feet… 1 chicken kebab… 2 guava sorbets… 1 Saint Emilion ‘61… 4 Guinness”. Claude Bergès, another member of Olipo, suggested that the novel could be built around a theoretical mathematical structure known as the 10×10 Greco-Latin square, and Perec said that this structure I realized that this could be achieved by using as a reference to a body of work. If you make a list, you’ll be able to write such a novel almost automatically.
Checklist (Atul Gawande, new yorkerDecember 2007)
In this essay, which has grown into a beautiful book, Checklist Manifesto: How to do things correctly, Gawande, a surgeon and MacArthur Fellow, offers a thoughtful meditation on a simple idea for a complex world: the checklist. The authors use simple, unassuming examples of highly complex fields, such as flying advanced aircraft or providing critical care for trauma patients, where the total amount of knowledge far exceeds an individual’s ability to retain or perfect retrieval. Observe what the tools can do. To achieve. He suggests that active use of checklists welcomes the possibility of human fallibility and is a step toward addressing it.
We have the means to perform some of the most complex and dangerous tasks, including surgery, emergency medicine, and ICU care, more efficiently than previously thought possible. But this outlook runs counter to traditional medical culture, which has a core belief that in high-stakes, complex situations, what is needed is a certain kind of professional boldness: the right thing to do. Checklists and standard operating procedures feel like opposites, and that makes many people nervous.
But it would be foolish to think that checklists eliminate the need for courage, resourcefulness, and improvisation. The body is too complex and individual for that. Even if we have excellent medicine, we cannot ignore the boldness of experts. But at the same time, one must be ready to embrace the virtues of the regiment.
Kanya Kanchana is an Indian poet and philologist. She likes lists.
Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands