Burn the lists to free your ass

Drifting through books

Sometimes you want a book that is like a map of a sprawling city, so you can drift. You want to dip yourself into the grid of catalogued impressions. You want to dump yourself anywhere, and then just go, follow the whims and twists and turns. You want to see what happens.

Nowadays I wake up with an aversion to lists. The reading moods, discovery and curiosity moods, the moods—they are shifting. I've always loved lists; they make for a good scaffold. Predictably, in 2020 I relied on several. There was the erotic thrillers list I came across and promptly started watching. The list held the premise of a project when all other projects obviously disintegrated. Then there was the blaxploitation list. Brian de Palma's filmography. Prince's discography. Lists are a one-sided communication and a false sense of control. In lists, you either order yourself or other people do that to you. Towards the end of Index Cards, which sprawls like a city, and is fantastic for reader drifters, Moyra Davey questions at length how one should read. Should one approach it systematically? A whole genre, a period, an oeuvre, a set, a package? Something which unwraps like a pack of cards, something where you can tick many boxes? A list comforts your compulsion to be vested and learned, to have an overview.  

Davey is in favor of reading as proposed by Virginia Woolf a hundred years ago. It is reading governed by moods in their totality: voracious and promiscuous reading that doesn't pay attention to a list and a system. Reading outside of a list means that the only person you're answering to is yourself, which is difficult for many. It requires engagement on a visceral level, like asking your taste buds, what are you craving right now? And what are you going to do about the craving? Giving in to impulses is rarely described as useful, more so as a mark of immaturity. The other day I woke up with an irresistible urge to go and buy a Dickens novel. (Wild!) I thought, a story set in Victorian London, with one thousand characters with funky names, half of which will die at the hands of greed and industrialization, is the nourishment I am thirsty for, today. I really can't rest until the book is with me, in my hands, and then I can read it. If you're used to self-policing through lists, the satisfaction of following an impulse is a heady companion. How fitting for Davey to end Index Cards with a whole section about reading, because the voraciousness she favours is generally reflected in her writing and the structure of the book too. Elsewhere she says, “reading is writing.” But in Index Cards, reading becomes thinking becomes writing and it's all laid out on the page in front of you. Davey declares that process as allowing “chance elements, the flânerie, as it were, of daily life” to enter into writing. 

Moyra, I understood—I love lists, but this whole time I've been a rather promiscuous participant. Davey extends this metaphorical understanding of reading as a sexual endeavour. She likens the most potent kind of reading, the adulterous and hungry one, to flirting with someone you desire or fantasizing about them. Any attempts at systematic overview are outgrown by an attention constantly screening for new impulses, new bibliographies at the ends of books to deconstruct and borrow from, new recommendations. If the world is overwhelming, maybe a list doesn't help. Maybe this is the saving grace: the roving compulsion; following the million threads; reading the next best thing. 

Lynne Sharon Schwarz in her memoir Ruined by Reading connects the self-policing through lists to the Original Sin of Christianity: “At bottom, of course, the issue in choosing what to read (and what to do and how to live) is the old conflict, dating from the Garden, of pleasure versus duty: what we want to read versus what we think we ought to read…” (Is anything, at its core, not ever connected to Catholic Guilt?) That reminds me of something quite basic, but true, I suppose, that I heard years and years ago, that having a body means being mostly in pain, so you might as well seek out pleasure whenever possible. Reading and listening and watching outside of lists, drifting, flirting—they can do that for you too.

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Related recommendations:

• The title is a sentence borrowed from Elena Gorfinkel's fantastic essay Against Lists in Another Screen film journal

• To riff on that title, Funkadelic's Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow, obviously

• Infinite mixtapes on NTS

• Gooling “anti lists” to discover that results are not critiques of to do lists and productivity economy but actually polemical articles about whether anti racist reading lists are useful