Wayne Koestenbaum loves the list & so do I

militantmaudlinist:

Michael Silverblatt: The list is one of your forms. Why do you like it so?

Wayne Koestenbaum: It tranquilizes me. The act of preparing a list or setting out to write in the form of a list performs on me a kind of inner mental hygiene. I don’t think in terms of linear arguments exactly but I do think in terms of like bodies, and I like to stack phrases and ideas next to each other—phrases that resemble each other so that literally when I set out to write a paragraph let’s say and I start—the list-making apparatus in me starts to rev up, I know exactly where I”m going. And I can also relish the incongruities between the different members of the list. It allows me to be both thorough and inconsequential at the same time. 

Wayne Koestenbaum: …I would say that the list has a certain gay vibe, or has over the last couple centuries maybe because it evades the march of a certain kind of doctrinaire thinking in progress. It allows one to assemble certain private collections… But I also think that the list—to take it out of a particularly sexual underground category—has the arts of appreciation even of the natural world. I’m thinking of Dorothy Wordsworth and Thoreau, among others of a certain kind of diary-keeping or bookkeeping intelligence that rather than assembles raison d’etre for everything, simply pays attention to it when it occurs. 

…

I wouldn’t have been drawn to write about the larger questions of social injustice and shame if I didn’t have within me very very clear memories of private shame that to me really aren’t trivial but are my entryway into the larger theme…I believe that by looking within and by hugging and mining certain memories again and again and dilating them, anything can be found…you keep diving into a subject— even if it’s just sneezing in third grade and I’ve got snot on my hand. But don’t let go of that incident until it can mean everything.” 

(From KCRW’s BOOKWORM interview, 2/9/12)

1. Aside from discussing the impulse behind my summer fun (admission: also timely) read, Humiliation, this interview theorizes my number one most compulsive behavior since childhood. 
2. I’m accepting the shifting boundary between theorizing an archiving practice and glorifying obsessive-compulsive habits.
3. But what about the idea that the obsessive-compulsive-afflicted are just well-suited for the work of documenting the private? Of finding intimate “entryways” into public worlds? The other week I heard Alison Bechdel speak about Fun Home as well as her forthcoming memoir, Are You My Mother? and her work is as rich as it is in great part because of her self-described obsessive-compulsive archiving tendencies. She admitted on stage to videotaping herself finishing the last scene in  Are You My Mother?, in which she as a character finishes her last book, Fun Home. 
4. Except what is the archive which comes out of obsessive impulses with delayed compulsions? 
5. I have a close friend with whom I write emails in list form. Something I like about the lists I write her is that there is this kind of arc but the content can wander, and the tone, too. 
6. Re. the last quote I highlighted on “not letting go”—ok; you don’t have to tell me twice. This is when Koestenbaum says out loud the impulse behind most of my dwelling. On everything. Everything could potentially mean more/ mean differently/mean, if I wait near it. I feel generous enough to call it dwelling because while the ideas of fixating, or obsessing, do reference the mind’s often looping search their pathological airs shadow how generative such a process often is. It is I think another way of defending a different “queer attentiveness,” or, the search ”for the odd detail, the unintelligible or resistant moment.” 
7.  I kind of like the way the list creates an image of progress but in content does not have to follow it. 
8. The list that dwells and archives but does not necessarily progress is also Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a book in theses on the color blue: “3. Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you could say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse to ever be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or all the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.” 
9. Chris Kraus’ I LOVE DICK also reveals the logic of dwelling on an event to exhume its potential meanings, excavating the debasement it does. 
10. The question though that I always end up asking with lists is when to stop. At what point have I exhumed enough? While sometimes rewarding it is also exhausting to dwell, linger, loiter, re-hash, excavate. Time slows but it also moves ahead; I fall in and out of it. I definitely get thorough, and honest, and very frivolous. Frivolous enough. When there is a decent range of brutal honesty & brutal frivolity I feel alright stopping. 
11. Whenever I write the word frivolity I just think about Colette. 
12. 
13. As I type this I am trying to mimic Colette’s lotusesque pose & one raised eyebrow—not easy— minus the headgear, serpent-like arm band, brass bikini (?), and studded botanical skirt design. The thing about Colette was that she was frivolous but like fiercely so. 
14. Brass bikinis worn by Colette as top signifiers of brutal frivolity. Maybe a little on the hyperbolic side. Whatever.