Amazon’s Listmania
Have you ever been enlightened by a single “customer-review” that you have read on Amazon? I find them ridiculous. And while I regularly buy books from Amazon, especially used ones, I have so far found the lists I’m supposed to peruse on the margins also a major burden. But last night, I came across a list which represented a true mania. This particular reader, Vik Kanwar, someone whom I know slightly, has compiled not one but seventy-one lists. The individual lists have names like History of Resentment, List of Lists, or Poetics of War. The entire effort seems overwhelming, a bit odd, and certainly hugely brilliant!
hugely brilliant?
Comment by sonia — April 13, 2006 @ 2:57 am
hazaar great!
Comment by St Antonym — April 14, 2006 @ 9:00 pm
Lists as a Minimal form of Communication
1. Amitava. 2. Vik. 3. Long time!
1. Re: Your Blog.
2. “ego-google”
2(a) doppelganger
(b) (Upstart poker player U.K.)
Stumble-Upon
Scanning>Skimming>Sorting
Content> Seriality> Consecutiveness> “Narrative”?
So here’s a short account of my odd fascination and the “mania” with lists. In 2002 I was running a never quite weekly arts salon called The Wednesday Circle. The last Wednesday Circle of that year the conceptual topic was listing. Amazon provided a place in the machine to experiment with this. (By coincidence a close friend from high school, now a projects developer at Amazon, helped design this Listmania feature, but that more accounts for my continuation as a tool of this tool rather than why I got started). As you well know academics signal to each other through citations, academics sometimes read bibliographies for pleasure, and we modern bibliophiles read more bookshelves than books. Some virtues of lists, and the ideal use of Listmania: The connections are somewhat more open than in a narrative. Good list should be short and rely on simple juxtaposition rather than any claim to encyclopedic authority or completeness. Virtue of listmania is its non-narrative character, not taste-making posture (which is instead represented by the Amazon feature “so you’d like to). “So you’d like to…” [So you’d like to join the be a post-colonial connoisseur of Louis Lamour disabilities of those thrown from horses.]” That’s more like an instruction manual or a claim to expertise. [Though I have put together some “syllabi” though without support text]. Also I’m not into the countdown thing or the David Letterman “top ten” hierarchy, which is not really a hierarchy at all, but just the set-up for a punchline.
Instead, lists as:
compilation
cataloging
indexing
piling
logging
miscellany
shorthand
juxtaposition
Lists are best when more democratic and slightly maniacal. On that note: it is worth defending “net neutrality,” see MoveOn.org’s campaign.
Some list-related activities
1. Look over to bookshelves and assign to a random row a project or significance.
2. Request a Full account of every book overdue book at the library
3. See Hanna Darboven’s Culture Work at DIA- Beacon (temporarily closed)
4. Save receipts from special or random occasions.
5. Daniel Spoerri’s Anecdoted Topography of Chance
take care,
vk
Comment by V. Kanwar — April 24, 2006 @ 4:50 pm