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Friday, June 24, 2011
Of Lists and Litanies
Lists can be simple things:
The days of the week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.
Ingredients in a recipe: 1 hen; 1 tb-sp salt; 1 oz. white fungus; 1 tb-sp sherry (optional).
Planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune,
Pluto.Positive integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, . . .
Lists consist of items, and an ordering of those items. The ordering may or may not be significant. When I listed the days of the week, for example, I did so according a standard principle for that particular list: temporal order. I could have listed them alphabetically: Friday, Monday, Saturday, Sunday, Thursday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Strange, no? Yet that’s how you’d find them in a dictionary with, however, lots of other items between them.
That list, of course, is English-specific. I don’t know the name of the days in Chinese, but one can, of course, check the web and find out. And what I found out, among other things, is that before the West came knocking, the Chinese week had ten days.
Back to our lists. There’s no particular order to the ingredients list. At least I don’t think so. I listed the planets in order from the Sun out, another convention. Had I used the alphabetic convention, that list, too, would have been odd.
Q. What’s the Chinese equivalent of alphabetic listing?
* * * * *
And then there’s that list of the positive integers. That’s a most special list. How would you alphabetize it? You can’t, not in THAT form. That’s the list, it has no other canonical order, and, unlike those other lists, this one goes on and on and on and . . .
Of course one could convert the integers into number names and then alphabetize those. But which names? The cardinals: one, two, three, etc., or the ordinals: first, second, third, etc.? The alphabetizations will be different. But, alas, whichever way you go, you still have a problem. Think about it.
How can you properly alphabetize a list if you don’t have the whole list? Imagine if I’d alphabetized the days of the week but had been working from a corrupted list that omitted Thursday. I’d have this list: Friday, Monday, Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday. When Thursday finally showed up I couldn’t tack it on the end; I’d have to insert it there in the middle.
Well, that’s the problem we face when alphabetizing a list of the positive integers. There’s always going to be one more positive integer. Always. No sooner are we done with alphabetizing the current list when another integer shows up. Let’s start with just two integers, 1 and 2, and add the integers to the list one by one. We’ll alphabetize the cardinal names.
one, two one, three, two four, one, three, two five, four, one, three, two five, four, one, six, three, two five, four, one, seven, six, three, two eight, five, four, one, seven, six, three, two eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, six, three, two eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, six, ten, three, two eleven . . . .
No, I’m afraid that alphabetizing that list is hopeless. And pointless as well.
All of a sudden, though, it’s looking like lists aren’t quite so simple. One might even, in the furthest stretches of one’s imagination, conceive of lists and a listing as being profound. It’s thus worth noting the one of the oldest existing programming languages, with hundreds of variants, was designed for LISt Processing: LISP. And LISP is the darling of the AI world.
Think of it, computing as list processing. And you thought computing and computers were about numbers.
* * * * *
The act of forming lists must have been aided by the invention of writing systems. Obviously, one doesn’t need a writing system in order to form lists, but writing facilitates working with lists. Historically, lists seem to be among the earliest written texts we have. Perhaps the elaboration of writing systems was, in some measure, driven by the desire to formulate lists.
In Information Ages (Johns Hopkins 1988) Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman list some of the lists found in an Assyrian collection of cuneiform tables from the seventh century BCE (p. 45):
Of the seven hundred extant cuneiform tablets in the royal library, the largest group consists of three hundred “omen texts.” These lists consist of short, conditional statements correlating various phenomena with predicted outcomes, such as “If a man’s chest-hair curls upwards he will become a slave.” The next largest group, two hundred tablets, comprises sign and word lists organized according to a wide variety of principles, largely to aid Akkadian-speaking scribes in mastering Sumerian, a dead language early in the second-millennium. A related group of one hundred tablets provide interlinear translations of Sumerian incantations and prayers. Finally, some one hundred tablets contain assorted conjurations, proverbs, and fables, of which only about forty record epics, like the famous story of Gilgamesh.
The tablets containing these lists, of course, would have been rare and precious objects. The ability to read and write them was rare as well. Were the tablets sacred objects? And the lists on them, sacred knowledge?
* * * * *
More recently, quite recently in fact, we have the Latour litany, so named by Ian Bogost, who has conveniently provided a web toy to generate (simulacra of) such litanies from Wikipedia topics. Some examples:
Malas, Panopoda carneicosta, Severo-Kurilsk, Kiwicon, Roy Neuberger, Remix (Mushroomhead album), Thomas Touchet-Jesson, 23rd Baron Audley, Max Sedgley, Cino
Rational love, Objezierze, Greater Poland Voivodeship, College of Journalism and Mass Communications (University of Nebraska–Lincoln), Black Beauty (dinosaur), Pointe de Bricola, Farm to Market Road 1528
Johnny McGurk, School of Politics and International Studies, Janowo, Rawicz County, Multilateral Force, Wyre Forest Council election, 2008, Yamaha XV920R
Bogost glosses these random sections through the Wikipedia thus:
Like all Latour Litanies, this little gadget underscores the rich diversity of things. It also reminds us that human beings are among them, since a large number of Wikipedia articles describe living and historical persons.
Just so.
Graham Harman (h/t Tim Morton) explicates the Latour litany thus:
These lists of objects, which often appear in my writings, are not my own stylistic innovation. They can be found in any author who wants to reawaken our awareness of the particularity of individual things. Ian Bogost calls them ‘Latour Litanies’ just because Latour does them so nicely, but they are far older than Latour.
In many cases I try to have the lists include one object from the sciences, one living creature, one machine, one compound entity, one human political unit and perhaps one fictional entity, just to enforce the notion of a ‘flat ontology’ in which all objects are equally objects. So here’s a sentence you might find in one of my books, though I’m inventing it right now: ‘The world is packed full with objects: neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.’
Pay attention to that recipe: 1. one object from the sciences, 2. one living creature, 3. one machine, 4. one compound entity, 5. one human political unit, 6. one fictional entity (optional). Whether or not you buy into flat ontology, that’s a recipe for a list that implies the cosmos.
All of it, in only six items. That’s one powerful list. Mucho mojo, that.
* * * * *
Finally, I leave you with some frame grabs from the opening moments of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo.
Comments
Any thoughts on Walt Whitman, master cataloguer, and his lists in Leaves of Grass? Not just the totality they gesture towards (often “America"), but the order and principles of inclusion (if there are)?
I’ve never read more that bits and pieces of Leaves, and that long ago. I’d assume that there is a logic to the lists, but obviously I’m not prepared to comment on it.
One could raise the question for other texts as well. For example, much of Borges’"The Library of Babel” consists of lists of books that must, on principle, exist in the library.
And here’s one for digital humanists with means to examine large bodies of texts: do lists crop up more frequently at certain times and places?
The wind bloweth where it listeth, so listen up: whither goest thou to Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist (Harvard 2011, from the Richard Ellmann Lectures), Chapter 4, “My Lists”, whence: “I had a Catholic education, and thus became used to reciting and listening to litanies. Litanies are by nature repetitious. Usually they are lists of laudatory phrases, as with the Litanies of the Virgin ...” (then, say, 5 Hail Marys ...)
Let me, uh, list a few quick thoughts:
1. When thinking of lists one might ask how “natural” the listing is, by which I mean something like this: One can take a randomly ordered group of words and list them alphabetically, but this is possible only because the letters of the alphabet have already been listed in a certain order. But the alphabetical order is itself not natural, but arbitrary in a way that, say, the succession of the days of the week is not. One day really does follow another, but B does not “really” follow A. The alphabet doesn’t have any natural but only a conventional sequence.
Like you said, the fact that the week consists of seven days is also arbitrary, purely conventional. So is the fact that it “starts” on Sunday, or for that matter that it has a start at all.
Now think of moving from this…
--I put the pickles in the shopping cart.
--I paid for the groceries at the checkout.
--I drove home.
--I parked the car in the Piggly Wiggly lot.
...to this:
1. I parked the car in the Piggly Wiggly lot.
2. I put the pickles in the shopping cart.
3. I paid for the groceries at the checkout.
4. I drove home.
Is this the same kind of list as the examples above? No. Is it really a “list” at all, or just a story that looks like a list? If it is a list, then is there a sense in which stories are also lists and can be analyzed as such? Isn’t your basic novel just a list of sentences? Or, as “The Library of Babel” reminds us, just a list of letters and punctuation marks?
How should we characterize the operation of moving from the first grouping to the second? If we think of the operation as a kind of writing or storytelling we might think of it as a sort of realism, as making the story cohere more closely with our sense of experience. Or maybe as the same sort of operation by which one turns the orginal Sound and the Fury into the Cliffnotes version.
As far as I know, we don’t really have terms for easily distinguishing between these various sorts of operations and answering these sorts of questions. Is there a word for the act of picking a point at which to break into a recurring cycle and designating that point a “beginning”? In what ways does our penchant for doing so reflect and shape our worldview and help us make sense of experience? Does the conceptual vocabulary of any of the narratologists get at any of these questions? If it does, does it do so in a way that could help us think about lists in general? About stories as lists? About lists as stories? Is there work in mathematics or computer science that could help us think about these things? I dunno.
2. How would a digital humanities project go about finding lists in a corpus? By searching for strings consisting of two or more consecutive units consisting of a single word followed by a comma, followed by a single word followed by a period? By looking for anaphoric structures?
3. No list of literary listings (like those in Leaves of Grass) would be complete without the wonderful lists in The Anatomy of Melancholy.
On how would one comb through millions of words in thousands of texts looking for lists, off hand, I don’t know. But it does strike me as an approachable problem and perhaps even an interesting one. As you’ve indicated, lists are going to have patterns of recurrence—punctuation, phrase length—that differentiate them from surrounding text. The business of analyzing lists for internal structure once one has identified them, that’s another matter.
Here’s the Project Gutenberg page of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.
Thanks for the link. A quick perusal suggests that maybe A of M might pose the ultimate challenge for a list-detection algorithm. A typical passage:
“What would he have said to see, hear, and read so many bloody battles, so many thousands slain at once, such streams of blood able to turn mills: unius ob noxam furiasque, or to make sport for princes, without any just cause, ‘for vain titles’ (saith Austin), ‘precedency, some wench, or such like toy, or out of desire of domineering, vainglory, malice, revenge, folly, madness,’ (goodly causes all, ob quas universus orbis bellis et caedibus misceatur,) whilst statesmen themselves in the mean time are secure at home, pampered with all delights and pleasures, take their ease, and follow their lusts, not considering what intolerable misery poor soldiers endure, their often wounds, hunger, thirst, &c., the lamentable cares, torments, calamities, and oppressions that accompany such proceedings, they feel not, take no notice of it. ‘So wars are begun, by the persuasion of a few debauched, hair-brain, poor, dissolute, hungry captains, parasitical fawners, unquiet hotspurs, restless innovators, green heads, to satisfy one man’s private spleen, lust, ambition, avarice,’ &c....”
Lists within lists, structured in a variety of ways. I suppose these forms of compounding have names in the classical rhetoric taught in Burton’s time. Even when quoting, the guy quotes lists. When he dreamed he probably dreamed not just of flying but of flying, soaring, winging his way over the cities, villages, and deserts of the earth, and other suchlike aerial maneuverings.
Lists within lists, sounds like a job of LISPman.
Maybe the Burton list deserves a place next to the the Latour litany in a revsed rhetoric for the 21st century.
As I recall, Burton extended and revised his Anatomy several times. Not only would it be interesting to follow the revisions, but it would be interesting to see if others picked up on his lists so that they began ‘propagating.’