Whenever I have seen a list, I have detected chaos behind it. The Ten Commandments had to be made because, well, just look at the crap going on in the Bible biz: snakes, disguises, golden asses, certain ladies and probably gents writhing around the golden asses, Sodomwise and Onanwise.
It must be exhausting trying to control everybody, right, mom, and Moses? Lists bring order to disorder, if only for a moment. Cash, the carpenter son who builds his mother’s coffin with his snoring saw in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, speaks in lists:
“I made it on the bevel.
1. There is more surface for the nails to grip.
2. There is twice the gripping-surface to each seam.
3. The water will have to seep into it on a slant…”
Cash is a word for money. Stories are often referred to as “accounts”, delivered by “tellers”, just like in a bank. Make sure you balance your checkbook, they say. I never balanced my checkbook.
In high school in the 1970’s, the two books that got passed around the most, besides number 3 Puzo’s The Godfather for the gossip at the wedding about Sonny Corleone’s bodacious wang, and number 4 It’s Alive!, because of the baby carriage with the claw hanging out on the cover, were (#1, what a bunch of boring crap is the expected order) The Guiness Book of World Records and its knockoff cousin, my beautiful #dooky, The Book of Lists.
I preferred The Book of Lists, because high school was disorder, at best. Lists broke disorder down. There were lists like “7 Messages Found in Bottles”, “8 Remarkable Escapes From Devil’s Island”, “Dr. Demento’s 10 Worst Song Titles of All Time”, “15 Semordnilap Palindromes”, “8 Cases of Spontaneous Combustion” and my favorite, “5 Famous People Who Died While Having Sex”, which included Genghis Khan, and I don’t want you to think too much about it, but Kublai Khan was Genghis’ grandson, who dealt with Marco Polo, and I have had weird sexual fantasies about being Marco Polo to that particular Kublai Khan, giving him deathly orgasms with my endless lists of goods and services. I’m sure he would have enjoyed my Marco Polo biz so much, that he’d touch himself. I told a lot of my own former lovers that I wanted to be the sixth on the Book of Lists list, stroking-out-wise. Therefore, dear reader, you have been warned: this Monday Pillow Book, as of this, the 100th list, forever remains unfinished, as far as I’m concerned. To be honest, I thought I had maybe 25 lists in me. And yet here I am, still fucking ALIVE. IT’S ALIVE, CLAW-WISE.
Frank O’Hara, in “The Day Lady Died”, makes a list of things he did on the otherwise quotidian day Billie Holiday passed away, picking up booze and cigarettes and then he does some equivocating over picking out a book to buy, searching out the literature he loves, searching in an exhaustive but finally exhausting way, for it nearly puts him, and me, to sleep. Despite all his order, this Fire Island dune buggy:
Sweet dreams, loyal Pillow Book List Readers. The list is dead, long live the ontological doo-dad.
The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
A lot of those list titles from The Book of Lists would make great titles for poems. Don't mind if I do!
PS/ the dune buggy photo: too soon?