Lists
by Saba Wa
list1 - n. 1 number of items, names, etc., written or printed
together as a record or aid to memory. 2 (in pl.) a palisadesr
enclosing an area for a tournament. b scene of a contest. - v. 1
make a list of. 2 enter in a list. 3 (as listed adj.) a (of securities)
approved for dealings on the Stock Exchange. b (of a building) of
historical importance and officially protected. []enter the lists
issue or accept a challenge. [Old English]
list2 - v. (of a ship etc.) lean over to one side. -n. process or instance of listing. [origin unknown]
listen /'l s( )n/ v. 1 a make an effort to hear something. b
attentively hear a person speaking. 2 (foll. by to) a give attention
with the ear. b take notice of; heed. 3 (also listen out) (often foll.
by for) seek to hear by waiting alertly. []listen in 1 tap a telephone
communication. 2 uses a radio receiving set. [Old English]
listener n. 1 person who listens. 2 person who listens to the radio.
listeria /l 'st r / n. any of several bacteria infecting humans and
animals eating contaminated food. [Lister, name of a surgeon]
listless adj. Lacking energy or enthusiasm. []listlessly adv.
listlessness n. [from obsolete list inclination]
He then turned to me and asked: And you. What do you do? You write, don't you?
Yeah, I write, I nodded.
And what, what do you write?
Nothing.
Nothing? So you don't write.
No, I write.
Soooo yoooou dooo wriiiite...he said in slow motion implying that perhaps I wasn't understanding his words.
Nothing, I said quickly and completely, I write nothing.
I laughed at the end of the story while Suresh stared at me blankly.
But if that colleague asked me today, I think I would tell him, I write lists.
List Anita and I put together when we returned from DC. It's the only thing we wrote in regards to the weekend. I complained about how I couldn't put the experience into my journal afraid that it would be reduced to the words that I describe them in. Sent out via email to all our friends with the heading "Notes from A.16":
TEXT/SLOGANSWorld
Take
Over
Involved in
Massacring
Families
International
Monetary
Fascists
Ignoble
Mother
Fuckers
Redistribute Corporate Plunder
World Bank Funds Destroyed Turtles
Read My Lips - No New Texans
Run Comrades: The New World Order is Behind You
Never Have so Few Stolen so Much from so Many
Human Need Not Corporate Greed
Stop Washington's War on the World's Poor
IMF and the World Bank: Hundreds Rich Millions Poor
Make Love Not Debt
IMF/World Bank Loan Sharks: Bite Me
IMF/World Bank Start Shaking: Today's PIG is Tomorrow's BACON
SPANK THE BANK
VOICES/CHANTS
The Whole World is Watching
Film the Police
Ain't no Power like the Power of the People
cuz the Power of the People Don't Stop
The People United Will Never Be Defeated
This is What Democracy Looks Like
This is What a Police State Looks Like
ONE We are the People TWO Defeat Oppression
THREE A little Bit Louder FOUR a New World
Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, the IMF Has Got to Go
More World: Less Bank
OHM
We're Here, We're Wet, So Cancel the Debt
Most Popular Scent: Vinegar
Eyewear: Swimming Goggles
Clothing: Plastic Garbage Bags
Nose Gear: Plastic Shark Snouts
Music: Darth Vader theme from Star Wars
Puppet of the Day: Huge IMF Structural Adjustment Pulverizer with Chomping Teeth Oiled with Bottle Labeled IMF LUBE JOB (half of the puppets stored were destroyed by police due to "fire hazard")
Quote of the Day (NYT 4/18/00): "After Several Tense Standoffs With Lines of Helmeted Policeman, A STRANGE STREET PARTY DEVELOPED"
Police Fashion:
Helmets
Bulletproof vests
Plastic Face Masks
Reversible Black/Flourescent Rain Gear
Scowls
Police Toys:
BillyClubs
Whistles
Plastic Handcuffs
Tear Gas
Pepper Spray
Tanks
Arrests:
640 Peaceful Protestors Illegally Blockaded and Herded On to School Buses Saturday Afternoon
500 Protestors Volunteered to be Arrested Monday
List of sayings copied in my journal from St. John's Cathedral, the American Poet's Corner. Anita and I had spent most of the night at Suresh's house while he played melancholic, depressing music for a few hours. When we tried to talk, he shhhed us and told us to listen. So we listened. We walked out feeling like our innards had been wrenched from the descent into darkness the music had taken us to. After arriving uptown, we went over to St. John's Cathedral for the all night reading of Dante's Inferno. But it had ended before we got there. We walked through the cathedral and ended up at the poet's corner. Anita wrote all the sayings engraved in the ceramic tiles, I wrote down only the one's I liked and then sat on the chair and stared blankly at the pulpit:
Live all you can, it's a mistake not to. Henry James
So we beat on, boats against the current borne ceaselessly into the past. F. Scott Fitzgerald
There is no end to life in its mercy, as in its pain. Edith Wharton
Out of Space. Out of Time. Edgar Allen Poe
There were things he stretched but mainly he told the truth. Mark Twain
A World of made
Is not a world of born. E. E. Cummings
Vision of Earth. Heal and Receive me. Louise Bogan
All the untidy Activity continues, awful but cheerful. Elizabeth Bishop
Thomas Stearn Eliot: And let my cry come unto thee
Walt Whitman: I stop somewhere waiting for you
Wallace Stevens: Oh blessed rage for order
Langston Hughes: My soul has grown deep like the rivers
Henry David Thoreau: be it life or death, we crave only reality
I used to watch Late Night with David Letterman for his Top Ten lists. During college, I worked on a student humour paper called the Heuristic Squelch. The first few pages consisted of lists that mocked campus and government politics, lifestyle, everything from the sacred to the profane. I joined the writing staff because one day, while sitting on campus idly, I decided to entertain myself by complaining to the two students passing out the paper that their top ten lists were sexist and avidly pointed to a few examples. The two students were the editors of the paper. One of them said to me, if you have a problem with it, you write something and so I did.
When Anita was here, she and I spent a rainy afternoon getting high and playing songs about water and rain. She made a list of the songs we listened to in her journal. After she left, I taped one side of a cassette entitled, Songs we didn't listen to on Friday, and sent it to her. I left the second side blank. List of songs made for Anita:
Waterfall - Mechell
REM: Nightswimming
Cowboy Junkies: Speed River
Rain, Concrete Blonde
Wave of Mutilation - Pixies
Magic and Loss - Lou Reed
Wandering Star - Portishead
Creep - Radiohead
Silent All these Years - tori amos
First we take Manhattan - Leonard Cohen
I'll be your mirror - Velvet Underground
Suresh called me and I asked him to tell me anything he could think of about lists. Desert Island Discs, he said. They take off from the hypothetical, if you were stranded on a desert or island, what ten things would you take with you. Tower Records now publishes a list called Desert Island Discs in their store magazine Pulse. The movie, High Fidelity, based on the book, takes place in a record shop with employees that are music snobs. The film starts with one of the characters turning towards the camera and saying, Desert Island Breakups. Throughout the movie, the characters make lists.
List of books Mick asked me to gather for him:
Bruno Latour
C/O Leh - HE 4769.P3 L3813 1996
C/O BS - Pandora's Hope - Q175.32.R42 L38 1999
On Bogota by Mauricio Rubio about crime and violence
Silver, Trade and War by Stanley Stein
I delete emails of lists that acquaintance send me that say "list of the things that make me happy"
Anita walked through the door, handed me two bags, proceeded to quickly pack her bags and then without looking back, said, goodbye doll. After she left, I hid under the covers for a few hours because I was sad. List of things in the two bags:
Pack of Nat Sherman's Black and Gold
Pack of Nat Sherman's Fantasia lights - Assorted colors, Gold Filtered
200 ML Remy Martin Fine Champagne Cognac 40%alc./vol - which I was drinking while making this list
plant
Lorrie Moore's character in her short story "How to Be an Other Woman" in the collection Self Help, makes lists that drive the narrative of the story.
List Lisa sent my parents six months after we got a restraining order against her for physically assaulting Kim written in clear black block letters with the heading "Ask Lilly about":
Ecstasy
Acid
Mushrooms
Pot
Alcohol
Walter
To Do List I wrote at the beginning of this semester:
Do Resume, send out
Drop out of school
My friend Feisal invited me out and I told him I'd come as long as we talked about lists. We arrived at a club where a friend of his was hosting a fashion show. I waited while he went up to the large and buff security guard holding the guest list. A woman was already standing there and it seemed she wasn't on the list. The guard found Feisal's name on the list at the same time that the woman on the side started to make his acquaintance. She turned to me and complimented me on my necklace. The security guard let all three of us in for free. Once inside, I began asking anyone I met about lists. Some people looked at me strangely and quickly moved away. Others spoke of lists made at work. One fellow felt that lists were too planned and he liked spontaneity. Another talked about the waiting lists at Eton, a prestigious boarding school in England. As soon as a son is born, he told me, the parents put him immediately on the Eton waiting list.
List of restaurants Feisal and I went to after midnight that had told us "kitchen closed" in the lower East Side before finally getting greasy, mediocre take out from the late night bar menu at B3:
Minghella Burmese Food
Dun Sookie Korean Food
First's
Max's Italian
List of graduate school actions/words that I still don't understand:
When they posit
When they enter an interstice, if you will
When they are intranslatable, invisible, hypervisible
When they are always at stake
When they become mobile
When they are spectral
When they are endlessly deferred
List of quotes written on the first page of various journals:
Shatter my Heart so a new room can be created for a limitless love Author?
I would never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member - Groucho Marx
The world's potter make such a delicate cup / and then smashes it on the ground - Omar Khayyam
Passion or coincidence once prompted me to stay - duran duran
The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact - Shakespeare
How did I become what I am and why do I suffer from being what I am - Nietzsche
To become a Sufi, one must die to oneself to become one Self
Sooner or later, the fabric of every life gets torn / That's when life begins
Dil se dil rah (From heart to heart, there is a road/path) Author?
List of not-for-schools books I've read since moving to New York recorded on inside flap of journals:
The Golden Notebooks Doris Lessing which I left on a bench at Riverside Park after I finished reading it
The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler on Anita's suggestion
Lady in the Lake Raymond Chandler which I got from the library
Birthday Letters Ted Hughes which I bought for Ivan when I was angry at him and wanted to break up.
Human Bondage Somerset Magham found in a used book store
Interpreter of Maladies, stories Jhumpa Lahiri out of curiosity when she won the Pulitzer for fiction
Self Help, stories Lorrie Moore which Sidharth mentioned at one of our experimental writer's meeting
Cocaine Nights J.G. Ballard which I just started and picked up because of the intriguing title
I once made a self-titled short film many years ago that was supposed to be about me. I spent the whole film talking about myself and then talking about how the words that I described myself are incapable of capturing who I am. Words lose their meaning, I kept implying. The student filmmaker and I ended up dating soon after that film and after we broke up, we stop talking. List of films he and I made:
Saba (7 min.)
Apocalypse Party (22min)
The book, Beelzebub's Tales to his Grandson by George Gordjieff, gives instruction at the beginning of the book on how to read it. The book must be read three time and in a particular manner. List of his instructions:
First, as you have already been mechanized to read all your books and newspapers
Second, as if you were reading out loud to another person
And only third, trying to fathom the gist of my writings
List of things I've thought of studying since starting graduate school:
Muslim or South Asian Diaspora in US and US media representation
Diaspora in Africa after I met Shaffique who shared with me his upbringing in Kenya
Diaspora in Indonesia because my brother lived there
Activism in South Asian Diaspora in the US and UK because Mick told me to bring together my personal and academic life
Diaspora in Singapore because my brother just moved there
Arab diaspora in Argentina which Axel and Juan think is a great idea
Suresh called and said to come out and have drinks with him and his friends. As soon as I arrived at the Kava Lounge, Suresh and Akbar started making lists for me. Suresh started with a list of occupations he would make up for himself and tell women that he'd meet in bars. Then, they turned to top pick up lines/stories. Suresh told a story about sitting next to a woman on a plane. Before the plane landed, not wanting the opportunity to meet her to pass, he started a game of hangman that said, really stupid pick up lines on an airplane. Any new person who came to the table was asked about lists but then we started playing hangman. List of the hangman results from that night:
S A Y "L I S T" O N E M O R E T I M E A N D I 'L L K I L L Y O U
R E S T A U R A N T W H O R E
S H O C K T H E M O N K E Y
P I Z Z A
S I N G L E E N D E D T R I O D E J E L L Y R O L L M O R T O N
List of happenings as I walked home from Kava Lounge located at 12th and Hudson because it was such a warm and beautiful night:
Watching a feather fall on the concrete building as a pigeon flew away
Taxi drivers offering me rides home
An unconcerned man, walking with a group of frat-like boys, screams at me, You shouldn't be walking alone at 3am.
Ticking sounds from the green traffic control boxes at almost every corner
A group of young men that walked out of a bar with drinks in their hand. One of them handed me his cell phone and I stopped briefly to talk to his friend on the other line.
Cursing at myself at various points for my idea to walk home
People shuffling out of Hotel Beacon into lanes and lanes of limousines and chauffeur driven automobiles
Every so often, other lone figures that would say, Have a good night, to which I'd respond, you too.
The night before I met Suresh for the first time at a party, I was talking to Anita on the phone and mentioned that I was going to Shaffique's house for a party. Oh, she said, I bet my friend Suresh will be there. They're both doctors and they must know each other. If you see him, tell him that he still has my records and I want them back!
At the party, I was buzzed already and didn't remember to ask Shaffique until I was close to leaving. I whispered into Shaffique's ear - is there a doctor name Suresh here. At that moment, Suresh stumbled over and said to me, Aren't you from San Francisco? Anita's friend. I met you a few years ago at that one bar.
It was true. We had met a long time ago. I looked to him, beer in one hand, and point at him, there's something I must tell you. A message I am supposed to give you from Anita
To return her records.
Sitting here smoking a fluorescent pink Nat Sherman Fantasia light cigarette, I feel like I could never look at another list again. But I take a deep breath and allow for balance. Writing is telling and all types of writing should be allowed to tell as they do.
List of things I write:
Academic papers
Hand written letters to Anita in San Francisco
Short stories
Poetry
Journal entries
Lists
Etc.
About Saba Wa
Saba is on the editorial collective of SAMAR magazine and lives somewhere in between LA, NY and SF.
