List Interview
Daniel Grear of the Arkansas Times interviewed me recently about the list archive I’ve been keeping on my website. The resulting feature is titled ““Chaos and Abundance’: Why writer Kevin Brockmeier is obsessed with keeping lists,” and you can read it in full (and see some surprisingly not unflattering photos of me) here.
‘Chaos and abundance‘: Why writer Kevin Brockmeier is obsessed with keeping lists
by Daniel Grear November 26, 2024 1:56 pm
A-LISTER: When he's not writing novels and short stories, Little Rock author Kevin Brockmeier meticulously chronicles popular culture.
Kevin Brockmeier is, first and foremost, a writer. In addition to 2021’s “The Ghost Variations,” the Little Rock-based author’s most recent book of spectral-themed flash fiction, he has written three novels, two short story collections, two children’s novels and a memoir, many of which “probe the fantastical,” as Arkansas Times contributor Wesley Beal once put it.
A persistent activity that occupies Brockmeier’s mind when he’s not writing, however, is listkeeping. For years, he’s been meticulously documenting his favorite media, amassing an online archive of more than 700 lists — some predictably broad, others hilariously narrow — that give order to the books, albums, movies and TV shows that have made the largest impact on him. To complement a season when many are compiling year-end lists of the art they find most dear, Brockmeier spoke with the Arkansas Times via email about this fascinating obsession.
How long have you been making lists?
Pretty much always. I can hardly remember a time when I wasn’t organizing the world into lists or considering some aspect of my experience and transforming it into a preference set, dating back to my very early childhood. At age 3, for instance, I came home from a family trip to Disney World with a complete seven-figure collection of the dwarfs from “Snow White.” I remember that it seemed very important to me to line them up in rank order on my dresser, starting with my favorite — Happy — and ending with my least favorite — Grumpy. In middle school, I used to lie awake at night making mental lists of the 10 people I would save in the event of a nuclear holocaust. (How I went from being the 3-year-old whose favorite dwarf was Happy to the 12-year-old tracing the schematics of some imaginary apocalypse, I couldn’t tell you.) In college, I kept a list of my 10 favorite books, albums and movies tucked in my wallet. So, obviously, as an inward habit, the impulse has always been with me.
What do you like about lists? What motivates you to maintain the habit of keeping them?
The neatness of them, for one thing. There’s something very satisfying to me about taking the chaos and abundance of the world and bringing a little order to it. It’s the same part of my character that finds Oulipean writing constraints liberating rather than imprisoning — the part that’s gratified to construct a novella using only 10-word sentences, say, or to produce an entire book of 100 two-page ghost stories. Exercises like this have always activated my imagination. Whenever I manage to create something without violating the rules I’ve established for myself, I have this sparkling little job-well-done reaction, as if I’ve completed an assignment, and each list I make feels like a kind of micro-assignment I’ve given myself: a thousand tiny jobs well done. That’s one side of the habit, the selfish side, but there’s also a generous side: I’m an evangelist for the things I love, which means I use my lists as handy little recommendation engines. I enjoy considering them and perfecting them, recalibrating them whenever my enthusiasm shifts or diminishes or grows, but I also enjoy being able to share them with other people.
The vast majority of your lists concern literature, music, film and television. Was it an intentional decision to limit yourself to those mediums, and why are you drawn to them in particular?
They’re simply the art forms with which I feel the most intimacy, the ones that actually move me, the ones I’ve spent the most time appreciating and trying to understand: art forms with important narrative or verbal or at least sonic components, which for me have always felt like the most wide-open doorways into experience. What this means is that they’re the art forms I know well enough to make useful, well-calibrated, hyper-specific or just pleasingly idiosyncratic value judgments about them. (For example, “Tender Is the Flesh” by Agustina Bazterrica, while very fine, is only number three on my list of “Five Novels About Eating People,” behind (1) “Under the Skin” by Michel Faber and (2) “Animals” by Don LePan; the first of my “Five Favorite Toy-Instrument Bands” is Modified Toy Orchestra, and their best album is “Plastic Planet”; that sort of thing.) I should add, though, that for me some of the most entertaining lists on the site depart from the books-and-movies-and-music mean you’ve noticed: my “Ten Favorite Steven Wright Jokes,” for instance, or my “Ten Favorite Panel Cartoons.” Whenever I’m able to add a list like that to the catalog, I feel as if I’m contributing an unexpected dash of color.
The abundance of these lists suggests to me that you consume a lot of media. Would you agree?
I suppose that’s true, though it’s all relative, of course. Lauren Groff, whom I know pretty well, reads more prolifically than I do. My friend Brad Caviness has a knowledge of Arkansas music that puts mine (and almost everyone else’s) to shame. I once visited the apartment of the music journalist Robert Palmer, and the wall of CDs he owned astonished me. My gift seems to be for finding the particular pockets or byways or ant-mazes of art that fascinate me and exploring them exhaustively. Also, I have an eccentricity of taste, an insubordination, that has kept me open to making unusual discoveries well into middle age. What this means is that I’ve read everything by, say, Chloe Aridjis or César Aira or a hundred other writers; listened to everything by David Sylvian or Susanna Wallumrød or a hundred other musicians; watched everything by Hirokazu Kore-eda or Joachim Trier or a hundred other filmmakers; and if you enjoy the same art forms I do and your taste is anything like mine, my recommendations might end up being valuable to you.
Some of the lists in your archive have a general, almost canonical quality, like “Fifty Favorite Books” and “Fifty Favorite Movies.” Others are hyper-specific, like “Top Ten (Non-Evangelical) Novels About Angels” and “A Dozen CDs that Enchant as Art Objects.” How do you decide what subjects warrant a list?
Frequently — and this probably constitutes the majority of the archive — I’ll realize that I’ve been pursuing a particular line of interest and feel compelled to formalize my impressions: “Twenty Favorite Works of Biblical Fiction” or “Top Ten Depressing Christmas Songs” or “Ten Favorite Novels That Take Place in Little Rock, Arkansas” or “Twenty Favorite Time-Travel and Time-Loop Movies.” Sometimes I’ll produce a list in response to some provocation I’ve stumbled across, like “Ten Great Books With No Sense of Humour” (inspired by a post on an acquaintance’s Substack) or “Twenty Favorite Singers” (inspired by a Rolling Stone list). Sometimes I’ll sense a need for a very particular set of recommendations when I’m teaching, and I’ll go home and make a list to share with my students: “Ten Favorite Books Written in the Ecstatic Register,” for instance, or “A Dozen Dangerous Writers.” Quite a few of the lists are just designed to be fun or amusing, like “Ten Favorite Muppets” or “Fifty Favorite ’80s Pop Songs With Saxophone Solos.” Finally, I take requests. That’s how the “Top Ten (Non-Evangelical) Novels About Angels” list you mention came into being, and why I posted “A Complete List of All the Love Notes in ‘The Illumination.’”
How frequently does a robust, endlessly evolving list like “Fifty Favorite Books” get tweaked? Are you someone for whom a decision like that is difficult or is it usually obvious when you encounter a new piece of media that’s going to bump off the weakest link?
Most often it’s the latter: I’ll read something and know instantly (or at least before too much time has passed) that it matters to me and I need to make room for it. Looking at my “Fifty Favorite Books” list, I can see that the last time I updated it was Oct. 4, 2023. I must have added “White Cat, Black Dog” by Kelly Link. Ordinarily, it would be hard for me to remember which book I ended up removing to make way for the new one, but this time it’s easy: I bumped off an earlier Kelly Link collection, “Magic for Beginners,” because I decided I liked her latest book better. Very occasionally, though, something will keep fascinating or provoking me, percolating in the far, far back of my mind, gradually working its way up through the ranks of my appreciation until I belatedly recognize that it’s essential to me. One example is the movie “The Eclipse” — the Irish one from 2009, with Ciarán Hinds, not the “Twilight” sequel — which I probably added to my “Fifty Favorite Movies” list a full decade after I originally saw it. And then there are what I’ll call my “micro-lists,” which periodically demand reconsideration, too. Take my “Five Favorite Cure Albums”: “Disintegration” and “The Head on the Door” are my firm numbers one and two, but their new album, “Songs of a Lost World,” is the best thing they’ve recorded in 30 years, so does it deserve a place in the top five?
Does being a serious listkeeper affect the way that you engage with media? Is there a voice in your head that’s always asking whether the art you’re currently taking in is going to make the cut?
I’m able to avoid that, for the most part, except when it comes to my dedicated year-end lists — the best books I’ve read over the calendar year, the best albums I’ve discovered or movies I’ve seen, etc. — along with a few other lists that are ongoing by design. I have a list of my “Favorite Books By Year,” for instance, with “by year” in this case meaning year-by-year as I’ve progressed through my life: my favorite book from age 1, age 2, age 3, etc. Usually, though, the process runs in the opposite direction. In the tug of war between reading and list-making, reading wins. And so does viewing. And so does listening. In other words, it’s the art that muscles out a list, not the lists that muscle out the art. For instance, I’ll find myself listening to a lot of minimalist electronica, and it will inspire a list of my “Ten Favorite Minimalist Electronic Albums,” or I’ll read a book like “Faithful Ruslan” by Georgi Vladimov, which adopts the point of view of a prison-camp guard dog, and out will pop a list like “Fifty Impressive Novels with Prominent Animal Characters.”
Who do you see as the audience for your lists?
Aside from a few people who know me personally and check the archive regularly, my guess is that most of the visitors who find the lists do so completely by happenstance. They’ll explore them for an hour or two — or three or four or five, because the archive is pretty extensive and offers a lot of rabbit holes — and then they’ll move on. Some people, I’m sure, will check in again after months or years have gone by and discover how much larger the catalog has grown, but most of them will remember it as a kind of roadside attraction where they stopped while they were on vacation that one time rather than making it one of their regular hangouts. That said, a number of the lists do provide useful catalogs for other writers. If you’re writing a story from the perspective of an eight-year-old, for instance, you can pull up my “Fifty Great Novels That Adopt a Child’s Point of View,” scroll down to age eight, and find a nice varied handful of technique models. I’ll add, anecdotally, that aside from the headline lists at the top of the first page — what you call the canonical lists — the list that seems to have attracted the most attention is my “Top Ten Dexys Midnight Runners Albums.” People like to bring that one up, I presume, because in the American context, for listeners who think of them as the one-hit wonder responsible for “Come On Eileen,” the whole idea of a top 10 Dexys Midnight Runners list sounds ludicrous, but the list itself makes it obvious that I really appreciate them.
When I attended Arkansas Governor’s School over a decade ago, you were a guest speaker and handed out printed lists to the kids. What was the thinking there?
What you’re asking about is the stagecraft of my lists — list-keeping as a kind of magic trick or sleight-of-hand. That’s actually where the outward-facing aspect of all this began. When I published my first book, the question I received most frequently at public events was “What are your favorite books?” or “Who are your favorite authors?” I always ended up chastising myself afterward for forgetting to mention one author or another, so I decided to formalize a list of my 50 favorite books, with no more than one per author, in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. I restricted myself to 50 books mainly so that I could fit the list neatly onto a single sheet of 8.5-by-11 paper, and I began carrying a whole stack of them around in my satchel. The readers I met seemed to enjoy having copies to take home from my events, as keepsakes or curiosities if nothing else, and it gave them an excuse to approach me at the signing table, too, even the ones who didn’t feel free to buy a book from me. Before long, I began building other lists: of my favorite movies and albums, short stories and graphic novels, etc. (Also of my 50 least favorite books, though I’ve never shared that list with anyone.) Once, at a public lecture, a friend of mine introduced me as “the Latter-Day Saint of touring writers” since I’m always trying to distribute my literature. A few weeks later, I mentioned this at another event, and someone in the audience said, “Or the Johnny Appleseed, maybe,” which I like even better.
Do you seek out lists by other people and publications at the end of the year? Are there any in particular you look forward to reading?
I find most of the big institutional year-end lists pretty uninspired. Even worse are the mass consensus lists that occasionally bubble up, like that survey The New York Times published last summer ranking the hundred best books of the 21st century, which seemed tailor-made to favor the expected and only the expected, and therefore generated an entire box of beige and gray crayons: completely maddening. What excites me are the individual sensibilities of list-makers like Elisa Gabbert, Dennis Cooper, Steve Donoghue and Ted Gioia, all of whom tend to post their year-end lists in either December or January. The Quietus produces a great annual list of the year’s best albums, which is always full of surprises for me, and The Millions posts 30 or 40 mini-essays by different writers each December as part of their “Year in Reading” series: a truly mixed bag of an exercise, but I can always tell when someone’s tastes are going to enrich my own. Sometimes the Democrat-Gazette prints a first-week-of-January feature asking various Arkansans to champion the single best book they discovered that year, and I always enjoy reading that, too.
Does the act of listkeeping interact at all with your practice as a writer?
1. Insofar as some of my characters, like me, experience fugues of list-creation, yes.
2. Insofar as listkeeping and sentence-writing are both expressions of rhythm, and both accumulate beat by beat and almost martially, yes.
3. Insofar as I tend to incorporate lots of noun- or verb- or adjective-chains — quick little supplementary parts-of-speech lists — into the cadences of my prose, yes.
4. Insofar as making a list is a more productive distraction from writing than, say, Microsoft Mahjong, yes.
5. And finally, insofar as there’s something about the listkeeping sensibility that’s related to my taste for fantasy, in ways that are real but hard to describe, yes. Italo Calvino is probably the writer with whom I feel the most kinship. In a London Review of Books essay, Salman Rushdie says of him, “Like all fabulists, Calvino loves lists,” which is an assertion that’s always stuck with me.
Are there any exciting lists on the horizon that we should be anticipating? And how long do you plan to keep this up? Do you see it as a lifelong project?
As of today, I’m at list No. 719. I’ve already got 20 or 25 more possibilities jotted down and waiting for me in the queue. Some of them I’ll be able to put together in 10 minutes (“Five Favorite Dhafer Youssef Albums”), but others will take long sessions of deliberate thought or some good thorough archaeological excavation of my reading history (“Ten Great Books With ‘Unlikeable’ Narrators”). I began posting the lists on my website back in 2020, during the worst days of the pandemic. I’m adding new ones to the archive more slowly than I used to, but I don’t sense that I’m anywhere close to stopping. The bottom line is that I think of my tastes as an important part of who I am — too important probably; comically important — and I can’t help but feel that whenever I generate a new list, or revise one, I’m outlining some new element of my character.
Daniel Grear is the culture editor at the Arkansas Times. Send artsy tips to danielgrear@arktimes.com.