Do you keep lists?

Do you maintain shopping lists? Christmas wish-lists? TBRs longer than your anticipated lifespan? You probably do. If you don’t, pull it together and start now.

I keep lists too - the usual ones and some not so usual. Think of my notes app as my commonplace book with several running lists, some of which are:

a) Reminders for Monday morning

b) Joy is not meant to be a crumb

c) A marvelous thing to be human

d) Inside me there’s an endless screaming

e) Fragments of self-hood

f) Art and revolt

g) Collecting my metaphors

h) Women who run with the wolves

i) There will always be a ribbon on loneliness running through who I am

You probably recognize the names of these lists. These notes often include passages from books that kept me up at night, prompts that help me process my thoughts and patterns, lessons I learnt from women that acted as the chosen parents for my mind, links to articles and essays I learn from every time I read them, and more. My goal for this newsletter is to share with you some of those notes I’ve been furiously collecting and filing.

Here are some ideas for you to build some new lists:

“A notebook, probably, or a to-do list of everything we do not yet know but might actually want, also abt flowers, travels, books/ not-books, poems/ not-poems, communist desire, brand mismanagement, perfume and the other senses, ideas about love and also ideas about the shape of ideas, what does it mean to be tethered to the world in an ending world and what brings about unending or untetherment” - Anne Boyer

avocado_ibuprofen

October 19, 2020

Kazuo Ishiguro - “Dream Techniques”

Anne Collier, Questions

Yoko Ono, Cleaning Pieces

Richard Serra, “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself”
[1967-1968]

to roll, to crease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist, to dapple
to crumple, to shave, to tear, to chip, to split, to cut, to sever, to drop, to remove, to simplify, to differ, to disarrange, to open, to mix, to splash, to knot, to spill, to droop
to flow

to curve, to lift, to inlay, to impress, to fire, to flood, to smear, to rotate, to swirl, to support, to hook, to suspend, to spread, to hang, to collect, of tension, of gravity
of entropy, of nature, of grouping, of layering, of felting, to grasp, to tighten, to bundle, to heap, to gather

to scatter, to arrange, to repair, to discard, to pair, to distribute, to surfeit, to compliment, to enclose, to surround, to encircle, to hole, to cover, to wrap
to dig, to tie, to bind, to weave, to join, to match, to laminate, to bond, to hinge, to mark, to expand, to dilute, to light

to modulate, to distill, of waves, of electromagnetic, of inertia, of ionization, of polarization, of refraction, of tides, of reflection, of equilibrium, of symmetry, of friction, to stretch, to bounce, to erase, to spray, to systematize, to refer, to force, of mapping, of location, of context, of time, of cabonization, to continue

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Tell me all about your lists and notes - I will file away your secrets and keep them forever.

(Header by Holly Warburton)