on lists (on Yom HaShoah)

I just walked across the quad to my office. I'm teaching Walt Whitman today. It's Yom HaShoah. A list of names is being read over a PA.

I’m fascinated by roll calls. Lists of proper names carry a dense sheen of reality: grade-school rosters, the granite-etched names of casualties at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in D.C., the names I hear read over a PA on the quad as I walk to my office. Lists can be a concordance of common experience. They can be the ties that bind Americans to what passes (sometimes) for a union.

We probably owe the impulse to unify by listing to Walt Whitman, whose catalogues are famously democratizing. They capture the simultaneity of civic space; the comings and goings of prostitutes and presidents alike are contemporaneous. So are slurs. Placed together, “Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff” become an alliterative nickname train.

Whitman’s poetry counteracts the otherwise evaluative nature of recounting. When we only call out the names, when we generate a composite list that is not (yet) resolved into a system of subordination that sorts out the somewheres from the elsewheres, we invite the visceral experience of democracy.

But of course, Whitman was as much a New York poet, praising “Mannahatta,” as he was the roughneck of the original frontispiece of Leaves of Grass.

Even the most democratic listing strategy becomes hierarchical, especially in the U.S.

I remember how heartbroken I was to learn that the vamp verse at the end of Huey Lewis’s song, “Heart of Rock and Roll” (1983) was tailored to regional markets. While all versions of the song included the line “D.C., San Antone, and the Liberty Town, Boston, and a Baton Rouge. Tulsa, Austin, Oklahoma City, Seattle, San Francisco, too,” and whole verses about “New York, New York” and “LA, Hollywood,” the pairs of cities that follow “in Cleveland … Detroit!” change from market to market. While I heard “Chicago … Kansas City!” at the song’s finale, other Midwestern markets heard Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, or Milwaukee.

Adjacency always leads to subordination; the mapmaker has to place the compass rose somewhere, and that somewhere is always an elsewhere. Always a Hoboken.