NPR Blues by Scott Wilkerson Lists are fun.
Lists clarify and simplify.
Lists articulate our dream of an essentialist world in which we can discern the nature of its objects and, thus, understand ourselves. But lists are also unstable, quixotic, and arbitrary. Some lists are more useful than others and some lists, not at all. But insofar as the former and latter are increasingly the same, NPR s list transmutes a charming, if necessarily doomed, enterprise into an instrument of hysterical absurdity. Listening to commentator Peter Breslow s rhapsodic introduction to the piece, one expects to hear a transcendently despairing voice singing hard truths about love and loss, framed inside the clean economy of low-down twelve bar phrases.