I’ve recently come across this fascinating interview with Umberto Eco on the occasion of a new exhibition he has curated at the Louvre in Paris. The exhibition is about the nature of lists, poets who list things in their work, and painters who accumulate things in their paintings. As a list-maker from wayback, to hear Eco state that “the list is the origin of culture” was music to my ears.

I don’t know that the lists that mushroom around me bear much relationship to the sort Eco would write or invent, but I’ve put his new book, The Vertigo of Lists, on one of them: my ‘must-read’ list.

A few highlights from the interview:

The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.

We like lists because we don’t want to die.

Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous – not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.

In the latest issue of The Monthly, Kirsten Tranter writes about the novels of Stieg Larsson, whose Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has been recommended regularly to me by friends and family members with reliable taste. I clearly have commitment issues when it comes to books in series - the last trilogy I read was The Lord of the Rings at the age of 11, I’ve only read the eponymous first (though marvellous) novel of Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, and I am still to open a Harry Potter – but Tranter’s piece, “Stockholm Syndrome”, was the final nudge I needed to embark on the late writer’s trilogy of crime fiction.

I stopped reading crime fiction a long time ago, but I’m not sure why. Goodness knows I’m a sucker for a page-turning story. Maybe I just wanted to keep my body count to a minimum in the fiction I chose to read. But while I no longer take my fill of mutilated and murdered women’s bodies on the page, there are endless numbers of them on television and film for me to “consume” at my leisure, if not pleasure. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed at the number of gruesome crime stories that begin with an act of violence against a woman. It’s almost as if these stories cannot get a toehold on the viewer’s (reader’s?) imagination unless a dead female body arrests their attention. What does that say about our culture?

Tranter writes that misogyny is Larsson’s “most cherished theme”, and his heroine Lisbeth Salander its “avenging angel”. Very late in the piece Tranter draws attention to this conundrum of crime fiction:

Salander’s admirable strength as an avenger is predicated on her own horrific victimisation; she has to be raped and abused before the story of her revenge can be set in motion. This is the conundrum Larsson has confronted: how might it be possible to condemn men’s hatred of women without telling stories that illustrate it?

It’s a very good question, and this is why I need to read the books in order to find out whether I agree Larsson has confronted or even attempted to resolve the dilemma. Surely it is possible to write engaging novels about women characters whose fictional journeys are not predicated upon some act of violence or abuse?

I like to think Tranter is right; that “the success of Larsson’s novels proves the role that imaginative literature … has to play in generating critical debate about the most serious social and political issues.”

My first short story has just been published in the third issue of extempore, a journal of writing, music, art, and improvisation published by Melbourne-based music-lover and writer Miriam Zolin. Miriam developed the idea for the journal from her passions for writing and music, and the recognition that there was no journal devoted to the interdependence between these art forms. The November 2009 issue was launched at the Wangaratta Festival of Jazz over the weekend, by none other than pianist Mike Nock, one of my favourite musicians and an all-round marvellous human being.

I wrote the story, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, as a way of getting into the head of one of the characters I am developing for my current project. In the story young Tilda is finishing high school and has decided to audition for the Sydney Conservatorium of Music’s Jazz Course. During the course of waiting, and waiting, outside the audition room, the reader learns many things about her musicianship and what has led her to this moment.

If you see extempore around the independent bookstores or in your library, take a look. You will find a diverse selection of poems, interviews, essays and photographs all responding in some way to the passion for music (and improvisation in particular). I was a little surprised to see mine is the only fiction published in this issue. Miriam’s always on the lookout for interesting submissions, so don’t be shy.