“Top” Lists for Arkansas

As you might have noticed, this year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and there is a lot of celebrating and memorialization going on. Our state has its own Arkansas250 Commission to offer a state spin on the national memorial efforts. As a part of this, different organizations and publications and institutions are assembling a variety of “top” lists. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, for example, is running a series called “50 for 250” profiling fifty noteworthy Arkansans.

Among those the newspaper has highlighted so far is Douglas MacArthur. He is certainly one of the most historically significant people born here, but his parents left soon after his birth; he never claimed to be an Arkansan and only came back once, in 1952, as part of a commemoration for the Little Rock park that bears his name. Is he really one of the top fifty Arkansans worthy of a profile in the state newspaper in time for the anniversary of the nation’s semiquincentennial?

I’d say no. After all, why not highlight some of the people who did claim Arkansas? As the editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, I’m often asked for my own informed opinion whenever someone is trying to make a list like this, and I have opinions plenty to share. But I also know that the making of any such list is both the aftermath of—and prelude to—a lot of arguing.

No such list will ever satisfy everyone. The Guardian recently published a list of “100 Best Novels.” Not 100 best novels of the last century, or 100 best novels written in English, or any such limiting factor. It listed its picks for the 100 best novels written or translated into English, which covers quite a lot. I’d read approximately forty of them. I can’t necessarily disagree with their top pick, Middlemarch by Mary Ann Evans (who wrote under the name George Eliot). But some selections simply appalled me. I have read one Cormac McCarthy novel in my life, and that was one too many, so the inclusion of multiple examples of his execrable writing baffled my mind, especially when there was apparently no place for such wonders as Jerusalem by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. I found Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita the very essence of tedium and never bothered to finish it, and the editors of the Guardian ranking it a notch above Don Quixote must surely be the literary equivalent of “fighting words.”

At least Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was nowhere near that list. Speaking of fighting words, I nearly got in a rumble back in my college days at a party talking to a self-proclaimed disciple of Kerouac’s. Fortified by a few drinks, I said to this person, “You know how they say that an infinite number of monkeys with infinite typewriters over an infinite period of time would end up, by sheer chance, producing the works of Shakespeare?” Yes, he nodded, he had heard that story. “Well,” I continued, “On the Road is five monkeys, two typewriters, and ten minutes.” I stand by this judgment, even if it results in the odd beer bottle being chucked at me.

Just reading these “top” books isn’t going to transform you into someone who has a true understanding of literature, just as learning about the lives of the top fifty Arkansans will not give you any complete sense of Arkansas history. So what is such a list good for? That the Guardian has its own online bookstore might reveal some of its decision-making, for no English translation of Lagerlöf’s Jerusalem is apparently in print, so they couldn’t sell that.

Decide what is valuable about such a list, and you narrow your criteria. If you want to educate people, your list should cover the obvious candidates but also include a few head-scratchers, a few unusual suspects, a few hidden figures, to make things interesting for the people already familiar with the subject. But really, any such list is all about the debate about what should be on the list itself. Rather like the discourse that surrounds Oscar nominees. While some movies can certainly be better than others (more believable storyline, greater technical achievement, more skilled acting), we know that comparing truly great movies is often subjective. Not that everything is relative, but you can’t really weigh a mid-century Swedish meditation upon mortality set in the Middle Ages against a more recent story of race and oppression and music and joy (complete with vampires) set in the early twentieth-century Mississippi Delta. There’s no obvious criteria that makes one better than another; rather, it’s the debate that is the important thing here.

Now, with that in mind, I’d like some lists from you. Top 5 lists. It can be anything, but the items on the list have to have entries on them in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas. It can be Top 5 books or movies set in Arkansas. Top 5 Arkansas sites to see before you die. Top 5 most important events in Arkansas history. Top 5 inspiring people from Arkansas’s past. Anything.

Send me your lists at glancaster@cals.org, and we’ll publish them in a future blog post with your name. You don’t have to justify yourself if you don’t want to (although you can!). I just want to see what other people would put at the top of their own lists, and then we can all talk about it.

Guy Lancaster is the editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas.