The Rule
Making a list is not writing
Just this: Whether it's a shopping list or a list of cultural artifacts, putting them into your story is not writing. At best, which is not good, you're trying to hypnotize your reader with nostalgia. (But see counter-examples.)
Counter-Example
"I saw sirens, hippocents, gorgons, harpies, incubi, dragopods, minotaurs, lynxes, pards, chimeras, cynocephali throwing fire from their nostrils, crocottas, hyenas, caladrii, bicorporate beetles, horned serpents, cerastes, basilicis, hypnotales, presters, specters of the desert, phantasms of the night, iguanas, dromedaries, polypodes."
ā Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose
A catalogue or an asyndetic catalogue (which is a catalogue that doesn't join the terms with "and") is an actual writing technique, seen here in Name of the Rose, and also found in Balzac's The Wild Ass' Skin, Harlan Ellison's short story, "Djinn, No Chaser," Harry Potter, and many more. The purpose of the technique (sometimes used in rhetoric) is create a kind of hypnotic state where the listener's mind is trained to accept fantastic things. In that sense, Cline could be said to create a trance where late 20th century disposable pop culture is granted higher artistic value than anyone ever intended.
Eco actually wrote an illustrated essay called "The Inifinity of Lists".
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