Trouble in creating a list

I want to create a list based on the information from a data.frame,  
Model. So I tried the following:

MyList <- list(colnames(Model)[2] = levels(Model$(colnames(Model)[2])))

but it failed with an error:

Error: unexpected '=' in "list(colnames(Model)[2] ="

I have the following problems with this command line:

(1) I wanted to use colnames(Model)[2] as a tag for the list:

 > colnames(Model)[2]
[1] "gender"

but it is not working as I intended. How to make colnames(Model)[2] a  
legitimate tag?

(2) Model$gender is a column in the data.frame. However Model$ 
(colnames(Model)[2]) seems not recognizable in the command line. How  
to correct this?

(3) How to add more tagged items to an existing list? cbind or rbind?

Thanks in advance,
Gang