8 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2023
    1. With his carefully kept Commentationes, Rütiner was building a conversational arsenal – a treasury of stories, jokes and privileged information that would show him to be in the know.

      There's a somewhat poetic connection between the "conversational arsenal" of Johannes Rütiner and the "stacking ammo" of Eminem who used his notes in rap battles.

  2. Jul 2022
    1. with established worldwide fame and prestige, to step in his previous successes to write more-of-the-same books and convert all the attention in cheap money. Just like Robert Kiyosaki did with his 942357 books about “Rich dad”.

      Many artists fall into a creativity trap caused by fame. They spend years developing a great work, but then when it's released, the industry requires they follow it up almost immediately with something even stronger.

      Jewel is an reasonable and perhaps typical example of this phenomenon. She spent several years writing the entirety of her first album Pieces of You (1995), which had three to four solid singles. As it became popular she was rushed to release Spirit (1998), which, while it was ultimately successful, didn't measure up to the first album which had far more incubation time. She wasn't able to build up enough material over time to more easily ride her initial wave of fame. Creativity on demand can be a difficult master, particularly when one is actively touring or supporting their first work while needing to

      (Compare the number of titles she self-wrote on album one vs. album two).

      M. Night Shyamalan is in a similar space, though as a director he preferred to direct scripts that he himself had written. While he'd had several years of writing and many scripts, some were owned by other production companies/studios which forced him to start from scratch several times and both write and direct at the same time, a process which is difficult to do by oneself.

      Another example is Robert Kiyosaki who spun off several similar "Rich Dad" books after the success of his first.

      Compare this with artists who have a note taking or commonplacing practice for maintaining the velocity of their creative output: - Eminem - stacking ammo - Taylor Swift - commonplace practice

  3. Jun 2022
    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodge-podge

      How is this broadly related to the intellectual history of commonplace books, zettelkasten, and other note taking matters.

      I recall an idea of a Hodge-podge book from my youth, but these may have been published children's activity books for fun rather than collecting tidbits as in something closer to a scrapbook.

      Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo - Thought about this randomly while editing notes for [[Forte2022]]

    1. listen deeply to Eric’s story

      Beyond Eric's words here, I'm struck by the fact that he's able to do this "feat" orally in a way that I certainly cannot. Perhaps he spent ages slowly building it up and writing it down in a literal fashion, but I suspect that part of it is not and that it is raw oral poetry in a way which requires culture and oral practice that I wholly lack, but wish I had.

      How can we better teach this?! Center this.

      Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo

  4. May 2022
    1. American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger oncewrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’sthat I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledgeabout that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words,[but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”7

      7 Tim Ferriss, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 421.

      relate this to Eminem's "stacking ammo".

  5. Dec 2021
    1. Talking about his process, he quoted the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett: “I connect every music-making experience I have, including every day here in the studio, with a great power, and if I do not surrender to it nothing happens.” During our conversations, Strong cited bits of wisdom from Carl Jung, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Karl Ove Knausgaard (he is a “My Struggle” superfan), Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep, Harold Pinter (“The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression”), the Danish filmmaker Tobias Lindholm, T. S. Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, and old proverbs (“When fishermen cannot go to sea, they mend their nets”). When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns.”

      Based on the collection of quotes and proverbs it sounds more like he's got his own commonplace book which he uses to inform his acting process. Sounds almost like he uses them so frequently that he's memorized many of them.

      Interesting that he refers to them as "hymns".

      Compare this with Eminem's "stacking ammo" for a particular use case.

      h/t to Kevin Marks for directing me to this article for this.

  6. Aug 2021
    1. Eminem shows Anderson Cooper his form of commonplace book in a 60 Minutes interview.

      Instead of calling it "commonplacing", he uses the phrase "stacking ammo".

      Cooper analogizes the collection as the scrawlings of a crazy person. In some sense, this may be because there is no order or indexing system with what otherwise looks like a box of random pages.

      <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>u/sorrybabyxo</span> in Eminem has his own version of commonplace system containing words that rhyme. : commonplacebook (<time class='dt-published'>08/10/2021 09:45:39</time>)</cite></small>