In the video for Walk on Water (2017), a song about art, aging, self-doubt, insecurity, criticism, and creativity, Eminem and his various clones use SMC Classic 12 typewriters to type random words in a nod to Émile Borel's 1913 analogy of dactylographic monkeys with respect to statistical mechanics.

The video closes with Eminem showing typed evidence of his creative genius: "So me and you are not alike / Bitch, I wrote 'Stan'".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryr75N0nki0

Notice the overlap of the dactylographic monkey idea and the creation of combinatorial creativity in Eminem's zettelkasten practice. The fact that he's brilliant enough to have created Stan (2000) is evidence that he's not just a random monkey, but that there is some directed thought and creativity which he has tacitly created during his career. https://boffosocko.com/2021/08/10/55794555/

Miles touches on the interplay of knowledge written down on index cards and the knowledge which is kept only in one's mind. Some practitioners in the space from 2013-2024 seem to imply that they're writing almost everything out in far deeper detail than Miles would indicate. In his incarnation, much of the knowledge might be more quickly indicated by a short sentence or heading which the brain can associate to longer explanations.

This sort of indexing is akin to some of the method potentially seen in Marshall Mathers' zettelkasten.

I'm creating a tag here for "card index for productivity" to track the idea of productivity in writing which I'm specifically using separately from the tag "card index as productivity system" which is used to describe their use for project tracking systems in systems like GTD, Memindex, etc.

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.

Reply to:

Who is Zettelkasten note-taking system for? <br /> u/Beens__<br /> https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/zhyu5i/who_is_zettelkasten_notetaking_system_for/

Perhaps your use case may benefit from knowing the longer term outcomes of such processes, particularly as they relate to idea generation and innovation within your areas of interest? Keeping notes which you review over periodically and between which you create potential links will help to foster more productive long term combinatorial creativity, which will help you create new and potentially useful ideas much more quickly than blank page-based brainstorming.

Her method was much more ad hoc than the more highly refined methods of Luhmann which allowed him to write, but perhaps there's something you might appreciate from the example of the character Tess McGill in the movie Working Girl. Even more base in practice is that of Eminem, which shows far less structure, but could still have interesting long term creativity effects, though again, it bears repeating that one should occasionally revisit their notes (even if they're only in "headline form") in attempts to refresh their memory and link old ideas to new to generate completely new ideas.

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

https://www.reddit.com/r/Eminem/comments/7mf19q/lose_yourself_handwritten/

Eminem's handwritten lyrics for "Lose Yourself"

High resolution versions:

https://i.imgur.com/iFNPFqe.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/XGRLLtW.jpg

http://messnerenglish.weebly.com/who-uses-a-writers-notebook.html

Example of a teacher using the commonplace book tradition within her class, though she frames it as a "writer's notebook". I like the way she uses examples of cultural figures who are doing this same sort of pattern.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59cUfik8w2s

https://sinistershady.tumblr.com/post/143252484472/eminem-stacking-ammo

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".

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.

Eminem on rhyming orange: "I put my orange, 4-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with George." #

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'>ᔥ <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>