https://danallosso.substack.com/p/retrenchment-day-20?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=40880&post_id=136303009&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. First Edition. St. Paul, Minn: Hungry Mind Press, 1995. https://www.amazon.com/Book-Ones-Own-People-Diaries/dp/1886913021

Recommended by Mark Bernstein at Tinderbox Meetup.

https://www.amazon.com/Private-Notebooks-1914-1916-Ludwig-Wittgenstein/dp/1324090804

Notes or diaries or a mixture of both?

—Eagles, Hotel California, track 1 on the album Hotel California<br /> https://genius.com/Eagles-hotel-california-lyrics

In many oral societies, dance is a common tool for memory in much the same way that we might pick up a pen and write. Though written in and performed in one of the most literate societies in human history, one might replace "dance" in Hotel California with other forms like writing: "Some write to remember; Some write to forget".

The first half might be interpreted by the majority as a tautology, but others write in their diaries as a means to purge their memories and let go of them. Similarly the idea of "morning pages" are designed to allow one to purge their surface thoughts so that they can clear their mind for other work: writing to forget.

(Without hearing this song this morning, I kept (diffuse) thinking about the two line endings "...to remember / ...to forget" until I made the connection to the lyrics and then immediately bridged this to orality.)

Mark Bernstein suggested this with respect to note taking and commonplace book traditions in a Tools For Thought Rocks talk: https://lu.ma/2u5f7ky0

Mallon, Thomas. A Book of One’s Own: People and Their Diaries. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984.

https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought

He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.

Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.

Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.

In addition to an extensive note collection, Paxson kept a separate diary, indicating a different practicing in a different form.

Roland Barthes used his card index as more than the traditional bibliographical, excerpting, and note taking tool that many had before him. He also used it to accumulate notes on what he had seen and heard in his daily life, phrases he liked, and plans. It came to serve the function, particularly in the last two years of his life, of a diary or what biographer Tiphaine Samoyault came to call his fichierjournal or index-card diary.

Are there examples of this practice before this time? Certainly in the commonplace book tradition, the ideas of journal, diary, and commonplace had been mixed before.

This sounds similar to my criticism of zettelkasten overreach.

See: https://boffosocko.com/2022/02/05/zettelkasten-overreach/

Published on October 12, 2010, Mourning Diary is a collection published for the first time from Roland Barthes' 330 index cards focusing on his mourning following the death of his mother in 1977.

Was it truly created as a "diary" from the start? Or was it just a portion of his regular note taking collection excerpted and called a diary after-the-fact? There is nothing resembling a "traditional" diary in many portions of the collection, but rather a collection of notes relating to the passing of his mother. Was the moniker "diary" added as a promotional or sales tool?

https://www.amazon.com/Mourning-Diary-Roland-Barthes/dp/080906233X

https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/11/19/joan-didion-on-keeping-a-notebook/

A nice little advertisement for Joan Didion's essay "On Keeping a Notebook". Mostly it's pull quotes from the piece without any additional commentary. I've downloaded a copy of the book to read the piece in full myself.

While only applicable to a small subsection of 330 index cards which were published as Mourning Diary, Roland Barthes apparently preferred blue ink pens.

Hill and Wang published Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes on October 12, 2010. It is a collection of 330 entries which he wrote following the death of his mother Henriette in 1977.

Kristina Budelis indicates that she saw them in person and reproduced four of them as index card-like notes in The New Yorker (September 2010).

So, how would it be considered if I for example use pencil and paper to write down poetry or anything and then I type my diary entries into an electronic device for it to be displayed in digital platform such as a blog? Is it considered to be "born" on paper? Or is it considered to be "e-lit" because despite of the paper based start, it was thought to be published in a digital media?