- Aug 2023
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www.smithsonianmag.com www.smithsonianmag.com
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There was a time, she once quipped, when she had worked for an editor "who was so mean that he used to eat thumbtacks for breakfast with skimmed water."
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www.smithsonianmag.com www.smithsonianmag.com
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“I think the most important thing I can say about Phyllis Diller,” says Bowers, “is that she was like Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. Just like Friedan, Phyllis Diller chronicled the daily lives of woman. But she did it with laughs.”
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“The file is like a tree,” Diller told the magazine’s Owen Edwards in 2007. “Leaves drop off, and new leaves are added—the new stuff pushes out the old.”
Phyllis Diller analogizing her index card file to a tree.
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Wer Warburgs Zettelkasten folgt, folgt ihm bei seinenGedankengängen; vom Bankenwesen in Florenz, der mit-telalterlichen Handelsgesellschaft, dem Herausbilden vonIndividualität, der rastlosen Berufsarbeit der Calvinistenund der reformierten Form der Askese bis zu Warburgseigener Herkunft aus alter jüdischer Bankiersfamilie.378Der Zettelkasten ist Warburgs Ariadnefaden durch seinelabyrinthische Bibliothek wie sein labyrinthisches Denken:vom Werwolf zur Geschichtsauffassung. Ein Gedanke,eine Idee oder ein neuer Begriff entstehen nicht in einergeradlinigen Progression, sondern in einem Prozess desHin- und Herbewegens von Idee-Einheiten und Querver-weisen, der so lange andauert, bis sich neue Schnittstel-len und Knotenpunkte gebildet haben.
machine translation:
Anyone who follows Warburg's list of notes is following his train of thought; from the banking system in Florence, medieval commercial society, the development of individuality, the restless professional work of the Calvinists and the reformed form of asceticism to Warburg's own origins in an old Jewish banking family. 378 The Zettelkasten is Warburg's Ariadne thread through his labyrinthine library and his labyrinthine thinking: from werewolf to history. A thought, an idea or a new concept does not emerge in a linear progression, but in a process of moving idea units and cross-references back and forth, which lasts until new interfaces and nodes have formed.
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americanhistory.si.edu americanhistory.si.edu
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Equal rights for the sexes will be reached only when totally unqualified women occupy high positions of power. —Phyllis Diller, May 1979, gag file under Women's Liberation
From the Phyllis Diller gag file at https://transcription.si.edu/project/8547<br /> via https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_1218385#
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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DILLER: And, you know, of course they always say to Californians that we don't have seasons. Of course, that is not true. We have fire, flood, mud and drought.
Was this originally hers? I've used a variation of it for decades myself....
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Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people seem bright until they speak.
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HEIDI ROTBART: She would write a joke on a piece of paper, and her assistants would type them up on 3-by-5 cards and then place them in the joke file.
Diller's manager indicated that she wrote jokes on paper and had her assistants type them up on 3 x 5" index cards.
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www.latimes.com www.latimes.com
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The joke file is a snapshot of American history.”
quote by Hanna BredenbeckCorp, of Smithsonian on Phyllis Diller's gag file
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“I really admired that she had everything so organized on catalog cards,” she said.
- Susan Wever, a retired librarian from Indianapolis, on Phyllis Diller's card index of jokes.
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Local file Local file
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“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is theproblem.” So declared Ronald Reagan as he launched hisadministration in January 1981,
Was this the end of government by the people? Government by the corporations had been building up for a long time, and this may have been the fulcrum at which things changed.
Something ironic in a president saying this about the institution which he's running. Almost too meta. And naturally could be said about his own way of running the government.
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www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com
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When I was learning to write in my teens, it seemed to me that paper was a prison. Four walls, right? And the ideas were constantly trying to escape. What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that tried -- that jumped off the cliff? Because paper enforces single sequence -- and there’s no room for digression -- it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure.-- Ted Nelson, demonstration of Xanadu space
quote ostensibly from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA
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Adam Smith stated the case long ago: "A man withoutthe proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, ifpossible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seemsto be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part ofthe character of human nature."
This seems apropos to the situation in which I view Donald J. Trump.
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Undoubtedly the first task of the statesman in such countriesis to raise the standard of living to such a point that thepeople may be freed from economic slavery and given thetime to get the education appropriate to free men.
A bulk of America was stuck in a form of economic slavery in the 1950s. See description of rural Texans in Robert Caro's LBJ biography for additional context --- washing/scrubbing, carrying water, farming, etc. without electricity in comparison to their fellow Americans who did have it.
In the 21st century there is a different form of economic slavery imposed by working to live and a culture of consumption and living on overextended credit.
Consider also the comedic story of the capitalist and the rural fisherman and the ways they chose to live their lives.
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If leisure and political power requirethis education, everybody in America now requires it, andeverybody where democracy and industrialization penetratewill ultimately require it. If the people are not capable ofacquiring this education, they should be deprived of politicalpower and probably of leisure. Their uneducated politicalpower is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrad-ing and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable ofachieving the education that responsible democratic citizen-ship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightlycondemned the mass of mankind to natural slavery, and thesooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracythe better it will be for the world.
This is an extreme statement which bundles together a lot without direct evidence.
Written in an era in which there was a lot of pro-Democracy and anti-Communist discussion, Hutchins is making an almost religious statement here which binds education and democracy in the ways in which the Catholic church bound education and religion in scholasticism. While scholasticism may have had benefits, it also caused a variety of ills which took centuries to unwind into the Enlightenment.
Why can't we separate education from democracy? Can't education of this sort live in other polities? Hasn't it? Does critical education necessarily lead to democracy?
What does the explorable solution space of admixtures of critical reasoning and education look like with respect to various forms of government? Could a well-educated population thrive under collectivism or socialism?
The definition of "natural slavery" here is contingent and requires lots of context, particularly of the ways in which Aristotle used it versus our current understanding of chattel slavery.
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Sir RichardLivingstone said: "We are tied down, all our days and forthe greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That iswhere contact with great thinkers, great literature helps.
What is the original context of this quote? Which meaning of "the commonplace" does he mean? The generic or the commonplace book?
Tags
- eudaimonia
- indigenous cultures
- Donald J. Trump
- intellect
- economic slavery
- Richard Livingstone
- chattel slavery
- open questions
- scholasticism
- standard of living
- Democracy and Education
- human nature
- Robert Maynard Hutchins
- analogies
- quotes
- Adam Smith
- separation of concerns
- slavery
- natural slavery
- economics
- commonplace books
Annotators
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Notewise, whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.
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quoteinvestigator.com quoteinvestigator.com
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Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California in the 1930s, and the coverage he received from newspapers was unsympathetic. Yet, in 1934 some California papers published installments from his forthcoming book about the ill-fated campaign titled “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked”. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:[1] 1934 December 11, Oakland Tribune, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked by Upton Sinclair, Quote Page 19, Column 3, Oakland, California. (Newspapers_com) I used to say to our audiences: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
via https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
Some underlying tension for the question of identity/misinformation and personal politics vis-a-vis work and one's identity generated via work.
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hub.jhu.edu hub.jhu.edu
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"If mathematics is the science of analogy, the study of patterns, then category theory is the study of patterns of mathematical thought."
original source?
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I think mathematicians do math in part because we think it's beautiful."
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In an article she wrote recently for Scientific American, Riehl quoted John Horton Conway, an esteemed English mathematician: "What's the ontology of mathematical things? There's no doubt that they do exist, but you can't poke and prod them except by thinking about them. It's quite astonishing and I still don't understand it, despite having been a mathematician all my life. How can things be there without actually being there?"
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samplereality.com samplereality.com
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Reading backwards revitalizes a text, revealing its constructedness, its seams, edges, and working parts.
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- Jul 2023
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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Books aren’t something one approves or disapproves of; they are to be understood, interpreted, learned from, shocked by, argued with and enjoyed. Moreover, the evolution of literature and the other arts, their constant renewal over the centuries, has always been fueled by what is now censoriously labeled “cultural appropriation” but which is more properly described as “influence,” “inspiration” or “homage.” Poets, painters, novelists and other artists all borrow, distort and transform. That’s their job; that’s what they do.
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I regret that the ideal of a home or family library has pretty much vanished along with door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and sets of the “Great Books of the Western World.”
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Local file Local file
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You cannot hopeto bribe or twist,thank God! theBritish journalist.But, seeing whatthe man will dounbribed, there’sno occasion to.—Humbert Wolfe, epigram from The Uncelestial City (1930
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“Its scale is prodigious,” David Butterfield, a senior lecturer in Classics at Cambridge, said in an email, adding that when the first publication appeared in 1900, “it did not go unnoticed that the word closing that installment was ‘absurdus.’”
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But I would do less than justice to Mr. Adler's achieve-ment if I left the matter there. The Syntopicon is, in additionto all this, and in addition to being a monument to the indus-try, devotion, and intelligence of Mr. Adler and his staff, astep forward in the thought of the West. It indicates wherewe are: where the agreements and disagreements lie; wherethe problems are; where the work has to be done. It thushelps to keep us from wasting our time through misunder-standing and points to the issues that must be attacked.When the history of the intellectual life of this century iswritten, the Syntopicon will be regarded as one of the land-marks in it.
p xxvi
Hutchins closes his preface to his grand project with Mortimer J. Adler by giving pride of place to Adler's Syntopicon.
Adler's Syntopicon isn't just an index compiled into two books which were volumes 2 and 3 of The Great Books of the Western World, it's physically a topically indexed card index of data (a grand zettelkasten surveying Western culture if you will). It's value to readers and users is immeasurable and it stands as a fascinating example of what a well-constructed card index might allow one to do even when they don't have their own yet.
Adler spoke of practicing syntopical reading, but anyone who compiles their own card index (in either analog or digital form) will realize the ultimate value in creating their own syntopical writing or what Robert Hutchins calls participating in "The Great Conversation" across twenty-five centuries of documented human communication.
See also: https://hypothes.is/a/WF4THtUNEe2dZTdlQCbmXw
The way Hutchins presents the idea of "Adler's achievement" here seems to indicate that Hutchins didn't have a direct hand in compiling or working on it directly.
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Both the cult of learning around Dante and the cult ofignorance around Newton are phenomena of the vicious spe-cialization of scholarship.
p. xxiv
Hutchins seems to indicate that the "vicious specialization of scholarship" is in part to blame for the emergence of the "two cultures" delineated by C. P. Snow later in the decade.
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As ScottBuchanan has said, "Popular science has made every manhis own quack; he needs some of the doctor's medicine."
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As Stringfellow Barr has said, the world israpidly dividing into technicians who cannot tell the differ-ence between a good poem and sentimental doggerel and "cul-tured" people who know nothing about electricity exceptthat you push a button when you want it. In a society thatis highly technological the sooner the citizens understandthe basic ideas of mathematics and natural science the better.
The idea of the two cultures had been brewing for a bit...
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We lament the man who, properly desiring to wrestle atfirst hand with the problems that the great poets and philos-ophers have raised, yet contents himself with the "results"and "findings" of modern science.
1952 variation of C. P. Snow's Two Cultures thesis (1959).
See also earlier comment on p xxi: https://hypothes.is/a/2BGWXiIAEe6WZyd5bbGl3g
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When Hermann Hesse referredto the present as "the Age of the Digest," he did not intendto say anything complimentary.
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democracyrequires liberal education for all.
Two of the driving reasons behind the Great Books project were improvement of both education and democracy.
The democracy portion was likely prompted by the second Red Scare from ~1947-1957 which had profound effects on America. Published in 1952, this series would have considered it closely and it's interesting they included Marx in the thinkers at the end of the series.
Tags
- 1952
- popular science
- information overload
- cults
- two cultures
- Democracy
- medicine
- Mortimer J. Adler
- zettelkasten why
- Stringfellow Barr
- communism
- Great Books of the Western World
- card index as storehouse
- C. P. Snow
- Robert Maynard Hutchins
- digests
- Red Scare
- card index as database
- Scott Buchanan
- poetry
- quotes
- science
- published note collections
- scholarship
- math shaming
- learning
- ignorance
- Syntopicon
- context
- published zettelkasten
- education
- Herman Hesse
Annotators
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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He takes banal people and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them.
Pevear talking about Chekhov.
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But Tolstoy himself said the point is to get the thing said and then, if he wasn’t sure he had said it, he would say it again and again.”
quote from Richard Pevear
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In a letter to the Times Book Review in November, 1971, Nabokov wrote, “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins.”
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Nabokov wrote his translation to inspire his reader to know the poem in Russian:It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin’s language and go through EO again without this crib. In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all “general ideas” (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.
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- Jun 2023
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One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between educationand democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form ofgovernment—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated
experience’ (1916: 101).
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Her motto was ‘never interrupt aconcentrating child’
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.
via u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/149knhj/comment/jobi9ro/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 on 2023-06-15
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www.thedailybeast.com www.thedailybeast.com
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Donald Trump has Sonny Bono beat as a kind of used-car salesman.
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I turn to Joan and say, “My word, Joan. I’m so impressed. Melissa knows Yiddish?” Joan goes, “No. She doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Yiddish. But anybody who’s speaking to you in Yiddish is telling you a joke so you laugh at the end of it. I’ve taught her that much so nobody will think she’s stupid.” That was Joan in her 50s. She’s almost 80 now and she still treats her daughter the same way.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“And yeah, it goes on, and on, and on. And one day, we’re going to get a little intern who thinks they’re in show business and is going to sit and put each and every one of these cards onto a computer so that when I’m in England and I need a joke about doctors, I can just go into my computer and come up with a — oh, this is a tramp. This tramp donated all her organs for transplants, which should make the recipients happy because her body has never rejected anything. [LAUGHS]: So. But it just goes on, and on, and on. These are just jokes over the years, years, and years, and years of jokes. And when I die, I can sell this to some lucky, lucky comedian who will then, if they’re smart, have enough to keep them going for their whole life.”
standing in front of her card index for comedy, built into a wall of other files.
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In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”
quote by Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center
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www.gutenberg.org www.gutenberg.org
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I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand, and enter in a little book short hints of what you find that is curious or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such particulars in your memory, where they will be ready either for practice on some future occasion if they are matters of utility, or at least to adorn and improve your conversation if they are rather points of curiosity.
Benjamin Franklin letter to Miss Stevenson, Wanstead. Craven-street, May 16, 1760.
Franklin doesn't use the word commonplace book here, but is actively recommending the creation and use of one. He's also encouraging the practice of annotation, though in commonplace form rather than within the book itself.
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quoteinvestigator.com quoteinvestigator.com
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Several English renderings have been published over the years. The following excerpt is from “Xunzi: The Complete Text” within chapter 8 titled “The Achievements of the Ru”. The translator was Eric L. Hutton, and the publisher was Princeton University Press in 2014. Emphasis added to excerpts:[1]2014 Copyright, Xunzi: The Complete Text, Translated by Eric L. Hutton, Chapter 8: The Achievements of the Ru, Quote Page 64, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. (Verified with … Continue reading Not having heard of it is not as good as having heard of it. Having heard of it is not as good as having seen it. Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. Learning arrives at putting it into practice and then stops . . .
The frequent educational quote "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.", often misattributed to Benjamin Franklin, is most attributable to 3rd century Confucian philosopher Kunzi (Xun Kuang or 荀子) who wrote:
Not having heard of it is not as good as having heard of it. Having heard of it is not as good as having seen it. Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. Learning arrives at putting it into practice and then stops . . .
The translation of which appears in Xunzi: The Complete Text, Translated by Eric L. Hutton, Chapter 8: The Achievements of the Ru, Quote Page 64, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. 2014.
Variations of the sentiment and attributions have appeared frequently thereafter.
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Tell Me and I Forget; Teach Me and I May Remember; Involve Me and I Learn<br /> by Quote Investigator®
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www.dsebastien.net www.dsebastien.net
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The Zettelkasten method aims to help you forget.
I would argue that it is more subtle than this. It allows you to forget, but the aim is to allow you to learn, remember, and slowly build.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“All of us are imperfect,” Professor Calkins said. “The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.”
This is a painful statement to be said by an educator, a word whose root means to "lead out".
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www.theparisreview.org www.theparisreview.org
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https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/09/12/free-pencil-day/
A list of quotes from famous writers about pencils in The Paris Review.
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blog.ayjay.org blog.ayjay.org
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circulation is the lifeblood of reading.
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contextisking.com contextisking.com
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Jeff Zucker, the former NBC executive and now president of CNN, coined the phrase “trading analog dollars for digital pennies” in 2008.
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www.lrb.co.uk www.lrb.co.uk
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‘The greatest pleasure,’ Rütiner wrote, ‘is to associate and converse with learned men.’
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- May 2023
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I am an academic, so a critic might say that intellectual masturbation is kind of my job description.
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of course I had done a lot of thinking even before I ever used a ZK, but now I can record, retrieve, and elaborate these thoughts easily so that they accumulate over time to something bigger. Now, writing a paper or grant proposal often comes down to concatenating a bunch of notes.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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The magic comes from the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly.
Will Simpson feels that the magic of note taking stems from "the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly".
I think it sems more from the serendipitous connections and resultant combinatorial creativity.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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But I wouldn't call them a ZK® (stealing Andy's shorthand!) but they were a box of notes (Zettelkasten?).
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I get by when I work by accumulating notes—a bit about everything, ideas cap-tured on the fly, summaries of what I have read, references, quotations . . . Andwhen I want to start a project, I pull a packet of notes out of their pigeonhole anddeal them out like a deck of cards. This kind of operation, where chance plays arole, helps me revive my failing memory.16
via: Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), vii–viii; Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 129f.
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system was described by Charles Darwin:I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios, in cabinets with labeled shelves, intowhich I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought manybooks and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work.Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes and make a generaland classified index, and by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all theinformation collected during my life ready for use.13
via Nora Barlow ed., The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809–1882 vol. 1 (London: Collins, 1958), 137.
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In a note, he dryly remarks: “Appearanceof the card index and constitution of the human sciences: another invention the historianshave celebrated little”.7
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www.3x5life.com www.3x5life.comFAQ1
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BJ Fogg is one of the leading authorities on habit change. In his best selling book Tiny Habits he says: “Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being. If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.”
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garyvaynerchuk.com garyvaynerchuk.com
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“Content is king, but context is God.”
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“Find out who you are and do it on purpose” Dolly Parton
source?
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Annotators
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I started making lists on index cards—you know the ones we used back in school.
Note the total lack of any referent to why we used to use index cards in school.
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librarian.aedileworks.com librarian.aedileworks.com
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Asking a computer to create a glossary for you doesn’t make you any smarter than having a book that comes with a glossary.
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laulima.hawaii.edu laulima.hawaii.edu
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“From that time, now the native citizens and now the enemyhave triumphed ... up to the year of the siege of Mount Badon,when the last but certainly not the least slaughter of these lowlyscoundrels occurred, which, I know, makes 44 years and onemonth, and which was also the time of my birth.”
—Gildas, Chapter 26 of De excidio et conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain)
We don't have a specific date or exact location for the siege of Mount Badon, roughly in the 5th century, but Gildas writes about the battle within the timeframe of his own life, and thus places a timeframe on the original Arthur.
Gildas also writes about Ambrosius Aurelianus, who he identifies as having Roman heritage. Some scholars believe that this is another name for King Arthur.
Is there any relation to the Mountbatten family from Battenberg in Hesse, Germany? (Unlikely due to distance, though Saxon invaders may have renamed a place location in Britain after a local Batten or Battenberg related name from their homeland.)
Or the location Mount Batten? Likely not, as the previously known How Stert in Plymouth Sound, Devon, England was renamed after Sir William Batten (c.1600-1667), MP and Surveyor of the Navy.
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howaboutthis.substack.com howaboutthis.substack.com
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My magic trick (having faced a similar dilemma with many lovely notebooks over the years) is to turn to the first double page and write in large lettersDON'T BE AFRAID TO MAKE YOUR MARK UPON LIFE'S PAGE.And just like that the new notebook spell is broken and the pen is free to write again.
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I somehow made myself write in it and started with a sentence that I think would make for an excellent essay title some day: "Cheap paper is the perfectionist's salvation."
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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’ve been studying notebooks for over a decade and I still haven’t landed on a perfect organization method. I have, however, found the perfect pen: uni-ball signo, .38mm. I discovered them while teaching in Korea in 2008 and haven’t looked back.
It can't be a good sign that an academic who has spent over a decade studying notebooks and note taking still hasn't found the "perfect" organization method.
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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Write down all these slender ideas. It is surprising how often one sentence, jotted in a notebook, leads immediately to a second sentence. A plot can develop as you write notes. Close the notebook and think about it for a few days — and then presto! you’re ready to write a short story. — Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks
quote is from Highsmith's Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
I love the concept of "slender ideas" as small, fleeting notes which might accumulate into something if written down. In saying "Close the notebook and think about it for a few days" Patricia Highsmith seems to be suggesting that one engage in diffuse thinking, passive digesting, or mulling rather than active or proactive thinking.
She also invokes the magic word "presto!" (which she exclaims) as if to indicate that magically the difficult work of writing is somehow no longer difficult. Many writers seem to indicate that this is a phenomenon, but never seem to put their finger on the mechanism of why it happens. Some seems to stem from the passive digestion over days with diffuse thinking, with portions may also stem from not starting from a blank page and having some material to work against instead of a vacuum.
From Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 (Swiss Literary Archives)
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Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. —“Hours in a Library”
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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Even three or four words are often worth jotting down if they will evoke a thought, an idea or a mood. In the barren periods, one should browse through the notebooks. Some ideas may suddenly start to move. Two ideas may combine, perhaps because they were meant to combine in the first place. —Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
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I highly recommend notebooks for writers, a small one if one has to be out on a job all day, a larger one if one has the luxury of staying at home.
from Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction
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jillianhess.substack.com jillianhess.substack.com
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As they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every species, here noting down something to imitate, here culling some notable saying to put into practice in their behavior, there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends, you would swear you were watching the Muses at graceful play in the lovely pastures of Mount Helicon, gathering flowers and marjoram to make well-woven garlands. —The Adages of Erasmus
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The bee plunders the flowers here and there, but afterwards they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment — The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne
Cross reference with Seneca's note taking metaphors with apes.
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We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, – in other words, our natural gifts, – we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came. —Epistle LXXXIV
Her own translation?
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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"[What] I like about the [zettlekasten] system is that it's a constant reminder to to make up your mind and to specify what you what you're thinking."<br /> —Sönke Ahrens, [Tinderbox Meetup - May 7, 2023 00:30:36]
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I'd been looking at it like a collection of knowledge. A collection that has no purpose apart from... being a collection. But Zettelkasten should be a place for creativity, playing with ideas with output as the goal (at least for me). It should be fun. And managing it definitely shouldn't take more time than using it for your purposes.
u/ittspelledsindi
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www.ala.org www.ala.org
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Coleridge, Melville, Twain, David Foster Wallace, and a host of others made marginalia into a form of literary expression.
Marginalia is a form of literary expression.
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www.mercurynews.com www.mercurynews.com
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Josh Sargent, a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk community in upstate New York, where Hoover researched the impact of industrial contamination in the St. Lawrence River for her dissertation, said she’s “a good person and always welcome here.” Debates about her identity seem to be taking place in the “bubble of academia,” he said, while the real challenges facing Native people are being overlooked. He said she’s doing important work, and her book, “The River Is in Us,” accurately depicted the environmental harm suffered by his community. “I hope people read it.”
An important question here: her identity may not have been completely authentic, but is this a reason not to heed and consider her work on its own merit?
How do any of us really know our identities?
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www.wordnik.com www.wordnik.com
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scarequotes
https://www.wordnik.com/users/scarequotes
An interesting Wordnik user.
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URL
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- Apr 2023
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Tyrion Lannister : A wise man once said a true history of the world is a history of great conversations in elegant rooms.
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www.dalekeiger.net www.dalekeiger.net
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Sometimes you must surrender the idea of steering the story toward a predetermined structure and destination. We all know how to do the latter, so it feels secure.
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Writing about science means humbling yourself about how little you know, and then writing the story in the authoritative voice of a tentative expert.
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Roy Peter Clark, writing scholar and coach at The Poynter Institute, says, “Reports give readers information. Stories give readers experience.” I would add: An article is generic; a story is unique.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Great genial power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive; in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind.”
original source?
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“I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”
I'm reminded a bit of Dale Keiger's mention of Mark Strand having this same feeling after writing a poem.
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Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”
For Aaron Sorkin smoking was a tool that was part of his writing process.
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www.dalekeiger.net www.dalekeiger.net
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In 1971, his reputation was beginning its ascent when he was interviewed by The Ohio Review. He described what he felt after completing a poem:Well, after the brief, and I think normal, period of exhilaration, there is a let-down. What I’ve done is written another poem. And what I have to do is write another one.
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Art is thought that produces a thing. Art is muscle memory that produces a thing. Art is a search that produces a thing. Art is a practice that produces a thing.Art is work that produces a thing.
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He preferred penning poems to typing them, because, he said, “A poem can appear finished just because of the cleanness of the typescript, and I don’t want it to seem finished before it is.” When he typed a poem, he said, he was reading it, but when he wrote a poem by hand he could hear it.
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www.kanopy.com www.kanopy.com
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13:14 - [Aby] Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos.13:18 Mythical and symbolic thinking13:20 strives to form spiritual bonds13:22 between humanity and the surrounding world,13:25 shaping distance into the space13:27 required for devotion and reflection,13:31 the distance undone13:32 by the instantaneous electrical connection.
Telegram and telephone destroy the cosmos. Mythical and symbolic thinking strives to form spiritual bonds between humanity and the surrounding world, shaping distance into the space required for devotion and reflection, the distance undone by the instantaneous electrical connection. —Aby Warburg, [00:13:14] quoted in Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory (Original quote??)
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We know, from the first generation of users,55:26 a person like Frances Yates,55:27 who have been writing about and speaking about later on,55:32 how much the structure of the library55:35 has helped them in defining their topics,55:38 and basically in their research,55:40 and how inspirational it was,
Frances Yates has apparently indicated how influential Aby Warburg's library and its structure was on her work and research.
direct reference for this?
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51:20 - [Aby] Not until art history can show51:22 that it sees the work of art51:23 in a few more dimensions than it has done so far51:27 will our activity again attract the interest of scholars51:31 and of the general public.51:36 Every serious scholar51:37 who has to venture on a problem of cultural history51:40 reads over the entrance to his workshop Goethe's lines:51:43 "What you call the spirit of the age51:46 "is really no more51:47 "than the spirit of the worthy historian51:49 "in which the age is reflected."51:57 In my role as psycho-historian,51:59 I tried to diagnose52:00 the schizophrenia of Western civilization52:02 from its images in an autobiographical reflex.52:10 May the history of art and the study of religion,52:13 between which lies nothing at present52:15 but wasteland overgrown with verbiage,52:18 meet together one day in learned and lucid minds,52:22 and may they share a workbench in the laboratory52:24 of the iconological science of civilization.
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44:19 - [Claudia] The classification is anything but indifferent.44:24 The manner of shelving the books44:26 is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader,44:30 who, looking on the shelves for one book,44:33 is attracted by the kindred ones next to it,44:36 glances at the sections above and below,44:39 and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought44:43 which may lend to additional interests44:46 to the one he was pursuing.
The classification is anything but indifferent. The manner of shelving the books is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader, who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend to additional interests to the one he was pursuing.<br /> —Claudia Wedepohl on the design of Warburg's library, [00:44:19] in Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory
Provides a similar sort of description of the push towards serendipity and discovery found in one's zettelkasten as well as that in Melvil Dewey's library classification and arrangements.
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12:03 - For art is not only something which is aesthetic relevant,12:07 but it's relevant in so many other dimensions too,12:11 partially, and intellectually,12:15 and there's a lot of knowledge enclosed within the artworks.
For art is not only something which is aesthetic relevant, but it's relevant in so many other dimensions too, partially, and intellectually, and there's a lot of knowledge enclosed within the artworks. —Michael Diers [00:12:03], art historian in Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory
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06:57 The entire range of emotional stirrings,06:59 aggression, defense, sacrifice, mourning,07:03 melancholia, ecstasy, triumph, et cetera, is expressed07:06 through the revival of movements, gestures, and postures,07:11 that is pathosformel:07:12 the expressive formulas of emotion07:15 either taken from ancient modes07:16 or reappearing as mnemonic traces in successive works.
The entire range of emotional stirrings, aggression, defense, sacrifice, mourning, melancholia, ecstasy, triumph, et cetera, is expressed through the revival of movements, gestures, and postures, that is pathosformel: the expressive formulas of emotion either taken from ancient modes or reappearing as mnemonic traces in successive works.
Original source for this? (Likely in German as original.)
Warburg is talking about the expression of current art through the lens of the classical arts and there is a throughline of "mnemonic traces" through out time.
Tags
- electrical connection
- libraries
- memory in art
- The Warburg Institute
- Melvil Dewey
- discovery learning
- art history
- mnemonic traces
- technophobia
- art
- cultural history
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- Claudia Wedepohl
- Frances A. Yates
- Aby Warburg
- quotes
- patience
- discovery
- immediacy
- human connection
- card index as discovery
- serendipity
- Michael Diers
Annotators
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“My father stopped hitting me for my grades,” Mr. Lorayne told The Chicago Tribune in 1988. “He hit me for other things.”
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“They were professional poor people,” he told an interviewer, invoking his parents. “I remember having a potato for dinner.”
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By the 1960s, Mr. Lorayne was best known for holding audiences rapt with feats of memory that bordered on the elephantine. Such feats were born, he explained in interviews and in his many books, of a system of learned associations — call them surrealist visual puns — that seemed equal parts Ivan Pavlov and Salvador Dalí.
"surrealist visual puns"
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www.thedailybeast.com www.thedailybeast.com
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Musician John Mayer, too, describes his typewriter as more of an emotional companion than a logistical tool. He laments writing lyrics with the judgemental “red squiggly line” of spell check, which he says stops the creative process because he feels compelled to fix the error, and turning to a typewriter which “doesn’t judge you, it just goes, ‘right away, sir, right away’.”
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Local file Local file
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Of all skill, part is infused by precept, and part is obtained by habit.SAMUEL JOHNSON
link to: - https://hypothes.is/a/hkyPEtm9Ee21MFP9ynnj0g
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For the rules in textbooks of rhetoric cannot by themselves make expertthose who are eager to dispense with study and practice.DIONYSIUS OF HALICARNASSUS
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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the best predictor of whether we agree with the science is simply where we fall on the political spectrum.
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University
the referent "the science" is "the [climate] science" in this context
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Now, I've made a number of documentaries about fake news. And what interests me is the first person to use the phrase mainstream media was Joseph Goebbels. And he, in one of his propaganda sheets, said “It's very important that you don't read the mainstream media because they'll tell you lies.” You must read the truth by the ramblings of his boss and his associated work. And you do have to watch this. This is a very, very well-established technique of fascists, is to tell you, don't read this stuff, read our stuff.<br /> —Ian Hislop, Editor, Private Eye Magazine 00:16:00, Satire in the Age of Murdoch and Trump, The Problem with Jon Stewart Podcast
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TheSyntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arisefrom his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader,nomatter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of theGreat Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed.
While the Syntopicon ultimately appears in book form, one must recall that it started life as a paper slip-based card index (Life v24, issue 4, 1948). This index can be queried in some of the ways one might have queried a library card catalog or more specifically the way in which Niklas Luhmann indicated that he queried his zettelkasten (Luhmann,1981). Unlike a library card catalog, The Syntopicon would not only provide a variety of entry places within the Western canon to begin their search for answers, but would provide specific page numbers and passages rather than references to entire books.
The Syntopicon invites the reader to make on the set whatever demands arise from his own problems and interests. It is constructed to enable the reader, no matter what the stages of his reading in other ways, to find that part of the Great Conversation in which any topic that interests him is being discussed. (p. 85)
While the search space for the Syntopicon wasn't as large as the corpus covered by larger search engines of the 21st century, the work that went into making it and the depth and focus of the sources make it a much more valuable search tool from a humanistic perspective. This work and value can also be seen in a personal zettelkasten. Some of the value appears in the form of having previously built a store of contextualized knowledge, particularly in cases where some ideas have been forgotten or not easily called to mind, which serves as a context ratchet upon which to continue exploring and building.
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Aristotle, who had said, many centuries before in Politics (BookVIII): ‘No one would dispute the fact that it is a lawgiver’s prime duty to arrangefor the education of the young. In states where this is not done the quality of theconstitution suffers.’
Current American climate indicates that Republicans take this quote of Aristotle's to heart, but they're not closely thinking about how they define "education". They're definitely not defining it with respect to John Locke's views in Some Thoughts Concerning Education which encourages political systems that move away from an electorate that is subservient to authority.
see: https://hypothes.is/a/upfxCtSiEe2wrdd3cOo-Lg for John Locke
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In his essay Of the Conduct of the Understanding, Locke frowned upon those
‘who seldom reason at all, but do and think according to the example of others, whether parents, neighbours, ministers...for the saving of themselves the pains and trouble of thinking and examining for themselves’ (p. 169).
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A political system, he said, needs people who are fair,open-minded, and think for themselves; it doesn’t want people who aresubservient to authority.
Is there a better direct quote from Locke for this indirect one?
Oddly, large portions of the religious right and Republican right are highly subservient to authority while simultaneously espousing the idea of "freedom".
Apparently the base definition of "freedom" on the right has shifted in large portions of American culture.
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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The Zettelkasten provides combinatorial possibilities that were never planned, never pre-meditated, or never designed in this way.
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If you have to write anyway, it is pragmatic to exploit this activity by creating a system of notes that can act as a competent communication partner.
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- Mar 2023
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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“The hardest thing I’ve learned over the years is that I’m getting paid a lot of money to produce a movie, but sometimes the best thing to do is nothing,” he told The New York Times in 1992, when he was making “Hoffa.” “I don’t need to impose myself.”Nonetheless, he knew he played a vital role.“It’s the creative urge that makes me work,” he told American Film magazine for a 1988 article. “The pleasure is, to some extent, vicarious, but it’s no less creative for that. It is creating a world by bringing together creative financing with creative filmmakers. In a sense, producing can be compared to conceptual art.”
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Mr. Luddy at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival. The festival became a gathering of devotees to the religion of filmmaking, and Mr. Luddy was its most fervent believer and its main officiant.
"religion of filmmaking"
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twitter.com twitter.com
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<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>I do my thinking with pen on paper. Digital tools, even (or especially?) the note-taking ones, are just not for me. <br><br>They may be easy to access or carry around, but what’s the point if they constrain the output?
— Julia Pappas (@JuliaPappasJoy) March 30, 2023A common issue of many digital note taking apps is that while they may have ease for cutting and pasting data into them, moving data around, visualizing it in various forms, and exporting it into a final product may be much more difficult. At the opposite end of the spectrum, physical index cards are much easier to sort, resort, and place into an outline form to create output.
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www.insidehighered.com www.insidehighered.com
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It does not feel patriotic to have my students pay money for public-domain literature on their American heritage.”
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Mentioned this to someone who moved to Bushwick and kept saying "I wish more of Brooklyn was like this" with a rebuttal saying "this is why the people who made it attractive to you aren't here anymore" and got the "it's not my problem" shit. https://twitter.com/hollley/status/1641149981678530560. I think that's where being a "transplant" into a different place becomes violent - your presence IMMEDIATELY disrupts the environments you're in (and because of that, you have an obligation to minimize it as much as possible).
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I’m not sure I need a system around, for example, the best way to surface the minutiae from interstitial journaling. In fact, just using the phrase “interstitial journaling” is a dead giveaway that I’ve already been overthinking it. Settle down, Jack!
🤪
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mastodon.social mastodon.social
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Ein Zettel, auf den kein anderer Zettel verweist, ist kein Zettel
—Detlef Stern, 2023-03-21, https://mastodon.social/@t73fde/110062851811483123
A note not referenced by another note is not a note. (translation mine)
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www.npr.org www.npr.org
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"No one volunteers for res," she says, a little ruefully.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Remember the Thesaurus is a work of the human brain and therefore it is fallible. —Kathleen M. Coleman
replace Thesaurus with zettelkasten...
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web.archive.org web.archive.org
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wenn man Sethes Lebensprinzip kennt: "Ich arbeite nur, wenn ich mag. Aber ich mag immer arbeiten."
Kurt Sethes' philosophy was encapsulated as "I only work when I like. But I always like to work." (Translation from German mine.)
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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‘‘So long as so-called A.I. systems are being built and deployed by the big tech companies without democratically governed regulation, they are going to primarily reflect the values of Silicon Valley,’’ Emily Bender argues, ‘‘and any attempt to ‘teach’ them otherwise can be nothing more than ethics washing.’’
ethics washing!
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Right before we left our lunch, Sam Altman quoted a saying of Ilya Sutskever’s: ‘‘One thing that Ilya says — which I always think sounds a little bit tech-utopian, but it sticks in your memory — is, ‘It’s very important that we build an A.G.I. that loves humanity.’ ’’
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‘‘I think it lets us be more thoughtful and more deliberate about safety issues,’’ Altman says. ‘‘Part of our strategy is: Gradual change in the world is better than sudden change.’’
What are the long term effects of fast breaking changes and gradual changes for evolved entities?
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Universities are factories of human knowledge. They’re also monuments to individual ignorance.
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biblioracle.substack.com biblioracle.substack.com
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Writing is rewarding. Writing is empowering. Writing is even fun. As human, we are wired to communicate. We are also wired for “play.” Under the right circumstances, writing allows us to do both of these things at the same time.
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In a piece like this, writing is the expression and exploration of an idea (or collection of ideas). It is only through the writing that I can fully understand what I think.
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one of the things I value about writing, is the act of writing itself. It is an embodied process that connects me to my own humanity, by putting me in touch with my mind, the same way a vigorous hike through the woods can put me in touch with my body.
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If we assume students want to learn - and I do - we should show our interest in their learning, rather than their performance.
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www.youtube.com www.youtube.com
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Learning has to be knowledge. 00:10:07 And learning has to be based on understanding. And what you understand you can absorb, internalize and it becomes knowledge. What you know, you don't forget. You can block something that you know, but not forget.
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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Ollendorff's name is used as an epithet in H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau:[10] "Yesterday he bled and wept," said the Satyr. "You never bleed nor weep. The Master does not bleed or weep." "Ollendorffian beggar!" said Montgomery, "you'll bleed and weep if you don't look out!"
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www.ebay.com www.ebay.com
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Plan Your Work and Work your Plan An Infallible Rule for Success
was there a prior source for this aphorism?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Witness the unapologetic swagger of "FORGET WITH IMPUNITY" vs. its wimpy cousin Evernote's "Remember Everything".
—u/spanchor
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Local file Local file
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Beware the “alibi of photocopies”! Photocopies are indis-pensable instruments. They allow you to keep with you atext you have already read in the library, and to take homea text you have not read yet. But a set of photocopies canbecome an alibi. A student makes hundreds of pages ofphotocopies and takes them home, and the manual laborhe exercises in doing so gives him the impression that hepossesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts thestudent from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo ofaccumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens tomany. Defend yourself from this trap: as soon as you havethe photocopy, read it and annotate it immediately. If youare not in a great hurry, do not photocopy something newbefore you own (that is, before you have read and annotated)the previous set of photocopies. There are many things thatI do not know because I photocopied a text and then relaxedas if I had read it.
(p. 125)
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twitter.com twitter.com
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We create product not to show how good we are, but to measure how good we are.
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>We create product not to show how good we are, but to measure how good we are.
— Naval (@naval) February 19, 2023
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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None of this is easy. In the words of Jill Lepore, one of our finest historians, “Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.”
ostensibly in The Story of America: Essays on Origins
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“Wisdom is the tears of experience,” the eminent sociologist Daniel Bell told my graduating class at Brandeis University.
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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A Zettelkasten is a system of notes that fit the criteria of being a system. Being alive vs. being a machine is a good metaphor to understand the difference. A Zettelkasten is alive, a conventional note taking system is a machine.
I'm not the only one to think of zettelkasten as "living"...
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My translation of Niklas Luhmann (1997): Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. S.11: “Bei meiner Aufnahme in die 1969 gegründete Fakultät für Soziologie der Universität Bielefeld fand ich mich konfrontiert mit der Aufforderung, Forschungsprojekte zu benennen, an denen ich arbeite. Mein Projekt lautete: Theorie der Gesellschaft; Laufzeit: 30 Jahre; Kosten: keine.”
As I began to work at the 1969 founded faculty of sociology of the University of Bielefeld, I was confronted with the request to name research projects I work on. My project was: a theory of society; Duration: 30 years; Costs: none.(1)
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- Feb 2023
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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Principles are higher than techniques. Principles produce techniques in an instant. —Ido Portal
source?
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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Posted byu/A_Dull_Significance6 hours agoWhat’s something you do with your Zettelkasten that you’re “not supposed to do”? .t3_11awtrx._2FCtq-QzlfuN-SwVMUZMM3 { --postTitle-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postTitleLink-VisitedLinkColor: #9b9b9b; --postBodyLink-VisitedLinkColor: #989898; } questionI think the title says it all.There are lots of ideas about things you should, or shouldn’t, do with you zettelkasten. What is something that works for you that you’re “not supposed to do”?For me, it’s the idea you shouldn’t keep quotes. I have a section (56/2) which is mainly a collection of different quotes on the topic of writing complexity and ease of comprehension. Some are for complexity, some against. Some place the burden on the writer, some on the reader, some mutual. I find it fruitful.What about you? What “rule” do you break?
Who made up this supposed rule against quotes! Are they not aware that quotes, particularly of sententiae, are some of the most excerpted and transmitted bits of knowledge in the entire Western canon? Without quotes, the entire tradition of note taking would probably not exist. Of course properly quoting is a sub-art in and of itself within rhetoric and the ars excerpendi.
A zettelkasten with no quotes— by definition— shouldn't carry the name.
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I’m an imposter-perfectionist
—NomadMimi
Perfectionism is a good thing to be an imposter at.
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blay.se blay.se
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Life in Zettelkasten is more like dance than a factory.
link to related: https://hypothes.is/a/whBvKrLnEe2OvPOgSd_4zg
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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Remember that life in a Zettelkasten is supposed to be fun. It is a joyful experience to work with it when it works back with you. Life in Zettelkasten is more like dance than a factory.
I've always disliked the idea of "work" involved in "making" notes and "processing" them. Framing zettelkasten and knowledge creation in terms of capitalism is a painful mistake.
the quote is from https://blay.se/2015-06-21-living-with-a-zettelkasten.html
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spectator.org spectator.org
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Indeed, Martin Anderson, Reagan’s former domestic policy adviser, says that Reagan’s system did wonders for his ability to give speeches. Reagan was able to approach a lectern with no sign anywhere of a prepared speech. Only those seated on the stage behind him could see his left hand drop into his suitcoat pocket and pull out a neat, small packet of cards and slip off the elastic band with his right hand as he set the cards down. And as for helping him in preparing the speech material, “his system was unrivaled,” Anderson remembers. “Before the speech Reagan would pore over the packs of cards, then pluck a few cards from one pack, a few from another, and combine them. In a matter of minutes, he would create an entirely new speech. The system was as flexible as a smooth gold chain.”
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“These cards are the tools of his trade. He can take any speech and insert some of these zingers and one-liners. Let’s say he’s speaking to a Kiwanis Club. He knew what to put in. If he was talking to a group of firemen, he had a joke about putting out a fire. If you’re really looking for the hand of a president, and how his mind is working, all of these note cards together, in a way, give you the magic of Ronald Reagan.”
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www.cbsnews.com www.cbsnews.com
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"Prosperity is something created by businessmen for politicians to take credit for."
—Ronald Reagan
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"If at first you don't succeed, do it the way she told you."
—Ronald Reagan
Now that we know better about the history and the results of the Regan administration, we really should be listening more to women —Ronald Reagan said it himself!
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"Room bugged? Every time I sneezed the chandelier said, 'Gesundheit!'"
—Ronald Reagan
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"I won't say he should be put in a mental institution, but if he was in one, don't think I'd let him out."
—Ronald Reagan
A sad show for the man who gutted mental health support in California and then more broadly in the United States.
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"Never start an argument with a woman when she's tired -- or when she's rested."
—Ronald Reagan
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"Don't say he's old, but every time there's a knock on the door he yells 'Everybody hide, it's Indians!'"
—Ronald Reagan
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"You can talk to any number of President Reagan's speechwriters over the years, and when they might hand him a speech, the speeches would come back with a quote, or an expression or a joke that they hadn't seen before," John Heubusch, executive director of the Reagan Library, told CBS News' Mo Rocca.
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"Nothing like a vote in the U.N. to tell you who your friends used to be."
—Ronald Reagan
Tags
- politics
- Mo Rocca
- Indians
- one-liners
- United Nations
- index card based commonplace books
- mental health
- John Heubusch
- Germany
- misogyny
- business culture
- Ronald Reagan
- prosperity
- speechwriting
- institutional racism
- how old is he?
- Cold War
- Reaganomics
- jokes
- quotes
- friendship
- Reagan administration
- spycraft
- economics
- zettelkasten for business
Annotators
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The Zettelkasten Method is not a thing; it is a manual to productivity.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)
—Sasha Fast https://forum.zettelkasten.de/profile/Sascha
I love the deeper definition and distinction of self-care here.
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aeon.co aeon.co
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If Seneca or Martial were around today, they would probably write sarcastic epigrams about the very public exhibition of reading text messages and in-your-face displays of texting. Digital reading, like the perusing of ancient scrolls, constitutes an important statement about who we are. Like the public readers of Martial’s Rome, the avid readers of text messages and other forms of social media appear to be everywhere. Though in both cases the performers of reading are tirelessly constructing their self-image, the identity they aspire to establish is very different. Young people sitting in a bar checking their phones for texts are not making a statement about their refined literary status. They are signalling that they are connected and – most importantly – that their attention is in constant demand.
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forum.zettelkasten.de forum.zettelkasten.de
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If you treat a metaphor as a second order perception (first order perception = senses) you can create Pseudo-Synesthesia which may increase divergent thinking.
Mull on this...
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One student’s rabbinical thesis, also completed that year,opened with the declaration: ‘We must not forget that History is a Science. Its facts cannever be doubted. One may indeed, differ as to the interpretation of facts but neverdispute the fact per se!’ (orig. emph., Holtzberg, 1916: Introduction).
Interesting to see this quote in light of the work of Ernst Bernheim and historical method.
At what point did history begin to be viewed as a science this way? (Did it predate Berheim?) Is it still?
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Anecdotes’, he concluded, ‘havetheir historic value, if properly tested’ – reflecting both his interest in details and also theneed to ascertain whether they were true (Deutsch, 1905b).
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“I only dowhat is easy. I only write when I immediately know how to do it. If Ifalter for a moment, I put the matter aside and do something else.”(Luhmann et al., 1987, 154f.)[4]
https://youtu.be/qRSCKSPMuDc?t=37m30s (all links are on takesmartnotes.com)<br /> Luhmann, Niklas, Dirk Baecker, and Georg Stanitzek. 1987. Archimedes und wir: Interviews. Berlin: Merve.
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we have preserved Eco’s handwritten index cardresearch system in all its detail, precisely because it is the soulof How to Write a Thesis.
!!!
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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“you’ll never be able to sanitize the Internet.”
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“The reality is that tech companies have been using automated tools to moderate content for a really long time and while it’s touted as this sophisticated machine learning, it’s often just a list of words they think are problematic,” said Ángel Díaz, a lecturer at the UCLA School of Law who studies technology and racial discrimination.
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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at a time when anything that takes more than a few minutes to skim is called a “longread”—it’s understandable that devoting a small chunk of one’s frisky twenties to writing a thesis can seem a waste of time, outlandishly quaint, maybe even selfish. And, as higher education continues to bend to the logic of consumption and marketable skills, platitudes about pursuing knowledge for its own sake can seem certifiably bananas.
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Consider Eco’s caution against “the alibi of photocopies”: “A student makes hundreds of pages of photocopies and takes them home, and the manual labor he exercises in doing so gives him the impression that he possesses the work. Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many.” Many of us suffer from an accelerated version of this nowadays, as we effortlessly bookmark links or save articles to Instapaper, satisfied with our aspiration to hoard all this new information, unsure if we will ever get around to actually dealing with it.
neocapitalism of information!!
Is information overload compounded by our information hoarding tendencies?
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wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com wordcraft-writers-workshop.appspot.com
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More provocatively, great writing is transgressive — it subverts expectations and challenges the reader.
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“...it can be very useful for coming up with ideas out of thin air, essentially. All you need is a little bit of seed text, maybe some notes on a story you've been thinking about or random bits of inspiration and you can hit a button that gives you nearly infinite story ideas.”- Eugenia Triantafyllou
Eugenia Triantafyllou is talking about crutches for creativity and inspiration, but seems to miss the value of collecting interesting tidbits along the road of life that one can use later. Instead, the emphasis here becomes one of relying on an artificial intelligence doing it for you at the "hit of a button". If this is the case, then why not just let the artificial intelligence do all the work for you?
This is the area where the cultural loss of mnemonics used in orality or even the simple commonplace book will make us easier prey for (over-)reliance on technology.
Is serendipity really serendipity if it's programmed for you?
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www.robinsloan.com www.robinsloan.com
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But a good short story is always basically a memento mori.
An interesting theory...
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce comes to mind as an excellent example.
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I have to report that the AI did not make a useful or pleasant writing partner. Even a state-of-the-art language model cannot presently “understand” what a fiction writer is trying to accomplish in an evolving draft. That’s not unreasonable; often, the writer doesn’t know exactly what they’re trying to accomplish! Often, they are writing to find out.
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sciencegarden.net sciencegarden.net
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Der Zettelkasten weiß tendenziell immer weniger als man selbst, aber immer soviel, wie wir auf Karten geschrieben haben.
google translate:
The Zettelkasten always tends to know less than you do, but always as much as we have written on cards.
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docdrop.org docdrop.org
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“The Zettelkastenis much more effortand time consumingthan writing books.”Niklas Luhmann, Shortcuts, p.26
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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Proust writes, with only the faintest irony, “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.”
source? Swann's Way?
Definitely from a literacy forward perspective!
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www.edwinwenink.xyz www.edwinwenink.xyz
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a very simple principle for note-taking: notes are things where I explain something to myself.
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What we ultimately should care about is being able to use our knowledge to produce something new, whatever that may be. To not merely reproduce you must understand the material. And understanding requires application, a hermeneutic principle that particularly Gadamer worked out extensively. If you really want to measure your level of understanding, you should try to apply or explain something to yourself or someone else.
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maggieappleton.com maggieappleton.com
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Digital gardening is the Domestic Cozy response to the professional personal blog; it's both intimate and public, weird and welcoming.
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If you ask an elder about the work’s meaning, you may quickly find yourself enrolledin what Wardaman law man Yidumduma Bill Harney calls “Bush University”.
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Art is often focused on aesthetic, but more importantly, it is avisual embodiment of knowledge.
link to: Eddington quote https://hypothes.is/a/TNV2WqfpEe2Z24NgnWsZCg
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And yes, it is also very pretty.
understated quote of the day
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strengejacke.wordpress.com strengejacke.wordpress.com
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Should you copy a method just because Luhmann used it? No, indeed it doesn’t make sense to copy a method just because it appears sexy. One should find the best fitting method for himself.
Some in the current zettelkasten space come close to this (Bob Doto comes to mind) while others seem to be more dogmatic. I think people generally ultimately do this in practice, but there is still a lingering sense of orthodoxy.
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www.thesing-online.de www.thesing-online.de
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A Zettelkasten is hypertext plus a hierarchical tree structure and keywords.
an elegant little statement
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Suppose that we were asked to arrange the followingin two categories—distance, mass, electric force, entropy, beauty, melody.I think there are the strongest grounds for placingentropy alongside beauty and melody and not with thefirst three.
Syndication link: https://boffosocko.com/2013/09/26/entropy-beauty-melody/
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en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
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His best-known works are two voluminous books that attempt to systematize the development of the sciences, History of the Inductive Sciences (1837) and The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840, 1847, 1858–60). While the History traced how each branch of the sciences had evolved since antiquity, Whewell viewed the Philosophy as the "Moral" of the previous work as it sought to extract a universal theory of knowledge through history. In the latter, he attempted to follow Francis Bacon's plan for discovery. He examined ideas ("explication of conceptions") and by the "colligation of facts" endeavored to unite these ideas with the facts and so construct science.[11] This colligation is an "act of thought", a mental operation consisting of bringing together a number of empirical facts by "superinducing" upon them a conception which unites the facts and renders them capable of being expressed in general laws.[22]
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www.complexityexplorer.org www.complexityexplorer.org
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My blurb should have a blurb, it was so good. —Simon DeDeo (12:10)
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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If something is not worth a note card, then I don't read it
—u/IamOkei https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10qpphw/given_that_you_do_analog_notemaking_do_you/
link to John Water's quote: https://hypothes.is/a/E6wDpPfVEey88SclTBoJPQ
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- Jan 2023
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The real story of what happened in human history is a thousandtimes more diverting.
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In the end I decided: everyone hates a long essay; everyoneloves a short book. Why not turn the essay into a freestanding workand let it stand on its own merits?And that is what I have done.
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Re"...what is it like? How does it manifest?"For me, the idea that my zettelkasten becomes an entity outside myself is most often (and most obviously) felt in two situations (tho there are probably others):When I'm importing new ideas and a connection arises that I hadn't thought of previouslyWhen following trains of thought and connections arise that I didn't overtly intend to makeIn the first instance, I come across ideas I had forgotten about, and although it's not the direction I assumed the new idea would go, it becomes an exciting and possibly more lucrative way to take it.In the second instance, where I might be tracing a thought line to develop an article, I might, for example, zoom in on the graph view in Obsidian and see an idea that, while not formally connected to the ones I'm following, happens to be in close proximity spatially, and so it triggers a new direction I might want to take the article. (You can see this happen IRL in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OUn2-h6oVc&)In both cases, my zk feels like it's offering me more than what I would have gotten had I not been communicating with it. There is a sense that I and it are working together. I import new ideas with a rough sense of how they should connect. It shows alternatives to my thinking on the matter.Obviously, in both cases, all the ideas are my own. So, the zk is not necessarily developing ideas for me. But, because of the way in which the ideas are handled—non-hierarchically, rhizomatic, cross-categorical, cross-theme, etc.—non-habituated connections come to light, connections that are less conditioned by my own conventional ways of thinking.
A good description from Bob Doto.
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chat.indieweb.org chat.indieweb.org
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[Rose] I trained instagram into thinking I have cats. I get a lot of cat adverts which are just cute pictures of cats now, 10/10 would recommend!
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www.complexityexplorer.org www.complexityexplorer.org
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Panofsky's quote that "“Thus, while science endeavours to transform the chaotic variety of natural phenomena into what may be called a cosmos of nature, the humanities endeavour to transform the chaotic variety of human records into what may be called a cosmos of culture.”
check quote and original source
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www.complexityexplorer.org www.complexityexplorer.org
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A. Both Robespierre and Animal are ambitious and protean members of an elite group, shifting their identities in response to changing conditions and gradually taking on increasingly extreme positions, driving both the French Revolution and the Muppet Show into what is colloquially known as “The Terror”.
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Browsing through Walten’s notes also helped Jagersma to get to know the pamphleteer better, even though he is been dead for three hundred years. “The Memoriaelen say a lot about him. I could read how Walten did his research, follow his fascinations, and see the ideas for pieces he was not able to work out anymore. In a way, these two notebooks are a kind of self-portrait.”
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In the process, her notes become very personal. “The more personal, the more valuable,” says Fraza. “The way in which you link your ideas is what makes your knowledge base unique.”
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And the third category is for things that inspire me but that I don’t yet know exactly how to use. This category is actually the most interesting.”
Many people collect notes that they're not sure what to do with or even where to put them. Neuroscience student and researcher Charlotte Fraza keeps her version of these notes in a category of "things that inspire me, but I don't yet know exactly how to use. She feels that compared to the other categories of actionable specific use and sources, this inspiration category is the most interesting to her.
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zettelkasten.de zettelkasten.de
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Richard Feynman was fond of giving the following advice on how to be a genius. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lie in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!”
Gian-Carlo Rota (1997): Ten Lessons I Wish I Had Been Taught, Notices of the American Mathematical Society 1, 1997, Vol. 44, pp. 22-25.
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fs.blog fs.blog
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“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” E.F. Schumacher
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laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com
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Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "Brief Mention," American Journal of Philology 20.1 (1899) 108-113 (at 108): With all our advance in scientific astronomy, the average modern man is not so familiar with the sky as was his antique brother, and some of the blunders in modern works of fiction that are scored from time to time in scientific journals would hardly have been possible for a ploughman of antiquity, not to say a sailor. The world needs every now and then a reminder that the modern head holds different things from the ancient brain-pan, not necessarily more.
How painfully true this may have been in 1899, it's now much worse in 2023!
Specialization of knowledge tends to fit the lifeways of the people who hold and maintain it. Changing lifeways means one must lose one or more domains and begin using or curating different domains of knowledge.
In a global world of specialization, humans who specialize are forced to rely more heavily on the experience and veracity of those around them who have also specialized. One may be able to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics, but their knowledge of the state of the art in anthropology or economic policy may be therefore utterly undeveloped. As a result they will need to rely on the knowledge and help of others in maintaining those domains.
This knowledge specialization means that politicians will need to be more open about what they think and say, yet instead politicians seem to be some of the least knowledge about almost anything.
This is just the start of a somewhat well-formed thesis I've developed elsewhere, but not previously written out... more to come...
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www.reddit.com www.reddit.com
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I’m back at the box.
This is a great euphemism for the fun "work" of maintaining a zettelkasten.
via u/A_Dull_Significance at https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10gnh3u/box_update/
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thebaffler.com thebaffler.com
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Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”
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Might not my Journal be called “Field Notes?”
—Henry David Thoreau, March 21, 1853
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