enthusiasms, addendum

in

Meant to include these links to notebooks that have inspired my recent (and enthusiastic) approach in the previous post but neglected to do so (wouldn't my middle school math teacher who always said it's not that you forgot it's that you didn't care enough to remember be proud probably not but maybe) in the fifteen minutes I've alotted myself for these diversions:

Dig the simple scrap paper approach for smaller, pocket-sized thoughtlet capture and coordination.

notetaking enthusiasms, part two

in

(previously…)

Some updates to yesterday’s enthusiasm

  • I've yet to fall on my face; in fact, the more I let myself play with this index-card-for-everything method, the more I love it.

  • For leaving the house, I've replaced the Dango notebook in my Dango pen wallet with tiny, cutup index cards. If legible, I tape them onto a larger card and file them away when I do my filing (usually at the start of a writing session). If illegible, I recopy them.

  • So far, the best thing about the notebook experiment / card switch is that I'm far more judicious about what I actually commit to pen and card. However, if I need to get something out of my head and I know – I've got a pretty good sense of whether its worth a card or not – I won't need it later, I keep a large post-it on the other side of the big wallet for scratch/scraps. I then affix it to the day's timeblock card and file it away. New post-it daily.

  • Speaking of scratchpads: I've started using the daily notes feature in Obsidian again: a more frictionless (read: not illegible) scratch – though to think, sometimes i need the friction of the cards. DN also functions as my work diary.

  • When I write on paper, I find my brain a bit freer. Let it rip.

  • Thinking: when I send the month’s newsletter, I’ll use the afterhaze as a time to process and discard unneeded notes.

  • Goal of this method: eliminate redundant notetakings and the need to transfer or duplicate.

  • And not fall on face.

in

“The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself."

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

a notetaking experiment initiated with enthusiasm which may fall flat on its face

in

Experiment, or another of my "why didn't I try this before other than I've been trapped in the same cycle for twenty years in spite of my best efforts to break out" endeavors: ditching notebooks entirely for index cards (I buy them in bulk quantities of 1000) and my modified physical Zettelkasten system.

So far: I've brought out my old Field Notes wallet (Coal Creek leather) and ditched the Field Notes and replaced them with blank index cards. I've shifted my time blocking and bloodsugar tracking to an index card paper clipped to the inside (also the home of my Inputs) that I'll put in the ZK cabinet along with the notes taken during that day.

Journal entries will be written on cards and filed away (given that I timestamp everything, this should work.)

On the other side of the wallet: many blank sticky notes. Lamy AL-STAR the only pen I have that fits, which solves my “which pen do I use now” quandary / useless thinking when I should probably be thinking of other things thing.

A sort of shedding of the middleman: the notebooks functioned as an illegible mess of thoughts I never used again. The ones I decided to keep were rewritten on cards which I treated as an index system. Far easier (and cheaper) to write them on the cards straightaway. Will likely keep a scratch card just to throw things down that probably wouldn't rate a card anyhow and file it in the cabinet with the daily timeblock / bloodsugar.

Potential pitfalls: I've tended in times past to think on paper, drawing things, etc. Suppose I can do those on the big dry erase board given that I recognize that I rarely, if ever, reference those notes to begin with.

The experiment begins. Will update as I succeed or fall flat on my face.

attributive superheroic dissonance

in

In an effort to forget that I'm getting nowhere on MainFictionThing this morning, I've spent an inordinate amount of time leafing through several of the attempts past to bring superheroes to prose – Craig Shaw Gardener's THE BATMAN MURDERS, short story collections – THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BATMAN, DICK TRACY: THE SECRET FILES –, Andrew Vachss's BATMAN: THE ULTIMATE EVIL, an old MARVEL SUPERHEROES collection, etc etc – and I can't shake the oddity of seeing "Batman said..." in prose: there's a cognitive dissonance – in spite of being an avid fan of the old Shadow pulps where "The Shadow said" runs adverbly rampant – that I find irreconcilable (though the TRACY stories are a little easier since those are, excepting the villains, named with – for lack of a better phrase – real names, no matter the quality of the story); even Morrison's prose/comics mixture in the oft-and-unfairly-maligned BATMAN 663 (which I happen to love) jars me a bit.

Wondering: Is it because I'm so used to seeing others' interpretation of the character that I find it impossible, through a particular lacking of my own imagination, to picture the character as I see him? Is it the codename thing that just feels weird?

Can't recall if I had the same sensation with the few STAR TREK or STAR WARS novels/novelizations I've read (though I do recall enjoying Peter David's TREK novels quite a bit); might have been easier since there's really only one visual interpretation of Picard or whomever. And, like Dick Tracy, it's not a codename but a real name...

I still haven’t gotten anywhere with MainFictionThing.

in

"I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with *grotesques*, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth, what are these *Essays* if not monstrosities and *grotesques* botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?"

– Montaigne, "On Affectionate Relationships."

in

"There are few grounds for hoping that, in any immediate future, there will be any recovery of social sanity. It would seem that the vicious circle must become yet more intolerable, more blatantly and desperately circular before any large numbers of human beings awaken to the tragic trick which they are playing on themselves. But for those who see clearly that it is a circle and why it is a circle, there is no alternative but to stop circling."

— Alan W. Watts, THE WISDOM OF INSECURITY