Have you ever read a book by mistake?
Revisiting a backup file of my old notes reminded me of the time I was reading what I assumed to be a novel by Ruth Ozeki, but it turned out to be a novel by Cynthia Ozick, published in 1987, called The Messiah of Stockholm.
Anyone could have made that mistake, I submit.
At least, anyone who, like me, failed to read the cover properly.
And every single page with the author’s name in the footer.
In any case I loved the book, even though it wasn’t written by Ruth Ozeki, which I didn’t realise at the time.
It’s about a man who believes he is the son of the Jewish writer Bruno Schultz, who was murdered by Nazis and his magnum opus, The Messiah lost. Although it’s (fairly) clear he can’t really be the great writer’s son, a bookseller, Mrs Eklund, goes along with the man’s story. They strike up a relationship in which she ‘believes’ his paternity claims while he believes, or at least doesn’t question, her repeated claim that her husband, Dr Eklund is inside the flat above the shop.
Is he? Is he really?
And then Adela turns up, claiming to be the daughter of Bruno Schultz, carrying with her the manuscript of the lost book. Are they going to ‘believe’ this too?
So in a way it was appropriate that I should have mistaken Ozick for Ozeki. Displaced identity was the theme. I did wonder, though, why the Ozeki writing style about which I had read was not much in evidence in the novel actually in front of me.
So there is still the genuine Ozeki to be read. Let’s hope I don’t pick up by mistake a novel by Julie Otsuka. Unless that too proves to be excellent, in which case I’ll be happy.
Over to you. Have you ever read a book by mistake? And was it an unforeseen calamity, or an unexpected joy?
Finished reading: The White Ship by Charles Spencer 📚
I knew very little about the rival sons of William the Conquerer, but have now learned some amazing stuff about the Norman dynasty that claimed England. The image of their armies arrayed on the sands beneath Mont Saint Michel is rather vivid.
Writing notes is much more than just writing notes. Done right, it’s a way of working with ideas:
I’m organising my notes right now and stumbled over this quote:
You’re not building a note-taking system, but rather a way to capture, explore, and generate ideas. by Jorge Arango on page 181 Duly Noted
The future of the humanities is wide open
The humanities within universities are facing decline and financial prioritization, yet interest in liberal arts thrives outside academic institutions.
To understand the future of AI, look to the past
The hype about AI isn’t new. In his day, Victor Hugo was breathless about the book.
By rejecting the terms of Trump’s authoritarian bullying, Harvard University may forego $2.3 billion in funding. But they’ll lose much more if they, and we, don’t continue to stand up to it. The stakes, conveniently, are written on the university shield.
Why not publish all your notes online?
Contemplating whether to publish personal notes online reveals both the potential benefits of motivation and community engagement and the drawbacks of self-doubt and privacy concerns.
Time to concede nothing
A reflection on the enduring legacy of thinkers like Erasmus and Castellio, emphasizing the importance of perseverance in upholding values of civility and humanism amid modern strife and polarization.
Why in #Australia are there at least 50 private health insurance options (!) but only two major supermarket options, only two main telecom providers, and pretty much a single major hardware chain? It’s well past time for some serious #antimonopoly action.
In his intriguing Zettelkasten, machine learning engineer Edwin Wenink has made 899 of his private notes public edwinwenink.xyz.
These notes are a constant work in progress and not necessarily intended for your reading. Nevertheless, I submit them to your “voyeurism.”
(HT: Annie)
And previously, Andy Matuschak has recommended working with the garage door up.
But where’s the limit?
Some sound advice from a less crazy time (two whole months ago): Write it Down | dansinker.com
Some say that due to AI, “the vast majority of human beauty that will exist has already been created”. I’m pointing out the opposite:
It’s a great time to be writing the future.
Why? Well, by nature humans innovate. Humans equipped with AI?
They just innovate harder.
Legendary computer game Myst started life as an interconnected network of cards in the equally legendary app HyperCard. To be precise, 1,355 cards in 6 HyperCard stacks.
Now, through graph analysis the last secrets of that network are finally being ‘deMystified’.
So many, many books I really want to read. Here are just a couple on this towering tsundoku pile:
The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time by Keith Houston 📚
The Best of all Possible Worlds by Michael Kempe
An interesting Zettelkasten discussion.
malikalimoekhamedov.substack.com/p/bob-dot…
See also: my review of A System for Writing.
It's a great time to be writing the future
Writers are worrying about AI taking their livelihoods. But unless you were already writing like a robot, that’s not how it works.
Now is a truly fantastic time to be writing. The future is absolutely wide open for the first time in a more than a century. That’s because the idiom of the whole culture is transforming and it’s up to us to change it.
Just as no one these days writes like Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy or Louisa May Alcott, in ten years time, no one will be writing the way we do now. Large language models (LLMs) have taken our entire idiom and trashed it. And that’s a good thing. Our prose, and therefore the prose of AI, sounds like it’s still living in the Twentieth Century. But it’s well past time for radically new ways of speaking, writing and therefore being.
The key driver is simply fashion. What seems amazingly cutting-edge today will rapidly go stale. AI prose (which imitates our older siblings) is about to taste like last week’s dinner.
But we’re not just dreaming of what comes after content - it’s also time to seize the means of containment.
Since AI is now providing all the ‘content’ the container industry can ever handle (i.e. all the content platforms without exception), we’re now free to make new human-shaped places beyond its reach.
We’re inventing both what AI can’t say, and where it can’t say it, so let’s go!
Five solutions to link rot in my personal note collection
Have you noticed that the problem of link rot on the Web is very real? Just writing a link to a separate page, without comment or annotation, assumes permanence and depends on that link persisting through time. But links don’t really work that way. They become obsolete far faster than feels comfortable. Because I didn’t like to acknowledge this, I now have a whole heap of old notes consisting of little more than broken links. Here are five possible solutions to this problem. Which ones make sense to you?
1. Write notes in your own words
It would have been better if my notes said what the link is about, and what interests me about it. Since realising the extent of this problem, and recognising that link rot is so prevalent, I try these days to be more careful in describing for myself the content or salient aspects of each source as and when I record the link.
Action: when referring to a web resource, summarise it just well enough that if and when it disappears, my reference to it will still make sense and be useful.
2. Refer to the Internet Archive
Apparently, many articles on Wikipedia now have broken links. That’s annoying, to say the least. One potential remedy might be to link directly to the archived version of the source on The Internet Archive, or maybe another archive site like archive.is
Action: where I doubt the longevity of the source, also link to the Internet Archive’s version.
Unfortunately online archive sites are themselves quite brittle and they’re vulnerable to hostile actions like being sued for breach of copyright, or even just running out of funding. Dependence on a single small charity as the memory keeper of the entire Web obviously creates a potential point of failure and sets us up for a big problem if and when the archive site itself disappears with a 401 error or worse.
3. Create your own personal archive
A heavy-duty solution would be to create my own archive of websites I’ve referred to. Bookmarking services such as Pinboard enable this. So does micro.blog, which is a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the indie-web. These services don’t just store the link to a web page. They also create and store a snapshot of the page. But these services store the archival data in the cloud, which may present a problem in some circumstances. And both the services I’ve mentioned are tiny one-person enterprises which suffer from the risk of that one person shutting up shop. On the other hand, individuals have a greater longevity than massive corporations, ironically, and I’m writing this in the year after Google shut down Google Podcasts without any consultation.
Alternatively, self-archiving on your own computer is possible by using an application such as archive box. A reference application such as Zotero, whose primary function is to manage academic references, can also create a personal archive of pdf articles and other sources. I use this and find it very helpful. It also enables saving and cataloguing of web page snapshots.
Action: Consider subscribing to a bookmarking service, or even using an app like archivebox. Check out the archiving features of Zotero that I’m not already familiar with.
With an archive of all the sources you’ve ever referred to, there’s no danger of link rot in your own references. But this just defers the problem one level further from you. It hasn’t gone away. All the articles and sources you archive are still susceptible to their own link rot. You can only realistically archive a couple of levels of hyperlinks before the task is too massive to handle.
4. Don’t worry, be happy
Another more philosophical ‘solution’ to the problem of link rot would be to stop worrying and accept that everything changes. Going slightly further, one could recognise that forgetting is an essential aspect of remembering, and that memory systems also need a mechanism for forgetting information. The Internet’s main forgetting system is for addresses to change or disappear without notice. This is inelegant and has unfortunate side effects, yet it works, I suppose. If I imagined the Internet to be a stable repository of collective knowledge, I simply imagined it wrongly. I thought we were building a new Pyramid of Cheops, but our blueprints were those of the Tower of Babel. It turns out the Web is no more permanent than a dog breed. It’s the river you don’t step into twice. If we think we’re gazing up at the night sky we’re fooling ourselves. The web isn’t the night sky, it’s just a cave wall studded with fireflies. And so on. I told you this was philosophical.
More generally, human knowledge isn’t really like gold bars in a bank vault, which you can store indefinitely and retrieve when you like. Culture, of which the Web is one aspect, is a machine for remembering, yet it also fabricates and forgets. How this happens remains a mystery. By attempting to memorialise himself for his achievements, King Ozymandius became a byword for failure. The art historian Aby Warburg saw Memosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, as a sphinx holding a riddle. What does culture forget and what does it remember? And how does it do it?
Action: Err, none? Radical acceptance of impermanence? Just go with the flow?
5. Sow and then reap
The term ‘link rot’ has stuck because the organic process it implies seems nearer to the reality. Perhaps a better model of human knowledge would be that it’s like seeds in a seed bank. A seed bank can last a long time, provided you plant the seeds each season to grow new seeds to store over winter. This metaphor suggests that knowledge persists not through storage but through use. And this thought brings me right back around to my first solution to link rot: make notes in my own words. By writing my own version of the knowledge I’ve found, I’m passing it on to the next reader, who might just choose to do the same.
Action: Don’t try to store knowledge. Share, teach, discuss. Pass it on.
None of these solutions are perfect, or even workable. Nevertheless, just because the Internet forgot some information doesn’t mean I have to forget it too.
I wonder if there are any other solutions to this problem of the Web degrading over time. Please let me know.
Now read: Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget too
Tame the chaos with just four folders for all your notes
Bob Doto’s book A System for Writing (my review) suggests setting up a Zettelkasten (a flexible collection of notes) with a small handful of folders.
These folders aren’t merely places to put notes, though. They suggest a specific workflow - a system for writing.
-
In-box
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Sleeping
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References
-
Main
Here’s a very brief summary of the process:
The In-box
Put your fleeting notes in the in-box so you know where they all are.
Make a regular time to process them into more permanent, polished main notes and move them to that folder.
The Sleeping folder
The ‘sleeping’ folder is a kind of in-box overflow. It’s for notes you just never seem to get round to processing. Put them in the sleeping folder and they’ll still be there when you finally feel like working on them (or you can just let sleeping notes lie). This keeps the In-box relatively small so you don’t get overwhelmed with unprocessed notes. Everyone has more thoughts than they can handle and probably makes more notes than they can handle too. It’s not a big problem - you just work on what you feel like working on and leave the rest. With this system you’ll at least be able to pick up where you left off.
The Reference folder
The reference folder is for reference notes. Let’s say you watched a movie and you want to make notes on it. Create a reference note with the name and all the details of the movie, then any notes you make can link to the reference note. This way you’ll never lose track of where a thought or idea or quote or image came from. You’ll have the details in the reference folder.
The Main folder
Main notes are a bit more polished than fleeting notes. They have a single clear idea, a title, a few links, and a unique ID.
Taming the chaos
That’s it.
Oh, and plenty of people think you need category folders or tags, like subject sections in a library. I admit this is a dominant way of thinking about knowledge. What else would you do, other than put it in categories? But this way of thinking is pretty much contrary to the spirit of the Zettelkasten. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann’s Zettelkasten was fertile because it broke down the established categories in sociology and re-constructed a major theory of society from the ground up. And art Historian Aby Warburg organised his Zettelkasten, a library and a whole institute against preconceived categories in his discipline.
Yes, chaos reigns, in a sense - but it’s structured, rhizomatic chaos.
💬 This is a quiet space…
Moving to Sydney offered cheap train travel compared with Europe. “Never mind arriving,” I would say, “it’s great value just for the view.”
Looks like they’ve finally worked out the real value proposition.
