Atomic Notes
Influence is everything: novelty its flimsy dress
What happens when once fashionable ideas get left behind?
I’ve often felt the culture moves on too fast, leaving so much on the table in terms of untapped potential. This is certainly true for pop music. Fashions come and go so fast that they leave great concepts stranded in time. You could write a great glam rock song in 2023, but you would have needed at all costs to avoid staying stuck in 1973. The trick is to avoid descending from homage into mere pastiche.
The Nemesis guide to being early described the fashion cycle as an endless process in which:
“each new thing is supplanted by another new thing, and no linear pattern emerges. Things very rarely reach the plateau of productivity, more often falling straight to Hades through the trough of disillusionment. No one seems to follow up on the hyped project of yesterday.”
THE NEMESIS GUIDE TO BEING EARLY nemesisglobal.substack.com
But it’s worse than that. It’s not just that, mysteriously, no one merely seems to follow up. It feels like they’re not allowed to.
💬“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” - James Baldwin. Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 78. no. 91, 1984.
A search for meaning in the palace of lost memories: Thoughts on Piranesi, a novel by Susanna Clarke
Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi has got me thinking about memory, identity, the fallibility of writing, and the paradox that intrinsic value might be created rather than found
💬 “There’s a left-field way of thinking about the world that doesn’t follow the straight path. The route forward doesn’t have to lead in one true direction but potentially many.”
Non-linear narratives inspire non-linear notes.
What I've learned from non-linear narratives
Thoughts on how non-linear narratives have profoundly influenced my reading and writing practices, allowing for a more organic and interconnected approach to storytelling and knowledge creation.
When did you first hear about making notes the Zettelkasten way?
#pkm #zettelkasten #notetaking
Daniel Wisser’s notecards as art and archive
Daniel Wisser’s exhibition in Vienna features 60 index cards with sketches of stories displayed in a note box (Zettelkasten).
What Tim Berners-Lee Has to Teach About Effective Notes
Tim Berners-Lee’s insights on the interconnected nature of knowledge have inspired a flexible, web-like approach to note-making that mirrors my natural thinking rather than some restrictive categorization.
“The rapid passage of time is a complete antimeaning machine. Doesn’t life absolutely require tactical slowing down if a person, even a smart, serious, concerned one, is to find the time and space to make meaning?” - Eric Maisel
Tactical slowing down is great, but then writing slowly is a whole strategy.
Leibniz created a haystack of notes that wouldn't fit in his Zettelschrank
Gottfried Leibniz, a prolific yet disorganized thinker, struggled to manage an overwhelming influx of ideas, resulting in a vast but minimally published literary legacy. Is this a cautionary tale or some other kind of tale? I have an opinion.