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Nov 20, 2020Liked by Zach Campbell

I'm in the same boat, dozens of notebooks, all in various states of processed/unprocessed. I've begun to view them as byproducts of a necessary practice; it's just not in their nature to interest me long enough to finish, and not in my nature to catch up. The few times I have, say, worked through 200 notes I took during a book (into the Zettelkasten), I don't feel it has provided a better outcome than just processing 20 random notes from 10 different books.

If you're practicing music, the music disappears in the playing; not so with writing, which (by its intrinsic relationship with technology) produces something in the world (even if it's just a folder full of files; my digital space is not exactly tidy either).

Maybe I'll ask my friend, who paints professionally, whether she has a similar level of scrapped work or not, since that is also a practice with a tangible product.

I wrote about my "system" here https://clerestory.netlify.app/zk/ I'm still using it, but it is a mess. Still, it's a useful mess at times, and much less of a mess than the physical notes that precede it. I'll go with James C. Scott and say that "fully-processed" or categorized is just a form of authoritarian high modernism, and at heart an aesthetic choice; what looks like outward chaos, like nature, can be inwardly ordered.

Loved this piece.

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Nov 15, 2020Liked by Zach Campbell

It was nice to read such an astute description of my own note-taking process. I'm working on a system of notational organization with multiple ongoing notebooks, small and standard sized, to organize my thoughts for essays, films, pitch notes, readings, and life in general. I blanche at the thought of re-organizing what has already been done, but I feel I am always trying to "optimize" a system as I move forward. I think I am the collector's fallacy, at least in my academic work, if not in firing off reviews. Surveying my desk at this precise time as I type this I can see 11 notebooks of various sizes all dedicated to deferent projects and purposes. It might be interesting to cobble together a film or essay just from random notes from various books. But now I'm rambling. Great read btw.

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Weirdly or not, I only take notes when I intend to convert them immediately into an article (invariably a film review) and throw them away after that. My only attempt at conscious note keeping was abandoned after one diary entry. So the only means for me to chart my personal growth over the years is to go through my impersonal film reviews (which I think is their only value; otherwise they are cringe inducing machines).

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Thanks for sharing, JAFB & Aster! There's a spectrum to the utility of notes - either an archive for posterity, or a disposable means to an end. I think if someone asked me where I land on that spectrum I'd have a hard time saying though ... I'd like for my notes to be things I could consult with pleasure and purpose, years in the future. But I also want them to do something, to support something external to them.

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