do you make note on your reading?

[luka]

and more generally are you trying to 'learn' when you read? do you consciously purposefully try to 'learn' things?
obviously im not which goes back at least till schooldays when i was very deliberately trying to shut out everything they were trying to nazi brainwash me with.
its too late for me to change now but i do wonder about the costs and profits of either approach. learning anything iii is different becasue of the information available and one of the things i find intriguing about the kantbot nexus is that they are the equivalent of people like thirdform who have managed to listen to the entirety of recorded music, something which has only become possible with the internet. but instead of music its reading every book. and they have all the digital systems, the cross referencing and search facilities and online encyclopedias and dictionaries at their fingertips. its created a new type of human.

 

[luka]

Kantbot Books

Books shelved as kantbot: After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. Hamann by John R. Betz, Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, Th...

www.goodreads.com

 

[version]

No, not at all. The closest I've come to anything like that is underlining the word 'rhizome' in a copy of Gravity's Rainbow as a joke.

 

[woops]

not since i was a student. i have a horror of people who write in their books, or, even worse, in library books. someone once told me that their books were worth more with their annotations

 

[shakahislop]

when i was working in a factory when i finished school, i spent a few lunch breaks making notes in biro in a copy of To The Lighthouse that i was reading. it still makes me cringe a bit. not to say that there's anything wrong with it but i must have looked an absolute berk.

 

[john eden]

Nah. I should really but it makes it feel too much like work. I do read for enjoyment, escapism and learning.

Some self-taught super clever people I know take notes on everything possibly as a fuck you to their shit schools. They do remember more because of that too.

 

[DannyL]

I do, yeah, but I rarely take full on notes but several of the books I'm reading atm are related to learning projects - one is about magical practice, another is one of the Reich books I've not read.

Where do the Kantbot guys get the time? Reading is a time sink.

 

[catalog]

I do make a fair few notes on books, although it is usually just copying out interesting quotes. I never annotate books but I've heard that it's a good way to make thing in and demonstrates engagement. But I'd never wanna "damage" a book in that way.

If I've sometime got hold of a PDF and don't wanna read it on screen, and print it out, I will then do a lot of annotations including doodles all over it. But since I've not got access to a printer very easily at the moment, there's less of that going on.

I also went through a phase of deliberately misquoting things I've copied, swapping letters about.

Over the last 4 or 5 years I've been keeping hold of all these notes in notebooks, and I do go back and read them from time to time. Some of the ideas for my "creative" projects do then come out of these notes.

But it's a strange thing, it never quite works in the way I might want it to. Some of the most valuable notes are on scraps of paper, cos that's whats to hand at the time, then I lose that bit of paper.

I also use "Google keep" notes on my phone but I've stopped using it for much apart from lists, cos it was getting too confusing to track it all.

One thing I like about writing it all out in a notebook is that I can draw at the same time, it takes a bit more effort etc.

 

[sus]

I put all my thoughts in the margins and put brackets around (not underline, yuck) sentences or phrases that are important or whose prose I like.

Then, when I'm done with the book, I record all the thoughts in a black notebook, copying out the passages by hand and fleshing out/interrogating my responses to them.

Then, when I finish finish filling up a black notebook (I have a few dozen by now), I index it, and type up the quotes and thoughts in a large Markdown file system/note taking system organized by subject matter.

So then when I want to write something, I have a big file with all the quotes and thoughts about masks, or language, or moral philosophy. And each file has lots of links to other related topic files, in a "See also" section, which sometimes includes further reading (books I wanna read on the topic but haven't) or URLs. And I can just re-read my notes on the subject and it's very easy to convert into a piece of writing. Many sentences or even paragraphs get more or less copy-and-pasted.

 

[sus]

It's like pre-writing parts for some future assemblage. And it means I can write enormous texts, 4, 5, 6k words, in a single day if I have files queued up.

 

[sus]

It can be a lot of work, but I think copying the quotes (once by hand, once by typing) helps me remember them, helps me embody and drill down the prose (as if I were writing it myself). And of course it saves so much effort on the flipside, makes the writing easy, so I never get writer's block I always have material, so long as I do the work up front of collecting quotes and thoughts.

 

[woops]

black notebook (I have a few dozen by now)

cool

 

[catalog]

Incredible system well done.

I could never do it, could never sustain that level of commitment. My system is almost self-sabotaging, in that I start to annoy myself if I am making notes in too methodical a manner. It can spoil my enjoyment of the thing I'm reading and lead to a weird sort of anxiety where I feel like I'm watching myself as I read. "Oh that would be an interesting thing to make a note of..." and then I cannot get into the thing.

It also starts to feel a bit like work.

 

[sus]

cool

That's right, I'm a very cool guy, effortless style, no colors allowed in my house just blacks grays whites beiges tans browns... I can't help it it's just who I am

 

[woops]

i mean it must be a nice feeling to have a big handwritten archive like that around the house

 

[sus]

Incredible system well done.

I could never do it, could never sustain that level of commitment. My system is almost self-sabotaging, in that I start to annoy myself if I am making notes in too methodical a manner. It can spoil my enjoyment of the thing I'm reading and lead to a weird sort of anxiety where I feel like I'm watching myself as I read. "Oh that would be an interesting thing to make a note of..." and then I cannot get into the thing.

It also starts to feel a bit like work.

I get that, but I think my train of thought is "if I don't write this down, I'll lose the precious thing forever, to time, it'll be as if it never existed" so perhaps you just need to get into the mentality where your feelings and thoughts are precious, where you're scared of losing them, where you'd get out of bed in the middle of the night to bleary-eyed jot a thought down in your notebook.

 

[sus]

i mean it must be a nice feeling to have a big handwritten archive like that around the house

That's true it is they're all identical and I have stickers with numbers on the spine so they're sequenced, and I keep a spreadsheet index with notebook + page number, so I can just ctrl-F search the index and then find out exactly where to go, like a personal encyclopedia system, I like it quite a bit

 

[sus]

Eventually I want to get the numbers embossed on the spines, class it up a bit, something more permanent (the stickers keep falling off, very annoying).

I should have chosen nicer bound notebooks from the get-go, but I was a poor student not planning a decade out, so they're just really simple, black, college-ruled

 

[linebaugh]

I used to do basically suspended's system without the after logging in journals but havent in awhile. I was much smarter when I did

 

[sus]

There's basically nothing else in my life I'm as fastidious about, mind you. House can be a mess, computer files totally unorganized desktop barely navigable... but the notes are organized.

I used to do basically suspended's system without the after logging in journals but havent in awhile. I was much smarter when I did

You should get back into it! What're you trying to do with them though, I guess? What're your aspirations, with the knowledge?

We should all peer-pressure linebaugh into becoming a painter or videographer or writer I think