Social Stream | Chris Aldrich

Eminem and “stacking ammo” in the commonplace book tradition

Annotated Why We Love Eminem by Anderson Cooper (60 Minutes (YouTube))

Eminem shows Anderson Cooper his form of commonplace book in a 60 Minutes interview. It’s a large box with stiff sides containing a menagerie of papers including several yellow legal pads, loose sheets of paper, scrap papers, stationery from hotels, etc. upon which he’s written words, phrases, songs, poetry, etc.

Instead of using the historic word “commonplacing”, Eminem uses the fantastic euphemism “stacking ammo”. Given his use of his words and lyrics collection in battle rap, this seems very apropos.

Cooper analogizes the collection as the scrawlings of a crazy person. In some sense, this may be because there is no traditional order, head words, or indexing system with what otherwise looks like a box of random pages and ideas. One might argue that the multitude of notebooks, papers, colors, sizes, etc. provides a sort of context which Eminem could use as a method of loci for remembering where to find particular ideas, thus making the need for an indexing system feel superfluous to him. This is even more likely if he’s regularly using, maintaining, and mining his material for daily work.

❧

ᔥ u/sorrybabyxo in Eminem has his own version of commonplace system containing words that rhyme. : commonplacebook (08/10/2021 09:45:39)

Gardens and Streams II: An IndieWebCamp Pop-up Session on Wikis, Digital Gardens, Online Commonplace Books, Zettelkasten and Note Taking

Event Details

Date: Saturday, September 25, 2021
Time: 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM Pacific
Event page: https://events.indieweb.org/2021/09/gardens-and-streams-ii-pPUbyYME33V4

We’ll discuss and brainstorm ideas related to wikis, commonplace books, digital gardens, zettelkasten, and note taking on personal websites and how they might interoperate or communicate with each other. This can include IndieWeb building blocks, user interfaces, functionalities, and everyones’ ideas surrounding these. Bring your thoughts, ideas, and let’s discuss (and build).

This will be a continuation of the ideas from the Garden and Stream pop up session in 2020. Everyone is welcome and need not have attended prior sessions.

Format

We’ll try to do something between a traditional all day IndieWebCamp and a single session pop-up over the span of several hours so that we can accommodate a brief introduction and three BarCamp topic related sessions. Feel free to brainstorm session ideas in advance of the mini-camp, but we’ll choose session topics the morning of the event.

Tentative Schedule

All times Pacific.

9:00 AM 30 minute introduction & IndieWeb building blocks
9:30 AM 20 minute session pitches and scheduling
9:50 AM 10 minute break
10:00 AM 60 minute Session 1 (including 10 minute break)
11:00 AM 60 minute Session 2 (including 10 minute break)
12:00 PM 50 minute Session 3
12:50 PM 10 minute closing remarks
1:00 PM pop up finished

Hack day? Yes, we’ll all gather the following day for 3 hours at roughly the same time with a short demo session to follow for folks to show off what they’ve been working on. Details for this will be forthcoming.

Everyone is welcome to attend.

Resources

Technology for attending
IndieWeb Chat Room
Etherpad: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/GardensAndStreams (for real time session planning, chat, questions, and note taking during the session)
hashtag: #GardensAndStreams
Code of Conduct: This event is covered by the IndieWeb Code of Conduct. By participating, you’re acknowledging your acceptance of this code.
Notes and archived video for this session, once finished, can be found at https://indieweb.org/2021/Pop-ups/Gardens_and_Streams_II

RSVP (optional)

If your website supports it, post an indie RSVP as a reply to this post or to the event page.
Or, log in to indieweb.org and on the event page click “I’m Going”.
Or, RSVP your attendance to this syndicated Tweet
Or, Add a comment below indicate that you’ll be attending.

And if none of the above methods means anything to you or you can’t log in to use them, don’t worry about it; just show up on the day!

Questions? Concerns? Volunteers?

Feel free to ask in the IndieWeb chat: https://chat.indieweb.org/indieweb/ or post a question below or on the call for volunteers post.

Who else keeps a waste book?

I carry around a small notebook (usually a 48 page Field Notes) for short fleeting notes. Later I copy them into my commonplace book/zettelkasten/digital garden and expand upon them.

Waste books were used in the tradition of the commonplace book. A well known example is Isaac Newton’s Waste Book (MS Add. 4004) in which he did much of the development of the calculus. Another example is that of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who called his waste books sudelbücher, and which were known to have influenced Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, Andre Breton, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph (2000). The Waste Books. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. ISBN 978-0940322509.

Annotated Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica by

Matthew Daniel Eddy (Intellectual History Review Volume 20, Issue 2, Pages 227-252)

Müller-Wille and Scharf ‘Indexing Nature’, also points out that Linnaeus interleaved blanksheets into his texts so that he could take notes. Cooper points out that this had been a common practice in natural historysince at least the late seventeenth century (Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous, 74–5). ❧

Apparently interleaving blank sheets into texts was a more common practice than I had known! I’ve seen it in the context of Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) using the practice to take notes in his Bible, but not in others.