Zettelkastening Away

I am almost a month into my project of writing into a Zettelkasten and am quite pleased with how it is going. When I initiated it I didn’t know where to start so I just began with an article near the top of my Vivaldi browser reading list and took notes on it. I think this first article was an excellent piece in The Guardian by Shaul Magid entitled The Zionist consensus among US Jews has collapsed. From there the following themes have emerged in my Zettelkasten note-taking:

• American Jewry following the Gaza war
• The rise and fall of the nation-state
• Post-growth economics
• Neolithic history.

So how do I get to taking notes about Neolithic history? Thinking about Zionism leads me into pondering the nation-state — I need to revisit what Hannah Arendt has to say about nation-states in The Origins of Totalitarianism — and in turn I discover a piece from 2018 by Rana Dasgupta also in The Guardian entitled The Demise of the Nation-State. Dasgupta will have a book coming out next year on the same theme, and he put together a related reading list for the upcoming book.

The first book on Dasgupta’s list is Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, by the political scientist James C. Scott. He makes the argument that when agricultural grains emerged in the Neolithic as a major food source, they proved easy to tax and this led to the first states being coercive rather than voluntary assemblies. Anyway, I read Scott’s book in the middle of October, put it aside, and last week I decided I had better take notes on it for the Zettelkasten before I return it to the library.

It is a much bigger project to take notes on a book than an article and I need to work out the best methods for doing so. It will depend on the book of course: for Against the Grain I am proceeding chapter-by-chapter. But I am astonished with how much more I am retaining when I write down notes rather than just reading the book and moving on. And the ideas from books can lead in so many directions.

When Pica went to Berkeley last week my stepmother suggested that Pica write a book as a memoir. And she thought that I should write a book as well. I am a long way from knowing what such a book would be about, but I can now confidently say that Zettelkastening is the way to get there.