That’s it! I am putting it on the record. I know some things, but not enough, and my crappy doomscrolling habits combined with my much less crappy posting habits get in the way of due diligence. So I’ll make a belated resolution to read at least one piece of captivating communist or communist-adjacent literature a month; more if I am feeling it.
I plan to start by capping off March with Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell- this has been a sorely missing piece to my analysis that I am very thankful for discovering has a well-regarded fit. I am living my disabled truth more and more in the years following 2020 despite having this affliction for more than half of my life at this point, and I have never felt a good foundation for a synthesis of my life and my principles through Marxist thought, nor have I found satisfactory answers through community, not really. I hope following this helps me become a pillar for others like me, our disabled comrades and comrades-to-be. After this, my wife found a very loved copy of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States at a local bookstore being given away for free. I have been meaning to go through it for years, and thus a freebie lands in my lap; it is destiny.
That said, recommend me the good shit! The year is still young, and I am pretty much this IRL:
This is interesting…how do you use this tool? Even though I have read a lot of the foundational stuff my memory and recollection is still sometimes lacking, and maybe using something like this can help me retain more on a re-read.
I still don’t completely understand all the nuances, but you can take a book and automatically break it into smaller chunks, maybe a paragraph or a section each. You can put those chunks in a spaced repetition queue with all the other books you’re reading. Then as you read them, make flashcards and mindmaps corresponding to the most relevant parts of the information to help encode the new information. Ideally, flashcards shouldn’t just drill facts but should ask you to do higher-level thinking like applying or synthesizing some information, or doing a test question that can show you a new aspect. If you put something like a textbook into your incremental reading, you might make flashcards from the exercises, for example. You want to get a wide variety of higher-level applications of the knowledge as soon as possible to progress efficiently. This means you should have fewer flashcards and they should prompt you to do higher-level thinking. When you feel like you’re hitting a wall with comprehension you can put that chunk back into the queue and the spaced repetition system will show it to you later.
In this way, you can put a lot of different books in your queue and make slow and steady progress on all of them while studying for about an hour or two a day.
It’s also possible to use Obsidian for this, and that’s what I’m currently looking to set up as it has a nice infinite canvas that’s good for mindmapping and doesn’t cost $70. It seems nicer to use than Supermemo, and there’s a new version of the obsidian-spaced-repetition plugin that includes the newer FSRS algorithm that can improve the spacing of reviews. I’m unsure if there are any special considerations around using obsidian-spaced-repetition with FSRS for incremental reading and writing, and whether it’s important to break books into chunks in Obsidian like it is in Supermemo. I need to do more investigation and get things set up.