How to be an autodidact

Personal curricula + my own knowledge system. (Also - enter the State Secrets...)

Before I begin today’s letter, a newsflash! From October 9th, and for just £4.99 a month, loyal readers will be able to get access to a top-secret fortnightly dossier - the Fairyland! State Secrets. VERY loyal readers will know that I LOVE GOSSIP - and if you join the “Fairy Ring” you can get your hands on all the GOSSIP every fortnight:

• secrets, recommendations, and funny bits from my reading life (I fine-tune my reading life to contain as much juicy detail as possible…)

• my process pitching and writing regularly for places like the New Statesman (etc); how to trick editors into letting you write for them; the 411 from the “London Scene”

• resurfaced snippets of historical gossip - think, eg., the lost background to the Madonna/Courtney feud, every CDAN “Four For Friday” blind about which you didn’t think to ask

• weird esoteric film + music recs (and virtual film nights if readers are game)

If you’re enthusiastic enough about the idea to want the State Secrets as soon as they come out, you can “pledge” here. Your subscription will be enabled as soon as I turn on “enable paid subscriptions.” Thank you for reading!! ♥¹

(Loved digging through the Prelinger Archives to make my Myra Breckinridge-esque promotional video - now have far too many clips of 1940s strippers on my hard drive. Hope nobody raids it.)

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An encouraging trend: women on TikTok are assembling “personal curricula.” They are listing things they want to know about - these range from the mystical Law of Attraction to The Picture of Dorian Grey - and putting plans into action to learn. Some of them have set themselves deadlines and timetables and homework. I’m slightly put off by the number of people who are using video essays and ChatGPT; I’d like the “curriculum” trend to be a little more literate. But I am generally very pleased by this turn back towards Victorian autodidacticism (please read this book!).

The general trend is towards resourcefulness, which is also the single trait I admire most in myself and in others. I love autodidacts, inventors, and Anna Delvey. I loathe credentialism. Nobody tells young people that if they are canny enough they can put all the good stuff together and literally use autodidacticism to social climb. I’m sure the publishing industry would balloon in size if this fact were better known.

If I were a Hitchcock character I would be Marnie because I am always where I shouldn’t be…. (they say this film is about trauma, I say it’s about bestiality)

Reading lots and lots of books is both cheaper and more rewarding than getting an actual university degree - my nonfiction habit has taken me into more rooms and found me more in the way of “useful connections” than my 1:1 ever did. Knowledge is power! Get out of the video essay sphere and put down that masters application and start reading biographies of aristocrats instead. Studying to become a Mitford is way cooler than actually being one.

The “personal curriculum” thing doesn’t really work for me. I really dislike knowing exactly what I’m going to read weeks in advance; I’d like to preserve the possibility of running into something I didn’t know existed at the outset. My favourite goals are always open-ended and optimised to allow for as much surprise as possible (“Leave the house for four hours every day” was a previous favourite). Here is how I do autodidacticism instead:

Timekeeping

I set a daily two-hour reading goal. I use this (excellent) app to track the hours on my phone; I also log them on a catch-all task management spreadsheet. (I’ll explain the spreadsheet on a later date; it’s a bit mad). This is a non-negotiable thing and also a surefire way to actually get through books. The admin seems really clinical, but this is the trade-off if you want two hours to yourself!!

The actual books I read are up to me - I usually jump between a few based on my mood, and when I’m in a big Chinese phase I will generally do one hour in Chinese and the other in English. I love my Kindle but I found myself getting more fickle in my habits after being granted the opportunity to read literally anything whenever I wanted. So I keep five on my home screen - usually a mixture of fiction and non-fiction, in varying degrees of seriousness - and get myself to finish one before adding another into the rotation.

Much more from me on reading and building a “personal context” here:

☆ .𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊. ☆☆ .𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊. ☆☆ .𓋼𓍊 𓆏 𓍊𓋼𓍊. ☆

My “value” experiment

I use a spreadsheet to tabulate the total new paperback cost of all the books I read. I’m aiming to get to £27,750, the current cost of a UK undergrad degree. (As soon as you start doing this you realise how little you actually get for your money on a university course).

This is just an experiment and probably not one worth taking too seriously. But I do now definitely perceive my reading as more of an “investment,” ie. worthy of planning around and dedicating quite a bit of time too. It is sort of fun to pretend I am a capitalist and pouring money into my own “human capital.” Twisted roleplay!!

I also assign each book on the spreadsheet to a “module.” Right now these are pretty broad (think “Modern Western Lit;” “Social and Cultural Theory”), but I’ll probably refine them year-on-year as I read more stuff and get more specific - eg. collapsing the “Lit” category into particular themes and literary movements. So this is basically my substitute for a “personal curriculum.”

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Organising different ideas

Can anyone explain why the Financial Times got so much product placement in AOA’s video for “Excuse Me”? Was it a covert op?

I need to have lots of ideas at once because I am a freelance writer. Sometimes editors actually email me and ask if I have ideas. It’s sensible to have some formulated ahead of time, and also to keep track of old pitches that have been rejected in case they can be redeveloped and find a better home elsewhere.

I organise all my ideas in one big Cloud-synced document. I (wrongly) call it a “Zettelkasten,” and you might like to look into that method; I’d recommend the book A System For Writing by Bob Doto. I was initially very inspired by this; the first few thousand words in my document were all linked together in Obsidian.

Now it is too hierarchical to qualify. I wanted hierarchy! The basic idea was to create a set pathway for everything that might eventually contribute to intellectual work - sort of an in-out tray but for thoughts. Interesting passages and fleeting ideas are copied down. Then the latter get fleshed out, and other things (subordinate threads; bits of evidence) gradually coalesce around them.

My document operates under the following headings (all linked on a sidebar for easy navigation):

• quote dump - interesting clippings from online articles, books, etc. Basically a “holding pen” for things that might be really useful soon but aren’t right now. Always provided with a citation; sometimes initially annotated with a general notion of how I might use it. My rule is I copy it down if it makes me go “😲.” I move stuff from here once I work out where it fits.

• to read more about - list of gaps in knowledge that stop me from doing what I want. If I have a few minutes I’ll just Google “best books about X topic” and write some down that sound cool.

• lit notes - when I am actually taking notes as part of close reading/to follow a complicated argument, they go here. I try and move them into the “ideas” realm when I can as part of general maintenance.

• article clippings - when something gets edited out of a published essay I put it here and try to “rehome” it.

• fleeting ideas - very quick ideas and theories, not particularly ordered or backed up by anything. I move them once they become:

• floating ideas - ideas developed to the point where they could either underpin a short essay or make up an underlying thread in a longer one, often with backup (supplementary reading, quotes, etc). At this point I can confidently pitch to an editor, or at least to an editor who trusts me.

• overarching ideas - collections of “floating ideas” that could eventually become book proposals, very long essays, etc.

My abbreviations always have consonant clusters in - this makes the Ctrl+F process quicker

I have lots of abbreviations to make maintenance as easy as it can be; eg. if I’m in a mood to expand on stuff I can just run a Ctrl+F for “TBDM” and find loads of ideas that “past me” thought should be expanded. I’m generally trying to get the document as big as it can be; I’d like it to be about the length of a medium-sized novel by the end of next year.

This is all a big experiment and I’ll tell you all whether it pays off in the end. The most demanding upcoming task = looking through the notes from my BA dissertation and resituating them all in the context of this document. I think those notes might actually be longer than the document itself…

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My “winter arc” ambition is to finally plug the biggest knowledge chasm I have. Said chasm = British political history. I will retreat into bed in late October and emerge in March knowing everything there is to know about the Thatcher premiership. At the end I might even be able to wing my way into becoming a Spad. Wish me luck!!

Yao Surong’s Mandarin version of House of the Rising Sun is, IMO, better than the original…

1. Any income made from this Substack helps me find a bit more freedom and security in my (professional) writing life! But it shall also just be FUN and fulfilling, and i shall make sure all gossip involved is very much worth the £4.99