Isak's Blog

One thing I’ve really enjoyed doing lately is finding articles and lectures and video essays about the book I’m reading. Reading itself is fun — it’s why why read, after all — but I’ve really missed out on how much fun it is to listen to others gush and rant about what you’re reading, too.

If all you do is read the book, you actually miss out on a lot of stuff.

Happy Friday,

I had a few days off work and enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather in Minnesota weeding the landscaping, detailing the car, and scrubbing my basement clean while listening to Peter Heller’s “Celine” and drinking a lot of Bustello coffee.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. “It was good to lie there in our bags watching the glow of our dying fire and the deeper glow of sunset beyond; but most of all it was good to feel the ground again and to know we were back in a country we loved,” said Sigurd Olson. It’s been a tough year for Minnesotans — and the latest attack on our Boundary Waters is enraging.
2. Big fan of making lists, and love these archive photos of Richard Feynman’s notes, including a “Notebook of Things I Don’t Know About.”
3. “The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.” Annie Dillard always has great, no-nonsense writing advice. I think if I spent 1/10 the time just creating stuff instead of feeling and thinking about creating stuff, I’d have a much better time.
4. On that note: “Worrying isn’t writing, and you can only revise drafts, not worries.” Advice I need to remind myself over and over again. Writing with Andrew’s speaking and presentation style is so similar to Technology Connections I googled if they were brothers or something.
5. Speaking of creative procrastination and typewriters: I’ve been oggling the different distraction-free writing set-ups at r/writerdecks. (For now, it’s my keys-to-go keyboard and Notion against the world.)
6. David Byrne has a magical, weird way of making everyday routines and items feel unique and creative and interesting to me, so of course this long interview with Nardwuar — who has a unique interview style of his own — has been a delight to watch.
7. I’ve been missing the bologna sandwiches, PBR, and Moonpies of Robert’s in Nashville, so I’ve been listening to old country music like Ernest Tubbs all week.
8. I generally don’t mind spoilers for books and movies, but I was flabbergasted at reading a book about the Transcendentalists, finding Margaret Fuller to be the coolest of the bunch, and then being gutted to learn she and her book manuscript were lost in a shipwreck so early in her career.
9. I liked Richard Powers’ “The Overstory” (and loved Anthony Doerr’s “Cloud Cuckoo Land”), and both feel very similar to this essay from Robert Moor’s upcoming book about climate activists that lived in a treehouse for months to block an oil pipeline. Been thinking about it for a month.
10. Twice a year LitHub publishes what I call “the big list of cool, new books,” and I discover lots of interesting books I wouldn’t otherwise find.

See ya on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

The woodchuck has emerged from hibernation, I’ve been playing the live Bon Iver album all week, and I’ve got a thick stack of books about the Transcendentalists I’m excited to dip in and out of.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Robert D. Richardson said Emerson thought that “language is the archives of history, … a sort of tomb of the muses.” The OED, the dictionary that traces the etymology and history of each word, has a hefty paywall that you may be able to access for free through your library. Mine does! And it’s great for procrastinating. “The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry,” said Emerson.
2. Maria and I downloaded Rollercoaster Tycoon and spent SO much time building a perfect park on the first level. It’s just as fun to play as when I was 10, and there’s a surprising amount of people still playing the game — like this person who made a rollercoaster ride so long, it won’t finish until after the heat death of our universe.
3. Your bad art is fertilizer for your good art. It’s the only thing that can close the gap between your what you want to make (your taste) and what you’re currently capable of making (your skill level) that Ira Glass talks about. More garden-creativity metaphors from Austin Kleon.
4. I’m always surprised to learn how much my creative heroes stole a lot of their ideas from their creative heroes. “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard is one of my favorite books, and she considered naming it “Creekside Solitaire” (like Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire), “Tinker Creek Almanac” (like Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac”), and plain old “Tinker Creek” (like Thoreau’s “Walden”).
5. Speaking of Annie Dillard, the first time I read “Tinker Creek” I felt simultaneously exultant (now THIS is what a book can be!) and decimated (she’s already done it, what’s the point of making more art?!). Funny stuff for an aspiring writer of twenty-one, but looking back now, the whole experience reminds me of that line from Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”: “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
6. Love this writing trick from Oliver Burkeman: draft it on the computer, print it out, delete the document, and type it back in. You’ll inevitably make edits, but the whole thing seems way less taxing. Like Lauren Groff says further down, “I’m trying to Jedi-mind trick myself into not putting so much pressure on any particular project.”
7. I love when two opposing things are true, and it’s up to you to know which advice to follow: Rick Rubin creates art for himself, never for the audience. Ralph Waldo Emerson always wrote with his audience in mind. My writing practice has the pendulum swinging to far to the latter.
8. “Bad texters are bewildered by expectations for prompt written communication, feeling punished by a system they never opted in to.” Interesting article from The Guardian on people (me!) who feel dread and anxiety over texting. Personally I’m a burst-texter, going silent for a while and then responding to all the messages at once.
9. And come to think of it, I don’t like calling or texting on my phone — mine’s mostly a camera and internet device, which is funny because I yearn for the days the internet was a place you went on your home desktop computer, not this black void in your pocket slowly eating all your waking moments. (Anyways: I still use Foqos and a 10-cent NFC tag to block stuff on my phone now and it’s wonderful.)
10. One of my favorite summer memories last year was sweating on a hotel rooftop pool in San Antonio, sipping a cocktail, and reading Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Larry McMurtry. I’ll be at a hotel pool again soon (not in summer, and not on the roof), but I might recreate it with this brand new Larry McMurtry biography by David Streitfeld. “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living.”

See ya on down the dusty trail,

Left to my own devices, I can be a homebody. I’m pretty content reading, writing, and going for walks without seeing people for a while.

My dad was this way too: “What’s there to go to town for?” he’d always say after we teased him for being a hermit, which has become a repeated family joke whenever running errands.

This is probably relatable for my fellow remote workers, but lots of people probably felt like this during the pandemic.

Happy Friday,

My creative antenna has been WAY more open than usual this week, and I’ve been riding it as long as it’ll push me, grateful each morning.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I started my morning sitting in a chair, listening to the new Bon Iver live album, drinking a pot of coffee, and watching the sun melt the ice off the trees. Bliss. I love hearing artists rework their music to sound so different than the original studio version.
2. Summer is approaching, which means I need a Big Summer Book. There’s something great about unfolding a huge book in June knowing warm months and many chapters lie ahead of you! This list has helped me narrow down my top picks. Maybe it’s time to lug around a thick copy of “War and Peace” all summer like Ladybird Johnson? Or maybe a thick Stephen King book. (Maybe both?)
3. It’s spring migration for my fellow birders! This year I got a phone with a better zoom lens and I LOVE IT for photographing birds. I don’t want to spend $5k on a good photography rig, so having a phone that doesn’t take potato-quality bird pics is great for sharing with friends.
4. Is creating art about finding meaning for ourselves or sharing an experience with others? Lo-fi Cinema on the joy of creating for both self-discovery and connection with others.
5. I’m listening to “The Comfort Crisis” while walking outside or doing chores and love the idea of a Misogi: a hard task you undertake with roughly a 50/50 chance of success. The quirkier and more challenging the better, but do it for yourself, not social media. Reminds me many of Beau Miles’ adventures like when he commuted to work by kayaking 4 days from his home to his office. I’m a low-momentum homebody so this stuff fascinates me.
6. I was avoiding my important writing pieces this week by procrastinating on my phone or organizing my digital files. And while procrastinating, I noticed Casey Neistat posted a new video about how procrastination and busy work are a necessary, integral part of the creative process, and I’ve felt less guilty about it.
7. I didn’t expect to tear up while scrolling my TikTok feed, nor did I expect such a short video to shift my perspective on childhood and adulthood.
8. “You give a chunk of the precious few hours of your life to something, imagining a great moment someday when it will all come together, and then when it does, you turn around and realize how many other great moments made up what you thought was ‘the process.’” Brendan’s always been great at celebrating how the little moments in our day end up being the most important thing we have. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” says Annie Dillard.
9. I’ve been reading Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” before bed in that consciousness window where you’re not fully awake but not quite asleep either. I have a surface-level understanding of Jung’s shadow self (check #4 above!), but I think there’s more communication going on with your subconscious in that half-dream state.
10. I’ve been making my way through Dante’s “Inferno,” and watching lectures from Yale, Better Than Food, and Brian McEvoy has helped me better understand what I’m reading beyond “whoa, this is really graphic and messed up.” And don’t sleep on “keyword + lecture” videos with super-low views, those are sometimes the best ones.

See ya on down the dusty trail,