Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. One of my favorite camping spots in northern Minnesota had an AQI above 1,600 this week, and my mouth tastes smoky while I’m typing this many hours south of there.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. PurpleAir is my favorite way to track air quality and monitor the summer smoke situation, recommended by someone who’s dealt with more wildfires in Colorado.
2. “There is such a thing as righteous anger, because that is not about you and your personal ego; it really is the anger you’re feeling on the behalf of the vulnerable.” Anger can be a powerful, empowering, and positive force when facing systemic injustices like climate change. (It’s been my main climate emotion for 7 years and I recommend it.)
3. I’m also a fan of having a creative nemesis. (My former nemesis wrote climate disinformation in Minnesota.)
4. “’It’s much worse than we think, and sooner;’ [the child in my dream said] to whom I said ‘no duh child in my dreams, what do you think this singing and shuddering is, what this creaming and reaching and dancing and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away?” Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” is one of my favorite poems, and it’s great set to Bon Iver.
5. Adults are seven times likelier to be advocating/taking action against climate change if their primary emotion is anger rather than hope. For every two clicks a person moves on the anger scale, they move one click on the activism scale.
6. I’ve apparently replaced “Big Book Summer” with “Stephen King Summer” after finishing “The Body” now listening to “Duma Key” and reading “Fairy Tale.” Something about King’s characters, from 11-year-old boys to high school teenagers to adults, makes his stories interesting even when the plot lags or the endings are unfulfilling. I grew up in a small town, and there’s something genuine in his simple, rural characters.
7. “Humans are not as dysfunctional as we think, we can work together to produce something joyful.” David Byrne on why he replaced one drummer with six so they can move around on stage.
8. I’m fascinated by people who commit to a seemingly pointless and time-intensive project , like Van Neistat typewriting, cutting out, and arranging every word of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” or the local legend riding Valley Fair’s Excalibur Roller Coaster (my childhood favorite) over and over, day after day, in search of — something.
9. When I grew up, the internet was a place; specifically, a computer tower and monitor on a desk in a room in our house. Now it’s in my pocket (and seemingly in my hand without me noticing), so I like this idea of using a scrolly phone and a scrolly chair to make it place-based again.
10. Very excited that Adventure Journal, a quarterly print mag that’s my ride or die (been subscribing since Issue 18 and want to buy the first 17) has archived their entire catalog to subscribers.

See you on down the dusty smoky trail,

Happy Friday Sunday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. I spent a few days at a lake in Minnesota floating and listening to loons a c fireworks, so this newsletter’s coming a few days later than scheduled (someday I’ll code a “publish in future” option on my website).

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Typewriters acted as a “meeting technology that enabled White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.”
2. Twice a year LitHub publishes a long list of upcoming books, and great for 1) finding interesting new books (obvi), 2) guessing which ones will be mega-popular prize winners, and 3) finding niche titles I’d never encounter otherwise.
3. All of us contain a variety of selves, and “a piece of writing succeeds when the writer invokes the best self to tell the particular story at hand.”
4. Very excited for Peter Heller’s “The Dog Stars” to hit the big screen this August. His literary wilderness thrillers are a go-to beach (lake?) read for me, and this is one of his best (I just hope the movie doesn’t lose the emotional tenderness of the protagonist!)
5. Goth Babe on why luxurious RVs can never capture the same experience as simplicity and companionship of camping with friends.
6. I think that semi-myth about writers writing in a frenzied bout of inspiration so intense the rest of your life recedes to a small echo is that state we all aspire to be hijacjed to - no matter how real or fleeting it might be. The dream: to be inspired with such certainty no doubt or judgement gets in the way of output!
7. “There are such obvious benefits to not scrolling your life away, and yet we do it all the time.” I think phones suck our energy, curiosity, and agency away from our interests and self-expression, but I still find advice like “find moderation and intention” to not be ass effective as I’d like.
8. This video from 10 years ago still crops up in my mind as on of my favorite examples of good (unexpected) storytelling.
9. There’s purpose and peril in daydreaming of “could be’s” in your future and “could have been’s” in your past — and this book sounds like an excellent teacher for not becoming too weighed down in the latter.
10. Still videos of nature doing its thing set to chill music like this invariable 1) calms me down, and 2) simultaneously gives me an existential crisis about how we’re spending our existence in this place.

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. I spent my afternoons this week dethatching my lawn (lawns are stupid) by hand with a rake before having the good sense to rent a power rake for an hour. At least I listened to a bunch of “Butcher’s Crossing.”

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. As an avid user of Field Notes’ pocket notebooks, I enjoyed this 4-minute ASMR video of some dude making very professional-looking pocket notebooks.
2. Loved reading about John Cougar Mellencamp’s performing in a hard-hat minutes with a bandaged head after a fan hit him on the head with a glass bottle, and how the original “Jack & Diane” lyrics were about an interracial couple. I need to read more “33 1/3” books (which this book is not - but it reminds me of the great series.)
3. I like using paper dictionaries more than Google, but I’m going to order one of these old Franklin Language Masters. It’s like a desktop calculator, but instead you type in your word and it returns the definition. So cool.
4. I can’t get enough of “authors recommend books” articles, so this New York Times article with Esi Edugyan recommending two books on my “really want to read soon” list (”Love in the Time of Cholera” and “War and Peace,” a possible Big Summer Book) to read by age 40 is good impetus.
5. I have a half-dozen Library of America hardcover books (the most beautiful books on my shelves, unless you think beat-up hardcovers of Robert Caro are more beautiful). If you’ve admired them in a bookstore, you’ll like this speech about its history and cultural reach. Consider me curious about them printing 17,000 pages of Henry James.
6. “I think discomfort is so important for change for an artist. Otherwise you’d just write the same thing over and over again. New experiences breed new creative work.” Goth Babe absolutely nails how adventures and discomfort are important to quality of life and creativity. After living in a van with my wife for years, I enjoy but struggle with how convenient living in a home is; I even miss - especially miss! - hard days on the road, because they’re the other side of the coin to unforgettable, adventurous days.
7. Both Nick Offerman and David Byrne recommended the movie “Dead Man” on Criterion’s Closet Picks, which Byrne described as being like Cormac McCarthy. (I’m very much the “dude in his 30s who likes McCarthy” stereotype but at least have the less common opinion that “The Border Trilogy” is his best work.)
8. Mailbag: I got a copy of the new Larry McMurtry bio, “Western Star.” Tracy Daugherty’s biography of McMurtry was one of my top reading experiences last year — I read it over a week of afternoons on a hotel rooftop pool in downtown San Antonio, drinking bitter-warm IPAs in the heat after spending mornings on the riverwalk.
9. If you’re curious about using a typewriter for distraction-free rough drafting, I can attest the first half of Joe Van Cleave’s video on incorporating is a helpful system to incorporate them into your writing/editing, analog/digital workflow. (My main use is they’re not connected to the internet, so if I put myself in a room without a screen I’ll actually write.)
10. Last, a STRONG recommendation for Mason Curry’s article on how to be a writer with a day job, some writing after work, before work, during work. I nodded and whispered “yes” to myself throughout the whole thing.

See you on down the dusty trail,