Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. This week’s roundup is too similar to two weeks ago. Annie Dillard died on Tuesday, one of my biggest writing idols who had me asking myself “you can do that?,” and later taught me through her work how to write and live.

Here are 10 interesting things about Annie Dillard I’m sharing this week:

Last week I wrote about how Cory Doctorow separates how he feels about his writing from the writing itself.

Annie Dillard would agree:

“Another luxury for an idle imagination is the writer’s own feeling about the work. There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress and its actual quality. 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.” “The Writer’s Life”, page 15

Annie Dillard died on Wednesday, who’s been one of my top influences, inspirations, and mysterious benefactor of writing wisdom for the past 10 years.

Her book, “The Writing Life,” is one of my favorite books about writing, but because she’s such a good writer, it doesn’t even rank in my Top 3 Best Dillard Books. Maybe Top 5. Maybe. Because each of her books is so good, and teach you so much about life and nature and philosophy and writing — her book about how to write and how to live is just the surface.

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. The orioles are around, a green heron flew through, and a baby skunk and myself scared each other while I was out for a run.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Love these three roundups of interesting book dedications from Molly Young.
2. RIP John Basinger, who memorized the entirety of “Paradise Lost” (my copy is 512 pages) by bringing his copy to the gym and memorizing seven new lines on the exercise bike and reviewing the previous 14 lines while lifting weight.
3. It’s fun but quickly boring to notice the trendy Classics everyone is recommending online — last summer was “Lonesome Dove,” then it was “East of Eden,” and “Count of Monte Cristo” is still popular. So I really liked Tip #4 from Naomi Alderman’s list to google three books you love in quotation marks to find an article talking about those three specifically — which would likely recommend another book you’d like. (Mine? I switched to authors: Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, David Gessner. First result worked well!)
4. Which helped me find this decade-old article about Annie Dillard, one of my favorite writers, and her book “Teaching a Stone to Talk,” one of my favorite books of hers. “That’s what interests Dillard: ‘ultimate concerns’. To address them she relies on two things: her senses and everything she’s read.”
5. I like older interview-style shows that interview creatives — and I’d never heard of “Bookworm,” a public radio show hosted by Michael Silverblatt from 1989-2023 (!). Here’s a helpful link to the full archive. I’m listening to interviews from the 90s with Elmore Leonard and Tom McGuane.
6. I’m nearly finished with Stephen King’s “Bag of Bones” about a writer grieving the sudden death of his wife and the ensuing writer’s block. The main character never reaches the top of the best-selling book lists and has to schedule his publications around other, more successful writers — which was inspired by King competing in real life with Tom Clancy.
7. Really like this list of recommended reading for every summer mood. I’ve paired Stephen King with summer reading since late elementary school, so I’d recommend his for when you want the literary equivalent of walking out of the summer heat into the cool but eerie shade of a quiet forest.
8. Do today’s writers have regular columns? The media landscape has changed so much, I can’t keep up, but I wonder if a column like Kurt Vonnegut’s or Hunter S. Thompson’s would work today — even if they’re as true today as they were over 25 years ago. When in doubt, write about human ignorance and imperfection, eternal truths.
9. I feel like I never let myself be bored anymore. (Thanks phones and infinite scroll!) The closest I get is around 4 p.m. when my brain’s so full of information and exhausted from computer work that I do chores without even music or podcasts to fill my thoughts. Here are some things to do while waiting that I probably won’t do but will think about as I unlock my phone.
10. Finally: end your week with this poem from Mary Oliver.

See you on down the dusty trail,

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,