Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. I saw my first northern saw-whet owl this week (a pair flew south to neat this spring) and we walked right past it in the tree a few times before noticing it. Makes you wonder about what else you’re not noticing.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. “If you ever need a pick-me-up, it’s best to find your way to any gathering where people are hellbent on making things.” Anna Brones on going to a festival of fellow creatives. She’s also enjoying the joys of using a typewriter.
2. It’s Big Summer Book season, and Jamie Todd Rubin (who reads older biographies and science books) writes about the allure of reading longer books.
3. But maybe instead of a Big Summer Book you’re looking for a Lil Summer Novel?
4. I first heard Fred again… a few years ago on Tiny Desk. He just finished his USB002 tour, and someone compiled every show into a 108-hour YouTube video that makes for great chill listening.
5. “Before you can make anything, you need a set-up. So when an idea comes, you have the tools to make it happen,” said David Lynch, which Braxton Haugen shares in a video about his new set-up. I liked his studio for his TikTok Tapes series, which reminds me of my post about writing spaces a few weeks ago.
6. Loved this summary of a lecture from Paul Schrader (writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) - that great works usually start off as a personal problem, and then become a metaphor. It transforms something deeply personal into something symbolic that a lot of people can relate to.
7. Hanif hits on what makes going analog so appealing now: how the discomforts of old technology can make you feel more alive and engaged with the world, but how it’s also a hollow nostalgia that’s increasingly incompatible with our world.
8. And if you’re not going analog, maybe just have more intention about what you use and why. “Every piece of software we use arrives with embedded assumptions about how we should work, think and create,” says Kai Brach.
9. Racket is having the most fun writing online and I’m pretty sure their article on CRT TVs was made specifically for me (but not really, their readers are rad too).
10. I know Ryan Holiday uses a notecard system to write his books and vaguely knew others did too, but Susan Orlean and John McPhee do too—the latter on big 5x9” ones.

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,

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,

Happy Friday,

I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep this week, but I have had really good coffee with my new-to-me drip machine and burr grinder.

Here are 10 things worth sharing this week:

1. Love these photos of Bob Dylan’s notebooks while writing 1975’s “Blood on the Tracks” (me and my dad’s favorite Dylan album). And it looks like a 1964 Royal Caravan typewriter? Maybe one to add to the collection.
2. Agree with all of Andrew’s reasons to use a paper dictionary instead of a search engine. You learn more and you remember better! It’s also more fun.
3. If you like words, you should check out a usage dictionary to understand what words to use when, too. I’m not a “keep books in the bathroom” guy, but David Foster Wallace said usage dictionaries make great bathroom books.
4. “When we read fast, we experience nothing. The book does not have a chance to burrow into our heart.” Gamifying reading might help you read more, but it also changes how you read. I tracked the number of books I read for a while, but it incentivized me to read shorter books instead of longer books I actually wanted to read. So I changed to tracking pages read a year, but I started listening to audiobooks at a fast speed while doing chores and hardly paying attention. This year I’m not tracking ANY reading, and while I’m still in a reading funk and haven’t finished a book, I’ve been reading snippets here and there in many books — something I haven’t done in years. “We are addicted to data and intent on improving ourselves over enjoying ourselves.”
5. There’s a huge, heavy, old CRT TV that I’ve been using to watch SNL, tv, and movies on through my computer using this HDMI-to-RCA converter, and there’s something really fun about watching Weekend Update or Heated Rivalry on a fuzzy 4:3 curved screen. Maybe I’ll get some retro shaders this summer and watch Unsolved Mysteries.
6. Speaking of dictionaries and reading, here’s a timely quote from Samuel Johnson, the English writer of the 1700s who worked on the first Oxford English Dictionary: “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
7. I appreciate that Tyler Cowen invited a Lit guy to talk Shakespeare on his podcast and not a dozen minutes in they were reading Shakespeare line by line. I’ve only read a few Shakespeare plays I was forced to read in high school and college. Maybe a good Big Summer Book this year would be a Riverside edition?
8. Sometimes when I think about how much of my life I’ve wasted on my phone, I daydream about typewriting or transcribing an entire book by hand. Bethany Collins is doing it with “Moby Dick,” and Van Neistat did it with “Breakfast of Champions.” I feel like I’d want to do it with a special book, but maybe it’d be a fun (long) exercise to pick a book off the shelf at random?
9. “I’m not saying my phone has caused the same problems I’d have with, say, heroin or alcohol. But maybe it’s worth asking: How much fun am I having? Or: How much fun am I missing out on when I’m on my phone?” I’ve followed Brendan since 2012 and totally agree with how weird it feels to not pull out your phone and instead just sit there doing nothing - especially in public.
10. To that end, you can pay $60 to brick your phone to keep you from using it. Or you can do what I did: download the Foqos app (totally free), set the unlock to an NFC tag (<$1 online), and use that instead. Not that I’ve been doing it lately, but it is nice when I want to buckle down on no-phone time.

See ya on down the dusty trail,