Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. I’m having one of those weeks where I flip between creative procrastination and quick bouts of writing, which is my least favorite part of the process.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. This sketch gets exactly at why daily writing goals haven’t worked for me, because they prioritize quantity over quality. I’ve had better look making a goal to sit and write. Some writer said they can sit and write or sit and do nothing — but they aren’t allowed to sit and do something else. Good writing advice!
2. Braxton Haugen did a great job making writing look fun and exciting on his TikTok Tapes series back in 2021 (just scroll to the bottom of his profile and start there). I loved his Neistat-Sachs-inspired studio, the jazz, the typewriters, the Bob Dylan — the series is as good as I’d remembered.
3. Robert Caro having almost 1,000 pages of his fifth and final LBJ book is the best news I’ve had this week. His entire interview with C-SPAN was fascinating, especially how he can’t write until he knows the last line of the book.
4. “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” I’m not able to consistently keep a journal but admire those who do, so I enjoyed Joan Didion’s essay on keeping a notebook to remember a past version of yourself and how you felt, not merely writing down events, thoughts, and observations.
5. I like reading quotes from creatives and artists, so @nitch on Instagram and @PoeticOutlaws on Substack are great — and both have a similar black-and-white aesthetic?
6. Ever wonder why composition notebooks have that iconic black and white speckled design? Well, this two-minute research party TikTok gets into how the design evolved and what it has to do with the lapwing bird.
7. Every spring the Kentucky Derby catches me by surprise and I celebrate by rereading Hunter S. Thompson’s essay about how the real event is the decadence and depravity of the elites that attend. This year, I listened to its word-by-word radio drama read by Tim Robbins (Shawshank Redemption) doing a passable impression of HST and Bill Frissell (Finding Forrester) composing — and an “All Things Considered” interview with illustrator Ralph Steadman.
8. I like Merriam-Webster’s “Word of the Day” newsletter to make my definitions more exact. They often hit that sweet spot of sharing words you can’t succinctly define but have heard and can use in daily conversation. Too many vocabulary resources share interesting and niche words you’ll rarely use.
9. I find electric typewriters to be a great middle-ground between the speed of computer typing and dexterous clunk of manual typewriters. Electric typewriters — again, hit that sweet spot — of speed where I can get my thoughts on the page at a reasonable speed, but not fast enough for lower-quality stream of conscious. So this video on the iconic IBM Selectric Typewriter has me curious about getting one with many diifferent typefaces.
10. Speaking of typefaces: I love old writing reference books from before the digital age. My mother-in-law shared her “Words Into Type” book when I started freelancing in 2019, and it’s fascinating to read how physical publishing used to work. Bonus: Mary Norris, the New Yorker’s Comma Queen, recommends it (I keep four reference books on my writing desk, and I’m delighted to learn they include her three recommendations).

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

I turned 33 years old which means I am officially of age in Hobbit years; I celebrated by staying up until 4 a.m. after saunaing with my dad — which was apparently too much fun because I’m still behind on sleep.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I have a few print magazine subscriptions: “Adventure Journal,” an outdoorsy quarterly I signed up for when I quit my job to freelance write to get major inspiration from. And “The New Yorker,” which I bought this year to spend less time reading the news on my phone. Analog is all the rage these days, but I my favorite part is receiving something nice in the mail instead of bills. Try it!
2. If you do subscribe, “The New Yorker” fully digitized its entire back catalog. I went back and read issues from the week I was born, then my dad, then my grandpa. The fun thing about history is how all this has always been going on.
3. I may or may not have watched this video about hobby tunneling and thought to myself: how hard could it really be to dig my own tunnel from my basement to my detached garage?
4. A new Bob Dylan book is came out in January about his later career, which might inspire me to get into more of it than just “Modern Times” and, yes, “Christmas in the Heart.”
5. The internet is better with RSS, and I missed the days of Google Reader so much I got a subscription to Feed.ly (like don’t love) a few months ago. It seems there’s a bit of a resurgence lately — Austin Kleon and Cory Doctorow both blogged recently about how much it improves your web browsing. I use it for work to track clean energy/climate news plus a bunch of writers and blogs I like.
6. I got my hands on the newest edition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the first update in 20 years. Cloth binding, nice pages, a thumb index — I’m in love, and it looks great next to my thesaurus and usage dictionary.
7. I’m still in a book rut (this is a recurring theme apparently) and have been daydreaming reading Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” after loving Knaussgaard’s “My Struggle” series a while back. So while I haven’t cracked the first book yet, I did discover the Proust FM radio website that plays the entire series on a loop forever.
8. If you feel like there’s maybe not much to celebrate for the U.S.’s 250th anniversary this year, well, you’re not alone — it seems like that’s how people have felt for every major anniversary of the U.S. (And yes, I read this in print with a cup of coffee Tuesday morning instead of scrolling BlueSky.)
9. I’ve been poking around books instead of reading them all the way through this year. Last night I cracked open this beautiful edition of “The Silmarillion” and played Andy Serkis’ narration to read the Beren & Luthien chapter, and it was a WAY better night that scrolling Reddit, BlueSky, and Instagram.
10. I’ve been low-contact with podcasts since the pandemic because they just started to feel too noisy, but I might have to dive into the “Exploring the Lord of the Rings” podcast series with the Tolkien Professor based on this BlueSky thread about the Mines of Moria.

See you 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,