Isak's Blog

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

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. The humidity dropped in Minnesota, so I ordered a new winter coat and can’t wait for colder weather.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. “I’m a machine for turning Talking Heads bootlegs and hammocks into pungent tech criticism.” Love this Longreads Questionnaire with Cory Doctorow, the tech blogger and fiction writer who I didn’t know had a thing for David Byrne, too!
2. I loved learning about the book clusters R.F. Kuang draws on for each of her books — Victorian lit for “Babel” with its maximal prose, Dante/Milton/Ovid for “Katabasis.”
3. I wrote about Cory Doctorow’s and R.F. Kuang’s advice to not pay too much attention to how you feel about your writing when you’re writing. First it has to exist, then you can make it good.
4. Love these illustrations Gustave Doré made for Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’ve taken a break from reading Inferno, but they complement the mood!
5. Love this video about how Terry Gross reads a book.
6. “Reading is prismatic, and a great writer shows us how to read far beyond their own works.” Enjoying this series from The Guardian asking writers about influential books they’ve read, especially this one with Madeline Thien about running up and down mountains listening to Middlemarch, the plurality of reading, and The Iliad.
7. “It’s clear the problem isn’t the writing, but the starting. In those cases, it’s helpful to think about why starting is difficult and then apply a solution.” Writing is easy once I’m actually writing, but the procrastination and hand-wringing before starting is my biggest obstacle. So I like this idea of using writing catalysts to get in the writing flow with less activation energy.
8. Taking notes on how to take good travel notes.
9. I’m still reading out of season with Dan Simmons’ “The Terror,” but pretty soon that will invert to reading thick, hot summer books.
10. The psychology behind why you rewatch the same movies (the same probably also applies to books).

See you on down the dusty trail,

I’ve written about how Cory Doctorow consciously separates how he feels about his writing from the writing itself:

“My writing epiphany was there was no relation to the way I felt about the words I was writing and their objective quality. … You can’t tell what’s good and what’s bad while you’re writing it. … Once you start thinking about what you’re writing, you lose the ability to stop writing it.”

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,

Note: After ten years of meaning to, every Friday I’m going to send out a list of things I found and interesting and worth sharing. These posts will share a mix of articles, books, music, art, and ideas that have inspired me. Welcome to the first.

Happy Friday,

It’s false spring in Minnesota, and only three hours of writing stands between me and a few pizzas and the Olympics this afternoon. Here are 10 things I found interesting this week: