Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. We’ve had some gorgeous spring weather this month, but I think it’s about to feel like full-on summer next week — so I’m squeaking in more time outside before the bugs come out.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. My favorite part of big book round-ups like The Guardian’s 100 best novels of all time is how many people react with that old internet adage: why wasn’t I consulted?
2. I agree with David Byrne that creativity comes from following what you’re passionate about. I can tell in my writing what I’m finding interesting and not!
3. Cal Newport’s book “Deep Work” had a big impact on me, and his latest op-ed about how social media has shrunk our attention spans so people are relying on AI to do their thinking for them seems on the mark.
4. New American Masters about Mary Oliver coming out in August looks very good. Wild Geese is of course one of my favorite poems of hers, along with Sleeping in the Forest. I have a CD of her reading her poems in my car that instantly chills me out.
5. I wasn’t familiar with Brad Neely but his typewriter interview with Austin Kleon is my favorite in the series so far.
6. Still thinking about this woman who lived alone in a cave for 500 days, lost count of the days after a few months, and whose response to completing the challenge was “Already? No way. I hadn’t finished my book.”
7. New Olivia Rodrigo song reminds me of Disarm by Smashing Pumpkins and I will not patiently wait for some loud live versions to confirm.
8. TV and movie adaptations are never as good as their books — but there are still adaptations I love (Little Women, Lord of the Rings, Fight Club), and the new East of Eden miniseries looks pretty good.
9. While I haven’t yet started a Big Summer Book, I am enjoying Crime & Punishment (which should really just be called Crime & Overwhelming Guilt) — but Raskilnikov’s guilt and misfortune is actually just really funny to me? I must not be alone because apparently they made a comedy stage adaptation in 2023.
10. I love how many people are into birding these days, and I loved the Listers documentary and am very, very excited the duo is working on their next documentary about the ivory-billed woodpecker.

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,

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 ogling 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,

Happy Friday,

It’s finally feeling like spring: the sun is melting, migratory birds are chirping and flying through the trees in their little flocks, and a fox left prints in my yard.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week.

1. I love looking at flow charts of how different genres of art — from types of books to genres of music — have changed and morphed over time. So I had a blast scrolling around Music Map this week, but I wish it were way, way more in-depth.
2. I got into typewriters during the pandemic: I needed to write without distractions. But using it always put me in a much different headspace than the one I had writing on a computer. So I really enjoyed this video about another guy who’s come to love typewriters.
3. RIP to Chuck Norris. I feel like Chuck Norris jokes were one of my earliest internet meme memories? I printed out a bunch of Chuck Norris jokes and taped them to my school locker in junior high, and we’d all memorize and parrot them to each other like one-liners.
4. Loved this profile of Willie Nelson. My very first concert was a Bob Dylan-Willie Nelson show! It ruled. I love reading about artists that live to make their art, spending their entire lifetime committed to the craft. Inspiring.
5. Really love this Instagram account sharing daily David Byrne dances.
6. I went to the Mall of America this week (I am still sad it’s not named Camp Snoopy!) and hadn’t yet heard that the MoA Hooters restaurant is closing — and people have thoughts.
7. I never thought I’d feel so understood by Charles Darwin? Turns out there were a lot of days he’d rather stay home in bed than go do science?
8. This week I nearly caught up on my stack of unread New Yorkers. I finally got current, only to discover a few long reads that are, ahem, very long: The Atlantic gave $100k to a staff writer to gamble on the NFL season, and Reuters spent a lot of resources tracking down the identity of Banksy. I kind of like the mystery of not knowing about Banksy though!
9. I’m sad about the downfall of the mass market paperback. There’s something very nostalgic and accessible about them, like something you don’t have to treat as precious or high-brow, but something that can carry around and love and beat up and share with a friend with folded, torn covers. In the meantime, I’ll keep ordering 70’s mass market paperbacks from bookfinder.
10. I finally caved and ordered this beautiful illustrated edition of Lord of the Rings to match my Silmarillion edition I got a few years back. I went back and forth between this and the newer Alan Lee box set, the 2000 set I had, the 1973 set my dad had, and the hilarious 1993 set my friend Tom has. I finally relented that I’ll probably collect them all eventually.

See you on down the dusty trail,