Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. This week I learned my plumber plays the hurdy-gurdy at the Rennaissance Festival, so I guess that’s as good a reason as any to go for the first time?

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I listened to this interview with Maria Popova of “The Marginalian,” one of the few blogs I’ve followed for over a decade — and I eventually realized I needed to pull it up and transcribe the entire thing for myself: her lack of productivity, no editorial calendars, why archives are deeper than the internet, walking four hours a day to think (making her writing merely transcribing) — there’s just so much packed into this interview.
2. I’m on a roll, because I also listened to Michael Pollan on the same podcast talk about how writing is like a compost heap, laundry lines as narrative, why what we read before bed matters, and so much more. I loved that Pollan’s influenced by Hoaglund’s nature writing — I read his essay collection “On Nature” in 2014 and it had a big impact on me.
3. This letter on nostalgia reminds me of that line from Patricia Lockwood: “You’ll be nostalgic for this, too, if you make it.”
4. My favorite niche, hyper-specific thing biographies do is when they go way, way back to explore how an area’s geologic history affected the person they’re writing about.
5. If you’re a writer, maybe you can relate to this short article about the importance of deadlines? This Friday Favorites post would never make it without a weekly, firm deadline holding me accountable (my Tuesday blog post got deferred to today, in no small part because the deadline was less firm!).
6. This 1:43-minute video of all the weird sounds David Brynes makes in the Talking Heads discography is hilarious and something I’ve long wanted to create myself.
7. Really relate to Carmen Maria Machado in how her writing happens in short, concentrated bursts. As alluring as a disciplined writing practice is, it’s always a fantasy to me!
8. That said, a lot of authors know to show up even when they don’t feel like it.
9. One Main Character of the Day on BlueSky this week was a writer at Axios (the place that writes news for short attention spans) who described how he uses AI to help him read books his attention span can’t handle. But more interesting is this Defector article responding to it about why we read.
10. If you like books and maps, boy do I have a website for you.

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. I’m sending this newsletter out before killing time at my local bookstore before catching a matinee of “The Odyssey” — an ideal way to start the weekend early.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I’ve been listening to Charli xcx’s “No One Lasts Forever” on repeat since Tuesday, the one with filmmaker David Cronenberg talking about death, mortality, and art. Goosebumps. So I loved this deep dive into the song with Charli, AG Cooke, and Finn Keane. I assumed they sampled an interview, but Charli personally recorded him! It reminded me of Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain” and “Different Trains,” and it was neat to hear AG Cooke confirm it.
2. Seriously impressed by this person’s dedication to building a typewriter-inspired writerdeck, complete with 3-D printing a typewriter shell, creating an LED word counter, and a sliding screen. Puts my writerdeck (ViWoods e-reader plus a clacky keyboard) to shame!
3. I don’t take for granted how great music streaming is — you can listen to anything, whenever you want! A miracle. But there’s also too much to choose from, so I’ve been enjoying curated radio shows more: American Routes, David Byrne Radio, Mark Hoppus’ After Hours Radio, and the weekly Bob Dylan radio hour on 103.3.
4. I might have to find the 37-volume set of Pliny writing about the natural world in the first century A.D. to dip in and out of like Valeria Luiselli suggests. Same but different: I snagged a copy of NYRB’s “The Journal” from Thoreau, a collection of entries about the natural world — its secrets and experiences.
5. One of the best openers I’ve read in a while: “Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary’s, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.”
6. I’ve been enjoying ending my day by reading a snippet of this New Yorker essay about an international scandal and “Alpine Divorce” — a bonkers story for outdoorsy folks.
7. “But there is a value, too, in language that dissolves like an afternoon in July, the last rays guttering in the branches as you close your book and go inside.” Great writing about the “Beach Reads” here — but I’d be lying if I didn’t say summer and winter are for big books! Something about the long seasons around the solstice make me want a long story, not an episodic one.
8. In a huge loss for Minnesotans and people with good taste, Pearson’s — of Salted Nut Roll fame — is closing in Minnesota. I await an in-depth, 3,000-word tribute to the snack and will report back.
9. I’m more of a “scribble it in a field notes notebook” type of guy but I very much love the appeal of creating a digital garden to have some semblance of organizing what I read online.
10. And finally, 30 seconds of David Lynch to end your week: “Stay alert, do your work, don’t worry about the world going by; it doesn’t mean you can sit around and not do anything, you’ve got to get your butt in gear and do it.”

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. One of my favorite camping spots in northern Minnesota had an AQI above 1,600 this week, and my mouth tastes smoky while I’m typing this many hours south of there.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. PurpleAir is my favorite way to track air quality and monitor the summer smoke situation, recommended by someone who’s dealt with more wildfires in Colorado.
2. “There is such a thing as righteous anger, because that is not about you and your personal ego; it really is the anger you’re feeling on the behalf of the vulnerable.” Anger can be a powerful, empowering, and positive force when facing systemic injustices like climate change. (It’s been my main climate emotion for 7 years and I recommend it.)
3. I’m also a fan of having a creative nemesis. (My former nemesis wrote climate disinformation in Minnesota.)
4. “’It’s much worse than we think, and sooner;’ [the child in my dream said] to whom I said ‘no duh child in my dreams, what do you think this singing and shuddering is, what this creaming and reaching and dancing and crying is, other than loving what every second goes away?” Ross Gay’s “Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude” is one of my favorite poems, and it’s great set to Bon Iver.
5. Adults are seven times likelier to be advocating/taking action against climate change if their primary emotion is anger rather than hope. For every two clicks a person moves on the anger scale, they move one click on the activism scale.
6. I’ve apparently replaced “Big Book Summer” with “Stephen King Summer” after finishing “The Body” now listening to “Duma Key” and reading “Fairy Tale.” Something about King’s characters, from 11-year-old boys to high school teenagers to adults, makes his stories interesting even when the plot lags or the endings are unfulfilling. I grew up in a small town, and there’s something genuine in his simple, rural characters.
7. “Humans are not as dysfunctional as we think, we can work together to produce something joyful.” David Byrne on why he replaced one drummer with six so they can move around on stage.
8. I’m fascinated by people who commit to a seemingly pointless and time-intensive project , like Van Neistat typewriting, cutting out, and arranging every word of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” or the local legend riding Valley Fair’s Excalibur Roller Coaster (my childhood favorite) over and over, day after day, in search of — something.
9. When I grew up, the internet was a place; specifically, a computer tower and monitor on a desk in a room in our house. Now it’s in my pocket (and seemingly in my hand without me noticing), so I like this idea of using a scrolly phone and a scrolly chair to make it place-based again.
10. Very excited that Adventure Journal, a quarterly print mag that’s my ride or die (been subscribing since Issue 18 and want to buy the first 17) has archived their entire catalog to subscribers.

See you on down the dusty smoky trail,

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,