Isak's Blog

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. I spent my evenings this week pressure-washing my concrete and listening to Stephen King narrate his book “Bag of Bones.” Recommend!

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Really enjoying Austin Kleon’s new book “Don’t Call It Art” and was delighted to find a short sub-chapter about having fun — which pairs with a question I’ve been asking myself this spring: What if this were fun?
2. I’m always fascinated by how writers spent their days before the internet (both the constant procrastination and the endless barrage of information), so this article with Louis L’Amour’s typewritten weekly to-do lists (nevermind the title) was so fun to read. It feels simultaneously so similar and yet dissimilar to modern routines.
3. Isn’t it fun to learn a new word for something you already do? I decided to blog more often this year about what I’m reading, thinking, and doing, and turns out that’s a “digital garden” of exploring and connecting ideas.
4. There’s a plethora of “the internet has made it harder to read” articles, but I found this article interesting because it wondered if having a job where you read bad writing (emails, reports, social media, etc.) all day makes it harder to wind down with a good book.
5. Meanwhile, here’s a guy who reads good writing every day for his job: “Not every executive can read every book,” he explains. “Everybody’s busy and they don’t have time to read everything.” Clark Speicher works for Hollywood reads a book every day or two (especially Lit), surgically breaks it down beat by beat, and recommends how it be adapted.
6. Every since I started percussion in band in fifth grade, I’ve been tapping on surfaces around me. So I decided to level up and learn the sticking for a tough song: the drum intro for Van Halen’s Hot for Teacher. There’s something satisfying about working through how a song works, it feels similar to doing a Rubik’s Cube in my opinion.
7. There is SO much energy in this Die Spitz show on KEXP, this is a blast.
8. Fela Kuti was a big inspiration for David Byrne and Brian Eno for Talking Heads’ “Remain in Light” album, but I didn’t know Hanif Abduraqib was a creative producer for the recent podcast mini-series “Fela Kuti: Fear No Man.” Plus Jad Abumrad from Radiolab!
9. Love this Instagram account from Nicholas Triolo sharing 200 books about ecology and justice in 200 words or less.
10. With summer heating up, now’s a perfect time to watch an old movie that pairs with higher temps.

See you on down the dusty trail,