Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. This week’s roundup is too similar to two weeks ago. Annie Dillard died on Tuesday, one of my biggest writing idols who had me asking myself “you can do that?,” and later taught me through her work how to write and live.

Here are 10 interesting things about Annie Dillard I’m sharing this week:

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,

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. This week’s roundup is different. Wendell Berry died on Monday after dedicating his life to thinking, writing, and advocating for a society that takes care of each other and the land.

Here are 10 things about Berry I’m sharing this week:

1. Berry was a writer of fiction, poetry, and essays, as well as a champion of agrarian communities and taking care of the land. He lived his values and challenged us to do the same. Here’s his obituary in the New York Times and The Guardian.
2. I haven’t read nearly enough of Berry’s writing, but here’s what I’ve loved: his poem “The Peace of the Wild Things” is one of my favorites. “The Art of the Commonplace” is a great collection of agrarian essays. And “Why I Am not Going to Buy A Computer ” is one of my favorite essays as somebody who loves typewriters, the romanticism of journals, and — yes — spends most of their working hours at a computer.
3. I enjoyed typing out two of my favorite Wendell Berry poems this week.
4. I first read Wendell Berry in an environmental philosophy college course shortly after I’d declared my Environmental Studies major. Amazingly, all my course materials are still saved in my Google Drive! It was a delight this week to read what I was thinking 13 years ago when I first discovered Wendell. One of my favorite parts of the course was Wendell’s writing in “The Art of the Commonplace” that we don’t have the right to ask if we’ll be successful in mitigating environmental harms — we have the responsibility to address them whether we are successful or not.
5. “’What’s curious to me is that, once started, you’re interested, you’re into it, you’re doing your work, and you’re happy,’ he said. ‘That applies to writing. Sometimes I don’t believe I can stand it another day, but then I’m working at problems I know how to deal with, to an extent.’” I read this excellent profile on Berry in the New Yorker in 2022, and it’s in my top ten profiles they’ve made. (The scene opens with his writing space.)
6. This 2019 New Yorker interview with him is also excellent: “My father insisted on the use of the right words, on calling things by their right names, and his syntax was powerful. I have a big debt to his language.”
7. If you’re not into agrarianism, or the importance of communities, or environmentalism in general — don’t worry! Ted Gioia, one of the bigger writers on Substack, wrote a while back about how Wendell’s rules for technology from decades ago are (not surprisingly) incredibly prescient in our current AI-driven, social-media-raddled society.
8. Berry was the subject of a great Bill Moyers episode in 2013, which I watched with my dad the same semester I was reading him in college. “To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough.” Also features a much-younger Bill McKibben!
9. Berry was very generous as a host but wasn’t a frequent media guest. Lucky for us, Nick Offerman — a student and advocate of Berry’s — shared some great stories about Berry in this Mountain & Prairie podcast.
10. “Make a place to sit down./Sit down. Be quiet./…/Accept what comes from silence./Make the best you can of it.” Wendell’s advice for being a poet is good advice for being a better human being.

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. The Minnesota Fair officially kicked off, marking the end of summer, and I can’t wait to eat every pickle-related item.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. RIP Dolly Parton, RIP Tim Curry; two phenomenal human beings who made the world a brighter place. A nugget of wisdom I read about them both this week: take your cause seriously, but don’t take yourself too seriously. Help others, but don’t let your ego get in the way. Now it’s time to watch “9 to 5” and “Clue.”
2. Forget reading in season, I’m reading out of season and spending the end of summer reading about a bunch of sailors whose ship froze stuck to the pack ice during an arctic winter while a mysterious creature stalks them.
3. At night while I read “The Terror” I’ve been listening to this dark 2007 ambient album “Erebus & Terror” by David Bickley inspired by Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition in the 1840s. I like it more than the official soundtrack to the miniseries of “The Terror.”
4. “The Terror” was included in a discontinued “Winter reads” series from The Guardian, which has 20 other wintry book recommendations I might dip into before the temps cool down.
5. Brendan gets it.
6. Loved hearing Adrian Tchaikovsky’s approach to good writing — mostly by starting with worldbuilding to create realistic characters, allowing the plot to unfold from there.
7. In extremely good news for me and my coffee habit, the American Heart Association released a review of many studies found that most adults can have up to 5 cups of coffee a day without adverse effects, and 2 to 4 cups can be good for you.
8. So excited for the upcoming concert film of David Byrne’s “Who Is the Sky?” tour. I missed his show when he came to Minneapolis, but we came through when his violinist’s five-string instrument
9. “It’s a bit like making dough: the resting is the most important part of the recipe. You cannot skip it or rush.” Lofi Cinema on giving your creative ideas time to rest.
10. Coming back to this George Saunders letter, where he writes “what if we tried to believe that everything we did and felt (and avoided, and screwed up) was, not only part of our long artistic journey, but was the journey?” Which reminds me of Anne Lamott saying it’s not that writers need to have really interesting experiences to tell good stories, but that they have to actually observe — to really notice and be aware of their experiences — to tell good stories.

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. The humidity’s finally left Minnesota, and I’m so excited to wear pants, listen to new Phoebe Bridgers, and enjoy the end of summer with pizza and tequila old fashioneds.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. I love staring at people’s bookshelves, so this list of David Bryne’s books (which he turned into a public lending library at a 2015 art festival) was fun to read through. Unsurprisingly, lots of music books I’d never heard of.
2. The “How I Write” podcast has so, so many interesting writers on the show, and the Anne Lamott episode was packed with great advice on writing and living. I especially liked her note on using a thesaurus: “You have to amass a kind of battered old toolbox if you’re going to get anywhere with writing.”
3. I finally saw the Odyssey last week, sneaking out on a Friday afternoon with a huge bucket of popcorn. The movie’s based on Emily Wilson’s translation (I liked both “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad” from her! More fun than Fitzgerald), and her new book out next month sounds great.
4. I’ve been reading about the Transcendentalists this year — it started with Robert D. Richardson’s “First We Read, Then We Write,” then Bruce Nichols’ new “The Emerson Circle,” and now I’m reading Laura Dassow Walls’ Thoreau biography, and I’m giggling at the story of that time Thoreau started a wildfire and felt bad about it for years and years.
5. “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Thoreau’s very popular amongst young adult Chinese readers. I read Walden in my freshman-year J-term course in college, a wonderful one-month, one-class “mini-semester” that I usually filled with books and coffee.
6. Phoebe Bridgers has a new album out, and I’m a sucker for the vocoder on the very first track “The Outside.” I first loved vocoder from Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek,” but fell in love with the sound in Bon Iver’s vocoder-adjacent “715 - CR∑∑KS,” and more recently Lorde’s “Clearblue.”
7. As much as I yearn for deeply experiencing each season as it comes and goes, it seems I like to read out-of-season — because I started reading Dan Simmons’ “The Terror” last night after a Barnes & Noble employee recommended it to my “I’ve been reading too much Stephen King” query, and I was immediately transported to the cold, frozen north pole when an 1840s steamship (same decade Thoreau started his wildfire!) is trapped — and haunted — by something sinister on the ice.
8. Loved this person reading “The Count of Monte Cristo” in one sitting (21 hours). I don’t think I have the attention span for marathon-reading, but this one for “The Power Broker” this fall could change my mind.
9. As if I needed another reason to read more Le Guin. (I just got her “Steering the Craft” this month and am excited - and intimidated - to work through it.)
10. Been following Ed Roberson’s Mountain and Prairie podcast for years. Very excited he’s putting together a book club for folks who love public lands and the American West.

See you on down the dusty trail,