Isak's Blog

Happy Friday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. It’s officially summer, and I’m soaking up LONG and HUMID summer days here in Minnesota and making plans for the summer solstice.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. A new PBS documentary about the Mississippi River looks SO good, can’t wait for this to come out.
2. I love following Dave Fogler’s YouTube channel for his time-intensive, pointless house modifications — but also for the midcentury vibes and fun vlogging, and his latest on eliminating corporate logos on his truck is a fun watch.
3. “I have faith that these typewriters are going to lead me somewhere. I don’t know where, but I hope somewhere interesting.” In which Ruth Ozeki discovers the joys of a typewriter. I also enjoyed learning about her writing process journal to aid her writing process.
4. If you’re having trouble writing, try reading, watching movies, going to a museum, or going out with a friend. Austin Kleon’s book “Don’t Call It Art” came out this week, and Chapter #7 is “Problems of output are problems of input.” (He’s making the book tour rounds, and I was happy to see him on the “A Reading Life” substack, too.)
5. I’ve been carrying a Field Notes journal in my back pocket since 2019, and I immediately ordered both sets of their new “Explore America” series, which reminds me of their fantastic “National Parks” series.
6. Larry McMurtry would write five pages a day on his Hermes 3000 typewriter, even stopping in the middle of a sentence to avoid going over his daily limit. I loved reading the Tracy Daugherty biography on him last summer, and the new “Western Star” bio is on my desk now.
7. My Big Summer Book pick right now is “Bag of Bones” (my version is 736 but it’s a small mass market paperback), and I am loving the eerie, summery tension laced throughout this one. I’m only 20% in, but I’m curious why this hasn’t been held up as one of his better books?
8. Resonated this TikTok about how creative backlogs can be a block. I’ve had a bunch of creative ideas rattling around in my head for too long, and doing them and moving on sounds easier and more fun than thinking “I really should do that soon.” Should!
9. There’s a plethora of book clubs and read-alongs on Substack that I’m finally going to give one a try and join Many Meetings on a read-through of The Silmarillion — a book I’ve read a few times but never feel like I quite grasp! Third time’s a charm?
10. “Doing the thing every day is easier than not doing the thing every day.” I regret that rigid consistency helps me do the things I want to do but I do wish I was less all-or-nothing about it.

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,

The woodchuck has emerged from hibernation, I’ve been playing the live Bon Iver album all week, and I’ve got a thick stack of books about the Transcendentalists I’m excited to dip in and out of.

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Robert D. Richardson said Emerson thought that “language is the archives of history, … a sort of tomb of the muses.” The OED, the dictionary that traces the etymology and history of each word, has a hefty paywall that you may be able to access for free through your library. Mine does! And it’s great for procrastinating. “The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry,” said Emerson.
2. Maria and I downloaded Rollercoaster Tycoon and spent SO much time building a perfect park on the first level. It’s just as fun to play as when I was 10, and there’s a surprising amount of people still playing the game — like this person who made a rollercoaster ride so long, it won’t finish until after the heat death of our universe.
3. Your bad art is fertilizer for your good art. It’s the only thing that can close the gap between your what you want to make (your taste) and what you’re currently capable of making (your skill level) that Ira Glass talks about. More garden-creativity metaphors from Austin Kleon.
4. I’m always surprised to learn how much my creative heroes stole a lot of their ideas from their creative heroes. “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard is one of my favorite books, and she considered naming it “Creekside Solitaire” (like Edward Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire), “Tinker Creek Almanac” (like Aldo Leopold’s “Sand County Almanac”), and plain old “Tinker Creek” (like Thoreau’s “Walden”).
5. Speaking of Annie Dillard, the first time I read “Tinker Creek” I felt simultaneously exultant (now THIS is what a book can be!) and decimated (she’s already done it, what’s the point of making more art?!). Funny stuff for an aspiring writer of twenty-one, but looking back now, the whole experience reminds me of that line from Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”: “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.”
6. Love this writing trick from Oliver Burkeman: draft it on the computer, print it out, delete the document, and type it back in. You’ll inevitably make edits, but the whole thing seems way less taxing. Like Lauren Groff says further down, “I’m trying to Jedi-mind trick myself into not putting so much pressure on any particular project.”
7. I love when two opposing things are true, and it’s up to you to know which advice to follow: Rick Rubin creates art for himself, never for the audience. Ralph Waldo Emerson always wrote with his audience in mind. My writing practice has the pendulum swinging to far to the latter.
8. “Bad texters are bewildered by expectations for prompt written communication, feeling punished by a system they never opted in to.” Interesting article from The Guardian on people (me!) who feel dread and anxiety over texting. Personally I’m a burst-texter, going silent for a while and then responding to all the messages at once.
9. And come to think of it, I don’t like calling or texting on my phone — mine’s mostly a camera and internet device, which is funny because I yearn for the days the internet was a place you went on your home desktop computer, not this black void in your pocket slowly eating all your waking moments. (Anyways: I still use Foqos and a 10-cent NFC tag to block stuff on my phone now and it’s wonderful.)
10. One of my favorite summer memories last year was sweating on a hotel rooftop pool in San Antonio, sipping a cocktail, and reading Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Larry McMurtry. I’ll be at a hotel pool again soon (not in summer, and not on the roof), but I might recreate it with this brand new Larry McMurtry biography by David Streitfeld. “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living.”

See ya on down the dusty trail,