Isak's Blog

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. 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,