Isak's Blog

There’s something special about vintage mass market paperbacks: those small, cheap books that could fit in your back pocket if they weren’t so thick. Titles with large fonts, a simple cover — the ones often used for the season’s best romance and thriller books, or retro horror. Yellow, dried out paper with a three-dimensionality that grips your finger. Dark typeface that’s easy to read. The ones you see on the rack of grocery stores, Little Free Libraries, and hotels and resort lobbies for bored visitors who didn’t have smartphones.

Happy Friday Sunday,

Cue the music, brew that pot. I spent a few days at a lake in Minnesota floating and listening to loons a c fireworks, so this newsletter’s coming a few days later than scheduled (someday I’ll code a “publish in future” option on my website).

Here are 10 interesting things worth sharing this week:

1. Typewriters acted as a “meeting technology that enabled White women to marry above their socioeconomic backgrounds and achieve upward mobility.”
2. Twice a year LitHub publishes a long list of upcoming books, and great for 1) finding interesting new books (obvi), 2) guessing which ones will be mega-popular prize winners, and 3) finding niche titles I’d never encounter otherwise.
3. All of us contain a variety of selves, and “a piece of writing succeeds when the writer invokes the best self to tell the particular story at hand.”
4. Very excited for Peter Heller’s “The Dog Stars” to hit the big screen this August. His literary wilderness thrillers are a go-to beach (lake?) read for me, and this is one of his best (I just hope the movie doesn’t lose the emotional tenderness of the protagonist!)
5. Goth Babe on why luxurious RVs can never capture the same experience as simplicity and companionship of camping with friends.
6. I think that semi-myth about writers writing in a frenzied bout of inspiration so intense the rest of your life recedes to a small echo is that state we all aspire to be hijacjed to - no matter how real or fleeting it might be. The dream: to be inspired with such certainty no doubt or judgement gets in the way of output!
7. “There are such obvious benefits to not scrolling your life away, and yet we do it all the time.” I think phones suck our energy, curiosity, and agency away from our interests and self-expression, but I still find advice like “find moderation and intention” to not be ass effective as I’d like.
8. This video from 10 years ago still crops up in my mind as on of my favorite examples of good (unexpected) storytelling.
9. There’s purpose and peril in daydreaming of “could be’s” in your future and “could have been’s” in your past — and this book sounds like an excellent teacher for not becoming too weighed down in the latter.
10. Still videos of nature doing its thing set to chill music like this invariable 1) calms me down, and 2) simultaneously gives me an existential crisis about how we’re spending our existence in this place.

See you on down the dusty trail,

Happy Friday,

I haven’t gotten nearly enough sleep this week, but I have had really good coffee with my new-to-me drip machine and burr grinder.

Here are 10 things worth sharing this week:

1. Love these photos of Bob Dylan’s notebooks while writing 1975’s “Blood on the Tracks” (me and my dad’s favorite Dylan album). And it looks like a 1964 Royal Caravan typewriter? Maybe one to add to the collection.
2. Agree with all of Andrew’s reasons to use a paper dictionary instead of a search engine. You learn more and you remember better! It’s also more fun.
3. If you like words, you should check out a usage dictionary to understand what words to use when, too. I’m not a “keep books in the bathroom” guy, but David Foster Wallace said usage dictionaries make great bathroom books.
4. “When we read fast, we experience nothing. The book does not have a chance to burrow into our heart.” Gamifying reading might help you read more, but it also changes how you read. I tracked the number of books I read for a while, but it incentivized me to read shorter books instead of longer books I actually wanted to read. So I changed to tracking pages read a year, but I started listening to audiobooks at a fast speed while doing chores and hardly paying attention. This year I’m not tracking ANY reading, and while I’m still in a reading funk and haven’t finished a book, I’ve been reading snippets here and there in many books — something I haven’t done in years. “We are addicted to data and intent on improving ourselves over enjoying ourselves.”
5. There’s a huge, heavy, old CRT TV that I’ve been using to watch SNL, tv, and movies on through my computer using this HDMI-to-RCA converter, and there’s something really fun about watching Weekend Update or Heated Rivalry on a fuzzy 4:3 curved screen. Maybe I’ll get some retro shaders this summer and watch Unsolved Mysteries.
6. Speaking of dictionaries and reading, here’s a timely quote from Samuel Johnson, the English writer of the 1700s who worked on the first Oxford English Dictionary: “A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.”
7. I appreciate that Tyler Cowen invited a Lit guy to talk Shakespeare on his podcast and not a dozen minutes in they were reading Shakespeare line by line. I’ve only read a few Shakespeare plays I was forced to read in high school and college. Maybe a good Big Summer Book this year would be a Riverside edition?
8. Sometimes when I think about how much of my life I’ve wasted on my phone, I daydream about typewriting or transcribing an entire book by hand. Bethany Collins is doing it with “Moby Dick,” and Van Neistat did it with “Breakfast of Champions.” I feel like I’d want to do it with a special book, but maybe it’d be a fun (long) exercise to pick a book off the shelf at random?
9. “I’m not saying my phone has caused the same problems I’d have with, say, heroin or alcohol. But maybe it’s worth asking: How much fun am I having? Or: How much fun am I missing out on when I’m on my phone?” I’ve followed Brendan since 2012 and totally agree with how weird it feels to not pull out your phone and instead just sit there doing nothing - especially in public.
10. To that end, you can pay $60 to brick your phone to keep you from using it. Or you can do what I did: download the Foqos app (totally free), set the unlock to an NFC tag (<$1 online), and use that instead. Not that I’ve been doing it lately, but it is nice when I want to buckle down on no-phone time.

See ya on down the dusty trail,