Isak's Blog

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,

Lots of people are seasonal readers, settling into cold and snowy books in the winter, hot and sunny books in the summer. It makes the book feel more immersive. Maybe helps you savor the season you’re in. But lately, I’ve been enjoying reading out of season.

I’ve spent this last week reading “The Terror” by Dan Simmons, a book set in the frigid north in which two steamships in the 1800s get frozen into the pack ice while searching for the Northwest Passage. The crew is forced to spend years in the dark, frozen wasteland as storms pummel their ship, food supplies dwindle, and an unknown creature haunts them as they wait for a summer thaw to release their ship.

Annie Dillard died on Wednesday, who’s been one of my top influences, inspirations, and mysterious benefactor of writing wisdom for the past 10 years.

Her book, “The Writing Life,” is one of my favorite books about writing, but because she’s such a good writer, it doesn’t even rank in my Top 3 Best Dillard Books. Maybe Top 5. Maybe. Because each of her books is so good, and teach you so much about life and nature and philosophy and writing — her book about how to write and how to live is just the surface.

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,