<![CDATA[Isabel1000]]>https://isabel1000.substack.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JiaO!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F98d71b85-ad2d-4d95-b862-07d86888ac4a_1280x1280.pngIsabel1000https://isabel1000.substack.comSubstackTue, 01 Sep 2026 13:22:00 GMT<![CDATA[The Universal Walk]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/the-universal-walk-690https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/the-universal-walk-690Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:15:36 GMTSince I moved in February, I’ve found myself very much missing my old walk. Here’s a little thing I wrote about it earlier this year before I moved.

Mid-Q3 of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant dropped the “categorical imperative,” what’s probably the worst idea of all time? It comes in a few forms, which he said were all equivalent, starting with:

Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

A famous refutation of the moral framework Kant built on this idea involves thinking about whether you should lie to a murderer at your door when they ask if you’ve got the person they’re trying to murder up in your attic. Philosophical scenarios like this can seem a bit farfetched sometimes — none of my friends have attics, really — but if you need to make it concrete, just give the murderer an ICE uniform and yourself an attic. Now, before a bunch of people got together and decided ICE was a good idea, Benjamin Constant decided the categorical imperative was a bad idea, and he did so while Kant was still alive, meaning that by end-Q4 of the 18th century, Kant could drop his countercounterargument in the essay “On a Supposed Right to Tell Lies from Benevolent Motives,” where he argues that the problem with lying when it makes sense for you is that if everyone lied all the time based on whatever made sense for them at the time, then the premises of human communication would collapse and so would human communication, which would be bad:

declarations in general find no credit; and hence that all rights founded on contract should lose their force; and this is a wrong which is done to mankind.

And what’s one disappeared attic-dweller to the very notion of humanity as such, at the end of the day?

I think for me, at the moment, what defines humanity is our capacity for redefinition, i.e., we can imagine something could be otherwise and then act to make it so, and in that sense, “solving“ thinking by coming up with a bunch of ideas that work independent of the context they exist in and do so for all of time (i.e. a priori-ly) would undermine the project of thinking and destroy humanity as such, for me, at least. I will say Kant did have an idea I’ve found incredibly useful in my own context, which is taking the exact same walk at the exact same time every single day. No clue what sort of clocks he had, so I’m sure like all ideas, it ended up looking a little different when he tried to live it — it certainly has for me.

In the roughly three-and-a-half years I’ve lived in this apartment, I’ve taken the same 25ish minute walk easily 3,000 times. I don’t think I’ve done one in the 3:00 AM to 4:30 AM stretch yet, but otherwise, I’ve done it at basically every time of day, and I’ve tried it in basically every kind of weather San Francisco has to offer, which, admittedly, not that extensive a menu. But I love this walk, and I’d never legislate it, as a specific thing or a general maxim, or even really recommend it to a single other person because it begins and ends in my apartment and makes sense to do 3,000+ times to me because I am me. If I ever stopped loving this walk, I’d stop doing it.

The appeal of thoughts that work in every context is the appeal of dogma is the appeal of riding a bike with training wheels: it’s easier! But don’t you want to do tricks and shit? I started out doing the Kant thing, with the walks at least, because it was an easy way to get me walking all the time, and now that I do that pretty much regularly, I don’t do them at roughly the same time every single day and do do all sorts of different tricks and shit. I did the same thing with Maoism and a bunch of other dogmas besides, and now I’m annoying, idiosyncratically! In my experience, the beauty of having a strict routine is that it’s kind of just a collection of all the stuff that’s good for you to do, which is why you keep doing it. As for whether doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way ever gets boring or monotonous, wouldn’t that depend on whether the person doing it is exactly the same? Kant had a lot to consider.

It’s nice to think we decide anything for ourselves, but step out of your door and onto the street, and any number of decisions have already been made for you, like which way you should go, something that was decided by the people who made the street, or whether there’s weather that exists or time that moves — stuff like that. The appeal of deontological thinking, in which the moral worth of an action is determined by the action itself and not its consequences, is that you feel clean saying things like “the ends don’t justify the means,” but the burden of deontological thinking is that you have to explain how the consequences that arise from you not doing something are meaningfully different from the consequences that arise from you doing something, which is to say, you have to explain why not doing something is any different than doing something. Usually not doing something just means doing the thing you were already going to do, which is either something you already decided or something someone else decided for you, which you are now deciding to go with. Sometimes other people make good decisions! The wheel, for example, is something you can say with almost idiomatic certainty you shouldn’t feel the need to reinvent. ICE?

What could the point of doing philosophy possibly be if not getting everyone to think for themselves and how could you live without assuming everyone already is?

Well, here’s some albums I used to listen to quite a bit in like 2023, a good year for that walk iirc:

  • Remember U.S. Girls In a Poem Unlimited? Boy was she rocking.

  • At some point in the year 2023, I was feeling incredibly over stimulated at a drag brunch and snapped out of a potentially Bad spiral because Sade’s “Is it a Crime?” came on, and I did this upon realizing that’s where the DOOM sample from “Kon Karne” is from:

    The missus is SO obsessed with Netflix's Is it Cake? Like ...

    “Kon Karne” is one of my all time favorite DOOM songs, and I think at the end of 2024, Apple told me I had listened to “Is it a Crime?” like 300+ times that year.

  • Speaking of rap music, I think maybe my favorite Pusha T verse is his feature on this Freddie Gibbs and Madlib song “Palmolive,” yuugh . . .

  • I got pretty into black midi that year too, specifically the album Hellfire. Boy were they rocking. Geordie Greep’s solo stuff also rocks (I like “Holy, Holy” and “Walk Up” and “As if Waltz”), and I went to see Greep live a year ago, and a man in front of me had an iPad out, and he was following the lyrics of every song on genius . com. I thought nothing of it, save that I treasure how many ways there are to be alive in this world, as I am also all about love

    never forget when greep had a one-sided beef with michelle zauner of japanese breakfast of all people : r/bmbmbm

Happy #friday #cheers,

Isabel

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]]><![CDATA[8/20 recs, and so forth]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/820-recs-and-so-forthhttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/820-recs-and-so-forthThu, 20 Aug 2026 18:09:49 GMTThere were no recs last week, as I was in the homeland, speaking Spanish, and seeing how much Catalan and Aranés I could intuit despite never having learned, although, as 我不过是一个白人女性, not always accurate — anyways, here’s a picture:

or shit no I meant this one:

well, cheers, here’s a bunch of music by Spanish speaking women that I like:

  • Once again it is FELI COLINA SEASON — I like this new album, which is also apparently a visual album, something that appears easier to share than this other song I like enough to send to people even with that album cover.

  • It was also just recently Arca season, with her new album. The first time I got French tips, I couldn’t stop thinking about that part from “Nonbinary,” and now every time I wear clothes that have any colors including black and especially beige, I think about that part from “Bruja”

  • I saw Isabella Lovestory live a bit ago, and it was great, as is this song “Tranki,” which is also a great thing to say in excessively Spanishly gay ways; also great is the song “Fashion Freak,” topical, and if you can speak Spanish, a really fun interview she did with a generally fun interview show.

  • As I have argued in other work, the part of this TAICHU’s song “NOCHE DE SATO” where she says “head-headshot” is really rather quite swagful.

  • As I have also argued in other work, you should do what La Dame Blanche does here, certainly the most swagful flute-wielding artist maneuvers I’ve ever encountered (sorry, Jethro).

  • Mon Laferte is great, “Vida Normal” is great, “Amantes Suicidas” is great, there are so many great songs she has made.

  • In another work I once argued that this Belanova album Cocktail is a bop.

  • Lucrecia Dalt’s ¡Ay! is one of my favorite albums of all time and seeing it performed at San Francisco’s very own The Chapel was one of my favorite shows of all time, and I actually mentioned this in a fictional work as well, in the episode about aliens.

  • I went to a very good Juana Molina show in SF once too, and something fell down from the roof, which she worked into her arc in a sublimely cool way — like this song and album it’s on.

  • Have y’all heard of this artist Rosalía, a “generationally” talented Burial fan?

  • I had to give up my tickets to the Mabe Fratti show here last year, though noted local music lover, well-mulleted Canadian, and all around exceptionally good dude T— made use of the tickets and also got me a cool shirt, thanks T—! Still, would’ve loved to see this song and that song live.

  • Highly recommend Javiera Electra and the album that came out last year, plus this performance on Youtube.

  • Hopefully you don’t have to feel the things I was feeling when I was mainlining this Lhasa de Sela album, but I will say it helped.

  • Sometimes I also wear makeup in bed, although rarely do I put out as fun disco-y jams as Juliana Gattas.

  • Sometimes I also feel a little bit of “Tristeza,” and to this end, I recommend Silvana Estrada and other songs like this one and ah what the hell, here’s the whole album, hermana.

  • Sometimes you do have to ball though and to that end I also recommend “Pájaro” and “Croissant” by Pulciperla and the album as well. I always recommend the album basically. What are you doing reading only excerpts?

  • Anyways, lastly, this song off Sotoymayor’s album from earlier this year, WABI SABI, is good as is the album.

I hope you listen to all this great art. Nicolás Jaar is not a woman, so I could not include him in the above list, but I fw his whole artistic vision to hyperbolic degrees and I recommend you listen to all that, too.

Make sure to give me money for my artistic vision

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and read all the actual stuff, too:

more work!

]]><![CDATA[new essay, "Problems For the Online"]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/new-essay-problems-for-the-onlinehttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/new-essay-problems-for-the-onlineFri, 07 Aug 2026 17:36:45 GMTI have a new essay in Kernel about “Problems For the Online.”

Reboot
Problems For The Online
Kernel Magazine Volume 6 is out now! Thank you to everyone who joined us at our launch party in San Francisco, where you heard Isabel Pabán Freed read the first portion of this essay: a reading of Twitter as novel/carnival/feast, inspired by the late Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. It was a joy to read and edit; I don’t think we’ve every publis…
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24 days ago · 4 likes · Isabel Pabán Freed

When I did the reading at the launch, I got to sit on chairs that made me feel like I was in the first scene of Tár, but not really the other scenes of Tár, which was overall cool:

Well, while I’m here, I have hit Isabel500[subscribers], so here’s a link to every essay I’ve put out this year, in order of my writing them, with a description:

  1. I loved the Elia Suleiman movie Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996)

  2. I concluded my last three book project and wrote about being a bipolar-gay-divorceé-leftist-bookstore-meltdown-surivor who has a sort of limitless laughter thing going on

  3. I really used to be such a little fucking freak, about Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon but also all sorts of other stuff as well

  4. I got sick of people who don’t know enough about Literature trying to shit on Sally Rooney to show that they know soooooooo much about Literature

  5. I also got sick of fascists in San Francisco displaying the types of casual cruelty towards homeless people that in any just society would have them enrolled in intensive outpatient reeducation programs

  6. After like a decade, I’ve finally been able to explain

    1. what a coffee cup is

    2. why liberals think Like That

    3. how it’s come to be that the world is run largely by an unrepentant pedophile cabal

  7. I really, really like playing pool

Additionally, some music recs:

  • The other day I was sitting on Valencia Street in San Francisco, California and an old guy was walking up the street with a portable speaker playing “Movies” by Weyes Blood, which I thought was a crazy choice contextually, but I do recommend you listen to this song with big headphones, alone, feeling pain you know can only ever be articulated to another human in beauty.

  • Speaking of main character music, this instance of the classic Kenny Segal beat + milo rap combo still goes crazy.

  • Saw Charlotte Adigéry play live in SF once, and it was insanely good. This song is good as well.

I am reading ’s new novel Meat Puppets right now, and so far it has been worth the wait — people are still trying to do with “contemporary literature” the things people who know sooooooo much about Literature are always saying only canonical authors do. Speaking of which, I had such a strong negative reaction to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) that I finally started my Ulysses reread, and when I got to the first Leopold Bloom chapter, it was so good that I had to put the book down and just sit there to experience the sheer joy of Literature — I actually once got death threats over being not so self-serious about liking Joyce:

so I guess I’ll be the bigger woman and say I’m really very sorry for all that, Mr. Joyce, and especially for not using “slatternly” — at yearclose, I will be riffingwoke!

Otherwise, I’ve been consumed by an idea for an insane “Texas novel” so I am working on that now, not sure how frequently auxiliary essays will be coming, although I’ll try to get some stuff out — I suppose you and all your friends and their friends could all try a combination of Substack subscriptions and book purchases to give me somewhere between 60,000 and two million dollars? Or more — idk! The novel will come regardless, but given that It’s the Characters! was by design sort of the negative of School, my goal is for this one to be more School-like than School was, if that makes sense — a sort of School+ — and you know: these things take time, so: grease the wheels and so forth? Cheers!

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]]><![CDATA[7/31 recs, and a review of the odyssey ]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/731-recs-and-a-review-of-the-odysseyhttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/731-recs-and-a-review-of-the-odysseyFri, 31 Jul 2026 15:56:42 GMTNot much to report this week, but you should:

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]]><![CDATA[7/25 recs and Charli XCX, queen, I haven't heard the new album, but I'm defending your Substack]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/725-recs-and-charli-xcx-queen-i-haventhttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/725-recs-and-charli-xcx-queen-i-haventSat, 25 Jul 2026 14:20:21 GMTI haven’t listened to the new Charli XCX album — although I have listened to:

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]]><![CDATA[7/18 recs and thoughts]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/718-recs-and-thoughtshttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/718-recs-and-thoughtsSat, 18 Jul 2026 14:01:57 GMTTwo people asked for recs this week, the first being

Do you have recs for any books that are like Disco Elysium the crpg game. Doesn’t have to be 1:1 but maybe books about failure, drug addiction, and the Inland Empire

I actually am just wrapping up the book that most reminds me of the two hours of Disco Elysium I played at a friend’s house, which is ’s T…

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]]><![CDATA[Concrete and actionable writing advice]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/concrete-and-actionable-writing-advicehttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/concrete-and-actionable-writing-adviceMon, 13 Jul 2026 14:29:21 GMTI am more or less categorically opposed to the idea of giving “writing advice” to people whose writing you haven’t read, because, like, how could you know . . . ? BUT, here’s a “tech stack” for you:

I do all my writing these days in Obsidian, a free notes app you can spend a lot of time customizing with its extensive library of community plug-ins, altho…

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]]><![CDATA["Why I Like Playing Pool"]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/why-i-like-playing-poolhttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/why-i-like-playing-poolThu, 09 Jul 2026 16:16:52 GMTI wrote a new essay about “Why I Like Playing Pool,” plus a bunch of other stuff, and also how I am going to stop writing about my life like this for a while. The essays I work on next, which will make up the second part of the book I am serializing here, will be about artists I like.

Other things,

  • One of the editors at Ludd Gang kindly asked me to submit…

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]]><![CDATA[Hegel recs, Drawings, Links]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/hegel-recs-drawings-linkshttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/hegel-recs-drawings-linksFri, 03 Jul 2026 15:33:02 GMTOnly one person availed themselves of the opportunity to ask things — there’s always next week!

your essay contains the best, clearest, most engaging summary I have seen of the first part of Hegel’s] the phenomenology. I am currently struggling through it and was wondering if you had any tips n' ticks, secondary sources you like, yadda?

Thank you! By far…

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]]><![CDATA[6/26 week, links, recs]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/626-week-links-recshttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/626-week-links-recsFri, 26 Jun 2026 15:34:34 GMTgm,

I had two essays come out recently,

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]]><![CDATA[Essay with my grand theory of everything and other things]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/essay-with-my-grand-theory-of-everythinghttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/essay-with-my-grand-theory-of-everythingMon, 22 Jun 2026 23:01:55 GMTI’ve laid out my grand theory of the universe — as well as lesser theories about Hegel, “identity politics,” and sexual violence — in this new essay titled “The Oft-Humbled Eunuch Is Once More, On the Subject of Desire, Humbled, Again.”

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]]><![CDATA[New essay out in Strange Matters]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/new-essay-out-in-strange-mattershttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/new-essay-out-in-strange-mattersFri, 19 Jun 2026 16:12:44 GMTI have a new essay up in Strange Matters today, which came out of something I wrote for Isabel1000 1.0 — it’s about the 1996 Elia Suleiman movie Chronicle of a Disappearance. If you want more, you can use up your other two free articles, and then subscribe to the magazine, with these two things I wrote:

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]]><![CDATA[It is the week of June 13th, so a gift?]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/it-is-the-week-of-june-13th-so-ahttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/it-is-the-week-of-june-13th-so-aSat, 13 Jun 2026 17:43:47 GMTI’ve been spending more time on Youtube lately, and when I’m not watching short videos where Chinese men neg you in autodubbed English about how bad you are at using sidespin in pool — which feature a lot of interesting linguistic quirks, like using “pot” and “drop” and referring to the cue ball as “whitey” — I’ve been relishing the humility of knowing …

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]]><![CDATA[Adventures in the rap song thunderdome (I)]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/adventures-in-the-rap-song-thunderdomehttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/adventures-in-the-rap-song-thunderdomeMon, 08 Jun 2026 21:47:19 GMTThere are two main rap songs I know about doing laundry, “LAUNDRY” by R.A.P. Ferreira and “Folding Clothes” by J. Cole, and “LAUNDRY” easily clears, advancing it to the next round, where it will go head to head with Chance the Rapper’s song “Good Ass Intro,” squaring off in “rap songs that mention Chance the Rapper,” although here “LAUNDRY” just barely …

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]]><![CDATA[Solving problems the week of 6/5/2026]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/solving-problems-the-week-of-652026https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/solving-problems-the-week-of-652026Fri, 05 Jun 2026 13:49:03 GMTA new idea I had yesterday is called Isabel’s Transsexual Razor, and it goes like this: any time someone has been weird to you, and you don’t understand why, you remark to yourself, well diva, if you had just done a better job shaving with Occam’s razor . . . A weird thing someone did to me once was approach me at a bus stop and tell me that they couldn…

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]]><![CDATA[the week of 5/29/2026]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/the-week-of-5292026https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/the-week-of-5292026Fri, 29 May 2026 13:40:18 GMTIt’s update time:

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]]><![CDATA[The View From the Lyft Going Past 16th Street BART]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/the-view-from-the-lyft-going-pasthttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/the-view-from-the-lyft-going-pastWed, 27 May 2026 18:08:34 GMTI wrote about “The View From the Lyft Going Past 16th Street BART” and my favorite contemporary poet.

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]]><![CDATA[Some Thoughts about Twilight]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-about-twilighthttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-about-twilightWed, 20 May 2026 14:46:57 GMTTwo Sundays ago, San Francisco being much befogged, and my brain, somewhat, likewise, I thought I would read the copy of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight that my woke PhD student friend had lent me the day before, having never done this at any other point in my life. Interesting read! The first thing that stuck out to me was that after a perfunctory flash for…

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]]><![CDATA[I fixed my ebooks, and yours too, maybe?]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/i-fixed-my-ebooks-and-yours-too-maybehttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/i-fixed-my-ebooks-and-yours-too-maybeTue, 12 May 2026 23:26:15 GMTThere were two very minor formatting things with the epubs for my novels that lead me to suggest everyone buy paperbacks, but I fixed them now, so if you prefer to read on da screen:

School:

  1. Kindle

  2. Other options

It’s the Characters!

  1. Kindle

  2. Other options

When the books came out, I uploaded the initial epubs and PDFs to libgen and z-lib, although I am unsure how…

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]]><![CDATA[stuff that is happening the week of 5/8/2026]]>https://isabel1000.substack.com/p/stuff-that-is-happening-the-weekhttps://isabel1000.substack.com/p/stuff-that-is-happening-the-weekFri, 08 May 2026 14:59:54 GMTHello loyal subscribers, it’s weekly update newsletter time:

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