A new Tuesday Trio:
On February 10th, 2001, a group of friends held a garage sale in Denton, Texas. The sale was immortalized in a surreal, 32-minute short documentary that has since become a cult classic. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the happening, today’s Tuesday Trio — one book, one record, and one movie based on a theme — is dedicated to The PriceMaster.
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The subject line for Friday’s newsletter came from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:
“Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, Robinson Crusoe, which … owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck.”
(Every book of mine is what I was able to save from the shipwreck of a great idea.)
I used this 2016 blackout poem for last Friday’s newsletter, “The year is too young to be this long.” A few people commented that they couldn’t believe it was made 10 years ago. This is the thing about making art and writing in a diary: you keep the receipts.
In desperate need of distraction and something to look forward to, I’ve been having a blast writing my new “Tuesday Trio” series for the Tuesday newsletter. In each letter, I recommend one book, one record, and one movie around a theme. The first three: “Radioactivity,” “Problematic Gifts,” and “Sherlock Holmes.”
“Evil fortune does have some use: it is a good thing to be born in a century which is deeply depraved, for by comparison with others you are reckoned virtuous on the cheap.” That’s our old friend Michel de Montaigne. I’ve read a few pages of his Essays every morning of 2026, and every morning I find some wonderful 400-year-old line that speaks directly to my present moment. (Old books are time machines.) If you don’t know Montaigne’s work, check out Stefan Zweig’s short biography, written in exile during World War II. My friend Ryan Holiday loves the book so much he bought a thousand copies to stock at The Painted Porch before it went out of print. (Montaigne was an influence on my book Keep Going, and I wrote more about his famous tower in my letter, “Room To Think.”)
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