The Daily Stoic

One of my favorite novels, I think it's probably the funniest novel of all time, is this book, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Tool.

It's so funny that Jim Belushi and Will Ferrell and I believe Ben Stiller have all tried to make it into a movie but couldn't.

And anyway, so John Kennedy Tool, he writes this book, he submits it to Scheinman and Schuster, who is his publisher, and they said this book is no good.

His agent doesn't believe in it so he's profoundly rejected and he's so depressed by this rejection, to go to the quote we were just talking about earlier, he's so upset by this rejection that he ends up committing suicide.

He commits suicide on a lonely road in Biloxi, Mississippi. He attaches a car hose or a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and he dies. And his mother is distraught.

The first time I read the literacy of Dungeons, I thought it was a slap-out on the e.

And I would recommend it to people and then like ten years later I read it and I thought it's a sadist fan.

And I think it relates to people who have bad law and I haven't been ready to read it again.

I was just thinking of what am I doing?

I still think that Confederacy of Thompson's holds up pretty well and is pretty something funny.

Yeah, there's a wonderful book about him. Robert Richardson's book, Mind on Fire, and it's all about his intellectual formation.

It's like it doesn't matter where he was born. It doesn't matter what his parents were like. It was like, what was the what's yeah. What are the influences of Emerson? Right. What was he reading? Yes.

I think it was in that book you mentioned, the Emerson Mon on Fire one where the guy points out there's more trees around Walden Pond now than there were then because the forest had recently been clear cut.

I've been having this weird experience where I've been reading books like I read this book on Pontius Pilate the other day by Ann Roe. It's in the store I'll give you one it's incredible but I had the experience of that book and with the Emerson mine on firebook the recommended where I can only make it like three or four pages and I have to stop yeah and it's not it's not like at first I was worried that it's like my social media ruined brain like the shallow thing which I do generally have I think everyone does and then like quick it but I think it's more like the density is so immense in these books and they're at the writing is so good that you have to stop and think about you can't you can't whip through it the way that is where one you know what they're talking about and two where like if you actually want to appreciate the love like it's what they're talking about is good and then on this other level the way they're talking about it you have to appreciate just like from an artistic standpoint and you can't do that if you're reading quickly

And, you know, his other book is about this like canoe trip that he takes.

I'm reading this biography of thorough right now that's really interesting and I marked this passage i was going to talk to you about it so he's walking in the woods and conquered and he says how often have they stood on this very spot at this very hour here he here he's uh here he went on stood uh ta ta wahan or what is it ta ta ta one uh he said and there there is his arrowhead he said it was a mere rhetorical flourish the the gesture of a boy playing Indians but when he impulsively stooped to complete the scene and picked up the nearest bit of rock it turned out to be uh quote a most perfect arrowhead as sharp as if it just came from the hands of the Indian fabricator and he goes on to say that that his whole life uh thorough has this almost magical luck of always being able to find the best arrowheads which you know in his time obviously he's a he's a tad closer to uh you know people actually using them in those very spots but I just you know we think of thorough as this philosopher which he was and then there is this other part of him that's just like a boy who likes to play in the woods and that's what comes through in the philosophy so much

One of my I mentioned that Montaigne essay. He has this book, Representative Men, where he just picks like seven or eight people and it's their biography, but it's really what their influences were, what made them different, what tradition they were a part of.

i've got my portable emerson i've got my penguin classics translation of nature and then i found this book i had that i forgot that i'd read emerson has a little collection of biographies called Representative Men and it's funny i saw a little sticker on there and i said oh that's where i bought this book i bought this book in australia a little bookstore your bond i beach

He's got a wonderful book I'd like to play alone please which we carry in the bookstore as it happens the two of the college age kids that work in the bookstore are huge Tom Segura fans and they were like can we work that day? We really want him to sign our copy. So he came in and did that and we just walked around the bookstore.

He wrote this great book called I Like to Play Alone, Please which is a collection of very funny essays.

Tom signed a handful of copies when he was here at the painted porch to do this interview

Check out his new book I'd like to play alone please which we have signed copies of here at the bookstore.

the ops school is away but the ops school is waiting to come out until 2014

She has a great book, Dare to Fly, which you can pick up at the paint of poetry.

You can follow her on Instagram at Martha McSally or go to her website, Martha McSally.

She has a great book called Dare to Fly.

He said it would be like if Goethe had written Faust and was the right-hand advisor to Napoleon or Frederick the Great or something like that.

Gerta at Weirmar toiling to the last, completed Faust when 80 years were passed.

but this great book by Daniel borstin called The Image that I suggest people read

such a contrast of natural splendor and human vileness

He wrote Churchill, Walking with Destiny.

I actually did the marketing for the sequel. It's a book called Blue Ocean Shift.

There's another one called Blue Ocean Shift that actually did the marketing for but the idea is red oceans is where there's lots of competition that means being like everyone else wanting the things that everyone wants focusing on what's out of your control like everyone else.

It's a new translation of Aristotle's poetics which is really about not poetry but the art of writing and understanding stories.

Plot is the most important thing.

The most important element in any tragedy is plot.

The best stories are about what could happen.

A simple definition of the proper length of a story would be that it is long enough to allow a change from good fortune to bad or bad fortune to good in accord with what is probable or necessary.

In today's episode translated by Philip Freeman from this audiobook How to Tell a Story you're going to get some ancient wisdom on how storytelling is an act of imitation using different media and different ways of telling story.

I love the Princeton University Press ancient wisdom from Modern Reader series.

You can listen to a bunch of the additions including How to Tell a Story anywhere you get your audiobooks and like I was saying we carry the physical ones here at the Painted Porch.

Introduction Storytelling is imitation.

In general it seems that there are two causes for the beginnings of poetry, both of them arising from human nature.

It is a great book of American history of reckoning with the path of why studying history and that stoic discipline of wisdom is not for the faint of heart.

I put it up there with Clint Smith's, How the Word was Pass which was one of my favorite books of the last couple years. This book deserves to be up there.

General Thai, Cigilis is fantastic writer, great historian, great American and someone who's credentials I think are unquestionable on this topic and it doesn't matter where you come down politically. I think you should absolutely read this book.

I love the book I thought it was brilliant I really really enjoy I think it's super important

And I read it and I was like, how could anyone read this and not see how preposterous the claims people are making about these things to, you know what I mean?

So you read like Dydian or you read Tom Wolfe and you're like, yeah, it wasn't the paradise that maybe we are retroactively imagining that it was.

actually I don't know if I should say this but Tom Wolf's estate reached out and they asked if I would write a new intro to the electric cool aid acid test. So in like the 60s Tom Wolf wrote this book about Timothy Leary and like his band of Mary Pranks or whatever and I was rereading it because they asked me and it was like amazing how utterly similar all of the types and the fascination and the the certainty that they've discovered this thing that will solve all of the world's problems and then just like how comical and delusional and dangerous it turns out to be like in retrospect.

have you heard have you read the book The Courage to Be Disliked

it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know.

for the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, I would give anything.

A great truth, people who have grit are more successful than people who don't. The opposite great truth, people who know when to quit are more successful than people who don't.

every truth has an equal and opposite truth.

this guy's name is Austin Cleon he lives in in Texas he's great I wrote this book uh steel like an artist oh yeah love that yeah his thing is work family scene pick two work sorry work work family and then like the scene like the the hangout pollamp right yeah he's like pick two you can pick two right

I loved his books Keep Going. I loved Show Your Work! I love Steal Like An Artist.

And check out Steal Like An Artist, Show Your Work!, Keep Going.

if you've never read City of Thieves, David Benioff, it's a wonderful story about his grandfather...but I got to the end of that night, cried, and I got to the end of Meditations and I cried

if the if the child was not the word of god i think god never spoke is one of the best lines the corporate countries are written

her book Invisible Rulers is all about how information spreads online and how niche propagandists can like sort of shape public opinion

I think her book is super important, Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

definitely check out Invisible Rulers, The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

"If you make it trend, you make it true" is a terrifyingly real quote across the cover of Rene DiResta's book,

Rene's book, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, is all about the virtual rumor mill and how niche propagandists can shape public opinion.

And then, as a Stokes should be, she's actually engaged in this. Before she wrote this book, she was actively involved in a campaign in California to get rid of some of the vaccine exemptions that were making it possible for people to endanger others pre-pandemic.

I think her book is fantastic. As I've said before, if you don't understand how media works, if you don't have real media literacy, you are at the mercy of forces and I would say fools whose power and avarice and danger you cannot really even comprehend.

And her new book, Invisible Rulers, the People Who Turn Lies Into Reality is a must read, has a great little line on the cover that says something about how if you can make it trend, you can make it real. I think that's powerful.

Her new book Quit the power of knowing when to walk away just came out.

I've also loved and raved about her book thinking in bets which I carry here at the pain and porch. If you haven't read you should absolutely check that out.

It's great book and if you haven't read thinking in bets you absolutely should and her other book how to decide. It's also Quite good recommending all of Annie's stuff if you haven't read any of it already.