Wherefore.

This is my new blog.

Every day of the week for the next year I hope to have an update. On Mondays and Thursdays I will be writing about books. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays I will be writing about music. On Fridays I will be writing about film. And on Saturdays I will be writing about comics.

But just in case there happened to be an audience for such a thing, I'm limiting it further: I will not be buying (or, ahem, otherwise acquiring) any new books, movies or albums to do this. Everything will be drawn from what I own. (Readers of Noel Murray's 2008 Popless feature in the A.V. Club will find this unnervingly familiar. Sorry, Noel; the idea was too good not to steal.)

But what I own is plenty. I have hundreds of books I have not read, hundreds of movies I have not seen, thousands of albums I haven't listened to. And yes, a lot of that has been pirated — which is to say that I am a media consumer in the twenty-first century — but just as much hasn't. I've spent far more actual money over the past ten to fifteen years on books and music and to a lesser extent on movies than I ever hope to see in one place again.

My tastes are specialized and somewhat mercurial: while I believe in the value of everything I own — or at least I believed in it enough to acquire it at the time — there's no guarantee that you, gentle reader, will find anything of interest in it. Though of course I hope you'll stick around. Maybe you'll find something you didn't know you could be interested in. I almost certainly will.

As for the title. In G. K. Chesterton's sublime 1908 comic tract Orthodoxy, he recalls his boyhood reading of Robinson Crusoe as formative to his view of the world:

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. 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 man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light.

But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills. For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one.

I'm going to try to talk about all of these things in the Chestertonian spirit of being grateful for their existence, and of trying to explain their appeal, if I can discover it. One of my favorite music blogs runs under the subtitle "Marcello Carlin reviews every UK number one album so that you might want to hear it," and it is my hope to scale the same heights of interestingness.

But we'll see.

Everything posted here will also be posted at my proprietary website. I am also concurrently running a music blog counting down the Latin Pop #1s since ever. And I occasionally free-associate on Tumblr. Further links to my own activity to come if, as, and when they arise.

See you Monday.