News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Our rather shady and damp backyard is full of toads. My daughter enjoys catching them, holding them gently, and examining their marvelous coloring. Seeing them through her eyes has been a reminder that they really are fascinating creatures.
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In what will be my last weekly Water Dipper for a couple of months, I recommend essays about community life after the pandemic, endangered apple varieties, and reactionary feminism. Doug Sikkema is planning to keep this feature running over the summer while I am busy moving.
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Robert Sapunarich shares what he learned during pre-dawn workouts with F3: true masculinity is about countering instincts of anxiety, despair, and resentment with courage, hope, and grace.
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Paul Krause examines the politics of Latin literature and discovers a desire for peace and joy, a peace and joy found in an intimate environment of beauty which the poets, even theologians, described as a garden. But the race to Arcadia runs through strife, war, and murder.
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Casey Spinks responds to Anthony M. Wachs and Jon D. Schaff’s Age of Anxiety: Meaning, Identity, and Politics in 21st-Century Film and Literature. He meditates on zombie shows, Pixar movies, Scorsese films, metaphysical realism, and the philosophical fate of modern culture.
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Matt Stewart interviews Michael LeFebvre about his recent book The Liturgy of Creation: Understanding Calendars in Old Testament Context. In the context of the calendars for holidays, feasts, and Sabbath observance in Leviticus, LeFebvre argues that we need to attend to the creation account in Genesis as a calendar for shaping the sacred rhythm of labor and worship.
What’s on the docket for next week? An essay on mutualism, a letter of gratitude to a mother, a meditation on cultural making, and a review of Durable Trades.
I continue to enjoy each new installment in Alexander McCall Smith’s 44 Scotland Street series. A Promise of Ankles is the latest book. I have an essay on McCall Smith’s localist aesthetic forthcoming in Plough, but to give a flavor of these stories, here’s a paragraph in which the narrator describes the fraught morality of an au pair’s method for keeping his charges—in this case young, male triplets—quiet:
This he had done by whispering in the ear of each of them, “If you are naughty, you know what will happen? One of those Highland cows out there will come and bite you. Hard!” . . . It is entirely possible that the boys were unscarred by the whispered threat and developed no phobias relating to Highland cows. A Highland cow, after all, features on the wrapper of a well-known brand of Scottish toffee, and James was liberal in distributing sticks of this toffee to his young charges. The association of Highland cows with the pleasure of a mouthful of McCowan’s Highland Toffee probably outweighed any negative association, or any incipient Oedipal issues, and thereby avoided any need for future analysis. Toffee, of course, confers an additional benefit in child-rearing: a child whose teeth are stuck together with toffee for long periods is unlikely to girn or ask interminable questions, giving an exhausted mother a few moments of peace. Such a fix might help parents at the end of their tether, but is frowned upon in the enlightened circles in which Matthew and Elspeth certainly saw themselves moving. But there were are many things disapproved of in enlightened circles that actually work rather well in the real, even if unenlightened, world