February 20, 2021

News from the Front Porch Republic

Greetings from the Porch,

I trust you all are staying warm despite the unusual cold engulfing much of the US this week. My daughter and I have been enjoying some good sledding, and we also relish long evenings reading by the wood stove with the snow piling up outside the windows.

In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about the new culture wars, congress, teachers unions, and John Calhoun.

• Steven Knepper recommends the unjustly forgotten farming stories written by Leo Lewis Ward, C.S.C. Men in the Field, Knepper concludes, is "indeed fit to sit on the shelf alongside Cather and Berry."

• Elizabeth Stice asserts that "one of the benefits of reading old books is to experience surprise." She shows how Petrarch helps her students come to terms with their mortality.

• In his review of Rod Dreher's book Live Not by Lies, Arthur Hunt III considers how deceit spreads on both sides of the political spectrum and draws on Dreher's first book to suggest how we might practice the truth even as lies proliferate.

• You may have noticed that FPR now serves as an online home for Alan Cornett's delightful podcast Cultural Debris. This week, he released a new episode in which he and artist Elisabeth Deane discuss Indian miniature painting, the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London, and whether lockdown is conducive to artistic creation.

What's on the docket for the coming week? A response to Marilynne Robinson's Jack, a book review of Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, and an agrarian response to the recent calls for policy proposals aimed at encouraging families to have more children.

Last week I closed with a rural poem by Maurice Manning. As a complement to that, here is a new poem by Dana Gioia lauding a very different kind of place: Los Angeles. "Psalm of the Heights" has three sections. Here's the first one, but click on the title to read all three:

You don’t fall in love with Los Angeles
Until you’ve seen it from a distance after dark.

Up in the heights of the Hollywood Hills
You can mute the sounds and find perspective.

The pulsing anger of the traffic dissipates,
And our swank unmanageable metropolis

Dissolves with all its signage and its sewage—
Until only the radiance remains.

That’s when the City of Angels appears,
Silent and weightless as a dancer’s dream.

The boulevards unfold in brilliant lines.
The freeways flow like shining rivers.

The moving lights stretch into vast
And secret shapes, invisible at street level.

At the horizon, the city rises into sky,
Our demi-galaxy brighter than the zodiac.