News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
There's no Water Dipper this week, but I've read two books for fun, completed an essay, and begun drafting another. Maybe I need to take breaks from "the discourse"--even in its thoughtful manifestations--more often.
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Doug Sikkema interviews three scholars--Paul Kemeny, Richard Gamble, and Ben Faber--about the long history of social restrictions on public discourse. By studying other fraught moments in history where questions about communication and censorship, politics and propaganda, freedom and government intervention came to a head, we might gain the wisdom needed to address these issues in our own contexts.
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Richard Bailey remembers the life and writings of Ed McClanahan--aka Captain Kentucky, a Merry Prankster, and one of the state's literary "Fab Five" (whose other members include Wendell Berry, James Baker Hall, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Gurney Norman). As Bailey concludes, "Immortality might not last forever. But I contend that Ed will—through his words and through the lives of those he touched with his generosity and his grace. All of which leads, to a simple blessing, a benediction. 'Oh, wow.'"
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Austin Jepsky draws on the thinking of Ralph Adams Cram to compare two small cities. Neither Columbiana nor Sewickley perfectly realize the role of Cram’s ideal walled town, but Sewickley comes much closer. While not perfect, it offers a real-world example of an economically vibrant, urban community.
This week I had the opportunity to teach several stories from Jhumpa Lahiri's beautiful collection titled Unaccustomed Earth. Many of these stories explore the psychological and cultural challenges that immigrants face. In the final story, one character, a second generation Indian immigrant, whose mother died when he was a teen and who subsequently retreated into a life of a cosmopolitan, nomadic photojournalist, reflects on the human need for place:
He was reminded of his family's moves every time he visited another refugee camp, every time he watched a family combing through rubble for their possessions. In the end, that was life: a few plates, a favorite comb, a pair of slippers, a child's string of beads. He wanted to believe that he was different, that in ten minutes he could be on his way to anywhere in the world. But he knew that it was impossible, wherever he landed, not to form attachments. He would miss the short, tinted wine glasses in his Trastevere cupboards, the shrinking trapezoid of sunlight cast on his bed in the afternoons. And he knew that in his own way, with his camera, he was dependent on the material world, stealing from it, hoarding it, unwilling to let it go.