News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
When this newsletter hits inboxes, I should be in Waco for the FPR conference. I'm looking forward to good conversations with many Porchers there!
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Oliver Anthony, Paul Kingsnorth, and Marce Catlett.
- Nishon Schick confesses that for many years she was a bad neighbor, but she also describes how she learned to be a better one: "[My neighbors] were friendly in a way I could not understand. They invited me to sit on the porch with them and the other neighbors who lived on our block. They offered to fill the empty beds in front of my apartment with flowers. Without asking, they filled our shared porch with plants in beautiful stone pots. I didn’t know how to respond to any of this, so instead I started to avoid them. I stayed inside if I heard them out front. I kept my head down if I did have to leave my house. Eventually I moved again."
- Stephen Schuler reviews Alan Jacobs's new biography of Paradise Lost: "For anyone who endeavors to read or teach Paradise Lost for the first time, I could hardly imagine a better single-volume guide to the work’s author, context, themes, and significance."
- Emily Ruddy reflects on a road trip, Charlie Kirk's murder, and her own tendency to dwell too much in a screen world: "Returning home on any other evening, I might have noticed the gold leaf edges of the icons on the shelf smoldering from the sun through the window."
- Alex Sosler isn't ready to hop aboard the AI train: "Well, I’m okay getting off the train. That’s an option, too, right? We don’t have to ride along if we take a look ahead and see the train is heading off a cliff."
- Michial Farmer listens to songs about music, and shares quite the story about his father.
A friend loaned me a copy of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, and I can now see why it’s such a popular novel. I certainly haven’t read a novel that is so pervasively ekphrastic, and her ability to transmute the style of the painting that’s at the center of her story into prose is remarkable. The narration reproduces the painting’s trompe l’oeil effects, and the book feels both entrapped and luminous. The protagonist’s account of his sorrow after his mother’s death conveys these twinned tones well:
Better wasn’t even the word for how I felt. There wasn’t a word for it. It was more that things too small to mention—laughter in the hall at school, a live gecko scurrying in a tank in the science lab—made me feel happy one moment and the next like crying. Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of the wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry-out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live. For weeks, I’d been frozen, sealed-off; now, in the shower, I would turn up the water as hard as it would go and howl, silently. Everything was raw and painful and confusing and wrong and yet it was as if I’d been dragged from freezing water through a break in the ice, into sun and blazing cold.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro