News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
This week the group Kittle and Co performed in Grove City. They are talented musicians, and I particularly enjoyed watching Simon Chrisman work his magic on the hammered dulcimer.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on slime mold, memorization, and forests.
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Geoffrey Kurtz reviews Jedediah Purdy’s Two Cheers for Politics and probes a tension at the heart of his argument for democracy: “Beyond tribalism and hyperindividualism, Purdy writes, lies the prospect of ‘civic virtue.’ Civic virtue, it turns out, is indispensable to his democratic vision. Yet his official theory denies him the means of exploring citizens’ inner lives, leaving him with almost nothing to say about how civic virtue might be fostered.”
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Elizabeth Stice commends the localist impulse that Wildsam field guides tap into and encourage: “The success of Wildsam is a reminder that many people want to experience the real. Every day we are marketed generic and homogenous products and destinations, but there is an audience for something different.”
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Seth Wieck praises Dana Gioia’s new collection of poetry and identifies the poet, now in his early seventies, as “the Virgil-of-Dante, or the Sibyl-of-Virgil, guiding us through the afterlife to find spiritual meaning in our living.”
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David Heddendorf reflects on the extra-curricular lessons he learned from his time in graduate school: “Temperamentally and vocationally, I was in the wrong place. Yet I don’t regret a single day I spent there—not only because I met my wife, but because I learned to relish a simple, quiet way of living that many around us seem anxious to exceed.”
David Heddendorf may not have learned how to be a “good” academic in grad school, but somewhere along the line he learned how to tell a good story. Some years ago, after reading some of his essays, I picked up Meridian Stories, a delightful collection of short stories set in a small Iowa town. More recently, he published The Wrestler, a coming of age novel set in rural Pennsylvania that explores the drama of faith with deft insight and psychological and spiritual wisdom. Now I’m caught in the spell of his new novel, The Terra Cotta Camel. David imagines compelling characters and stages their conversations and development in ways that draw this reader at least into their lives. As a taste, here is the scene where one of the characters is given the titular terra cotta camel by his grandson while his son and daughter-in-law look on:
Had she guessed what it meant to him? He could only nod, his elation subsiding into something like shame. When he tried to slip the camel back into Alec’s hand and change the subject, the boy beat his fists against his grandfather’s leg. “No! No! No! It’s yours, Grandpa! It’s yours!” He kept pressing the thing into Drew’s palm until Drew closed his fist and dropped the figure into his pocket.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that Max had been mocking him, scorning an old man’s nostalgia for a recovered relic. Max was one of those tough-minded, unsentimental types, “nones” they called them now. No religion to speak of, just science, an open mind, maybe a whiff of what something they called spirituality. They were absolutely convinced that absolute creeds were stifling and irrelevant, and they harbored tender feelings for polar bears. With so many devices and so much data, such a blizzard of talk and tunes and breaking news, they really believed they’d laid hold of everything there was. The world consisted of what they could post and share. The universe dwelt inside their phones.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro