News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
We've opened up registration for our fall conference on Civility and its Discontents. Ross Douthat will be part of a public conversation Friday evening and give a keynote talk on Saturday, and we are finalizing a lineup of thoughtful speakers (Nathan Beacom, Elizabeth Corey, the inimitable Bill Kauffman, and more). We're also building a bit of elbow room into this year's schedule to ensure we have more time for conversation between sessions. It would be great to see many of you in Grand Rapids this October.
Also, I'm logging off email and internet for a few weeks, so this newsletter will be on hiatus until the second week in August. But my fine compatriots at FPR will continue publishing new essays four or five days a week while I'm away, and we have some really good ones on tap (the history of kindergarten, the joys of fireworks, the uses of scotch tape, the missteps of the Chicago Manual of Style, and much more).
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about motherhood, rural decline, and Phoenix.
- Austin Hoffman compares digital tech to a mouse trap: "AI and algorithm-based media are more like human mousetraps. If you are exceptionally clever or skilled, they can provide you with food, free from labor, but more often than not, they will kill you. And your death is the intended function. These tools are not amoral instruments for good or ill. They have an intended design: to keep you trapped, hooked, glued, addicted."
- Paul Schweigl commends the life of Fatty Bolger, one of the seemingly minor characters in the Lord of the Rings: "Like most hobbits and even a few people, Fredegar had a real commitment to the local. It is tempting to try to save the world, but there are demons at the village gates, too. These grassroots level terrors are perhaps mere deputies of the boss villains, but their sting is devastating, nonetheless. Critiques of the current pontificate/presidency/zeitgeist/global cause du jour can be fascinating, but our neighborhoods, parishes, and even our bowling leagues appear to be in sadder shape than they used to be."
- Travis Jarrett considers the value of little league softball: "There is almost inevitably some moment now during games that I find myself, hands on knees (I never sit during softball), just taking in the scene around me. Parents are chatting with each other about the girls, about the umps (who have “obviously” missed some call), about their lives, or about any other number of things that appear in similar and equal fashion both mundane and poignant. . . . A landscape rife with playful competitiveness and honest leisure. And it always strikes me, somewhere beyond the scoreboard, of how important this all is."
- David Bannon reflects on how Emerson responded to the death of his beloved son: "Emerson has no control over his grief—his love—for Wallie, however much he might hope otherwise. Sorrow and death do not benefit us, he suggests, they do not bother with us at all. They are simply part of life, inextricably linked and absolute, carrying him not 'one step into real nature.'"
Alan Jacobs and I are apparently reading the same Anthony Trollope novel right now. Doctor Thorne is certainly a good read, and it's full of Trollope's trademark insight and wit. While Jacobs rightly notes Trollope's attention to the power of money, I've been struck in my reading by Trollope's delightful evisceration of British economics and politics. In this passage, Trollope imagines a conversation in which an up-to-date man tries to convince a small-town yokel that the rapid technological improvements of the industrial revolution have been good for him:
Come, my friend, and discourse with me. Let us know what are thy ideas of the inestimable benefits which science has conferred on us in these, our latter days. How dost thou, among others, appreciate railways and the power of steam, telegraphs, telegrams, and our new expresses? But indifferently, you say. "Time was I've zeed vifteen pair o' 'osses go out of this 'ere yard in vour-and-twenty hour; and now there be'ant vifteen, no, not ten, in vour-and-twenty days! There was the duik—not this 'un; he be'ant no gude; but this 'un's vather—why, when he'd come down the road, the cattle did be a-going, vour days an eend. Here'd be the tooter and the young gen'lmen, and the governess and the young leddies, and then the servants—they'd be al'ays the grandest folk of all—and then the duik and the doochess—Lord love 'ee, zur; the money did fly in them days! But now—" and the feeling of scorn and contempt which the lame ostler was enabled by his native talent to throw into the word "now," was quite as eloquent against the power of steam as anything that has been spoken at dinners, or written in pamphlets by the keenest admirers of latter-day lights.
"Why, luke at this 'ere town," continued he of the sieve, "the grass be a-growing in the very streets;—that can't be no gude. Why, luke 'ee here, zur; I do be a-standing at this 'ere gateway, just this way, hour arter hour, and my heyes is hopen mostly;—I zees who's a-coming and who's a-going. Nobody's a-coming and nobody's a-going; that can't be no gude. Luke at that there homnibus; why, darn me—" and now, in his eloquence at this peculiar point, my friend became more loud and powerful than ever—"why, darn me, if maister harns enough with that there bus to put hiron on them 'osses' feet, I'll—be—blowed!" And as he uttered this hypothetical denunciation on himself he spoke very slowly, bringing out every word as it were separately, and lowering himself at his knees at every sound, moving at the same time his right hand up and down. When he had finished, he fixed his eyes upon the ground, pointing downwards, as if there was to be the site of his doom if the curse that he had called down upon himself should ever come to pass; and then, waiting no further converse, he hobbled away, melancholy, to his deserted stables.
Oh, my friend! my poor lame friend! it will avail nothing to tell thee of Liverpool and Manchester; of the glories of Glasgow, with her flourishing banks; of London, with its third millions of inhabitants; of the great things which commerce is doing for this nation of thine! What is commerce to thee, unless it be commerce in posting on that worn-out, all but useless great western turnpike-road? There is nothing left for thee but to be carted away as rubbish—for thee and for many of us in these now prosperous days; oh, my melancholy, care-ridden friend!
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro