News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The fall issue of Local Culture is in production and should be on its way to subscribers early next week. Thanks to all of you who subscribe and read along. When we launched this journal three years ago, we weren't sure how many folks would be interested, but we now have over one thousand subscribers, and that number continues to rise.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays on important elections, art vandals, and going home.
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Adam Smith visits the College of St. Joseph the Worker, a new institution in Steubenville, OH that combines a trade school with a liberal arts core. Smith also reflects more broadly on the opportunities for institution building: "Porchers are the type of people who notice institutionalization and despise it. It’s easy for us to get so romantic about practices and so cynical about institutions that we shun the work of building and maintaining them. This is a serious mistake, one I’ve made for too long."
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In this excerpt from their new book, Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen recommend that we jettison the identity of "consumer": "Freeing ourselves from the corrosive Consumer identity isn’t an individual task, but a call for system change rings hollow if we are afraid of personal change. How can we imagine a world beyond the Consumer if we can’t talk about our experiences of consuming and acknowledge that down-powering will not be easy?"
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Russell Arben Fox reports from the recent Prairie Festival held at the Land Institute and explores the contrasts and parallels between Wes Jackson's work and that of his friend Wendell Berry.
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Ashley Colby questions the strategy some follow of maximizing their earnings and retiring young: "What is the goal of life? Cultural messaging has tricked many of us into thinking it is wealth and status, or career advancement. For us, it is the project of our marriage, our family, friends, and the good we can do in the world."
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John Murdock talks with FPR president Mark Mitchell about this history of FPR, his new book, and the value of productive private property.
I'm teaching Moby-Dick in an American literature course right now, and I always relish the opportunity to re-read Melville's great novel and introduce it to another group of students. I was particularly struck by Ishmael's description of the social-media-less joys of standing watch on the masthead (though he's well aware that other dangers tempt meditative sailors):
The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes. There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner—for all your meals for three years and more are snugly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro