News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The summer seems to be winding down. I attended our faculty retreat this week, which is always a good day but also marks the imminent onset of the academic year.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about TikTok democracy, AI parenting, and rooted virtue.
- Nadya Williams reflects on bears in fairy tales and in real life: "What are bears for? Fairy tales offer an answer that seems, on the surface, simple: bears, like other animals in these tales, are for the entertainment and fruitful edification of children."
- Frank Filocomo talks with a TikToker celebrating third places: "Through her series, she is advocating for a kind of Tocquevillian renewal, that is, a call for Americans to actively combat isolation by interacting with and patronizing local mom-and-pop shops and other small businesses."
- J.T. Edelblut sifts through the reasons that "blue zones" have become a popular model among those seeking to live longer lives: "Building community doesn’t map well into the high value we place on choice at the individual level."
- Nathan Mayo challenges us to practice personal generosity: "Some good things can only exist at the person-to-person level. To institutionalize them drains them of their moral power."
- Russell Arben Fox reviews Daniel Wortel-London’s book The Menace of Prosperity: New York City and the Struggle for Economic Development, 1865-1981 and weighs in on the abundance debate: "The wealth of America’s cities are immense; the most important lesson of Wortel-London’s magisterial history is that, if tens of thousands of city residents over the years have seen, in their time and in their particular context, a means to tie that wealth less to elite use and more to abundant employment, why shouldn’t we join those who are continuing to seek to realize, in today’s context, this vision once more?"
- Michial Farmer plays songs about insects this week and reads passages from Jean-Henri Fabre’s Souvenirs entomologiques.
Alan Jacobs’s new book, Paradise Lost: A Biography is a wonderful little book, but I was hoping that Jacobs would devote at least some space to Milton’s reception in America. One of the only American authors Jacobs mentions is Twain, who famously paraphrases an academic to declare that Paradise Lost “meets his definition of a classic—something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Yet Milton was the locus of a republican tradition that understood virtue as the guarantor of liberty and happiness. Margret Fuller claimed that “Milton is more emphatically American than any author who has lived in the United States.” And when John Muir walked across the country after the Civil War, he carried with him a New Testament, the poems of Robert Burns, and Paradise Lost. I did appreciate the way Jacobs begins his last chapter, on Milton’s reception in film and video games and music in the last few decades. He begins by describing some allusions in movies, and then he warns that allusions do not serious engagement make:
We allusion-mongers love these quotes and echoes, and we love to think them important. But they aren’t, not really. They’re fun, but not important, because there’s no genuine engagement with Milton here, with his characters or his story. Neither Bill Crystal’s comically urbane Satan nor Al Pacino’s scenery-chewing histrionic one have anything at all to do with the Satan of Paradise Lost. He’s only useful to provide a line or two to please the people who happened to be paying attention in English literature class.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro