News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Our first week in Italy has been a rich one. Our departure was rather harried, however, because we discovered a burst and leaking pipe in our house when we returned home from visiting family for Christmas. As it turns out, water can cause a lot of damage, and we’ll be dealing with the aftermath of this for some months to come. But we were able to get the clean up started in our home before leaving with the students for Rome. Now that we’re here, we’re trying to enjoy the good food, important conversations, and remarkable history.
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Hans Zeiger describes what he learned by crafting a history of his town’s involvement in World War II: “Among the many lessons of this search, I learned we must know the particular stories of America—we cannot know it merely in the abstract; we must find it out in the real places where we live and where people have lived before us, and where they will live after us.”
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Dan Rattelle commends Renee Emerson’s new book of poems: “Nature is never pure in these poems; it is always responding to human care or lack-of-care, commodified, and, indeed, turned into a symbol by the poet herself. Emerson doesn’t hide the grief that haunts this book; it is about the death of a child.”
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Jeffrey Whittaker praises the literary imagination of Susanna Clarke: “We taste myth when we read Piranesi, because in the story, like in Barfield’s exploration of how the meaning of words changes over time, we are taken out of our modern sensibilities (if only for a moment), and thrust into an ancient mode of thinking.”
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Elizabeth Stice probes the encouraging desires for place and the outdoors that a company like Huckberry taps into and fosters: “Huckberry’s success speaks to a desire for adventure and relationship with the land within the American public. People want to go backpacking and hiking and ride their motorcycles across the vast expanses of these United States, or at least they think they do.”
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John Murdock introduces the Health panel from our fall After Virtual conference to podcast listeners. Adam Smith and Brian Volck discuss how we might pursue health in the midst of a medical industrial complex oriented toward other goals.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro