News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Spring is in full swing here in Michigan. Our buttercups and snow drops have bloomed, and now the daffodils are in their full glory and the tulips are close behind. The sandhill cranes with their incredible calls are back as well.
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In my weekly Water Dipper, I recommend essays about pesticides, Current, and robot overlords.
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Christine Norvell probes the dynamics of telling readers that a book is bad: “Do readers get to decide for themselves, or have they been conditioned to believe a book should be labeled and judged by someone else, as my student did?” Huck Finn in particular proves a fruitful book to consider in this respect.
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Michial Farmer considers Italio Calvino’s Leonia–one of the places in Invisible Cities–and sees “a distorted reflection of Western society circa 2021, chasing fast on the heels of the future but unable to escape the past that is never not in pursuit of it.” Drawing on this fictional city, Farmer reflects on how we should bear the weight of history.
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Seth Wieck pays tribute to Larry McMurtry and situates him in relation to his teacher Wallace Stegner and some of his fellow writers from the Stanford MFA program. Despite his demythologising efforts, he retained an affection for Texans: “McMurtry couldn’t quite set the Bowie knife to the scalp of the Western like Cormac McCarthy did the same year, maybe because he knew those people weren’t grotesque caricatures; they were people he’d known and loved. And when he died last week, he was probably the last person in Archer City who had any connection to those people at all.”
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Matt Stewart interviews Gracy Olmstead for the Brass Spittoon. They talk about Wallace Stegner and the tensions surrounding place. Olmstead concludes with a word of wisdom: “above all else, I think the calling should be to live well and faithfully wherever you are—and hopefully, if you’re able, to live there for a long time, so that long attentiveness and presence in place enable you to truly see, understand, and address local needs in a deep and lasting way.”
What’s on the docket for next week? Another consideration of Larry McMurtry’s literary legacy, a review of David Cayley’s new intellectual biography of Ivan Illich, an example of how to make the classroom device free, and an essay arguing that Lockean liberals should make common cause with Porchers.
I’ve been enjoying the essays collected in The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map in recent weeks. Here is an excerpt from “Every Tool Shapes the Task: Communities and the Information Highway”:
You may ask, “What should we do? We live in this world. The Internet obviously has great potential. How should an organization conduct itself?” First of all, I think we have to remember that every tool shapes the task. When you get a new tool, it affects your task. It might be a trivial tool in the kitchen; if someone gives you one of those machines that slice and dice, you suddenly find yourself slicing and dicing instead of using your old recipes. Does anyone here know what an electronic microscope does to a research group? Suddenly everything has to be observed at two thousand magnifications because you now have this expensive beast.
Be mindful of how tools shape your tasks. You will only find out when you learn about the tool. Learn about the Internet, but keep your head clear and refer back to your goals. What, in the best of all worlds, do you want to do? Do any of the applications of your new electronic microscope bring you closer to your goal? When do you need to go back to traditional tools: talking to people face to face, meeting with groups, organizing a potluck? Can you recognize the moment when the intangibles of the potluck far outweigh the elegance of an electronic message? Because in the end, what we are all concerned about is people.