News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Last weekend I was in Lexington, KY to give a talk and somehow found myself in the middle of a traffic jam with thousands of well-dressed people trying to get into Keeneland for the Breeders’ Cup. That was as close as I got to the horse racing, but it was still quite the cultural experience.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays on Wendell Berry, Ronald Blythe, and oat milk. I also reflect a bit on the reception thus far of Berry’s Need to Be Whole.
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Russell Arben Fox commends John de Graaf’s new film on Stewart Udall and his politics of beauty: “Udall was a person capable of changing his mind—about the postwar passion for dam-building, most prominently—and of growing and rethinking as the years went by.”
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Seth Higgins picks two tools–chopsticks and lug wrenches–and ponders their cultural significance: ” Semiotic tools are inevitable in an American economy that is increasingly segregated between those whose work is dependent on process and those who focus on outcome.”
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Ethan Mannon reviews Wendell Berry’s new collection of short stories, How it Went: ” He has never chased the new or tried to be avant-garde. Even in the physical act of writing, he has famously resisted the ‘advantages’ of a personal computer and has opted instead to continue using the older technologies of pencil and paper. Though How It Went is technically a new book from Berry, the stories are pleasingly familiar.”
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Geoffrey Kurtz draws on Leszek Kolakowski to look beneath some of our political labels: “The mark by which we recognize a rightly ordered way of thinking about politics, it seems to me, is that such a way of thinking should recall us to the fact that we are, and that we receive, gifts.”
I recently wrapped up a draft of a book chapter on Emily Dickinson’s poetry. In particular, I focused on her worries that the industrial print economy and culture would inevitably commodify her if she pursued publication. Her articulation of these concerns, and the alternative forms she found to share her poems, remain fascinating and inspiring. I’ll leave you with one poem in which she articulates her limited and humble aspirations:
If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one PainOr help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in vain.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro