News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm preparing to head to Westmont College for a conference on the liberal arts, so I likely won't have time to compile a Water Dipper next week. After the conference concludes, we plan to spend a few days hiking in Joshua Tree National Park before returning home. I'm looking forward to the break from house repair.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays on hedgerows, bird flu, and truckers.
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Christian McNamara reviews Nicholas Dawidoff's The Other Side of Prospect and tries to make sense of what a loss of economic opportunity does to a place and its people:
With so many people in Newhallville out of work, the ecosystem of “breakfast counters and taverns, barber and dress shops, the doctor’s and dentist’s offices” that Winchester paychecks had previously supported dried up. Residents went from not locking their doors to chaining their front hoods shut to prevent the theft of car batteries. Substance abuse and the drug trade that feeds off it took hold. By the time Winchester finally shuttered its factory for good, crack cocaine had become “a third manufacturing boom in Newhallville, a predatory successor to carriages and rifles.” In the cruelest irony of all, the withdrawal of an iconic American firearms manufacturer resulted in an explosion of gun violence.
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Casie Dodd praises Sally Thomas's new novel Works of Mercy: "Thomas’s novel suggests that those who would answer ... difficult vocations well must learn to look through the pain and see the light shining through."
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Dixie Dillon Lane commends children who act a bit like mountain goats: "We should not reject the good fruits of our modern era, but let us also not neglect the good it does young bodies and minds to run up and down the cliffs, to have a mountain to rest the eyes against, and to sometimes simply be outside without parental interference."
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Elizabeth Stice draws on Cheap Land Colorado to find lessons for how we might support off-the-grid modes of life: "Reading Cheap Land Colorado makes you wonder how we can make more space for human flourishing among the poor and on the edges of society? Conover’s approach to the San Luis Valley might offer us a starting point."
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Alan Cornett talks with Holly Ordway about her new book, and they "discuss the value of literature, receiving vs using stories, why reading fiction can be a dangerous act, and why so much modern Christian art is so bad."
While painting the newly installed drywall in our house this week, I listened to Annie Dillard's An American Childhood. Dillard grew up in Pittsburgh and later moved to Washington (my own life has mirrored this migration), and I enjoyed her descriptions of this region of the country. Of course her prose is always invigorating and surprising. Since spring training began this week, maybe it's fitting to quote this passage on how she played baseball as a girl:
I pitched in a blind fever of concentration. I pitched, as I did most things, in order to concentrate. Why do elephants drink? To forget. I loved living at my own edge, as an explorer on a ship presses to the ocean's rim; mind and skin were one joined force curved out and alert, prow and telescope. I pitched, as I did most things, in a rapture.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro