News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I'm getting reports that subscribers are receiving the current issue of Local Culture in their mailboxes. Our printer had some delays with this one, but I'm glad to hear it's now arriving in readers' hands. Enjoy!
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about math, antitrust, and work.
- Art Kusserow remembers his father's life and the relationships that defined it: "I am in my 72nd year of life; the same age he was when he died in 1990. Men often reflect on their relationship with their fathers during these coincidences of milestones; a similar thing often happens when a son reaches the age his father was when the son was born."
- David Bannon considers how grief for the death of his loved ones shaped Lincoln's life and his work as a national leader: "[At Gettysburg] the president spoke no more than three minutes, his high Kentucky tenor easily carrying to the closest of the twenty thousand spectators. As with his views on emancipation, the president’s thoughts on American national purpose had for years been leading up to this point. Still, even today we are stunned by his compassion and resolve. Lincoln’s search for meaning had raised him to new heights of eloquence."
- John Mac Ghlionn suggests that 3D printing is not--at least not yet--the solution for the nation's housing woes: "As rents skyrocket and homeownership becomes increasingly out of reach for many, urgent action is required. To address this crisis, a multipronged approach, encompassing both short-term interventions and long-term structural reforms, is necessary."
- Nadya Williams reviews Jarosław Marek Rymkiewicz's memoir and reflects on how a childhood marked by trauma and loss might be salvaged by artistic memory: "It seems that we can feel nostalgia even for a childhood defined by trauma, war, the unspeakable. The sounds of childhood in hindsight are precious simply because they were the soundtrack of our formative years."
- Lucas Nossaman mulls the questions raised by Ethan Mannon's The Georgic Mode in Twentieth-Century American Literature: The Satisfactions of Soil and Sweat: "Do we love the soil and the creatures put in our stead, or do we prefer the images our devices project at us? While the choice is not always so cut and dry, Mannon’s book can help us begin to retool our imaginations and ennoble common labor again."
We ran Lucas Nossaman's review of Ethan Mannon's new book this week, and I've been enjoying it myself in recent days. Mannon writes thoughtfully and cogently about how various American authors--Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, Willa Cather, Louis Bromfield, and others--imagine healthy modes of working on and with the land. His chapter on Cather, for instance, draws on several of her novels to think through the benefits--but also the potential dangers--of preserving some landscapes as National Parks:
Indeed, The Professor's House raises the entire suite of questions about national parks: to whom do they belong? how should they be protected? how accessible should they be for visitors? The paradoxes Tom experiences--his reticence to "expose those beautiful and silent places to vulgar curiosity," coupled with his knowledge that, in the end, their protection depended upon such exposure (to, in this case, the Smithsonian) and "vulgar" consumption by visitors--is exactly the conundrum answered (however imperfectly) by the National Parks Movement.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro