News from the Front Porch Republic (copy)
Greetings from the Porch,
It's the time of year when we're busy stocking some of summer's bounty away for the winter: freezing corn and peaches, fermenting pickles, canning salsa and tomato sauce.
- In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about weedkiller, conversation, and data centers.
- Make time to savor Teddy Macker's long, profound meditation on Walt Whitman and the task of healing the wounds of a mangled body politic: "I doff my hat to Mark Twain who once quipped, during another sickly stretch, 'The present era of incredible rottenness is not Democratic, it is not Republican, it is national.' Put differently, we need to address both symptoms and underlying root causes—and the root causes are national. To not address root causes is to worsen the rot. What I would add to Lawrence’s diagnosis (an addition that I will partly explore in this essay) is the problem of our growing political hate: the violence of heart, the society-sponsored prejudice, that is so commonplace, so normalized, so thoroughgoing, and so politically correct (on all sides) as to often be invisible."
- Cole Hartin examines how Karl Ove Knausgaard's novels make visible what we too often overlook: "The right kind of literature has the power to make the immediate visible to us once again. It can do so without resorting to arguments. Rather, this kind of literature can become the arena in which truths we thought we knew (but have stopped being able to see) come into focus."
- Nick Freiling cautions that an endless loop of satire and memes and jokes may not sustain a healthy public discourse: "The Babylon Bee—launched less than a decade ago—has become ubiquitous in the vast (and, for better or worse, high-stakes) world of Christian public dialogue in America. . . . I suppose it’s all a testament to The Bee’s genius. Or perhaps to society’s collapse into self-parody and cynicism. Probably both. But the point is: There is no other openly-religious brand that reaches so many people. Not even close."
- Jessica Burke describes what it's been like for her to raise children on both sides of some kind of digital divide: "When I became a mom nineteen years ago, smartphones didn’t exist. Cartoons were still limited to designated times when they were broadcast on television or to a DVD and its player. . . . By the time my toddler was born two years ago, it was rare for me to see a child in a restaurant who wasn’t watching a cartoon on his own tablet."
- Robert Corban argues James Scott should be remembered as an agrarian: "It is perhaps still predictable that commentators would neglect the peasantism, agrarianism, or critique of big ag for the anarchism, libertarianism, or the broader critique of the state in Seeing, Moral Economy, and more recent books like Against the Grain, but to do so is to miss a crucial part of that broader critique and, I would argue, the whole of the work of Scott."
- Michial Farmer plays songs about restlessness. This is a great episode and on a very Porchy theme, so if you haven't yet checked out Michael's podcast(?)/radio show(?)/musical rumination(?) start here.
I picked up a copy of Jon Fosse’s Septology last summer at the Regent College bookstore (which is remarkably well curated). It’s a fat book, but I’d heard great things about this Catholic, Norwegian, Nobel-Prize winning author. And wow was I glad to sit with it over the summer. What a book. In some ways, Fosse’s mystical narrative reminds me of my favorite Nordic books: George Mackay Brown's wonderful Magnus and Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Fosse’s style takes some getting used to—there are no sentence breaks—but it’s quite readable once you get started, and Asle’s meditations on art, friendship, providence, and place are framed and ordered by his devoted and doubt-haunted prayers. I’m not sure I’ve read a more beautiful account of Christ’s nativity:
the one thing that makes Christmas bearable, other than going to mass on Christmas Day at St Paul's Church in Bjorgvin, and other than painting of course, yes, the one thing that makes Christmas bearable is thinking about a young man and a young woman in love, yes, a little like Ales and I once were, it's just that we never had children, it just never worked out, no, I can't think about Ales, I think, it's too terrible, I'd rather think about a young woman with child and a young man in love with her even though he's not the father of her child, the two of them are the only ones in the world, and he, the young man, is thinking that the young woman makes him so happy that even though he isn't the father of the child she's carrying he has to help her, they have to find a place where she can give birth, the young man thinks, and then the two of them, the man and the woman, go off to find a place somewhere and someone who can help, but as they're walking it starts to rip and tear inside the young woman's body and then they're at a farm, they go up and knock on the door but no one opens up, so either there's no one home or else no one wants to open the door for them, but the house is dark so probably there's no one there, so they go into the hay barn, there are some cows in the stalls, some sheep walking around in the main part of the barn, and it's probably the heat that the animals are giving off that makes it less cold in the barn than it is outside, so the girl lies down in the straw and there she gives birth to a baby and she says that an angel has told her she would give birth to a babdy boy so it must be a boy, she says, and she says that the angel told her not to be scared because God was with her and the young man sees that a light is coming from the child, an incomprehensibly beautiful light, and the young woman takes her breast and she gives it to the baby and the boy falls silent, and he sucks, he sucks, the young man thinks, and everything about it is unbelievable because there's such a strange light shining from the baby lying there at the young woman's breast, then she looks up at the young man and she smiles at him and the young man thinks that this, this light, no, he can't understand it, because this light from the child in the darkness, in the dark barn, no, it's impossible to understand, he thinks
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro