News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
As promised, John Murdock has released both of Paul Kingsnorth's conference talks via the Brass Spittoon podcast. Stay tuned for the audio versions of the panels as well.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about Michigan, Las Vegas, and Willa Cather.
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Elizabeth Stice takes stock of the new periodical County Highway: "County Highway is not county-specific. It’s for all of America outside major cities. Well, outside of New York and Los Angeles, for sure. In the second issue, there’s a piece about unions in Las Vegas. Another “outsider” voice comes from Miami, though he travels to Puerto Rico. It’s “the rest of America,” but it’s not necessarily rural America, despite the squirrel recipe. There’s Taylor Swift and pro wrestling rather than who was seen at Bemelmans Bar, but you’re not going to come away enlightened about Iowa or Nebraska, or anywhere in particular."
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Frank DeVito assesses Jay Gatsby's yearning for ultimate meaning: "Gatsby’s character yearns for the infinite; he sparkles with something unusual in the midst of the lavish wealth and chaotic parties of Long Island’s frivolities. Gatsby has 'one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it . . . it faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.'"
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Richard Bailey reviews a new biography of Fannie Lou Hamer: "Like Bob Dylan, Hamer’s life was marked by protest and songs of protest. Her protests, however, grew from her personal experience on the ground in Mississippi. Kate Clifford Larson’s Walk With Me demonstrates this rootedness in the local and Hamer’s commitment to place in meaningful ways."
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Mark Botts recalls his childhood experiences with his church youth group: "The children’s pastor made his point about who was serious or not when it came to serving God. He could have closed the service, and I would have been out of time to change my mind and stand before my peers as one who loved God, so I don’t know what compelled him to do what he did next. Maybe he was tired of working with kids."
One of the joys of teaching nineteenth-century American literature each fall is the opportunity I have to re-read Moby-Dick. Melville's sprawling masterpiece never fails to draw me into its rollicking drama and comedy. This time, I noticed in particular Melville's repeated considerations of our often self-justifying and contradictory moral scruples. Not that such hypocrisy is something humans continue to succumb to, of course.
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy paté-de-foie-gras.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult to injury, is it? Look at your knife-handle, there, my civilized and enlightened gourmand dining off that roast beef, what is that handle made of?—what but the bones of the brother of the very ox you are eating? And what do you pick your teeth with, after devouring that fat goose? With a feather of the same fowl. And with what quill did the Secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Cruelty to Ganders formally indite his circulars? It is only within the last month or two that that society passed a resolution to patronize nothing but steel pens.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro