News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
One of the great gifts of school breaks is the opportunity to do plenty of leisurely reading. I enjoy reading for class or a research project, but I can't often find the time to read other books straight through except during breaks.
- Steven Knepper takes heart at the board game renaissance and the opportunities for shared attention and sociability these games provide: "Tabletop games put something in our twitchy, swipe-hungry fingers other than a digital device—a hand of cards, a pair of dice, a plastic Zeus. And since others have put down their phones too, we can look out over those cards into a human face, a present human face."
- Paul James Macrae isn't very impressed with Heather Cox Richardson's new book: "It is an MSNBC segment with pseudo-historical gloss. Billed as a warning to American democracy, it is a simple yet pretentious work that will do nothing to solve the problems bedeviling the nation. No conservatives will read it, and none will be persuaded by its arguments."
- Sarah Silflow expresses hard-won gratitude for the ways that parenting invites self-denial: "What this means is death. When our kids were little, parenting meant death to my independence: my time, my space, my very body, were no longer my own. Parenting meant death to sleeping in and going out on a whim. It meant death to plans carefully wrought and carelessly wrecked by fever and blowouts and ear infections."
- James Decker turns to Wheeler Catlett for guidance regarding how to be a good lawyer: "Neither Wheeler Catlett nor his real-life inspiration John Marshall Berry practiced in the 21st century, but for those of us in the profession who do, their example remains powerful and timeless. We live within a membership of community."
I'm enjoying George Steiner's classic Real Presences. While Steiner's imagined antagonists are certain proponents of deconstruction, his arguments remain quite pertinent in our day of computer-generated text. For Steiner, art involves conveying the presence of another person and, in turn, cultivating our own capacity for presence:
A cultivation of trained, shared remembrance sets a society in natural touch with its own past. What matters even more, it safeguards the core of individuality. What is committed in memory and susceptible of recall constitutes the ballast of the self. The pressures of political exaction, the detergent tide of social conformity, cannot tear it from us. In solitude, public or private, the poem remembered, the score played inside us, are the custodians and remembrancers (another somewhat archaic designation on which my argument will draw) of what is resistant, of what must be kept inviolate in our psyche.
Under censorship and persecution, much of the finest in modern Russian poetry was passed from mouth to mouth and recited inwardly. The indispensable reserves of protest, of authentic record, of irony, in Akhmatova, in Mandelstam and in Pasternak, have been preserved and mutely published in the editions of personal memory.
In our own licensed social systems, learning by heart has been largely erased from secondary schooling and the habits of literacy. The electronic volume and fidelity of the computerized data bank and of processes of automatic retrieval will further weaken the sinews of individual memory. Stimulus and suggestion are of an increasingly mechanical and collective quality. Encountered in easy resort to electronic media of representation, much of music and of literature remains purely external. The distinction is that between ‘consumption’ and ‘ingestion.’ The danger is that the text or music will lose what physics calls ‘critical mass,’ its implosive powers within the echo chamber of the self.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro