News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
Our apple trees and new blueberry bushes are in full bloom, so I’m hoping we don’t get another hard frost.
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In this week’s Water Dipper I recommend essays about AGI, hiddenness, and grace.
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Keturah Lamb shares her vision for capable hospitality and her hopes for equipping others who aspire to this vision: “It is daunting to envision running a pleasant, blessed household. This is why we’re not meant to do it alone. Women are meant to flock together, with their words and their hands, to keep one another safe and to make the world more joyful.”
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Davin Heckman warns about the way ChatGPT may alter our informational commons: “AI is the culmination of an ideological fantasy of elite control, woven into the very infrastructure of commonplace media technologies. When it gets used to talking to us, we may get used to talking to it, and at that moment, the legacy of human culture is at risk.”
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Rachel Hicks articulates what she’s found so encouraging in Czeslaw Milosz’s poetic response to his experiences of exile: “Exile exacts a toll on the mind, body, and spirit. To carry always the weight of not belonging, of not being “native,” of not being able to return home, or not to be able to call anywhere on this earth home—it is a low burn, an irritant.”
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Elizabeth Stice explains why she’s become obsessed with payphones and how noticing these relics changes her relationship to her surroundings: “The value in seeing payphones is the way it develops a practice of seeing. So often we are driving or walking down streets, unaware of what serves us no purpose or where we aren’t heading. Looking for things forces you to notice things. Sometimes it will cause you to turn around and drive back to some spot you never would have seen if you weren’t watching so closely.”
Barbara Kingsolver’s new book Demon Copperhead is a coming-of-age novel that follows Damon—or Demon—as he grows up in a disintegrating family and community in Southern Appalachia. Opioid addiction, coal mining, high school football, youthful dreams, and hard-won wisdom all come out in Demon’s distinctive idiom:
Now I know, if you finish high school that’s supposed to be a step up, moneywise. College is another step up, but with a major downside: for the type of job college gets you, most likely you’ll end up having to live far away from home, and in a city. My point though is the totem pole of paychecks, with school as one thing that gets you up there, and another one being where you live, country or city. But the main thing is, whatever you’re doing, who is it making happy? Are you selling the cheapest-ass shoes imaginable to Walmart shoppers, or high-class suits to business guys? Even the same exact work, like sanding floors, could be at the Dollar General or a movie star mansion. Show me your paycheck, I’ll make a guess which floor. If you are making a rich person happy, or a regular person feel rich, aka better than other people, the money rolls. If it’s lowlifes you’re looking after, not so much. And if it’s kids, good luck, because anything to do with improving the life of a child is on the bottom. Schoolteacher pay is for the most part in the toilet.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro