News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
The video recordings of the conference sessions are now available. We'll be releasing the audio versions on the Brass Spittoon podcast soon. Also, we have a few people interested in hosting local "porches" or gatherings of FPR readers. If you want to add your name and email to this list, just let me know.
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In this week's Water Dipper, I recommend essays about chalk, fungi, and goldenrod.
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Carla Galdo reviews David Kline’s Great Possessions: An Amish Farmer’s Journal and articulates the unquantifiable value of a caring community: "It took a crisis for me to take deeper delight in my own community; to relish the people, both local and far-flung, who care for my family and who bear us up, much like the Amish bear one another up in times of need."
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Andrew Skabelund diagnoses the particular forms that modernity's ills tend to take: "Modernity has become permanently liquid; it no longer seeks solid replacements to the pre-modern world but finds greater value in transience, not just of institutions and things, but of human relationships too."
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Carter Johnson meditates on Henry Bugbee and fly fishing: "We can never ossify the world because it is always moving and changing like the river. Yet we can open ourselves to this ever fluctuating movement. This is manifested in the moment when the angler, fly, and fish are suspended together, held as with the fragile tension of water molecules. This is that something."
I had the chance this week to visit a class that my friend Richard Bailey is teaching on Wendell Berry. (Richard also took me steelheading, which was incredible.) It's always a treat to listen to the questions and responses that student have when encountering Berry's ideas and arguments for the first time. I also got to re-read some excellent essays, including "An Argument for Diversity," in which Berry proposes a law linking the scale of work to its quality:
If we wish to make the best use of people, places, and things, then we are going to have to deal with a law that reads about like this: as the quality of use increases, the scale of use (that is, the size of operations) will decline, the tools will become simpler, and the methods and the skills will become more complex. That is a difficult law for us to believe, because we have assumed otherwise for a long time, and yet our experience overwhelmingly suggests that it is a law, and that the penalties for disobeying it are severe.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro