This Week's Miscellany (03/05/24)
When your kids like the stuff you like (or not!), Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, dandelions, potted plants, and a mother's intellectual life
Hi, I’m Haley! Book midwife (editor) and author. Hello to new subscribers and welcome all to another edition of This Week’s Miscellany. TWM is full of my favorite things from around the web, typically trending literary.
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I want to thank you all for the well-wishes and promises of prayers for my upcoming surgery. I shared the whole medical saga last week if you missed it.
Living in Florida has its drawbacks (hurricanes, alligators, giant bugs of all sorts, oppressive heat and humidity, urban sprawl, really bad 1970s architecture) but March isn’t one of them. Remind me in August when I have my annual “I’m moving to the Outer Hebrides!” meltdown that the past four months have been glorious weather and that the spring flowers are a wonder. Because they truly are.
My teenager was in his first musical this weekend! Alice by Heart (by the creators of Spring Awakening) is a newish lesser-known show set in 1941 in a London tube station during the blitz. Alice’s best friend Alfred is dying of tuberculosis and they re-enter the world of their favorite childhood book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to process their grief. It’s sad and beautiful and the kids were fantastic.
While I often fantasize about moving somewhere with more charm and historic beauty (and walkability! and trains!), it’s hard to put a price tag on having roots somewhere. The performing arts were where I found my community in middle school and high school. Daniel used to bring me food between musical rehearsals and we’d sit in the parking lot of the high school auditorium. Now our son is the one on the stage being mentored by the same choral director who mentored me. It’s just…well, it’s pretty special.
Having your children develop interests in the same things you love isn’t a guarantee, of course. Children aren’t accessories. They’re their own people with their own interests, talents, and preferences! The same son who has turned into a theatre kid over the past year is also a gamer—something I have absolutely no interest in. I have negative interest in video games. But I’ve had thousands upon thousands of conversations about gaming because it’s important to him. There is no formula for getting your kids to turn out a certain way. They might not like the things you like or value the things you value. (This is true of my kids! They are not little mini-Haleys or mini-Daniels. They are decidedly themselves with all the challenges that entails!)
So admittedly, there is only so much you can control as a parent, but surely one of the very best things about having kids is getting to share with a new human being about what matters to you, about what you love. I’ve been taking my kids to the ballet and to plays and musicals and concerts for years because I love these things! And because it’s part of our family culture, they have an appreciation for the arts, too.
As a parent you get to read your favorite books aloud, share your favorite movies, take your kids to your favorite places. It is a joy! And it is a gift to them. There is a trend to focus on kid-specific experiences and entertainment. That’s not all bad, of course. Children deserve things of good quality designed for them (ahem, Bluey). But if you have a large family, you could be in kidcentric land for quite some time. So it’s important to remember you also get to share what you love. Your kids might enjoy watching The Importance of Being Earnest and anytime they see a cucumber they’ll say, “There were no cucumbers to be had at the market today. Not even for ready money.” And it’s just fun.
Related: I loved the common sense advice in this post.
Nourishing Your Intellectual Life as a Mother by
Tune into the sheer joy of things that your children will reveal to you at every turn: the fascinating busy-ness of an anthill; how a quarter moon looks like a slice of lemon and a crescent moon looks like a fingernail clipping; how the poetry of Ogden Nash (“The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk”) is so fun and enlivening to read out loud and laugh about; how reading T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, you get to say ambrosial phrases like “Rum Tum Tugger” and “Bustopher Jones.” It’s a particularly healthy intellect and heart that can celebrate these delights. You get to do this and more with your kids.
More Links
What’s the fun of writing on the internet anymore? by James Shelley
The better your words, the more likely it is that somebody will poach them. . . Somebody else will train their large language model on your text and serve it up without citations or footnotes. To write on today’s internet and assume universal respect for your “moral rights of authorship” is an act of grand delusion.
You might as well write anonymous papyrus fragments.
I first encountered this sonnet in Ang Lee’s Sense & Sensibility, fell in love with it, and memorized it for a high school English class. I still remember every word.
Sonnet 116: What Shakespeare and Jane Austen Have in Common by
Speaking of sense, another way this sonnet has become meaningful in my life is through its appearance in one of my favorite film adaptations of one of my favorite novels: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.
I found Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc at the used bookstore the other day!
Mark Twain’s Obsession with Joan of Arc by Emily Zarevich
American author Mark Twain fell desperately, and intellectually, in love with the fifteenth-century French soldier Joan of Arc. Many centuries and much geographical distance were between them, but that didn’t stop him from writing her an epic love letter in the form of a novel.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Claire Coffey can write on any topic and I will eat it up.
You can have a meadow, green and gold, dotted with the ease and abundance of summer, a feast for the eyes and the body and the bees, all by working a little less. And is summer really the time for finding more reasons to work? No. It is the time to receive gratefully the abundance of creation, the symphony of yellow. The planting-out time of early spring is behind you, the harvest time is coming. Now is the moment to lie in the hammock sipping dandelion mead.
And an excerpt from Joy Clarkson’s lovely new book!
Are you a tree or a potted plant? by
I am a potted plant, I said to myself. Always ready to be moved, never mingling my roots with those of my neighbors, a stranger to solid ground.
This thought fell into my mind like a blunt object. Inside my house was a small potted plant that I had taken pains to keep alive during the final throes of completing my thesis, like a talisman of my own survival.
And this treasure of a book by Fabiola Garza released yesterday!
This is one of the amazing projects I have had the pleasure of midwifing into the world. And I’m so excited about it! You can order a copy here.
Wishing you all a wonderful week! And a huge thank you to all those who upgraded to a paid subscription this week. This is a reader-supported newsletter so if you enjoy getting these emails, please consider supporting this Substack by upgrading to a paid subscription with the button below.
Thanks for reading!
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Votive, Author, Podcaster)
Haley’s books
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
My kids are younger than yours, but watching them grow in appreciation for the things that I also enjoy has been a beautiful experience of parenthood. I frequently listen to the Beatles channel in the car and my 7-year-old daughter has developed a deep fascination with them, often asking me to share whatever factoids I can recall about the band and asking me if it is John or Paul who is serving as lead singer on whatever track is playing. I'm new to Substack but I loved reading this miscellany and look forward to more!
Haley, Princesses of Heaven looks great! The Catholic little girls in my life will love it! Now we need an introduction to some of the great male saints for little boys to get them interested, and it needs to include Bl. Carlo Acutis in it. I have 8 nephews and one godson, and we need something to introduce them to some of the great male saints. Please tell me something like that is in the works!!!