This Week's Miscellany (04/14/23)
Goodbye Twitter?, The Holy Grail, Posthumous Book Edits
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.
Every week I think, Will I have anything at all to say in this week’s post? Then I end up writing far too much. My apologies, but there’s always a lot to share! Before diving in, perhaps a short intro is in order. There are so many new faces around here (maybe from Notes?—more on that in a minute) that it occurred to me that you might not know who is behind this newsletter.
I’m Haley. Sometimes known as Haley Carrots because that’s my Twitter handle (long story).
I married my high school sweetheart at age 20, had our first baby at 23, and after graduating from Baylor University’s Honors College, I worked at Baylor for a couple of years as a publications specialist. I started a grad program at FSU in art history, but quit because I wanted more babies in my 20s and I’m too sick during pregnancy (hyperemesis gravidarum) to do anything but listen to audiobooks and try not to throw up my anti-nausea meds.
While growing our family, I blogged in the dinosaur days of the internet (Carrots for Michaelmas), then podcasted in the dinosaur days of podcasting (Fountains of Carrots).
Now I write books for children and for grown-ups and, as of last year, I work full-time for Word on Fire as the editor of their children’s imprint, Spark.
I also speak on the topics of faith, literature, and motherhood and sometimes my husband and I lead pilgrimages (last year to England and Scotland, next year to Belgium).
My husband makes whisky and rum for a living and we have four kids ages four through fourteen. My passion is to fill the world with good stories.
And I’m glad you’re here.
The Demise of Twitter
Before sharing literary links I loved this week, I want to share some thoughts on social media.
I get easily addicted to social media platforms. After all, they’re designed to addict us! So during Lent and Advent, I often try to limit my use. But this year, it was easier to stay off Twitter. Because Twitter has become the very worst.
But let’s back up. Back when I was blogging and podcasting, my income really depended on my social media platform. And I invested a lot of time in building it up. I enjoyed Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But over time it became exhausting. I stopped using Facebook. My life improved. Then when I switched from working full-time for myself to working as an editor, the pressure to be on social media evaporated. My life improved again.
After stepping back a bit, this is what I’ve come to believe:
Social Media is designed in such a manner that to use the platforms in a healthy way, you cannot use them how they are intended to be used.
Twitter is designed to reward the quickest, hottest, least nuanced, most outrageous takes. It thrives on fury, fear, and us/them attitudes. It requires excessive time on the platform. The shrillest, cruelest voices grow most quickly.
But you can use it, well, subversively. You can go against the grain of the platform’s design. It is possible to be kind rather than cruel, thoughtful rather than reactive, community-building rather than divisive. But to do that you have to use it differently than it’s built to be used. And most people fail to do so.
I’ve seen too many people, especially in the past three years, become strange, sick versions of themselves because social media has made them ill—fixated, outraged, afraid, losing a sense of the humanity of other people. For more on this, I highly recommend
's book Untrustworthy.But Twitter was still enticing to me because scholars, journalists, and writers could all communicate and discuss—until recently. Elon Musk could not have done a better job at burning it all down: verification nightmares, troll takeovers, suppressing people and topics he has a personal vendetta against. It’s almost as if having one billionaire in charge of a major platform of communication isn’t working well for the rest of us. And I think the nail in the coffin (for me) is how he’s dealt with the growth of Substack. As writers and thinkers have moved to Substack, instead of ensuring that Twitter could continue helping them share their writing (giving writers a reason to stay on Twitter), it penalized users for posting anything Substack related. And now with Substack Notes (basically like a simple social feed) I don’t feel any need to stay on Twitter. The people I want to talk to are already on Substack. There’s no ads because it’s subscriber supported. Win win.
I’m hopeful that Notes will offer a great way to share writing and built conversation.
To set up Notes
Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to my Substack, you’ll automatically see my notes. As on Twitter, you can like, reply, or “restack” them.
You can also share notes of your own.
But as with any social platform, I’m curious what kind of culture Notes will cultivate. I am hopeful that it will have the vibe of the GoogleReader blogosphere from days of yore. Instagram is the only social channel still standing for me, but I’m far less active there than I used to be. Primarily because it sucks up my time, but also because it’s so easy to become a “character” in a curated narrative of your own life for the consumption of others. And should we make it part of the human experience to share every single thought with the whole world?
Speaking of which, this piece about an influencer who abandoned her enviable social media maven income for a desk job was fascinating. There is something twisted that happens to you when your whole life becomes content.
A Request
My dear friend, Laura Fanucci, a fellow writer and mother of five little boys was just diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer, stage TBD. She is facing a year of intense treatment during which she will not be able to write full-time. Would you consider contributing to her family’s GoFundMe to cover her missing income and a financial cushion for all the expenses they’ll be facing? Let’s make this horrible situation just a little bit easier by removing some of the financial burden.
Literary Links
The Holy Grail of Grail Stories by Maggie Phillips for Tablet
I started reading this wonderful piece hoping that it would discuss my number one guy, Chretien de Troyes. Not only did Phillips dive into his story of Percival and the grail, she draws on the scholarship of one of my favorite college professors, Dr. Sarah Jane Murray. Delightful! And a very Easter-y read for the Easter season.
Murray said that the knight gets the answer to his unspoken question on Good Friday, when de Troyes has him make his way to a chapel in the woods. There, Perceval divests himself of his armor (“the thing he wanted more than anything at the beginning of the story,” Murray said, when he first encounters knights and is inspired to become one), and spends the night in vigil. On Easter Sunday, he takes Communion.
“So the real question we have to ask ourselves,” Murray said, “is he might not have found the graal, the platter, that he saw at the Fisher King’s castle, but he certainly does get served the blood and the wafer.” It is a scene, Murray said, “a thousand years ahead of that scene in Indiana Jones, where everybody’s trying to figure out which one’s the Grail, and Indy has to realize it’s the carpenter’s cup.”
This is a short, fun read about writers who started later in life:
Best of late blooming novelists by
We could also mention Seneca, Montaigne, Johnson, Conrad, Frost, Stevens, Chaucer, Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Daniel Defoe, Edith Wharton, Jonathan Swift, Anna Sewell, Kenneth Grahame, Mary Wesley, and so on and so on.
Maybe in the future we’ll start seeing literary late bloomer lists… or just Best New Talent Irregardless of Age.
And speaking of novelists, this is a fascinating read on altering books posthumously (including some interesting discussion of one of my favorites, Ursula Le Guin):
As Classic Novels Get Revised for Today’s Readers, a Debate About Where to Draw the Line by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris
“A little bit of language nuance is going to be lost, but something is also gained,” Downes-Le Guin said. “What we gain is the potential to not give offense.”
There is nothing admirable about being intentionally offensive. However, I am extremely uncomfortable with altering an author’s books after her death. Instead of altering the text, I’m in favor of robust introductions or footnotes to help the reader understand the historical context and make his own judgment about the offensive or insensitive language. Are there extreme cases when an alteration should occur? Sure. And I think the title change of Agatha Christie’s title And Then There Were None from a title with a racial slur is one such alteration. But generally, I’m opposed to altering texts.
And this was a bright spot amidst the doom and gloom pieces about the humanities in higher education:
A Renaissance from Below by Ted Hanzi-Antich Jr.
As W. E. B. Du Bois knew, the goal of liberal education is human freedom: “not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.” Higher education needs liberal education, because the good life requires freedom, and we are not born with the knowledge of how to be free. The fact that community college students may have greater access to that education than their peers at elite universities is perhaps an example of a cosmic justice, in which the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
Anyone for a delightful introduction to David Copperfield by my dear Dickensian friend, Boze Herrington?
For me, David Copperfield is just about the best book ever written—the apotheosis of the novel, the apex of Dickens’s art. Nor am I alone in holding this opinion: Tolstoy considered it his favorite of Dickens’s books, and Sigmund Freud gave a copy to his fiancé on the occasion of their engagement in 1882. Dickens himself believed it the best of his works—“Like many fond parents,” he wrote in the preface to the 1869 edition, “I have in my heart of hearts of a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield.”
And have you heard of The Catherine Project? Summer reading courses are open and I signed up for one. Here’s hoping I get in!
Listening
If, like me, you are interested in literacy and education, this is a must listen:
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
And a quick read on a Very Important Musical Question:
What’s the Most Innately Millennial Album Ever Made? by Luke Winkie
The Year of Jane
We’re in the thick of Emma for our Year of Jane book club. Keep an eye out for the weekly reflection and discussion question email on Sunday!
And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. And a huge thank you to Kaitlin and Natalie for upgrading to a paid subscription. 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.
And if you’re not in a position to pledge a monthly subscription but you enjoyed this post, you can always just throw some change in the tip jar.
Thanks for reading!
P.S. I’ve been thinking about doing short reviews of my favorite children’s books and perhaps a “Mail Bag” feature to answer your questions. Is that of interest? Got a question for me? You can leave it here in the comments.
Haley
(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)
Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns
I would love to read children's book reviews!
Oh, and I forgot to say, I would loooove to read your children’s book’s reviews!