This Week's Miscellany (05/05/23)

Nickel Creek, Eugene Vodolazkin, The Secret History, Loneliness

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.

Yesterday, when trying to sort out how to get paperwork filled out so my son could take his inhaler on the 8th grade school trip, I got bad news: it was all going to be far more complicated than I expected. We needed doctor’s notes signed and everything had to be done immediately because the trip was only a few hours away. But the school had a proposal for me. A chaperone had dropped out last minute. Would I like to chaperone from 10am to 4am on a trip to Universal Studios—inhaler in hand?

So here I am, preparing for 18 hours with middle schoolers. Let it be known that I really love my kid and nothing less than my affection for him would prompt losing an entire night of sleep and keeping track of middle school boys in an amusement park which is basically my nightmare. I can already feel my anxiety skyrocketing.

To the Wizarding World we go!

But I couldn’t leave without sending along some great reading material to start off your weekend….

Listening

Nickel Creek has a new album after many, many years! I’ve seen them play twice, once at a music festival with my older brother and once in Jacksonville with my high school best friend Claire. Her mom (who was also my European history teacher) drove us and chaperoned us and was very cool about the whole thing and in hindsight I should probably send her a belated thank you note. Anyhow, I love Nickel Creek and I’m enjoying diving into the new album.

Here’s a review of new album, Celebrants, by Charlie Clark for Fare Forward.

Like any relationship, a band has a life of its own, its own story to lose in the telling. On Celebrants, Nickel Creek’s co-authors pick up the loose threads and knit them together into a loving, faithful reevaluation of their friendship, their creative partnership, and the Christ-haunted musical territory they’ve been prospecting for thirty-odd years.

Reading

And speaking of new releases…Eugene Vodolazkin, author of one of my all-time favorite novels, Laurus, has a new book out from Plough.

I have the book but I haven’t started it yet. Here’s a great review from Front Porch Republic by Aaron Weinacht

Seen as a kind of “afterword” to Laurus, many critics will no doubt view Vodolazkin’s History of the Island with the same cosmopolitan distaste with which they view the final, excruciatingly naive redemption scene in Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment. Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation, even as we pathetically pursue the latest “cure” for that emptiness—be that radical politics, surgical revisions to our anatomy, or compassionate medical assistance in dying. It looks patronizingly at best and with hostility at worst, at the idea that our modern despair should prompt some deep rethinking. (“Ahh, those Luddite localists,”… and so on).

Links

I ate up this wonderful piece on Catholic novelists Donna Tartt and Christopher Beha from Dappled Things by a Twitter friend who became a real life friend when he came to one of the Advent concerts featuring musician Harrison Lemke that we hosted in our little house in Waco.

High Church Dionysians and the Problem of Pride: A Review-Essay by Alex Taylor

Both The Secret History and What Happened to Sophie Wilder fit within the category of Catholic literature, as recently sketched out for poetry by Dana Gioia in his First Things article, “Poetry and Christianity.” Each novel was written by a mind steeped in a sacramental imagination. Each presents a poetically crafted cosmos in imitation of the real viewed from a Christian perspective. But an even closer unity binds Tartt’s campus novel and Beha’s post-campus novel. Both present us with a preeminent spiritual problem revealed by Christianity, one which the narrators of the novels can only grasp “through a glass darkly”— namely, the vice of pride and its consequences.

And lots of food for thought in this piece from Public Discourse

Treat Students Like Future Parents, Not Just Future Employees by Mary Frances Myler

It is possible to build a pro-marriage, pro-family culture on the college campus, but certain secular sacred cows must be abandoned—namely, expressive individualism and the sexual revolution. Young people are hungry for truth, and it’s high time our universities gave them some.

(Thanks to

Leah Libresco Sargeant

for sharing

Ivana Greco

's round up of writing on career and family)

Yours truly joined Beth Jordahl on Beth’s BookCast to talk about Jane Austen.

Listen here: Jane Austen: Life Coach (with Haley Stewart)

I’ve really gotten into Hopkins over the past couple of years thanks to Dr. Holly Ordway and I enjoyed this piece from Plough.

What I Do Is Me: Gerard Manley Hopkins found the big picture in nature’s most intimate details by Margaret R. Ellsberg

Until he was in his thirties, Hopkins was always down on his knees with a sketchbook or journal, squinting at something tiny that disclosed the Big Picture. And then, when he left his notebooks for writing – however rarely – poetry, every poem contained a collision. In the octet of each of his sonnets, we meet nature interacting with humanity; in the sestet, we meet God. Between the octet and the sestet, we encounter the volta – a turning, a white space – and in this sacred space occurs a transformation in every sonnet Hopkins wrote.

Surgeon General: We Have Become a Lonely Nation by Vivek H. Murthy

Loneliness and isolation hurt whole communities. Social disconnection is associated with reduced productivity in the workplace, worse performance in school, and diminished civic engagement. When we are less invested in one another, we are more susceptible to polarization and less able to pull together to face the challenges that we cannot solve alone — from climate change and gun violence to economic inequality and future pandemics. As it has built for decades, the epidemic of loneliness and isolation has fueled other problems that are killing us and threaten to rip our country apart.

The Year of Jane

We wrapped up Emma and will be beginning Mansfield Park! Reading Schedule coming your way on Sunday.

And that’s all folks! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend. This email is free to receive but time-intensive to produce, so I want to offer a huge thank you to those 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.

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Thanks for reading!

Haley

(Editor of Word on Fire Spark, Author, Former Podcaster)

Haley’s Children’s Mystery Series about Mouse Nuns

Haley’s Book on Jane Austen’s Novels

Haley’s Book about Radical Simplicity