That thing you just said: I was editing it in my head as you spoke. And that email you sent me earlier today: I edited that, too. Sorry, I don’t think less of you. It’s because I’m a copyeditor. My mind just sort of does it automatically. PowerPoint slides, interstate billboards, restaurant menus, church bulletins: We live in a world of typos, and it’s my job to see them. The measure of a book’s quality, they say, lies in what’s left on the cutting-room floor. Copyeditors are the ones employed to do the cutting.
“I thought, I’m afraid of a stupid needle,” she said. “And these animals have to deal with this all the time.” She reflected on how her newfound freedom, and quite possibly her health, came at the expense of animals suffering or dying to develop the vaccines.
Merely being grateful for those animals seemed insufficient; Ms. Strohacker wanted to give something tangible in return. A little online research returned the National Anti-Vivisection Society’s sanctuary fund, which supports the care of retired lab animals. She made a small donation. “To give thanks was the very least I could do,” Ms. Strohacker said.
This is local cuisine: a cultural object that is the result of the societal conditions and history on the ground in a particular place, not the construct of a top-down, international food conglomerate. Nothing bums me out quite like seeing a Sysco truck pulling up to a restaurant, knowing that the same shitty foodstuffs available in cafeterias and airports the world over will soon be sold here, too. The mini hot dogs of Troy, New York, are not healthy or trendy or even the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten, but they do represent a little act of rebellion against a domineering monoculture, against disordered diet trends, against painstakingly styled TikTok food. Plus, they’re just really cute.
My preparations for each Lunar New Year begin in the bathroom. On Lunar New Year’s Eve, I turn on the hot water and let the air fill with steam. With my bare toes curled against the chilly floor, I scissor off a lock of hair, clip my nails, and discard these symbolic crumbs of bad luck into the trash. Then I get in the shower, where I suds and scour and scrub down every inch of skin.
“You have to wash off all of the bad luck from the year before.” This was my mother’s imperative, as if bad fortune could accumulate into a grungy layer over the course of the year. As if I had one chance—a crucial opening on a February night—in which it would be possible to get rid of it.
The larger social context that Winslow explores is what moves this story beyond one crime into a reflection on the myriad unacknowledged crimes committed across decades. “Decent People” — a title that becomes increasingly ironic — is really about a community eating itself. “It seems there’s a lot more going in this small town than I’d expected,” Josephine says. “Everyone’s got a secret.”
Not for long.
In “The Guest Lecture,” Keynes is a prop for a novel that’s barely a novel. (The other characters are sketched, as if they were James Thurber drawings, in a gentle line or two.) Riker pulls it off because he’s observant, and he has a grainy, semi-comic feel for what angst and failure really feel like. His antinovel resembles books that split commentary on a writer with more personal material — books like Julian Barnes’s novel “Flaubert’s Parrot” and Geoff Dyer’s quasi-biography of D.H. Lawrence, “Out of Sheer Rage.”
Who was the monkiest monk of them all? One candidate is Simeon Stylites, who lived alone atop a pillar near Aleppo for at least thirty-five years. Another is Macarius of Alexandria, who pursued his spiritual disciplines for twenty days straight without sleeping. He was perhaps outdone by Caluppa, who never stopped praying, even when snakes filled his cave, slithering under his feet and falling from the ceiling. And then there’s Pachomius, who not only managed to maintain his focus on God while living with other monks but also ignored the demons that paraded about his room like soldiers, rattled his walls like an earthquake, and then, in a last-ditch effort to distract him, turned into scantily clad women. Not that women were only distractions. They, too, could have formidable attention spans—like the virgin Sarah, who lived next to a river for sixty years without ever looking at it.
These all-stars of attention are just a few of the monks who populate Jamie Kreiner’s new book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction”. More specifically, they are the exceptions: most of their brethren, like most of us, were terrible at paying attention. All kinds of statistics depict our powers of concentration as depressingly withered, but, as Kreiner shows, medieval monasteries were filled with people who wanted to focus on God but couldn’t. Long before televisions or TikTok, smartphones or streaming services, paying attention was already devilishly difficult—literally so, in the case of these monks, since they associated distraction with the Devil.