Norris is the famous New Yorker copy editor who wrote “Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” a few years ago. That book — a record of her equally passionate relationship with punctuation — gave us a rich example of her noble predilection for knowing everything there is to know about a single subject. If Isaiah Berlin were alive today and able to read “Between You & Me,” I am certain he would have considered Norris a perfect candidate for inclusion in the category of hedgehog, his term for a person who works to know one thing completely, as opposed to the fox, who pursues many things superficially.
Over a period of nearly 40 years, which has included countless trips to Greece, Norris’s experience of the country and all things Greek has remained ever fresh: Very nearly she believes it her destiny. In an oddly brooding way, it’s almost as though she thinks Greece has been there from the time she was young to rescue her from herself.
By day, she researches the poetry of John Donne as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. But in the evening, when Dr Katherine Rundell wants a bit of comfort, she reads Paddington. “As an adult, the thing I love about Paddington is that the structure Michael Bond has built into his books is one of hope. Things which appear to be negative turn out to be just cogs in the greater machine. I think Bond sees life as miraculous – and that’s in the structure of the book.”
In her own forthcoming work, Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, Rundell argues that children’s literature offers unique insights and distinctive imaginative experiences to adults. “Defy those who would tell you to be serious,” she writes, “those who would limit joy in the name of propriety. Cut shame off at the knees... Plunge yourself soul-forward into a children’s book: see ifyou do not find in them an unexpected alchemy; if they will not un-dig in you something half hidden and half forgotten.”
While his colleagues remember the terrible noise of this lifeline breaking, Lemons himself heard nothing. One moment he was jammed against the metal underwater structure they had been working on and then he was tumbling backwards towards the ocean floor. His link to the ship above was gone, along with any hope of finding his way back to it.
Most crucially, his air supply had also vanished, leaving him with just six or seven minutes of emergency air supply. Over the next 30 minutes at the bottom of the North Sea, Lemons would experience something that few people have lived to talk about: he ran out of air.
I have, today, been to zero restaurants and have encountered sushi multiple times. I got a can of tomato paste at Whole Foods, and there was sushi. A coffee, at midnight, at my local bodega: sushi. I walked past a Target, and I did not go in, but if I had, there would have been sushi.
Despite various evidence to the contrary, such as all the climate news and…actually all news, it is a glorious time to be alive. The evidence for this is prepackaged sushi. It’s everywhere, all the time: in airports and train stations, at grocery stores, at sports stadiums, at Walgreens. I like consistency, so I find this reassuring: Yes, the quality varies, but the little plastic black-bottomed box, the line of fake grass, the petals of pickled ginger—they are almost always there.
Chipotle took a known commodity among Mexicans that suddenly turned trendy in the hands of white Americans, for white Americans. But Chipotle proved no gateway to pique Americans into learning about other types of burritos. Instead, the Mission variety came to dominate burrito culture in the United States — and endangered other styles in the process.
This is a lyrical, often narrative collection rich with allegory. Slipping into this collection feels like peeking behind a curtain of a dark fairy tale. One in which Maleficent and Cinderella’s step mother take the shape of an older woman telling the speaker, “I think of young women like you as a present / for my husband.” The speaker then asks if Disney villains have committed crimes beyond growing old and becoming replaceable. Even in a world of fairy tales, the speaker finds herself something to be opened, something to be used: “I am an object to be unwrapped, opened, slipped into for a fortieth birthday.” This objectification in multiple realms shows its inescapability in this collection.