Letter From the Editor: Head Butler Wants To Be Your Booster Shot

UPDATES: I have added some survival tools to Oh, no. It’s back. And at the worst possible time. I’m not planning to die this winter. These are my survival tools and some new gift suggestions to the Holiday Gift Guide.
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Tomorrow I’ll publish the final Butler of the year. It will be what marketers call a “carefully curated” selection of books, music and film that might enrich your life over the next ten days. In years past, that’s been an easy and pleasant day to program — I just look over the year’s reviews and choose the best. This year I feel the weight of our collective sadness and have a different goal: to find, in the 2,300 pieces I’ve published over the last 17 years, culture that, delights and challenges, inspires and instructs but, most of all, entertains.

“Entertains” doesn’t mean for me what it may for you. In part, that’s because I don’t participate in the standard pastimes of the pandemic. My TV hasn’t been on for five years; I haven’t binged or streamed anything. Podcasts are a happening thing now, but not for me; I can’t stand hearing in real time what I could read… or skim. I do social media because publishers believe writers need to have a “platform.”

Last week, I had a reason to write in my calendar — I was invited to a dinner party with notable guests in smart clothes, the sort of invitation that used to come my way with some frequency and stopped completely in March of 2020. Scorn these Society events if you like; I was looking forward to this one. It was canceled. “Asking friends for a dinner at this moment isn’t the action of a true friend,” the hostess emailed. “It could easily ruin all your other plans for Christmas and the New Year.” The dinner is postponed. Until… when?

Until March, if the American experience is similar to what Danish scientists have predicted. That means three months of canceled theater and concerts, restaurant dinners in outdoor sheds, closed offices and, possibly, schools. In other words, the movie we’ve already seen, just with less fear — we’re vaccinated and boosted, we might get sick, but we won’t die — and more boredom, frustration, anger, and breakdowns.

I’m lucky. I was working on a novel during the pandemic, and my days were pretty much what they were before COVID: reading and writing and walking. This time around, I’m finishing the book, and then I’ll turn it over to the focus group, edit it and get it sold. If that doesn’t fill three months, no worries — I’ll start the next one.

I’m cautious about drawing conclusions, but I think I learned something worth sharing. In a winter like this, when so much of our lives will seem out of our control — and will be out of our control — it’s really important to have a project. Not a work project, assigned to you by others. A personal project. A project with a purpose that matters to us and may come to matter to others.

In my book, a young monk climbs a mountain to ask the all-important question of a venerable lama: “What’s the secret of life?” The lama says there are three secrets. The first: “Pay attention.” The second: “Pay attention.” The third: “Pay attention.”

Butler exists to point you to the good stuff, new and old, that you might not otherwise see. Yesterday, I reviewed Louise Glück’s book of poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective. First day sales on Amazon: 15 copies. That has to be more copies of this book than were sold by any bookstore in this country, including Amazon. Thrilling to me. And useful, I think, to those of you who bought it. “When minds rub against one another,” Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “the mental temperature goes up.” Louise Glück makes you pay attention.

In the language we speak now, it comes down to this: Head Butler wants to be your booster shot.

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This post was previously published on headbutler.com.

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