“
But every time her ruminations start tending toward the ponderous, someone else shows up to remind you what real derangement looks like. There’s the journalist J. Allen Boone, amanuensis of Strongheart, another 1920s movie-star German shepherd, who developed a theory of animal-human psychic entanglement called “Totality” and later objected whenever anyone referred to Strongheart as “dead.” As for Peter the Great, another Rinty rival from the silent era, he was described by one admirer as “a genius second to none,” not to mention a staunch prohibitionist who tried to keep his handlers away from “fiery liquor.” (Naturally, he was shot to death in a drunken brawl.)

- from the New York Times’ admiring review of Susan Orlean’s Rin Tin Tin

I’ve got stuff to do, so I’ll keep my own thoughts on the book relatively short for now.

When I first learned that Orlean was writing a book about Rin Tin Tin, I worried that the project might be almost a show-off move, something she might have done on a dare to prove — like some improv actor assembling a scene out of spare parts hollered from the crowd — that she is capable of making a good book out of absolutely anything. Those unfounded worries might explain why my favorite parts of the book proved to be the ones where Orlean confessed to developing advanced symptoms of the very Rin Tin Tin obsession she was supposed to be documenting.

There is no good reason that I should care about the story of a movie dog whose movies I never saw. Orlean’s first chapter served as a deft, multi-pronged dismantling of my indifference. Anybody who teaches nonfiction writing should read the chapter and consider adding it to their syllabus.

OK. That’s it. I need to go. I spent the morning moving furniture around. There’s more to move. My mood is good. Great, really. If I were moving furniture while listening to an audiobook about strolling around Paris, the furniture-moving might seem like drudgery by comparison. But my headphones happen to be filling my ears with the story of the Soviet gulag. So emptying a room of a couple beds and some dressers seems like a pretty pampered way to spend a day.

Notes

  1. davidquigg posted this