You're viewing all posts tagged with Susan Orlean
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I almost feel sorry for the two administrators who have been arraigned—not for their behavior, which disgusts me, but for their apparent surrender to the notion that football was bigger than them. Did they worry that, if they brought a complaint to the proper authorities, they would be pariahs? Think of the lost income! The outraged alumni! The lost television revenue!

- from Susan Orlean’s “Football U.”

Read Kasey Anderson, too. Same subject. His post is here.

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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.

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There are too many zoos breeding too many animals (baby animals are a huge draw, so most zoos simply can’t resist producing them). The surplus animals end up in mostly unregulated auctions where anyone at all can buy them. It’s appalling. In my perfect world, we would establish perhaps four national zoos of unimpeachable quality and close the rest of them. The money we’d spent or donated to all the closed zoos—and whatever public money had supported them—would instead go to animal sanctuaries and research programs and habitat preservation in the animals’ natural environment, and to fund documentary films that would show us the way animals live when they are free. These films would fill us with awe and respect and even a little bit of fear, which is what we should feel about these creatures. Love that is used to justify ownership isn’t love at all.
- Susan Orlean considers a “small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers.”
Played 2 times
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

I’m 46 minutes into Susan Orlean’s appearance on “The Sound of Young America.” If this smart, worthwhile, fun, touching interview turns terrible in the final 13 minutes, I’ll come back and apologize for linking to it.

my new "Stare and Write" post: Susan Orlean's 119 words on a Manhattan blacksmith who really doesn't want to talk to you

(this post was reblogged from stareandwrite)
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The greatest feat, though, was performed by what were called “mercy dogs” in the First World War. These dogs walked among the troops on a battlefield, after the fighting had simmered down, carrying saddlebags of first-aid supplies. Wounded soldiers could call the dogs over and then help themselves whatever they needed. Those who were more gravely wounded could call the dogs over so they could embrace them and have their company while they died. A dog can do that, and would do that, with all its heart, and with tender patience.
- Susan Orlean
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It highlights two distinct types of bravery: the pluck of the sweet-faced soldiers who are too young and ingenuous to doubt themselves or picture their own mortality, and the nerve of Junger and Hetherington, who had made the deliberate, knowing choice to be deep inside danger. I couldn’t get the movie out of my mind. I felt for the first time what a numbing terror a war really is, and how personal it is in its triumphs and losses. If you haven’t seen it, be forewarned that it will break your heart.

The movie also made me think a lot about the nature of being a reporter. In a million years, I would never have the bravery to put myself in such a dire situation, and I have always felt a little ashamed that I don’t have the guts to do anything close to what Junger and Hetherington have done, even when I know these are stories that need to be told. Their bravery is our gain. When I heard yesterday that Hetherington and another photographer, Chris Hondros, were killed working in Libya, I felt sick. It was a horrible reminder that bravery is a banner, but it is, unfortunately, not a shield.

- Susan Orlean today in “TIM HETHERINGTON, ‘RESTREPO,’ AND BRAVERY”
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I taught at the University of Montana a couple of years ago. I loved it, and I loved my students. They know, I hope, that I would do anything to help them achieve their dreams—almost universally, to become big-name writers for newspapers and magazines and the authors of best-selling books. I shared their dreams with them. But I also told them that upon their graduation, if they were so lucky to land that job of their dreams, and if that job put them in some position where we would both be going for the same story, I would do everything I could to knock them to the ground and step on their heads. I would not remember that lovely time we shared in Montana.

… journalism is a business based, almost exclusively, on competition. There’s a reason they call it a beat. It is a game in which some people win, and a lot more people lose. And if you don’t want it bad enough, you will lose. Gary Smith will beat you. Tom Junod will beat you. Susan Orlean will beat you. Never forget that’s who’s out here, waiting for you. If you’re not driven, if you’re not motivated, if you’re not ambitious, you had better write poetry and try to make starvation seem romantic, because once you come out here, into the messy real world of commerce and hit counts and breaking news, you will get done.

- Chris Jones blogging about his disappointment that he did not get nominated for a National Magazine Award this year.

If you go read the full post and an earlier one, you will see that there are various sideshow elements to this — tense exchanges with Scott Raab and a grad student named Michelle Dean, who has since responded:

You found a person, one who you imply to be of lesser stature than yourself - a “dabbling writer” (accurate), a “graduate student” (ditto) - and you thought: now here is a person who needs to be cut back down to size. There’s a dissonance there, no? Either I’m significant or I’m the hundred-and-third person to make fun of that post of yours on the internet.

It’s messy. There’s a rawness to Jones’ posts that we might prefer to see posthumously, unearthed by some biographer from the secret diaries that explain why Jones’ reporting and writing took on a fierce, obsessive urgency starting in the spring of 2011.

You may prefer not to read any more of Jones’ posts or Dean’s posts or Raab’s comments. You might, in fact, get so upset, taking one side or the other, that you forget the quote above. It’s a quote that matters to me because it goes a long way toward explaining why every word I type these days is a word that I type for free.

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The ducks, even without a pond, seemed fine, although their resting state seems to me one of a busy restless anxiety, like slightly underpaid event organizers.
- the latest blog post from Susan Orlean, a licensed and bonded simile engineer.
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The next morning my phone rang before breakfast.

“What are you doing to Gomez?” a raspy-voiced woman shouted at me, as soon as I said hello. “Why are you dumping him?”

“What are you talking about?” I shouted back. “I’m not dumping him! I’ve been taking good care of this cat for months! I’m just trying to figure out if he has another home!”

- Susan Orlean blogs the heartwarming story of a stray cat and a microchip ID.
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I spent many afternoons in the store, surrounded by books I’d hauled down from the shelves, reading and whiling away the day. I bought a few of the books, but not many. If you plotted the dollars I spent at the cash register against the time I spent reading books there for free, Borders probably made less than a penny an hour off of me. I was living proof of a doomed business model.

- Susan Orlean on the occasion of the Borders bankruptcy, recalling her college years in Ann Arbor.

Fully aware of how goofy it is, I can’t hold back the Christmas Carol part of my brain that summons The Ghost of Literature Yet To Come. He points a spectral forefinger at the deadbeat undergrad with her Didion and her Joseph Mitchell and whatever else is in that slapdash stack of never-to-be-paid-for books and rasps, “Today she is taking words. Someday she will give them back.”

I hate the ghost a little when he’s so cryptic. Can’t he just link? Can’t he just send me to this lede and this passage? Then he wouldn’t have to rasp anything. He could just point, and I’d say “she’s gonna write that?” He’d nod, and I’d get chills.

Remember way back when we were little kids, and all in the space of a few hours you could read something by one of your favorite writers, get inspired to start something new, mention your new thing to the writer, and end up with the writer telling 106,506 people about your idea? Me, neither. In conclusion … 1) Today, at least, 2011 is better than 1991, 1981, 1971, and 1961 put together. 2) Susan Orlean is unreasonably nice. 3) If you don’t submit something to my new Stare and Write Tumblr, then Susan Orlean and 106,506 people may end up very disappointed in my lack of gumption. Actually, I shouldn’t exaggerate. Since I’m one of those 106,506 people and I’m already chronically disappointed by my lack of gumption, only 106,505 people would be affected. Really, though, the only pressure I feel to make this work isn’t pressure at all. It’s more of a nice nudge, a sense that this could be fun, and that it’s worth trying to make it happen. If the idea appeals to you, I hope you’ll consider submitting your 200 words or less here. Thanks. I’m excited about this, but I’ll try not to flood this space with more appeals for you to join in. Thank you for indulging me. Click for high-res photo

Remember way back when we were little kids, and all in the space of a few hours you could read something by one of your favorite writers, get inspired to start something new, mention your new thing to the writer, and end up with the writer telling 106,506 people about your idea?

Me, neither.

In conclusion …

1) Today, at least, 2011 is better than 1991, 1981, 1971, and 1961 put together.

2) Susan Orlean is unreasonably nice.

3) If you don’t submit something to my new Stare and Write Tumblr, then Susan Orlean and 106,506 people may end up very disappointed in my lack of gumption. Actually, I shouldn’t exaggerate. Since I’m one of those 106,506 people and I’m already chronically disappointed by my lack of gumption, only 106,505 people would be affected.

Really, though, the only pressure I feel to make this work isn’t pressure at all. It’s more of a nice nudge, a sense that this could be fun, and that it’s worth trying to make it happen. If the idea appeals to you, I hope you’ll consider submitting your 200 words or less here. Thanks.

I’m excited about this, but I’ll try not to flood this space with more appeals for you to join in. Thank you for indulging me.