Susan Orlean's Blog, page 15

My five-and-a-half-year-old son has fallen in love with the "Magic Treehouse" books, and I do admire them, but after dozens of bedtimes spent in their company, Jack and Annie were starting to get on my nerves. (Does Jack always have to push his glasses up before he takes action? Does Annie always have to befriend the weak and the downtrodden, and wake up so much earlier than Jack?) Rather than discuss these complaints with my son, I decided it was time for us to refresh his bookshelves. My d...

In retrospect, there was a certain inevitability to jeggings. Pant legs have been getting skinnier and skinnier for the past six or eight years, to the point where manufacturers were running out of superlatives—how many variations can there be on "super-super-ultra-skinny-leg," anyway? Finally, jeggings were unleashed on the world. I recall spotting my first one in the wild—make that a Forever 21 Store—about a year ago, and have since noticed them extending their range even as far as the...

The genius of a folk melody or story is not the feeling that it's original but quite the opposite—the feeling that it has existed all along. This is the same genius at work in products like Silly Bandz that are so simple and obvious that all you can do when you first encounter them is pound yourself on the head with a rubber mallet and moan, "Why didn't I think of this? Why didn't I think of this?" In case you have been cryogenically preserved for the last year or so and were just recently...

I think of myself as something of a connoisseur of procrastination, creative and dogged in my approach to not getting things done. Right now, because I have written approximately half of my book, I have tracked off onto those sorts of book-related procrastination reveries that have the great advantage of looking almost like tasks that urgently need doing. For instance, the dedication: Who should it be? Mom? Son? Husband? Or how about some set of initials that will keep people guessing? This i...

In further hashtag news, I got an e-mail today from someone reporting a new, inventive use of the form—in text messages. He offered this example: "You looked cute today. #notgonnalie" Genius! I had never considered using a hashtag anywhere other than on Twitter, but now I'm inspired. Text messages have always seemed a little flat to me, so the murmuring Greek chorus of a hashtag might be a perfect way to liven them up and give them a bit of dimension. And from there, who knows? Books...

Yes, writers are (usually) paid by the word. This fact seems to fascinate and baffle anyone who is not a writer; I guess I'm just so used to it that I have forgotten how peculiar it must seem. After I mentioned it in mixed company recently, someone gasped, "Like the way you buy meat—priced per pound?" I had never thought of it that way, and later that day, when I was out feeding our cattle (who were priced per pound, too, even though they are not yet meat), I felt like we had a new kinship...

I'd like to say that I don't care about LeBron James's decision to leave Cleveland for Miami, but I really do. I grew up in Cleveland and still feel the usual protective defensiveness about it, and I'm always rooting for the city to get a lucky break. I am also entirely cynical about professional sports, but I can tell you that when I'm back in Cleveland and one of the local teams is doing well, there is a decided lift in the air. Until the very last minute, I thought—hoped—that LeBron would ...

If it weren't for the astronomical heat this week, I would have never seen the pretty actress, Maria Bello, expressing her breast milk to feed an injured pigeon. What can I say? Heat makes me desperate. I'm currently in residence at Yaddo, an artist community housed in a magnificent, gloomy, turn-of-the-century mansion in upstate New York. To say the mansion is without air conditioning would underplay the point. The air in the mansion, even in moderate heat, is almost sludgy; in the last few ...

July sightings:
A porcupine, quills bristling, shuffling down a path with its legs spread wide, as if he were wearing a pair of too-tight pants.
Last season's fawns, now filled out and grown up, their baby spots faded to a copper sheen.
Snapping turtles, as big as hubcaps.
Spring tadpoles, now July's bullfrogs, as wide as a man's hand, happy to stay up late, burping and thrumming.
Swallows, diving and careening like drunks.
Squirrels, so fat they have the beginnings of double chins, yet...

The semiology and phenomenology of hashtaggery intrigues me. From what I understand, it all began very simply: on Twitter, hashtags—those little checkerboard marks that look like this #—were used to mark phrases or names, in order to make it easier to search for them among the zillions and zillions of tweets. For instance, if you wanted to make a comment about Sarah Palin, you could include her name in the tweet, or you could make the comment and follow it with her name marked by hashtag...