Susan Orlean's Blog, page 17

I've been researching and reporting a book on dog actor Rin Tin Tin for the last four years, and now, as I go through my notes in preparation for writing, I'm coming across bits and pieces of reporting that I'd almost forgotten—wonderful, weird scraps that I collected some time ago and buried in the mass of Rin Tin Tin material on my desk.

Today, I came across a "cutting continuity shot list" (basically, the film editor's cheat sheet) from an early Rin Tin Tin silent film, "Where the North...

Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn't have to come in contact with it. In the past, a car buyer entered a dealership (a place that, free coffee aside, was plenty soul-scorching in its own right) much the way a fish entered a barrel guarded by an armed militia: Jaw gaping, eyes glassy and rolling, tender parts utterly exposed. By the time you were...

Volcanic ash is as soft as baby powder, if baby powder were made of microscopic shards of glass. I was living in Portland, Oregon, in 1980, when Mt. St. Helens erupted. The first belch from the mountain sent all of its force and flotsam north and east, away from Portland; the second caught a westerly wind, and the ash drizzled down on the city. The day of the second eruption, I was at the Portland Art Museum, watching the epic, gloomy seven-hour Hans-Jürgen Syberberg film "Hitler: A Film...

When it comes to consumer electronics, I'm a big fat sucker, because even though I know you should never, ever buy anything until the second version of it is released, I just can't resist. I live in a state of perpetual Beta. Yes, I read tech guru Gina Trapani's warning that no one should order an iPad now since in time the price will go down and the quality will go up, and I know she's right, but it takes a stronger constitution than I've got to resist the dulcet tones of a new gadget...

I'm happy to report that my trip to Manhattan to appear on "The Martha Stewart Show" with my chicken Tookie went off without incident. I worried every step of the way. I worried whether Tookie would like the car ride, and whether she'd be happy being in the television studio, and whether she'd act out in some wild chicken-y way on camera; I even worried whether, when she was back home with her flock, the other chickens would sense some fundamental change in her (exposure to the bright lights ...

I'm bringing one of my chickens to Manhattan tomorrow, to be on an episode of "The Martha Stewart Show," which Martha—a celebrated chicken keeper herself—is devoting to the subject of backyard chickens. My chickens are not seasoned travellers (note to self: maybe don't use the word "seasoned" when talking about pet chickens?) so I've been fretting about the whole enterprise, which will entail travelling two hours by car from my house to the city, and then several hours in the studio while we ...

The position I find myself in quite often these days is a deep, knee-buckling squat, head tilted, eyes rapidly scanning the bases of walls and the undersides of cabinetry, in a desperate effort to locate an electric outlet. I am not alone. In airports and train stations and bus stops all over this land, there are squatting, head-tilting, eye-scanning individuals desperately looking to plug in. Like many people, I travel with a Best Buy's worth of electronics: My phone, my computer, my iPod...

Soon, the snow will melt, the grass will green up, and the fields will be filled again with toffee-colored deer—or, as we affectionately refer to them, Cloven-hoofed Disease Vectors. From a distance, it is hard to see the tiny ticks that get a free ride on the deer, then drop off into the grass and try to catch an inbound express on a human ankle or animal belly. These ticks are quite often carrying bacteria. In my household alone, we've had two bouts of Lyme disease (me), one of...