Susan Orlean's Blog, page 6

What I remember the most is the cookies. This was someplace in the Bronx, on a street with beat-up buildings and chipped sidewalks, but, like everywhere on the New York City Marathon route, it was lined with people. They were hollering and clapping as the runners loped by, and if you were wearing a shirt that said anything on it—your name, a university affiliation, a goofy slogan,—they shouted that, too, just to cheer you on. Some people held out cups of water. They were not part of the official, marathon-sanctioned watering stations; these were just neighborhood people who figured anyone running twenty-six miles might appreciate some water. Some little kids held out plates of orange sections, and were so shy and proud that they looked away each time a runner reached for one. At the end of that stretch of road, an older lady in churchgoing clothes held out a china plate of fat oatmeal cookies. I was trying to break four hours, but I couldn’t pass up cookies. I slowed down, and as I took one she smiled at me and announced, “Good for your energy, plus they’re homemade.”

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I attended the University of Michigan, but I got my real education at alternative newsweeklies. That’s where I learned to write, to report, and to think of myself as a journalist; that’s where I grew up. Even now, many years out from my last newsweekly job, which was at the Boston Phoenix, I still think of myself as a product of the alt-weekly world. And it was a wonderful world. We didn’t make much money, but we made up for that by enjoying a certain amount of freedom in what we wrote and how we wrote about it, and by having the conviction that we were doing something a little better than what was being done at conventional newspapers. In many cases, that arrogance was unearned, but the sense of mission and adventure was real. We could write ten thousand words about amyl nitrate (which I actually did) or cults or Hmong refugees or corruption if we felt the story was good. Everyone was young (or youngish). We were excited about being writers or editors. Working at an alternative newsweekly felt mischievous and disruptive and nimble, and it was as close to feeling like I was in a rock band as I’ll probably ever get.

When I went to work at the Phoenix, in 1982, its offices were in a ratty old building at the end of the otherwise glamorous Newbury Street in Boston’s Back Bay. I don’t mean ratty in a figurative sense, either: there were rat traps tucked into most of the corners and nooks, and they weren’t ironic. The office had all the polish and orderliness of a very bad yard sale late in the afternoon. Everyone was shaggy. There were, as one would expect in a roiling workplace full of young folk, a million desperate romances and personal dramas and the like, but everyone was also very serious about the work. Back then, the Boston Globe seemed stuffy and self-important, and the Phoenix set itself up as the scrappy anti-Globe, more tuned into street culture and the arts; funnier, looser, cooler. I did stories on a crazy array of subjects: how Miami had been reborn, how much I loved giving parties, Ginsu knives, and a music festival in Jamaica. Of course, many of us secretly hoped that a big paper like the Globe might scoop us up, eventually. I interviewed for a job there not long after I started working at the Phoenix, and the editor who met with me warned me that the paper, as a rule, didn’t hire from alternative newsweeklies since we didn’t have a work ethic and didn’t understand how to behave in a professional way—as if we were drinking beer and getting high all day and still managing to put out a pretty good newspaper every week. I didn’t get the job, of course, but I realized then that our silly nose-thumbing at the Globe was equalled only by its silly nose-thumbing at us.

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For the past ten years or so, propelled by an epiphany he once had at the loading dock of a Winn Dixie, the artist Brendan O’Connell has been painting Walmarts: people shopping, and products on shelves, and people removing products from shelves and paying for them. He was fascinated by the stores’ ubiquity and the commonality of the retail experience. At first, Walmart threw him out of its stores, but now they regard the work as revealing something essential and meaningful in the Walmart universe. He is, as one company executive said, capturing “the art in the Wonderbread; the art in the Jif.”

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Some years back, Brendan O’Connell had a revelation at a Winn-Dixie. He was in his sophomore year at Emory University, and was spending the summer working at one of the company’s stores, in St. Augustine, Florida, un-loading merchandise from trucks. Usually, his job amounted to what he likes to call a Sisyphean task, because it was hard for him to apply himself to the work with the necessary stick-to-itiveness and zeal. This particular day, however, O’Connell found himself mesmerized by the patchwork of colors and shapes coming off the truck, and by the mosaic that the products created once they were stacked on the Winn-Dixie shelves. In a flash of clarity, he decided that light and color and form are what keep humankind from existential despair and loneliness, and that he wanted to devote himself to capturing that insight in some visual way. It was as if his life path had suddenly presented itself to him at the loading dock. This would have been a magical moment, except that it was interrupted by the store manager, who wrote him up for loafing on the clock.

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It is hard to imagine Thomas Kinkade as anything less than supremely self-assured. When I profiled him, in October, 2001, he had the glow of someone who had played a hunch and won, succeeding beyond even his considerable expectations. The hunch was this: that people liked pretty pictures, and they liked the feeling of buying something that they believed was “valuable.” He made those pictures, and made a lot of money, and laughed off the idea that he was cranking out kitsch.

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Sometimes, in the wee hours of the night, I can’t sleep and I don’t want to read, so I occupy myself by rearranging my home screen. It’s like rearranging your kitchen cabinets without having to get out of bed. And, similar to rearranging your kitchen cabinets, it can sometimes be disorienting: you grab for the salt and you end up with a wine glass, or you tap on what used to be Soundhound and end up with Epicurious. The thing is, I have a zillion apps, and I’m always looking for the perfect arrangement for them, so scrambling my home screen is part of that eternal quest.

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The Utah mayor who recently confessed that he wrote happy news stories about his town using a pseudonym, often quoting himself, was living a writer's dream. I haven't read his stories, but I like to think he didn't hold back at all. Instead of just quoting himself, I'm hoping he went all out, lavishing praise on himself: "According to the young, handsome mayor of West Valley City…" or maybe "A statement from West Valley City's brilliant and riveting mayor, Mike Winder, who has been frequently described as 'Presidential' or, at the very least, 'senatorial'" or "Mike Winder, who has the charisma of George Clooney, the athleticism of David Beckham, and the political instincts of Thomas Jefferson, called the City Council meeting to order." Otherwise, what's the point?

The funny thing is that the newspapers that printed Winder's phony stories had a lower standard of accountability than, say, the reviews section of Amazon, a pretty loose forum but one which requires you to have at least purchased an item under whatever name you use as your nom de review. Otherwise, I'm sure most writers would spend an awful lot of time cranking out reviews of their own books—"breathtaking… beautifully wrought… a must-read… an astonishing accomplishment"—in other words, Winder-style happy news. The requirement to have an actual, active Amazon account has made it just too much trouble to write one's own good reviews—at least that's what a friend told me. Now the only recourse is to lean on friends and family.

That Winder also posed as "Richard Burwash" (his pseudonym) in phone calls and e-mails and even set up a fake Facebook page for his fake persona suggests, though, that Winder is a bit more of a player than the usual person who plants a little fabricated good news out in the world. A fake Facebook account? This guy is the mayor of a city—a city with enough problems that the actual newspaper was reporting a lot of bad news about it—and he is spending his time putting together a fake Facebook account? And here I thought I was cagey because I asked my sister-in-law to write a good review of my book on Amazon. Here's the question: Will Winder's behavior mean he will be bounced out of politics, now that he has been exposed as a fibber and a con? Or in this weird political climate will he instead be celebrated as someone who was just fighting back against the nasty, nasty media? I almost don't want to find out.

Photograph: Nationaal Archief/via Flickr

The Utah mayor who recently confessed that he wrote happy news stories about his town using a pseudonym, often quoting himself, was living a writer’s dream. I haven’t read his stories, but I like to think he didn’t hold back at all. Instead of just quoting himself, I’m hoping he went all out, lavishing praise on himself: “According to the young, handsome mayor of West Valley City…” or maybe “A statement from West Valley City’s brilliant and riveting mayor, Mike Winder, who has been frequently described as ‘Presidential’ or, at the very least, ‘senatorial’” or “Mike Winder, who has the charisma of George Clooney, the athleticism of David Beckham, and the political instincts of Thomas Jefferson, called the City Council meeting to order.” Otherwise, what’s the point?

The funny thing is that the newspapers that printed Winder’s phony stories had a lower standard of accountability than, say, the reviews section of Amazon, a pretty loose forum but one which requires you to have at least purchased an item under whatever name you use as your nom de review. Otherwise, I’m sure most writers would spend an awful lot of time cranking out reviews of their own books—“breathtaking… beautifully wrought… a must-read… an astonishing accomplishment”—in other words, Winder-style happy news. The requirement to have an actual, active Amazon account has made it just too much trouble to write one’s own good reviews—at least that’s what a friend told me. Now the only recourse is to lean on friends and family.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

I went to a football school, which meant that I went to a university that served up education and was simultaneously operating a sports franchise. I never met any football players during my four years in Ann Arbor; as far as I knew, they lived separately, ate separately, and socialized separately from the rest of us mere students. But when I imagine what might have gone on at Penn State, when someone from the athletics department allegedly happened upon the former defensive coördinator Jerry Sandusky molesting a ten-year-old boy in the gym, it's like one of those fifties football movies with a lot of soulful, whispered conversations that conclude with bromides like how this had to be kept quiet for "the good of the team"; that everyone had to keep "eyes on the prize"; that the team was "bigger than any single one of us." If the allegations about Sandusky are true, he's a sick man who needs to be immediately isolated and treated. If the allegations against the two other members of the staff are true—that they had received reports of Sandusky abusing a child and chose to not call the police, not report it to child-protection authorities, not demand that Sandusky immediately turn himself in and seek help—then we are lost. (Attorneys for Sandusky and the two administrators have issued denials.)

I have long been one of those tedious people who rails against the coronation of "student-athletes." I have heard the argument that big-time athletics bring in loads of money to universities. I don't believe the money goes anywhere other than back into the sports teams, but that's another story. Wherever the money goes, college sports are actually too valuable, and the Sandusky story supports that. 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!

There is no real solution. College athletics are so entrenched and enjoyed by so many people that they will never be discontinued or substantially changed. I know that. I just pity the people caught in that tender trap. And most of all, I pity those kids.

Photograph by Joe Robbins/Getty Images.

A small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers. How did it come to this? The blame should be doled out carefully. Very little of it should fall on the sheriff of Zanesville, who did what was probably the only thing he could do: give a kill order when darkness fell and Terry Thompson's wild carnivores were still prowling around town. Anyone who argues that he should have used tranquilizers or live traps knows very little about small-town sheriffs, wild animals, and tranquilizers. (How many small towns in the Midwest anticipate having tigers on Main Street and stock the equipment to capture them alive?) I love wild animals, but if I knew there might be a bear in my backyard, I would understand that it might need to be killed.

Obviously, the problem lies with Thompson himself—both his mad decision to release his animals and with his need to own them in the first place. Anyone who claims that he needs to own wild animals because he loves them is delusional. Wild animals don't want to be owned. They're wild. They are not pets; they are not our friends; they are not objects. No scenario makes private ownership of wild animals reasonable or fair. It never ends well for the animals. When I wrote about the Tiger Lady of New Jersey, I realized that every possible outcome for her tigers was sad—even sending the animals to a sanctuary that could provide them with better care. There should never have been twenty-seven tigers in suburban New Jersey to begin with.

There will always be vain, obsessive people who want to own rare and extraordinary things whatever the cost; there will always be people for whom owning beautiful, dangerous animals brings a sense of power and magic. It must be like having a comet in your backyard, a piece of the universe that is dazzling and untouchable right outside your door. But animals live and die and breed and feel pain and can inflict pain. There is no excuse for any individual to own them, period. States should pass laws making it illegal to own or trade wild animals; the phony "educational" permits that many private owners have used to skirt those laws should be eliminated. There is no constitutional right to own a Bengal tiger. It's not a matter of individual freedom; as we have seen in Zanesville, it is first and foremost a public-health issue. Would you want to live next door to someone who owned animals that could kill you if they just happened slip out of their cages?

The dirty secret of all of this is that zoos, which are always cited as the good version of wild-animal ownership, have to accept some of the blame, too. 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.

Photograph by Vanderlei Almeida/AFP/Getty Images.