"I assumed that I would at least meet with Streep so that she could study my mannerisms and pick up my Ohio accent."

"I straightened up my New Yorker office, expecting a call any day announcing that she was heading over. I mentioned it to friends at work—something along the lines of 'Oh, Meryl Streep might be dropping by, just in case you see a stranger wandering around,' and tried to imagine which gestures of mine she might focus on. Time passed. More time passed. I finally called Ed and asked him when Meryl was coming to see me. He told me she didn’t need to, because she had already created the character on her own."

Writes Susan Orlean, in 'The Making of “Adaptation'/When your quirky book becomes a quirkier movie" (The New Yorker).

"Ed" = Ed Saxon, a co-producer of the movie based on Orlean's book "The Orchid Thief."

"Some of my readers hated the movie and were angry that I had allowed 'The Orchid Thief' to be adapted in that way. My response was to remind them that nothing in the book had changed, no matter what the film had made of it.... We see books as beautiful and meaningful and important and profound, but we see movies as dreamlike. Being a character onscreen transports you forever into another, more enchanted realm."

"The graveyard of kitchen fads is wide and deep, littered with the domestic equivalent of white dwarf stars that blazed with astonishing luminosity for a moment..."

"... and then deteriorated into space junk. The allure of invention in the category is understandable, since preparing meals is a Sisyphean task and anything that promises to make it faster, or easier, or better, or healthier, or more fun, is irresistible—and often, for a while, anyway, profitable for the manufacturer. Some cooking 'tools' are so specific and inessential that they are hardly missed: cue the microwave s’mores maker, the pancake pen, the carrot sharpener, the hot-dog slicer, and the butter cutter. Many of these haven’t vanished completely; they have just transitioned from ubiquitous (or at least a fixture on Christmas-gift lists) to rarities, from being items you feel that you must have and will use to dust catchers that will end up front and center in your next Goodwill donation. Other kitchen devices, such as the fondue pot, are so culturally and stylistically time-stamped that they become shorthand for an entire era and method of entertaining, long after anyone makes regular use of them...."

Writes Susan Orlean in "The Instant Pot and the Miracle Kitchen Devices of Yesteryear/Preparing meals is a Sisyphean task, and anything that promises to make it faster, or easier, or better, or healthier, or more fun, is irresistible" (The New Yorker).

"Pointless," I said out loud...

... as I did my sunless sunrise run this morning. 

I needed to remember a distinctive word in the passage I wanted to blog from the audiobook I had in my earphones. 

 

I search the Kindle version. Ah, here it is:

Mittens has graciously deferred to Gary; Leo couldn’t care less about power; and the dog just finds the whole thing, and, in fact, everything in life, exciting. So what are these two creatures fighting about? I trust in the fact that animals are pure in their hearts, efficient in their emotions. I admire that they don’t seem to waste time hating each other if there isn’t a specific purpose to it. Food, shelter, dominance, and love affairs seem to be the things that matter, and once those are sorted out, what else is there to say? Could it just be a personality conflict? Does Gary find Mittens unlikable? What a disappointment that would be. It would mean that animals are just as flawed as we are, susceptible to petty grievances and pointless conflict and capable of making awful sounds at each other when we really have nothing to say.

The book is  "On Animals" by Susan Orlean. The "creatures" — Mittens and Gary (and Leo) — are cats. 

"When you run out of ideas, just write down a list. Readers love lists."

Says a character — an author who teaches writing — in a novel I'm reading, "Our Country Friends" (by Gary Shteyngart).

I'd highlighted that line when I read it, and it popped to mind as I was listening to the audiobook of the other book I'm consuming this week, "On Animals" (by Susan Orlean), and I got to the last paragraph of the essay "Lost Dog." The dog (Coby) was found and it seemed as if we were closing in on the miscreant who stole the car that contained the dog (and a viola da gamba)...

At this point, the police certainly knew the thief’s name. After all, it was on the pawn voucher and in the detention records from his previous lockup with Chris Walker, and there were fingerprints on the Volvo, the viola da gamba, the pawn voucher, and probably on Coby. But the man was still at large. Before the car was towed to a wrecking yard, [the dog owner] went through it one more time to see if there were any last belongings of his or [his wife's] still inside. There was nothing of theirs, but the thief had left behind some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name.

... some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name — a list! Just write down a list. Readers love lists. 

The next thing that the reader wanted to happen was the capture of the thief, but it's a true story, and that didn't happen. So how do you tie it up satisfyingly? Out of the blue, there's a list, miscellaneous items, indicative of miscellaneous things — the man had a girlfriend, he wrote poetry.... 

I appreciated the essayist's artistry. And oh! how pleased I am that I have a tag for this: lists.

"During the Second World War, a pigeon was cited for bravery by the U.S. Army. During a storm, the bird, known as U.S. 1169, carried a distress message..."

"... from a foundering Coast Guard vessel and alerted rescuers. Between 1943 and 1949, the Dickin Medal—a British award for animal bravery—was bestowed on thirty-two pigeons, nearly twice the number given to hero dogs."

From the book "On Animals" by Susan Orlean.

Here's the Wikipedia page for the Dickin Medal, where you can see the details of what these pigeons — and other creatures — did. And by "other creatures," I mean dogs, mostly. 18 of them. The only other creatures were 3 horses and — incredibly! — 1 cat. He was a ship's cat named Simon:

"I ordered a chartreuse Eglu complete with four red hens. The Eglu came via UPS. A few days later, the hens were delivered to my local post office."

"'You have a package here,' the postal clerk said when she called, 'and it’s clucking.' I rushed into town and picked up the package. It was heavier than I had expected, smaller than I had pictured, as noisy as I had been warned. At home, I opened the box and decanted the hens into the wire pen that attaches to the Eglu. They were young Rhode Island Red hybrids called Gingernut Rangers, with bright brown eyes and rich red feathers speckled with white. Their combs were small and pink and their knobby legs were bright yellow. Within six weeks or so, their combs would redden, and their legs would pale—signs that they were about to start laying. The knock on chickens has always been that they’re stupid. Even some chicken fanciers hold this opinion. I recently read an online comment from someone who announced cheerily that her chickens were 'extremely entertaining due to the fact that they are dumb as stumps!' But my hens didn’t seem stupid. They explored the pen with that stop-action motion that makes chickens look like cartoon characters, but with a brisk alertness and sharp curiosity. Right away, I figured out that 'pecking order' isn’t just a figure of speech. They adhered to a strict social system, with each hen taking her turn at the feeder and corrective nips doled out to any chicken that stepped out of line."

I'm reading "On Animals" by Susan Orlean.

Here's the website for the Eglu, a plastic chicken coop, which Orlean found by googling "cool-looking chicken coops" and "modern design chicken house" after rejecting the usual "design that was half doghouse, half toolshed, and gigantic."

"The pro-appropriation people will say, 'well, Johns is an artist and anything that Johns does is going to be transformative.'"

Said the intellectual property lawyer, quoted in "How did this teenager’s drawing of his knee wind up in a Jasper Johns painting at the Whitney?/A new work debuting in a major exhibition raises complex questions about artistic license and appropriation" (WaPo). 

The teenager, Jéan-Marc Togodgue, had made an anatomical drawing of a knee (because, he says, he wanted to understand an injury to his knee). The artist saw the drawing hanging in Togodgue's doctor's office and copied it as part of a painting. It's painted to look like the original drawing is taped to the painting. 

Johns wrote to Togodgue, "I would like you to be pleased with the idea and I hope that you will visit my studio to see what I have made." 

An artist named Brendan O’Connell — O'Connell's son is friends with Togodgue — called attention to the copyright issue: “This isn’t like him doing the Savarin coffee cup or doing some pop appropriation like I do.... This is somebody’s work that he directly copied."  

In the era of Black Lives Matter, [he] found it particularly offensive that a White artist from the segregated South was using the work of an African teenager in this way.

"The thread began with a tweet that simply read 'Drunk' and began ending with one that read, 'I am goi f to sleep. My husband has asked me five hundred rimes@if I am alright.'"

"'That means it’s go to sleep o’clock.' At some point in the middle, she tweeted: 'Ok a newborn colt rocks it totally and he thought my hand was his mom. It was not. He has tasted life’s infinite tragedy. As I mentioned Earlier I am inebriated.'"

From "Susan Orlean explains her drunken viral Twitter thread, candy-coated fennel seeds and the comfort of cats" (WaPo). Susan Orlean is a much-praised New Yorker writer, best known for "The Orchid Thief."

There's an interview with Orlean — after she recovered from her drunkenness and learned how popular her drunken ravings had become. Excerpt from the interview:

At some point, my husband came in and said he had gotten a few texts from friends saying they thought that my Twitter account had been hacked. And I said, “It hasn’t been hacked!” I was incensed at the thought that someone thought it was hacked. Then he said, “Are you sure you want to be tweeting in your condition?” I said, “Yes, yes, it’s fine. Everything’s fine.” But I was just sort of tweeting, and I wasn’t looking to see if anyone was responding. I was just typing, stream-of-consciousness, without giving a great deal of thought to if anyone was reading it. To me, it was late at night, even though it wasn’t late. I had gone to bed at 8:30, because I was hammered.

I noticed the tweets at the time, and it revived my interest in Susan Orlean. So whatever that crazy stuff was it was effective in boosting her visibility and maybe even her reputation. It caused me to go read the article of hers in a recent New Yorker, which I'd noticed but skipped with a vague plan to get back to it later. The article is about rabbits: "The Rabbit Outbreak/A highly contagious, often lethal animal virus arrives in the United States." Sample paragraph:

"Competitiveness about 'I know the Internet better than you do,' is really out of date."

"Nobody 'knows the Internet' well enough to count anymore. Maybe a decade ago, but even then there was more than anyone could digest."

Says Instapundit, linking to me, which he's been doing since a decade ago, and I know the internet well enough to know it's nice to get an Instapundit link, and it wasn't me that was getting competitive in the "I know the Internet better than you do" mode. I was quoting Susan Orlean, nattering inanely about keeping up with internet things like @Horse_ebooks and "This Is My Milwaukee."

ADDED: Even more so than in the nonvirtual world, we all go where we want, and I want to be here, after I've gone out following my whims and predelictions, showing you what I've found and nattering, possibly not always inanely, with the lucky consequence that you've chosen to browse here.

"I try to learn interesting things about the world and in this case, the competitiveness about 'I know the Internet better than you do' is pretty profound."

"There's a tremendous arrogance. I found that hilarious — by Gawker standards, it was a resounding compliment." 

The "that," which Susan Orlean found hilarious, was Gawker's opinion that her New Yorker article, "Man and Machine/Playing Games on the Internet" was "generally, much less embarrassing than it could have been."

I've read the New Yorker article. You'll need a subscription to read more than the very beginning. It's about 2 guys who are interested in doing prankish internet things and portraying what they are doing as an art project. Why is The New Yorker facilitating their enterprise? Partly because they've managed to build heavy traffic, but also because Susan Orlean felt like writing about it. So then, why did she feel like writing about it? You can read the interview at the top link and find some answers like:

It doesn't even occur to me to turn on the TV anymore. I'm just sort of screwing around online, either on my phone or my iPad. I can stay very entertained. It's remarkable....

I'm a real app girl — I'm always goofing around with the newest gizmo....

I, for one, welcome our computer overlords. I don't worry about that, I really don't....

Heretofore "always... afraid of video games," Susan Orlean "felt an urgency rising in me."

Somehow, strangely, Microsoft Kinect brings out the elite scribe's sexual (-sounding) longings.