Let me tell you about something I saw last night. Eighteen men and women, all lightly dressed in summer white, lay on a proscenium stage. From the floor, 36 naked hands bent at right angles from 36 wrists and wriggled up, each at a slightly different pace. Let me make sure you’ve got the picture: 36 splayed palms with urgently curled fingertips, turning clockwise and counterclockwise, clockwise and counterclockwise—as if working the lids of enormous and invisible upside-down jars—and at the same time lifting slowly, pushed upwards by long, lithe, tendril-like arms.

Just to give you a sense of the oddness of the image, these naked, floating, turning palms rose from a stage deep in the heart of Boston (in a building with crystal chandeliers, ruby damask walls, curving staircases, and gold-leaf everywhere) and deep in the heart of winter (on a night whose 17-degree cold plummeted to a wind-chill factor in the aughts).

I was watching Mozart Dances, by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and my imagination was being lifted and loosened like those imaginary glass jars.

Upstage, a backdrop was turned into a giant canvas, covered with enormous watercolor brushstrokes—one part mad child making fingerpaintings, one part mad giant making like Motherwell.

The dances were sometimes balletic, sometimes modern, always surprising: pliés, bourées, jetés, and attitudes, but all done barefoot, barelimbed, and with ironic twists: arms floating up all pretty, then squeaking into something angular and awkward; a circle dance suggesting Matisse, then flattening into the Virginia Reel; languid ballerinas freezing into Egyptian vase ornaments, a butterfly morphing into an insect, a bird into a mechanical doll, a corsair into a sailor cruising the street. The lyric vocabulary of ballet devolved into the vernacular, the poetic turned pedestrian.

What did any of this have to do with writing?

As I headed back out into the bitter cold, I thought about Mark Morris’s creative instincts. He never lets himself cross over into cliché, and he plants, plays with, and then supplants our expectations. His language is always surprising, fresh, and funny. I can’t get that one image out of my head, the palms floating up from the floor. They are terribly close to something I’ve seen before, yet remain completely unfamiliar: Sperm, propelled by wriggling tails? Lily pads, levitating out of the swamp and dancing on their stems? Lima beans, sprouting up into the air rather than up through the dirt? Periscopes, pushing up through water and taking a look around?

Images organic, evocative, surreal. And entirely original.

Sitting in the cab of a pickup, waiting to drive up the coast of O‘ahu, I find myself watching a butterfly four feet in front of the windshield. My focus sharpens. The butterfly’s wings are like the iced feuilles of a French pastry—terribly thin slices of tangerine, edged in mocha. They lift and lower, lift and lower, forming two erect parallel planes, then two flat spans. The insect swoops and twitches among clusters of tiny, pansy-shaped blossoms, spears of jade-green leaves, and waxy teardrops of orange berries. I have been looking at this amazing bush of purple, green, and orange every day for a week. But I haven’t seen it.

Our senses are like tender shoots of foliage. They respond to nature, closing down in the cold. And they respond to human nature, curling up in the face of searing criticism, lying in wait when colleagues are wintry, turning to steel under stress. Then, in a place like Hawaii—where I grew up, where I seek creative renewal—they slowly open with light, warmth, the gentleness of tradewinds, and the kindness of old friends.

If the tropics pry open the senses, they humble the writer. It’s one thing to discover the powers of perception, quite another to find powers of description. It can take days for my muscles to let go, longer for my senses to open, and even longer to connect words to images.

Ten days into my most recent trip, and two hours after seeing the butterfly, I hit the Hau‘ula Loop Trail. My hamstrings, my heart, and my breath struggle awkwardly to find a rhythm on the root-strewn hillside. I weave in and out of shade and light, along a corridor of tufting ti plants, past a stand of stately ironwood, into a grove of Cook pines. I crest the hill and raise my eyes. Off to the left, the vertical trunks and horizontal branches of a silk-oak frame the western face of the next ridge, resting in shadow. The late-afternoon sun casts its light on the branches in the foreground—the feathery leaves of the silk-oak shimmer silver, the fronds of a palm arc gold, the lime-green scythes of a koa cut into the sky.

In the background, a hundred greens stitch patterns into the next ridge: the shaggy gray-green of ironwoods, the waxy emerald of African tulips, the dark-teal arrowheads of Cook pines, the olive tufts of wilelaiki, the khaki canopies of eucalyptus.

I am seeing green, as if for the first time.

Didja catch two fascinating articles in last Sunday’s New York Times? In the Op-Ed pages, Farrar, Straus & Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi writes about the heroic—and hidden—work behind great literature, and about the myopia of those infatuated with the idea of e-books.

David Carr, in “Why Twitter Will Endure,” confesses his own infatuation with Twitter, and defies conventional notions about that brand of social media. He sees the possibility of narrative in “short-burst communication” and applauds the economy and precision forced by text messages. But he concedes that “the real value of the service is listening to a wired collective voice.”

In Talking Story, Shelly Runyon writes about the Twitter feed of Susan Orlean, and what it tells us about Orlean’s particular brand of short-burst communication. For you doubters who snicker at the Morse-Code-like rhythms of Twitter and insist that Tweet feeds are fluff, Orlean may change your mind. The author of The Orchid Thief proves two things about micro-narrative: first, that it is possible to tell stories in 140 characters; second, that it takes a damn good writer to do it.

Susan Orlean, Twitter, and the new-media pecking order

susanorlean BTW, my animal sitter at home reports that Laura has become a total raging maniac rooster madman, complete with rooster rage. Oy. – November 11, 2009

In a grassy upstate-New York yard fit for farming, Susan Orlean gives a camera crew for The New Yorker a tour of her utility shed. Half of the shed is occupied by seven chickens. Outside the shed is a fenced-in area, resembling a petting zoo. Chickens zoom past the cameras as Orlean squats down just inside the yard. Three birds rush over to snack on the tomato half in their dutiful owner’s hands.

Orlean points to a black-feathered bird with white specks and a scarlet crest. “This chicken was a sweet little chicken,” she says. “The guy I bought her from had named her Laura, after the character in The Glass Menagerie, and she’s turned out to be a rooster. A big shock to everybody.”

Almost every day, Orlean writes one-liners just like that about her chickens on Twitter. It started with her just tweeting her life, discussing her family and career. Then something clicked. Her fans fixated on the birds. They followed her chicken tweets, re-tweeted them to friends, and tweeted her back. It became a chicken-tweet movement, inquiries about chickens flying fast at Orlean. All the while her following proliferated, growing to six thousand by last June:

susanorlean Do I get a toaster or something when I hit 6000 followers? – June 19, 2009

susanorlean Whoa! Send toaster immediately! –June 21, 2009

Eight thousand in July:

susanorlean Hey, thank you all for pushing me into the toaster-and-a-blender category (8000 followers—but I know you just love me for my chickens). – July 10, 2009

And double that today (and growing).

With all of this notice, the natural next step for a staff writer at The New Yorker was to pitch a piece to her editor.

susanorlean Got a thumbs-up on my chicken story, so I’ll let you all know when it’s running. My editor’s comment? “Buk buk”. – September 8, 2009

On September 28, 2009, The New Yorker published the anticipated Orlean chicken tale, “The It Bird: The return of the back-yard chicken.” The story chronicles her impulse to purchase egg-laying hens and her discovery that she is a part of growing trend. The article is characteristically provocative, a survey on the suburban life of the egg-laying fowl intermixed with the dry wit of Orlean’s Twitter feed.

“Chickens seem to be the perfect convergence of the economic, environmental, gastronomic, and emotional matters of the moment,” Orlean writes. “I do detect a little overripening on the edges—I’ve noticed some late-stage phenomena such as chicken diapers, for people who want their chickens as house pets.”

Orlean argues that chickens will endure, and have endured, through all manner of fads, whether as farm animals, pets, as food producers in hard times, or as designer-bred show-chickens. Today, they are poster chicks for the organic and local-food movements. But it is Orlean’s sentiments as a pet-chicken owner that brought thousands to her feed. These readers engage with Orlean in a way impossible even five years ago. Orlean involves them in her creative process through tweets, which in turn motivates her audience to read her print stories.

The effect of the pre-publication Tweets is impossible to quantify, but there is a sixth-sense among those involved that the build up to the story increased popularity for “The It Bird.”  Jamie Leifer, a public relations representative for The New Yorker, explained that metrics on print stories aren’t tracked, but the Orlean video was the most streamed video the week “The It Bird” ran and number three the following week.

“I had an enormous reaction to this piece,” Orlean explained over email in January 2010, adding that she did six radio and two television interviews after the story went to print. “It was clearly talked about, passed around, noticed, commented upon, and I have no doubt that talking about it in advance on Twitter primed the pump. That may not be hard evidence but it’s certainly real in terms of the sensation of a writer experiencing an audience.”

Consider “The It Bird” as a case study in contemporary media, an example of literary and social media fostering a new engagement with narrative. Carefully cultivating her audience, Orlean pushes them to appreciate her prose. Her openness, her chickens, and her enigmatic twit-wit keeps Orlean’s feed at the top of her reader’s pecking order.

susanorlean One benefit of writing a story about chickens: Every time you write the word “chicken,” it’s amusing.  – August 17, 2009

—Shelly Runyon

{Shelly Runyon lives and writes in Boston Massachusetts. She is currently enrolled as a MLA Journalism degree candidate at Harvard University Extension School.}

I just read this article in the San Francisco Chronicle and had myself a snigger.

Tom Torriglia happily proclaims himself part of the grammar police, and he even started a group called NAGG (the National Association of Good Grammar).

But already I don’t trust him. He insists that the “correct” way to say 2010 is “twenty ten,” arguing that we pronounced 1812 “eighteen twelve” and the 1960’s the “nineteen sixties.” Torriglia goes so far as to say “twenty aught nine” for last year. Were the rest of us misled during the aughts—two thousand one and onward—seduced by Arthur C. Clarke and his 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Here’s the thing: the pronunciation of 2010 is not a grammar issue, it’s a usage issue. (See my brief explanations of grammar, style, and usage in Online and on the Shelf.)

I’m with Berkeley linguist George Lakoff, who comments that both pronunciations are equally correct—if there is such a thing—though he predicts that twenty ten is going to take over. “It’s shortest,” he explains. “It’s easiest to understand.”

I think Torriglia once played his accordion at a book party I threw. He’s a great guy. But for now I trust his musical notes more than his nagging.