Teju Cole’s small fates

After reading Teju Cole’s subtle and haunting novel Open City, I began following him on Twitter.

Right away I noticed that he was doing something quite different from the random links and observations most people disseminate. Each tweet was a miniature story—an example of flash fiction taken to the extreme. The ones below were posted on a single day.

Since Mrs Okafor, of Ikoyi, has a phobia of banks, her cook Peter helped himself to the $50,000 she left lying around the house.

Brick by brick, the new mosque sponsored by Alhaji Yusuf in Ijebu Ode went up, and when it was finished, it came down, all at once.

Police will never catch Ojo, alias Paraga, one of Akure’s most notorious criminals. With a noose, he escaped to the afterlife.

It is true that Chidi, of Anambra, beheaded his aunt Margaret, but it wasn’t for a ritual. He just couldn’t stand the woman.

The Audi 80 compact sedan is fast and reliable, with a trunk roomy enough to fit the swollen corpse of an adult male. In Yenagoa.

Digging a little further, I discovered that these tiny stories were not invented but instead were gleaned from Lagos newspapers as a side effect of Cole’s work on a nonfiction book about the city.

As I began work on this project, and was paying more and more attention to daily life in Lagos, a peculiar thing happened. I found myself drawn to the “small” news. I began to read the metro sections of newspapers, and the crime sections. In Lagos itself, where there is a thriving newspaper culture, I bought several papers and went through them each day. In Brooklyn, I rely on the internet, through which I have access to some dozen Nigerian papers each day: Daily Times, NEXT, Vanguard, Punch, This Day, National Mirror, Tribune, PM News, Guardian, and so on. What I found in the metro and crime sections of these papers was a different quality of everyday life. It was life in the raw, as one might find in the Daily News or the New York Post, but not in the Times. A lot of this material does not have direct bearing on the book I am working on. It is too brief, too odd, and certainly too sensational for the kind of writing the book requires. The material needed another outlet.

Teju Cole may consider them a mere by-product, but his collected “small fates” would make a strange, small, oddly absorbing book of their own.

Nukespeak

Long ago, in a galaxy far away, I was a college freshman and (I think) the youngest member of the Boston-area Clamshell Alliance.

That’s how I first met Steve Hilgartner, the baby-faced, iron-spined antinuclear activist. A few years later I got to know Steve Hilgartner and Dick Bell a bit better when I worked one summer as an energy researcher for a nonprofit they had set up on Beacon Hill. And when their book Nukespeak came out from Sierra Club Books (with coauthor Rory O’Connor) they signed my copy, which still has an honored place on my shelf

Recently I saw that a book called Nukespeak had just been published. My first reaction was outrage: Someone stole my friends’ title! But as it turns out, Sierra Club has followed its original post-Three Mile Island edition of Nukespeak with a new post-Fukushima edition, available as an ebook (more details at the Nukespeak website).

Mr. Banville and Mr. Black

According to the Wikipedia entry on John Banville, “He writes only about a hundred words a day for his literary novels, versus several thousand words a day for his Benjamin Black crime fiction.”

Not long ago I read Banville’s novel about the Cambridge spies, The Untouchable, and noted some of the more dazzling passages.

Public disgrace is a strange thing. Fluttery feeling in the region of the diaphragm and a sort of racing sensation all over, as of the blood like mercury slithering along heavily just under the skin.

I shall miss old Skryne…. He was hardly the popular image of an interrogator. Hardy little fellow with a narrow head and miniature features and a neat thatch of very dry, stone-coloured hair. He reminds me of the fierce father of the madcap bride in those Hollywood comedies of the thirties.

In the hall I handed him his hat. He had a way of putting it on, fitting it carefully to his head with rotating motions, using both hands and crouching forward a little, that seemed as if he were screwing the lid on to a container of some precious, volatile stuff.

Then I turned to Christine Falls, the first of the crime novels Banville published as Benjamin Black. The style was more straightforward, but every once in a while there was something like this—an astonishing performance for someone producing a few thousand words in a day. The protagonist, a man named Quirke, has had his kneecap shattered by a couple of thugs after inquiring into matters best left alone.

He had noticed that his damaged knee inside its cast seemed to have taken on the task of alerting him at moments of surprise or alarm, moments which he in the narcotic haze in which he was still afloat could not register with sufficient force or instantaneity, so that the pinned-up joint of his leg must bring them to his attention by way of a twinge, a sort of pinch, such as a sadistically jolly uncle might give, meant to be playful but leaving a bruise.

Secret weapon for marketers

One advantage of starting a new job is that you get exposed to new points of view. I’ve enjoyed sharing ideas with the new marketing director, who started the same day I did. Last week he lent me The Creative Companion by David Fowler.

Printed in 2003 by Ogilvy & Mather as a small red spiral notebook (I’m not sure you could say that it was published) it was apparently intended for in-house use, as a kind of secret weapon for marketers. It contains a one-page foreword, a two-page afterword, and 30 miniature essays. Many of these are pure gold. Two of them appear below.

The Same Old Story, But New.

Advertising, like literature and cinema, operates on a mere handful of story lines, retold in hundreds of new ways. Which one will you use? Well, how about “conflict”? A problem occurs, your product solves it.

Aren’t the classic Volkswagen ads really about “the underdog”? What about “using product changes world”? “Cute town where the thing is made”? “Using product changes person’s life”? “Founder as goofball/regular guy/earnest guy”? “Factory tour”? “Quirky roots of product”? “Employees”? “Title cards”? “"Talking heads”?

Instead of just writing ads, stop and think about the story you want to tell. Consider how others have told it before you. Then tell it once more, new.

Don’t Create, Uncover.

Stop trying to create a brand. Instead, simply reveal an appropriate portion of the brand. The brand already exists. It’s already at work in the minds and hearts of people. Maybe they’re just overlooked an aspect of it.

Unless it’s a new product, don’t go off and create anything. Just illuminate a corner of the brand that has been in the dark. Then your message will feel appropriate, like it comes from the brand.

Unless you know somebody at Ogilvy, I’m not sure how you can get hold of this book. There’s a copy in Katoomba, Australia, you could get for $37.40 plus $19.95 shipping. (It may be worth it.) Otherwise you could be out of luck.

My New York museum exhibit wish list

Some months ago, Ephemeral New York suggested that it would be a good idea for a New York museum to put on an exhibit of etchings by Martin Lewis.

I agree. I can picture a Martin Lewis exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, and there are a few other ideas for New York-based exhibits that I think would be worth a try.

• Islands of New York, for a look at Governors Island, Rikers Island, City Island, Roosevelt Island, Ellis Island, Randall’s Island, and other small and sometimes overlooked islands of the city
• New York wastelands, featuring the photography of Nathan Kensinger
• Thoreau’s New York, including Thoreau’s uneasy meeting with Walt Whitman, and a glimpse of Staten Island as it was in 1843, when he arrived to tutor the sons of William Emerson.
• Joseph Mitchell’s New York, with excerpts from his essays and photographs of McSorley’s, the Old Hotel, Joe Gould, and the oystermen’s community on Staten Island
• Wildlife of New York, highlighting the variety of birds, mammals, fish, reptiles and amphibians, and insects found in the city, with emphasis on major parks and the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge