You can’t keep hiding, dog

The New Yorker‘s famous “Nobody knows you’re a dog” cartoon appeared in 1993.

Things have changed.

Today, anyone who can type your name into Google can quickly find out that you’re a dog.

You can try to cover your tracks (sorry) so well that you have little or no online profile, but it’s a losing game. Whether you’re promoting yourself or your company, the key to success in the early 21st century is to build communities online. You need to get more visitors to your website, more friends on Facebook, more followers on Twitter.

The key to doing that successfully is to allow your authentic self to show through. In a time where customers can look you up on Yelp and comment on your product, where they can peek at your office building with Google Earth, and where they can look up your CEO, it’s impossible to hide.

Today, everyone knows you’re a dog—or can easily find out. You can’t bury your past and identity like a bone in the backyard. So the challenge is to be your own dog, be the best dog you can be, and communicate who you are as authentically as you can. 

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.

River teeth in Nyack

Yesterday Jenn and I took a train up the Hudson to visit our friends Gail Hovey and Pat Hickman. On the way we stopped at the Tovin Studio Gallery in Nyack, where Pat’s work is on display.

The first thing I noticed was a wheel of what looked at first glance like arrowheads. Pat explained that these were river teeth, a name adopted by David James Duncan for his book and journal, which offers this explanation of the name.

There is in every log a series of cross-grained, pitch-hardened masses where branches once joined the tree’s trunk. “Knots,” they’re called in a piece of lumber. But in the bed of a river, where the rest of the tree has been stripped and washed away, these knots take on a very different appearance, and so deserve a different name. “River teeth,” we called them as kids, because that’s what they look like. Like enormous fangs, ending in cross-grained root that once tapped all the way into the tree’s very heartwood.

Most of the show consists of works created from sausage casings—or in other words, the intestinal linings of animals. The material dries to a light papery sheet like parchment, which Pat wraps around objects (including some of the river teeth), colors with rust and other natural materials, assembles into ancient-looking books, and into which she embeds rusty nails and the lively-looking dried bodies of geckos. (Pat assured us that no geckos were harmed to create her art. They died of natural causes or in screen-door accidents and other mishaps.)

As another visitor commented, the overall effect of the show is beautiful and creepy—an assessment that Pat didn’t seem to mind.

Beware of Dog

I spotted this sign on a junkyard on the West Side. It’s so much more effective than the usual “Beware of Dog,” don’t you think?

First, it doesn’t even use the word “dog,” which has positive connotations: man’s best friend, and so on. It shows a picture of a vicious beast with fangs. It addresses you in the voice of that beast, which is startling, and it grabs the reader’s attention with a question, and the word “you.”

But most important, it sets a scene and tells a little story. It invites you to imagine yourself inside the junkyard around dusk. You hear a low growl and this thing emerges from behind a heap of auto parts. It can make it to the fence in three seconds. Can you?

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).