let’s begin this week with another song for my dog, carl richard marx, who is currently in his crate chewing on an antler, a favorite toy of his which i mentioned in a previous #carlsong a few months ago.
as many of you wrote me last time, we all make up songs for our dogs. in this i am not unique, but i hope you will appreciate this little bop which tries to explore the fundamental disconnect between animals and people. how do we know what they want when they don’t have language?
a lot of people would disagree with me and say, “of course animals have language! they tell us what they want all the time”. and i can be persuaded by this, as the song shows. sometimes carl can be very clear with what he wants, usually from a small list of options: stick, water, out, food, hold me. yes, carl likes to be held. when he starts to wander the house randomly chewing on the wall, what he is trying to say is, “i don’t know what to do with myself, so just cuddle me until i fall asleep”. it works every time.
these are the types of “conversations” people and their animals engage in all the time. co-created agreements on how to live together and take care of each other. however, there is another subset of people who take this a step further and give their dogs a human voice, imagining what that dog would say and sound like were they capable of speech. these are the people of dog instagram.
this spring i am going on tour with my friends Welcome To Night Vale and i need merchandise help at each show. you get 2 free tickets and there’s a minimal time commitment pre and post show. please email erin@erinmckeown.com for more details. complete tour dates are listed below.
carl, who just turned 5 months, is a fox red labrador. and yes, he does have an instagram, which i choose to keep private. instead of texting family and friends a million pictures of carl sleeping, carl carrying a stick, carl sleeping, carl eating the wall, carl sleeping, carl in a field, carl with his brother, i post on his instagram. initially, carl’s instagram account followed only one other, mine. i thought this was funny, should anyone care to look closely at his profile. as carl has gotten older, and i have more time on my hands, i have gone way deep into fox red labrador instagram. carl’s account now follows about 150 fox reds, a few friends’ dogs, and one cat.
it shouldn’t have surprised me that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of instagram accounts just for this one rare color of labs. but i am still shocked when instagram serves me more and more fox reds to follow. when i open up the app, i am greeted by pictures of other fox reds that remind me of when carl was smaller and pictures of big, thick adults that give me an idea of carl’s final size, which is slated to be very very big. i recently listened to a lovely book about a man and his dachshund. so i went deep into dachshund instagram and reveled in the sausage jokes and persistent tugging. i also re-read “where the red fern grows”, and of course there was redbone hound instagram to accompany my literary journey. for the most part it’s been a delight to scroll through pictures of awesome animals.
but i’ve also experienced some disappointment in this world of dog instagram. many of the accounts i follow are dog influencers. yes, this is a thing!! amongst the cute pictures and videos, these accounts are offering discount codes for dog products and always tagging those products in their posts and bios. there’s also a very annoying mobius strip of what i call engagement posts: post your dog sleeping and tag 5 friends! #tongueouttuesday and tag 5 friends! at some point nearly all the accounts i follow are posting or reposting the same 10 stories. there’s good dog bingo, bad dog bingo, holiday themed posts where dogs meant to run in fields and kill things are wearing green bowties and top hats or christmas garlands with little bells.
however, the most upsetting thing i’ve seen on dog instagram is when dog owners (referred to in various spellings as hooman, momma, daddy, etc) write captions as their dogs. it’s really a thing. i guess people think it’s funny? i don’t think it’s funny at all. i think it’s mostly racist, whether people are intending that or not.
almost all of the dogs that i see on instagram speak in a kind of broken english, with poor grammar, spelling, and sentence construction. it mirrors almost exactly the dialect used starting in the 19th century with minstrel shows and continuing on to this day when people imagine how black people speak. let me be clear, i am *not* talking about African American Vernacular English. i am talking about the vicious parody and stereotype of AAVE that began with minstrel shows.
WTF, you say. why do you have to ruin something so fun as dog instagram? hear me out. i do know what i am talking about. in case you forgot, i spent my college time studying minstrel shows and their descendants in popular culture. in the classes i teach now, i make a case that all musical theater grows out of the minstrel show. in fact most american popular culture does. this newsletter is not here to show you the receipts, but they’re out there, and i am not the only one with these opinions.
anyway! i have seen my fair share of “negro” dialect and most dog instagram falls right into it. why do people imagine their dogs talk this way? i hardly think most people are thinking, “i am gonna make good old fido sound like tambo and bones”. but when these dialects were created, they were made to remind people that black folks were animals, sub-human, the equivalent of livestock. and now, when we think about how animals talk, consciously or not, these patterns of speech persist.
why don’t we imagine that dogs have a *better* vocabulary than us? why don’t we imagine that they exist on a higher conceptual plane, with access to more complicated concepts of time and space than us lowly hoomans? why don’t dogs sound like great writers like shakespeare? or toni morrison? why do we imagine that they could even give a shit about saying anything to us at all?
i’ve tried this opinion out with friends and gotten some interesting feedback and fun dinner table conversations out of it. some friends agree. others defend the caption makers because it’s not consciously racist, and well, a paw on a keyboard is bound to make spelling mistakes. i hear all this! and i still think there’s some there there.
if you’re still with me at this point, let’s see how meta we can getta. another conversation i had with my friend ron was about my aversion to expressing my personal opinions publicly. it’s been suggested to me more than a few times that i attempt a career as a columnist, or at least engage more on twitter as a public intellectual. like every other hooman, i have opinions. i get outraged by things. i think other things are stupid. i hate and i love.
but i rarely express these things publicly. especially when i think they might be controversial, like saying that most dog instagram captions are perpetuating racist language tropes. when i think about people as wonderful as roxane gay or nikole hannah jones, writers whom i follow on twitter who have strong opinions and express them often, i think, “i don’t have the stomach for the shit that follows if i say how i really feel”. i’ve had friends get cancelled, i’ve gotten caught in the wierd ripples of internet approbation, and i’ve seen the results of calling power to account with honest, open public disclosure and truth-telling. it’s all important, but maybe it’s not for me.
yet, in this conversation with ron, i asked, “if i’m not generating blowback or controversy with my writing, am i even saying anything useful?” i tend to think the answer is yes. conflict and disagreement do not always the most useful culture make. there’s much to be said for validation, representation, and symbiosis in public culture. for the most part, that’s where i aim this newsletter, especially as it evolves forward. but this observation about dog instagram has just kept eating at me. it feels potent, it feels interesting, it’s just the right combination of absurd and important to keep me chewing on it. so this essay is a toe-dip into expressing something that will likely generate some conversation, if not complaint. the internet is very very not good at thoughtful discussion, so i am wary. also telling people they are doing something racist is a bit of a third rail. but on the other hand, what do i have to lose? i want this newsletter to be interesting, readable, and useful. so we shall see, wont we?
x erin
ps - obligatory #carlcontent!! here is carl running in slow motion!
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
the clothing brand carhartt means so many things to so many people
who knew that giving your dog an antler to chew was the end point in such a strange production cycle
a deep mediation on houseplants by one of my favorite writers
we need to be talking about britney griner more!!
helen keller was way more of a radical than most folks know
more fiction i have enjoyed recently: Slumberland (Paul Beatty)
NERD ALERT!! in looking up the wikipedia for famous Catullus 85 “i hate and i love (odi et amo)” i discovered a mashup of the poem with… miley cyrus’s “wrecking ball”.
2022 IN-PERSON SHOWS
** volunteers always needed to sell merch. you get 2 free tickets and minimal time commitment before and after the show. email erin@erinmckeown.com for more info
April 30 - Portland OR
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
TICKETS
May 1 - Seattle WA
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
830PM 530PM
May 2 - San Francisco CA
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
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May 4 - Highland Park CA
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
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May 5 - San Diego CA
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
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May 6 - Phoenix AZ
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
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May 7 - Santa Fe NM
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
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May 9 - Boulder CO
appearing as The Weather with Welcome To Night Vale
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May 12 - Waltham MA
Museum of Industry and Innovation
TICKETS
Jun 3 - Fayetteville AR
Erin will be performing in-person to celebrate the opening night of T2’s production of “Miss You Like Hell”
stay tuned for tickets & info
***
Jun 1 - Jul 17 - Fayetteville AR
Miss You Like Hell at Theatre Squared
TICKETS
If you have further questions or concerns about COVID protocols, please contact the venues directly.
Reminder, Erin does not appear in productions of Miss You Like Hell
how meta do you wanna getta?