Words on the Street

Years before Twitter, there was Words on the Street, an almost daily feature at Dave Bonta's blog, Via Negativa. Fans of Dave's more recent daily microblog, The Morning Porch, might not realize that he ever had this cynical, urban alter-ego, a modern-day Diogenes who, with his old-school, cardboard-based messaging system, literally sleeps on everything he writes. "Bonta's words are given another layer of meaning by their fixed context, the unchanging homeless character whose placard they grace. "Friend Me" takes on a completely different significance seen here, as opposed to on one's favorite social networking site. Each page I flick to raises a smile and then asks me to come back to it and think, and then to think again. In this book Dave moves towards cementing his reputation as satirist and as an important contemporary gadfly." --Kaspalita Thompson