The Native Americans were only half right when they said that the camera steals your soul. It takes away far worse: your mystery. And your marketability.

You need to have control over your own image. At the end of each weekend, there are hundreds of new pictures of Penn students up on Facebook, doing glamorous and respectable things like flipping off the camera, vomiting, urinating on Ben Franklin and making out with members of the same sex. Everyone likes to be a student celebrity, and to feel courted by the roving lens of the Pennparazzi (the friend with the digital camera). But overexposure now means less mystique later. The real truth that I must face is that if I want to be successful later, I’m going to have to keep a paper bag over my head right now. And this isn’t just to avoid One Night In Paris -type debacles. This is because I want to be a Serious Writer with a good jacket photo.

Don DeLillo’s reclusive protagonist in Mao II said that, “when a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.” Well, I want to be God.

I appreciate the approach of J.D. Salinger. There are probably about three extant headshots of dear Jerome David, and the last one to appear on a dust jacket was taken in 1951. There was one taken in 1998, but who knows if it’s even the same guy since no one had seen him in four decades? Talk about enigmatic! Despite his alleged creepiness and penchant for macrobiotic foods and teenage girls, I will always think of him as a fresh-faced, affable youth of 32. There are about six photographs of Virginia Woolf, but they all send the same message: character-nose, serious, intense. Shakespeare, similarly, had a good trademark image (though it was a drawing, not a photograph). Great writers from Lord Byron to Pynchon have kept a low profile. Nowadays, such image maintenance is near impossible.

Up until the fall of 2005, you could only have one photograph of yourself on Facebook. Oh, the agony and pleasure of deciding how to present yourself to the world! It is wretched to have a photograph that reveals your homeliness, but it is also embarrassing to choose a picture that is too flattering. You must strike the right balance, and vigilantly de-tag.

Be iconic. Be elusive. Be modest with your image; don’t whore it out. The next time someone sticks a camera in your face, tell him to save it for the mortals. You’ve got a legacy to build.

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