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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
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Daily Blah for... Sunday, April 30, 2006
The Soul of Sedaris
Tonight was the second time I'd been to see David Sedaris read. The first, you may recall, was in the relatively intimate, if a little 1970's-esque, First Unitarian Church in San Francisco. This time he was swallowed up in Cupertino's gigantic Flint Center, the stadium rock star of the literary world. His voice and his pacing were as laugh-triggering as ever. The all-new material, however, was a far lower quality.
Sedaris has two problems -- firstly, he's running out of quirky memories of his family to write about. His adventures with Hugh in France have served as a substitute, but they don't stand up on their own -- witness him straining to connect a story about a skeleton Hugh bought him, and how it haunted him, with a flashback to a childhood barbecue where his mother chided him for wolfing down his meat while he was choking on it. Both nice little set-pieces, but they don't hang together, at least not in the humorous essay form Sedaris is contractually wedded to.
Secondly, you get the sense he'd really prefer to be a fiction writer -- which is where he started, effectively, in the Barrel Fever collection. So he's straining to find a new style. He treated us to a nice little Aesop-esque piece on a Buddhist sheep and an inquisitive crow who gives the sheep a mantra to practice while the crow pokes its lambs' eyes about, based on a real incident he'd heard about in rural Normandy. Apparently this is a harbinger of more animal stories. But that's not much to expand a career on.
Mark Twain went from humorous essays and memories to the Great American Novel: hefty but rewarding topics like the Mississippi and emancipation. But there's something about Sedaris that seems to resist heavier topics, to suspect anything that is not trivial or a quirky character sketch. I would love for him to probe deeper on some topic or another.
After the reading, I stood in line with my friend Elinor for an hour so she could get a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day signed for her mother. Sedaris, who had been chatting amiably at the simpering students and tourists in line in front of us, suddenly went quiet and cold when Elinor hit him with the request that he make some mention of marrying her mother in the dedication. Something was going on inside his head, and I couldn't help but wonder if he and Hugh had had The Talk -- the one every long-term gay couple must be having in Europe these days, surrounded by high-profile civil unions breaking out in Britain and Spain and the Netherlands.
"I may live with you somday [sic]," he wrote, "but marry? No way." I can't imagine Sedaris, a consummate writer who loves language and has written in such great detail of his meticulousness, neatness, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, does a lot of misspelling. I have since liked to think that the germ of a great novel about marriage, this century's emancipation issue, was brewing in his head. I like to think that, because every generation should have a Mark Twain.
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