Daily Blague

What I'm reading now: Thomas Goltz's Chechnya Diary and Ian Rankin's Fleshmarket Close. Mr Goltz and I have a mutual friend, and she tells me that there's a Georgia Diary in the works. Azerbaijan Diary was the literary equivalent of our trip to Istanbul: it opened up an overlooked world and demanded that attention be paid. I don't expect the Chechnya book to be quite so sanguine, however. I wonder: will Mr Goltz take on the Kurds? All of these peoples seem have always been prone to tribal violence, but contact with nation-states has transformed their skirmishes into genocide... In between these books and whatever I was reading before, I swallowed Danny Gregory's Everyday Matters: a New York Diary (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). There are lots of interesting things to say about this album of annotated drawings, but what struck me was the blog-like quality of Mr Gregory's self-disclosure. Everyday Matters is riddled with bullet-hole sized glimpses into Mr Gregory's personal history, but no comprehensive picture is coaxed from the details. This open-endedness is remarkably life-like - although if one were having a cup of coffee with Mr Gregory it would not be overstepping to ask for a capsule summary of his parents' relationship(s), or for the precise number of full and partial siblings. It's not that these are important details; they're not. But they're the details that I'm curious to know. Other people might be just as tantalized by the author's sparing way with his successful career in advertising. Danny Gregory is not the actual subject of his "diary"; living is. And we're all doing that.... I had the wacky idea yesterday of inventing a talking bird whose witty remarks would spice up these entries - and don't be surprised if I do. It seemed so compelling and irresistible that, despite intense j'en doute expressions from Kathleen, I found myself thinking about it the moment I woke up this morning. The problem is, I'm not a sitcom writer; I don't have that kind of cleverness. I'd goof it up and get arrested probably, like the lady two floors down who was seized by ASPCA officials at her Columbia University office because she'd taken measures to repel pigeons from her windowsill, and thereby offended the neighbors who were feeding them from their balcony. (This was years ago; she's gone, but they're still there, and you don't want to think what the color of their balcony railing is.) But what if I called it Numa Numa the Wonder Bird? Would that draw visitors? How desperate.... "Never complain, never explain," counsels Danny Gregory on his blog. What kind of birds talk, anyway? I could set it up like this: an important client of Kathleen's would give her the bird for some compelling reason and she would have to take care of it. Already we have crossed a line into the wildly improbable. Ours is a no pets! household.... If I've made you laugh with this nonsense, cut it out, because I was almost as humiliated as Gary Brolsma to learn about the Numa Numa Dance video - today. It's been a center of attention since late last year; how can I not have heard of it? Not that I particularly want to see some poor shlub do what an old friend of ours calls "SID" - seated interpretive dancing. But I'm crazy about the name. How much would Danny Gregory charge to make a watercolor of my fantasy fowl?

PS: I think the video is kind of sweet. I can picture M le Neveu letting go in a similar fashion, although not in front of a camera.

PS: I neglected to thank Patricia Storms at Booklust for finding and recommending Danny Gregory's work. Apologies to the creator of The Tart!