David Sedaris
Oct. 8th, 2016 11:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraDavid Sedaris is #25 on the list maintained by the delightful blog Stuff White People Like. (Regrettably, that blog hasn’t been updated in quite some time, from which I must conclude that white people have all succumbed to depression and general angst.)
And it’s true, there wasn’t a single person-of-color in attendance at the David Sedaris reading at Bard College that BB and I attended last night.
Well. There was one. She was an usher. Does that count? I assume Bard College recruits its ushers by promising them free access to events they would otherwise have to dole out $45 to attend -- difficult on a student budget. This usher performed her duties with grace and aplomb, but I noticed when BB and I snuck out – early – that she’d decided to sit this one out with a book. Did not notice the name of the book.
The reading was kind of a mixed bag. I love-love-love Sedaris’s stuff about his family and about his misadventures as a young man with drugs, bizarre jobs, and weird landladies, floating through Raleigh and NYC. But I am meh on the animal adventures.
And I actively dislike what I guess would have to be called Sedaris’s fictions. Last night’s reading, for example, began with a letter to Santa from a kid who was thanking Santa for offing his odious stepfather. No, it’s not the mordant subject matter that turns me off; it’s the obvious pandering to what someone -- the publisher's marketing department? Sedaris himself? -- seems to have decided is the Sedaris Audience. This might be fallout from that decade-old piece in The New Republic in which some ass decided to fact check Sedaris’s memoir stuff. I dunno.
When Sedaris is brilliant, he is very brilliant indeed, and he’s brilliant more often than most people are brilliant. His language is so simple; his juxtapositions, so subversive, so true. (Of course, there is a difference between "true" and "truthful.") You laugh – but guiltily. Part of the appeal of a David Sedaris public event, in fact, is that you're mingling carbon dioxide molecules with other people who, presumably, find the subversive just as hilarious as you do.
His story about slamming the Carnegie Hall stage door on Tiffany’s face – she’s the sister who committed suicide – is just so amazing and the ending is so powerful. Not available online unfortunately, so I can’t point to it and say, See?
But the Q&A at the end of the reading – I guess this is Sedaris’s equivalent of the Inna Gadda Da Vida encore, right? – was kinda lame. I read somewhere that he gathers new material for essays from his own extemporaneous responses to weird audience questions, so I guess they’re useful. To him. But not to me. Plus BB’s squeeze was coming in on the night train. We beat a hasty vamoose.
David Sedaris writes No Photographs! into his contracts. But I got one anyway. For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lifeinroseland. Of the top of his shiny head:
And it’s true, there wasn’t a single person-of-color in attendance at the David Sedaris reading at Bard College that BB and I attended last night.
Well. There was one. She was an usher. Does that count? I assume Bard College recruits its ushers by promising them free access to events they would otherwise have to dole out $45 to attend -- difficult on a student budget. This usher performed her duties with grace and aplomb, but I noticed when BB and I snuck out – early – that she’d decided to sit this one out with a book. Did not notice the name of the book.
The reading was kind of a mixed bag. I love-love-love Sedaris’s stuff about his family and about his misadventures as a young man with drugs, bizarre jobs, and weird landladies, floating through Raleigh and NYC. But I am meh on the animal adventures.
And I actively dislike what I guess would have to be called Sedaris’s fictions. Last night’s reading, for example, began with a letter to Santa from a kid who was thanking Santa for offing his odious stepfather. No, it’s not the mordant subject matter that turns me off; it’s the obvious pandering to what someone -- the publisher's marketing department? Sedaris himself? -- seems to have decided is the Sedaris Audience. This might be fallout from that decade-old piece in The New Republic in which some ass decided to fact check Sedaris’s memoir stuff. I dunno.
When Sedaris is brilliant, he is very brilliant indeed, and he’s brilliant more often than most people are brilliant. His language is so simple; his juxtapositions, so subversive, so true. (Of course, there is a difference between "true" and "truthful.") You laugh – but guiltily. Part of the appeal of a David Sedaris public event, in fact, is that you're mingling carbon dioxide molecules with other people who, presumably, find the subversive just as hilarious as you do.
His story about slamming the Carnegie Hall stage door on Tiffany’s face – she’s the sister who committed suicide – is just so amazing and the ending is so powerful. Not available online unfortunately, so I can’t point to it and say, See?
But the Q&A at the end of the reading – I guess this is Sedaris’s equivalent of the Inna Gadda Da Vida encore, right? – was kinda lame. I read somewhere that he gathers new material for essays from his own extemporaneous responses to weird audience questions, so I guess they’re useful. To him. But not to me. Plus BB’s squeeze was coming in on the night train. We beat a hasty vamoose.
David Sedaris writes No Photographs! into his contracts. But I got one anyway. For
lifeinroseland. Of the top of his shiny head:
