AGENDA:
Please work on Sokol/Gannon entries.
Finish any missing work for your portfolios.
Go to library for David Sedaris.
Me Talk Pretty One Day
David Sedaris, 2000
Little, Brown & Company
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316776967
Summary
Me Talk Pretty One Day contains
far more than just the funniest collection of autobiographical
essays—it quite well registers as a manifesto about language itself.
Wherever there's a straight line, you can be sure that Sedaris lurks
beneath the text, making it jagged with laughter; and just where the
fault lines fall, he sits mischievously perched at the epicenter of it
all.
No medium available to mankind is spared his cultural vision; no
family member (even the dynasties of family pets) is forgotten in these
pages of sardonic memories of Sedaris's numerous incarnations in North
Carolina, Chicago, New York, and France.
One essay, punctuated by a conspicuous absence of s's and plurals,
introduces the lisping young fifth-grader David "Thedarith," who arms
himself with a thesaurus, learns every nonsibilant word in the lexicon,
eludes his wily speech therapy teacher, and amazes his countrified North
Carolina teachers with his out-of-nowhere and man-size vocabulary.
By an ironic twist of fate, readers find present-day Sedaris in
France, where only now, after all these years, he must cling safely to
just plural nouns so as to avoid assigning the wrong genders to French
objects. (Never mind that ordering items from the grocer becomes rather
expensive.) Even the strictest of grammarians won't be able to look at
the parts of speech in the same way after exposing themselves to the
linguistic phenomena of Sedarisian humor. Just why is a sandwich
masculine, and yet, say, a belt is feminine in the French language? As
he stealthily tries to decode French, like a cross between a housewife
and a shrewddetective, he earns the contempt of his sadistic French
teacher and soon even resorts to listening to American books on tape for
secret relief.
What David Sedaris has to say about language classes, his brother's
gangsta-rap slang, typewriters, computers, audiobooks, movies, and even
restaurant menus is sure to unleash upon the world a mad rash of
pocket-dictionary-toting nouveau grammarians who bow their heads to a
new, inverted word order. (
From the publisher.)
Author Bio• Birth—December 26, 1956
• Where—Johnson City, New York, USA
• Education—B.F.A., Art Institute of Chicago
• Awards—Thurber Prize; Time Humorist of the Year;
Advocate Lambda Award.
• Currently—lives in London, England, UK
According to
Time Out New York, "David Sedaris may be
the funniest man alive." He's the sort of writer critics tend to
describe not in terms of literary influences and trends, but in terms of
what they choked on while reading his latest book. "I spewed a mouthful
of pastrami across my desk," admitted Craig Seligman in his
New York Times review of
Naked.
Sedaris first drew national attention in 1992 with a stint on
National Public Radio, on which he recounted his experiences as a
Christmas elf at Macy's. He discussed "the code names for various posts,
such as 'The Vomit Corner,' a mirrored wall near the Magic Tree" and
confided that his response to "I'm going to have you fired" was the
desire to lean over and say, "I'm going to have you killed." The radio
pieces were such a hit that Sedaris, then working as a house cleaner,
started getting offers to write movies, soap operas and
Seinfeld episodes.
In subsequent appearances on NPR, Sedaris proved he wasn't just a
velvet-clad flash in the pan; he's also wickedly funny on the subjects
of smoking, speed, shoplifting and nervous tics. His work began
appearing in magazines like
Harper's and
Mirabella, and his first book
Barrel Fever,
which included "SantaLand Diaries," was a bestseller. "These hilarious,
lively and breathtakingly irreverent stories...made me laugh out loud
more than anything I've read in years," wrote Francine Prose in the
Washington Post Book World.
Since then, each successive Sedaris volume has zoomed to the top of the bestseller lists. In
Naked,
he recounts odd jobs like volunteering at a mental hospital, picking
apples as a seasonal laborer and stripping woodwork for a Nazi
sympathizer. The stocking stuffer-sized
Holidays on Ice collects
Sedaris' Christmas-themed work, including a fictional holiday
newsletter from the homicidal stepmother of a 22-year-old Vietnamese
immigrant ("She arrived in this house six weeks ago speaking only the
words 'Daddy,' 'Shiny' and 'Five dollar now'. Quite a vocabulary!!!!!").
But Sedaris' best pieces often revolve around his childhood in North
Carolina and his family of six siblings, including the brother who talks
like a redneck gangsta rapper and the sister who, in a hilarious
passage far too dirty to quote here, introduces him to the joys of the
Internet. Sedaris' recent book
Me Talk Pretty One Day describes,
among other things, his efforts to learn French while helping his
boyfriend fix up a Normandy farmhouse; he progresses "from speaking like
an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of
cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in
the front window."
Sedaris has been compared to American humorists such as Mark Twain, James Thurber and Dorothy Parker; Publisher's
Weekly called
him "Garrison Keillor's evil twin." Pretty heady stuff for a man who
claims there are cats that weigh more than his IQ score. But as
This American Life producer
Ira Glass once pointed out, it would be wrong to think of Sedaris as
"just a working Joe who happens to put out these perfectly constructed
pieces of prose." Measured by his ability to turn his experiences into a
sharply satirical, sidesplittingly funny form of art, David Sedaris is
no less than a genius.
Extras• Sedaris got his start in radio after
This American Life
producer Ira Glass saw him perform at Club Lower Links in Chicago. In
addition to his NPR commentaries, Sedaris now writes regularly for
Esquire.
• Sedaris's younger sister Amy is also a writer and performer; the
two have collaborated on plays under the moniker "The Talent Family."
Amy Sedaris has appeared onstage as a member of the Second City improv
troupe and on Comedy Central in the series
Strangers with Candy.
• If I weren't a writer, I'd be a taxidermist," Sedaris said in a chat on Barnes and Noble.com. According to the
Boston Phoenix, his collection of stuffed dead animals includes a squirrel, two fruit bats, four Boston terriers and a baby ostrich.
•
When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, he's what he said:
I guess it would be Cathedral by
Raymond Carver. His sentences are very simple and straightforward, and
he made writing seem deceptively easy—the kind of thing anyone could do
if they put their mind to it. (From Barnes & Noble.)
,
for instance, deals with a young girl who can taste the emotion of
whoever made the food she eats. In your world, the magic is simply part
of the natural landscape. It doesn't overcome the reality of the main
story. It's a facet of the story rather than being the whole story.
