David Sedaris

AGENDA:

Continue working on Sedaris essay.

POST:  Look over questions on previous post and post a paragraph response to discussion questions 1-3.  Refer to specific essays and cite text evidence.

Me Talk Pretty Discussion questions

AGENDA:

Listen to "Me Talk Pretty One Day"
Audiobook:  Go to 3:09:51/ pg. 166
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdRpz9PkOhY


1. What better place to start a discussion of a Sedaris book than with the parts you find the funniest? Which parts make you LOL (laugh out loud)? Go around the room and share your belly laughs with others.
2. Are there sections of the book you feel are snide or mean-spirited? Perhaps his criticism of Americans who visit Europe dressed "as if you've come to mow its lawns." Or perhaps the piece about his stint as a writing teacher. Is petulance a part of Sedaris's schtick...his charm?
3. Talk about the Sedaris family, in particular his parents. How do they come across? Whom does he feel closest to? Sedaris makes an interesting statement about his father: it was a mystery that "a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests." Is that unusual?
4. David Sedaris is a descendant of Woody Allen's brand of humor—personal idiosyncrasies or neuroses raised to an art form. What does Sedaris reveal about himself, his insecurities, angst, secret hostilities, and do you find those parts funny or somewhat touching, even sad? Actually, do you like Sedaris as he reveals himself in his book?
5. Are there parts of Me Talk Pretty that you disliked, didn't find funny, found overworked or contrived?
6. For a book club meeting: it would be fun to get the audio version and listen to selected segments. I especially recommend the French lessons in Paris.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

David Sedaris

Sedaris narratives cont.

AGENDA:

EQ: What are the nuts and bolts of good essay writing?

Read this blog post:--CONCISION and CLARITY

http://gloriagracechang.blogspot.com/2012/08/me-talk-pretty-one-day_21.html

Me Talk Pretty One Day Summary

David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000) is a New York Times best-selling collection of humorous, autobiographical essays. Sedaris has mastered the art of self-deprecating humor. His radio debut was on the NPR's Morning Edition in 1992, where he read his hilarious and now-popular essay “SantaLand Diaries," tales of his experiences working as a Santa elf for a large department store. Shortly after his NPR performance, he was awarded a two-book deal with a major publisher and has since written numerous other best-sellers and frequently performs his works on stage. Me Talk Pretty One Day is Sedaris’s third book.
The twenty-eight essays in Me Talk Pretty One Day cover some of Sedaris’s more awkward school experiences growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina. For example, in the essay “Go Carolina,” Sedaris relates his first encounter with the school speech therapist, who attempted to cure the author’s lisp. Sedaris found it curious that though there were other students who were equally humiliated by being called out of class for special training to rid themselves of speech impediments, it never seemed to be the popular or cute students.
The stories continue as the author moves through several colleges as he tries to decide what to do with his life. Most of these stories make fun of the author, but Sedaris is not shy of also putting members of his family in the spotlight. In the essay called “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” Sedaris picks on his youngest brother Paul and Paul’s frequent use of curse words. Paul, born at the end of the line of six children, was raised by more relaxed parents. In this particular essay, Sedaris points out that Paul got to do so much more than the older kids were allowed.
When Sedaris moves to Paris with his boyfriend, Hugh, he takes with him his ability to find humor in humiliating situations. In the title essay, “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” Sedaris tries to become more proficient in speaking French but is embarrassed by the teacher. In “The City of Lights in the Dark,” Sedaris admits that he spends much of his time in Paris watching dubbed American movies.
This collection proved so popular that movie director Wayne Wang made an offer to adapt the essays to film. Sedaris agreed for a while, and then changed his mind. He was worried about how his family would be portrayed and backed out of the deal.

WRITNG:  Work on your own essays

HMWK: Read Sedaris' essays

Queen of the Fall Memoir/Sedaris humorous essay

AGENDA:

Continue to work on polishing your Queen of the Fall memoir.



 Think about what you can write for a Sedaris humorous essay.

READ previous blog post and do sentence exercise.  Post your answers on that post!

Other essay contests:
Harvard-Radcliffe
College Board/Atlantic Writing Prize:
https://www.collegeboard.org/writing-prize




HMWK: Read Sedaris to page 100

David Sedaris Santaland Diaries

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=santaland+diaries+david+sedaris&view=detail&mid=D3C8E67C9CB87CC732D8D3C8E67C9CB87CC732D8&FORM=VIRE2&adlt=strict

David Sedaris

AGENDA:

Finish Queen of the Fall memoirs

How to Write Like David Sedaris

David Sedaris videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExcpcPZKWpU&list=PLA86A504AA10A73C9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5apZmwR9UI&list=PLA86A504AA10A73C9 


How to write like David Sedaris:

http://remainingawriter.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-to-write-like-david.html 

http://ydrstorytelling.blogspot.com/2012/04/david-sedaris-on-writing-write-everyday.html

http://thecopybot.com/2011/08/sedaris-first-sentence/ 

http://www.missourireview.com/archives/bbarticle/a-conversation-with-david-sedaris/ 

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812072,00.html 

Welcome back!

Please read Sedaris to pg. 59

TRY THIS EXERCISE TODAY AND POST YOUR ANSWERS!

http://thewritepractice.com/four-commandments-to-writing-funny/ 

READING:  For next Tuesday, read to pg. 60 in Sedaris

Next book: David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day

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.)