Content & Context

DIALOGUE: DAVID SEDARIS

Contributor to the New Yorker and Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, humorist David Sedaris has just published a new collection of short stories called Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. I talked with him recently over cake at Cozy Corner in Oak Park, Illinois.

Books&Culture: Why do you avoid reading reviews of your books?

David Sedaris: With every previous book I’ve called the publisher and said, You can’t let this book come out. I’ll give you your money back, please don’t let this happen. But I didn’t this time, and I think it’s because the majority of the stories were published in the New Yorker. I don’t trust myself but I do trust them. It’s just given me great confidence. I got a bad review yesterday and my publicist warned me not to open this magazine that I’d never open anyway. I went a radio program yesterday and I was thinking about it the whole time I was getting interviewed. And then I thought, Wait a minute, I write for the New Yorker. That somehow made it OK; if they don’t like my book, they’ll just have to take that up with the New Yorker.

You’ve resisted being labeled a “writer,” going as far as to list “typist” as your occupation. Do you still?

I’m OK with it now. I think with your fifth book you can use the label. The thing is, when you write humorous stuff people just kind of assume that you dictate your stories into a tape recorder. They don’t really think that you chose this word over this one, that you really struggled with the construction of this as a story. Sometimes I want to say, Excuse me, but I rewrote that 16 times, and I put a lot of thought into using that word as opposed to that one, and you may notice that I’ve not used the same word twice in that paragraph, and there’s a rhythm to these sentences. But if people are going to buy the book or show up at the bookstore for the touring stops, how much do I need?

You taught writing courses at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. How did you like teaching?

Most of my students were planning to be painters, not writers, and they just had to take a certain amount of English classes and were looking for an easy A. I had one student who was incredibly talented, and she deserved a better teacher than me, because I wasn’t a teacher. I don’t know why a story works. If something’s awful, I don’t know where to start. It takes a very patient person to say, let’s work on the sentences for a while, then let’s work on the storytelling. But I don’t know those tricks.

There’s a story I wrote in [my latest] book about drowning a mouse. My editor at GQ said, ‘You need to cut out this stuff about the townspeople talking about the skeleton in the attic, because it doesn’t really go anywhere.’ And then Ira [Glass, host of This American Life] said, ‘Oh no, you need to keep that, because that establishes that you’re a logical person. You did not believe the story about the skeleton, and then when you’re afraid of zombies and drown the mouse and people think, “But he was logical on page one!”‘ My editor at the New Yorker said the same thing. And I didn’t know that; I probably would have cut it like my [first] editor told me to.

I’ve never had a natural talent for writing. I started writing when I was 20 and knew enough to keep to myself the horrible garbage I was writing. If I write something that works I can’t think, I need to do that again,

because I don’t know how.

How has doing public readings and recordings changed the way you write?

It changes the rhythm of the sentences. I look at stories in Naked that I never got a chance to read out loud. And now when I record the book on tape I think, ‘When did I expect to breathe in this sentence?’ It’s not built in. And in this [latest] book the breath is always built in. There’s a new story I haven’t read out loud yet, I’ll probably read it in a bookstore tomorrow. I had to turn it in already to be published in an anthology, and I hated to turn it in before I had a chance to read it out loud, because when I read it tomorrow, I’m going to find out so much. I’m going to learn that this doesn’t work and this doesn’t work and I need a new ending, and I need more dialogue here, and I don’t need that, I’ve already made that point.

How often do you laugh while you’re writing?

It’s not too often. It might happen twice a year. But I like it when it happens. It happened a few weeks ago when I was writing something and I wound up not using it. I guess I just surprised myself. In real life I find lots of things funny, but I laugh when they happen. And then when I write them down I don’t laugh because I’ve already laughed.

Your writing is very eccentric. Can you identify influences on your writing style?

I’m more influenced by things that I hear than things that I read. There’s an English guy named Alan Bennett who’s a national treasure in England [where Sedaris now lives]. He has a lot of things on the BBC. Whenever I listen to anything of his on tape, his voice gets in my head and I just have to realize that for the next three weeks, everything I write is going to be third-rate Alan Bennett.

Last year I was reading a lot of Patricia Highsmith stories. I’m not a mystery person at all but there’s something in her sort of old-fashioned sense of description that affected a couple stories in [my latest] book. There’s a story in [my] book about going to the Apple Pan in Los Angeles. The description of the men, the description of the counter, that was all Patricia Highsmith. I wouldn’t have written it that way or been that descriptive if I hadn’t listened to her.

Or Ira. I was listening to This American Life and Davy Rothbart did a story about going with his mom, who was deaf, to someplace in Brazil so she could be healed by a faith-healer. I think it was the best thing Ira’s ever had on his show. That’s the kind of thing you listen to and then you think, I’m going to do something, I don’t know what it is, but I want to do something that could possibly move people the way that that did. I think that’s partly why you read: to feel that things are possible. I don’t mean in a jealous way, like I want to do something even better, but just to think for one moment that you could affect people and to realize, Well, gee, I have the opportunity.

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Los Angeles Times:

ROSETTENVILLE,South Africa – When apartheid ended a decade ago, this was a tidy, all-white suburb of 20,000 squeezed between the sprawling black township of Soweto and the economic engine of white rule, Johannesburg. But the residents who converged on a local school to vote in elections [last month] reflected, like so much of South Africa, a nation transformed. Now a teeming suburb of 50,000, Rosettenville is a racial melange. Thousands have moved here from Soweto and other black and mixed-race townships, often buying homes from departing whites. Joining them have been Nigerians, Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, lured by the post-apartheid detente with the rest of Africa. … Whites and blacks live side by side here in equal numbers and relative harmony. But crime has escalated, housing prices have sunk, schools are overcrowded … and joblessness shadows the streets of modest homes.

From the New York Times:

PRINCETON, N.J. — More than 70 springs have come and gone since the first [trees] succumbed, but grieving friends … have never stopped searching for survivors of one of the worst ecological calamities in American history. They stalk damp backwoods and prowl deserted country roads looking for rare American elm trees that have somehow managed to ward off Dutch elm disease, which spread in successive waves across much of the country beginning in the 1930’s, killing more than 77 million elms in the biological blink of an eye. [They have found] a majestic giant standing in a prominent spot in Princeton since before it became a cemetery in 1757. About 100 feet tall, this noble elm bows gracefully over the corner of Witherspoon and Wiggins Streets, not far from Princeton University.

• Related from B&C:Reading Trees

WEEKLY DIGEST

Are scientific visuals science or art? The X-ray of the human skeleton, the double helix model of DNA molecule—are these aesthetic or purely functional? The question is pertinent to Felice Frankel, MIT research scientist and author of Envisioning Science: The Design and Craft of the Science Image, and Eric Heller, whose photographs of microscopic phenomena were exhibited at the National Academy of Science in Washington, D.C., says the Boston Globe. “What’s primary for me about my photographs is that they communicate scientific information,” says Frankel. They may “happen to be beautiful … but I feel I’m revealing the beauty that’s already there.” Article What the article should have clarified is 1) whether art’s perceived threat to empiricism is its possibility of “multiple readings” (as the Globe puts it), and 2) how art communicates and informs differently than the scientific method (in other words, how is there truth in beauty as well as in findings?)
Speaking of truth claims, it’s a bad time for creeds, says Martin Marty in his Sightings newsletter. Thanks to the myriad distortions of The Da Vinci Code, ancient creeds are considered to be “irrelevant, repressive clampings-down by villains and stupefiers,” Marty says. Thank goodness, he says, for Luke Timothy Johnson’s book The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters, and for an article on the book by Peter Steinfels in the New York Times. Creeds, Johnson says, provide a “clear and communal sense of identity” in an incoherent age. Besides, says Marty, “anti-creedalism usually issues in another form of creedalism.” Entry

Earlier in Sightings: Prayer requests and privacy concerns

• Speaking of belief systems, it’s important to see Al-Qaeda as an ideology, says Jason Burke in the current issue of Foreign Policy. “The mere mention of al Qaeda conjures images of an efficient terrorist network guided by a powerful criminal mastermind,” Burke says. “Yet al Qaeda is more lethal as an ideology”—Al-Qaedaism—”than as an organization.” The name Al Qaeda is merely the FBI’s convenient appropriation of a common noun in order to “apply conventional antiterrorism laws to an adversary that was in no sense a traditional terrorist or criminal organization,” Burke says. Instead, Islamic militants whom we call Al Qaeda are interested in sporadic, widespread, loosely organized disruption of Westernization. Burke corrects nine myths about Al Qaeda. Article

Earlier: bin Laden and company: “one fringe of a small fraction of a minority … of Islamists” (second item here)
Elsewhere: The plan for transfer of power in Iraq, from The Week

• Was it really Seattle—home of Microsoft and wi-fi-outfitted Starbucks—that hosted a conference last month called “Information, Silence, and Sanctuary”? It was, and it attracted diverse advocates of what it is now being called information environmentalism, the Christian Science Monitor reported. In a world crowded with cell phones, laptops, ubiquitous advertising, and other “informational pollutants,” “we’re kind of numbing ourselves,” said a professor who used to work for Xerox’s technology think tank. “Our current forms of media are creating mushy minds,” says another. Article Unfortunately, the sentiments of these gatherers tend to fall into a vague advocacy of simplification for its own sake. As I wrote in this B&C story about technology and community, Quentin Schultze better articulates the importance of traditional systems of revealed wisdom as an alternative to our obsessive informationism.

Related: The brief history of the term information environmentalism, from WordSpy.com

• If you write or create art, you may not want to read Joan Acocella’s piece in the current New Yorker on the history of writer’s block. “Writers have probably suffered over their work ever since they first started signing it, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that creative inhibition became an actual issue in literature,” Acocella says. This is because writers had long regarded their work as “rational, purposeful activity which they controlled.” It was the English Romantics who came to see poetry as “the product of ‘some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind.'” Inevitably, writer’s block is now considered a mental health issue. “Blocked writers are now being treated with antidepressants such as Prozac, though some report that the drugs tend to eliminate their desire to write together with their regret over not doing so.” No word on how long it took Acocella to write this piece. Article

Elsewhere:
Why poetry readings are boring, from the London Independent
Ten cliché s of fiction set in the Pacific Northwest, from The Stranger
A mathematical model of New Yorker fiction selection, from the New York Times