"Sage was used, and, as is his habit, he took great care spooning the life-giving drippings onto the meat. Like always, we ate at the table, which was set and had candles on it.... We usually sit down for dinner between 9:30 and ten. I like to eat until I hate myself.... I once ate an entire 12-ounce can [of Aunt Ruby’s peanuts] in one sitting, hoping I’d get eternally sick of them, the way I did with Goldfish crackers when I was 6. No such luck, though. Aunt Ruby’s peanuts are my weakness. I cannot resist them, and so I have to do things like eat salads and fish and diet Jell-O in order to fit them into my life. I have to walk a minimum of 15 miles a day and do these sad little exercises all morning otherwise I would be massively overweight, which is something I like on other people, just not on myself."
From "David Sedaris Eats Until He Hates Himself/'Too much lunch puts me in a stupor, but at night, I really take the gloves off'" by David Sedaris (Grub Street).
I love David Sedaris. I even bought Aunt Ruby's peanuts in the middle of reading the article. Of course, I'm reading his new book — that is, I'm listening to the audiobook for the 4th time. Chapter 9 — "Highfalutin" — was recorded at the show he did here in Madison, so I am personally, minusculely, present in the recording.
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25 comments:
"Pre-natal zucchini"?
Roots? Stems?
I ordered Levinas's Totality and Infinity last night at 9pm because it had an index added, something I sorely missed in the original publication 50 years ago; and it arrived at 7am this morning. I have no idea how Amazon pulls that off. It looks like a print-on-demand book, an only slightly-off genre but that's obviously not the traditional offset printing.
I love David as well, but his sister Amy is my favorite. She was immortalized in David's story "Shiner Like a Diamond,' and her appearances on Conan and Letterman in the early 2000s were bizarre and hilarious. On Conan's show, she once brought a wind-up baby toy that her friend had painted as Adolf Hitler.
Tiffany Eckhardt Zucchini Song
I love veal chops. But the size of snowshoes? That's a bit much don't ya think, even when just using embellishing language for dramatic effect?
Hint: as with lamb, or suckling, or veal, etc, the smaller the meat of the baby animal you're eating the better. Take for instance chuletillas, which is Mexican actual milk-fed lamb chops. Seriously, from a suckling lamb less than 4 weeks old as a rule. To someone who hadn't eaten it before it would qualify as fingerfood they're so tiny...and so so delicious.
The younger, the cuter, the more delicious.
Is he referring to himself in the third person?
Veal seems problematic. And what is "pre-natal" zucchini?
Why doesn’t he marry his boyfriend of 30 years?
Don't know Sedaris, though agree with his choice of risotto. Parmesan Risotto freezes well, so on the off days, when you don't feel like cooking a schnitzel with a side, defrost the risotto in microwave slowly till it starts to heat through. we've frozen meals in the event of covid. so far so good, we've been lucky.
"Why doesn’t he marry his boyfriend of 30 years?"
He doesn't believe in it.
As he wrote in "Calypso":
"While I often dreamed of making a life with another man, I never extended the fantasy to marriage or even to civil partnerships, which became legal in France in 1999, shortly after Hugh and I moved to Paris. We’d been together for eight years by that point, and though I didn’t want to break up or look for anyone else, I didn’t need the government to validate my relationship. I felt the same way when a handful of American states legalized same-sex marriage, only more so: I didn’t need a government or a church giving me its blessing. The whole thing felt like a step down to me. From the dawn of time, the one irrefutably good thing about gay men and lesbians was that we didn’t force people to sit through our weddings. Even the most ardent of homophobes had to hand us that. We were the ones who toiled behind the scenes while straight people got married: the photographers and bakers and florists, working like Negro porters settling spoiled passengers into the whites-only section of the train."
I know next to nothing about this Sedaris chap but I will say I already kinda don’t like him. I can’t quite figure out why but I suspect it’s the very thing Althouse likes: his exaggerated, witty style of communication. I’ve come to despise “writerliness,” my word for the trait many treasure of presenting reality in a way only writers can. I have this trait myself but have sought to repudiate it. Sedaris seems writerly to me.
Hugh better hope he gets his cut when David kicks the bucket. You can't disinherit your spouse in the United States.
His writing is so much better when he reads it. I like to listen to him on audiobook.
pre-natal zucchini
Is this more men-can-get-pregnant bullshit??
“ Is he referring to himself in the third person?”
No, he’s talking about his boyfriend Hugh.
I call bullshit on the 15 miles/day.
I am younger than him and thinner than him.
I know my route distances and times.
I can do a determined 3.5mph pace and get in my 7+ miles in +/- 2 hours.
Over 15 miles, 3.5mph is a difficult pace for someone his age and fitness level.
So at 3mph (reasonable for the first 10 miles) he would be spending 5+ hours walking.
No.
'Why doesn’t he marry his boyfriend of 30 years?'
Doesn't want to give up half of future earnings?
David Sedaris is a genius and a national treasure. That said, he is so fking INWARD that I can barely stand it (even as I appreciate how his genius exposes the pathology of the inwardness). Is this INWARD thing a gay thing?
Just asking. For a friend.
Having a few times and seriously used snowshoes? Sorry. Even the very smallest ones are about 10x the size of a veal chop.
OK. Having disposed of any literal connection between snowshoe reality and his meal, I still admire his hyperbole.
I think wit resides in that zone between the literal and the absurd. Good comics are always playing there.
Go David!
The babies always taste best. That's why Hillary and Huma dine on aborted fetus with fava beans and a nice chianti.
I'm similar to Sedaris, in that I could eat far more food at one sitting than my body needs if I allowed myself to -- especially if it's something I really like. But I also can't eat within three hours of going to bed at night, because I'd feel uncomfortable and wouldn't sleep well. I can't imagine starting dinner at 9:30 or 10 -- that might be the European or urban-intellectual eating schedule, but it would never work for me. And if I overate that late, the way he does, I would probably barely sleep at all. Of course, an increasing amount of research shows that a lack of good sleep and overeating are interrelated, because the brain chemicals that encourage bingeing are raised. What I'm saying is that David Sedaris should eat dinner at 5 p.m. (he is, at 65, technically a senior citizen), go to bed at 10, and then see if he can get through the day without stuffing himself with peanuts and risotto.
Sedaris is skilled at witty hyperbole. But at this point I wish he'd do something else. A reinvention, like Carlin.
Live, no one is funnier than Sedaris. Maybe 20 years ago Izzard came close.
An omnivore, like me.
LOVE David's take on marriage. I voted for gay marriage in WA state, but the unwillingness of some gay folks to accept the bad/annoying parts of the institution is irksome. As if gays/lesbians somehow redeem the institution. No, no, no - same sex marriage also means that now same sex couples can be annoying, boring fuckwits that assume everyone they meet is incredibly interested in their nuptials.
'I voted for gay marriage in WA state...'
Old joke:
Gay marriage? Sure, I'll vote for gay marriage. Why shouldn't they be just as miserable as the rest of us?
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