"I think a lot of men view reading fiction as a frivolous waste of time. We’ve been conditioned to ignore the benefits of empathy."

"I think it’s a marketing problem. Reading should be sold to men like lifting weights for your brain. But it’s not just men. People who are happily staring at their phone all day don’t want to pick up a book. Their attention spans are fried."

From "Anthony Jeselnik: Men Should Think of Reading as 'Lifting Weights for Your Brain'/But the comedian isn’t naïve when he makes selections for his popular book club: 'Most importantly, they’re short'" (NYT gift link).

Asked "What’s a supposedly funny book that you just don’t find funny?," Jeselnik answers, "I have zero tolerance for David Sedaris." 

I wonder what David Sedaris would say about the notion that "Reading should be sold to men like lifting weights for your brain."

David Sedaris wants to go to the Post Office.

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ADDED: This reminds me of my favorite passage in my favorite movie, "My Dinner with Andre," quoted numerous times on the blog, such as here, in 2013, in "What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?":

"Got any more of these cross-literary sparks, or is there another Stafford zinger that cracks you up?"

Grok asked me after I was asking it about the poem "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" by John Ashbery, specifically my favorite line, "Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched/Her long thigh."

The poem had just come up in a crossword puzzle: 20 Across: "Cartoon character featured in the John Ashbery poem 'Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.'" There are a lot of cartoon characters in that poem, but the answer is POPEYE. 

I'd said to Grok: "That description of Olive Oyl and the poem title — 'Farm Implements' — made me think of this quote David Sedaris found in the biography of Jean Stafford: 'She was sharp-tongued and once described a fellow writer as 'looking as if she were pregnant with farm machinery.'"

That's in DS's new book (commission earned).

Well, I didn't have any more cross-literary sparks or Stafford zingers, so I said "No. Do you?"

And Grok was all "Yes — plenty." Etc.

"All the judgy comments here made me feel like I had accidentally wandered into a thread on Bluesky. For cryin' out loud, relax!"

Ha ha. I agree with that commenter about the comments at "David Sedaris/The humorist on art collecting, interacting with fans and a surprising upside of the Upper East Side" (NYT)(gift link, because there are lots of pictures of David Sedaris in his New York apartment, with all its oddball artwork and enigmatic rugs).

The judgy comments are mostly resentful of Sedaris's wealth and his choice to spend what he has on art and on chairs that seem as if they might be uncomfortable. 

And here's Sedaris's new collection of essays: "The Land and Its People" (commission earned). It came out 5 days ago. I've read it and will read it again and again. I love David Sedaris's voice and his books are, by far, my favorite book to listen to while falling asleep. But this new book won't work for that. It's got loud, aggressive clapping/percussion between the essays.

"I'm so happy with the title of this book. I was going to title it 'The Testicles of an Old Sparrow in Winter.'"

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The book is out on May 26th, and I buy every David Sedaris book and listen to it about a thousand times, so whatever it turns out to be, I highly recommend it.

The title, after all the fuss about "testicles" (the word), turns out to be "The Land and Its People" (commission earned).

David Sedaris at the Oscars, being very David Sedaris with his famous* tiny notebook and his modest interest in celebrity.

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_________________

* Famous to anyone who's read the published diaries of David Sedaris. He has a method to his writing, and it begins with carrying a little notebook everywhere and writing down observations to be expanded upon, the next day, as a diary entry.

"Retirement Plan."

An Oscar-nominated short, by John Kelly:

And here's David Sedaris brilliantly admiring it, in "The Dream of Finishing One’s To-Do List in 'Retirement Plan'/In John Kelly’s animated short film, narrated by Domhnall Gleeson, nothing’s off limits when it comes to thinking about the future—particularly when there’s so much left to do" (The New Yorker):

"[O]ne server... has watched diners grapple with a layered dessert consisting of honeycomb semifreddo covered in a tundra of shaved Comte cheese"

"'We get a lot of people who will take a couple bites and be like, "Well, I just thought it was way too much cheese,"' he says. 'I will have sat there and watched you just scoop right off the top, which is quite literally all cheese.' Now, he provides a bit of gentle parenting, making sure diners reach their spoons to the bottom of the dish and get semifreddo in each bite. In a world of Yelp Elites and TikTokers and Beli-trackers and, yes, restaurant critics like myself, it makes sense to leave nothing open to interpretation. Only, interpretation is half the fun...."

From "It’s time to retire the restaurant monologue/When did dinner out start to feel like a TED Talk?" (Eater).

Have you misinterpreted any food lately? 

Have you provided fun through food interpretation? All I can think of is the David Sedaris diary entry where he talks about a restaurant's use of foam: "I had a foie gras soup that looked as if it had been pissed on. Hugh had sea urchins, the shells emptied out and filled with what looked to be dirty bubble bath... [S]hould the trend continue, you’d never again be able to tell if the waiter had spit in your food." From "Theft by Finding" (commission earned).

"Even as a child, I’d watch Uncle Henry force Toto into the basket, with Dorothy sobbing in the background..."

"... and think, It’s only fair. I mean, he did bite the woman."

Writes David Sedaris, in "And Your Little Dog, Too/Two small dogs, both unleashed, rushed toward me, snarling, and one of them bit me on my left leg, just below the knee. It all happened within a second" (The New Yorker).

A few days after I was bitten in Portland, I wrote a short essay about the experience, which I read at a show in Anchorage, Alaska. The audience reacted much the way people had at the Salem book signing. “Really?” I said. “I get nothing here?”

“Dogs are really good judges of character!” someone called out from the darkness.

"This is my nightmare."

Said David Sedaris, last night at the Overture Center, here in Madison.

Were you there? We were.

I had to worry about him a few times. Was it comic stage business when he made repetitive fussy little noises and then switched to humming to himself in a way that felt like desperate self-soothing as he searched for his place in his readings? He also spent a lot of time urging us to by another author's book — "Long Island Compromise" by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. He called her the female Philip Roth. Really? Maybe, but I got tired of hearing about her, and the bit that he read from her book wasn't as good as what he was reading us from his next book — "The Land and Its People."

"If the case is not put on hold, 'InfoWars will have been acquired by its ideological nemesis and destroyed,' Jones' lawyers wrote."

I'm reading "Alex Jones asks Supreme Court to block massive defamation judgment/Jones says the court must act immediately to prevent his site, InfoWars, where he has spread conspiracy theories, from being handed over to the satirical news site The Onion" (NBC News).

Didn't Jones successfully fend off The Onion already? "The Onion failed in a previous attempt to acquire InfoWars via a bankruptcy auction, but Jones' lawyer said a new attempt is underway in Texas state court."

Side question #1: Is it "underway" or "under way"? Here's a column on that highly refined subject:

"[M]y notes weren’t always as illuminating as I’d expected them to be. 'What does ‘Alt’ mean?' I asked Hugh over dinner one night."

"He looked down at the page. 'It’s not "Alt,"' he said. 'It’s "A.L.T."' Then I remembered. We’d been out early that morning, observing a short parade of ostriches. It was misty, and I pointed to a vague shape on the horizon. 'What’s that?' I asked Dalton. He followed my finger and told me it was likely an A.L.T. 'Animal-looking thing,' he explained."

I'm so glad to see a new David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker, "Notes on a Last-Minute Safari/We saw every animal that was in 'The Lion King' and then some. They were just there, like ants at a picnic, except that they were elephants and giraffes and zebras."

I liked seeing the first syllable of my last name in a new context, but more important was the opportunity to find out David Sedaris's opinion of going on "safari," because I had quite recently asserted, to a complete stranger, that going on safari was really basically the same thing as going to the zoo. These things are packaged. It's not as though you're exploring the authentic natural habitat of elephants, giraffes, and zebras.

"To better accommodate diverse gender identities, some Spanish and Portuguese speakers are increasingly using the -e suffix for some nouns..."

"... such as using 'todes' in addition to 'todos,' both of which mean 'everyone.' Even some government offices in Latin America have adopted using the -e suffix as part of a wider movement for inclusive language. Using Latine (sounds like 'la-TEEN-eh') in the U.S. 'makes sense as an internationally used way of speaking and writing in a less gendered manner,' says Monica Trasandes, director for Spanish language media and representation at GLAAD.... More than half of those polled from states along the U.S.-Mexico border or in the Midwest said the term Latine makes them uncomfortable, and more than 60% of respondents aged 65 and older said the same. There's also pushback in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, with people arguing the term is unnecessary or that it distorts grammar rules...."

From "Latine is the new Latinx" (Axios).

It's hard to imagine how this feels to someone whose native language envisions every noun as either masculine or feminine. I've spent time learning French and Spanish, and I have my feelings about the masculinity and femininity that permeates everything, but these are an outsider's feelings, weighed down by effort it takes to learn a lot of extra and seemingly arbitrary information. If it's your native language, you know what's masculine and what's feminine. Isn't it natural and fluent to you? Isn't it disturbing to be pressured to speak differently and to use made-up words in service to someone else's ideology? Do you feel a sense of loss when the world is not enlivened by the masculinity and femininity of inanimate objects and abstract concepts? I don't come from that world, but from a distance, it feels beautiful, and if I were you, I would want to believe it is beautiful.

David Sedaris is such a great talk-show guest.

Here he's talking about a children's book he spent about 5 minutes writing:

"Kids — they can be nice and stuff, but I don't think they're that bright.... It can't be that hard."

He says his parents never read to him when he was a child. Mine didn't either. Sedaris's parents put the kids to bed with "2 words: 'Shut up.'"

The book's illustrator is Ian Falconer, famous for the "Olivia" books, who died last year, as Sedaris mentions, in a set up to a remark that only he could make.

Falconer is quoted in his NYT obituary: "If I had to say one thing, it would be to not underestimate your audience. Children will figure things out; it’s what they do best — sorting out the world."

You know who did not underestimate his audience? David Sedaris, when he told that joke about Falconer on the late-night talk show.

"Our record is forty-three miles in a single day—ninety-one thousand steps, according to our Fitbits."

From "How to Eat a Tire in a Year/Walking and talking with my friend Dawn," the new David Sedaris story in The New Yorker.

Dawn is, essentially, Sedaris's wife. She was his college girlfriend, in the days before he admitted he is gay, and they spend so much time together that when he returns from his long trips, his life partner Hugh asks "How's your little wife?"

Or so it says here in this story.

"When Trump was president I started every morning by reading the New York Times, followed by the Washington Post, and would track both papers’ websites..."

"... regularly throughout the day. To be less than vigilant was to fall behind.... My friend Mike likened this constant monitoring to having a second job. It was exhausting, and the moment that Biden was sworn in to office I let it all go. When the new president speaks, I feel the way I do on a plane when the pilot announces that after reaching our cruising altitude he will head due north, or take a left at Lake Erie. You don’t need to tell me about your job, I always think. Just, you know, do it. It’s so freeing, no longer listening to political podcasts—no longer being enraged...."

Wrote David Sedaris, in "Happy-Go-Lucky," which came out in 2022 (I earn a commission through that link).

I recalled that passage as I was listening to Monday's NYT "Daily" podcast, "Swing State Voters Are Souring on Biden/A new Times/Siena poll finds Donald Trump leading President Biden in five of six key battlegrounds."

"I don’t trash-pick as often as I’d like to — usually when I’m faced with doing something far more unappealing..."

"... or whenever I need to work off some bad karma. It’s a terrific hobby for me, an anxious putterer with a holier-than-thou bent who writes better when my hands are occupied with something else. (I’m not alone — the humorist David Sedaris is a much more accomplished writer and trash picker than me.) When I do it, though, Bluetooth headphones in my ears and a weed gummy dissolving in my stomach, solicitousness and gratification ripple through me."

Writes Jazmine Hughes, in "The Joy of Picking Up Other People’s Trash/When my neighborhood changed around me, I decided to change it" (NYT).

The neighborhood is not named, but we're told it's in Brooklyn, and the change is gentrification — "turbocharged gentrification." Hughes looks around and sees herself as "the only Black person standing on the corner" while "gaggles of 20-somethings... roam the streets, presumably in search of eyebrows, which none of them seemed to have."

"What if I weren’t a writer? Would I be allowed to repeat a story at a cocktail party? Are comedians allowed to repeat things on stage?"

"How far do the ethics reach? Did my repeating your story ‘steal’ it from you? Did it mean you couldn’t write about it in the future?"

Said David Sedaris, quoted by Gabb Schivone in "The Hot Dogs and the Notebook/How David Sedaris turned me into one of his freaks" (Slate).

I wish there were a comments section over there. Schivone tries so hard to attack Sedaris and to inflate the importance of his anecdote, an anecdote that I won't even repeat... and not because of scruples about theft. It's not something you'd want to hear. Read "Portnoy's Complaint" if you'd like a description of a kid's relationship to a food item.

ADDED: I'm seeing comments there now. They are not supportive of Schivone. A good one: "The hot dog is not a story. Telling Sedaris about the hot dog is a story."

"He doesn’t dispute the fact that people are buried on his land or that the area is steeped in Revolutionary significance..."

"... his vision for the IHOP involves a wait staff in tricorne hats and bonnets. But it was still a bit of a mystery exactly whose bones were buried on his property and who put them there. And, besides, if there really were hundreds of soldiers beneath the ground, Broccoli believed it to be self-evident that he was the one pursuing the vision of life, liberty, and happiness that George Washington’s troops had fought and died for: the right to sell pancakes where they were buried...."

From "The Battle of Fishkill/When Domenic Broccoli set out to expand his IHOP empire upstate, he didn’t expect to find a grave site — or start a war" (NY Magazine).

There's a misplaced modifier — "where they were buried" — but still, I like that passage. I love that a restaurant guy is named Broccoli, but he sells pancakes. And I love that it's IHOP — which is the first place that ever employed me and also iconic in the writings of David Sedaris. And Broccoli's opponents are colorful and sometimes dressed in Revolutionary War outfits.

"What would be the point of hedonism?" — the automatic transcription mistranscribes. He said "heganism."

 

(Yes, 2 David Sedaris posts (almost) in a row. It just happens sometimes. I don't artificially separate posts from other posts.)