It’s tempting to divide books into two categories: those you think you ought to read, and those you actually do. It’s a phenom even Mark Twain commented on (“A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read”), and it’s why Borders usually relegates “Literature” off in some far-from-the-coffee-shop corner and piles all of the other stuff—the stuff you actually read, from Nicholas Sparks to James Patterson to Twilight—in the middle.
Now, meet David Sedaris, an author nebulous, intelligent, and funny enough to confuse the categories of what you should read and what you’d like to. A nationally recognized humorist, author, and radio personality, Sedaris appeared in Akron (the same area, incidentally, where he enrolled in, and dropped out of, Kent State University thirty years ago) to do a reading on April 21 at E.J. Thomas Hall.
Sedaris’s voice is wide-reaching, smart, and enduring. He’s been contributing to National Public Radio for nearly two decades, earning a Grammy nomination in 2004. He’s written stories for The New Yorker, won a James Thurber Prize for his writing, been named Time’s Humorist of the Year, and been published in The Best American Essays.
Standing before the lectern at E.J. Thomas, slightly built and riffling through papers, Sedaris looks like a writer, not a radio personality. When he speaks, the impression gets stronger—his voice, thin and melancholy, is nowhere near the baritone ideal of radio deejays and professional storytellers.
And yet somehow the voice fits the stories, wracked with the blackest of humor and the sweetest of irony. The evening’s selection included several of the short animal stories he’s currently working on (“They’re not fables, because fables have morals”) as well as a few essays and selections from his diary. Each reading came branded with Sedaris’s peculiarly charming sense of twisted humor—“The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat”, a story about two white rats sharing a cage, ends with a smug little limerick about being injected with AIDS. “Just a Quick Email” was a Sedaris classic, a story about a pair of viciously feuding sisters embedded in a long and passive-aggressive email. And a long, untitled musing about the way people dress and behave at airports (“It’s like someone was in the middle of washing shoe polish off a pig, and then suddenly threw down the sponge and said ‘Fuck this! I’m going to Los Angeles!’”) even dipped a cautious toe into politics, making my seatmates uncomfortable.
Drug use, alcoholism, violence, family dysfunction, adultery, illness, childhood neuroses, even pure, garden-variety hatred: Sedaris both celebrates and dismantles the monsters with an acid humor that’s constantly at odds with the reedy-voiced writer onstage. (“I chose Kent State because people had been killed there,” he wrote in one essay. “At least they hadn’t died of boredom.”)
[...] out some of my film reviews for Buzzbin—Hot Tub Time Machine, Clash of the Titans—as well as a review of a performance by author David Sedaris. [...]