David Sedaris at the Lied Center
Way back in September, my wife bought, as a birthday present, tickets for us to see David Sedaris read at the Lied Center on April 13. Some people might think seven months is too much gap between the birthday and the gift, but I cherished the tickets on my desk, looking forward to what would be my first experience with a book tour.
I know it's odd for a bookish type like me never to have attended a book signing or reading. One friend doubted me at first when I mentioned I'd never been to a signing or reading. It's just not something that's come up. I stumbled on a couple of autograph tables at science fiction conventions as a teen, and at least one of the autographs was made out to a ridiculous name I'd decided to adopt when signing in for the weekend. The name was on my tag, like Cornelius or Rupert in the movie version of 'Fight Club,' and the author, I believe it was Larry Niven, read the tag and made the book out to Shockley. Which didn't ruin the weekend but it did make me wonder why on earth I ever thought it would be cool to be named Shockley.
Part of it is I've never been a big autograph seeker. If I happen to, for instance, spend a couple of hours chatting it up with Pat Martino after a show, it might eventually occur to me to ask him for an autograph. Mike Metheny edited the Jazz Ambassadors Magazine, which I typeset and write for, for almost a decade before I thought to have him get his kid brother's autograph. I wanted my vinyl 'Bright Size Life' signed, since that was a major gateway drug to jazz for me, but then I couldn't find it when the time came. Mike got me a publicity still signed by Pat, which I hung in my cubicle at work.
I got Mike's autograph too, but only after I'd found his first album on vinyl, something he hoped I wouldn't be able to find. Ditto for Steve Cardénas, who I caught after a show armed with a Sharpie and a copy of an LP he recorded with some local artists in a basement studio when he was scarcely old enough to shave.
Chuck Palahniuk's autograph probably outnumbers the rest combined. This wasn't planned. I wrote him a letter last fall and the care package he sent included a personal letter, a trade paperback of 'Fight Club,' an eraser 'FOR BIG MISTAKES,' and a packet of zinnia seeds, all of which bore his autograph. In the case of the book and letter, they were personalized autographs. Oh, he signed the lid of the box he packed the necklace in as well. The necklace is one he made from semi-precious stones and beads that read, 'To Rod McBride from Chucky P.' When I showed my coworkers this, along with the other stuff from the care package (a beanie skunk 'power animal,' a rubber chicken, a plastic severed finger, a sushi air freshener, fake vomit and re-lighting candles), they suggested that instead of me stalking the author, the roles were reversed. But apparently, when Chuck takes fan mail, that's how he treats it, at least with the first letter. He only accepts fan mail during limited windows, and when you see the thought and effort he puts into a response, you understand that once he hit the best-seller list with 'Choke,' there was no way he could keep it up year 'round unless he was going to quit writing and dedicate his life to fan mail.
It was the first time I wrote a fan letter, unless you count the times I've written to the interns who scan Congressional and Presidential mail, then pull up the form-letter that most closely matches what I'm bitching about. Hit 'control+P,' sign it with a mechanical pen to create false authenticity, and mail it out on my dime.
Wait, that's not fan mail, that's hate mail.
Dude, you said you were going to talk about Sedaris...
When setting out for Lawrence, I made sure I had a copy of 'Naked,' the only Sedaris tome I could find at the last minute, in case he signed autographs. I'd called ahead to make sure they weren't going to charge for parking, and, while I was at it, asked if he was doing a meet-n-greet. The girl wasn't sure, but said that he'd signed autographs until midnight last year.
When we arrived, there were tables selling Sedaris books and posters. We went to the usher to give our tickets and she asked if he was still signing, indicating the tables we'd just passed.
"Unless he's changed a lot from his publicity stills, he's not over there," I said.
"Oh," the usher said. "He must have stopped so he could do the reading. The word I had was that after, he'd stay until everyone who wanted an autograph got one."
That's fine, I thought, but it's not like I'm going to wait around until midnight.
We found our seats, and I had to use the Mens before the show started. On my way there I found the table where the man was indeed signing books. And the line wrapped clear around the corner of people who apparently thought he'd be able to whip out 400 autographs in the final 15 minutes before the reading.
Okay, you're not that into autographs. How was the reading?
Better than I expected. In addition to reading most of Sedaris' books, I've listened to the 'read by author' versions of the last couple at work, and to his 'Live at Carnegie Hall CD.' His delivery is great. Even if you've only heard him on NPR, you know how much better his reading is than the printed page.
But since I'd already read pretty much everything except uncollected stuff he's done for the New Yorker and other magazines, I expected the punch-lines to be dulled by having heard them before.
Instead he started out with two hilarious parables, launched into some recent columns he's written, and some diary entries. I laughed until I cried.
Sedaris cuts through all the Politically Correct noise and tells the truth, even when he's probably stretching facts.
Highlights included his account of a flight behind two people who appeared the image of refinement but who spoke in the 'shit' and 'fuck' patois of the trailer court. Followed by a cab ride with a driver who appeared at first to be a very decent fellow but who turned out to be a philanderer, something of a pervert, and proud of it. And who taunted Sedaris for 'liking the dick' when he sniffed out that Sedaris might be gay. Then a visit to Amy's apartment in the West Village where she showed him her latest acquisitions in the area of things to keep it hot for their father, Lou, when he comes. 'The Joy of Sex' for the coffee table, which, Sedaris points out, is pretty much the last thing a father wants to see in his daughter's apartment. Then she produced a magazine she'd found, from the 1970s, pornography with a bestiality angle. 'Really the last thing a father wants to see in his daughter's apartment.' Sedaris also had a list of reasons not to blow a horse in your bedroom. In fourth place was the dirt on the rug.
The 'parables' were also hilarious. One dealing with domestic violence, religious and sexual intolerance, as seen through the eyes (and then eye) of a hen. The other and the work of a hairdresser, if a baboon was fixing the hair of a cat. Similar to Kafka's 'Investigatios of a Dog,' which ponders atheism from the standpoint of dogs who can't see the people taking care of them, but with a contemporary twist. Plus, it's not translated and taken 80 years out of its cultural context.
The author also hawked a collection of short stories he edited, 'Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules,' the proceeds of which go to a literacy center, 826NYC.
He'd originally been approached, of course, to edit an anthology of humor. He said that while he enjoys humor, he doesn't seek it out. His confessions to a competitive nature in some of his stories make me think that perhaps the last thing he needed was to try and evaluate other people's humor essays.
So he asked if he could edit a short story collection instead.
I don't know if this falls under the 'great minds think alike' column, but I have to say his choices look solid. 'In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried,' by Amy Hempel is included, as is 'Song of the Shirt, 1941,' by Dorothy Parker. It looks to be a pretty eclectic collection, including Jhumpa Lahiri, Tobias Wolff, Sarah Vowell, Flannery O'Conner, and Katherine Mansfield among others. I'll be buying a copy, even though I have several of the stories in other collections, it's a good-cause thing.
And as Sedaris points out, the more copies are sold, the more he looks like a humanitarian.
Even if it wasn't a charitable thing, publishers need positive reinforcement for publishing short ficiton.
Q&A
As I suspected he might, based on the Carnegie Hall CD, he threw the floor open to questions near the end. People asked about his brother, his niece, etc. He was also asked about the movie of 'Me Talk Pretty One Day,' which he'd optioned. When Jack Lemmon couldn't do the role of Lou Sedaris due to becoming 'the late' Jack Lemmon, Sedaris pulled the plug on it.
Oh, and he had a pack of Kools free to anyone who smokes them. A gift from a well-meaning fan who didn't know that Sedaris smokes Kool Milds. If you haven't been a smoker, this might seem a silly distinction, but very few smokers I've ever known (and certainly not me) would simply say, 'any old cigarette' the way some people say 'any beer you've got on tap is fine.' Or the way people order coffee, like there was only one kind.
A true addict would have smoked the Kools anyway, at least if he was hard up for cash, which Sedaris probably isn't. When I was in the full grip nicotine, as payday neared, I got way, way less picky about my smokes. I always smoked non-filters, but a filter-tip can be fixed: you break it off and put the end that normally gets lit in your mouth, lighting the jagged end where filter had been. It never made sense to me why nicotine addicts would want something on their cigarette that made it harder to get nicotine into their bloodstream. Picture a crack addict trying to make sure part of the cocaine in the smoke gets left behind and thrown away.
I even had a question for the Q&A, because unlike my blogs and this site, when I write fiction, I really work over the rewrites. Not that they get better, but I am always refining the tripe. One of the devices I've picked up for this is reading aloud, which is something I do alone in my den, feeling self-conscious as my beanie 'power' skunk, rubber chicken, and wind-up Lobster listen. I feel like an idiot reading to inanimate objects, but they never laugh at the wrong places or throw the lime wedges from their cocktails at me.
I stumbled on this trick before the Cult Writer's Workshop 'distinction essay' on the subject. In the background at my day job, I generally have an audio book going, and 'read by the author' is preferred. It makes an interesting study in comparing the way I sub-vocalize someone's writing style and the way they say it. Another great thing about audio books, and you mainly find this in ones NOT read by the author, you can hear the clunkers. Those lazy tricks writers use, bad and/or inadequately attributed dialogue, etc., all just glares in an audio book. A few narrators, Frank Muller and Richard Poe for instance, can pretty much salvage any book, but there's a limit to what a good dramatic reader can do.
So I was going to ask Sedaris, if I got called on, how much reading aloud he does in the revision process, but in the process of answering another question, he answered mine. Something to the effect that he was on book tour, twice a year, and every night was a different reading in a different town. Signing autographs until midnight, which means eating McDonalds or ordering room service prior to the reading and letting it sit there until he finally gets back to the room.
Which jives with what I've heard Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, and other writers say about book tours. I imagine your first book tour is a gas, at least the first few days of it. Kind of like how Max Barry describes the handful of e-mails he got off his site in the early days as making him, '...feel famous in a way that the watching my first novel sink without a trace hadn’t.'
But Sedaris, in answering the question of what he thought of Lawrence, KS, also indicated that each night he revises the material he's read on book tour, so that 'by the end of the month it will be Amy with the horse.'
I don't know how much reading aloud he did prior to his NPR career, which as far as I can tell is what really made his writing career take off. I do know, at least from my perspective, that his writing has improved dramatically in recent years, with 'Me Talk Pretty One Day' and 'Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim' being easily his best work.
It's good to see a writer who keeps on improving after they've attained commercial success that might be 'cruised' on. I don't see Stephen King making any giant steps in his game. I'd aver that King's best work (I haven't read anything since 'Insomnia,' so don't skewer me if I've missed a jewel), was his earliest. 'The Shining,' in particular.
I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect once you're a New York Times Bestseller, the editors do less editing. Especially if the writer (and I'm not naming anyone in particular) lacks humility. A big ego and big sales could put pressure on an editor to either tread lightly or get the writer assigned to an editor who won't put their foot down at all. Contrast this with the advice Craig Clevenger got regarding the name of one of his characters in 'Contortionist's Handbook.' He thought it would be clever to use the name Eric Weiss for the final section, as that was Houdini's real name. His editor disagreed, and Clevenger came around, and I'm quoting him, "Like they said in Spinal Tap, 'It's a fine line between clever and stupid.'" That's not the kind of feedback that strokes the ego.
I suspect the writers I really respect, and Sedaris is one of them, have this in common: they never get to feeling like they've arrived. They're always trying to write a better book. Thomas Pynchon, John Irving, Chuck Palahniuk, Don Delillo, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, these guys all tend to write better books over time. With exceptions you could point out, I'm sure.
And Faulkner, who had no small ego, didn't even hit his stride until his fourth novel. You don't get four books to break through these days. Faulkner had the benefit of a public that actually read books instead of watching 'reality' shows where people eat bugs, get stabbed with progressively fatter needles, and balance on taxi-cabs suspended over shark-infested water. Starting with 'Sartoris'/'Flags in the Dust,' he got better and better. It wasn't until his very latest work that it really deteriorated, and that was probably side effects of a life of heavy drinking as much as a lack of editorial guidance.
The Non-Q in the Q&A
News flash for those of you not privy to this, but David Sedaris is a homosexual. I'm not outing him here, he's written about it for years. The torment he went through growing up gay in North Carolina. Taught that being homosexual was worse than being black (in an environment where school teachers responded to desegregation by imitating lower primates), he fantasized about getting electroshock therapy, brain surgery, hypnotism, whatever it took to 'cure' him of wanting guys.
Sedaris writes about this, his boyfriend, the assumptions people make about pedophilia among homosexual men. The weird guy who called after transposing the number for the housecleaning service Sedaris worked for and the number for a gay escort service. He manages to tell these stories in a way that makes you laugh out loud and breaks your heart at the same time.
He's also written that he detests the rainbow flag and the notion that someone could speak for all homosexuals. He is willing to make fun of himself when it comes to stereotypes he happens to illustrate, the lisp, the nesting instinct, etc. But he never defines himself as his sexual preference. And while he writes about quarrels with his boyfriend, he doesn't present it as being fundamentally different than it would be if they were a heterosexual couple.
In pointing out the open bigotry people will express towards homosexuals without realizing there's one right in front of them, he's great at illustrating how we all need to be more civilized. And he also has a sense of humor, something a hardcore ideologue can't entertain. Sedaris was the guy who wrote a piece (rejected) for the NPR 'begathon' describing NPR as a 'conspiracy of Jews.' The Jews in question, Terry Gross and Ira Flato were fine with it, but the brass at NPR was scared to run it.
Still, in the Q&A, you knew there had to be at least one kid who was there because he worships Sedaris as a champion of homosexuals everywhere. When he spoke up, he even admitted that he didn't have a question. Went on to thank Sedaris for writing a story, 'Gay Boy,' if I heard correctly (I was seated above and behind the kid), and to share that he had read the story to 'a group of K.C. Christians' who 'never pooped.' I could be misquoting some of this. But Sedaris seemed to get the same general idea, rephrasing it for the crowd in terms along the lines of, 'He thanked me for a story I wrote, and apparently he read it to some people who don't defecate.'
In other words, Sedaris didn't take the bait.
The kid who piped up in the Q&A, in fairness, didn't appear to be old enough to drink, and teenagers should be given something of a pass on being annoyingly unbalanced. And as obnoxious as I was at 18 (some say still so at 35), I'm sure that the social pressures on a gay teen aggravate the adolescent universals: angst, false wisdom and outrage.
When I was 18, I couldn't talk about anything except being a Libertarian. Same difference.
The Autograph Line Redux
So we're leaving, and my wife asks me if I'm going to try and get in line. I might have if I'd had floor seats by the door where the signing table was. But if I had to wait behind more than five or six people, forget it. The line was, if anything, longer than the pre-reading line when we left. The parking lot traffic was horrendous, and I briefly wondered if I would have gotten to the highway just as fast if I'd waited for an autograph, but I probably saved ten minutes by keeping my copy of 'Naked' unsigned.
In the parking lot, the cars had been leafleted. Not surprising, and it's not like I've never done it to others. The pair on the windshield of our car made some bold assumptions about who might attend a David Sedaris reading.
'Hedwig and the Angry Inch' is coming to Lawrence, one of the cards informed me. Co-sponsored by 'Queers & Allies,' the show is apparently a rock musical focused on drag-queens, and runs for four nights. Three of them midnight shows, so maybe they're cashing in on the 'Rocky Horror' angle. The closing night is also, 'PRIDE NIGHT!' This last in hot pink type to emphasize what a bonus that closing show would be.
The other souvenir left for us was a flyer with much poorer production values, a slip of purple photo-copied paper for 'Womyn Take Back The Night,' apparently a shindig coming up on April 29 that is supposed to 'protest violence against womyn.'
While I generally believe violence should be reserved for child molesters, rapists, murderers and professional politicians, I can't get too worked up for an organization that can't run a spell-check on its flyers. No matter how good their 'cause' might seem.
When it comes to writing fiction, I believe in a broad linguistic license. But spelling something the way it is phonetically said by a character as a telling detail is completely different from intentionally misspelling a word because the word 'men' is so offensive to you. This is 'tolerant' Lawrence, KS?
I wonder if it occurs to people like the teenager with the non-question and the 'womyn' who want to take back the night (I guess they've written off the day to mayhem), that the exact kind of thing Sedaris writes so poignantly about, is exactly what they are guilty of. Teachers making fun of 'funny' people, coaches call the players 'a pack of tap-dancing queers' as an insult, these things are exactly the kind of thing Xtians might feel if sitting in an audience while someone talks about how Xtians never poop and otherwise gloats over making members of a major world religion squirm.
I don't believe homosexuality is a choice, but I'm not sure believing in God is much of one either. If you're going to tolerate one, you better be prepared to tolerate both.
Anyway...
The reading was a gas.
And I'm a little in awe of Sedaris as a writer, because most authors are lucky if their publisher will pay for them to go on book tour. Just the expenses. Just being allowed to do a reading in a book store in hopes of generating interest. Do the local Morning TV show (I've even seen Toni Morrison doing this, and after she'd won the Nobel), go to any radio stations that will have you, then head to the book store and read for a handful of people. Sign a few books and hope no one accuses you of defacing their property. On to the next town.
If you're getting successful and are entertaining in person, Chuck Palahniuk for instance, draws a substantial crowd doing this. From what I hear, the draw he gets is young, enthusiastic and frightens people my age and older. But there's lots of them.
Still, as far as I know, Chuck's readings are always free. You'll hear once in a while of the 92nd Street Y charging for a reading, but it's usually a reading by someone famous who never does book tours.
Sedaris gets $25 for the cheap seats at his readings and they sell the joint out. Okay, he doesn't personally get that. The crooks at Ticketmaster take more than their share off the top, and the production company that booked him, the Lied Center, and so on, all take their little chips off it too, but it's still an auditorium full of people who paid to go to a reading.
Paid as much as most concerts cost.
Remarkable in a country where most people won't read anything but the TV listings.
Oh, Yeah
My wife noticed this too, so I know I'm not alone wondering about this. The masturbating wind-up monkey he gave to his brother, which ended up in decaf espresso for an elderly relative to find. His favorite charity, the 'slave monkeys' of Helping Hands. The collection he assembled, 'Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules,' by Sedaris' account has three monkeys in it.
I had to wonder, what is his thing with monkeys?
