Monday, June 30, 2008

‘When You Are Engulfed In Flames’, David Sedaris


First, an apology to riders of the Red Line, direction Alewife, on Friday night. Yes, I was the obnoxious woman travelling in an iPod bubble, sporadically stifling giggles in a semi-snorting manner. I’m not entirely sure of the external effect, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. But what can you do? David Sedaris can be funny. Bizarrely, not always so: I didn’t think very much of ‘’Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim’’, and I thought ‘’Me Talk Pretty Some Day’’ was alright. But he slid his way back on to my shelf courtesy of an NPR review (the thinking American’s Radio 4; bless them for trying), a cool dust jacket picture and my fledgling Barnes & Noble Members card (20% off Hardbacks! 10 cents off B&N Starbucks!).

It’s probably a tautology to say that observational comedy can be a bit hit or miss; in fact it was a running joke recently with a friend who was visiting from the UK (and there’s a lot of mileage in that one, given you only have to… observe, to get a laugh). And if your living is made from this sort of thing, there’s the inevitable second-album effect. You’ve been building up to your first release all your life, saving up your best material, and distilling it into the perfect essence of your message, man. As for the second, well, you’ve seen a lot of hotel rooms and junkets and you’d better deliver by July. Lucky, then, that Sedaris got a bit of new material by moving abroad, variously to Tokyo, London, Paris and Normandy. I have no doubt that the moves were contrived entirely for this reason; he claims the move to Tokyo was for the purpose of quitting smoking, but you can imagine the conversation with the publisher: ‘Quitting smoking eh? There’s something in that…. But what about you also go somewhere where people speak funny?!’ The whole lost-in-translation thing was actually not particularly amusing (the title of the book comes from a Japanese fire prevention sign or some such) but there were plenty of other expatriate tales to keep me chuckling along in recognition. Attempting to learn the local language without feeling like a total numpty, hopelessly attempting to fit with the locals and yet being constantly entertained amused by your environment are all part of the joy of being a permanent alien. I wonder if I’ll ever be able to give it up, or if I’ll continue living my life led by a search for random adventures. Perhaps there’s a book in it.

1 Comments:

At 3:05 PM, Blogger Tom said...

Have you ever noticed that when people leave comments on your blog, they're really more about them than about what you've written about?

 

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