Short rounds: of southern accents and cancerous snapping turtles

I've a free moment between family gatherings and outings, so here's a short rounds post on Talk Southern to Me, as well as David Sedaris' new book Calypso.

First up, Talk Southern To Me.   As mentioned a few days ago,  I was interested in the book because its author produces a series on YouTube called "Sh%t Southern Women Say".  Talk Southern to Me is similar, a bit of southern culture and humor, which has chapters on southern manners and culture but is mostly about language; every chapter closes with sayings related to it, and what's not covered there is included in a list of words and their translation at the end. Southerners have a distinct family of dialects, whether we're from the country-club-and-family-money society, or the trailers, muddin', or outlaw-country side of the woods. Southerners, of course, will see themselves and their families in every chapter, and -- depending on how many Yanks they count in their circle of friends -- may be startled to learn that more of their use of language is distinctly southern than they thought. (Expressions like "He used to could", which a Michigan friend of mine of mine was baffled about, are an example.)   Although Fowler is very general at times, I love discovering southern creators who are enthusiastic about preserving the distinct culture of the South in a positive, fun way, instead of edging into prickly defensiveness. Particularly amusing was the section that potent expression, "Bless your/her/his/their heart",  can be used for everything from sincere sympathy to a manners-approved method of gossiping.

David Sedaris, for those who don't know, is an American-born humorist whose essays and short fiction usually evoke a strong sense of pathos, often being unbelievably personal, so much so that discomfort turns to giggles.  Sedaris is an acquired taste, I think, as if a reader is introduced to him in the wrong way they might be left thinking "Why would anyone read him?". He has a strong taste for the odd and unusual, and enjoys derailing social scripts by  asking taxi drivers about local cockfighting laws, or inquiring of supermarket clerks if they have any godchildren. His latest collections of musings, Calypso, seems to be inspired by the onset of old age, as he and his siblings cope with not only the decline of their once-formidable father (who now needs constant care and is alarmingly pleasant to be around,  a distinct change from his forbidding childhood presence), and the suicide of their sister Tiffany.  David himself had a momentary scare with cancer, but the tumor was easily isolated and removable, and he happily fed it to snapping turtles after finding a doctor who was willing to do the operation for him and give him the tumor. Apparently it's illegal for surgeons to give people anything that comes out of them during surgery (presumably C-section babies are an exemption).   Sedaris had hoped to feed the tumor to a snapping turtle which had a cancerous growth on its head (his favorite turtle), but the cheeky reptile disappeared during the winter.  I enjoyed Calypso well enough, but I'm probably too young to appreciate it in full given the general theme.   My favorite Sedaris story remains "Six to Eight Black Men", his rendering of Christmas in the Netherlands.

Oh, and apparently the Southern Women Channel just posted a new episode not a month ago to celebrate the end of hurricane season:

"Lord, I hope it don't flood the Wal-Mart."

"Didje git your milk and bread?"

"Fill up the tub so we can flush the commode!"

"Bless her heart, she's wearin' white rain boots after Labor Day."
"Pray for me, I gotta tell my husband they postponed deer season." 

This week at the library: airborne hell, David Sedaris, and coffee with evil

Last week I broke off from The City in History to do some light reading, beginning with Phillip Kerr's Hitler's Peace, a bit of speculative historical fiction which will be getting full comments tonight. The novel features an Office of Strategic Services agent accompanying President Roosevelt to the Big Three conference at Tehran in 1943, where he keeps getting arrested after insisting there are German spies at work. Considering the string of murders and catastrophes that follow him and Roosevelt,  he might be on to something.  It's a fun WW2 thriller, but the big attraction is how often the lead character rubs shoulders with titanic personalities --  and not just the Big Three.

After that I read through Elliot Hester's Plane Insanity, which collects outrageous tales taken from his years of service as an airline steward. Most of the stories concern the bad behavior of passengers --who break into fist fights and sneak pythons aboard -- though there are some involving the airline crew's own flubs, like the time the author opened an emergency door and witnessed the jump chute (the inflatable tube that allows passengers to escape).   It's an entertaining enough read, though it certainly makes the life of airline service unappealing: Hester's experience reveals  nothing but fourteen-hour days filled with the worst experiences in customer service, with air turbulence thrown into the mix, and a life lived in hotel rooms and buses sometimes enlivened by raucous parties and meaningless sex. Neither Hester nor any of his coworkers seem to take much pleasure, let alone fulfillment, from their jobs.

After that I enjoyed thoroughly David Sedaris' Lets Explore Diabetes with Owls, a curious collection of essays and short pieces of fiction. The fiction defies classification;  the only stories told are presented as true tales from Sedaris' life (delivered in his dry, inappropriate, and pathos-inspiring way) , but mixed in with them are oddities like a letter written from a lady to her sister, chiding her for giving a pizza coupon as a wedding gift. (Nevermind that  the lady's driving led to her sister being crippled and dumped by her boyfriend, and that said boyfriend just happened to be the man the lady was marrying..) A few of the pieces can be tenatively tied together under the heading travel, but it's largely a collection of miscllenaeous pieces. Sedaris writes on the usual topics: his dyfunctional family, the oddities of life, and the ocassional animal fixation. It's a second-tier Sedaris book, I think; far better than Holidays on Ice, which I read for the Santaland Diaries and nothing else,  but not quite as funny as say, Me Talk Pretty One Day. 

This week, I am engaged in Sharpe's Siege, where the good rifleman is once again running around doing the impossible with thrilling heroics and not a few one-liners from his compatriots. This one mixes in naval action with the land engagment, and features an American privateer.  So far, so good. Once that's finished I''ll return to The City in History. I think if I can make it to the medieval epoch, I'll be all right.  Waiting in the wings is Wendell Berry's Nathan Coulter, which is not at all as spellbinding as Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter were.

Barrel Fever

Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays
© 1995 David Sedaris
208 pages

Three years ago I heard David Sedaris talk about his experience living in Paris and was immediately taken by his style of humor. I don't know how to articulate the Sedaris experience, except to say that he writes dryly about pathetic situations. Beginning with Me Talk Pretty One Day, I began reading his works of collected essays about his life. I believe I've only read two since I started this blog, Holidays on Ice and When You are Engulfed in Flames. Barrel Fever, Sedaris' first work, is much different from the volumes following it. While they consist chiefly of essays based on Sedaris' own life, Barrel Fever is dominated by first-person fictional essays and stories, two of which are repeated in Holidays on Ice owing to the Christmas theme. (They don't lose anything in repetition, especially not his SantaLand Diaries.)

The stories' narrators don't share much in common beyond being kooky and pathos-inspiring. I said before that the only way I know how to describe Sedaris' writing is to say that he writes dryly about pathetic situations, and the same is true of these stories. In one, a teenage suicide attempts -- through her suicide letter -- to instigate a lynch mob at her own funeral, including a CD containing "Music for Stoning". The humor here is dark, morbid, and more than a little perverse -- moreso than his biographical essays, I think, and not quite as funny. While I enjoy his fables (as read on This American Life), I didn't enjoy his stories here as much as I expected. The essays were typical of his essay collections, meaning that they made for disturbingly funny reading.

This Week at the Library (24/9)

Books this Update:

• Rules of Civility, George Washington
• Foundation’s Edge, Isaac Asimov
• Holidays on Ice, David Sedaris
• The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations, Al Franken

I began this week with George Washington’s Rules of Civility. I spotted it while looking for another book, and knew immediately that I had to examine it. When I went to check it out, I was informed that I looked as though I already knew how to be civil. I’m not sure what that means, but I have a suspicion that it means “I notice you’re not wearing a shirt with Bill O’ on it..” The book is a collection of rules Washington supposedly followed. Many of them are holdovers from a different era -- Washington elaborates on situations with your “betters” and your “inferiors”. Some of the rules are common rules you would expect -- don’t sneeze or cough in front of company except with your mouth covered (and your head turned, preferably); don’t clean your nails or relieve yourself of body lice at the table; don’t chew your nails in front of people, that sort of thing. Here are some of the ones I liked:

• Be not hasty to believe flying reports to the disparagement of any.
• Associate yourself with men of good quality, if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company.
• Let your conversation be without malice or envy, for it is a sign of a tractable and commendable nature; and in all cases of passion admit reason to govern.
• Speak not injurious words, neither in jest or in earnest scoff at none though they give occasion.
• Speak not evil of the absent, for it is unjust.

There are more here. Next I read Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge, the fourth book in the Foundation series. According to It’s Been a Good Life, a posthumous autobiography, Asimov was asked to pen another Foundation book a number of years after he had written the trilogy, and so had to read the trilogy again to recover his thoughts. This book mentions the robots that Asimov wrote so much about in other works. Before I read his biography, I wondered why there were no robots in his Foundation universe, seeing as it was set in the far future and robotics would have come a long way. I assumed that the rising suspicion regarding them (a theme throughout Asimov’s robot novels and stories) led to their demise. Asimov deals with that question in this book. Foundation’s Edge is a marvelously written book; it’s probably my second-favorite Foundation book, right behind the first. Excellent stuff.

Next I read David Sedaris’ Holiday on Ice, a short book themed around Christmas. Half of the book is typical Sedaris -- essays recalling memories from his life and relating them to the reader in a dry, amusing narrative. The other half of the book consists of stories written by Sedaris with a holiday theme. My favorite section of the book was “The SantaLand Diaries”, which you can listen to here. Sedaris reads the essay on “This American Life”. He starts about four minutes in.

Next I read The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The book is set in the mid-19th century -- the 1860s, precisely. During this time Italy was approaching unification, and the book is written to document the waning power of the aristocracy. The story itself is interesting: the book…wasn’t. I found it very difficult to read get through and the plot seemed to be jumpy. The most interesting chapter for me was the chapter where the Prince slowly approaches his death.

Don Fabrizio had always known that sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hourglass. In some moments of intense activity or concentration this sense of continual loss would vanish, to reappear impassively in brief instants of silence or introspection; just as a constant buzzing in the ears of the ticking of a pendulum superimposes itself when all else is silent, assuring us of always being there, watchful, even when we do not hear it.

Lastly, I read Al Franken’s Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. The book, written in 1996, purports to be satire of the growing lack of civility in American politics. Franken focuses his ire on a few personalities in particular: Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson. There are others, of course, ranging from Oliver North to Arlen Specter. I don’t have much to say about the book: parts of it were amusing; other parts not so much.

Quotation of the Week: “…and in all cases of passion, admit reason to govern.” - George Washington

Pick of the Week: Foundation’s Edge, Isaac Asimov

Next Week:

• Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature's Most Dangerous Creatures, Carl Zimmer
• Foundation and Earth, Isaac Asimov
• Worldwar: in the Balance, Harry Turtledove
• Puzzles of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov

This Week at the Library (10/9)

Books this Update:

• Me of Little Faith, Lewis Black
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris
• Surviving Auschwitz, Primo Levi
• Carl Sagan: A Life, Keay Davidson

I began this week with Me of Little Faith, which is a book about comedian Lewis Black’s experiences with religions and the paranormal. Black is a comedian often featured on The Daily Show who hosts his own show on the Comedy Central channel called The Root of All Evil. It’s not anti-religious, which came as a surprise to me given his comedy routines. Black was raised Jewish and considers himself a Jew even though he doesn’t follow Judaism. This makes him a “cultural Jew”, which Black says sounds like a name for some sort of yogurt. Black begins by describing growing up in a family of “cultural Jews”, then moves on. The book is a book of comedy, so there’s no real organization to it. Black describes his experiences and knowledge of various religious entities (Jonestown, Oral Roberts, Mormons, the Amish, televangelists), reflects on religions’ various effects, and provides personal anecdotes to give the reader a feel for Black’s own religious beliefs. As far as I could figure, he believes in a god, believes in ghosts, believes some people are gifted with psychic abilities, and is easily impressed by astrological coincidences. He mentions experiences he’s had -- seeing things while visiting the Farm, seeing things while being touched by a guru, etc. A large part of one chapter comes from his “Red, White, and Screwed” show; a clip of which you can see here.

Next I read David Sedaris’ When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Sedaris is a comedian, one I became familiar with thanks to NPR. He often appears on the show “This American Life”, and when he read from Me Talk Pretty One Day, I was so amused that I had to go find the book. I ended up reading all of his humor books, and I looked forward to this new one with great anticipation. It was not disappointing. Sedaris’ particular style of humor is as ever delightful. If you want to listen to Sedaris reading from one of his books -- and thus get an idea for what is included -- click here for one of my favorite readings. That’s a short version: you can watch the longer version here.

Also this week I read Surviving Auschwitz, which is the story of an Italian man named Primo Levi who was captured by fascists while hiding in the countryside of Italy. Owing to his Jewish ancestry, he was sent to Auschwitz. Because he was captured in 1944, he was only forced to spend a year in the work-camp. While the SS had suspended mass killings by this point -- wanting to maintain as much of a work force as possible to help with the war effort -- death was still common. Levi describes the work details, the infirmary, the rituals of life in the camp. It’s an interesting read.

To finish the week’s reading off, I read Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson. The book is a large biography of Sagan, host of Cosmos and an astronomer associated with the Mariner and Voyager projects. He’s one of my favorite people to learn from, and as such I enjoyed this biography very much. The book does not shy away from Sagan’s failings, which I appreciate. Reading the book is a bit like reading about science, skepticism, and psuedo-science from the 1950s to the 1960s. Here are a few Sagan-related links:

1. Celebrating Sagan
2. "Pale Blue Dot"; Sagan reading from Pale Blue Dot. Beautiful video.
3. "Wonder and Skepticism", parts 1 and 2. His last lecture.
4. Ted Turner interviews Carl Sagan, part 1. You can find the rest from there.
   

Pick of the Week: When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris

Next Week:

• The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampusa. This book is another book for school.
• Banquets of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov. Given how much I enjoyed the first two books in the Widowers series, I’m sure I’ll enjoy this one.
• The Way You Wear Your Hat: Frank Sinatra and the Lost Art of Livin’, Bill Zehme. I read this book in early 2005 and am anticipating a good re-read.
• Sinatra: the Artist and the Man, John Lahr