The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
Front-Ranger:
The last issue was a bit problematic for us so it was a bit of a relief to see the latest issue come. The cover is comic, with a raging (yet again) Trump wearing a mask...over his eyes! I chuckled and then decided to put it on the bench in the entry hall of my house. Today was the day when my grandsons come over for art and gardening lessons. Little Charlie glanced at it when he came in. He is a very perceptive lad so I know he realized who was depicted, but he didn't say anything. Then, when my elder grandson came over, he glanced at it too. I'm not sure if it even registered with him. On the dashboard of their car is a figure of Trump wearing a hula skirt. So they probably think he is just some kind of cartoon character.
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: Front-Ranger on March 03, 2020, 10:23:35 pm ---So they probably think he is just some kind of cartoon character.
--- End quote ---
I do, too, only it's a problem having a cartoon character as POTUS.
Front-Ranger:
Going back to the Sedaris piece, I was thinking about it this morning before rising and realizing that in my mother's final journey my family played several roles, as well as differing roles within myself. I played the Lisa role of course, and my sister played the David role, and my brother played the role of Hugh, I guess.
Internally, David was present most of the time and I tried to suppress that voice, but it would have been better just to sit with it and let it come out and understand it. Basically, to sum up, David's voice is "Why me?"
Sedaris' articles have often irritated me because of his self absorption, but then I realize that he is also serving as the narrator and looking at himself objectively. He is the casting director giving himself that role. His satirical, verging on cynical and sarcastic voice is part of the human condition. Lost in the article is the fact that his dad recovered and went back to the assisted living facility. As far as I could tell, he didn't die, despite all the obituary talk.
The writing that I like best is when Sedaris talks about nature, and this is no exception. The siblings are distracted from their combing of dad's home by a deer wandering around outside. Their awestruck voices ring of forgotten childhoods in this home and they recapture some of the joy of it. This feeling returns at the very end when they spy a naked woman through a window. They marvel at the sight just as they did at the deer. Maybe this experience will help them connect with their father.
serious crayons:
I think to some extent we all bring our own reading backgrounds into this. I am really used to reading memoirs and essays about the writers' own experiences, including extremely private ones. For example, five minutes ago I read an essay in Time by an author I know slightly IRL about her rape in college and how she came to think of it afterward. And that was pretty normal because at this point I have read sooo many first-person accounts of rapes (never from the rapist, though -- which actually would be interesting), gang rapes, domestic abuse, incest, mental illness, addiction and so on. In fact, there are so many of those things there's been a backlash that says, essentially, don't bother unless you have something fresh and universal to say about it (which my IRL friend did). Which is actually what I've always thought. I don't want to read an essay that reads like someone's journal written for their own therapeutic benefits -- it should say something larger than that.
Which I think David Sedaris' do. I haven't read much of his early work but I gather that back then he was just trying to be funny. Since he's been writing for the New Yorker his essays seem to make deeper and more nuanced points. Those are almost always critical at his own expense -- he doesn't portray himself as heroic (that's generally been Hugh's role) which is why it doesn't come off as self-absorption to me. His behavior and character flaws are often used to make the point of the piece.
As I recall, I first noticed this with an essay some years ago about how a family had moved into his neighborhood from somewhere else, and at Halloween didn't realize you were expected to go trick-or-treating on the actual Halloween night. They came the following night instead. The Sedarises were out of candy at that point, so David's mother (I'm recreating this from dim memory, but it went something like this) asked him to share some of the candy he'd acquired trick-or-treating. He refused. He just sat there surrounded by piles of candy, greedily eating it all himself. I realized he was making a larger point about inequality and privilege -- either in general among all people or maybe just the United States compared to poorer countries/cultures. I think that might have been the first time I noticed how his writing seemed to have evolved (or at least evolved from what AFAIK was, previously, purely comedic). I think that's when I really started liking his stuff. His pieces had subsequently become more subtle and nuanced and -- in the case of the one we're discussing as well as the one about his mom's alcoholism -- more serious in topic. But they never come across as particularly self-serving to me; I think he usually makes himself the butt of the joke (or of the larger point). In the dad story, I think it's a little more ambiguous than that because his dad really does sound pretty bad.
OK, i just found the Halloween piece and skimmed through it. It's from 17 years ago and it's not as subtle as his more recent work. But it's pretty much as I remember. https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/2003-11-03/flipbook/052d/
Front-Ranger:
Good insight, Katherine. It's easy to go back to his early work since "The Candyland Diaries" is broadcast every year during the holidays. His self-deprecating voice seemed to be fully developed even back then.
The following article, "The Altitude Sickness" by Nick Paumgarten is eerie to me, since I was aware of several incidences where alpinists died one way or another. I had an encounter with the main person in the article, Conrad Anker. I was trudging up the Khumbu Trail towards Everest Base Camp in 2012, and had arrived at the more difficult part just a day or two before arriving at the camp. I could only go 2-3 miles a day and then had to stop at a teahouse for the night. Because of the altitude, I could only eat soup and milk tea. I was sitting on the comfy divan when three men came in. Two of them were dark haired and another one had blondish hair and was very fair. He seemed to be mentoring the other two. He was strutting around with lots of energy in contrast to the rest of us, who were conserving our energy. He was saying things about the porters and guides. He said the porters earned a maximum of $7 a day, and that accommodations in the teahouses was more than that, even if they shared. So the porters, and oftentimes the guides, lodged in caves. He was very vocal about giving the porters more benefits and rights but still at the same time, was very full of himself. I observed a lot of alpinists during that trip and found the same thing over and over.
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