I haven’t been much of a dead-tree flipper lately, but a week ago my wife took me to hear David Sedaris speak in San Francisco, and as a result, I decided to read his book Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Most hilarious is Today’s Special, a deconstruction of the exotic food in fancy Manhattan restaurants (choice quote: “If cooking is an art, I think we’re in our Dada phase”). Sedaris serves up layers of odd recipies, like skirt steak coated with suffocated peaches and asprin sauce.

This talent at jumbling odd yet imaginative nouns takes him into amusing places as in Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist, covering his descent into performance art via useless college courses and methamphetamines. Soon he’s hanging out with Alfred Jarry wanna-bes and their human-hair bowls. At story’s end, Sedaris is pouring a milkshake on his head in an art gallery performance before his wise-cracking, IBM computer programmer father.

Sedairs is alternately morbid, cynical, artsy, homosexual, and sentimental, but he’s not above base humor, as in You Can’t Kill The Rooster, a breakdown of his younger brother who oddly never took on the relatively refined tastes of his siblings (in that, he prefers pot to speed). The Rooster’s crass talk runs the lines of “If she’s old enough to bleed, she’s old enough to breed,” and “Fuck the stock talk, hoss, I ain’t investing in shit.” The icing on the cake is how Sedaris’ aforementioned programmer father finds such blunt banter admirable. Regarding The Rooster: “Now there’s a guy who knows how to communicate.”

Eventually, Sedaris moves to France, resulting in several stories about his expatriate adjustments. He deftly writes (still in English) the stumbling grammar spoken by a beginning French language student:

“Sometimes me cry alone at nght. That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you.”

His French teacher is not amused:

“‘Were you always this palicmkrexis?‘ she asked. ‘Even a fiuscrzsa ticiwelmun knows that a typewriter is feminine.’”

Ha, ha, ha. I open this book on the train on my way to work, and a half-hour magically vanishes into Sedaris’ fruity, pointed world.

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