Davis Sedaris thinks differenter

MANILA, Philippines - Unlike a lot of authors, David Sedaris enjoys book tours. He likes gabbing with fans in book signing lines, eliciting unusual responses to random questions, like: “When did you last touch a monkey?” And he likes giving fans gifts: on his visit to Manila back in 2006, he spent some time acquiring cheap pasalubong to give away to those who showed up at his Powerbooks signings. In his latest collection, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, Sedaris recalls getting excited in a Costco by the huge supply of travel size aspirins: perfect gifts to give on book tours! “Put these in your purse and think of me the next time you get a hangover,” he would later tell his fans, handing over the aspirin packs.

Honestly. How many authors dispense giveaways at their own book signings?

Sedaris has always been, well, different. This is his eighth collection (if you include the fractured fables of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk), and while he’s not exactly breaking new ground, the humorist still finds things in his life to laugh at.

This is no easy feat. He has exhaustively explored his family members (which include actress/writer Amy Sedaris) in previous books, including poignant essays on his mom’s battle with cancer. Well, “poignant” for Sedaris means a clear-eyed truth delivered at the end of a string of laugh-out-loud blasphemies. That’s just the way he rolls. You’d think he would have nothing left to talk about. No more family skeletons in the closet.

But the modus operandi for Sedaris, like many fine essayists, is to drag in memory as a way of illuminating a present-day problem. For instance, in “Laugh, Kookaburra,” he spots a kookaburra bird outside a restaurant on a trip to Australia: it reminds him of being a kid, when he would sing the old folk song Kookaburra with his sister Amy until the wee hours — until his father threatened to paddle him with a fraternity bat if he didn’t stop.

This essay contains at least one poignant observation about getting on in the world: Sedaris’s Australian guide asks him to imagine a four-top stove: each burner represents a part of his life — family, friends, health and work. The guide tells him he has to cut off one burner in life “in order to be successful.”

Guess which one Sedaris chooses to cut off?

He can also be a straight-up funny social critic, as in “Think Differenter,” which explores how people have all become gadget whores who peg moments of their lives to which Apple device they owned at which time.

The iPhone 2 led to the 3, but I didn’t get the 4 or 5 because I’m holding out for the 7, which, I’ve heard on good authority, can also be used as a Taser. This just means I’ll have one less thing to carry around. And isn’t that technology’s job? To lighten our burden? To broaden our horizons? To make it possible to talk to your attorney and listen to a Styx album and check the obituaries in the town where your parents continue to live and videotape a race riot and send a text message and stun someone into submission all at the same time?

One interesting essay (“Day In, Day Out”) reveals how Sedaris comes up with material: he’s been keeping a daily diary since 1977 — hundreds of volumes worth that provide a useful record of where he’s been, funny things he’s heard, sketches of people. It’s a discipline that’s sadly disappeared from our modern world; nowadays, people just carry around cell phones. 

Interspersed in the book are monologues reflecting the author’s growing discontent with religious and right-wing types — the kind of Bible thumpers who claim that only certain people can see Jesus when they die; the kind that define “marriage” in strict man-woman terms only. Sedaris lives in London now, so his sketches of close-minded Americans feel a bit, well, sketchy: like he’s been outside the US so long, he can’t remember encountering a rational, sensible human being there. In any case, the monologues mostly feel like easy targets.

On the other hand, Sedaris has fun recalling what it was like to be an American abroad in the post-Bush, pre-Obama days. Everybody blamed him (me, too) for George W. Bush’s policies, and everybody — from England, France, Australia, etc. — told him there was “no way” Americans would ever elect a black president. On the day Obama was indeed elected, Sedaris got to experience what I call “instant pogi points”: a sense that, somehow, Americans were still capable of making the right choice. But even this last-minute revision of American opinion rubs Sedaris the wrong way:

“Obama!” they cried, and “You did good!” I’d like to say their tone was congratulatory, but there was something else in there as well. Not “How wonderful that you have a thoughtful new president,” but “How wonderful that you elected the president we thought you should elect.”

Eventually, all the back slapping and “Obama!!”s get on the writer’s nerves: Oh, get your own black president, he thinks.

In “#2 to Go,” Sedaris talks about his visit to China, and how much he disliked Chinese food growing up — though people kept telling him real Chinese food was amazing. “Everybody swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I’d had in the United States. ‘It’s more real,’ they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.”

He then encounters that wonderful curiosity known to first-timers in Beijing: “The first thing you notice is what sounds like a milk steamer, the sort a café uses when making lattes and cappuccinos. What you’re hearing, that incessant guttural hiss, is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly from the depths of his or her soul.”

The essay gets rather nasty, almost like a Trip Advisor’s Guide To Hell, detailing the shock and horror Sedaris feels whenever eating in a Chinese restaurant. Let’s just say that phlegm is only the tip of the iceberg.

It’s nice to see Sedaris still has an eye for the pithy details. Who says that travel doesn’t broaden your perspective?

LET’S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS By David Sedaris275 pages Available at National Book Store