Not Quite a Red Letter Day for Vowell and Sedaris

David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell brought a couple of hours of This American Life to this Santa Barbara on Saturday, and the truth be told, I have to spend some time talking about what the truth is. Sedaris opened by indirectly referencing the tempest in the press pot of late created by Alex Heard's article in The New Republic (no link, as it's a pay story--gee, you'd think TNR was as worthy a pub as the News-Press) that calls out Sedaris for making shit up (and he is sort of obsessed with excrement--a diary entry about a Japanese barber with shit-stained hand joins the ranks with the giant turd in the Parisian toilet and his grandma's scary brown towels--, but let's not get sidetracked trying to pin his psycho-development). The question becomes can you lie in nonfiction, and if you do, how horrible a person does it make you.

For it seems writers beyond Heard find fudging your shit to be a big no-no. Oscar Villalon in the San Francisco Chronicle argues there are only two reasons for non-fiction writers to lie:

The first is purely cynical: Nonfiction sells a lot more than fiction. For many readers, books must have some sort of utilitarian purpose -- you have to learn something "real" from it -- and they don't see any point in investing their scarce free time in reading make-believe. It's an ironically ignorant stance, but it exists. Publishers or agents, by calling a work nonfiction that isn't, are hoping certain readers will be more likely to pick it up.

The second reason is laziness: In another irony, a writer doesn't have to work as hard to create the verisimilitude and the nuance a novelist must render to make his world recognizable and true when he already has the reader's suspension of disbelief. The book is labeled nonfiction, so however incredible the actions and descriptions therein, they must be believed. After all, truth is stranger than fiction.

I don't mean to get bogged down in attacking these two points, as the first suggests most readers aren't very smart ("golly gee, if I'm going to bother to read, I better get me some book-learning"), and the second suggests readers are very gullible ("he told me it's true so it must be, golly gee"). Instead, I have to point out that Villalon ignores the 20th century and the thinking that got done in it that suggests we might not ever know anything, and that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to literature as much as the arts. Terms like fiction and nonfiction are both fiction, at this point, and each and every reader has to figure out what's "true" and what's "funny" and if those two words have to do anything at all with each other.

Meanwhile, back to the stage of the Arlington in Santa Barbara, upon which Sedaris never mentioned the to-do directly, but instead joked about the two things he would say that were untrue that evening, and would also go on to talk about his wife Gail. And how her poor uterus fell out in shock upon learning about the drug-addict writer (the never mentioned, yet pardoned, yet savaged James Frey) who lied in his book she loved so much. In the meantime Sedaris wondered if his fibs compared to a country claiming another country had some bad weapons and used that lie to invade the other country...sure enough, we seem awfully eager to castigate our writers and let our politicians not be driven from office with pitchforks and torches. It's one thing to re-create quotes from your childhood; it's absolutely another to sit quietly like a George Tenet till that book deal comes through. But maybe that's just me.

OK, as for the reading itself, truth be told, or at least my version of it, we may be in the land of diminishing returns for both writers. Sedaris might be cruising on his best tropes at this point, for in addition to the shit schtick (me talk potty one day?), he's recently been to Japan and his diary entries from that trip have a lot of the "lost in translation" humor he has mined so well before (especially in "Jesus Shaves"). He can't talk Japanese; the Japanese can't talk English; verbal hijinks ensue. Eventually he'll have to travel to outerspace and hope there's actually non-English ETs with which he can trade intergalactic mangled phrases. His longest piece, due out in the New Yorker in a couple of weeks, seemed an effort to be a bit more serious as it examined his semi-friendship with the sex offender who lived in his small French willage [sic], and thereby considered what is beyond the pale. Maybe its point was to make us wonder how we ourselves might be violating this man (with a plate in his head) by laughing at him, and as with much Sedaris, it's not like he's writing to make us think better of him.

Vowell probably was more rewarding for those who don't know her work well. She opened with a piece about John C. Freemont's non-hardy but very talented cartographer Charles Preuss, a fun look at an inadvertent explorer but we managed to hear it two weekends in a row on KCRW's broadcasts of This American Life. For her longest segment she read the admittedly uproarious section of Assassination Vacation about the Oneida Community, a truly American mix of utopianism, conserving precious bodily fluids, and the making of "products" including James Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau and durable kitchen goods. This topic is perfect for her wry eye, as it captures a kind of hope and hypocrisy that is ripe for ribbing. But again, Amy and I were pretty sure we've heard her read this passage before, and I did read the book. (Still, fans want to hear Springsteen do "Born to Run," so maybe I'm just a pissy audience member.)

Still, it might just be that both Sedaris and Vowell have set such high standards that even they can't live up to them. I did laugh, and isn't that enough to expect for a Saturday night out?