David Sedaris’ Greek grandmother was a leviathan litterer. The woman would throw anything out a car window. The important thing for her wasn’t a clean outside but a clean inside. “Look at the sky, littered with clouds, or the beach trashed with shells.” How was that mess any different from a hundred cans in a ditch?This is typical of the twisted logic Sedaris encounters from his family and fuels his own skewed attitude that informs the arresting anecdotes and observations that run through LET’S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS.
Many of the stories are travel pieces or about lengthy sojourns in foreign climes. Sedaris lived for a while in both France and England and his observations from an ex pat American perspective are both acerbic and acute.
His comparison studies of Japan and China are highly informative, contrasting cuisine, health and hygiene between the two oriental powerhouses.
No guessing which country he’s talking about in the story called Laugh, Kookaburra. Sedaris has made two trips Down Under, and this story concerns an outing to Daylesford, Victoria, which David describes as Dodge City designed by homosexuals. Here he ruminates on the song he learned at school – laugh kookaburra laugh, how gay your life must be! – and if owls are the professors of the avian kingdom, then kookaburras might well be the gym teachers.
The ornithological theme continues with Understanding Owls, a treatise on taxidermy and nocturnal bird decorative art. Like all the other stories, it’s a hoot.
Sedaris never explains the title LET’S EXPLORE DIABETES WITH OWLS, but in his author’s note he talks about ‘forensics’, a cross between speech and debate. “Students take published short stories and essays, edit them down to a predetermined length, and recite them competitively. To that end, I have written six brief monologues that young people might deliver before a panel of judges.”
One of them is “from” a husband and father so confused by the issue of state sanctioned same sex marriage that he goes on a murder spree, considers eloping with his neighbour’s ride on mower, and wonders whether legislators will decide that cars don’t belong in garages anymore.
Another is from a woman tearing strips off her crippled sister whose spouse has spurned to the extent of divorcing her and marrying the sister. The sibling shellacking is triggered by the inappropriate wedding gift received, a set up so grotesque and cruel, you feel bad laughing. But brutality can be so breathtakingly funny; subversion as comedy.
Yet another is from a fundamentalist Christian doing the damning everyone to hell rant that Jesus junkies get almighty high on.
There’s twenty six stories in all – although the final instalment is actually a poem in rhyming couplets about a kaleidoscope of canines – and every one of them is an hilarious corrective for political correctness.