What's good about the New York Post? Well, for one thing, it gets straight to the point. Here's Sherryl Connelly on Oh, the Wilseys You'll Know, quick and dirty.

In other news, Marty Rosen interviews David Sedaris for the Louisville Courier-Journal (former employer of my dad and of, we recently discovered, my friend Hillery Stone's grandmother, who was his editor!). All good, plus this story from Sedaris:

And my editor at The New Yorker is really great. At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface. That typeface is just enough to scare you. I would sit down, and I just couldn't do anything. And they said, just write anything and send it to us. Plus, their grammar rules—boy, I learned more about grammar. I just closed a story for them yesterday. It was about this argument I had with a woman on a plane and about working a crossword puzzle. This woman from The New Yorker called me yesterday and said, "4 across and 23 down would never work that way." I figured with that story you're gonna get a puzzle nut who's gonna draw out a little grid and try to write all the things I wrote in these blanks, and they're gonna think, "Wait a minute, this doesn't add up."… Somebody at The New Yorker … did just that.

This is interesting too:

...there was a story I wrote in "Me Talk Pretty"—I should know better by now. I think when people move to another country their first impressions are pretty typical. Everybody who moves to France pretty much says the same thing. I wrote a story about my French teacher that I wish I could take back, or rewrite it. What I left out was all the great things she did. There are laws here, like if you're a nanny you're only supposed to work a certain amount of hours, but then the nannies get exploited like crazy. They come here from Eastern Europe, and they're basically slaves. Our teacher—it was a very beginning French class, and it's murder listening to people take their baby steps in a foreign language, and there were all these nannies in the class that were being exploited. And the teacher called their employers to try to help them. And I liked her. She was funny. But I left that out of the story.

I didn't realize when I started writing about France that by and large most people have their ideas about France and they don't want those ideas contradicted, and that this was sort of playing into that. I didn't do it knowingly, but people sort of wanted to hear about an evil French teacher, and she did do some pretty bad things. But to leave out the good part made it a lesser story. I guess I was thinking at the time, well that's just too complex; if I add that she did all these great things too, that just makes it too complicated. But that's what people are—they're complicated. So if I had it all to do over again, if there was one thing I could go back and rewrite, that would be the first thing. Then everything else would follow it.

Sedaris says of expats in France, "There are a lot of people here—Johnny Depp lives here. R. Crumb lives here. John Malkovich lived here until last year. There's a whole community. I don't remember the exact figure, but it's really astonishing the number of Americans who live in Paris. But I just know two of them." So that's Johnny and John, or Bob and Johnny, or...? I'd like to see a Bride of Coffee and Cigarettes, or The Wrath of Aline, where they all get together, tell risqué jokes, and brood attractively and/or productively.

Update: Hooray! Marty Rosen sent the rest of the interview. Sedaris says "asshole" in it. Heh. He also talks about Jonathan Lethem, Sarah Vowell, the sameness of food, plastic surgery, and his unhealthy addiction to the movies, which you should try your best to emulate.

By the way, should you ever find yourself in the emergency room with a badly scratched cornea, I suggest the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, on 14th and 2nd. Do not, even if blinded by a troop of blocked Shakespearean monkeys, go to the Beth Israel ER, which is your typical city screamfest (particularly at midnight). At Eye & Ear, which you can only go to with eye, ear, nose, and throat sort of things, you're basically in a dentist's waiting room—it's that quiet, clean, and carpety. Highly recommended. Eyepatches make a snappy accessory, too, as I'm obviously not the first to inform you. Mine is a sanitary but unimaginative white; they come in a variety of colors for $5 each at the 826 Valencia pirate store. For those just slightly less lucky than me, designer glass eyes are $25 each, all of which look as though they'd mistakenly been to Beth Israel in the past 24 hours.

Also, I can't believe that until this moment I didn't link the current pirate craze with the current pirating craze. I was blind, but now I see.

Sedaris in the Flesh [Louisville Courier-Journal]