channeling sarah vowell....

I just finished reading Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli, which I read (out of chronological order) after finishing Assassination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates. For those of you who are not familiar with her work, she is a witty and sarcastic essayist, in the same vein as David Sedaris, Ira Glass, or anyone whom you might have heard on "This American Life." In short, Vowell channels almost any writer who has appeared on the Stuff White People Like list (this is a wonderful parody of race and class stereotypes, and Sedaris happens to be #25, sandwiched between "wine" and "Manhattan, and now Brooklyn too").

I could never hope to be as skilled a writer as Vowell, but I can certainly read her work and see glimmers of my own writing, or at least glimmers of my own neuroses. In talking about one of her writer friends, she says, "He's mad for ellipses. I tell him, yeah, I have similar affection for the parenthesis (but I always take most of my parentheses out, so as not to call undue attention to the glaring fact that I cannot think in complete sentences, that I think only in short fragments or long, run-on thought relays that the literati call stream of consciousness but I like to think of as disdain for the finality of the period)."- Sarah Vowell, Take the Cannoli, pp. 202 - 203.

I couldn't have said it better myself (though I could have tried, and did contemplate actually trying, but then thought better of it and ate a Popsicles. Hey, is that a......).