This is turning into a brainpolice holiday tradition. I have many Dutch friends and though most of them find this funny, there is always someone who doesn't...tough...It's just a the traditional celebration of Sinter Klas in The Netherlands as seen from the fractured prism of another culture.
Sedaris is pretty brilliant. You think this is offensive? You should read his account of his class at l'Alliance Francais in Paris and how the beginning level French Language students try to explain Easter in French to a Muslim student. It's in his collection of Essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day.
Here's Sedaris reading an excerpt from Me Talk Pretty One Day about Americans on The Metro in Paris:
Here's Sedaris reading an excerpt from Me Talk Pretty One Day about Americans on The Metro in Paris:
5 comments:
This is very good. Thank you for posting it.
Hello, sorry for using the comments' section for posting this but the contact window on your profile refused to open :-) I have just come across your blog and I must say it looks really, really interesting. In your profile, the first things I noticed were "Le pere Noel est une ordure" (hilarious) and the Simenon books (total and absolute respect to the master :-)
I am looking forward to going through your posts -just started.
Greetings from Greece, Liana
Liana, thank you very much for your comment. I don't get a lot of comments but that is not the purpose of my blogging activities. I try to express my esthetic, sense of the ridiculous and by writing about the issues I am concerned with, it's a learning process for me. I can start researching a subject with an idea or opinion, but at one point through my writing, I realize that I really don't understand how complex it really is and by the end of the piece, I often have changed my point of view completely. It's a good example of why believing is the end of knowledge, once you accept something unconditionally, you stop asking questions....Thanks for stopping by and wading through the last 6 years of my life.
When I am in Europe I tell people I am Canadian.
the Ol'Buzzard
Mr. Buzzard, I loved your comment...when I speak French to people who don't know me, at one point in the conversation they try to identify my accent...I used to say Canadian...but then as I spoke more over the years, they would peg me as Irish...now, due to the bad influences around me, they almost always think I am Dutch...but now I tell them that I am an American from Detroit and get a reaction of utter disbelief.....btw, my French tutor for a few years was Belgian, but all of the students in the class were Dutch, except for me the lone American...`most of the people I associate with, Very French, Middle eastern, North African and Dutch have never really met an American before and I tend to destroy
all of their previous conceptions.
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