Wednesday, August 19, 2009

David Sedaris on Daylesford, the Kookaburra song and his family

Our destination that afternoon was a place called Daylesford, which looked, when we arrived, more like a movie set than like an actual working town. The buildings on the main street were two stories tall, and made of wood, like buildings in the Old West, but brightly painted. Here was the shop selling handmade soaps shaped like petit fours. Here was the fudgery, the jammery, your source for moisturizer. If Dodge City had been founded and maintained by homosexuals, this is what it might have looked like.


Read the New Yorker article in its entirety here.

6 comments:

genevieve said...

HEH. Thank you!!

*exiented* is a word, according to Blogger and me.

R.H. said...

When I was fourteen I was working at Newport Railway Workshops*. We were known as "Lad Labourers", us boys -old times being quaint, and at Christmas me and another little labourer used our free railway passes to visit Daylesford.
I think about this trip, and all I can picture is the pair of us in a sort of ballet pose, arms raised, feet in the air; we'd never been to the country before.
I always thought of Daylesford as a good place to end up, but the latte set with their great caravan of natural ingredient have beaten me to it.
They're an infection. Contamination. Abomination. They are a virus, leaping the outer suburbs to land in picturesque little country towns. They are a disease, of sameness. A boredom of uniformity.
I hate them. Yes.

Daylesford is gone. Ruined.

-Robert.

*I've travelled about since then but have ended up here, in Newport. Quite an irony.
(Or maybe not.)

elsewhere said...

This is strange reading in America, where I'm struggling to say 'forest' instead of 'bush'.

Kath Lockett said...

He's so deliciously brilliant. Who else could call us 'Canada in a thong' or consider our funny kookaburra the gym teacher of the bird world?

Helen said...

What a shame he wasn't there when Mr Bucket and I visited. Bucket man stood near the bank and handed out zines (his stuff is being sold now at Wolf at the Door in Hepburn, hence the marketing offensive) while I lurked nearby at one of the tables outside the Indian cafe to enjoy the passerby comments and LULZ.

I must blog that sometime.

Ariel said...

I was fascinated to see what he'd write about us from that perspective of 'almost just like us', which is how I felt in the US - like it wasn't foreign at all, but then all of a sudden it was.

Helen ... blog that! Sounds hilarious.