"I'm not making up any of these stories I'm telling you tonight."

This was one of the funniest parts I heard in Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia". In a way, it seemed to touch on each of the nonfiction books we've read this semester. What is true in each writer's story, and what makes it true?

Gray's monologue definitely has the feel of a set of anecdotes refined and enhanced over long practice. I felt very much like I was watching a comedy act although obviously some of the material was manic, dark, and disturbing. Since I missed seeing the movie in class, I watched the episodes via Youtube on my own, but I wish I'd experienced the reactions of the class during moments when he seems to pause for an effect or when he really got rolling on a topic. Like other bloggers here, I was distracted by his delivery and the odd sound effects that played at certain moments in his stories. I enjoyed some of his stories more than others, but I had a hard time connecting with Gray - he seemed so tense and at times rough-edged.

There were moments of such absurdity and ugliness in exploiting a people and a historic event for the entertainment of a movie, that I found myself wincing and wondering how he felt about it. Some of his stories were so matter-of-fact, I wondered if he found it as disturbing as I did, until his "Khmer Rouge Primer". The quote that made me believe he was disturbed by the massacre was this: "So five years of bombing, a diet of bark, bugs, lizards and leaves up in the Cambodian jungles, an education in Paris environs in a strict Maoist doctrine with a touch of Rousseau, and other things that we will probably never know about in our lifetime. Including perhaps an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America, set the Khmer Rouge out to commit the worst auto-homeo genocide in modern history."