Particulate!: "Sedaris Accuracy Still Questionable"

Thurber Prize-winning author David Sedaris was notably stung last year by an article in “The New Republic” magazine claiming he had fabricated numerous parts of his New York Times best-selling books of short stories.

Now, new claims are being made that Sedaris has broken the laws of physics as well.

According to an article to be released in tomorrow’s edition of “Particulate!” magazine, claims made by Sedaris in a short story that appears in his most recent book, “Umbrella Up My Arse,” are “simply impossible under the laws of physics are we currently know them.”

In the 183-page short story that the “Particulate!” expose calls into question, Sedaris claims that once, while working in a county morgue, an ambulette brought in the dead body of a man who had expired “from an umbrella up his arse” – and that the umbrella was “fully opened.”

“From the standpoint of physics, this is clearly impossible,” says physicist Brian Wemple, the article’s author who heads the physics department at Hamburg-Wittlinger University’s campus at Hasylab. “It all goes back to when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object."

Wemple is the co-author with M.C. Broderick of the just-released “Big Bang Theory Revisited: New Facts About Black Holes" (Regency Books, Oct. 2008 348 p.p. plus illustrations.)

Sedaris’ “Umbrella Up My Arse” received favorable reviews from many critics because it was the first time Sedaris had ventured into the omniscient third person in a short-story format.

In the “Particulate!” article hitting news stands tomorrow, its publishers say Wemple will lay out his accusations against Sedaris in an 18-page article complete with five full-color charts.

For his part, Sedaris, who is just about to embark on a 33-city book tour for his latest work, “When You Are Engulfed in Frames,” claims he has always positioned his articles as being “true-ish.”

But this isn’t the first Sedaris short story that has been put under the scientific microscope and failed to pass the sniff test. In a 1997 “New Yorker” article, Sedaris claimed he had once inserted 93 Jujubes up his nose while staying at a Hilton Resort Inn “merely to pass the time of day.” And in 1999, Sedaris told January magazine that while doing “shopping cart wheelies” in a suburban Wal-Mart parking lot he “once saw angels.”

“Again, both of these statements are impossible under the laws of physics as we currently know them,” says Wemple. “For one thing, Wal-Mart did not actually have a full-serve store in Fayetteville until the year 2003 -- and the Second Law of Physics makes time-travel impossible.”

Sedaris has also been called out for claiming that his sister Amy once made the entire island of Manhattan “smell like maple syrup.”

Intimates of Sedaris, who has 46 years and is a resident of France, say he has become increasingly peculiar as he ages. Sedaris is a well-known figure at JFK International Airport in Long Island, for example, because of his recent penchant for filing official complaints against the airport with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages the airport, claiming that Terminal Three of the Saarinen-designed facility “smells like old ham.”

“He comes less and less to America because of this,” says John Rowell, a fellow short-story writer from North Carolina who has often been called “a male Amy Sedaris.” But Rowell notes that other celebrities have made this same complaint about the smelly Terminal Three, including Bette Midler, Elizabeth Banks, Anna Paquin and Chevy Chase.

Currently a resident of Baltimore, Rowell’s last book, “The Music of Your Life,” (Simon and Schuster, 2003) was called “stylish, smart and frequently hilarious” (Lee Smith) and “a zany, poignant collection of stories about not fitting in” (David Ebershoff).