The Reader Travels

I’m letting the music guide me back to South Africa. The silly songs still ring in my head from the time I wake in the morning to the hour I lay my head back down to sleep. I’m sure they’re continuing on through my dreams, making the journey connected, cyclical.

A dear friend told me the other day, “You have a disease.” And I said, “Yes, I think you’re right.” Perhaps it’s a happy form of obsessive compulsive disorder. I can’t stop it, I just follow the threads of tinkling tunes from place to place and hour to hour.

She’ll be coming around the mountain when she… high hopes, he’s got high hopes, he’s got… Tarantara! tarantara! Tarantaraaaa!… I am the very model of a modern major general… Jimmy crack corn and I don’t… Ugh! Make it stop.

So, now you want to know what possible silly song road I could travel to get back to South Africa? So here it is. I had to stop listening to Tom Lehrer’s That Was the Year that Was to help me curb the plague of silly songs driving through my brain, but it doesn’t matter. The songs are still there.

Anyway, in one of the songs he sings about nuclear proliferation and how it seemed in the 60s that everyone was getting the bomb. France got it, but that’s OK because they’re our allies. The Soviets got it, but that’s OK because it helps balance the powers. The Chinese and Indonesians were working on getting one. Lehrer then sings about South Africa getting two bombs - one for the black and one for the white. It’s only right.

So there, now we’re back in South Africa.

OK, so I’m not really into competitive reading, and I don’t usually write real book reviews, but The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge posted on A Life in Books had too dear a theme for me to pass up.

Get this, it’s all about travelling to distant places by way of books. Can you believe it? What have we been doing here for the past 10 months, anyway? In the rules, we have to go to real places, so I’m glad my tour of Middle Earth is over (see archives from back in March).

Anyway, here are the places I plan to go over the next few months, so expect the occasional “review.”

1) India via The Hindi Bindi Club

2) Prague via The Witch of Prague

3) Kabul via The Kite Runner

4) Argentina via Imagining Argentina

5) Backwoods Georgia via Deliverance

6) Africa via To Asmara: A Novel of Africa

This is one of my favorite sayings from the CEO of my company. My man and I have both worked for him, and he’s said it about both of us at least once. When I told one of my best friends I have career limiting tendencies, she said, “They’re called breasts, dear.”

But that’s really not it. I’m a blurter, plain and simple. I say things like, “I don’t make phone calls. That’s why I got a job programming,” (which is almost an exact quote from something I said in the office just yesterday). Sometimes I drop F-bombs and cackle really loud to taunt people in meetings.

Anyway, today, I went for a laugh in a meeting with my boss and his boss and every other boss in the organization, at the expense of a co-worker. Oh, he had a fine comeback and he was a great sport about the whole thing, but the damage had been done, another blow to my career potential. Because, once again, it’s all about me and not how cruel little kids can be.

When I told my husband what I’d done, he said, “That’s just mean.” And I said, “But it was funny, right?” He didn’t seem to think so.

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For more on this subject see:

She Speaks Her Mind

Tag, I’m It

My mother shared with me her gift of turning everything into a song. One word or phrase will start a tune in her head. She usually takes the words and makes up her own songs to go with it. But for me, words will trigger memories of songs I already know, and they come pouring forth from my mouth.

Memory has never been an overwhelming feature of Mom’s brain, while I still remember useless and meaningless things like my grandmother’s phone number from when I was six and my phone number and address from when I was nine. She has the gift of musical creation, while I have the gift of regurgitation.

So lately, my musical memory trigger has been firing, and I’m singing funny songs my parents sang while I was growing up, like “Zombie Jamboree” and Tom Lehrer’s “Be Prepared.” And yesterday I found myself listening to Tom Lehrer’s That Was the Year that Was album, a nice little piece of political satire from the mid-sixties.

The album opens up with a song called “National Brotherhood Week,” where he jokes about people trying to force themselves to get along with each other for a whole week, to the tune of “High Hopes.” Let’s all sing along, shall we?

“Oh the Protestants hate the Catholicsand the Catholics hate the Protestants,

and the Hindus hate the Muslims

and everybody hates the Jews.”

But we’ve got high hopes… At least we can laugh about ourselves. And sing.

In his story “Nutcracker.com” from Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris talks about his hatred of computers and how his friends would call him a “technophobe.” He argues against such a label, claiming that just because he hates computers doesn’t mean he’s afraid of them. He writes:

The word “phobic” has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing. No credit is given for distinguishing between these two very different emotions.

I had to think about this a lot. If someone hates Jews, he’s called anti-semitic, but if someone hates gays, he’s called homophobic. By nomenclature Jews can be hated fully and purely, while we get to condescend to the gay haters by saying those people are really just scared that “the gay” is contagious or something.

I agree that fear and hatred are completely separate things and that “homophobic” is more of an anti-hatred propaganda term than a true expression of the emotion.

On the other hand, I don’t think that fear and hatred are completely unrelated. Mr. Sedaris’s hatred of computers aside, I do think that a great deal of hatred in the form of bigotry arises from a fear of those who are different from us, but it also arises from upbringing, peer pressure, life experiences, ignorance and a total lack of perspective. (I’m sorry, was that “pompous”?)

I think a lot about the subject of racism, and I love to read books by and about people of other races, religions, nations and cultures. There’s just something to be said for learning the differences and recognizing the sameness, those common threads of all humanity.

Regrettably, hatred and fear of those who are different from us seems to be a common thread of humanity, a fact of life. The Gospel According to Shug says, “Helped are those who are enemies of their own racism,” recognizing that we all have a capacity to hate and the ability to fight against it. (from The Temple of My Familiar, Alice Walker)

On Live’s Mental Jewelry album, they sing, “This is not a black and white world. To be alive I say the colors must swirl. And I believe that maybe today we will all get to appreciate the beauty of gray.” It’s a little idealistic, but a lovely image nonetheless.

May we all be, “Helped.”

My last stop on the magical realism tour of the world is South Africa. Andre Brink’s Imaginings of Sand is an epic tale of several generations of white women living in rural South Africa. As in most of the Latin American tales, the political climate plays like a soundtrack to the magic that happens throughout the characters’ lives.

In Latin America, we see the disparity between the haves and the have nots, and like South Africa, the distinctions are often drawn on racial lines. But in Latin America those lines have blurred as blood lines commingle. In Africa things seem a little more black and white.

When I think of South Africa, I think of racism. It’s just something the media has drilled into me. And in my own prejudice, if I meet a big white man with a South African accent, I assume instantly that he doesn’t care for people of color. Of course, my own southern US accent could afford me the same assumptions in someone else’s ears.

But regardless of politics and racial intolerance, there is real life happening in Imaginings of Sand. The “real” lives. The individuals hidden behind the stereotype. The details. That’s where the magic happens.

When I think back on it, I really don’t know what to believe about things my ex-boyfriend told me. His brother said to me after we broke up, “S- is the biggest liar I know.” Of course, at the time I was dating S-, I believed everything; I was under his spell. His youngest brother would look at us and say the word, “Svengali,” over and over. I had to look it up, and even then, I had no idea what he was talking about until the spell was broken many years later.

Regardless of truth, he lived in a haunted apartment in Dallas. Apparently there had been some sort of family murder suicide in the two story studio, and S- would see the father and the children’s ghosts in the upstairs rooms and along the stairs. It didn’t matter that the place was built in the 1970s. A violent act had taken place, and the former tenants were confused and sad, and somehow bound to this building.

Later, after we broke up, he moved to Colorado and returned for a visit to tell me of his further adventures with the spirit world. Colorado was a beautiful place, and he was getting in touch with nature. But he felt the spirits there too. He would be walking through the woods and suddenly pass through a spot, and just know he was in the presence of ghosts. Whether it was a chill or a tingle, a vision or a smell, I don’t remember. I just remember looking at him and believing it was true.

The beauty of these ancient spirits was that instead of being tied to a man-made structure, they were tied to the land, to nature. Perhaps they had died in battle or on the hunt. Or perhaps this was a place where the old and infirm were sent to sit and die, alone, but with…