Mallory's Camera

Election cycles come and go, but there was only one Leonard Cohen.

Tom Waits, please take care of yourself.

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Listened to an audio version of Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari on the drives to and from T-burg. Wanna know where I went wrong in my life? I did not do enough traveling.

In 1979, I turned down an offer from Ann ____, Reed __________, and Jon ______ to join them on their round-the-world trip. It would have cost $10,000. I did not have $10,000. Plus the interpersonal dynamics seemed messy: Jon and Reed were Best Friends; Ann was sleeping with both of them (presumably without Reed’s knowledge: He was the official boyfriend), and I was only sleeping with Jon. I did not want to sleep with Reed.

Jon had the most fabulous mantle of shoulder-length, honey-colored hair, and making love to him in the mornings while the sun streamed its benediction through a dusty window, adorned with spider webs, was like making love to the archangel Gabriel.

Ann and Jon and Reed went to Tehran. They went to the Khyber Pass (before it was closed forever to Westerners.) They went to Nairobi. They went to Katmandu.

Sometimes they sent me postcards.

There’s more, much more, to that story, but my heart is heavy this morning. I don’t feel like writing it.

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What I like about Theroux beside his descriptive powers – which are considerable – is his curmudgeonly disposition. He hates aid workers! On a desolate highway in Kenya, he encounters two blonde aid workers from some British charity who performed something literally called “wet feedings” – they divied out portions of a corn, soybeans, oil, and sugar mix to some small number of malnourished infants and toddlers living in close proximity to the road.

That sounds like something wardens would do in a game preserve, the irascible Mr. Theroux informs them.

Theroux also meets many fabulously interesting people. In Ethiopia, he’s introduced to a gentleman who spent many years in prison for some unspecified thought crime. The worst torture for this gentleman who was very educated was that prisoners were not given access to reading materials. One day, a new man entered the prison who had somehow managed to smuggle in a book – an English-language copy of Gone With the Wind!

Theroux’s acquaintance then spends the next can’t-remember-how-many years translating Gone With the Wind into Aramaic. Since he doesn’t have access to paper, he writes on the back of those silver foil pieces that come in cigarette boxes. His handwriting is microscopic. Eventually, he completes the translation on several hundred pieces of foil, but alas! when he is released, he’s lost track of the pieces, and so spends the next five years or so tracking them down. Eventually, he finds them all! And today, his translation of Gone With the Wind is the definitive Aramaic translation of Gone With the Wind!

I don’t know which I love more – the story itself or the fact that anyone in Ethiopia would want to read Gone With the Wind in any language.

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This is me in Luxor, Egypt circa 1978. I’ve explored much of North Africa – some of it in the company of the afore-mentioned Ann – but realistically speaking, I’m too old to do anything but guided tours these days.

Iceland’s on the bucket list.

Also Eastern Europe.