RIF Second Reading

In the second reading of Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, there was a chapter that was entertaining to me called "Tongue." This involved the thalagoya, which is an odd, lizard creature that was said to make a child "become brilliantly articulate, will always speak beautifully, and in his speech be able to 'catch' and collect wonderful, humorous information"(73), if you eat the thalagoya's tongue. His Uncle Noel ate only half the tongue and he became "a brilliant lawyer and a great story teller, from eating just part of the tongue" (74). There are other uses, but I found it quite cultural and humorous that people would eat a lizard tongue to be successful.

In "Sweet Like a Crow" chapter, the italicized quote at the beginning was interesting to me:
"The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical people in the world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line, or rhythm" (76).

And the chapter, I'm assuming, is supposed to be a type of poem. Proving the quote by Paul Bowles about being unmusical by not usuing any sort of rhyme scheme and just made up of a series similes. But even with the similes, it all makes sense by the end of the poem with the line "Like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep/and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets" (77). From discussion in class, we've characterized Ondaatje's writing as "lyrical," proving our writer to be contradictory to generations before him.