Still ran Dingo — Yellow-Dog Dingo — very much bewildered, very much hungry, and wondering what in the world or out of it made Old Man Kangaroo hop.
More from “The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo.” I just can’t get enough of it . . . who the hell writes like that? Ruddy was, of course, inspired by the incantation of formal Indian storytelling, but I wonder if he borrowed the source material and made it accessible to the Western world, sort of like a literary Paul Simon. The rhythms remind me of a lot of Technicians of the Sacred, one of those books that changed my life . . . Natalie is going around chanting lines and lines from the kangaroo chase scenes. You’ll be sitting there doing something and out of nowhere you hear: “Down sat Dingo — Poor Dog Dingo — always hungry, dusky in the sunshine; hung out his tongue and howled.”
