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Pietro, a sculptor. Rudolf Wittkower (German art historian, refugee from the Nazis [where to begin?], author of Art & Architecture in Italy 1600–1750) compares him to Michelangelo ([1475–1564]),
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painter, poet, sculptor of genius …) in his capacity for superhuman
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concentration. ‘But unlike the terrible and lonely giant of the sixteenth century, he was a man of infinite charm, a brilliant and witty talker, fond of conviviality, aristocratic in demeanour, a good husband and father, a first-rate
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organiser, endowed with an unparalleled talent for creating rapidly and with ease.’
And Cézanne? Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) was a French painter of genius, associated with the Impressionist
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school of painting. He was inarticulate: people called him the Bear. He worked very slowly and with
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difficulty. He is most famous for his landscapes and still lifes. His method was to apply blocks of paint to the canvas, often with a palette knife rather than a brush. He worked so
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slowly that even fruit could not
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stand still enough: it rotted
What’s the longest word in the world?
I don’t know. I don’t know all the words in the world.
What’s the longest word you know?
I don’t know.
How can you not know?
I think it’s the name of a polymer. I can’t remember how it goes.
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Wait a minute. Here’s a good one. di(2-ethylhexyl)hexa-hydrophthalate.
Is that the polymer?
No.
What does it mean?
I once knew.
My dad would know.
The hell he would (think I)—I would like to say this but I don’t KNOW that he doesn’t, there is only an (in my opinion) overwhelming likelihood, & I think I should not blacken his name to L without good hard evidence.
He MAY know. It didn’t come up in the conversation.
What did you talk about?
I talked about the Rosetta Stone. He talked about his car and about a writer he admired.
What kind of car does he have?
He didn’t say. Diethyl-dimethyl methane. Diethyl-diethyl malonate. Diethyl-methyl-ethyl malonate.
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before he was done. He used
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ENENEKONTASYLLABIC
wax fruit instead.
And who was Rilke and who was Zweig and who was Musil? Who was Newton and who was Einstein? Rilke
Why don’t you teach me the syllabaries?
WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?
WHY DON’T YOU TEACH ME THE SYLLABARIES?
Well
Are they hard?
Not very
Please
Well
Please
I told you the deal
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Glenn Gould (eccentric, brilliant mid-20th-century Canadian pianist and specialist in the works of J. S. Bach [18th-century German
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composer of genius]) said of The Well-Tempered Clavier [forget it], that the preludes
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were merely prefatory
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and of no
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real musical interest. The
You could teach me ONE syllabary
I told you the deal
Is there a language with only one syllabary?
I think Tamil makes do with one
So Tamil would be a monosyllabaric language
Yes
And Japanese is a disyllabaric language but most people would call it bisyllabaric
Yes
trisyllabaric tetrasyllabaric pentasyllabaric hexasyllabaric
reader
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may
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take comfort
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in a plain
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preface.
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I will hope to do no worse by
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ENNEAKAIDEKASYLLABARIC
EIKOSASYLLABARIC
heiskai
You’re missing a masterpiece of modern cinema. Finish the Odyssey and I’ll teach you the hiragana, yes?
Done.
Emma offered me a work permit & a job.
I said: Done.
Odyssey 1.
Odyssey 2.
Odyssey 3.
Odyssey 4.
I never meant this to happen. (L is reading Odyssey 5. He has read four books in four days. I would carry on from where I left off but I have misplaced my notes.) What I meant was to follow the example of Mr. Ma (father of the famous cellist), who I read somewhere started teaching Yo Yo when he was 2.
Coupez la difficulté en quatre was his motto, which meant that he would reduce a piece of music to a number of very small short tasks; the child was to master one task a day. He used the same procedure with Chinese characters, the child learning a character a day—by my reckoning that makes two simple tasks but you get the picture. I thought that this would be an enormous help to L for very little trouble to myself, & when he was 2 I started him on flashcards.
I think that the first simple task was supposed to be cat. No sooner had he mastered this simple task than he wanted to go on, he wanted every single word in his vocabulary on a card, he sobbed PURPLE PURPLE PURPLE when I tried to stop before writing it down. The next day he started his first book, Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss, no sooner had he started than he started to cry because he did not know Hop and Pop. I saw in a flash that the time required to teach a two-year-old workaholic by the look-and-say method would leave perhaps 6 minutes a day for typing, & so (doubting my ability to make ends meet on 55p a day) I hastily went over a few principles of the phonics system. He learned to say huh when he saw an h and puh when he saw a p and by the end of the week he could read as follows: Hop. On. Pop. The. Cat. in. the. Hat.
I thought: It worked! It worked!
He would sit on the floor and when he found something interesting he would bring it over to show me.
Thunder of tiny feet. He had unearthed a treasure. Yes? I would say
And he would produce from the page—O Joy!—a thing of glory
The
Wonderful!
And here was another find! What could it be? Could it—No—Yes—Yes—It was a
Cat
And he would pluck from the page one marvel after another, until at last he could nonchalantly draw now a rabbit, now a dove, now a string of coloured scarves from an ordinary empty black top hat.
Wonderful marvellous wonderful marvellous cool
I was not getting as much work done as I had hoped.
One day it occurred to him that there were quite a lot of other books on the shelves.
He selected a book with pictures, and he came to my side, perturbed.
The face on the gutta percha inkstand has a tale to tell
I explained gutta percha, inkstand and tale
it is believed to be that of Neptune, moulded to commemorate the successful use of the material to insulate the world’s first submarine telegraph cable from England to France in 1850.