The Last Samurai

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.

treiskaiogdoekontasyllabic tessareskaiogdoekontasyllabic pentekaiogdoekontasyllabic

before he was done. He used

oktokaiogdoekontasyllabic enneakaiogdoekontasyllabic

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

HEPTAKAIENENEKONTASYLLABIC

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

heptasyllabaric

may

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take comfort

enasyllabaric

in a plain

dekasyllabaric hendekasyllabaric dodekasyllabaric

preface.

hekkaidekasyllabaric

I will hope to do no worse by

heptakaidekasyllabaric

OKTOKAIDEKASYLLABARIC

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.

& I said NO.