One should use the word noggin as often as possible

8 Srpen 1990, Středa, Praha

I was the only one at the Czech lesson today. These have become a rather strange experience. We are working through a very long vocabulary list, with long digressions into other words. For instance today I learnt the Czech words for bookplate – ‘Ex libris’, bookworm – ‘knihomol’ (literal translation book-moth), bring a bottle party – ‘mejdan’, and To wall up a noggin – ‘zazdit preka’.

Mr Svatopluk Malec, my teacher, is a drinking man and wanted to know which was correct ‘Tot, shot or noggin?’ I told him that one should use the word noggin as often as possible. Perhaps our lessons could be put to better use.

On my request we spent the last ten minutes correcting my mistakes in pronunciation and intonation in reading out a passage of Czech. Milena will be in on Monday, perhaps.

In Czechoslovakia

The grasshoppers,

or crickets,

I could write crickets,

being

in a non-English speaking

country,

and all Webster’s

available to me,

chirr,

whirr,

growl,

like miniature wooden

lions,

in the grass,

like toys,

hilarious

rattlesnakes

the size

of worms,

thrilling

r(with hacek)

Metamorphoses

The furniture in it’s increasing density,

darkening, and the light, the window light,

moves, rippling, the greys mottled like roof-lead,

surrounds me like an army an arm stops. Changes

again, the table is now made of gas,

awaiting its inevitable disturb,

with boxes, columns, lines of air between,

in rigidities of form. And listen, now,

that something in the acoustic of the heart

convinces us, illogically so,

the room we sit in, with the curtains drawn,

is diving underground, a lift-shaft down

into the floor, the ground, the earth, plunging

through space, like one of Lucretius’ atoms,

stretched out into a line of pure math,

an equation reaching, like π, as far

as we can tell, to infinity (like

a syringe to meet the forearm of

whatever amenable god we place there).