"shch" as in "girlish charm"
What to do, what to do. In about a week I have to get serious about the relocation; for now I'm beholden to nothing, I'm some kind of warmth-eating lizard. I was going to try to write this week, but that's probably a bad idea. Instead I'll have a Reckoning. A Reckoning is where you take your book, or the half so far completed, to a coffee shop, and then you pull out your brightly colored pen and you start to read it. At the end of the day you Reckon to yourself whether it should have been brought into existence.
The question arises of what I'm going to do with this Polish after I get back from Poland. I'm finding it a very cool language (though the grammar is fucking impossible—seven cases!) but I'm not sure what literature in Polish is worth reading. They say Czeslaw Miłosz's early poetry is all right, if you avoid the criticism, and Wislawa Szymborska? I really love Adam Zagajewski's "Try To Praise the Mutilated World" but am less wowed by other pieces of his. Another reasonable thing would be to use Polish as a springboard into another Slavic language—Czech is very close but again, what to read? Karel Čapek? There's always Russian, but it seems like everyone learns Russian. Maybe if I'm really going to deal with one of these insanely inflected languages I should just go for Greek. If I had unlimited processing power I would love to improve on my smattering of Japanese, but reading adult-level Japanese is obviously a much different kettle of fish than ordering a bowl of miso, and I don't think I'll ever learn the thirty thousand kanji, or however many there are. Sadly. Anyway, this is all pretty academic until my German gets much much better.
