I'm only reading this review because Meade texted me the link. My response:
I'm only blogging this because, having ended up in "Jabberwocky," I took the occasion to check my memory — do I still have it memorized? — and wanted to ask those of you have memorized it, if you have found that there is one word that is the stubborn last holdout. For me, the word is "whiffling." If you're not like me, and it's not "whiffling," then I bet it's "uffish."
But if you're ever trapped in a cabin in the woods and a monstrous man is trying to kill you, look around — try to find something vorpal.
The hardest word to remember when memorizing (and retaining the memorization of) "Jabberwocky."
Your experience may vary. Indeed, you may have chosen to memorize some other poem. But if, like me, you chose "Jabberwocky," as you go back and check to see if you still have the memorization down, isn't "whiffling" the hardest word to remember?
Interestingly enough, "whiffle," unlike some other words in "Jabberwocky," is a real English word — and not just a word that became a word because of "Jabberwocky."*
It means (according to the OED), "To blow in puffs or slight gusts; hence, to veer or shift about... To vacillate, to be variable or evasive.... To move lightly as if blown by a puff of air; to flicker or flutter as if stirred by the wind."
There's writing of "wyffling windes" way back in 1568. And The Nation wrote (in 1881), "Who like a manly man, will not whiffle, or quibble, or evade."
And the OED takes note of "Whiffle ball," "n. (a proprietary name for) a light, hollow, perforated ball used to play a variety of baseball." Example from 1970, a caption in Time: "[David Eisenhower] passing the afternoon playing wiffle ball on the south lawn of his father-in-law's White House." In happier times.**
David Eisenhower was 22 and he was the "Fortunate Son" of the Creedence Clearwater recording that played on the radio as he whiffled on the lawn.
I think she lost because she chortled while telling miners to learn to code.
Other words with OED entries that originated in "Jabberwocky":
"Bandersnatch" — "A fleet, furious, fuming, fabulous creature, of dangerous propensities, immune to bribery and too fast to flee from; later, used vaguely to suggest any creature with such qualities." Used by C.S. Lewis: "Always, at the critical moment, a strange knight, a swift ship, a bandersnatch or a boojum, breaks in."
"Galumph" — "Originally: to march on exultingly with irregular bounding movements. Now usually: to gallop heavily; to bound or move clumsily or noisily." Later example: "In the hall was a galumphing lass with a lot of jerseys and a po face," from "Friends in Low Places," a 1965 novel by Simon Raven. And I thought Garth Brooks thought up the bon mot "friends in low places." That's a riff on "friends in high places," which has been a stock phrase since the 17th century.
"Mimsy" — that's defined as "Unhappy" and appearing "Only in Carroll and later allusions," so it doesn't really belong on the list. It's no "chortle," that's for sure. But I'd like to suggest "Mimsy" as a name for Harry and Meghan's new baby. I heard they wanted something unusual. I know, Mimsy seems like a girl's name, but I heard they were looking for something gender neutral. So... just an idea for the Prince who can be President! Prince Mimsy! President Mimsy W. Windsor!
I'm reading about this subject because I've long been interested in paraphrasing, and, writing the previous post, I encountered one of those "quotes" that are virtually always remembered in paraphrase form. You know, like "Play it again, Sam" (For "Play it, Sam"). Why do we do that? Does it happen when there's something off about the verbatim quote, and we're really fixing it, making it what it would be if we were writing the screenplay and expecting an actor to say it?
The misremembered quote I ran into this morning is "Why can't I just eat my waffle?" I can tell you for a fact, based on watching the video about 25 times just now, that the verbatim quote is: "I was wondering why it is that, like, I can't just eat my waffle. Just gonna eat my waffle right now."
Why did I watch 25 times? Because I found myself forgetting the word order almost as soon as I heard it even when I was trying to get it verbatim. It was incredibly hard to remember exactly where Obama said "like." Also, the first 3 words are garbled... because he is literally eating the waffle. That's why the word "just" is so important. He's not wondering why he can't eat his waffle. He is eating his waffle. He wants to eat his waffle without having to do something else at the same time.
The difficulty of discerning "I was wondering" might cause listeners to begin the sentence with "why it is that," which sounds odd. I myself, trying to get a verbatim quote, kept switching to "why is it that." There seems to be a strong instinct to switch words into a more natural order, which might say a lot about how language develops and how babies learn to speak in a way that follows established rules (and long before they have any awareness that there are rules that many adults believe in and take pains to enforce).
So if you're looking to memorize verbatim text, it will be easier, I think, if the text you choose follows the natural pattern of speech. And — to continue in the same line of thinking — if you find a particular text strangely hard to memorize, you might want to think about why it was put in that form. Is the speaker/writer hiding something or trying to affect an elevated style? Is there something humorous? Something meant to exclude less intelligent listeners? What's going on?
Did you understand the post title? You will if you read the linked article... the linked... link... ... linc...
That's a technique for memorization. I remember reading, long ago, about papers left by an old woman who couldn't talk and who was assumed to have lost her language ability. It was considered sad that her notes looked like this: o f w a i h h b t n t k c t w b d o e a i i i h....
But then it was understood, and they realized what they were seeing and felt overwhelmed by their failure to understand her.
During the grueling two-week competition, Mohamed was tested on proper pronunciation, voice and style as he recited from memory random verses from the whole Qur’an — not an easy feat, considering the Qur’an has more than 6,000 verses and spans 604 pages....
His triumph shocked members of the local Somali community, who have long doubted that a youth raised in Minnesota could compete with those raised in Muslim countries.
Mohamet “Hambaase” Ali, the former principal of the Islamic school at Abubakar As-Saddique mosque in Minneapolis where Ahmed trained, said Somali parents often dispatch their kids to Africa for what’s known as “dhaqan celis,” meaning to “rehabilitate kids,” so they are better accustomed to their culture and religion.
Most families, he said, are wary of their kids growing up in the West and losing their identity, which parents say makes youth vulnerable to all kinds of problems. But Ali believes that children can simultaneously maintain their American identity and meet cultural and religious expectations....
“I feel really proud to be the first American to win this,” Mohamed said. “They fear us now. They now know that we Americans are tough in Qur’an.”...
Ahmed Burhan Mohamed plans to go to the University of Minnesota and study to become a doctor.
"Bill Burr’s 2003 report recommended using numbers, obscure characters and capital letters and updating regularly—he regrets the error."
It's in the Wall Street Journal, so good luck trying to read it. Maybe the headline alone will be useful.
Excerpt:
The new guidelines, which are already filtering through to the wider world, drop the password-expiration advice and the requirement for special characters, [said Paul Grassi, an NIST standards-and-technology adviser]. Those rules did little for security -- they "actually had a negative impact on usability," he said.
Long, easy-to-remember phrases now get the nod over crazy characters, and users should be forced to change passwords only if there is a sign they may have been stolen, says NIST, the federal agency that helps set industrial standards in the U.S....
Academics who have studied passwords say using a series of four words can be harder for hackers to crack than a shorter hodgepodge of strange characters -- since having a large number of letters makes things harder than a smaller number of letters, characters and numbers.
The article points us to this popular cartoon, which memorably and accurately shows the problem:
And I liked this:
Collectively, humans spend the equivalent of more than 1,300 years each day typing passwords, according to Cormac Herley, a principal researcher at Microsoft Corp.
And here's Lorrie Faith Cranor, the woman who made a dress out of the 500 most-common passwords (like iloveyou).
"But I’ve never asked him for a damn thing," said Frank Giustra, who has given the Clinton Foundation over $100 million. He's described — in WaPo's "The Clintons, a luxury jet and their $100 million donor from Canada" — as a "Canadian mining magnate and onetime Hollywood studio owner.
Last week, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged that an affiliated Canadian charity founded in 2007 by Giustra kept its donors secret, despite a 2008 ethics agreement with the Obama administration promising to reveal the New York-based foundation’s donors.
The foundation said the arrangement conformed with Canadian law. But it also opened a way for anonymous donors, including foreign executives with business pending before the Hillary Clinton-led State Department, to direct money to the Clinton Foundation.
For Giustra, the partnership with Bill Clinton provided an introduction to the world of international philanthropy at the highest levels — a feel-good, reputation-enhancing effort that he said he finds more personally satisfying than amassing wealth.
At the same time, Giustra continued to expand his business empire, closing some of the biggest deals of his career in the same countries where he traveled with Clinton.
According to Giustra, you can believe that Bill Clinton didn't get involved in any of those business dealings, because Bill Clinton is utterly bored by that sort of thing: "He doesn’t care about that stuff. His eyes would glaze over." Even if that is to believed, Giustra could still have used the appearance of connection to the ex-President to leverage his business dealings.
As for Giustra's believability, consider that he also says that when Bill Clinton saw that that Giustra was carrying a biography of Julius Caesar, Clinton not only began talking about the book, he began "quoting whole passages of it from memory."
Alexander Hamilton once told Jefferson that Caesar was “the greatest man who ever lived.” Hamilton might have been tweaking his humorless rival. He knew that his own political opponents often compared him to Caesar, and deep down he probably shared their suspicion, not to say their loathing, of the dictator. But everyone acknowledged Caesar’s military genius. He was a master strategist whose tactics are still studied by generals. In Gaul, through the instrumentality of his legions, he killed or enslaved hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Yet he brought stability and a semblance of the rule of law to those rude provinces. He greatly enriched himself at the expense of those he conquered. Yet he also greatly reformed provincial governance, sharply limiting the extent of “gifts” a Roman governor could (legally) help himself to.
I'm reading the full transcript of Bob Dylan's long, rambling speech at that MusiCares event).
[My] songs didn't come out of thin air. I didn't just make them up out of whole cloth.... It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock 'n' roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music.
I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.
For three or four years all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals. And I met other singers along the way who did the same thing and we just learned songs from each other. I could learn one song and sing it next in an hour if I'd heard it just once.
If you sang "John Henry" as many times as me -- "John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I'll die with that hammer in my hand."
If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written "How many roads must a man walk down?" too.
And if you'd've sung Big Bill Broonzy's "Key to the Highway" — "I've got a key to the highway / I'm booked and I'm bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin' because walking is most too slow" — you'd have written "Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose/Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes/He asked poor Howard where can I go/Howard said there’s only one place I know/Sam said tell me quick man I got to run/Howard just pointed with his gun/And said that way down on Highway 61."
And "Sail Away Ladies" — "Ain't no use sit 'n cry / You'll be an angel by and by / Sail away, ladies, sail away" — would get you to "Boots of Spanish Leather" — "I'm sailing away my own true love...." And "Roll the Cotton Down" — "Ten dollars a day is a white man's pay / A dollar a day is the black man's pay" — "If you sang that song as many times as me, you'd be writing 'I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more,' too."
So there's the formula. Sing a lot of folk songs, sing enough, until they take a new form and you've got your songs, your Bob Dylan songs. Or, I take it, sing enough Bob Dylan songs, over and over, and out of those will emerge your songs.
Only songs work that way, where you internalize someone else's words so deeply that you develop an instinct for words that yields up new words that count as your words. You can't do that with writing, can you? Maybe with poetry, memorizing it and reciting it over and over. But if you want to write prose, what can you do? You could try the Hunter S. Thompson method:
He used to type out pages from “The Great Gatsby,” just to get the feeling, he said, of what it was like to write that way, and Fitzgerald’s novel was continually on his mind while he was working on “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”....
"You’ve been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books," Bob Dylan sang much more than once, but I don't see how you could ever catch onto an instinct to write like F. Scott Fitzgerald by reading all his books (like The Thin Man) or typing out particular pages (like Hunter S. Thompson) or fixating on individual sentences (as we did here on the blog in the old Gatsby project). I think the language you use to write prose is the language of speech, and you picked that up in a way that was even more fundamental and tradition-based than all those folk songs Bob Dylan had to sing to get to his own songs.
That's the headline at #1 on the Wall Street Journal's "Popular Now" list, and I guess those words are working better to win clicks than the actual title on the essay from last Saturday "Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results," which is framed around the story of a hardcore teacher from the 1960s, "a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky."
Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated...
The teaser on the sidebar "Popular" list got me to click, but my hopes are dashed. It's nice to look at the past for sighs and nostalgia and exclamations of "You can't do that today," but you can't look to this past and see how to fix education.
The essay writer, Joanne Lipman, does try to extract some lessons — "A little pain is good for you," rote learning works, etc., — but she begins with predictable disclaimers:
Now I'm not calling for abuse; I'd be the first to complain if a teacher called my kids names. But the latest evidence backs up my modest proposal.
Lipman assures us that "Studies have now shown" that something she calls "conventional wisdom" — nurturing self-esteem and a joy in discovery of knowledge — is wrong.
Kupchynsky was a music teacher, and I don't know what went on in Ukraine that led to his ferocity and his relocation to a northern New Jersey high school, but he was off the norm even then. (I happen to be an authority on high school in northern New Jersey in the 1960s. I had 4 years of direct personal experience.)
Anyway, Lipman has a book to sell, about Kupchynsky, and maybe it will fire up the same crowd that got excited about "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" a couple years ago. Remember that? It was also about drilling youngsters into proficiency playing classical music.
But most of what kids need to learn isn't music performance, and those who get carried away thinking about strict music education ought to demonstrate their love of strictness by being stricter with themselves as they contemplate the effectiveness of different approaches to educating children. Consider whether there's something self-indulgent, sentimental, and even perverse in your dreams of fixing education by getting tough with children.
Did you instinctively resist my suggestion? Ah, you just took my tough test of whether you are serious about toughness.
"Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town."
You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.
People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.
"He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972."
(In 1972, Brodsky became the poet in residence at the University of Michigan. I was a student there at the time and remember a grand assembly with Brodsky received as a great hero.)
This amused me.Cowboy style. I ran across it because I was looking for the text to the famous Mark Antony speech, which I'd been forced to memorize in junior high school, many decades ago. (Here's Marlon Brando doing it, not amusingly.) And what got me testing my own memory was something I'd just read about Barack Obama, which someone had emailed me, a propos of the recent "born in Kenya" dustup. It's a GQ article from November 2009 called "Barack Obama's Work in Progress."
Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to know our president as a lot of different things: campaigner, lawyer, father, basketballer. But what if Obama’s first and truest calling—his desire to write—explains more about him than anything else? Robert Draper recounts the untold story of the first man since Teddy Roosevelt to serve as author in chief.
I haven't combed through that whole article looking for the Kenya connections, but I noticed this bit about Shakespeare:
Sometime in 2002, the young state senator pays a daytime visit to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The artistic director, Barbara Gaines, is happy to show the politician around. Watching the carpenters erect the set, he asks Gaines which play is about to be performed. “Julius Caesar,” she tells him.
At first, Obama doesn’t say anything. Then, in a very soft voice, he begins to recite some twenty lines from the play. As he does so, he places his hand on his heart, as if stricken by the words’ transcendent beauty.
The director is agog. She has never heard an elected official quote Shakespeare in such a way.
Now, wait a minute. Who, upon mention of "Julius Caesar," doesn't start going "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me you ears..."? If it was some other 20 lines from the play, I might be impressed. The fact that he went on for 20 lines is sort of cool as a demonstration of memory. It's more than I can do without missing some words, but then, I learned it during the LBJ administration. But who goes on for 20 lines, putting on a memory show? Maybe you would if you saw that you were getting the director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater agog.
Later, she tells a co-worker, “I just had the most amazing experience. I met the first politician to have the soul of a poet.” (The first, she means, since Abe Lincoln, who quoted lines from Macbeth less than a week before his assassination: I think our country sinks beneath the yoke…)
The soul of a poet. Doesn't anyone remember Eugene McCarthy?
Many women loved this Senator from Minnesota, who challenged LBJ in 1968, and the poetry was part of it. My maternal grandmother loved him because he was a poet. 1968 — there was a year. Bobby Kennedy pushes Senator McCarthy — the good Senator McCarthy — aside, LBJ declines to run, Martin Luther King is shot down, 2 months later Bobby follows him, and Nixon becomes inevitable.
By the way, speaking of MacBeth and LBJ, they made a play back then: MacBird!
"People used to ask me then, 'Do you really think Johnson killed Kennedy?'... I never took that seriously. I used to say to people, 'If he did, it's the least of his crimes.' It was not what the play was about. The plot was a given."
"Book Challenges Obama on Mother’s Deathbed Fight," says the NYT, which, of course, isn't generally inclined to cast unnecessary aspersions on this President. "Lied" is my paraphrasing. The NYT wrote "mischaracterized."
During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.
In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses.
But in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument....
The book came out in early May. The reason this article is hitting the front page today is that the NYT has been trying to extract a response from Obama.
On Wednesday, in response to repeated requests for comment that The Times first made in mid-June, shortly after the book’s release....
It took repeated requests for the NYT to get an answer to such an important question?!
... a White House spokesman chose not to dispute either Ms. Scott’s account or Mr. Obama’s memory, while arguing that Mr. Obama’s broader point remained salient.
Fake false but accurate?!
“We have not reviewed the letters or other material on which the author bases her account,” said Nicholas Papas, the spokesman. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago.”
This is the standard response of the memoirist: These are my memories. This is how I remember it. Even if I am mistaken, there is truth in the way this story has become part of me. (That notion is expressed beautifully in the interview at the end of the audiobook version of the thoroughly delightful "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir.")
But I don't accept that the President could have an innocently false memory about this story, which he milked dramatically, as Byron York describes here:
"I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn't thinking about how to get well, she wasn't thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence," Obama said in September 2007.
"She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn't have to reimburse her for her medical bills," Obama added in January 2008.
"The insurance companies were saying, 'Maybe there's a pre-existing condition and we don't have to pay your medical bills,' " Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.
Those terrible, heartless corporations have been a theme of the Obama presidency. He has been trying to structure American brains around that idea, so he can win acceptance of policies that most Americans don't want, and that story of his personal agony played an important role in pushing through an immense federal power.
I don't think I've read anything 100 times — except maybe the Sermon on the Mount and Marbury v. Madison. Have you? Do whole passages reside in your memory simply because you've read them so many times? ("It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department...") Or have you made a point of memorizing pages of text? ("Think not that I am come to destroy the law...")
I have been told by an eminent academic critic that I am a sad symptom of the failure of an intellectual class in time of crisis. The implication being, I suppose, that the professor and his colleagues are hilarious symptoms of success. The benefactors of humanity deserve due honor and commemoration. Let us build a Pantheon for professors. It should be located among the ruins of one of the gutted cities of Europe or Japan, and over the entrance to the ossuary I would inscribe, in letters six or seven feet high, the simple words: Sacred to the memory of the world's educators. SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS, CIRCUMSPICE.
I put the link there for the Latin, which is the punchline. Punchlines in Latin, knocking educators. That in itself is funny.
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