It began with my attempt to remember all five of Kubler-Ross’s “stages” to death. Anger, Denial, Bargaining and Acceptance. I could guess at the fifth (sadness? grief? self-pity), could even remember Cliff Gorman acting them out in “All that Jazz” and saying it sounded like a Jewish law firm. But I could not, with any certainty, pull up that fifth stage.
I recalled that it was once said the brain will always forget one thing in a list. But, in recently committing the original “Seven Sisters” schools to memory — because I could, that’s why — I found a formula that helped me instantly recall the Seven Dwarves without omitting a single one: subcategories. You see, of the Seven Sister schools, two are no longer single-sex institutions. Of the Seven Dwarves, two have names that don’t end in “y.” When I broke it down that way, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Bashful, Doc came tumbling out, almost without pause.
Emboldened, I tried to name all eight Maryland congressional representatives. I came up one short — and it was one from Baltimore to boot, although not my own. I started to move on to the U.S. Supreme Court, then decided to stop pressing my luck.
The cause of this madness? Galleys. Because whenever I confront page proofs, I feel as if I’m in the latter portion of the Kubler-Ross continuum, working my way to acceptance. This is the book. It cannot be improved upon dramatically. Here are my writing tics, my worst habits, on full view. I have to let it go.
Whenever I hunker down with my own writing, I regret that I read so much trash when I was young. But I don’t regret memorizing anything, even the lyrics to “The Flintstones.” I think that rote memorization got a bum rap in my youth, and would be glad to have a few more historic dates rattling around in my head. I wish I had been made to learn more poetry by heart, or taught the mathematical tricks used in the Gilbreth household. (Did anyone else notice the death of Ernestine Carey, co-author of Cheaper by the Dozen, a few weeks back?) I wish I knew more mnemonic devices such as HOMES for the five great lakes. I can name the planets of our solar system, but I stumble on the various sentences designed around them. I can’t even remember the little bit of historical doggerel that helps you recite a certain section of Baltimore streets in order. Did Eager Chase Biddle? Something like that.
Not to get too meta, but memories about memorization please. Mnemonic devices welcome, along with supportive advice about surviving galleys.
I remember the ones Mr. Rainer pounded into us in ninth grade, to remember how predicate nominative and predicate adjective stuff worked:
Lucy met the train
The train met Lucy
The tracks were juicy
The juice was Lucy
and
Algy met a bear
The bear met Algy
The bear was bulgy
The bulge was Algy
I don’t remember why this is supposed to help me remember to say “It is I” rather than “It is me,” though.
Let’s see:
In the first week of Latin class in ninth grade, we memorized ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ in Latin (and I still remember it).
FACE – the spaces in the treble clef, from the bottom.
A Rat In Tom’s House May Eat Tom’s Ice Cream – for spelling the word arithmetic.
ROY G BIV – for the colors in a rainbow.
I’ve a terrible memory for this sort of thing, except for Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE. But google has some interesting plantetary ones, my current favorite being: My Very Erotic Mate Joyfully Satisfies Unusual Needs Passionately. (… though I’m quite certain the Sisters of (No)Mercy never taught us this particular one. This I would have remembered!)
With the dismissal of Pluto, I suppose the Passion’s now gone. Sigh. C’est la vie.
I know the preamble of the constitution from Schoolhouse Rock.
I’ve always envied people who can quote Shakespeare at length.
And for those of you reciting planets – don’t forget that Pluto doesn’t count now.
Do you remember School House Rock! When I was in high school we had to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution and recite it and were graded down if we sang it. It was hard not to break into song with “We the people… ” I swear it is the only reason I know my times tables, and certain parts of speech .. “conjuction junction whats your function … “
I was just reading B.G.’s comment and the words to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star in Latin came back to me. I hadn’t realized that I remembered it.
The group that voted out Pluto may do a new vote.
I am too old for School House rock. However, for those of you who knew Hair- Shakespeare- What a piece of Work is Man, How noble in reason etc. Somewhere, later on, there is a problem in how a word is pronounced in order to make it fit the song. Our teacher caught that.
Mary, re TTLS in Latin, I learned it in the Fall of 1961. Wonder if we had the same text book? If so, yours must have been an old book when you got to use it.
Peg, you made me laugh.
As for Powell’s in the Portland airport — that is the work of the divine Miss Billie J. Bloebaum, a snazzy dresser who has championed many a book, to great result. She has hand-sold the heck out of Every Secret Thing and many other books in the crime field.
Lizzie, send your notes here and I’ll transcribe them, and I’ll send the galleys to you for a spit-and-a-polish. Deal?
Okay, get honest — how many of us can name the parts of an atom because of Venus Flytrap’s “gang war” between the Pro-tons and the New-trons (the negative dues and the positive dudes”?
And Cincinnati downtown streets are “Big Strong Men Will Very Rarely Eat Pork Chops”
Principle and “a prince of a pal”
Capital and “the one with the dome” (dooooome)
Desert and “strawberry shortcake”
Affect happens to _A_ thing
If only I knew one for occassion, for which I never get c and s amounts right.
It’s an occasion to see.
You are right. We were (mostly) robbed by the anti-rote-memory movement. I think it’s Read About the Eager Chase here in in Charm City. At Central Catholic, Brother Emilian didn’t think memorization was evil. In English 12 he assigned us to memorize a poem “about the length of Gunga Din” which meant all too many guys did that poem and we were “Gunga Dinn”ed to death, though Timmy Crimmins did it so hilariously I’m still laughing. I bucked the trend and did the first section of T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (“Four Quartets):
“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.”
And so forth for maybe 30 more lines.
What a lucky choice. I understood little of it, but now for 40+ years I’ve had those “oh, this is what he meant!” moments. And certain lines are always nearby: “for the leaves were full of children, hidden excitedly, containing laughter.” My sister Jeannie (10 years younger) helped me memorize the poem back then in 1961 and some lines “quick said the bird, find them, find them” have been part of our secret language ever since.
My sophomores memorize the first 18 lines of the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, and the soliloquy “To be or not to be” from Hamlet. Every now and then I am thanked. A kid walks up and says “Hey Mr. Logan, remember me–Marty Sokolovsky–listen”, and he nails it word perfect after 17 years. Makes a teacher want to cry for joy.
We (pre-Vatican II)altar boys can go on in Latin at great length: “Misereatur tui omnipotens dei, dimmissis pecatta tuis.” I think it means God is miserable if someone lets his two pigs out..
Thanks, Keith!!
hey Ab… I can still do a lot of the Prologue to the Canturbury Tales in Old English, which for some reason I memorized in high school.
I used to know a silly sentence for remembering taxonomic rankings, but true to form, I’ve forgotten it. And now some troublemakers are placing Domains above Kingdoms, so the whole thing is screwed up anyway. Why does nothing remain the same? Even a planet can’t feel safe in its status anymore. I begin to feel very insecure when I dwell on Pluto’s fate. What was the original question again?
I remember in 4th grade, Jacksonville, FL, having to learn the Gettyburg Address for class. Every Monday morning we had to recite a bible verse. Those of us who went to Sunday School regularly rarely had a problem, but everybody’s fallback was “Jesus wept.”
Earlier this week Bebe Moore Campbell, an African American writer, died. This is a link to an article she wrote about memorization. There is something real cute in there about how at the age of three she memorized something useful.
http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/515985.html
Is it because I’m Canadian, or ?? but I know what I thought were THE universal mnemonics for the planets: Many Very Eager Men Jumped Swiftly Under Nine Planets and for reading music: All Cows Eat Grass and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge.
In undergrad we had to memorize part of the periodic table of the elements. Parts are easy, but those transition metals! Our mnemonic was: SCTV carries many funny comedies nightly,copper, zinc. I guess no one in our group was creative enough to include the last two. Yet almost fifteen years later I can still put those elements in order,
Susan
I memorize poems using song cycles….for instance, I can do Ned Rorem’s 8 poems by Emily Dickinson far better than if I just memorize the Emily Dickinson. Then I sing, of course, which is embarrassing.
I am currently learning the state capitals with an online puzzle for 3rd graders. Don’t laugh.
By the way, I have no sympathy for you and your galleys–I am currently transcribing 8 hour-long interviews, all comprised of ONLY good quotes. Better than no good quotes, to be sure, but not much.
But now that Pluto is gone- do we need a new way to remember the planets? Personally, I wanted them to add Xena instead of removing Pluto- but I didn’t get a vote.
I am amusical but I know Every Good Boy Does Fine. We had to memorize poems in 7th and 8th grade and speeches from Shakespeare in high school- I still remember Thanatopsis, Captain, My Captain and a few speeches- Puck, Hamlet(need I say which?), the witches, Oberon and Hippolyta’s sparring. When I started Hebrew school, we had to memorize prayers in Hebrew- the actual reading of Hebrew taking longer.
At the Powell’s Books at PDX, the first book I saw was Every Secret Thing and the bookseller says it does well there. It has a good placement -in a revolving bookstand when you come in- and the book is at eye level with a note card describing it(I always look at books that have the honor of having a handwritten notecard).
I can’t remember any memorization techniques.
John still Stays Up Nightly, but we’re no longer sure exactly what he’s doing.
I remember Never Eat Sour Watermelon for Norht, East, South, West. I have long ago forgotten the one for the planets, not that it would make anymore sense.
I can still remember the first few lines to things like the preamble to the Constitution, Brutus’ ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ speech and one from Hamlet, but as I begin to say them I start running them all together!
Alas poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times…..
I always figured that if you could remember either the first few lines of something or the first verse to a poem, it impresses the hell out of most people and they tell you to shut up! I had a professor at Western Michigan who told us that knowing all of the vice presidents would help us win bar bets!
I can’t memorize things, I have to absorb things. Which is why I did so much better in the humanities than math and science. Most of what I know today I have no concrete idea how or where I learned it. I can’t tell you how many times somebody will ask me a question that I immediately answer and then a few seconds later think to myself “now where the hell did that come from?” The only device I can truly recall has already been mentioned here and that’s the musical notes one.
Oh yeah, as for galley nervousness, I find going back and reading the first draft of my first novel and seeing how far I’ve come since then makes me feel a little better about my own foibles and failures as a writer. If all else fails, go read a book you know is really, really bad.
I’m just popping in here to point out two things I got right about 1975, according to the very helpful Maryland Room at the Enoch Pratt:
bus fare, non-peak, was 35 cents.
the organ store at Security Square was Jordan Kitt’s.
A few months hence, when I’m being berated via e-mail for getting something wrong, I just want to be able to point back to this blog and note: I tried, I really, really tried.
If you knew how much time I spent today trying to make sure where the apostrophe goes, if at all, in the Battle of Jenkin’s Ear.
“have to mimic the usage on the plaque itself, which the character is studying. And I’m still not sure about that!”
I don’t know where this is, but see if Google Earth will zoom in close enough for you to see it, if nobody can check for you. Or is it something that’s no longer there?
Beth said: <i> “Okay, get honest — how many of us can name the parts of an atom because of Venus Flytrap’s gang war between the Pro-tons and the New-trons (the negative dues and the positive dudes? </i>
I remember that, but it was the Pros and the Elected Ones. The nucleus was neutral territory, I think.
<center>***</center>
For the colors of the rainbow, how’s this one? Richard of York gave battle in vain.
<center>***</center>
If you can’t remember if it’s a double L or a double N, remember that Nell doesn’t work in personnel.
Of course, now it’s Human Resources.
The Kubler-Ross stage you’re missing is Depression.
Here in the Midwest, children memorize the Great Lakes with the mnemonic HOMES. The other day, I unpacked my daughter’s spelling homework to find she’d noted one after the toughie “significant” — “Sign if I can’t.”
But here’s my boast: In college, we could pick up extra credit in psych classes by volunteering for grad students’ thesis experiments. I skewed one by scoring perfectly on several memorization tasks. I remember (ha!) one in which you memorized a long list by noting something about each word that related to the word above it. And I’ve forgotten almost the entire list, of course — it was 30 years ago, after all — but still recall the first pair: gun, angle. My mnemonic: A gun doesn’t quite describe a 90-degree angle. Pathetic, I know, but hey! It stuck!
I think Jenkins’s Ear. As it’s the severed ear of poor Robert Jenkins, the apostrophe shouldn’t go before the “s” severing his name as well. My instincts would be to then opt for Jenkins’ Ear but I never trust my intincts in areas of grammar and usage. More authoritatviely, Mssrs Strunk and White apparently suggest Jenkins’s, decreeing that that ‘s is added to form singular possessive no matter what the final consonant is (pg. 1, Elements of Style, examples of Charles’s friends and Burns’s poems given).
My memory is as bad as my grammar. In 1975 I was riding the Baltimore MTA bus daily to high school and I would have sworn that the fare was $.30. I would never have emailed you but I would have thought “She’s wrong about the bus fare.” I’m glad to know you checked (though not happy about further confirmation of my lousy memory).
The trick is . . . I have to mimic the usage on the plaque itself, which the character is studying. And I’m still not sure about that!
“The trick is . . . I have to mimic the usage on the plaque itself, which the character is studying. And I’m still not sure about that!”
Oh, sorry (about the spelling lesson) and good luck.
I suppose it would be just too good for this to be the plaque you’re looking for:
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<a href=”http://www.cviog.uga.edu/Projects/gainfo/statues/bloodymarsh.htm” target=”_new”><img src=”http://www.cviog.uga.edu/Projects/gainfo/statues/bloodymarsh3.jpg”></a></center>
Not about me, but I’m still amazed that my brother committed Danny Kaye’s signature piece “The Lobby Number” to memory when he was 11.
I still remember the planet’s order from Screech on Saved by the Bell – he said “MVEMJSUNP” like, as its own word. sound it out. You will never forget them. Although now it’s: “MVEMJSUN”. (RIP Pluto)
by the time I was 5 I was memorizing entire chapters of the Bible. in my Bible school is was drilled into me, and for some reason I did well with large chunks of things to memorize. But if you told me not to forget to bring my calculate to school the next day, there’s no way I’d remember. I wonder what that’s called?
Things I’ve memorized and remember for which there is no real use:
(1) pi to twenty-two places which seven-years-older brother Skip taught me when I was in fourth grade — age eight — not because there was any purpose to it but because he was fifteen and thought it’d be fun to see how far my memory could stretch. I’ve never added on to that limit because what need is there for that sort of stuff except to win bar bets?
(2) “If” by Rudyard Kipling, extra credit in fifth grade.
(3) kingdom-phylum-order-class-family-genus-species // Bio 1 test prep c. 1969.
(4) chlordane, lindane, pentachlorophenol — three top legal organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) used as termiticides // Ent101 test prep c. 1971. Dr. J. Gordon Edwards was the sort of professor who ate DDT in class just to show you that it wasn’t all <em>that</em> poisonous. And he didn’t think much of Rachel Carson either.
(5) The three vowels immediately after the “h” in “Weyerhaeuser” are in alpha order. // software control project to set saws for the sawmill in Raymond WA using lasers to scan the logs and some sophisticated algorithms. c1981
(6) The worst memory waste, though, is “Brent and Joanne, Vic and Pam, Jerry, Michelle and Sharon” — the names of the folks in the house down by State with whom I was allegedly going to stay late after class — instead of heading home to the family manse — and hang out with until after dinner when, actually, I was going somewhere I shouldn’t've been. Knowing their names was supposed to add verisimilitude to the story. c1971
I can remember their names but not where I shouldn’t've been going.
The chemical symbol for Gold. It’s Au.
A science teacher sophmore year taught us, “Just think of someone saying “‘ey, you! Bring back my gold!”
I remember it to this day.