Working with Psalm 119

Back in March 2013 I mentioned that I was (yet again) beginning to learn Psalm 119, that largest of all the Psalms. In it the same theme is worked over time and again - making it extremely difficult to get your head around which line belongs where.

During 2014 this was almost the only thing I tried to memorise, and I got it under my belt completely. But of course, as soon as I left it alone, it would disintegrate, and all my hard work seemed to be for nothing. 176 verses of two lines apiece down the drain, it seemed.

I'd tried on my first effort at learning this Psalm to link up the verse number with an image, and the image was supposed to help me remember what the verse was. It kind of worked, but I didn't put the effort in to retain what I'd learned, although for a few weeks there it was a bit of a party trick being able to recall any random verse just from the number.

When it came to my attempt in 2014, I didn't start with much of a plan, which was a bit foolish. However, I soon noticed that there was a key word in the beginning of each of the first three stanza (each stanza has eight verses) that linked up to the 2nd, 3rd and 4th letters of the alphabet: B, C, D. (Just in case you've forgotten what they are!)

That gave me an idea. If I could at least remember how each stanza started, I'd have some way of keeping track of where I was in the Psalm. But the fourth stanza didn't have any relevant word in the first line that began with E. It did have the word cleaves (my soul cleaves to the dust). This registered in my head with one of Henry the Eighth's wives, Anne of Cleaves, and so Anne found herself as a signpost in the series.

But to add random names to the stanzas would be to add another complication which I could do without. So while Anne stayed for E, I chose a name beginning with F for the next one, the name of someone I knew. I did this with every subsequent stanza. Friends and relatives became signposts throughout.

Learning the eight two-line verses within each stanza was another issue again, which I'll write about another time. But using people's names as signposts, alphabetically, gave me an additional benefit. It showed me how I might keep track in my head of all the other poems and sections of Scripture I'd learned over the years. Because I'd learned them randomly, there was no order to them.

So I made a list of the memorized pieces, and linked a person's name to each one, in alphabetical order. Yes, I had to learn who belonged to what, and it took regular revision, but the list is now intact (most days). I'm now reaching the end of the fourth run through the alphabet, and have to remember people's names for 98 pieces. (It was a bit of a trick finding names beginning with X and Z and so on.)  Some still catch me out at times, but overall this method is working.

By the way, on my last revision of Psalm 119, it was intact...

Writers on writing

I used to write a weekly column. Very early on I learned that people give you much more credit for your supposed knowledge than you deserve. I wrote about rhododendrons once, and had people ringing up for advice on how to look after them. I had no more idea than they did. So I was intrigued to come across the following quote from Kingsley Amis, in which he (rather tongue-in-cheek) discusses his writing techniques. This item first appeared in The Listener UK, though I found it in a Readers Digest April 1990. 

There are one or two little tricks of the trade you learn by writing a lot of novels: how to handle transitions more smoothly, get your characters without fuss from one scene to the next. And you get better at what might be called the tip-of-the-iceberg con. You imply that you know everything about a subject – for example, eisteddfods – just by quoting two or three little bits. The implication being, ‘I could tell you all about it if I had room, but I’m just letting these little bits out. That’s the tip, but there’s a huge iceberg.’ Of course, there really isn’t iceberg. 

This second quote was also in that Reader's Digest. It originally appeared in the Esquire magazine, and it has Columnist Bob Greene discussing his profession:

Bob Greene

I do not lift heavy objects; I do not manufacture things. What I do is to go out and see things and meet people, and then I put it all on paper for strangers. That may not sound like work – sometimes I can’t believe I get a pay cheque for it. I have been writing a column for over 18 years, and I have become virtually incapable of experiencing things and keeping them inside myself. 

I talk to people and notice things, and then I turn those things into a column for the most wonderful gift a storyteller can be given: an audience on the other end. The way I see it, everyone of us in the writing business starts off with precisely the same tools: the 26 letters of the alphabet. All we can do is try to arrange those 26 letters in a different way than anyone else has before. 

Code-Cracker

One of the ways I get my brain up and running in the morning, now that I'm retired, is to do the Code-Cracker.   My mother, when she was alive, and was living upstairs in our house, used to have the Code-Cracker done before I got out of my heated blanket in the morning (and I've always been an early riser).   Suffice to say, her brain was pretty sharp too.

I got started on the Code-Cracker in my last job - one of the female staff always used to do it in the morning tea break, and so we'd make a copy of it and both of us would get on and do it.  I never managed to finish it before she did!  I doubt that I would have beaten my mother either, if she and I had had a race.  (She could do cryptic crosswords without having the puzzle in front of her, just by having someone tell her how many spaces there were and what ones were filled in.)

The Code-Cracker that appears in the Otago Daily Times is produced by Simon Shuker, who lives in Wellington, NZ.  It's reproduced throughout the country in various papers, and is one of the most popular daily puzzles available.   And it's popular not just in this country, but in a wide variety of places around the world - it appears under the name Codeword in the Daily Mail in London, for instance, where it's been appearing for two decades.

Unlike some versions of Code-Cracker, Shuker's one always uses all the letters of the alphabet.  Furthermore, it's laid out in such a way that you can quickly see whether you've already used a particular letter or not, and what number it relates to.  And the numbering starts from the first box on the page and works consistently through the puzzle: before number 26 appears all 25 other numbers will have turned up in sequence.

Some versions of the puzzle don't use all the letters of the alphabet, which is frustrating, and some of them jumble the numbers all over the place, so it's not easy to know where you're starting from.  Personally, I think Shuker's 'hand-crafted' puzzle is the best version available - and if doing one a day isn't enough for you, you can always buy a book of his pre-published puzzles and do them again...

You can find a couple of interactive samples on the Code-Cracker site.  However, I notice that if you click on one of the letters at the bottom all the places that letter appears will show up.  That reduces the puzzle element considerably.  Think I'll stick to the paper version!

Alphabetic trivia

Writer Alan Jacobs obviously didn't have much to do this morning (my time). Here are the results of four of his tweets, in which he provides sentences of various lengths that each contain all the letters of the alphabet. Makes a change from 'the quick brown fox, etc'.

Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz.

Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.

Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

Driving under the Influence - of what, exactly?

I can't upload this particular video to Blogger, it seems, so I'll have to just give you the link and let you go chasing after it yourself.

What seems to be a woman police officer stopping a tall and gangly bloke for drink driving takes more than a couple of strange turns in its few minutes.

You can fool all of the people some of the time....

Standardization - not!

It’s strange the things we take for granted: I’d assumed that the QWERTY keyboard layout was the standard (obviously apart from those countries that don’t use the same alphabet), but nope! Even in England there are some differences in layout, though at least here the differences relate to the #, the £, and the @ which are all in strange places.

But when I was in Luxembourg, I discovered that the alphabetical letters are swapped around as well: not enough to make things totally unfamiliar, but certainly more than enough to cause confusion when you’re typing passwords and such: the sorts of things that you take for granted, and don’t bother to check when you’re typing. Seemingly the people in Luxembourg tend to use the French keyboard – and of course those jolly French people couldn’t possibly have the same keyboard as the English. It would just not be the done thing!

You can check out some of the variations in keyboard layouts here.