Ditch the bookmarks!

Dorothy L Sayers, from a short essay entitled A Note on Creative Reading (from the back of a book called Begin Here, which was published during the Second World War and deals with economics and Germany and politics and a good deal more). 

Which reminds me: please burn all your book-markers - even the pretty one Aunt Mabel sent you last Christmas (or at least put that one away and only bring it out when she comes to call.) You cannot possibly be so bird-witted as to be unable to discover which page you got to by looking at it.
If the author mentions some other book in terms which make it seem important, whether he approves or refutes it, don't take his word for it: get the other book and read it, and judge for yourself. If he refers to something, or uses a word, which you don't understand, get a dictionary or work of reference and look it up. (Don't write and ask the author to explain; he is not required to be an Encyclopaedia, and you will only give him a poor idea of your industry and intelligence.) Especially, examine the sources of what he writes; to read Mr Somebody's critical valuation of Milton's prose or his examination of the economic effects of the Peace-Treaty is quite valueless if you have never read any Milton and do not know what the Peace-Treaty actually said.

How times have changed, you might say. I don't at all agree with her view of bookmarks because I'm plainly bird-witted enough to need them to find my place. It must speak volumes about my lack of attention to what I'm reading (!)
As for asking the author to explain: these days authors are all too ready to explain, and enjoy discussions with their readers. Or so we're led to believe. It's one of the joys and perils of the Internet. You can drop an author an email or even a tweet without blinking. And mostly they will reply...quickly. 

Chesterton, Cheese and Poetry

This morning on Twitter, a friend quoted G K Chesterton: The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. The original sentence by Chesterton, which appears in an essay appropriately entitled, Cheese, doesn't have 'the' at its beginning, but is otherwise as writ.   Cheese can be found in a collection of Chesterton's essays entitled, Alarms and Discursions, which, it turns out, I have on my shelves - it's one of about twenty-five Chesterton titles I have, many of which I haven't read, for the reason that I collected them faster at one point than I could keep up with reading them.  Chesterton is a superb writer, but can't be skimmed.  Skim him and you miss his point - in fact you're likely to miss several points, as he's prolific in points.  

Anyway, Cheese is a delightful piece of nonsense, and if you want to read it without borrowing my copy it's reproduced in full on the blog NMissCommentor - the blog is written by an American lawyer named Tom Freeland, but isn't entirely about things legal, as the post on Chesterton and cheese shows.

When I read that Tweet this morning I thought unto myself (instantly going into poetic mode) that it would be fun to write a poem on Cheese.  Perhaps not, though Cheese as a word has the advantage of having quite a few rhymes available to it, if you want to rhyme.  Apart from the obvious, there's frieze, knees, wheeze, sleaze, Chinese, trustees, trapeze, Congolese, journalese, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.  

Before setting to on my poem I thought I'd see what other people had written on the subject, since I couldn't believe that Chesterton was entirely right on the lack of cheese poetry.  For starters, there was Chesterton's own effort - in this case a piece of nonsense parodying a better-known poem.  It comes from another collection of essays, A Miscellany of Men, and the essay is entitled The Poet and the Cheese.  (If you want to borrow this book from me, you'll have to wait until I find out why it's not in its place on the shelves.)

SONNET TO A STILTON CHEESE

Stilton, thou shouldst be living at this hour

And so thou art.  Nor losest grace thereby;

England has need of thee, and so have I -

She is a Fen.  Far as the eye can scour,

League after grassy league from Lincoln tower

To Stilton in the fields, she is a Fen.

Yet this high cheese, by choice of fenland men,

Like a tall green volcano rose in power.

Plain living and long drinking are no more,

And pure religion reading 'Household Words',

And sturdy manhood sitting still all day

Shrink, like this cheese that crumbles to its core;

While my digestion, like the House of Lords,

The heaviest burdens on herself doth lay.

You can read the complete essay on The Literature Network, if you're of a mind.  

There's actually a blog called The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. It's only marginally about Chesterton, and much more about cheese.  (Note that the 'The' has crept into their heading again.)  The link I've just given you is to the post on Chesterton and cheese, but there's also a post on poets writing on cheese in which Chesterton's parody is joined by a tiny W H Auden poem, and three other poets unknown to me.  (I think they're local, like the cheese Chesterton preferred.  He was a locavore, according to Freeland.)   

Marcia Vanderlip, in the Columbia Daily Tribune, wrote an article on the very subject I'm discussing, but when she got the poets to write about cheese, they wrote in prose.  

The minor poet, John Armstrong, who lived in the 18th century, wrote a poem on Cheshire cheese which contains a line that has been immortalised on the Net as being one of the worst lines in poetry:

....that which Cestria sends, tenacious paste of solid milk...  Armstrong seemed prone to writing heavy-duty poetry on difficult subjects - check out the brief Wikipedia entry on him.  And I don't know what Cestria means: although there are plenty of places in the UK named after it.  

There was a contemporary of Chesterton's, James McIntyre,a Canadian poet who was willing to write poetry on any subject his neighbours required, and he became known primarily as the Cheese Poet, because he had a kind of predilection for poems on cheese. He had one failing: he couldn't write very well.  He still managed to publish two books of poetry but his work passed out of favour until some of his poems were anthologised in a 1997 publication called Very Bad Poetry.  This included his masterpiece and possibly best-known poem, Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds.  A brief sample:

We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese,

Lying quietly at your ease,

Gently fanned by evening breeze;

Thy fair form no flies dare seize.

All gaily dressed, soon you'll go

To the provincial show,

To be admired by many a beau

In the city of Toronto.

But even the best of authors (though not necessarily men who were also the best of poets) have their low points.  For one last example, here's Arthur Conan Doyle using cheese allegorically, and also a little over-earnestly:

The cheese-mites asked how the cheese got there,

  And warmly debated the matter;

The Orthodox said that it came from the air,

  And the Heretics said from the platter.

They argued it long and they argued it strong,

  And I hear they are arguing now;

But of all the choice spirits who lived in the cheese,

  Not one of them thought of a cow.

Same meat, different gravy

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer has one of those eye-catching titles that publishers love (Driving with Plato, for instance) but which actually have little to do with the book's contents.   In fact it wasn't the title that caught my eye, but the subtitle: the art and science of remembering everything.  I've read a number of books on memorisation, and, since I'd been given a gift voucher for Marbecks by the cast of Grimhilda! I thought buying and reading another book on the subject (for free, as it were) wouldn't go amiss.

I'm glad I did, though initially I thought the book might just cover the same ground as many others.  At one point, Foer discusses an interview he had with Tony Buzan, the guru of memory work, and a person Foer doesn't seem to have too much time for.  He quotes something Buzan's chauffeur said about the writer's 120 or so books: Same meat, different gravy.  (I wonder if the chauffeur still has a job?)  Same meat, different gravy is pretty much how I've felt about Buzan's books too.  Not only does he uplift from writers of the past about memory work, but he repeats his own theories, and promotes his system of Mind Mapping to a great extent.  Foer notes, in relation to Mind Mapping: my own impression of Mind Mapping, having tried the technique to outline a few parts of this book, is that much of its usefulness comes from the mindfulness necessary to create the map. Unlike standard note- taking, you can't Mind Map on autopilot.  My sense is that it's a reasonably efficient way to brainstorm and organise information, but hardly the " ultimate mind- power tool" or "revolutionary system" that Buzan makes it out to be.  (page 206).  That's pretty much my own feeling about Mind Mapping, though Foer does give examples of its very positive use in at least one particular environment. 


Anyway, the book is only partly about Buzan (he's unavoidable if you're writing about memorisation), and apart from him Foer charts a great deal of territory that was unfamiliar to me.  He does write about doing memory work, and some of the techniques are familiar, but the rest of the book is full of intriguing real-life characters.  Foer began his interest in memorisation when he covered the US Memory Championship.  He became somewhat obsessed with the subject, and amazingly, a year later he was able to enter the Championship himself - and win!

Foer's mentor was an eccentric 25-year-old Englishman called Ed Cooke, a grandmaster in the International Memory Championships.  Foer was trained in the techniques of memorising as required for the US Championships, as well as being given a good deal of advice about the whole process of what it takes to train your memory to remember.   Foer was able to go to Cooke's home in the UK more than once - each occasion is a highlight in the book.

The book swings between narrative and discussion of the processes of memorisation - and the necessity of it, something that Foer and the others regard highly compared to those in charge of education in general.   Memorisation of material (especially stretches of important text) leads to greater understanding of your world and the culture you come from.  It's not surprising that the lack of training children to memorise has resulted in youngsters leaving school with a minimal understanding of who they are in the wider scheme of things.

There's an interesting section on savants, in particular Kim Peek (the original Rainman, who at the time the book was written had been memorising the telephone books in his local public library for ten years, and who had an extraordinary range of facts at this fingertips) and Britisher, Daniel Tammet, who I've written about previously on this blog.  Tammet comes in for a deal of criticism in the book: it seems that Foer thought he may not have been as 'autistic' as he claims.  Certainly Tammet is unusual not just in his ability to memorise and retain material, but in his social skills, which are superior to those most autistic people have.  He's worked hard to make them so, however, as he notes in both his books, and as Foer mentions here.

Tammet's abilities in the numerical area are queried: this is the particular area Foer is concerned about, and wonders whether Tammet hasn't just learned and practiced the techniques most memorists use.  He mentions in passing Tammet's ability to learn languages (Icelandic in a week) but doesn't elaborate on how Tammet is supposed to have used 'ordinary' techniques to learn these, which is a pity.  I think Tammet, in spite of Foer's criticisms, has extraordinary brain capabilities (caused by an epileptic fit as a child, it's thought) and is probably much more likely to have an 'opening' in his brain that allows him to achieve what he does.  It's usually the case that savants - or what might be called their opposites, people who have lost their ability to retain new memories (and these appear in the book too) - have had some major brain trauma as a child or adult.  This brain damage reconfigures the brain in some way, so that the normal balance is upset.  Sometimes this results in an extraordinary use of the brain; sometimes it debilitates it to a huge extent.

I must say I thoroughly enjoyed this book - admittedly it's a topic close to my heart.  I did feel a bit let-down, however, to find that in spite of there being a chapter entitled How to memorise a poem Foer didn't come up with anything terribly helpful in terms of learning how to memorise text.  This is something, in fact, that most writers on memory techniques avoid, preferring lists of things or remembering names instead.  But text, such as poetry, and Scripture, is what I find memorisation is most useful for, and the orators of the past learned huge chunks of text as a matter of course. This omission is curious, because at one point he mentions how his mentor, Ed, "had long ago learned the bulk of Paradise Lost by heart (at the rate of two hundred lines per hour, he told me), and had been slowly slogging his way through Shakespeare."  How Ed did this isn't really discussed, except in a brief page or two in this same chapter.  

All this talk of mental building (as opposed to metal building) has got me going on memorising stuff again.  I learned a poem yesterday (improving my approach to the memorising by incorporating some of what Foer writes about), and will get back to doing this regularly.  The more you memorise, of course, the better your retention gets, and even in the last two or three years I've found I've improved my retention rate for poems by the slightly different approaches I've been taking to learning them.  I'd love a more foolproof method, but in the meantime will have to go with what I've got.

Years ago, my wife and I worked through a series of cassette tapes on improving your memory by Kevin Trudeau.  He used pretty much the same techniques as Foer writes about here, and Buzan discusses in his 120 books.   We had a great time with these tapes, and certainly achieved what we were supposed to achieve, but lost our skills as soon as we stopped using them daily.  You have to keep at it.  Like any other skill, as soon as you start leaving it alone, the skill level drops.  Foer talks about the OK Plateau in relation to this.  This is when you think you're good enough at a skill and don't push yourself to improve further.  Most of us have skills of some sort at this level.

Good memorisation requires daily practice, and not only daily, but practice that pushes you further and further (it's like playing the piano and challenging yourself to keep on doing stuff that seems beyond you).  For years I've learnt poetry and Scripture while walking to work - or, now that I've retired, while walking the dog.  I've put this aside over the last few weeks because it felt as though my brain was tired with all the work we were doing on Grimhilda!  The result is I have to get up and go again.  Is it worth it?  I think so.  Foer gives plenty of reasons throughout the book as to why it's worth it (and competing in memory championships is the least of them).  One of the best, I've found, is that actually memorising a poem or chunks of Scripture means you get to grips with what they're saying, far more than you ever would if you just read these off the page.  If for no other reason, that's why I'll keep practicing.

Rhyme or not to rhyme

The following paragraph (pg 163) comes from Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, a marvellous book looking at the technical aspects of poetry, which Fry infiltrates and invigorates with his daft and witty sense of humour.   At this point he's just spent quite some time discussing rhyme, and by dint of using the terrible disastrous William McGonagall poem on the disaster on the Tay Bridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins' Wreck of the Deutschland (Hopkins is obviously a poet he admires a good deal), Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain' (on the sinking of the Titanic) and Tennyson's superb (if all too familiar) 'Charge of the Light Brigade' has shown how difficult it is to use good rhyme in a poem intended to commemorate a disaster.  

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail.   I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming.  Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry [Fry enjoys it when it's done well]  it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words.  It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting 'ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace...' when surely a proper poet should be thinking high pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus.  Well, yes.  But a rhyme is a rhyme and won't come unless searched for.  Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme.  To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas.  It is one of the things we do.

This paragraph resonates with me, of course, because much of my time in the last year has been spent finding that elusive note or chord for the musical I've been writing - Grimhilda! - and trying to find rhymes that make sense, fit and don't take the verse off in a direction that has nothing to do with the plot.