I pulled out the juggling balls I ganked on my way out of town and began practicing with them again.

I achieving enlightenment with ganked juggling balls bad karma?

http://www.google.com/search?q=muscle+...:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Yeah. Stuff like that really sticks. As a teenager I can remember trying to memorise pop songs word for word, inflection for inflection. They’d become common subcultural reference points. Rap was completely new to the UK at the time and stuff like LL cool J, Run DMC, the Beastie Boys was fascinating. (Shit I’m showing my age.) And then the House scene happened and we had all sorts of samples to learn. I KNOW you’re gonna dig this… don’t touch that dial.

At Uni it was cool for a while to get drunk and then be able to entertain the crowd with a recital of something - preferably absurdly intellectual (yeah, I know, I hung around with English majors). ‘I met a traveller from an antique land who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert…’ I learnt Tom Lehrer’s version of the chemical elements to the tune of A Modern Major General (but my mate could do almost anything by Flanders and Swann, barstard ). Also all the words to American Pie. With hindsight it was cool because it was a kind of lost skill - no music, just fireside stories and songs - and it also turned out that /everyone could do it/, be they sad geeks like me or otherwise. Seems it’s some innate human thing, to be able to internalise whole a cultural reference point of personal significance.

Rote learning has its place in school. Kids these days don’t know their times tables. And honestly, it IS useful to know that x is minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c all over 2 a.

The rhythmic method for memorization I’m familiar with and have used. I’ve memorized things by putting them to music, with great success.

This is precisely what you’re doing when you learn, memorize and perform a cover song as well. It’s enormously useful and you’re obviously good at it. Emerson is a great idea.

It does remind me that just because something has been overused as a blanket approach even when it isn’t the most valuable approach, doesn’t mean it’s never the most valuable approach. It hasn’t occurred to me, for example, that memorizing really good pieces of writing might give me a much better understanding of what good writing is, and cause my own writing to improve, than just reading a bunch of different pieces of writing might.

The rhythmic method for memorization I’m familiar with and have used. I’ve memorized things by putting them to music, with great success. This has been of course used in advertising forever. I remember more jingles word for word than I would ever care to count. I can recite the Fresh Prince of Bell Air theme song by heart at will - and not only the words but every little tonal inflection - with disturbing precision. But your mnemonic-juggling technique, that’s original. : )

It’s true though, how many of us actually make use of this for our own purposes? How many of us actually make use of most good ideas for our own purposes, for any length of time or with any consistency? Others, not so concerned with our best interests, are using these things on us all the time. We have these amazing mental abilities, all of which can be put to better use. That’s a lot of what self-mastery is, I believe.

I’ll be thinking about what else might be worth memorizing. I just had a look at the G.A. and I can see why you chose it. It’s pretty powerful. Being from Canada I wasn’t familiar with it, though parts I recognized from movies and what not.

I’m thinking certain Emerson essays would be great to memorize. I already have bits and pieces committed to memory because they were just that awesome.