Grammar and its complications

[GulPlum <plumeski@yahoo.com>]

Kathryn Cawte wrote:

<snip>

> I used to hate reading plays at school. We rarely got to see them
> actually performed and it's just not the same reading them. It's no 
> wonder so many people view Shakespeare as boring having been made 
> to read some of his plays at school. Plays should be performed; 
> books should be read.

I always hated reading plays (and poetry) as well. However, at school 
I was fairly lucky as our teachers more or less established their own 
specific curriculum, and when it came to plays, they'd set an agenda 
based on theatre performances or cinema releases throughout the 
year. :-)

Please bear in mind that the school I went to had a heavy 
humanties/languages bent, and everyone who finished it was (in 
theory, if not necessarily in practice) at least trilingual, if not 
quadri-lingual (plus a couple of dead languages for good measure). 
That meant there was a LOT of literature to be studied in one 
language or another, and the number of badly performed classics from 
three cultures I saw as a teenager made me appreciate a decent 
production all the more. :-) 

> And how many other people around here were forced to learn certain 
> parts of Shakespeare etc at school and can *still* quote the darn 
> things? It really makes you wish that other text book were written 
> like that. I mean I'm doing an MA in Medieval Studies but can I 
> remember useful dates? no. Can I still quote passages from the 
> Merchant of venice and Macbeth that I learnt at school - hell yes.

I have a memory like a sieve. I mean that in the sense that it's very 
selective about what it chooses to imprint. Things like huge swathes 
of text or lists of dates are maintained for as long as I need them 
to perform or sit an exam. After that, I maintain nothing more than a 
vague image of what once was. After all, what are books (and 
paticularly reference books) for, if not to keep a record of 
information of which I do NOT require instant recall? 

I have a vague idea of who says what in Shakespeare's plays but I 
don't need to remember quotes: my Dictioonary of Quotations and 
Complete Shakespeare do that for me. Neither do I need to remember 
the exact dates of battles, or say, in terms of hobbies, the dates 
that films were released (my brother has an encycolpeadic memory for 
that kind of thing, and can tell you the winner of every major Oscar 
in any order you wish since the awards were invented). My dad can 
recite poems he was taught at school 70 years ago, but I can barely 
manage the first couple of sentences of a short text I needed to 
memorise for a meeting last week!

I have reference books (and the Internet) for that kind of thing, and 
prefer to spend my time *thinking* about things rather than 
regurgitating them.

Going back to a subject raised a couple of days ago, I have a very 
visual memory (I've never been tested, but trust my experience). For 
instance, in terms of HP quotes, I can rarely remember exact quotes 
(of narrative or of speech) but I am able very quickly to find any 
text I need very quickly in the books (which I've only read twice, 
which isn't much by HP fandom standards!) :-) and actually can 
remember whereabouts on the page most of the often-quoted passages 
are, even if I can't remember the text itself. When quoting canon on 
the main list, I'm aways deleting "top of the page", "middle of the 
chapter" or things like that from my references. :-)

Similarly, if asked to quote some of the movies I've seen many, many 
times (those on the HPFGU-Movie list will know that I've seen CoS 
over 30 times; that is *far* from being my record for a single 
movie!) :-) I'm usually very hard pressed to recall a quote exactly. 
But I can usually remember camera moves or frame arrangements in 
terrific detail. 

Strangely enough, though, when reading a book (any book) I don't 
actually have a very sharp mental image of what the characters look 
like, regardless of how well they're described. As a result, seeing 
PS/SS before reading the HP books had absolutely no effect on the way 
I imagine the characters, or indeed the whole Potterverse. ;-)