After reading the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (or, at least, the Edward Fitzgerald translations), I've decided to try to get back to memorising poems again. I tried to explain to someone why you'd want to do this, but it's difficult to articulate.
I guess, if I thought about it, words have a taste—and taste is a terrible description, but it's a sensation that it leaves in your mouth, and hoo boy does that ever sound weird written out—and a poem is such a wonderful thing to just hold there in your head and mull over and just savour. They're like songs, made of rhythm and prose, but in their own way. Why would you ever want to learn to sing or play a song?
Anyhow, I've been starting again with the Rubaiyat; this is, on the whole, a terrible idea considering the poem is comprised of over one hundred quatrains and after a week I have but one to show for it. My technique originally consisted of writing out the quatrain on a notecard. I did this exactly once. It's kind of difficult to just randomly do wherever unless you're one of those people with a hipster PDA (note to self: reconsider going back to this) and a pen and you have a decent writing surface (this isn't particularly throne friendly). I got tired of typing this up in a text document, then going back to check whether I'd successfully remembered it; it's also a pain if you're trying to learn because ideally you'd write the lines underneath or above the line you're trying to remember so you can read it while writing it. This is useful the first couple of times, at least for me, as the physical act of writing or typing something out—provided I've not checked my brain out and done a straight mindless copy—really helps to cement the words in my head, at least anchoring them enough that I can start from a blank sheet of paper (or notecard, as it were). This seems to form a more permanent impression than what I did to learn Do not go gentle into that good night, in which I just memorised each line enough to write it down, then read and recited it a lot.
It was sometime just before midnight and I couldn't sleep, so I got to trying to memorise this, which is admittedly a terrible idea if you're trying to fall asleep, but I wrote this program up in about a half hour. It only works in a text console, which is fine by me because I have SSH on my phone, even if I don't always have reception. If I was more motivated, I'd do some more with it but this is Good Enough™.
That's enough rambling for now, I guess. I really just wanted to write something (I liked it when I used to do the 750 words exercises), and this is what I happened to be thinking about.