By Robert Oliphant

Zakarias Moussaoui is now apparently put away for good in a "super max" federal prison in Florence , Colorado , to "rot" (Judge Leonie Brinkman). With 23 solitary-confinement hours each day, Moussaooui is clearly headed for "mental decapitation," as prison expert James E. Aiken put it, and bound to end up " like the cell mate of the Count of Monte Cristo, who died an old, tired convict," as quoted by Richard A. Serrano in the Los Angeles Times of May 5, 2006 . Practically considered, though, exactly how "cruel and unusual" is the "mushroom"-like future which Moussaoui faces, along with fellow inmates like Theodore Kazcynski , Terry Nichols, and Eric Rudolf? With three square meals a day and free medical care, it may not be all that bad.

The "old, tired convict" . . . . Let's start with Aiken's misleading description of Edmund Dantes ' "cell mate." Many Americans will recall from the Dumas novel, including its three film versions (1912, 1934, and 1975), that the Abbe Faria is actually a solitary confinement prisoner with a capacious memory who has kept his wits magnificently about him by staying mentally active in his isolation.

After tunneling his way into contact with Edmund, a poorly educated sailor lad, the Abbe Faria (probably a proscribed Jesuit) in effect "creates" Edmund's new aristocratic identity by introducing him to the riches of western civilization that the older man carries in his head. All this very much like Matteo Ricci (another Jesuit) did in his 1601 mission to the Chinese court (described in detail by Jonathan Spence in "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci") and very probably the model for James Hilton's Father Perrault , the high lama of isolated Shangri La as a storehouse of civilization in "Lost Horizon."

The Koran as mnemonic target . . . . Moussaoui , of course, is no Abbe Faria . Nor is he another John McCain or General William H. Dean, both of whom managed to keep their sanity by drawing upon their well-stocked memories, including poems and song lyrics they had previously learned by heart. But Moussaoui as a Moslem will certainly have his own powerful mnemonic resources to draw upon, namely, the Koran.

Even American Moslems, it's worth noting, still memorize all of the Koran - I personally know of a highschooler in the San Fernando Valley who has done it. So it can fairly be described as a practical memory target for all Moslems, including Moussaoui , very much like a hold-in-the-hand anthology of 114 individual poems ( suras ), each composed of relatively short lines ( ayat ).

Most of these lines rhyme, as in the ababxccb -pattern of the 7-line opening sura , Al- Fatiha , e.g., raHiim ("merciful"), aalamiin ("worlds"), raHiim ("merciful"), diin ("day"), nasta'iinu "help"), mustaquiima "path") , ' alayhim ("favored"), Daalliin ("astray"). Like English poems the lines vary in length and number; some suras , therefore, are quite long, e.g., sura 37, As- Saffat "those ranged in ranks," which is 182 lines long.

English-language memory resources . . . . The best long-poem parallel that comes to mind is Milton's " Lycidas " (193 lines) which includes a number of non-rhyming lines, along with lines of different length ( trimeter and pentameter), and is still a practical mnemonic target for Americans - it's still in my head, for instance, which is more than I can say for most free verse I've learned and lost (e.g., Whitman's "I hear America singing").

For Americans as a whole, the best overall parallel to Moussaoui's memory resources would be a mastery of the 400 poems currently available on www.poetryoutloud.org web site; or a mastery of all the public-domain poems in William Harmon's "The Top 500 Poems," up to and including those by Edgar Arlington Robinson; or all the poems in Harold Bloom's "The Best Poems of the English," up to and including those by William Butler Yeats. Roughly considered, these average out to 20,000 memorized lines (150,000 words), which at 30 words per hour would call for at least 5,000 hours of personal best study time.

Though daunting a target like this is still far more practical than memorizing the complete Bible; for example, Mark , the shortest of the four gospels (recently performed by Nicol Williamson), runs for 10,000 words. So this kind of preliminary effort by Americans bound for solitary confinement certainly makes sense, especially if they hope to equal Moussaoui's chances for surviving this kind of mental decapitation.

From memorization to personal creativity . . . . Once learned, a poetic document, including the Koran, lends itself to many other uses beyond simple recitation. By way of illustrating some of these personal-best possibilities, Appendix One, "Poetry Mnemonics and Personal-Best Survival," explores a number of these possibilities from the point of view of a fictional prison inmate. It is followed by Appendix Two , "Planet Shangri La and Dr. Biff's Parole Hearing," which describes the fictional author of Appendix One and sets forth the events leading to his incarceration, along with the reaction of prison officials to his educational ideas.

What's here should not be taken as an actual prediction of Zakarias Moussaoui's chances for mentally surviving solitary confinement in a United States maximum security federal prison; madness and rage, as many of us know, can often overpower the strongest of us, mentally and spiritually. But the challenge itself, as Dr. Biff points out in Appendix One, reaches far beyond the walls of Florence or Pelican Bay, since each of us is always subject to solitary confinement in one form or another. The physical deprivation of blindness is one form certainly, and so are various forms of social isolation. So are - coming even closer to home, I suspect - those endless nights of sleeplessness and frustration that thunder down upon us without warning, rhyme, or reason.

Mnemonic Civilization . . . . Private or public, the underlying human conflict is fundamentally between civilization and madness, to the degree that most civilizations worth the name are fundamentally mnemonic in their emphasis upon the mastery of central texts. These may be religious, as with Indic civilization (the Mahabharata), Chinese civilization (the Confucian classics), and Islamic civilization. Or they may be secular, as with the Greeks and their emphasis upon Homer, to the degree that Athenian prisoners who could recite in full the Iliad and the Odyssey were spared from slaving away in Sicilian stone quarries.

As matters now stand, the American civilization lies somewhere between the sacred and the secular. Its traditional sacred text, the King James version of the Bible, though unrhymed, was highly mnemonic thanks to its use of rhythmic sentence endings ( cursus planus , cursus velox , and cursus tardus ), a device that may have been borrowed from Ottoman sects by the early Eastern European Hussites and other protestant sects. But newer translations are far less memory-friendly than the King James (how many youngsters learn complete psalms by heart now?). And the memory-friendly rhythms and rhymes of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Poe, and Kipling have long been replaced by denser imagery and prosaic free verse forms that take twice as much time to learn and disappear from the memory with frightening speed and permanence.

TO CONCLUDE. . . . How many poets - apart from the cowboy poets who meet in Elko , Nevada , actually recite their works with the aplomb and passion that characterized W.H. Auden and Robert Frost? And where are the memorized declamations that used to dignify our commencement programs and other school ceremonies? As criminals from a non-mnemonic civilization, it is quite likely Moussaoui's maximum security neighbors will have far fewer memory resources than he to draw upon as the days march endlessly in single file from one year on to the next, and then still further on and on and on.

The incarceration of Zakerias Moussaoui has received plenty of public attention, enough so in my view to remind us that civilization will always be what we individually carry around in our heads and draw upon for comfort, intellectual sustenance, and inspiration as we live our lives day after day.

Let's hope we each have enough of it in our head to keep us going if and when hard times come down upon us.

APPENDIX ONE . . . . Poetry Mnemonics and Personal-Best Survival . . . . Excerpted from All Around Americans, Young and Old - A Personal Best Guide to Mental and Physical Fitness , Copyright ©2004 by Biff Marlowe, PhD. Address all inquiries to Jennifer Marple , editorial consultant c/o The Elstner Foundation ( Sears Tower ), Chicago , Ill.


Introduction: Why This Booklet Was Written and How it Works. . . . The primary reason for this booklet can be summed up in one phrase: Solitary Confinement. . . . We all know, some of us from direct experience, that solitary confinement is the punishment of last resort for a prisoner.

Back in 1830, for example, the Europeans greatly admired the effectiveness of our prisons, as indicated by the very low number of repeat offenders in the American criminal justice system. So the French sent young Alexis de Tocqueville over here to study what was going on in our prisons and why it seemed to be working so well - and so cheaply.

De Tocqueville discovered that the basic goal of American penology was to discourage repeat offenders by making the prison experience less pleasant than the most unpleasant job in the American workplace.

Stone quarrying and coal mining, for example, were considered to be very unpleasant jobs; the same was, and still is, true of repetitive factory work and stoop labor in agriculture. As indicated by expressions like "30 days at hard labor" and "bread and water," unpleasant work and unappealing food were key low-cost elements in American "discouragement" penology, and remained so until after WWII.

But the most powerful discouragement-element was solitary confinement. Though more expensive, it is still in use as a primary feature of maximum security prisons like Pelican Bay in northern California . Hence the need for prison inmates to understand exactly what the challenge of solitary confinement means and how - should the occasion arise, deserved or undeserved - they can prepare themselves to meet that challenge in a dignified and productive manner.

Hence also the larger need for Americans in general to understand and deal with the many other forms of solitary confinement which they are bound to encounter in our complex modern society

***

Solitary confinement is not restricted to prisoners. Each of us certainly knows what it feels like to be all alone with only ourselves for company, especially late at night. How many Americans right now would sell their souls for one night of peaceful, uninterrupted sleep? How many of us are intimately familiar with the anxious thoughts, vain regrets, old resentments, and wistful yearnings that take shape on their own and then flow through our "stream of consciousness," as William James called it?

As part of that stream, can any of us deny that one thought can lead to another for us in an unpredictable, almost crazy way? Can any of us deny that sometimes these thought sequences can end up driving us to take self-destructive actions that "seem like a very good idea at the time," as the saying goes?

Solitary confinement in its various forms may free us from life with boring or dangerous companions. But it also gives our uncontrollable personal consciousness almost complete power over us, to the degree that we may seek escape in forms of self-destruction: alcohol, drugs, thrill seeking, even permanent insanity sometimes.

Self hatred , not self esteem, is the price, according to Dostoyevsky, that human beings often pay for their sensitivity and intelligence.

***

For thousands of years, possibly hundreds of thousands , our traditional weapon against self-destructive consciousness has been our ability to remember poetry - accurately and at will . To remember a poem like "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" is fundamentally a yes/ no experience for us in which rhythm and rhyme ensure that we can learn the poem and call it up as an independent voyager in our stream of consciousness.

Poetic memories, simply put, have permanent shapes that protect them from the distortions and confusion of our uncontrollable natural stream of consciousness. In addition, these poetic shapes can as spoken physical objects be linked via chanting or singing to physical activities in a number of ways.

Religious rituals use poetic-memory materials, for example. So do the military rituals of basic training or boot camp, often with tremendous bonding power - as pointed out by William McNeill in "Keeping Together in Time." Even more tellingly, the solitary-confinement experiences of prisoners of war consistently celebrate the power of poetic memories in maintaining sanity, morale, and the will to survive.

There's plenty of evidence, then, that supports our use of memory, especially poetic memory, as a primary weapon against self-destructive elements in the stream of consciousness that flows through our minds. To make you comfortable within your own mind, not just your own skin - that's why this booklet was written.

We can reach this goal in five steps: personal-best self testing , poetry memorization, vocabulary learning, up-tempo reading, and personal-best program design. Here's a brief sketch of what lies ahead for us.

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> Personal-best self testing . . . . a brief description of the personal best physical fitness revolution and the importance of self- testing as part of its ACT-method: accurate measurement, crossover benefit, and time-efficiency.

> Poetry memorization . . . . a hands on introduction to the use of self testing as part of the poetry memorization process, including in-the-head creative activities.

> Vocabulary non-rote learning . . . . a hands on introduction to the use of clues and self testing in learning technical terms and foreign-language vocabulary, including in-the-head creative uses.

> Up-tempo reading . . . . a hands on introduction to reader-friendly testing as a tool for increasing your recreational reading speed up to at least 600 words a minute, including better retention.

> Personal-best program design . . . . a general introduction to basic program elements: time commitments, activity targets and measurements, measuring crossover benefits, achieving time-efficiency - including the physical-mental fitness connection.

***

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Personal Best Self Testing

Americans have always been a do-it-yourself people. But in the last twenty years we've seen what might be called a personal-best explosion in the physical fitness department. One feature of this explosion is much more emphasis upon solitary exercise: "bowling alone," as a recent study called it.

Another feature is the emphasis upon a personal-improvement sequence, as opposed to the win/ lose element in team and one-on-one competition. The third feature, as with American sports in general, is the emphasis upon statistical data: distance, speed, level of difficulty, previous performance, etc. Overall this emphasis has been described as the ACT-system: Accurate measurement, Crossover benefit, and Time efficiency.

One of the main attractions of a well-equipped gym, for example, is the range of accurate measurement it offers. The aerobic equipment, for example, keeps track of distance, difficulty level, speed, pulse rate, and even total calories burned up, just as crossover benefit is measured by weight readings, blood pressure readings and blood tests in a physician's office.

Good intentions strengthened with honest self testing - this is the driving force behind the personal best fitness revolution in America .

Self testing in poetry memorization, vocabulary learning, and up tempo reading is a natural development of personal best fitness programs, especially when it uses the same general ACT-system. It is tempting to envision the personal best movement expanding to encompass physical fitness and mental fitness, with one-stop spas offering accurate measurement, crossover benefit, and time-efficiency in many areas: aerobics here, RF testing there; resistance training here, poetry memorization there; stretching here, vocabulary growth there, etc.

Right now, though, the do-it-yourself route to mental fitness is still the most practical alternative for us, just as it was for Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and many other self-taught and self-tested Americans.

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Poetry Memorization

TRADITIONAL AND NON-TRADITIONAL TARGETS. . . . The easiest poems to learn by heart, as the saying goes, are those which like folk songs stick in our mind's ear, thanks to their traditional rhyming and rhythm patterns. As an illustration, here are the first four lines of "Ode to Autumn," by John Keats, which is the third most popular poem in our nation today, based upon the anthology listings in The Columbia Granger's® Index to Poetry," 9 th edition.

By way of emphasizing the traditional structure of these lines, we'll boldface the emphasized (stressed) syllables and put the line-ending rhymes in italics.

***

Seas on of mists and mel low fruitful ness,

Close bos om friend of the ma tur ing sun,

Con spir ing with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch eaves run ."

***

With non-traditional, non-rhythmic targets we can in effect make them look like a poem by breaking them down into manageable lines. We may need to do this with dramatic roles, especially monologues, with some song lyrics, Biblical psalms, and even modern poems. Here's such a representation of the first sentence from Lincoln 's Gettysburg Address.

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Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth

On this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty ,

And dedicated to the proposition that

All men are created equal .

***

STRUCTURE-FRIENDLY LEARNING. . . . Children are natural rote learners. Most of them can soak up a traditional poem like a sponge, especially if they hear it and speak it in rhythm (sometimes called "sing song"), including counting time with hands, feet, and even fingers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Unfortunately, we tend to lose our rote learning skills after age 20.

So we need something that appeals to our understanding of how our learning-target works as a complete structure, appealing to our mind's eye along with our mind's ear.

The following versions of our two examples do this by retaining the line-ending words, by using initial letters (including clusters) to represent the other words, and by representing extra syllables with hyphens. Thanks to these clues, your "structural memory" will help you to identify at least 70% of the incomplete words in the following Keats version, and probably 60% of those in the Lincoln version.

[ Keats ]

S-.... o .... m ....a.... m-.... fruitfulness,

Cl .... b-.... fr .... o.... th .... m--.... sun ,

C-- .... w.... h.... h.... t.... l.... a.... bless

W ..... fr .... th .... v.... th .... r.... th .... th .... eaves run .

[ Lincoln ]

F- .... a... s-.... y.... a-...., o.... f-.... br .... forth

O .... th .... c---.... a.... n.... n-...., c-.... i .... liberty ,

A .... d---.... t.... th .... pr--- .... that

A.... m.... a.... cr --.... equal .

For any American over 20, this structure-friendly system really works. It's far easier, for example, to write out a structure-friendly transcription than it is to write out a fully spelled out line. Once written out, the transcription in effect gets traced and retraced again every time you go over it in your mind's eye and ear.

Consequently your mastery grows stronger and stronger, especially when you start reciting it to yourself and experiment with different kinds of pauses and kinds of emphasis. Once learned, a memorized poem is a permanent possession, just like a toy you can pull out at any time, inspect, and even play with. Overall you should figure 50 words an hour as your basic learning rate and a retention rate of at least 70%.

***

LINE-ENDING SELF TESTING . . . . Forgetfulness is our mind's primary defense against confusion. Hence we always need to retest ourselves on a poetic target we've mastered. The simplest test here is to recall the line-endings of a target like, say, America , The Beautiful : . . . skies . . . . grain . . . . majesties . . . . plain . . . . America [the second one]. . . . thee . . . . good / brotherhood . . . . sea .

As you'll discover, recalling line-endings compels you to recall the words that preceded them. Best of all, you can do it in your head or on a small piece of paper, taking as much time as you want.

PERSONAL-BEST INTERPRETATION. . . . Once memorized, a poetic target is fair game for anything you want to do with it. A good first step is to puzzle out what the sentences mean, not just the individual words. Beyond that, you can experiment with emphasizing different words and with your pronunciation -: how much length to give certain vowels, how much distinctiveness to give certain consonants, etc.

You'll find this kind of "multi-tasking" effort will strengthen your reading speed and comprehension, along with improving your speaking effectiveness before groups and in one-on-one contact.

SPIN-OFF CREATIVITY. . . . What's most fascinating about a memorized poem is its ability to serve as a template for your own in-the-head creativity in a number of ways. Of these, the most difficult is the "ending-rhyme" form ( bouts rimes in French), which requires you to compose a poem of your own, ideally in your head, that keeps the ending rhymes of your source.

Here's an illustrative "ending rhyme" four-line spin off from our Keats example that uses fruitfulness, sun, bless, and run.

***

The mind must not be judged by fruitfulnes s.

Its orchards wither quickly in the sun

Its towers collapse; nor can it seek to bless

The heavens and expect fresh streams to run .

***

There's no doubt that this kind of in-the-head composition is very, very difficult, even for professional poets. But it's a marvelous way to kill time in solitary confinement, including a bout of late-night insomnia. Just as important, your memory of the source will help you to remember your spin-off far more effectively than any totally original poem that you think of during the night and then forget by early morning.

Less difficult, and often much more fun, especially with popular songs, is the parody form. In it you simply stay with the rhythm of your source and echo a key word here and there. Here's one based on our Keats example. As you can see, the alternate-rhyme pattern (a-b-a-b) is the same but the rhyming words themselves are quite different.

***

Season of heat and insects buzzing round ,

When high humidity makes strong men wheeze ,

And every dermatologist in town

Insists we smear ourselves with gunk and grease .

***

GETTING PHYSICAL WITH MEMORIZED POEMS. . . . To return to our solitary confinement theme, imagine you're locked up all alone and that you must manage your own personal best physical and mental fitness program. As we've seen, and as many prisoner's accounts indicate, the poetry you remember will be a lifesaver and a sanity-saver. It can also be a physical-fitness saver if you use poetic lines as exercise counters.

Rhythmically considered, any line can be converted into a 4-beat Left-Right-Left-Right line (5-beat lines are simply converted into two 4-beat lines via the addition of 3 pauses). In addition, lines can also serve as repetition counters in resistance training via one repetition to each line.

As with Tai Chi, the important consideration here is remembering what your sequence is, in which case the natural logic, say, of twenty 14-line sonnets will work far better than trying to keep track of 280 repetitions through monotonous counting.

There's nothing new about the physical use of rhythmic poetry. Marching, dancing, group calisthenics, even tapping out the rhythm on our fingers - these all go way, way back. As a form that is physically rhythmic and verbally meaningful, poetry is our most natural and most memorable form of expression. So it's well worth your time as a physical-fitness partner, especially with our structure friendly system.

In general you can expect to learn fifty words of poetry in one clock hour with a long term retention rate of 70%. You can also expect plenty of crossover benefit in concentration power, public speaking power and confidence, pronunciation clarity, and intellectual independence.

On a personal-best basis, your first thousand words will be the hardest, especially if you recite them out loud (even to yourself). But you'll never forget the feeling of personal achievement that comes with it. . . . a feeling that no one will ever be able to take away from you.

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Vocabulary Non-Rote Learning

MEANING-CLUE AND TARGET WORDS. . . . Rote-memorization of vocabulary words is very difficult. If you check a frequently used word like RUN in your desk dictionary, you'll find it has at least sixty different meanings. If you check its appearances in your daily newspaper, on the other hand, you'll find it shows up in several different spellings: RUN, RAN, RUNS, RUNNING.

The best way to handle all this meaning/spelling variation is give ourselves a structural clue and follow the meaning-first sequence that's used in crossword puzzles and games like Jeopardy. As in the following medical terms.

***

" a small abscess" ( m2cr3a2sc5 ). . . . . . . . microabscess .

" pertaining to the heart muscle" ( m3c4i3 ). . . . . . . . myocardial .

" surgical removal of a kidney" ( n2ph3e2t3y1 ). . . . . . . . nephrectomy .

***

We can also self-test ourselves by placing our target word first, followed by a structural clue for the meaning and then the meaning itself. You'll find it's easy to construct your own structural clues. Simply break the word down into segments and identify each segment with its initial letter or letter-cluster, followed by the number of letters in that segment.

How you construct your clues is up to you. The word myocardial, for example, could be represented as either "m3c4i3" or "m3c7." . . . Phrases are more awkward. But you can handle them by placing a period between each word and occasionally retaining actual words that turn up frequently. As in the following.

microabscess "/ ("a1.sm5.a2sc5"). . . . . . . . " a small abscess" .

myocardial . / ("pertaining to the h5.m4le" ). . . . . . . ." pertaining to the heart muscle"

nephrectomy ."/ ("s4i2a2.r2m3a2.o2.a1.k3n3"). . . . . . . . " surgical removal of a kidney"

Your clue-construction activity will gradually introduce you to "word-building blocks" like micro- , myo - , card- , etc., and the process itself goes quickly - very much like a personal-best form of shorthand. Writing out your target words and meanings, incidentally, can gobble up hours if you're not careful.

So take advantage of what resources are available. The Viz. Ed flash cards for medical terms and legal terms can be a practical tool for you, along with glossary pages in textbooks that offer plenty of space for your clue-notes.

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SPELLING SELF-TESTING . . . . Rightly or wrongly, our ability to spell is always important as an indication of our educational level and general intelligence. In a spelling bee the word is pronounced first, followed by one of its dictionary meanings.

We can present such a test in written form by using "keyboard friendly" phonetics to represent a word's pronunciation. You will find a full treatment of keyboard-friendly phonetics in The Scholastic Children's Dictionary. Many foreign-language instruction books are now using it, and so do many Americans who follow their own personal phonetic logic in guessing a word's spelling from the way it sounds. Most seven-year-olds will surprise you when you ask them to read the following syllable-by-syllable representations out loud .

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[ migh"oh-mah-lae'-shee-ah ] " a softening of muscle" myomalicia

[ noo-rael'jee-ah ] " nerve pain" neuralgia

[ of- thael" moh-pleh'jee-ah ] " a paralysis of the eye muscles" ophthalmoplegia

***

PRONUNCIATION SELF-TESTING. Our personal-best pronunciation of English words is part of the personality that we present to society, especially over the phone. The most important element in our pronunciation of a word is which syllable gets the most emphasis. Like our test examples, our desk dictionaries represent emphasized syllables by placing the stress mark (boldface for strong, non-boldface for secondary) after (not before) the syllable in question.

We can therefore easily test ourselves by selecting words and proper names from a newspaper at random and asking ourselves which syllable, according to the dictionary, gets the strongest emphasis: (a) first, (b) second, (c) third, (d) fourth, (e) none of these. By way of a self-testing illustration, here are ten syllable-emphasis targets taken at random from the Los Angeles Times of July 25, 2004 .

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(1) idea , (2) preparation , (3) American , (4) Washington , (5) Sacramento , (6) government, (7) Republican , (8) Pakistan , (9) pagoda , (10) confidence. . . .

Here are the answers, based on pronunciations listed first in Webster's New World Dictionary. . . . (1) b , (2) c, (3) b, (4) a, (5) c, (6) a, (7) b, (8) a , (9) b, (10) a.

***

In the interests of time-efficiency, you should probably stay clear of keyboard-friendly phonetics for a start, along with looking words up in a dictionary. If you stick with your vocabulary lists (or Viz Ed cards) your intellectual effort (creating your word-element clues) will do the rest, along with the physical the act of writing your clues out.

Overall your goal should be a rate of 50 words an hour and a 70% retention rate - just the same as in poetry memorization.

***

There are several reasons why personal-best vocabulary learning is important for all of us. One reason is that the overall vocabulary of English is very, very large. Our full-coverage unabridged dictionaries contain roughly 600,000 words (twice the size of German), and our desk dictionaries contain about 60,000 (more if we count proper names).

Even more of a problem for us is the fact that at least 80% of the words in our desk dictionaries are listed as borrowings. . . . Norman French, Parisian French, medieval Latin, Renaissance Latin and Greek, etc.

This 80%-borrowing feature is unique to English, with the result that we have relatively few "natural structure" words like armchair , headache , and overflow, etc. Hence we tend to go blank on words, not just proper names, far more than speakers of languages with natural-structure vocabularies. Since going blank on words is a symptom of Alzheimer's disease, our memory-unfriendly vocabulary may explain the fact that our Alzheimer's rate is four times that of Japan , as noted in Medical Science News).

Our memory-unfriendly vocabulary probably accounts for our traditional emphasis upon the mental-fitness benefit of studying foreign languages. As should be apparent, our structural-clue method will work, and has worked, beautifully with studying the vocabulary of any foreign language. In this connection it's worth pointing out that European foreign-language teaching now emphasizes vocabulary much more than we do.

One chain of language schools even ignores past-tense verb forms in favor of participle combinations, reasoning that what's important to us is thinking of the right word at the right time, as opposed to usage concerns like pronunciation, verb agreement, subjunctives, and the like.

As a practical personal-best challenge you should therefore consider acquiring a reading knowledge of one or two foreign languages. Traditionally, graduate students achieved this goal on their own in roughly six weeks, using Viz Ed flash cards to acquire a working vocabulary of roughly 1,500 words.

After this they would simply read at length and guess, especially mystery stories. As you'll discover, there is absolutely no personal-best thrill like picking up a newspaper in, say, Spanish or German and realizing you can actually make sense out of most of what's in it.

From a solitary-confinement point of view, you can also take control of your consciousness by trying to translate one of your mastered poems word by word into one of your foreign languages.

***

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Up Tempo Reading

A recent "Reading at Risk" report by the National Endowment for the Arts has pointed out, much to the concern of educators and book publishers, that Americans under age thirty now read far fewer books than they did as recently as 20 years ago, paralleling a gradual reduction over the last 40 years of our average recreational-reading speed from 600 words per minute down to 250.

It's been argued that this decline in the reading speed of young Americans accounts for our national decline in book use, since younger Americans must now spend more than twice the time to cover the same recreational-reading material. This reading-speed decline clearly parallels changes in our approach to the testing of reading, especially non- textbook recreational reading.

So it clearly makes sense of us to think about new, more "reader-friendly" ways of test construction - especially practical tests we can make up on our own in connection with a personal-best reading program.

***

Forty years ago what we tested nationwide was mostly "move the lips" textbook- reading mastery: facts, definitions, processes, comprehension, etc. Recreational readers were therefore free to progress at their own pace through fiction and nonfiction on the old assumption, lege , lege , aliquid haerebit ("Read, read, something will stick").

And stick it often did, idiosyncratically but beneficially, to the degree that the sheer volume of recreational reading still seems to be the crucial element in developing writing skills - as pointed out in numerous studies surveyed by Steven Krashen of USC.

During the last 20 years, however, our educational leaders have begun to test recreational reading using textbook-testing techniques. These now stress factual recall (the Electronic Bookshelf tests, etc.) and interpretation of content - is there any American under thirty who hasn't been asked to explain the symbolism of the turtle in John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath"?

Inevitably, then, Americans from middle school on have begun to develop test-fearful reading habits, with the result that their overall reading tempo has gone down and down and down. Hence they read fewer in the same amount of time, with the result that fewer books are sold by American bookstores and publishers.

Hence also the need for "reader friendly" self testing as a tool for developing " up tempo" reading skills and satisfaction, especially those who have lost reading speed, not increased it, in connection with their education.

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READER-FRIENDLY TESTS. Position-sequence tests can fairly be described as reader-friendly do-it-yourself tests. They're just like asking a 4-year- old " Whom did Dorothy see first on the Yellow Brick Road - the Cowardly Lion or the Tin Woodman?" In music, these tests take the form of playing two passages in random sequence and asking the student, "Which of these actually appears first in the piece you have just studied?"

In reading, a friend can pick a couple of paragraphs at random and ask us the same "which paragraph appears first?" question as a check upon whether we've actually given each page its fair share of attention.

Intelligence, general knowledge, interpretive skills, brute-force memorization - these are far less important in producing position-sequence test results than the honest effort of looking at each page quickly. Hence the term "reader friendly."

More ambitious reader-friendly tests can be constructed and scored very cheaply. One approach simply photocopies five pages, removes all original-sequence clues, places them in a new, random sequence, and identifies them as R1 through R5. It then asks five which-appears-first questions regarding five 3-item "round robin" groups: 123, 234, 345, 451, 512 (note how number 1 and 2 come "round" again in the last two groups).

Start to finish, it takes only 15 minutes to construct a 5-item test like this for any book, fiction or nonfiction and 30 minutes to contract a test with 10 or 15 items. Because of their cheapness, fairness, and security (random sequences can be easily varied), reader-friendly tests have already been used in large-scale recreational reading programs for middle schools (1,200 students, 16 books, 10-item tests) in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Tests like these can bring honesty and accurate measurement into a personal best reading program. In addition, they encourage a personal-best reader to relax and return to a natural page-centered recreational reading pace, gradually working his or her way back up to 600 words a minute - roughly 25,000 words an hour, or four hours for a conventional 200-page, 100,000-word book. Most important, this self-testing method extends the personal best reader's range of choice to encompass any book he or she wants to read and be self-tested on. True, 20 minutes per book can add up in a twenty-book program. But the results usually more than justify the time spent, especially in crossover impact and self esteem.

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INDEX-FRIENDLY NONFICTION SELF TESTING . . . . In the interests of time-efficiency, a book-based self-testing program can limit itself to nonfiction books that have indexes at the end. These cover proper names and subject-categories, very much like an alphabetized table of contents. Here's a "tutor-friendly" step-by-step illustrative example.

(1) Pick a nonfiction book, making sure that it has an index at the back that covers proper names. As an example we'll use Bill Clinton's "My Life."

(2) Pick 10 proper names at random from the index and write them out as a separate proper-name list (left-hand side of the page. Include the number of page-citations listed for each (right-hand side of the page.) Such a list for our Clinton reading target might be: N1: Caplan , Tommy (9); N2: Carson, Johnny (2); N3: Carville, James (11); N4: Castro, Fidel (11); N5: Chase, Chevy (2); N6: Cheney, Dick (5); N7: Chirac, Jacques (6); N8: Churchill, Winston (5); N9: Cuomo, Mario (12); N10: Cutler, Lloyd (3). This should take you only a couple of minutes.

(3) Fold over the right-hand side of the page so that it covers and conceals your page-citation numbers.

(4) Read the book. Then come back and for each 3-name group answer the question, "Which name in this 3-name book has the largest number of page citations - resolve any ties alphabetically." Via the "round robin" system you will have ten 3-name groups: 123, 234, 345, 456, 567, 678, 789, 89-10, 9-10-1 , 10-1-2 (note how 1 and 2 reappear at the end).

(5) Unfold the right hand side of the page to disclose the actual number of page-citations for each name. Then score yourself. This is not an easy "structural memory" test. So any score over four should be considered excellent. As your "proper name awareness" improves, however, you can expect to see your scores improve - and your nonfiction reading speed.

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PROPER-NAME CHRONOLOGY TESTING. . . . Names make news, as the saying goes, and important names make history, along with leaving their mark in our desk dictionaries, usually about 5,000 of them. For any group of proper personal names, you can therefore raise the question, "Which of these names is listed as being born first (exclude names not listed in your desk dictionary)? Only two of our "My Life" names, incidentally, appear in Webster's New World - Winston Churchill (b. 1874) and Fidel Castro (b. 1926). So the correct answer to our question would be Churchill (N9).

In the American mainstream, name-chronology questions are today widely used to test general knowledge. Even more important, proper-name knowledge plays a key role in developing reading skill and retentiveness. Up tempo reading is therefore for most of us a two-way street. The more name-knowledge we acquire, the faster we can read; and conversely, the more we read, especially nonfiction, the more we add to our store of name-knowledge.

PROPER-NAME IMPORTANCE TESTING. . . . Some proper names appear more frequently in our books and newspapers, as you will discover if you check data sources like Info- Trac , library catalogues, and internet servers. Practically considered, the simplest way to determine "who's most important" is to look the name of a deceased famous person up in Webster's New Biographical Dictionary (Merriam-Webster), and then count the number of lines in the biographical entry for that name. On this basis we can fairly ask the question, "Which of the following names is considered the most famous today, based on the number of lines in WNBD?"

A typical list of target names based on "My Life" might be these: Churchill, Winston (31); Eisenhower, Dwight (17); Hobbes, Thomas (16); Johnson, Lyndon (8); Kant, Immanuel (19); Kennedy, John F. (10); Kennedy, Robert (8); Lincoln, Abraham (20); Roosevelt, Franklin (22); Roosevelt, Theodore (27). As with our index-citation tests, you can use the "round robin" technique to construct your own multi-item name-chronology and name-importance tests.

Important proper names are usually quite familiar to the reading public. Many nonfiction authors therefore refer to them as a technique for making their books readable, as opposed to peppering their pages with the names of obscure Russian poets, for example. A recent study found that nonfiction literary prizewinners had a much higher proportion of important names in their indexes than non-prizewinners.

Hence the desirability of making a personal-best name check of a book's index before you decide to invest your precious time in wading through it.

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Personal Best Program Design

A booklet like this works best as a cafeteria. In a cafeteria, after all, we can choose exactly what we want to put on our tray or "on our plate," as the saying goes. We can also decide later on exactly how we want to handle it - including eating the dessert first if we want to.

At this point, then, you as a reader can stop right here and decide where you want to go with the alternatives we've considered, as opposed to having a mental-fitness nutritionist-coach advising you what to consume and when.

Imagine for the moment that you are your own nutritionist-coach. In designing your own personal best program, here are some options to consider.

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TIME DECISIONS. . . . There are only so many hours in each day, week, or month for you to work with. As with our cafeteria analogy, you're the one who must decide how many hours you want to spend on your program, including the privilege of changing your mind later on. As we've seen, our basic words-per-hour rates are 50 for poetry memorization, 50 for vocabulary learning, and 24,000 for recreational reading (you'll find this page-a-minute rate will feel right to you if you give it a fair try).

The kind of time we're talking about here is conventional solitary sit-down study time. A hundred hours of this kind of time is the rough equivalent of a three-unit college course in terms of our national Carnegie Unit standards. As with college work, you have plenty of sequence options here: three hours a week, fifty hours a month, etc.

You also have some time-efficiency options: studying vocabulary while watching TV, going over poems in your head at night or reading while you're on an exercise bike. If you count these, make sure they don't get confused with your primary study-time program decisions - and counting.

The same kind of distinction applies to your physical fitness time decisions. There's no doubt that your time spent on the job or commuting consumes calories and can conceivably count as exercise time. But it can't be measured as accurately as half an hour spent on a treadmill at speed X, difficulty-level Y, and calories burnt Z.

Accurate measurement, crossover benefit, and time-efficiency - these will be central to your program's success, including the crucial factor of self-esteem. So beware of taking on Mr. Self Deception as your personal-best partner. Better far, most of us will surely agree, to set modest goals and be honest with yourself than to be overambitious at first and then fall on your face.

TARGET DECISIONS. . . . As long as you keep track of your study-time hours, where you spend them is your business. Here are some actual cases: memorizing Chuck Berry lyrics (why not?) or psalms from the Bible (a traditional target, certainly). . . . learning sign-language vocabulary (potentially an all-purpose language-learning resource). . . . reading romances, mystery novels and thrillers (ideal for building up speed in recreational-reading eye movement).

Choosing your own targets, after all, ensures you'll be taking advantage of your most precious learning resources: enthusiasm and personal energy. Practically considered, though, we should remember that our ACT-system encompasses accurate measurement and the features of crossover-benefit and time-efficiency.

Your choice of poems should therefore recognize that structure-friendly poems by Shakespeare and Robert Frost are much easier to learn than poems by, say, Walt Whitman or Robert Lowell. In addition, mainstream poems are usually better recitation targets than obscure ones.

You may therefore want to choose poems from a mainstream anthology or from the Columbia University Granger's® Index, which ranks poems on the basis of how frequently they appear in poetry anthologies. Anthologies like these offer you plenty of personal choice; but they do so within a framework of time-tested quality - very much like going to a cafeteria that's been in business for several generations.

In foreign-language vocabulary learning, we recognize that some words are used more frequently and are therefore worth learning first. In recreational reading, we recognize that some books have a longer shelf life than others , especially those on sale at two cents a page.

In making nonfiction reader-friendly choices, here are three useful questions to consider: Did the book win a nonfiction literary prize? Was it first published at least 20 years ago? Is it still in print? More informally, you can be guided by the library status of previous books written by an author and by recommendations from friends and teachers (we all enjoy telling other people what they should read, don't we?).

Personal choice plus mainstream crossover benefit and time-efficiency - this combination works well in both physical and mental fitness programs, you'll discover.

TESTING DECISIONS. . . . Our battery of self-testing options is here to get you started. Practically considered, accurate and expressive recitation will be your best test for poetry learning, just as flash cards like Viz Ed will take you surprisingly far in vocabulary learning (the Viz Ed cards for Latin offer marvelous help in learning Latinate English words, by the way).

For recreational reading, the index-based tests are very time-efficient, especially when they are backed up by proper name tests, including pronunciation.

The most important test, of course, is how you personally feel about the progress you are making, along with the informal reaction of people you talk to, especially strangers. Sad to say, your friends and family love you just the way you are, no matter what they say. So don't be upset if they are somewhat less than enthusiastic about the personal-best progress you're making. We all have trouble adapting to change, don't we?

TRACKING DECISIONS. . . . Like our stream of consciousness, our personal time-stream awareness is very hard to control. Who of us can remember what we were doing forty-five days ago at this moment? Who of us will remember what we were actually like when we started a personal-best improvement program.

Hence the desirability of keeping some kind of log - nothing fancy; just dates, activities, and activity numbers set down every few days as a memory jogger for later on. On letterhead-size lined notebook, example, you can cover several days on one page. Even more important, you can cover both physical and mental fitness activity from the same ACT-perspective.

In terms of physical fitness, it makes sense to keep tract of calories, and it makes even more sense to keep track of your exercise activities, especially if you find yourself doing more and doing it more effectively as the days and weeks wear on. The same is true of your poetry and vocabulary learning, recreational reading, and self-testing performance. As you'll discover, it's not easy to be completely honest with yourself when you're dealing with actual facts and numbers. But it's fun to try - especially if you we keep your tracking-log completely private.

The best feature of a tracking log is the way it opens the door for one of the most precious feelings that ever comes our way, namely, the feeling of surprise that comes with the recognition that we've achieved something we never imagined we could do. For some of us it may be the feeling that comes with mastering the operation of a wheelchair.

For others it may be the sudden realization that we can actually make personal-best sense out of a difficult poem, a technical article or the front page of a foreign language newspaper.

For still others it may be the feeling that lying awake at night has suddenly become a time of mental opportunity, not a time for grief, fear, and resentment. Feelings like these come and go according to their own logic, of course. But a tracking log gives you a better chance of encountering them, along with a stronger awareness of your progress and personal worth.

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Conclusion: Bad Thoughts, Public-Record Memories, and Social Value

We all know what it feels like to be alone with our thoughts, including bad ones. So it's not hard for any human being to imagine what it must feel like to be locked up in solitary confinement. So far our scientists have been unable to tell us where our bad thoughts come from. But we all certainly know what it feels like to have bad thoughts coming down upon us.

In some instances, as we also know, the malevolent power of the darkness in our mind can be strong enough to push us into self-destruction - alcohol, drugs, suicide - as the only way to blot out that darkness, even at the price of giving up life itself.

What's in this booklet takes advantage of the fact that we all can recognize the difference between remembering or forgetting a proper name, a word, or a poem. Even more important, we all know that this kind of recognition is a public matter.

The words in a poem, for example, are a matter of public record, with the result that we ourselves can check up on how many words in it we've remembered correctly.

This kind of public-record memory is possible for us because of a poem's structure and memorability (a key poetic requirement, according to Paul Valery ). Hence, and this is a key point, our memory of a poem has a structure that is far more powerful than the random flow of our stream of consciousness, including its unpredictable bad thoughts and self-destructive urges.

Logically then, we would expect prisoners with well-stocked public-record memories to survive solitary confinement better than prisoners without such memories . So it's not surprising that prison literature, including studies of wartime prisoners, supports the survival value of public-record memories in solitary confinement settings.

Most of us will surely agree that there are many different kinds of solitary confinement. The cultural isolation of the immigrant or stranger, the emotional isolation of the unwanted child, the social isolation of those whom a competitive educational system defines as losers, the physical isolation of the hospital patient, the sensory isolation of the hearing and visually impaired - these all in effect lock us up with only our own thoughts for company.

Hence the desirability of well-stocked public-record memories for all of us in the long run , including the use of self-testing in achieving both mental and physical fitness.

Practically considered, self testing is almost synonymous with self control. To test ourselves measurably, means that we in effect step back from our yearnings and fantasies, seeing ourselves and our limitations as we truly are.

More positively, this kind of testing means we can also see our personal-best progress accurately, even though the judgments we get from others may be hasty and unfairly negative. For nearly all of us, of course, the ability to control our natural urges is very, very difficult to acquire and practice.

Responsible self testing may well be a positive step forward for those of us who need to fight the minor temptations of indolence and self-indulgence. And it may well be essential for those trying to break free from the tyranny of drugs and alcohol. Put a Poem in your Head not a Pill may seem like an overly slick, jazzy slogan. But for many desperate Americans today it may be worth taking seriously as the only available personal best option. . . . especially in a do-it-yourself country.

***

In larger terms we can fairly see our solitary confinement problem from the perspective of social value, not just personal survival. As parents, after all, our primary value lies in the example we set before our children, not just the comfortable home and educational opportunities we may or may not be able to provide.

In personal terms, is it not how well we each conquer the "enemy within" that defines our social value as examples of human determination overcoming human weakness? Is it not this kind of example that stands the best chance of making an impact upon those we care about, including society as a whole, and even the planet?

Memorizing a couple of Shakespearean sonnets may not seem like much. But as those who attempt it will agree, the task is a rewarding one, and - even more important - the results are almost impossible to fake.

At a time when the winds of idealism and conquest threaten to blow our towers down, the personal-best conquest of our own untrustworthy minds may be a far more proper study than most of us realize - for ourselves and for the world we live in.

*****

*****

APPENDIX TWO . . . . Planet Shangri La and Dr. Biff's Parole Hearing

Preliminaries. . . . Most novels are terminated , not finished. . . . which is to say that the surviving characters - imaginatively, at least - get on with their lives somehow and even turn up later on in other works. The Oz books come to mind, along with Nancy Drew. So do Mark Twain, Trollope, and Proust . Whatever happened to X makes just as much sense after reading a novel as it does when we show up at a high school reunion.

Planet Shangri La tells the story of an 18-year-old cocktail waitress and wind surfer who gets involved with a group of environmental activists lead by Dr. Biff Marlowe. Repelled by the violence of the methods, she cooperates with a government task force and plays a key role in thwarting the group's bio-chemical assault upon a Caribbean cruise ship and sending Dr. Biff to prison, thereby raising the question, How will Dr. Biff adjust to prison life?

This epilogue tries to answer the above question and others regarding Dr. Biff and his ideas, especially those which have an impact upon his fellow inmates and upon the prison bureaucracy, along with his fellow Americans outside. The great film director Raoul Walsh once said that fictional characters may come across as flesh-and-blood human beings, but they are actually "talking ideas," by virtue of what they say and do and stand for in a fictional scheme of things.

There's no doubt that some of Dr. Biff's ideas are provocative. . . . "Boot camp with lots of big words" was how some of his trainees in Durango , Colorado , described his program for improving their mental and physical fitness. The virtues of memorizing poetry are open to serious question these days ; so are assertions regarding the value of studying foreign languages, especially for older Americans.

Since these ideas and others have played a role in putting the man in prison, the reader has every right to smile at their naiveté, or dispute them, or even defend them against Dr. Biff's adversaries, inside and outside of the American prison system.

***

ABOUT DR. BIFF'S PAROLE HEARING

Washington DC, Nov. 15, 11 AM [two years later]

BUREAU OF PRISONS COMMUNICATION LOG. . . . NOV 15, 11AM

> bureau of prisons. . . . if you know your party's extension, please enter it now. . . . ****

>department of rehabilitation services. . . . if you know your party's extension, please enter it now. . . . ****

>deputy director's office. . . . this is cheryl speaking.

> cheryl this is brian gelucci . . . . is sam there. . . .

>I think he's on another line brian . . . . do you want to wait. . . .

> I'll give it a try. . . . nothing urgent though. . . .

>let me ring again for you. . . . ****. . . .

>this is sam steel. . . .

> sam . . . . it's brian .

> brian . . . . . . . long time no hear pal. . . . what's happening at your branch of club fed . . . how's the new warden working out. . . .

>well enough I guess. . . . he sure uses a lot of big words though.

>we get a lot of those now. . . . princeton . . . . stanford . . . . you name it.

>no more ball and chain guys like us. . . . right . . . .

> let's say not as many huh. . . . is he giving you trouble. . . .

>not exactly. . . . but some of us are starting to worry about one of the minimum security inmates.

>give me his name and I'll pull his file up on the screen. . . . then we can talk business.

>last name is marlowe . . . . em , ay, are, ell, oh, dubuhlyoo , ee . . . . william harvey . . . . do you need his file number. . . .

> no here he is. . . . ex viet nam . . . . still in good physical shape it looks like. . . . has he punched somebody. . . .

>I wish he had sam . . . . it looks to me like he has an early parole fix going for him.

>let me check that brian . . . . . . . . . . . . . my file doesn't show anything yet.

>no special circumstances paperwork right. . . .

>not yet. . . . what's so special about this guy. . . .

> he's a super smoothie sam . . . . he's been tutoring the warden's two daughters this past year and getting double work detail credit for it.

>double. . . . how's he doing with the support group program. . . .

>he's been ducking that . . .all because he's conducting his own group rehabilitation program now.

> what's wrong with that brian . . . . sounds to me like he's paying his dues.

> there's no group effort to it. . . . that's what's wrong. . . . he's got these

guys reciting poems and pumping iron at the same time all by themselves. . . . reading books too. . . . all they do as a group is give themselves tests which they make up themselves.

> doesn't he do any teaching. . . . I see he's got a phd from . . . . stanford . . . . . no wonder the warden likes him. . . .

> that's right. . . . stanford . . . . the inmates are starting to call him doctor biff. . . . some of the staff too. . . . sam this guy doesn't have an authority problem. . . . he is an authority problem.

>calm down brian . . . . all that will count against him at the parole hearing won't it. . . .

> I'm not so sure about that. . . . he's written his stuff up in a little booklet he calls self testing for social value. . . . that's self stuff not group stuff. . . . so if that booklet kicks in. . . . what's going to happen with all your rehab programs sam . . . . the support groups. . . . the woodworking. . . . the vocational training. . . . the socialization seminars. . . . he's even got some of them learning arabic on their own. . . . and I mean really on their own with just a couple of books and a set of flash cards.

> you're right brian that is a problem for us. . . . all of us. . . . can you send me some copies of his booklet. . . . what did you call it. . . .

> self testing for social value. . . . as I said it's short. . . . I'll send you five copies by express mail.

>great. . . . believe me I'll get right on it. . . . anything else. . . .

>no sam . . . . that's it.

>thanks for calling then. . . . and remember. . . . don't turn your back on them.

>you too sam .

>take care buddy . . . . you done good.

CONVERSATION TERMINATED BY RECIPIENT

END OF LOG SEGMENT

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BUREAU OF PRISONS COMMUNICATION LOG. . . . NOV 25, 11AM

> bureau of prisons. . . . if you know your party's extension, please enter it now. . . . ****

>department of parole. . . . if you know your party's extension, please enter it now. . . . ****

>parole board liason . . . . office of doctor myrtle wise. . . . this is bruce .

&