111 words
Andrew Shields
1 January
Next
semester, I'm teaching a course called "111 Words a Day: A Writing
Project". All the students and I will each write 111 words of critical
prose every day – no more, no less. The number of words for each day is both
arbitrary and exemplary: arbitrary in that it could just as well be 137 or 94,
but exemplary in that 111 is a lovely number. I'd first thought of 100 words a
day, but that might seem like an approximation that would lead us to write a
few more or less instead. The arbitrary and precise beauty of 111 will provide
a discipline for us all to live up to.
2 January
The title
of Kafka's "The Next Village" establishes a proximity between one's
village and "the next village", yet the brief text consists almost
entirely of a saying from "my grandfather" that makes that village
distant in time. The narrator speaks only a few words to introduce his grandfather's
words – as relatives, they're close to each other, but a generation still
separates them. Thus, the potentially unbridgeable time of the journey to the
next village is actually bridged by how the grandfather's words reach across
time to be remembered and reproduced by the narrator. A "ride to the next
village" may be uncertain, but language will always get you there, and
beyond.
3 January
In the last
four-and-a-half lines of the fourth stanza of Patricia Smith's
"10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine", the formulas used by
white America in response to incidents like the one described here are
introduced with "anyway" in such a way as to depict the victim as
unworthy of the empathy usually granted to those struck by random violence.
Specifically, this ten-year-old girl's allegedly mediocre educational
performance supposedly renders her unworthy of physical comfort and ulimately
of unconditional love – of "the wild notion of loving you loud and
regardless." Even the victim of apparently stray bullets is stripped by
the institutions around her of any solace after having been shot.
4 January
On
Goodreads, a reviewer of Danez Smith's "Homie" complains that an
emphasis on "LGBTQ, minorities, women, or some combination of the
three" leads to poems that "lack universality and
verisimilitude". But the concept of "universality" has a history
in which particular identities are erased to establish such a
"universal" perspective. Specifically, the "universal"
erases all forms of particularity except for the straight, the white, and the
male, which are thus established as unmarked and general. The construction and
reconstruction of this "universal" position depends on the dismissal
of the art of LGBTQ people, minorities, and women because they are seen as
failing to erase their particularities in service of the "universal".
(#111words, 4 January)
5 January
The title
of Tishani Doshi's "Girls Are Coming out of the Woods" appears in the
poem as its first line; then in four enjambed variations; and finally whole
again in the penultimate line. With the first enjambment ("Girls / are
"), they are separate from their action; their selves precede their agency.
With the second ("Girls are / coming"), their existence precedes
their agency. With the third ("Girls are coming / out of the woods"),
they are full agents who have freed themselves from danger. The fourth creates
a verbal idiom: "Girls are coming out / ..." In any sense of
"coming out", the girls are now their own public agents. (#111words,
5 January)
6 January
The opening
line of Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" treats
an abstraction as a person. This is common enough to have a name – personification
–, and Death in particular is often pictured as the hooded Grim Reaper with a
scythe. Here, though, Death becomes a carriage driver remarkable for his
"Civility", which makes the poem doubly strange: personification as a
first strangeness; the overturning of the conventional image as a second
strangeness. In a sense, the rigorous development of this opening figure in the
rest of the poem might even make it seem normal, even as the poem counts on that
double strangeness to maintain its energy. (#111words, 6 January)
7 January
In Emily
Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death", the three scenes Death
drives the speaker past echo the riddle of the Sphinx: from a childhood morning
to an afternoon of labor and a sunset of old age and retirement. Each stage
depends on the others as part of a narrative. Yet the enjambment of the stanza's
first line disrupts this narrative: before the linebreak, the children
"strive" to be educated in the classroom, but then their striving shifts
from the classroom to the playground. As ambition for the future is displaced
by the desire for a present victory, this first scene asserts its independence from
the stanza's overall narrative. (#111 words, 7 January)
8 January
It is odd,
as Emily Dickinson does, to speak of oneself as "Nobody", as one has
to be somebody in order to be able to speak. Yet there are senses in which one
might well say, "I'm nobody." In "Moonlight", Juan responds
to Chiron's mother asking who he is, "I'm nobody." That is, it is not
important who he is. Further, Odysseus says that he is "nobody" in
order to disguise who he is from Polyphemus. Finally, to say that one is not
well-known, one might say, "I'm a nobody." This last connects with
several moments in Dickinson's poem, when the speaker turns to
"advertising", or being "public", or desiring admiration.
(#111words, 8 January)
9 January
Danez
Smith's "Dinosaurs in the Hood" is mostly a movie pitch: who should
make the film, what scenes should be in it, and how "this can't be a black
movie". The pitch climaxes in the repeated phrase "& no one kills
the black boy." But then there's a call to make only the first scene:
"the little black boy / on the bus with a toy dinosaur, his eyes wide
& endless // his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there." Instead
of the movie or even the scene, this concluding image reveals the work to be
not a film that's still to be made but an already completed work: a poem.
(#111words, 9 January)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/57585/dinosaurs-in-the-hood
https://youtu.be/nJwiOTeKDOQ
10 January
In his
column "My Journey to Radical Environmentalism", Charles M. Blow describes
how he has changed his life to combat climate catastrophe, from reusable
shopping bags to getting rid of his car. The suggestions are so familiar that
there is even a catch phrase to sum them up, though Blow doesn't mention it:
"Reduce, reuse, recycle". But then he turns to his impoverished rural
childhood: "Poor people were the original recyclers before recycling was
the norm. Waste was for the wealthy." If this has inspired Blow to change
his urban adulthood, he doesn't take the point a step further: climate
catastrophe derives from an economic system based on generating surplus wealth.
(#111words, 10 January)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/opinion/radical-environmentalism.html
11 January
I have long
Spotify playlists for the years from 1964 to 1980, with music all over the
world. I put them on shuffle and discover things. For example, when I listen to
1964, 1965, and 1966 on consecutive days, Buffalo Springfield's first releases
in 1966 stand out as something new. If I then hear Jimi Hendrix in 1967, his
guitar sound is so unique – until 1968, when everybody tries to sound like him.
The Doors also stand out in 1967 with their lineup of voice, organ, guitar, and
drums, but they have little influence; apparently, nobody heard The Doors and
tried to sound like them, as so many did with Hendrix. (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 11 January)
https://open.spotify.com/user/117291987/playlist/1e95fjupOFatM2zFGGdmVk?si=jc4k_8j0R2eQW0jdAMT3DQ
https://open.spotify.com/user/117291987/playlist/0V7Cc0ryBeXj4BJJWuo9vu?si=0Je48QZxSzeY1KsnJPS7kw
12 January
For the
speaker in Morgan Parker's "Matt", "every white man or boy"
in her life "has been called Matt". These Matts finally become part
of history, enslavers raping the speaker's enslaved ancestors, whose only
defense is to smile, "almost as if / it had been rehearsed." The same
issue appears in a poem by Terrance Hayes when he remarks that "we relate
the way the descendants / Of the raped relate to the descendants of their
rapists." In the American "relation" of "relationships"
between the races, then, blacks, and especially black women, have performed
such smiles (which white "Matts" cannot read) to protect themselves
while they experience the violence of racism. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12
January)
Morgan
Parker, "Matt":
Matt has
kissed me hundreds of times
and he
kissed my ancestors, too. He held them down and
kissed them
real good. He was young and he could afford
it. When he
touched them, they always smiled, almost as if
it had been
rehearsed.
http://sixthfinch.com/parker1.html
Terrance
Hayes, "America, you just wanted change is all" (fifth poem at the
link):
Like
no
Culture
before us, we relate the way the descendants
Of the
raped relate to the descendants of their rapists.
https://www.aprweb.org/poems/american-sonnet-for-my-past-and-future-assassin
13 January
In the
first stanza of Elizabeth Bishop's "Late Air", "love-songs"
sung by "radio-singers" are tricks, like those of
"magicians" and "fortune-tellers", and they confirm the
self ("whatever you believe"). The "dew-wet" language is
itself full of trickery, with all its hyphens. In offering "better
witnesses / for love" in the "remote" lights of a radio aerial, the
second stanza privileges a different poetics: distant, dry, free of trickery,
refusing to confirm the self – like Bishop's later poetry. However, as the two
stanzas repeat their lineation and rhyme scheme, the second, "better"
poetics here can only work in collaboration with the first, and in their shared
form – "remoteness" must also "tell fortunes". (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 13 January)
Late Air
Elizabeth
Bishop
From a
magician’s midnight sleeve
the radio-singers
distribute
all their love-songs
over the
dew-wet lawns.
And like a fortune-teller’s
their
marrow-piercing guesses are whatever you believe.
But on the
Navy Yard aerial I find
better witnesses
for love on
summer nights.
Five remote
red lights
keep their nests there; Phoenixes
burning
quietly, where the dew cannot climb.
14 January
At Grateful
Dead concerts, the band rarely said more than "we'll be back in a little
bit" to close the first set and "thank you, good night" to end
the show. For me, as a result, even short announcements, especially stories
about songs, can disrupt the musical experience at concerts. But when Andreas
Schärer tells a story, as he did at this evening's concert with Emile Parisien
and Vincent Peirani at Moods in Zurich, something else can happen: the words
pick up speed and become more rhythmic, the other musicians begin to play
along, and the introduction to the song turns out to have been part of the song
all along. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 January)
Emile
Parisien, soprano saxophone; Vinvent Peirani, accordion; Andreas Schärer,
vocals
Moods,
Zurich, 14 January 2020
15 January
After a
racist remark by a "fucking guy on the street", Morgan Parker's
"Great America" introduces 35 lines of noun phrases in a vision of
"great America" as a "fall": "as if there were any
imagination / left from the fall of our stinking / expanse of sweat and dahlias
and wartimes". The sheer quantity of details erases their individual
implications. But when Parker's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"
follows Spencer Tracy to a drive-in for an ice cream, he faces "the
embarrassment of available choices" – and the flavors are not listed. In both
cases, an excess of details "embarrasses" the imagination, which must
notice details without being overwhelmed by them. (Andrew Shields, #111words,
15 January)
https://boulevardmagazine.org/morgan-parker
https://lithub.com/guess-whos-coming-to-dinnera-poem-by-morgan-parker/
16 January
James
Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" is a "meandertale" (18.22) in a
"claybook" (18.17) as well as an "allaphbed" (18.18). This
meandering tale made out of alphabets, printed in a book, and reaching all the
way back to stories originally told on clay tablets in the Tigris-Euphrates
Valley adds a valley to its name to become a "meanderthalltale"
(19.25) and incorporates many of the tales of human origins that have been
generated for millennia. All of these tales, including the paleontological
story of human origins in which the Neanderthals found in the Neander Valley play
their part, are treated as tall tales, and their claims to truth are repeatedly
exposed as violence-prone exaggerations. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16
January)
17 January
In Simon
Armitage's "A Vision", a "full-blown balsa-wood town" presents
a "vision" of the future. Its many details, such as "board-game
suburbs," offer a game to play in which "people like us" live among
"bottle-banks" and "electric cars." As "a true,
legible script", this story of the future offers a form of "true"
communication. But the poem's final quatrain finds the model in a landfill,
"unlived in and now fully extinct". The disposal of the model may appear
to erase its utopian game, but the story of the loss of "a vision"
prevents its loss, as the poem establishes its own "legible script"
that deletes and rescues the vision it describes. (Andrew Shields, #111words,
17 January)
https://genius.com/6527735
18 January
Today in
Basel, I drove through a highway tunnel with the date of its construction above
the entrance: 1985. I only moved here in 1995, so I don't remember what the
site looked like before then, and that tunnel is just part of the landscape. In
fact, since I was born in the United States in 1964, modern highways in general
have always determined the landscape of my life, along with their necessary
counterparts: parking places, parking lots, parking garages. Yet this landscape
is a twentieth-century invention that is still spreading today, as was
confirmed after I left that tunnel when I drove past a parking garage that
opened last year. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 January)
19 January
The speaker
in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" sexually propositions a
woman – for a second time. The demonstrative pronoun in the second line refers
to a previous "coy" action of hers. As he wouldn't call her that if
she had accepted his proposition, she must have rejected him beforehand.
Further, he accuses her of duplicity: he assumes that she is pretending to not
want him but actually does, with "coyness" as a delaying action to extend
the pleasure of being courted. The speaker's consideration of "time"
exaggerates that delaying game to expose it as ridiculous, end the game of
"coyness", and play a game he hopes he will enjoy more. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 19 January)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress
20 January
Near the
end of Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse", Lily Briscoe engages in
a long reverie about the late Mrs. Ramsay and ponders how understanding her
requires at least "fifty pairs of eyes". This image might seem like
it should stand for how this novel works, but in fact, it's more appropriate to
Woolf's earlier "Jacob's Room", which is hardly ever told from the
title character's perspective. Instead, other people in Jacob's life reflect on
him, and they are frequently left even more puzzled by him than Lily is by Mrs.
Ramsay. Ultimately, all those "pairs of eyes" cannot figure him out,
and Jacob remains a cipher in his own novel. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20
January)
“One wanted
fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs of eyes were not
enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.” (Virginia Woolf, “To The
Lighthouse”)
21 January
What happens when you answer a rhetorical question? On morning walks, the narrator of Jackie Kay's
"Timing" sees two people she calls the grandmother and the
granddaughter. One morning, when the grandmother glares at her, she dismisses
it: "How do I know what's inside the old lady's head?"
The rhetorical question implies it's impossible to read minds, but before and
after this, the narrator twice tries to do so: first, the woman's gaze "looks
unsettled"; then, the woman holds the girl's hand "a little too
firmly". So the rhetorical question dismisses mind reading, but the scene
as a whole offers two ways to do so as non-rhetorical answers to that question.
(Andrew Shields,
#111words, 21 January)
The grandmother in her blue padded coat stares at me
and looks unsettled. She has given me this look ever since she realized our
paths cross every day. Perhaps she dislikes fate. I don't know. How do I know
what's inside the old lady's head? She takes her granddaughter's hand and holds
it a little too firmly until we've passed each other, silently, meaningfully.
One hand on her brolly and the other holding her granddaughter's on their
way to school. (Jackie Kay,
"Timing")
22 January
One of
Greta Thunberg's most frequent points is her quotation of the IPCC report's
numbers about the "carbon budget" that would keep the earth below a
given amount of overall warming. She returns to this point to ask her listeners
– primarily but not only the world's political leaders – what they plan to do
to prevent the rapid depletion of this budget. One of the most common claims
made in response to such questions is to say that she is being too
"black-and-white" or too "apocalyptic". Like so many
criticisms of her statements and positions, this serves to distract from the
question – and from how her questions unfortunately continue to remain
unanswered. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 22 January)
23 January
Some people
make art a competition; they can draw me into it, too. Once I met a guy with a
magnificent record collection. Whenever he mentioned something I hadn't heard,
he was triumphant. His absolute favorite was a tape he'd made from the radio of
"the best recording he'd ever heard", with "perfect overdubbing":
"Aerial Boundaries", by Michael Hedges. He was incredulous when I
told him the album was mostly recorded without overdubs. To convince him, I
pretended to hold a guitar and made gestures to show him how I'd seen Michael
did it live so many times. I won, but it would've been a nicer conversation
without the coolness competition. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 January)
https://youtu.be/YaIN13aDbCc
24 January
Today, Markus
Schreiber took a photograph of five young women who were in Davos as climate
activists: Vanessa Nakate, Luisa Neubauer, Greta Thunberg, Isabelle Axelsson,
and Loukina Tille. But when AP first published the photo, Nakate, who is from
Uganda, had been cropped from the left side of the picture, leaving only the
other four activists to be seen, who are all European. When this was pointed
out to AP, they posted the full version of the photograph and said that
"there was no ill intent." Still, even if no particular people
intended to censor the presence of the activist from Africa, such moments are
tiresomely frequent manifestations of systemic racism. (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 24 January)
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ikrd/vanessa-nakate-greta-thunberg-davos
25 January
When Jane
Austen's Emma meets Harriet, she resolves to "notice her" – to grace her
with attention. Emma then resolves to "improve" Harriet, her
inferior. This personal condescension is also social: Emma will "detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good
society". That is, Harriet's friends are inferior to Emma's. Finally, Emma
will "form her opinions and her manners." In each step of this
"formation", Emma is active, Harriet passive. But when this
"formation" succeeds, Harriet becomes an active agent herself – and Emma
denounces the entire educational project. The "superior" Emma is not
willing to allow her "inferior" to improve enough to erase the difference
necessary for her superiority. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 January)
She would notice her; she would improve
her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into
good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. (Jane Austen,
"Emma")
http://www.austen.com/emma/vol1ch3.htm
26 January
Mr.
Knightley does not think well of Jane Austen's Emma's attempt to
"form" Harriet Smith; he criticizes what "Emma's doctrines"
can "give" to Harriet: not "strength of mind", but only
"a little polish". Education, that is, should aim to construct depth:
Knightley sees Emma as only influencing Harriet's lovely surface instead of getting
beyond the superficial to the depth of "mind". Further, the
"polishing" of the surface is weak compared to the
"strength" that is Knightley's goal in education. If Emma sees her education
of Harriet as the "formation" of a passive object, Knightley sees education
as the transformation of the superficial into the deep and the weak into the
strong. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 January)
"I am
much mistaken if Emma's doctrines give any strength of mind, or tend at all to
make a girl adapt herself rationally to the varieties of her situation in life.
– They only give a little polish."
http://www.austen.com/emma/vol1ch5.htm
27 January
The
portmanteaus in "Finnegans Wake", such as
"meanderthalltale" (19.25), may be more spectacular, but even quite simple
words like "troupe" (49.20) can end up having several contextually
motivated meanings. The salient sense of "troupe" here is a
theatrical company; this "utility man" is an actor who plays many
small roles, but Orani can also cover for leads. If the theatrical terms peppering
this page further motivate this reading, the earlier mentions of "the
Crimean war" (49.5) and other military terms also resonate with military
"troops". Finally, the page is also riddled with bird names, and French
"troupe" can be a flock of birds. So, like Orani, "troupe" "sustains
long parts" here. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 January)
Under the
name of Orani he may have been the utility man of the troupe capable of
sustaining long parts at short notice. (James Joyce, "Finnegans
Wake", 49.19-21)
28 January
The doubling
caused by enjambment in line two of Shakespeare's sonnet 116 doesn't involve
literal and figurative senses, like metaphor. Instead, it's like zeugma: a
later element alters an earlier element (as in Dickens). By itself, "love
is not love" is nonsense, but it could mean that "a word doesn't mean
what it says it means". The following relative clause alters that sense:
inconstant love isn't love – or, a word may be used incorrectly. With the
enjambment, then, the sense of "love is not love" itself "finds
alteration" as the relative clause alters the meaning of the main clause. As
enjambment is a figure, then, is poetic form in general rhetoric? (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 28 January)
"Love
is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds" (William Shakespeare,
Sonnet CXVI)
"Mr.
Pickwick took a seat and the paper" (Charles Dickens, "The Pickwick
Papers")
29 January
Bored by
Harriet's indecisiveness at a shop, Jane Austen's Emma goes "to the door
for amusement." She hopes to see something of interest to her, perhaps one
of the various other members of local society, or even "a stray
letter-boy", as a letter is always of interest. When she sees lower-class
people of the village, she is still "amused enough" by them to remain
at the door. So even when they are "nothing", both society and the
lack of it are more interesting to her than her protegée, whose indecision
keeps her in the position of the passive object where Emma not only once found
but also now still keeps her. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 January)
Harriet,
tempted by every thing and swayed by half a word, was always very long at a
purchase; and while she was still hanging over muslins and changing her mind,
Emma went to the door for amusement. – Much could not be hoped from the traffic
of even the busiest part of Highbury; – Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr.
William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole's carriage-horses
returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the
liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on
the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with
her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of
dawdling children round the baker's little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread,
she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough
still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing
nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
30 January
The first
sentence of Jane Austen's "Persuasion" offers six reasons to read:
amusement, occupation, consolation, the rousing of the faculties, the
transformation of "unwelcome sensations", and narcissistic
identification. The joke is that the book in question is "the
Baronetage", a lexicon of noble families. Yet the reasons could all be offered
as serious justifications for reading classic literature or the Bible, and one of
them even parodies Aristotelian catharsis, as those "unwelcome
sensations" are "changed naturally into pity and contempt"
instead of "pity and fear". If Sir Walter's preferred mode is
narcissism, the novel's mockery of him undercuts it as a model for reading
"Persuasion" itself – including identification with Anne Elliot.
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 January)
Sir Walter
Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own
amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation
for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were
roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the
earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic
affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost
endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were
powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. (Jane
Austen, "Persuasion")
31 January
The most
convincing discussions I have seen of "American Dirt", by Jeanine
Cummins, have all insisted that the issue is not "cultural appropriation" but the author's stereotyping of Mexicans and Mexico. As an American migrant to Switzerland, if
I wrote a novel set in Basel about people from
Basel, I would need to be careful that my
Swiss characters were not based on stereotypes about Swiss people –
and that my "expat" characters were not based on stereotypes about
expats, either. If I succumbed to stereotyping while writing this hypothetical book, then my "appropriation" of Swiss (and expat) culture would
be "inappropriate" – but for the reliance on clichés, not for "cultural
appropriation". (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 31 January)
1 February
Wolfgang
Muthspiel, Jeff Ballard, and Larry Grenadier played the same sets at their
shows at the Bird's Eye in Basel last night and tonight. Initially, I thought they were playing more "freely" tonight: the first tune, "Wondering", still ended with an accompanied drum solo, but instead of a steady guitar-bass ostinato, the
accompaniment had more rhythmic variation, and Ballard responded
accordingly. But I later realized it was not that
the tunes were more "arranged" one night and "freer" the second. Rather, what had sounded arranged
the first time had been improvised. Seeing two shows in a row reveals how these musicians play so well together that their improvisations sound like
arrangements. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 1 February)
2 February
When
Captain Wentworth returns to Anne Elliot's neighborhood in
"Persuasion", they are sure to cross paths. But just when they are
about to first meet after seven years, her nephew has "a bad fall".
Nothing further is said about the fall itself – neither where, nor when, nor
how he fell. So although this accident generates "serious anxiety" for
the characters, it generates no anxiety in the narrative. Beyond the narrative delay
it causes, it has no figurative implications in the marriage plot as a whole.
That is, even though "falls" can be laden with implications, this one
is just a narrative device, and not a metaphor, metonymy, or symbol for
anything. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 February)
She and
Mary were actually setting forward for the Great House, where, as she
afterwards learnt, they must inevitably have found him, when they were stopped
by the eldest boy's being at that moment brought home in consequence of a bad
fall. The child's situation put the visit entirely aside; but she could not
hear of her escape with indifference, even in the midst of the serious anxiety
which they afterwards felt on his account. (Jane Austen,
"Persuasion")
3 February
In the beginning
of "The Good Place", Michael first tells the newly deceased Eleanor that
"every religion guessed about
5%" of the
afterlife and then develops this statistical perspective on narrative: while on
mushrooms, Doug Forcett, "a stoner kid ... during the 1970s",
imagined the afterlife in a "long monologue where he got like 92%
correct". Psychedelic hallucinations are often connected to religious
mysticism, but Michael's version of Doug's story does not appeal to that
tradition. Instead, Michael understands that vision in terms of his narrative
statistics. This is consistent with the statistical narrative of the show's afterlife,
with its tally of points to determine who gets into "the good place".
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 February)
Good Place
1:1
Hindus are a little
bit right, Muslims a little bit. Jews, Christians, Buddhists, every religion
guessed about 5%, except for Doug Forcett. [...] Doug was a stoner kid who lived in Calgary during the 1970s. One
night, he got really high on mushrooms, and his best friend, Randy, said,
"Hey, what do you think happens after we die?" And Doug just launched
into this long monologue where he got like 92% correct. I
mean, we couldn't believe what we were hearing.
4 February
After
listening to his aunt, his uncle, and "old Cotter" discuss Father
Flynn's death, the narrator of James Joyce's "The Sisters" lies
awake, angry and confused. The anger comes from Cotter's condescension towards
him as an "impressionable" child whose behavior and knowledge of the
world needs supervision. The confusion comes from Cotter's elliptical
self-censorship: his "unfinished sentences" communicate with the
adults but leave the narrator to "extract meaning" from his
omissions. Here, the child is left puzzled by the allusive nature of socially
acceptable adult discussion. Even as the ellipses still communicate by
implication, so much is left out, not just to protect children's
"impressionable" minds but also to avoid scandal. (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 4 February)
– It's bad for children, said old
Cotter, because their minds are so impressionable. When children see things
like that, you know, it has an effect. . . .
I crammed my mouth with stirabout
for fear I might give utterance to my anger. Tiresome old red-nosed imbecile!
It was late when I fell asleep.
Though I was angry with old Cotter for alluding to me as a child, I puzzled my
head to extract meaning from his unfinished sentences. (James Joyce, "The
Sisters")
5 February
While
skipping school with a friend, the narrator of James Joyce's "An
Encounter" takes a ferry across the Liffey, observes a "graceful
three-master" being unloaded, and hears that it is from Norway: "I
went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend [...]." Presumably, he
fails to read the writing on the ship because it is in a language he does not
understand. He then goes on to try to interpret the sailors on the basis of
some symbolism of "green eyes". Ultimately, he cannot read the
foreign alphabet, nor is he able to read "the foreign sailors" in
terms of a symbolic language that remains but "a confused notion".
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 February)
When we
landed we watched the discharging of the graceful three-master which we had
observed from the other quay. Some bystander said that she was a Norwegian
vessel. I went to the stern and tried to decipher the legend upon it but,
failing to do so, I came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any
of them green eyes for I had some confused notion. . . . (James Joyce, "An
Encounter")
6 February
In the
moments I discussed from James Joyce's "The Sisters" and "An
Encounter", the narrators cannot understand something because they lack
information – and in "An Encounter", additionally, the narrator doesn't
know the language he tries to read. In "Araby", in contrast, after
"Mangan's sister" tells the narrator about the "Araby"
bazaar, he is unable to read because of a surplus: "At night in my bedroom
and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I strove to
read." In private and in public, the excess of the beloved image renders
the text on the page as incomprehensible as the incomplete texts in the other
two stories. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 February)
7 February
In James
Joyce's "Eveline", the title character ponders her forthcoming
departure from Ireland with her lover Frank. In her reflections, she recalls
many details of her life, including the loss of her mother many years earlier:
"As she mused the pitiful vision of her mother's life laid its spell on
the very quick of her being [...]." In "Araby", the image of the
beloved comes between the narrator and the page; here, the "spell" of
Eveline's "vision" of her mother comes between herself and her
thoughts. Such spells leave Joyce's characters unable to read, think, and
realize their desires "quickly" – in both the lively and the timely sense
of the word. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7 February)
8 February
In the
first episode of "The Good Place", Eleanor assumes her parents are
both in "the bad place": "Maybe they're being used to torture
each other." She has already heard audio of people screaming but not yet learned
about "demons", so she knows people are tortured, but not by whom.
Her joke is consistent with what she knows and with her sense of how her
parents tortured each other while alive. Even though this is actually a sign of
what's to come, the remark's humor and its consistency with her knowledge keeps
it from standing out. If it is "foreshadowing", its integration into its
moment keeps its from casting any "shadow". (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 8 February)
9 February
The
"imaginary shotguns" in Matthew Olzmann's poem first seem to come
from a teenager's imagination: "There’s a teenager in an SUV, shopping
mall, or nightclub / with an imaginary shotgun." This teenager could be
remembering playing cops and robbers, or, more frighteningly, imagining
shooting up a mall or nightclub. But then it's not the teenager who's doing the
imagining: "[...] there’s a kid with an imaginary shotgun, / and the men
who claim to see it will return with real guns." So the shotgun is
imagined by others who perceive the kid as a potential threat, and the violent
threat comes from those who actually have guns, not from the teenager. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 9 February)
http://foggedclarity.com/article/imaginary-shotguns/
10 February
Neil Young
is "a dreamer of pictures" ("Cinnamon Girl"), and one he
has dreamt again and again is the ideal of being somewhere else and in love. In
the next song on "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere", the title track,
the desired "elsewhere" is "back home", where "a woman
that I'd like to get to know" is living. Further, this return home offers
the chance to be "just passing time". This may be an escape from the
"day-to-day running around" of "nowhere". But since
"utopia" means "nowhere" and this paradisiacal
"home" is a rejection of "nowhere", the picture dreamed of
here rejects a utopian vision in favor of something more "homely".
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 10 February)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsZjKQEN1tY
https://genius.com/Neil-young-and-crazy-horse-everybody-knows-this-is-nowhere-lyrics
11 February
"After
the Gold Rush" begins with a dream of an archaic world of "knights in
armor" and "fanfares". This offers an escape from the
present-day world in the second stanza: "a burned-out basement" where
the music of "peasants singing and drummers drumming" has become "a
band playing in my head". With the past only a dream, there's no escape
except to get high. If the final stanza provides an alternative escape, it's a
dystopian dream where only "the chosen ones" will leave earth for
"a new home in the sun". In this song, then, Neil Young's otherwise
often utopian vision of elsewhere offers only a lost past and an apocalyptic
future. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 February)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Zf4D1tHdw
https://genius.com/Neil-young-after-the-gold-rush-lyrics
12 February
In Neil Young's
"Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" and "After the Gold
Rush", "home" is somewhere else: "back home" and
"a new home in the sun", respectively. In "Oh Lonesome Me",
a Don Gibson cover on "After the Gold Rush", "home" is a
trap: "Everybody's going out and having fun; / I'm a fool for staying home
and having none. / I can't get over how she set me free." The only imaginable
"elsewhere" is where she is: "She's out and fancy free."
Unlike in Young's own songs, then, this "elsewhere" offers no escape,
and since one is already at home, there's no alternative "home" in
the past or the future. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 February)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p_yH5ItSgU
https://genius.com/Neil-young-oh-lonesome-me-lyrics
13 February
In the
utopia of Neil Young's "Old Man", there's no beloved for the song's
young man to be with: "Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of
two." If the lonely paradise offers no escape but finding someone else, experiences
of "love lost" make that wish seem unfulfillable, and create a desire
for "things that don't get lost". As the unlosable would be
"like a coin that won't get tossed", loss results from chances and
choices one should avoid. But the untossed coin also figures the young man himself
"rolling home to you". Avoiding chance and choice, he keeps in motion
while still returning "home" to his lonely paradise. (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 13 February)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAtDrFdomN4
https://genius.com/Neil-young-old-man-lyrics
14 February
In James
Joyce's "After the Race", the confusion so many of Joyce's characters
experience comes from "the noise of the car" that the young, wealthy
Jimmy is in the back seat of, as well as a "deep bass hum of melody"
from his seatmate. Whenever the two Frenchmen in front of the car turn back to
speak to the two men in the back, it is such a strain for Jimmy "to catch
the quick phrase" that all he can do is "make a deft guess at the
meaning" and hope his "suitable answer" is appropriate. The
interference of noise and music makes the interpretation of language a matter
of guesswork. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 February)
The car ran
on merrily with its cargo of hilarious youth. The two cousins sat on the front
seat; Jimmy and his Hungarian friend sat behind. Decidedly Villona was in
excellent spirits; he kept up a deep bass hum of melody for miles of the road.
The Frenchmen flung their laughter and light words over their shoulders and
often Jimmy had to strain forward to catch the quick phrase. This was not
altogether pleasant for him, as he had nearly always to make a deft guess at
the meaning and shout back a suitable answer in the face of a high wind.
Besides Villona's humming would confuse anybody; the noise of the car, too. (James
Joyce, "After the Race")
15 February
In James
Joyce's "Two Gallants", Corley goes off with a woman and leaves
Lenehan to himself for a few hours. While passing the time, Lenehan has supper
and imagines what Corley and the woman are doing: "[H]e heard Corley's
voice in deep energetic gallantries and saw again the leer of the young woman's
mouth." Lenehan hears a voice and sees a mouth: Corley's voice captivated
him earlier with its tale of seduction, while her "leer" is almost
all he has perceived of her. In this metonymic "vision" that leads
him to "feel keenly his own poverty of purse and spirit," Lenehan
cannot imagine anything beyond these fragments of what he perceived. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 15 February)
In his
imagination he beheld the pair of lovers walking along some dark road; he heard
Corley's voice in deep energetic gallantries and saw again the leer of the
young woman's mouth. This vision made him feel keenly his own poverty of purse
and spirit. (James Joyce, "Two Gallants")
16 February
In James
Joyce's "The Boarding House", Mr Doran recalls "his confession
of the night before" about his affair with Polly, his landlady's daughter.
His story is only a confession in the performative frame that determines its
interpretation by the priest, whose interrogation "draws out" the
"ridiculous details" and fills in the gaps left by Doran's discretion
and embarrassment about details. The interaction of confession and
interrogation produces a ridiculous story with as few gaps as possible. But in
this moment of closure and completeness, one gap remains: whether Doran will use
the social and theological "loophole" of marriage. The exhaustively
detailed story leaves only the gap authorized by society and religion. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 16 February)
The
recollection of his confession of the night before was a cause of acute pain to
him; the priest had drawn out every ridiculous detail of the affair and in the
end had so magnified his sin that he was almost thankful at being afforded a
loophole of reparation. (James Joyce, "The Boarding House")
17 February
Today, our
class discussions of Emma's plan for Harriet's "formation"
reconsidered the sequence of verbs here.
When Emma "notices" Harriet, she still sees Harriet as a person in
her own right, but her subsequent assumption that Harriet is inferior and needs
improving begins to strip Harriet of her personhood. The further step of
"detaching" her from her friends and "introducing" her to
Emma's "society" negates Harriet's already existing social identity
and replaces it with Emma's. And finally, the step of "forming her
opinions and her manners" nullfiies Harriet's thoughts and actions and
leaves behind a cipher. Thus, Emma's creation of a socially acceptable person
first requires the erasure of Harriet's personhood. (Andrew Shields, #111words,
17 February)
She would notice her; she would improve
her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into
good society; she would form her opinions and her manners. (Jane Austen,
"Emma")
https://www.facebook.com/andrewjshields/posts/10156751410681615
18 January
For Ralf
Simon, a guest's arrival is a "primal scene" of literature: as guests
have stories to tell, the "story within a story" is essential to storytelling.
This analysis connects with Aristotle's "Poetics" and the tragedies
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which I've been slowly reading for
several years now. The plays are riddled with scenes in which someone tells a
story about events elsewhere: for example, a messenger's description of
Orestes's murder of Aegisthus in Euripides's "Electra". The
pervasiveness of such "messenger stories" is consistent with Aristotle's
observation that tragedies have "unity of place": if plays never
leave their main locations, anything happening elsewhere has to be an embedded
story. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 February)
https://edoc.unibas.ch/59775/
19 February
In these lines
from "Finnegans Wake", as Giordano Bruno becomes "Father San
Browne" and "Padre Don Bruno", his characterisitics are doubled
and varied as well. This priest takes "tea and toast" and toasts the
"quaintesttest yarnspinner" – that is, he tells a tale to a tale-teller
who is doubly superlative (while also perhaps passing a kind of test twice). At
the same time, he is a faithful comforter (treuer Tröster in German) – and
offering comfort is another form of yarn-spinning. But this comforted person is
not a storyteller: the "quain-" becomes "queen of
Iar-Spain" ("Iar" is Irish for "west"), which echoes
the Spanish elements mixed with English in Bruno's two names here. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 19 February)
If Father San Browne, tea and toaster to that
quaintesttest of yarnspinners is Padre Don Bruno, treu and troster to the
queen of Iar-Spain
[...] (James Joyce, "Finnegans Wake", 50.19-21)
20 February
This paper
uses "compositional semantics" to analyze the grammar and semantics
of Emily Dickinson's "My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun". Such
thorough attention to a poem's details is often lacking in literary criticism. The
resulting identification of "plausible" interpretations of the poem is
meant to offer a foundation for "broader" interpretations. But the
doubleness of rhetoric troubles the paper's attempt to strictly distinguish
"grammatical" analysis and "broader" interpretations. In
particular, the authors ignore the poem's double personification of "my
life" and "a loaded gun". This failure to consider rhetoric
leads to an unconvincing insistence that the poem's speaker is "either a
person or a gun" rather than a personified gun. (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 20 February)
Bauer, M., Bade, N.,
Beck, S., et al. (2015). Emily Dickinson’s “My life had stood a loaded gun” –
An interdisciplinary analysis. Journal of Literary Semantics, 44(2), pp.
115-140. Retrieved 20 Feb. 2020, from doi:10.1515/jls-2015-0010
21 February
The
"Loaded Gun" that stands "in Corners" in Emily Dickinson's
poem has an unrealized potential for violence. Personified and picked up by its
"Owner", the gun realizes its violence in the hunt "in Sovreign
Woods" as speech echoed by the surrounding "Mountains". As the
firing of the gun during the hunt, this violent speech is controlled and
released in a series of moments. But in the next stanza, the gun's violence becomes
non-verbal language: a smile that is more explosive now, like Vesuvius. If the
personified gun figures a person, then their repressed violence cannot always
be released in a controlled fashion when it emerges from the
"corners" of their life. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 21 February)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52737/my-life-had-stood-a-loaded-gun-764
22 February
Along with
the emotional range of the actresses who play the March sisters (Saoirse Ronan,
Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, and Eliza Scanlen) and the brilliantly implemented range
of editing styles from rambunctious scenes with rapid, multi-camera cuts to
long, single-camera shots, the power, energy, and significance of Grete
Gerwig's adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women" is punctuated
by three scenes with pairs of actresses: first, Laura Dern and Ronan as mother
and daughter; later, Meryl Streep and Ronan as aunt and daughter; finally, Streep
and Dern as somewhat antagonistic sisters-in-law. Here, three generations of
magnificent actresses manifest an artistic tradition of women's creativity that
Jo March laments the absence of. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 22 February)
23 January
At a
concert last month, Ronny Graupe used no pedals and only altered the sound of
his electric guitar with the knobs, which highlighted the instrument's percussive
potential. The night before, I'd heard similar things on nylon-strong guitar
from Julio Azcano, but a week later, when Wolfgang Muthspiel also explored the
classical guitar's percussiveness (in a Ralph Towner style he shares with
Azcano), it made me really notice the contrast with his electric-guitar playing:
the effects washed out the attack of fingers and picks. Today, though, on electric
guitar with pedals and often heavily layered delay, Mary Halvorson used her
effects to highlight rather than efface the percussiveness of her style.
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 February)
24 January
In Jane
Austen's "Emma", Mr. Elton offers Emma and Harriet a riddle about
courtship "which a friend of his had addressed to a young lady." To Emma,
Mr. Elton attributes the riddle to a friend as rhetoric, saying "friend"
but meaning himself. This double reference is itself further doubled by the openness
of the dedication of the charade "To Miss ––": though Emma first sees
this as Harriet, it turns out to be Emma herself. But given the later
implication that Mr. Elton gave the same charade to his future wife, the riddle
serves as material for any man to use to court any woman, with all of them
being interchangeable. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 February)
25 February
When the
narrator of James Joyce's "Araby" goes marketing on Saturday evenings
with his aunt, the "flaring streets" are filled with sound: "[...]
the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys […], the nasal
chanting of street-singers". Everyday "curses" are vulgarities,
but in religion, curses call for bad things to happen to someone. Further, a
"litany" is a long, boring list but also a ritual call-and-response
prayer. Finally, if "chanting" can refer to the singing of street-singers,
it even more strongly recalls Gregorian chanting in medieval churches. The
words that characterize the vulgar, everyday world here all have
straightforward worldly senses but combine to turn the market into a church.
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 February)
26 February
Jim
Jarmusch's "Down by Law" begins with women telling men off. First,
Ellen Barkin smashes Tom Waits's possessions while he sits around listlessly.
Then, Billie Neal lies naked in bed and mocks John Lurie while he counts his
money. Overall, the movie's focus is on Waits and Lurie, but the actresses
steal the opening scenes. And at the end of the film, after Waits and Lurie
have wandered through the bayou with Roberto Benigni as escaped convicts, Nicoletta Braschi also steals the show. In
fact, despite the focus on men in Jarmusch's films, the women get regular
opportunities to put the men in their place, both as characters and as actresses.
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 February)
27 February
In the
first line of Emily Dickinson's "'Why do I love' You, Sir?" (459), a woman echoes a man's question
about her love of him. The second line's "because" offers an anti-reason.
Completing that clause, the third line offers two readings: if the man is
"wind" and the woman "grass", she loves him for not needing
her; if the woman is "wind" and the man "grass", she doesn't
need him but implicitly loves him anyway. Only the former works with the fourth
line: if "the Wind does not require the Grass / to answer", he shouldn't
ask her that question. The enjambments establish four answers that refuse to answer
his question. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 February)
"Why do I
love" You, Sir?
Because —
The Wind does not
require the Grass
To answer — Wherefore
when He pass
She cannot keep Her
place.
28 February
Today, our
class discussion of Dickinson's "'Why do I love' You, Sir?" (459) began
with two students playing a female "I" and a male "You" in
a dialogic prelude to the poem:
She:
"I love you."
He:
"Why do you love me?"
She continued
with the poem's first line, which implies such a prelude: she responds to his
response to her statement. And the entire scene, including the poem, consists
of refusals: he refuses to respond by saying that he loves her, too; she
doesn't answer his question but echoes it back to him in the poem's first line
and then continues to refuse to answer him as I discussed yesterday. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 28 February)
"Why do I
love" You, Sir?
Because —
The Wind does not
require the Grass
To answer — Wherefore
when He pass
She cannot keep Her
place.
29 February
Before he
first reads the Bible on his island, Robinson Crusoe chews tobacco as a cure
and is "almost stupefied" by it. Further, he soaks some in rum for
later, then smokes more. Thus "too much disturbed" to read, he
"casually" turns to Psalm 50:15: “Call on Me in the day of trouble,
and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.” After kneeling to pray for
the first time in his life – for that deliverance – he drinks the tobacco-laced
rum and goes to bed. In his drug-induced stupor and disturbance, he accidentally
stumbles on Sortes Sacrae – randomly opening the Bible for guidance – and feels
personally addressed by the Psalm. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 February)
1 March
When Roberto
(Roberto Benigni) appears in "Down by Law", Zack (Tom Waits) echoes his
first line: "Yeah, 'It's a sad and beautiful world', pal. That's a good
one." This repetition dismisses Roberto's words. After drinking from his
flask and humming a melody, Zack tells Roberto to "buzz off."
Roberto's echo of these words takes a surprising turn: "Thank you. Buzz
off to you, too." This repetition becomes a lesson, and Roberto even notes
the phrase down and practices it as he walks away. So Roberto accepts Zack's
phrase, while Zack appears to reject Roberto's – but once Roberto's gone, Zack
gives his melody a text: "It is a sad and beautiful world." (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 1 March)
https://youtu.be/lp2IHaeflYo
2 March
In 1929, in
"A Room of One's Own", Virginia Woolf said writers need "five
hundred a year and a room of one's own". According to a website, this is
about £32,000 in 2020 – or $41,000 or 32,000 CHF. Ideally, then, you need to
earn that much per year with your writing to be a writer. But Woolf is not
talking about salary; she's talking about interest. So to make $40,000 a year,
you would need to have an investment that pays that much in interest every
year: $1,000,000 at 4% interest, for example. So unless she's successful
enough, a Woolfian writer needs to be a millionaire and have a reliable
investment. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 March)
https://www.in2013dollars.com/uk/inflation/1929?amount=500
3 March
"Life
is short," said Hippocrates. "Life is short", begins Maggie
Smith's poem "Good Bones", "though I keep this from my
children." So the speaker lets her children think life is long and thus
conceals a truth that might frighten them, along with a series of other things
she doesn't tell them, all of which add up to the world being "a real
shithole", despite its "good bones". Yet even as the poem examines
the world's dark side and feels the need to conceal it, it ends with a call for
aesthetic transformation of the "shithole": "You could make this
place beautiful." Life may be short, but "art is long",
Hippocrates added. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 March)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones
4 March
"Good
Bones" measures life's length ("short"). This measuring first
counts life and then accounts for the speaker's life in accounts both counted
("a thousand ways") and unaccounted for ("kept from
children"). In lines 5-13, accounting becomes statistics ("fifty
percent"), another counting of accounts: each side of each "for every
X a Y" is a story. Then accounting becomes two scenes of selling:
"selling the world" to the children and a realtor's selling of a
house. Yet both these sales focus on aesthetics, on "making the place
beautiful". If this economic aesthetic conceals "shitholes", the
poem's own aesthetic revelation of one's implication in the world's accounts
enacts an aesthetic and ethical accountability. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 4
March)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bones
5 March
Crusoe's
second turn to Sortes Sacrae is motivated by his fear of the
"savages" who occasionally visit his island. "Discomposed"
by the thought of them, he recalls the verse that turned up before, is
"comforted", and prays again for the promised "deliverance".
After praying, he opens the Bible and reads Psalm 27:14 and its call to
"wait on the Lord." Again, he is comforted, this time so much that he
expresses it with adynaton, the trope of inexpressibility. Through his bibliomancy
and rhetoric, Crusoe constructs his European, Christian perspective, which
created the idea of "savages" in the first place, as the only way to
be "delivered" and "comforted" from that "savagery".
(Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 March)
One morning
early, lying in my bed, and filled with thoughts about my danger from the
appearances of savages, I found it discomposed me very much; upon which these
words of the Scripture came into my thoughts, “Call upon Me in the day of
trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify Me.” Upon this, rising
cheerfully out of my bed, my heart was not only comforted, but I was guided and
encouraged to pray earnestly to God for deliverance: when I had done praying I
took up my Bible, and opening it to read, the first words that presented to me
were, “Wait on the Lord, and be of good cheer, and He shall strengthen thy
heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.” It is impossible to express the comfort this
gave me. In answer, I thankfully laid down the book, and was no more sad, at
least on that occasion. (Daniel Defoe, "Robinson Crusoe")
6 March
In James
Joyce's "The Boarding House", when Mr Mooney the butcher "goes
for his wife with the cleaver," he repurposes a tool of their trade as a
weapon. After their separation, Mrs Mooney leaves that trade, opens a boarding
house, and finds herself needing to make decisions when her daughter gets
involved with one of the boarders: "She dealt with moral problems as a
cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind." Like
her ex-husband, she also repurposes the tool of her former trade, but as a
figure for the decisiveness and skill with which she handles the weapons not of
violence but of rhetoric. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 March)
7 March
In
"Persuasion", Anne Elliot challenges Captain Harville's ideas about
men and women: "Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own
story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been
in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything." This is Miranda
Fricker's "hermeneutical injustice": Anne wants to articulate an idea
but doesn't have a concept for it. This isn't due to a fault in herself;
rather, the society she lives in doesn't have any concepts for her ideas. So
she can identify the problem – men wrote the sources of people's ideas – but
cannot name it without the concept of sexism. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7
March)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_injustice
8 March
What Joyce
called the "scrupulous meanness" of "Dubliners" makes the
text a relatively "neutral" space for projection, and the ideas that
interpreters project into this space are like "Mangan's sister" for
the narrator of "Araby" or Polly's "hopes and visions" at
the end of "The Boarding House": they make it impossible to interpret
what one sees, just as the narrator of "Araby" cannot read through
his desire, or Polly's "fixed" gaze does not see "the white
pillows" in front of her. One thus interprets one's own desire for a full
interpretation rather than the stories' actual "meanness" (with my
own impossible desire being to erase the desires that erase genuine
interpretation). (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 March)
At night in
my bedroom and by day in the classroom her image came between me and the page I
strove to read. (James Joyce, "Araby")
Her hopes
and visions were so intricate that she no longer saw the white pillows on which
her gaze was fixed or remembered that she was waiting for anything. (James
Joyce, "The Boarding House")
9 March
Coronavirus
measures mention how people always touch their faces, and that's made me aware
of how often I do so. But I belong to two types of people that probably touch
their faces more often than average: people with glasses, and people with hay
fever. I often touch my face because of my glasses: taking them off to wipe
them, or pushing them up (as I unconsciously did while typing this very
sentence – and later while revising it). And during hay-fever season, despite
medication, I often rub itches around my eyes.– I wonder what other categories
of people touch their faces unusually often. (And I just pushed my glasses up
again.) (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 March)
10 March
Today, I
found another example of a pattern I have been writing about in James Joyce's
"Dubliners": how characters cannot perceive their surroundings because
of their fantasies about the objects of their desires. But this example is near
the end of Virginia Woolf's novel "Orlando": "[...] she was now
a very indifferent witness to the truth of what was before her [...]."
Woolf's narrator goes on to offer a general reflection on reverie: "[...]
some say that all our most violent passions, and art and religion, are the
reflections which we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the
visible world is obscured for the time." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 10
March)
11 March
The
parallelism that begins Emily Dickinson's "Some keep the Sabbath going to
Church –" (236) replaces words in the first line with others in the
second: "Some" with "I"; "going to Church" with
"staying at Home". The third and fourth lines continue this substitution
but reverse the terms: first the "Bobolink" and "Orchard"
of "Home", then the "Chorister" and "Dome" of
"church". Although this chiasmus isn't as sarcastic as the first two
lines of the third stanza, with "God" "a noted Clergyman"
whose "sermon is never long", the first stanza thus already
establishes the poem's reversal of priority, with a societal service at church
second to a natural service at home. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 March)
236 Some
keep the Sabbath going to Church —
Some keep
the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it,
staying at Home —
With a
Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an
Orchard, for a Dome —
Some keep
the Sabbath in Surplice —
I, just
wear my Wings —
And instead
of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little
Sexton — sings.
God
preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the
sermon is never long,
So instead
of getting to Heaven, at last —
I'm going,
all along.
11 March
In the
first three stanzas of Emily Dickinson's "A Bird, came down the Walk
–" (359), the speaker only appears through observations of that bird from
a distance ("I saw") and reflections on its behavior and appearance
("I thought"). The first line of the fourth stanza may then seem to maintain
the speaker's focus on the bird: "Like one in danger, Cautious". But
even though the line is end-stopped and not enjambed, the next line shifts the
perspective and makes it the speaker who is "like one in danger". As
the physical distance between them disappears, then bird and speaker are successively
characterized with the same words, even without repeating them. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 12 March)
359 A Bird,
came down the Walk —
A Bird,
came down the Walk —
He did not
know I saw —
He bit an
Angle Worm in halves
And ate the
fellow, raw,
And then,
he drank a Dew –
From a
convenient Grass —
And then
hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a
Beetle pass —
He glanced
with rapid eyes,
That
hurried all abroad —
They looked
like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred
his Velvet Head. –
Like one in
danger, Cautious,
I offered
him a Crumb,
And he
unrolled his feathers,
And rowed
him softer Home —
Than Oars
divide the Ocean,
Too silver
for a seam,
Or
Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap,
plashless as they swim.
13 March
"111
Words a Day" encourages students to make strong claims in clear, concise,
precise, and direct texts. In class today, several students said that, both in
school and at university, they have had their attempts to think for themselves
censored by instructors, who even say that young writers don't know enough or
have enough experience to make independent claims. This is pedogically,
academically, and ethically irresponsible: it is bad teaching to discourage
independent thinking; such discouragement of young scholars from asserting
their own ideas undercuts the methods of scholarship; and dismissing their
status as knowers negates their position as full participants not only in
discourse but in society as a whole. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 March)
14 March
Only when Jane
Austen's Emma is angry at Mr. and Mr. Elton does she notice her own politeness.
Despite Elton's irritating attention at Mr Weston's party, she has "the
comfort of appearing very polite, while feeling very cross." The
"comfort" of behaving properly thus covers up her anger. When he then
proposes to her, she first restrains her anger, but when expressing it becomes
appropriate, she rebukes him "with fewer struggles for politeness." This
"struggle for politeness" later returns when the new Mrs Elton
assumes she's Emma's social equal: "It was as much as Emma could bear,
without being impolite." Austenian politeness is thus a means of
concealing anger and offense. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 March)
15 March
In Jim
Jarmusch's "Ghost Dog", Louise Vargo (Tricia Vessey) offers her
lover's killer, Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), her book "Rashomon":
"Ancient Japan was a pretty strange place." Later, Ghost Dog talks to
Pearline (Camille Winbush), an avid young reader, and loans her the book:
"You just gotta promise that
when you read it, you come tell me what you think." When she returns it, she says
of her favorite story: "It's one story, but each person sees a totally
different story." But first she says, "Ancient Japan was a pretty
weird place." These women offer a counter-narrative to Ghost Dog's
"strange" life and death in the "weird place" of contemporary
America. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 March)
16 March
In October
1948, President Harry S. Truman gave a campaign speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,
which addressed, among other things, his decision to use the atomic bomb
against Japan in August, 1945: "As President of the United States, I had the fateful responsibility of
deciding whether or not to use this weapon for the first time. It was the
hardest decision I ever had to make. But the President cannot duck hard
problems–he cannot pass the buck." Last Friday, President Donald
J. Trump was asked at a press conference whether he takes responsibility for
the "lag in testing" for coronavirus–and he passed the buck: "I
don’t take responsibility at all." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 March)
17 March
In the
first chapter of Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go", the narrator
Kathy remembers sitting at a window with other schoolgirls watching boys outside.
While the girls all know Tommy, the best athlete, is about to be chosen last to
humiliate him, Kathy remembers their perspective as "detached". They are
thus like Henry James's "watcher at the window", who observes from a
distinterested position. But such observers can also be interested judges, and
Kathy feels compelled to add that they did not "relish the prospect"
of Tommy's humiliation. Still, they did "relish" the overall scene, and
their pleasure depended on the humiliating judgment they claimed to have no
interest in. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 March)
And I realised that
for Ruth and the others, whatever the boys chose to do was pretty remote from
us; whether we approved or not didn't come into it. We were gathered around the
windows at that moment not because we relished the prospect of seeing Tommy get
humiliated yet again, but just because we'd heard about this latest plot and
were vaguely curious to watch it unfold. In those days, I don't think what the
boys did amongst themselves went much deeper than that. For Ruth, for the
others, it was that detached, and the chances are that's how it was for me too. (Kazuo Ishiguro, "Never Let Me
Go")
18 March
When James
Joyce's Eveline breaks out of her indecision about emigrating "Buenos
Ayres" with her fiancé Frank, he is the agent of her "escape" in
the "would" constructions of free indirect thought: "Frank would
save her ... give her life, perhaps love, ... take her in his arms, fold her in
his arms ... save her." Here, Frank gives her salvation, life, and perhaps
romance, as well as comfort and protection. But when she is at the North Wall
in Dublin to meet him and go on board ship, she no longer sees his agency as
positive: "he would drown her." The agent of life is now an agent of death. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 18 March)
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror.
Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps
love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right
to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would
save her.
[...]
All the seas of the world tumbled
about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped
with both hands at the iron railing. (James Joyce, "Eveline")
19 March
As Tony
Murray points out, when James Joyce's Eveline "finds herself immobilised
at the harbour", she is "neither at home nor abroad". The harbor
is an in-between space where Eveline's decisiveness disappears before the
Atlantic crossing to Argentina. So there are not just two spaces determining
Eveline's actions and choices (Dublin or Argentina?) but three: home, harbor,
and Argentina. And at the harbor, the decision she made at home can still be
changed. – In a sense, there are even four spaces, since the ship is between
the harbour and Argentina. It is not Argentina, then, but Eveline's vision of
the crossing that leads her to imagine her fiancé Frank drowning her. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 19 March)
20 March
In James
Joyce's "After the Race", Jimmy's father, first "a butcher in
Kingstown", becomes rich "opening shops in Dublin and in the
suburbs". This commercial success also leads to political connections through
which he receives "some of the police contracts" for even more sales,
as well as to prominence as someone called "a merchant prince" in
newspapers. As a further sign of his ascent in the world, such an exemplary
commercial, political, and societal figure must also send his son to university,
including a semester at Cambridge "to see a little life" – that is,
not for education, but for social experience to prepare him to take his
father's success even further. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 March)
21 March
As the opening
of James Joyce's "After the Race" focuses in on Jimmy Doyle, the word
"cars" appears six times, first as the cars in the race,
"scudding" and "careering" along, then as the "blue
cars" of the French the Irish cheer for, and finally as "one of the
trimly built cars", the one that Jimmy is riding in, along with two
Frenchmen happy about "the success of the French cars." Here, the
plural "cars" disappears, though the singular "car" remains
until the young men head out to a yacht in the harbor for "supper, music,
cards." The excitement of the cars remains in the ensuing card-playing –
from "cars" to "cards". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 21
March)
22 March
For Margot
Norris, Jimmy Doyle in James Joyce's "After the Race" doesn't just
unfortunately lose "pots of money" in a night of drunken gambling but
actually falls prey to a confidence game. Many scholars of Joyce's
"Eveline" also argue that Eveline's fiancé Frank cannot be trusted,
and similar arguments have been made about "The Boarding House", with
Mr Doran taking advantage of Polly Mooney. Everyone fooled in these stories
could be seen as primarily fooling themselves, but such a reading would come
down to victim-blaming. They are all enchanted in their own ways, and then
fooled, but if they have been tricked, then the tricksters enchanted them in
the first place. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 22 March)
23 March
In season
1, episode 4, of "The Good Place",
Jianyu reveals himself to be not a monk who has taken a vow of silence
but Jason Mendoza from Jacksonville. When he'd pretended to meditate, he was wondering
what was going on: "I think we might be in an alien zoo or on a prank
show." In that zoo, he would be on display for the amusement and
edification of extraterrestrials; in that show, he would be tricked in order to
embarrass him. To put it in the statistical terms that Michael likes (and in
this episode he mentions that it is possible to be 104% perfect), Jason is
about 67% right. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 March)
24 March
When Jane
Austen's Emma insults Miss Bates during the Box Hill outing, she removes the
mask of politeness. Miss Bates's self-deprecating joke leads Emma to lose the
self-control that otherwise characterizes her responses to any negative
thoughts and feelings she has: "Emma could not resist". So she does
what she is otherwise able to resist: she tells someone what she really thinks
about them. And when Mr. Knightley then reproaches her, her "liberties of
manner" are not what most irritates him. Rather, he complains that she –
and by implication all the members of the class they both belong to – should
never reveal their contempt for all those they consider beneath them. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 March)
25 March
In season
1, episode 4, of "The Good Place", Jason reveals himself to Eleanor
and tells her what he did for a living: "I sold fake drugs to college
kids." Eleanor doesn't mention the connection to her own job: selling fake
drugs to old people. Later, Eleanor tells Chidi that Jason isn't a monk:
"Jianyu is a fraud, just like me." This refers to the fact that she
and Jason should both not be in "the good place", but she could also
say that about their fraudulent lives on earth. The story's overall fraud lies
elsewhere, but Jason and Eleanor's mutual fraud in the afterlife mirrors their
fraudulent lives on earth. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 March)
26 March
In her
interpretation of Emily Dickinson's "Civilization — spurns — the
Leopard!" (276), Leslie McAbee concludes that the leopard in the poem
"remains fixed outside the nonhuman realm as a classifiable specimen for
human study and as a racialized foreign animal beyond the pale of Western
civilization." But as McAbee sees this as the speaker's failure "to
advocate overtly for the Leopard’s release from captivity," she is forced
by an apparent desire to not implicate Dickinson in this "failure" to
argue that Dickinson herself "reveals that well-intended advocacy can
recapitulate what it seeks to oppose." Here, the intentional fallacy is a
result of the critic's desire to see the poet as ideologically pure. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 26 March)
27 March
The
questions in "Civilization — spurns — the Leopard!" (276) establish
parallels between situations: "Was the Leopard – bold?"; "Need —
a keeper — frown?" The dashes setting off those last words challenge them:
Is it valid to call the leopard's behavior "bold"? Is it proper to
"frown" at such behavior? The parallelism makes the words
exchangeable: "Was the keeper bold?"; "Need the Leopard
frown?" This extends to the poem's verbs: "Civilization spurns the
leopard", but it and its human proxies (keeper, Signor) also
"rebuke", "frown" at, "pity", "stifle",
and "suppress" the animal. Even the speaker's call for "pity"
does not prevent her, through these parallelisms, from participating in the
"civilized" taming of the "Asian" beast. (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 27 March) [A lot of credit to the students in my Emily Dickinson
seminar for co-developing these ideas in our Zoom discussion today.]
276
Civilization — spurns — the Leopard!
Civilization
— spurns — the Leopard!
Was the
Leopard — bold?
Deserts —
never rebuked her Satin —
Ethiop —
her Gold —
Tawny — her
Customs —
She was
Conscious —
Spotted —
her Dun Gown —
This was
the Leopard's nature — Signor —
Need — a
keeper — frown?
Pity — the
Pard — that left her Asia —
Memories —
of Palm —
Cannot be
stifled — with Narcotic —
Nor suppressed
— with Balm —
28 March
In
"Gulliver's Travels", when the king of Brobdingnag first sees Gulliver, he tries to understand
this miniature creature who is approximately 12 times smaller than the typical
Brobingnagian. "As learned a
person as any in his dominions", he applies his knowledge of philosophy and mathematics to interpret
Gulliver's shape and posture, and concludes that he "might be a piece of
clock-work". When he sees Gulliver as an automaton made to impersonate the
behavior of a human, he is astonished to hear "it" speak in a
"regular and rational" way. This turns the European trope of
astonishment at the idea that unfamiliar people can be "rational
creatures" back on the European castaway. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28
March)
The king, although he
be as learned a person as any in his dominions, had been educated in the study
of philosophy, and particularly mathematics; yet when he observed my shape
exactly, and saw me walk erect, before I began to speak, conceived I might be a
piece of clock-work (which is in that country arrived to a very great
perfection) contrived by some ingenious artist. But when he heard my voice, and
found what I delivered to be regular and rational, he could not conceal his
astonishment. (Jonathan
Swift, "Gulliver's Travels")
29 March
The Swiss
German evening news reported this evening on coronavirus in Spain. One hospital
worker said in an interview that staff shortages were a significant problem,
and that these staff shortages were the result of the slashing of hospital
budgets. That sounded familiar: practically every news report I've seen about
countries with growing difficulties dealing with coronavirus has eventually
touched on ongoing staffing and budget problems that exacerbate the crisis with
the pandemic. All such cuts in health-care systems worldwide can be traced back
to "the economy" and some variation on "austerity". The
pandemic definitively reveals that such austerity has always been at the
expense of the lives of the majority. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 March)
30 March
The news
that singer-songwriter John Prine was in serious condition with a coronavirus
infection was especially poignant to me because Prine began his career at
twenty-four in 1971 with an eponymous album that featured not one but two songs
that depicted the potentially lonely side of aging far more vividly than any
other young artist ever has: "Angel from Montgomery" and "Hello
in There". Both had already crosssed my mind this month with the news of
coronavirus patients dying alone in intensive-care stations without any loved
ones with them – especially the latter, with its call for listeners to speak to
older people "waiting for someone to say hello in there, hello." (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 30 March)
31 March
There are
many messages in Kafka's "An Imperial Message". The first is from the
Emperor to "you". The second is whispered by the Emperor into the messenger's ear. In the third, the messenger
whispers into the Emperor's ear to confirm its correctness. The fourth is that
non-verbal confirmation: the Emperor nods to the messenger. This scene as a
whole is the fifth, sent by the Emperor and the messenger to their audience. The
sixth is again non-verbal: the messenger points to his insignia to say he's on
imperial business. And the seventh is from the narrator to "you": the
message that there was a message, even if it has not arrived. (Andrew Shields,
#111words, 31 March)
https://www.textlog.de/32060.html
http://www.kafka-online.info/an-imperial-message.html
1 April
This is
attributed to Paul Valéry: "A work of art is never finished, merely
abandoned." But in context, Valéry is not talking about how he himself
understands the creative process. Rather, he sees dilettantes
("amateurs") as understanding it that way – and not even all
dilettantes, but only those full "of anxiety and perfection".
Further, he sees such dilettantes as not even understanding what it is to
complete a work. So the well-known versions of the quotation, especially when
it becomes a first-person statement, simplify Valéry's attempt to distinguish
himself and his works from such "amateurism" as a claim about his own
creative process – something quite different than what he originally meant. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 1 April)
Aux yeux de ces
amateurs d’inquiétude et de perfection, un ouvrage n’est jamais achevé,
– mot qui pour eux n’a aucun sens, – mais abandonné ; et cet abandon,
qui le livre aux flammes ou au public (et qu’il soit l’effet de la lassitude ou
de l’obligation de livrer) est une sorte d’accident, comparable à la rupture
d’une réflexion, que la fatigue, le fâcheux ou quelque sensation viennent rendre
nulle.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/03/01/abandon/
2 April
I've been
writing these 111-word texts since 1 January, so this is my 93rd such text. The
students in my course "111 Words a Day: A Writing Project" started on
20 February, when the class first met, so they are on their 43rd such text
today. We had three sessions before we went online, and one online session
since then (with the next coming tomorrow). Since the introductory session, then
they've had three feedback sessions, plus comments from me on selected texts
(through 27-28 March). And the combination of regular practice and a few
comments has already helped them write significantly more effective texts with precise,
concise, clear, and convincing claims. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 April)
3 April
In Emily
Dickinson's "Me from Myself – to banish" (709), tensions within the
self between "Me", "Myself", and "I" are figured as
military and political: "Invincible ... Fortress",
"assault", "peace", "subjugating",
"Monarch", and "Abdication". In particular, the speaker
seaks "peace / ... by subjugating / Consciousness". After a discussion
of this poem in class today, I came across another "subjugation" in a
quotation in Jean M. O'Brien's "Firsting and Lasting" from an 1858
historical speech in Suffield, Massachusetts: "... the subjugation of the
forest ..." The colonizers of New England "subjugated" the
forest; Dickinson's speaker would "subjugate" her own consciousness: how
does the colonization of New England leave traces in Dickinson's poetry? (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 April)
709 Me from
Myself — to banish —
Me from
Myself — to banish —
Had I Art —
Invincible
my Fortress
Unto All
Heart —
But since
Myself — assault Me —
How have I
peace
Except by
subjugating
Consciousness?
And since
We're mutual Monarch
How this be
Except by
Abdication —
Me — of Me?
This was
the beautiful portion of ground, to which our steps have this day been
directed. Beneath the turf, our feet has pressed; under this sacred house, in
which we are now assembled have long since been deposited the mortal remains of
those who first encountered, and began the subjugation of the forest that once
waved in unbroken grandeur over these hills and dales. (Proceedings at
Suffield, September 16, 1858, on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth
anniversary of the decease of the Rev. Benjamin Ruggles, first pastor of the
First Congregational church; quoted in Jean M. O'Brien, "Firsting and
Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England", University of
Minnesota Press 2010)
4 April
In
interpreting James Joyce's "The Boarding House", Gerald Doherty says Joyce's
"reader" is "frustrated", which seems quite odd to me. I
respond to "Dubliners" in many ways, but never with frustration. Today,
a student drew my attention to a passage in "Eveline" that captures the
experience of reading "Dubliners" in a different way; it is part of Eveline's
rememberance of her courtship with her fiancé Frank, a sailor: "People
knew that they were courting and, when he sang about the lass that loves a
sailor, she always felt pleasantly confused." Eveline "reads" the
song with "pleasant confusion" – and that's much closer than
"frustration" to what reading "Dubliners" is like to me. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 4 April)
5 April
Max Brod
reported that Franz Kafka said that the "Eleven Sons" in his story
"Elf Söhne" were "simply eleven stories I am working on just
now." This kind of remark gets literary scholars working to figure out
what the author means; in this case, which "son" described in
"Elf Söhne" corresponds to which of Kafka's stories? As long as they
don't reduce the story's "meaning" to the answer to that question,
there's no harm done in such detective work, but I still often wonder why so
much attention is given to such statements, as if the author's
"intention" is actually central after all, despite the problems
raised by the intentional fallacy. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 April)
6 April
As Facebook
Memories reminded me, the Washington Post ran an article four years ago today
about an educational controversy in Therwil, Switzerland: "Switzerland
shocked by Muslim teens who refused to shake hands with female teachers."
The daily practice of shaking a teacher's hand might seem odd to people
elsewhere, but in Switzerland, schoolchildren regularly do so, and back when my
son was youth football player, it always struck me how he and his teammates
would shake their coaches' hands at the end of practice. The school controversy
seemed overblown to me at the time – and now, with social distancing having
eliminated not only handshakes but in-person teaching, it just seems quaint. (Andrew
Shields, #111words, 6 April)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/04/06/switzerland-shocked-by-muslim-teens-who-refused-to-shake-hands-with-female-teachers/?fbclid=IwAR1BJmKztQgBDBKHZk2LOtfQwIsJmdDtTJ12yDSL75vH_bJXbBTxybpovSc
7 April
In
"Pride and Prejudice", Elizabeth Bennet stays at Netherfield when her
sister Jane is ill there, and she spends the evenings with Mr. Darcy, Mr.
Bingley, his sisters Miss Bingley and Mrs. Hurst, and the latter's husband,
"who live[s] only to eat, drink, and play at cards." The others seek
other entertainment, and when Miss Bingley cannot get Mr. Darcy to stop reading
and talk to her, she asks Elizabeth to "take a turn about the room." Whenever
I take a walk these days, I think that if the lockdown in Switzerland banned
such walks, I could take "turns about the room". But the rooms at
Netherfield were larger than mine. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7 April)
8 April
At yesterday's
coronavirus briefing, when Kristen Fisher of Fox News asked about the
turnaround time for coronavirus test results, President Trump revealed what he
thinks journalists should do: "[...] you should say, 'Congratulations. Great job' — instead of being so horrid in
the way you ask a question." Anything short of praise, then, even by a
reporter from his favorite network, will be dismissed by Trump as
"horrid". That's absurd, but Trump persisted, later calling Jon Karl
of ABC News "a disgrace" for supposedly misrepresenting a question's background.
Karl could have responded that Trump himself is a disgrace in his
"horrid" deflection of questions with attacks on the reporters who
ask them. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 April)
9 April
At the
coronavirus briefing on 5 April, President Trump mentioned the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine
as a treatment for covid-19 and asked a question he has recently "used for
certain reasons" : “What do
you have to lose?” Whatever those "certain reasons" are, he courted
African-American voters during the 2016 Presidential campaign with that
question: "You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no
jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed – what the hell do you have to
lose?" So when he returns to it now, he's saying that the situation of
Americans under Trump is so bad that people might as well take a chance on the
unproven. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 April)
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