Watching “The Lady in the Van”, “Nobody Wants This”, and “Un cuento perfecto” while down with a cold

I've been down with a bad cold since Thursday, so I've been watching things. After honoring Maggie Smith (1934-2024) with Nicholas Hytner's "The Lady in the Van" (2015), I turned to the new Netflix series "Nobody Wants This", because I like Kristen Bell from "The Good Place". After that, I wanted something in Spanish, and I found a 2023 Netflix series "Un cuento perfecto", with Anna Castillo, whose work I knew from Salvador Calvo's "Adú" (2020). Castillo, like Bell, has such an expressive face. – And this "perfect story" is the first film or series I have ever seen that has a sex scene interrupted because the woman is having her period. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 September 2024)

The case of Lionel Tate in Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004) – and on the internet today

While re-reading Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004), I was struck by her mention of Lionel Tate. In 2001, Tate was convicted of murder as an adult for a death he caused at 12. In 2004, when his conviction was overturned, he accepted a plea deal including ten years' probation, so when charged with armed robbery in 2005, he was sentenced to ten years for the robbbery and thirty years for violating probation. Since all the reports on this were at least ten years old, I limited my search to the past year – and the results about Tate's case were mostly essays for students to plagiarize. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 September 2024) 

From Claudia Rankine to Aimé Césaire and César Vallejo

Between April 2016 and March 2017, I read Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004) four times (in part because I taught a course on Rankine's work – and Anthony Vahni Capildeo's – in the Spring Semester of 2017 at the University of Basel English Department). The epigraph to Rankine's book is from Aimé Césaire's "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal", so I read that in French back in 2017, too. Now, rereading Rankine for a student's MA exam, I notice again her references to César Vallejo's "Considerando en frío" – but now, having been learning Spanish since November 2020, I went to read that poem in the original, too. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 September 2024)

Not remembering Maggie Smith in “As You Like It” at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario in Spring 1977

In spring 1977, presumably during our spring break from school, my family went from in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, to Stratford, Ontario, for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. My father was especially excited about the trip, because he wanted to see Maggie Smith as Rosalind in the festival's production of William Shakespeare's comedy "As You Like It". I wish I remembered something about her performance, but all I remember about that trip was that a dog bit me on what an online map suggests was Tom Patterson Island in Lake Victoria in central Stratford. Still, Maggie Smith (1934-2024) always reminded me of that trip, even if I all I remembered was that dog. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 September 2024)

Explaining the form of sonnets with Ernst Jandl’s “sonett"

In a class today on two sonnets by William Shakespeare (18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", and 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"), I began by discussing the form of a sonnet. I hadn't planned to use it, but I suddenly remembered the wonderful example of Ernst Jandl's "sonett", all of whose lines are variations on the first line: "das a das e das i das o das u". With the clear unstressed articles and the stressed names of the vowels, the meter is easy to describe. The rhyme scheme is also clear, and the fourteen lines and their organization (Petrarchan) are also straightforward. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 September 2024)

 

sonett

Ernst Jandl

 

das a das e das i das o das u

das u das a das e das i das o

das u das a das e das i das o

das a das e das i das o das u

 

das a das e das i das o das u

das u das a das e das i das o

das u das a das e das i das o

das a das e das i das o das u

 

das o das u das a das e das i

das i das o das u das a das e

das e das i das o das u das a

 

das o das u das a das e das i

das i das o das u das a das e

das e das i das o das u das a

Re-reading four novels by Virginia Woolf for a student’s Master’s exam this fall

In 2019 and 2020, I went through Virginia Woolf's nine novels from "The Voyage Out" (1915) to "Between the Acts" (1941), as well as her unusual 1933 book "Flush", a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the perspective of her dog Flush. Many years before that project, when I was still at university, I had read "Jacob's Room" (1922), "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), "Orlando" (1928), and "The Waves" (1931). Now a student will be doing her Master's exam with me, and one of her topics is London in four Woolf novels, so I'll get to reread "Night and Day" (1919), "Jacob's Room", "Mrs. Dalloway", and "The Years" (1937). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 September 2024) 

Epanalepsis (or epanodiplosis) in Emily Dickinson’s "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -" (Fr591)

While preparing Emily Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -" (Fr591) for discussion on Wednesday, I noticed the structure of the penultimate line: "And then the Windows failed - and then." It begins and ends with the same phrase. In the past, I've described such lines as "framed" by the repeated phrase. But recently, I've been discovering the many old rhetorical terms for types of repetition (with "epistrophe" being my favorite, because of Thelonious Monk's composition "Epistrophy"). So now I've been able to find "epanalepsis" or "epanadiplosis" for such repetition at the beginning and end of a sentence (or, in this case, of a line of poetry). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 September 2024)

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - (591)

Emily Dickinson

 

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm -

 

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room -

 

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable - and then it was

There interposed a Fly -

 

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not see to see -

 

 

A Michigan absentee voter since 1992

Late Friday, I received my absentee ballot from Michigan. When I first voted from abroad in 1992, I registered at my mother's address in Michigan, and I have been a regular absentee voter there ever since. In my first Presidential election in the United States in 1984, I lived in California, where I was going to university; in my second in 1988, I lived in Pennsylvania, where I had just started graduate school. I sometimes wonder if I was supposed to have applied for my 1992 absentee ballot in Pennsylvania. But at the time, I was using my mother's address as my US address, so Michigan made more sense to me. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 September 2024)

A New Zealander in Basel, over twenty years ago

When our son Miles was about two or three years old, we went for a walk on a damp and gloomy autumn weekday. We lived in Kleinbasel at the time, and we crossed the Rhein at the dam. We hadn't intended to stop at the playground there, but we did. There were only two other people there: a woman and a child. It turned out the woman was from New Zealand. She had married a French-speaking Swiss man who was a letter carrier, and she was very homesick. I don't know what made me remember that woman today, but we never saw her again, and I wonder what happened to her. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 September 2024)

Terrance Hayes and his revision of poems between magazine and book publication

For the first session of my Contemporary Poetry seminar this semester, I picked out the poem "Continuity", by Terrance Hayes ("So To Speak", 2023). Yesterday, when I found the poem's first publication in The New Yorker in 2021, I copied it to prepare notes. But then I remembered that when I did the same a few semesters ago with one of Hayes's "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin" (2018), I didn't notice that Hayes had revised the poem between its original magazine publication and its appearance in a book. So now I checked – and was glad I did. The changes were mostly small, but one couplet was significantly different. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 September 2024)

Former President Donald Trump “goes to eleven”:“This is Spinal Tap” in a political commentary

In "Trump’s Old News", his commentary for The New York Review of Books on the debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Fintan O'Toole interprets Trump's rhetoric: "It is hard for Trump to increase the volume when he long ago turned it up to eleven." "Up to eleven" comes from the 1984 Rob Reiner movie "This is Spinal Tap", when Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), guitarist in the band Spinal Tap, brags about how his amplifier dials "go to 11". Tufnel's failure to understand that the labelling of the dial doesn't change the amplifier's volume now marks Trump's increasing inability to ever do anything but shout his outrage. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 September 2024)

 

The similarities between men’s and women’s football – and one noticeable difference

Recently, I have gone to see the FC Basel women's team play a few times. For the most part, the football the women play looks just like how the men play, with the same strategies and tactics, the same ball-control skills, the same mistakes, and the same occasional strokes of genius. But last Friday, at the match between the women's teams of the FC Basel and FC Zürich, I did notice something different about free kicks: in women's matches, the defending players in the wall between the ball and the goal put their hands behind their backs, while the men in the wall put their hands in front of their crotches. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 September 2024)

References to the “weirdness” and “abnormality” of MAGA and the Right” from early 2024

Back in July, when Minnesota's Democratic Governor Tim Walz (now the party's candidate for Vice President) described leading Republican and MAGA politicians in the United States as "weird", the expression caught on, and there was much discussion of the use of the term. The usage seemed new at the time, but today, at the end of an opinion column in the New York Times about Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris, I saw links to two opinion pieces by conservative Times columnists from earlier this year: a January column by Ross Douthat about "the Right's abnormality problem" and to a February column by David French about "the profound weirdness of MAGA." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 September 2024)

Weird Beard’s excellent psychedelia at the Bird’s Eye Basel, 10 September 2024 (and again tonight, 11 September 2024)

At their concert at the Bird's Eye in Basel last night, Weird Beard blended styles into wide-ranging psychedelia: Luzius Schuler contributed electric keyboard textures and jazz-piano solos; drummer Rico Baumanm played rock grooves enriched with inventive jazz fills; Dave Gisler shimmered through electric-guitar sounds from choppy staccato to long, fast, fluid runs; and Florian Egli laid down steadily pulsing lines on electric bass guitar for the others to paint pictures around. There were only a dozen or so people in the audience, and all my Basel-area friends interested in psychedelic improvisations should go check them out tonight at 8:30 pm for the second of their two Bird's Eye shows this week. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 September 2024)

Weird Beard: Luzius Schuler, Florian Egli, Rico Baumann, Dave Gisler

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) and xenophobic urban legends about immigrants eating pets and wild animals

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Thing Around Your Neck", the title story of her 2009 short-story collection, Nigerian immigrant Akunna hears from her "uncle" what his neighbors in a town in Maine once suspected about his family: "Your uncle [...] told you how the neighbors said, a few months after he moved into his house, that the squirrels had started to disappear. They had heard that Africans ate all kinds of wild animals." I remembered this moment in Adichie's story when I heard the urban legend spread by Republican Vice Presidential candidate J. D. Vance and other xenophobic politicians that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating their neighbors' cats. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 September 2024)

A good line in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”: "Don't bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice."

I watched and listened to Rick Beato's countdown of the Spotify Top Ten, which he does every few months. While he pays attention to the details of the music, with comments about such things as chord progressions, the use of autotune, and the decade a recording sounds like, he never comments on the lyrics. That's my thing, of course, and one line in a song, Sabrina Carpenter's  "Please Please Please", stood out to me: "Don't bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice." Variations on "don't make me cry" permeate pop music, but I have not heard the wonderful and convincing link to makeup running before. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 September 2024)

 

John Perry Barlow, The Grateful Dead, “Throwing Stones”, and Republican Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris for President

When Dick Cheney, the Republican Vice President of the United States under President George W. Bush (2001-2009), ran for Wyoming's seat in the United States House of Representatives in 1978, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow worked on his campaign. But within a few years, Cheney's increasingly right-wing politics inspired Barlow's lyric for a 1982 Grateful Dead song by Bob Weir, "Throwing Stones". I hadn't heard of Cheney when I first heard the song then, but I've despised him since he was Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush from 1989-1993. Yet now, that life-long Republican has endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for President of the United States. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 September 2024)

Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax” and my son when he was three years old

When my son Miles was three years old, and my mother was visiting us in Basel, he asked her to read him "The Lorax", by Dr. Seuss. But they couldn't find our copy of the book it was in (a collection of Seuss stories that did not say "The Lorax" on the cover). My mother knew he had heard the story often, so she asked him to recite it to her: "I bet you know it by heart." Then he reeled off line and line of the book, until he stumbled two-thirds of the way through, lost the thread, and despaired: "I'm sorry, Grandma, I don't know 'The Lorax' by heart." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 September 2024)

The Sullivan Act, John Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer” (1925), and the United States Supreme Court’s Bruen decision

In John Dos Passos's novel "Manhattan Transfer" (1925), unemployed and broke Dutch Robertson, who is about to begin a series of robberies, is warned by his girlfriend Francie about carrying a gun in New York State in the 1920s: “Next thing some cop’ll see it on your hip and arrest you for the Sullivan law.” The Sullivan Act was a New York state law passed in 1911 that required people to apply for licenses "to have and carry concealed a pistol or revolver". But the United States Supreme Court struck down the Sullivan Act as unconstitutional in its 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 September 2024)

My favorite pop concerts, my favorite Grateful Dead concert, my favorite recent jazz concert, and the best band I’ve ever seen

The best pop concerts I've ever attended are Talking Heads in San Francisco in 1983, Leonard Cohen in Zurich in 2008, and Taylor Swift in Zurich in 2024. But for me, that category excludes all Grateful Dead concerts and jazz concerts. My favorite Dead show was 22 July 1984 in Ventura, California. The most recent exceptional jazz concert I've seen was Jason Moran on solo piano in Basel this past April. But for the quality of the musicians and the range of the material, the best ever was John Zorn's Naked City in New York and Philadelphia in 1988 and 1990 (with Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, and Joey Baron). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 September 2024) 

On hearing “Sultans of Swing”, by Dire Straits, in January 1979

I was 14 when the Dire Straits song “Sultans of Swing” came out in the United States in January 1979. I listened to Top 40 radio at the time (I hadn’t yet discovered anything else to listen to in Toledo, Ohio), and the song's guitars and driving beat and evocative story sounded so different than anything else that I heard on the charts. As I just found out, it peaked at number four. When I got the band's eponymous debut album featuring the song, I played it often. Now, at 60. I still turn to it once in a while, as well as to the band's third album, 1980’s “Making Movies”. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 September 2024)

A Japanese lantern lit by gas in Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913)

When Charles Swann has tea with Odette de Crécy in Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913), they ascend stairs that feature “une grande lanterne japonaise suspendue à une cordelette de soie (mais qui, pour ne pas priver les visiteurs des derniers conforts de la civilisation occidentale s'éclairait au gaz)”. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century France of the novel's "Un amour de Swann" section, the oriental fashion of the Japanese lantern hanging on a silken string may offer an exotic touch, but the practical comforts of occidental progress, here in the form of the gas used to light the lantern, are still maintained. Eastern ornamentation serves to decorate Western functionality. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 September 2024)

Songs about turning or being 64 or 22 or 18 or 16 – but none about turning or being 60?

A friend who turned 64 shortly before I turned 60 responded to my congratulations with "When I'm Sixty-Four", by The Beatles ("Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", 1967). I couldn't think of a song about turning or being 60, so I responded with "22", by Taylor Swift ("Red", 2012). My friend countered with "I'm Eighteen", by Alice Cooper ("Love It To Death", 1971). Of course many songs have "sixteen" in the title, such as "You're Sixteen", which was written by The Sherman Brothers (who also wrote the songs for "Mary Poppins") and recorded by Johnny Burnette in 1960. I haven't found a song called "Sixty", so maybe I'll write it myself. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 September 2024)