Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and Ohio sixth-graders in 1976

Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" was released as a single in the United Kingdom on 31 October 1975 and in the United States that December. At some time before June 1976, my sixth-grade music teacher at Ottawa Hills Elementary School in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, brought the song in for us to hear, discuss, and sing. We went through it so often that I have had all the lyrics and all the instrumental parts memorized ever since I was eleven. Or as a classmate said when I wrote a March 2010 post about listening to "Bohemian Rhapsody" with my children Miles (then 10) and Luisa (then 6), "the lyrics are burnt into my brain." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 31 October 2024) 

A day with Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and James Joyce

My day began with a deathbed confession of a murder from half a century earlier: “You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat” (Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado). It continued with the sense of overhearing someone quoting 1 Corinthians 2:9: “‘Eye hath not seen’ may possibly / Be current with the Blind / But let not Revelation / By theses be detained—“ (Emily Dickinson, “The Lilac is an ancient shrub, Fr 1261). It ended with a further Biblical allusion, to Matthew 7:3-5: “from Lesbia Looshe the beam in her eye” (James Joyce, “Finnegan's Wake”, 93:27-28). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 October 2024)

Images of champagne in Taylor Swift lyrics

The first mention of champagne in Taylor Swift's songs is in a description of "big parties" in "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" ("reputation", 2017): "Everyone swimming in a champagne sea". This image of swimming in champagne returns in "the last great american dynasty" ("folkore", 2020): "Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names". These are images of excess and luxury. Then, "champagne problems" ("evermore", 2020) takes the luxury of "Dom Pérignon" and makes it a problem of luxury. Finally, "Paris" ("Midnights", 2022) turns champagne into a fantasy of luxury in a new setting: "Cheap wine, make believe it's champagne [...] In an alleyway, drinking champagne." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 October 2024)

Arthur Fils and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, two young French players to watch from the Swiss Indoors quarterfinals in Basel on Friday, 25 October 2024

At the quarterfinals of the Swiss Indoors men's tennis tournament in Basel on Friday, 25 October 2024, the best match was a close three-setter: Ben Shelton (22, USA, ATP 23) beat Andrei Rublev (27, Russia, 7), with Rublev converting zero of six break points and Shelton winning two of two. But the two most impressive players were Arthur Fils (20, France, 20), who beat Stefanos Tsitsipas (26, Greece, 11), and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard (21, France, 50), who beat Denis Shapovalov (25, Canada, 95). Both these Frenchmen, who faced no break points in their matches, will surely be in the Top Ten soon, and today, Mpetshi Perricard defeated Shelton in the final. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 October 2024)

Phil Lesh (1940-2024) leads The Grateful Dead into “Gimme Some Lovin’”, Berkeley Community Theater, 2 November 1984

On 2 November 1984, at the fifth of six Grateful Dead concerts at the Berkeley Community Theater around Halloween, the band played a conventional second-set opener with "Help On The Way / Slipknot! / Franklin's Tower" and "Lost Sailor / Saint Of Circumstance". Then, instead of going to "Drums" and "Space",  Jerry Garcia went into "Wharf Rat". As that song's final jam began to merge into "Drums", bassist Phil Lesh (1940-2024), with a huge grin on his face, broke into the band's debut performance of the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" (1966) and, in a duet with Brent Mydland, sang on stage for the first time in over a decade. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 October 2024) 

Listening to “Box of Rain”, “Unbroken Chain”, and “Eyes of the World” on hearing of the death of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh (1940-2024)

On hearing that Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh died today, I first listened to his "Box of Rain" ("American Beauty", 1970), with Robert Hunter's lyrics: "Such a long long time to be gone and a short time to be there." I followed that with his "Unbroken Chain" ("From the Mars Hotel", 1974), with Bobby Petersen's lyrics: "Listening for the secret, searching for the sound." And finally, I turned to Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's "Eyes of the World" from "Dick's Picks, volume 31", live at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey, on 6 August 1974, with Lesh taking intro and outro leads in one of The Grateful Dead's finest performances. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 October 2024)

 

“Goils don’t know how to make speeches”: The comic strip “Nancy” and men’s silencing of women

A fan of Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip "Nancy" posted a strip from 23 October 1944, in which Sluggo tells Nancy that he wants to run for "president of d' neighborhood". He refuses Nancy's offer to make speeches for him because "goils don't know how to make speeches". So Nancy starts running for the office herself! – Just as Nancy decides to run for office when Sluggo chooses to silence her, men refusing to take women seriously or even refusing to let them speak catalyzed both the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848 and the second wave of feminism that began in the United States in the 1960s. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 October 2024)

“Narcotics in all of my songs”: Taylor Swift’s “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024)

Here's a line from Taylor Swift's song "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024): "[I] put narcotics into all of my songs / and that's why you're still singing along ..." Narcotics are painkillers, and in law-enforcement and popular usage, addictive drugs more generally. In medical settings, narcotics can be put into pills or intravenous solutions; in bars, they can be slipped into drinks to take advantage of people. Among other things, the "narcotics" that Swift slips into her songs are the rhetorical, poetic, and literary devices that keep people returning to her lyrics (along with some "Easter eggs"). So here, "narcotics" is a metaphor for metaphors. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 October 2024)

Stalled in the middle of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Mike Nichols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1966)

The other day, I watched the 1933 Disney cartoon "The Three Little Pigs" with the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" as preparation for a discussion of Taylor Swift's "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024) in today's first session of my eight-week-long Volkshochschule beider Basel course on Swift. I also started Mike Nichols's 1966 film of Edward Albee's 1962 play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (an Oscar-winning role for her). I stalled fifty minutes in, as a drunk couple yelling at each other gradually grows tiresome. But the superb acting still makes me want to finish it soon. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 October 2024)

A marginal note I wrote in my e-book of Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day” (1919)

Back in 2019-2020, I read e-books of all of Virginia Woolf's novels in chronological order. I highlighted occasional passages, but generally did not write notes. Now, re-reading four of Woolf's novels for a student's MA exam, I've begun with the earliest, "Night and Day" (1919), and the other day, I came across a note I had written when suffragette organizer Sally Seal mentions her frustration with how long the movement has been taking: "I'm fifty-five, and I dare say I shall be in my grave by the time we get it—if we ever do." My note was not about the suffrage but about that age: "Read on my 55th birthday." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 October 2024)

“Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” (Churchill and Ronell) and the 1948 revision of Disney’s 1933 short “The Three Little Pigs"

The song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" appeared in the 1933 Oscar winner for Best Animated Short Film, "The Three Little Pigs", one of Disney's "Silly Symphonies". An immediate hit, it was written by Frank Churchill (1901-1942) and Ann Ronell (1905-1993; she had also composed the eventual standard "Willow Weep for Me" in 1932). When the Big Bad Wolf disguises himself to try to blow down the third house, the one made of brick, he dresses like a Jewish stereotype, which was criticized at the time. Later, in 1948, Walt Disney had animator Jack Hannah revise the scene to eliminate the wolf's stereotypical voice and part of his disguise. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 October 2024)

Breaking my record for concerts attended in one year (which I set last year)

In 2023, I went to 73 concerts. By the end of August 2024, I'd gone to seventy concerts, and I assumed I'd break my record in September. However, I only went to three concerts the whole month. At the end of September, I was planning to attend four concerts in three days, and two more at the beginning of October, but I came down with a bad cold that flattened me for ten days, and I haven't made it to any concerts since, as I've been catching up with everything. Tonight at the Bird's Eye in Basel, though, I'll be at my record-breaking seventy-fourth concert this year, the Matthias Spillman Trio. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 October 2024)

“Sense was breaking through”: Andrew Bird’s musical setting for Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (Fr340)

On 26 October 2022, singer-songwriter Andrew Bird released a recording of his setting of Emily Dickinson's poem "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (Fr340), featuring singer Phoebe Bridgers. The arrangement begins with just Bird on guitar and vocals for the first the three lines, at the end of which bassist Tony Berg enters and Bridgers harmonizes the fourth line: "That Sense was breaking through". It's as if the bass and the second voice are that "sense" that "breaks through". And at the end of the song, when Bird repeats the poem's opening stanza, the spare instrumentation returns, but then he sings that line unaccompanied, and the sense breaks through again. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 October 2024)

 

Performing “Apparently with no surprise” (Fr1661): The theatricality of Emily Dickinson

In an essay I discussed with my students last week, Brenda Wineapple characterizes Emily Dickinson as "original, difficult, theatrical, perceptive, witty". We found the idea of Dickinson's theatricality especially helpful in discussing the late poem "Apparently with no surprise" (Fr1661, 1884), which we even performed with three students and me playing the roles of the "happy Flower", the "Frost", the "Sun", and the "Approving God":  "Apparently with no surprise / To any happy Flower / The Frost beheads it at it's play - / In accidental power - / The blonde Assassin passes on - / The Sun proceeds unmoved / To measure off another Day / For an Approving God." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 October 2024) 

Donald Trump demonizing “illegal immigrants”, all immigrants, naturalized citizens, and all citizens who oppose him

Ever since he began campaigning for President in June 2015, Donald Trump has demonized immigrants to the United States – mostly those he considers "illegal", but sometimes also those who enter the country legally. On Friday, 11 October, though, Trump's advisor Stephen Miller called for "denaturalization" of immigrants who have successfully applied for and received United States citizenship. And yesterday, on Fox News, Trump even called for the National Guard or the military to be used against those citizens he sees as "radical left lunatics." As I noted after a burst of similar rhetoric from Trump last November, anyone who opposes him can become an object of the violence he calls for. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 October 2024)

 

• I take the recent points from this post by Heather Cox Richardson.
• My post from 14 November 2023.

Metrical variation in Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023)

Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023) begins with dactyls: "Seated alone at the edge of the bed". The poem is in couplets, so the second line could balance that tetrameter with dactylic trimeter, but it turns to troches instead: "grasp the finest fabric first". That could establish a pattern for the poem: alternating lines of dactylic and trochaic tetrameter. But Hayes's third line shifts to iambs: "the shrunken sock or silk softest to touch". "Softest" is a trochaic substitution, but that's not unknown in iambic pentameter lines. The continuous movement between several meters in Hayes's poem models how "free verse" can make use of variable metrical effects. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 October 2024)

 

  

Terrance Hayes’s poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm”, PechaKucha, proper names, and Isamu Noguchi

Terrance Hayes calls his poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm" (from "So To Speak", 2023) "an analogue PechaKucha", a Japanese presentation form that involves making twenty-second statements about twenty slides. In my Contemporary Poetry seminar, we discussed the proper names in Hayes's poem: Kafka, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Matisse, Picasso, Hitchcock, and Isamu Noguchi. As none of us had heard of Noguchi before, I gave the students two minutes to prepare a twenty-second statement about what the poem says about him, and then called on students at random to make their statements. Afterwards, we looked him up: Noguchi (1904-1988) was an Usonian artist, furniture designer, and landscape architect. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 October 2024)

[Hayes’s poem is online, but he revised it considerably for book publication, so here’s the poem as it appears in “So To Speak”]

Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm

Terrance Hayes, "So To Speak", 33-36

 

An Analogue PechaKucha, 2020

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

It appears I will never be remembered

as a great singer nor extravagant eater.

Either I am standing or I am dreaming.

Or I am standing near the mouth of a theater.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

One early & deeply progressive symptom

of the Kafka Virus: a stream of movies seeps

into the shell of the infected individual's sleeping.

Dream factors greatly in the disease.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I accept I may never get over the ways my mother

loved me poorly. She is close to god in me.

On a planet without surefire

gods & mythologies, there is family.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Inside the stream of Whitney Houston's

voice, Dionne Warwick warns,

"You're gonna need me one

day. You're gonna want me back in your arms."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

There are no ugly people, only expressions

of uglinessm when the mouth is set

this way or that. It's best to think of time

the way a miser thinks of money.

 

¯\_(' ')_/¯

Matisse liked to have the nude near to see her,

but Picasso liked to close his eyes upon her.

What I remember of 1987, is mostly what I remember

of '88 except with different deaths & births.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

If you watch Hitchcock's Vertigo

the other way round, you may notice 

inside the movie is a whole other movie

told from the point of view of the young lady.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Each new pair of glasses assures things

never look the same, but several glasses

of liquor can create the same feeling.

Balance the morass & the molasses of jackasses.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

Even where I doubt the presence of God 

I am awed by the scale of creation. 

Any science suggesting all that happens

is coincidence, is nonsense.

 

\_('.')_/¯

"Intrepidation." "Misfortunate." "Ya-licious."

"Holy smoked turkey." "Attack of the third dimension."

I continue to half believe a fourth s

resides somewhere inside the word obsession.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Clap for a low back country road 

like a tree talking below a constellation.

A low back river talking twilight 

with the leaves clapping below a constellation.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Often right after taking a photo you immediately

crop or color the image so it seems

the doctored thing is the memory.

I'm not saying you have to lie to dream.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

I stream the sequel to a terrible disaster

movie where the protagonist searches for a lover

with the support of characters who meet catastrophe

helping the main character.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

The gun is lowered but then a toe

or two in the boot is shot & when the shoe

comes off, there's a hole a grandchild or two

a generation or two later can put a finger through.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Before the sleeping dream,

we are told to keep nickels in the glasses

of wine by our beds. The virus seems

to have some relationship to cash.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Clap for Tetris, the video game

that teaches you the most geometry for life.

Stacks of boxes of books, closets of hangers

and monster angels and historical fabrics.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I was struck by the sky of my South

Carolina. It made my mouth ache.

I was old by the time I heard the prophet

Isaiah used to preach naked.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Ghost, the loss that broke you was so

ubiquitous, I failed to see it lingering in the ether

like the misspelled affections that go

undetected by both letter writer & letter reader.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Often I confuse Vivamus, moriendum est,

which means "Let us live, for we must die,"

with Bibamus, moriendum est which means "Let

us drink, for we must die."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Isamu Noguchi sculpted the marrow

of a black stone into bamboo & planted husks

of live bamboo shoots to guard it. I know

this ragged clock waits to be clogged with dust.

 

The magnificent career of Rafael Nadal

Early on, Rafael Nadal made this Roger Federer fan suffer by beating him at the French Open four years running (2005 in the semifinal; 2006 to 2008 in the final). But I learned to appreciate Nadal's compelling style, especially on the clay courts at Roland Garros, with his fourteen titles, 112 wins, and only four losses. Even though his clay-court style had been around for seventeen years by the time he last won it in 2022, only three players ever figured how to beat him there: Robin Söderling (2009), Novak Djokovic (2015 and 2021), and Alexander Zverev (2023, when Nadal was suffering from the injuries that have now ended his career). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 October 2024)

Finding Coover’s "The Universal Baseball Association” on a library shelf at Stanford in the 1980s

Regarding Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968), I remember now that I did not read it in school when I played tabletop baseball games, but in college a few years later. I worked at Stanford's Meyer Library shelving books, and when I shelved one by Coover, I recognized him as the author of a novel about such games, so I checked it out and read it. By then, I had already begun reading literary criticism, so I dug up an article about the novel. To my amusement, the scholar did not know those games actually exist, but thought that Coover had completely made them up. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 October 2024)

SwissPass, the Swiss Federal Railways, and the “enshittification” of customer service on the internet

The internet's "enshittification" (Cory Doctorow) includes how companies make it hard to contact them. I received a suspicious-looking email from SwissPass, a service of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). Although it wasn't phishing, I replied to mention that it looked like it was. It was a no-reply account. The SwissPass website has no email address or contact form. I found an SBB Customer Service email address. An auto-reply said it's no longer used. That reply mentioned a "help and contact" page – which has no email address or contact form. Both sites offer phone numbers to call – but not toll-free. I finally wrote them using a form for complaining about train personnel. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 October 2024)

“The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968), by Robert Coover (1932-2024)

When I recently had the idea of writing about mechanical pencils, I put it on my list of possible topics for daily prose. But only yesterday did I not come up with an issue to write about (films and politics having grabbed my attention for most of the past week). While I was writing about my life with mechanical pencils, which began with tabletop baseball games in the 1970s, I thought of a novel I read back then about a man playing such games: Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968). So it was uncanny to learn this morning that Coover died on Saturday at 92. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 October 2024)

Mechanical pencils

In the mid-1970s, I began playing tabletop baseball games like Strat-O-Matic, though my favorite was eventually one called Extra Innings. I stopped playing them around 1980 or so, but one thing remains from my years playing such games: mechanical pencils. Back then, when I needed a new pencil or new lead, I would walk the mile or so from our house in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, to the University of Toledo bookstore, which had a great collection of Pentel pencils. I still prefer their P205 pencils with 0.5 mm lead. Back then, such pencils were only available in black, but these days I have several of them in a range of colors. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 October 2024)

Anti-smoking rhetoric in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” (2017) and Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” (2010)

About eight minutes into "Get Out" (Jordan Peele, 2017), Rose (Allison Williams), a young white woman, takes a cigarette from her boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black man, and throws it out the window of the car she is driving. Her opposition to his smoking, which her parents turn out to share, runs through the film. This time around, it reminded me of the guardians at the boarding school in "Never Let Me Go" (Mark Romanek, 2010, based on Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel), who insist that their "students" should never smoke. In both cases, the anti-smoking people want to keep the bodies they want to exploit as healthy as possible. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 October 2024)

A petition against Basel’s staging of the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2025

Today in my mailbox was a petition from the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland to start a referendum against the staging of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest in Basel next May: "35 Million [Swiss Francs] in tax money for a propaganda show?" Given what I know about this small, "national-conservative" Swiss political party, which is against homosexuals, trans people, and abortion, I assumed they were against the "propaganda" of a "gender ideology" they would claim was bering spread by Nemo, the non-binary winner of the 2024 ESC. But to my surprise, they dislike the ESC for the "occultism and Satanism" that they claim some of the contest's performers have been spreading. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 October 2024)

"When the defendant [Donald J. Trump] lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office"

In the "Government’s motion for immunity determinations" filed yesterday, 2 October 2024, by Special Counsel Jack Smith in United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, the "Factual Proffer" that "provides a detailed statement of the case that the Government intends to prove at trial" begins with a straightforward claim: "When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office" (3). This is not actually disputed by former President Trump's legal team. After all, they did not defend him by saying that he did not commit crimes; they defended him by arguing that, as President, he was immune from prosecution for those crimes. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 October 2024) 

“Such stuff as dreams are made of” at the end of John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)

At the end of "The Maltese Falcon", John Huston's 1941 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel, Detective Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond) picks up the titular falcon, asks Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) what it is, and is puzzled by Spade's response: "Such stuff as dreams are made of." The quotation comes from a speech by Prospero in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (1610-11): "We are such stuff / as dreams are made on." In the film, Spade knows his Shakespeare, while Polhaus apparently does not. Yet as actors, both Bogart and Bond surely knew the line. Actors, after all, are immersed in cultural history in ways the characters they play are usually not. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 October 2024)

Ward Bond and Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon"

Elisha Cook, Jr., in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) and “The Big Sleep” (1946) – and in a 1949 adaptation of “The Great Gatsby"

Today, when I saw a man tailing Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in John Huston's 1941 film of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon", I was reminded that I have always liked Elisha Cook, Jr., who plays that henchman of Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet). Cook also appears in another Bogart film, "The Big Sleep" (Howard Hawks, 1946). Otherwise, I know hardly anything he made, but Cook also played Klipspringer in Richard Maibaum's 1949 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby", a film I had never heard of before. In "The Maltese Falcon", Cook is on the receiving end of Bogart's memorable line, "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 October 2024)