Swiss broadcaster Blue Sport and the varieties of German used in their broadcasts

The Swiss television channel Blue Sport broadcasts all the matches of the Swiss men's football league, the Super League. Until recently, their German-language broadcasts had one commentator, but now they have a second commentator, always a former Swiss player in the league (and often a former Swiss men's national team player). One feature of these broadcasts strikes me as unusual: The main commentator speaks Swiss High German, but the second commentator speaks his particular variety of Swiss German. This is so consistent it must be a conscious decision by the broadcaster. I've listened to sports broadcasts in many countries, but I've never before heard one where two commentators speak different languages. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 November 2024) 

Abstract: On Truth and Lies in a Swiftian Sense

In "Tim McGraw", the first song on Taylor Swift's eponymous 2006 debut, a boy flatters a girl by comparing her eyes to "Georgia stars", and she responds, "That's a lie." This begins Swift's exploration in songwriting of rhetoric, lies, and truth. Through the lies and truths of rhetoric, that song's speaker negotiates the meaning of her former relationship with herself and with her ex-boyfriend. Truth, lies, rhetoric, and the negotiation of truth, as well as rumors and the simultaneity of truth and lies, are also addressed in such later songs by Swift as "Dress" (from "reputation", 2017), "illicit affairs" ("folklore", 2020), "happiness" ("evermore", 2020), and "Cassandra" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 November 2024)

 

Note: This is the abstract for "On Truth and Lies in a Swiftian Sense", my talk on Taylor Swift on Tuesday, 10 December, at 1 pm, in room 11 of the English Department of the University of Basel, Nadelberg 6, Basel.

"I do not agree with being a white Otello”: White tenor Francesco Meli apparently thinks opera audiences are stupid and unimaginative

Tenor Francesco Meli is currently performing the title role in Verdi's "Otello" at the La Fenice opera house in Venice, and the white singer has publicly objected to one feature of the production: "I do not agree with being a white Otello." That is, the director of the production, Fabio Cerese, decided that Meli would not wear blackface for the role. Meli seems to think that the audience needs to have his face be painted black or they won't understand what's happening. Apparently, he thinks opera audiences are incapable of using their imaginations. La Fenice could of course solve the problem by hiring a black tenor to sing the role instead. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 November 2024)

 

“And so they went on […] keen for the worry”: An evening with the Finnegans Wake Reading Group in Basel

At our Finnegans Wake Reading Group in Basel this evening, we took up where we had left off last time: "And so they went on, the fourbottle men" (FW 95.27). And so we went on, without four bottles but with lots of good cheer and great insights into "the framing up of such figments in the evidential order" that constitute James Joyce's 1939 novel. When we finished our hunting, a hunt had begun: "Gundogs of all breeds were beagling with renounced urbiandorbic bugles, hot to run him, given law, on a scent breasthigh, keen for the worry" (FW 96.36-97.2). For once, we completed much more than one page in our "upframings". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 November 2024) 

Names of bands I’ve been in from the 1980s to today

My 1980s band at Stanford first changed names at every gig, including Ask Andrew, The Bears, and The Sound and The Furry (one five-word name). Then we settled on Petting Zoo. Everyone else left town after graduation, but I stayed in Palo Alto for a year and formed Onomatopoeia. Asked what genre we played, I'd say, "Means what it sounds like." After not having bands in Philadelphia or Berlin, my short-lived band in Saarbrücken was Psychic Sidekicks. In Basel, my acoustic folk trio Human Shields had  a great run from 2006 to 2017. After a few years of hibernation, I hope to resurrect Human Shields with a new duo in 2025. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 November 2024)

How to write a Bob Dylan song: A creative-writing exercise

My latest exercise for my poetry and songwriting class is to "write a Bob Dylan song", like "Queen Jane Approximately" from "Highway 61 Revisited" (1965), with a one-line refrain to end each stanza: "Won't you come and see me, Queen Jane?" First, come up with a good refrain line that ends with a good rhyme word. Then pick a form for your stanzas, the simplest being a quatrain with an ABAB rhyme. Then make a list of rhymes for your rhyme word. Now write lines to rhyme with your refrain, and then brainstorm what goes around those lines. Write many more stanzas than you need, then keep all the good ones. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 November 2024)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s “Summer” and a "hieroglyphic profile” of Napoleon in Thomas Hardy's "The Trumpet-Major" (1880)

Thomas Hardy's "The Trumpet-Major" (1880) takes place during the Napoleonic Wars, around 1806 and the Battle of Trafalgar. The novel refers to a caricature of Napoleon that it calls "a hieroglyphic profile", with such features as a hat that is "a maimed French eagle", a face "of human carcases", and an ear that is "a woman crouching over a dying child." I had not heard such images called "hieroglyphic" before, but I know them from the paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593), such as those I once saw in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna: a profile of "Summer", for example, made up of cherries, a peach, a cucumber, and other summer crops. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 November 2024)

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “Summer”, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Public Domain

“Neck or nothing” in Thomas Hardy’s “The Trumpet-Major” (1880)

In Thomas Hardy's "The Trumpet-Major" (1880), while they are trying to protect Bob Loveday from a press gang, Matilda Johnson tells Anne Garland that "it is neck or nothing with us now." Although I did understand "neck or nothing" immediately, I would have said "all or nothing". My sense is that I had never heard the expression before, but it has a long history: the entry for the expression Oxford English Dictionary has citations from 1673 to 1968, whose authors include Jonathan Swift and William Cowper. There's even a quotation from Charles Dickens – but it's from "Sketches By Boz" (1836), which I didn't read when I read all of Dickens's novels. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 November 2024)

Update: Of course now I have found the phrase in Dickens’s “Martin Chuzzlewit” (1844): “[…] he'll fill his wehicle with passengers, and start off in the middle of the road, neck or nothing […]”. But according to the online Dickens concordance, that’s the only use of the phrase in one of CD’s novels.

“I should like to study mathematics – to know about the stars”: From Katherine HIlbery in Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day” (1919) to Jakob Bernoulli and Thomas Pynchon

In Virginia Woolf's "Night and Day" (1919), Katherine Hilbery has a "purely imaginary dialogue" in which she hesitantly reveals "her ambition" to herself and her imaginary interlocutor: "I should like [...] to study mathematics – to know about the stars." This wish recalls something said by the Basel mathematician Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705): "Invito patre sidera verso." I first came across Bernoulli's motto in Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" (1997), where it is quoted in an English translation: "Against my father's wishes, I study the stars." I later used it as an epigraph to a poem I wrote for my mathematician father's 70th birthday, "Ars Conjectandi" (the title of Bernoulli's book on probability). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 November 2024) 

A snowy walk in Liestal to get to a concert

When the train from Basel reached Liestal station, I made my way through the first winter snow to the bus stop, but the next bus was delayed by 45 minutes. So I put the address into my phone and followed the GPS to the venue. The paths I went down were often narrow, and the streets and sidewalks had not been cleared, but I had thought of getting my winter boots out, so with a bit of care, I never slipped. I made one wrong turn and walked down a beautiful footpath in the snowy night to a dead end. But I found my way back and arrived at the venue. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 November 2024)

“Herself, and not her music”: Emily Dickinson goes to a Jenny Lind concert, 3 July 1851

On 3 July 1851, twenty-year-old Emily Dickinson went to a concert in Northampton, Massachusetts, by the Swedish singer Jenny Lind (1820-1887). Three days later, she wrote about it to her brother Austin, who was then living in Boston: The singer, not her singing, was what captured Dickinson's attention: "Herself, and not her music, was what we seemed to love – she has an air of exile in her mild blue eyes, and a something sweet and touching in her native accent which charms her many friends." Yet Dickinson could not name what charmed her about Lind: she "seemed to love" her, with that vague "air of exile" and "something" about her accent. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 November 2024)

Participating in and attending events at the BuchBasel literature festival, 15-17 November 2024

At this weekend's BuchBasel literature festival, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel on Taylor Swift with moderator Svenja Reiner and writer Anne Sauer, author of the recently published book "Look What She Made Us Do: Anne Sauer über Taylor Swift". But I also heard superb talks by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (at the opening ceremony on Friday), by photographers Johny Pitts and Eddie Otchere on Otchere's photography, by Carolin Emcke on "queer life", and by Pitts and poet Roger Robinson on their collaborative book of photographs and poems, "Home is not a Place". Pitts and Robinson's title also came up as a theme in the other events I heard. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 November 2024)

Turning 22,000 days old

On my 60th birthday in August this year, I wondered how many days old I was. I found an internet page to calculate it: I was 21,915 days old. That made me wonder when I would turn 22,000 days old, so I used that page to calculate it: 16 November 2024 (today). Then I forgot about it, until yesterday, when I was reminded of the number by a calendar alert that I had set up and then forgotten. If all goes well, I'll make 23,000 days on Friday, 13 August 2027, 25,000 days on Wednesday, 2 February 2033, and 30,000 days on Friday, 12 October 2046, at the age of 82. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 November 2024)

Don Q speaks to crowds and empty rooms

Don Q told crowd after crowd what he saw, and they saw what he said he saw. As he kept speaking and speaking, the crowds thinned out until the rooms were empty, but he kept speaking to the crowd he still saw before him. The former members of the crowd had left, but they kept seeing what he said he saw, and they told others about what they saw that he said he saw, until half the people saw what others said they saw that he said he saw. Meanwhile, Don Q left an empty room, went outside, and was followed by the crowds that saw what he said he saw. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 November 2024)

A “tattoo” in Thomas Hardy’s “The Trumpet-Major” and the annual Basel Tattoo

In Thomas Hardy's "The Trumpet-Major", the Royal Army's Dragoons show up in the village of Overcombe, and Anne Garland hears them break the silence of the night: "Louder sounds [...] came from the camp of dragoons, were taken up further to the right by the camp of the Hanoverians, and further on still by the body of infantry. It was tattoo." The "tattoo" is a military signal played on drums or bugles, but I only learned the term in 2006 with the first Basel Tattoo, a show of military bands that has taken place every summer since then (except for 2020 and 2021, when it was cancelled due to the pandemic). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 November 2024)

The trolley problem, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, the television series “The Good Place”, and allegory and literature as thought experiments

This morning, on my way to teaching a session on Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948), I passed a classroom where I spotted a slide from a presentation on "the trolley problem", philosopher Philippa Foot's 1967 thought experiment. In class, then, we discussed "The Lottery" itself as a literary thought experiment akin to the trolley problem and the scientific thought experiments of Albert Einstein or Erwin Schrödinger. But I also referred to the vivid, macabre presentation of the trolley problem in episode 6 of the second season of the television series "The Good Place". Ultimately, we linked "The Lottery" as a thought experiment to allegory in particular and to literature in general. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 November 2024)

Screenshot from Season 2, Episode 6 of The Good Place

The playwright “Colman” and the actor “Bannister” in Thomas Hardy’s “The Trumpet-Major” (1880)

In Thomas Hardy's "The Trumpet-Major" (1880), which is set during the Napoleonic Wars, the main characters go to see a play in Budmouth: "To-night it was one of Colman’s, who at this time enjoyed great popularity, and Mr. Bannister supported the leading character." Charles Bannister (1738-1804) was an English actor and singer who was widely celebrated for his performance as Caliban in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest". "Colman" is probably George Colman the Younger (1762-1836), whose play "The Iron Chest" premiered in 1799 with Bannister in the cast. But it could also be his father George Colman the Elder (1732-1794), if any of his plays were still being produced after his death. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 November 2024)

Update, 13 November 2024: A friend on Facebook quoted the manuscript of Hardy’s novel, which names Colman’s play as “The Heir at Law”, and added that “Bannister” is more likely to be Charles’s son John Bannister (1760-1836).

Don Q and a rifle

Don Q held up a rifle and said it was a microphone. He held up a dagger and said it was a pen. He held up a bomb and said it was a clock. He held up a skeleton and said it was a mannequin. He held up a tombstone and said it was a bench. He held up body armor and said it was a suit. He held up a tank and said it was a bicycle. He held up barbed wire and said it was kite string. He held up a drone and said it was a balloon. He held up his mask and said it was his face. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 November 2024)

Don Q and the clouds

Don Q saw clouds on the southern horizon: “See the dust rising from all the approaching giants, who grow every day.” He saw clouds on the northern horizon: “See the dust rising from all the giants among us, who grow every day.” He shouted louder until the people nearby, hearing nothing else, asked Don Q what to do about the giants. “We must send all the giants beyond the horizon.” The clouds from the southern storm kept growing every day, blowing their wind and rain towards the smoke from the northern fires, which kept growing every day. “The giants, the giants,” Don Q shouted. “The giants, the giants,” the people cried. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 November 2024)

“I cannot tell the sum”: A cento for the day after the election, November 2024

I cannot tell the sum

I cannot see a spoke

I cannot see - your lifetime -

I cannot vouch the merry Dust

I cannot buy it - 'tis not sold -

I cannot be ashamed

I cannot be proud

I cannot meet the Spring - 

I cannot want it more -

I cannot want it less -

I cant tell you - but you feel it -

I cannot see my soul

I cannot make the Force

cannot fold a Flood

cannot feel the seam

cannot solder an Abyss

cannot prick with Saw

cannot make Remembrance grow

cannot comprehend it's price -

All this and more I cannot tell - (Andrew Shields, #111Words, a cento, 6 November 2024)

I can’t pretend like I understand: A cento for Election Day 2024

I can't pretend like I understand. I can't even be sure. I can't even say it with a straight face. I can't unlock it. I can't hear you any more. I can't get no relief. I can't hear one single word. I cannot explain that in lines. I cannot play this game. I can't make it all match up. I can't say anything to your face. I can't remember what it's like. I cannot be excused. I can't help myself. I can't even touch the books. I can't sing a song that I don't understand. I can't get out of bed. I cannot move; my fingers are all in a knot. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, a cento, 5 November 2024)

Wikipedia’s List of female United States presidential and vice presidential candidates – and comedian Gracie Allen’s 1940 spoof campaign

There's a Wikipedia "List of female United States presidential and vice presidential candidates" that goes back to Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child receiving nomintaton votes at the abolitionist Liberty Party convention in 1847. Only two women have ever received electoral-college votes for President, both in 2016: Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party and indigenous activist Faith Spotted Eagle, who received a vote from a faithless elector pledged to Clinton. But my favorite piece of trivia is in the list of women who have received 40,000 or more votes for President: it concludes with comedian Gracie Allen, whose 1940 spoof campaign for President for the Surprise Party garnered 42,000 votes nationwide. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 November 2024)

Mosquitoes in poems by Jane Hirshfield and Meagan Chandler

I have a set of online poetry magazines that I read to find poems to send Facebook friends on their birthdays. This morning, I read "I Was Not, Among My Kind, Distinctive", a new poem by Jane Hirshfield in the November 2024 issue of "Poetry": "I fed the world’s mosquitoes who fed the world’s bats." Perhaps that line would not have stuck in my head if it was not for "The Horse Trail", by Meagan Chandler, from the excellent Singapore-based daily literary magazine "Eunoia Review": "[...] the humming mosquito tickling / my ear with thirst as I clear a way through tangled reeds / convinces me that I am needed [...]." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 November 2024)

 

“Torius”, the earliest known named resident of the area that is now Basel

For my sixtieth birthday in August, my wife and my in-laws gave me a subscription to the new ten-volume history of Basel, "Stadt.Geschichte.Basel". Since then, I've been reading the first volume, one or two pages at a time, and in the last few days, I've arrived at the section about the Basel area during the Roman Empire. This morning, I came across an illustration of a "Gepäckanhänger aus Geweih" ("Luggage label made of horn"), which has an inscription: "T.Tori". As the book notes, this refers to the name of the luggage's owner, "Torius", which makes this otherwise unknown soldier the earliest resident of what is now Basel whose name is known. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 November 2024)

“Crackle”: The fifth derivative of position

I wanted to look up "crackle" because I wondered from a poem by Ada Limón if it might be the name of a bird (as the context of the poem suggested). It's not, but it is a name for "the fifth derivative of position". In order, the derivatives of position from the first to the sixth are velocity, acceleration, jerk (or jolt), jounce (or snap), crackle, and pop. Yes, the fourth to sixth derivatives are named after the characters in advertisements for Kellogg's Rice Krispies: snap, crackle, and pop. The latter don't come up often, but according to Wikipedia, reduction of snap, the derivative of jerk, to zero improves railway tracks. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 November 2024)