Excellent texts in the “111 Words a Day” class

For this morning's session of my "111 Words A Day" class, I asked the students to pick out one text by another student that they found excllent. To narrow the task down a bit, I asked them to choose from texts that were written by 20 and 26 March. I've done this with earlier versions of the class to work on developing positive points to describe texts that work well. That counters the tendency to work on editing to improve texts, which can often come across as a set of negative observations about what not to do. And today, I even managed to go on a brief spiel about Aristotle's "Poetics". (AndrewShields, #111Words, 3 April 2025)

Isobel Meikle-Small and Carey Mulligan as Kathy H in Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” (2010)

In Mark Romanek's 2010 film of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel "Never Let Me Go", Kathy H is played by Isobel Meikle-Small in the first part of the movie when the character is young, and then by Carey Mulligan in the second and third parts when she is a teenager and an adult. Rewatching the movie today, I spotted a moment in the third part when Mulligan responds with a quick smile to a comment by her old friend Ruth (Keira Knightley), and I was reminded of Meikle-Small smiling in just the same way earlier in the film. I wondered, then, if the two had worked together to develop their character's mannerisms. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 April 2025)

Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” and Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused"

In Taylor Swift's "All Too Well (10 Minute Version)", a woman addresses her ex: "I was never good at telling jokes, but the punch line goes, 'I'll get older, but your lovers stay my age.'" This echoes a joke in Richard Linklater's 1993 film "Dazed and Confused": Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a graduate still hanging around his high school, tells three teenage boys, "That's what I love about these high-school girls, man: I get older; they stay the same age." In this moment of "locker-room talk", the four boys bond together in laughter; in Swift's song, the woman addresses her joke to her ex, but is by herself when she does so. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 April 2025)