Dos gnomos y dos espectros

Quise limpiarme los dientes, pero el gnomo estaba usando el inodoro. Fui a otro baño, pero el espectro se estaba duchando. Fui a la terraza para acostarme en la hamaca, pero otro gnomo, que no conocía, estaba durmiendo allí. Fui al salón para ver fútbol en la tele, pero otro espectro, que tampoco conocía, estaba viendo una telenovela guatemalteca. Fui a mi dormitorio para leer, pero todos mis libros habían desaparecido. Me senté en el piso y toqué la gitarra.

Spike gets a job as a red teamer for Bark

After a spell of unemployment, Snoopy’s brother Spike finally found a new job as a red teamer for Bark, the large language-model text generator for dogs. He spent his days barking obscenities at the interface for ten hours with only two short breaks and time off to relieve himself. Needless to say, the pay was miserable, and he got no benefits. After two months, he used BarkTime to chat with Snoopy, who was horrified by how terrible his brother looked: “You can’t keep doing this terrible work!” — “But I need the job,” Spike sighed. And two weeks later, he was fired without notice or compensation when his job was outsourced overseas. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 July 2025) 

“Let It Bleed” at five years old; “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as an adult

Among the albums my parents owned was "Let It Bleed", by The Rolling Stones, which came out in 1969 when I was five,so it seems to me like it’s been around forever. Of the album's lines, it was “we all need someone we can bleed on” that stuck in my head even when I was little. Deacades later, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was a friend’s favorite song, and we played and sang it together all the time, with long jams between the verses. After he killed himself in September 2016, I couldn’t play it for years. But now I can play it withour crying, in his memory. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 July 2025)

A snarky comment by an online connection who never interacted with me before

A few months ago, I read a superb poem online by a poet previously unknown to me. I posted it on Facebook and sent him a friend request so that I could tell him how much I liked it. Then I didn't hear anything more from him. — Today, on a recent post of mine, he wrote a snarky comment implying the text was AI-generated. Especially after my bad experiences with other snarky comments over the last year and a half, my response was swift: I deleted the comment, unfriended the poet, and blocked him. But maybe I wouldn't have done so if he had actually engaged with some of posts previously. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 July 2025) 

Literary tie-dyes from Taylor Swift and Emily Dickinson to James Joyce and Elizabeth Bishop

For my Taylor Swift seminar in spring 2024, I made a tie-dye T-shirt with her name and the course number. For my Emily Dickinson seminar in fall 2024, I made one with "I'm Nobody!" on the front and "Who are You?" on the back. This spring, for my Finnegans Wake Reading Group, I made one with "Here Comes Everybody" on the front and "meanderthalltale" on the back. For my Elizabeth Bishop seminar this fall, I've designed another tie-dye: "rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!" on the front and "Cold dark deep and absolutely clear" on the back. Now I just need to come up with one for my Virginia Woolf seminar this fall, too. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 July 2025) 

Prosa del gnomo

Prosa del gnomo

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El gnomo me dijo una vez que le tenía que dar un pelo de la coronilla. Cuando lo negué, me dijo, "Puedo tener un pelo hoy o todo en décadas." Desde entonces he perdido todo ese pelo, y oigo al gnomo reír cada día.

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Cuando llegué al teatro, el gnomo se estaba sentando en mi mesa preferida. Me ofreció una silla y me pidió un café y un agua mineral, como me pido siempre. Me dijo que llovería todo el día. Quise leer hasta que llegaras, pero no quise ser grosero, así que hablamos de las cosas que toda la gente dice para decir nada.

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El gnomo dijo: "Nieva". Miré fuera y no nevaba. Contesté: "No hay ninguna nube, el cielo está azul y el sol brilla". El gnomo dijo: "Nevó ayer". Me acordé de que llovió, así que lo negué: "Anduve en la lluvia ayer, mi abrigo estaba mojado". El gnomo predijo: "Nevará mañana". Pensé en alto: "Veremos, veremos".

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Me quise despertar, pero el gnomo quiso dormir otra hora. El reloj de mi celular cantó, y canté con él, pero el gnomo susurró para pedir silencio, rodó al otro lado y siguió durmiendo. Su ronquido era más ruidoso que el celular y yo, y nosotros dos nos despertamos. Herví agua para café, escuché música con mi celular, y el gnomo roncó y roncó.

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Hace varios días el gnomo ha desaparecido. Imagino que se fue a otro lugar para diciembre y Fin de Año. Quizá esté con otros gnomos en el Polo Norte para hacer juegos para los niños y las niñas del mundo, que están esperando sus regalos de Navidad. En la nieve fuera de la fábrica los gnomos hacen muñecos de nieve con sombreros y zanahorias como nariz. 

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En otra sala, el gnomo habló con el espectro de algunas cosas extrañas que sigo haciendo. Ambos se rieron de que, por ejemplo, me senté aquí, toqué algo con mis dedos y suspiré a veces, o hablé con nadie o quizá conmigo. No entendieron mis palabras casi susurradas, formulaciones para comentarios a mis estudiantes sobre los ensayos que estaba corrigiendo. 

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El gnomo camina por el campo y mira su celular nuevo, que roba del espectro. Pero el celular mira también al gnomo.

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Fui con el gnomo al museo y vimos un autoretrato de una pintora con una boina roja. El gnomo gritó: “¡La conocí! ¡Y me robó esta boina hace ciento once años!” Se giró hacia mi y añadió: “No escuchaste que dije algo sobre mi edad.” Me hipnotizó con su mirada, y olvidé sus palabras hasta que muchos años después soñé sobre nuestra visita al museo.

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El gnomo miró en el cielo azul y dijo: "Creo que está lloviendo, y hoy olvidé mi paraguas." Cerca de él, miré en el cielo azul y dije: "Pero el cielo está descubierto y el aire es seco." El gnomo rio y gritó: "¿No puedes ver la tempestad? ¿No puedes sentir la humedad del aire? ¿No puedes escuchar el viento?" Lo miré como si estuviera loco, y me miró también como si yo estuviera loco. Nos miramos en silencio mientras el sol se ponía. Pero sin su paraguas, la lluvia invisible y silenciosa mojó al gnomo y extinguió la llama de su pipa. 

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El gnomo no quiso ver el partido de fútbol entre España y Alemania, así que trajo su boli y dibujó bigotes y barbas sobre las caras de las jugadoras en una foto de los dos equipos. "¿Por qué no vemos una película de Navidad en Netflix? Quiero ver una historia de una mujer de la ciudad que vuelve a su pueblo y encuentra el significado verdadero de la vida y de la Navidad." ¡No pude creer sus palabras! "Pero gnomo, es julio. ¡Quedan todavía cinco meses para la Navidad! Y las jugadoras ofrecen un significado importante para la vida y para las niñas." El gnomo se calló y dibujó otro bigote.

“Shake it off” from “Piers Plowman” and Mark 6:11 to Virginia Woolf, Wilco, and Taylor Swift

In Virginia Woolf's "Jacob's Room" (1922), Timmy Durant stops worrying about his friend Jacob Flanders: “There are things that can't be said. Let's shake it off.” This made me think, of course, of Taylor Swift's song "Shake It Off" ("1989", 2014), and of Wilco's song "Shake It Off" ("Sky Blue Sky", 2007), but I also wondered how old the expression is. — It's very old: The earliest reference in the Oxford English Dictionary is from William Langland's fourteenth-century Middle English poem "Piers Plowman": "And shryf þe sharpliche and shak of alle pruyde." The second is from Myles Coverdale's 1535 translation of the Bible: "Shake of the duste from your feet" (Mark 6:11). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 July2025) 

An alternative timeline: Meeting an old Spanish poet in Basel in the 1990s

In an alternative timeline, shortly after my arrival in Basel in 1995, I met an old Spanish poet who had lived here since 1936, when he escaped from capture in Granada by the nationalist militia and found refuge in Switzerland. He hadcontinued to write poems and plays, and had also written four novels and a study of Spanish poets and the Spanish Civil War. In 1956, he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. We spoke German, Federico and I, but I started learning Spanish in order to read his works in the original. In 1998, shortly after his 100th birthday, he died peacefully in his house beside the Rhine. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 July 2025) 

“Regular estrofootball” and “irregular testofootball"

While watching the exciting England-Italy football match last night (the semifinal at the UEFA European championships which England won 2-1 in extra time), my son Miles, my daughter Luisa, and I had fun turning the whole world of football and its discourses on its head. We called the players we were watching "regular" football and discussed all the ways that it is superior to the "irregular" football that some people claim to prefer. We also came up with another way to discuss the two types of football: the superior "estrofootball" and the inferior "testofootball". While we will continue to follow "testofootball", we're looking forward to more excellent "estrofootball" in the future. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 July2025)

Discovering a local music scene, this time around Worcester, Massachusetts

When I was in the United States in June, my sister and I went to three concerts in the Worcester, Massachusetts, area from Thursday to Saturday and got a good sense of the quality and community of the area's music scene. The Thursday singer-songwriter, Sarah Louise French, often sings with Colt and the Coyotes, the rock-and-roll band on the Friday, and the Smack Dabs, the swing-blues band on the Saturday, plays the same venues as the others. Not only can local and regional musicians be excellent, they also have all kinds of reasons for not achieving broader success, from not wanting anything like stardom to all kinds of legitimate life choices. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 July 2025) 

Daniel Poncin, an ENS student of German in the early 1960s, mentioned by Paul Celan in his diary

From 1997 to 2000, my wife Andrea worked in the German Department at the University of Poitiers in France. One of the professors in the department, Daniel Poncin, studied German at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris in the early 1960s. One of his teachers was the Germanophone poet Paul Celan, who lived in Paris from 1948 until his suicide in 1970. Daniel showed me an assignment he had done with Celan's corrections and comments. A few days ago, in Bertrand Badiou's "Paul Celan: Eine Bildbiographie" (Suhrkamp, 2023), I came across a quotation from Celan's diary: "Poncin, blaue Krawatte, spielt mit rotweißen Bleistift" ("Poncin, blue tie, plays with a red-and-white pencil"). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 July 2025) 

Snoopy does nothing

Snoopy has a long list of things to do, but after doing some of them, he has climbed up on the roof of his doghouse to do nothing. Across the river, the hills rise in the distance to become the low mountains to the north. After the rain earlier this afternoon, a light breeze is pushing grey clouds across the half-clear sky. Snoopy sits there quietly, without his typewriter, and slowly clears his head. Later, perhaps he will do something: go to hear some jazz; do some cleaning in his doghouse; watch a football match on TV; read a book; even get out his typewriter after all. But for now, nothing. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 July 2025) 

Odd claims about Jane Austen in a New York Times headline

Here's the weird headline for an article by Sarah Lyall in The New York Times: "The Essential Jane Austen: A peerless chronicler of class and romance, the 'Pride and Prejudice” author was never prolific. But her work remains remarkably relevant, more than two centuries after her death." It's weird to say that she wasn't prolific: she wrote and published five novels from 1811 to 1818. And there is no "essential Austen": she completed six novels in all (one written in 1803 but only published in 1818), and they are all central to literary history. And in the end, the article recommends all six of them, so it even admits they're all essential! (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 July 2025)

Omen and masked Plunderlanders raid the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm

Snoopy is playing with his brother Spike, his sister Belle, and the other puppies at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. Everybody's dancing to that fine, fine music. Suddenly, Omen the puppy-killer and a squad of masked Plunderlanders rush in and start grabbing puppies. Snoopy, Spike, and Belle hide in a corner and watch as the intruders put leashes and muzzles on puppy after puppy. Omen stalks around with a rifle at the ready, careless about where it's pointing, and stopping every now and then for photo ops. Just as three masks are reaching for Snoopy and his siblings, he falls off his doghouse and wakes up as he hits the ground. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 July 2025)

Potential conflicts between tennis matches and football matches

On Sunday, 9 July 2006, I watched the Wimbledon men's singles final at my friend Mark's house. Mark was actually hosting a party for the FIFA Men's World Cup football final between Italy and France that evening, so I made sure a second screen was available in case the tennis went past kickoff. But Roger Federer beat Rafael Nadal with time to spare for the football. Last night, though, we had tickets for the UEFA Women's Euro football match in Basel between France and the Netherlands, and we had to leave before the Wimbledon men's singles final ended. So I watched on my phone, and the match again ended before kickoff. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 July 2025)

How two tennis players prepare to serve

Preparing to serve, the one player collects three balls in his left hand or on his racket. After throwing one away, he sometimes gets another. Once he's chosen two, he looks closely at them before putting one in his pocket. Before the first serve, he bounches the ball with his racket and then few times with his left hand. — Preparing to serve, the other player collects four balls in his left hand or on his racket. He throws one away quickly, then looks closely at the remaining three before tossing one away and pocketing a second. Before the first serve, he bounces the ball a few times with his left hand. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 July 2025) 

“Double bagels” in Grand Slam women’s singles finals, and Iga Świątek’s three “bagels” in a row

The 6-0, 6-0 victory by Iga Świątek (Poland) over Amanda Anisimova (USA) in today's Wimbledon Ladies' Singles' final was the third Grand Slam Women's final with two straight sets at love (a "double bagel"). The first was at Wimbledon in 1911 when Dorothea Lambert Chambers (UK) beat Dora Boothby (UK), although the defending champion Lambert Chambers only had to play the final "challenge round" back then. The second case was in 1988 at the French Open when Steffi Graf (Germany) beat Natalia Zvereva (a Belarussian player then playing for the Soviet Union). With Świątek's 6-2, 6-0 semifinal win over Belinda Bencic (Switzerland), Świątek now has won three "bagels" in a row. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 July 2025)

Greg Osby with the Warren Haynes Band at Z7 in Pratteln, 10 July 2025

At the end of the second set at Z7 in Pratteln last night, the Warren Haynes Band locked into the groove of "Pretzel Logic", the title cut of Steely Dan's 1974 album, and extended it with solos by the whole band: drummer Terrence Higgins, bassist Kevin Scott, alto saxophonist Greg Osby, keyboardist Matt Slocum, and bandleader Warren Hanyes on electric guitar. Osby's solo was especially riveting, with Higgins and Scott playing around the groove and Osby pushing into free-jazz territory. After Donald Harrison the night before at the Bird's Eye in Basel with The Cookers, that made two nights in a row for me of great alto players born in 1960. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 July 2025)

The Cookers at the Bird’s Eye in Basel, featuring Donald Harrison’s great solos and bassist Cecil McBee at 90 years old

Last night at the Bird's Eye in Basel, The Cookers performed an energetic set of late hard-bop. The second set offered more dynamic range than the almost overly intense first, but in both sets, alto saxophonist Donald Harrison played superb solos with clear and distinct parts that had the audience applauding at the end of each of them. For me personally, the evening brought a new milestone: bassist Cecil McBee was born in May 1935, so he is 90 years old. That makes him the oldest musician I've ever seen live, passing pianist Joe Haider, who was 87 years old when I saw him at the Bird's Eye in August 2023. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 July 2025)

Anki flashcards and the proliferation of AI images

With the Anki program for electronic flashcards, language learners use images to learn words. In November 2020, I started using it for Spanish, and I still make new vocabulary flashcards now. For each new card, I put the word into an online image search (usually DuckDuckGo) and skim through the results until I find an image that might be helpful in learning the word. At first, I often found good stock photos or paintings to put on the cards, and those remain good sources. But increasingly, the image-search results are littered with AI images. They could also be useful for language-learning, but I definitely prefer photos, drawings, or paintings by humans. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 July 2025)

Snoopy has insomnia and reads Virginia Woolf

While the rain cools July down, Snoopy lies awake in his doghouse and reads Virginia Woolf. Jacob wanders Greece with melancholy reflections on civilization and the present day a hundred years ago. A car hisses by in the damp street, and water trickles in the gutters and eaves. Snoopy lies awake in the night, and Jacob stumbles through the day. Snoopy hasn’t slept properly since he came back from Plunderland, but he can’t stop reading about Don Q and thinking of his cruel laughter. Jacob looks at the sky above the Parthenon and doesn’t know what he should think about Home Rule. What are we going to do with his shoes? (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 July 2025)

Don Q laughs with the crowd about hating the Demon Cats

Don Q looked at the window painted on the wall and saw a crowd that would laugh at everything he said about the Demon Cats: "They hate Don Q. But I hate them, too. You know that? I really do, I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really believe they hate Plunderland." As he listened happily to the crowd's laughter, he chuckled at the memory of the laughter of Omen and Ron Disease at the new concentration camp near the Southern Hush Money House in White Sea Lake and the laughter of Vanza and Bookalie at Hush Money House about Bookalie's concentration camp in the Land of the Savior. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 July 2025)

Don Q said it, and the crowd laughed

When Don Q said it to a crowd, they laughed. So when he stood in front of another crowd, he said it again, and the new crowd laughed, too. So whenever he stood in front of a new crowd, he said it again, and each new crowd laughed, too. And some of the members of the crowds repeated what he said to others, and some of them laughed, too. Gradually, the members of Don Q's crowds and some of those others had all learned to laugh at what Don Q said. So the other day at the new concentration camp, he said it to Omen and Ron Disease, and they laughed. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 July 2025)

Z said, “Don’t exaggerate."

In the year 15, A spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 16, B spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 17, C spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 18, D spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 19, E spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 20, F spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 21, G spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 22, H spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 23, I spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 24, J spoke, and Z said, "Don't exaggerate." In 25, K spoke, and Z said, "No one could ever have foreseen that things would get so extreme." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 July 2025)

The “Kafkaesque”: As much “a maelstrom of lies” as “bureaucratic absurdity"

In "Abrego Garcia is a fake gangster. Trump and Bukele are not" (Public Notice, 2 July 2025), Liz Dye addresses Kilmer Abrego Garcia's "dystopian journey through several prisons and at least two countries": "To call it Kafkaesque is to reduce it to a tale of bureaucratic absurdity, rather than a maelstrom of lies concocted to cover up a terrible policy." While Dye's overall point is correct, she herself "reduces" the Kafkaesque to a matter of bureaucracy. That may be one sense of the expression, but Franz Kafka's "The Trial" and "In the Penal Colony", just to name two works, are as much about "maelstroms of lies" as they are about bureaucracy. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 July 2025)

Medicaid and mortality rates

In a study on Medicaid and mortality rates, Angela Wyse of Dartmouth and Bruce D. Meyer of the University of Chicago conclude that their "findings suggest that lack of health insurance explains about five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans." It was heartbreaking to read about this study this morning, one day after the Republican Party majority in the United States Senate voted to slash Medicaid in the name of "work requirements" that are demonstrably ineffective. But of course that justification of the cuts under President Donald Trump is secondary to the desire to cut Medicaid that has been a Republican dream for decades. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 July 2025)

Taking a further step in reading Spanish with “Cien años de soledad”, by Gabriel García Márquez

Until last night, I looked up words from sentence to sentence while reading "Cien años de soledad", by Gabriel García Márquez. But while waiting at Logan Airport for my flight to Zurich, I decided to read whole paragraphs at once and only note the words I wanted to look up at the end of each paragraph. This turned out to work very well, and it reminded me of a similar stage in my process of learning to read German-language literature back in the late 1980s. After about ten pages, I finished a chapter, and I could have read more, but I was too heartbroken about the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 July 2025)