Cuando me despierto, voy a la cocina y veo al gnomo tomar un café en la mesa. Nos miramos. "¿Tienes algo que decirme?", dice. "¿Tienes algo que decirme?", digo. Nos miramos. El espectro entra desde el salón. "¡Feliz cumpleaños! "Gracias," decimos yo y el gnomo en el mismo momento. Nos miramos. "¿Es tu cumpleaños?" nos preguntamos en el mismo momento. Nos miramos. El espectro ríe. "Estáis ambos locos."
El gnomo tiene un trabajo nuevo como guardia de seguridad en un sitio de construcción de tranvía. Cuando le veo en la intersección cerca del hospital, le doy una señal para preguntarle si puedo atravesar la calle, pero él me ignora, como si yo no pudiera ser visto. Espero en la lluvia hasta que el gnomo me da permiso para ir. Varios coches me pasan y también personas mojadas sobre sus bicis y el autobús que quiero usar para ir al centro de la ciudad. Después de unos minutos, desaparezco completamente entre las gotas de la lluvia.
When I first got into The Grateful Dead in 1982, two recordings of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's "Franklin's Tower" had been released: the studio version on 1975's "Blues for Allah" and the live version on 1981's "Dead Set". I once preferred that live version after Bob Weir's "Feel Like A Stranger", but now I appreciate how, after all the complex, swirling lines of "Help on the Way" and "Slipknot!", the studio version completes the three-song suite with the simple A-major-to-D-major groove of "Franklin's Tower" (with a quick passing G major in between), which is a great springboard when Garcia sings, "If you get confused, go listen to the music play." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 August 2025)
Estaba ponderando que no había visto al gnomo por dos semanas, y el espectro todavía no sabía dónde el gnomo había desparecido. Pero hoy hemos recibido una carta del gnomo. Estaba pasando dos semanas en Reikiavik con su familia islandesa. Sus relativos viven en la ciudad en un parque famoso para las personas mágicas. Con la carta había una foto de su casa, que yo había visitado hace once años con mi hijo y mi hija. No vimos a los gnomos tampoco a hadas o elfos.
For Roman Jakobson, in "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics" (1960), "the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination." The "axis of selection" involves choosing one word instead of another; the "axis of combination" putting words together in a sequence. Reading individual words in James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1939) often involves the former, and sets of alternative senses: "sweet tarts" (116.23) can be cakes, "loose" women, or "sweethearts". But immediately thereafter, such layering is instead "projected into the axis of combination" as two phrases in a row: "Maggy's tea, or your majesty, if heard as a boost from a born gentleman" (116.24-25). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 August 2025)
14 July 1984 at Berkeley's Greek Theater was my favorite performance of the Grateful Dead's "Help on the Way / Slipknot! / Franklin's Tower" suite. With the band ready for the second set, Bob Weir wasn't on stage yet, so Phil Lesh got the crowd to shout, "Come on, Weir!" as Jerry Garcia began the "Help on the Way" groove. Then at the end of "Slipknot!", Garcia pushed the register ever higher until the rhythm section suspended the beat and he spiralled back down to the song's primary riff. During "Franklin's Tower", the crowd roared when it began to rain and Garcia seemed to be calling it down from the clouds. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 August 2025)
The first song on Taylor Swift's album "The Life of a Showgirl" (forthcoming on 3 October 2025) is "The Fate of Ophelia". That sounds like a quotation from Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's song "Althea" (from the 1980 album "Go To Heaven"): "You may be the fate of Ophelia." Whether Swift's song echoes Garcia and Hunter's remains to be seen, but I was struck by this further connection: guitarist John Mayer, one of Swift's ex-boyfriends, first met the Dead's Bob Weir when they played "Althea" together on "The Late Late Show" in 2015, a performance that inspired Weir to ask Mayer to join the newly formed Dead and Company that fall. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 August 2025)
From the roof of Hush Money House, Don Q looked down at the people sitting at the beautiful cafe tables and chairs. "The garden has never been so beautiful." He looked into the distance. "I have to tell Vanza I can see his house from here." When he looked down again, his guards were clearing the tables, and then Malice walked to one of the cafe tables with her assistant, who was carrying a tray with a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. "Malice," he shouted, "order a piece for me. I'll come right down." She glared up at him. "Okay, I guess I'll have to get my own." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 August 2025)
Don Q went up on the roof of Hush Money House and looked across the vast expanse of Plunderland spread out before him. Close at hand, he smiled to see his troops deployed in the streets against the criminals moving among them to rape and murder his supporters. Far in the distance, on the other side of the country, up in the North, loomed the largest part of Plunderland. "There, in the icy wastes", he bawled, "I will have the meeting that will make my name go down in history as a peacemaker the likes of which the world has never seen before. Thank you for your attention to this matter." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 August 2025)
I didn't start listening to the Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast when it started in May 2020, but I have listened to most of the episodes in the past two or three years. The host, Jesse Jarnow, is the author of several books, one of which I've been reading recently, "Heads: A Biography of Psychedelic America" (2016). Both the podcast series (now in its twelfth season) and that book, along with their many references to the field of Grateful Dead Studies, have finally given me a foundation to design a course on my favorite band, which I'm going to teach in Spring Semester 2026 and call "The Grateful Dead: Music, Literature, Culture". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 August 2025)
Sometime in 1982-1983, I found an LP in the KZSU Stanford library: "Make Believe Ballroom", by The Grateful Dead, a radio-broadcast bootleg of their 13 August 1975 concert at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall (fifty years ago today). They were on a touring hiatus that had begun in October 1974, but the GAMH show featured all the songs from their forthcoming new album, "Blues for Allah", released that September. The show's highlight for me has always been the triptych "Help On The Way / Slipknot! / Franklin's Tower". As I loved that tape, I was thrilled when the show was officially released as "One From The Vault" in April 1991. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 August 2025)
For Winter Quarter 1986, I called my morning-jazz program on Stanford's student-run radio station KZSU "From the Mountain to the Crossing". Every show began with "The Mountain", by South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, from "Water from an Ancient Well" (1985). That began a journey through jazz old and new, which always ended with "The Crossing", by Detroit-born jazz singer Sheila Jordan (1928-2025). The title track of her 1984 album is a duet with bassist Harvie S: "And for those of you who wonder / what the crossing means to me: / it's the love I have when I'm singing for you. / Oh the spirit of the music sets me free." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 August 2025)
The Crossing (Sheila Jordan)
There are moments in your lifetime
when the whole world seems insane.
If you search beyond the madness,
there is peace of mind to gain.
Where there is no time or season
and there is no fear or strain,
take your troubles to the crossing.
It's where joy outweighs our pain.
Oh the crossing, oh the crossing,
it's been known by many names.
Some have found it through religion,
putting faith in God each day.
When the world seems lost and shattered
and your dreams have gone astray,
never seek out self-destruction.
There's a crossing that can help you find a way.
Oh the crossing, oh the crossing,
what a blessing it can be.
When you're feeling down and lonely,
there's an answer; there's a key.
And for those of you who wonder
what the crossing means to me:
it's the love I have when I'm singing for you.
Oh the spirit of the music sets me free.
Snoopy read the headline from a publication in Plunderland: "Tell-It Report: Two Confederate States to be Reinstalled Under Don Q." He looked up from his screen and stared into the distance as if he were asking the horizon which two states in the country might want to go back to the time when they had rebelled against it. After a few seconds of steadily increasing puzzlement, he looked back down at the screen and read the headline again: "Two Confederate Statues." So Don Q wasn't restoring any Confederate political entities. He was only honoring the memory of those who rebelled against the country before he had started turning it into Plunderland. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 August 2025)
Bob Dylan's recents setlists are very repetitive, so I think he's neglecting the full range of his incredible catalogue. I went through a Wikipedia list of 745 songs “by Bob Dylan”, deleted many of them, and ended up with my very personal list of 167 songs as a possible working repertoire for Dylan. That's heavy on my favorite albums, so I threw out a bunch more to get to 83 brilliant songs. (I've thought about a similar list for The Rolling Stones.) Then he could play three shows without repeats and always have some surprises available. Still, Dylan's 84 years old, so whatever he wants to play is cool, of course! (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 August 2025)
My Dylan list:
1. 4th Time Around
2. Absolutely Sweet Marie
3. All Along the Watchtower
4. All I Really Want to Do
5. As I Went Out One Morning
6. Ballad in Plain D
7. Ballad of a Thin Man
8. Blind Willie McTell
9. Blowin' in the Wind
10. Boots of Spanish Leather
11. Buckets of Rain
12. Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)
13. Dear Landlord
14. Desolation Row
15. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
16. Down Along the Cove
17. Drifter's Escape
18. Early Roman Kings
19. Every Grain of Sand
20. Everything Is Broken
21. Forever Young
22. Girl from the North Country
23. A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall
24. High Water (For Charley Patton)
25. Highway 61 Revisited
26. Hurricane
27. I Contain Multitudes
28. I Shall Be Released
29. I Want You
30. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight
31. If Not for You
32. If You Ever Go to Houston
33. If You See Her, Say Hello
34. It Ain't Me Babe
35. It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry
36. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
37. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)
38. John Brown
39. John Wesley Harding
40. Just Like a Woman
41. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
42. Knockin' on Heaven's Door
43. Lay Lady Lay
44. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
45. Like a Rolling Stone
46. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
47. Love Minus Zero/No Limit
48. Love Sick
49. Maggie's Farm
50. Make You Feel My Love
51. Masters of War
52. Mississippi
53. Most Likely You Go Your Way And I'll Go Mine
54. Mr. Tambourine Man
55. My Back Pages
56. Not Dark Yet
57. One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below)
58. One Too Many Mornings
59. Pledging My Time
60. Positively 4th Street
61. Queen Jane Approximately
62. Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)
63. Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35
64. Sara
65. Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)
66. She Belongs to Me
67. Shelter from the Storm
68. Simple Twist of Fate
69. Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
70. Subterranean Homesick Blues
71. Tangled Up in Blue
72. Tears of Rage
73. Things Have Changed
74. This Wheel's on Fire
75. The Times They Are a-Changin'
76. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
77. Visions of Johanna
78. Watching the River Flow
79. When I Paint My Masterpiece
80. The Wicked Messenger
81. You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
82. You're a Big Girl Now
83. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
