Learning how to touch-type in the 1970s

My student Malena wrote an amusing text about not knowing how to touch-type: she typed it without looking and left it uncorrected. I thought I'd already written 111 words on how I learned to type, but I haven't. When I was in eighth grade in 1977-78, my mother insisted I take typing class. Reluctantly, I did so—and even enjoyed it, as a kind of problem-solving exercise and an activity with measurable progress (how many words per minute?). When I went to college in 1982, I thanked my mother, because I was one of the only young men in my dorm who could type, while almost all the young women could. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 April 2025)

On not remembering much about my 1992 visit to the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in the Black Forest

Recently, I thought about writing about visiting my mathematician father, Paul Shields, when he was at the Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in the Black Forest in the spring of 1992. The problem was that I couldn't remember anything about that visit except that it happened, although now it does cross my mind that it was when I met Abraham Lempel or Jacob Ziv (I'm not sure which) of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm used in data compression ("The next word is the shortest new word"). This morning, though, I read someone else's memory of Oberwolfach: Michele Santamaria's poem "Oberwolfach, A Love Poem" in the latest issue of the poetry magazine "The Shore". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4April 2025)

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) 

A student, Bach’s “Bourrée anglaise” for solo flute, and a coincidence

Today, I commented on a week's worth of texts by several students from my class "111 Words a Day: A Writring Project." In one text, Celine mentioned hearing Johann Sebastian Bach's flute composition "Bourrée anglaise", which reminded her of her sister. As I love Bach's works for flute, I checked and discovered that it is the third movement of the Partita in A Minor for Solo Flute. Although I mostly listen to Bach's Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord, I noticed that I have that partita on an album by Peter-Lukas Graf. When I mentioned that in my comments on her text, Celine said that was the very version she had heard. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 31 March 2025)

Snoopy and his plans to visit his mother in Plunderland

Snoopy left Plunderland many years ago, but sometimes he returns to the country to visit his mother at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm. Having recently planned another trip to see her and his sister Belle, he's now beginning to worry about returning there: dogs who have barked out against Don Q, Vanza, and Lone Odor have been detained in pounds and even flown out of the country. And it doesn't help that Omen is one of those responsible for such actions. After all, she has confessed to being a puppy killer, and she has been staging photo opportunities outside of the pounds abroad where many of those dogs have been sent. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 March 2025)