Heiner Müller’s poem “Missouri 1951” and the Great Flood of 1951

Heiner Müller's poem "Missouri 1951" ("Gedichte", Alexander Verlag, 1992) briefly sketches the Great Flood of 1951, a catastrophe that left over half a million people displaced and seventeen dead. When I read the poem recently, I realized I had never heard of that flood before, and it struck me how an East German Communist's poem taught me something about the history of my own homeland, the United States. Many Wikipedia pages on historical events include a section on literary or cultural representations of those events, but the Great Flood of 1951 page has no such section. But surely a few other literary or cinematic works, besides Müller's poem, refer to it. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 January 2025)

 

Missouri 1951

Es wurde von den Staaten

Dem Staudamm Geld verwehrt.

Weil sie nichts gegen ihn taten

Hat sich der Fluß beschwert.

 

Er ist aufgestanden

Ihm schien der Damm zu alt.

Die Stadtbewohner fanden

Das Wasser kalt.

 

Die abgehauenen Wälder wachsen

Unter der Erde fort.

Dresden ein Brandfleck in Sachsen

Die Toten haben das letzte Wort.

 

The editorial decision to publish critical journalism – or puffball personality pieces

In 2002, when the radical right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen made the runoff election for the French presidency, the Basler Zeitung published a two-page spread about his political positions – a critical analysis of the man and his politics. In 2017, when his daughter Marine Le Pen made the runoff election for the French presidency for the first time, the same newspaper, with its new right-wing editor-in-chief Markus Somm, published a two-page spread about her, too – on her cats, her apartment, and her charm. When you read articles about extremist politicians, keep in mind that actual critical analysis is always possible, and it is a conscious editorial decision when it is absent. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 January 2025)

Being Bob Dylan’s “chick”: Suze Rotolo and “hermeneutical injustice"

In "A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties" (2009), Suze Rotolo describes being Bob Dylan's "chick" in the 1960s: "There was an attitude toward musicians’ girlfriends—'chicks,' as we were called, or 'old lady,' if a wife—that I couldn’t tolerate. Since this was before there was a feminist vocabulary, I had no framework for those feelings yet they were very strong." The situation of having an experience but lacking vocabulary to name it is "hermeneutical injustice", as philosopher Miranda Fricker dubbed it in "Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing" (2007). Fricker's prime example was women, like Rotolo, dealing with male supremacy before second-wave feminism. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 January 2025)

 

Quotation from Rotolo here: https://susanbordo.substack.com/p/a-complete-fiction-suze-rotolo-and

Recording sessions from the 1980s to 2025

With new strings on my Ovation acoustic guitar, I went to Freiburg today to record new Human Shields demos with my friend Jörg Benzing. The last time I did serious recording was in 2016 for the Human Shields EP "Défense de jouer". Those sessions were dramatically different from recordings I made in the 1980s and 1990s, live in a radio-station studio or with twentieth-century four-track or eight-track recorders. But even in the last nine years, it seemed to me today, the technology has made another leap forward, with intuitive on-screen editing making everything dramatically more efficient and productive (at least when someone knows how to operate the software, as Jörg does). (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 January 2025)

Putting on new guitar strings, and buying a new pair of needlenose pliers

Last night, when I sat down to restring my acoustic guitar (the lovely Ovation I bought in 2017), I couldn't find the needlenose pliers I keep in the case for my trusty old Fender acoustic guitar (which I bought in 1985), and the pliers were missing from our toolbox, too. So I couldn't cut the long extra parts of the new strings off after tuning them all up. So today, I made a special trip to a hardware store for a new pair of needlenose pliers. So before practicing just now, I cut off the string ends. And of course, I had to retune the new strings after every other song. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 10 January 2025)

Breaking strings on my guitars

I began learning to play guitar in July 1983, and for almost twenty years, I broke strings all the time, whether on acoustic or electric guitar. Only in the early 2000s, when I began to play sitting down while accompanying my friend Markus Bachmann for his Swiss German songs, did I stop breaking so many strings. I still kept the percussive style that had perhaps led me to cut through them like butter, but I apparently became a less aggressive player when I played sitting down rather than standing. I thought of this today when I broke a string while practicing, which still happens far less often than it used to. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 January 2025) 

What I’ve done on Facebook over the years, and the need for alternatives

I joined Facebook in 2007 because my friend Geoff Brock wanted to play Scrabble with me. Over the years, I've created multiple networks of people to stay in touch with: family in the United States and elsewhere; friends there, in Germany and in many other countries; poets and writers all over the world; former Basel English students; and musicians I have heard and met in Basel and elsewhere. I've also established two traditions of my own: sending people birthday poems and writing my daily prose. But with various recent decisions made by founder Mark Zuckerberg, it's time to start thinking about alternatives, as I did when I left Twitter for Mastodon. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 January 2025)