A trip to the Embassy with "1984"

I took the train to Bern this morning to renew my passport at the U. S. Embassy. The security requirements there restrict what you can take inside – no laptops, for example, and no backpacks, with no lockers to store things while you're inside. So all I had was my wallet, my phone, a charger for it on the train, and a small cloth bag with my documents. On the train there, I read "1984" on my phone, and I finished it on my way back. The security experience was nothing like Orwell, though – and I did not return to Basel with anything resembling Winston Smith's final realization: "He loved Big Brother." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 May)

Who's afraid of going to work?

People in "essential" jobs have continued working during the coronavirus pandemic – often with little or no access to testing and protective gear. Despite their fears of contracting the virus, many cannot afford to leave their jobs. As Kevin Hassett says, “It is scary to go to work. [...] I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home [...]." But Hassett is not an "essential" worker on the "front lines" of the "war against" coronavirus – he is a Senior Adviser to President Trump who has called for "the economy" to re-open quickly, and he has access to testing and face masks (which he only wears "at times"). (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 May)

 

Virginia Woolf and the wandering imagination in "The Mark on the Wall"

While the narrator of Virginia Woolf's "The Mark on the Wall" wonders whether an unusual "mark on the wall" is a nail, a hole, or something else, she wanders through long trains of associations. When she considers getting up to check, she rejects the idea first because she couldn't "say for certain" and later because she can't see what she'd "gain". When she exhorts herself, her mind still wanders into questions: "I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is – a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?" Only when someone complains about the "snail" on the wall does her imaginative wandering end. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 10 May)

Keep moving

Keep the economy burning, keep it moving, keep money moving from account to account, keep moving resources around to be burned up, keep the people moving around and crossing each others' paths, keep everything moving so that the economy keeps moving, don't stop moving to keep a virus from moving, keep producing produce, keep producing waste, keep producing carbon dioxide to produce produce and products and waste, keep everything moving even when so many people are dying – and that is the link to climate catastrophe, which also follows from an economy that always has to keep everything in motion, people, produce, resources, fossil-fuel vehicles, even when a virus is moving, too. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 May)

Fortune I do not want: Emma and "inducements to marry"

Jane Austen's Emma turns up the rhetoric when she tells Harriet Smith about her attitude toward marriage: "Fortune I do not want; employment I do not want; consequence I do not want [...]." The preposed objects and the epistrophe hammer home Emma's clarification of why she has "none of the usual inducements of women to marry": she's already wealthy; she already has plenty to do; she already has high status. But all this rhetoric is also over-insistence, especially when she later finds a man to marry who offers more of all the "inducements" she says she does not "want". She may not have lacked them, but ultimately, she did want them. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 May)

Reopening schools without consulting schoolchildren

Throughout the discussion of reopening Swiss kindergartens, primary schools, and middle schools on Monday, one voice has been absent: schoolchildren themselves. Perhaps it's too much to ask kids in primary school to participate in such a discussion, but children attending middle school in Basel are 12 to 15 years old, and it wouldn't be hard to find a small but significant number of teens who have read and absorbed more about the coronavirus than most adults, including the politicians, educators, and parents now making decisions for them. At the very least, the schoolchildren's concerns should've been heard before re-opening educational institutions to give them somewhere to go while their parents work. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7 May)

Saved from experience in Juana Adcock's "The Serpent Dialogues"

The woman in Juana Adcock's "The Serpent Dialogues" talks with a snake, but one day the snake stops coming to visit her, and she begins to keep a diary. On day 27, shortly before the snake finally returns, she writes about "reaching for my phone as a form of / noise or interference, like wanting / to be saved from experiencing this instant / with all its beautiful and devastating aloneness". The potentially beautiful experience of the unique instant is replaced by the noise of the interchangeable experiences offered by the phone – but that replacement of the unique moment is also a form of salvation, in which one escapes from "devastation". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 May)

Poetry preserves the past in "1984"

When Winston Smith in George Orwell's "1984" returns to the shop where he bought his diary, the shopkeeper recites an old rhyme: "Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's, You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's." Winston is struck by the poem's effect: "When you said it to yourself you had the illusion of actually hearing bells, the bells of a lost London that still existed somewhere or other, disguised and forgotten." These verses about old London churches contain not only the history but also the past atmosphere of the city. Even in half-remembered fragments, poetry preserves the past against the Ministry of Truth's erasure. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 May)

My January 20 is May 4

Georg Büchner's "Lenz" begins with a date: "On January 20, Lenz walked through the mountains." In his Büchner Prize speech, Paul Celan made something out of that wounded date: "Every poem is inscribed with its own January 20." The poem's date is not a historical, public event but a private moment, like Lenz in the mountains (which becomes public and historical only when Büchner makes it literature). But the January 20 inscribed in my poems is actually May 4, a date both historical and private: the date of the Kent State shootings in 1970 (50th anniversary this year), and the date in 1982 when I first lost a friend to suicide. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 4 May)

Texts and Instrumental passages in Grateful Dead songs

In Grateful Dead songs, instrumental passages often contribute to the narrative or argument. In "Cassidy", the lines before the final improvisation set up the shift from words to instruments: "Let the words be yours, I'm done with mine." The return of words at the jam's end is then also thematized: "Flight of the seabirds, scattered like lost words." Other songs also conclude jams with comments on what the band just played, as in "Uncle John's Band" ("How does the song go?") and especially "Let It Grow": "What shall say, shall we call it by a name?" The preceding improvisation has no name – except perhaps the band's proper name: The Grateful Dead. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 May)

On a comic comparing Austen and Hemingway

John Atkinson's comic quickly compares standard ideas about the feminine Jane Austen and the masculine Ernest Hemingway. But in Austen, sisterhood is far from always positive; etiquette is a mask for cruelty; there isn't much tea; status is as political as the "politics" in Hemingway; balls don't end in brawls but are full of verbal and psychological brutality; the novels end in marriages but only after broken engagements and rejected proposals; and war and military masculinity are pervasive. In fact, Austen explores all the themes associated with Hemingway here (even booze doesn't go untouched by her characters), and if he doesn't address "hers" themes, he's the more limited writer than Austen. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 May)

Extended senses of "poet" and "poetry"

In the New York Review of Books, not only does Susan Tallman refer to Gerhard Richter as "contemporary art's great poet of uncertainty", she also quotes a 1989 review in the Washington Post: "Richter wars on poetries." Despite its loss in cultural status, poetry remains a model for other art forms, and even quite far from art (as with an athlete's "poetry in motion"). But according to the OED, the extended use of "poet" appeared in1839, and the extended use of "poetry" even goes back to 1654. So "poet" and "poetry" gained their extended meanings when poetry still had a higher status, and those senses have remained in use even today.  (Andrew Shields, #111words, 1 May)

 

OED, poet 3b:  In extended use: an imaginative practitioner of any of the fine arts; a person working with creativity and imagination in any art form. (earliest example in 1839)

poetry, 6a: Something comparable to poetry in its beauty or emotional impact; a poetic quality of beauty and intensity of emotion; the poetic quality of something. (earliest example in 1654)

"For Harriet every thing"

When Jane Austen's Emma first takes on Harriet Smith as a protégée, she contrasts her with her now ex-governess: "Mrs. Weston was the object of a regard which had its basis in gratitude and esteem. Harriet would be loved as one to whom she could be useful. For Mrs. Weston there was nothing to be done; for Harriet every thing." This seems to run counter to moments in the novel where Harriet is "nothing" or even less than nothing, but even here, Emma sees Harriet not as having any self or personality of her own, but as a blank slate for her to work her wonders on as she "improves" her. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 April)

Third-Person Effect in "1984"

In the first chapter of George Orwell's "1984", Winston Smith attends the Two Minutes Hate and sees a film clip of Emmanuel Goldstein, "the Enemy of the People", as he engages in "his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party". Goldstein's speech may be "so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it", but it is also "just plausible enough" to make it seem like "other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it." This is the "third-person effect", in which one thinks others are more likely to be fooled by things than one is liable to be fooled oneself. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 April)

TJ Swan puts down Sugarhill and Kurtis Blow and establishes a tradition

TJ Swan's 1979 "And You Know That" begins with bragaddacio: "Nobody can do it like the Swany can." Such boasting is more, though, than just a way to put everyone else down, even if TJ Swan definitely does so when he names names: "Sugarhill, Hollywood, Kurtis Blow, [and] Cheeba" may all be "kinda good", but Swan's listeners will notice "who's sweeter than sweeter". This list positions those performers with respect to Swan and thus establishes the tradition he wants to belong to. Unfortunately for TJ Swan, that tradition still centers The Sugarhill Gang and Kurtis Blow, but has left TJ Swan behind for those who read lists of early hip-hop recordings. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28 April)

Orson Welles makes Kafka less funny

The English version of "Before the Law" that Orson Welles uses to narrate the animated version of Kafka's story that opens his film of "The Trial" translates the opening sentence as follows: "Before the law there stands a guard." The "guard" replaces the more literal "doorkeeper" in the original translation of the text by Willa and Edwin Muir. But a guard's relationship to what is being guarded has more to do with "law" and is thus more conventional than is the case with a doorkeeper. Without the associative distance between "law" and "doorkeeper", the literalization of the law as architecture no longer works, and the text loses some of its comedy.  (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 April)

Kafka the joker

Franz Kafka laughed while reading from "The Trial", which might seem odd, as the "Kafkaesque" isn't usually considered humorous. But his work is peppered with humor, especially word play. The title of "Before the Law" isn't unusual, as in the phrase "equality before the law", but the opening sentence makes that rhetorical abstraction concrete and literal: "Before the law stands a doorkeeper." The law becomes something one can "stand before"; as it even has a doorkeeper, and hence a door, it is now an architectural work one can enter. The brief story then plays out the comedy of the doorkeeper's refusal to let "the man from the country" enter "the law".  (Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 April)

Dickinson and Kafka

This semester, I've been having the pleasure of teaching a BA course on Emily Dickinson and an MA course on Franz Kafka. This has led to the pleasant (though ultimately unsurprising) discovery that Dickinson's poems and Kafka's prose have a lot in common. One way to characterize their commonality would be to say that Dickinson can be quite Kafkaesque, but that's not fair to Dickinson's own singularity, and one could just as well say that Kafka can be quite Dickinsonian. With their engaged but distanced gazes at the world and at language, they both explore the claims societies make on individuals and how one can respond to and even resist them.  (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 April)

Knocking it out in a minute

In her April 23 "Letter from an American", Heather Cox Richardson wonders about "Trump's emphasis on dramatic cures for Covid-19", such as hydroxychloroquine or his remark about injecting bleach: "And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute." Trump wants a heroic solution to a situation that has no place for individuals who address problems with decisive, instinctive action. His trivial understanding of drama leaves out the hero's tragic hubris that leads to his downfall; instead, he sees only the myth of the brilliant flash of insight that would confirm, as he claimed in 2016 at the Republican National Convention, that "I alone can fix it." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 April)

On Peter Schjeldahl and "disembodiments of aesthetic experience"

Peter Schjeldahl's reflections on art under social distancing (and closed museums) offer a wonderful interpretation of the difference between seeing Velázquez's "Las Meninas" in December in the Prado and thinking about it now, "from lingering exhilaration to vertiginous melancholy." But he begins by dismissing virtual tours as "amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience". This makes art something only for those who are able to travel to see the originals, when not everyone can travel to Madrid. And even Schjeldahl's reconsideration of the work now isn't based on an "embodied" experience of the work anyway. Reception "at a distance" (including my reception of Velázquez through Schjeldahl) is a necessary part of aesthetic experience. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 April)

 

See also my essay on Jan Svenungsson, "Abstract Reception"

Child care and the "opening" of the economy

Farhad Manjoo writes that "the economy will not really 'open up,' and life will not really return to normal, as long as parents don’t have any place to send our children during the day." But this also reveals that under the "old normal", the economy was never "open", especially not for those doing unpaid care work (which is primarily done by women). American conservatives complain that liberals and progressives want to push through policies, such as universal child care, that have nothing to do with the pandemic – but the pandemic makes clear that the norms of child care – and other norms – need thorough revision, and not only in the United States. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 22 April)

"The dude in red's back at the Pole"

"Christmas Rappin'", by Kurtis Blow (1979), begins with the opening of Clement Moore's 1823 poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas", but then interrupts and negates it: "Don't you give me all that jive about things you wrote before I's alive / 'Cause this ain't 1823 -- ain't even 1970." Anything older is dismissed in favor of this new song in a new style, but a Christmas song cannot escape that tradition and ends as Moore's poem does: "The dude in red's back at the Pole / Up north where everything is cold / But if he were right here tonight / He'd say, Merry Christmas and to all a good night." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 21 April)

Kafka's "Old Manuscript" and political failure

At the end of Franz Kafka's "An Old Manuscript", the Emperor leaves it "to us artisans and tradesmen to save our country" after an invasion by "nomads", even though "we are not equal to such a task" – "a misunderstanding" that "will be the ruin of us." When politics fails, solutions are sought elsewhere: in technology and in the economy. In Kafka's story, the Emperor doesn't address the crisis problems; in contemporary democracies, the political system fails when it seeks technological or economic fixes: carbon sequestering or carbon taxes to address climate catastrophe; a vaccine or an economic stimulus to end the coronavirus pandemic when a President "takes no responsibility at all." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 April)

Uns Handwerkern und Geschäftsleuten ist die Rettung des Vaterlandes anvertraut; wir sind aber einer solchen Aufgabe nicht gewachsen; haben uns doch auch nie gerühmt, dessen fähig zu sein. Ein Mißverständnis ist es, und wir gehen daran zugrunde. (Franz Kafka, "Ein altes Blatt")

It is left to us artisans and tradesmen to save our country; but we are not equal to such a task; nor have we ever claimed to be capable of it. This is a misunderstanding of some kind; and it will be the ruin of us. (Franz Kafka, "An Old Manuscript", tr. Willa and Edwin Muir)

A small edit from plot to analysis

In my academic-writing courses for English majors at the University of Basel, I frequently comment on the use of "is about" and similar phrases in the first sentences of essays. Such constructions put off critical analysis and interpretation in favor of plot summary: "Jane Austen’s novel 'Emma' is about Emma Woodhouse, a young woman who loves matchmaking and being right." My editing suggestion is to make the character, rather than the novel, the subject (here, combining the above with the essay's second sentence): "In Jane Austen’s novel 'Emma', Emma Woodhouse, a young woman who loves matchmaking and being right, plans to transform her protégée Harriet into a perfect woman of society." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 April)

Going Down the Road Feeling Bad, The Grateful Dead, Fillmore East, 19710428

"Going Down the Road Feeling Bad" from 28 April 1971 at the Fillmore East (released as "Ladies and Gentlemen... the Grateful Dead") shows how The Grateful Dead fit all the parts together in live performances, especially in the "chilly winds" verse (about 3:05 in), with sinuous rhythm-guitar from Bob Weir, surprising bass arpeggios from Phil Lesh, driving drum fills from Bill Kreutzmann, and swirling organ from "former member of The Grateful Dead" Tom Constanten, who was sitting in that night. Jerry Garcia shines quietly as he closes it out with a subtle reading of the melody of "And We Bid You Goodnight" before the band powers back into "Not Fade Away". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 April)

Who ambushes whom in Dickinson

Who ambushes whom in the "fond Ambush" in Emily Dickinson's "I know that he exists" (365) can be addressed in ever wider contexts: one can look in the poem (for phrases, lines, or images that point in either direction) or in the poet's work as a whole, as in "He lived the Life of Ambush" (1571) or the veil in "My life closed twice before it's close" (1773); one can research such figures in Dickinson's poetic and theological contemporaries or beyond them to the literary and religious history of tropes of ambush and revelation. If this leaves the issue unresolved, the process still enriches understanding of the poem and the poet. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 April)

For background, see my previous post on the poem.

Lee Konitz (1927-2020)

At every moment during the alto-saxophone solos by Lee Konitz (1927-2020) on trumpeter Kenny Wheeler’s 1997 “Angel Song” (with Bill Frisell on electric guitar and Dave Holland on upright bass), his playing is all melody in flight, the tone all breath, the technique sublimated into effortlessly flowing ideas. He so rarely plays fast that when he does it's like he’s discovering velocity. The lines are full of pauses that are what rests should always be: as essential to the music as the notes. On “Onmo”, Wheeler and Konitz improvise counterpoint, with Konitz joyously echoing Wheeler’s staccato with legato lines. Konitz has left us, but every moment in his playing remains alive. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 April)

"Onmo", from "Angel Song", Kenny Wheeler, Lee Konitz, Bill Frisell, Dave Holland:

https://open.spotify.com/track/7KhMq3jnB7h71JfmKMHi06?si=1w_Ufi4vT02GnD-MpwWTDA

The sublime ambush in Dickinson's "I know that He exists."

In his discussion of Emily Dickinson's "I know that He exists" (365), Gary Grieve-Carlson summarizes other interpretations in contrast with his own. Yet all these interpretations share what seems to me to be a misreading of an image in the second stanza: while they see God ambushing the speaker, I see the speaker ambushing God. Before reading Grieve-Carlson's interpretation, I already understood this as an example of the trope of hidden truths that seekers only unveil at great cost, as in Friedrich Schiller's "Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais". Dickinson's speaker knows a hidden God exists; the figure of the terrifying sublime captures the danger of "ambushing" Him with "our gross eyes". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 April)

365 I know that He exists.

Emily Dickinson

I know that He exists.

Somewhere — in Silence —

He has hid his rare life

From our gross eyes.

'Tis an instant's play.

'Tis a fond Ambush —

Just to make Bliss

Earn her own surprise!

But — should the play

Prove piercing earnest —

Should the glee — glaze —

In Death's — stiff — stare —

Would not the fun

Look too expensive!

Would not the jest —

Have crawled too far!

The layer of pollen on the cars

Except for one short trip, my family's car has been parked right outside our house for a month now, and a layer of pollen from the springtime trees has settled on it. While on my daily walk today to get some exercise, I noticed that many others cars are also covered in pollen. That's no surprise, given the Swiss stay-at-home policy during the pandemic. But it does raise a question for me about any future return to "normalcy": as the Basel region has such excellent public transit, what if we try to resist "the old normal" and just stop using our cars – or at least radically reduce our use of them? (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 April)

John Prine's soldiers

The soldier in John Prine's "Spanish Pipedream" is escaping the draft, and his Sam Stone returns from the war with a morphine addiction that eventually kills him. But those are not the only soldiers on Prine's 1971 debut album. The old man telling his story in "Hello in There" mentions that he and his wife "lost Davy in the Korean war" and adds that they "still don't know what for." And the chorus of "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore" memorializes all the soldiers dying in "the conflict overseas" (as it is put in "Sam Stone") when heaven is described as "already overcrowded from your dirty little war." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 April)

"the antibiotic can’t keep up with it"

In March 2014, I responded to a Donald Trump tweet connecting vaccines and autism with a link to Jennifer Raff's essay on vaccines, "Dear parents, you are being lied to," and told him that his tweet was "dangerous and wrong." I got no response, but I remembered that tweet when I heard about another dangerous, incorrect statement from his two-hour-plus coronavirus briefing on Friday, 10 April, 2020: "The antibiotic can't keep up with [the coronavirus]." Antibiotics, of course, only work against bacteria. In line with Raff's title, I keep thinking that Trump's supporters are "being lied to", but they – and all Americans – are also being provided with absurd, ignorant, life-threatening misinformation. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 April)

This is a very brilliant enemy.  You know, it’s a brilliant enemy.  They develop drugs like the antibiotics.  You see it.  Antibiotics used to solve every problem.  Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.  And they’re constantly trying to come up with a new — people go to a hospital and they catch — they go for a heart operation — that’s no problem, but they end up dying from — from problems.  You know the problems I’m talking about.  There’s a whole genius to it. (From the transcript of the briefing)

Jennifer Raff's article "Dear parents, you are being lied to".

My tweet in response to Trump's.

"Paradise" and "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore", by John Prine

Even at 24, on his first album, John Prine twice imagined his own death – or at least wrote songs in which the narrator does. "Paradise" ends with a final return to the Green River in western Kentucky, one focus of the song's memories: "When I die, let my ashes float down the Green River." If this conservationist song criticizes the Peabody Coal Company, "Your Flag Decal Won't Get You Into Heaven Anymore" challenges easy patriotism – with the speaker dying in a car accident when his "window shield" gets "so filled with flags I couldn't see." In each case, imagining the narrator's death adds a final twist to the song's sociopolitical critique. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 April)

"Illegal Smile", "Spanish Pipedream", and "Sam Stone"

The first two songs on John Prine's eponymous 1971 debut hope for ways out of "dead ends": in "Illegal Smile", drugs help to "escape reality"; in "Spanish Pipedream", a woman convinces "a soldier on my way to Montreal" to "blow up the TV", "go to the country", and establish a counterculture. The image of the Canada-bound soldier complicates these hopes: he was evading the draft to avoid becoming like the album's "Sam Stone", a soldier who returns "from the conflict overseas [...] with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back" and later dies of a morphine overdose. Ultimately, the shellshocked soldier's "illegal smile" doesn't help him to "escape reality." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 10 April)