Snoopy’s view of Don Q’s Plunderland

From atop his doghouse, Snoopy looks across the ocean to Plunderland, where Don Q sits in Hush Money House. From Snoopy's vantage point, everything happening in Plunderland comes down to what Don Q sees when he looks at the window repainted on the wall every day. Once he looked at what had been painted there and convinced all the people who see what he tells them to see to try to hunt Dime Penny down. Now he looks at what Vanza has painted there and convinced all those same people that all the dogs Don Q says are barking against him have to be flown away to pounds to the south. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 April 2025)

Don Q invites Bookalie to celebrate his successes

Looking at the window painted on the wall, Don Q decided he wouldn't make the same mistake he had made with Sky Man, who had not praised him but argued with him. This time, he would only invite his friends to celebrate whatever he saw when he looked at the window. So he invited his protege Bookalie to speak to the Six Flacks with him about the situation, with Vanza, Omen, and others joining them. While Don Q, Vanza, Omen, and the others smiled and chuckled as they celebrated their successes, Bookalie said everything Don Q wanted to here about the incarcerated men Don Q had declared criminals and gang members. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 April 2025)

A British touring production of “Twelfth Night” in the late 1990s

In a British touring show of William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night" that I saw in Toledo, Ohio, in the late 1990s, the stage was empty but for a table and several chairs, and the six actors wore hats to distinguish the roles they played. One brilliantactress, whose name I don't know, played the estranged twins Viola and Sebastian in the same clothes but different hats. When the two are finally reunited at the end of the play, she faced the audience, hatless, and turned her head from one side to the other to distinguish the characters, and the audience learned that she had been speaking the roles differently throughout the performance. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 April 2025)

Seven premieres at the Human Shields concert in Basel on 11 April 2025

The Human Shields concert on Friday, 11 April, featured seven world premieres of songs written between 2018 and 2024. "Speak Up" was inspired by young people who speak up. "Water from a Whiskey Glass", which I wrote before I stopped drinking alcohol, came from a line I had lying around for years. "Touchstone" was inspired by Claraplatz in Basel. "What the Fuck" is a jam-rant. I wrote the poem for "Not Who We Are" on 7-8 January 2021 but only wrote the music in 2024. "Radical Left Thug" counters the Grifter's use of that phrase. And "Love Deeper" takes a poem by George Szirtes and makes a ballad out of it. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 April 2025)

Watching two FC Basel football matches in one afternoon and evening

This afternoon, I'm watching the first leg of a quarterfinal between the FC Basel and FC Aarau women's football teams, and this evening, I'll be watching a regular-season match between the FC Basel and the FC Zurich men's football teams. The women's match is on a live stream broadcast by the Women's Super League in Switzerland. The men's match will be on the free channel SRF2 as well as on the pay channel Blue Sport. There's no commentary for the women's match, and only a few cameras. After long previews with several experts, the broadcasts of the men's match will have commentators, numerous cameras, and video-assisted review for the referee's calls. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 April 2025)

Singing Woody Guthrie’s "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia

While preparing for this evening's Human Shields concert at Beclys in Basel, I thought of Woody Guthrie's 1948 song "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)", which he wrote about the crash of a plane being used to deport Mexican farm laborers from California to Mexico: "You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane. / All they will call you will be 'deportees'." So tonight, we started with the song and dedicated it to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration, whose case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, which has ruled he must be returned to Maryland. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 April 2025) 

Buying first one and then later another copy of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows"

In July 2007, I bought "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" the night it was released. In August, my wife and I began to read the series to our seven-year-old son Miles. Whenever we had no time to read to him, he just read it himself. One morning in November, he took the "Deathly Hallows" book to school to read at recess, and promised he wouldn't lose it. When he came home for lunch, he hadn't lost it, but he had left it on the playground, where someone had set the book on fire! So I got another copy, and he finished reading the series the day before his eighth birthday. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 April 2025) 

Don Q, Lovey Leave-It, and Pronoun Users

Don Q shouted at the window on the wall: "I don't want to talk to anyone who uses pronouns!" Vanza told Lovey Leave-It: "The President says Hush Money House shouldn't speak to pronoun users". Lovey Leave-It responded to a journalist: "Anyone who uses pronouns must not care about our reality. We will not answer your inquiry." The journalist responded: "The press secretary's refusal to use pronouns keeps people from saying things easily. And by the way, your response contains five pronouns." Lovey Leave-It wrote back: "I don't care about your difficulties with anyone who is not using pronouns. I care about the truth for everyone who supports Don Q in Plunderland." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9April 2025)

A blackboard from my class and the discussion of it in my colleague’s class

In class this morning, I filled a blackboard with notes on the third paragraph of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" (1861), mostly on metaphor and the distinction between Pip the child as a character and Pip the middle-aged adult as a narrator. Later, my colleague Ridvan Askin, who taught the next class in the same room, mentioned to me that he had begun his class by asking the students if they knew what my class had been about. The only word that would have given it away was "Pip", but Ridvan said that none of the students knew him as the protagonist of Dickens's novel (though they had heard of the novel). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 April 2025)

On first reading Doris Lessing’s “The Fifth Child” (1988)

On a Sunday in October 1990, I went to the library at the University of Pennsylvania to do some reading and studying for classes that week (in my doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory). While I was there, I also picked up Doris Lessing's 1988 novel "The Fifth Child", which my girlfriend Carolyn had recommended to me. I only got back home from the library after midnight, and when I went to bed at 2 am, I thought I'd read a couple pages of Lessing's novel before I went to sleep. Instead, I finished the gripping novel at 5 am, and it became a central text for my dissertation.(Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 April 2025) 

A student goes from her university to the demonstrations in the capital

In April, when the demonstrations in the capital began, she packed a backpack and left her university. During the long night on a half-full train, she slept fitfully. On arriving, she went to the square and was assigned to a tent. On the first Saturday in June, exhausted and longing for a bath, she went to the suburbs to her parents' house. Having thought she was at university, they were surprised to see her. When she told him where she had been, her father, a general, told her she should not go back to the square the next morning. She said she wanted to rest and would go back on Monday. (AndrewShields, #111Words, 6 April 2025)

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)

Don Q thinks about firing Wallace

Don Q asked Wiley about Wallace, "Should I fire him?" Gromit barked. Don Q asked Exit about Wallace, "Should I fire him?" Gromit barked. Don Q asked Vanza about Wallace, "Should I fire him?" Gromit barked. Don Q asked Lone Odor about Wallace, "Should I fire him?" Gromit barked. Wiley, Exit, and Vanza all hesitated. Lone Odor said, "You should fire him." He snickered to himself. He didn't want any competition in going to the moon to plunder its cheese resources. Don Q wondered out loud to the window on the wall, "But would it make me look bad?" Vanza said, "Nothing can make you look bad, Don Q." Gromit barked. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 March 2025) 

Vanza, Exit, Wallace, Gromit, and Wiley in the group chat

Vanza said, "I'm doing an economic event in the Mitten, but I think this would be a big mistake for Plunderland. I am not sure Don Q is aware." Exit said, "We are prepared to execute. I welcome other thoughts." Vanza said, "If you think we should do it, let's go." Exit said, "I fully share your loathing of Europe." Exit said, "Godspeed to our Warriors." Vanza said, "I will say a prayer for victory." Wallace said, "Amazing job." Gromit barked. Wiley said, "Really great. God bless." When the Six Flacks raised the issue, Don Q looked at the window on the wall and said, "I don't know anything about it." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 March 2025)

Exit receives a letter from Vanza

Exit opened the letter from Vanza, which he hoped contained news from Don Q at Hush Money House about what to praise and what to blame this week in Plunderland. The letter was blank, but he knew how to make the letters visible. But when he lit the special security candle and held the letter up to the flame, his hand was shaking, so he put the message down and took another swig of whisky from his Six Flacks mug. When he held the paper up again, it caught fire. Forgetting about the invisible ink, he watched the flame spread across the page and thought, "It is a pleasure to burn." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 March 2025) 

The Aphorism Quartet at the Bird’s Eye in Basel, and the Kern-Hammerstein standard “Nobody Else But Me"

At the Bird's Eye in Basel this evening, the Aphorism Quartet (with Domenic Landolf on saxophones, Michael Beck on piano, Arne Huber on bass, and Jorge Rossy on drums and vibraphone) concluded their first set of originals with one standard: a brisk, tight, and wide-ranging version of "Nobody Else But Me", by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II. Written for the 1946 revival of the composer and lyricist's 1926 musical "Showboat" (which also featured their "Ol' Man River"), it was, as I was moved to learn when I looked it up, Kern's very last composition: he died on 11 November 1945, and the song was first performed on 5 January 1946. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 March 2025) 

Smoking and Sherlock Holmes in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (2005)

In Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), Kathy H describes how she and her fellow Hailsham students were warned about smoking: "There was even a rumour that some classic books— like the Sherlock Holmes ones— weren’t in our library because the main characters smoked too much [...]." Arthur Conan Doyle's "A Study in Scarlet" (1887), the first Sherlock Holmes novel, may have been missing from Hailsham's library, but Kathy H and her friends Tommy and Ruth do act like the stereotype of Holmes as an "armchair detective": in order to understand the mysteries of their lives as clones, they mostly sit around and discuss all the clues they have noticed. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 March 2025)

The founding of Basiliska by anti-Anselmite monks in the year 1111

The city of Basiliska was founded in the year 1111 by rogue Benedictine monks who had broken with Anselm of Canterbury over the ontological argument for the existence of God. When these monks-errant arrived at a bluff above the Rain River, they found an ancient basilisk there, which Bede had mentioned centuries earlier, and cast it down into the waters below. To honor the always shoeless monster, they built their city, Basiliska, around a fortress on the bluff. Inside, they built their cathedral and monastery, where they also went shoeless. Centuries later, the city of Basel on the Rhine River is still known for its Monster Cathedral and its Barefoot Square. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 March 2025)

The loudest screamer, yeller, and complainer is a fraudster

In a recent television interview, United States Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick (who was CEO of the financial-services firm Cantor Fitzgerald from 1991 to 2025) downplayed the problem of the United States Social Security Administration's possible failure to send regular monthly checks expected by their recipients. After claiming that his mother would never complain if her check didn't show up, he added, "A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining." I'd like to thank Secretary Lutnick for confirming what I and many others have understood for a decade now: his boss is the country's loudest screamer, yeller, and complainer, so United States President Donald Trump is a fraudster. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 March 2025)

The journeys of my quest for musical transformation: through a November snowstorm and a cool spring evening to hear Andreas Schärer at the Klavierwerkstatt in Liestal

Sometimes, my quest for musical transformation involves an actual journey. On 21 November 2024, I went through the dark and white night of a snowstorm to the Klavierwerkstatt in Liestal to hear the trio of vocalist Andreas Schärer, guitarist Kalle Kalima, and bassist Tim Lefebvre. Last night, exactly four months later, I went to the same venue on a cool, dry spring evening to hear Schärer and pianist Daniel García. Even without the storm, the trip there felt like a magical quest, with two buses, a train, a third bus, and a walk through the night alongside a stream to get to the venue, where Schärer and García cast their spells. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 March 2025)

Working "against those determined to score political points at the expense of an incredibly vulnerable population” (John Oliver, “ICE Detention”, “Last Week Tonight”, 9 March 2025)

At the end of the story on ICE Detention on the 9 March 2025 episode of "Last Week Tonight", John Oliver calls for resistance at lower levels of goverment to the federal policies of President Donald Trump's administration: “We’re going to have to find ways to push back hard at the state and local level against those determined to score political points at the expense of an incredibly vulnerable population.” While Oliver is specifically discussing immigrants subject to detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, his point can also be applied to the scoring of political points with cruelty to all vulnerable populations—especially, with Trump, cruelty to transgender and non-binary people. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 March 2025)

“This dress bugs me”: Eszter Balint in Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise” (1984)

In Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise" (1984), Eva (Eszter Balint), a young Hungarian who is moving to Cleveland to live with her aunt, stops in Brooklyn to visit her cousin Willie (John Lurie) and his friend Eddie (Richard Edson). Although Willie first dislikes her and refuses to speak Hungarian with her, he eventually gives her a dress as a present. But later, in a scene that has stuck with my wife Andrea and me, Eva throws the dress away and mutters to herself, in her Hungarian accent, "This dress bugs me." That phrase, with Balint's pronunciation, has long since become part of our private language when we find small things annoying. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 March 2025)

A day with Ishiguro, Morrison, Dickens, and Joyce

My day: first Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), "My name is Kathy H"; then, Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" (1970), "The pieces of Cholly’s life could become coherent only in the head of a musician"; then Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" (1854), "Mrs. Sparsit saw him detain her with his encircling arm, and heard him then and there, within her (Mrs. Sparsit’s) greedy hearing, tell her how he loved her, and how she was the stake for which he ardently desired to play away all that he had in life"; and then James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1939): "What Barbaras Done to a Barrel Organ Before the Rank, Tank and Bonnbtail." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 March 2025) 

From Adrienne Rich and Emily Dickinson to Johann Jakob Bachofen, “Mutterrecht”, and Basel

For this week's session in my course on Adrienne Rich's poetry, we discussed Rich's poems "I Am in Danger—Sir—" from her 1966 collection "Necessities of Life", along with a chapter on Rich and Emily Dickinson from Betsy Erkkila's 1992 book "The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord." While discussing Rich's changing understandings of Dickinson from the 1950s to the 1980s, Erkkila also touches on many other milestones in Rich's writing, including her 1976 study "Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Experience And Institution". Erkkila's list of influences on that book refers to Johann Jakob Bachofen's 1861 book "Mutterrecht"—which made me smile, as Bachofen (1815-1887) was from Basel. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 March 2025)

Sixteen concerts so far this year

With the Skyjack concert on Saturday, I'm up to sixteen concerts this calendar year. But I count double bills as two concerts, so it's not sixteen nights out. Saturday was the nineteenth time I've seen trombonist Andreas Tschopp (who's in the band Hildegard Lernt Fliegen, which I've seen fourteen times). The two solo performances by pianist Brad Mehldau I saw in January were at least the tenth and eleventh time I've seen him. I know I saw two or three more Mehldau shows in about 2000-2005, but I don't have the exact dates. And since my first concert in 1978 (Linda Ronstadt), I'm up to 703 where I know the date. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 March 2025)

The social and communal experience of musical transformation at the Bird’s Eye concert by Swiss-South African band Skyjack, 15 March 2025

As I wrote two years ago, inspired by Ted Gioia's "Music to Raise the Dead", I am on a quest for musical transformation. And as I wrote last May, following Vinnie Sperrazza's "Chronicles" on Substack, the interplay of musicians in jazz (the primary idiom of my quest) offers a model of community to the world. Last night's wonderful concert at the Bird's Eye in Basel by Skyjack (with Swiss musicians Marc Stucki, saxophones, and Andreas Tschopp, trombone, and South African musicians Kyle Shepherd, piano, Shane Cooper, bass, and Jonno Sweetman, drums) brought those points together: when the interplay expands to include band and audience, the musical transformation becomes social and communal. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 March 2025)

Marc Stucki, Shane Cooper, Andreas Tschopp, and Jonno Sweetman of Skyjack

Don Q, Lone Odor, and the cars outside Hush Money House

Don Q and Lone Odor walked out the front door of Hush Money House and admired the line of cars that Lone had arranged to have brought there. While Lone jumped up and down and shouted, Don Q moved his hands back and forth and told the Six Flacks that he was going to buy one for his granddaughter: "After all, as long as I'm the King of Plunderland, they don't let me drive." As always when Don Q imagined that he was King, Lone smirked in the background. None of the Flacks ever found out whether Don Q actually did buy one of the cars to give to his granddaughter. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 March 2025)

Don Q, the water flowing down, and the little fish

Unbelievably, Don Q broke into where the angels lived, and the water flowed down. "They sent it out to the ocean," he said, looking at the window painted on the wall where he saw whatever he was thinking about, so many things that nobody had ever seen before. "I can show you a picture." Nothing like this had ever happened before, he thought. "Nothing like this has ever happened before." He wondered what had been happening with all the water. It must have been that little fish that he had once heard people talk about. He looked at the window and saw it swimming there. "It was a certain little fish." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 March 2025)

The extraordinary differences between two altarpieces from the mid-fifteenth century and Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece from the 1510s

At the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar yesterday, I also saw two altarpieces that predate Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altar from 1512-1516 by around fifty years: Caspar Isenmann's altarpiece from Saint Martin's Church in Colmar, from 1465, and an unknown artist's altarpiece from Stauffenberg, from 1454-1460 (which was originally also in Isenheim). While both of these works were impressive, the shift in half a century is still extraordinary: in Grünewald's work, the bodies are less stylized, the colors are much more intense, and the paintings have more depth. Perhaps Grünewald was just the better artist, but the differences also mark the new developments in art that were spreading across Europe at the time. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 March 2025) 

Matthias Grünewald and Otto Dix at the Musee Unterlinden in Colmar, France

Today, I went to the Musee Unterlinden in Colmar to revisit Matthias Grünewald's extraordinary Isenheim Altar from the 1510s. The museum now has a newer section that includes work from the 20th and 21st centuries. After I had spent an extra-long time contemplating Grünewald's "Annunciation", I was struck by a 20th-century painting that I immediately recognized as another "Annunciation". The style was familiar, and it turned out to be a 1950 painting by Otto Dix, whose work from the 1920s I have often seen before. And the museum also had Dix's 1946 "Crucifixion", another echo of Grünewald. As I learned, Dix was a POW in a camp near Colmar in 1945-1946. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 March 2025)

Matthias Grünewald, “Annunciation”

Otto Dix, “Annunciation"

Matthias Grünewald, “Crucifixion"

Otto Dix, “Christ on the Cross"

Writing a poem about a taxi ride in Colmar, France

This morning, I decided to write a poem, with no idea what to write about. I'm in Colmar, France, for a few days, on a work retreat with my daughter Luisa, who is finishing her final big project for school. As I haven't revisited Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altar at the Musée Unterlinden yet, I wrote about our cab ride from the train station to our rented apartment. The taxi driver would have paid a high fee for us to pay by card, so we scraped together just neough Euro change to cover the cost of the ride. The poem is 106 words long, so it couldn't be my daily 111-word text. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 March 2025) 

“Rich representation” in references to primary and secondary material in academic writing

I’ve been talking to students in academic-writing courses about what I call “rich representation”: don’t just refer to primary texts; quote them and analyze the details. And don’t just refer to secondary texts; quote them and frame the quotation with the author’s name to communicate your take on that work. This approach to materials with "rich representation" (which LLM-based text generators cannot do) enriches your texts, as well as your engagement with them. (Unfortunately, a lot of academic writing by humans does not engage much with quotations from primary materials. And many references to secondary literature are just page references or even just names of authors of works in the bibliography.) (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 March 2025) 

“A strong breeze at the top of the hill”: The limits of Kathy H’s world in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (2005)

In Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), Kathy H goes to the edge of the grounds of Hailsham school: "There was a strong breeze at the top of the hill, and I remember being surprised by it because I hadn't noticed it down on the grass." I've read Ishiguro's novel many times, yet like Kathy H, I find myself surprised by the connections of such otherwise minor details to how Kathy's life is determined by others: the top of the hill is the limit of the world she is allowed to move in; the breeze she now notices is a figure for the demands the outside world makes on her. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 March 2025) 

Tucumcari and Route 66 in a poem by Gregory Stapp

There are things I know only because of songs, poems, or other works that reference them. Reading Gregory Stapp's poem "There are no sidewalks in Tucumcari, New Mexico" in the "Eunoia Review", I thought of Lowell George's song "Willin'", from Little Feat's 1971 album "Little Feat": "And I've been from Tucson to Tucumcari / Tehachapi to Tonopah." I knew of Tucson, Arizona, before I ever heard the song, but I still know nothing about the other three cities. Stapp also mentions Route 66, which many of my friends in Basel only know about because of Bobby Troup's 1946 song "(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66" (originally recorded by Nat King Cole). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 March 2025)

Route 66 in Tucumcari, New Mexico, photo by Lars Plougmann, Creative Commons License

Counting to high numbers and reciting poems to suppress evil thoughts in Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times” (1854)

In Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" (1854), when mill-worker Stephen Blackpool disappears, his friend and fellow mill-worker Rachael tells her confidante Sissy Jupe that she fears he might have been murdered, a thought she always tries to suppress: “I do all I can to keep it out, wi' counting on to high numbers as I work, and saying over and over again pieces that I knew when I were a child”. While her counting to control her thoughts may coincide with schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind's utilitarian pedagogy of "Facts" and "statistics", her recitation of poems is something Gradgrind's pupils could never turn to in a moment of distress, because they never learn any. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 March 2025)

Teaching four sections of a course in a week – and improvising a summary of the Bible

Whenever I teach three sections of a course per week, the third group generally gets the best class: my points are polished, and I can refer to the discussions with the first two groups. But in 2004-2005, when I taught four sections per week of an introductory course, I was just too worn out to teach well by the fourth time around. This week, I taught four sections of a course again, my two sections and two sections for my colleague on paternity leave. But now, the best was the fourth session, with my improvised two-minute summary of the entire Bible in a discussion of Charles Dickens's 1854 novel "Hard Times". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 March 2025)

“Double consciousness” in Jordan Peele and Toni Morrison

In a class discussion this morning, we considered the concept of "the sunken place" in Jordan Peele's "Get Out" (2017), where, one student said, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) becomes "a spectator of his own life." After we had discussed that for a while, I mentioned a historical term for such self-spectatorship: the concept of "double consciousness" introduced by W. E. B. DuBois in his 1903 book "The Souls of Black Folk". This afternoon, in a discussion of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" (1970), we also turned to the concept of "double consciousness" in the description and story of Cholly Breedlove. Perhaps I will make the time soon to reread DuBois's book. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 March 2025)

United States President Donald Trump and “raw earth”, his eggcorn for “rare earth"

United States President Donald Trump keeps talking about Ukraine's "raw earth", which he would like to control. Usually, I appreciate the linguistic creativity involved in such "eggcorns" (as in calling an "acorn" an "eggcorn"), and I won't criticize an eggcorn user for being unfamiliar with an expression. But Trump is the President of the United States, and here, when he wants to make policy decisions about the Russian war on Ukraine, the eggcorn reveals he has no clue what "rare-earth minerals" are. When the President keeps making such a mistake even as an issue keeps getting discussed, it's one more sign that he is unqualified for the challenges of the job. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 March 2025)

On poet Adrienne Rich’s husband, father, sister, and brother-in-law

This evening, while preparing for a discussion tomorrow of the title poem of "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law", by Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), I learned some new things about her family. I already knew that her husband Alfred H. Conrad (1924-1970) was the author of a groundbreaking 1958 study on the economics of slavery in the antebellum South. But these connections are new to me: her father, pathologist Arnold Rice Rich (1893-1968), has several diseases or conditions named after him. Cynthia Rich (b. 1933), like her sister, first married a scholar, physicist Roy J. Glauber (1925-2018), and later came out as a lesbian. And Glauber himself won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 March 2025) 

The Colin Vallon Trio with Patrice Moret and Julian Sartorius at the Tinguely Museum and the Bird’s Eye in Basel on 28 February and 1 March 2025

Pianist Colin Vallon's trio with bassist Patrice Moret and drummer Julian Sartorius played at the Tinguely Museum in Basel on Friday afternoon, 28 February, and then again at the Bird's Eye in Basel that evening and last night (Saturday, 1 March). On Friday afternoon, I dreamed to their music like the soundtrack of a road movie. On Friday evening, I focused on Sartorius's drumming, especially on the snare. And yesterday, I got a sense of the trio as a whole. Besides some solo introductions by Vallon, they play no solos. But they aren't all soloing all the time; rather, they're accompanying each other as the compositions and improvisations build toward their climaxes. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 March 2025)

Colin Vallon, Tinguely Museum, Basel, 28 February 2025

Patrice Moret, Tinguely Museum, Basel, 28 February 2025

Julian Sartorius, Tinguely Museum, Basel, 28 February 2025

Don Q shouts at clouds again, but it’s Sky Man

When Don Q looked at the window that Vanza kept having repainted on the wall, he shouted at the clouds, and they never shouted back. Often, tears would fill their eyes, and they would say, "Thank you, sir." But one day, when Don Q was shouting and putting his cards on the table, it wasn't the clouds; it was Sky Man. Tears did not fill his eyes, and he said, "I'm not playing cards." Vanza looked at the window and said, as he'd said before, "I really don't care." Later, Don Q laughed. "This is going to be great television." But Elephant, Macaroni, and Schmerz had already taken Sky Man's side. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 March 2025)