Songs remembered in posts about David Crosby's death

Although the musical career of David Crosby (1942-2023) began with The Byrds in 1964 and continued through his 2022 solo album "For Free", the memorial posts I saw for his death yesterday largely referred to two albums: "Crosby, Stills & Nash" (1969), to which Crosby contributed "Guinnevere", "Wooden Ships" (co-written with Paul Kantner and Stephen Stills), and "Long Time Gone"; and "Déja Vu" (1970), by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, to which he contributed "Almost Cut My Hair" and the title track. The occasional posts referring not to Crosby's songs but to Stephen Stills's "Helplessly Hoping" or Graham Nash's "Our House" mark how central the group's harmonizing was to their sound. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 January 2023)

Nick Cave, Paul Krugman, Sarah Firisen, and the "grotesque mockery" of ChatGPT

Like me, Nick Cave thinks ChatGPT is bullshit, as he wrote on seeing "a song in the style of Nick Cave" written by ChatGPT: "[...] this song is bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human". Such "grotesque mockery" also appears in an article by Sarah Firisen, who quotes a passage from Paul Krugman. While I didn't know until after I read the paragraph that it had been written by ChatGPT, I had found it unusually flat for Krugman, framed as it was by "it is possible that" and "it is also worth noting that". Such telltale formulas make a "grotesque mockery" of Krugman's usually vigorous writerly voice. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 January 2023)

 

The formulaic bullshit of ChatGPT essays

In their writing, some students use formulaic phrases they think makes writing sound "academic". The ChatGPT essays I have seen exemplify the profound flaws of such a formula-based approach to writing: the bot's broad, simplistic framing of topics amounts to little more than "bullshit" in Harry G. Frankfort's sense ("The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him"). Such bullshit essays don't actually analyze anything. As long as bots can't impersonate thinking rather than just spewing out empty, formulaic bullshit, the main thing teachers have to worry about is students using AI-generated essays to produce hopelessly mediocre work. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 January 2023)

An empty syllabus and a lesson with a silent teacher: My course "Doing the Right Thing: Contemporary Films by African-Americans" in Fall Semester 2017

In Fall Semester 2017, I taught "Doing the Right Thing: Contemporary Films by African-Americans." The schedule on the syllabus was empty except for the first session, which said "Moonlight" – Barry Jenkins's "Moonlight" (2016). We discussed it until we thought we were done with it, which took four weeks (one session per week). Then we turned to the other movies on the syllabus and discussed them each for one or two weeks, depending on how long we felt we needed to discuss them. – In the first of our two sessions on Jordan Peele's "Get Out" (2017), I was silent, while the students had an amazing discussion. I offered comments at the end. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 January 2023)

 

Note: The other films in the course were Justin Simien's "Dear White People" (2014); Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" (1989); Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station" (2013); and Tyler Perry's "For Colored Girls" (2010).

Closing the library at Stanford with William Carlos Williams and Gabriel García Márquez

In the mid-1980s, shortly before midnight at Stanford's Meyer Undergraduate Library, we staff members made an announcement that began, "The library will be closing in 20 minutes." After making the announcement several times, I started playing with it. Once, I recited William Carlos Williams' "This Is Just To Say", and then continued: "No, this is just to say that the library will be closing in 20 minutes." But in my favorite, I recited the first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and then added, "Many years from now, when you face your firing squad, all you'll remember is ... 'The library will be closing in 20 minutes." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 January 2023)

 

Note: Here's the first sentence of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", in Gregory Rabassa's translation: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

"Some useless, although probably harmless, concoction": The unnamed "placebo effect" in Shirley Jackson's "The Third Baby's the Easiest" (1949)

In Shirley Jackson's "The Third Baby's the Easiest" (1949), which she incorporated into her memoir "Life Among the Savages" (1953), the pregnant narrator receives a shot in the hospital, and wonders about its effect: "[...] I am always afraid with nurses that they feel that the psychological effect of a hypodermic is enough, and that I am actually being inoculated with some useless, although probably harmless, concoction." She may not call it a placebo, but the concept long predates the twentieth century, as does "placebo" itself, which derives from the Vulgate Latin of Psalm 116:9: "Placebo Domino in regione vivorum" ("I will please the Lord in the land of the living"). (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 January 2023)

Mugging and "the odor of scared children" in Toni Morrison's "Home" (2012)

In Toni Morrison's novel "Home" (2012), Frank Money walks down an Atlanta street in the evening: "Had he been alert instead of daydreaming, he would have recognized that reefer and gasoline smell, the rapid sneaker tread as well as the gang breath—the odor of scared children depending on group bravery." Like Frank, when I daydreamed down my block in Philadelphia in 1989 after going to the store to buy dishwashing detergent, I heard that "rapid sneaker tread", and then I found myself being mugged by two teenage boys in front of my house, one of whom, I now realize with Morrison's wonderful formulation, definitely had the "odor of scared children". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 January 2023)

The Treaty of Nerchinsk: A treaty between Russia and China that was written in Latin

The Treaty of Nerchinsk between Russia and China, which was signed in 1689 at the Russian fort of Nerchinsk near the Amur River, opened up trade between the two countries and established a border to be marked with boundary stones. As no one in the Russian and Chinese delegations could speak both languages, the main negotiators were Andrei Bieobocki of Poland for Russia and the Jesuit missionaries Jean-Francois Gerbillon of France and Thomas Pereira of Portugal for China. They spoke Latin to each other and translated back and forth into Russian and Chinese for their respective delegations. So the treaty was ultimately written in Latin rather than in Russian and Chinese. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 January 2023)

Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page at the ARMS benefit at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, December 1983

In December 1983, I went to an Action into Research for Multiple Sclerosis benefit concert at the Cow Palace in Daly City, California. The shows on the tour organized by Ronnie Lane, who had MS, featured Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker (with Clapton and his band), Jeff Beck (with Jan Hammer), and Jimmy Page (with Paul Rodgers). It was the first time Clapton, Beck, and Page, three former Yardbirds lead guitarists, performed together. At the end of the break after Cocker's set with Clapton, the auditorium went dark, a synthesizer groove started, and the lights burst on as Beck, who died on Tuesday at 78, began his fusion set with "Star Cycle". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 January 2023)

Naomi Raplansky (1918-2023) and her wife Eva Kollisch (b. 1925)

Naomi Raplansky, who died on 7 January 2023 at the age of 104, was sixteen when she first had poems published in "Poetry" in July 1934. Among the poets with work published in the same issue was Agnes Lee, who was born in 1868. In 2009, when she was 91, Raplansky married her longtime partner Eva Kollisch, who was then 84, as I learned from Wikipedia. There's no English Wikipedia page about Kollisch, but there's a German one, and a month before her fourteenth birthday, she was able to flee Germany to Britain with the Kindertransport in July 1939. She reunited with her parents in New York City the following year. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 January 2023)

The figure of "paint by numbers" in Greg Brown's "Whatever It Was" and The Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey"

According to Wikipedia, the first successful  "paint-by-numbers" set was introduced in 1951, when songwriters Greg Brown and Robert Hunter were two and ten years old, respectively. In Brown's song "Whatever It Was", from his 1997 album "Slant 6 Mind", the country is "a paint-by-number and it costs a million bucks down at the pawn." This is the figurative (and "usually depreciative") sense of "paint-by-numbers" defined in the OED as "designating that which is (merely) mechanical or formulaic, rather than imaginative, original, or natural." The same figurative sense appears in The Grateful Dead's "Touch of Grey", but Hunter makes the figurative sense more explicit: "Paint by number morning sky looks so phony." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 10 January 2023)

 

The Las Vegas mass shooting on a video screen in the background of Maria Schrader's "She Said"

Near the end of Maria Schrader's "She Said" (2022), as journalists Jodi Kantor (Zoe Kazan) and Megan Twohey (Carey Mulligan) are close to publishing their New York Times article of 5 October 2017 on Harvey Weinstein's long history of harassment and assault, a video screen in the background at the Times building shows a CNN report about a mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. That moment in the film shook me up as it took me back to waking up on Monday, 2 October 2017, to the news that sixty people had died in that shooting while singer Jason Aldean was performing the festival's final set. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 January 2023)

The abecedarian in Hakeem Jeffries's speech on Friday, 6 January 2023

In his speech on Friday after Republican Kevin McCarthy of California finally won the Speaker of the House vote in the United States House of Representatives, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Democrat from New York who has replaced California Representative Nancy Pelosi as the leader of the House Democratic caucus, turned to an ancient rhetorical and poetic form: the abecedarian. In 26 statements, Jeffries ran through the alphabet to summarize the House Democratic caucus's goals, with a few digs against Republicans along the way: from "American values over autocracy" to "freedom over fascism", "maturity over Mar-A-Lago", and "quality of life over Q-Anon", and finally to "zealous representation over zero-sum confrontation". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 January 2023)

Sitting on a bench in Kannenfeldpark on a sunny January afternoon

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon in Basel today, and with the weather report for the next week predicting rain, rain, and more rain, Andrea and I went for a walk. Shortly after we got to Kannenfeldpark, I said I'd like to sit down on a bench in the sunshine. Andrea wanted to keep walking, so she "took a turn" around the park (a phrase we like from "Pride and Prejudice") while I sat down. In my minutes on that bench, I gradually went from slouching a bit to sitting straight up, my eyes closed most of the time while I concentrated on my breathing in a little round of meditation. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7 January 2023)

My Federal Communications Commission Restricted Radiotelephone Operator Permit

While hunting for (and eventually finding) my daughter Sara's Social Security card from the United States (because we need the number for bureaucracy), I found another card that I still have from my life in the United States: a Federal Communications Commission Restricted Radiotelephone Operator Permit that I was granted on 6 August 1982 as part of my work at KZSU, the student-run radio station at Stanford University. Although I only started studying at Stanford that fall, I was able to start working at the radio station that summer. I worked at KZSU through June 1988, including a long stint as Jazz Director, and then again in the summer of 1990. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 January 2023)

Forty-four-and-a-half minutes of Neil Young playing electric guitar from 1970 to 2022

To trace the five decades of progression of Neil Young's sound on electric guitar, spend forty-four-and-a-half minutes listening to three songs performed with Crazy Horse. His cacophonous melodic invention is already pervasive on the sixteen minutes of "Cowgirl in the Sand" from the 1970 archival release "Live at the Fillmore East" (from a double bill with Miles Davis). Then turn to the richer, throbbing sound of the thirteen-and-a-half minutes of "Danger Bird" from the soundtrack of the 1997 tour documentary "Year of the Horse" (directed by Jim Jarmusch). Then finish up with the fuzzed-up sound on the just over fifteen minutes of "Chevrolet" on the latest Crazy Horse album, "World Record". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 January 2023)

 

Screenshot of Neil on guitar from the official video of "Chevrolet"

The fate of Hershey's Kisses in Basel

When my son Miles was about four, he was invited to his friend Colleen's birthday party here in Basel. Back in the United States a week earlier, Colleen's mother Jamie had bought a gigantic bag of Hershey's Kisses to serve at the party. But when the expatriate parents enthused about their childhood comfort food to their children, the children – most of them born or at least raised in Basel – thought the Kisses were disgusting. Surprised, the parents tried them, too – and thought they were disgusting. In the chocolate paradise of Switzerland, the children had never eaten bad chocolate from the United States – and the parents had lost the taste for it. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 4 January 2023)

 

(This text was inspired by this article on American chocolate by Arwa Mahdawi.)

Quarters, other small coins, darkness, and happiness in Ilya Kaminsky's "Dancing in Odessa"

In his poem "Praise", from the 2004 collection "Dancing in Odessa", Ilya Kaminsky plays with the image of a relative who arrives to surprise children with a magic trick: "The darkness, a magician, finds quarters // behind our ears." Here, the personification of darkness, otherwise a figure of fear or anxiety, turns it into the small gift of the comedy and nostalgia of a childhood memory. The link between coins and a noun with "-ness" echoes an earlier moment in the book, from "American Tourist": "happiness // is money, yes, but only the smallest coins." The quarters and other small coins figure the happiness drawn out of darkness in Kaminsky's poems. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 January 2023)

 

 

Two years with Adrienne Rich's "Collected Poems: 1950-2012"

In the Spring Semester of 2021, I taught a seminar on Adrienne Rich's poetry. For the course, I used the second edition of Rich's selection of her work, "The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950-2001", which came out in 2003, but I also bought myself her "Collected Poems 1950-2012", which was published in 2016. I've been reading that collected edition ever since, and yesterday, on returning from vacation, I finished the last few poems. From "Storm Warnings", which opened her first book "A Change of World" in 1951, to "Endpapers", the last poem in "Collected Poems", it was quite an experience to immerse myself in all of Rich's wide-ranging, provocative work. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 January 2023)

 

 

W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

 

The exhilarating kitsch of the Maid of the Mist boat tour at Niagara Falls

I was struggling to come up with something especially memorable from 2022, but then I saw the "Maid of the Mist" sweatshirt my daughter Sara was wearing today. While Sara and I were on a road trip in the United States with my sister True last July, we left True at a friend's house near Buffalo and went to Niagara Falls, where we went on the Maid of the Mist boat tour that goes past the American Falls and then incredibly close to the extremely loud Horseshoe Falls. While it may be a very kitschy tourist attraction, being soaked by the Niagara mist is nonetheless an intense, exhilarating, and unforgettable experience. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 1 January 2023)