A Novel of Anomaly in Winterthur's Villa Sträuli

On 12 May 1999, I took the train to Winterthur to go to a unique solo-bass concert by one of my favorite musicians, Dave Holland. He played many of his own compositions, and other tunes from "God Bless the Child" to a composition by Anthony Braxton. Today, I took the train to Winterthur again to go to a noontime concert at Villa Sträuli featuring another favorite, singer Andreas Schärer, with the band A Novel of Anomaly: Kalle Kalima on guitar, Luciano Biondini on accordion, and Lucas Niggli on drums. It was my 19th concert by Andreas since I first saw him with his band Hildegard Lernt Fliegen in Willisau in 2012. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 July 2021)

Lucas Niggli, Kalle Kalima, Andreas Schärer, Luciano Biondini: A Novel of Anomaly, Winterthur, Villa Sträuli, 3 July 2021

An onomatopetic palindrome of words in Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol"

When Ebenezer Scrooge wakes up after his visits from the three Ghosts in Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol", he's excited about changing his life, but has lost track of time: "I don't know what day of the month it is! [...] I don't know how long I've been among the Spirits." Before he finds out it's Christmas morning, he hears "the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard". Then, as with the metrical prose at the end of "Martin Chuzzlewit", Dickens depicts the emotion with language that draws attention to itself – a palindrome of onomatopoetic words: "Clash, clang, hammer, ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding, hammer, clang, clash!" (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 July 2021)

 

Scrooge asks a boy what day it is.

The "deliberate anachronism" of seeing Dickens as referring to Tolkien

In Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol", Ebenezer Scrooge asks the Ghost of Christmas Present if Tiny Tim's life can be spared, and the Ghost responds first by quoting Scrooge's awful Swiftian statement about "decreasing the surplus population" and then with a question: "Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?" Since I had never read "A Christmas Carol" until this past week, I read this line with a "deliberate anachronism" (as Borges put it in "Pierre Menard") as a reference to Gandalf's remarks to Frodo in "The Fellowship of the Ring": "Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them?" (Andrew Shields, #111words, 1 July 2021)

 

John Leech illustration from 1843

The expression "bran-new" in Dickens and Twain

It didn't take me long to read Charles Dickens's "A Christmas Carol", but then it's much shorter than his usual tomes. In it, I came across the expression "bran-new", which I also noticed in earlier Dickens novels. I began to wonder if this was the original form, with "brand-new" once having been a variation. But the original expression was "brand-new", which probably derives from a "firebrand" and hence refers to something newly forged, with "bran-new" a now archaic variation. It also appears in Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as part of Huck's inventory of what he and Jim own, "a bran-new Barlow knife worth two bits in any store." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 June 2021)

Vaccination beyond coronavirus: shingles, tick-borne encephalitis, and a booster

When I got the second dose of coronavirus vaccine on 8 June, I decided to talk to my doctor about other vaccines, especially the relatively new one for shingles. Today, I had an appointment to discuss all this, but it turns out that the best shingles vaccine, Shingrix, has not yet been approved in Switzerland, though it should be available soon. Instead, as ticks have been spreading in Switzerland since I got here in 1995, I got the first of three shots for tick-borne encephalitis, with appointments for the next two in one and six months, as well as a one-time booster vaccination with Boostrix-Polio for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, and poliomyelitis. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 June 2021)

Metrical prose in Charles Dicken's "Martin Chuzzlewit"

At the beginning of the next-to-last chapter of Charles Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit", when John Westlock and Ruth Pinch begin the walk when he'll propose to her, the prose slips into an iambic metrical pattern, with alternating heptameter and pentameter phrases and a concluding tetrameter: "Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down to hide themselves." The narrative left little doubt about the imminent marriage proposal, but the meter combines with the "brilliant" adverbs that begin the first three phrases to celebrate it in advance. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28 June 2021)

"John Westlock and Ruth Pinch", Sol Eytinge, Jr., wood-engraving 1867

Back to the cinema after 16 months and 5 days for "Wanda, mein Wunder"

The last time Andrea and I went to the cinema was on 22 February 2020 to see "Little Women" at the Kult Kino Atelier in Basel (which I know because I wrote 111 words about it the same evening). Before the film was the trailer of "Emma", which we planned to see as soon as possible. But then the cinemas closed because of the pandemic, and only this evening, two weeks and one day after Andrea's second dose of coronavirus vaccine, did we go to Atelier again for "Wanda, mein Wunder", featuring our friend Sophie's father André Jung as the father of – as Andrea just put it – a very dysfunctional family. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 June 2021)

 

André Jung and Agnieszka Grochowska in "Wanda, mein Wunder"

Working at a computer shop in Palo Alto in 1981

In spring 1981, at sixteen, I worked part-time at a computer store in Palo Alto. I can't remember what brands it sold, but the IBM PC was only released that August, and I just cleaned up and ran errands anyway. After several months, I was alone one day, and a man came in to consider a computer for his business. I started telling him about the computers on display, and when my boss returned, he listened in amazement as I shared the information I'd picked up from listening to him for so long. If the shop hadn't closed a few weeks later, perhaps they would have trained me as a salesman. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 June 2021)

Finishing "Martin Chuzzlewit"

On 19 April this year, I wrote about finishing Charles Dickens's "Barnaby Rudge"; today, I finished his next novel, "Martin Chuzzlewit". The novel's image of the "U-nited States" (as characters are frequently represented as pronouncing it) is memorable, especially when guns come up: "Martin learned [...] that to carry pistols into legislative assemblies, and swords in sticks, and other such peaceful toys [...] were glowing deeds." Like the Gordon Riots in "Barnaby Rudge", this recalls the January attack on the Capitol, but also how Republican Representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene want to carry guns onto the House floor. Now, exactly six months away from Christmas, it's on to "A Christmas Carol". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 June 2021)

The con man tells the "gull" how the con works in Charles Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit"

In Charles Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit", when Tigg Montague, as he calls himself, tries to get Mr. Pecksniff interested in investing in the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan and Life Assurance Company, he explains how the company works:  "There is nothing like building our fortune on the weaknesses of mankind. [...] I give you my honour that WE do it." The company will generate profits "as long as there [are] gulls upon the wing." Montague explicitly explains to Pecksniff that the company defrauds people. That is, the con man tells the mark how the con works, and counts on the "gull" identifying with him rather than with one of the "weak" people being defrauded. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 June 2021)

 

Forty-ninth illustration by Fred Barnard for Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit (Chapter XLIV).

Muthspiel, Colley, Rossy: My first concert in fifteen months

The last concert I attended was on 11 March 2020, when I saw Hildegard Lernt Fliegen at the Jazzhaus in Freiburg two days before the first Swiss lockdown was announced. Tonight, fifteen days after my second dose of coronavirus vaccine, I went to the garden of the Kunsthalle in Basel to hear Wolfgang Muthspiel, Scott Colley, and Jorge Rossy. Hearing the music was wonderful, of course, but seeing the musicians was, too: Muthspiel swaying back and forth to the rhythm as the music got louder and louder; Colley smiling again and again at Rossy's quick-witted playing; Rossy seamlessly switching from sticks to brushes to mallets to playing snare with his hands. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 June 2021)

Muthspiel, Colley, Rossy

Paraprosdokian in movie reviews by Anthony Lane and A. O. Scott

In his recent review of "Godzilla v. Kong" in "The New Yorker", Anthony Lane made me laugh out loud: "One mark of the Godzilla franchise is the ingenuity with which each director manages to waste the talents of an excellent cast." This paraprosdokian builds toward a positive statement and then abruptly veers into the negative. It reminded me of an even more amusing line with which A. O. Scott began his review of "Horton Hears a Who!" in "The New York Times" in 2008: "What distinguishes 'Horton Hears a Who!' from the other recent Dr. Seuss film adaptations [...] is that it is not one of the worst movies ever made." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 22 June 2021)

 

Illustration by Hisashi Okawa for the Anthony Lane article

 

Manuel Neuer, Munich, UEFA, and rainbows

In Germany's first two matches at the Euro 2020 (as well as in their friendly against Lithuania before the tournament), Germany's goalkeeper Manuel Neuer wore a rainbow-colored captain armband for Pride month. UEFA apparently considered forbidding him to wear that armband in further matches, but then decided not to do so. But when Munich announced they would light up the Allianz Arena in rainbow colors on Wednesday for Germany's third match against Hungary, UEFA forbade them to do so with the excuse that the stadium lights should only be the participating teams' colors or UEFA's own. The organization campaigns against racism but refuses to stand up against other kinds of discrimination. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 21 June 2021)

 

Turning a writing tip into an experiment

In episode 74 of "The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps", Tony Long recalls how as a student he was given the exercise of writing a paper on "psyche" in Greek philosophy without the word "soul", which is a common but apparently potentially misleading translation of "psyche". This story made me think of framing some of my suggestions about academic writing as exercises or experiments. My students have several formulaic ways of using the names of authors, such as Jane Austen, in essays about their works, so I could assign the experiment of writing about an Austen novel without ever referring to the author by name, except in the essay's title. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 June 2021)

Women sharing secrets in Adrienne Rich and Doris Lessing

The two women in Adrienne Rich's 1962 poem "To Judith, Taking Leave" have been "cramped sharers / of a bitter mutual secret". They may get beyond that experience "as two eyes in one brow / receiving at one moment / the rainbow of the world." But two women sharing "bitter" secrets also appear in Doris Lessing's 1962 novel "The Golden Notebook" when Anna Wulf and Molly Jacobs "exchange glances" while in conversation with Molly's ex-husband Richard: "Anna and Molly again raised their eyebrows at each other, conveying that the whole conversation had been wasted as usual." But unlike Rich's women, Anna and Molly don't yet get beyond their "bitter mutual secret." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 June 2021)

Singing McCartney on his birthday

Today, I read several times that it's Paul McCartney's 79th birthday. A few minutes ago, I was sitting outside reading, enjoying the somewhat cooler air after a brief rainfall at the end of the hot afternoon, with the rainy scent still rising from the patio, and I heard my daughter Sara playing "Yesterday" on the piano. I came inside to enjoy it better and to tell her it was McCartney's birthday, but when she finished the piece, she surprised me by asking me to sing along with her. It was easy, as she has the lyrics on her sheet music, and I enjoyed pretending to know how to sight-read the melody. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 June 2021)

Denise Levertov dancing to "Workingman's Dead"

In January, I came across Jeffrey Harrison's poem "Elizabeth Bishop and The Grateful Dead": "I'd like to think it happened – / my favorite poet meeting my favorite band." Harrison's favorites are also mine, so his wish fulfillment would also be mine. This morning, in my daily reading of one Denise Levertov poem, I finished her long poem "Staying Alive", and read in a sub-section called "Happiness" of my teacher dancing to the Dead in 1970: "Two nights dancing (Workingman’s Dead) / with someone of such grace and goodness, happiness / made real in his true smile." I imagine Denise's "true smile" while dancing and singing along: "Come hear Uncle John's Band"! (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 June 2021)

 

Bull crit with Flaubert, Joyce, and Dostoevsky

In graduate school, I noticed I'd read enough works on the history of the novel to say many things about works I hadn't read. I called this "bull crit"; the two main works I did it with were "Madame Bovary" and "Ulysses" (both of which I've since read). In my Master's seminar on Toni Morrison this past term, I asked the students what they knew about Dostoevsky. None of them knew his works well, but many turned out to their own surprise to be able to say a lot about them – and I joined the bull crit with comments on "The Brothers Karamazov", which I know only from reading about it. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 June 2021)

Coming out of "Ice Age 2" with a six-year-old after nightfall

Often when I leave the cinema after a movie, everything looks for a while like the movie's visual world. The effect is strongest when I go in while it's still light outside and the movie ends after nightfall. In spring 2006, when my six-year-old son Miles and I went to see "Ice Age 2", we came out after dark, and I noticed that effect in myself again – and Miles seemed disoriented. First he said he had to go back into the cinema to make sure it was empty, and later, when he was in bed, he described how the movie was still playing in his mind whenever he closed his eyes. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 June 2021)

Hearing Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" and remembering a Saturday in 1977

Recently, Marvin Gaye's "Got To Give It Up" must have played somewhere in a store or on a television soundtrack, or at least something that resembled it enough that the music in my head eventually turned into it, and I remembered that one Saturday afternoon when I was 12 and just beginning to listen to the radio in Ohio, I stumbled across "American Top 40" with Casey Kasem for the first time and heard him introduce Gaye's song, which was making its debut on the countdown that day. A bit of research revealed that this must have been 23 April 1977; two months later, the song reached #1 for one week. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 June 2021)