Naomi Osaka, Patrick Mouratoglou, Serena Williams, and coaching: US Open 2018 and Australian Open 2024

This morning, I watched an Australian Open match between Belinda Bencic and Naomi Osaka. As Osaka began to have a recurrence of an abdominal injury she suffered at her previous tournament, she consulted with her coach Patrick Mouratoglou. As this was the first match I've watched this year, it was also the first time I had seen a player and coach talk during a match, which has only recently begun to be allowed. What made this particularly striking was how it recalled Osaka's first US Open win in 2018, when Serena Williams received a warning from umpire Carlos Ramos for receiving coaching during the match – from the very same Patrick Mouratoglou. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 January 2025)

Years as chapter titles in Virginia Woolf’s “The Years” and Toni Morrison’s “Sula"

I recently finished rereading Virginia Woolf's "The Years" (1937), all of whose chapters (except the last, "The Present Day") are titled with the year they take place: 1880, 1891, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1917, and 1918. So when I also finished rereading Toni Morrison's "Sula" (1973) the other day (in preparation for my second three-semester cycle of Morrison's novels), I noticed that Morrison, too, used dates as titles of chapters: 1919, 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1927 in Part One, and 1937, 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1965 in Part Two. Of course, Morrison knew her Woolf: she wrote her 1955 Master's at Cornell University on Woolf and William Faulkner. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 January 2025)

Brooke Herter James's poem "One Afternoon in Maine” and Robert McCloskey's 1952 picture book "One Morning in Maine”

This morning, I read Brooke Herter James's poem "One Afternoon in Maine". The poem clearly alludes to Robert McCloskey's 1952 picture book "One Morning in Maine". One morning in Basel, I read that story to my three-year-old son Miles, and while reading, I wondered what McCloskey did after publishing his famous books from the forties and fifties (including "Make Way for Ducklings", 1941, and "Blueberries for Sal", 1948). When I headed out the door to take Miles to day care, I grabbed the International Herald Tribune from the mailbox, and after dropping him off, I read that McCloskey, who was born in 1914, had died the day before, 30 June 2003. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 January 2025)

 

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

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

 

Missouri 1951

Es wurde von den Staaten

Dem Staudamm Geld verwehrt.

Weil sie nichts gegen ihn taten

Hat sich der Fluß beschwert.

 

Er ist aufgestanden

Ihm schien der Damm zu alt.

Die Stadtbewohner fanden

Das Wasser kalt.

 

Die abgehauenen Wälder wachsen

Unter der Erde fort.

Dresden ein Brandfleck in Sachsen

Die Toten haben das letzte Wort.

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

Recording sessions from the 1980s to 2025

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