Images of champagne in Taylor Swift lyrics

The first mention of champagne in Taylor Swift's songs is in a description of "big parties" in "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" ("reputation", 2017): "Everyone swimming in a champagne sea". This image of swimming in champagne returns in "the last great american dynasty" ("folkore", 2020): "Filled the pool with champagne and swam with the big names". These are images of excess and luxury. Then, "champagne problems" ("evermore", 2020) takes the luxury of "Dom Pérignon" and makes it a problem of luxury. Finally, "Paris" ("Midnights", 2022) turns champagne into a fantasy of luxury in a new setting: "Cheap wine, make believe it's champagne [...] In an alleyway, drinking champagne." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 October 2024)

Arthur Fils and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, two young French players to watch from the Swiss Indoors quarterfinals in Basel on Friday, 25 October 2024

At the quarterfinals of the Swiss Indoors men's tennis tournament in Basel on Friday, 25 October 2024, the best match was a close three-setter: Ben Shelton (22, USA, ATP 23) beat Andrei Rublev (27, Russia, 7), with Rublev converting zero of six break points and Shelton winning two of two. But the two most impressive players were Arthur Fils (20, France, 20), who beat Stefanos Tsitsipas (26, Greece, 11), and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard (21, France, 50), who beat Denis Shapovalov (25, Canada, 95). Both these Frenchmen, who faced no break points in their matches, will surely be in the Top Ten soon, and today, Mpetshi Perricard defeated Shelton in the final. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 October 2024)

Phil Lesh (1940-2024) leads The Grateful Dead into “Gimme Some Lovin’”, Berkeley Community Theater, 2 November 1984

On 2 November 1984, at the fifth of six Grateful Dead concerts at the Berkeley Community Theater around Halloween, the band played a conventional second-set opener with "Help On The Way / Slipknot! / Franklin's Tower" and "Lost Sailor / Saint Of Circumstance". Then, instead of going to "Drums" and "Space",  Jerry Garcia went into "Wharf Rat". As that song's final jam began to merge into "Drums", bassist Phil Lesh (1940-2024), with a huge grin on his face, broke into the band's debut performance of the Spencer Davis Group's "Gimme Some Lovin'" (1966) and, in a duet with Brent Mydland, sang on stage for the first time in over a decade. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 October 2024) 

Listening to “Box of Rain”, “Unbroken Chain”, and “Eyes of the World” on hearing of the death of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh (1940-2024)

On hearing that Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh died today, I first listened to his "Box of Rain" ("American Beauty", 1970), with Robert Hunter's lyrics: "Such a long long time to be gone and a short time to be there." I followed that with his "Unbroken Chain" ("From the Mars Hotel", 1974), with Bobby Petersen's lyrics: "Listening for the secret, searching for the sound." And finally, I turned to Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter's "Eyes of the World" from "Dick's Picks, volume 31", live at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, New Jersey, on 6 August 1974, with Lesh taking intro and outro leads in one of The Grateful Dead's finest performances. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 October 2024)

 

“Goils don’t know how to make speeches”: The comic strip “Nancy” and men’s silencing of women

A fan of Ernie Bushmiller's comic strip "Nancy" posted a strip from 23 October 1944, in which Sluggo tells Nancy that he wants to run for "president of d' neighborhood". He refuses Nancy's offer to make speeches for him because "goils don't know how to make speeches". So Nancy starts running for the office herself! – Just as Nancy decides to run for office when Sluggo chooses to silence her, men refusing to take women seriously or even refusing to let them speak catalyzed both the Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, in July 1848 and the second wave of feminism that began in the United States in the 1960s. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 October 2024)

“Narcotics in all of my songs”: Taylor Swift’s “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024)

Here's a line from Taylor Swift's song "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024): "[I] put narcotics into all of my songs / and that's why you're still singing along ..." Narcotics are painkillers, and in law-enforcement and popular usage, addictive drugs more generally. In medical settings, narcotics can be put into pills or intravenous solutions; in bars, they can be slipped into drinks to take advantage of people. Among other things, the "narcotics" that Swift slips into her songs are the rhetorical, poetic, and literary devices that keep people returning to her lyrics (along with some "Easter eggs"). So here, "narcotics" is a metaphor for metaphors. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 October 2024)

Stalled in the middle of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Mike Nichols’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” (1966)

The other day, I watched the 1933 Disney cartoon "The Three Little Pigs" with the song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" as preparation for a discussion of Taylor Swift's "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024) in today's first session of my eight-week-long Volkshochschule beider Basel course on Swift. I also started Mike Nichols's 1966 film of Edward Albee's 1962 play "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (an Oscar-winning role for her). I stalled fifty minutes in, as a drunk couple yelling at each other gradually grows tiresome. But the superb acting still makes me want to finish it soon. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 October 2024)

A marginal note I wrote in my e-book of Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day” (1919)

Back in 2019-2020, I read e-books of all of Virginia Woolf's novels in chronological order. I highlighted occasional passages, but generally did not write notes. Now, re-reading four of Woolf's novels for a student's MA exam, I've begun with the earliest, "Night and Day" (1919), and the other day, I came across a note I had written when suffragette organizer Sally Seal mentions her frustration with how long the movement has been taking: "I'm fifty-five, and I dare say I shall be in my grave by the time we get it—if we ever do." My note was not about the suffrage but about that age: "Read on my 55th birthday." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 October 2024)

“Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” (Churchill and Ronell) and the 1948 revision of Disney’s 1933 short “The Three Little Pigs"

The song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" appeared in the 1933 Oscar winner for Best Animated Short Film, "The Three Little Pigs", one of Disney's "Silly Symphonies". An immediate hit, it was written by Frank Churchill (1901-1942) and Ann Ronell (1905-1993; she had also composed the eventual standard "Willow Weep for Me" in 1932). When the Big Bad Wolf disguises himself to try to blow down the third house, the one made of brick, he dresses like a Jewish stereotype, which was criticized at the time. Later, in 1948, Walt Disney had animator Jack Hannah revise the scene to eliminate the wolf's stereotypical voice and part of his disguise. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 October 2024)

Breaking my record for concerts attended in one year (which I set last year)

In 2023, I went to 73 concerts. By the end of August 2024, I'd gone to seventy concerts, and I assumed I'd break my record in September. However, I only went to three concerts the whole month. At the end of September, I was planning to attend four concerts in three days, and two more at the beginning of October, but I came down with a bad cold that flattened me for ten days, and I haven't made it to any concerts since, as I've been catching up with everything. Tonight at the Bird's Eye in Basel, though, I'll be at my record-breaking seventy-fourth concert this year, the Matthias Spillman Trio. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 October 2024)

“Sense was breaking through”: Andrew Bird’s musical setting for Emily Dickinson’s “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain” (Fr340)

On 26 October 2022, singer-songwriter Andrew Bird released a recording of his setting of Emily Dickinson's poem "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" (Fr340), featuring singer Phoebe Bridgers. The arrangement begins with just Bird on guitar and vocals for the first the three lines, at the end of which bassist Tony Berg enters and Bridgers harmonizes the fourth line: "That Sense was breaking through". It's as if the bass and the second voice are that "sense" that "breaks through". And at the end of the song, when Bird repeats the poem's opening stanza, the spare instrumentation returns, but then he sings that line unaccompanied, and the sense breaks through again. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 October 2024)

 

Performing “Apparently with no surprise” (Fr1661): The theatricality of Emily Dickinson

In an essay I discussed with my students last week, Brenda Wineapple characterizes Emily Dickinson as "original, difficult, theatrical, perceptive, witty". We found the idea of Dickinson's theatricality especially helpful in discussing the late poem "Apparently with no surprise" (Fr1661, 1884), which we even performed with three students and me playing the roles of the "happy Flower", the "Frost", the "Sun", and the "Approving God":  "Apparently with no surprise / To any happy Flower / The Frost beheads it at it's play - / In accidental power - / The blonde Assassin passes on - / The Sun proceeds unmoved / To measure off another Day / For an Approving God." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 October 2024) 

Donald Trump demonizing “illegal immigrants”, all immigrants, naturalized citizens, and all citizens who oppose him

Ever since he began campaigning for President in June 2015, Donald Trump has demonized immigrants to the United States – mostly those he considers "illegal", but sometimes also those who enter the country legally. On Friday, 11 October, though, Trump's advisor Stephen Miller called for "denaturalization" of immigrants who have successfully applied for and received United States citizenship. And yesterday, on Fox News, Trump even called for the National Guard or the military to be used against those citizens he sees as "radical left lunatics." As I noted after a burst of similar rhetoric from Trump last November, anyone who opposes him can become an object of the violence he calls for. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 October 2024)

 

• I take the recent points from this post by Heather Cox Richardson.
• My post from 14 November 2023.

Metrical variation in Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023)

Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023) begins with dactyls: "Seated alone at the edge of the bed". The poem is in couplets, so the second line could balance that tetrameter with dactylic trimeter, but it turns to troches instead: "grasp the finest fabric first". That could establish a pattern for the poem: alternating lines of dactylic and trochaic tetrameter. But Hayes's third line shifts to iambs: "the shrunken sock or silk softest to touch". "Softest" is a trochaic substitution, but that's not unknown in iambic pentameter lines. The continuous movement between several meters in Hayes's poem models how "free verse" can make use of variable metrical effects. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 October 2024)

 

  

Terrance Hayes’s poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm”, PechaKucha, proper names, and Isamu Noguchi

Terrance Hayes calls his poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm" (from "So To Speak", 2023) "an analogue PechaKucha", a Japanese presentation form that involves making twenty-second statements about twenty slides. In my Contemporary Poetry seminar, we discussed the proper names in Hayes's poem: Kafka, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Matisse, Picasso, Hitchcock, and Isamu Noguchi. As none of us had heard of Noguchi before, I gave the students two minutes to prepare a twenty-second statement about what the poem says about him, and then called on students at random to make their statements. Afterwards, we looked him up: Noguchi (1904-1988) was an Usonian artist, furniture designer, and landscape architect. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 October 2024)

[Hayes’s poem is online, but he revised it considerably for book publication, so here’s the poem as it appears in “So To Speak”]

Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm

Terrance Hayes, "So To Speak", 33-36

 

An Analogue PechaKucha, 2020

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

It appears I will never be remembered

as a great singer nor extravagant eater.

Either I am standing or I am dreaming.

Or I am standing near the mouth of a theater.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

One early & deeply progressive symptom

of the Kafka Virus: a stream of movies seeps

into the shell of the infected individual's sleeping.

Dream factors greatly in the disease.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I accept I may never get over the ways my mother

loved me poorly. She is close to god in me.

On a planet without surefire

gods & mythologies, there is family.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Inside the stream of Whitney Houston's

voice, Dionne Warwick warns,

"You're gonna need me one

day. You're gonna want me back in your arms."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

There are no ugly people, only expressions

of uglinessm when the mouth is set

this way or that. It's best to think of time

the way a miser thinks of money.

 

¯\_(' ')_/¯

Matisse liked to have the nude near to see her,

but Picasso liked to close his eyes upon her.

What I remember of 1987, is mostly what I remember

of '88 except with different deaths & births.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

If you watch Hitchcock's Vertigo

the other way round, you may notice 

inside the movie is a whole other movie

told from the point of view of the young lady.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Each new pair of glasses assures things

never look the same, but several glasses

of liquor can create the same feeling.

Balance the morass & the molasses of jackasses.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

Even where I doubt the presence of God 

I am awed by the scale of creation. 

Any science suggesting all that happens

is coincidence, is nonsense.

 

\_('.')_/¯

"Intrepidation." "Misfortunate." "Ya-licious."

"Holy smoked turkey." "Attack of the third dimension."

I continue to half believe a fourth s

resides somewhere inside the word obsession.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Clap for a low back country road 

like a tree talking below a constellation.

A low back river talking twilight 

with the leaves clapping below a constellation.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Often right after taking a photo you immediately

crop or color the image so it seems

the doctored thing is the memory.

I'm not saying you have to lie to dream.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

I stream the sequel to a terrible disaster

movie where the protagonist searches for a lover

with the support of characters who meet catastrophe

helping the main character.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

The gun is lowered but then a toe

or two in the boot is shot & when the shoe

comes off, there's a hole a grandchild or two

a generation or two later can put a finger through.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Before the sleeping dream,

we are told to keep nickels in the glasses

of wine by our beds. The virus seems

to have some relationship to cash.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Clap for Tetris, the video game

that teaches you the most geometry for life.

Stacks of boxes of books, closets of hangers

and monster angels and historical fabrics.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I was struck by the sky of my South

Carolina. It made my mouth ache.

I was old by the time I heard the prophet

Isaiah used to preach naked.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Ghost, the loss that broke you was so

ubiquitous, I failed to see it lingering in the ether

like the misspelled affections that go

undetected by both letter writer & letter reader.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Often I confuse Vivamus, moriendum est,

which means "Let us live, for we must die,"

with Bibamus, moriendum est which means "Let

us drink, for we must die."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Isamu Noguchi sculpted the marrow

of a black stone into bamboo & planted husks

of live bamboo shoots to guard it. I know

this ragged clock waits to be clogged with dust.

 

The magnificent career of Rafael Nadal

Early on, Rafael Nadal made this Roger Federer fan suffer by beating him at the French Open four years running (2005 in the semifinal; 2006 to 2008 in the final). But I learned to appreciate Nadal's compelling style, especially on the clay courts at Roland Garros, with his fourteen titles, 112 wins, and only four losses. Even though his clay-court style had been around for seventeen years by the time he last won it in 2022, only three players ever figured how to beat him there: Robin Söderling (2009), Novak Djokovic (2015 and 2021), and Alexander Zverev (2023, when Nadal was suffering from the injuries that have now ended his career). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 October 2024)

Finding Coover’s "The Universal Baseball Association” on a library shelf at Stanford in the 1980s

Regarding Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968), I remember now that I did not read it in school when I played tabletop baseball games, but in college a few years later. I worked at Stanford's Meyer Library shelving books, and when I shelved one by Coover, I recognized him as the author of a novel about such games, so I checked it out and read it. By then, I had already begun reading literary criticism, so I dug up an article about the novel. To my amusement, the scholar did not know those games actually exist, but thought that Coover had completely made them up. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 October 2024)

SwissPass, the Swiss Federal Railways, and the “enshittification” of customer service on the internet

The internet's "enshittification" (Cory Doctorow) includes how companies make it hard to contact them. I received a suspicious-looking email from SwissPass, a service of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). Although it wasn't phishing, I replied to mention that it looked like it was. It was a no-reply account. The SwissPass website has no email address or contact form. I found an SBB Customer Service email address. An auto-reply said it's no longer used. That reply mentioned a "help and contact" page – which has no email address or contact form. Both sites offer phone numbers to call – but not toll-free. I finally wrote them using a form for complaining about train personnel. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 October 2024)

“The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968), by Robert Coover (1932-2024)

When I recently had the idea of writing about mechanical pencils, I put it on my list of possible topics for daily prose. But only yesterday did I not come up with an issue to write about (films and politics having grabbed my attention for most of the past week). While I was writing about my life with mechanical pencils, which began with tabletop baseball games in the 1970s, I thought of a novel I read back then about a man playing such games: Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968). So it was uncanny to learn this morning that Coover died on Saturday at 92. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 October 2024)

Mechanical pencils

In the mid-1970s, I began playing tabletop baseball games like Strat-O-Matic, though my favorite was eventually one called Extra Innings. I stopped playing them around 1980 or so, but one thing remains from my years playing such games: mechanical pencils. Back then, when I needed a new pencil or new lead, I would walk the mile or so from our house in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, to the University of Toledo bookstore, which had a great collection of Pentel pencils. I still prefer their P205 pencils with 0.5 mm lead. Back then, such pencils were only available in black, but these days I have several of them in a range of colors. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 October 2024)

Anti-smoking rhetoric in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” (2017) and Mark Romanek’s “Never Let Me Go” (2010)

About eight minutes into "Get Out" (Jordan Peele, 2017), Rose (Allison Williams), a young white woman, takes a cigarette from her boyfriend Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young Black man, and throws it out the window of the car she is driving. Her opposition to his smoking, which her parents turn out to share, runs through the film. This time around, it reminded me of the guardians at the boarding school in "Never Let Me Go" (Mark Romanek, 2010, based on Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel), who insist that their "students" should never smoke. In both cases, the anti-smoking people want to keep the bodies they want to exploit as healthy as possible. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 October 2024)

A petition against Basel’s staging of the Eurovision Song Contest in May 2025

Today in my mailbox was a petition from the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland to start a referendum against the staging of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest in Basel next May: "35 Million [Swiss Francs] in tax money for a propaganda show?" Given what I know about this small, "national-conservative" Swiss political party, which is against homosexuals, trans people, and abortion, I assumed they were against the "propaganda" of a "gender ideology" they would claim was bering spread by Nemo, the non-binary winner of the 2024 ESC. But to my surprise, they dislike the ESC for the "occultism and Satanism" that they claim some of the contest's performers have been spreading. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 October 2024)

"When the defendant [Donald J. Trump] lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office"

In the "Government’s motion for immunity determinations" filed yesterday, 2 October 2024, by Special Counsel Jack Smith in United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, the "Factual Proffer" that "provides a detailed statement of the case that the Government intends to prove at trial" begins with a straightforward claim: "When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office" (3). This is not actually disputed by former President Trump's legal team. After all, they did not defend him by saying that he did not commit crimes; they defended him by arguing that, as President, he was immune from prosecution for those crimes. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 October 2024) 

“Such stuff as dreams are made of” at the end of John Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)

At the end of "The Maltese Falcon", John Huston's 1941 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel, Detective Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond) picks up the titular falcon, asks Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) what it is, and is puzzled by Spade's response: "Such stuff as dreams are made of." The quotation comes from a speech by Prospero in William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" (1610-11): "We are such stuff / as dreams are made on." In the film, Spade knows his Shakespeare, while Polhaus apparently does not. Yet as actors, both Bogart and Bond surely knew the line. Actors, after all, are immersed in cultural history in ways the characters they play are usually not. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 October 2024)

Ward Bond and Humphrey Bogart in “The Maltese Falcon"

Elisha Cook, Jr., in “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) and “The Big Sleep” (1946) – and in a 1949 adaptation of “The Great Gatsby"

Today, when I saw a man tailing Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in John Huston's 1941 film of Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon", I was reminded that I have always liked Elisha Cook, Jr., who plays that henchman of Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet). Cook also appears in another Bogart film, "The Big Sleep" (Howard Hawks, 1946). Otherwise, I know hardly anything he made, but Cook also played Klipspringer in Richard Maibaum's 1949 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby", a film I had never heard of before. In "The Maltese Falcon", Cook is on the receiving end of Bogart's memorable line, "The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 October 2024) 

Watching “The Lady in the Van”, “Nobody Wants This”, and “Un cuento perfecto” while down with a cold

I've been down with a bad cold since Thursday, so I've been watching things. After honoring Maggie Smith (1934-2024) with Nicholas Hytner's "The Lady in the Van" (2015), I turned to the new Netflix series "Nobody Wants This", because I like Kristen Bell from "The Good Place". After that, I wanted something in Spanish, and I found a 2023 Netflix series "Un cuento perfecto", with Anna Castillo, whose work I knew from Salvador Calvo's "Adú" (2020). Castillo, like Bell, has such an expressive face. – And this "perfect story" is the first film or series I have ever seen that has a sex scene interrupted because the woman is having her period. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 September 2024)

The case of Lionel Tate in Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004) – and on the internet today

While re-reading Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004), I was struck by her mention of Lionel Tate. In 2001, Tate was convicted of murder as an adult for a death he caused at 12. In 2004, when his conviction was overturned, he accepted a plea deal including ten years' probation, so when charged with armed robbery in 2005, he was sentenced to ten years for the robbbery and thirty years for violating probation. Since all the reports on this were at least ten years old, I limited my search to the past year – and the results about Tate's case were mostly essays for students to plagiarize. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 September 2024) 

From Claudia Rankine to Aimé Césaire and César Vallejo

Between April 2016 and March 2017, I read Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004) four times (in part because I taught a course on Rankine's work – and Anthony Vahni Capildeo's – in the Spring Semester of 2017 at the University of Basel English Department). The epigraph to Rankine's book is from Aimé Césaire's "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal", so I read that in French back in 2017, too. Now, rereading Rankine for a student's MA exam, I notice again her references to César Vallejo's "Considerando en frío" – but now, having been learning Spanish since November 2020, I went to read that poem in the original, too. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 September 2024)

Not remembering Maggie Smith in “As You Like It” at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario in Spring 1977

In spring 1977, presumably during our spring break from school, my family went from in Ottawa Hills, Ohio, to Stratford, Ontario, for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival. My father was especially excited about the trip, because he wanted to see Maggie Smith as Rosalind in the festival's production of William Shakespeare's comedy "As You Like It". I wish I remembered something about her performance, but all I remember about that trip was that a dog bit me on what an online map suggests was Tom Patterson Island in Lake Victoria in central Stratford. Still, Maggie Smith (1934-2024) always reminded me of that trip, even if I all I remembered was that dog. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 September 2024)

Explaining the form of sonnets with Ernst Jandl’s “sonett"

In a class today on two sonnets by William Shakespeare (18, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?", and 116, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"), I began by discussing the form of a sonnet. I hadn't planned to use it, but I suddenly remembered the wonderful example of Ernst Jandl's "sonett", all of whose lines are variations on the first line: "das a das e das i das o das u". With the clear unstressed articles and the stressed names of the vowels, the meter is easy to describe. The rhyme scheme is also clear, and the fourteen lines and their organization (Petrarchan) are also straightforward. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 September 2024)

 

sonett

Ernst Jandl

 

das a das e das i das o das u

das u das a das e das i das o

das u das a das e das i das o

das a das e das i das o das u

 

das a das e das i das o das u

das u das a das e das i das o

das u das a das e das i das o

das a das e das i das o das u

 

das o das u das a das e das i

das i das o das u das a das e

das e das i das o das u das a

 

das o das u das a das e das i

das i das o das u das a das e

das e das i das o das u das a

Re-reading four novels by Virginia Woolf for a student’s Master’s exam this fall

In 2019 and 2020, I went through Virginia Woolf's nine novels from "The Voyage Out" (1915) to "Between the Acts" (1941), as well as her unusual 1933 book "Flush", a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the perspective of her dog Flush. Many years before that project, when I was still at university, I had read "Jacob's Room" (1922), "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925), "To the Lighthouse" (1927), "Orlando" (1928), and "The Waves" (1931). Now a student will be doing her Master's exam with me, and one of her topics is London in four Woolf novels, so I'll get to reread "Night and Day" (1919), "Jacob's Room", "Mrs. Dalloway", and "The Years" (1937). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 September 2024) 

Epanalepsis (or epanodiplosis) in Emily Dickinson’s "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -" (Fr591)

While preparing Emily Dickinson's "I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -" (Fr591) for discussion on Wednesday, I noticed the structure of the penultimate line: "And then the Windows failed - and then." It begins and ends with the same phrase. In the past, I've described such lines as "framed" by the repeated phrase. But recently, I've been discovering the many old rhetorical terms for types of repetition (with "epistrophe" being my favorite, because of Thelonious Monk's composition "Epistrophy"). So now I've been able to find "epanalepsis" or "epanadiplosis" for such repetition at the beginning and end of a sentence (or, in this case, of a line of poetry). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 September 2024)

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - (591)

Emily Dickinson

 

I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air -

Between the Heaves of Storm -

 

The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset - when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room -

 

I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away

What portion of me be

Assignable - and then it was

There interposed a Fly -

 

With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -

Between the light - and me -

And then the Windows failed - and then

I could not see to see -

 

 

A Michigan absentee voter since 1992

Late Friday, I received my absentee ballot from Michigan. When I first voted from abroad in 1992, I registered at my mother's address in Michigan, and I have been a regular absentee voter there ever since. In my first Presidential election in the United States in 1984, I lived in California, where I was going to university; in my second in 1988, I lived in Pennsylvania, where I had just started graduate school. I sometimes wonder if I was supposed to have applied for my 1992 absentee ballot in Pennsylvania. But at the time, I was using my mother's address as my US address, so Michigan made more sense to me. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 September 2024)

A New Zealander in Basel, over twenty years ago

When our son Miles was about two or three years old, we went for a walk on a damp and gloomy autumn weekday. We lived in Kleinbasel at the time, and we crossed the Rhein at the dam. We hadn't intended to stop at the playground there, but we did. There were only two other people there: a woman and a child. It turned out the woman was from New Zealand. She had married a French-speaking Swiss man who was a letter carrier, and she was very homesick. I don't know what made me remember that woman today, but we never saw her again, and I wonder what happened to her. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 September 2024)

Terrance Hayes and his revision of poems between magazine and book publication

For the first session of my Contemporary Poetry seminar this semester, I picked out the poem "Continuity", by Terrance Hayes ("So To Speak", 2023). Yesterday, when I found the poem's first publication in The New Yorker in 2021, I copied it to prepare notes. But then I remembered that when I did the same a few semesters ago with one of Hayes's "American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin" (2018), I didn't notice that Hayes had revised the poem between its original magazine publication and its appearance in a book. So now I checked – and was glad I did. The changes were mostly small, but one couplet was significantly different. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 September 2024)

Former President Donald Trump “goes to eleven”:“This is Spinal Tap” in a political commentary

In "Trump’s Old News", his commentary for The New York Review of Books on the debate between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, Fintan O'Toole interprets Trump's rhetoric: "It is hard for Trump to increase the volume when he long ago turned it up to eleven." "Up to eleven" comes from the 1984 Rob Reiner movie "This is Spinal Tap", when Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), guitarist in the band Spinal Tap, brags about how his amplifier dials "go to 11". Tufnel's failure to understand that the labelling of the dial doesn't change the amplifier's volume now marks Trump's increasing inability to ever do anything but shout his outrage. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 September 2024)

 

The similarities between men’s and women’s football – and one noticeable difference

Recently, I have gone to see the FC Basel women's team play a few times. For the most part, the football the women play looks just like how the men play, with the same strategies and tactics, the same ball-control skills, the same mistakes, and the same occasional strokes of genius. But last Friday, at the match between the women's teams of the FC Basel and FC Zürich, I did notice something different about free kicks: in women's matches, the defending players in the wall between the ball and the goal put their hands behind their backs, while the men in the wall put their hands in front of their crotches. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 September 2024)

References to the “weirdness” and “abnormality” of MAGA and the Right” from early 2024

Back in July, when Minnesota's Democratic Governor Tim Walz (now the party's candidate for Vice President) described leading Republican and MAGA politicians in the United States as "weird", the expression caught on, and there was much discussion of the use of the term. The usage seemed new at the time, but today, at the end of an opinion column in the New York Times about Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris, I saw links to two opinion pieces by conservative Times columnists from earlier this year: a January column by Ross Douthat about "the Right's abnormality problem" and to a February column by David French about "the profound weirdness of MAGA." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 September 2024)

Weird Beard’s excellent psychedelia at the Bird’s Eye Basel, 10 September 2024 (and again tonight, 11 September 2024)

At their concert at the Bird's Eye in Basel last night, Weird Beard blended styles into wide-ranging psychedelia: Luzius Schuler contributed electric keyboard textures and jazz-piano solos; drummer Rico Baumanm played rock grooves enriched with inventive jazz fills; Dave Gisler shimmered through electric-guitar sounds from choppy staccato to long, fast, fluid runs; and Florian Egli laid down steadily pulsing lines on electric bass guitar for the others to paint pictures around. There were only a dozen or so people in the audience, and all my Basel-area friends interested in psychedelic improvisations should go check them out tonight at 8:30 pm for the second of their two Bird's Eye shows this week. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 September 2024)

Weird Beard: Luzius Schuler, Florian Egli, Rico Baumann, Dave Gisler

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) and xenophobic urban legends about immigrants eating pets and wild animals

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Thing Around Your Neck", the title story of her 2009 short-story collection, Nigerian immigrant Akunna hears from her "uncle" what his neighbors in a town in Maine once suspected about his family: "Your uncle [...] told you how the neighbors said, a few months after he moved into his house, that the squirrels had started to disappear. They had heard that Africans ate all kinds of wild animals." I remembered this moment in Adichie's story when I heard the urban legend spread by Republican Vice Presidential candidate J. D. Vance and other xenophobic politicians that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been eating their neighbors' cats. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 September 2024)

A good line in Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please”: "Don't bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice."

I watched and listened to Rick Beato's countdown of the Spotify Top Ten, which he does every few months. While he pays attention to the details of the music, with comments about such things as chord progressions, the use of autotune, and the decade a recording sounds like, he never comments on the lyrics. That's my thing, of course, and one line in a song, Sabrina Carpenter's  "Please Please Please", stood out to me: "Don't bring me to tеars when I just did my makeup so nice." Variations on "don't make me cry" permeate pop music, but I have not heard the wonderful and convincing link to makeup running before. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 September 2024)

 

John Perry Barlow, The Grateful Dead, “Throwing Stones”, and Republican Dick Cheney’s endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris for President

When Dick Cheney, the Republican Vice President of the United States under President George W. Bush (2001-2009), ran for Wyoming's seat in the United States House of Representatives in 1978, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow worked on his campaign. But within a few years, Cheney's increasingly right-wing politics inspired Barlow's lyric for a 1982 Grateful Dead song by Bob Weir, "Throwing Stones". I hadn't heard of Cheney when I first heard the song then, but I've despised him since he was Secretary of Defense under President George H. W. Bush from 1989-1993. Yet now, that life-long Republican has endorsed Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for President of the United States. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 September 2024)

Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax” and my son when he was three years old

When my son Miles was three years old, and my mother was visiting us in Basel, he asked her to read him "The Lorax", by Dr. Seuss. But they couldn't find our copy of the book it was in (a collection of Seuss stories that did not say "The Lorax" on the cover). My mother knew he had heard the story often, so she asked him to recite it to her: "I bet you know it by heart." Then he reeled off line and line of the book, until he stumbled two-thirds of the way through, lost the thread, and despaired: "I'm sorry, Grandma, I don't know 'The Lorax' by heart." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 September 2024)

The Sullivan Act, John Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer” (1925), and the United States Supreme Court’s Bruen decision

In John Dos Passos's novel "Manhattan Transfer" (1925), unemployed and broke Dutch Robertson, who is about to begin a series of robberies, is warned by his girlfriend Francie about carrying a gun in New York State in the 1920s: “Next thing some cop’ll see it on your hip and arrest you for the Sullivan law.” The Sullivan Act was a New York state law passed in 1911 that required people to apply for licenses "to have and carry concealed a pistol or revolver". But the United States Supreme Court struck down the Sullivan Act as unconstitutional in its 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 September 2024)

My favorite pop concerts, my favorite Grateful Dead concert, my favorite recent jazz concert, and the best band I’ve ever seen

The best pop concerts I've ever attended are Talking Heads in San Francisco in 1983, Leonard Cohen in Zurich in 2008, and Taylor Swift in Zurich in 2024. But for me, that category excludes all Grateful Dead concerts and jazz concerts. My favorite Dead show was 22 July 1984 in Ventura, California. The most recent exceptional jazz concert I've seen was Jason Moran on solo piano in Basel this past April. But for the quality of the musicians and the range of the material, the best ever was John Zorn's Naked City in New York and Philadelphia in 1988 and 1990 (with Wayne Horvitz, Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, and Joey Baron). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 September 2024) 

On hearing “Sultans of Swing”, by Dire Straits, in January 1979

I was 14 when the Dire Straits song “Sultans of Swing” came out in the United States in January 1979. I listened to Top 40 radio at the time (I hadn’t yet discovered anything else to listen to in Toledo, Ohio), and the song's guitars and driving beat and evocative story sounded so different than anything else that I heard on the charts. As I just found out, it peaked at number four. When I got the band's eponymous debut album featuring the song, I played it often. Now, at 60. I still turn to it once in a while, as well as to the band's third album, 1980’s “Making Movies”. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 September 2024)

A Japanese lantern lit by gas in Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913)

When Charles Swann has tea with Odette de Crécy in Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913), they ascend stairs that feature “une grande lanterne japonaise suspendue à une cordelette de soie (mais qui, pour ne pas priver les visiteurs des derniers conforts de la civilisation occidentale s'éclairait au gaz)”. In the mid-to-late nineteenth century France of the novel's "Un amour de Swann" section, the oriental fashion of the Japanese lantern hanging on a silken string may offer an exotic touch, but the practical comforts of occidental progress, here in the form of the gas used to light the lantern, are still maintained. Eastern ornamentation serves to decorate Western functionality. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 September 2024)

Songs about turning or being 64 or 22 or 18 or 16 – but none about turning or being 60?

A friend who turned 64 shortly before I turned 60 responded to my congratulations with "When I'm Sixty-Four", by The Beatles ("Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", 1967). I couldn't think of a song about turning or being 60, so I responded with "22", by Taylor Swift ("Red", 2012). My friend countered with "I'm Eighteen", by Alice Cooper ("Love It To Death", 1971). Of course many songs have "sixteen" in the title, such as "You're Sixteen", which was written by The Sherman Brothers (who also wrote the songs for "Mary Poppins") and recorded by Johnny Burnette in 1960. I haven't found a song called "Sixty", so maybe I'll write it myself. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 September 2024) 

Witchcraft in Thomas Hardy’s “The Return of the Native” (1878)

In Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native" (1878), Eustacia Vye is attacked by her neighbor when she visits church: "Susan Nunsuch had pricked Miss Vye with a long stocking-needle [...]." Suspecting Eustacia of witchcraft, Susan responds with her own counterspell. Later, wandering the heath near Susan's house, Eustacia is visible "as distanct as a figure in a phantasmagoria", and Susan proceeds to make a beeswax effigy of her enemy, stick it full of needles, and hold it over her fire to melt and burn. In a storm later that night, Eustacia falls into a roaring stream and drowns, but nobody but Hardy's readers knows about Susan's burning of the effigy. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 31 August 2024)

Steve Silberman (1957-2024): The Grateful Dead, journalism, the history of autism, and a lively presence on social media

I first heard of Steve Silberman (1957-2024) at the latest in 1994, when he published "Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads" with David Schenk. Later, I discovered him on Twitter, where I followed his sharp, insightful, and witty posts on a wide range of subjects, from queer issues to jam-band music, and especially the history of autism and the concept of neurodiversity that he explored in his 2015 book "Neurotribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity". Today, when I began listening to the latest episode of the Good Ol' Grateful Deadcast, it was sad and moving to hear his voice after the news that he died Wednesday night. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 August 2024) 

Ben Rhodes, the moment between the Trump assassination attempt and the Biden withdrawal, and our moment today

"How will we look back on this moment?", writes Ben Rhodes in the New York Review of Books of 15 August 2024. With its references to "the horrifying attempt to assassinate Trump" and a potentially "hastily chosen alternative" to United States President Joe Biden's candidacy for re-election, the article's "moment" was between 13 July (the assassination attempt) and 21 July (Biden's withdrawal in favor of Vice President Kamala Harris). Yet Rhodes's point remains in our new moment today: even if Donald Trump loses, "we still won't move beyond the ominous nature of our current predicament." A Harris win won't make Trump's supporters and their authoritarian threat to the United States disappear. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 August 2024)

 

German words hyphenated at the end of lines of print: “bein- / halten” and “Isotopenana- / lysen"

In the early 1990s, while working on my dissertation in Comparative Literature ("Observing Women: Doris Lessing, Christa Wolf, Marguerite Duras", University of Pennsylvania, 1995), I found a German word hyphenated at the end of a line of prose: "bein- / halten". I thought this had something to do with "holding" ("halten") a "leg" ("bein"), but that made no sense in context. Only after I looked it up did I see that the word combined the prefix "be-" and "inhalten" and recognize it as a verb meaning "comprise" or "contain". I remembered this just now when it took me several seconds to decipher "Isotopenana- / lysen" as "Isotopen-analysen" or analysis of isotopes. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 August 2024)

“Orangeade” in Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913) and the history of the word “orangeade”

In Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913), Mme Verdurin offers the young pianist at her salon a drink: "Allons, donne-lui de l'orangeade, il l'a bien méritée." The "-ade" ending for fruit-flavored drinks was introduced into English through the French loanword "limonade". French Wiktionary cites an earlier "orangeade" in Alexandre Dumas père's novel "Joseph Balsamo" (1853). And the Corpus of Historical American English has a reference from an 1855 article in Harper's that marks the word's French origin: "The French are, in a similar manner, famous, from of old, for their skill in the manufacture of refreshing beverages, which they call, from the fruits that are used, orgeade, orangeade, etc." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 August 2024)

The origin of “cliffhanger” and moments of excellence in Thomas Hardy’s novels

In "The Secrets of Suspense" (The New Yorker, 27 May 2024), Kathryn Schulz mentions the origin of the word "cliffhanger" in Thomas Hardy's novel "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873), in which Henry Knight hangs on a cliff until his love interest Elfride Swancourt is able to rescue him. Schulz then adds, "I cannot in good conscience recommend 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' [...]". But then she admits that "the scene on the cliff is a tiny, self-contained masterpiece: smart, riveting, and, so to speak, completely over the top." That is what keeps me reading Hardy's novels in chronological order: even his weaker novels are full of such moments of excellence. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 August 2024)

 

Celebrating my 23rd birthday in 1987 at Angels Camp with David Lindley, Santana, and The Grateful Dead

I spent the weekend of 22-23 August, 1987, at Calaveras County Fairgrounds in Angels Camp, California. I didn't see any "celebrated jumping frogs", but there was an air show both days, and a few musicians gathered on stage to play many hours of music: first, David Lindley and his band El-Rayo X; then Santana; then The Grateful Dead, with Carlos Santana sitting in with them on two songs each night ("Good Morning Little Schoolgirl" and "In the Midnight Hour" on Saturday; "Iko Iko" and "All Along the Watchtower" on Sunday). It was a nice way to celebrate my birthday (23 on the Sunday) with my friends Sam Sandmire and Eric Williams. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 August 2024)

Le Corbusier’s Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France; the Second Vatican Council; and Georges Brassens

Today, my friend John Arbuckle and I visited the Chapelle Notre-Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France (designed by Le Corbusier in 1955). During the mass held while we were there, visitors were allowed in but asked not to take any photographs. It was all in French, of course, and I first thought that when the church opened, the mass would still have been in Latin, as vernacular languages only began to used in Roman Catholic services after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). And then I thought of French singer Georges Brassens (1921-1981) and his 1976 song "Tempête dans un bénitier": "Sans le latin, sans le latin, / La messe nous emmerde." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 August 2024) 

Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2024 Democratic National Convention speech

For a couple of seconds during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last night, the camera cut to the eighty-two-year-old Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., and I remembered two previous presidential elections: first, I voted for Jackson in the California presidential primary in 1984 (the first presidential election after I turned 18) and watched his televised speech at the DNC that July in San Francisco. Second, on election night in November 2008 in Chicago during Barack Obama's speech after his opponent John McCain conceded, there was a similar cut to Jackson crying at the sight of the first African-American to win the highest office in the United States. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 August 2024)

Nineteenth-century criticism of colonialism and enslavement by Lord Byron and US Catholics of the time

In "The British Museum’s Blockbuster Scandals" (The New Yorker, 13 May 2024), Rebecca Mead writes, "[...] the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles [in 1816] was controversial from the start (Lord Byron decried their removal from the Acropolis as vandalism)". And while reviewing "The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church", by Rachel L. Swarns (The New York Review of Books, 23 May 2024), Tiya Miles writes, "[...] every [antebellum] argument for slavery and human sale presented by a Jesuit priest or church leader was countered by other members of the faith". Such examples undermine claiming that criticism of past colonialism and enslavement constitutes "presentism". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 August 2024)

 

Dictating poems in Spring 1997

In Spring 1997, I had a problem with my right wrist which made it hard to write. I spent the University of Basel semester break in Poitiers, where Andrea was teaching in the University's German Department. As I wanted to write poems, I bought a handheld dictaphone and tried out what it was like to dictate poems instead of writing them. Then I typed them up left-handed, which was also an interesting experience for someone who knows how to touch type. I found myself writing two poems in the voice of a seventeen-year-old girl, Erica, who was in trouble with her parents for having stayed out all night with her boyfriend. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 August 2024)

Andreas Schärer, Colin Vallon, and Mario Hänni will be at the Bird’s Eye in Basel on 13 and 14 August 2024

For my 30th and 31st concerts by Andreas Schärer, I'll go to the Bird's Eye in Basel tomorrow and Wednesday (13 and 14 August) to see him with Colin Vallon on piano and Mario Hänni on drums. I've only seen Vallon once before, with guitarist Rory Stuart at the Bird's Eye in July 2005. I've never seen Mario Hänni, but the first thing I found when I just looked him up was him performing Pink Floyd's "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" with Evelinn Trouble in a ten-piece band in Geneva in May 2023. That makes this Pink Floyd fan look forward to seeing him! Come and join me if you can! (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 August 2024)

 

Thomas Hardy’s “The Hand of Ethelberta” (1876)

A few days ago, I finished another Thomas Hardy novel: "The Hand of Ethelberta" (1876). While George Gissing considered it "surely old Hardy's poorest book", I thought it worked pretty well. While Hardy's two previous novels, "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873) and "Far From the Madding Crowd" (1874), had central female characters with three men wanting to marry them, the titular Ethelberta has four men after her in the course of the book (plus, she's already a widow). For me, its main flaw is the ending, which skips a number of years that could have offered a very interesting story of Ethelberta taking control of her spendthrift second husband's life. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 August 2024)

Epidemiologist Adrien Proust (1834-1903) in Simon Schama’s “Foreign Bodies” (2023)

As many readers of Simon Schama's "Foreign Bodies: The Terror of Contagion, the Ingenuity of Science" (2023) probably were, I was surprised that a chapter in a book on the history of vaccination was titled "Proust's Travels." But the Proust in question is not Marcel (1871-1922), the author of "À la recherche du temps perdu" (1913-1927), but his father Adrien (1834-1903), an epidemiologist whose journey all over Europe and Asia to try to organize a cooperative international response to cholera led him to be called "the geographer of epidemics". Like numerous figures in Schama's book, Adrien Proust clashed with political and nationalist resistance to public-health measures taken to combat infectious disease. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 August 2024)

“Oh give me a break”: Words from Donald Trump that Kamala Harris should use against him

Asked at a press conference yesterday about the size of the crowds at speeches by Democratic Party presidential candidate Kamala Harris and Vice Presidential cnadidate Tim Walz, former President and Republican Party candidate Donald Trump began his answer with colloquial exasperation: "Oh, give me a break." I hope to see this turned into a meme that can be used to respond to convicted felon Trump's many ridiculous statements, such as his subsequent lie at that press conference that "nobody died on January 6th" when the United States Capitol was stormed by his violent supporters in 2021. May Harris, Walz, and other Democratic politicians add "give me a break" to their rhetoric. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 August 2024)

Swifties in Vienna sing “Long Live” to defy terror

After the cancellation of the three Taylor Swift concerts scheduled in Vienna for 8-10 August, Anne Sauer (author of "Look What She Made Us Do", Rowohlt 2024) posted an Instagram video of Swifties singing "Long Live" (from "Speak Now", 2010). Swift wrote the song for her fans and the members of her band: "Long live the walls we crashed through / How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you / I was screaming, 'Long live all the magic we made' / And bring on all the pretenders / One day, we will be remembered." The Swifties in Vienna have made it into an anthem for joy and against terror. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 August 2024)

Scientific American summarizes the “dangers to science” in Project 2025, the policy blueprint for a second Trump administration

In July, Scientific American published "What to Know about Project 2025’s Dangers to Science", an article by four of their editors, Ben Guarino, Andrea Thompson, Tanya Lewis, and Lauren J. Young. With a focus on abortion, agriculture, climate change, education, the environment, health care, and technology, the article characterizes the devastating effects on science of policies proposed in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a second Trump administration in the United States. Among the project's many radical, dangerous, and ridiculous proposals is the elimination of the National Weather Service, a move that would cripple the country's warning system for such severe weather events as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and heat waves. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 August 2024)

 

Governor Tim Walz, the “weird” Republican leaders, and people in the United States as "WEIRD"

Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, the nominee for Vice President on the Democratic Party ticket with current Vice President and presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the 2024 United States election, first drew significant national attention for his characterization of the leadership of the Republican Party: "These are weird people on the other side." While there are nice ways to be weird, Walz has offered the creepy examples of Republican politicians "taking books away" and being in the doctor's office. But I keep remembering anthropologist Joseph Heinrich's acronym WEIRD for "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic" people. In these terms, from a global perspective, almost everyone in the United States is "weird". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 August 2024)

The common swifts have left Basel, but there’s still another brilliant aerialist to observe

In the jet-lagged daze that I was (and actually still am) in after I returned to Switzerland last Wednesday, I did not think of looking into the sky to see if I could catch a last sighting of swifts before they head to Africa for the winter. Only on Saturday did they cross my mind, when they were almost certainly gone (at least the common swifts, as the Alpine swifts around the Basel Münster often leave later). But when I went on a walk this evening, I had several sightings of another magnificent aerialist: bats, whose insect-hunting flight through the same habitat as swifts has led them to evolve similar traits. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 August 2024)

XTC’s “Leisure” and the need for a universal basic income

"They taught me how to work / But they can't teach me how to shirk correctly": for the unemployed speaker in Andy Partridge's song "Leisure" on XTC's 1982 album "English Settlement", the powers-that-be ("they") failed to educate him for the life he is actually living. But in late twentieth-century capitalism, as well as today, "they" do not want workers to learn "how to shirk", that is, enjoy any leisure time, even in the face of chronic unemployment: "What a waste of breath it is / Searching for the jobs that don't exist." In 2024, I'm spinning this as an anthem calling for a universal basic income instead of a miserly dole. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 August 2024)

Judith Butler’s concept of the “phantasm” of gender as a way to understand the outrage directed at the women competing in Olympic boxing

While I was in the United States last month, I picked up Judith Butler's "Who's Afraid of Gender?" (2024). By now, I have read fifty-plus pages of it. As I expected, Butler uses some psychonanalytic terminology (which I am very skeptical about). But their identification of the term "gender" as a "phantasm" that "has to gather up a wide range of fears and anxieties – no matter how they contradict one another – package them into a single bundle, and subsume them under a single name." This week, I have found the concept of the phantasm useful in understanding the incoherent outrage directed at Olympic boxers Imane Khelif (Algeria) and Lin Yu-Ting (Taiwan). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 August 2024)

The trinational background of my three children – and of United States Vice President Kamala Harris

Like Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the United States and the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for the United States presidential election on 5 November, 2024, my children have three national backgrounds. Harris's parents were born and raised in India and Jamaica, while she was born and raised in the United States (and lived in Canada as a teenager). I was born and raised in the United States, and my wife Andrea in Germany. While our first child was born in Germany, our other two children were born in Basel, Switzerland, where all three have grown up. They all identify strongly with their three countries: the United States, Germany, and Switzerland. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 August 2024)

The binational background of Donald Trump’s children and the trinational background of Kamala Harris

Donald Trump was born in the United States in 1946. His first wife, Ivana Zelníčková Trump, was born in Czechoslovakia in 1949; this third, Melania Knauss Trump, in Slovenia in 1970. His children, Donald Jr. (b. 1977), Ivanka (b. 1981), Eric (b. 1984), and Barron (b. 2006), thus all have binational backgrounds. Yet all that doesn't keep Trump from spouting racist nonsense about the trinational background of Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in the 2024 United States presidential election: her father Donald J. Harris was born in 1938 in Jamaica, her mother Shyamala Gopalan was born in 1938 in India, and she was born in 1964 in the United States. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 August 2024)

“You won’t have to vote anymore”: The convicted felon announces his intention to end democracy in the United States

In a speech in West Palm Beach, Florida, this evening, convicted felon Donald Trump told the audience at the Turning Point USA Believers' Summit that they "have to get out and vote." He then added, "In four more years, you know what? It will be fixed. It will be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote." So Trump has just announced that, if he wins the Presidential election on 5 November 2024, he does in fact intend to end voting in the United States, and hence end democracy. Or how else can this be interpreted? (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 July 2024)

Good music by local musicians: Screen Door at Tower Hill Botanical Gardens in Boylston, Massachusetts

It's nice to go out on a summer evening and hear some good music by local musicians. In this case, my sister, my daughter, and I went to Tower Hill Botanical Gardens in Boylston, Massachusetts, and heard a duo from nearby Holden called Screen Door, two vocalists playing accordeon and acoustic guitar (with subtle touches from an electric hi-hat pedal). They offered an excellent selection of covers, from Otis Redding's "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and Paul Simon's "Me And Julio Down by the Schoolyard" to songs by The Decemberists and Ray LaMontagne, as well as a number of tunes I didn't know but others in the audience did. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 July 2024)

Doing a lazy breaststroke while listening to music, then remembering Hal Ashby’s “Harold and Maude” (1971)

 The air temperature where my sister lives is 24° C (75° F), and the water temperature in her pool is 26° C (79° F). Still, in the water, I kept moving to not be chilly. With music playing from my phone, I swam the crawl a bit. But I don't like swimming laps, so I did a lazy breaststroke with my head out of the water to hear the music. I felt like Mrs. Chasen (Vivian Pickles) slowly swimming to the first movement of Tschaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and merely glancing at her well-dressed son Harold (Bud Cort) floating like a drowned corpse in Hal Ashby's "Harold and Maude" (1971). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 July 2024)

On United States President Joe Biden’s decision to serve out his term

One of my first thoughts when I heard that United States President Joe Biden had withdrawn from the Presidential campaign was that he should also resign the presidency now, but of course he rejected that idea in his official statement with his decision "to focus solely on my duties as President for the remainder of my term." In the meantime, I think that was the right move, as it frees up Vice President Kamala Harris to focus on campaigning. Still, if Harris were now the 47th President of the United States, that would have had the ironic side effect of ruining former President and convicted felon Donald Trump's "Trump 47" merchandise. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 July 2024)