“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One of my first thoughts when I heard that United States President Joe Biden had withdrawn from the Presidential campaign was that he should also resign the presidency now, but of course he rejected that idea in his official statement with his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)

From Biden’s poor debate performance to his withdrawal from the Presidential campaign

I was incredibly annoyed by the public discussion in the United States of President Joe Biden's poor performance in his debate with convicted felon Donald Trump on 27 June 2024. As has happened so often lately, everything seemed to be about criticizing the flaws of the Democratic Presidential candidate while ignoring the Republican candidate's weaknesses. So I'd been hoping Biden would stay in the race. But when he withdrew yesterday, he chose a good time for the decision: after the Republican convention last week. Vice President and likely Democratic nominee Kamala Harris will surely face similarly unbalanced coverage, but the age issue Republicans have been emphasizing now only applies to Trump. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 July 2024)

Word Salad: A writing activity for groups

At our family reunion this evening, I did an activity I adapted from a project by German poet Thorsten Krämer. My brother-in-law dubbed it "Word Salad": I asked everyone to write their name and six words on an index card. I then wrote each of them a short text that contained their six words. After dinner, I read all those texts out loud to the group. An alternative would be to have the group guess whose words were used in each text. I've also used this near the end of the semester in creative-writing classes, with each student writing a poem based on six words chosen by one of their classmates. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 July 2024)

Deciding to read Emily Dickinson’s letters, then stumbling on a new edition a few hours later

When I took the train into Boston yesterday, I alternated between reading R. W. Franklin's "Reading Edition" of "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" (1999) and Alfred Habegger's "My Wars Are Laid Away In Books: The Life of Emily Dickinson" (2001). In the latter, I read about letters Dickinson wrote in 1850, the year she turned twenty, and I decided that I wanted to finally read an edition of her letters. In the evening at the Booksmith bookstore in Brookline, I was browsing the "new non-fiction" section, and there was a brand-new 2024 edition of "The Letters of Emily Dickinson", edited by Cristanne Millear and Domhnall Mitchell. I bought it, of course. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 July 2024)

A very minor incident at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

In the Dutch Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston today, I wanted to take a picture of the oil painting "A Lesson on the Theorbo," from the workshop of Gerard ter Borch the Younger (1617–1681). When I pulled my phone out of my pocket, the plastic number I'd been given when I checked my backpack fell behind a set of early 19th-century French chairs of walnut and gilded bronze. Given that the room is where two Rembrandts were stolen in 1990, I did not go down on my knees to get the number, but a security guard reached behind the chairs to pick it up for me. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 July 2024)

Finding an affectionate English expression for an old woman to translate a bit of German word play

In a graphic novel I'm translating from German into English, an old man on his sixtieth wedding anniversary calls his wife "meine Faltenschnitte". I played around with this word for a while to try to figure out what to do with it, but when I finally admitted I was stumped, I consulted with my wife Andrea, a native speaker of German. She associated it with "Sahneschnitte", which is both a type of pastry or cake and a word for an attractive young woman. So she made several suggestions for a possible English translation of "Faltenschnitte" as a term of endearment for an old woman, of which my favorite was "sugar wrinkle". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 July 2024)

“Bright pools of electric glare” outside a cinema in John Dos Passos’s “Manhattan Transfer” (1925)

In John Dos Passos's "Manhattan Transfer" (1925), in a scene that takes place in the early 1910s, before the outbreak of World War One (given an earlier reference to the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 and a later reference to Sarajevo), dancer Cassandra (Cassie) Wilkins and her boyfriend Morris McAvoy leave a cinema: "They came out of the movie blinking into bright pools of electric glare." What strikes me about this is how often that is my own experience of coming out of a cinema, especially when the movie started before night fell: I am very aware of the "bright pools of electric glare", and often quite disoriented by the nighttime lights. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 July 2024) 

Thomas Hardy’s references to painters in “Far From the Madding Crowd” (1874)

Charles Dickens's novels are full of references to literature that inspired Dickens (especially "Robinson Crusoe"), and I have also noticed some in Thomas Hardy's novels. But unlike Dickens, Hardy also refers to painters. In "From the Madding Crowd" (1874), he compares Gabriel Oak's dog George's fur to paintings by English painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), "as if the blue component of the grey had faded, like the indigo from the same kind of colour in Turner’s pictures". That comparison remains in England, but charwoman Maryann Money's "brown complexion" recalls the earlier French painter Poussin (1594-1665) with its "mellow hue of an old sketch in oils—notably some of Nicholas Poussin’s." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 July 2024) 

The two Presidents of the United States whose previous highest office was being in the House of Representatives: Garfield and Lincoln?

In a conversation this evening, the issue of whether Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York is old enough to run for President of the United States came up. She almost is, as she will turn 35 (the minimum age) in October. But I wondered who has ever been elected President with the House of Representatives as their previously highest elected office. Unless I missed someone, there are two cases: Abraham Lincoln (Representative from Illinois, 1847-1949; elected President in 1860) and James A. Garfield (Representative from Ohio, 1863-1880; elected President in 1880). The odd coincidence is that both were assassinated (Lincoln in 1865; Garfield in 1881, after only six-and-a-half months in office). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 July 2024)

Taylor Swift in Zurich, 9 July 2024

Yesterday, in the baking heat at Zurich's Letzigrund stadium, we experienced three-plus hours of music and performance by Taylor Swift, her dancers,  her band, and her stage designers. The show was as intense as my previous two benchmarks for pop concerts: Leonard Cohen (Zurich 2008) and Talking Heads (San Francisco 1983). I was particularly struck by how, in part by the powerhouse arrangements and in part by the concert's sheer volume, the selections from the almost ambient recordings on Swift's two 2020 albums, “folklore” and “evermore”, were transformed live into anthems, especially in a moving performance of "marjorie": "What died didn't stay dead, / You're alive, you're alive in my head." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 July 2024)

How I memorized the setlists during concerts by The Grateful Dead

Grateful Dead setlists changed from show to show, with few or no repeats in multi-show runs at one venue. The peak for me was when they played 97 songs with only five repeats at a six-show run at the Berkeley Community Theater around Halloween 1984. I got good at memorizing the lists during shows; I’d remember the first word or letter of each title. For the second set on 30 October 1984, then, I would have remembered Scarlet Fire Far Estimated Eyes Drums Space Other Stella Sugar US or perhaps just SFFEEDSOSSU. On the way home after shows, my friends were always surprised I could remember the whole list so well. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 July 2024)

Taylor Swift could play five three-hour concerts without repeating songs + my wishes for the “surprise songs” on the first night in Zurich

Your numbers may vary, but there are 232 tracks on 11 albums in my Taylor Swift music collection, with a few duplicates, such as two versions of "State of Grace". It  comes to fifteen hours and twenty minutes of music in all. Her concerts on her Eras Tour are three hours and fifteen minutes long, so she could do five such concerts with few or even no repetitions of songs. (This is how a Deadhead thinks, of course.) But the current setlist includes 44 fixed songs plus two "surprise songs" at each concert. Tomorrow in Zurich, I'd like to hear "New Year's Day" and "When Emma Falls in Love" as surprises. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 July 2024)

The vividly developed conceits of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun” and Ringo Starr’s “Octopus’s Garden” on The Beatles 1969 album “Abbey Road"

From 1967 on (the year of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band"), John Lennon and Paul McCartney's lyrics were so consistently strong that it becomes less interesting to describe what makes them so good. I'll conclude my posts on lyrics by The Beatles, then, with "Abbey Road" (1969) – and two songs by their bandmates, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. Harrison's "Here Comes The Sun" may be a very simple text, but it vividly develops its conceit from start to finish (and of course the acoustic guitar is gorgeous). The same can be said for Starr's even more vivid "Octopus Garden", a "joy for every girl and boy" – and adults as well. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 July 2024)

The first two songs on “The Beatles” (1968, aka “The White Album”)

The double album "The Beatles" (1968), or "The White Album", as fans immediately dubbed it, has so many songs I'll just comment on the first two's lyrics. Paul McCartney's "Back in the USSR" lives from its specificity, such as the BOAC flight from Miami Beach to the Soviet Union, and its humor, which peaks in the verse alluding to The Beach Boys song "California Girls": "Well the Ukraine girls really knock me out." John Lennon's "Dear Prudence" is much simpler in its address to Prudence, but it spins out variations on a theme, from "Won't you come out to play?" to "Open up your eyes" and "Let me see you smile." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 July 2024)

The vividness of Paul McCartney’s “Penny Lane” and other songs on the US version of “Magical Mystery Tour”, by The Beatles (1967)

My posts on Beatles lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney have focused on the song lists on their UK releases. But the US version of "Magical Mystery Tour" supplements the six songs on the British EP with five extraordinary singles, including the brilliant pair of Lennon's "Strawberry Fields Forever" and McCartney's "Penny Lane". Those two are not only grounded in the songwriters' lives but also overflow with imagery, something completely absent from songs on the band's early albums. "Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes", McCartney sings – and the vivid descriptions of the barber, banker, fireman, and nurse make it live for our ears and eyes, too. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 July 2024)

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarizes the nonsensical implications of “Trump v. United States"

In her dissent in the aptly named "Trump v. United States" decision today, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotamayor explains the majority's ruling: "The majority makes three moves that, in effect, completely insulate Presidents from criminal liability. First, the majority creates absolute immunity for the President’s exercise of 'core constitutional powers.' [...] the second move [...] is to create expansive immunity for all 'official act[s].' [...] Finally, [...] evidence concerning acts for which the President is immune can play no role in any criminal prosecution against him. [...] That holding, which will prevent the Government from using a President’s official acts to prove knowledge or intent in prosecuting private offenses, is nonsensical." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 July 2024)

 

The complete opinion is here. 

John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s wide-ranging lyrics on “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967)

On "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (1967), John Lennon and Paul McCartney further expanded their lyrical range. "A Day in the Life", one of the few real collaborations in the Lennon-McCartney songbook, blends Lennon's surreal spin on reading the news with McCartney's down-to-earth take on getting up in the morning and going to work. In "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!", Lennon drew on a drawing by his son Julian and a nineteenth-century circus poster, as well as on Lewis Carroll. In the title song, McCartney played with stereotypical concert announcements, while "When I'm Sixty-Four" offers a playful long-term take on romance. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 June 2024)

How I predicted a goal in the Germany-Denmark match right before it happened

In the 68th minute of this evening's match between Germany and Denmark at the UEFA European Men's Football Championship, Germany's Antonio Rüdiger passed the ball from midfield back to Manuel Neuer, and I said, "There's going to be a goal now." Neuer passed to Nico Schlotterbeck, who made a long pass over more than half the pitch to winger Jamal Musiala, who controlled the ball and shot it past Danish goalkeeper Kaspar Schmeichel for a 2-0 lead. My wife Andrea wondered how I'd called the goal, so I explained: the Euro app on my iPhone announces goals a few seconds before they are shown on the obviously slightly delayed television broadcast. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 June 2024)

The widening subject matter of Beatles songwriters Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s lyrics on “Revolver” (1966)

The breakthroughs in lyrics by Beatles songwriters John Lennon and Paul McCartney on "Rubber Soul" (1965) were formal: they involved humor, rhetoric, characterization, thematic development, scene-setting, and storytelling. Only Lennon's "Nowhere Man" and "In My Life" widened their basic subject matter beyond variations on love songs. On "Revolver" (1966), McCartney's lyrics may have mostly stuck to that subject, but he also wrote the moving character study of the impovishered old woman "Eleanor Rigby" and the surreal sing-a-long "Yellow Submarine", while Lennon contributed increasingly wild songs that culminated in the album closer "Tomorrow Never Knows", inspired by LSD trips and Timothy Leary's "The Psychedelic Experience" (and driven by Ringo Starr's thunderous drumming). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 June 2024)

John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and the lyrical breakthroughs of “Rubber Soul”, by The Beatles (1965)

John Lennon's "Norwegian Wood", which started my train of thought about lyrics he and Paul McCartney wrote for The Beatles, tells a quickly and precisely sketched story (of a one-night stand) in a vivid setting (the woman's apartment with its "Norwegian wood") with humor ("I crawled out to sleep in the bath"), rhetoric (the antimetabole that opens the song), and a twist (the man sets fire to the apartment at the end). Several other superbly developed lyrics exemplify the songwriters' breakthroughs on "Rubber Soul" (1965), including the character sketch of Lennon's "Nowhere Man" and the bilingual humor of McCartney's  "Michelle" (along with his "Drive My Car" and "I'm Looking Through You"). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 June 2024)

 

Footnote: Lennon later said he hated the album closer, his own "Run For Your Life", for its abusive misogyny. 

The stronger lyrics on “Help!” (1964), the fifth album by The Beatles

There are still some flat lyrics by John Lennon and Paul McCartney on "Help!" (1964), The Beatles' fifth album, but more songs have clear strengths. Lennon's title song has strong thematic development, while his "Ticket to Ride" has another striking title, and both "I've Just Seen a Face" and "Yesterday", by McCartney, explore the effects of the passage of time. The album's strongest original lyric is Lennon's "You've Got To Hide Your Love Away", with its vividly developed image ("gather around all you clowns"), but again a cover song has the best lyric: the comic story of Johnny Russell's "Act Naturally", originally released in 1963 by Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 June 2024)

“Beatles for Sale” (1964): A step forward in Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics

With "Beatles for Sale" (1964), John Lennon and Paul McCartney take a step forward with their lyrics. Lennon's "No Reply" has a setting and objects ("your door", "your window", a telephone). Although they mostly just repeat it, other songs have some imagery, such as Lennon's "I'm a Loser" (a clown with a mask; tears like rain) and McCartney's "I'll Follow the Sun" ("tomorrow may rain, / but I'll follow the sun"). And although it is also repetitive, "Eight Days A Week" has its striking and memorable title. But as on "With the Beatles", the best lyric here is by Chuck Berry, with the vivid extended figures in "Rock and Roll Music". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 June 2024) 

The somewhat better lyrics of the Lennon-McCartney songs on The Beatles’ third album, “A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)

The lyrics John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote for The Beatles' third album, "A Hard Day's Night" (1964), show some improvement compared to the consistently flat and clichéd lyrics on their first two albums. The title song has its paradoxical title, and "Can't Buy Me Love" has some clear thematic development. On "I'll Cry Instead" and "You Can't Do That", Lennon livens up his songs with some anger. And McCartney's "Things We Said Today" (with its lovely and surprising B-flat chord at the end of the bridge), whose lyrics are still mostly vague and generic, at least has the nice variation of "Someday when I'm lonely" to "Someday when I'm dreaming". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 June 2024)

The weak lyrics of the Lennon-McCartney songs on “Please Please Me” and “With the Beatles” in 1963

The songs by John Lennon and Paul McCartney on The Beatles' first two albums ("Please Please Me" and "With the Beatles", 1963) explode with musical energy (as with "I Saw Her Standing There"), but their texts are cliché-ridden and devoid of imagery, story, characters, or even humor. Some of the cover songs have better texts: "Till There Was You", by Meredith Wilson (from the 1957 musical "The Music Man"), is full of well-developed images, and the epistolary conceits of both Chuck Berry's 1956 "Roll Over Beethoven" and the multi-authored 1961 hit "Please Mr. Postman", by The Marvelettes, are rigorously and wittily extended. Only later did Lennon and McCartney become good lyricists. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 June 2024)

Why does a teen idol like Taylor Swift interest even oldies like me?

I'm still getting interview requests about my Taylor Swift seminar. This week, I was asked how a teen idol like Swift could interest even oldies like me. I gave three answers. First, with eleven albums in eighteen years, and four since her thirtieth birthday, she has long been writing music for adults. Secondly, I don't listen to music according to its "target audience". I listen, and when I like something, I keep listening. Thirdly, as a teacher and parent, I have enough experience with young people to take them seriously, rather than "assuming they know nothing", as Swift says, or in this case, that they are mere suckers for marketing campaigns. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 June 2024)

The Basel-based vocal group OWK and their wide-ranging arrangements from Coltrane and Sinatra to Mitchell and The Bee Gees

Yesterday in the foyer of the Theater Basel, I heard the Basel-based vocal group OWK for the second time: the four singers Maria von Rütte, Alice Auclair, Martina Henriques Dias, and Sneha Lama, accompanied by guitarist Eren Şimşek and bassist Paddy Fitzgerald. Once again, they impressed me with their wonderful arrangements, which ranged from John Coltrane's 1960 "Naima" (from "Giant Steps") and David Mann and Bob Hilliard's 1955 "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" (which Frank Sinatra was the first to record) to Joni Mitchell's 1971 "A Case of You" (from "Blue") and The Bee Gees' 1977 "How Deep Is Your Love?" (from the soundtrack to "Saturday Night Fever"). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 June 2024)

Excellent commentary on BBC1 for the UEFA European Men's Football Championship

I have several options for watching the UEFA European Men's Football Championship in languages I know: stations from Germany, France, Austria, and Britain, or Swiss broadcasts in German and French. For last Sunday's match between England and Serbia, I enjoyed the BBC1 commentary so much that I just watched Germany play Hungary on that channel. Wasting little time with background, the commentators focus on details like German midfielder İlkay Gündoğan's superb movement or moments of poor positioning by defenders, as when Hungary's center-back Willi Orbán moved his feet poorly and was unable to clear a ball without surrendering a corner. In one hour, I'll stay on BBC1 for Switzerland against Scotland. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 June 2024)

Jamming from The Velvet Underground’s 1967 song “I’m Waiting for the Man” into Traffic’s 1967 song “Dear Mr. Fantasy"

At the end of "I'm Waiting for the Man", which Lou Reed wrote and recorded with The Velvet Underground for their 1967 debut "The Velvet Underground & Nico", I like to go into a jam that feels like drifting along high on something (heroin in the song; jamming for me), "until tomorrow but that's just some other time." Today, I suddenly found myself going into "Dear Mr. Fantasy", which Traffic recorded on their 1967 debut "Mr. Fantasy" (with words by Jim Capaldi and music by Steve Winwood and Chris Wood. Afterwards, it seemed fitting: in Capaldi's words, Reed may "break out in tears", but he still "can make us all laugh". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 June 2024)

A giant red rose painted on my face and a Stevie Ray Vaughan concert, forty years ago today, 17 June 1984

Forty years ago today, there was some sort of summer fair on the Stanford University campus, and I came across a woman who was doing face-painting. I asked her if she could do a giant red rose around my right eye. She said she'd give it a try, we agreed on a price (I don't remember how much, but more than for her standard things), and she spent quite a long time patiently painting that rose. That evening, I went to the Kabuki Theater in San Francisco to see Stevie Ray Vaughan (for the second time), and all through the concert, I wondered why people kept staring so intently at me. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 June 2024) 

UC Berkeley law professor John C. Yoo should be persona non grata, but if you quote him, you should always identify him as the author of the torture memos

In a Substack post today on "The Right's Politics of Revenge", historian Thomas Zimmer summarized what Donald Trump supporters said after his felony conviction on 30 May. I liked how he identified one supporter: "John C. Yoo, a law professor at Berkeley and also the guy who authored the torture memos under George W. Bush [...]." Although I'd seen Yoo's remarks on Trump before, I was sure he'd only been referred to as a professor, but at least The New York Times on 5 June called him "the author of once-secret Bush administration legal memos declaring that the president can lawfully violate legal limits on torturing detainees and wiretapping without warrants". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 June 2024)

 

"Luckily we can predict what our machine guns will do”: A line from Katy Evans-Bush’s “Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle” and its echo in a SCOTUS decision

"Luckily we can predict what our machine guns will do," writes Katy Evans-Bush in "From lines by Kenneth Patchen #14" in her book "Joe Hill Makes His Way into the Castle" (CB Editions, 2024). These poems make songs of what this decade offers us ("what it takes to make songs with" in #9), but that machine-gun line makes a song of something that happened yesterday, long after the poem was written: the United States Supreme Court ruled that "bump stocks", which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire nearly as fast as machine guns, cannot be regulated in the United States. Unluckily, we can almost always predict what SCOTUS will do these days. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 June 2024)

Remembering reading Philip Levine’s poem “28” in “The New Yorker” in September 1986

Yesterday, British poet Raymond Antrobus asked me if I had a favorite poem I had first read in The New Yorker. I remembered reading "28" by Philip Levine back in the 1980s. I dug the poem up in the magazine's archives: it was published in the issue of 1 September 1986. I was 22 at the time, and the poem floored me with the 56-year-old poet recalling (and perhaps fictionalizing) his experiences half his life ago: "At 28 I was still faithless." The poem appeared in Levine’s “A Walk with Tom Jefferson” in 1988. I bought the book in Boulder, Colorado, on 17 August 1988, which I noted in the book. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 June 2024) 

Two Swiss People’s Party politicians in a scuffle with the police

Yesterday, in the run-up to the peace summit at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland this weekend, Ruslan Stefanchuk, the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukranian Parliament, visited the Federal Palace in Bern, the seat of the Swiss government and parliament. With the main stairway blocked because of heightened security for Stefanchuk's visit, Thomas Aeschi of the far-right Swiss People's Party (SVP) refused to take an elevator upstairs and got into a scuffle with the police. Aeschi's SVP colleague Michael Graber later said on Swiss television that he completely disagreed with the police's actions. As usual, members of a far-right party insist on law and order until it applies to them. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 June 2024)

 

The alleged “weaponization” of the legal system in the United States and the conviction of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden on felony gun charges

For former United States President Donald Trump and his supporters, the trials he has faced, and especially his recent conviction on 34 felony charges in New York City, are politically motivated: "Can a President order his Department of Justice to indict an opponent just prior to an election?" (all-caps removed). But now President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden has been convicted on three felony charges for federal gun violations. As one joke I saw put it, President Biden is apparently not very good at "weaponizing" the legal system. It's also a nice irony that Trump and his "Second Amendment" supporters got the Hunter Biden conviction they wanted – but on gun charges. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 June 2024) 

United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and the “polarization” of United States politics

In the United States, "polarization" has allegedly paralyzed the country's politics, with Democrats moving left and Republicans moving  right. Supposedly, if "both sides" were willing to compromise, the country's political business could get done again. But when asked by undercover activist Lauren Windsor what could be done about polarization, United States Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said that "it’s difficult [...], because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised." And Alito will not compromise on "return[ing] our country to a place of godliness." Polarization comes not from "both sides" but from a far right who want to impose their "Christian nationalism" on the rest of the country. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 June 2024)

 

Note: See Jay Kuo’s article about Alito’s remarks. 

Art, “its own special reality”, and the unreliability of Charles Kinbote in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (1962)

In Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" (1962), Charles Kinbote refers in one of his annotations to the late poet John Shade's poem "Pale Fire" to "the basic fact that reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average 'reality' perceived by the communal eye." This sounds like the character might well be serving as a mouthpiece for the author's own aesthetic views, but Kinbote's unreliability as a commentator and as a narrator at least complicates and perhaps even completely undermines any quotation of this particular passage as a clear, straightforward presentation of Nabokov's own understanding of art. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 June 2024)

A bike ride on a rainy summer evening

Yesterday I went out in the evening on my bike again, but this time it was raining. I took a different route to the river, so instead of going downhill most of the way I had to go up on a bridge over train tracks. And this time I was going across the river, where the wind picks up when it's raining and makes it feel like it's raining harder. Needless to say, there weren't many people out enjoying the weather, but in the park on the other side of the river a few young men were working out despite the rain. On my way back later, it was still raining. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 June 2024)

A bike ride on a summer evening

I coasted down the hill I’d have to ride back up again later. The summer evening sun shone off second-story windows and the mirrored sunglasses of several people walking up the hill. I got to the street with the tram and turned right to head to the park. A Friday crowd sitting in little clusters enjoyed the sun on the grass while little children scattered around them laughing past their bedtime. The river, its water high with all the recent rain, shimmered on the other side of the lawn. Time kept passing. Saying goodbye to the sun, the park, and the river, I went inside to hear a band or three. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 June 2024)

38 Republicans in the United States Senate vote against the right to use contraception

On 7 June 1965, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that married couples could use contraception without restrictions. On 22 March 1972, Eisenstadt v. Baird extended that to unmarried people, and on 9 June 1977, Carey v. Population Services International extended it to minors. Yesterday, on 5 June 2024, a 51-39 vote in the United States Senate "to protect an individual’s ability to access contraceptives and to engage in contraception" failed because of the 60-vote filibuster. U. S. citizens should consider this in the 2024 election: 38 Republican Senators voted against the right to contraception. (New York Senator Chuck Schumer voted against the bill for procedural reasons.) (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 June 2024)

 

A deep dive into The National

After binging on Wilco, I've turned to The National, a band I've known about for years now but never listened to. I've now gotten through the beginning of 2013's "Trouble With Me", the sixth of their ten studio albums. So far, I really like the sound of the band, which flows nicely out of my burst of listening to Wilco, and the baritone of lead singer Matt Berninger, which I already know from "coney island", the band's collaboration with Taylor Swift on her album "evermore" (2020). If none of the band's songs have stood out to me yet, that's in part because I have mostly had them on in the background. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 June 2024)

A deep dive into Wilco, especially “Cruel Country” (2022) and “Cousin” (2023)

Since I had fallen behind in collecting albums by Wilco and hadn't listened to them much recently, I picked up their two most recent ones, "Cruel Country" (2022) and "Cousin" (2023), and listened to their whole studio catalogue in order. From about 2005 to 2015, I listened to their first eight albums a lot, so those were all familiar old friends, with "Hummingbird" from "A Ghost Is Born" (2004) still being my favorite Wilco song. On the two newest albums, I particilarly like "Many Worlds" from "Cruel Country" as it stretches a small fragment of text out into seven minutes and fifty-three seconds of a lovely, textured instrumental crescendo and dimuendo. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 June 2024)

Read “Das nächste Dorf”, by Franz Kafka, in honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of his death (in German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian)

Exactly one month before his forty-first birthday, Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis one hundred years ago today at a sanatorium in Klosterneuburg, Austria. To honor the anniversary of his death, spend one minute reading his story "Das nächste Dorf", which he published in "Ein Landarzt" in 1920. If you can't read German, I've collected four translations of the story: "The Next Village" (tr. Willa and Edwin Muir, 1961); "Le prochain village" (tr. Laurent Margantin, 2012); "La aldea más cercana" (tr. Juan José del Solar, 2003); "Il prossimo villaggio" (tr. Ervino Pocar, 1979). If you know translations in other languages, please add them in the comments (with the translator's name, if possible). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 June 2024)

 

Das nächste Dorf

Franz Kafka, "Ein Landarzt", 1920

 

Mein Großvater pflegte zu sagen: "Das Leben ist erstaunlich kurz. Jetzt in Erinnerung drängt es sich mir so zusammen, daß ich zum Beispiel kaum begreife, wie ein junger Mensch sich entschließen kann, ins nächste Dorf zu reiten, ohne zu fürchten, daß – von unglücklichen Zufällen ganz abgesehen – schon die Zeit des gewöhnlichen, glücklich ablaufenden Lebens für einen solchen Ritt bei weitem nicht hinreicht."

 

*

 

The Next Village, tr. Willa and Edwin Muir (1961)

 

My grandfather used to say: "Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that – not to mention accidents – even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey."

 

*

 

Le prochain village, tr. Laurent Margantin (2012)

 

Mon grand-père avait coutume de dire : "La vie est étonnamment courte. Maintenant tout se rassemble en moi dans le souvenir, si bien que, par exemple, je comprends à peine qu'un jeune homme puisse se décider d'aller à cheval jusqu'au prochain village sans craindre que – si l'on écarte la possibilité d'un accident – le temps d'une vie ordinaire à l'heureux déroulement ne soit que très insuffisant pour une telle course."

 

*

 

La aldea más cercana, tr. Juan José del Solar (2003)

 

Mi abuelo solía decir: "La vida es asombrosamente breve. Ahora, en el recuerdo, se me condensa tanto que apenas logro comprender, por ejemplo, cómo un joven puede decidirse a cabalgar hasta la aldea más cercana sin temer que – dejando aparte cualquier calamidad – ni aun en el transcurso de una feliz y corriente alcance ni de lejos semejante cabalgata."

 

*

 

Il prossimo villaggio, tr. Ervino Pocar (1979)

 

Mio nonno soleva dire: "La vita è straordinariamente corta. Ora, nel ricordo, mi si contrae a tal punto che, per esempio, non riesco quasi a comprendere come un giovane possa decidersi ad andare a cavallo sino al prossimo villaggio senza temere (prescindendo da una disgrazia) che perfino lo spazio di tempo, in cui si svolge felicemente e comunemente una vita, possa bastar anche lontanamente a una simile cavalcata.” 

First edition of Ein Landarzt, 1920

Five teenagers convicted and later exonerated; one businessman calling for the death penalty then and now convicted

Five teenagers were arrested in Central Park in New York City on charges of assault and rape. One businessman called for the death penalty to be reintroduced in the state: "I want to hate these muggers and murderers. They should be forced to suffer [...]." The five teenagers were all convicted and imprisoned. Twelve years later, another man confessed to the rape in the teenagers' case, and their convictions were vacated. Now, another twenty-three years later, that businessman, who in a civil case has recently been ruled to have committed rape himself, has been convicted on thirty-four counts of falsifying business records with the intent to violate federal campaign finance limits. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 31 May 2024)

André Holland in Rebecca Hall’s “Passing” (2021) and other films I’ve seen him in

When I first watched Rebecca Hall's 2021 adaptation of Nella Larsen's 1929 novel "Passing", I focused on Tessa Thompson's performance as Irene Redfield, as well as on the visual storytelling by cinematographer Eduard Grau. On a second viewing, I've noticed André Holland's performance as Brian Redfield. But then other performances I've seen by Holland have also been excellent, including his roles as Kevin in Barry Jenkins's 2016 "Moonlight" and as Andrew Young in Ava DuVernay's 2014 "Selma". He's also in DuVernay's "August 28th: A Day in the Life of a People", which links poems and historical events that took place in the United States on that day from 1833 to 2008. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 May 2024) 

André Holland and Tessa Thompson in “Passing"

Lightness and intensity with Caroline Davis (alto), Julian Shore (piano), Chris Tordini (bass), and Allen Mednard (drums) at the Bird’s Eye Basel, 29 May 2024

When the rippling ringing of the ride cymbal flies from the long day into an open night and the snare-drum accents and alto-sax accidentals dance to bass snaps and strums and piano swirls and whirls, the first minute of the evening’s music clears ears and finds minds and makes magical beats for feet and hands and tapping fingers, and the first untitled tune with its bells and whistles from Caroline Davis’s alto to Julian Shore’s piano to Chris Tordini’s bass to Allen Mednard’s drums shimmers and glimmers and skips and turns and swerves and curves enough for an entire evening with lightness and intensity, and then there’s still so much more. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 29 May 2024)

“A kind of emotional excitement” in Nella Larsen’s novel “Passing” (1929) and “exoticism” in Rebecca Hall’s 2021 film adaptation

In Nella Larsen's "Passing" (1929), the black main character Irene Redfield explains her theory about white women's interest in black men to her white friend Hugh Wentworth: "I think that what they feel is — well, a kind of emotional excitement." In the 2021 film "Passing", director and screenwriter Rebecca Hall kept Larsen's words for this dialogue but also has Irene (Tessa Thompson) introduce the concept of "exoticism". Today, when I heard that word while watching the movie for a second time, I wondered if it might be an academic anachronism. According to Google's Ngram viewer, it was used in the 1920s, but by 2019 it was used ten times as often. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 May 2024)

Books I’ve been re-reading for courses and exams, and a note on “Great Expectations” and “The Great Gatsby"

My recent posts on Vladimir Nabokov are all related to my re-reading of him to prepare for a Master's oral exam this week. At the same time, I have been re-reading three novels for a written Bachelor's exam I will grade next week: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" (1925), John Dos Passos's "Manhattan Transfer" (1925), and Nella Larsen's "Passing" (1929). And with me teaching Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" (1861) this semester as well, I keep associating all those novels with Dickens – but especially "The Great Gatsby", whose overlapping with "Great Expectations" begins with the titles and continues in their explorations of what happens when poor young men have "great expectations". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 May 2024) 

“The monstrous semblance of a novel” in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (1962)

In Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire", Charles Kinbote writes his notes to John Shade's poem "Pale Fire" and includes a line "written [...] in the margin of the draft": "The evening is the time to praise the day". In the political and poetic world that Nabokov builds in his novel, that line in a draft is only saved by the work of the annotator. But in Nabokov's novel itself, it is not a deleted line but part of the final version in which Nabokov turns a fictional poem and its annotations into what Kinbote himself explicitly does not want his work of annotation to become: "the monstrous semblance of a novel". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 May 2024) 

The “Acres of Perhaps” in Emily Dickinson’s “Their Hight in Heaven comforts not”

After I came across the "grand peut-être" in the supposed last words of François Rabelais and recalled "the unshakeable PERHAPS" in "Brief Pause in the Organ Recital", by Tomas Tranströmer, in Robin Fulton's translation, I was struck today by another nominalization of "perhaps" in the poem "Their Hight in Heaven comforts not" (Fr725), by Emily Dickinson: "I cant see - // The House of Supposition - / The Glimmering Frontier that / Skirts the Acres of Perhaps". I searched my digital version of Dickinson's complete poems and scrolled through her many uses of "perhaps", but this genitive metaphor (parallel to the "House of Supposition") is her only nominalization of the word. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 May 2024)

The “grand Sylvain”, the “Poplar Admirable” (or Admiral), and the “Grosser Eisvogel” in Léon-Paul Fargue, Vladimir Nabokov, and Anne Duden

As Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was not only a novelist but a lepidopterist, his memoir "Speak, Memory" (1951/1966) is full of butterflies and moths, and once, he even lists lepidopterans in literature, including the "grand Sylvain" or "Poplar Admirable" in "Les quatre journées" (1941) by Léon-Paul Fargue (1876-1947). Nabokov uses the older expression, "Admirable". I first learned that butterfly's English name when I once came across a "Grosser Eisvogel" in "Hingegend", a poem I was translating by Anne Duden; I first thought of the "Kingfisher" ("Eisvogel") but then found out that the "Grosser Eisvogel" is the "Poplar Admiral." (But in the end, Duden told me she was referring to a large kingfisher!) (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 May 2024)

Tracing a phrase from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (1962) to François Rabelais and Tomas Tranströmer

In "Pale Fire" (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Charles Kinbote annotates poet John Shade's unfinished poem "Pale Fire". For the phrase "the grand potato", Kinbote refers to the supposed "last words" of François Rabelais (1483/1494?-1553): "Je m'en vais chercher le grand peut-être." This line first appeared in the life of Rabelais included in the 1693 translation by Peter Anthony Motteux (1663-1718) of Rabelais's "Gargantua et Pantagruel" (1532-1564). For me, it echoes "the unshakeable PERHAPS" in "Brief Pause in the Organ Recital" ("Kort paus i orgelkonserten"), from "The Wild Market Square" ("Det vilda torget", 1983), by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015), as translated by Scottish poet and translator Robin Fulton (b. 1931). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 May 2024)

Jan Lundgren and Hans Beckenroth’s duo arrangement of “She’s Leaving Home”, by The Beatles

At their duo concert at the Stadtcasino in Basel last night (which was before the solo piano set by Fred Hersch that I wrote about yesterday), pianist Jan Lundgren and bassist Hans Backenroth played a gorgeous version of "She's Leaving Home", by The Beatles (from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", 1967). The original has Paul McCartney singing the first verse and McCartney and John Lennon singing the chorus in a beautiful multi-tracked arrangement. In Lundgren and Backenroth's arrangement, Backenroth played the verse melody on bass, and Lundgren took over on piano for the chorus melody. This arrangement appears on the duo's 2022 album, "The Gallery Concerts II: Jazz Poetry" (ACT). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 May 2024) 

Fred Hersch plays “After You’ve Gone”, by Turner Layton and Henry Creamer (1918)

During his solo set at the Stadtcasino Basel this evening, pianist Fred Hersch played what he called "the oldest standard I know": "After You've Gone", from 1918. It was written by Turner Layton and Henry Creamer, an African-American songwriting duo, and first recorded by white American singer Marion Harris. I have three versions in my music collection, by Benny Goodman (1935), the Quintette du Hot Club de France (1937, in a compilation of Django Reinhardt music), and Sidney Bechet (1943). Hersch's performance fit beautifully into his wide-ranging set, and with it, he took the opportunity to pull out some stride-piano chops just before returning to the melody to finish the tune. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 May 2024)

Moral judgments in Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” (1955)

For Vladimir Nabokov, as he wrote in his 1956 afterword to "Lolita" (1955), the novel "has no moral in tow." Yet Dolores Haze herself provides moral judgment of the Humbert Humbert who calls her "Lolita": although he may insist that "it was she who seduced" him, she later refers to "the hotel where you raped me" and says he "had attempted to violate her several times when [he] was her mother's roomer." And even Humbert ultimately condemns his treatment of the "slave-child" he trapped in a "background of shared secrecy and shared guilt": "[...] there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it [...]." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 May 2024)

“Mumbo Jumbo” in Thomas Hardy’s “A Pale of Blue Eyes” (1873) and Francis Moore’s "Travels Into the Inland Parts of Africa" (1738)

In "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873), Thomas Hardy refers to "a species of Mumbo Jumbo." As so often, I wondered then about the history of an expression I did not know had been around that long. The word is first recorded by the "Oxford English Dictionary" in English geographer Francis Moore's "Travels Into the Inland Parts of Africa" (1738), where it refers not only to a god, spirit, or idol, a "dreadful Bugbear to the Women, call'd Mumbo-Jumbo", but also to "a cant language [...] called Mumbo-Jumbo". Perhaps I would have long since known about the word's African origins if I had ever read Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel "Mumbo Jumbo"! (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 May 2024)

Thomas Hardy avoiding a conventional ending for a romance novel in “A Pair of Blue Eyes” (1873)

Thomas Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873) begins with Stephen Smith, a lower-class young man trained as an architect, in love with Elfride Swancourt, whose parson father forces her to break off her romance. After Smith goes to colonial India to seek his fortune, Elfride falls in love with Henry Knight (without knowing that Knight was once Smith's mentor). When Smith returns from India as a wealthy man, the novel seems to be heading toward Elfride finally choosing between the two, but Hardy chooses a less conventional ending: without the two men's knowledge, Elfride has married someone else and died just as they were on their way to confront her. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 May 2024)

“Fishing for compliments” with Marcel Proust

I came across an English expression in Marcel Proust's "Du côté de chez Swann" (1913): "'Puisque vous le voulez', répondit Odette sur un ton de marivaudage, et elle ajouta: vous savez que je ne suis pas 'fishing for compliments.'" I would have thought that "fishing for compliments" was too recent to be used in a scene taking place in nineteenth-century France, but the entry for this sense of "fish" in the "Oxford English Dictionary" includes the phrase in an 1803 quotation: "I feared he would think I was fishing for a compliment." And the general figurative sense of "fish" of trying to indirectly "elicit a particular response" goes back to 1570. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 May 2024) 

“Another Step”, by the Martin Lechner Band, with two lyrics that I wrote

"Another Step", the new album by singer Martin Lechner's band with Dave Feusi on tenor saxophone, Roland Köppel on piano, Patrick Sommer on bass, and Andreas Schnyder on drums, begins with two songs that Martin and I wrote together: "Black Bird" and "Magpies". In each case, two older eight-line poems of mine caught Martin's attention, and he began to set them to music. But then he wanted more lyrics, so I had to find my way back into two poems that had long since seemed finished to me. But I managed to write more than he needed, and then he picked out parts he liked and put them in the songs. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 May 2024)

 

Putting my raincoat into my backpack in case I end up in “the meddle of the mudstorm” (“Finnegans Wake”, 86.20)

This morning, I checked the weather report and saw that rain was forecast starting around 6 pm. Since I wasn't sure I would come home before the "Finnegans Wake" reading-group meeting at 6 pm, I put my raincoat into my backpack. After I did end up coming home at 4:30 pm, I decided I might ride my bike back to the meeting. Although the weather report no longer forecast rain, I took my raincoat along anyway. During the meeting, just as we were discussing "the meddle of the mudstorm" (86.20), there was a cloudburst outside, and I was happy to have my raincoat "tospite the deluge" (86.23-2) on my ride home. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 May 2024)

Phrases Emily Dickinson wrote in 1862

These are phrases from Emily Dickinson poems that R. W. Franklin dates to 1862: "this brief drama in the flesh" (279); "Thunder - in the Room" (292); "Recordless Company" (303); "the Juggler of Day" (321); "Some Transatlantic Morn" (326); "That Phraseless Melody" (334); "In Leagueless Opportunity" (342); "Not all Pianos in the Woods" (347); "She dances like a Bomb" (360); "Some rumor of Delirium" (361); "a fond Ambush" (365); "Sufficient Dynasty" (375); "Syllables of Velvet" (380); "Drums off the Phantom Battlements" (406); "A pleading Pageantry" (414); "The Gnat's supremacy" (419); "a baffling Earth" (447); "A Geometric Joy" (456); "a Wake of Music" (462); "The Cruel - smiling - bowing World" (496). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 May 2024)

The community of dancers by the stage at the Tamikrest concert in Basel on 12 May 2024

Down in front at the Tamikrest concert at the Gannet in Basel last night, a small community of dancers formed during the show. There was me, an old white guy in my Tamikrest T-shirt; there was a pair there together – a stocky bearded light-brown man and a turban, and a white, ponytailed woman in a black outfit; there was a thinner brown man in a long-sleeved black button-down shirt; there was a small young light-brown woman in a white top that shone when the black lights were on; there was a brown woman who was the best dancer of all, with her long curly hair bound on top of her head. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 May 2024)

Oum at Volkshaus Basel (11 May 2024) and Tamikrest at Gannet Basel (12 May 2024): Dancing and running into students

Last night I went to the Volkshaus in Basel to hear Moroccan singer Oum with her sextet (oud, trumpet, saxophone, bass, percussion). I danced right fron the beguining. The rhythms were unfamiliar to me, but I could usually find one instrument to guide me. And sometimes I just swayed to the vocal melody. My Moroccan student Nora from my 111-words class was also there, delighted to finally see one of her favorite singers. Tonight, then, I went to the Gannet in Basel to hear Malian band Tamikrests. It was my second time seeing them, and once again I danced all night – and ran into my student Fionn, from the same class! (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 May 2024) 

Press inquiries about my Taylor Swift seminar

For my Taylor Swift seminar this semester at the University of Basel, I have received about fifteen press inquiries from newspapers, magazines, and radio and television stations. Until the other day, they were mostly from Switzerland, with four from Germany (one of which I turned down because it came with only a few hours' notice for a live radio discussion). But now I have also received an inquiry for an email interview from the newspaper "El Mundo" in Madrid. It's been quite an experience, but as I recently said to University colleagues , I am looking forward to teaching Emily Dickinson this fall and not being asked for interviews about her. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 May 2024)

Martin Lechner and Band at the Bird’s Eye in Basel, 10 May 2024

At their concert at the Bird's Eye in Basel last night, singer Martin Lechner and his band (Dave Feusi, tenor saxophone; Roland Köppel, piano; Patrick Sommer, bass; Andreas Schnyder, drums) played jazz standards, pop songs from the eighties and nineties, and original tunes. Two of the latter featured my lyrics ("Black Bird" and "Magpies"), and I enjoyed them a lot, but as with Samara Joy's wonderful performance of "Guess Who I Saw Today" at the Volkshaus in Basel last month, Martin was at his very best in two songs where he could dig into the role of a clearly defined character: the standard "It's Only a Paper Moon" and Radiohead's "Creep". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 May 2024)

Basel singers performing Taylor Swift songs at Mitten in der Woche on 8 May 2024

Last night at the Mitten in der Woche "swiftomenal" event at the Kaserne in Basel, I sang two Taylor Swift songs accompanied by Fabio Gouvea on electric guitar: "Champagne Problems" and "Never Grow Up" (with "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" by Tom Waits). There were also four more riveting performances of rearrangements of Swift songs: Baschi Hausmann sang "State of Grace" to solo electric guitar; Jasmine Albash sang "Cruel Summer" and "... Ready for It?" to solo keyboards; Laine sang two unreleased Swift songs with solo acoustic gutar, "Need You Now" and "This Is Really Happening"; and Jenny Jans and Axel Rüst sang "Exile" and "Lover" with acoustic guitar and keyboards. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 May 2024)

A nine-part blackboard on the last paragraph of Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (2005)

For today's discussion of the last paragraph of Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005), the nine students wrote on one-ninth of the blackboard each: words or phrases from the paragraph; keywords for their ideas; concepts from criticism; links to our other two Ishiguro novels ("An Artist of the Floating World", 1986; "The Remains of the Day", 1989); links to literary history or theory. Each student presented their ninth of the board for discussion with the others, while I mostly remained silent until the end. With one student absent, I wrote a new idea of mine about "Never Let Me Go" in the empty ninth: "Il faut imaginer Kathy H. heureuse." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 May 2024)

Like it or not: A podium discussion on “Postcolonial Theories” at the University of Basel

The podium discussion on "Postcolonial Theories" in the Aula at the University of Basel this evening featured Professor Falestin Naili (Near and Middle Eastern Studies), Professor Erik Petry (Jewish Studies), and Dr. Henri-Michel Yeré (Sociology / African Studies) from the University of Basel, as well as Dr. Kijan Espahangizi (History) from the University of Zurich and Swiss writer Christoph Keller as moderator. In a wide-ranging discussion, one moment has stuck with me as a figure for those historical and contemporary conflicts dubbed "postcolonial": Dr. Yeré, a Swiss scholar who was born in the Ivory Coast, mentioned that his mother tongue is French, the colonial language, "whether I like it or not". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 May 2024) 

Saxofour at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, 4 May 2024 (and memories of the World Saxophone Quartet in San Franscisco in the 1980s)

In the mid-1980s, I heard two incredibly memorable performances by the World Saxophone Quartet at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco: Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake, Hamiet Bluiett, and David Murray. Last night at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, I was reminded of the WSQ's wonderful combination of energy, arrangements, and humor by a performance by saxofour with Florian Bramböck, Klaus Dickbauer, Christian Maurer und Wolfgang Puschnig. Playing in front of Jean Tinguely's "Grosse Méta-Maxi-Maxi-Utopia", the Austrian saxophone quartet performed a wide-ranging set of original compositions (with jokes in between) and concluded their intense and entertaining set with an encore played while walking up the steps into that gigantic sculpture. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 May 2024) 

“I’m against …” – “So you’re for …?"

"I'm against diversity, equity, and inclusion." – "So you're for uniformity, inequity, and exclusion?" – "That's not what I meant!" – "Sorry." – "I'm against critical race theory." – "So you're for gullible race superstition?" – "That's not what I meant!" – "Sorry." – "I'm against antifa." – "So you're for fascism?" – "That's not what I meant!" – "Sorry." – "I'm against decolonization." – "So you're for colonization?"  – "That's not what I meant!" – "Sorry." – "I'm against being woke." – "So you're for being asleep?"  – "That's not what I meant!" – "Sorry." – "I'm against identity politics." – "So you're only for your own identity?"  – "That's not what I meant!" – "Sorry." – "I'm against the radical left-wing." – "So you're for the reactionary right-wing?" – "That's not what I meant!" – "Sorry." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 4 May 2024)

Jazz, Poetry, and Community

After listening to The Choir Invisible with Charlotte Greve (alto saxophone, vocals), Chris Tordini (bass), and Vinnie Sperrazza (drums) last night at the Bird's Eye in Basel, and then reading Sperrazza's thoughts on his blog about jazz and community on the way home (a community exemplified by that trio's interplay), I read a Facebook post by British poet John McCullough about my late Anglo-American teacher Denise Levertov, and then another by Canadian poet (and London resident) Nancy Mattson about how American poet (and Athens resident) A. E. Stallings mentioned visiting me in Basel in an article on Canadian poet Anne Carson, and I felt like part of an international poetry community. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 May 2024)

Durs Grünbein, Taylor Swift, and critics who say their works are too long

 In 1999, German poet Durs Grünbein published a 229-page collection of new poetry, "Nach den Satiren" (Suhrkamp). I read three reviews that all said he should have published a much shorter collection (80 to 90 pages). Each reviewer listed poems they thought were either definite keepers or obvious flops. I compared the lists and saw that one reviewer's keeper was always another reviewer's flop. I remembered this after reading many reviews of Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department" (2024) that list songs she should have cut – with everyone disagreeing about the keepers and flops. All this speaks for long collections of poems or songs that readers or listeners can curate themselves. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 2 May 2024)

The 1978 film “La Cage aux Folles” at the Fine Arts Cinema in Palo Alto, California, in the early 1980s

For several years in the early 1980s, the Fine Arts Cinema on California Avenue in Palo Alto, California, ran Édouard Molinaro's 1978 movie "La Cage aux Folles", starring Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault. I moved to Palo Alto in September 1980 for my last two years of high high school, and I'm pretty sure I saw the movie at that cinema before starting at Stanford in September 1982. Today, when I read a student's text about having seen the musical in high school a few years ago, I realized the film was probably my first experience of a work that challenged the homophobia of the 1970s culture I grew up in. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 1 May 2024) 

The Hailsham canon of literature and art in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go” (2005)

Unlike their fellow clones raised elsewhere, the "students" at the Hailsham school in Kazuo Ishiguro's "Never Let Me Go" (2005) are educated in the history of English and European literature and art. Along with the painter Pablo Picasso, the writers the narrator Kathy H mentions include William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Franz Kafka (and two still alive today, Edna O'Brien and Margaret Drabble). Yet Hailsham's jam-packed literary and artistic canon for its cloned organ donors does not include any writers with non-European backgrounds. Perhaps novels by Nella Larsen or Zora Neale Hurston would give the clone underclass ideas about overturning the social order they are raised in. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 April 2024)

Two groups at the Volkshaus in Basel: Andreas Schärer, Kalle Kalima, & Björn Meyer; and Gretchen Parlato and Lionel Loueke

This evening's concert at the Volkshaus in Basel began with the trio of Andreas Schärer on vocals, Kalle Kalima on electric guitar, and Björn Meyer on electric bass guitar. They performed songs from Schärer and Kalima’s “Evolution” (2023, with Tim Lefebvre on bass). It was my fourth time hearing them, and the music opens up more with each show. Then came the duo of Gretchen Parlato on vocals and percussion and Lionel Loueke on electric guitar and vocals with songs from their “Lean In” (2023). Loueke's looping creates relaxed grooves of layered electric guitar combined with his rhythmic chanting and lead-guitar lines, all providing a beautiful foundation for Parlato’s singular singing. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 April 2024) 

Joseph Sobran and a quotation from him in a meme

"In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college": This quotation from Joseph Sobran has been appearing on my Facebook feed. Joseph Sobran (1946-2010) was an ultra-conservative journalist who was fired from William F. Buckley's "The National Review" in 1993 for being "contextually [?] anti-Semitic." He later spoke at conferences organized by Holocaust denialists David Irving and the Institute for Historical Review. My friends sharing this meme might also note that, based on his public Facebook feed, Thayrone Xington, who posted the meme and wrote, "Let that sink in", is a MAGA supporter and a transphobe, among other far-right things. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 April 2024)

 

A search for a recording of a Bach Sonata for Flute

In the 1970s, I loved my father's LP of Johann Sebastian Bach's Sonata For Flute No.1 In B Minor, BWV 1030. In 2017, I couldn't remember the flautist's name, so I carefully listened to many recordings for their tempo, their overall sound, and harpsichord accompaniment (not piano). The first of Peter-Lukas Graf's two recordings sounded too cold, but his second, despite piano accompaniment (his daughter Aglaia), was still gorgeous, so I bought it and Aurelie Nicolet's version, which fit all my criteria. Today, I finally found my father's flautist's name: Poul Birkelund. The LP with Finn Viderø on harpsichord is available used, but I don't have (or want) a record player. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 April 2024)

Taylor Swift’s “The Black Dog”, The Starting Line, Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen”, and Aretha Franklin

Taylor Swift's "The Black Dog" from "The Tortured Poets Department" (2024) imagines an ex with a new partner: "When someone plays The Starting Line / And you jump up, but she's too young to know this song." Only two singles by The Starting Line were successful between 2002 and 2007, so a young person today might well not know them. In Steely Dan's "Hey Nineteen" from "Gaucho" (1980), a thirty-something man dates a nineteen-year-old: "Hey Nineteen / That's 'Retha Franklin / She don't remember the Queen of Soul." Aretha Franklin's greatest successes were from 1967 to the early seventies, so she might have been unknown to many younger people in 1980. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 April 2024)

Taylor Swift and Wilco and songs with identical titles (plus Glenn Kotche on drums and Ethan Hawke in “Boyhood” and “Fortnight”)

In 2014, when Taylor Swift released "Shake It Off" on "1989", I connected it with Wilco's "Shake It Off" from "Sky Blue Sky" (2007). Swift's song shakes off what others say; Tweedy's anticipates being "awake enough" to shake off dreams. Now, Swift has released "I Hate It Here" on "The Tortured Poets Department", echoing Wilco's 2007 "Hate It Here". These two songs share a musician: Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche plays on Swift's tune. Further, on a camping trip in Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" (2014), Mason Evans, Sr. (Ethan Hawke), plays "Hate It Here" for his son (Ellar Coltrane) – and Hawke has a small role in Swift's video for her new single "Fortnight". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 April 2024)

 

Two concepts of “the reader” that aren’t necessarily compatible

A problem with the concept of “the reader” is that it can mean two things that aren’t necessarily compatible with each other. On the one hand, there’s a linear reader who reads once from beginning to end. This is the reader Walter Benjamin describes in "The Storyteller" (1936) as having a "consuming interest in the events of the novel", the one who wants to know what is going to happen and why. On the other hand, there is a reader who knows the whole work and has read it repeatedly. This is the reader James Joyce describes in "Finnegans Wake" (1939) as "that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" (120.13-14). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 April 2024)

Vieux Farka Touré at the Volkshaus Basel, 22 April 2024

I had a fourth-row seat right in the center for Malian guitarist Vieux Farka Toure's concert with his band this evening at the Volkshaus in Basel (as part of the Offbeat Jazz Festival). But I didn't sit in it. Instead, I stood over to the right side of the seats and danced right from the beginning. As always with Malian music, I had to figure out anew how to dance to each tune: sometimes by listening to the bass, sometimes to the drums, and sometimes to the intertwining lines of guitar and ngoni. But the extended jams offered plenty of opportunities to find my way into the nuances of the rhythms. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 April 2024) 

Taylor Swift songs and Miss Havisham & Estella from Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” (1861)

I hear Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" (1861) in Taylor Swift's "right where you left me" ("evermore", 2020): "Help, I'm still at the restaurant / Still sitting in a corner I haunt [...] / Dust collected on my pinned-up hair." Dickens's Miss Havisham has also stayed "right where you left me" in her house, with everything around her "covered with dust". Now Swift's "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?" ("The Tortured Poets Department", 2024) recalls Dickens's Estella, raised by Miss Havisham to get revenge on men: "You wouldn't last an hour in the asylum where they raised me / So all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs."  (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 21 April 2024)

Cassandra in Greek mythology, Christa Wolf, and Taylor Swift (plus a pinch of Friedrich Nietzsche)

During our listening party yesterday afternoon for Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology", I was first struck by her song "Cassandra" for its mythological title that reminded me of "Kassandra", by German novelist Christa Wolf (1929-2011), whose work was the subject of one-third of my doctoral dissertation back in the 1990s. But then I also thought my co-teacher Rachael Moorthy would like the song, as she has already noticed Swift's multiple references to women from Greek mythology. And finally I laughed at how Swift gave another spin to the Nietzschean aphorism we had discussed on Wednesday in connection with her "Cruel Summer": "What doesn't call you makes you aware." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 20 April 2024)

First listening to Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” (2024)

At six am, I listened to Taylor Swift's new album "The Tortured Poets Department." It struck me that the album may have a first single, "Fortnight", but it doesn't sound like it was written and produced to be a blockbuster single. Not only that, none of the other fifteen songs have that feel to them either. At eight am, the album almost doubled in length (to 31 songs) with the release of "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology". That's what some of my Taylor Swift students and I listened to at our listening party this afternoon. So far, the two songs I like most are "Cassandra" and "Peter" (as in Pan). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 19 April 2024) 

“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” in memory of Dickey Betts (1943-2024)

On hearing the news that guitarist Dickey Betts of The Allman Brothers Band died today, I went to put on his tune "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed", the live version from the band's March 1971 concerts "At Fillmore East", with its glorious guitar solos by Betts and Duane Allman sandwiching Gregg Allman's organ solo while Berry Oakley on bass and Butch Trucks  and Jai Johnny Johansson on drums push all the soloists and each other to beautiful climaxes and interludes between them. My dear old friend Paul Baer, who sadly committed suicide in September 2016, loved this tune, so for me today it's "In Memory of Dickey Betts and Paul Baer". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 18 April 2024) 

Taylor Swift, Friedrich Nietzsche, and aphorisms

Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" (from "Lover", 2019), includes a variation on an aphorism by Friedrich Nietzsche: ""What doesn't kill me makes me want you more." In the "Lover" session of our Taylor Swift seminar today, I asked the students how they use (and have heard others use) the Nietzsche aphorism from "Twilight of the Idols" (1888): "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger." While some of their responses make the aphorism a principle of resilience, one student referred to how it can also have an effect of "toxic positivity". The students also pointed out that many Swift lines have also come to be used as aphorisms, and not only by Swifties. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 17 April 2024)

Paul Krugman on “GOP radicalism” and the failure of “centrists” to see it

Columnist, economist, and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman observes in the "New York Times" that if self-declared "centrists" "were willing to admit the fundamental asymmetry in our political debate, willing to admit that if DC is broken, it’s because of GOP radicalism, they would have done it long ago. It’s not as if this reality was hard to see." But as such people who want to seem "Serious" and "sensible" will not blame "polarization" on one side alone, they will continue to not see the reality of politics in the United States today. And here's the thing: Krugman came up with this take not in April 2024 but in April 2013. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 April 2024)

The compression of the time frame in James Ivory's 1993 film of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Remains of the Day"

James Ivory's 1993 film of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel "The Remains of the Day" compresses the time frame of Ishiguro's story. In the novel, the events recalled in 1956 by Mr. Stevens, the butler-narrator, run from a 1923 international conference put on by Stevens's employer, Lord Darlington, to another meeting at Darlington Hall in about 1937. In Ivory's film, the initial conference takes place in 1936, with a secret meeting "three years later" about the Sudetenland crisis in September 1938. While the compression of the timeline might make sense in the film version, Ivory and his screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala could have been more careful about the actual dates of historical events. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 April 2024) 

Faith Ringgold at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts in February 2024

During my February visit to Massachusetts, my sister, my mother, and I visited the Worcester Art Museum (WAM), where there was an exhibition of work by Faith Ringgold (1930-2024), who died yesterday. I walked into the small room containing in her work and was immediately spellbound by "Picasso's Studio". This quilt from WAM's collection, which is part seven of Ringgold's sequence "The French Collection", depicts a young African-American woman modeling for Picasso with "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" in the background, with the model's story framing the image. Ringgold's use of texts in her images has made me interested in teaching a course on her wide-ranging work, from such quilts to children's books. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 April 2024)

Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department” and the 200th Anniversary of the death of Lord Byron

Taylor Swift's "The Tortured Poets Department" will drop on Friday, 19 April 2024. This morning, while paging through the 4 March 2024 issue of "The New Yorker", I have just read the beginning of an article by Anthony Lane about English Romantic poet Lord Byron, who "succumbed to a fever on April 19, 1824, in the town of Missolonghi, on the west coast of Greece, at the age of thirty-six." For a possible link between Swift and Byron, I've found only a BBC article that mentions Byron as one example of "a tortured poet" but does not note that Swift's album is coming out on the two-hundredth anniversary of Byron's death. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 April 2024) 

My result with an exercise for students in writing long sentences

After the hitherto mostly pleasant Sunday afternoon reunion of old college roommates for a round of their favorite card games abruptly ended with a surprisingly fierce dispute about the relative merits of French, Italian, and Australian wine, someone on the ground floor of the old brownstone turned on the flickering light in the musty stairwell, and the party's last guest, still so shocked by all that anger about such a trivial subject as to be sure something else must have been going on, cried about a long-lost love on the way home under the star-filled winter sky that the last traces of the cloudless day's light had long since faded from. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 12 April 2024) 

Never Any Tag

Clutter and cushions and glasses and cups and saucers and sauces and bottles and cans and canisters and candle drips and winey drops and beery drabs and one-faced photos and two-faced snaps and middle-finger poses and outstretched tongues and crucified eyes are the aftermath strewn across the stained rugs and spotted carpets and scratched parquets that barefoot or stockinged or hosed or sandaled gals and maids and lasses and dames are tiptoeing between with their highest wildest heels in their tireless tired hands and their slippery sticky fingers after a latte evening and an airy morning as we arise to gather up ourselves and everything on another dawning Never Any Tag. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 April 2024)

“Stop Making Sense”, the Talking Heads concert movie, in 1984 and 2024

I saw Talking Heads on 6 December 1983 at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium (now the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium), the week before the four shows filmed at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood to make Jonathan Demme's 1984 movie "Stop Making Sense". The movie reinforced my memory of the concert's images, such as David Byrne running around the stage during "Life During Wartime", dancing with a lamp during "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)", and wearing a giant suit during "Girlfriend Is Better". Tonight I saw the 40th anniversary restoration at the kult.kino in Basel, and it remains one of the most extraordinary works of art I have ever experienced. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 April 2024) 

“The piano is a sculpture”: Jason Moran plays Duke Ellington in Basel, 8 April 2024

“The piano is a sculpture. The piano is a machine”: Thus spoke Jason Moran to begin his solo concert of Duke Ellington music last night at Basel's Martinskirche. During “Black and Tan Fantasy”, he put the pedal down to carve a two-handed sculpture of mobile bass notes. As he lingered on his patterns, the piano-machine’s high strings sang overtones that grew ever louder every second. “Care is built into the walls” of the church, he said later, and after describing his afternoon visit to Claude Monet’s “Waterlilies” at the Fondation Beyeler, Moran made “It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That a Swing” a statement of Ellington’s painterly achievements. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 April 2024) 

“J’ai oublié les mots”: Gregory Privat in Basel, 8 April 2024

The day’s last light fades through the stained-glass windows of the Martiniqueskirche in Basel on this summery Monday evening in early spring. Gregory Privat touches the keys, the hammers strike the strings, and arpeggios, octaves, and melodies resound from the open lid of the grand piano (whose polish reflects it shimmering interior) and echo through the church to our insatiable ears. Then he sings, he loops his words into choirs, he touches the keys more and more, and his voices fly up to the frescoes so many have seen in the silence of the church for centuries and centuries: “J’ai oublié les mots; J’ai oublié les mots; J’ai oublié les mots.” (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 April 2024) 

“For you and I” and “of you and I” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day” (1989)

In Kazuo Ishiguro's "The Remains of the Day" (1989), the butler-narrator Mr. Stevens tells the housekeeper Miss Kenton they just accept a decision made by their employer Lord Darlington: "His lordship has made his decision and there is nothing for you and I to debate over." This construction with "you and I" after a preposition appears several times in Stevens's usage, including in the novel's final pages: "Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make a small contribution count for something true and worthy." Its appearances always mark class boundaries – between Lord Darlington and his employees; between Stevens and people from lower classes. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 7 April 2024)

Isak Dinesen’s “The Blank Page” (1957) and Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” (2017)

After discussing "The Blank Page" (1957) by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) with students on Friday, 22 March, I discussed Taylor Swift's "Blank Space" (from "reputation", 2017) with students on Wednesday, 3 April. I didn't notice the coincidence of the titles until I was preparing the song and noticed the connection between blankness and writing: "I've got a blank space baby / And I'll write your name." In a 1981 article, Susan Gubar interpreted Dinesen's "blank page" as "an act of defiance" against the erasure of women from literary history. In that light, Swift defiantly asserts herself as the writer who controls the story in "Blank Space" and writes stories in her songs. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 April 2024)

A New Yorker cartoon and the fantasy of emigration from a reactionary United States

The Daily Cartoon on the "New Yorker" website for 4 April 2024 depicts a father reading a bedtime story to his daughter: "And so, freaked out about the coming election, they moved to France and lived happily after." The idea comes up whenever the forces of reaction in the United States take power, or just come close to doing so: we can move to Canada or to Europe. But right now, France (like other countries to emigrate to) is facing its own takeover by a radical right-wing party: Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National (which was founded by her father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972 and called the Front National until 2018). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 5 April 2024)