andrewjshields

Thursday, March 28, 2024

My imaginary eleven-piece band for a joint country-pop tour by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift

Back in 2018, I imagined a jazz nonet to tour with Beyoncé, but with her turning to country music now with "Cowboy Carter" due out tomorrow, I've come up with an eleven-piece band of international musicians from the United States, Benin, Cuba, Chile, and the United Kingdom for a joint country-pop tour by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift with jazz soloists, big-band arrangements, and several other incredible singers: Rhiannon Giddens (banjo, vocals), Lionel Loueke (guitar, vocals), Chris Thile (mandolin, vocals), Esperanza Spalding (bass, vocals), Eric Harland (drums), Alison Krauss (violin, vocals), Nicholas Payton (trumpet, arrangements), Soweto Kinch (alto saxophone, rap), Jany McPherson (piano, vocals), Robin Eubanks (trombone), and Melissa Aldana (tenor saxophone).  (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 March 2024)

Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Hapax legomena in Taylor Swift’s “crumpled masterpiece”, “All Too Well (Ten-Minute Version)"

Taylor Swift's "All Too Well (Ten-Minute Version)", from "Red (Taylor's Version)", 2021, the ponders a relationship as a work of art destroyed by an ex: "But maybe this thing was a masterpiece / Till you tore it all up." In Swift's work so far, "masterpiece" is a hapax legomenon – a word that appears only once in a corpus. Another such word in "All Too Well" is "crumpled": "I'm a crumpled-up piece of paper lying here." With the "crumpled-up paper" of a self after a breakup and the torn-up pieces of that "masterpiece" of a relationship – out of these singular words – Swift composed the song that many have considered her own masterpiece. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 27 March 2024)

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

The shirt in Walter Benjamin’s Franz Kafka essay and the scarf in Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well"

In preparing to discuss objects in Taylor Swift's "All Too Well (Ten-Minute Version)", I remembered a story I learned from Walter Benjamin's 1934 Franz Kafka essay. In a Chassidic village, the men gather in an inn; in the corner sits a newly arrived beggar. When everyone says what they wish for, the villagers want a workbench or a son-in-law, but the beggar says he wishes he was a king who escaped a war in his nightshirt and eventually found himself in this village. "What good would that do you?" – "I'd have a shirt." – Objects (that imagined shirt; the scarf in "All Too Well") transport stories from kingdoms to villages and back. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 26 March 2024)

Monday, March 25, 2024

My students and the animal imagery in a passage about Mr. Bounderby in Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times” (1854)

When the lies of Mr. Bounderby in Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" (1854) have been exposed to an uninvited crowd in his home, he ushers them out with "blustering sheepishness": "[...] he could not have looked a Bully more shorn and forlorn, if he had had his ears cropped." When I gave this paragraph to my students today, I only asked for comments and interpretations, but they immediately picked up on the animal imagery, which one student even linked to another phrase about "a pedigree." As always, an open discussion led to the primary points that I would have mentioned, while also generating many other angles that I had not yet noticed. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 25 March 2024) 

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Somi and the microphone at her concert in Basel on 23 March 2024

I had a front-row seat at the Offbeat Jazz concert at the Volkshaus in Basel last night by the singer Somi. She served her voice well by how she stood on stage: instead of holding the microphone right up to her mouth as so many singers do, she stood back from the microphone stand and used the microphone primarily to capture the direct sound of her singing, rather than to amplify it. At moments when her band played more quietly (bassist Keith Witty, drummer Otis Brown III, pianist Toru Dodo, and saxophonist Jowee Omicil), I could even hear the power of her voice more from the stage than from the speakers. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 24 March 2024)

Saturday, March 23, 2024

Pale young woman with long brown hair at the supermarket

The pale young woman in the supermarket line has long brown hair halfway down her back. – This morning, she brushed it in the armchair by the window, idly gazing across the street while the church bells rang nearby. She smiled when she finished, as she always does, and she stood up and took her coffee cup to the kitchen. – When the cashier tells her that the bananas had to be weighed, a blank look takes over her face: she doesn't understand. The cashier smiles and goes to weigh the bananas. When she pays, the young woman manages to smile again as she packs her groceries and then heads for the door. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 23 March 2024) 

Friday, March 22, 2024

Remembering reading Isak Dinesen’s “The Blank Page” (1957) and teaching it today

I usually remember when I first read texts that struck me, especially ones I read in college clauses. But although I know I read "The Blank Page" (1957), by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), during my studies (along with Susan Gubar's 1981 article "'The Blank Page' and the Issues of Female Creativity"), I'm not sure what course it was in. Still, I often remember the story's image of a gallery of framed, blood-stained sheets from aristocratic wedding nights, with one sheet blank, along with Gubar's discussion of the story as an allegory of the history of women's writing. And today, I discussed it with students again for the first time in many years. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 March 2024)