My paternal grandmother’s voting history, from 1920 to 1976

My paternal grandmother, Grace Shields, was born in 1895 and thus first voted in the 1920 United States Presidential election, after the Nineteenth Amemdment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote. In 1976, two years after the death of her husband, my grandfather Lewis Shields, she told my father she was glad she could finally vote for the Democratic candidate in the Presidential election. When my father asked why she had never done so before, she said she had always voted for the Republican candidate because her husband wanted her to. She knew it was a secret ballot, but she did not want to have to lie to him. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 9 June 2023)

The first two nights of Hammondwoche at the Bird’s Eye in Basel: LaBox and Florian Arbenz’s Truth

Last night at the first night of Hammondwoche at the Bird’s Eye in Basel, LaBox offered classic organ-trio jazz, with Roland Köppel soaring on Hammond, Marco Figini playing funky guitar solos with rich, bright tone, and Michael Wipf laying down tight and wide-ranging grooves. I had anticipated the band’s sound, so I stood by the bar and danced all through the two sets. Tonight, drummer Florian Arbenz’s Truth, with Arno Kryger on Hammond and Percy Pursglove on flugelhorn, offered a stark contrast with their textures of Hammond chords, drums coloring around the pulse, and long, surprising horn lines. It still made me move, but in my seat and in my head. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 June 2023)

A powerful Australian movie about schizophrenia whose title I had forgotten: “Angel Baby” (1995)

Occasionally, I remember a powerful Australian movie from a couple decades ago in which two people suffering from schizophrenia fall in love and try to make a life together outside clinics. The woman watches the game show "Wheel of Fortune" every day, and for her, the answers are messages that tell her things about her life. When the two lovers go off their medication, and he's away, the answer is "worst-case scenario" – and all I remember of the plot is that what follows is in fact such a scenario. – A bit of internet sleuthing helped me identify the movie as Michael Rymer's "Angel Baby" (1995), starring John Lynch and Jacqueline MacKenzie. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 7 June 2023)

“We learned to play our bloody instruments”: From Warsaw to Joy Division

After recording their EP "An Ideal for Living" in December 1977, only a year-and-a-half after they had begun playing their instruments, the band Warsaw changed their name to Joy Division and began writing further material. When they finally got into the studio again in April 1979, after complications with record companies, they recorded their debut LP "Unknown Pleasures", which was released in June 1979. Here's a story I heard long ago but have not been able to confirm: When a music journalist asked bassist Peter Hook whey Joy Division sounded so different than Warsaw, despite having the same band members, Hook's answer was flip: "We learned to play our bloody instruments." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 June 2023)

Ron DeSantis, Winston Churchill, Leon Trotsky, and Petrarch

On Saturday, 3 June, 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis spoke in Iowa: "We will fight the woke in education. We will fight the woke in the corporations. We will fight the woke in the halls of Congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. We will make woke ideology, leave it to the dustbin of history." While his phrasing here imitates Winston Churchill's speech in 4 June 1940 after Dunkirk, DeSantis's "dustbin of history" pinches Leon Trotksy's November 1917 imitation, as the Bolsheviks seized power, of Petrarch's fourteenth-century phrase "the rubbish heap of history". So DeSantis hovers incoherently between Churchill, Trotsky, and "an Italian poet from the fourteenth century". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 5 June 2023) 

Felwine Sarr and Henri-Michel Yeré at the Kunstmuseum Basel

In a multilingual event at the Kunstmuseum Basel today, Felwine Sarr from Senegal presented his novel "Les Lieux qu'habitent mes rêves" in French, with German translations, and had a conversation in English with Henri-Michel Yeré (a Basler from Ivory Coast). The novel is about twin brothers. In the first passage that was read, the one who leaves Senegal tells the story of how he discovered poetry; in the second, the one who stays in Senegal tells a story of religious initation. The discussion also turned to Sarr's 2018 collaboration with Bénédicte Savoy on the restitution of African cultural heritage from French museums, which had been commissioned by French President Emmanuel Macron. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 4 June 2023)

A concert by Kind Regards as a perfect evening on the last day of the semester

With the semester over yesterday, I came back from taking my daughter Sara to her riding lesson with the plan of just relaxing at home all evening,. But then Facebook reminded me about an event I had said I was interested in: a concert by the Basel band Kind Regards at the Sääli in Zum Goldenen Fass in Kleinbasel. I checked their Facebook page, listened to a few seconds of a video, and thought, "This is the right music for me." And it was: David Schwarz, Pascal Grünenfelder, Gilbert Trefzger, Cyprian Kohut, and Beni Bürgin played folk-rock that was just to my taste, including a gorgeous cover of Wilco's "Jesus Etc." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 3 June 2023)

The end of the fourth round of "111 Words a Day: A Writing Project"

I first taught "111 Words a Day: A Writing Project" in the Spring Semester of 2020. Today, we finished the fourth round of the course (every Spring Semester). As always, the students love the course's openness, and we all I enjoy the wide range of topics and stories that the others write about. And I love the effect of the course, in which just the act of writing a short text every day jump starts every student's writing over the course of fourteen weeks. And my ongoing daily writing (for almost three-and-a-half years now) has become a good habit that, for now at least, I would not like to do without. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 2 June 2023)

My Worcester Red Sox Pride T-shirt

It's the first day of Pride Month in the United States. I didn't think about it, but this morning here in Switzerland, I put on my purple T-shirt that I got after the Worcester Red Sox baseball game I went to  last summer with my sister Sara, my daughter Sara, and our friends Liz, Scott, Mollie, and Burke. It has a stylized "W" with a white outline, inside which are the stripes of a Pride flag: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple. I had first found a red one, but purple is my favorite color, so I was overjoyed to find a purple one in another part of the store. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 1 June 2023)

 

Note: This is the black version of the T-shirt:

 

Remembering the Roxy CD store and the Bergli bookstore at Rümelinsplatz in Basel

This afternoon, I walked across Basel from Barfüsserplatz to Nadelberg (where I work at the English Department of the University of Basel). As I got to Rümelinsplatz, I remembered the two great stores that used to be there many years ago: the Roxy CD shop (with its wonderful jazz section upstairs) and the Bergli bookstore with English-language books. Hardly a week went by when I did not buy a CD from Roxy or a book from Bergli. The Roxy closed because CD sales declined, but despite being a successful business, the Bergli bookstore closed because the owner could not find a good successor to take over when she wanted to retire. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 31 May 2023)

The “Four Freedoms” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 and the “Four Freedoms” of U. S. Republicans in 2023

On 19 May 2023, Jamelle Bouie published an opinion piece on "The Four Freedoms, According to Republicans": 1) The "freedom to control"; 2) The "freedom to exploit"; 3) The "freedom to censor"; and 4) The "freedom to menace". Bouie explicitly recalled the "Four Freedoms" of United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's State of the Union Address on 6 January 1941: 1) The “freedom of speech and expression”; 2) the “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way”; 3) the “freedom from want”;  and 4) The “freedom from fear.” Bouie's summary of visions of "freedom" offers an interpretive tool for understanding national and international politics in 2023 and beyond. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 May 2023)

FC Basel fans wearing jerseys with the names of player who have left the club

At this afternoon's FC Basel match at St. Jakob Park in Basel , many fans wore jerseys with the names of players no longer with the club, including Silvan Widmer (left in 2021, now with Mainz 05), Albian Ajeti (2019, Sturm Graz), Mohamed Elyounoussi (2018, Southampton), Jean-Paul Boëtius (2017, Hertha BSC), Breel Embolo (2016, AS Monaco), and Marcelo Díaz (2015, Audax Italiano). I also saw jerseys of now retired players: Walter Samuel (retired in 2016), Marco Streller (2015), and Alex Frei (2013; the club's head coach until February). There was even a mint-condition Ivan Ergić jersey — the Serbian footballer and poet left Basel in 2009 and retired from football in 2011. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 May 2023)

A rapid flow of images in a sequence of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (2022)

In a sequence in the Daniels' "Everything Everywhere All At Once" (2022), Michelle Yeoh's face is in the center of the screen with rapidly changing lighting while the background changes faster than the eye can take in. I was in the cinema with my daughter Sara, who turned to me when the sequence ended and said she hoped the movie came with a seizure warning. I agreed with her, but had thought something else: each of those background images that flickers past is a complete image someone filled up with numerous details, even though none of those details can be perceived when the film is shown at 24 frames per second. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28 May 2023)

“Far and few between” in Gemma Files’s “The Kindly Ones"

A student chose "The Worm in Every Heart", a 2004 collection of short stories by Gemma Files, for an oral exam next week. While reading the book, I came across a variation on a familiar expression in "The Kindly Ones", as a mother recalls her rare contacts with her runaway daughter: "The postcards, far and few between as they were, retained an ever more strained optimism." I wondered if this was a one-off slip from "few and far between", or perhaps an occasional recent variation, but "far and few between" turns out to have been found in print as early as 1843 (while "few and far between" goes back to 1668. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 May 2023)

Note: The information in the last sentence comes from this blog post.

My last math class in college: Modern Algebra

After deciding not to major in math, I still took one last math class in the Fall of 1985: Modern Algebra. In the first session, Professor Gregory Brumfiel said that Rubik's Cube could be used to help us learn about group theory, but he had found that few students actually learned it well that way. Halfway through the term, he then mentioned that we had reached the point where the Cube would be useful, so if anyone wanted to come to his office hour, he'd show them how it represented groups. In a lost opportunity, I didn't go, and nobody from my study group did, either, as far as I remember. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 May 2023)

From physics to math to German to English: the course of my studies

I went to college to study physics, but Freshman Physics was all equations, so I thought I might as well study math. Late in my freshman year I read Nietzsche and began to consider German, too. In my sophomore year, I studied the German language all year and took courses on German thought from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, along with math courses. But when I had to declare a major after a year off, I chose English instead. Over the years, I had taken so many math courses that I do wonder if I might have also been able to finish a math major in my last two years. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 May 2023)

Telephones and technological ambivalence in three songs by Greg Brown from 1988 to 2006

In the title track of Greg Brown's 1988 album "One More Goodnight Kiss", one annoyance to overcome is a new telephone: "I'm gonna unplug that sucker." With "Think About You" from Brown's "Further In" (1996), the telephone, though still a landline, is joined by other technology to be turned off: "Gonna turn off the radio, control nothing remotely. / Ain't gonna rent me no video, disconnect the telephone." In "Eugene", from "The Evening Call" (2006), the technology to avoid becomes a cellphone: "You can try me on the cell, but most places I wanna be it Greg Brown's work." In Brown's songs, the devices develop, but this ambivalence about technology persists. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 May 2023)

 

On a swingset in an empty playground in Kharkiv, Ukraine

He leans his bike against the post on the corner of the playground. With nobody else around, he doesn't bother to lock it. With the swingset to himself, he sits down on one of the two swings and rocks back and forth for a moment. Looking up into the sky, he decides to fly there, so he begins swinging – legs stretched while going forward, tucked in while going back, a little higher each time. At the highest points, he looks up into the sky again and again, imagining that it's always been empty except for clouds, rain, and birds. He never looks to his left at what's left of the school. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 May 2023)

 

This is based on this photograph taken in Kharkiv, Ukraine, in April 2023 by Armin Smailovic. I saw it in this article in the Swiss online magazine Republik. 

An only partly apocryphal story about Xerox’s early work on personal computers

The story I heard in Palo Alto in the mid-1980s went like this: The designers from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center went to Xerox HQ with prototype personal computers to show to the higher-ups. The higher-ups were unimpressed, but the wives of some of them were there, and as former secretaries, they were very impressed. So the higher-ups thought the thing was just a glorified typewriter. — I posted this story to a Language Log post today as a comment, and commenter Gregory Kusnick confirmed that the story I heard is not entirely apocryphal (the key difference being that it wasn't the wives but the current secretaries who liked the new devices). (Andrew Shields, #111words, 22 May 2023)

 

“Negatived” in Charles Dicken’s “Little Dorrit” (1857) and “Our Mutual Friend” (1865)

In Charles Dicken's "Our Mutual Friend" (1865), when Mr. and Mrs. Boffin discuss how to find an orphan to adopt, one of Mrs. Boffins's suggestions is "negatived" by her husband. The verb form of "negative" surprised me, as I would have thought it was more recent than that (which is an example of the "recency illusion"). But the verb form of the adjective "negative" goes back to the early eighteenth century, and it also appears in Dickens's "Little Dorrit" (1857). Again, it involves a rejection of alternatives, now proposed by Jeremiah Flintwich to explain the mysterious sounds his wife is hearing: "Mistress Affery negatived each with a shake of her head." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 21 May 2023)