“Optic devices” and the creation of images in Denise Levertov’s “After ‘Mindwalk’” and Bruno Latour’s “Ou suis-je?"

In her poem "After 'Mindwalk'" from "Evening Train" (1992), Denise Levertov writes of how we must "admit what, / even through eyes not naked but robed / in optic devices, is not perceptible". When I read the poem today, the phrase "optic devices" reminded me of Bruno Latour's description in "Où suis-je? Leçons du confinement à l'usage des terrestres" (2021), which I read earlier this year, of how "optic devices" give us images of his "Univers", the "vaste extérieur" of what he calls "Terre": "nous les lisons, nous les apprenons, nous les calculons, mais toujours de l’intérieur de nos laboratoires, de nos télescopes ou de nos instituts, sans jamais en sortir." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 30 April 2023) 

“Unacceptabobble” “prodigygality”: Joycean words in Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” (1861)

Near the end of Charles Dickens's "Great Expectations" (1861), two characters use words that could have come straight out of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake" (1939). First, Joe Gargery says that when he heard Pip was ill, he thought that "a wisit at such a moment might not prove unacceptabobble." Later, while bothering Pip when he is eating breakfast, Mr. Pumblechook describes his "frame" as "exhausted by the debilitating effects of prodigygality." For Dickens, such stumbles in the pronunciation of words appear in dialogue to serve characterization: Joe the simple blacksmith; Pumblechook the pretentious self-proclaimed benefactor. In "Finnegans Wake", of course, such mixings of words permeate practically every moment of the narration. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 29 April 2023)

United States Vice President Kamala Harris’s call for “a better future for all"

On Wednesday, 26 April 2023, Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, tweeted about the achievements of the administration that President Joe Biden of the Democratic Party heads: "Our Administration has made the largest investment in infrastructure since President Eisenhower and the largest investment in climate action in history. We are investing in America and building a better future for all." That last phrase, "building a better future for all," might seem like a formula that any politician could utter, but in the contemporary United States, the other major party, the Republicans, does not want "a better future" for everyone, but only for its white supremacist and Christian nationalist supporters. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 28 April 2023)

“The highest form of knowledge”: Plato, Bill Bullard, and George Eliot

An internet quotation credits this to Plato: "The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world." As so often when I check if a quotation is from the person it's attributed to, this comes from someone else, California educator Bill Bullard: "The highest form of knowledge is empathy, according to George Eliot, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another's world." The closest Eliot passage I've found is from "Janet's Repentance" in "Scenes of Clerical Life" (1857): "Yet surely, surely the only true knowledge of our fellow-man is that which enables us to feel with him." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 April 2023)

Selected recordings of Bill Frisell’s “Strange Meeting"

At the end of their opener of Thelonious Monk's "Misterioso" at the Stadtcasino in Basel on Sunday, guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan improvised a segue into Frisell's haunting "Strange Meeting". Frisell first recorded the tune with guitar, tuba, bass, trumpet, and drums on "Rambler" in 1984. Then it was the title track of a 1987 album by the trio Power Tools, with Frisell, bassist Melvin Gibbs, and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. For 1994's "This Land", Frisell wrote a beautiful horn chart (clarinet, alto saxophone, and trombone) with guitar, bass, and drums, and in 2001, he made it a trio again on "Bill Frisell with Dave Holland and Elvin Jones." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 26 April 2023)

Bill Frisell and Thelonious Monk’s “Misterioso"

Guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Thomas Morgan opened their duo concert at the Stadtcasino Basel on Sunday with Thelonious Monk's "Misterioso". Frisell previously recorded "Misterioso" on his 2006 album "Bill Frisell, Ron Carter, Paul Motian" (with Carter on bass and Motian on drums), but before that, Motian and Frisell recorded it with Joe Lovano on saxophone on the 1997 Paul Motian Trio album "Sound of Love", which was recorded live at the Village Vanguard in New York in 1995. It was the Motian version that I heard silent echoes of on Sunday, as if there were a trace of Lovano's saxophone and Motian's cymbals and toms hovering behind Frisell and Morgan. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 25 April 2023) 

“A certain slant of light” on this spring morning

On clear winter days in Basel, the opening lines of an Emily Dickinson poem often cross my mind: "There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons" (Fr320). As I walk down the street in Basel at 47°33'N and find myself blinded by the "Slant" of light from winter's late afternoon sun, I imagine Emily looking out her window in Amherst at 42°23'N and experiencing the same (though perhaps with slightly less "Slant" in her case?). By April, I usually no longer experience that same sense of "Slant", but this morning, for a moment, sunlight came slanting through the clouds into our second-story living room, and Dickinson crossed my mind again. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 24 April 2023)

Pankaj Mishra misquotes Frantz Fanon and I misrember Claude McKay

In an old issue of the New Yorker (6 December 2021), I found Pankaj Mishra's article on "Frantz Fanon's Enduring Legacy," which quotes (and slightly misquotes) Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961): "As [soon as] you and your fellow men are cut down like dogs, there is no other solution but to use every means available to reestablish your weight as a human being.” This image from the Martinique-born Fanon reminded me of Jamaican-born Claude McKay's poem "If We Must Die" (1919), but I was misremembering its first line: "If we must die, let it not be like hogs." McKay's "mad and hungry dogs" are the oppressors, not the oppressed. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 23 April 2023)

 

Possible features of excellent texts that we discussed in the 111 Words class yesterday

A student who read my text from yesterday evening sent me the list of points from our discussion of excllent texts in class yesterday morning. These features are not necessary to all excellent texts, but they did come up in at least one of the seven texts we looked at, and many came up in several: a clear message or purpose; rhetorical devices and figures; strong last sentences; memorability and resonance; rhythm; tension; variations on themes; vividness and immediacy, often grounded in specificity; word play and comedy; layout; defamiliarization or enstrangement à la Viktor Shklovsky; constraints (including the 111-word constraint); and the effect of seeming to be a train of thought. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 22 April 2023)

A discussion of excellent texts in the 111 Words a Day course

For today's session of "111 Words A Day: A Writing Project", I asked each student to pick one excellent text by another student and to be prepared to say why they thought it was excellent. This gives us a chance to praise each other's texts, rather than, as one student put it, to nitpick them. After each student's comment on the text they chose, I wrote a few words on the board, so by the end of the class, we had a nice list of features that contribute to making texts excellent. Unfortunately, I cleaned the whiteboard before thinking of taking a picture of it, so now I've lost that list! (Andrew Shields, #111words, 21 April 2023)

An FC Basel victory at the end of a long day

After a long day with two morning classes, a three-hour afternoon meeting, and a lecture and reception in the early evening, I made it home just in time for the second leg of the Europa Conference League quarterfinal between OGC Nice and FC Basel. And the match then made my day even longer: after Nice went ahead in the 9th minute, Basel finally equalized in the 86th minute with a goal by Jean-Kevin Augustin. After Basel's Zeki Amdouni only hit the post in the 90th minute, the match went into extra time. Basel's Kasim Adams Nuhu scored in the the 98th minute, so Basel qualified for their second European semifinal ever! (Andrew Shields, #111words, 20 April 2023) 

Bill Frisell’s “Small Town” as a one-minute song and a nine-minute improvisation

The title track of guitarist Bill Frisell's duo album with bassist Thomas Morgan, "Small Town" (2017), first appeared on Frisell's "Disfarmer" (2009), with Greg Leisz, Jenny Scheinman, and Viktor Krauss. The original recording is 1:01 long: Frisell plays an acoustic melody that sounds like the first verse of a folk song, followed by a melodic fragment even briefer than a couplet. The live version with Morgan is 8:58 long; Frisell turns that simple form on the electric guitar into a vehicle for improvisation that keeps the folk-song feeling and quietly evolves into a Morgan solo. With a slightly heavier tone, Frisell returns to the melody and lets the tune drift out. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 19 April 2023)

 

Note: Frisell and Morgan will be playing in Basel on Sunday, 23 April 2023.

Bill Frisell’s recordings of music from movies, especially John Barry’s “James Bond” music

The debut album of John Zorn's band Naked City was guitarist Bill Frisell's first recording including movie music, such as John Barry's "James Bond" theme. His own albums occasionally featured other movie music, such as Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer's "Moon River" and "The Days of Wine and Roses", until in 2016 he released the movie-music album "When You Wish Upon a Star", which included Barry's "You Only Live Twice" (with Petra Haden on vocals). That song, along with Barry's theme to "Goldfinger", also features on "Small Town" (2017) and "Epistrophy" (2019), Frisell's two duet albums with bassist Thomas Morgan — the duo playing at the Stadtcasino Basel next Sunday, 23 April. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 18 April 2023)

“The Weight” and “What a Wonderful World” at Pink Pedrazzi and George Ricci’s concert in Basel last Friday

At the end of their duo concert at Ängel oder Aff in Basel last Friday, Pink Pedrazzi and George Ricci played "The Weight" from The Band's 1968 album "Music from Big Pink", which got the crowd in the small café singing along: "Take a load off, Fanny! / And put the load right on me." For the encore, Pink played Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" on ukulele, which also got us singing along. I thought it was a much older tune than "The Weight", but it was written by Bob Thiele and George David Weiss and released by Armstrong on 1 September 1967, ten months before "Music from Big Pink". (Andrew Shields, #111words, 17 April 2023)

Steve Swallow telling Larry Grenadier about the “secret” he learned when he was 70

In September 2014, bassist Larry Grenadier and I went to a concert at the Bird's Eye in Basel: trombonist and pianist Christian Muthspiel was playing compositions inspired by John Dowland tunes with Steve Swallow on bass, Matthieu Michel on trumpet and flugelhorn, and Franck Tortiller on vibraphone. The music was beautiful, but what I remember most is a moment in the conversation between Larry Grenadier and Steve Swallow during the set break, when Swallow, who turned 74 a few days later, told Grenadier, then 48, about a "secret" he had discovered when he was 70: "If you practice, you get better! How come nobody told me that when I was 20!" (Andrew Shields, #111words, 16 April 2023)

Heather Cox Richardson’s list of figures who opposed discrimination throughout the history of the United States

In her Letter from an American on 1 April 2023, Heather Cox Richardson offered a series of figures from American history to counter the implicit or even explicit Republican idea that "liberal democracy" is immoral. While I'm not sure that's what her examples were all standing up for, Richardson's list of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Herera, Julia Ward Howe, Benjamin Banneker, Sitting Bull, Saum Song Bo, Dr. Héctor García, Edward Roberts, and Stormé DeLarverie makes another point for me: all these examples of people in past historical periods who fought against discrimination are evidence that what we see today as discrimination has always been challenged by those who were subject to it. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 15 April 2023)

 

An apparently false memory of a story about Jason Moran playing piano for senior citizens

As I remember it, years ago I read a profile in "The New Yorker" of jazz pianist Jason Moran that included a story about Moran sometimes playing piano for senior citizens in nursing homes and retirement homes. At one home, he played a Duke Ellington composition, and a very old African-American man nodded appreciatively, so Moran continued to play Ellington for him. Later, he found out the man was over a hundred years old and had actually played with Ellington back in the 1930s. — That's how I remember it, but I just found the profile, which was published in 2013, and there's no mention of Ellington or playing in nursing homes. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 14 April 2023)

Pip’s nighttime plan to “enlist for India as a private soldier” in Charles Dickens’s “Great Expectations” (1861)

When Pip in Charles Dicken's "Great Expectations" (1861) first discovers that the "benefactor" who gave him his "great expectations" is Abel Magwitch, the escaped convict the young Pip had once stolen food for, he gets up in the middle of night and considers a plan to "enlist for India as a private soldier." According to Jerome Meckier's timeline for the novel, this takes place in November or December 1828. At the time, the military instrument of the East India Company's control of much of India was its own private army separate from the British Army. So Pip does not want to be Private Pirrip; he wants to join the Company's army. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 13 April 2023)

A scene from Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” (1989) as an example of annotating a work of art as a starting point for interpretation

To demonstrate what happens when one feels the need to annotate a work that one is studying, I turned to an exemplary favorite today: a scene from Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" (1989) in which Mookie (Spike Lee) is wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers Jackie Robinson jersey, Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) is wearing Air Jordans, Cee (Martin Lawrence) is wearing a Los Angeles Lakers Earvin "Magic" Johnson jersey, and Clifton (John Savage) is wearing a Boston Celtics Larry Bird jersey. My twenty-something students know Michael Jordan and his shoes, but such history here as the rivalry between Magic and Bird needs annotation for them to begin to interpret the scene's implications. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 April 2023)

 

Marlene Dietrich and cinematographer Karl Freund in Les Murray’s “Fredy Neptune” (1999)

When Fred Boettcher in Les Murray's "Fredy Neptune" (1999) first sees Marlene Dietrich in Hollywood, where he is an extra on the 1930 film of "All Quiet on the Western Front", she is talking to "Freund the boss cameraman". The influential cinematographer Karl Freund (1890-1969) began his career in Berlin, most famously on Fritz Lang's "Metropolis", before moving to Hollywood in 1929, where his films included "Dracula" (1931) and "Key Largo" (1948). Dietrich (1901-1992) also began her career in Berlin, but with the success of "The Blue Angel" (1930), she also went to Hollywood. In Murray's verse novel, the transplanted Germans exchange the "Berlin wisecracks" that Fred hears in their conversation. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 11 April 2023)