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)