andrewjshields

Poem sort of in Sports Illustrated

2008-10-07T17:10:00.002+02:00

A poem has appeared in Sports Illustrated, at least in the online version. Well, at least as a link in Jon Wertheim's online column! Page down a bit! (Thanks to my Mom for pointing this out.)

Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

2008-10-07T15:46:00.003+02:00

John Gallaher tipped me off to the new David Byrne & Brian Eno CD Everything That Happens Will Happen Today a while back, and I just thought I would openly thank him for the great tip! Get yourself a copy here. A must for all fans of Talking Heads, Eno, and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts!

Susana Gardner and Nicholas Manning: A Poetry Reading in Basel, November 19, 2008

2008-10-05T14:16:00.002+02:00

[Click on the image to see the poster in a larger format.]

Official American Sadism, by Anthony Lewis

2008-10-04T22:48:00.004+02:00

This is from Anthony Lewis's "Official American Sadism," an essay in the September 25 issue of the New York Review of Books. The book he is referring to here is Jonathan Mahler's The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power. Hamdan is the plaintiff in the famous Hamdan v. Rumsfeld case in which the Supreme Court ruled that Bush's military commissions were unconstitutional.

One of the remarkable facts exposed in this book is that Hamdan was first questioned in Guantánamo by an FBI agent who carefully built up a relationship with him and, in time, got detailed statements from him about al-Qaeda and some of its leaders. The agent had ample evidence for Hamdan to be prosecuted in a federal court; he thought he could persuade Hamdan to testify against more important al-Qaeda figures in return for a reduced sentence. But to his dismay Hamdan was designated for trial before a military commission; the FBI was immediately cut off from him and lost a potentially important witness.

This confirms something I started being worried about in September 2001: the militarization of the "war on terror" meant that criminal trials would not be one of the principal means used to combat terrorism. And this proves it: the military commissions clearly hinder the battle against bin Laden and company!

Lewis also quotes Major General Anthony Taguba:

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

Taguba, "who was appointed to investigate the torture at Abu Ghraib and found that there had been 'wanton criminal abuse' of detainees, was forced into retirement."

Gopnik on Magic

2008-09-30T23:36:00.005+02:00

Magicians are, in their relations with one another, both extremely generous and extremely jealous. Just as chefs know that recipes are of little value in themselves, magicians know that learning the method is only the beginning of doing the trick. What they call “the real work” isn’t the method, which anyone can learn from a book (and, anyway, all decent magicians know roughly how most tricks are done), but the whole of the handling and timing and theatrics of the effect, which are passed along from magician to magician and from generation to generation. The real work is the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas. The real work is what makes a magic effect magical. (Adam Gopnik, "The Real Work: Modern Magic and the Meaning of Life," The New Yorker, March 17, 2008)

Of course, I really should have commented on this back in March or April, but this article is not as timely as the Hilary Clinton article in the same issue of The New Yorker!

Anyway, this was an excellent article by Adam Gopnik on magicians and how they understand what they do, and it was full of passages like this that seem to touch on the magic of other arts as well, including poetry. The "real work" is what separates the great magicians from the decent ones, and one could argue that it is a similar "real work" of "handling and timing and theatrics" that makes a great poet.

And that "real work" involves not just the timing of the individual performance (read, the individual poem), but a sense of "the complete activity, the accumulated practice, the total summing up of tradition and ideas"—that is, an understanding of what magic (or poetry) has already done, and what one's own contribution to that activity, that practice, that tradition, and its ideas is.

*

In the process of looking up that article, I discovered that one of my all-time favorite New Yorker profiles is also online: this one about the magician and actor Ricky Jay, from 1993. Now if only they had the David Mamet profile online, too (and there's a connection here, since Jay was in at least two of Mamet's movies, "The Spanish Prisoner" and "House of Games").

"Man is the animal who dreams. And when he dreams, he dreams of money." (Ricky Jay in "The Spanish Prisoner")

Slavery as Basis for an Ideology of Deregulation

2008-09-29T09:04:00.004+02:00

The following is from "Jefferson's Concubine," Marie Morgan and Edmund S. Morgan's review of Annette Gordon-Reed's book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (the review is in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books, dated October 9, 2008—as usual, the NYRB is published in the future ...):

What is important to the Hemings family's story is the harsh and nearly inescapable nature of the "peculiar institution" in the time of Thomas Jefferson. Racial identification was its sine qua non, and specifically race as legislated by slave masters, whose primary goal was "the maximum protection of property rights—with little or no intervention by the state or other third parties." (The quotations are apparently from Gordon-Reed's book.)

What struck me here is something that I perhaps should have noticed ages ago, but it is something that I have never seen commented on: the historical starting point for an ideology of deregulation and non-intervention by government is slavery. More precisely, it is the attempt by slave-owners to defend their property rights.

I would be an idiot if I had not noticed that "states' rights" derives from the defense of slavery, but this is the first time I have ever noticed the connection between deregulation and the defense of slavery.

So from now on, when I hear someone support "deregulation," I'll think "slaveholder ideology," just as I long have done on hearing "states' rights."

Dowd on Kissinger

2008-09-29T07:54:00.003+02:00

My favorite line from the International Herald Tribune this morning is from Maureen Dowd on Friday's McCain-Obama debate:

"And who cares what Henry Kissinger thinks? He was wrong 35 years ago, and it’s only gotten worse since then."

Harp Guitar, Pat Metheny

2008-09-29T07:49:00.003+02:00

I received a note from my Mom about an old post of mine with a video of Michael Hedges playing Bach on a harp guitar. She asked me about the instrument, so I thought I'd post a link to a description of it, along with a video of Pat Metheny playing one:

Lousy Govt. = Lousy Economy

2008-09-27T23:15:00.003+02:00

My favorite line from the Presidential debate last night was from McCain (from the CNN transcript):

"The Iranians have a lousy government, so therefore their economy is lousy."

I'm sure Obama noted the irony (he's far too smart not to), but I suspect he thought it would be a bad tactic to point out that McCain had just described the current state of the United States. (Tactic, not strategy, and Obama knows the difference, I'm sure.)

Miles plays the drums

2008-09-27T22:25:00.004+02:00

Miles had another open house at the drum school Basel last week. This time he did not play with me (as he did last year); instead, he played a drum duet with his drum teacher Lorenz Hunziker (whom you can't see in the video):

Paul Newman

2008-09-27T21:44:00.002+02:00

Back in the seventies, my favorite movie was "The Sting," and another favorite was "Cool Hand Luke." So I guess Paul Newman was one of my favorite actors back then. I had kind of forgotten about him, so I was surprised to be so sad at hearing of his death. Here are two of my favorite scenes from "Cool Hand Luke":

"What we have here is failure to communicate" is a line that crosses my mind many times every year!

Not Exactly Woody Guthrie

2008-09-26T22:58:00.003+02:00

Here's one I like by Mark Halliday, "Not Exactly Woody Guthrie."

*

I like the two explanations of the simple act of checking "to see whether the field goal was good," the simple one in the first stanza (a social explanation), and the more complex aesthetic explanation in the second, which captures so cleanly one difference between sport and art.

Shakespeare parodies

2008-09-25T21:52:00.003+02:00

There are three fun Shakespeare parodies up at New Verse News:

McCoriolanus, by Bill Costley
William Shakespeare's Obameo and Johniette, by Olga Wayne
Johniette's Soliloquy, by Aaron Gillego

Nice coincidence that both Wayne and Gillego came up with those names!

No on 8, you Californians!

2008-09-23T22:58:00.003+02:00

Thanks to C. Dale Young for posting this one (and as I said in his comments, I'm 44, I like to write poems, and my sister just married her girlfriend in San Diego last weekend):

Idroscalo. Ostia

2008-09-21T22:21:00.002+02:00

There's another new translation of mine up at lyrikline, of Dieter M. Gräf's poem "Idroscalo. Ostia."

DMB on HST and other things

2008-09-20T23:06:00.002+02:00

My friend Don Brown quoted Hunter S. Thompson here:

"McGovern made some stupid mistakes, but in context they seem frivolous compared to the things Richard Nixon does every day of his life, on purpose, as a matter of policy and a perfect expression of everything he stands for."

(Don and I, we're just linking back and forth to each other!)

Jazz for Obama

2008-09-20T22:50:00.003+02:00

I suspect that New York City is full of people who are jazz fans and who plan to vote for Barack Obama. If you are one of them, kill two birds with one stone and get yourself down to the Jazz for Obama concert on October 1. A great lineup, wish I could be there! Mehldau! Lovano! Stanley Jordan! Hank Jones!

Swerve, in Horizon Review

2008-09-15T22:40:00.001+02:00

My poem "Swerve" is in the first issue of Salt's new online journal Horizon Review. It's nice to be there with such a fine list of poets (hi, Rob; hi, George; hi, James; hi, everyone).

Understanding the election

2008-09-15T22:38:00.002+02:00

Justin Evans posted a funny, somewhat scary list of points that will help anyone understand the American election.

Here's the first, to give you a taste of it:

* If you grow up in Hawaii, raised by your grandparents, you're 'exotic, different.'

* Grow up in Alaska eating mooseburgers, a quintessential American story.

Don Brown on DFW

2008-09-15T21:32:00.003+02:00

Don Brown has written a thoughtful piece on (literary) suicide in response to David Foster Wallace's suicide on Friday.

Update: There's also a nice DFW piece on Caleb Crain's blog, with long quotations from an interview Crain did with DFW in 2003.

Reasons to collect books

2008-09-14T22:39:00.001+02:00

Here's another gem from Wondermark, this time on book collecting.

Johnny Cash, by David Bauer

2008-09-14T13:29:00.004+02:00

[My friend David Bauer wrote this article for the Basler Zeitung on Friday, September 11. I liked it so much, I asked him to do an English version, which I edited for him and am now posting here. I am not actually such a Johnny Cash fan as he has become, but I have always liked his singing and his songs, and I like the way David marks how a particular singer can become a touchstone for one's own life—for me, Jerry Garcia and Greg Brown most of all.]

What makes Johnny Cash so essential

By David Bauer (from the Basler Zeitung, September 12, 2008)

When Johnny Cash died, I did not care. Five years ago it was, but I did not remember until I looked it up. Johnny Cash was a name to me. A name that one knew, but that meant nothing to me. Love is a burning thing...nanana...ring of fire. And that was it.

Today, Johnny Cash is to my soul what oxygen is to my lungs - even though I discovered him only one year ago, by accident, in awkward circumstances. I watched the movie about his life, Walk The Line, on my laptop. The audio track was crap, so Cash started stuttering every few seconds. That was it: My "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash" moment. Johnny Cash introduced himself to me, but the man I saw was Joaquin Phoenix. I got to know his songs, but Joaquin Phoenix sung them. But still, it triggered something. I craved to learn more about this person and his music.

Pretty late I was. Cash had started his career some fifty years ago, and even the late milestones that made him known in my generation had already occurred a few years back: the movie and his late work, the "American Recordings" produced by Rick Rubin. Singing cover versions of some very well-known songs, Cash made a sweet offer to all those to whom even the word "Country" smelled a little funny. So Cash took the stage at the 1994 Glastonbury Festival amidst Britpop madness and was invited to be part of a Simpsons episode (where he gave his voice to a coyote). Yet it was his cover version of the Nine Inch Nails classic "Hurt" that eventually secured Cash a place in the 21st century. Today, Coldplay regularly cover his "Ring of Fire" at their concerts, and you even get to hear it when you wait on call-centre hotlines.

But what exactly is it that makes Johnny Cash so compelling, so essential? Even today, or maybe even more so today.

First of all, it is the music, of course. Country minus cowboy kitsch. Cash was a genius at making his songs easy with his guitar, while at the same time adding some true severity with his voice. A voice that did not fail to be haunting even when it became fragile in Cash's late years. His version of "Hurt" is simply one of the most touching songs ever sung.

Cash's song are not complex; instead, they come down to a kind of musical trinity: a melody, a voice, a story. This is true of his whole discography, from his earliest songs like "Walk the Line" and "Folsom Prison Blues" to the last songs recorded shortly before his death. True mastery lies in reduction, as only few understand.

Yet it is not only the music that makes Cash unique, but just as much where it came from.

Cash's biography is full of cracks, sparkling highs and dark lows. And there's a love story that easily matches the great dramas of world literature: His relationship with June Carter is a recurrent theme running through Cash's life. Their paths crossed early, in music and in private, and after some twists and turns, the musical duet turned into a love affair for eternity. Shortly before his seventieth birthday, Cash sang: "Love is love and doesn't change in a century or two."

This is another secret: Cash's songs are deeply rooted in life, so they just keep growing and growing.

Today, bands are disposable commodities. The music industry has turned into a rushing merry-go-round where you jump on only to be thrown off the next second. Everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, but that's it. You rarely find true personalities in music, whose biography and work develop together, musicians that have something to say.

But why Cash? Why not Presley, why not Dylan, why not Cohen? I don't know. Comparing quality does not help. Music is not either good or bad, it's only about one thing: Does it touch you? Cash touches me to the quick, while with Elvis, I feel nothing.

What makes the difference is this je-ne-sais-quoi that you cannot describe, only experience. Like the other day, when I came across Johnny Cash again.

On the very evening I have to let my personal June Carter go, I zap through glimmering TV programmes, lost in thought, and suddenly, I come across Walk the Line. Johnny Cash and June Carter singing "Jackson." No further evidence is needed: You do not look for Johnny Cash; he finds you.

I switch off the telly, pull everything from Johnny Cash out of my record collection and let song after song have its effect on me. It's at moments like these that all the power of Johnny Cash's music unfolds. His music is the good friend that comforts you without pity. The friend who lays his hand on your shoulder and says: You're right; life's a monster that eats you. But if you're tough enough, if you believe in yourself and the good in life, it will spit you out again.

Learning from Johnny Cash is learning about life. If you listen very closely, you might even understand it one day, that strange thing, life.

DFW

2008-09-14T13:22:00.003+02:00

I have only ever read one piece by David Foster Wallace ("Roger Federer as Religious Experience"), but that was such a beautiful piece of writing about one of my favorite subjects (tennis) that I find myself deeply saddened by the news of his death by hanging on Friday.

My friend Ulrich Blumenbach is in the last stages of writing the German translation of Infinite Jest. How odd it must be to have the author of something you are translating die while you are doing so. (Perhaps like having the author you are writing criticism on die while you are writing the criticism, something that has also never happened to me.)

Perhaps I am struck as much by the deaths of Reginald Shepherd and DFW because they are both of my generation (DFW was 46; Reginald 44; and I am 44).

Clueless

2008-09-14T10:30:00.002+02:00

Here's a little study of Sarah Palin, "She's Not Ready," by Bob Herbert.

A Campaign of Lies

2008-09-11T11:28:00.003+02:00

"... John McCain is running a campaign almost entirely based on straight up lies."

If you're not sure what to do about the horror of McCain's campaign, then follow the advice of Josh Marshall:

"This is clearly a testing time for Obama supporters. But I want to return to a point I made a few years ago during the Social Security battle with President Bush. Winning and losing is never fully in one's control -- not in politics or in life. What is always within our control is how we fight and bear up under pressure. It's easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let's stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We've got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They've both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country."

McCain may win, but those who have seen through him have to do their best to expose him as the liar he is.