Articles by Jerome Shea
Jerome Shea is an emeritus professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he still teaches his classical tropes course every fall and his prose style course every spring. He has been the Weekend Wonk since January of 2007. His email is shea@macinstruct.com.
La Llorona
March 29, 2009
Last week I mentioned La Llorona, the Weeping Woman or Wailing Woman. You cannot have lived in New Mexico very long without hearing the tale. In fact, La Llorona is known throughout Central and South America and the American Southwest. There are many variations, but the most common around these parts features a young woman named Maria. She is poor and from the wrong side of the tracks. She may be exceedingly beautiful or she may not be, but she is always ambitious: she is going to better herself.
Water in the Ditch
March 23, 2009
Spring has come to my town; she is coy for the moment but will soon be sashaying. The flowering trees are busy in white and pink. The elms are bristling with catkins. The crocuses are up. There is even furtive budding on my big mulberry and of course the globe willows are leafed out already. I greet even the dandelions with cheer. By late morning these days it is top down weather and the Little Red Beast and I are making the most of it.
Charmed Life
March 15, 2009
A friend writes, “Ever since some awful hard times early on, Jerry, you really have been a very lucky fellow, as you know.” She is quite right. I will spare you those hard times, if only so that I don’t sound like a whiner. But ever since then I have indeed been wonderfully lucky: in my marriage, in my children, in my career, in my health, and in other ways that haven’t occurred to me yet.
Bizarre Bazaar
March 8, 2009
In the pages of tabloids you can find everything to feed your head, albeit a crude diet. The celebrity gossip, of course, the low-down on “Brangelina,” and “TomKat,” how Brad’s poor heartbroken ex, Jennifer, is holding up (or not), whether Oprah and Stedman really have a future, and so forth. And of course the reader is always on a first-name basis with these celebs. The fantasy is that if the stars (pardon the pun) were aligned just right, Oprah would love to hang out with you and let her hair down.
Tabloids
February 22, 2009
So there I was in the checkout the other day and a cover story and headline assailed my eye. The picture was of our new First Couple (dancing, I think). The President’s back is to us and the First Lady is looking over his shoulder with an ominous scowl. The headline? “MICHELLE TO OPRAH: BACK OFF! HE’S MINE!’” Welcome to the world of the checkout line tabloids, familiar to us all.
My heart has followed...
February 8, 2009
Don Marquis was born in a small Illinois town in 1878 and died in New York City in 1937. He packed a lot of life into that span. It’s a shame that he is all but forgotten today. He was basically a newspaper columnist, and his forte was humor. But as if publishing a column six days a week wasn’t punishing enough, he also churned out novels, short stories, essays, poetry, and plays both humorous and serious—more than thirty volumes in all.
Don Marquis
February 1, 2009
First of all, it’s “MARkwiss (Scots), not MarKEE (French). And he wrote much more than Archie and Mehitabel. Nevertheless, it is for Archie and Mehitabel that he is known, if known at all, and one could do far worse. (In fact, the temptation to just turn the rest of this wonk over to Archie is almost irresistible.) Marquis created Archie (the cockroach) and Mehitabel (the alley cat) in 1916 so that he could get column material in some other guise, so that he would have a voice not his own for a while.
Son of a Ditch!
January 24, 2009
That’s “Ditch,” not—well, you know—despite any personal failings we might have. But when we scream, ”SON OF A DITCH!” when racing across a finish line, we are sometimes misheard. This wonk is long overdue. Harvey has been nagging me about it since forever. Ok, who is Harvey and who or what are the Sons of Ditches? Harvey Buchalter and I are the co-founders of this esteemed running club, so-called. Why Sons of Ditches?
The Sweet Singer of Michigan
January 10, 2009
Take heart, Gentle Readers! I have found William Topaz McGonagall’s soulmate! (Surely you remember McGonagall, “World’s Worst Poet”?) I sing of Julia Ann Moore, aka “The Sweet Singer of Michigan, “ and I take special pride in that she was from our own American heartland. A lifelong Michigander, she was born in 1847 and died in 1920. She married Frederick Moore, a farmer, in 1865. Eventually they became decently prosperous, but their lives were typical of the time and place.
The Pig Story
January 4, 2009
Welcome to 2009, friends. Looks like things will probably get worse before they get better, so let’s start the year off with my all-time favorite joke. (I always thought of it as a “shaggy dog story” [“shaggy pig story”?] but my research into that wonderful genre suggests that a purist might give me an argument. Whatever. We start with very early spring in Milwaukee and a young man we’ll call “Bob.