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.
His Poor Wife
September 15, 2007
No, I am not referring to the Long-Suffering Diana, though some might like to make that case. I am referring instead to the recent spate of disgraced politicians and others, those whose sexual shenanigans, real or alleged, have been exposed for all the world to snicker and gawk at, to mull over in glee or in dudgeon. Larry Craig is not the last, only the latest, and let me be even-handed about this.
10-4, Good Buddy
September 8, 2007
I had to laugh. David Brooks, University of Chicago B.A. (History, ’83) and conservative pundit, was hunkered down with an over-the-road trucker in a diner in Virginia,* which got me fantasizing George Will jawing about porkbelly futures at the feed store or Thomas Sowell…but I find it too painful to fantasize Thomas Sowell. Let me say right off the bat that I like David Brooks’s stuff. He’s neither a ranter nor a knee-jerk ideologue and I often find in his columns a shiny intellectual bauble that I can play with for hours on end.
Pinocchio
September 2, 2007
On the streets of Florence, second only to reproductions of David are reproductions—often keychain size—of Pinocchio, the world’s most famous puppet. This is as it should be, I suppose. Just as Michelangelo was a revered native son, so was Carlo Lorenzini, who gave us one of the world’s most famous children’s stories. We know him as Carlo Collodi, a name he took from his mother’s village. He was born in 1826, spent his life as a newspaperman and something of a political gadfly, and died in 1890.
A Grouch Abroad: Pictures
August 12, 2007
Il Duomo Street scene, w/ Campanile, “Bruno,” “Gladys” I’ll have his name in just a minute! The Long-suffering Diana Abstemious Shea Il Duomo, interior The dome, interior Baptism of Christ The Arno Harry’s Bar, along the Arno One of these statues isn’t. Washday A view from Fiesole Street scene, Fiesole Roman…and Roman Catholic Temple ruins Santa Croce and Dante statue Florence, and Fiesole, from the dome The Campanile, from the dome
A Grouch Abroad II
August 4, 2007
Friday afternoon, I think it was, we spent six months in the Uffizi Gallery. It sure felt like that, traipsing from room to room to room to room… Please understand. I get off on Renaissance religious art with the same fervor as the next guy. But please! ENOUGH! I got really maxed out on the Big A’s (Assumption, Ascension, Annunciation), not to mention the nativity scenes and all the pietas. And can we please relegate St.
A Grouch Abroad: An Idiosyncratic Report
July 28, 2007
(Being an account of the recent trip that Shea and Diana, his long-suffering wife, took to the city of Florence [the one in Italy]. Cosmopolitan readers will note that the perspective is American and somewhat provincial. You have a problem with that?) Well…before we had even boarded our flight in Albuquerque they confiscated my Swiss Army knife. Yes, it was my fault, and the second knife I have lost to Homeland Security, but I take my bad omens where I find them.
Eccentrics
July 21, 2007
I have another book for you, friends: Carl Sifakis’s American Eccentrics. It is in fact the ideal bathroom book, with entries that can be enjoyed at a short sitting as it were. Sifakis simply gives one- or two-page accounts of some of our stranger countrymen and –women and starts the whole thing off with a very thoughtful introduction. As always, I recommend the book itself. What follows is just a taste.
What's It All About, Alfie?
July 14, 2007
No, not that Alfie. I just couldn’t resist the title. While I was wrestling last week with the whole issue of incentives (“Carrots and Sticks”), a friend steered me to a remarkable book—Punished by Rewards—by one Alfie Kohn. Kohn is an erstwhile academic who, according to his website, spends all his time these years researching, writing, and lecturing at large. He is also a maverick, a contrarian, which is always tonic.
Carrots and Sticks
July 7, 2007
Last week I listed the three “Free Response” AP questions. I was delegated to read the third one—all week long. But it was a good question and I’d like to share it with you. It is based on a true-life incident. A couple of years ago a high school student wrote to Randy Cohen, “The Ethicist” columnist in The New York Times Magazine. This student’s school was always having charity drives of one sort or another.
Summer Camp
June 30, 2007
I have just come back from a sojourn in Daytona Beach, where the weather was unusually pleasant for mid-June. I was, however, not lollygagging on the littoral all day. Oh no. I was holed up in the Convention Center across A1A from the Hilton (where we stayed in sybaritic luxury) reading Advanced Placement essays for eight hours a day. Well, somebody has to. This year there were over 900 of us plowing through about 280,000 booklets in English Language and Composition.