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.
And Another Thing...
January 26, 2010
So, as I predicted in “Juggernaut,” along comes, electronically, my invitation to this summer’s high school essay reading, my ticket to beautiful Louisville, Kentucky. I am very happy about this. Almost happy enough to still the terrors that strike at my vitals when I realize that this means another forced march through Cyberland. Stay tuned. With luck there will be no “electronic signature” to contend with. Have you noticed, by the way, that to get your package redelivered or your stove fixed by a national outfit, you don’t call their local people anymore?
Juggernaut
January 18, 2010
Yet again I have been almost brought low by technology. I say “almost” because I haven’t given up yet, though it may be a near thing. A certain outfit that I sometimes work for has sent me an on-line form to fill out for them. It wasn’t always this way. These people and I used to communicate by snail mail. I would get hard copies in the mail and I would fill them out and send them back.
Face the Music
December 23, 2009
I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write this wonk (the first line on my note pad reads, “Is Techno Guy worth it?”). But this week the UNM Chorus, the Dulce Sueno Chorus, and the UNM Orchestra, under guest conductor Stephano Miceli, performed Brahms’ German Requiem, one of the masterworks of the Western world, and the contrast was just too stark to ignore. At the risk of compromising my modesty—faithful readers know that I have sung in the UNM Chorus for years—I will tell you that the performance was truly professional-grade, a stunning and transcendent experience for all.
Whales
December 6, 2009
Ever notice that some animals seem to have real trouble following the script? Take your penguin, for example. As a bird he is a disgrace (I’m sorry, but it’s time somebody said so and if it has to be me, well there you are then). Your penguin could pass muster as a portly butler in a whodunit, but where he really shines—if you have ever seen him gracefully cavorting under water—is as a fish.
Security Fable
November 29, 2009
If you ponder Krutch’s security axiom—security lies not in what one has but in what one can do without—long enough, you inevitably remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper, one of Aesop’s most famous fables. The details vary a bit in each telling but basically we have a happy-go-lucky grasshopper (in the original, a cicada) and a no-nonsense ant. The ant has spent the summer and fall finding bits of grain and grubs and hauling them laboriously back to his larder in the ant colony.
Security
November 22, 2009
Way early in my teaching career, I used a book by Joseph Wood Krutch entitled The Desert Year. Krutch (1893-1970) was a drama critic, an English professor, a naturalist, a graceful writer, and, I have always thought, a wise man. The Desert Year is a collection of essays inspired by his observing and contemplating a year of life in the Sonoran Desert. Think Thoreau in Arizona. One line in that book struck me so forcefully that I wrote it down and I still have it: “Security depends not so much upon how much you have, as upon how much you can do without.
Security a la Carte
November 22, 2009
Last week I said that Joseph Wood Krutch’s axiom—which I usually phrase as “security lies not in what one has but in what one can do without”—may have more to do with morality than with materiality. I think it does, but I would like to put that on hold for a bit. And I have been telling my faithful correspondents, Joe and Sally, that I think that axiom is either very profound or just very commonsensical, and that its phrasing may be more compelling and beguiling than the idea behind it.
Digital Watch
November 8, 2009
Last week, after my watch fell into the boiling spaghetti water (don’t ask), I guessed that I would need a new one soon. Although it did dry out enough to begin working again, it began to get very creative in its time-telling. When the sun had just come up but my watch told me it was 1:47, I went shopping as soon as I could. And a surprise was waiting for me.
Nightmare
November 1, 2009
Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious, said Freud famously, and he set us off on that road in the scientific quest for dream understanding. Dream analysis can be a very helpful tool to serious psychoanalysts. Downscale, we have the dream interpreters in the daily papers. Often those interpretations confirms our hopes and wishes—our dreams—for love or money. Not much different from the astrology columns, really. But first I must make peace with the Long-Suffering Diana.
Dream On
October 25, 2009
Last week, when I was visiting son Dan in San Diego, I had my usual anxiety dream and was telling him about it, somewhat bemused because here I was in La-La-Land, having a wonderful vacation with not an obvious care in the world. Anyway, I refer to “my anxiety dream” in the singular because it really has been the same dream with just minor variations for the past fifty years. Always the setting is some school and I am probably an undergraduate.