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.
Descansos
May 18, 2008
Descanso, in case the Spanish term is new to you, means “resting place.” In practical application, it refers to the embellished roadside crosses—shrines, in effect—erected where people have been killed in traffic accidents. One is tempted to say—and some would say it with angry conviction—that New Mexico is littered with descansos. Far from considering them litter, I think this practice of erecting descansos and of the state’s winking at their existence—other states forbid them and aggressively tear them down—says good things about us Nuevo Mexicanos.
Danny Boy
May 11, 2008
Perhaps the best part of my rediscovery of Paul Robeson was listening to his rendition of “Danny Boy.” “I guess it’s not just for tenors anymore,” I mused. We all feel, I think, that Irish tenors have a lock on that perennial favorite. Not so. Basses have sung it. Groups have sung it. Women have sung it—in fact, the man responsible for “Danny Boy” assumed that the singer would be a woman; he even substituted “Eily Dear,” for “Danny Boy,” to accommodate male singers.
Paul Robeson
May 4, 2008
Last month I promised you a wonk on Paul Robeson, one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Only one (older) student in my UNM class knew who Paul Robeson was. If that survey is at all representative, I would like to try to remedy it in some small way. Robeson, the whole man, needs to be remembered, and as much for our sake as for his. That would take a book, of course.
Drowning in the Danube
April 22, 2008
So not long before E. D. Hirsch got his shorts in a bunch over the fact that the latest generation did not know the facts that they should know and therefore were in danger of becoming culturally illiterate, “Trivial Pursuit” hit the market and became an instant and enduring success. Is this a contradiction? I suppose it depends on the questions (even if there is a gray area). Simply put, some facts matter and some do not, or, some are culturally important and some are not.
Danube Revisited
April 13, 2008
Last week I undertook a half-hearted defense of E. D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy idea. In truth, though, it does have the odor of the flaky about it. For one thing, it points up how uncomfortable we are with the whole idea of so-called facts: what I know is indispensable knowledge; what you know (and I happen not to) is trivia, from which the word “trivial” derives. And we all still feel the sting of being knocked out of the spelling bee, of our friend’s supercilious smirk when we assumed that Boxing Day had something to do with fisticuffs, and, yes, of not knowing that the Danube flowed through Europe.
On Not Knowing Where the Danube Is
April 6, 2008
So last week I expressed dismay, to put it mildly, over the young woman on the quiz show who did not know where the Danube River was located. I promised—or maybe “threatened” is more apt—a follow-up wonk. This did not sit well with the Longsuffering Diana, who saw trouble ahead: her husband becoming especially fatuous and alienating many of his readers into the bargain. She is probably right as usual, but that has never stopped me before.
Potpourri
March 30, 2008
Yes, a grab bag, and I reserve the right to enlarge on some of these ideas and crochets in future wonks. So many things seem to be coming in, most of them absurd. For example, the other night I was channel surfing and stopped momentarily at a cheesy quiz show called “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” Well, this contestant was not. She could not name the continent—the continent!—that the Danube river runs through.
Staying Put II
March 22, 2008
This idea of mobility is easy to oversimplify and of course is also a matter of degree. There are people who, for whatever reasons, move every couple of years and often over great distances; there are others who are born, live, and die in the same house in the same town. Some are proverbial rolling stones while some are as rooted as oak trees. But most of us fall somewhere in between.
Staying Put
March 16, 2008
Old joke: “Lived here all your life, old timer?” “Not yet.” You can blame this wonk on Sally. She has lived all over the place during the last 45 years, both in this country and abroad. Shea, on the other hand, has been hunkered down in Albuquerque since 1969. So in her email to me a couple of weeks ago, she wondered out loud how it might feel to have put down roots as I did.
Sally
March 9, 2008
Readers of this cyber-space (you know who you are) will recall “Sally,” who showed up in a couple of recent wonks. Sally was that fellow grad student at Colorado State who went to Mexico with me over Christmas break in 1964 (“Ford Flathead II”). In “Equus Caballus,” Sally’s derisive laughter assaulted my equestrian skills, or lack thereof. After the Mexico trip, I thought I was in love with Sally and suffered the sorrows of young Werther well into the springtime.