Weekend Wonk
Eccentrics
Jerome Shea 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?
Jerome Shea 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
Jerome Shea 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
Jerome Shea 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.
SoCal II
Jerome Shea June 23, 2007
Tip: If you missed last week’s Weekend Wonk, be sure to check it out. It’s the first part of this series. Slept well? Hope so. Let’s go. About 4 miles south of Kingman we will leave I-40 and head into the mountains on old 66, cresting Sitgreaves Pass at 3652 feet and dropping down into the old mining town of Oatman, AZ. This was surely the most formidable part of the old road.
SoCal I
Jerome Shea June 16, 2007
Having a friend in L.A., another in South Laguna, and a son in San Diego, I have over the years become a real aficionado of Southern California. I know that SoCal is an easy target for critics: ticky-tacky sprawl, the kingdom of the mall, developers on a roll, freeways out of control (you see that it even inspires its own doggerel). But that is only half of it. There is solitude and spectacle abounding.
Retirement
Jerome Shea June 9, 2007
I did it. I retired about two weeks ago and it seems fitting that I mark the occasion in this cyber journal or whatever you want to call it. I am now a retiree, official senior citizen, duffer, old fart, whatever. If you want to give it some dignity, I am now professor emeritus after 30 years at the University of New Mexico, the last dozen of them in the English Department.
World’s Worst Poet
Jerome Shea May 27, 2007
Give ear, Gentle Reader: And the Tower of London is most gloomy to behold And the crown of England lies there, begemmed with precious stones and gold. King Henry the Sixth was murdered there by the Duke of Glo’ster, And when he killed him with his sword he called him an imposter. Please meet William Topaz McGonagall, born in Edinburgh in 1825 or 1830, and dying there in 1902, a man with so tin an ear that it never occurred to him that the last line, above, exactly replicated the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” a man who could rhyme “ruins” with “bruins” and count it a poetic coup, and yet a man who ranked himself right up there with the Bard of Avon.
Sabine Baring-Gould
Jerome Shea May 19, 2007
What? You’ve never heard of Sabine Baring-Gould? Dear me. A Google search will turn up a dozen pages of citations (no, really). There is a Sabine Baring-Gould Appreciation Society (small but determined). He wrote more histories, novels, tracts, sermons, essays, and whatnot—especially whatnot—than a half-dozen lesser men could have hoped to. Dear me, it’s time you were enlightened. I first turned up “S. Baring-Gould” (as he styled himself) while browsing aimlessly in the University of New Mexico library, and was immediately hooked.
Harold Welsh (or Welsch) Revisited
Jerome Shea May 12, 2007
Back in March, I wrote about my erstwhile colleague Harold Welsh, brought low by an inadvertent pun ("Great Moments in Teaching"). But the account was not as it seemed. I had not had contact with Harold in 40 years, but we do have a mutual friend who supplied an address—Harold is still in Illinois, not far from the scene of the alleged happening—and suggested that I send him a copy of the column.