Macinstruct

What Mac Brazel Found, or What Would We Do Without Weather Balloons?

mcone — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:48:05 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 14, 2010

The Longsuffering Diana and I spent last weekend staying with friends in Roswell, New Mexico. We breezed through Roswell many years ago, but this time we discovered a little city with a lot to offer. Roswell is home to the venerable New Mexico Military Institute and to the Roswell Industrial Air Center. It boasts the Roswell Museum and Art Centre, and the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. (Don Anderson, a capable artist in his own right, and his brother Robert founded the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company. With those hefty profits, Don sponsors ten artists a year who live at his compound and paint or sculpt to their hearts’ content, the only stipulation being to create something to leave behind for the museum.) The Roswell area also contains probably the largest concentration of dairy farms in the Southwest, and those thousands of milk cows feed a huge cheese plant that churns out mozzarella and Parmesan like that mill that grinds salt at the bottom of the sea. Their only customers are Kraft Foods and Domino’s Pizza.

So there’s a lot going on in Roswell. But unless you have been living under the proverbial rock all your life, you know what Roswell is really, indelibly, and internationally known for. That’s right: the “Roswell Incident” back in 1947. As if the conspiracy bloggers and the X-Files types haven’t given it robust life, Roswell itself has got into the act. Our first visit was to the International UFO Museum and Research Center, on North Main Street in the old Plains movie theater building.

Here, briefly, is the story. On 4 July 1947, there were violent thunderstorms in east central New Mexico. On the morning of 5 July, Mac Brazel was checking for damage on his ranch near Corona, about 75 miles northwest of Roswell, the nearest town of any size. He found a lot of mysterious debris strewn about, the result of some kind of crash. He gathered up this mysterious metallic stuff and took it to Sheriff Wilcox in Roswell the next day. Wilcox took it to the folks at Roswell Army Air Field, and then the fun began.

The army sent investigators to Corona, and the crash area was cordoned off. In a grisly turn, they asked a local undertaker, Glenn Dennis, how many child-sized caskets he could lay hands on. A nurse witnessed doctors performing autopsies on what were clearly not human life forms. She was hustled away. In a move that really astounds me, Col. William Blanchard, commanding officer of RAAF, then told his Public Information Officer, Lt. Walter Haut, to issue a press release (8 July 1947) to the effect that a “flying disk” (aka, a flying saucer, a UFO) had crashed up in Corona. Either Blanchard was incredibly naïve about army procedures or pathologically credulous and honest. At any rate, before you could say “Fox Mulder,” the “flying disk” had turned into that old standby, a weather balloon. (I swear, if half of New Mexico witnessed a huge flying saucer with aliens waving out the portholes while singing “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the authorities would say it was a…weather balloon.)

Well, things eventually died down. Several people said they were crudely intimidated. That nurse was transferred to England. Brazel never talked about it again (but refused to believe it was a weather balloon). Then, thirty years later, people began to come forward, people who said they had indeed seen the bodies, and so forth. And these were reputable people, not loons. Best guess on the bodies now is that they are in a sub-basement cooler up at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio or sequestered at that wonderful catch-all of the extraterrestrial, Area 51 in the Nevada desert. In the early 1990s, Haut and Dennis spearheaded the effort to establish the UFO museum.

So what do you think? Or what do I think? I pride myself on being skeptical in such matters. Lord knows we have had our share of dubious UFO sightings and of alien abduction stories from people who are clearly unstable. But too many very stable people are coming forward now. Col. Blanchard appeared to believe whatever it was that his investigators first reported. Glenn Dennis did not dream up that request for child-sized caskets. And then there’s that nurse. And the more the army—later the Air Force—tried to explain it away, the more desperately absurd, even contradictory, their explanations got.

Something truly weird happened out there. Something.

Meet Your Macinstructor

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. He may also be found reading vintage wonks at http://unmlive.unm.edu.

Teacher’s Testament II

mcone — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:51:18 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 28, 2010

One of the best things to happen to my teaching has been my wonking. I said last week that a writing teacher should be a writing practitioner. I don’t delude myself that my weekly wonks are high art, but I like to think they show care and craft, things that I can pass on to my students. It has given me a valuable lesson in humility, too. Try as I may, a couple of typos inevitably slip through (“Matt, can you PLEASE change ‘chose’ to ‘choose’ in the second paragraph? Sorry. Again.”). This has made me a lot more understanding than I once was. I can share their suffering for working under the gun, too. Finally, I like especially to show them a sentence that nagged at me, and how I fixed it (“Do you see how ‘to magic back that dream’ sounds so much better than ‘to magic that dream back’?”). The important thing is that my students know that Shea doesn’t just talk the talk: he walks the walk.

Inspiration. I still recall an incident from my undergraduate years. Professor Smith one day got exercised in spite of himself, and we juniors and seniors “gazed at each other with a wild surmise.” Medieval literature, we assumed, was just something one studied to pass the final. It was inconceivable that one could get so stunningly excited about it, but the pro(o)f was pacing back and forth right in front of us, wild-eyed as any cartoon professor, a lesson in the etymology of “inspired.” We all got a shot of education that day. I am blessed because I really do love what I do. And when that love ambushes me as it did Professor Smith, I know that I am doing what I was born to do.

I always impute to a student more intelligence and good will than he may have, rather than less. (“Always assume,” someone once said, “that in every class you teach there is a student who is your superior in head or in heart.”) Hokey as it sounds, this attitude usually pays off in the way that students, in turn, respond to me. If the real reason for some rule or other diverges from the party line, I give the real reason. I try, too, to separate the trivial from the important for them, to provide some perspectives that will stand them in good stead. Most simply put, I try to remember how I felt as a student and act accordingly. Actually I try to be two things at once which any good teacher will recognize: a fellow human being but, nonetheless, a teacher, not a dorm buddy or soul mate. Buddies and soul mates they have in abundance. It’s teachers—humane teachers—that are rare.

None of these ideas and observations are groundbreaking (or “seminal,” as we academics like to intone) and many of them have been used and are being used by good teachers everywhere. If there is a common thread here, it lies in the prescription to narrow rather than widen the gap between “teachers” and “students.” I have become convinced that a deliberate blurring of the distinction or, perhaps better, a cavalier disregard for it is a very healthy thing.

I became a professor emeritus after spring semester of 2007, but I still teach my classical tropes course every fall and my prose style course every spring. I hope to continue to teach those courses until they pry the chalk out of my gnarled dead hand. Closing in on fifty, these have been wonderful years. I would not have missed them for the world.

Postscript. The prose style course and the classical tropes course (an outgrowth of it) are both my own creations, my special babies. They are not just good courses but, I would argue in a messianic way, courses that all students should be exposed to, courses that will remodel one’s head. Someday, I suppose, I should begin casting about for a protégé, someone to fill my size nines. But not yet.

This time around, my prose style course almost got canceled for low enrollment. We did squeak by, but the experience really shook me, shook me more than I could have imagined. When things looked most bleak I appealed to the department chair to fight for the course, to persuade the dean not to kill it. “It’s not the money, Gail!” I cried. And that is when I realized to my surprise that it really wasn’t about money. It was about Shea’s soul.

What has been happening over these last years is that I no longer teach the other courses, like the grammar course and the mid-level composition course, that used to be my recruiting tools. So I made a pitch to the current crop of E220 teachers: “Let me give you a day off. I will come in and teach your students how to write with classical tropes (hoping, of course, that some will sign up for the tropes course next fall). They win; you win; I win.” So far, about half a dozen teachers have taken me up on the offer and I am crafting the best guest lecture I am capable of.

Cross your fingers. Please cross your fingers.

Meet Your Macinstructor

A Teacher’s Testament

mcone — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 13:15:34 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 21, 2010

I first stood on the other side of the lectern, the teacher’s side, close to a half-century ago. You will agree, I hope, that that constitutes a long ride—Lord knows how much chalk I have gone through in almost five decades—and it ain’t over yet. So, with your indulgence, perhaps the time has come for old Shea to wax profound and expansive, at least for one wonk.

In all that time, what have I learned?

But first, some background. I am a writing teacher and have taught it all: from developmental writing (a no-no to say “remedial writing”) to freshman composition to grammar to more sophisticated composition courses to classical tropes to prose style (with a change of pace stop-off at the history of the English language). But I sometimes joke with my students that it is all the same course (Shea 401?) because all of my courses are in service to the word, to this wonderful language that we have been vouchsafed. My mantra, always, is “Rub your nose in the prose.” I want my students to be excited, passionate, about the word, about language. And judging by the students who give me very high marks year after year on the course evaluations, who sign up for two, three, or even four of my courses, and who have, over the years, nominated me for teaching awards (In 1991 I was named a Teacher of the Year at UNM), I am doing something right, I am making a difference.

If I had to put my philosophy in a nutshell, it would be this: the best teaching is not teaching at all. This is really just a rephrased half-truism, but it is worth thinking on. What I mean is that the best teacher is not so much a teacher as he or she is, still and profoundly, a student of the subject. My dictionary happily translates the Latin studium as, among other things, “zeal,” and the truly great teacher is the truly great lover/student of the subject. The more we can make the other students realize that, the better off we are and they will be.

Let me quickly add that the best teacher/student should be just as expert as possible, should know the subject inside and out. But that learning should be worn lightly and never used to intimidate. I used to tell my freshman students that if I could not write a good impromptu essay in ten minutes (more on this below), then I really didn’t belong on the teacher’s side of the lectern. Nor does that mean that one’s expertise should be trivialized or denigrated. It should be advertised for what it is, a wonderful tool for learning more, for doing better, and for appreciating more fully. Unless you intend to make a living on quiz shows, expertise should not be an end in itself.

To come at it another way, and a way that affirms a broader application, I hope it goes without saying that a good teacher will make the (other) students work hard. But it is equally important that those students get the chance, often, to see the teacher/student at work, to see him actually working something out in front of them, be it a knotty sentence diagram or a good example of bdelygmia. One day many years ago I made a desperate leap into the obvious. My writing students were all in a funk, resentful of my nagging and, even more, of my fatuous cheerleading. A mutinous mutter began to bloom darkly. “Ok,” I said,” Somebody give me a topic and somebody clock me.” Thus was born what I came to call “Put Your Chalk Where Your Mouth Is” and I have been refining it ever since. Sometimes I would race the clock and try to turn in a virtuoso performance, preening and strutting. Sometimes I would accept shouted criticisms and suggestions. Sometimes I would chatter incessantly to myself. But always, to their great glee, I would be putting myself on the spot, showing that I could take it as well as dish it out.

And it was not just in front of the class. I used to—I have fallen a bit from grace here—do every writing assignment myself (i.e., if Shea assigned seven hundred words on shoes or ships or sealing wax, he would write the same essay himself). At any rate, I am always writing for my students (“Throwing Xerox at the problem,” a student once said). When a question comes up in class, be it on causative verbs or metadiscourse , I will quickstep back to my office and pound out a single-spaced gloss—and write it as well as I can. A writing teacher should be a writing practitioner, in other words.

Reading over this, I realize that I do have more to say (the old being notoriously garrulous) than I realized at the start. I see, too, that I am coming up on my usual two pages, so I will take a break for now and hope that you are sufficiently curious to come back next week. See you then.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Jerome Shea has served at the University of New Mexico in various capacities for over twenty-five years; in 1995 he joined the English Department as a tenured associate professor. Shea's expertise and interests are in general composition, traditional grammar, stylistics, classical tropes, the history of the language, and professional rhetorics. Email him at shea@macinstruct.com

Names

mcone — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 13:34:53 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 14, 2010

A couple of weeks ago Leslie Linthicum, one of my favorite Albuquerque Journal writers, did a touching piece about Spanish first names—“given” names, Baptismal names— in northern New Mexico. You are probably thinking Carlos or Juan or Miguel, but you would be wrong. No, these are names that I had no idea existed until I settled in New Mexico: Eustaquio, Dionicia, Epifanio, Procopio, Estanislao, Tranquilino, and a host of others. Why especially in the mountains of northern New Mexico? Because many families up there trace their roots back centuries, when el norte was still part of Mexico, and even before that, before those families left Spain. These names have Greek, Visigoth, and even Moorish origins. Sadly, as a rule the people who bear such names are very old themselves (Leslie’s hook was the announcements from Espanola’s funeral homes). As the people die off so also will the names, probably. Grandchildren are likely named Carlos or Linda, Jose or Maria. Great-grandchildren will likely be christened Robert or Susan, even Aidan or Ashley.

All of which got me, Jerome Paul Michael Shea, thinking about given names. (A couple of months ago I told a young woman that my name was Shea. “That’s my name, too!” she chirped. I guessed correctly that Shea was her given name, not her surname. I am bracing myself to someday meet a perky Shea Shea.)

Names are serious business. Not for nothing is “handle” the slang term for one’s name: that is how people first grab onto you. And most names have some kind of cachet, some sort of mysterious something that clings to them like ectoplasm. How often have you heard someone say “He just doesn’t seem like a ‘David’ somehow” or heard someone exclaim that a friend’s name fits her like a glove. There are, evidently, some women who should be named Daphne and others who shouldn’t. Or sometimes a name is just right for a child but an embarrassment when that child becomes a dowager (Britney?). Or vice versa. According to one source, the most popular baby girl’s name in this country in 2008 was Amelia. That strikes me as a name that takes several years to grow into, a name redolent of horsehair sofas and antimacassars. But perhaps that is what the parents were aiming at. “Madeline” has made a surprising comeback. To me, that name has “great aunt” written all over it.

Some common words would make wonderful, euphonious names. For years I have been suggesting to friends in the family way that Diarrhea would be a lovely name for a girl child (“Step with me into the garden, Diarrhea”). So far, no takers.

Names go in and out of fashion. Back in 2001, according to one source, the top five boys’ names were Jacob/Jakob, Michael, Matthew/Mathew, Joshua, and Christopher; the top five for girls were Emily, Madison in various spellings (remember the movie Splash, which made a big splash?), Hannah (starring Darryl Hannah—coincidence?), Ashley in all its spellings, and the regal Alexis. In 2008 we have Aidan/Aiden/Aden, Ethan, Noah, Cayden/Caden/Kayden/Kaden, and Caleb/Kaleb. Liam was moving up fast on the rail that year and would be number three in 2009. For girls we turned, seems to me, old fashioned: Amelia, Isabella/Izabella, Madeline in various spellings, Emma (Jane Austen here?), and Abigail. There is often a riot of different spellings. Madyleyne, Madalynne. Ashleigh, Ashlee. Madysyn. Anything, I guess, to give your little bundle of joy a distinction over the other little bundles named Madison. Where Cayden came from I have no idea. And I used to deride Chad as the ultimate silly preppie name until I found out that there is actually a Chad (d. 672) in the calendar of saints. Who knew?

The Puritans named their offspring to instill virtue. The names Prudence and Grace were common as rocks in the pasture, but Ever Vigilant Winslow, now there was a moniker, bested only by Shun The Devil Cabot. We did not see such a flowering until the hippies came along centuries later (Moon Unit, Flower Petal, Rainbow Rider).

Names beget nicknames. I am Jerry to all but my wife and a few close friends. Seemed easier just to bow to the inevitable. But some resist. I know two men who were christened Charles. One is a Chuck; call the other one Chuck at your peril.

Some names, like some topcoats, are reversible: Marshall Brandon, Brewster Curtis. These drive me nuts when I am reading the class roll. And then there are gender ambiguous names: Leslie, Kim, Kelly, Tracy, Stacey, Taylor, and so forth.

A name can make or break you. Percival was one of the greatest of Arthur’s knights, a hero to be reckoned with. Naming a kid Percival today would be almost child abuse. Remember Ernie Kovacs’ fey poet, Percy Dovetonsils? One’s name can hold one’s fate.

Just ask that boy named Sue.

Correction: In the last two wonks I used the phrase “three in the tree” to describe a certain stick shift arrangement. Son Dan says he has always heard it as “three ON the tree.” That makes much more sense. I do try to get these things right, but sometimes, to borrow from the great Fred Allen, you just feel like sticking your quill back in your goose. Three on the tree it is.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Makeshift

mcone — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 13:50:58 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 7, 2010

Interesting word, “shift.” Or perhaps I should say a word with interesting variations and connotations. “Shift for yourself” connotes a hardy resourcefulness. On the other hand, “shiftless” connotes laziness. The entry takes up over three column inches in my dictionary. “Makeshift” suggests crudeness but also ingenuity. Day shift. Graveyard shift. Shifts and stratagems. And certainly to describe someone as shifty is not a compliment. (Shift as camisole can’t possibly have the same etymology [can it?] but it is right in there with the other definitions.)

Last week I was singing the praises of the stick shift (aka the standard or manual transmission). I have a few verses left to sing before I grudgingly give the automatic transmission its due. With a stick, you have more control over the movement of the car, for one thing: I would much rather have a stick shift in treacherous road conditions. And should your battery die—or your starter—you can ask a willing stranger to push you. You put the car in second gear, depress the clutch (so that the car will roll freely), turn on the ignition, and then, at speed, “pop” the clutch, so that the drive wheels turn the engine rather than vice versa. Voila! The car bucks once, the engine coughs into life, and you’re good to go to the repair shop. Much less bother than the jumper cables you have to use with an automatic, and if the starter in your slushbox Beemer goes kaput, your only recourse is a tow truck.

Now for a shameful disclosure. I did not learn to drive on a stick shift. I took my driver’s test in my father’s ’56 Olds. Hydra-Matic. Only two pedals to worry about, which is probably why I passed. But I knew that I wanted to learn to drive a stick,* and I took no half measures. The car at hand was my brother’s 1931 Chevy coupe, a wonderful car with a rumble seat, and a stick shift that was not even synchromesh.

Synchromesh, probably the greatest advance before the automatic transmission, would not come in until five or six years later. You can thank the synchronizers for the fact that it is almost impossible to grind the gears in a manual transmission these days. A “crashbox,” as in Steve’s Chevy, was another matter entirely. You started out in first gear as usual, and then you depressed the clutch, slipped the stick into neutral, RELEASED the clutch, goosed the gas ever so slightly and cocked your ear, hoping to get the engine and transmission turning at about the same speed. Then you depressed the clutch, AGAIN—this is called double-clutching and, yes, it will be on the test—and ever so subtly tried to snick the stick into second gear, without your passenger grinning and saying “Hey, grind me a pound of that, too, wudja?” That, believe me, is a trial by fire. Later I used to drive a big Reo dump truck that was also a crashbox. I never did get really good at it. Incidentally, if your clutch linkage breaks, as the cable used to do with depressing regularity on our poor Dodge Aries, you can actually drive to the repair shop without a clutch. The technique is very much like driving an old crashbox.

Ok, let me throw a bone to the automatic transmission partisans, shiftless though they be (sorry, couldn’t resist). The skunk in the woodpile here is the clutch. With no clutch there is no linkage to break and no discs to wear out and need replacing. Although a clutch will last a long time nowadays, a clutch job will set you back a very pretty penny. But most of all with an automatic, you have only two pedals for your two feet to engage—a level playing field, as it were. And you can yak on your cell phone, scarf your Big Mac, or put on your make-up without that annoying shifting. (Yes, I have driven these so-called manual override automatics. Sorry—just ain’t the same.)

Once you are cruising along, a stick shift is no big deal. It’s the delicate interplay between the clutch and the gas pedal from a dead stop that struck fear into the heart of sixteen-year-old Dan Shea and his father, riding shotgun. Too little gas and you stall out, ignominiously. Too much gas and too quick on the clutch and my little Metro convertible would bolt ahead like a demented Brahma bull, a rictus of terror on old Pop’s face. (We will not speak of trying to start out on an incline.**). But Dan has been in the club for years now, wheeling his little 5-speed Civic with aplomb. For that, among many other things, old Pops is proud of the boy.

He can shift for himself.

*I have found out that in some countries if you take your driving test with an automatic transmission, it is so stamped on your license. You have to take the test again on a stick shift to get that extra endorsement.

**Years ago some cars had an ingenious device called a “hill holder.” When you depressed the clutch in such a situation, it also activated the brakes, so there was no danger of rolling back into the guy behind you. Sadly, it seems to have gone the way of the dodo, although rumor has it that it survives on some Subarus, and good on them.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Shifting for Yourself

mcone — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:27:56 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 31, 2010

I’m driving through my neighborhood the other day and come upon an old Honda hatchback with these cautionary words soaped on the back window:

Learning 5-speed
Keep Distance

Well, that forthright admission tickled me all the way home, where I raced to my computer and emailed Dan and his sister, passing along my find and adding, “Ah, the memories came flooding back to old Pops.” And indeed they did. I made it a point that our progeny learn to drive a stick shift, a transmission by which you have to use a clutch to shift gears. The Little Red Beast and his garage mate, Wanda Honda, are both stick shifts (or “have stick shifts”: the expressions seem to be interchangeable).

I don’t have the figures, but I would guess that most cars in this country today have automatic transmissions. This was not always so. (A discussion of transmissions can get incredibly complex; let
us just note that in any car you have to transfer power from the engine to the drive wheels, and a transmission is what does that.) Automatic transmissions (i.e., clutchless) came out just after WWII with the Hydra-Matic* in Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs. The automatic transmission was arguably the most significant advance in technology since the automobile had been invented. Hydra-Matic was followed by variations that were marketing poetry: Dynaflow, Powerglide, Torqueflite, Ford-O-Matic (a tad prosaic, that one). By the mid-50s, it was rare to find an Olds, or a Buick, Chrysler, Lincoln, or other mid-level or high-end car with a stick shift, and Chevys and Fords were quickly following suit. It wasn’t long before the first urban legend took hold, the one about the moron who thought that the “R” on the gear selector stood for “Race,” with predictably disastrous results. The diehard stick shift aficionados derided automatics as “slushboxes” and still do.

Many, I’m sure, thought the stick shift would go the way of the buggy whip. But then the Volkswagen Beetle became a surprise success and ushered in a slew of other economy cars, practically all of them with stick shifts. Stick shifts get better mileage (though automatics are catching up), are less expensive to produce, and are more efficient in getting power to the drive wheels. This made a difference—to cite an extreme example—in a three-cylinder Geo Metro which could muster only 57 horsepower! And, if you ask me, sticks are just more fun and give the driver more say so in the driving, which is a very liberating, empowering feeling.**

These new 4-speed (most are now 5-speed) stick shift “econoboxes” had bucket seats, so the gearshift got moved back onto the floor (“four on the floor”) where it had been until the mid-30s, when the gearshift got moved up to the steering column. Because 3-speed transmissions were then the rule, this arrangement became known as “three in the tree.” “Three in the tree” allowed for three people to squeeze in more comfortably on the bench seat. (More important, it allowed your honey to snuggle up to you without accidentally kicking the car out of gear.) The bucket seats/floor gearshift arrangement caught on to the extent that many car makers have now put the automatic gear selector on the floor also. Your Buick sedan is not a sports car by any stretch, but the cockpit gives a pleasant illusion of its being one. Three in the tree required more complicated linkage, which was a good reason to phase it out. The linkage was so worn on my ’51 Chevy that frequently I would be shifting confidently through the gears and get hung up in second gear. Wouldn’t go into third, wouldn’t even go back into neutral. The remedy was simple if bothersome: pull over, pop the hood, and re-align the “fingers,” the levers that were farther down on the steering column. Then you were good to go again. Until the next week. And don’t forget to wipe the crud off your hands.

The automatic transmission also effected changes in the emergency brake (or “parking brake” or “hand brake”), both in where it was located and how it worked. This may seem trivial, but quite often it made a big difference in the delicate accommodations that a stick shift driver has to make between the clutch, the (foot) brake and the gas. Having three pedals and only two feet puts a driver at an obvious disadvantage, as we shall see next week.

I know people—not just teens but twenty-somethings and even thirty-somethings—who cannot drive a stickshift and likely never will. In the grand scheme of things this hardly matters a whit anymore, I guess. Even the cheapest rental cars are slushboxes, at least in this country. Still, I salute our intrepid teenage neighbor with the amusing sign on the back of her old Civic. She is learning a very useful skill. I think she will be a better driver because of it, and I know she will have more fun.

*Yes, the Hydra was that many-headed serpent in Greek mythology. Whatever were they thinking (or smoking) at GM?

**Wanda Honda, our CR-V, has a 4-wheel drive system that is completely automatic. If she slips into or out of 4-wheel drive (at the urging of her computers), you never know that she has done so. I resent that, too. With our old Mazda van it was a major project to switch into 4-wheel drive, and I gloried in it!

Meet Your Macinstructor

And Another Thing…

mcone — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:59:05 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 24, 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? In fact, you can’t find the number for the local freight warehouse or repair center, giving “unlisted number” a new poignancy. No, you dial an 800 number to a call center located Lord knows where. The people at the other end of the phone line are the new intermediaries (gatekeepers, truth be told). They contact the local outfit (telepathically?) which, you are assured, will contact you within the next few days. This means that you had better sit by the phone, because you cannot negotiate an appointment through your voice mail. I’m sure this goes under the heading of convenience. (I rebelled and called a local handyman to fix my oven. He was at the door in fifteen minutes and did a bang-up job. Since we are always told that small businesses are the backbone of our economy, I was not just smug, but proud.)

It is a good rule of thumb that when you hear the word “convenience” or one of its cognates, it is not your convenience that the minions of XYZ Corp. are talking about, but theirs. If, indeed, the word has any meaning at all; usually, it doesn’t. Thus: “For your convenience, all our customers will now be strip-searched” or “For your convenience, these premises are now patrolled by Rottweilers.” Such a powerful, narcotic word, convenience. I long to walk up to the grinning manager and say, “For your convenience I have just poured STP into your cash registers.”

Technology is such a mixed blessing. I realize that that is a truism, but sometimes it hits home so starkly. These things start off innocently enough. How could the cell phone not be an unalloyed blessing? The world will have instant access to you, you can call for help if your car breaks down, and so forth. Well, ask any high school teacher what she thinks of cell phones! Or how do you feel about the guy that rear-ends you because he was gassing on the phone to his brother-in-law? Such abuses aside, I am not the first to wonder if you want the world to have instant access to you in the first place.

But these questionable improvements keep coming. I don’t know who came up with that electronic signature nonsense that I described last week. But I can easily imagine the salesman. He looks and sounds like Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. He has a spiel that mesmerizes the folks at XYZ Corp. The future—a future of bigger profits and even more satisfied clients—blooms before them. And of course Prof. Hill can demonstrate the electronic signature feature such that a baboon could easily accomplish it (after all, he does it three or four times a day: he should have it down pat). So these poor fish take the bait, and clients start emailing them death threats. Who knew?

You could make a list of technological improvements that have been unalloyed blessings, I guess, but it would be a short list. The high speed dental drill would be on my list, car seats for kids, I suppose, and certain pharmaceuticals, but not all of them. Some advances really do advance us, and most seem to be in the medical field. But speaking of pharmaceuticals, the drug companies can now push their pills over the public airways, as we all know. Thus, we are hearing much more about intimate matters than we would like (“Mommy, what’s “erectile dysfunction”?). What tickles me is that they are required by law, evidently, to list possible dicey side effects. You can almost see the voice-over guy squirm as he races through the embarrassing list: “Hexigloppen is not recommended for pregnant women or the ambidextrous. Possible side effects may include dizziness, nausea, renal failure, impotence, incontinence, and hives.” But he always recovers and adds chirpily, “Ask your doctor if Hexigloppen may be right for you!”

Brave new world? I have my doubts.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Juggernaut

mcone — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 05:40:27 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 17, 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. Simple. But now, more and more, it is all done on-line, and the point is that I have no choice but to play their demonic game. I think there is something very wrong about this. I feel myself being squished under the wheels of a Juggernaut and, worse, I see no hope of reversing—or even stopping—this trend.

Here is an example. I was asked in this on-line form to designate an emergency contact, should something happen to me at one of their far-flung functions. I referenced the Long Suffering Diana, as I always do. But I did something—I still am not sure what—to anger the computer program. It then told me to correct whatever I had filled in. I did so, as near as I could guess how to do it. It still was not satisfied, and kept badgering me over and over until, in a frustrated rage, I gave up. I will skip several other snafus and tell you that after some emails and phone calls I finally got near the end of the form, to a place that called for an “electronic signature.” Here I was way out of my depth, and beyond the capacity of my antiquated eMac (remember those?). Not to worry. I forwarded the stuff from my study to the kitchen alcove where Diana reigns with her almost state-of-the-art Mac. You should know, also, that Diana is very computer savvy—maybe not as much as a twenty-something, but not shabby by any measure. We actually got the electronic signature accomplished (!), but then this pop-up popped up: “An error has occurred during the submit process. Cannot process content of type/html; charset=UTF-8.”

Yeah, I know, that “charset=UTF-8” trips me up every time. I’m sure it catches you, too, huh?

This is not only madness but rank bullying, and an electronic way of saying “our way or the highway.” Maybe they should just put us old farts on an ice floe. What really gets me about this is that they hold all the cards: you play their game or you fold, go away, don’t bother them any more—get out of the way, you old relic! And I know there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Well, if I cannot avoid being squished, at least I can squeal, so I fired off a rather intemperate email. A few days later—while I was composing a more temperate email, hoping to get out of this limbo—the phone rang. It was a nice lady from company headquarters in New Jersey and the exchange went something like this:

“Jerome Shea?”

“Speaking.”

“Jerome, I have your latest email here on screen, and you are clearly stressed and frustrated.”

I babbled some sort of apology for my heated email, but she then said, in a voice like honey:

“No, we quite understand, Jerome. You had every reason to be frustrated. But—Jerome?—no more stress, no more frustration, no more on-line stuff. I am going to attach that document to an email right now. You download it, print it out, sign it with an ordinary pen, and FAX—no, snail mail—it back to us. How’s that, Jerome?”

“How’s that”? “How’s THAT”? Tears welled in my eyes. It felt as if his own sainted mother had awakened little Jerome from a bad dream and clutched him to her bosom. I began to gibber and squeak. (Here it should be added that this “electronic signature” nonsense is evidently not ready for prime time: they must have had bushels of irate complaints, we peasants threatening to take up our pitchforks.)

Of course, that was a wonderful outcome, better than I had dared dream. But when the euphoria passed, I realized that this was only an example of what I have come to call technoblesse oblige. They can afford to show us mercy because they have the power to show us mercy—and the power to take it away. If I am lucky, they will be contacting me again soon to invite me to an essay reading session next June. And if I want to read those essays, all the arrangements will have to be made on-line, including my travel arrangements. (It used to be that you simply told them when you wanted to leave and come back, and they did the rest. No more. As a friend said, “Why should they pay underlings anymore when they can make YOU their underling?”)

Welcome to the future, I suppose. Thank goodness for the help that our for-now-up-to-date Mac and my savvy wife can provide. Otherwise I suppose that I would have to go to the local library and try my luck with a PC (good luck with that). Or I could swallow my pride (just a light snack in these matters) and pay one of my bright students twenty bucks do their bidding—twenty bucks that would come out of my pocket, not theirs.

I told a friend that I should probably instead write a wonk on anger management.

But not yet.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Face the Music

mcone — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:19:18 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 20, 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. I am still sung out and wrung out but profoundly grateful to have been a part of it.

Against that background, I will now describe a recent flap on the UNM campus, chart the fallout from it, and add your wonker’s sagacious reflections.

Four or five years ago I was walking to class on a fine September morn when music—loud music—assailed my ears. It was what I would later learn is called “techno music.” I stopped, turned, and beheld this rather tall and nattily dressed young fellow standing beside a big boom box and bopping away, swaying and tapping his feet. This was not some kid with a guitar strumming softly and hoping for tips. You could hear this din fifty yards away. And Techno Guy* was not looking for tips, which, come to think of it, would not have been appropriate. No, we would later learn that he was actually proselytizing: he saw himself as an evangelist for this techno music, bringing it to the yearning masses! After that I seemed to come upon him once a week or so. The students were unfazed. Some seemed to like the music, jiggling a bit themselves; others just went about their business. I was nonplussed. I really didn’t know what my reaction should be.

An aside. I stopped listening to “popular” music back in the early ‘70s when I was still a twenty-something. For most of my generation, good music died (as Don McLean put it) with Bob Dylan, the Mamas and the Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Three Dog Night…you get the idea. I cannot tell you the difference between heavy metal and punk rock (or techno music) to save my soul. I am not proud of this ignorance—I think one should try to keep up with things, even strange new things. But I do suspect that I would not be able to distinguish Heavy Metal from Strangled Cat, should I make myself listen to it.

Anyway, Techno Guy finally got challenged early last month by a faculty member whom we will call Professor Killjoy. Prof. K. asked Techno Guy to tone his music down. Eventually the case got to the Dean of Students and it was decided that Techno Guy should crank his amp down to a third of what it had been. Killjoy was happy, Techno Guy not so much, but resigned for the time being.

Then the students got into the act, via the Daily Lobo letters page. To my surprise, the respondents were pretty much split on the issue. I would have expected them to pile on Prof. Killjoy. Some did, of course, saying that he came off as arrogant and on a power trip (oddly, and to their credit, I don’t think the word “fascist” ever came up). Others saw this as a free speech issue (music as free speech?), so that Techno Guy was being denied his right to expression. Others, though—even some who enjoyed Techno Guy’s music—saw a difference between freedom of expression and aural assault. These people backed Prof. Killjoy, even if reluctantly.

An issue that didn’t come up but seems obvious is the generational divide. Prof. K. and I are products of the ‘60s (see above: Bob Dylan, etc.) and the older generation has always seen the younger generation’s tastes—in music, in dress, in language, in anything—as a cultural travesty and the Death Knell of All We Hold Dear. But I guess because Prof. K. never said that he objected to the quality of the music (just that it was too loud), that whole issue was happily skirted.

Another issue is that of venue, this being, after all, a university campus. I don’t just mean that it is hard for most people to study or hold serious conversation with music drowning everything out. I mean that a university setting should promote a certain gravitas, and music blaring on the campus is an assault on that gravitas. This lays me open to a charge of old fogyism, I suppose. UNM isn’t Oxford, my critics would reply, and I should join this loud and vulgar new world.** Well, I’m willing to be called an old fogy, a mossback, a fuddy-duddy. Let Techno Guy find a street corner or a city park and blare away the livelong day.

All in all, Techno Guy handled it pretty graciously, and I find it oddly charming that he saw himself as being on a cultural good will mission. Far less do I respect the jerk next to me at the red light who thoughtlessly assaults all of us around him with his hip-hop music or, worse, that bone-rattling bass sound that is now so pervasive. I often fantasize that I have a concert quality sound system crammed into the trunk of the Little Red Beast and that I can blast back with, oh, Rossini’s Stabat Mater.

But (OMG! as the kids twitter) suppose Jerko likes it? What then?

*His real name is no secret, but he quickly became known as Techno Guy, so we’ll stick with that. Same with Professor Killjoy, a name I made up.

**Even Oxford isn’t Oxford these days, I’ll wager; surely today’s Oxford is far from the romantic, sepia image that most of us have always had of it.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Whales

mcone — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 02:26:26 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, 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. What’s—as they say—with that? And if penguins insist on behaving like fish, at least they do a better job of it than the ostrich, another bird with suspect credentials and ugly into the bargain. Speaking of fish, I learned just yesterday that some of them are warm-blooded. Now that’s plain wrong, and how am I going to break that news to the goldfish in my backyard pond, gliding numbly under the ice, semi-comatose till next May? Then we have fish who, tiring of one pond, can trundle awkwardly to a neighboring one. “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly”? Don’t bet on it.

And don’t even start with me on marsupials.

But I come today to talk about whales, another major disappointment. We all know—Aristotle noticed and noted the fact over two millennia ago—that whales and other cetaceans are not fish, but mammals. They are warm-blooded, birth their calves live, and produce milk to nurse them. They even have vestigial body hair in the form of whiskers around the snout, the skeletal structure inside their (front) flippers is clearly mammalian (they lost their hind legs, and flippers, millions of years ago), and they have horizontal, not vertical, tails.

We all know that life began about a gazillion years ago in the primordial ocean, a sort of amniotic fluid vaster than we can imagine, the Great Womb of Life. We know, too, that some life forms elected to stay there, and I am sure that sharks and salmon and whatnot had their good reasons. I have no quarrel with our finny brethren. My goldfish are much more attractive gliding under water in the pond that I dug for them than stomping around in the compost pile looking for food. More power to them, I say.

But who can forget that awe-inspiring parade in your old biology textbook where the first restless marine critter seeks a better life for herself. She develops a primitive lung, her fins get more and more stumpy, and there she is, ambling awkwardly up the beach. (You go, girl!) In a trice, geologically speaking, she is transmogrified into a lizard, a dinosaur, a lemur, a proto-ape, a homo erectus, and—voila!—your grammar school teacher or Dolly Parton (and her husband, of course). We did it! We became mammals! And as mammals we voted overwhelmingly for the life terrestrial.

So why in the name of all that’s holy did the ancestors of the whales decide to do an about face and go back to the briny? Because that is precisely what they did. Purple mountain majesties and fruited plains just didn’t seem to do it for them: oh no, they decided to go back to the Great Womb. Slackers.

This has always fascinated me. Not just the arresting fact that they decided to return to the sea, but just what they looked like before they slowly became the whales that we know. Paleontologists think they have a pretty good candidate in the mesonychid, a creature that walked the earth back in the early Paleocene epoch. The mesonychid was about the size of a wolf, an ugly beast that you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night. It fed on carrion and was a proto-ungulate, which is to say its claws were slowing evolving into primitive hoofs. (Going way, way back in the family tree, zoologists think that whales and hippos are pretty closely related.) Try to imagine this animal slouching silently through the dripping ferns, always hungry. Perhaps it developed a special taste for marine carrion? Perhaps an idea finally glimmered in its brain: why feed on dead scraps when, wading farther and farther into the water, you might wind up at the main buffet? Maybe that’s how it happened. Just a thought.

And if that doesn’t awe and intrigue you, consider that this inconsiderable animal evolved into, among other species, the blue whale, the largest creature that ever lived on land or sea. How did that happen, you ask? Beats me, but I am not sure that the experts agree on how it happened either. Consider first, though, that with enough time almost anything can happen, and that we are talking about more than 70 million years. Two other things come to mind. One is the buoyancy that water, especially salt water, provides. You don’t have to depend on legs to support you, so that particular design element is now irrelevant. Secondly, of the two sub-orders of whales, those with teeth and those with sheets of baleen instead, the latter are the real giants. With their ability to sieve their way through clouds of krill and schools of herring, anchovies, sardines and other small prey, they can ingest meals of truly prodigious proportions. Again, just a thought. But with those two factors in play, the sky is probably the limit.

So there are Shea’s ruminations on whales. You’re welcome.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Security Fable

mcone — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:11:33 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, 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. The grasshopper, meanwhile, has spent those seasons roistering about—drinking, singing, dancing—and generally goofing off. Comes the winter, and the grasshopper, cold and hungry, pleads with the ant for food and shelter. The ant makes some snide remark about improvidence and slams the door in the grasshopper’s face. In some versions the grasshopper offers to (literally) sing for his supper, or otherwise entertain the ant. Too late. The ant is unmoved. It is never reported what happens to the grasshopper, but because Aesop was not Walt Disney (whose version ends in happy reconciliation), we can assume that the grasshopper will be a frozen corpse by morning. Ants practice tough love without the love. The same point, with the same righteous insect, is made in the Old Testament (Proverbs, 6:6-8): “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.” Let that be a lesson to you sluggards. You can eat, drink, and be merry and then pay a big price for your foolishness, or you can keep your nose to the grindstone but be snug (and smug) when the snow flies. What you can’t do is have it both ways.

Is the ant a cousin to Krutch’s horned toad and pack rat? Well, the parallels aren’t exact but they’re close, and certainly that silly grasshopper would not last long in the Sonoran Desert. The moral is very clear. Keep your nose to that grindstone. Sacrifice for the future. Save for a rainy day. Let old Ben Franklin be your guide (“Early to bed, early to rise….” “God helps those who help themselves.” “He that lives upon hope will die fasting.” And so on. Ad nauseam.). In more familiar terms, I suppose it would mean putting in overtime if you get the chance, having a regular savings plan and cutting up those credit cards, and not shelling out for a Caddy if a Chevy will do.

Ok, we get it.

So we should be high-fiving the ant, right? But we really don’t feel like it. Nobody can reasonably be against responsibility, against behaving like a grown-up. So why don’t we like the ant (I wonder if it would have turned out differently had Aesop chosen that more sympathetic paragon of industry, the honeybee)? You can say it’s because he is willing to let the grasshopper die rather than part with a few of his precious provisions (surely the Little Red Hen wouldn’t let her lazy friends starve!) but I think it’s more than that. The truth is that we respect the ant but don’t like him, and we like the grasshopper even if we don’t respect him. And therein lies a basic human conflict. This isn’t about security. It’s about how you spend your time on earth, time that will not come again. It is also about the body and the soul and what nourishes each.

We don’t like the ant, for one thing, because he is an insufferable prig with all of the deadly priggish virtues. He’s the kid with no friends, and for good reason. And we instinctively like the grasshopper because, although he’s no better than he should be, at least he doesn’t pretend to be. He certainly is a wastrel, if we are being honest about it, but we have this sneaky suspicion that he knows more about life than the holier-than-thou ant.

I think this is what I meant when I said that Krutch’s axiom represents not so much a material position as a moral one. And the ant is more to be pitied than censured.

It’s all about life, and who has the better one. With his store of grubs and grains, the ant will certainly have the easier time of it getting through the winter. What the fable conveniently glosses over, however, is the spring and summer: the grasshopper gloried in those times (a short life and a happy one, friends), squeezing every joy out of life, while the ant couldn’t see past the end of his groping pincers. Just so, the man who thinks of himself as possessed of a job with a good pension plan may instead be possessed by them. As Thoreau warned us, will that security-driven man discover when he comes to die that he has not lived?

The ant has his good points, even if he is a prig and a fussbudget. But so does the grasshopper. So does the grasshopper, living by his wits, taking chances so that he can own his own life. We should remember what the grasshopper teaches, too.

Moral: All work and no play make Jack a dull formicidae.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Security a la Carte

mcone — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:50:39 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, 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. It would not be the first time that words have trumped ideas. More on that later, too.

But first, let’s be crass: when things go to hell, how much money, or stuff that can be turned into money, do you need? Well, you can’t put your finger on a figure, can you? People whose wealth is off the scale—and there seem to be more and more of them these days—will probably always have a good bit of money and goods left over to survive. People at the bottom never had much anyway, but at least—cold comfort—they will not have much to miss. This is why we have people in homeless shelters, people picking through dumpsters, and so forth. (If I seem to be making light of this scandal—believe me, I’m not.) That leaves us with the great middle class. We also have to guess at the severity of the crunch, and so forth, and the short answer is that I simply don’t know, I can’t name a figure.

I like to think that Diana and I are secure. I have my UNM pension and my Medicare and Social Security; Diana is still working at a secure job with a good pension in the offing. “[We’re] all right, Jack,” as the Brits used to say. Maybe the point is that we FEEL secure, and feeling secure is the more important part of what I choose to think that Krutch was getting at. Until some complete disaster does befall us, we can afford the good middle class life: we can help out the kids if need be, we can give generously to good causes, I can zip off in the Little Red Beast for a week in SoCal on a whim, and so forth. So maybe we should look at security not as some nebulous dollar amount to serve as a desperate life ring, but as the feeling of security that you have right now, when you are not sailing as blithely along as you might have been before this present crisis, but at least chugging along. So security can be appreciated not only materially and morally, but also psychologically: if you feel secure, you are secure. When I hear the furnace come on in the night, I can smile inwardly and snuggle my face into the pillow, knowing that we can afford the gas bill. I sleep well.

Psychology cuts the other way as well. (Or shall we call this spiritually secure? Dear me, the choices are proliferating like kudzu.) What I mean is that certain people, if the crunch does come, will be ready to meet it. We all know people like this, people with cast iron hope and cheer.

Zip—there goes the job. Zap—there goes the house and savings. Joe Everyman is now in a one room apartment or even a homeless shelter. Does he spend his last few bucks on a jug of muscatel and go curl up under a bridge, totally defeated? Not on your life. He washes his last good shirt in the sink, slaps on a smile, and starts pounding the pavement looking for work. One suspects that in a previous life he was a tough little horned toad scrabbling through the sand in the shade of a saguaro. Some people have gumption and some don’t. Faced with the same adversity, Jack Everyman may well scuttle under the bridge with his jug. What makes the difference? I wish I knew. Religious faith may have something to do with it, and upbringing, but my guess is that is mostly just the temperament you were born with, something in your DNA. Think how anger affects it: Jack says, “Why me? This is so unfair!” (glug, glug); Joe says, “By Godfrey, before I die I am going to have a Mercedes again and a garage to park it in. You can bet the rent on that!”

I think that Krutch was on to something profound even if he did not realize it at the time. Thinking simply about the desert creatures, he inadvertently put his finger on the larger symbolic resonance of that phrase. And he phrased it so well that it seems to have its profundity built in. That is what made it stick in my mind for over forty years, certainly, and that is what recommended it to my better students semester after semester. The idea touches upon the material, the psychological, and the spiritual, just for openers.

As to its moral dimension, well, the ant and the grasshopper couldn’t make it this week but they promise to be here next.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Security

mcone — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:48:58 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, November 15, 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.” Over the years I have used this intellectual McNugget to feed my writing students, to try to confound them, to upset their assumptions. I have had students spend a whole semester wrestling with this counterintuitive conundrum and producing some excellent papers in the process. If I run across Krutch in the hereafter, I must stand him a goblet of nectar.

For the record, it must be pointed out that the line refers not to Everyman but to the creatures of the Sonoran Desert: the lizard and the horned toad, the packrat and the rattlesnake. From their perspective it makes perfect sense. Where the annual rainfall is less than three inches, a lizard had better learn to do without water. If daytime temperatures reach 140 degrees on the desert floor, these critters had better be willing to do their foraging at night. Because they cannot call the shots, they have learned over the centuries how to survive in one of the harshest climates imaginable. They have learned to do without, or darned close to it. Krutch is making a virtue of a necessity.

So what about us, what about Everyman? Is it better to emulate the humble monks and all those other models of poverty, or chase the material dream, to try to keep up with those ever-receding Joneses? Here in the university neighborhood is a guy who lives in a minuscule apartment on about three grand a year, does not own a car (nor will he even ride in one), is of course a raw food vegetarian who raises almost all of his food in a little garden plot, and so forth. He is always writing letters to the editor extolling this lifestyle (“crowing” might be a better word) and decrying all the waste and evil in the world. Sort of an unappealing cross between Francis of Assisi and Henry of Concord. Still, when I am writing the mortgage check or paying the car insurance premium, I find myself envying this character who travels so light.

But Sandy MacTight , as we’ll call him, has neither wife nor children. That’s his right, of course, but it does rub me the wrong way when he gets so sanctimonious. He also, by the way, lives off a trust fund. It’s a very small one, and he is to be commended for admitting to the trust fund in those letters to the paper: he is nothing if not endlessly forthcoming. Imagine St. Francis with a trust fund! Still, Sandy’s life is hardly possible for most of us, and most of us fervently wish he would give his smug sermonizing a rest.

At any rate, now is a good time to reflect on Krutch’s words. We seem to have avoided a replay of the Great Depression, but not by much. In the last eighteen months, many people have lost their homes, and a house is the biggest investment that most of us will ever make. Others lost thousands in the stock market, or in pension plans, or in schemes like Bernie Madoff’s. Unemployment is reported to be around 9% and some say that is a very rosy reading of the real figures—it might be more like 15%. If you still have a job, your hours may have been cut back, your salary reduced. Times, in short, are tough. A lot of people will be sorely tested and have a lot of time to think of having and not having. A lot of people will deeply miss the life they had. Mental health care may be one of the few growth stocks in the months to come.

Seen in this light, you could be forgiven for wondering why you got up every morning to trudge to that job that you secretly hated, why you moonlighted to make the house payments, why you socked money away every month for that college fund. Why did you build up this life brick by patient brick if somebody was going to come by with a wrecking ball and smash it all to pieces?

The stark truth is that whatever you have you can lose, which would seem to argue for the horned toad philosophy. As the old song wails, “When ya got nothin’, ya got nothin’ to lose.” Which is why the horned toad philosophy seems inherently bracing, even heroic, and the opposite position dangerous and pernicious: if you feel you need more than a loincloth and a begging bowl, you are not only setting yourself up for a hard fall but you are also courting corruption and imperiling your soul.

Krutch’s argument—can we dignify it as “Krutch’s axiom”?—is a moral position masquerading as a material one. And we’ll come back to it next week. Maybe we will invite along our friends the ant and the grasshopper.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Digital Watch

mcone — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:47:13 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, 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. I liked my old digital watch, but except for the chintzy $3.99 models I couldn’t find a new one. Almost all the watches these days are the old “analogue” jobs, the ones with the traditional clock face and hands. This seemed strange, because digital watches were very popular back when I bought my old one, and they seemed to fit right in with all our other space-age-themed stuff. In fact, I thought they would soon displace analogue watches entirely. And because they worked so dependably, it must have been people’s feelings about them that caused this reversal. I have a hunch that the watchmakers have gone back to the old style because they saw that people were becoming nostalgic, and, maybe more, because they saw that people got a bit scared of, or resentful about, the precise time-telling of digital watches.

Certainly people do crave the old sometimes. The future is exciting, but it is also unnerving, just the way any foreign country can be. (Not for naught did Shakespeare call it “that undiscovered country.”) A new thing by definition is novel, and people can take only so much novelty; they crave the old guideposts, the old anchors (and isn’t this the appeal of “retro” styling?). Breweries, for example, have realized this, so that many of them make this sort of pitch: “Old Gutbuster, our special bourbon. Granddaddy Hicks told us never to change the recipe, and we haven’t. We still age Gutbuster patiently in old oaken vats just like Granddaddy did back in 18 and 84.” “Traditional” is a favorite word of advertisers, and they often extol things made “the old fashioned way.” So perhaps the watch people sensed that the space age was exciting at Cape Canaveral but that on our wrists we wanted a connection to the familiar past.

I also suspect that people got unnerved when they saw the time as 2:43 or 5:29. Such a precise time as 2:43 seems to rub our noses in time’s importance these days. At the least it makes time seem more important than we would like to see it and reminds us that we are often slaves to time. Although our old-style watches might actually read “2:43,” we would glance at them quickly and see the time as “quarter to three.” We knew how to put time in its place, to be cavalier about it, to be master of it.

Small doses of nostalgia can be good for us. When we go into the future, as we must, it’s good to take a bit of the past with us, like a toddler’s security blanket. But it’s even more important that we put time in its place. It’s important that we don’t have these blinking gizmos on our wrists anymore, because it’s important that we don’t get so frantic about time as did that poor white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. I thought about these things as I was making my choice at my local K-Mart. Maybe I went too far, because I walked out with a wind-up pocket watch. But I can stuff the darned thing out of sight where it won’t badger me, and when I really need the past I can press this watch (that my grandfather might have owned) up against my ear and listen to it tick.

I may have saved myself.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Nightmare

mcone — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:56:36 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, 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. She maintains that her anxiety dream, which is set in her second grade classroom, is every bit as valid as mine, which is in some undergraduate student setting. And it is. I did not mean to suggest that her anxiety dreams take a backseat to mine. To my way of thinking, as long as the dream seems to reflect our feelings of inadequacy, of not being good enough, of not being up to a task, that’s a valid anxiety dream. Incidentally, I found another anxiety dream on the internet which was almost exactly like son Dan’s. This was a waitress dreaming that she was tripping, was spilling trays, was way behind on serving her tables, that the bartender was screaming at her, and so forth. Whatever floats your boat. Or your dream. It also seems a little murkier than that. I finally did survive my school experiences and went all the way to the Ph.D. I finally beat that system! So my guess is that any later anxiety—how are our kids faring in these tough economic times? Am I being attentive enough as a husband? Will the chairman let me teach my course next semester?—still uses the old undergraduate dream to express itself. One size fits all, as it were.

I don’t have what I would class as real nightmares, not since I left childhood behind. I once had a terrifying experience—I was four or five—when I was sure that a locomotive was after me, and there I was flailing my way through snow up past my knees and knowing that the big black locomotive was gaining on me. But that was in real waking life! Perhaps that shows how close little kids are to the terrors of dreams. Who needs nightmares when you can make up your own in bright daylight.

What I have now—and what I suspect most normal adults have—is what I’ll call “nightmare lite.” I do have unpleasant dreams, or unpleasant features in dreams, but they are not really terrifying. Even the acrophobia that I mentioned last week I can handle (I always manage to scoot back from the edge). Another thing I remembered, and which seems to be common, is to have someone threaten you or bully you in a dream. You know you ought to defend yourself, but two things may happen. You may be so completely cowed that you don’t fight back at all and have to live with the shame, or you do try to fight back, but it seems as if your arms are flailing through molasses and your punches land harmlessly And if you try to run away, you are running in slow motion through that molasses and getting nowhere. (How eerie that my real life struggle in the snow, when I thought that New Haven Railroad locomotive was after me, captured that same condition.)

By the way, the “mare” in “nightmare” does not refer to a female horse Rather, as my Shorter OED tells me, “nightmare” refers to “a female monster supposed to settle upon people and animals in their sleep, producing a feeling of suffocation.” “Mare,” a very old word, is itself an incubus (a male demon) or succubus (a female demon). Scary stuff, for sure.

Many artists have tried to paint nightmares. Picasso’s Guernica has the look of a nightmare, a bitter metaphor for the bombing of that Basque town in 1937. Surrealists like Dali also come to mind. But the man famous for his nightmare paintings—and famous, really, for those alone—was a Swiss (1741-1825) who was born Johann Heinrich Fussli, later changed his name to (John) Henry Fuseli, and spent most of his life in England. He was a pre-romantic, a flamboyant character who saw William Blake, the poet and mystic, as his soulmate. Here are two versions of the painting, the first circa 1782, the second from 1790/91. It is the second that I was shown in an art history course and that has stayed in my mind to this day. Did Fuseli assume that “mare” meant female horse? I don’t know, but the most striking feature for me has always been that horse with the preternaturally luminous eyes that is looking on. Is it frightened? Fascinated? Is it a conspirator in the dream? And there you see the “mare,” surely an incubus in this case, sitting on that curvaceous woman’s chest and grinning evilly (incubi were rumored to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women).

Sweet dreams, one and all.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Dream On

mcone — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:44:12 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, 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. This time the nasty was a term paper that I had completely spaced out and that was due the next day. Sometimes it is a course I had signed up for and completely forgot about and the semester is almost over. Sometimes I can’t find the classroom. Sometimes I am naked into the bargain.

I remarked on the fact that we all seem to have this same anxiety movie that we play in our sleep: school setting, some obligation that we have spaced out, etc. Dan replied that that simply wasn’t true. He never cottoned to college: instead, he got a job bussing tables in high school, went on to become a server and then a waiter, and has been a bartender for the last several years. HIS anxiety dream has him assigned the usual complement of tables to wait on. But then suddenly it is not, say, ten tables, but thirty tables, spread over three floors of this crazy restaurant! And, yes, sometimes he’s naked.

Of course this makes perfect sense, and I felt rather chagrined to have been so parochial. Maybe I don’t hang out with the wrong crowd, but clearly I hang out with the same crowd, of academics and other professional types. I asked the Long-Suffering Diana what her anxiety dream is. It has to do not with her undergraduate days but with her current life as a second grade teacher. Sally admitted to the undergraduate dream but added that she too has anxiety dreams set in her past as a professor. If you check anxiety dreams on the internet, however, you will find, over and over, people citing the “undergraduate” dream that I always have. Exactly the same dream, I daresay.

My guess is that anxiety dreams grow from seeds planted when we were at our most vulnerable, when we were desperately trying to prove ourselves and find our lifelong identities. And who is more desperately vulnerable than a student, with grades hanging over his head and with—he thinks—all the world’s eyes and expectations focused on him? Dan went to a different “school,” but his dream makes perfect sense in that context. This is why I am a bit puzzled by Diana’s and Sally’s extensions of it. I never have that teaching anxiety dream. Does that mean that I am more secure as a teacher? I doubt it. A puzzle, surely. But a logical extension of one’s school days.

And naked. Ah, yes, naked. Books say it reflects embarrassments in our past (like looking stupid in front of the whole class? like being a totally bungling waiter?), but you would think we would get used to it by now (“You lookin’ at me?” says [a naked] Travis Bickel). In my dreams I often have the false comfort of an undershirt. False comfort because when I pull it down to cover my privates, up it goes in the back to bare my fanny. And of course vise versa. Fiendish. Come to that, why don’t we recognize our anxiety dreams after all these years? Why don’t we say, “Hello, old friend, shall we just entertain each other until the alarm goes off?” Beats me. I do know that I quite often AM aware that I am dreaming.

I remember my dreams, often (and) vividly. I had a loosely connected and mundane dream last night. I give my unconscious a C+ for it. There was one feature of it worth noting, however. I don’t think I have had a true nightmare since I was a kid. I mean the kind where the monster under the bed gets loose and chases you to hell and gone, the kind where your only recourse is to awaken. (Whoever said “Make me a child again just for tonight” hadn’t thought things through.). The one feature that still sometimes crops up in my dreams is acrophobia. In waking life I have a decent respect for heights, but they don’t terrify me. In a dream, however, any precipice will send me scuttling back from the edge on my belly like a crab, trembling.

Anxiety dreams for testing, nightmares for terrifying. So aren’t there sometimes good dreams? Of course there are. Dreams of flying are often cited (do birds dream? have they any need to?). I have had those dreams. But then I had a dream maybe twenty years ago that will always be with me, and not with me. The dreamscape was a mountain of sorts, a switchback road climbing it. Near the top were trees and a tarn as blue as the cerulean sky above. Reading over that description, I realize that it seems as schlocky as the paintings in many a motel room. And yet…and yet a peace washed over me that stopped up my breath and started my tears.

Ever since, I have tried and tried and failed and failed to magic back that dream.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Lemonade

mcone — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 00:39:17 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, October 18, 2009

(Another vintage essay, friends [1990?], but such car rants are, I hope, timeless.)

Our family car is a 1988 Chevy Astrovan. I drive it as seldom as possible, not because it is a truly terrible machine but because certain defects that it does have can ruin my day if I start to dwell on them. The coachwork, in particular, is a disgrace, the ultimate in cheap plastic and bad fasteners. Handles snap off and panels come loose. The plastic itself cracks. For some reason the electric plug for the remote door lock won’t stay connected. The sliding door is an expensive disaster that strikes regularly. Lately, as if the car were laughing at me, the wipers will sometimes make one swipe across the windshield for no reason at all. Like any engaged car owner, I often regale my friends with these woes.

On the other hand, I can’t recall ever singing the car’s praises, and there is much to praise. It is a roomy and comfortable car for cross-country travel. The view it provides for the driver—for the passengers, too—is superb. Most of the accessories have never failed. Finally, there is the drive train. Not so long ago, an owner would have considered himself lucky to get a hundred thousand miles out of a car. However, I have every reason to believe that this Chevy engine and transmission will last at least twice that long. My gratitude should smother my petty irritation. I should remember the Dodge Aries that the Astro replaced and get down on my knees. I should be grateful and shut up.

But I won’t, and statistics suggest that my behavior is typical. Why are we so eager to complain and so stingy with our praise? Probably there are a number of reasons. For one thing, bad stories, like any bad news, somehow are just more engrossing. If someone says his car is comfortable or reliable or especially safe, we smile and try to stifle a yawn, as if the neighborhood gossip has just told us a long story about a happy marriage. But I think the basic reason for this phenomenon is a very simple, primitive one: we want revenge.

We have been wronged, violated, financially ravished, and we will move heaven and earth to see that someone is punished for it. We are out for blood!

This reaction reveals a lack of perspective and humility that should embarrass us. Trouble with our cars we take as a personal affront, and yet the good things about our cars—the long-lasting engines, the general reliability, the efficient service from the dealer—we take as only our due. We deserve perfection, and anything short of that is an insult to the natural order of things, proof that the world is morally out of whack. Who do we think we are? Nobility, evidently; gods, more like. And nothing will shut us up until no one buys a Chevy Astro ever again and the dealership is razed and the land it stood on becomes a blasted ground zero on which—like salt-sown Carthage—not even weeds will ever grow. Only that will restore the moral balance of the universe. Only that will teach them not to mess with us!

And sometimes we do get satisfaction. A local automobile dealer from whom we bought our first new car and whose idea of customer satisfaction was a cruel and notorious joke was finally, rightfully, driven out of business some years ago. Yet I still buttonhole strangers on the street, my eyes glittering, and tell them the more outrageous stories about that mercantile miscreant so that he will never return, never again rise to visit evil upon the world.

This is the kind of moral firepower that we should reserve for world hunger or cancer or child abuse. Perhaps it is only in a country where people can afford to spend many thousands of dollars on an automobile that they can also afford to drive themselves crazy with misplaced outrage.

The Astro, the Aries, and our first Honda (compromised at the factory and made steadily worse by the dealer) are distant memories today. Readers of this cyberspace know that I now drive—and sing the praises of—the Little Red Beast, my ’99 Mazda Miata. Our family car is a ’98 Honda CR-V, a rock-solid, if boring, appliance of a car. Over the years both of them have held up so solidly that only the most neurotic nit-picker could find a nit to pick. Great cars, both. So I should be happy, right? Well, I guess I am. And it is churlish of me, I know, to lament the fact that I have no stories to tell, anecdotes to make my blood boil. But still…still…

Meet Your Macinstructor

Talknet

mcone — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:26:20 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, October 11, 2009

(This is an oldie, folks, but I hope it is still a goodie.)

On a local radio station these nights, a program called Talknet encourages troubled folks nationwide to call in for advice on legal and financial matters. It’s a good show: the pace is brisk; the host is knowledgeable and personable. What is especially heartening, though, is the inference one might draw from these proceedings, which is that life is for the tough-minded, those who can weigh their options and ACT. In these parlous, muddled times, this ethos deserves to thrive. Thus inspired, and chagrined over patchy success in teaching writing year after year, I was moved to act. Well, “act” is a bit strong, but I did slip into the following reverie.

Me: Hi, Council Bluffs, you’re on Talknet.

Caller: Hi, Jerry, this is Bill.

: Hi, Bill.

: And I really think you’ve got a super show.

: Kind of you to say so. What’s your problem, Bill?

: Well, Jerry, my grandfather died last year and left me this semicolon.

: Lucky fellow.

: Granddad?

: Well, I hope Granddad has gone to a better place, but I mean you, Bill. Not many guys out there luck into free semicolons. How old are you?

: Twenty-three. Uh, so anyway, uh, I was wondering if maybe I should just keep it as a collector’s item—you know, like an investment—or what are the rules if I use it? I mean, I don’t want to sound like a klutz.

: Of course you don’t. But let’s get a few more facts here. What do you do for a living?

: I’m a carpenter, plumber—sort of a general handyman.

: So you don’t write for a living, obviously. Do you write much? Do you like to write?

: Well, no, not a whole lot. But I never had a semicolon before. I was thinking maybe I could be a writer.

: Now hold on a minute, Bill. Sure, it’s a temptation, this semicolon. But it’s also a darn tricky thing and I can’t say what’ll happen to you if you go off half-cocked to be a writer. It’s not only risky, but a writer needs a lot of capital, seed money so to speak: commas, apostrophes, parentheses. You don’t want to get too big too fast, eh?

: Right, ok. So maybe just using it, you know, for fun?

: Well, “fun” is a tricky word, Bill, and I have to tell you right off the bat that you could be in big trouble.

: Trouble?

: Trouble. Some states have laws against it. I don’t know about Iowa, but in many states you have to be thirty before you can use a semicolon. You could be looking at a year in the slammer and a ten thousand dollar fine.

: Oh, wow.

: “Oh, wow” is right, so check with a lawyer first. Or write the Iowa Attorney General; only cost you a stamp, which is cheap at the price.

: Gee, thanks, Jerry.

: No charge, Bill. Now: assuming you can use it, how do you use it? You stick that puppy right between two independent clauses that are close in their content, like “Albany is the capital of New York—semicolon—Springfield is the capital of Illinois.” Or…

: Uh…

: Wait a minute, now—you really want to up the ante, you use it between clauses that are dramatically contrasting: “Harry dreamed of owning a Porsche—semicolon—he couldn’t even make the payments on a moped.” There are other uses, but let’s stick to those, ok?

: Ok. I think I’ve got that. Maybe I could do that.

: “Maybe” may not be good enough, Bill. Let’s see what we’ve got here, ok? We’ve got this twenty-three-year-old guy—a fine guy, I’m sure—who has a serious choice to make. Remember, we’re not talking commas here—we’re talking big league punctuation. You sock that semicolon away in a drawer, show it to friends once in a while: basically you sit on it. I figure that your friends’ estimation of you goes up 6% or 7% a year. Solid. No fluctuation, no risk. Sure it’s slow, but it’s solid, right? You can bank on it. Now: you use it in a sentence seven, eight times a year. Big appreciation, right? WRONG! First off, you’ve got the real risk of making a mistake and losing your shirt—everything, zilch, zero. Ok, but suppose you don’t; suppose people are somewhat impressed, which is, after all, what we’re after. Notice I said “somewhat.” Sure, you might make a killing, but suppose it’s only “somewhat.” You’ve got wear and tear—depreciation—on that semicolon. And then you’ve got the brain-breaking work of making up sentences for the thing. How much is your time and sanity worth? Friend of mine practically mortgaged his soul for a colon he got at a garage sale. Thought it was a real steal and it almost wrecked his life and his marriage. So think hard about that.

: So, uh, what are you saying, Jerry?

: I’m saying, Bill, that you can go for the slow but solid, or hold your breath and go for the big one. I’ve told you what I know. No, wait, I haven’t—not everything. When you fly around the country like I do, you sense drifts, changes, trends. Maybe it’s these times we live in: tough times, people jittery. Whatever it is, I don’t think people go for semicolons these day, not like you’d think. They are about as “now” as Granddad’s buggy whip. Dashes are the big ticket now and maybe—maybe—exclamation points. So my advice to you, my young friend, is not to beat your brains out. It just doesn’t figure, not on MY pocket calculator. Sit on it, Bill.

: Well, ok, I guess I’ll go along with that.

: You do that, Bill. And good luck, tiger. Hoo, boy. Hey, what a night. This is Jerry Shea on Talknet. We’re here; it makes our night when you’re here. Keep in touch. But you know what? Don’t call—write. It’s good practice.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Writing Right

mcone — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:38:56 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, October 4, 2009

There is a wonderful scene in Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run where the hopelessly inept Virgil Starkwell tries to rob a bank. He sidles up to the teller’s window and slides a note across. The note reads, “Give me all the money. I’ve got a gun.” Or so he thinks it reads. The teller studies the note, looks at him quizzically, and says, “You’ve got a gum?”

“No,” Virgil hisses, “I’ve got a gun…a gun!”

“No,” says the teller patiently, “Look right here: It says, ‘I’ve got a gum.’”

Virgil protests, vehemently but fruitlessly. By now a crowd of customers and tellers has gathered and they are all passing the note around and weighing in. The consensus is overwhelming for “gum,” so Virgil just slinks off, foiled again.

Poor fellow should have applied himself more when they were teaching the Palmer Method.

Turning from the hilarious to the tragic: yes, doctors have been successfully prosecuted for sloppy prescription writing. In a Texas case, both the doctor and the pharmacist were fined almost a quarter million dollars each because the doctor’s handwriting was so bad that the pharmacist—who, it was held, should have double-checked with the doctor—dispensed the wrong drug. This justice was small comfort to the patient, who had died as a result.

Yes, we are back to handwriting issues, as promised last week. For much of the information in this wonk (including that Texas anecdote) I am indebted to Kitty Burns Florey and her very entertaining and informative book, Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. Florey traces the history of handwriting (interspersed with her own Palmer memories) all the way from the stylus and the clay tablet to the word processor, handwriting’s nemesis. She throws in a history of writing implements (the quill, the ballpoint, the pencil, some classic fountain pens), the pseudo-science of graphology (what your handwriting reveals about you), calligraphy, and more. I recommend the book (just as I recommend her earlier work, Sister Bernadette’s Barking Dog, a memoir and history of the Reed-Kellogg diagramming system that we all suffered under). Does Florey lament the demise of cursive writing? Well, yes and no, as we shall see.

First of all, I think no one would deny that the computer is here to stay and that we should deal constructively with it. We should be teaching our kids typing, or “keyboarding” (they can handle the other computer stuff better than we can). The real question is whether we should consign good handwriting and its instruction to the infamous ash heap of history. What is the real value of clear and even elegant handwriting, that we should fight to save it?

Let’s put this on a handwriting continuum that runs from the absolutely impenetrable to the truly handsome. Clearly (pun intended), if your cursive chicken scratching would exhaust the patience of a saint, you have done no one, yourself included, any good. You may as well give up and practice your printing. (Incidentally, my guess that about half of those Advanced Placement students used printing rather than cursive was way off: studies show that only about fifteen percent of those students use cursive anymore.) To the other end, truly handsome writing is something that we should all strive for, I suppose, although most of us will never come close to achieving it. (Note that I said “truly handsome” rather than “calligraphic.” I am coming to see calligraphy as another thing entirely, a thing that makes beautiful designs rather than shaping the letters that make up the words that make up the sentences that communicate the ideas to us. Handwriting is a useful communication skill; calligraphy is an art, or at least a craft. They both have their virtues, but we shouldn’t confuse the two.)

The opposite of clear and even handsome handwriting—the absolutely impenetrable described above—is called cacography. What is surprising is that for a couple of centuries conspicuous cacography was the norm among the upper classes. To write badly, sloppily, meant that you had better things to do with your time and talents. Good handwriting, in other words, was for the effete, those with no really significant talents, those with time to waste. I’m sure this is not the first instance of wrong-headed vanity in the species, nor will it be the last. Perhaps it accounts, too, for the fact that most people’s signatures—in a small sampling I took—are absolutely indecipherable, even when their handwriting usually (if barely) passes muster. And something else about one’s signature. My students agreed that most of us write our signatures in a different fashion from our everyday writing. Mine, for instance, starts with a very bold and swooping J and the three e’s in my name are not the standard Palmer minuscule but rather the majuscule shrunk down. And the “S” looks very much like a dollar sign (a forlorn hope for riches?). But the final “hea” is a disaster, a headlong flight to be done with the whole thing, ending in an angry and impatient flip.

What to make of all this? I think we know deep down that our handwriting is a reflection of us (witness those signatures, for starters)—you needn’t be a graphologist to see that, nor need you subscribe to some of their questionable theories. And I would hope that conscious cacography has gone out of fashion. Shouldn’t we see bad handwriting in the same light as we see bad spelling or bad grammar? We all have to write in longhand sometimes and it behooves us to do as decent a job of it as we can, for our own satisfaction and for the sake of our readers. Here Florey has a suggestion for us. In the last few decades, rather than the Palmer cursive that left generations cursing, there has been resurgent interest in Italic writing, a hybrid of printing and cursive writing* that was devised in 16th century Italy and is just as beautiful today. And, says Florey, it is surprisingly easy to learn.

But whatever you do, whatever you choose, do try to work on that awful scrawl you have been perpetrating. Start now, before you try to pull off that next bank job.

*In the last few decades, the big idea among educators is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to teach first graders to print and, when they get to third grade, try to teach them a quite different style of writing, a wholly different kinetic challenge. Why not find something—Italic, D’Nealian, whatever—that is a natural outgrowth of printing. Mature printing, if you will.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Cursive Writing

mcone — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:13:46 +0000

Jerome Shea
Sunday, September 27, 2009

I suppose because I am a teacher, a friend sent me an article last week which noted the decline of cursive writing practice in our schools (“Penmanship Losing to Computers”). Had I noticed a change over the years? My first response was that I hardly ever see my students’ handwriting, cursive or otherwise: all the work that I grade, they do on computers (and if someone used a “cursive” font, I’m afraid the irony would be wasted on me: don’t get cute, I’d say). Then I remembered that I am treated to page after page of handwriting every year, when I grade those Advanced Placement essays. Most I can decipher, though some scrawl really tries my patience. More on that later.

(Just to be clear, “cursive” writing, as opposed to printing, is the kind where you connect the letters in your words, and most of the letters have shapes different from those of printed letters. One supposed virtue is speed: you go faster if you don’t have to lift your pen at every letter, “cursive” coming from the Latin verb meaning “to run”). Typically, little kids first learn to print and then, in what some see as a rite of passage, a rite that the Long-suffering Diana begins with her second graders, they start to learn cursive. In bygone days, some schools awarded fountain pens to those who finally mastered the art of handwriting. That must have been a proud day, a red letter day.

I can write in cursive (I almost never print) though it is pretty much limited to to-do and grocery lists, comments on student papers, and my notes on the blackboard. My students gave me a B+ for legibility when I asked to be graded the other morning. My “hand,” as we used to say, is serviceable but hardly elegant. I learned cursive under the stern gaze of the good nuns back at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and what they used was the Palmer Method. Partners in crime, I’d say. I still remember the numbing drills, the circles and the push-pulls. I remember that we were encouraged to use the whole forearm, something that still strikes me as deeply perverse. Because of Mr. Palmer’s method, I thought cursive writing was so called because it involved profanity. Prophetically, all the freshmen in my prep school had to take typing. Brother Michael. First period. Every day. At LaSalle, all papers had to be typed. We never looked back.

Of course, the villain in the piece is the computer. It’s the old story of changing technology. We went from sticks scratching in the dirt to quill pens to Bics to typewriters and finally to the computer and all the wonderful software that goes with it. Most teachers (there are heroic hold-outs) argue that with only so many hours in the day, teaching computer skills (keyboarding, if nothing else) deserves the time that used to be given over to handwriting instruction and practice. Hard to argue with that, really.

I don’t know how I feel about the issue; maybe I’m writing this wonk to find out. I called on my trusty sounding board, Judy and Joe, for their views. They both feel somewhat more strongly about it than I do. Judy points out that kids don’t pass notes in class anymore…they just text! And she adds (a tad primly), “My handwriting AND signature are totally legible.” Joe weighs in with his signature eloquence, “…does anyone really know how direct the link is between thought and handwriting? Think of all the billions of letters, diaries, memoirs, etc. that came from the authors’ brains through the nerves of the right or left hand to paper.” And speaking of letters, i.e., the world of letters, we have celebrated examples of writers who absolutely refuse to create with a typewriter or computer, others who abjure the computer but who will defend their old Smith Coronas (manual, of course) to the bitter end. Clearly these are matters of magic to them: to compose on a Mac (as I am doing right now) is to insult the Muse and send her packing. Right. Whatever.

Back to the Advanced Placement kids. My recollection is that a good many of them print. I won’t hazard a percentage but it might be almost half. Perhaps they were never taught cursive, though frankly I doubt that. More likely some teacher finally said, “Chuck, your handwriting is so atrocious that I can hardly puzzle it out (and you are going to be blown out of the water when you take your SATs and your APs). From this day forward, I want you to print your stuff.” I suspect, too that these kids are very proficient at printing and can do it almost as fast as their classmates can write cursive. But I do get that atrocious handwriting from time to time. If it is absolutely illegible to you, you pass it up the line to the table leader (which—yikes!—will be me next June). I think of it as the equivalent of mumbling, (another infuriating habit) and if you have been reading for three hours without a break it is hard not to get furious at the kid, as if he were poking you in the eye with a blunt stick just to see your reaction. So, yes, truly bad handwriting can hurt you, hurt your chances. But here is an irony that I have observed, and I come back to Joe’s musings on the relationship to thought and handwriting. In my experience, the very best AP writers, the really inventive, witty ones with striking vocabularies and so forth, do not have the best handwriting. It is legible, of course, but hardly calligraphic. On the other hard, the aggressively beautiful handwriting (curlicues, circles dotting the i’s—you can spot it a mile away) quite often barely conceals vapid and vacuous thought.

I think we need to come back to this next week. Stay tuned.

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