Weekend Wonk

Swamp Cooler

mcone — Sun, 20 May 2012 18:07:43 +0000

If you are reading this wonk in my neck of the woods, the American Southwest, you can stop right now and go back to Facebook. In fact, wherever the climate is very hot and very dry you, too, can probably skip it, at least if the term “swamp cooler” or “evaporative cooler” is familiar to you. But a swamp cooler was new to me when I came here many years ago* and it underscored the fact that I wasn’t in Kansas (well, Pennsylvania) anymore, Toto. It was, really, part of the exotic allure, the distinction of this new place, a detail that I could casually drop into letters back East, like roadrunners or green chile or mescal. Ever since then, like all of my neighbors, I have had a love/hate relationship with the box on the roof.

A swamp cooler is a wonderfully simple device. It consists of a big metal box
with three, or sometimes four, louvered side panels. These panels you line with pads that allow water, in a sump at the bottom, to flow down them, saturate them, when a pump shoots that water up to the top of the panels. Inside the box is what I call a squirrel cage fan, a cylindrical fan that is really more like a hamster’s wheel. This fan draws in the outside air, newly moistened and cool, and shoots it down into the house through the air ducts. Wonderful, eh?

In many ways, swamp coolers certainly are. For one thing, they cost much less than comparable refrigerated air systems. And they use a lot less electricity—you are not running a big compressor, just a belt-driven fan with maybe a ¾ horse electric motor and a simple water pump. That is much cheaper than turning your house into a 2000-square-foot refrigerator. Another thing about a swamp cooler is that it puts moisture into the air in the house, which is a wonderful thing where the air is parched and so are you. That is also, of course, why you will not find swamp coolers in the Midwest, the East, or the South, where to add even more moisture to that muggy air would be intolerable. That saving moisture is also why the longsuffering Diana insists on evaporative air despite its drawbacks (which we’ll get to). Refrigerated air conditioners suck the moisture out. In this desert, we need all the moisture we can get, to give our lungs and our skin a break.

So you are wondering what the downside is. Well, for one thing, with a swamp cooler you have to leave a couple of windows cracked open to let the air flow through the house and out. I never considered this a big deal, especially if you have a couple of patrolling Rottweilers to discourage unwanted visitors. Or you can put bars on the windows as many of my neighbors do, an idea that never appealed to me.

Anyway, that’s the least of the problems. For one thing, swamp coolers are incredibly dirty. We are talking rust. We are talking build-up of mineral scale. We are talking the flaking off of whatever they spray on the inside, some black stuff that comes off in big chunks over the years. And a vigorous wire brushing never seems to catch it all at the source. We Sheas have a ritual in the spring. Diana will turn the swamp cooler on high blower and I will station myself below the vents with the vacuum cleaner to try to collect as much blown-out crap as I can. After a half hour of this, working every vent with the Hoover, we can run the cooler on low for the rest of the season with only the occasional big black flake floating down to the living room rug to fascinate the cats.

But there is more. My impression is that refrigerated air needs very little upkeep, or if it does, you have to get a pro to do it. But the swamp cooler, which has to be mothballed every fall and put back in service every spring, has become a guy thing, like changing your own oil or mowing the lawn. There are certain things you do to prove that you can still do them. (Yes, mortality, I’m lookin’ at you!) To rub salt in this wound, Diana now says that she doesn’t want me up on the roof if she’s not home, explaining that I would be in no shape to dial 911 if, shaky old gent, I should fall off the roof. (I love you too, dear.)

Anyway, up a shaky ladder to the roof you go. And you always, always, forget something. You take the custom covers off but forget the next step, where you need the vise grips. Down you go; up you go. You drop the tiny brass fittings and they roll off the roof. And everything leaks. Things spurt and squirt. Or a fitting will finally produce a drip so subtle that you cannot even see where the leak is. Get a better wrench. A 9/16th this time. Get some plumber’s putty. Down you go; up you go. To the hardware store you go. There seems no end to this.

There is an end, of course, and you are grateful for it, and the swamp cooler will rattle and hum and squeak for another summer. But for the life of you, you can’t imagine how romanced you once were by this misbegotten device.

*The “floor furnace” was new to me, too, and I will leave the details to your imagining. A hint: it quickly cured me of stumbling around barefoot in the dark on winter nights.

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.

L’envoi, EMD

mcone — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:40:53 +0000

Maybe I'm just a wuss after all. After all, I survived EMD as did so many others who were not physically crippled or emotionally scarred by the experience. And it wasn't the physical labor, the "hoppin' like a bunny," that made the pre-load such hell. In fact, I regret now that I didn't take up serious running until ten years later. With the legs that EMD gave me, I'll bet I could have run a marathon in under three hours! When I got home in the small hours, my legs used to tingle wonderfully and I weighed 130 pounds, tops.

It wasn't physical. It was psychological, the idea that a machine could make me run like a crazed rabbit. The idea that a machine could make a fool of me. The idea that a machine, something with no soul, could so enrage me. I don't work fast and I get flustered easily. That's just who I am and I can't change that. If you want "grace under pressure," I'm not your guy. "Don’t get mad, get even" is excellent advice, but I got only the first part, getting mad.

Anyway, dear EMD, here is that doggerel that I wrote so many years ago. I think maybe I have made my peace with you. Let’s hope so.

Easy Money (or, How I found EMD and True Happiness)

Oh, I've been up and I've been down,
But now my life is sunny:
Work all night at EMD,
Scarf up that easy money.

(refrain [after each verse])
Easy money,
Hoppin' like a bunny,
Laughin' all the time.
Son: spend yer life at EMD
Where workin' is a crime.

Mary Lou, with eyes so blue, says,
"Wanna be my honey?
Jess truck on down to EMD,
'n git some easy money."

Cousin Zeke, the hippie freak, says,
"Straight'n out yer head.
Do yer thing at EMD—
Groove on that easy bread."

Uncle Dwight, the socialite, says,
"Life can be a bash!
Paint the town in trucks of brown,
Rake in that casual cash!"

We can make the whole world free,
The Reds will lose their scruples,
When all them happy Moscovites
Grab up them relaxed ruples.

God made the world in just six days
And then when He was done He
Said, "One sole pleasure left to man:
That EMD easy money."

Grandpa Jasper went to heaven,
Saint Peter thought it funny.
Said, "Ain’t no joy up here for you,
After all that easy money."

The pre-load is a jolly crew
Made up of red-eyed scholars
Who sit around till sundown
To court them darlin’ dollars.

There'll come a day (though far away)
When my soul drops to my boot,
Jest lay me on the belt and watch me smile
When I think of all that loot!

The widder Shea can have her day
And play at roulette and rummy.
Go to Vegas and play away
All that easy money.

Which is fine with me, for don’t you see
That the world’s delights do fail
Against the fun of EMD—
Takin' money home in a pail!

Meet Your Macinstructor

Hoppin’ Like a Bunny

mcone — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 18:00:02 +0000

One problem that I had with the job at EMD—or, rather, that the job had with me—was that, at 33, I was about ten years older than the other guys. Troublemaker. Malcontent. I was bad news in the same way that a 33-year-old draftee would be bad news in the army even if he was as fit as a twenty-something. A twenty-year-old is gung-ho and malleable; a thirty-year-old is just a tad cynical, a pain in the ass. That was me.

The foreman, the guy who had to deal with my attitude, was ten years younger than I but only in years. Myrrl McBride was a quiet guy who never lost his cool or his temper and who worked just as hard as we poor grunts. A grin was a display of deep emotion for Myrrl McBride. I liked him right off the bat, and he is still a friend these many years later. Whenever I was on the verge of throwing a fit or a tire iron, Myrrl would croon, "Easy money, boys, easy money! Like pickin' it right up off the ground!" My gorge would rise but then I would realize that he had skillfully defused my rage. "Shit," I’d mumble, and grin myself. This occasioned a bitter little ditty that I penned after a particularly bad night. I remember the refrain:

Easy money,
Hoppin’ like a bunny,
Laughin’ all the time.
Son: spend yer life at EMD,
Where workin' is a crime!

I emailed Myrrl the other day (he lives in North Carolina now), and he said that he had just stumbled upon "Easy Money," the whole opus. Must be fate. He is sending it to me. It is all yellowed, he says, like any sacred text, And he says that "easy money" was my phrase, not his. He also—bless him—implies that I was some sort of father figure for the pre-loaders and that my "wit and sense of humor" worked wonders for the crew’s morale.

Frightening, memory loss in one so young.

One of the perks of the job, if you want to call it that, was the quarterly EMD newsletter, which, I suppose, was meant to remind us that we were a family. (The truism that you can’t pick your family springs to mind.) Most of the news was of no great import ("EMD Gaining Foothold in Nepal!"), at least not to me. But then there were the human interest stories. The EMD driver who rescued the kitten up a tree, the one who realized that a woman was going into labor and stayed with her, reassured her, until the paramedics arrived. But sometimes they took a more heroic, albeit darker, tone. A typical account might be of an EMD driver (pre-loaders never got to be heroes and maybe I unconsciously resented that) who smelled smoke in a house he was delivering to. He pounded on the door frantically but to no avail. So he kicked it in and, in the back, through a wall of flame, saw a mother and child (and kitten?) overcome by the smoke. Heedless of his own safety, he raced right through the flames and dragged the victims to the safety of the back yard. Wow. Makes you want to cheer, right? But then came the (sucker)punch line, the real point of the story. With second degree burns on his arms and face, he politely refused the paramedics’ help AND FINISHED HIS ROUTE! I would throw the newsletter down and stomp on it while screaming at Diana, "These people are sick! SICK! Second degree burns and the only frigging thing that matters to EMD is.....!" Well, you can picture me spluttering, a man unmanned.

One summer evening we had a small diversion before the shift. A delivery truck had been wreckered down from Taos. Somehow the driver had lost control on a mountain road and rolled this little Ford Econoline. There it—or what was left of it—was, behind the warehouse, and we were all gawking at it. (I assume that the driver finished his route on foot, hopping along while dragging his broken leg behind.) I noticed right off that any telltale corporate lettering or logo had been spray-painted over, and not very expertly at that.

"Myrrl," I said, "What the hell is that all about?" He explained that any area manager had a standard kit in the trunk of his company car, and the most important item in the kit was a spray can of that trademark brown paint (oops!). The very first thing any manager did was to spray over all incriminating signage.

"But Myrrl, that’s so transparently silly!"

"Of course it is," he replied with a grin, "But the ritual must be honored: EMD drivers, you see, never have accidents."

Such, such were the days. Or, rather, the nights.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Easy Money

mcone — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 00:29:48 +0000

I have had the usual run of jobs to support my real life. I have driven tractors, forklifts, and trucks—dump trucks, delivery trucks, garbage trucks. I have done farm work and construction work and warehouse work. I’m not averse to physical labor, but when my grown-up job, teaching, finally became my career, I welcomed that development. What I’m writing about here is the worst job I ever had, the job from hell.

You are probably imagining stoop labor, something like that. Picking chile, row upon row in the blistering sun. Yes, that would be the absolute pits. The point is moot, however, because before the sun reached its zenith that first day, I’d have quit or died. But on with the story.

In the early ‘70s, having finished my coursework for the PhD, I girded my loins to attack the dissertation,* probably a year’s worth of research and writing. I was working for a local delivery outfit at the time and Diana was working for a title company. I did not want Diana to be our sole support, so I looked around and found a job which was half-time but paid twice as much as MPX was paying me. Five bucks an hour! That was serious money in Albuquerque in 1974. This was a union job (Teamsters) with a worldwide delivery service that is familiar to you all. But because I so loathed the job, perhaps an alias is in order. Let’s call it EMD for “Easy Money Delivery.”

It was night work, ten to two, or sometimes three, in the morning, so I could be up by noon every day and get in some serious writing. I never did get used to working nights, but that was the least of it.

I was what they called a pre-loader, one of the guys loading the local delivery trucks for the next day. There were about a dozen of us, each responsible for two trucks. The trailer that had come in from Denver or Phoenix or wherever would be backed up to the big door that opened onto the conveyor belt. The local trucks, inside the warehouse, would be backed up to the belt like piglets on a sow. I was responsible for two neighboring areas in the southeastern part of the city. The pre-loader would stand poised—I think “braced” is a better word—at the back of his two trucks, waiting for the packages to come down the belt. Above his head, for each truck, was a list/chart of the streets according to the preset route the driver took every day. The pre-loader would grab whatever package was addressed to his areas—remember, two trucks, not just one—scrawl a number on it with crayon, run into the appropriate truck and stash it where the number indicated on the shelves that lined the cargo area. If he had not screwed up—and if he had, he’d hear about it—the driver would not have to search for his deliveries at all. They would be lined up in order, down one side of the cargo box and up the other. EMD was nothing if not efficient.

At ten on the dot somebody would hit a switch somewhere and the belt would rumble to life and not stop until the night’s work was done. (I think it was stopped once so we could pull a guy’s foot out of the mechanism; he was reprimanded and hobbled home in disgrace.) If you are thinking of the classic scenes in Modern Times or of Lucy and Ethel trying to keep up with an assembly line, you have the idea. But it was worse. Much worse.

Here you are and the belt is rolling inexorably on. You are grabbing packages, horsing them around to see which ones are yours and you see one and then another, one for each truck and you pull them both off the belt, look up, scrawl the right code number on the one and run it into the truck but meanwhile not only is the other package not yet shelved but the belt is still moving and more packages for your area are scooting by and you lunge at one that is inches from being out of your reach and maybe the guy next to you down the line has spotted a couple of yours and tossed them back to you...or at you (thanks). Remember, the belt never stops. And you are always running, you never stop running in and out of those trucks. Within 20 minutes on a busy night you will have packages stacked up around you like some humiliating rampart, and you will never catch up until they shut off that damned belt at two in the morning. You just pray that you don’t lose even more ground, that you are not buried behind your rampart, never to be seen again.

The union contract stated that they could work you an extra hour if need be, but if it went a minute over five hours they had to pay you for eight. In my fourteen months at EMD, I think that management caved just twice (as you’ve guessed, it was during the Christmas rush). And if the foreman was getting nervous about that deadline, there was a very simple remedy.

Speed up the belt.

I’m sorry. The memories are getting just too vivid. See you back here next week and we’ll put paid to this thing.

*Sherwood Anderson, Charles Burchfield, and the American Small Town (UNM, 1975) in case you missed it the first time.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Absolutely!

mcone — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 23:46:40 +0000

Is your world drab and drear, Bunky? Do people snicker when you slink into a room? Has your love life been on hold since the Clinton administration? Well, you don’t have to be that guy! Doctor Shea is here with a cure, my man! With Dr. Shea’s help, the sun will break through, men will respect and envy you, and the women...oo la la!

Whence comes this salvation, you wonder? Two words: absolute phrase!

Spicing your conversation with absolute phrases will tell those around you that you are a sophisticate, a man of the world, the essence of debonair. You will move in better circles, be invited to parties where they serve caviar and Chateau Lafitte. (No more boxed Chardonnay and cheese doodles for you, Bunky!)

Such at least is how I try to cajole my prose style students. That’s my pitch to get them comfortable using absolute phrases. If any do go on to fortune and fame, I’ll credit it to their facility with absolute phrases, even if they protest.

The absolute phrase is also called the “nominative absolute” (which tells you something right there). A friend reminds me that the Romans knew it as the “ablative absolute,” and they thought it the bee’s knees, the cat’s meow. It’s called a nominative absolute because it has to spring from a noun (or pronoun). It is called absolute because it is self-contained, a nice tidy thought which connects rhetorically to the main part of the sentence but does not connect syntactically. What that means is that if, using the old Reed Kellogg system, you try to diagram a sentence which contains an absolute phrase, there is no way to connect—with a solid line or dotted line or whatever—that phrase to the rest of the diagram. All you can do is stick it in the same neighborhood and hope for the best. And it is called a phrase because that’s what it is. It often does the work of a clause, but although it has what you might think of as a subject, it does not have what is called a finite verb, a true predicate. (A clause is a string of words with a subject and a predicate; a phrase isn’t.)

But enough technicalities for the moment. Here (DRUM ROLL) is a sentence employing an absolute phrase: “Igor having been properly disciplined, I cleaned and stowed my implements.” Did you spot it? Excellent! Yes! “Igor having been properly disciplined” is a classic—and I daresay classy—absolute phrase. “Disciplined” is what is known as a past participle, which—as I used to beat into my grammar students—is “a word that comes from a verb but functions otherwise.” In this case it functions adjectivally, describing the chastened Igor. What else you see there are a qualifier (“properly”) and the machinery (“having been”) to put the phrase into what’s called the past perfect aspect.* Sure, you could have said, “After Igor had been properly disciplined, I cleaned and stowed my implements.” That would be a subordinate (adverbial) clause, and that is what most people would have said (or written.) But most people also settle for cheese doodles, not caviar. Don’t be that guy, Bunky! I am offering you a better life here!

There are four patterns for making absolute phrases: noun + participle, noun + prepositional phrase, noun + adjective, and noun + noun. You have already seen the first, but here is one with a present participle running the show: “Igor bowing and scraping, I assured him that he was back in my good graces.” The adjective model? “Barry insolent as always, I wanted to slap his fat face.” Prepositional phrase (with the absolute following this time)? “The bad guy stood there defiantly, his guns at the ready.” Noun plus noun? “Medusa glared at Jason, her hair a nest of writhing snakes.” Cool, huh?

Quick quiz: “Igor, bowing and scraping, promised not to disobey again.” Absolute phrase? Nope. Igor is now the subject of the whole sentence and “bowing and scraping” is just an adjectival cluster. The comma’s the culprit.

Despite my blandishments (or better, “My blandishments notwithstanding”), the style students are often still cowed. So I tell them that we hoi polloi use quite a few absolute phrases without giving them a thought. “That said” crops up all the time: “My opponent makes a good point. That said, I still must....” “All things considered.” “Present company excepted.” “God willing” (which is right from the Latin, “Deo volente”). “Truth be told.” These are all absolute phrase idioms, and I’ll bet you can think of some others.

Nonetheless, I may be in the minority in my enthusiasm. Bryan Garner, the reigning authority on American usage, sniffs and says that the absolute phrase “often has an antique literary flavor.” In his summary judgment he sides with the esteemed Fowler brothers, who opined that it is “not much to be recommended.”

“Fie,” I say! And I am tempted to add some such sentiment as “The language having gone to the dogs....”

*Ok, “having” is also a necessary present participle, but I didn’t want to get too complicated.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Dingbats

mcone — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 02:07:34 +0000

Fuck.

There, that’s out of the way.

We gather today, brethren and sistren, to talk about obscenity, vulgarity, cursing. Bad language not in the grammatical sense but in the moral sense. I warn you that we may get to talking dirty.

A news story brought this to mind. Some people want to take another look at the strictures that broadcast media labor under. On cable and satellite TV practically anything goes, but on broadcast TV if a star at an awards show releases the so-called f-bomb—as has happened more than once—heads might roll. Some see broadcast TV as the last refuge of decent language, of keeping the vulgarians at bay; others see these strictures as silly prudery or a battle already lost. I don’t know where these arguments will take them.

I do know that we have become much less publicly inhibited about language. In print media, for example, the f-word was for decades strictly forbidden. Then some bold editors started using substitutions like “frigging” or employing coy asterisks (“f**k”). The practice of The New Yorker probably evolved (devolved?) this way and now one regularly encounters the word “fuck” or its cognates in its pages. If someone being profiled says it, they print it. One imagines William Shawn spinning in his grave.

By the way, you may be wondering about the title of this wonk. A dingbat is an ornamental piece of type, the modern equivalent of the busywork in illuminated manuscripts. But I have also heard that those symbols on the top row of the keyboard—what you see in the comic strips to indicate profanity—are referred to as dingbats. Thus, when the klutzy cartoon character mashes his thumb with a hammer, he will scream, “*^&%$!!@!!!” Now you know. Fun word, dingbat.

Some definitions, just to be precise. Cursing—which is often used to cover the whole topic lately—means to hope that ill befalls someone. It runs from “God damn you” and “Go to hell” to “May your children spit on your grave.” “Jesus [H] Christ” is not, strictly speaking, cursing, but for a Christian it is profanity, taking God’s name in vain. All the rest of it is obscenity, words that should not be uttered in polite society. All those four-letter words. Whether it is sacrilegious or just coarse and vulgar, may we use “bad language” to cover it all? Thanks.

Bad language is, or was, usually associated with the ill-educated, the rabble, the lower classes. Your grandmother would have pointed out that such people use bad language because their proper vocabularies are so meager that the poor creatures have little else to fall back on to express their thoughts. There might be some truth in this, but the implied snobbery drowns it out. Could it be that the hoi polloi have more to be enraged about than the smug upper classes, and for that reason the f-word and similar locutions come more naturally to them?

But I don’t believe that, either. Bad language, it seems to me, is most often a sort of verbal tic. I use words like “hell” and “damn”—hardly offensive these days—without even thinking about it. “Goddamn” impinges a bit more on my awareness. I rarely say “fuck.” Sometimes it is genuinely spontaneous but at other times it is calculated, and at those times I feel silly: “Oh look! He’s a Phd but not above using the f-word.” I am linguistically slumming and should be ashamed of myself.

Grandma also said that the trouble with using bad language trivially (“I tripped over the fuckin’ tricycle”) was that if something truly awful happened to you, you would be at a loss to properly express your outrage and pain (sort of like debasing the coinage). This gave rise to the anecdote about somebody’s uncle who always swore (another loosely used term) like a pirate. But when he lost a couple of fingers to his chainsaw, he is supposed to have stared at the digits down there in the dirt and said, “Aw, the dickens.” Well, it’s a good story, but the theory has holes big enough to drive a friggin’* truck through.

You could spend an academic career—and some have—studying this stuff. For now, just a couple more observations. For the most part we decry bad language, but there are (shaky) defenses for it. “Well, at least it’s honest,” some say. I guess that means that if something is more than a darn shame, then if you are true to yourself and the experience you should call it a fucking shame. Maybe. And if you work hard at being a real character—untypical grannies are the usual suspects here—then your language is called “salty” and you get a pass. In fact, you get an audience.

Anyway, I don’t mean to be a prude, but watch your language, ok?

*I do get tired of the f-bomb. You got a friggin’ problem with that?

Meet Your Macinstructor

Recommendations

mcone — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 00:52:38 +0000

The letter of recommendation, usually for a student applying to grad school or for a new PhD applying for her first real teaching job, is a fact of academic life and a venerable tradition. In the past two weeks I have written three, though two were for the same student and were essentially variations on a theme for two similar programs. Over the years I have written countless recommendations. I hope they helped. I am pretty sure that none of them hurt. That student applying to two UK grad schools was accepted by her first choice within a week, and York University told her that her recommendations were a deciding factor in their decision. I suspect that my colleague’s letter—I asked Megan who else had written—made the real difference.

I don’t think I do a poor job of it, but I always feel that I should write more or dig deeper. One school of thought, however, says that more than one page is a no-no, so I take comfort in that, usually writing exactly one page. I have a rough formula down. I always start with, “X has asked for a letter of recommendation to your program and I am [happy/delighted] to oblige him.” (“Overjoyed” seems a bit much, even fey. Forget “ecstatic.”) Then I talk about my connection to the student: the courses that he took from me, what grades he got, that sort of thing. I usually describe my courses as challenging and that the student rose to the challenge. I also ask the student to give me some stuff that I can bounce of off. (“I’m told that X won the award for [whatever], doubtless deserved.”) I always like to point out—if true—that the student was a very conscientious and hard worker. If the recipient takes that as code for “not very bright, a drudge,” well, that’s a risk I’ll take. I refuse to make myself crazy. If the applicant is not just a student but a friend, I say so, and why he became a friend. I then try to wind up with something short but memorable, maybe a chiasmus: “Your program will be excellent for X and X will be excellent for your program. I hope you will give his application the good hard look it deserves.”

It used to be that recommendations were confidential, the applicant never allowed to see them. Often you were obliged to scrawl your signature across the sealed envelope flap. Real secret agent stuff; I’m surprised that we weren’t told to write in invisible ink. That policy has been relaxed somewhat in the last few years. Often the student has a choice and checks a box: to see or not to see. Then she has to guess what her choice will say to the recipient: is she so secure that she does not need to see the recommendation, or is she really insecure and probably unworthy? But then, suppose the recommendation is toxic.... See above: making yourself crazy.

I will not write a recommendation unless I can help the student’s cause, and I do turn some requests down. In other words, I would never knowingly sabotage a student. But everyone has stories about the poisoned recommendation. “I would be delighted to write, dear boy!” says Professor Viper, and then proceeds—who knows how or when that poor student somehow offended the guy--to damn the blighter in three vitriolic pages. A career nipped in the bud. I suspect that most such stories are academic urban legends, but some may be true and I hope the Professor Vipers of this world get poisoned recommendations for the afterlife. A colleague once told me that ending a recommendation by writing, “If there’s anything else you need, feel free to give me a call” really means “Give me a call and I’ll tell you off the record what I really think of this loser that I have just recommended.” God help us.

It’s not that chicanery doesn’t go on. There is what I call the con job or the old switcheroo. Some years ago, UNM was in the market to fill an administrative position. One of the finalists looked very good, but in a spirit of due diligence they called several people at his old employ to double check. Well, according to the folks at University X, this fellow could practically walk on water, they were devastated at the possibility of losing him though of course he had a right to further his career, etc., etc. Turns out, they knew that he had his hand deep into the cookie jar but didn’t want the public embarrassment of charging him. So UNM, where he quickly stuck his hand in OUR cookie jar, became the patsy. Moral: if a recommendation seems too good to be true, it probably is.

What to do? Praise the applicant to the skies and she might look, literally, too good to be true. Mention a couple of weak spots to try to make her seem human like the rest of us, and a big “loser” flag might pop up.

Such a delicate and sometimes depressing dance it is.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Indiana Shea and the Ruta Maya

mcone — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 01:01:46 +0000

I am beginning this wonk in longhand, sitting by the pool at the Palma Real condominiums south of Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico. A stiff ocean breeze is making those royal palms sway, but it is not unpleasant. Dear me no, it is not unpleasant at all. Just past the pool and the palapas,* the Caribbean laps sand which, more than anything, resembles powdered sugar. The condo’s statue of Neptune, in fetching premature verdigris, presides over the scene, hailing passing ships. When one awakens in the small hours, one hears the gentle susurration of the surf and, smiling, drifts back to sleep.

A week past seventy but life is still worth living and adventures worth pursuing. We are here in the Yucatan with our old friends Joe and Barb, who have been here before and are taking wonderful care of us (finding the condo, renting the car, explaining the money). This stretch of Caribbean coast from Cancun down to Belize is called the Riviera Maya, and a good four-lane highway, Mexico 307, runs from Cancun to Tulum, about halfway down. The Riviera Maya is part hope and part marketing. Forty years ago, Cancun (“Nest of Snakes” in Mayan!) was just a gleam in a tourism director’s eye. But only a fool could have failed to see the possibilities—blue-green waters and white sand beaches, the world’s second longest coral reef, a winter climate to rival anything in the tropics...and Mayan ruins! So Cancun was born in a building frenzy, and the Riviera Maya followed. Now as you drive down 307 you see monstrous, grandiose entrances for one hotel/spa/golf course after another. These entrances don’t entrance, alas, and I think the Maya would disavow any architectural influences. But some places are still authentic, and Puerto Morelos is one. (Akumal, I’ve heard, is another, Mahahual a third.)

Not counting the (very) odd afternoon in Juarez, I’ve been to Mexico three times. The first destination was Mazatlan, a glitzy tourist spot even 50 years ago and a sizeable town. The second time, the Sheas went to Kino Bay, a tiny fishing village on the Gulf of California. Puerto Morelos I call the Goldilocks destination: not too Mazatlan (not at all Mazatlan, in fact) and not so primitive and isolated as Kino. It’s just right. The brochure says it has a population of ten thousand, but I would have guessed half that. And it is, for the precious time being, unpretentious and real. Real as in broken sidewalks where there are sidewalks at all. Real as in buildings that never knew a building code, and all in pastel greens and pinks and blues. Real as in a plaza that appears to be a continual work in progress. Did I mention hole-in-the-wall restaurants with great food? I witnessed two processions this week. There they were, a bunch of little kids toting banners, shepherded by a couple of grown-ups (teachers?) and, bringing up the rear both times, the same four superannuated musicians playing a sax, a trumpet, and two improvised drums. Round the plaza they went, celebrating or commemorating Lord knows what.

Mangrove swamps and cenotes: Quintana Roo is riddled with them. The swamps you want to steer clear of, lest you become a snack for a crocodile. Cenotes are water-filled limestone sink holes. We visited two. The second was ok, with fish nibbling my toes, which gets old, but the first was underground and we had it almost to ourselves. You take wooden stairs down about thirty feet and around a corner, and there you are in a cave—stalactites, the whole bit— paddling around in crystal clear water. I could certainly do that again.

But I came really for just one overarching purpose: to visit a Mayan ruin while I still can. And we did. Two places, in fact. Tulum was one, and interesting (look but don’t touch, like Chichen Itza nowadays). But for me it paled beside Coba, about 40 kilometers inland. The thing about Coba is that it is still in the jungle. Only about ten percent of it has been excavated. Think about that. Ninety percent of this huge site is still smothered by trees and vines. The guess is that Coba was an outpost, an off-shoot, of Tikal, the famous site in Guatemala. There is evidence of trade and royal intermarriage.

The star attraction at Coba is Nohoch Mul, the second highest Mayan pyramid in the Yucatan. You glimpse it through the trees, round a corner in the trail, and there it is and it takes your breath away. It’s almost a hundred and forty feet high.

Well of course I climbed it. We tourists swarmed up like ants. It’s a little scary and a workout and I wish now that I had counted the steps. But from the top (the summit?), standing beside a kind of sacred penthouse, you gaze out over jungle for miles in all directions. You take a deep, calming breath. You grin foolishly. Wow. Double wow.

Indiana Shea! I could hear the iguanas singing, each to each. And I know that they were singing for me.

*A palapa is one of those big permanent “beach umbrellas” with a thatched roof. There is no decent English equivalent that I know of. Handy word.

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Seventy

mcone — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:52:50 +0000

“Inside every old person is a young person wondering what the hell happened.”

This 3rd of March Mrs. Shea’s little boy will notch his seventieth year on God’s green Earth. I hesitated to write a wonk about it. Having already written at least three wonks on aging, I didn’t want to risk becoming a garrulous old bore on the subject. But I was working on a wonk that wasn’t working out, and reaching the Biblical allotment is just too tempting a subject. So I’m going to risk it. Lucky you.

The truth is that I do think about growing old, being old, much of the time. I suspect that most people my age do. Not that we are depressed about it, necessarily. It’s more of a detached fascination, a bemusement nicely pointed up in that quotation from a popular poster, cited above. “So it’s come to this, has it?” you murmur to yourself. “How? When? Why?” And there’s no point in denying it, no point in denying Medicare, trifocals, grandkids.

If you whine about aging, people admonish you to consider the alternative. Which is fair, and tonic. I’m glad to still be here, though I refuse to be absurdly upbeat about it all the time. Mark Twain said, “If you can’t get to seventy by a comfortable road, don’t go.” All things considered, my road has, thank goodness, been pretty comfortable. A few potholes but nothing serious, nothing to break an axle, and it got better, smoother as the years rolled by. I have lived more years than my parents did. My mother died at 52, my father at 59. In Diana’s family, I am the oldest of the kids and kids-in-law. Like so many my age, I seldom sleep all through the night, but seldom do I lie there in the small hours and terrify myself with thoughts of mortality. I expect another dozen years or so. But then (he said cheerily) I could be hit by a bus tomorrow. No profit in thinking about it. (Pop’s preferred exit was to be shot in his twilight years by an irate husband. Didn’t happen to him; probably won’t happen to me.)

So when did old age hit? You don’t wake up one morning and say, “Son of a gun, I’m old now!” No, it’s only later, only looking back. I think retirement, time on your hands, has a lot to do with it. “Keep busy” is still the best advice. I compounded things by giving up marathons at the same time I retired. I don’t really regret either decision, but I am deeply grateful for the two courses that I teach and the wonks that I write. And there’s nothing but myself to stop me from racking up twenty or so miles a week, even if I am slow as molasses.

So what’s to be gained? Well, for both good and ill, time’s arrow flies only forward. I am the sum of all these 70 years. I look out at my class and I think, “I’ve already been 20—in fact, I was 20 with a vengeance long before you were born—but none of you have been 60.” Thus do we lord it over the young’uns. I honestly think I am finally gaining a modicum of wisdom. I can feel it. Really. “Age is a terrible price to pay for maturity,” but what choice do we have? And to whatever extent I don’t look or act quite as old as I am, I am happy to accept appropriate compliments. When someone asks me how I’m doing, I often snitch one of Pop’s comebacks: “Remarkable for a man my age!” You can’t pull that off at 50.

The arrow flies only forward, so forward one should look, I suppose. That, too, is standard advice for oldsters. But sometimes what trips me up—even more than dark mortality slithering up in the small hours—is a memory come out of nowhere. It might be a cross-country summer trip, the Sheas in their tiny Honda (a rest stop in Illinois, maybe; Dan is tying his sneaker, I am sitting on the picnic bench); it might be that exact moment when I knew that Diana was my salvation in this life; it might be just waking up on a morning long ago and exulting in my body, feeling the sun upon it, feeling coffee warm in my gut. I think of my life in decades and every decade is like a city where I once lived but can live no more. And when these memories ambush me, I see myself at the city limits. I am confronted by a plump, red-cheeked policeman, an image from one of my childhood picture books. I am wheedling. He is smiling but implacable.

“I just want to get back in to see my, uh, my old, uh, high school!”

“We’ll send you a picture, Jerome.”

“But you don’t understand, I....”

“No, Jerome. You can’t come in. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.”

Well.

The Sons of Ditches are throwing me a party, bless their hearts. And bygod I’m going to make the most of it.

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Olio (Oleo?)

mcone — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 15:13:39 +0000

Olio or oleo? The two are staples in crossword puzzles, and I can’t keep them straight. One is a butter substitute, the other a melange, a potpourri, a miscellany. This wonk of course will be the latter, but which word applies, you ask? Hey, look it up. I can’t be doing everything for you. But Happy New Year. We have survived another one. And I promise that if this is a retrospective, it will be only accidentally so.

***

According to the Mayan calendar, or certain of its interpreters, the world will end before 2012 is up. The pity of it is that the world will not end until after the election. But a friend of mine thinks it’s all hogwash: the Mayans simply ran out of stones.

***

The previous wonk, “Dear Me,” was of course pure fantasy, if only because of the old time travel problem involved. You remember that one from scores of science fiction stories: you can’t change the past without changing the future, and since the future that you are in is one you have always known...you get the idea: you can’t change me at 16 without changing me at 69, so the script has to be followed with absolute fidelity to the original. This is determinism up close and personal. If the time theorists are right, I can give my younger self advice until I’m blue in the face and he is still going to drift into that disastrous marriage, for example. There he is—there the new, enlightened, me is—in 1968 again as the marriage approaches, but knowing now that it is a looming disaster and that there is not a damn thing he (I) can do about it or the long fallout from it. If such a letter really could be written, I think I would take a pass. I am many things, but I hope a sadist is not one of them.

***

Among the many outrageous things that Newt Gingrich has said recently are words to the effect that he would ignore any court decision that he disagrees with. In fact, he would haul recalcitrant judges before Congress and make them explain their problematic decisions. (They already do this, usually at length. We call such an explanation “the opinion of the court.”) This is one of the most appalling things I have ever heard, stunning even by the Gingster’s generous standards. But I’m sure he knew that he was tapping into some deep resentments in society. Are you still as steamed by the Roe v. Wade decision as I am by the Citizens United decision? Wouldn’t it be satisfying to take those nine black-robed lifers down a peg? So appalling but so appealing. Let’s just absolutely not go there, ok?

***

With Diana at my elbow for moral and technical support, I finally tackled something that has been dogging me for a month. UNM periodically demands that faculty and staff take some on-line “courses.” What this means is that I study—actually I skip the study—things like workplace safety issues and, my favorite, sexual harassment issues and then take a 10 or 15 question multiple choice “exam.” What a waste of everybody’s time. If I am a jerk around the ladies, will this “course” turn me miraculously into Alan Alda? If I am a decent guy to begin with, I know how to behave myself around the ladies without this patronization. If I refuse, do they pull my spring course? If I flunk, will they send a guy named Horst around to break my legs? Call me a cynic, but I’ll bet somebody’s brother-in-law is making big bucks out of this pc scheme.

***

The Iraq War is now officially over. Halliburton won.

***

My New Years Eve this year was literally funereal. My Aunt Virginia died in Rhode Island on the 28th of December, so I flew east for the funeral on Saturday, the 31st. Gin was 94 and in failing health, so while there was sadness there was also relief, almost happiness, for her release after a long and good life. And funerals are impromptu family reunions. My brother, whom I hadn’t seen in a decade, came up from Pennsylvania, and I hadn’t seen some of my Quinton cousins in twice that long. So there were tears but there was also much hugging and laughter. There we were on the threshold of 2012, the future, but also looking back on Gin’s life and on our own growing up and growing old. The god Janus, whose month is January, would have approved that gathering on that day.

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