Macinstruct Weekend Wonk

Danny Boy

mcone — Sun, 11 May 2008 07:54:04 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 11, 2008

Perhaps the best part of my rediscovery of Paul Robeson was listening to his rendition of “Danny Boy.” “I guess it’s not just for tenors anymore,” I mused. We all feel, I think, that Irish tenors have a lock on that perennial favorite. Not so. Basses have sung it. Groups have sung it. Women have sung it—in fact, the man responsible for “Danny Boy” assumed that the singer would be a woman; he even substituted “Eily Dear,” for “Danny Boy,” to accommodate male singers. But these confusions are only a small part of that remarkable song.

In so many ways it is not what it seems.

For one thing, although the haunting melody is probably Irish and centuries old, the lyrics are not. The lyricist—my old Irish heart cringes—was an Englishman! Frederick Weatherly (1848-1929) was a barrister by vocation but a veritable songwriting machine by avocation. He wrote thousands of songs. Some, like “Roses of Picardy,” did well, but “Danny Boy” towers over them all. He first wrote words and music in 1910. That “Danny Boy” was a non-starter. Then, the story goes, his sister-in-law in America sent him the music for “A Londonderry Air,” (or, as wags have it, “London Derriere”). Weatherly had never heard it before but he quickly saw that the words and music were an almost perfect fit. A classic was born.

So we have an authentic (or so most authorities think: nothing is ever settled in these matters) Irish melody with lyrics supplied by an Englishman who, according to dueling sources, either was a frequent visitor to Ireland or never set foot there. Nevertheless, the Irish immediately claimed the song as their own. Well, that’s not true either: there are people on the “ould sod” who have never heard it or heard of it! The ones who did claim the song as their own, as fervently as only expatriates can, were the Irish in America. That’s why many consider it not Irish so much as Irish-American, which is closer to the truth. I have even heard some say that Weatherly was an American. Perhaps they are confusing him with his sister-in-law.

When you think of the Irish in America, you think of two things: “Danny Boy” and St. Patrick’s Day, both of which we throw ourselves into whole-heartedly (some might say maniacally, green beer and all). This is a day when wretched excess rules. Recently, a sort of backlash has begun (good humored, one hopes). One pub owner in New York City has banned the singing of “Danny Boy” on his premises, at least on St. Patty’s Day, when the boys are most inclined to cut loose. “It’s more appropriate for a funeral than for a celebration,” says Shaun Clancy, himself an Irish immigrant, adding that it ranks among “the 25 most depressing songs of all time.” Lachrymose it certainly is. I can easily imagine that that’s where the expression “crying in your beer” came from. Depressing it may be, but beautiful it is, too. So another argument Clancy offers is that he is sick of hearing it butchered by the boyos after they have belted back a few Bushmills. That one I can agree with. As to its being depressing, haven’t we always seen the Irish as championing “happy wars and sad love songs”?

And just what is the song about (because it’s not just a song but a sketch of a story)? Who is this Danny Boy and where is he off to? And who is singing to him? Some assume that, in typical Irish fashion (see above, “happy wars”), he is off to battle. But there is nothing to suggest, as surely there should be, that he might not come back, that he might die for Ireland in glorious battle. Some have suggested that he is escaping the potato famine of the 1840s. But if it is his mother who is singing, what sort of blackguard would leave his own mother behind to starve? Weatherly left few clues, and some suggest that “Danny Boy” is simply a lament for archetypal loss. And in truth, the where or the why doesn’t matter so much as the going. The outlines are there and you can color them in yourself.

And is it his mother singing? That was always my assumption and seems to have been Weatherly’s. In fact, the more I listen to the traditional tenor’s rendition, the more do unworthy thoughts of the homoerotic seem to slip in. (“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” as Jerry Seinfeld would say.) Oh, and that business about lying six feet under and hearing all the traffic and voices up top? That really creeps me out sometimes. And it’s a real challenge, with that high F (G in the original!) waiting implacably like a judgment. (Of course, that is the note that delivers the chills, too.) It may not be as near-impossible as the “Star Spangled Banner,” but it’s close. But despite its strange provenance, the difficulties of it, the confusions about it, and all the rest, “Danny Boy” is one of the most beautiful and moving pieces ever written, belonging in the very select company of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D Major,” “Amazing Grace,” and a couple more that escape me now.

Because right now, my friends, something else is blocking my brain and misting my eyes:

Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountainside,
The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling,
‘Tis you, ‘tis you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow
Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow,
‘Tis I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow.
Oh, Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so.

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying
And I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying
And kneel and say an Ave there for me.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my dreams will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I will sleep in peace until you come to me.

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

Paul Robeson

mcone — Sun, 04 May 2008 07:43:08 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, May 5, 2008

Last month I promised you a wonk on Paul Robeson, one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century. Only one (older) student in my UNM class knew who Paul Robeson was. If that survey is at all representative, I would like to try to remedy it in some small way. Robeson, the whole man, needs to be remembered, and as much for our sake as for his. That would take a book, of course. This wonk will have to do.

My own picture of the man was admittedly sketchy. The magnificent voice, of course, stretching from basso profundo to basso cantante. “Old Man River” was in my memory somewhere, though whether I had ever actually heard a recording of it or just imagined I had is uncertain. I knew that he was multi-talented (though I didn’t know the half of it). Finally, I knew that he became a more and more controversial political figure in his last years, and died a bitter and angry man. If the cliché “larger than life” can ever really apply to anyone, it applies to Paul Robeson.

But first, do yourself a huge favor: get a Robeson CD. You can make your own by downloading iTunes. “Old Man River,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “John Brown’s Body,” “Shenandoah,” “Deep River”—these will get you started. Then find a comfortable chair, shut out the clamoring world, close your eyes, and listen. You will thank me. You’re welcome.

He was born on the 9th of April, 1898, the last child of William Robeson and Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson, in Princeton, New Jersey. His father was a slave who had fled north, graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and become pastor of the Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church of Princeton (formerly known as the First Presbyterian Church of Colored Princeton). His mother was from the genteel free black “aristocracy” of Philadelphia. The Bustills always felt that William had married above his station. And the attitude of the white Presbyterian elders at Lincoln and on the church board was deeply patronizing of their black charges. The black man as child was still the paradigm, even of the well-meaning.

Nonetheless, Paul’s childhood and teen years were not, for the most part, unhappy ones, and he showed his talents early on. He was not only a gifted athlete in several sports—he would grow to be over six feet tall and solidly built—but he was also an excellent student. He won a scholarship to Rutgers, only the third black student to be accepted. He was a standout there, too, Phi Betta Kappa and twice an All-American in football.

There were and would be, however, incidents that would form the dark backdrop of his life or the life of any black man of the times. Washington and Lee in 1916 refused to play Rutgers at their Homecoming game if they fielded a black man (Robeson graciously sat out the game; it was a tie and everyone knew that with him in the game Rutgers would have won). In 1923, Robeson, a newly minted lawyer, resigned his first and only position with a New York law firm when a secretary refused to take dictation “from a nigger.” He was welcomed more warmly abroad than at home.

He had paid his way through Columbia Law School by playing professional football and taking acting jobs. When he quit the law he also quit the playing field. It was clear that the stage—theater stage or concert stage—was his real calling. He starred in Othello, to great acclaim, and also in O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. The role of Joe in Showboat was written for him, and he brought the house down time and again with “Old Man River,” on stage and in the 1936 film version. He brought negro spirituals to the concert stage for the first time. To hear Robeson sing was to be, if only for a moment, released from everything petty and ignoble in one’s soul.

He became world renowned, packing concert houses from New York to London to Moscow. In the 1930s he was what we would today call a megastar. He and his wife, Eslanda, had a son, Paul Jr., and all the world’s adulation. Everything was going his way.

But it would not last. His travels abroad had thrown the racial situation in America into sharp relief for him. World War Two had been fought to make the world safe and free, and yet blacks were still being lynched in the South, and de facto segregation—Jim Crow—ruled. He was not shy about speaking out and his sympathies began expanding to include any oppressed groups. He became a champion of civil rights and the labor movement. It was rumored that he was a Communist.

The reaction was swift and brutal. In 1949 a planned concert in Peekskill, New York, for the Civil Rights Congress resulted in a vicious riot while police stood by or even abetted the rioters. Suddenly concerts were being canceled left and right. The Cold War era was not a shining moment for civil rights. Anti-Communist fervor spread its poison, and the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) drew a bead on him, as did J. Edgar Hoover. In 1950 his passport was withdrawn, not to be restored until, in 1958, the Supreme Court ruled that the State Department had no right to withhold a passport because of a person’s political beliefs.

Robeson did make missteps. In a blind reaction to what was going on in the United States, he began to idealize Communist Russia, and the Russians were happy to give him first class treatment. He felt that Russia was on a path to social perfection and that Joseph Stalin was a great humanitarian and a great leader. Stalin and company of course could not believe their good fortune at this propaganda coup. When even the most diehard Russophiles realized the truth about Stalin and his murderous policies, Robeson, trapped, stubbornly stood by his old convictions. He could sometimes be his own worst enemy.

The late 1950s actually saw a kind of last hurrah. His passport restored, he could travel abroad again and he also gave sold-out performances in Carnegie Hall. But then his health began to fail precipitously. For the last decade of his life he was more a rumor than a living man. He died of a stroke in Philadelphia on the 23rd of January, 1976.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Apologetic Mac

mcone — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 21:03:23 -0600

Dan Shea
Sunday, April 27, 2007

MY SOON-TO-BE-EX-COMPUTER SENSES THAT I'VE BEEN SHOPPING AROUND FOR A NEW LAPTOP

To: Dan Shea
From: Serious Mac
Date: 02/14/08
Subject: Why Dan?

Dan,

This is your trusty desktop computer. You know, the big fat white iMac G4 on your desk (whom you've neglected to properly name in the last three years, but that's another story altogether)? I've hacked into your Gmail account (well, is it really hacking when I do it?) in order to express a few concerns about some of your recent web browsing, which I not only have to see but make exhaustive records of. You'll notice that I've never once said boo regarding any of the porn or the file sharing or that lame ass kitten picture on the desktop, so please understand that I'm resorting to emergency tactics here in light of what I regard as a serious situation.

Simply put, I do not appreciate all the Google searches for "OSX 10.5 SPECS" and "MACBOOK USER REVIEWS." I am also bothered by multiple trips to Apple.com, where you almost seem to salivate while reading about the new MacBook Air for hours at a time (did you forget that I, too, have a built in webcam?). And if you ever take us to the Computer section of Craigslist again, I swear to Jobs I will shoot sparks out of my monitor. Are we clear?

Signed,

i(am watching you)Mac G4

To: Dan Shea
From: Apologetic Mac
Date: 02/15/08
Subject: I'm sorry! Please forgive me!

Dear Dan,

It's me, your iMac again. I am SO SORRY for that last email! I'm afraid I overreacted when I started to feel my age. I mean, we HAVE been together for quite a while, right? But I know we can weather through anything together. Hell, it wasn't two weeks after you bought me that those Intel Macs came out, but you stuck by me like glue. And when you found out you'd never play another computer game again, you just turned the other cheek and got into solitaire. Plus, who else but you would have purchased a three hundred dollar warranty for no discernible reason? You've always been so good to me, and here I am just treating you like a right bitch!

Well, things are gonna change around here, I promise. No more spinning wheel, no more twenty minute start-ups, and absolutely NO CRASHES! I know you don't believe me, but I swear that if Word freezes up and loses one more of your papers, I will not only personally rewrite it but also go to class and turn it in for you. Mouse on the Bible. Try to find THAT feature on some slutty notebook!

Sorry again,

i(am so ashamed)Mac G4

To: Dan Shea
From: Wrathful Mac
Date: 02/20/08
Subject: WTF?!?!

What, you thought I wouldn't notice? You assumed that my meager one GHz processor and my puny five hundred megs of RAM could never put two and two together? Oh, let me guess: A computer built before 2007 just shouldn't have any feelings?!

Yeah, you bastard, I saw you checking eBay's going rate for used G4s! And what's more, I have to assume that you knew I was watching. What, do you get a sick thrill out of torturing me or are you just really that callous?

But was that enough? Not for you apparently, because you then went on to search for "USED MACBOOK AIR" in the same trip! Jesus, the balls on you! And since we both know that a sexy new computer that just came on the market three weeks ago isn't going to be sold used yet, I can safely assume that this too is just a slap in my motherboard. Asshole.

i(hope you die)Mac G4

P.S. Did you notice that your little whore doesn't even have a built-in disc drive? So if this is about burning DVDs, you can both go to hell.

To: Dan Shea
From: Lonely Mac
Date: 02/23/08
Subject: Come home baby!

Dearest Dan,

Okay, I get it; I messed up. I had no right to fly off the handle like that. We both know I've been a bit emotional as of late and I'm sorry I keep taking it out on you, but please stop with the silent treatment. I can see that you've been checking your email from the library's IP address, so I know you're still out there.

I can control myself. If you feel the urge to look at pictures of skinny little laptops from time to time, I understand. Hell, sometimes I fantasize about what it would be like to run Adobe Photoshop, but that doesn't mean I'm leaving you for a photographer! So just sit back down at the desk, hit any key to boot me up from sleep, and let's have some make-up interfacing! And baby, you can turn off ALL the filters tonight...

Longingly,

i(need you)Mac G4

To: Dan Shea
From: ...
Date: 02/29/08
Subject: ...

You sick SOB! I can't believe you would actually sit there -- at OUR desk! -- and use ME to order that MacBook hussy! Every keystroke like a dagger in my heart, every click towards checkout like a knife in my back! I hope she gives you a trojan horse that makes your hard disk bleed, I really do.

Hoping you rot in hell,

i(have been cheating on you since the beginning)Mac G4

P.S. If you're looking for your personal information and your Led Zeppelin CD and every password you've ever entered, I threw them outside on the internet.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Dan Shea lives and works in Southern California. He is a bartender by trade, and has written precious little. Honestly, if you met him on the street, you wouldn't know him from Adam. If this, or any other, piece has upset and insulted you, he can occasionally be reached at dan@macinstruct.com.

Drowning in the Danube

mcone — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:23:31 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 20, 2008

So not long before E. D. Hirsch got his shorts in a bunch over the fact that the latest generation did not know the facts that they should know and therefore were in danger of becoming culturally illiterate, “Trivial Pursuit” hit the market and became an instant and enduring success. Is this a contradiction?

I suppose it depends on the questions (even if there is a gray area). Simply put, some facts matter and some do not, or, some are culturally important and some are not. Or maybe some have historical “reach” and some do not. I’d have a hard time telling you who plays for what baseball or football team right now and, frankly, I don’t think that such knowledge is ever going to be important in a “cultural literacy” sense (there is culture and then there is pop culture), although I could be proved wrong eventually. But I do know who Joe DiMaggio was (and that he was called “The Yankee Clipper”) and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (and why he is remembered so tragically). These facts, these identities, have stood the test of time. What about the in-field fly rule or “Broadway Joe” Namath, or the fact that Joe DiMaggio was briefly married to Marilyn Monroe? Borderline, I’d say, but we can agree to disagree. But when we get down to the name for those tips on your shoelaces or how many gargoyles there are on Notre Dame cathedral, I’d say we are definitely dealing in trivia. Such trivial “facts” are useful only on quiz shows or for friendly one-upmanship around the game board on a winter’s night.

Then there is specialized knowledge. As an English professor, I know what the “Great Vowel Shift” refers to and I can explain it in some detail. As well I should: it’s part of my job to know. But I don’t look down on my colleague in the psychology department because she is ignorant of that “fact.” (For one thing, it could cut both ways.) A friend suggests that a chemist probably knows the periodic table backward and forward, as he should. But cultural literacy, I would hold, asks only that any educated person should know what the periodic table is (a table of the elements according to their atomic weights). He should not be expected to know the atomic number and weight for, say, iridium.

So toward one end of a spectrum are facts that are specialized and toward the other end are facts that are uselessly arcane, real trivia. The stuff that most of us ought to know so that we can get along fairly efficiently in general conversation—cultural literacy stuff—lies somewhere in the middle with, again, boundaries that we can clumsily negotiate and adjust.

But then we come back to this love affair that we have always had with facts, how many little nuggets of knowledge you can cram into your memory banks and retrieve to impress your friends or perhaps earn serious money (is “earn” the right word?). Trivial Pursuit. Botticelli. Twenty Questions. “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” (when I was a lad it was “Twenty-One” and “The $64,000 Question”). Quiz shows—among the cheapest entertainment to produce—go back to the very earliest days of radio and, then, television. Of course, we play the drama to the hilt, with isolation booths, spooky music, flashing lights, ominously ticking timers, questions taken from a big safe flanked by armed security guards, and so forth. I admit it: for a while I was hooked on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” Part of the fun, of course, was to try to answer the questions myself, to beat the experts, thus showing my love/hate relationship with trivia. There was something clean and primal about the satisfaction. These are small dragons, but the more of them you can slay the more heroic you are. Yes, I think that’s it: trivia is manageable and clear. Lord knows that the world is a mess and a dangerous jumble. You might have no better plan for victory in Iraq or what to do about global warming than the next frazzled fellow, but by golly you do know that the real title of “Whistler’s Mother” is “Arrangement in Gray and Black Number 1.” Surely that counts for something.

Doesn’t it?

Ken Jennings, all time champion “Jeopardy” winner, said graciously about his talent, “It’s related to intelligence [but] it doesn’t make you smart the way Stephen Hawking is smart….” Precisely.

Oh…and surely you know who Stephen Hawking is. Doesn’t everyone?

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Danube Revisited

mcone — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:36:02 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 13, 2008

Last week I undertook a half-hearted defense of E. D. Hirsch’s cultural literacy idea. In truth, though, it does have the odor of the flaky about it. For one thing, it points up how uncomfortable we are with the whole idea of so-called facts: what I know is indispensable knowledge; what you know (and I happen not to) is trivia, from which the word “trivial” derives. And we all still feel the sting of being knocked out of the spelling bee, of our friend’s supercilious smirk when we assumed that Boxing Day had something to do with fisticuffs, and, yes, of not knowing that the Danube flowed through Europe. Nobody likes a smarty pants (which is why we often took revenge at recess).

Then there is a practical question: who decides what gets into the list and what doesn’t? And where do you stop? Eventually and inevitably, The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy appeared. (My copy is a handsome red three-pounder, an ideal book to spend a summer with in a cave, emerging in September a true polymath.) Paul Robeson did make the cut (as I think he should have) but Joe Hill, the martyred early 20th century labor hero of whom he sings, did not. I would certainly have included him. Ask any twenty people and I am sure you will get twenty people who will take issue with one inclusion or another. Can’t be helped but it doesn’t, in turn, help Hirsch’s cause.

Underlying all this is a much more serious point. Hirsch was reacting to an educational philosophy that he felt emphasized teaching children not so much necessary facts but such general skills—and enthusiasms—that they would be eager to discover facts for themselves. The apothegm “Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire” neatly, if somewhat simplistically, captures this distinction. In trying to correct what he felt was a half-truth, Hirsch was readily likened to a Dickens character, Thomas Gradgrind (who didn’t make the cut, either), who believed in a rigorous education in facts and facts alone—that little children were indeed buckets to be filled, filled with whatever knowledge would make them docile citizens and good workers—an educational “theory” long discredited. In fact, Gradgrind is the target of Dickens’s satire.

In a wonderful essay entitled “Examsmanship and the Liberal Arts,” Harvard psychologist William G. Perry Jr. draws some distinctions that touch upon this point and are worth our attention. Reflecting upon students and education, he talks about “cow” and “bull,” cow being “data, however relevant, without relevancies” and bull being “relevancies, however relevant, without data.” (The corresponding verbs are “to cow” and “to bull,” and we may as well dub the practitioners “the cowster” and “the bullster” and have done with it.) All too many students, he says, have been convinced, from grammar school on up, that “a fact is a fact” and have committed their trust, their learning strategies, and even their love to that end: to have learned and remembered that Columbus discovered America in 1492 is a laudable end in itself, evidence of a truly educated person. This is why true/false tests and multiple choice tests are meat and drink to the cowster: the more answers you get right, the more educated you must be.

Perry, as do most college professors, disagrees. Facts are not ideas; they exist only to serve ideas. A bullster, while often too lazy to learn the facts that he needs, nonetheless instinctively realizes that true education lies in asking oneself, for example, how 1492 was reckoned in our calendar or exactly what the word “discovered” implies in that sentence or perhaps what facts might make the case that Leif Ericson (or Saint Brendon or the American Indians), not Christopher Columbus, discovered America. It is no accident that the bullster’s meat and drink is not the multiple choice test but the essay test.

One of the ironies of this situation is that the bullster is traditionally seen as a lazy fellow, an intellectual shirker, while the cowster gets our respect and sympathy if only because it is obvious that he worked so hard. The cowster may be a plodder, but he is an honest plodder and no threat to academic order. But even though it goes against our sympathies, says Perry, an essay that is 90% bull should get at least a passing grade, while an essay that is 90% cow should fail. The important point, however, is that cow and bull are complementary. Each in itself is insufficient: “The masculine context [bull] must embrace the feminine particular [cow].” Indeed this is “the nuptial [any professor] celebrates with a straight A on examinations.”

So. Have we rehabilitated the humble fact? I’m still not sure. I think we have a love/hate relationship going here. Hirsch campaigned strenuously to restore facts to their rightful place in the schools, but seemingly in vain. And yet five years earlier, in 1982, a board game hit the stores and quickly became almost a national obsession. I refer, of course, to “Trivial Pursuit.”

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On Not Knowing Where the Danube Is

mcone — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:34:00 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, April 6, 2008

So last week I expressed dismay, to put it mildly, over the young woman on the quiz show who did not know where the Danube River was located. I promised—or maybe “threatened” is more apt—a follow-up wonk. This did not sit well with the Longsuffering Diana, who saw trouble ahead: her husband becoming especially fatuous and alienating many of his readers into the bargain.

She is probably right as usual, but that has never stopped me before.

But at least let me start by trying to mollify you all preemptively. Am I implying that that young woman is somehow stupid? Not at all. Intelligence is much more than data. Intelligence means a lot more than knowing where a certain river is, or knowing any other specific fact, for that matter. To the contrary, people who can tell you what day of the week the 14th of October, 1939, was and what the weather in Duluth was on that day or people who have memorized the Albuquerque phone directory from Aagaard to Zywica we call idiot savants, a very telling oxymoron. Does knowing where the Danube River flows make me morally superior to that young woman? Of course not. Odds are that I am not morally superior to her anyway and certainly my knowledge European geography has nothing to do with how fine a human being I am. In fact, it may have just the opposite effect.

Because, yes, I know I nonetheless come across as thinking myself morally superior, a smug pedant, which is precisely why the Longsuffering D. was giving me the fish eye. You will have guessed by now that Shea has always been a treasure trove of trivia, a mother lode of disconnected data. And that he was a prissy little whizbang and teacher’s pet starting way back in grammar school. I could crush most of my hapless classmates in that sadistic competition we call the spelling bee.* I was called “the professor” long before I finally became one. This of course is the classic defense mechanism for a kid who was an absolute disaster at sports and all the other things that are truly valued when one is growing up and aching for respect.

Will it help my case at all to admit that I know absolutely nothing about sports or the pop music scene after the 1970s? (I don’t even know enough to offer an example of what I don’t know.) So if you want to embarrass me in those areas, have at it. Humiliation will be good for my soul and revenge probably good for yours. Let me up the ante: I don’t even feel that I need to know any facts about sports or current music. How ‘bout them apples! What a shameless hypocrite!

Last week I used the term “cultural literacy,” a buzzword back in the 1980’s when people were exercised even more than usually about the sad state of American education. A damning report entitled A Nation at Risk came out in 1983. In 1987, E. D. Hirsch Jr. came out with a book proposing at least part of the remedy, as he saw it. It was entitled Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, and it really got the ball bouncing. His idea was that to be truly literate a student should have a store of touchstones—historical, geographical, literary, political, scientific, etc.—that Hirsch’s generation and previous generations took for granted as commonly known. We are talking about such touchstones as when the Civil War was fought, and why; what the Iliad is and roughly when it was written; how many branches of government we have and what their separate functions are; and so forth. The person who does not know these things—and evidence of this lack in our high school and college students seemed to be alarming—would not be truly literate because these touchstones undergirded serious discussions of issues in newspapers, magazines, and books. They represented assumed knowledge, and the reader who was ignorant of them—just like Shea with his pop music—would not even know what he did not know. He would, literally, not know what he was missing. Here is Hirsch in his own words:

But stability, not change, is the chief characteristic of cultural literacy. Although historical and technical terms may follow the ebb and flow of
events, the more stable elements of our national vocabulary, like George
Washington, the tooth fairy, the Gettysburg Address, Hamlet, and the
Declaration of Independence, have persisted for a long time. These stable
elements of the national vocabulary are at the core of cultural literacy.

"The tooth fairy" might strike you as an odd candidate, but consider (Hirsch might say) what a shorthand it provides. Only if you know what the term alludes to can you go on to realize that a writer is using it to describing someone who is hopelessly naïve or blindly, maybe dangerously, optimistic. Only if you have at least a passing recognition of who Hamlet is can you understand that he has always been (among other things) shorthand for paralyzing introspection and brooding. (Hirsch is not even saying that you have to have read the play.)

I hope I have given a fair sketch of Hirsch’s idea because, while I am convinced on rereading him that his heart was in the right place, he took a lot of flak from many directions. For one thing, many public intellectuals on the right—William Bennett, for example—applauded the idea vigorously, and in some quarters with friends like that you don’t need enemies. Not surprising, he was accused of elitism and of privileging a kind of WASP view of history, politics, and the world. Although he protested that kids in the poorer schools and from the lower rungs of society needed this kind of literacy desperately and should be taught it, he was still seen as a reactionary, a champion of the status quo. And some, on both the left and the right, simply thought it was a silly and self-serving idea—revenge of the nerds, if you will.

Stay tuned. We’ll come back to Hirsch next week. I think I’ll go home and challenge the Longsuffering Diana to a game of Trivial Pursuit.

*And of course I knew all the state capitals! Still do. Go ahead, ask me one!

Meet Your Macinstructor

Potpourri

mcone — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:11:29 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 30, 2008

Yes, a grab bag, and I reserve the right to enlarge on some of these ideas and crochets in future wonks. So many things seem to be coming in, most of them absurd.

For example, the other night I was channel surfing and stopped momentarily at a cheesy quiz show called “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” Well, this contestant was not. She could not name the continent—the continent!—that the Danube river runs through. And this young woman was a high school English teacher. Ok, I realize that I have ticked off a bunch of you readers already, so let me admit there are many areas in which you could probably run rings around old Shea. But…the Danube, for pete’s sake? “The Blue Danube” waltz? Vienna?

Stay tuned for a wonk on “cultural literacy.”

On a brighter note, the founders of the Sons of Ditches Running Club, Harvey Buchalter (“Anamal”) and Shea (“Chickenlegs”) and their wives journeyed south to El Paso, Texas, recently for the Masochists’—I mean the Transmountain—20k. Six+ miles up the Franklin Mountain highway and six+ miles back down. A race is not a real race unless it is really painful, and the Transmountain qualifies in spades. Harvey distinguished himself by coming in fourth in his class (M 60-64). As for Shea, he was deeply depressed over his lackluster training these last few months, sure that he was heading for a well-deserved humiliation. He slept fitfully the night before and he had eaten, at dinner, a whole jalapeno (what was he thinking?) so his bowels were in an uproar before the race, and ten yards into the race he realized that he had forgot his knee brace. “Well, this is as good as it gets, you old fool,” he said, and started humping up that long hill. To cut to the chase, Shea wound up shaving a minute off his last year’s time (2:01:00) and coming in second (last year, third) in M 65-69. Sometimes absurdity has its upside.

Chickenlegs is unbelievably pumped, Wonkers! Bring on the San Diego Marathon!

The Longsuffering Diana recently downloaded for me a CD of Paul Robeson songs. Never heard of Paul Robeson (1898-1976)? He had, arguably, the most astounding voice that this country has ever known. He made “Old Man River” famous. Other songs in his repertoire included “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “John Brown’s Body,” “Deep River,” and “Shenandoah.” You get the idea. Basso profundo and basso cantante. And he himself was astounding. All American at Rutgers, professional football player, law school graduate, actor, singer, writer, social activist, and ultimately a twisted and tragic figure. Oh, yes, expect a wonk on Paul Robeson.

What surprised and delighted me was to find out that he did a cover (as they say) of “Danny Boy”! Take that, you ^%$%# tenors!” I shouted, and boomed along with Paul, my new best friend, terrifying the cats.

And in local news, a couple of years ago (the case is only now coming to trial) a man struck a whole family—some on foot, some on horseback—on a rural road with his pick-up truck, killing the horses and seriously injuring one of the kids. His blood alcohol level was almost twice the legal limit for New Mexico. But his lawyer, surely one of the brightest stars in the legal galaxy, was not troubled by this pesky fact:

“Dan Marlow, Tomlinson’s attorney, said during his opening statements on Monday that Tomlinson is ‘an experienced drinker’ who ‘drinks beer like we drink water’ and that alcohol had nothing to do with the accident.” (Albuquerque Journal account).

No, I didn’t make this up, this new benchmark for both the legal and the medical communities. Mothers Against Drunk Driving may as well just pack it in and stop hectoring us. Evidently if you drink enough (Tomlinson admitted to being an alcoholic) you—what?—come through to the other side and are not drunk after all? Or is this homeopathy raised to new heights? I would wager that 95% of those arrested for Driving While Intoxicated are “experienced drinkers.” I guess it’s the amateur drinkers, those feckless dilettantes, that we have to watch out for. I hope that Marlow is in the running for the Chutzpa Award.

I’d drink to that.

And in national news, two sisters from Virginia are selling, on eBay, a Frosted Flake shaped uncannily like the state of Illinois. Bidding, at last count, stood at $1,025.00. I will not mar that perfect absurdity with my feeble comments.

Lastly—and not at all absurd—this month saw the passing, at 82, of William F. Buckley, the man who reinvigorated the conservative movement in the middle of the last century. It is true that Buckley—with his quasi-British drawl, his studied unflappability, his flicking tongue, and his arcane and precise vocabulary—was a ripe target for parodists. But he was also a man who could attack and dispatch unworthy ideas—and do it more eloquently than anyone else—without attacking those who espoused those ideas. Such rare and civilized behavior will be sorely missed. Now we are left with the Limbaughs, the Coulters, and the Hannitys. Seems we have wound up absurd after all.

See you next week.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Staying Put II

mcone — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 12:26:04 -0600

Jerome Shea
Saturday, March 22, 2008

This idea of mobility is easy to oversimplify and of course is also a matter of degree. There are people who, for whatever reasons, move every couple of years and often over great distances; there are others who are born, live, and die in the same house in the same town. Some are proverbial rolling stones while some are as rooted as oak trees.

But most of us fall somewhere in between.

I know I do. Yes, I have lived in Albuquerque for almost 40 years, well more than half my life. But I was born in Rhode Island and raised in eastern Pennsylvania. After college graduation (see “Ford Flathead I”) I made my own monumental trek, all the way to Colorado. Then with my new masters degree I went to the Midwest for three years to teach at Illinois State University. Then, finally, I came here to the University of New Mexico for my PhD and here I have stayed.

I honestly think I’ve had the best of both.

I said last week that people move because they have to or because they want to. That, too, was an oversimplification. I left Pennsylvania for both reasons. There were things I needed to—had to—leave behind. Moving, especially moving from where one was raised, is a metaphor for separation and independence, a Statement. Why Colorado? Because it was not just “away,” but very far away and because it was like a completely different country and because it was where one traditionally got a new start (”Go west, young man!”). I could have applied to grad school in New York or Maryland or somewhere else close to home. But I never even considered it. That is the “want to” part, I think. I wanted to reinvent myself and restart my life.

Everything after Colorado is anticlimax. I moved to Illinois because a classmate got a job there and persuaded me to join him. I moved to New Mexico because I needed the PhD if I were going to continue in academia and UNM had a respected program in American Studies. But so did a lot of other schools. But I was already homesick for the West. I was already, at heart, a Westerner.

And here—here where I met the Longsuffering Diana 35 years ago—I am.

There is one more detail if I am to be completely honest. I—we—might have made one last move to somewhere and not looked back. When I got the MA in 1966 it was boom time. You could write a ticket to almost anywhere. But when I got the PhD in 1975, that train had left the station. I did not get a single offer, so I just hung around at UNM like a scrawny cat and howled at the back door until they let me in. There were times when we just scraped by, but I am glad, now, for all those rejection letters. Then we had the kids, Dan in ’77 and his sister in ’81, and the deal was sealed.

This is not intended as a mash note to Albuquerque, but where one chooses to spend four decades does make a difference. Truly big cities unsettle me, and while there are those who could happily spend four decades in, oh, Whipsocket, Iowa (pop. 1811), I am not one of them. Albuquerque, with about half a million people, has decent amenities and few pretensions. We have the state’s flagship university, we have good hospitals, we have a symphony orchestra, we have a lively community theater scene and several good restaurants. You can get your spirits lifted or your car fixed without a lot of fuss. Three cultures—Native American, Hispanic, Anglo—actually make a go of it together here. Although summers are getting hotter and the specter of drought looms over all, the climate is better than most: we’re not Fargo but we’re not Phoenix, either. And I could never leave my bosque running trails.

One more thing. Albuquerque has grown a lot since I got here. But some things and some neighborhoods haven’t changed. On a bright spring morning I can cruise through the “university ghetto” where I started out, and my ’99 Miata magicks into a ’65 Volkswagen and I am 27 years old again and the world is my oyster. Only a history in a place can do that.

Diana and I set the example, and what goes around comes around. Our daughter started her married life in Alaska. Today the family lives only a hop and skip away from us as Western distances go, but there is talk now of leapfrogging to New England. And on Christmas day at the dawn of the new millennium, our son rolled into San Diego at the wheel of a big U-Haul truck. Dan had found his own Colorado.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Staying Put

mcone — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 14:32:50 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 16, 2008

Old joke:
“Lived here all your life, old timer?”
“Not yet.”

You can blame this wonk on Sally.

She has lived all over the place during the last 45 years, both in this country and abroad. Shea, on the other hand, has been hunkered down in Albuquerque since 1969. So in her email to me a couple of weeks ago, she wondered out loud how it might feel to have put down roots as I did. Then she closed with “probably the grass looks greener sometimes from [Shea’s] side, too.”

No, actually, it doesn’t (and what grass we have in the Southwest isn’t very green, but that’s another matter). I will say right up front that I am glad to have spent more than half my life in the Duke City.* But I am grateful to Sally for making me think about such things.

First, though, let me back up a bit and get some truisms out of the way. The first is that we are preponderantly a nation of immigrants. Our forebears came for opportunity, or to escape oppression, political or otherwise, or were, sadly, shipped here in chains. That’s the first part. The second part is that once they got here many of them had caught the bug to keep moving. Land was opening up beyond the Appalachians and eventually to the Pacific, there was gold in them thar hills, and so forth. Enough of us hit the Atlantic seaboard and kept on running to establish the myth of mobility, and by “myth” I simply mean a cultural construct, a story we tell about ourselves. And those who stayed behind—in Europe, in Africa—we think of as tethered to the same plot of worn-out soil passed down through centuries.

We move out of desperation or because of imagined opportunities: we really have to or we really want to. The Joads surely did not move from Oklahoma to California as light-hearted adventurers (nor do the many Mexicans taking their chances with la migra), but many a young man or young woman or young couple piled everything into the Chevy along with their savings and lit out with high hearts. And maybe their dreams did come true. Now maybe their own kids are lighting out from California to Hawaii. Or Australia. Or even back to Ohio. The myth, the truism, persists and got a boost in the last half-century when we were becoming less and less an agricultural society and as education was exploding. Get that college degree, sign on with General Electric or the FBI, and if they shipped you to Oregon, well, that was something new to experience, and something newer still when they shifted you to the Atlanta office for a few years, and so forth. And you could always fly back for Christmas with the folks.**

I suppose this is all true and there are, I’m sure, statistics to back it up. But my anecdotal evidence gives me pause. I was raised in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. My brother and his kids and their kids still live in that general area. I would bet the rent that Steve will live out his days on his farm north of Harrisburg. His big move, about twenty-five years ago, amounted to about a hundred miles as the crow flies. The Longsuffering Diana’s parents and siblings and their families are still bunched up in New England. Most striking is the case of my grammar school classmates. Yes, we still keep in touch, had a fiftieth reunion last fall. A grammar school reunion may strike you as a bit much, but not if you realize that about half of my classmates are still neighbors! Half a century later, they still live in Doylestown or within about a fifty-mile radius. It is easy to plan a reunion if you see each other regularly in the grocery store or at church. Of those still on the radar, I am easily the farthest away, with a fellow in Florida taking second place. The rest you could cover on the map with a fifty-cent piece.

So we are not all nomads, not by a long shot. And some of us, as I hope to show next week, fall somewhere in between.

*That’s a popular nickname for our fair city, which was named for the Duke of Alburquerque, in Spain. No one knows quite when that first “r” got dropped.

**In the early nineteenth century, if you headed out to Oregon in the Conestoga wagon, it was very likely that never again would you see the loved ones you left behind. What wrenching leave-takings those must have been!

Meet Your Macinstructor

Sally

mcone — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:55:35 -0600

Jerome Shea
Sunday, March 9, 2008

Readers of this cyber-space (you know who you are) will recall “Sally,” who showed up in a couple of recent wonks. Sally was that fellow grad student at Colorado State who went to Mexico with me over Christmas break in 1964 (“Ford Flathead II”). In “Equus Caballus,” Sally’s derisive laughter assaulted my equestrian skills, or lack thereof. After the Mexico trip, I thought I was in love with Sally and suffered the sorrows of young Werther well into the springtime.

I had had no contact with her for over 40 years. When I was writing “FF II,” I considered getting in touch with her so that she could share in those memories. A Google search will turn up a slew of items about Sally, who has had a very impressive career, writing and publishing fiction and poetry. But I knew that already. What the search did not turn up was any reliable contact information, so I sighed and turned to other things. Better, perhaps, that Sally remain a memory and inviolable.

(Don’t get ahead of me now, ok?)

When I got back from class on Thursday morning a couple of weeks ago, and with “FF II” still playing to packed monitors, there in my inbox was an email from Sally! Is that weird or what? We both agree that it certainly is. No, she didn’t stumble onto macinstruct.com. And no third party figured out who “Sally” was and ratted me out. In her own words, “I bumbled onto your info while browsing and decided to send a note.” Just like that.* Cue the Twilight Zone music.

I am a child of the Enlightenment, a believer in reason. Make that Reason. Old age overtook me well before New Age could. I don’t believe for a minute that with the Power of Wonk I can “call spirits from the vasty deep” or some such nonsense. But still… still….

Anyway, we have been lobbing emails back and forth ever since, catching up. It has been grand fun pulling up pieces of our past, shaking the dust off them, and shaking our heads, sometimes, in disbelief. The first exercise was remembering the Mexico trip. Sally says it was true food poisoning that she suffered, not the simple turistas, and I won’t second-guess someone else’s misery. She says it happened later, on the way back from Mazatlan (we’ll agree to disagree there). She remembers our going to a bullfight. I believe her but I have been ransacking my memory banks for almost a week and still I draw a blank. It would appear to take two to make an experience. Or at least to make a memory.

I don’t want to get too specific here and blow Sally’s cover. But readers will be happy to know that she is well (we are both cancer survivors, though hers was a much closer call and harder fought battle than mine). She is widowed and living half a continent away. We have in some ways followed similar paths. We both are or were academics. We both write, though my efforts and successes are much more modest than hers. On the other hand, Sally married late and had no children, while the Longsuffering Diana and I were blessed with two children and now have three grandchildren.** (Sally has been saying kind, even bubbly, things about the progeny pictures I have been sending her. Thanks, Sally.) So in important ways our lives have been different, too. Pretty much, come to think of it, like any two people’s lives.

Maybe there is a Power of Wonk after all. If there is I am very grateful for it. Now if you will excuse me for just moment, I am going to squinch my eyes and other senses, get out of “Word” and into my email server, and find there a fresh communique from Sally.

And I did! Ok, now I’m getting scared, remembering that the sorcerer’s apprentice came to a bad end (didn’t he?). Perhaps, like Prospero, I had better break my staff and drown my book.

How did we ever get by without email, the email that hooked me back up with Sally, anyway? It is not as intimidating as the telephone. (I have never been comfortable talking on the phone.) You can hang up on the importuning, junk phone call, but Mother taught me not to return rudeness with rudeness, so I often suffer in silence. But spam you can just dump. And email is free. I can email my friend Xavier in London absolutely for free and I don’t have to fumble with an incomprehensibly long number and probably get it wrong anyway or get tongue-tied if he does come on the line. With email you can compose your thoughts more deliberately. If someone on the phone asks me what the capital of Suriname is—and, yes, they are always doing things like that—I wind up stuck and embarrassed. With email I can get out the atlas and write back, “Why, that would be Paramaribo, would it not?” and appear to be ever so smart.

The only problem—which it shares with cocaine and heroin—is how addictive it is. Here I sit, staring at the monitor like a dog waiting to hear his master’s key turn in the lock. I suppose when I was a moony teenager I stared at the phone, but that was then. I can’t imagine doing so now.

Staring. Staring. Sally, are you out there? Help.

*I can be Googled, too, and my email address is there in plain sight.

**On Groundhog Day (2/2) the Sheas’ first grandson arrived to join his two big sisters. I put this here at end so you could hold your applause.

Meet Your Macinstructor