Weekend Wonk

Teacher’s Testament II

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 28, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cross your fingers. Please cross your fingers.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Jerome Shea is an emeritus professor of English at the University of New Mexico, where he still teaches his classical tropes course every fall and his prose style course every spring. He has been the Weekend Wonk since January of 2007. His email is shea@macinstruct.com. He may also be found reading vintage wonks at http://unmlive.unm.edu.

A Teacher’s Testament

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 21, 2010

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

In all that time, what have I learned?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Your Macinstructor

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

Names

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 14, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just ask that boy named Sue.

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

Meet Your Macinstructor

Makeshift

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, February 7, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

He can shift for himself.

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

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

Meet Your Macinstructor

Shifting for Yourself

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 31, 2010

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

Learning 5-speed
Keep Distance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Your Macinstructor

And Another Thing…

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 24, 2010

So, as I predicted in “Juggernaut,” along comes, electronically, my invitation to this summer’s high school essay reading, my ticket to beautiful Louisville, Kentucky. I am very happy about this. Almost happy enough to still the terrors that strike at my vitals when I realize that this means another forced march through Cyberland. Stay tuned. With luck there will be no “electronic signature” to contend with.

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

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

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

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

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

Brave new world? I have my doubts.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Juggernaut

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 17, 2010

Yet again I have been almost brought low by technology. I say “almost” because I haven’t given up yet, though it may be a near thing. A certain outfit that I sometimes work for has sent me an on-line form to fill out for them. It wasn’t always this way. These people and I used to communicate by snail mail. I would get hard copies in the mail and I would fill them out and send them back. Simple. But now, more and more, it is all done on-line, and the point is that I have no choice but to play their demonic game. I think there is something very wrong about this. I feel myself being squished under the wheels of a Juggernaut and, worse, I see no hope of reversing—or even stopping—this trend.

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

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

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

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

“Jerome Shea?”

“Speaking.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But not yet.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Face the Music

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 20, 2009

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write this wonk (the first line on my note pad reads, “Is Techno Guy worth it?”). But this week the UNM Chorus, the Dulce Sueno Chorus, and the UNM Orchestra, under guest conductor Stephano Miceli, performed Brahms’ German Requiem, one of the masterworks of the Western world, and the contrast was just too stark to ignore. At the risk of compromising my modesty—faithful readers know that I have sung in the UNM Chorus for years—I will tell you that the performance was truly professional-grade, a stunning and transcendent experience for all. I am still sung out and wrung out but profoundly grateful to have been a part of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Your Macinstructor

Whales

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 6, 2009

Ever notice that some animals seem to have real trouble following the script? Take your penguin, for example. As a bird he is a disgrace (I’m sorry, but it’s time somebody said so and if it has to be me, well there you are then). Your penguin could pass muster as a portly butler in a whodunit, but where he really shines—if you have ever seen him gracefully cavorting under water—is as a fish. What’s—as they say—with that? And if penguins insist on behaving like fish, at least they do a better job of it than the ostrich, another bird with suspect credentials and ugly into the bargain. Speaking of fish, I learned just yesterday that some of them are warm-blooded. Now that’s plain wrong, and how am I going to break that news to the goldfish in my backyard pond, gliding numbly under the ice, semi-comatose till next May? Then we have fish who, tiring of one pond, can trundle awkwardly to a neighboring one. “Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly”? Don’t bet on it.

And don’t even start with me on marsupials.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Your Macinstructor

Security Fable

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

Jerome Shea
Sunday, November 29, 2009

If you ponder Krutch’s security axiom—security lies not in what one has but in what one can do without—long enough, you inevitably remember the story of the ant and the grasshopper, one of Aesop’s most famous fables. The details vary a bit in each telling but basically we have a happy-go-lucky grasshopper (in the original, a cicada) and a no-nonsense ant. The ant has spent the summer and fall finding bits of grain and grubs and hauling them laboriously back to his larder in the ant colony. The grasshopper, meanwhile, has spent those seasons roistering about—drinking, singing, dancing—and generally goofing off. Comes the winter, and the grasshopper, cold and hungry, pleads with the ant for food and shelter. The ant makes some snide remark about improvidence and slams the door in the grasshopper’s face. In some versions the grasshopper offers to (literally) sing for his supper, or otherwise entertain the ant. Too late. The ant is unmoved. It is never reported what happens to the grasshopper, but because Aesop was not Walt Disney (whose version ends in happy reconciliation), we can assume that the grasshopper will be a frozen corpse by morning. Ants practice tough love without the love. The same point, with the same righteous insect, is made in the Old Testament (Proverbs, 6:6-8): “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.” Let that be a lesson to you sluggards. You can eat, drink, and be merry and then pay a big price for your foolishness, or you can keep your nose to the grindstone but be snug (and smug) when the snow flies. What you can’t do is have it both ways.

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

Ok, we get it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meet Your Macinstructor