[ale] chmod -R ?

[jcpilman at gmail.com]

I recently changed my work laptop over to UBUNTU, Yea! All of the .txt
files I copied over from XP and put in ~/Documents have execute
permission for the owner. To change that, I tried:

~$ chmod -R a-x Documents/*.txt
~/Documents$ chmod -R a-x *.txt
~/Documents$ chmod -R a-x ./*.txt
~/Documents$ chmod -R u-x ./*.txt

It fixes the permissions for the files in Documents, but it does not
recurse into the lower Directories.
I looked at the man pages, but haven't figured it out.  I also made
sure I am the owner with chown.  All the files I copied were
originally:

nobody:nogroup.

chown recursed the way I expected it on the first try.

Can you see what I'm doing wrong?

...John