I am a PhD student studying the history of Renaissance natural history focusing on French accounts of Brazil. Chicago born, longtime KC resident, SUNY Binghamton grad student.
A picture I took of Shark Tooth Rock in Davenport, CA (13 October 2018)
A few years ago when I started working on my PhD here at SUNY Binghamton I arrived not only with a game plan in mind for getting this job done but with 4 chapters written of the sequel to my novel Erasmus Plumwood. That sequel, Plum in the Sun, follows Plumwood west to San Francisco where he’s started working on his dream job in a Silicon Valley company called Technophilia. The only problem is that when he arrives there he finds the job to be far from the dream he hoped it’d be, in particular because of a really awful boss named Don Basil who has it out for Erasmus.
I tried a few times to keep writing Plum in the Sun in my first semester in Binghamton but I found the task was a lot more difficult to do now that my mind was so squarely focused on the doctorate and setting myself up for success academically here. With that in mind I set the novel aside figuring I’d come back to it eventually. It’s only been in the last couple of months that I’ve started to think about working on it again, and while I’m certainly not going to do much of anything with it as I’m in the middle of the doctorate right now, I’m nevertheless beginning to think about working on that novel again.
The next chapter on the list to write is another of my fictionalizations of my own memories, replacing the real people who were with me in the moment with the characters populating this story. The basic premise of the chapter is that the two main characters, Erasmus Plumwood and his girlfriend Marie-Thérèse Merlinais, get more comfortable being together in California on a Sunday drive along the Pacific Coast Highway around Half Moon Bay, something my Mom and I did in October 2018 in what was one of my favorite days yet. I’m looking forward to describing the indescribable beauty of the redwoods and the coastline, the bird song and the feel of the sea breeze on my face.
But this is a story that I have to be in the right sort of mood to write. It’s not something I can do when I’m annoyed or tired or grumpy in any way, it has to be something I write when I’m in a really good mood, not all that different to how I was feeling on the day of. There’ll be some things that will be different between the real event and its fictionalized counterpart; for one thing we made that drive in October and the characters will do it in June, but considering that like it was for me it’ll be Erasmus and Marie-Thérèse’s first time seeing those sights I think my experience can still inform theirs even if I didn’t see it all in Summer.
I do intend to finish Plum in the Sun. If I’m being honest the plot and the characters are a lot stronger than the original book in what’s becoming a series. I was joking a few years ago with a friend that if I did make a series out of Erasmus Plumwood and Plum in the Sun then I might try and make it sound grandiose, if in a mocking way, and call it the Plumwoodiad. I do have a third book in the back of my head wrapping up at least this part of the lives of my characters, but considering I’m putting a dissertation ahead of Plum in the Sun on my writing assembly line, any third book in this Plumwoodiad is well further down the line and won’t be seen for a while.
So as I keep moving through my doctorate, I can’t help but smile when I think of what awaits me when I eventually do get to writing this chapter. It’ll be a wonderful few days spent intensely remembering that day and all I saw in one of the most beautiful parts of this country.
Late last week moving into Labor Day weekend I realized later than most at SUNY Binghamton that we not only had the long weekend off but also Tuesday and Wednesday for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. I guess I didn’t expect we’d be in class for two weeks and then suddenly out for nearly an entire week. In any case, I knew I wanted to make the most out of the extended break, so I decided I was going to go on at least a couple day trips around the Southern Tier of New York and the Finger Lakes just to the north of here.
On Saturday then, feeling frustrated by staying too long in my apartment on such a beautiful day I got in the car and decided to drive up towards Ithaca following what I knew of the local geography and state highway system without plugging directions into my car’s navigation system. I eventually made it to the shores of Cayuga Lake, and proceeded to drive north up the western shore of the lake thinking I’d try reaching the top and take the interstates back down to Binghamton.
After Saturday, I’d hoped I could get out again on Monday or Tuesday and take another multi-hour drive, give myself some time to see the beautiful scenery of this part of the country, and enjoy a few hours of a good podcast or audiobook. I ended up staying in Binghamton on Sunday and Monday, wanting to avoid most of the holiday weekend crowds, with the goal of waking up on Tuesday and getting on the road early with no destination in particular in mind.
Still, after spending the morning in my apartment doing some much needed cleaning I finally got on the road around 13:00 EDT. This time I did set a route into the navigation system to a town I’d wanted to visit since the first time I drove by the signs on I-86 pointing to it when I moved here in August 2019: Watkins Glen. The drive was scenic and uneventful, lots of small towns and country roads. I listened to Stephen Fry’s book Heroes, his retelling of the Labors of Heracles took up the entire afternoon’s drive.
When I arrived in Watkins Glen I quickly found a parking spot across the street from Watkins Glen State Park, my destination for the day, and made my way into the park’s main gate. Watkins Glen is home to one of a number of spectacular waterfalls that mark the furthest reach of the glaciers that dug the Finger Lakes into the New York landscape during the last Ice Age, only unlike Taughannock Falls outside of Ithaca the gorge that lies at the heart of Watkins Glen State Park is far narrower and honestly an impressive feat of engineering by the people who made it a tourist attraction at the turn of the last century.
I decided to take the Gorge Trail and see where it led. Running at 1.5 mi (2.4 km) the Gorge Trail is the main attraction of the park. Its high narrow walls make the place seem otherworldly, like something that might be fitting among the tales of the Greek heroes retold in Stephen Fry’s books. It was awe-inspiring and a little frightening at the same time. The trail is made up of an elongated stairway rising up the gorge to its conclusion at a set of 150 stone steps leading to the Upper Entrance to the park called Jacob’s Ladder. I hiked the entire route from the main entrance up to the top of Jacob’s Ladder. Along the way I was dazzled by the amazing power of all the ice and water that carved out that gorge over millions of years.
This was my favorite part of the Gorge Trail.
In the first half of the hike I took a fair number of pictures and videos that I figured I’d post onto my Instagram and Facebook after I’d left the park. I didn’t stop to look at what I’d captured, as much as I want to take pictures and videos of these places I visit, more than anything else I want to experience those places in the moment that I’m there. Selfies in particular are rare among my pictures; I care less about showing that I’m somewhere than showing the people who happen to see my pictures what I got to see.
After hiking back down to the main entrance on the far easier 1.1 mi (1.8 km) long North Rim Trail with a friendly couple from the Binghamton area I got back in the car and drove back to Binghamton, figuring I’d look at those pictures once I was back in my apartment and could really focus on them alone. 90 minutes later once I was back at my desk I looked through them, picked out 4 videos and a handful of photos and initially posted them to Instagram. One video that I chose to be the first of the lot, the cover picture as I see it, ended up getting posted to Instagram as a reel. I think at the time I intended it to go up as a longer video file that I could share onto my Instagram story and it’d play automatically instead of just showing a preview frame like videos uploaded as regular Instagram posts tend to do.
I posted everything and turned to Facebook, making a fairly similar update for my family and friends who tend to follow me on that platform. Yet as the videos were uploading to Facebook I kept noticing my phone lighting up with updates from Instagram at a dizzying pace. In the first 3 minutes that reel I’d posted had gotten 40 “likes.” I texted one of my best friends (and a frequent reader of this site) to tell her what was happening, and in the process of typing and sending the message another 45 “likes” appeared. In the next minute the total number rose from 85 to 280.
As I went into the notification settings in the Instagram app to see if I could reset things so my phone battery wouldn’t be drained too quickly by so many updates so quickly the number of “likes” rose over 300. By the time I finally went to bed around 23:00 the total was at 350. At the time of writing this post that number stands at 368.
Normally a post of mine might top out at around 40 “likes” that are often from the same people. Occasionally the things I post on Facebook will top out around 100 similar reactions, as Facebook now has more than just the like button, but nothing in my experience with social media can compare with the reaction to that Instagram reel of a pan shot across the gorge at a particular placid spot. I know for the people who are actively trying to get lots of reactions and “likes” to their social media posts that the 368 that mine received might seem insignificant, but to me it’s something to write home about.
I don’t particularly expect people to view the things I post on social media. I think it’s interesting that this particular reel has a lower than average reaction from my usual viewers. As far as I’m concerned even though this Instagram reel went as close to viral as anything I’ve ever posted on the internet, I see it as a happy accident, something that speaks more so to what the video showed than anything about me personally. Sure some of the people who “liked” that reel might subscribe to my Instagram account and follow future things I post, but either way it’s not something that’s going to change how I use that platform or social media in general. If anything the speed at which the “like” count on that reel grew seemed funny to me in the moment.
In any case if I were to try to use Instagram to promote the really important things that I make, my writing, I’d need at least 10,000 followers to activate the feature that’d allow me to add links to outside webpages to my Instagram stories. It’s one reason why I think this blog has such a steadily low readership: the place where the majority of my audience interacts with me is also a place where I can’t promote this blog or anything else I write lest I direct my audience to the “link in bio.”
Social media can serve a good purpose in my life: it’s a way that a small fish like me can make myself known for the things I do. It can have a lot of downsides too, the amount of spam subscriptions I see on my Instagram account can be gobsmacking. I’ve also got some pretty sour memories of experiences with Facebook from my high school years as well that lurk in the background, but now in my late 20s as much as I may notice what the trolls might have to say, for now I’ve been lucky not to have been harassed enough to spoil the utility of the platform for me.
The idea of a rivalry and all the extra stuff that goes with it seems to be baked into American culture. Rivalries often make for the most exciting games in a league’s calendar not only for the history traditionally associated with that matchup but also for the antics and occasional brawls that break out in the process of playing the game. As a young Cub fan I always expected there’d be a fight during a Cubs vs Cardinals game or a Cubs vs White Sox game, just as any meeting between the Red Sox and the Yankees seemed sure to produce the sort of atmosphere normally reserved in North American professional sports for the hockey rink.
Interestingly, going off of what I wrote about last week in terms of regionalism, I think it’s important to recognize that rivalries often define a region’s local identity more than anything else. The two great cities of Missouri, Kansas City and St. Louis, are defined just as much by the shuttlecocks at the Nelson-Atkins and the Gateway Arch as they are by the rivalry between the Royals and Cardinals, particularly during the 1985 World Series, which ended in Game 7 with a Royals victory over the red birds. I only hope that with the introduction of MLS’s new St. Louisian team, St. Louis City SC, that we’ll see a strong rivalry between “City” as likely they’re going to call themselves, and our own Sporting.
If anything unites most American cities and their surrounding metropolitan suburbs it’s a general dislike for other cities and their metros. Often the greatest of these rivalries seem to be founded in sports: the Chicago/St. Louis rivalry for example, which certainly began as a disagreement among two of the Midwest’s greatest metropolises in the nineteenth century and developed in the last decades of that century and into the early decades of the twentieth through the birth of the Cubs in 1871 and the ancestors of the Cardinals, the original St. Louis Browns, in 1882. In the decades and generations since that rivalry has grown not only with the introduction of the Blackhawks vs. Blues rivalry in hockey but also a general sentiment that I experienced as a Cub fan going to college at a place dominated by St. Louisians; it didn’t help that my freshman year was also a year when the redbirds won their last World Series.
On a larger scale it seems like we could carry this idea of the rivalry to a geopolitical level. Sure, the US has rivals, traditionally they’d be our counterparts in Europe, in particular in the nineteenth century Britain and in the first half of the twentieth century Germany. More recently though, in the last few generations the US’s biggest global rivals have tended to be the likes of Russia and more recently China. I will fully admit to playing off of the eternal bogeyman in the American psyche by playing the sublimely stereotypically Russian theme tune to the fantastic 1990 film The Hunt for Red October every time I find myself in St. Louis when the Cardinals are doing well. In my own silly way it’s playing off of fears of the bogeyman projected on the wall in this country in communism, comparing my own Cubs’ greatest rival to that red scourge.
It’s interesting though that we have come to develop such profound senses of national pride out of how different we are from other countries, or at least how different we see ourselves from other countries. People in positions of authority, both in government and in the media, have taken advantage of this idea of rivalry to profoundly change the political discussion: we hear more banter about the creeping influences of socialism or Islam today than we do from the same people about problems that face our country internally like racism, vast inequality, and the constant threat of violence due to our overly lenient gun laws.
I’ve often thought that if anything is true it’s that a people who define themselves by what they aren’t rather than what they are will surely fall apart in the long run. Equally, a people who cry wolf at the shadow of the wolf on the wall, labelling it something foreign, when its fangs are being used by the same crier to cause chaos in the cave itself is a people doomed to falter. We’ve found ways to use the excitement of sports to infiltrate our politics and our daily lives, forcing us to adopt a mindset that it’s always us vs. them. Eventually, if we’re not careful we’re going to bring about our own defeat on the field of play, and not by anything our opponents do. It’ll be an own goal, a safety, our knives in our own back that will bring the land of rivals to its knees.
In the last couple weeks since the UN released their new and ominous climate report I’ve been reading quite a bit about how climate change is going to impact my own home region and city. More often than not I tend to feel let down by the data available as for the United States it tends to be organized by state. So, instead of reading about how climate change is going to impact the Kansas City Metro I usually am left reading reports about its potential impacts on the States of Kansas and Missouri as a whole. While this is somewhat helpful as it narrows down the data from a national level to at least focusing on my local region, it becomes increasingly unhelpful the closer into the details I try and investigate as the climate is hardly uniform across both Kansas and Missouri.
I think this complication in how we think about ourselves and our regional identities is in large part due to how we so thoroughly organize our societies here in the United States into our 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the overseas commonwealths and territories. Metropolises like Kansas City don’t fit comfortably into these state-based regions as they straddle interstate borders. Think through a list of the major metropolitan cities in the United States, how many of them straddle interstate borders like Kansas City? This tends to be a factor more in the East and Midwest than the West where the borders tends to reflect the regional geography better than in the West where they are based on abstract lines of latitude and longitude (see the rectangularity of Colorado and Wyoming).
At the time when the United States was first formed as a federal republic in the late 1780s these borders effectively reflected what had been the borders between neighboring colonies and later effectively semi-autonomous republics and commonwealths. The idea of urban sprawl, let alone suburban development, was in its infancy. Cities could only be as large as a person could cross them by foot or carriage. Yet thanks to industrialization and a booming population the great cities of this country have spread far and wide from their original boundaries. There is a good argument to be made that the westernmost suburbs of New York today are located in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
We should really begin to think of our country not as a collection of states defined solely by their geographical boundaries but instead as a collection of metropolises defined by their sprawl and common culture. I believe the best maps to describe the population of the United States today are those that depict either regional media markets, such as the counties where the local TV and radio broadcasts come from a specific city, or those that show general spheres of cultural influence.
A map of the US media markets
All of this is fully impacted by each metropolis’s local climate. Kansas City is Kansas City in part because of its varied weather and four seasons, and by the fact that unlike much of Kansas to the west that Kansas City actually gets a decent amount of rain. So when I read that the climate “in Kansas” or “in Missouri” is going to do X or Y I’m left frustrated because our climate in Kansas City is vastly different from the climate of Goodland or Dodge City as it equally is from that of St. Louis or Ste. Genevieve. I suggest we begin to really start thinking of our country in this manner that’s more accurate to the population and density.
For me, having lived on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the metro, I see myself as a Kansas Citian well before I’ve ever thought of myself as a Kansan or a Missourian. The same can be said in regards to my original hometown in the Chicago suburbs: I always felt more a part of the greater Chicago Metro than I ever did feel any connection to the rural parts of Illinois beyond the suburban sprawl. The continuing pandemic has only increased my sense of a metropolitan identity with how profoundly the state government in Missouri let its citizens down in not fighting but actually aiding and abetting the spread of the pandemic throughout the state.
Yesterday I did find a Kansas City-specific climate change report published by the Mid-America Regional Council. In it the evidence points to a likely conclusion that Kansas City will move by the end of this century from its current situation of being on the borderline between a humid continental climate and a humid subtropical climate to being fully within the bounds of the latter. As a humid subtropical city, we will have more rainfall per year, with hotter summers and milder winters. Less snow, sure, but more summer days when it will be too hot and humid to be outside.
One aspect of this report that wasn’t stated that I think needs to be considered: if Kansas City is going to have a hotter and more humid climate, then surely the cities and states further to the south (Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas) will see their climates transition to a point that they will be unbearable for many people. To me this seems to indicate that Kansas City will become a destination for many climate refugees from the West South Central census region, meaning our current metropolitan population of 2.34 million is only a shadow of what we might end up happening.
With the last weeks of the Summer break from the Academic Year coming to an end, I thought it would be fun to offer those of you who still read these posts a few podcast suggestions that I regularly listen to throughout the week. These may do a decent job at giving you a general idea of my own interests as they stand at the time of writing.
Planetary Radio
I first found this podcast in early 2020 just before the current pandemic began, and have made it a regular staple of my weekly radio and TV diet. It’s something that I make a point of listening to, if not on its usual Wednesday release, then by the end of the day on Thursdays. Hosted by Mat Kaplan, this is the official podcast of the Planetary Society, a space advocacy organization of which I am a proud member.
Planetary Radio, new releases every Wednesday.
A People’s History of Kansas City
A People’s History of Kansas City is always a wonderful solution for homesickness. I first started listening to it during my first year in Binghamton, I believe in early 2020. Some of my fondest memories listening to this podcast are of the time I was driving back to Binghamton from Albany Airport down I-88 (NY) and listening to a gripping story about the Guadalupe Centers here in KC, or more recently when on the way to and from a Royals game I listened to a couple episodes about Disney’s Kansas City roots and the post-contact history of the Missouria, the people for whom the Missouri River and the State of Missouri are named. I always look forward to hearing an episode of A People’s History, and occasionally even hearing people who I know personally get interviewed on this show (it helps being a historian).
A People’s History of Kansas City is off for the Summer.
Real Humans by Gina Kaufmann
Staying with the Kansas City, and KCUR, theme for a minute I want to suggest Gina Kaufmann’s latest project, Real Humans. It’s a shorter podcast, the episodes rarely seem to go over 20 minutes, but it addresses ordinary people here in KC and how the world we’re living in is impacting their lives. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve heard of this new 2021 release so far, and am looking forward to more stories brought by the host of KCUR’s old 10 am show Central Standard.
Real Humans by Gina Kaufmann, new episodes on Sundays
Star Talk Radio
I’ve been a fan of Dr. Tyson’s for a while now, having first really heard about him in my undergraduate Astronomy class at Rockhurst. This is essentially a radio version of his talk show that aired for a while in the mid-2010s on National Geographic’s cable channel. Essentially it’s Dr. Tyson and his friend Chuck Nice discussing whatever the topic of the week is with their guest. It’s admittedly been harder to get engaged in this podcast than others, but it’s a good one nonetheless.
Star Talk Radio, new episodes premiere on Mondays at 18:00 CT/19:00 ET.
Mission: Interplanetary
I think I first subscribed to this podcast either during PlanetFest this past February or during this year’s Yuri’s Night celebration in April. Either way, this has become one of my favorites for the interesting topics involving human Space exploration that are covered in each episode. The hosts, astronaut Cady Coleman and scientist & author Andrew Maynard are a lot of fun to listen to on either a long drive or a long walk around the neighborhood.
Mission: Interplanetary, off for the Summer. New episodes expected this Fall.
Ologies with Alie Ward
Ologies has topped most of the Apple Podcast charts this Summer and for good reason. I first found it one afternoon this Spring after a fun visit to the Helzberg Penguin Plaza at the Kansas City Zoo when I decided I wanted to find a podcast about penguins. Lo and behold, Ologies had an episode entitled “Penguinology,” with an expert in those antarctic sea birds, and from that point on I was hooked. I’ve really enjoyed listening to the various guest experts on this show, and while it’s a longer one it makes for good listening when you have a free 90 minutes to spare.
Ologies with Alie Ward, new episodes on Tuesdays.
Overheard at National Geographic
Overheard is a podcast that I found fairly early on in my current run of frequent podcast-listening, which all largely began with A People’s History and Planetary Radio. I’ve been a subscriber to National Geographic Magazine for quite a while now, and when I saw that Nat Geo had a podcast I figured it’d be a good one to listen to. At first it was hard to get engaged with it, the early stories I heard weren’t ones that I was all that interested in, but more and more I’ve come to really enjoy it. A recent episode involved that I loved an anthropological study of surviving Nahua-speaking communities in Mexico. Overheard has gone from being one that I’d occasionally listen to to a show that I look forward to every week.
Overheard at National Geographic, new releases on Tuesdays.
Sidedoor
From one Washington scientific institution to another, Sidedoor is a podcast from the Smithsonian that I only found a little over a month ago after my day trip to D.C. to visit a special exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) about Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Sidedoor has so far had really engaging stories that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, and it’s inspired me more than ever to make it back to D.C. to visit the collections that get a mention on the podcast, in particular an upcoming special exhibit at the old Arts & Industries Building called Futures that sounds like it’ll be really neat.
Sidedoor, new episodes every Tuesday resuming in the Fall.
Gates McFadden InvestiGates: Who do You Think You Are?
One big change in my life that came about the same time as the start of the pandemic was my decision to try watching Star Trek again. I started this time with Picard and have since moved onto The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and am currently watching Voyager as well as the new episodes of Lower Decks. Considering a good portion of my free time tends to be spent watching Trek, after all there’s so much to praise about those shows and films, I’ve been on the look out for a good Trek podcast to listen to on a weekly basis. So, when I read on Twitter that The Next Generation‘s own Gates McFadden (Dr. Crusher) would be launching a podcast where she interviewed her fellow Trek stars, I figured I’d give it a go. To be honest I’ve really enjoyed listening to a pair of friends who I know for their performances on screen talk for an hour, or sometimes two, about their lives.
Gates McFadden InvestiGates: Who do you think you are?, new episodes on Wednesdays.
Conclusion
As you can see, I’ve got a lot of different podcasts that I tend to listen to on a weekly basis, and yeah I make time for them. There are a number of other ones that I’m looking in to, notably the Sisters in Strange podcast co-hosted by my cousin Chelsea Dunn and the Star Trek: The Original Siblings podcast co-hosted by my good friends Alex and Sami Brisson, the latter of which I’ll get to once I actually watch the original Star Trek series.
I’ve even considered providing narration of these blog posts as a sort of podcast, a service which is an option if I ever decide to give it a go. At the moment though I’m happy to just have people read what I’ve decided to write about.
It’s hot again here in Kansas City. At the time of writing the current air temperature is 36ºC (97ºF) with a heat index of 45ºC (113ºF) and a humidity measuring at 55%. Like I said, it’s hot again here in Kansas City. And while August is usually the hottest month of the year here in the Midwest, and while thankfully we aren’t dealing with the horrific wildfires that are burning up the Mountain West and Pacific states, it’s still hot here on the prairies.
The thing about this heat that makes it more unusual to me than our regular summer heat waves is the fact that based on a UN climate report that was published earlier this week this sort of heat is going to be the norm in places like Kansas City in the coming decades, and to be honest we have only ourselves to blame. As warm as it is here it must be even worse further to the south right now in Texas and beyond the Rio Grande in Mexico and Central America. Our summer discomfort bodes even worse for the people who live in places where 35ºC+ temperatures in the summer are the norm because when our weather gets that hot theirs is bound to get even hotter.
It makes me wonder then how will this impact our winters? In the last decade we’ve seen harsher winters with more formidable blizzards and snowfall here in Kansas City than I can remember in my own relatively short lifetime. Will our summers get hotter and our winters cooler? Or will the summer heat mean our temperature cycles won’t fall quite as far as they have? For the record low temperature that I’ve experienced here has been -26ºC (-15ºF), though thankfully I was away in comparably balmy yet snowy Upstate New York when the temperature dropped even lower than -26ºC (-15ºF) this past February during the storms that knocked out power to Texas and by extension most of the Great Plains.
I’m not terribly fond of this sort of heat, and yes there is a difference to dry heat compared to this wet heat (take that pun where you will). When I was on a road trip with my Dad driving across the deserts of the Colorado Plateau in western Colorado and eastern Utah in June I got to experience this same temperature, 36ºC (97ºF) in a very dry climate, and it was actually a pleasant experience. Would I want to live out there in the deserts near Moab and Green River? Probably not. But if a KCUR article today about a local group of triathletes is correct, as KCUR usually tends to be, the human body can adapt rather well to extremes in temperature. I’ve tried to take the opportunity to go out and walk earlier in the mornings when the temperature is still in the high 20s, low 30s C (around 80ºF), which has certainly helped me cope with the few times I’ve needed to go outside during the height of the afternoon when as it happens I’m writing this post.
I guess the best answer I can give now is that we’ll adapt. We’ll adapt both in realizing we have to shift towards renewable energy sources ASAP or risk our very survival as a species, and we’ll adapt to the new climate that we ourselves have created, for better or worse. While it’s been fairly obvious for a while I’d say the new UN Climate Report is rightfully the herald of the Anthropocene, the latest geological epoch in Earth’s history. It’s an epoch when the greatest impact upon the balanced and complex ecosystem of our planet has been transformed and impacted the most by us and our industriousness. We’ve created our bed, now it’s time to sleep in it, and make sure the feathers don’t fly out of the mattress and pollute the entire bedroom floor. That cleanup would be practically impossible.
I still remember my first ever school assignment. It was in March 1999, my second semester of Kindergarten. The job was to learn how to write the number “1”, which in the U.S. is normally just written like a vertical line (|). I didn’t listen to all of the instructions, and brought my work back to my teacher, who was flabbergasted to see I had written slashes (/) across the page. It was not only my first assignment, but also my first F. Now, 22 years and eight schools/universities later, it’s interesting to me to look back at the early years in my life when I was learning to write my letters, first in print, and later starting in second grade in cursive.
I grew to be fairly proud of my handwriting, for how fluid it steadily became, but especially for how much it seemed to reflect back on my own personality. Yet in the last few years I’ve found myself writing things by hand far less than ever before, and since starting my first MA in London six years ago, handwritten notes have become a hassle to transport back and forth to Kansas City.
For me, of any of the essential skills I learned in my elementary school years, cursive was the one that seemed the most validating. Everything official, proper, or grown-up that I knew about that wasn’t printed by a press or typed on a computer was written in cursive. I even tried to emulate my favorite cursive handwriting, that being Thomas Jefferson’s on the Declaration of Independence, which after seeing it on the wall in so many classrooms over the years was almost as familiar an image to me as any classic and often replicated picture, like George Washington Crossing the Delaware or the shot of Sammy Sosa hitting a home run that I had up on my bedroom wall as a kid (Go Cubs!)
As a result of my interest in emulating that older style of cursive, I quickly moved past the standard style of cursive script that we were taught at my parochial school, the D’Nealian style, with its regimented curves and extra humps on the n and m, to something that was all my own, yet still mostly legible for my teachers, except of course for when I tried reintroducing the old long s character among the double-s in my handwriting, making Congress appear as it did in the 18th century as Congreſs. I was quick to decide that it was better to keep the long-s out of homework, lest it lose me credit, and use it for fun though.
When I started my college years, now a full decade ago, my experience with handwriting seemed to undergo a sort of flowering. I quickly found that I could remember more information if I hand-wrote it, and developed a very particular style of note-taking that was entirely my own. What’s more, I insisted on taking all of my notes on a type of yellow legal paper that worked perfectly for what I was trying to do. In 2010 and 2011, at the end of my high school years, I’d expanded my writing to include the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, and often found it fun to try and write down names and other important notes in English but using those alphabets rather than the usual Latin one, just to see how things would work out.
Over the four years that I was an undergrad, and briefly during my two years working on my History MA at UMKC (2017-2019), I used this system to its fullest extent, and really grew to enjoy the process of putting the ideas being discussed at the front of the room down on paper, always imagining that someday I’d go back and look at those notes. In all honesty, I actually have done that from time to time, but usually when I’m looking for something specific in those notes.
My experiences moving across the water to do my first MA at the University of Westminster in International Relations and Democratic Politics (2015-2016) spelled the first end for my use of handwritten notes. I took my yellow legal paper with me, but as I discovered, it seemed less useful to take regular notes in my classes when I wasn’t being graded on the material covered in the lectures, and overall any documents I created while in London would have to be brought back with me to Kansas City when I finished my degree there. That simple need to conserve space, and the benefit of having a computer that’s perfectly capable of recording writing made my handwritten note taking fairly untenable.
Today, as I’m working on my doctorate, I still occasionally take notes by hand, though usually only in the form of edits to typed documents and even more specifically only when I’m in Kansas City where I have easy access to a printer. Like my experience in London, the need for the things I’m taking back and forth across the eastern half of the U.S. to fit in my Mazda means that it’s more helpful if I don’t have a big set of file folders full of handwritten notes in tow. Plus, today I have everything filed away digitally on my computer, meaning every set of notes I have on a specific book or a specific article, or on a lecture I heard is easy to find with my computer’s search tools. Today, if I can have a book or an article available for me to digitally take notes on it, then I’ll take that option a thousand times over having the physical paper document or paperback in front of me any day.
I don’t know how much I’ll use my handwriting in the future, now that I don’t use it for work. I’ve never been too fond of writing my fiction by hand either, it usually takes much longer than typing it, and my thinking through a story often happens much faster than my hands can write with pen and paper. I still try to send handwritten letters and cards to people when I can, though again when the ease and utility of computers and smartphones is brought into the discussion it quickly becomes evident that any “snail mail” is almost as much of an antique as using an old fashioned typewriter; while those older technologies work, they fall short of the efficiency of the new in many ways.
So, is this the end of handwriting for me? Maybe. I certainly think cursive should still be taught in schools, but I concede the fact that my own experience has shown that with the rise of so much still fairly new digital technology, including every device that you are reading this on, has made a fair deal of handwritten communication redundant.
From my visit to the Stade olympique de Montréal in 2019
As surely nearly everyone reading this knows, the Olympics are back on after a year-long delay due to the ongoing pandemic. And the many, many people who have argued that the games should’ve been cancelled because of COVID have a pretty solid case, if I’m being completely honest. The best I can tell is that the games went on largely because of the financial loss that Tokyo and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) would lose, let alone all of the national broadcasters and corporate sponsors, if the games had ended up being called off. Marketplace’sreport on the costs related to holding the games placed the estimated cost of the current Olympiad in Tokyo “at around $35 billion,” a figure substantially higher than the most recent Summer Olympics five years ago in Rio ($13 billion).
Still, while I can’t help but agree with the naysayers, that bringing the globe’s top athletes to one city, the capital of a country with very low COVID vaccination rates, was a bad idea all around, I’m still enamored with the games like I am every time that they occur. The first Olympics that I can remember, the one that caught my attention and never gave up, was Sydney 2000. As a young seven year-old living on the edge of Kansas City, I loved everything about the Olympics, from the amazing opening ceremony, to how clean the facilities looked, to the gobsmacking talent of the athletes themselves, the ones who make the Olympics the spectacle they are every time around. That year I can particularly remember the diving events more than anything else; diving remains one of my favorite Summer Olympic sports because of it.
By the time the Winter Olympics came around in 2002, hosted by Salt Lake City, I was excited to see the circus begin all over again. Only this time, it’d be in my own country, albeit a good two-days drive west of home. At about the same time as the Salt Lake games, I even enrolled in a local fencing school, thinking that maybe someday I might even make it up to that stage of competition. My days in the saber competitions were fairly brief, though recently I’ve wondered if maybe the foil would’ve been a better fit for me. It’s been interesting watching each Olympiad in the intervening decades: as a child I got to look up to the Olympians of the Sydney, Salt Lake, Athens, Turin, Beijing, and Vancouver games, while by the time London came around in 2012, I suddenly found myself the same age as most of the athletes.
In the years since, with Sochi, Rio, Pyeongchang, and now Tokyo, I’ve found an even greater appreciation for the Olympics watching as an adult. I don’t really expect I’ll ever end up competing in any Olympic event, at 28 I’m likely past my prime in most categories, but I still enjoy sitting back and watching hours of competition each evening, and being awestruck at the skill of these top athletes in their respective sports.
If anything, I really hope the IOC can figure out the big issues wracking the games, from the corruption, to the high cost of hosting, to issues of doping scandals, and return these games to being purely 16 days focused on the individual athletes and their talents. Any global sporting event is going to be a massive revenue source for broadcasters and corporate sponsors, so while I may raise an eyebrow every time one of the athletes from my country comes on the screen talking about their favorite sandwich from Subway, I usually dismiss it as just something they’ve got to do to be able to afford to compete at this level.
Proposals have been made in the last couple of years to have permanent Olympic host cities, say a rotating set of cities that could take turns hosting the games. Dr. Dave Amos, an Assistant Professor in the Department of City & Regional Planning at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, CA made a pretty good argument for this in 2018 on his excellent urban planning YouTube channel City Beautiful.
In his video, Amos argues that there should be 6 cities designated permanent hosts of the Games, with the Summer and Winter Olympics rotating between those 6. For the Winter Games they are Calgary, Turin, and Pyeongchang, while for the Summer Games they are Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, and Sydney. Honestly, the argument makes a lot of sense, and would be a good solution to the problem of cost and how useful Olympic venues become following their run in the spotlight, as those six cities’ venues would be reused every few years.
I like the idea, though one of the big draws for me every time is getting to see the events in a different city. I’m loving the opportunity to learn a bit more about Tokyo and Japan in general this time around, just as I found myself reading quite a bit more about Pyeongchang and South Korea three years ago during the last Winter Olympics. I’m hoping, for example, to be able to be in LA during the 2028 Summer Olympics, I’d love at least once to see the games in person, to not only immerse myself in the Olympics as I can watching them on TV, but to be there in person surrounded by the whole experience. I imagine it’s similar to going to an F1 race instead of just watching it on TV. The race itself is better on TV, honestly, but the fan experience alone is worth the trip.
Still, if the IOC ends up choosing a permanent host city, or a set of permanent host cities, I’ll be excited to see who they choose, and will undoubtedly begin daydreaming about making the trip out to see the Olympics in person there someday. For now though, I’m content to sit in front of the TV and spend an evening watching the events in Tokyo from afar.
I’m writing this having just read a stirring article in Commonweal by Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and theology at Boston College, on the merits of reading St. Augustine’s Confessions in the original Latin. Professor Kaveny’s article was in response to Princeton’s Classics department’s much noted decision to cut the requirement for its undergraduate majors to prove proficiency in Latin and/or Ancient Greek in order to earn their degrees. I’ve had a number of discussions with friends and colleagues about that particular decision, being a current student of Latin myself, and an off-again-on-again student of Classical and Koine Greek. While I personally haven’t yet read Augustine in the original Latin, in part from a personal dislike for what I perceive as the grumpiness of St. Augustine’s writings (of the early Church Fathers I prefer St. Gregory of Nyssa), I can relate to the thrill and benefit of reading these texts in their original languages.
A page from my copy of Ovid’s Ars Amorita
There’s something lost in the translation of any text. English, for all its excessive complexity, lacks the imperfect tense for verbs, meaning that when I am trying to express an idea in any of the languages my sources are written in that uses imperfect verbs, I’m often left struggling to find a really good clear way of expressing that the action is in the past but not quite completed. Think about particular words or phrases in English that sound like other words; the planet Uranus has a funny name depending on how you pronounce it, but that relation between the seventh planet and your posterior anatomy is lost if you try to translate it into practically any other language.
Beyond just understanding literature as its authors intended, the study of Latin and Ancient Greek is critically important to understanding the origins of our civilization, however problematic that word may well have become. The civilization of the peoples whose cultural origins are drawn from Europe, both eastern and western, derive in their origins from the ancient civilizations of the Greeks and the Romans. Those cultures, those powers, those memories have had such a profound and lasting influence on our world today that it would be profoundly shortsighted to stop teaching about them to such a detailed level as many programs do. Our political systems have their origins at least in part in the Classical World, modern representative governments can draw some of their lineage from the democracy of Athens as well as from the Roman Republic.
Generation after generation following the fall of the Western Roman Empire tried in their own way to set themselves up as the heirs of Rome, from Theodoric and the Ostrogoths based at Ravenna in the fifth century CE through Charlemagne and his successors the Holy Roman Emperors in the German-speaking lands north of the Alps, to the Tsars of Russia, the revolutionaries of France, and the founders of the United States. I once wrote in my book Travels in Time Across Europe that to me, Paris today feels as close to what I’d imagine an idealized vision of Rome during the height of the Republic would’ve been like two thousand years ago. The symbols of those governments, particularly of the Roman Republic and the later Roman Empire, remain so present in so many aspects of our world today.
I study the history of French natural history texts written in the second-half of the sixteenth century right at the tail end of the Renaissance that began in Florence in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The whole idea of a renaissance is that it was a period when classical culture, literature, architecture, politics, and philosophy saw a revival, a rebirth as is the etymology of the word “renaissance” itself. Advocates of this “renaissance” at the time saw themselves as rekindling the light of the classical world, of restoring the course of what at that time was beginning to be understood as European (aka Western) civilization.
The accidental realization that the Americas existed in 1492 thanks to Columbus resulted in one of the greatest changes in the history of humanity, the opening of the Atlantic and the beginning of permanent contact between the peoples of the Americas and those of Eurasia and Africa. It’s because of this that I prefer not to refer to our civilization as “Western” or “European,” but rather as an Atlantic civilization. It is still the descendant of the civilization of Christian Europe, itself a descendant of the older Mediterranean civilizations of Greece and Rome, but since 1500 our civilization has been profoundly altered by its encounters with civilizations beyond Europe’s waters.
I concede that many of the worst aspects of our Atlantic civilization, from colonialism to slavery can trace some of their origins back to the Greeks and Romans, and that ideas like Manifest Destiny here in the United States have been argued to have drawn influence from older ideas like Rome’s right to rule the world, but even in the historical periods when these claims were being made they were incredibly flimsy. That said, of any problem today, one cannot tie modern ideas of race back to the classical world, as our ideas about race didn’t really begin to develop until 1500; it’s development in the Americas is a central theme to my research.
All this said, we need to understand our history to understand who we are and how we got here, and to do that we need to understand the classical foundations upon which our civilization has been built. The best way to understand those foundations is to be able to read the books they left behind in their original languages. Since the Renaissance we’ve remained generally in the same steady period of knowledge about the classical past; in fact one could argue that the beginnings of all modern fields of research can draw their origins back to the humanists of the Renaissance who sought to revive the sciences of the classical past. Language barriers speak more so to the problems with our education system in general than to anything else. Language education isn’t prioritized in this country, where assimilation and Americanization have been the standards for generations; we come to expect schoolchildren to only know American English because anything else would be unpatriotic. Even if a student comes into a Classics program with a foundational knowledge of one of the Romance languages, in this country likely Spanish, they’ll have a way into beginning to understand Latin. There are strong connections between languages as much as there are between cultures of different ages, we just have to know where to look.
This week I’ve decided to write a poem. Writer’s block has determined it’s not quite the right time for me to try and express my thoughts on this topic or any topic in full sentences. Enjoy!
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 