Category Archives: Life

The First Quarter-Century

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, to begin Season 5, I discuss some hopes of mine for the first quarter of the twenty-first century through reflections on three things that I imagined might be possible twenty-five years ago.

25 years ago, I was a young boy of 7 when I witnessed the ringing in of the New Year 2000 in my Aunt Jennie’s living room. I was a new arrival here in Kansas City, having only lived here for close to six months, and surrounded by people and places that were fairly new to me. The end of the twentieth century was a significant turning point in my life. It meant that I would be a part of the first generation to grow to adulthood in the third millennium of the current era. Despite this I’ve always felt drawn to the 1990s as the decade when I planted my roots and began to seek out an understanding of my world and what might lie beyond.

I remember throughout the day sitting in front of the television set watching several things, including my first viewing of Star Trek: The Next Generation, whichever channel it was showed “The Best of Both Worlds” Parts 1 and 2. Yet they also cut to the new year’s celebrations in cities around our planet. I remember seeing the fireworks go off atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge and later along the Thames. At 11 pm our time we watched the ball drop in Times Square, and then again, an hour later the networks rebroadcast that ball drop for us living in the Central Time Zone. We stayed the night with my Aunt Jennie and cousins Chelsea and Isabella and then drove north to Smithville, Missouri on the morning of New Year’s Day to buy a new sofa before returning to the farm my parents bought the previous summer where we were still building our house. That winter we lived in a 10-foot long trailer that had to be moved into the farm’s barn in the winter to keep it from blowing over in the high winter winds. This way at least we could be on the build site so my parents could be around to oversee the entire process of our house being built. The only other thing of note from New Year’s 2000 was that it was the last time I visited the town of Smithville until February 2019 when I gave a public lecture at the Smithville branch of the Midcontinent Public Library system. I’ve since made the trip to that northern Kansas City suburb once more in April 2024 in a vain effort at seeing the Northern Lights when I could’ve stayed home and seen them perfectly well in the city.

As New Year’s 2025 approached this year then I began to reflect on my memories of New Year’s 2000. In all honesty it was the first New Year’s that I can remember staying up for, let alone my first New Year’s in Kansas City. It’s one holiday that I’ve continuously celebrated in this city ever since. Yet what I’ve been thinking about more is what I was reading at the time about future technologies that were just around the corner. On a recent episode of the Startalk podcast hosted by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and Comedian Chuck Nice they interviewed Dr. Charles Liu, a professor of astrophysics at the City University of New York, Dr. Tyson talked about how the most futuristic thing that he looked forward to from the original 1960s Star Trek series were the videophones that they used. I too remember an entry in one of my childhood factbooks that I loved reading around the millennium which included one of these as one of the great up and coming technologies. While we may not have landline telephones with video capabilities like that entry suggested our portable smart phones all largely have this very function. The funny thing about it is that I rarely use FaceTime on my iPhone. Looking at my call logs the last FaceTime videocall I made was in March 2024 when I was excited to show off the room upgrade that I got in a hotel in the Chicago Loop to my parents. We’d stayed at that same hotel together several years before in the week between Christmas and New Year’s and had half the space for the three of us that I had in this room on my own.

A Tandberg E20, the sort of videophone I expected we’d all have.

I tend to make more videocalls on my computer over Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger and very rarely over Skype which Zoom largely replaced in 2020. Zoom has become the de facto videocall platform for many of us, especially in professional contexts. I even use Zoom to record lectures thanks to its screen sharing features. I do wish the technology could improve further though. It would be great to have an easier way to have the camera be set up higher so that it’s not looking up at me but instead straight-on or slightly downward. While an aesthetic preference it also speaks again to the old Star Trek ship-to-ship on screen communications seen in all of the series. Star Wars’s holographic communications would be an even neater step forward, and while I remember seeing a story about how the French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon used holography in his bid in the 2022 French presidential election and another that ABBA is touring again in holographic form the technology still seems to be far from ubiquitous enough to be a regular form of communication.

An Air France Concorde at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in Virginia.

Another technology that I remember dreaming about in 2000 that was in active commercial use then yet has lain dormant for most of the quarter-century since is supersonic flight. The Concorde last flew in 2003 thanks to its extreme cost and the fatal crash at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2000. Yet I remember my Mom often saying that she wanted to cross the Atlantic at least once on a supersonic jet. While there are many aspects of the in-flight experience on your average transatlantic flight that I enjoy, I do actually enjoy the food and movies in economy for the most part, I certainly wouldn’t mind a quicker jump across the water to Europe. The average supersonic flight between New York and London or Paris was 3.5 hours compared to the 7 hours it tends to take on subsonic aircraft. That’s closer to the travel time for a flight from the Midwest to Southern California today. Looking at supersonic aviation now and the promises of companies like Boom at restoring supersonic flight to commercial service, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to someday fly on one of these planes. In the short term I’m more hopeful that Kansas City might finally get a nonstop service to one of the European capitals in time for our hosting duties in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. On my last return trip from Paris to Kansas City via Washington-Dulles while I enjoyed a great many aspects of the flight I do remember a growing sense of annoyance at how long it takes to get to Kansas City from Europe when compared to most other American cities our size and larger.

Finally, at the turn of the millennium one of my favorite TV shows was the natural history program Eyewitness co-produced by the publisher Doring Kindersley, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and the BBC. Surprisingly for how influential it’s been, I haven’t written about Eyewitness on the Wednesday Blog yet. This program brought the factual book series of the same to life for its viewers and set the stories of life, the universe, and everything it told in a computer-generated space it called the “Eyewitness Museum” which acted in some ways like a physical museum yet in many others with unusual camera angles and hallways it was entirely an edifice of the mind. I remember loving this series because it gave me the space to imagine and wonder at nature, the world, and human history in a manner which few other programs have done. I remember hoping that I could visit such a museum sometime in my life, and in some ways I’ve done that time and again. Many of the cultural artifacts in the program are on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and when it comes to the animals & plants on camera it’s well and truly on display in natural history museums around the globe that I’ve gotten to visit.

I rediscovered Eyewitness again in my early twenties when DK began uploading the episodes onto YouTube. By that point I’d already been making videos of my own for nearly a decade, and rewatching this old show from the ‘90s I was inspired to try to frame the material I wanted to describe in videos and in my teaching in a similar minimalist fashion on a blank white background with the object of my videos and lectures taking front and center. As it turns out, white is a much harder color on the eyes so in 2019 I switched to a light blue which I continue to use. My former students will certainly be quite familiar with my blue slideshows that form the core of my teaching materials. Those old Eyewitness episodes disappeared from YouTube in Fall 2023, in fact the last time I watched any of them was when I showed one to my seventh graders as part of their World Geography class.

Yet when thinking about the Eyewitness Museum itself the technology exists today that the viewer could tour that structure through virtual reality headsets. I still haven’t tried one of those on yet, at first from what I understood they didn’t fit over glasses, yet I’m curious about what potential they may hold for both education and entertainment. It would be fascinating to use such a headset to wander through that labyrinth of galleries famous for their all-white surfaces and see everything they hold.The last twenty-five years did not meet our expectations in many respects. Paul Krugman’s final editorial for the New York Times published on 9 December 2024 speaks to the loss of our millennial optimism in the face of 9/11, the Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, the Great Recession, and all the other crises that have crashed on the rocky shores of our world. Where for a while we thought we might have fine sandy beaches that heralded a prosperous, safe, and happy future now we have fearsome cliffs which act as much as walls defending our “scepter’d isles” as limits to the possibilities of things in our world. I feel a dissonance in my own life with the world we live in because I am still an optimist, and still dream of things that we could do, new monuments to that optimism we could build, and like the Irish quarrymen brought to a young Kansas City in the nineteenth century by Fr. Bernard Donnelly, the founder of the Kansas City Irish community, ways in which we can break down those cliffs and build a city of fountains and gardens in its place. I’ll write more about all of this next week in a reflection on what I hope we will see realized in the next quarter of the twenty-first century. By the time we reach New Year’s 2050, I will be 57 years old, far from the young boy who watched humanity ring in the third millennium in what was for him a new city in a new time full of hope.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

On Names

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Season 4 Finale: This week, to celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to write a bit about naming conventions that I’ve come across, and to explain why I use my full name professionally.

In American culture middle names have a bad reputation. They’re most famously used in our childhoods to scold us, and in adulthood they most often appear in legal matters. A writer naming non-descript American characters John Booth or Lee Oswald might get away with it but include their middle names Wilkes and Harvey and you have two of the most notorious assassins in American history. Most accused or convicted murderers in our legal system tend to be known in the press by their full names: first, middle, and last. There’s an odd cadence to it when these people are identified by the police or the courts. It’s one of the more common times when middle names get used.

I go by my full name professionally. On my website, in my email signature, and in every conference program and academic publication that I’ll ever appear in I’m identified as Seán Thomas Kane. Trust me, I didn’t intend to draw any connection between myself & the men mentioned in the last paragraph who killed two Presidents who I’ve always looked up to. In my case, the use of my middle name has a different sort of significance. In my extended family I often get called Seán T., in part because I have many relatives who are named Thomas, one of whom goes by T. among the family. Whether intentional or not, my parents gave me one of the most traditional Irish names they could have. Irish names are traditionally patronymic, meaning the person is so-and-so, son or daughter of so-and-so, descendant, son, or daughter of so-and-so. Those last names (or surnames if you aren’t American) that begin with O’ refer to families who are descended from a specific person who lived centuries ago. The ones that begin with Mc however are Anglicizations of the Irish word mac, meaning “son” of a specific person who lived centuries ago. My father’s name is Thomas, so in Irish my name is Seán mac Tomás, or Seán, son of Thomas. Kane is an Anglicization, or better an English phonetic rendering of the Irish name Ó Catháin, pronounced two different ways depending on where you’re from in Ireland (for those reading this, listen to the podcast to hear those two pronunciations.) Cathán was a more common Irish given name in the Early Middle Ages and derives from the word cath meaning battle.

This was in the back of my mind when I decided to start going by my full name professionally. It was 9 March 2016 and I had a few hours without much to do while waiting for a car to pick me up at Lyon-Saint-Exupéry Airport on my way to the eastern French city of Besançon, the capital of the Franche-Comté region and a city which Caesar mentioned in his book about the Gallic Wars (De Bello Gallico 1.38). That cold and rainy Wednesday in March there was a national railway strike in France and I ended up booking a back seat of a Renault Clio driven by a Frenchwoman who spoke little English alongside two other Frenchwomen who again spoke little English from Saint-Exupéry Airport outside of Lyon to Besançon, a good 4 hour drive. Right before they arrived though, I was on Facebook posting an update about my trip and thinking about how I wasn’t entirely sold on sticking with Seán Kane as my name professionally, after all when you search Seán Kane on Google you get a fair handful of results. There on Facebook I noticed that my friend Luis Eduardo Martinez, a fellow graduate student in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, and a gentleman who I consider a good friend to this day, used his middle name professionally. I felt inspired and changed my name on my Facebook profile from Seán Kane to Seán Thomas Kane then and there standing in the airport parking lot.

This proved to be even more advantageous when the Renault carrying the three Frenchwomen arrived as the driver stepped out and proved that the way Seán is spelled makes little sense to a monolingual French speaker. I remembered when I started studying French at Rockhurst University and we chose French names to use in class how I immediately was discontented with being called Jean alone, as I’d rather be called Jean-Thomas because that’s essentially a French translation of my name coming from Irish. So, I suggested that she call me “Seán-Thomas” which was heard as “Jean-Thomas.” Et voilà, that’s how it all got started. For the record: the Irish name Seán is in fact just an Irish spelling of the twelfth century Norman French pronunciation of that French name Jean, which is also the source of the English name John. You can hear the connections better in an English accent than in my own American one where the oh sound in John has shifted closer further forward in the mouth.

This wasn’t the first time I’d changed my name on my Facebook profile. For a while in high school, I went by my Irish name, Seán Ó Catháin, and that was the name on my early membership cards with the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Yet as much as I was inspired by the Gaelic revival and wanted to do my part to restore our ancestral language, I found that it was impractical to use in America and that deep down I do identify more with Kane than Ó Catháin because that’s the name my grandparents, my dad, and most of my paternal relatives use. Kane itself began as a misspelling by the U.S. Army draft sergeant processing my great-grandfather Thomas Keane when his number was drawn in 1918. He enlisted and served as an artilleryman in France and eventually became an American citizen as Thomas Kane because the sergeant told him if he wanted that first e added back into Keane on his papers he would have to go back to the back of the line and start the process over again.

So, to answer a question I often get in Kansas City: no, I’m not related to any other Kanes in this city except my Dad, and in fact outside of my Dad and his brother’s family all of my living paternal relatives who share our family name on either side of the Atlantic spell it Keane. I suppose I could change mine back to that one, I suspect my granddad’s cousin and longtime Wednesday Blog reader Sr. Mary Jo Keane would’ve approved of that, yet at this point the name dispute feels moot especially considering the Keane spelling only goes back another generation or two to about the 1850s before which in the official British government records written in English my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather’s name was written as Thady Caine. In Irish his name would’ve been Tádhg Ó Catháin, and we know he spoke Irish as his first language. So, what was his name? I’m honestly not sure.

I like how different naming conventions reflect different cultures in their own ways. Our Irish patronymic system is really more Gaelic than Irish, after all it’s the same system that’s used by our Scottish Gaelic speaking cousins and it mirrors a very similar system used in Welsh. In fact, my Welsh ancestors’ family name was Thomas, which derives from the Welsh ap Tomos. Fitting, eh?

When I teach about the Vikings I like to bring up the Norse patronymic system too and explain that Leif Erikson (as we call him in English) was actually Leifr Eiríksson in Old Norse, and that following this tradition as it’s today practiced in Iceland were I born there, or should I someday immigrate to that island republic I’d probably start going by an Icelandic version of my name: Jón Tómasson, dropping the Ó Catháin/Kane family name all together in regular use there to better fit Icelandic society while still retaining it outside of Iceland. I see this as similar to how patronymics are used in Russian, where Tolstoy’s tragic character Ivan Ilyich is known by his first and middle name and not by his first and family names Ivan Golovin as we’d do in the English-speaking world. There, for the record, Seán mac Tomás would translate as Иван Томасaвич (Ivan Tomasavich).^[1] In a hypothetical blending of cultures where Irish speakers interacted more with French speakers in North America than with English speakers I could see our patronymic system developing into the French system of having double names, thus why when I still published a French translation of my C.V. I would write my name as Seán-Thomas with the hyphen which I don’t use in English.

Another set of naming systems that I’ve encountered that I appreciate are those originating on Iberia where the family names of both the mother and father are included. My same friend Luis Eduardo Martinez’s full name, and the name I first read when I met him in September 2015 is Luis Eduardo Martinez Mederico. In this Spanish naming custom, his father’s family name appears first followed by his mother’s family name. This is opposite to the Portuguese where the maternal family name precedes the paternal one. So, in the Spanish custom my name would be Seán Thomas Kane Duke, while in the Portuguese custom it would be Seán Thomas Duke Kane. My parents and I actually refer to our family as the Duke-Kane Family, and we’ve joked about what my life would’ve been like if I’d been given both family names at birth in that order. I often conclude that including the East Yorkshire name Duke alongside Kane would’ve made me sound more English.

Then there are the professional names like Smith or Miller. These derive from the first bearer’s profession, so Jefferson Smith had an ancestor somewhere in the distant unwritten past of that Frank Capra film’s imagination who was a blacksmith. Today, on Christmas, we celebrate someone who has such a name, that being Jesus. I get annoyed with my fellow Americans who see “Christ” as Jesus’s last name because it’s not a name at all but a title in the first stage of becoming a name. This name as we understand it ought to be written in English as Jesus the Christ, from the Greek Ἰησοῦς Χριστός through the Latin Iesus Christus, but that word Χριστός is merely a Greek translation of the Hebrew word māšiah (מָשִׁיחַ), which again is usually rendered in English as Messiah, the name of Handel’s most famous oratorio and what Brian certainly wasn’t (he was a very naughty boy.) This is a kingly title, fitting with our view in Christianity of Jesus as priest, prophet, and king appears most prominently this time of year in the Feast of Christ the King, something we celebrate in the Catholic Church at the Liturgical New Year, which was 24 November this year.

Jan van Eyck’s depiction of Christ the King from the Ghent Altarpiece (1426)

A brief digression here: this past Feast of Christ the King I learned that the official name of the day is the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe. While that last title might sound overly grandiose in the twenty-first century it actually comes from Ancient Mesopotamia, where the most powerful monarchs of those city states as far back as Sargon of Akkad (r. c. 2334–2284 BCE) claimed this as their imperial title: šar kiššatim, which actually meant King of Kish, the primate of all Mesopotamian cities and according to the older Sumerian King List it was the first city to crown its kings following the Great Flood. So, in essence this title places Jesus, a humble carpenter who was incarnate as God the Son as the true “King of Kings (forever, and ever) and Lord of Lords (for ever and ever)” to quote from the Handel.

Now, back to that rendering Christ as Jesus’s last name. In his lifetime, Jesus was known as Jesus of Nazareth, and in earlier times Christians were known as Nazarenes (Acts 24:5). This word is still used to describe Christians in Hebrew in the form notsrí (נוֹצְרִי) and in Arabic with naṣrāniyy (نَصْرَانِيّ). Thus, he was known more by a locator name than by a last name in the modern American sense. Furthermore in John’s Gospel, St. Philip referred to Jesus as “Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.”^[2] So, in the culture in which Jesus was born he would’ve been known most fully in this way rather than with any last name that we may recognize. It’s important to remember that Jesus’s ministry took place 2,000 years ago, and contrary to some popular belief he didn’t speak English. English wasn’t even a language then, though an older form of Irish was around, just probably not heard as much in Galilee or Judaea.

So, let me conclude with the bits that seem to have started as identifiers that came at the end of people’s names before there were family names in the sense that we use them today. These are often locators of where the person in question was from. In the case of Leonardo da Vinci, da Vinci merely refers to the fact that Leonardo was born in the Tuscan commune of Vinci. These particles of place tend to denote nobility in some names, see the French, Spanish, and Portuguese de, the Italian de’ and di, and the German von. However, I see the utility in having this locator in someone’s name to make it clear that even though they’re a Booth they’re not related to every other Booth around. That way a random John Booth living in 1865 would’ve had less trouble because of his more infamous counterpart’s scheming that Good Friday. I’d ask though, in my own case whither would such a locator in my name identify? Where would it refer to? Would it stick just with me, saying that my original hometown is Wheaton, Illinois, so I’d be Seán Thomas Kane of Wheaton? Or would it go back to the origins of my particular Kane/Keane/Caine/Ó Catháin family in the Derryhillagh townland outside of Newport, County Mayo, in Ireland? In Irish the way this would be written would either be with a different Irish preposition ó (yep, there are at least two of these), or with the preposition as. In my Irish as I speak it, I say as in this context more than ó, as in to say “Is as Meiriceá mé,” or “I am from America.”

We don’t do these in Irish names, in part because of our patronymic system which does a fine job on its own. Sometimes when I’m writing stuff in Latin and I want to adopt the style of the Renaissance humanists who I read in my research I’ll try to Latinize my name with one of these locators, rendering my hometown of Wheaton, Illinois by using the name of the Roman goddess of what, Ceres, and essentially making a town name from there. Thus, Wheaton becomes Ceresia. The tricky thing is that when I’m translating my name into Latin, something that was done in academia more into the nineteenth century but is almost never done today, I have a conundrum of whether to start from Kane or from Ó Catháin. I for one don’t like how a Latinized Kaniussounds, so instead I do go from Ó Catháin and use Cahanius, or Ioannes Thomae Cahanius Ceresius in full.

Names are important, and they say as much about the person who bears them as the people who named that person and the culture to which they belong. I’ve played around with my own name a fair bit, as you’ve seen. Today I’m more used to being called Seán-Thomas in French than in English, though the latter has happened more and more. I’ve even noticed that people have started calling me Thomas seeing that name and recognizing it faster than they do Seán, especially with the fada on the a. I smile and acknowledge them, after all I’m happy to be mistaken for my Dad. Looking forward, should I be fortunate enough to name my own children I’ll say these two things: first I’m not the one who’ll be pregnant with them for nine months, so I shouldn’t get first call on their names, and second there’s that Irish tradition that offers a simple answer to this conundrum. Will my first-born son be named Thomas as well then? Yeah, maybe. We’ll have to wait and see how this poorly named lifetime membership with one of the dating apps works out for me. I certainly hope I’m not putting my name out there for the rest of my life, though you can bet I’ll be using that lifetime membership joke for as long as I can.

Nollaig shona daoibh a léithoirí rúin! | Merry Christmas, dear readers!

^[1] NB: I’m using Russian as the example here because that’s the one I’m more familiar with. No political inclinations toward the Kremlin in their invasion of Ukraine are intended.

^[2] John 1:45 (New American Bible), see more here.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

On Democracy

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope.

One of those great efforts with which human history is concerned is the question of what our original nature was at our beginning and if and how we have changed that nature. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s notion of the primitive as “closer to humanity’s origins” and living in a state without the societal and technological innovations “that obscure their nature” evokes this original nature, what in Christianity is called our original sin, or biologically our evolved state as a particular form of bipedal mammals among other lifeforms.^[1] The seeming natural state of human societies until very recently has been toward forms of monarchy and aristocracy, the Tory Party in Britain today still refers to itself as the natural party of government because they descend through many generations from the old Cavaliers who supported Charles I and the aristocrats in the Parliaments of the Stuart and Georgian centuries who opposed the liberal reforms of the Whigs. Here in the United States, our own whiggish political tradition sees its modern manifestation in the old establishment wing of the Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party or G.O.P., whose founders in the 1850s included former Northern members of the Whig Party once led by our own aristocrats, men like Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams in the early republic.

Yet those same men stood for something beyond just preserving their own aristocratic power within their own society. These American Whigs and their Republican and Democratic successors aspired to a high ideal of human nature that entrusted power in the hands of the many rather than in those of a few or the one. Dr. Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote in her Letters from an American about how the Secessionists who dragged this country into our Civil War in 1860 and 1861 were trying to assert their own aristocratic vision of the republic that would benefit the few at the disregard of most and the expense of the many. As James J. Sheehan reminded us in his essay in the December 2024 issue of Commonweal, Tocqueville wrote that the chief difference between the source of power in an aristocracy or a monarchy, or their corrupted forms oligarchy and a tyranny, and the source of power in a democracy is that “despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot.”^[2] The despots rely less on our trust in their rule, and in many of the cases we see today they sew discontent in government, the economy, and for all of us with each other in order to assert their authority and keep hold of power.

Democracy is a far harder thing to keep, as Dr. Franklin knew well. The inclusion of more and more people complicates any organization, yet it also allows that organization to better reflect all involved. Democracy requires the efforts of all of us to survive; if left unwatered and unnourished by each generation it will wither and die like any other flower or fruit on the vine. Throughout my life, I’ve looked to heroes in our history from Lincoln, Mandela, Óscar Romero, Popes Francis and St. John XXIII, to people closer to my own life. What all of them have in common is a desire to improve the lot of humanity, and in the case of Lincoln and Mandela to promote democracy in their homelands. When I look ahead and worry about what might be coming in these next four years, I often wonder if I would be safer, happier, healthier, and living a more fulfilled life elsewhere in another country where I can leave the troubles of my own behind. Yet I remember these heroes, MacDonagh and MacBride, and Connolly and Pearse, my great-grandfathers who fought in the two World Wars, the dreamers and optimists who organized and marched non-violently for civil rights here in America and in Ireland too, and looking again at our own day I pause. This is our time to make life better for our successors while we live to overcome the long winter of fear before us. If I left now, could I look those heroes of mine in the eye when my time ends?

I believe in democracy because it is the best form of government we’ve yet imagined. I believe in representative government because I would rather have a say in my neighborhood, my city, my county, my state, and my country than not. I believe in democracy because I believe in humanity and that all of us can make something better if only we believed in ourselves and in each other. I believe that before that original sin there was original grace, original goodness; that before the first frown there was the first smile; that before the first thoughts of lust there were thoughts of love. I believe in democracy because I need to believe that I will have a future, that all the things which I’ve done in these last 31 years are building up to something which will, in Bill Nye’s words, “change the world,” no matter how small that change may be. To do any of this, to see any of this goodness in our hearts, to believe in ourselves again we need to be willing first to acknowledge our faults and second to forgive ourselves and put in the effort to make our lives better. For all our technology and our ever increasingly complicated ways of life, we are still the same humans as our ancestors living in Lévi-Strauss’s primitive manner. We retain the same bodies and souls. Because of this, we can build a future for our posterity in a spirit of grace, compassion, and optimism that would make the heroes of old proud.

^[1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Montaigne to Montaigne, trans. Robert Bononno, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 25.

^[2] James J. Sheehan, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” Commonweal, December 2024, 13.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

The Versatility of Storytelling

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, how the same tools can be used to weave a variety of different stories.

My favorite sorts of stories are the ones where I feel that I’ve gotten to know the characters and can relate to them on a personal level; that these characters are either real people who I’ll never meet or entirely fictional is beside the point. I often remember the stories I was reading, or watching, or listening to more than the experiences from my own life that surrounded new tellings of those stories. This potent relationship is heightened in moments when my own life is dull or foreboding, as in the height of the recent Pandemic when I passed the long days of isolation in my Binghamton apartment or at home in Kansas City watching and reading stories in the Star Trek franchise which I only really began to discover in February and March of 2020.

I wanted to be a storyteller from my youth. I read a book by the Irish journalist Frank Delaney called Ireland which followed a young man as he discovered his own passion for storytelling by listening to the seanchaí who often visited his family’s home. I began to write for myself around this time, though my efforts were focused more on poetry and plays at first. A decade ago, I built up the endurance to write a longer-form short story called “Abducted and Abandoned,” and around that time started writing what today is The Wednesday Blog. By the time I was working on my first master’s degree in 2015 and 2016 I’d begun writing a longer work, my book Travels in Time Across Europe, which I self-published in 2017. That one tells the stories I collected from my year living in London, stories of my own adventures traveling from the British capital to other cities across Europe. At the time I imagined that it could become a sort of valuable source for readers seeking to understand the world as it was in that last year before the Brexit referendum and the rise of Trumpism swept across Britain and the United States.

Dr. Olivia Stephens, the main character of “Ghosts in the Wind.”

Like the main character of Delaney’s Ireland, I too went to university to study history, to use my passion for storytelling, and as things came about, I’m now close to earning my doctorate in the field. Today, besides my efforts here with the blog I largely am just writing things related to my research. Alongside my dissertation I currently have one encyclopedia entry soon to be published, a book chapter and a scholarly article submitted for editing and am now writing another article related to my translation of André Thevet’s Singularitez. I still try to write the odd bits of fiction, like “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released two weeks ago, or “Ghosts in the Wind” which I’m quite proud of. Yet I haven’t written anything to be acted in years. That’s striking to me, because my first big scribal efforts were for the stage and screen in my high school years. I do have an idea for a play that I might turn to someday in the next few years, yet even writing that here fills me with a sense of loss because it could well become another project that I’m excited about and have good ideas for yet don’t ever get to.

What I love most about writing for the stage and screen is that there’s a chance I’ll get to hear my words interpreted into lived experiences. Ideas that once only existed in my mind could be seen by many others played out before them and enlivened by the actors who utter those words & all the designers of sets, sound, lighting, props, effects, and music who flesh out that lived experience into something relatable and emotional in its truth. In short, to see my words brought to life in performance is to see a world created from what was once my thoughts, the smallest and most intimate of stages that I alone know.

To this end then, I am awed by the versatility of those storytellers who create these worlds in their performances. My erstwhile dissertation advisor Dr. Richard Mackenney, a man for whom I have the deepest respect and consider a friend, often talked about his own experiences on stage playing characters created by Shakespeare alongside many of the greats of the British theatre. In his lectures I saw a performance like any revival of King Lear or any of the Henrys or Richards that Shakespeare wrote. My own lecturing has taken on this same quality, yes at least in part in flattery, because I saw how he kept the rapt attention of most of the 150 or so students in the lecture hall with his art.

In recent weeks I had the pleasure to see the English actor Ralph Fiennes play two very different yet still akin parts in the films Conclave and The Return. In the former, Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals who is tasked with managing a papal conclave on the death of the Pope. In the latter, Fiennes returns to the screen a mere month after he appeared cassocked as an English cardinal this time dressed in rags as Odysseus returned to Ithaca after 20 years away at war against Troy. To see the same man inhabit two characters who on the surface could not be more distinct is a profound testament to the man’s mastery of his art. Both films are pieces of theatre imagined with the realism of a certain type of cinema that is more European than American, with less effects and a minimalist score that has its roots in the French New Wave. In the American context it’s reminiscent of the minimalism that we see in some of the television dramas produced recently for their streaming service by Apple.

I felt that I could instantly relate to Cardinal Lawrence in spite of his high office. The finest leaders I’ve met, whether cardinals and bishops or mayors, senators, and ambassadors are all people first and foremost. They acknowledge the trappings of their offices yet retain the everyman spirit that makes them relatable. I saw this in Cardinal Lawrence more than in many of the other characters who populate the halls of the Vatican in Conclave. That he is an English Catholic cardinal speaks to the post-Reformation moment in which we now live when the old sectarian wars of religion feel behind us and reflects on the Catholic Church in England and Wales that I know from my year living there and going to Mass in London. He speaks for a certain Anglophonic ideal that is democratic yet still upholding of tradition and custom.

Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence and Odysseus, in performances which premiered within a month of each other.

Odysseus in contrast is a man who has seen much and endured much more than I ever hope to. His pain is written across his mostly silent face, and in this role, Fiennes says more with a tortured look than with words. That he only acknowledges his own identity verbally once in the film is telling. This is a man who fears that he won’t be the man that his family have waited for over these twenty long years that he was away. I can merely relate in that I’ve noticed time and again how my home and my city change each time that I’m away. On this most recent return of my own from Mérida on 10 November I was startled in the weeks that followed to see that the last vestiges of the long summer we had in this region at last faded away into a brief Fall before receding into the winter cold far sooner than I expected. Even more dramatic was the city I found on my return from London at the end of August in 2016. Kansas City wasn’t the same place it had been even 8 months before when I flew home for Christmas. There were plenty of stories I’d missed while I was away, one relative who’d been born and who I met for the first time at a far later date than any of her cousins in the youngest generation of my family. In that loss that comes with being far from home I can relate, yet in the pain he suffered and inflicted while he was away at war, I am thankful to lack that experience.

Yet the brilliant versatility of storytelling here expresses itself in Fiennes’s ability to say so much with so little about the war he fought and the trials he faced on his homeward voyage. Odysseus suffered for his efforts, and in his suffering, I see his humanity & feel that I can relate to him. At the end of the film, I felt that I got to know Odysseus for the man he’d become, and that in spite of the Bronze Age setting and the far looser garments, in a film whose costumes are marked by a combination of loincloth & cloak, than anything I would wear, I felt that I could see myself, my own humanity in that moment in time on the island of Ithaca in the second millennium BCE, perhaps the 12^th century BCE as the polymath Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–194 BCE) dated the fall of Troy to 1183 BCE.Where both Conclave and The Return succeed is in placing the lives of their characters in moments and settings which feel real. Odysseus’s Ithaca feels as lived in as Cardinal Lawrence’s Vatican, yet the former seems to be set in a far brighter and younger world with different morals and values than the darker and starker built world which succeeded it in the monumental edifices of the Vatican. Yet both are in my imagination places which I now have visited & seen, and both are places that I would recognize again if I ever returned to them in my memory of those films, or should I ever venture there in my own life to the Vatican or to the Ionian Islands and Peloponnese where the filmmakers created their vision of Ithaca. That stage is as lived in as any seemingly sparser platform that Shakespeare’s Muse might have evoked in Henry V; it is as alive as any other that can be imagined in our art.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Notes on Carruthers Smith’s Museum

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, some notes on the subtext and background of my story “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released in this blog last week.

This story about Carruthers Smith was born out of a dream I had at some point between 5:00 am and 9:00 am on Saturday, November 23^rd, 2024, after a late night working at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. I often have quite thematic dreams like this one, and so when I woke from this particular dream, I knew I had a story to write. The dream itself only lasted as far as Part I of the story you will have just read, or perhaps heard if you prefer the podcast version. I began writing it shortly after waking and finished it close to 3:00 pm on that same Saturday. It proved therefore to be one of the quicker ones that I’ve written in quite some time, though one of the stranger ones at that. I wanted to write out several notes about the story, its characters, and its setting so you might better understand the subtext behind the story, and to preclude any other interpretations of what I’ve written.

In my original dream none of the characters had names. I observed the action from the perspective of Agent Pat O’Malley, which is why in the first part of the story he is the narrator. In my original dream he was filing some sort of metallic slide rule for the character that became Carruthers Smith, a reversal of roles as in the dream I was initially there to interrogate Smith for some uncertain cause. The setting of the story, Carruthers Smith’s Museum, was there in the original, though now writing this nearly 18 hours after waking today I remember it looking more like an art gallery built on a platform above the sanctuary of some old Upstate New York church with a big square base to the bell tower and a more Victorian looking wooden exterior that I often saw in the small villages in Broome, Tioga, and Tompkins Counties on my drives between Binghamton and Ithaca when I lived in Binghamton between 2019 and 2022. Agent Penny Wilson’s character was in the dream yet taken off-stage by Smith’s accomplice, trapped somewhere, yet my character couldn’t prove they were so entangled and thus I had no reason to properly accuse Smith’s character. At that point of desperation, I awoke and began writing.

My characters’ names are always quite intentional and tell more about the characters than their actions or dialogue in the story might convey. Carruthers Smith was the first character who I named in this story. I wanted the villain to be a looming WASPish figure, the last scion of the Gilded Age living a recluse in this vast museum he built for himself somewhere far from the great cities of the Northeast yet still within a day’s drive of any of them. I settled on Southeastern Delaware as the setting simply because it seemed most practical for the federal agents to drive there from Washington than if they were in New Jersey, on Long Island, or on Cape Cod. Lewes became the setting for the story because I’ve always liked that name and its connections to the county town of East Sussex in the south of England. I went back and forth for a minute between the names Smith and Jones; several weeks ago, I’d gotten the idea for a story about a man who is always wrong about everything named Erroneous Smith, which I haven’t written yet though I took aspects of his sketched character and took them into the less comical Carruthers Smith. As for his first name, I drew that from an old Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” published at the beginning of 1904 in The Strand Magazine in London and a month earlier in Collier’s in New York. The 1984 Granada TV adaptation of the story featuring Jeremy Brett as Mr. Holmes was my introduction to the story and remains etched into my memory from watching that series in the early mornings on PBS during my high school days. Carruthers is one of the two suspects in Conan Doyle’s story, and it’s a British-enough name that it felt fitting for the old colonial New York type of person I was looking for.

Sidney Paget’s art in *The Strand* edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist” (1904). Public Domain.

The federal agents were all named in quick succession. Bill Hardy is named to make him appear as non-descript and American as I could with a nod to the Hardy Boys. I know a lot of Bills, though none from Buffalo, and so it seemed a fitting name to use here without nodding to one in particular. Pat O’Malley drew from the idea that I can best write from the perspective of someone like me, that is a fellow Irish American. My family comes from the townlands around Newport, County Mayo a part of the country which before colonization was ruled by the O’Malleys and Burkes. Everyone around Clew Bay is related to some degree or another if you go far enough back, and I have a handful of O’Malley ancestors myself. Patrick was an easy choice, it’s the most accepted Irish name in the English-speaking world, with my own Seán in all its phonetically spelled variations reflecting each country’s version of English coming in second, though Liam, the Irish version of William, is quite popular now too probably thanks to the recently buried Liam Payne of One Direction. Penelope Wilson was a harder one to name. I’ve used the name Penelope in my long awaited second novel in my romantic comedy series which I dramatically call the Plumwoodiad and was hesitant to use it again. It’s in part a nod to Penny Hofstadter in The Big Bang Theory, one of my favorite TV shows, yet more so a nod to the original Penelope in Homer’s Odyssey. At one point when I stepped away from my desk yet was still engrossed in this story while making breakfast, I considered putting a line in there about her having to wait a long time to find a man who can string her husband’s bow. The name Penny was intended to give her a deep well of resilience and strength that she would call on to save everyone else from Carruthers Smith. Wilson was another choice of trying to make her sound as American as possible, and while I did have President Woodrow Wilson in mind a bit here, I also thought about Robert Sean Leonard’s character Dr. James Wilson in the Fox series House in mind with this name.

I didn’t initially plan on making everyone else in this story Irish Americans. This is something which makes me laugh now thinking about it. I’ll make a small digression here, if you’ll permit me. When I was in elementary school, I remember one day my teacher brought out a stack of books for us to all read together as a class that was about a character who she said, “was from an ethnic group that aren’t often talked about in books.” I remember thinking then how the only book about Irish people or Irish Americans I could remember reading in my school was Tomie de Paola’s picture book about the life of St. Patrick, the namesake and patron saint of my elementary school, St. Patrick’s in Kansas City, Kansas. That’s nagged at me since, and I do think we Irish Americans tend to get forgotten because the Carruthers Smiths of this country have largely accepted us as white in the last sixty years since the first of our kind was elected President. It’s often forgotten today how we Irish Americans were reviled by the old English colonial population in this country for a long time. I heard some stories about this, and in the older histories of my alma mater Rockhurst University, there are stories of Rockhurst students in the 1920s and 1930s sneaking into Klu Klux Klan rallies to try and fight back against their banality. And yet, all that fit neatly into the background of Carruthers’s assistant, who I decided would be a first-generation Irish American, whose parents crossed the Atlantic during the big wave of migration among our people to this country in the 1890s. That character developed into Peter Dougherty. I had to be careful here, the first couple of names I gave him ended up being changed because I realized they were the names of actual people I know either in the Kansas City Irish community at large or nationally among my brothers in the Ancient Order of Hibernians. I imagined Peter was a sort of Bob Newhart type character who spent his early life trying to get by amid the shifting tides of the world around him, and once he found Carruthers Smith he was eventually willing and able to give up on trying to just survive and instead enjoy something more comfortable even if it meant sacrificing the woman he loved. That woman became the penultimate character I named in this story. At first her named was Bridie McGinty, Bridie being a pet form of the Irish name Brigid, yet that changed near the end of the story when I decided instead to name her after my great-great aunt Delia McDonnell who came to America from Ireland in the 1940s or 1950s. yet I had a mental image of her from the start. She was going to be a cross between Mamie O’Rourke in the 1894 classic song The Sidewalks of New York, Dorothy Day, and many of the women who I’ve known in my life who day in, and day out work in the schools and hospitals and for nonprofits trying to make life better for others. There’s a subtle yet profound truth in this: if you make life better for other people who’re worse off than you are, it’ll eventually make your own life better too. Call it trickle-up economics if you will. Lastly, there was the town doctor, who got the name Ronald out of a desire to find something that felt like it’d fit a character born in the 1940s or 1950s, and Yancey because it was the end of the story, and I was looking for something at the end of the alphabet.

From Ric Burns’s New York: A Documentary Film, sung by Robert Sean Leonard who already got a mention in this blog post.

Let me say something briefly about the time in which this story is set. From the first moment I thought of this story taking place in 1990, thirty-four years ago. I felt this was far enough removed from the turn of the twentieth century to have much of the off-stage action feel removed yet still before the millennium which feels like a profound break in time in my own life. I did have aspects of the lived environment of the 1979 Peter Sellers film Being There in mind when I thought of the décor and technology that Carruthers Smith would have in his museum, where the building itself was largely designed forty years earlier in the first few years just after World War II, yet the technology kept getting updated to a certain point at which Carruthers no longer felt comfortable replacing things. I’ve seen this in people who prefer to stick with certain technology that they’re most familiar with even if many years or decades have passed since that technology has been commonly sold or can be repaired with replacement parts on hand with the manufacturer. Doing the math here, this places Carruthers Smith’s birth in 1914, Peter Dougherty’s in 1899, and Delia McGinty Dougherty’s in 1898. The agents meanwhile are largely children of the 1950s and 1960s, with Penny Wilson the youngest at around 25 years old. It seemed less important for me to settle their ages than it did the characters in Carruthers’s orbit. There is something of the nostalgic for me writing about characters in the seventies, eighties, and nineties who were born in the decades just around the turn of the twentieth century. These birthdates were the norm for the oldest generations when I was born in 1992, and today I do miss something of the expectation that my great-grandparents’ generation born between 1890 and 1918 would still be living in our world with us today. I in fact only met one of my eight great-grandparents, the last of them to be born, who died when I was three years old.

The Walter Parks Thatcher Archive in *Citizen Kane*

Finally, I want to end by addressing the museum itself. I love museums, or musea as Carruthers would surely use the Latinate plural of that word, and so Carruthers Smith’s Museum was intended to be a twist on that happy place of mine as it was in my dream. The museum is made of one long gallery whose white walls and white marble floors match the place where I work yet whose shape is more akin to some of the galleries at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, yet I often thought of how it appeared with its own internal lighting in a manner similar to the private archive of Walter Parks Thatcher in Citizen Kane with its long shadows and stark surfaces. That warm and welcoming space is twisted however when you remove all of the art from its confines except for something that seems eerily out of place. The great rubber artifact is a phrase that made me laugh the first time I wrote it, and yet what’s essentially a giant eraser-shaped blob of milky white goo became the unintended means of Carruthers Smith’s fall into depravity. Was he ever afraid of it? I think so at first, yet by the time we met Carruthers he’d lost any real desire to live and was happy to have something that could take his life at any moment be a constant presence in his life. He may have once loved another, he may have once been happy with his success, he may have once believed in being the patriotic good boss whose tires helped drive the Allied advances across North Africa and Europe, yet by the time we meet him he is so jaded about life itself that he sees no reason to cherish it. I imagined this rectangular piece of rubber standing atop a foot-tall podium, with the object itself reaching up to about six or seven feet in height, so it would tower over anyone who approached it, yet not by too much. Was the rubber alive? Perhaps in a sort of imagined monstrous way, yet only as much as a Venus fly trap is alive.

The giant rubber monolith in the center of the room stands for the corruption at the heart of Carruthers, his willingness to sacrifice others for his own success. His two-faced approach to people like Peter who keeps the keys to his house, yet he still sees as little more than a servant speaks to just how morally bankrupt Carruthers is. Here is a man who was once on good terms with presidents for his wartime industrial service. In one line which I cut he admitted for the first time how on the morning of the 1948 election he voted for Dewey and then put a call to President Truman to wish him good luck because if Truman thought Carruthers Smith was a friend then maybe he’d sign another contract for more tires and tank treads for the impending war in Korea. Money for the sake of money alone is the corruption at the heart of this man, a heart that’s been hollowed out so he can hide away even more of his gains. He is the true face of an oligarch who puts on a nice mask for the sake of selling his wares in a democracy yet would rather all the nice people who buy those goods stay out of his way and leave the governing of society to the captains of industry and their cronies in government.

Carruthers Smith then is a warning, a vision of the last echoes of the First Gilded Age at the dawn of its successor. All the successes for expanding suffrage, workers’ rights, and improving our education, healthcare, and overall quality of life are at risk if we allow the oligarchs of today try to return us to a limited regulation small government policy of the late nineteenth century. If we let the wolves into the henhouse the chances are good that they’ll turn it into a buffet for themselves to feast upon while everyone else is left out in the cold to fight over scraps or starve. Of all the federal agents who seek to bring Carruthers to justice, it’s Penny Wilson who is successful. Without her tenacity or her compassion for Peter Dougherty that reinvigorates his soul after decades of uneasy slumber in his boss’s shadow, Carruthers would have remained at large, a glowering menace on the far horizon of the seat of our democracy. The youngest of all the characters in this story is the one who saves them all.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Carruthers Smith’s Museum

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, we join a team of federal agents as they investigate a strange museum owned by a reclusive Captain of Industry that has never opened its doors to the public.

Part I.

I arrived at Carruthers Smith’s Museum just after 4:15 in the afternoon after nearly a three hour drive out from D.C. and across the Chesapeake Bridge and most of Delmarva to Lewes, Delaware where the reclusive tycoon had taken up residence nearly fifty years before. My office began tracking his investments five years ago, when my colleague Bill Hardy was on the case, but just last week when he came out here to this beach town he never returned. My partner, Penny Wilson, joked when we were leaving the Hoover Building’s garage that Bill must’ve gotten distracted by the beach and stuck around for an unannounced vacation. Whatever the case, Smith’s file was dropped on my desk, and I was sent out to the Delaware Shore to see what became of Bill, and then to pick up where he left off investigating Smith’s Museum. There was something that didn’t make sense about a museum that had never opened to the public.

Carruthers Smith was one of the titans of the rubber industry, his tires and tank treads had helped us win the War in Europe, for one, and he was lauded by every administration since Franklin D. Roosevelt for his service to our country as one of the good, charitable captains of industry. His father was a strong supporter of the Taft Administration, having had his wings clipped by Theodore Roosevelt’s trust busting, and his grandfather one of the great Wall Street investors that supported Republican nominees from Grant through McKinley. The Smith Company hadn’t started with rubber tires, first they were a shipping company that cornered the market for trade between Rio de Janeiro and New York. They even helped keep an eye on ex-Confederates who’d escaped to Brazil in 1865, reporting on their whereabouts to Union authorities. Thanks to their deep connections in Rio as well as New York, they were well placed to corner the developing rubber market when it appeared almost forty years before Carruthers Smith was born. All this is to say it took a lot for any federal agency to be willing to investigate a good tycoon when there were plenty of rotten ones out there who ignored their workers’ safety or were notorious union-busters or preferred to outsource their factories overseas and flood the American market with cheap goods that were easily breakable and commonly known among the public as generally worthless. Smith Tires were different, they were sturdy and dependable, far more so than any competitor. They were especially good traveling over sand, so much so that the Army still kept a contract with Smith for tires for any future desert operations.

Still, Penny and I were there in front of Carruthers Smith Museum, our car parallel parked with the handbrake on Franklin Avenue. It was a very modern building, white walls that showed some of the characteristic curves of the Art Deco, yet it seemed less brutalist than the Hirshhorn and more akin in color to the Guggenheim in New York. There seemed to be no front door where you could queue to enter, but there was a smaller service door off Franklin Ave. that I could see from the driver’s seat. “Do you think that’s it, Pat?” Penny asked.

“Yeah, that seems to be it. Let’s go ring the bell.”

We got out of the car and walked into this small service driveway and up the five concrete steps that led to the service door. There was an industrial-type doorbell affixed to the wall at the top of the steps next to a door that on closer inspection turned out to be steel painted white to match the rest of the building, yet it had no window through which the respondent could see their visitors or vice versa. I rang the bell, holding down the button for a good two seconds. “Mr. Smith, this is Agents Patrick O’Malley and Penelope Wilson of the FBI, may we come in and talk to you?” We waited for another thirty before a buzzing announced to us that the metallic lock on the door was released, and we were allowed entry.

We found ourselves in a sort of room that could be a back office, it had denim blue carpet, and high wooden walls around which were photographs of the museum under construction beginning from the laying of the cornerstone in 1942. An old wooden desk stood to my left; it reminded me of a smaller version of the Resolute Desk that sits in the Oval Office. Before us was a set of stairs that led three steps up to another door. This one had a window, yet it was high up in the door, and thus too high for either of us to see through it. Yet there was light beyond it that seemed to dance off the high white ceilings of the room beyond. I nodded at Penny, and she walked up the steps and opened the door. The room beyond seemed minimalist in nature, yet it was still quite large. “This must be the museum,” Penny said.

“It looks that way,” I replied, scanning left and right as we entered the room beyond. There was a high angled white wall to our left in front of us, blocking our view beyond to whatever was to the south in that room. To our right the room continued for some uncertain distance, its white tile floors fading into the darkness at the far edge of the room. There didn’t seem to be any art on the walls of the museum, nothing here displayed. What could Carruthers Smith have been collecting these last 50 years? Beyond the angled wall in front of us light danced on the ceiling from something metallic. I proceeded cautiously, my gun still holstered, as was Penny’s, yet we both knew we could draw in 3 seconds at least and be on guard. The heavy sounds of our shoes clicked across the floor as we rounded the corner and found a small metallic box on a table in front of a large glass display case standing erect that housed a large rubber object, rectangular in shape, and standing at least 6 feet tall. It seemed taller being up on a podium. I looked up at it, confused what I was seeing, “maybe it’s the largest single piece of rubber the Smith Company has ever produced,” I quipped to Penny.

“It is in fact,” came a voice from behind us. We turned to see Carruthers Smith standing there, a tall man who once might have been the eye of many a high society debutante. He was slim in frame, wearing a gray double-breasted suit of the kind not often seen since the early 1960s. “This is the largest single piece of rubber that my family’s firm ever acquired and sought to study. How do you find it, Agent Wilson?”

Penny looked back at it, “it’s a little unsettling, how is it held up in the case?”

“You are welcome to walk around the back and discover that fact for yourself,” Carruthers replied in a slow, tenor voice that betrayed hints of the Transatlantic accent he and his class used decades ago.

Penny looked at me and I nodded approval, sending her around the case to its right to ascertain the supports for this piece of rubber. “How is it standing on its own?” she asked with incredulity seeping through their voice.

I walked left around the case and found her behind it looking for where some sort of supports ought to be yet instead there was nothing. The rubber artifact instead stood erect inside the case, not leaning on it or putting any pressure on the glass that could shatter it. Carruthers appeared behind Penny, “it truly is a wonderous specimen, one that was brought to our office in Rio from deep in the Amazon in 1941, on the same day that the Japanese attacked our fleet at Pearl Harbor. My agent who ran the Rio Office then, a Senhor Dos Santos, said that anyone who touched it felt as though they were touching something that seemed alive.”

“Alive?” I asked, quizzically raising an eyebrow.

“Yes, Agent O’Malley, this artifact was alive when it arrived here in early Spring 1942. I had it shipped into our wharves in Jersey City where it was loaded onto a train and brought to Lewes where I could study it myself.”

“Mr. Carruthers, I know your family’s connection to this town doesn’t go back very far, didn’t your father have a summer cottage here?”

“No, most of the family would summer in Newport, Rhode Island with our friends, yet I was the one who enjoyed the waters further south here in Delaware and found Lewes a fine enough little town to build my summer cottage here,” Carruthers replied, never dropping his hint of a smile.

“When did you first come here then?” Penny asked.

“In 1932, an 18 year old looking for something profound and reclusive in life. I’d read Thoreau you see; Walden inspired me to seek new things beyond the family firm or society life in New York. The Depression brought land prices low here, and I thought I might be able to help the local people. I provided tires at a 33% discount to all residents of Lewes, which ingratiated myself to their company.”

“Is that why you built this museum?” I asked.

Carruthers looked around him at the cavernous space, its white walls and white tile floors made the space feel monochromatic and minimalist. “I built this museum to house the treasures I’ve collected in my years, things old and new, mundane and,” he gestured to the rubber artifact before us, “wonderous.”

“But why haven’t you opened it to the public?” I asked, “Surely this would be a testament to your life and work like the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh or the Freer Gallery in Washington?”

“I never felt that it was complete and ready for the public. There was always something missing, something which I couldn’t quite place. I’ve been collecting for this museum now for 58 years ever since I first arrived in Lewes, and still the museum is not yet finished. But you, dear agents, have come a long way, surely you have business to attend to?”

I looked at Penny who nodded and walked back around the display case. We followed behind her to the metal table that stood beyond. “Mr. Smith,” she began, “we are here to ask two questions. An agent of ours, Bill Hardy, came here a week ago to inquire into the contents of this museum that has never opened and ensure they are all legally in the country, and he has yet to report back to the office since. So, we are here both to see if you know what might have happened to Agent Hardy and to complete his assignment.”

“I met with Agent Hardy when he arrived here on the 10^th, he seemed to be in a hurry to return to Washington, so I didn’t want to detain him too long. As to his investigation into this museum, you can find the effects of that effort on the table here,” Carruthers motioned downwards toward the metal table between them where a single silver box was placed in the middle.

“Sir, are you here alone?” I asked.

“In fact, I have one assistant here with me,” Carruthers motioned to a man who only just seemed to appear from the corner of my eye. He wore a dark green museum guard’s uniform, with a black necktie on a white shirt. “Have you met Peter Dougherty? He’s one of your tribe, a fellow Irish American born in Brooklyn.”

I turned to see Peter more clearly and saw a wizened old man, at least 80, who looked back at me with tired eyes. “How long as Mr. Dougherty been working for you?” I asked.

“Peter was hired by my father as a warden to keep watch over me in my youth, in 1929 I believe.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Smith,” Peter replied in a low baritone voice.

“And you’ve been with Mr. Smith ever since?” Penny asked.

“That’s correct, Agent Wilson.”

“Peter served in the first war in the trenches under my Uncle George’s command, and after the war when lost his job after Black Tuesday, my dear uncle asked my father to bring him on.”

“So, this Peter has been working for the Smith Family for over 60 years,” I thought, “he’s loyal then, very loyal.” “Where did you serve, Mr. Dougherty?”

“At St. Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive with the Fighting 69^th,” he replied proudly.

“We appreciate your service,” Penny smiled at him. Peter returned the smile, yet he seemed tired by the process.

“So, you say that this box is what remains of Agent Hardy’s investigation?” I asked.

“Yes, Peter collected the things he left here.”

“And when did he leave?”

“He left his investigation on the 10^th,” Carruthers replied, his expression unchanging.

“On the same day he arrived?” Penny confirmed aloud.

“Indeed,” Carruthers affirmed.

“Then you haven’t seen him since the 10^th?” I asked, pulling a notepad and pen out of my jacket’s right pocket and opening it to a page titled “Carruthers Smith Museum.”

“That is correct, he had a sudden change of mind and chose to end his investigation right here while he was looking over the financial records of my museum.”

“May we see those records?” I asked, trying to understand why Bill would give up an investigation like that.

“Certainly, Agent Wilson, will you follow Peter, he’s not as strong as he once was and could use the help lifting these boxes, unless you’d rather attend to it, Agent O’Malley.”

I looked at Penny who gave me a glance, I knew she could do this well enough, “Go with him, you’ve got this.”

“Understood,” she replied, before turning and following the aged soldier to the northeast across the large gallery in which we stood until they passed beyond the light and into a portion enveloped in darkness. I could still hear their footsteps as a door beyond sight opened and they passed through that portal to the collections’ storage beyond.

“How long have you and Agent Wilson been together?” Carruthers asked.

“She was assigned to be my partner fresh out of the academy two years ago.”

“So young,” he pined, “but keen eyed still. Would you care to sit and inspect the effects of Agent Hardy’s investigation,” Carruthers motioned toward the box on the table.

I sat, feeling as though the invitation was unavoidable and slid open the metal lid with my hands. Inside were several metal artifacts, a slide-rule, Hardy’s notepad, and a paper sheath for the instrument. I took the notepad out first, noting that it was closed and flipped open the cover. The first few pages were notes from other cases he’d worked recently, followed by a page with directions to Lewes from Washington. Yet after that the pages were just filled with what seemed like random numbers, ten full pages of random numbers. “Can you explain these numbers, Mr. Smith?”

Carruthers looked down at the paper in my hand, “they refer to specific indices in my records, you can find everything you need in the documents that Agent Wilson and Peter will shortly be bringing to this table.”

I looked back down at them, and began to mutter the numbers aloud, for no apparent reason, yet still to mutter them aloud all the same. “Seven, nine, six, five, three, one, nine, eight, two, five, three, one, eight, three, seven, six, nine, zero, seven, five, three, nine, zero, seven, two, one, six, five, three,” until I found my eyes drooping, an air of drowsiness coming over me. It seemed like a good long while since Penny and Peter had left my sight and gone into that distant room off in the dark, what could be taking them so long? “Seven, nine, six, five, three, one, nine, eight, two, five, three, one, eight, three, seven, six, nine,” I tried to stand from the table yet felt my body heavier than expected; it was a weight which felt less physical and more emotional. I could swear I saw the display case to my left open, how could that be opening?! The large rubber artifact was there before me, what a strange thing it was. I began to see the darkness consume the distant edges of my vision until all that remained was that artifact, which seemed to yawn before me. I thought I could hear Bill’s voice, “Pat! What are you doing?” but soon all was silent.

Part II.

Penny found the collections room to be far less impressive than the gallery beyond. It’s linoleum floors and light green walls seemed to be caught in a time loop going back to the late 1940s when this part of the museum was built. She followed Peter further and further back into the collections until they came to a locked metal cabinet on a nondescript back wall. Peter took a key from his coat and unlocked it, revealing nearly a century’s worth of documents behind the door. “This is everything,” he said, “everything from Mr. Smith and his father’s time leading the firm.”

“Mr. Smith’s father retired in 1936, yes?” Penny asked.

“Yes, he left the firm to Mr. Smith in that year.”

“And how long has Mr. Smith been collecting for this museum?”

“For as long as I’ve known him,” Peter replied.

“You know, my grandfather served in World War I,” Penny said, trying to make small talk as she began to finger through the files.

“Did he,” Peter seemed uninterested in the topic.

“Yes, he was an ambulance driver from Kansas City, most of the guys on his crew became animators.”

“We all have our own paths to take, Agent Wilson.”

Penny kept looking through the files, moving fast between folders with handwritten dates and names on them. “Are you looking for anything in particular, Agent Wilson?” Peter asked.

“Not yet just trying to get an idea of what’s in here,” she replied as she kept quickly flipping through the folders. “So then, if you won’t talk about the war, what did you do between then and when you started working for the Smith Family?”

“I was an interpreter for a while at Ellis Island until the government closed that facility in 1922.”

“Which languages do you speak?”

“English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.”

“Oh wow, you’ve got a knack for language, then.”

“I ran away from home when I was fourteen and took a job on the Smith Company’s ships going to Rio, learned Portuguese there and Spanish on their stopovers in San Juan and Havana. I learned my French during the war. Captain Smith put me on interpreting duty with our French allies when he heard about my work.”

“That’s Mr. Smith’s Uncle George, right?”

“Right.”

“So, what’d you do after 1922, Mr. Dougherty?”

“I tried going back to the Smith Company, but they weren’t taking as many sailors for the Brazil Route anymore, so I became a policeman.”

“You were a cop?” Penny turned to look at Peter who stood behind her still looking as tired as before.

“I served with the New York Police Department for five years until 1927.”

“What happened then?”

“My sergeant had us raid the wrong alderman’s office and we were all out of a job.”

“That’s tough,” Penny paused a moment, “I’m glad you were a good cop. My dad is a cop in Kansas City, it runs in our family.”

Peter was silent, he still seemed reluctant to share much more than was necessary, even if it was just to pass the time.

Penny ignored this, “What about your personal life, did you ever marry?” she asked, trying to unlock the man behind her as she pried open the files before her.

Peter was silent for a moment before she heard a sigh, the first sound he’d made other than the odd monotone words she’d heard from him before. “I did, a long time ago.”

Penny smiled, “what was her name?”

“Delia McGinty.”

“I see you stayed in the community,” Peter made no response to that attempted joke. “How did you meet?”

“At a party in 1924 at the Hotel Commodore on 42^nd Street in Manhattan hosted by one of the big Irish organizations in the city. She was there with a friend, Mary Mulroney. They were both famous for standing up for themselves.”

“What did they do?”

“They were suffragettes during the war, and afterwards Delia worked as a schoolteacher on the Lower East Side. She wanted to give these new kids who’d just arrived the welcome that our parents’ generation didn’t get.”

“She sounds like an amazing woman. So, what happened?”

Penny could feel a darkness shift over Peter’s face even though her back was turned to the older man, “We were married for nearly twenty years, but she disappeared around the time we went to war with Germany the second time in 1942.”

Penny turned and offered a compassionate look, “I’m sorry, Peter, that must have devastated you.”

Peter returned her gaze with a weary look, “It was a long time ago. My cop friends couldn’t find her, there was no sign of her anywhere. Mr. Smith took me in and invited me to move here to Lewes with him. I left the city and the memories and started anew.”

Penny had reached the bottom third of the files when she found one that caught her eye, she read the label, “1941,” and turned to Peter again, “Isn’t this the year that that rubber artifact came into the Smith Family’s possession?”

Peter’s face seemed weary, yet sharp with a renewed purpose. He reached into his coat pocket and drew a pistol, pointing it at Penny who stood from her squatted position. “Peter, what’re you doing?” Penny asked, alarm in her voice as she reached for her sidearm.

“Don’t move, Mr. Smith said no one is to inquire about the origins of the artifact.”

“Peter, you need to lower your weapon and put it on the floor,” Penny commanded.

“I work for Mr. Smith, not you,” Peter said with a cold steel in his voice.

“Mr. Smith is hiding something, Peter, why else would he order you to put your life and freedom in jeopardy by threatening a federal agent to protect it?”

Peter gave no answer, but his hand had begun to shake. Penny stepped forward, gingerly, eyes on Peter’s. “Peter, I’m not going to hurt you, just give me the gun. There’s a reasonable explanation for all this.”

Peter’s hand lost its steadiness, and Penny closed the gap between them, taking the gun from his hand and resetting the safety. She looked it over, “whose gun is this, Peter?”

“It’s my old service pistol, from my cop days.”

Penny looked at the gun, it had to be at least 63 years old, before returning her gaze to Peter, “let’s start over again,” she held the 1941 file up to him, “why is this file so important, Peter?” Peter was silent, “You were a good cop, remember, going after corrupt officials, protecting your community. Is it worth going to prison in your nineties to stay silent about this?”

“I’ve lived a long life,” Peter said slowly, “Mr. Smith is the only person I have left. You’ll get there someday, Agent Wilson, when everyone you’ve ever known is gone.”

“Yeah, you’re right, but for now Peter I’m with you, and I want you to understand I’m not going anywhere until you explain why you pulled your gun on me.”

“Mr. Smith said no one should ever know what that thing really is, what it does. It caused a big ruckus in Rio when they first brought it into the warehouse. He never said what happened, just that they had to handle a police investigation over it and that some workers died.”

“Some workers died because of that thing?” Penny was alarmed at the thought. “Pat’s in there, right next to it.”

She ran for the door, leaving Peter behind her, pulled it open and charged back toward the table where Carruthers stood. “Where’s Pat!” she shouted.

Carruthers turned to meet Penny’s fierce eyes, “Agent O’Malley left his investigation,” he said in the same soft, dry voice he’d used when they met him.

Penny looked at the display case, it wasn’t quite as she’d left it, instead the front plate of glass seemed to reflect the light just a bit differently. “Mr. Smith, when I collected this file from your cabinet, your man Peter pulled his gun on me. Would you care to explain?”

Carruthers looked to the file in her hand, “1941” he read on the label. “That file is confidential, and without a warrant I see no reason why you must be aware of its contents. Please return it to me,” he held out his hand.

“No.”

Carruthers’ face lost the soft glow of friendliness it’d had since they arrived, “I believe the law is clear on this matter, you have a piece of my personal property which if I’m correct in assuming you have no specific warrant to search.”

Penny opened the file, as the papers caught the light from above, yet at that moment Carruthers moved to slam it shut, “you will not read anything in that file, it is not yours to read!” he commanded.

“If you don’t want me reading that file then you can tell me where Pat is. When I left you, he was sitting at that table. You were the last person to see him and now he’s not here.”

“He needed a rest from his troubles.”

“What do you mean, rest?” Penny gave Carruthers an interrogatory look, her eyes locked on his. She caught the smallest of a micro expression, his eyes glanced slightly to the left toward the display case behind him. Penny dropped the file, revealing Peter’s service pistol in her hand beneath it, pulled the safety back and fired a shot into the display case. A second shot shattered the glass. A third pierced the rubber artifact within. An oil began to ooze out of the artifact as the air entered a newly formed chasm in the bullet’s path. Penny drew her own service weapon from the holster at her hip and pointed it at Carruthers. “Explain,” her one word command.

“You have no right,” he whispered in a seething, quiet, and deadly voice.

Footsteps came from behind as Peter appeared from the darkened far end of the gallery, a shocked look on his face. “Mr. Smith, I tried to stop her,” his voice faltered as he looked to the shattered display case and the fast liquifying rubber artifact. A hand appeared from within, followed by the arm to which it was attached, and soon Pat’s face and body were restored to light and air. Penny ran forward, her gun still drawn toward Carruthers. She pocketed Peter’s service weapon and caught Pat at his shoulder.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Pat looked around, and caught Carruthers in his sight, “what was that thing?”

Yet before he could respond another body appeared from the case, someone who was placed below Pat, it was Bill Hardy. He hadn’t taken that unannounced beach vacation after all. Penny got Pat onto his feet and went to help Bill who’d been immobile for a week now. “That thing ate me!” Bill shouted; his eyes blurred by the sudden shock of the gallery’s artificial light.

There was still a good half of the artifact left, yet it kept draining out of the case, a white liquid oozing down onto the white tile floor below. Another figure began to appear, someone crouched down, kept still by the weight of the prison in which they’d been enthralled. Penny heard a sob come from across the room, and unsteady feet run forward as Peter approached the milky pool, “Delia?!” he shouted.

Peter saw as a frail woman appeared from within, she didn’t seem to have aged as much as would be expected. She was crouched over, in almost a fetal position, wearing the same blue dress she’d worn the last day he saw her. Her eyes were glazed over, surely, she hadn’t seen daylight in almost fifty years. Yet her hair still had mere whisps of gray. Peter helped her up, though unsteady he lifted her from what remained to the artifact and set her in a chair at the metal table. Ensuring she was safe, and wouldn’t fall from her chair, where she’d begun to rub her eyes, Peter turned to his employer. “What happened?”

Carruthers looked at the man who’d stood by his side for the last half century and laughed, a cruel, heartless laugh. “She came to me to ask about the workers who’d died in Rio. She said that she wouldn’t let it slide, and that if I was a true patriot, I would be better to my workers. Yet while we spoke, she saw the artifact, and slipped in.”

“I didn’t slip,” Delia spoke with a defiant voice. “You gave me a piece of paper with notes about the workers to read, you told me this would have all the information I needed. You said I should read it aloud to prove to me that what you read was the truth. I read it and was drawn into that monstrous thing of yours.”

“That’s what happened to me!” Pat shouted.

“You had me write those numbers in my notebook, I figured they were accounting figures,” Bill said groggily. “What do those numbers do?”

Carruthers remained defiant, keeping his silence in spite of his situation.

“Give it up, Carruthers, you’re done for,” Peter said, standing up to the man who’d commanded his loyalty.

“How dare you speak to me that way,” Carruthers seethed.

Peter raised himself before the man, “You’re no better than the rest of us, you and your captains of industry. You were born into riches, but do you really know what I had to do just to survive? I’ve been watching you for sixty-one years, I know who you really are you two-faced miser. You’d happily put on the red, white, and blue in support of the war effort and to make people feel proud to buy Smith, but any chance you got to denigrate Mr. Roosevelt or Mr. Truman you took. You’re one of the good bosses, that’s what you told everyone, but I know you for the weasel that you are, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. You don’t care for any of us, not a one. We could all be starving and dying of plague and all you’d do is pack up and leave us to die.”

Carruthers was seething with rage now, “How dare you speak to your betters like that, you worthless Irish scoundrel! All of you should’ve been sent back on your ships with your agitators and your freedom fighters! And you, Delia McGinty, we had a name for you and your kind who upset the natural order of things in 1920. Insufferables you all were!”

Penny stepped forward, “that’s enough of this,” she took a pair of handcuffs from her jacket pocket, “Carruthers Smith, you’re under arrest for kidnapping, and attempted murder.” She grabbed his wrists and placed them behind his back, cuffing him there. “Bill, do you want to help me get him to our car? This was your case first.”

“Gladly,” Bill said.

Pat turned to Peter, “do you have a phone? I should call the office for backup.”

Peter pointed toward the darkened portion of the gallery where he and Penny had disappeared before Pat began to read Bill’s notepad. Pat nodded and walked to the collections room to place his call.

Peter turned and looked back at Delia. He took the other chair at the table and brought it around to her side, sitting in it next to her. “Delia, do you remember me?”

“How long has it been, my love?”

“Forty-eight years, forty-eight long years,” he sobbed as he hugged her.

She looked at his face, “you must be at least ninety by now.”

“Yes, but you don’t look a day older than the last time I saw your face.”

“I don’t understand it,” she said, “if it’s been forty-eight years then I must be at least ninety-five. Do you have a mirror?”

Peter looked around and cautiously took a shard of glass from the floor and held it up for Delia to see her reflection. “How is this possible?”

They looked down at the floor, at the milky white liquid that oozed from the fallen artifact, gobsmacked at this new lease on their life together.

Part III.

The following morning a story appeared on the newswires in papers nationwide, “Carruthers Smith Arrested on Kidnapping Charges,” the headline read.

Carruthers Smith, of the Smith Import Company family, was arrested by federal agents at his home in Lewes, Delaware on kidnapping charges on Saturday. Among his victims were 95 year old Delia McGinty Dougherty of Brooklyn, New York, and Agents William Hardy and Patrick O’Malley of Washington, D.C. who were in Lewes investigating possible charges of art theft lodged against the accused. Mr. Smith began building the Smith Museum of Contemporary Art in Lewes a town of just over 2,000 inhabitants on the shores of Delaware Bay in 1941, yet the museum famous in Lewes for its Streamline Moderne architecture never opened to the public.

Dr. Ronald Yancey, M.D. of Lewes inspected Agents Hardy and O’Malley, and the miraculously young suffragette Delia McGinty Dougherty, and concluded all were in good health despite the unusual circumstances of their captivity. Carruthers himself was taken by federal agents from Washington, D.C. for questioning and is being held in a detention facility in Wilmington pending trial before the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. No other arrests were made in the raid. Mr. Smith, age 76, was famous in his youth as the captain of industry who singlehandedly supplied the Allied forces in World War II with rubber tires that could traverse the deserts of the North African Campaign and the muddy fields of Northern France and Germany. For his service, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1947 by Speaker of the House Joseph W. Martin, Jr. (R-MA).

One curiosity of the case is the vitality of Mrs. Dougherty, age 95, who Dr. Yancey wrote appears to be physically fifty years younger than her age. Dr. Yancey offered no comment when asked further about her condition. Mrs. Dougherty’s husband, Mr. Peter Dougherty, age 91, of Brooklyn, has lived in Lewes with Mr. Smith since 1942. When asked for comment on his wife’s health, Mr. Dougherty said “I am fortunate indeed to have these next few years to spend with my beloved.” No charges have been filed against Mr. Dougherty. Agent Penelope Wilson, one of the three federal agents who were investigating Mr. Smith told Sophie Fleming of the Daily Whale, the Lewes local newspaper, that Mr. Dougherty was unaware his employer had been imprisoning Mrs. Dougherty in the museum. Mr. Dougherty agreed to stand as a witness against Mr. Smith in the tycoon’s impending federal trial.

This is not the first missing persons case connected to Mr. Smith. In 1941 several workers from the Brazilian branch of the Smith Company disappeared on the job Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian authorities have said they are interested in questioning Mr. Smith.

A spokesman for the federal agency responsible for the raid said no objects were found in the museum’s galleries.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

The Joy of Reading

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, an odd sort of sorrow that explains my reading habits.

On Sunday evening, I surprised myself by finishing reading Sebastian Smee’s new book Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism. I read a review of it in the New York Times several months ago in conjunction with the exhibition celebrating the 150^th anniversary of the first Impressionist exposition which I saw at the Musée d’Orsay this summer and is now showing at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. I’ve long loved the works of Claude Monet, especially his choice and use of color, yet of all the impressionists in this exhibit the one who stood out to me the most was Berthe Morisot (1841–1895), one of the few women included in the 1874 exposition. This book tells the story of her life during the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune, and in the first three decades of the Third Republic at a time when France was a prosperous great power yet still politically unstable, something familiar to our own day. I’d first heard of the Commune as an underlying current of the macabre in Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera, though this is the first time I’ve properly read about the Commune or its collapse during the Semaine sanglante, or Bloody Week of 21-28 May 1871.

“Berthe Morisot au bouquet des violets” by Édouard Manet (1872), Musée d’Orsay

“Pourtrait d’Édouard Manet,” by Henri Fantin-Latour (1867), Art Institute of Chicago

Over the months I read and listened to this book I felt that I got to know Morisot, her friend Édouard Manet (1832–1883), her sister Edma Morisot (1839–1921), her husband Eugène Manet (1833–1892), and her daughter Julie Manet (1878–1966). Early while reading this I went, as I often do, to the Internet to look at the paintings described and learn more about these people I was meeting on every page. It struck me that many of the children of these Impressionists lived well into the twentieth century, Julie died in 1966. I’ve been drawn to the Impressionists for how tangible their art is, as I’ve written here before in my early childhood in the 1990s the decades a century before, notably the Columbian Exposition of 1893, felt recent and quite tangible to me. That sense remains even as we now move toward the end of this first quarter of the twenty-first century, and so Morisot, Manet, and Monet feel more contemporary to me than perhaps they aught to. That their art began to be acquired for American museum collections in the first decades of the twentieth century makes them feel to me more contemporaneous with the 1893 World’s Fair, the Theodore Roosevelt Administration (1901–1909), or the earliest stirrings of silent film before World War I than with the American Civil War which erupted when these artists were first exhibiting their works. That their children lived into my grandparents’ and parents’ lives leaves people like Morisot who died nearly 130 years ago feeling like they were just here yesterday.

I think the setting of Paris also helps with this. The French capital has changed in some ways, for one the Métro was built after Morisot died, though after I finished reading Smee’s book on Sunday night it struck me looking at some of the addresses mentioned in the latter chapters of the book that she would have seen the Eiffel Tower rise over the Champs-du-Mars from her various homes just across the Seine in Passy. Again, these are all symbols of the Belle-Époque that marked the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and yet these are people whose lives began during the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe in the 1830s and 1840s, a decade which also saw the death of the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834) and some of the last great figures of the American and French Revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s. Do you see how time can seem to pinch when considering it on a personal level? Paris is a city that has changed in some ways yet in others it would still be recognizable to someone from the 1880s or 1890s. One of my favorite short stories that I’ve ever read is Andrew Robinson’s contribution to the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine anthology series Prophecy and Change, a story titled “The Calling” in which Robinson’s character from the TV show, Elim Garak, is sent by his planet’s government to seek assistance from the United Federation of Planets whose capital in the late twenty-fourth century is Paris, one of the great cities of Earth. Garak remarks that unlike most other Earth cities Paris feels ancient, and that the locals like to keep their particular sense of Frenchness in spite of all the interplanetary mingling going on at this point over 350 years from now.

Again, despite all the advances in technology from Robinson’s description of Paris in the late 2400s it sounds like it would still be recognizable to someone like me who knows it from the 2010s and 2020s or perhaps even to Morisot and Manet who knew it in the 1860s through the 1890s. That’s a bold claim that may be without much merit, but I’ll make it here because it speaks to something intensely Parisian, a city more modern in many respects than many of our great cities here in the United States with a constantly evolving transportation network, good healthcare, and some of the best educational institutions on the planet, yet still true to itself in its age. When I finished Robinson’s story, I was so moved that I considered trying to contact the author to tell him as much, though I haven’t built up the courage to do so yet. That’s something I’ve begun to do with fellow historians, at these conferences over the last three weeks I would often tell people whose books I’d read how much I enjoyed them. It’s something I hope people will say to me when I publish my own works later this decade.

If any book that I’ve recently read speaks to this sense of timelessness yet also is populated by such profoundly vibrant characters it’s Paula Lafferty’s new fantasy novel La Vie de Guinevere in which a woman named Vera living in early twenty-first century Glastonbury in the southwest of England discovers she’s a time-traveling Queen Guinevere and is brought back to the seventh century to fulfill her obligations as queen. I’ve known Paula for over a decade now, she’s one of the pastors of my Mom’s church, and I count her among my good friends, so I’ve been excited to hear progress of this book over the last few years when we’ve met for meals and crossed paths. I read this book during my trip to Toronto over Halloween weekend and finished it on the 6^th of November in Houston and again this is one where I quickly began to feel familiar with the characters and where I looked forward to visiting with them again. Paula’s way of breathing life into them made them feel contemporary in a way that most stories set in the Early Middle Ages don’t. Glastonbury is a great setting for good portions of this story; it’s another one of these timeless places, one that I’ve yet to visit, yet it speaks to an element of maturity in the English countryside that seems foreign to our young society here in the American Midwest.

And yet, there is a degree of that agedness that you can find in my cousin Chelsea Burton Dunn’s series of books By Moonlight telling the story of a Kansas City woman named Vee. These books are set here in town, many of the main characters live in my neighborhood, yet things are not quite as they seem for most of the Brooksiders in question are werewolves. I read the first book over the course of one evening, during which time I met Vee and Shane, the werewolf pack leader, and his family. Knowing Chelsea I was able to recognize the story, its setting, and characters quickly and began to feel a sense of comfort around them. These were just more people I was meeting, albeit on paper only. Now when I drive or walk down the street where the werewolves are said to live in these books, I find my mind thinking of them. In this instance, having the story take place so close to home makes it easier for me to find joy in reading it. These are the furthest sorts of stories from my usual fare, especially from the history, anthropology, and zoology works I read for my studies, yet there’s still a place for them and their characters to flourish in the imagination.

I have a tendency of getting close to finishing a book and then setting it aside for a while and leaving it unfinished. I think this goes back to my sense as an only child that the characters in the books I read often feel far more familiar by the time I’m finished with the story, and so I don’t want to see them leave my regular daily life where I spend a good hour or so each day visiting with them and learning more about their lives and experiences. It’s silly in some cases, yet it’s truly a factor in my reading. I remember doing this reading Judith Herrin’s Byzantium in 2016 and 2017, building up a several month gap near the end of the book in part because I didn’t want the story to end. That may also be why my greatest attempt at fiction, my stories about Erasmus Plumwood, remain unfinished. That and that I’ve been translating Thevet’s Singularitez and writing my dissertation.

There is a special joy in reading that is lost in other media. The stories are projected from the page into our imaginations whence they come to life for us to see in our mind’s eye. I love watching television shows and seeing films, in fact I’m eager to go see Robert Zemeckis’s new film Here and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, yet reading is much more personal and intimate. It’s a story acted out on the perfect sized stage, a stage that can project just to the individual or to a group if the book is read aloud. At the moment both of the Morisot paintings at the Nelson-Atkins are off view, one is in Nice for a Morisot retrospective exhibit, yet I still chose to wander the Impressionist galleries of the museum this Monday to see the light and color and life which Morisot and her friends envisioned in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Their lives continue to recede into the past, like Eurydice’s eternal fall from Orpheus’s outstretched arms into the dark of Hades, yet for me there’s still a string tethering the Impressionists and me and all the generations in between. That’s a string I will leave bound as long as possible even as time pulls us further apart. It’s a string I will rejuvenate by going to see their paintings and reading more about their lives even as the distance between us continues to grow.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

The Strenuous Life

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, to start November, a realization I had recently about how to overcome less severe colds.

2024 has been a tough year for me, that is a definite fact. Among all the rough seas of this year have been a series of nearly monthly colds that knocked me down at times when I otherwise would have lived to my fullest potential. I started to see a pattern at the end of July when I developed a cold after spending too much time under an overworked ceiling fan in our living room watching the Summer Olympics on television. A month before, on the morning I was due to drive my parents to the Kansas City International Airport for their summer Mediterranean trip, I woke up to find my voice gone, and after the return drive from the airport I was sapped of any and all energy.

That illness was one of the worst I’ve experienced since the pandemic. I ended up taking a week to do nothing and merely rest and return to my teenage summer hobby of watching television and reading all day. It was perhaps my first weeklong break from working since 2020, if even before. In the following week, even though I was still unwell I wrote two significant papers I needed to complete, and began writing papers for the three conferences I attended at the end of October and on the week of this blog post’s release. I thought I’d learned my lesson, I had a similar summer cold in 2021 after over-exposing myself to the ceiling fan in my bedroom which led to me to being sick throughout my western road trip in Colorado and Utah that year.

And yet, at the end of July of this year I found myself getting sick again in the exact same manner. I figured it was a minor thing, and I adopted the tack I’d first tried out in 2020 at the start of the pandemic of doubling or tripling the amount of water I drank to flush whatever it was out of my system. In both instances, in late June and late July, I stayed home as much as possible, close to the kitchen where I could get more water, and close to my supply of tissue boxes. I’d figure each illness would last for maybe a week, though often they’d end up lasting for 10-14 days. I ended up traveling to Orlando while I was still recovering at the end of July for the National Convention of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) to lobby as a member of the Kansas delegation and spent that week in Florida with a bad cough. When I finally returned home to Kansas City at the end of that trip I slept for a full day, and eventually felt fully recovered the following morning.

I felt lucky to break the cycle at the end of August and not get sick over Labor Day weekend, one of my usual weekends when I’m unwell thanks to my seasonal allergies. I was very careful to avoid overexposing myself to the ceiling fans at home, which are essential to keeping the rooms in our century-old house cool in the increasingly muggy Kansas City summers, and I made sure to pay close attention to my allergies if they would announce themselves while I spent Labor Day weekend outdoors volunteering with the Fr. Donnelly AOH at the Kansas City Irish Fest’s Pershing Gate at the southeast corner of Pershing Rd. and Grand Blvd. The same luck held out at the end of September and beginning of October when I spent a long day outdoors at Wyandotte County Park in my role as Chairman of the Fr. Donnelly AOH’s Irish Road Bowling Tournament. I think I helped myself there by staying in the A-frame shelter that is our tournament’s headquarters for most of the day and avoiding going out onto the park’s lawns.

And yet, the end of October saw this cycle of monthly ailments returning. This time though it wasn’t due to an overactive ceiling fan drying my throat and making it easier for me to get sick. Instead, with the cooling weather and our ongoing drought I waited too long to buy a new humidifier for my bedroom. By the time I bought one, my throat had been sore from dryness for a full 4 days. I woke up on Day 5 to find the dry throat was gone but the congestion and sneezing familiar from late June and late July had arrived. This was a serious worry, as I would be spending the following three weeks traveling to three separate academic conferences in three separate cities in three separate countries here in North America. I figured I could make the first two work, those were in San Antonio and Toronto, but the third in Mérida, Mexico was more worrisome because I knew I would need to use only bottled water there, and so would need to be careful with my weakened immune system traveling to Mexico for the first time.

I will actually be arriving in Mérida on the day this blog post is published, so it remains to be seen how this leg of my “2024 North American Tour” goes.

Despite these worrying signs, I found a glimmer of hope to latch onto on Days 5, 6, and 7 of this late October sickness that helped me realize how I can end this particular cold sooner. Those three days, as well as Day 4 when I bought my new humidifier, I was hard at work at my current employer, the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, as a team captain leading teams of ushers during performances. On Day 5 I was less active for most of the performance, staying to my assigned floor and managing affairs there, yet on Days 6 and 7 I signed up to work in a role that took me all throughout the public-facing side of the building. I easily walked a good 15,000 steps during my shifts those two days and was struck by the fact that I was less congested during those shifts than I expected. On Day 7, walking up the grand staircase for the umpteenth time that afternoon it occurred to me that this could prove the merit of President Theodore Roosevelt’s idea of the strenuous life.

As a boy and young man, Roosevelt was beset by a variety of ailments that left him homebound and unable to experience the vigorous life that he dreamed of. So, entering adulthood as a student at Harvard, he began to live out that strenuous life that he’d dreamed of, and slowly but surely worked hard to strengthen his body and rise out of the afflictions that confined his childhood. I’d wondered for a while now how this could have worked, today we often identify people by the ailments they suffer, even identifying ourselves in this manner. It’s good to acknowledge ourselves, yet I wonder if it also keeps our eyes as a species and especially here in the United States focused on what holds us back rather than what will allow us to rise up? During this weekend hard at work though, running up and down stairs and working directly with thousands of my fellow Kansas Citians and visitors to our fountain city, I found that even though I could feel the congestion that beset me, it didn’t control what I was doing. The more I kept moving, the more I kept observing the people around me, and the more I helped those people to have the best experience they could attending the performances on in the building, the better I felt. By the end of my shift on Day 7, while I certainly was congested, my primary physical sensation was exhaustion, which was fitting. Perhaps then this conference tour would be good for my health and would make it easier for me to fully recover. Granted, the congestion I began feeling at the end of October was far less severe than the two colds I caught in June and July of this year. I was reminded over the weekend that if I were sicker, like I was at the end of June, it would be a far different story. Still, perhaps this is a lesson in how to keep the onset of these colds at bay: to keep moving, to keep working, all while drinking double or triple the usual amount of water. Maybe then I too can come close to saying I’m as fit as a bull moose.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

The Face

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, I have a spooky short story for you, based on an experience I had over the summer.

The second evening since my colleagues had left town now arrived, I made my way down into the caverns of the metro to cross Paris from Opéra to the Maison de la Radio. The journey should only take 30 minutes, during which time I knew I would be surrounded by people, it was the rush hour after all. Yet one thing was certain about this journey: none of us would intentionally make eye-contact with each other. That is one of the great, universal, cardinal rules of public transport systems. To look into the eyes of a stranger who was stuck sitting or standing beside you in close quarters was to break some great pact of collective anonymity. I kept to this rule as well as I could, having learned it as a child and improved within its bounds in my teenage and young adult years.

That is what struck me the most about the face that I saw peering at me from ahead. At first, I thought I must’ve been seeing things, yet then I looked at it more closely and saw its eyes gazing back at me in an unbroken stare. Whose face was this that would be so flagrant in their regard for the social order of the metro? I turned away quickly and restored my gaze on the linear route map on the upper section of the walls of the carriage. It was just above the twin doors which stood before me. I was positioned in the center of the train’s vestibule, holding onto the vertical pole as all of the seats were taken, and if I could’ve taken one for myself it would’ve served little purpose, as I was alighting in only a few stops.

I looked back in the corner of my eye and saw those eyes piercing their way through the stifling air back at me. A shiver ran down my spine, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, someone really was watching me, someone here on this train. I looked up at the map again, we were only just arriving at Miromesnil. I knew I could transfer here, but it would take me out of my way, and I needed to get closer to the Maison de la Radio if I was going to have time for dinner before my concert. At Miromesnil, I looked to see if the face I’d seen was one that alighted, perhaps to transfer to Line 13 or to the streets of the 8th Arrondissement above. The doors closed as soon as they opened, and we were off southwest again toward the intersection of l’Avenue de Franklin Roosevelt and les Champs-Élysées. I feared turning to look again, those eyes could well still be there staring at me. They didn’t look friendly, I’d convinced myself. They were eyes that stood out for how sharp their whites appeared against the brown of their pupils, like a milky sea surrounding a distinct island of mahogany. It seemed unnatural in the greenish light I saw them in, a light produced by the electronic lighting on the train.

At Alma – Marceau, I knew I could transfer to the RER C, which would take me to my final destination, but I stuck to my plan, in spite of the eyes that I was sure still gazed at me. Did their owner long to know more about me? Did they think me foolish, or could they see through the sport-coat and sweaty dress shirt that I’d been wearing for several days? I let the doors close on the Alma – Marceau platform without alighting, and watched as the station flew past us until the darkness of the Line 9 tunnel overwhelmed the green light illuminating the train again.

There they were! The eyes! Gazing at me from behind, I thought. I felt tired, weary of feeling like I had to look over my shoulder to see who this person was, like the unknown figure who’d sit behind me at Mass when I would feel too self-conscious to turn around and see who it was. That would require I acknowledge them, say “hello” or what you will. Here though, the sign of peace was not turning to acknowledge this figure standing behind me, rather to acknowledge that I could see someone’s eyes there staring at me in the window yet not turn and interrupt their privacy in so public a place by looking into them myself. So, there I stood, trying my hardest not to turn as Orpheus did and lose the love which I felt for that vaunted, phantom privacy.

At Trocadéro, I alighted with relief, and walked down the platform following the signs for Line 6. I pulled out my phone and searched in the metro’s app for my route again, confirming I would need to take Line 6 only one stop to Passy. I walked up a flight of stairs and down another, noting the Trocadéro ticket lobby was surely nearby, before I descended onto the Line 6 platform for trains terminating at Place de la Nation. I didn’t notice anyone familiar from the Line 9 train on the platform and breathed a sigh of relief. I thought about buying a bottle of water from the vending machine on the platform to help calm my nerves, but thought better of it, remembering I was hopefully heading to dinner before my concert.

A minute later, the train arrived, its light green signage mirroring the color scheme of the Paris Metro overall. I watched it arrive, and boarded in the penultimate carriage, which I found moderately full. I had plenty of room on either side of me as I again chose to stand, keeping myself upright with the aid of the vertical pole in that train’s rear vestibule. I watched the doors close and lock, and the train begin to move, picking up speed with a good rhythm from the tracks below us.

As we reached the tunnel my relief turned to horror, there was that face again, those eyes piercing my soul with their weary look, as if the weight of a life lived well yet not to its fullest sang a plaintive hymn from their gaze. Was that what I feared about them the most? That they seemed to be tired, forlorn? Something else caught my attention though, without many other people around me, logically there wouldn’t be anyone else in this carriage’s end vestibule who was on my last train. I looked back at those eyes with trepidation and let out an audible laugh as the train flew out of the tunnel from beneath Trocadéro and onto the elevated line that took Line 6 over the Seine and along the western edge of the Champ du Mars.

Those eyes were my eyes, their piercing stare was my piercing stare, that weary gaze was my weary gaze. I saw myself in the window this whole time and feared what I saw. I feared the figure who was trying to make it through one day to the next without causing too much trouble for himself. I was scared of failure and restless in this self-enforced frugality of expression.

I saw the platforms of Passy station appear alongside the train, and alighted onto the platform, descending down the stairs, and out toward the banks of the Seine.

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

On Pauses

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

This week, some words about silence in communication.

In my current job, one thing that is often challenging for new hires is learning how to operate our radios. In general, personal radios are the same no matter where you go, albeit with different features added to higher-end models like screens telling you which channel it’s tuned to. I found our radios to be one of the easier parts of the job to adapt to, I have experience working with radios from my time in the Boy Scouts for one. Yet I wish when teaching people how to use radios for the first time we would talk about how we communicate on a most basic level. We use all of our senses to communicate but especially our sight and hearing.

Sound is the purest medium of communication for us humans: we talk with one another by emitting sounds from our mouths and receiving them with our ears. There’s a whole genre of performance these days called “spoken word” which annoys me because that’s the purest and most fundamental form of communication, let alone art, that we have. Rather, it should be called speaking, talking, or if you want to be fancier oratory. It’s only since we began to read silently that this distinction between speech and writing has grown. From what I remember hearing, the first significant reader to read silently was St. Augustine of Hippo, though that could be apocryphal.

Beyond sound there’s visual communication. In my job when we’ve talked about backup plans should our radios no longer be functional or useful I’ve suggested, perhaps a tad jocularly, that we should resort to semaphore flags, or some sort of similar if more rudimentary system. I have the semaphore Wuthering Heightssketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus in mind when making this suggestion, but still, it’s always worth considering. In writing we are stuck having to express the full range of emotions and meanings in a manner that is limited by letters, words, and symbols on a physical surface. Emojis now help in more popular parlance to express the emotion behind our texts and social media posts, yet there again I often get annoyed when I see the bubbly and bucolic emojis used in places where they seem unfit, as though a contemporary expectation is that we all are using a string of emojis at the ends of our sentences because everyone else is doing it. I removed the emojis placed by default on a happy birthday message that Facebook suggested I send to a friend because they aren’t a necessary part of my communication. I use the period, or full stop for my non-American readers, at the ends of my texts because that’s how I end a sentence unless it’s interrogatory or exclamatory in nature.

As you can see, I have more to say about visual communication, especially the written word, because that is my own medium. I also dabble in photography, and have embraced Instagram for this reason, yet again I feel less need to take selfies everywhere I go because I can far more honestly demonstrate my presence in a place through writing. On my Instagram stories, I decided about a decade ago when I first opened my account that I would always format my captions with a highlighted blue background and white text as a way of saying, however subtly, to my readers that these are my words. I’ve kept to that, though this is the first time I’ve acknowledged that practice.

In either of these senses, hearing or sight, should we lack one we have to rely even more on the other to understand our surroundings and what others are trying to express. I’ve learned a hard lesson that my nonfiction writing benefits greatly from firm clarity over the opacity that I prefer as I unravel the story in my fiction. The same occurs when using radios: these are devices which allow an individual to communicate with others from a distance sight-unseen. The words we speak into our radios then need to be crystal clear for the people listening to understand what we are trying to say. I like to think of the mission controllers in Houston or Star City who have relayed intricate strings of numbers up to astronauts and cosmonauts beyond our planet to help them complete their missions and return home safely. It gives me a thrill to try to be that clear on my radio, and to be comfortable with that level of clarity when speaking into it.

Yet beyond these two senses, we have minds which are experiencing all of the things that our senses relay to it. We see more than just the messages other people display or transmit, and we hear more than just talk. Our minds are capable of parsing through all of this and making meaning out of it to orientate us in our lived worlds. This summer when I was back in London, I knew I was in a very public setting in close proximity to about 10 other people when I took the new Elizabeth line from the Docklands to the West End one Sunday afternoon, yet I also knew from experience and from seeing the people around me that no one would think anything if I pulled out the book I’d just bought, Michael Palin’s Erebus, and start reading it. Sure, everyone around me could see what I was reading if they wanted, but in that moment it was perfectly alright to do that because it was an unspoken part of life on the trains of the British capital that people pass the time by reading, so long as those readers don’t then share what they’ve just read with the strangers seated or standing about them.

On Friday afternoon last week, I went to one of the local cinemas to see the new film Lee staring Kate Winslet as Lee Miller, one of the great photographers and war correspondents of the last World War. I bought my ticket knowing it was going to be a stellar performance from Winslet, yet I was struck just as much by the dialogue as I was by the pauses written into the script. In one scene, one such pause propelled the story forward far more than any other moment in the whole film, connecting the postwar framing narrative together with the main story being told. That’s the beauty of theatre and film: it’s a medium where the written script is interpreted by actors who we see and hear, and so these two senses are unified to bring these characters and stories to life. This film, like its contemporary Freud’s Last Session which I saw earlier this year, had the feel of a play, and could probably work as such though the realism of Lee is that it takes the audience along with the photographer as she witnesses the destruction of Europe and the horrors committed by the Nazis in the wake of their fall from power in 1944 and 1945.

These silent moments are something that I find can be expressed more in my narrative writing, a style I usually use writing fiction, where I’m writing dialogue as well as the connecting tissue giving those words spoken by the characters their place in the world of the story. In real life we can express nearly as much with a look as we can with a word. This setting of Britain, Occupied France, and Germany in World War II is a potent one for telling stories, after all so many movies continue to be made about that war even as we move ever further from those years. I wonder if in the twenty-first century when we are so connected by our technology, how are our innate communicative abilities adapting to our newfound world? When I was little it was a big deal to see a copy of a foreign newspaper available for sale here in Kansas City; you could maybe buy a copy of the Sunday Times at Barnes & Noble in the magazine section, but they wouldn’t always have it available. Today though, we have people from all around the globe talking at once.

What is it we aren’t saying amid all the cacophonic chaos of our modern social media?

Click Here to Support the Wednesday Blog

Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

New Posts on Wednesdays

Category Archives: Life

The First Quarter-Century

The First Quarter-Century – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to begin Season 5, I discuss some hopes of mine for the first quarter of the twenty-first century through reflections on three things that I imagined might be possible twenty-five years ago.

On Names

On Names – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Season 4 Finale: This week, to celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to write a bit about naming conventions that I’ve come across, and to explain why I use my full name professionally.

On Democracy

On Democracy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope.

The Versatility of Storytelling

The Versatility of Storytelling – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the same tools can be used to weave a variety of different stories.

Notes on Carruthers Smith’s Museum

Notes on "Carruthers Smith's Museum" – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some notes on the subtext and background of my story “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released in this blog last week.

Carruthers Smith’s Museum

Carruthers Smith's Museum – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, we join a team of federal agents as they investigate a strange museum owned by a reclusive Captain of Industry that has never opened its doors to the public.

Part I.

Part II.

Part III.

The Joy of Reading

The Joy of Reading – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, an odd sort of sorrow that explains my reading habits.

The Strenuous Life

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to start November, a realization I had recently about how to overcome less severe colds.

The Face

The Face – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I have a spooky short story for you, based on an experience I had over the summer.

On Pauses

On Pauses – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about silence in communication.

The First Quarter-Century – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to begin Season 5, I discuss some hopes of mine for the first quarter of the twenty-first century through reflections on three things that I imagined might be possible twenty-five years ago.

Share this:

On Names – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Season 4 Finale: This week, to celebrate Christmas I’ve decided to write a bit about naming conventions that I’ve come across, and to explain why I use my full name professionally.

Share this:

On Democracy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for my birthday I want to write to you about my belief in all of us and how democracy remains our best hope.

Share this:

The Versatility of Storytelling – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the same tools can be used to weave a variety of different stories.

Share this:

Notes on "Carruthers Smith's Museum" – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some notes on the subtext and background of my story “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released in this blog last week.

Share this:

Carruthers Smith's Museum – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, we join a team of federal agents as they investigate a strange museum owned by a reclusive Captain of Industry that has never opened its doors to the public.

Part I.

Part II.

Part III.

Share this:

The Joy of Reading – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, an odd sort of sorrow that explains my reading habits.

Share this:

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to start November, a realization I had recently about how to overcome less severe colds.

Share this:

The Face – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I have a spooky short story for you, based on an experience I had over the summer.

Share this:

On Pauses – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about silence in communication.

Share this: