Category Archives: Life

The Museum

The Museum – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to round out Season 3 of the Wednesday Blog podcast, a few words about my love for museums. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, to round out Season 3 of the Wednesday Blog podcast, a few words about my love for museums.

I learned about our cosmos from visiting museums and reading books as a child. Where my books could thrill my imagination into creating whisps of wonders that would dance about my mind and keep me enchanted during the quieter moments, museums offered me the physical embodiments of many of those same wonders. The older Irish word for a museum is iarsmalann, or “reliquary.” Museums, the seat of the muses of the Ancient Greek cosmos, are where we house our greatest treasures today. They are places which the public can visit and learn about our human world and the natural cosmos it inhabits. Museums are seats of knowledge where we can wonder about a great many things that otherwise would not be accessible to us.

My favorite museums to visit are the ones I return to the most. From my youth, I loved wandering the halls of Chicago’s Field Museum and Art Institute most. In the acknowledgements of my dissertation, I will note that it was in the Field Museum as a small child that I first experienced wonder, and that that is where the passion, beauty, and joy that drives my career and my life today began. One of my last truly awe inspiring visits to the Art Institute was in January 2019 on the last day of the American Historical Association’s meeting at the Hilton on South Michigan Avenue. That afternoon as I wandered around the labyrinthine halls of the Art Institute, I was struck at how endearing I found the Early Republican galleries, rooms which previously I’d been frustrated by because I still have trouble finding my way out of them. I’ve returned to the Field Museum more in the following years both to wander the halls and to remember all the joyous times I’ve had in that building as a child, a teenager, and now an adult.

Here in Kansas City, my favorite museum by far is the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. When we first moved to Kansas City, 25 years ago this summer, my Dad took me to the Nelson in hopes of filling that role that the Field Museum had for me back in Chicago. As I grew and matured, I found myself returning to the Nelson more and more, seeing the same art each time sure, but more so appreciating the constancy of that art than anything else. In the last six years I’ve grown to love the Kansas City Zoo & Aquarium as well; perhaps the Zoo is a better equivalent locally to the Field Museum with its dominant focus on the natural world over anything else. I think of the Zoo like another sort of museum, a living and breathing museum situated in the expansive wooded grounds of Swope Park. One of my dreams is to contribute a museum to Kansas City, ideally a natural history museum where my own particular contribution would be in a History of Science gallery.

Elsewhere, during my year in London I fell in love with many of that city’s great museums. I became a member of the British Museum and would often walk there from class and spend my afternoons wandering and loving how much I could learn there. It was on these visits to the British Museum that I decided to do my doctorate in History or Classics; I settled on History as you know, though I ended up in the Renaissance in part because of my love for the Banqueting House on Whitehall and Hampton Court Palace, two expansive palaces now turned into museums by Historic Royal Palaces. Initially, I wanted to study Roman history and focus on how the concept of Roman citizenship expanded as the Republic’s and later Empire’s borders expanded outward from the City of Rome. Yet, I instead decided to settle in the Renaissance, a period that seemed to me to evoke some aspects of the idealized Rome that I thought of while still feeling closer to home. In London too I loved my visits to the Natural History Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum in South Kensington, two that I returned to on several occasions on this most recent, if brief, visit to the British capital in October.

The more I’ve traveled, the more museums I’ve visited. In many respects they fill certain roles which I set in my mind from early on depending on their focus. In Upstate New York, if I wanted to visit a natural history museum I would go to the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca or if I wanted to wander around an art museum for an afternoon, I’d go to the Rockwell Museum in Corning or the Everson Museum in Syracuse.

I’ve been fortunate to see so many of these places and experience the life we give them amid all the relics of our past. In more ways than I probably even recognize, these museums have inspired my career, and I hope that I may contribute a verse to their songs one day.

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The Columbian Exchange

The Columbian Exchange – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to talk a bit about how the period I study resonates in our everyday lives through the foods we eat. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I want to talk a bit about how the period I study resonates in our everyday lives through the foods we eat.

(Sound of a grill lighting.)

This week, I thought I’d record an idea that I’ve had for a while. Originally, this demonstration was going to be filmed for a course I taught last summer, but it didn’t get developed in time. So, on Tuesday afternoon when I was looking at the story I was developing for this week and saw how little I’d finished of it, thanks to my other work taking up a greater amount of my time than expected, I returned to this idea. So, here’s a synopsis of me grilling a couple burgers and talking about it.

First, I get the ground chuck burger patties out of the freezer. (frozen patties hitting the plate) Buying in bulk and freezing the beef helps keep costs down.

“Now the seasoning that I usually use for this, Lawry’s, has salt, sugar: definitely something which appeared through the Columbian Exchange from Madeira to the Caribbean and Brazil, and the spices are paprika and turmeric: those are also important with the trade connections in the 16th & 17th centuries, onion, corn starch, and garlic. So, this seasoning is certainly a part of it. This seasons the beef which is European in origin using spices that come from all around the globe.”

“And now, I’ll season these.” –– The seasoning adds flavor to what otherwise is just a frozen piece of bland-tasting beef. Meat seasonings are more common in Texas barbecue, where they take the form of rubs. When I’m making brisket, I will use a big meat rub from Joe’s Kansas City Barbecue to enhance the meat’s flavor.

“Now, of course you could top your burger with garnish, with tomatoes which come from Mexico, or lettuce, which is more ubiquitous, onions, which are European in origin, or mustard, ketchup (which is tomato sauce & sugar, I’m less fond of that). The point is that the burger has a great deal of different sources to it, many of which go back to the Columbian Exchange, elements of which are traceable back to Europe as well as the Americas. And then of course, you eat your burger with fried potatoes, with French fries (chips if you’re British.) Potatoes come from Peru and were introduced to other places from there, or sweet potatoes which also come from South America. I’ve read that sweet potatoes were sometimes called Taíno potatoes after the native people of the Caribbean, yet they were also used by the Tupinambá of Brazil who I study.”

After the grill heated up to around 650ºF (343ºC), which on this very windy evening took about 15 minutes, I took the patties outside and dropped them on the grill. (Sizzling sound)

Once I had the patties on the grill, I returned to the kitchen to prepare the cheese, to cut the cheese if you will. For this meal, I’m using two different types of cheese. On one burger I have an Irish cheddar and on the other a Mexican blend that’s mostly made up of Monterey Jack and White Cheddar. I discovered my love for the Monterey Jack burger at our local Tex-Mex restaurant, where the burger on the menu is made with Monterey Jack cheese. The flavor is distinctive and a nice change of pace. I also like putting provolone, parmesan, and mozzarella on my burgers, though in that instance to go full Italian burger I also enjoy including marinara sauce. I discovered this type of burger at a famous burger restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the street from Harvard’s Houghton Library, called Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, where this Italian burger was named the Dr. Fauci Burger on the menu.

“Alright, time to flip.”

“Now, of course none of this would’ve been possible without the transatlantic trade connections that developed after Columbus’s first voyage in 1492. The beef in these burgers come from cattle which replaced the bison which existed previously out here on the Great Plains, and there’s some debate about whether bison should replace beef all over again. So, maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time if I do this all over again, I’ll be doing it with bison instead of beef.” While I made my speech to the microphone, the timer went off on my watch telling me the patties were done cooking. “And now, the timer’s gone off. Let’s take these off. So, these are looking pretty good. There’s the cheddar one, and now my Monterey Jack one.”

“But now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, I want to eat. Bye, bye.”

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Lacrimosa

Lacrimosa – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Today, one week after this city's great triumph and great tragedy, I've decided to reflect on the week now passed. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane

Today, one week after this city’s great triumph and great tragedy, I’ve decided to reflect on the week now passed.

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One of my favorite speeches of Peter Capaldi’s run on Doctor Who came at a moment when the Doctor finds himself in the middle of a war-game just beginning. On the one side are an alien species beginning their invasion of Earth, on the other the humans fighting for survival as we do. In a powerful bit of oration, Capaldi’s Doctor cries out that none of this conflict would happen if we would just sit down and talk with each other. I think of this scene often when I’m reading news analysis of our current moment in American history. We are at a point where we so vastly disagree with each other over the very facts of our nature and our world that we only talk with people with whom we agree.

Now there’s a key semantic note here: we talk to people with whom we disagree, yet we often only talk withpeople with whom we agree. One week ago, this city was filled with millions of people talking, cheering, laughing, and dancing with each other in our moment of jubilee. One week ago, this city basked in the bright, warm mid-February sky. 

I didn’t go downtown for the parade, instead choosing to watch the first hour of it at home before going to my parish church for Ash Wednesday Mass and a delightful afternoon walk on that warm day at the Kansas City Zoo. While I was at the Zoo, riding on the Sky Safari chairlift on the way back from seeing the chimpanzees, I heard over the staff radio that something was happening at the parade. A few seconds later one of my best friends, a regular Wednesday Blog reader no less, texted me about a shooting at Union Station. By the time I returned to ground at the other side of the chairlift near the cheetah enclosure I knew enough that I chose to cut my zoo visit short and return to the assured safety of home.

At that point, we didn’t know if the shooting, still ongoing, was a terror attack or a fight gone wrong. It turned out to be the latter, yet in the process 22 bystanders were injured and 1 bystander, Lisa Lopez-Galvan, was killed. Her name is now etched into the memory of this city. She is by no means the first Kansas Citian to be killed in a shooting in the past year, each Sunday at Mass my parish prays for the victims of gun violence killed in the past week, ultimately reading 184 names in the 12 month course of 2023. Still, this was the first time that such a shooting happened with elected officials from the Governors of Kansas and Missouri to the Mayor of Kansas City to State and County legislators from throughout our region were all present. There are reports of Chiefs coach Andy Reid and players from the team helping comfort other revelers shocked by the sudden shooting and leading many to safety within Union Station itself.

At the time of writing the Kansas City Police Department has reported that the two suspects in this shooting are juveniles who got into an argument at the end of the Super Bowl Rally and started firing at least one, if not two, weapons. These individuals weren’t talking with each other but instead were talking to each other. The circumstances of the laws which govern our society here in Missouri contributed to this situation, and I hope that the experience inspires change in the hardest of hearts in Jefferson City and Topeka. 

That evening, feeling shocked and dumbed by the experience of seeing our jubilee transform into a living nightmare I wanted to do something, anything that could help. At dinner, I compiled a list of all of the Members of Congress who represent the Kansas City Metropolitan Area with their DC office phone numbers and posted it to my Instagram story and Facebook profile. The following morning then, I dialed the three numbers of my Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver, and Senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt. I spoke with a staffer for the Congressman and left messages with the senators’ offices.

  • Sen. Hawley (R-MO): (202) 224-6154
  • Sen. Schmitt (R-MO): (202) 224-5721
  • Sen. Moran (R-KS): (202) 224-6521
  • Sen. Marshall (R-KS): (202) 224-4774
  • Rep. Cleaver (D-MO): (202) 225-4535
  • Rep. Alford (R-MO): (202) 225-2876
  • Rep. Graves (R-MO): (202) 225-7041
  • Rep. Davids (D-KS): (202) 225-2865
  • Rep. LaTurner (R-KS): (202) 225-6601

In each case, echoing what Jason Kander, a local veteran and sometime Democratic political candidate, said on Wednesday night, asked each official to consider the repeal of a law called the Protection for Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) which prohibits lawsuits against the gun industry over damages caused by their products. The judicial system is something which ensures consumer safety. Without this safeguard, we are at far greater risk as a society, and we’re a society with a government that has checks and balances built into our very DNA! Those checks and balances only really work if the different branches of government, and the people who choose those in government, talk with each other about the issues of the day which in some cases can determine life or death.

As the week drew to a close, I set into a new task and worked a good 21 hours this weekend at the Kauffman Center in what was truly a wonderful antidote to the grief I felt after the events midweek. To me it seemed that many people choose to come see the Kansas City Ballet’s production of Peter Pan for the escapism that the boy who never grows up embodies. We did our part, however small, to help heal our city and restore some of that jubilant spirit to our lives. Even so, on one of those nights after a long shift I drove home down Main Street and stopped at the Pershing Road light just before midnight. Even then, days later, with St. John of the Cross’s dark night of the soul feeling ever present around me at that scene, the red and yellow confetti still gently fell as it had on Wednesday morning.

On Saturday afternoon, I attended with my parents and grandmother a rally held by the gun control organization Moms Demand Action in Washington Square Park, located across Main Street from Union Station. It is a site I know best as the annual home of the Kansas City Irish Festival’s arts area, where among other works of great imagination, I talked myself out of buying a beautiful painting of the USS Enterprise-Dfrom Star Trek: The Next Generation during the last festival over Labor Day weekend. The speakers at that rally included Moms Demand Action organizers, Missouri State Representatives, Jackson County Legislator Manny Abarca IV, and our mayor Quinton Lucas. All of the speeches I heard were stirring, and like my relations there I felt the same call to action, even as the same confetti fell around us blown on the wind from the west across the park.

Writing this on Monday night just before bed, I’m surprised to think that by the time you read this blog it will have only been 1 week, a mere 7 days, since our jubilee became our nightmare in the place where our city celebrates great triumphs. To me, this last week has felt more like two weeks, the emotions have been too great to be contained by a single week alone. I sit here, writing, hoping these words speak with you, while listening to Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic’s 2015 performance of Verdi’s Requiem. It seems to be the best soundtrack for this week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog, something which evokes the inherent conflict and paradox of human experience and human emotions. Giuseppe Verdi was, after all, noted for his anti-clerical views, yet his spirituality can be heard in every note of this great Mass of the Dead.

I thought briefly on Wednesday about what I would say if I were in the room with the two suspects in this shooting. Yet after a few moments, after all the anger, all I felt was sorrow that they made their decisions which led to the nightmare they wrought. When I listen to the Lacrimosa in Verdi’s setting, I think not only of Ms. Lopez-Galvan, but of those individuals as well who caused her death. How can we heal if we cannot recognize each other’s humanity? This prayer then, the words which Verdi set to music, as Mozart and Berlioz did before him, speak to both the victims and the perpetrators:

Lacrimosa dies illa

Qua resurget ex favilla

Judicandus homo reus.

Huic ergo parce, Deus:

Pie Jesu Domine,

Dona eis requiem. Amen.

Full of tears will be that day

When from the ashes shall arise

The guilty man to be judged;

Therefore spare him, O God,

Merciful Lord Jesus,

Grant them eternal rest. Amen.

Postscript

Dear Reader, this is now the second week in a row that I’ve released a follow up to the weekly edition of the Wednesday Blog, a sign perhaps that this format does not quite work as well for current news as I might wish. About 20 hours after I wrote this week’s post and an hour after I sent the recording off to Spotify to be published at midnight Central Time, I read a story from KSHB, Kansas City’s NBC affiliate which confirmed the two main suspects’ names, their charges, and some of their testimony from their own hospital beds where they are recovering from their own gunfire.

What struck me the most about this story, which has since been updated with more information and a mugshot of the suspect whose bullet killed Ms. Lopez-Galvan, is that the man in question’s testimony shows some sense of remorse. Quoting from the article written by KSHB’s news staff, “‘Just pulled a gun out and started shooting. I shouldn’t have done that. Just being stupid,’ Mays said.” Knowing some of the humanity of this suspect speaks to me of how broadly this shooting has hurt so many.

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Tempus Fugit!

Tempus Fugit! – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week some words on time management. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week some words on time management.

In school we don’t just teach our subject matter, in my case history, and in some instances, geography and French, Latin, and Irish, we also teach valuable life skills. One of the skills which I am still learning how to do is the skill of balancing my time. It occurred to me several weeks ago that when I returned to Kansas City December 2022, I was looking forward to having a quiet domestic life here in my adopted home city, enjoying the arts of the city, enjoying the good food of the city, spending time with my family and my friends, going to mass on Sundays at my parish church on a regular basis, and living what to me seems like an ordinary life. In the process of trying to make that ordinary life work I’ve taken on many jobs.

This has resulted in my schedule filling up dramatically. I am fortunate to be able to work in fields that I excel in. And I know that I couldn’t do more things with my writing, with my teaching, with my service in the arts, I just need to find the way to balance all of my responsibilities, all of my passions, and all of my joys. Time management is a beautiful thing when you figure it out. I’m most of the way there; there’s still that I could be working on. I might have three or four, or maybe five things on my to-do list on a given day, but find myself finishing maybe two or three of those things because the days are short. It makes me wonder if I’m perhaps noticing for the first time in my life that I don’t want to work as much in the winter when we have such short daylight hours. When I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I used to work a good 12 hours a day often times going back to my desk after an evening of dinner and TV and resuming work until one or 2 o’clock in the morning. I realized that this was not good for me, and so have since endeavored to avoid that practice. Yet, this avoidance has resulted in me, working less overall, and getting less done. And in spite of that avoidance and ideally the extra quiet time to focus on other things, I find myself still not getting a full night sleep, because I can’t turn my mind off, and quiet my thoughts while I’m trying to rest. 

This is what happened on Monday night of this week, when I found myself lying awake in bed until 4 o’clock in the morning thinking through my life since I returned home to Kansas City. I’ve done some pretty decent work today considering my sleep deprived state, yet I certainly could’ve done better. And it strikes me as fascinating how my ability to get things done can be limited by my fatigue, yet also enhanced by the adrenaline and drive to achieve my goals.

I don’t particularly want to be a self-help writer, I hope that most things which may appear in that genre could be discerned by the individual reader on their own. I am perhaps too stubborn and prideful to read in that genre, yet here I am writing something which could fit into it. Sleep is a good thing. Rest is a wonderful thing. Here in the United States, we have a tendency to work far too much and not give ourselves enough time to rest and relax. I often feel that I can’t relax when I still have things to get done, which is why I started to create to-do lists. Naturally, since I accepted a position which took up almost all of my time in the Fall, I dropped the habit of making to do list, which is perhaps a part of my frustrations today.

Recently, when I was building a lesson for one of my jobs about the history of home rule and Republicanism in Ireland, I reread Robert Emmett, famous 1803 speech from the dock, in which Emmett says That his epitaph will remain unwritten while Ireland remains unfree. There’s a sense of incompletion that I appreciate in this document because I feel that I will not really rest until the work that I am endeavoring to complete today is done. The goalposts are in sight for all these things which I am doing, so there’s chance for rest on the horizon as well. I am a very goals oriented person. Overall, I even have a stack of fun reading material which I have left there for myself to pick up and there are books which I will only begin. Once I finished other ones I’m currently reading. I worry, of course with my torturous speed of fun reading that I may very well not get to those fun books that are further down on the list until the point at which time I’m no longer interested in reading them. 

So perhaps this speaks to that truism that we ourselves are often the cause of our worst foibles and faults, I think that’s fair in my case. Even now, as I dictate this weeks blog, I attempts to do more than one thing at once, to fill my time as best I can. This is a time that I would normally spend listening to podcasts and music, letting myself enjoy the sonic experience. Yet here at 6:30 in the evening on Tuesday, I find I don’t have a podcast written a blog post not paired for this week’s publication, something which I had really hoped I would have ready by now.

That might very well be a good sign of my life and times today. Even after, decisions and conclusions were reached which freed up my time and made me feel more fulfilled, I am still struggling and struggling evermore to do all of the things that I want to do in this time that I have. Tempus fugit!

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How to Know the Unknown

How to Know the Unknown – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week I want to talk about how we can recognize the existence of unknown things. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week I want to talk about how we can recognize the existence of unknown things.

At the beginning of the month when I was preparing for my copyright post, I looked into an old interest of mine that had always been there, yet wasn’t quite active in the last few years, the effort by an organization called Thank You Walt Disney to restore the building that his first studio, Laugh-O-Gram, occupied at 31st & Forest here in Kansas City called the McConahay Building. To this end, I made a detour by the old building one afternoon on the way back from the central post office at Union Station and saw a good deal of work underway on that block, and after some back and forth I found a book written by some members of that organization called Walt Disney’s Missouri that I requested from the Kansas City Public Library.

I found Disney’s early years in Marceline, Chicago, and Kansas City quite familiar; his passion and drive to create art and tell stories in a new and inventive way using the skills and talents he developed over those early years remind me deeply of many of the ideas and projects I’ve worked on since my high school days. The sky truly is the limit in this mindset. I find the young Walt Disney to be a familiar face, someone who is quite relatable to all of us who have adopted Kansas City as our canvas for the many things we create.

Yet Kansas City is not like many other great American cities, for unlike New York, Los Angeles, or even Chicago we aren’t on a shoreline, we don’t look out onto an endless expanse of water far out to the horizon. Instead, we have the vast sightlines of the prairies and Great Plains extending out from our city in every direction. The astounding sunsets that glowed across the prairies out to the west of our old family farm are some of the great images of my childhood that will forever be burned into my memory.

When I was reading about Disney returning to Marceline, Missouri as an older man, I felt intensely familiar with the setting having grown up in the Midwest; familiar with the vast scale of the prairie that overwhelms me in how small it makes me, and the few built-up edifices of our civilization feel amid the tall grass Prairie. Our interventions only emptied this landscape and rebuilt it anew with the farms & ranches that have largely replaced the native roots. We have changed this landscape to suit ourselves, and yet this landscape remains its own because its fundamental character is too distinct for us to fully comprehend in our vision of a normal inspired by the great woodlands and old colonies of the East Coast and even older cultivated and measured forests and farmland growing around the ancient generational villages and towns of Europe.

My research focuses on the unknown entities that were too far-fetched to be imagined on the edge of the European imagination, particularly animals whose proportions were exaggerated to a degree that set them and the world they inhabited apart from the well-known and measured Mediterranean World at the heart of the European cosmos. This question of how we can begin to describe the unknown has stood out to me for a while and it’s something that both thrills and scares me at the same time. I feel a profound sense of humility thinking of all the things that we don’t know that exist beyond our world, whether they be lifeforms deep in the still largely unexplored oceans or entities deep in the void of Space. Yet I love stopping to think of these things and the endless horizon they represent as it gives me a sense of things still to accomplish.

Imagine, dear reader if you will, what it would be like to witness something you never before knew appear before your own eyes, or even those things which you do know about but only in stories and fables happening in real life. Shakespeare asked his audience to use their imaginations to fill in the breadth and depth of his world. In the prologue of Henry V, the Chorus asks the audience to imagine that the actors on the stage might

“on this unworthy scaffold bring forth 

so great an object. Can this cockpit hold 

the vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

within this wooden O the very casques

that did affright the air at Agincourt?

O pardon, since a crooked figure may

attest in little place a million,

and let us, ciphers to this great account,

on your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts         

the perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.”

Henry V, Prologue 11–23

Our imaginations are perhaps our greatest assets, after all we call ourselves Homo sapiens, wise humans. We pride ourselves on our capacity for thought, on our ability to imagine possibilities for ourselves and our posterity. We need the unknown to give us hope that there will be something new to discover tomorrow, for even if that new thing is familiar to others, it will still invoke wonder in us. Hope is what the greatest human endeavors are built upon, the hope that even if a cause seems doomed in the short term that someday it will succeed.

I feel this sense of potential success is central to my nature. I grew up with this hopeful maxim from three sources, my Catholic faith in things inexplicable, my Irish heritage informed by the experiences of generations who hoped for home rule and justice under a colonial government, and more light-heartedly from my lifelong passion for the erstwhile lovable losers, the Chicago Cubs. Robert Emmet perhaps put it best in his speech from the dock that he knew someday his epitaph would be written, someday someone yet unknown to him in 1803 would be able to judge his efforts towards Irish independence. “Let my character and my motives repose in obscurity and peace, till other times and other men can do them justice. Then shall my character be vindicated; then may my epitaph be written.” 

We cannot truly know what our future will hold, though we can predict what variable futures might come to exist. I wonder if a young Walt Disney would have imagined the man he would become, and how his name would be known by what surely is a majority of humanity alive today, 123 years after his birth. All of that was unknown in his childhood, just as all the things that will happen tomorrow and every day after that are still to a certain degree unknown to us today. That might be the closest we come to touch the unknown, to recognize its ambiguous feel, yet while that fine cloth of silk might seem somewhat familiar in its unfamiliarity, we ought to always remember that it extends far enough from our view and beyond all our horizons into infinity. There is, and likely will always be, more unknowns than knowns in the Cosmos.

A historian restores things forgotten from the vast silk threads of the unknown and weaves those fibers back into the great tapestry of human knowledge. I just started reading a book yesterday which does this with the understanding that religion and science have always been at odds when it comes to the age of the Earth. Perhaps I will write about that book, Ivano Del Prete’s On the Edge of Eternity: The Antiquity of the Earth in Medieval & Early Modern Europe in this publication later this year. That, good people, remains well and truly among those strands of the great yet smooth silky unknown sea which lies behind us, beyond our vision as the Greeks understood the future to be. The future is perhaps more unknown to us than the past because we at least have means and methods to uncover the past we’ve long forgotten and left behind, whereas the future remains unwritten and daunting to behold.

Perhaps that is why I chose to become a historian, because I find a comfort in imagining and reading about the past that is absent when I imagine the future. There is some truth there that the future I behold is colored in the same hues as my present, which I know will not be realized as the future will certainly be its own creation, inspired by our current moment yet distinct from it all the same. The characters who grace this “kingdom for a stage” will have taken their last bow by the time many of these events I imagine in the future occur; and at the culmination of the future lies the greatest unknown of all, one about which we tell many stories and ascribe many tenants, all to humanize it and make it more familiar.Our memories keep past ideas, people, places, and things alive in our knowledge. I hope the people at Thank You Walt Disney are successful in restoring the McConahay Building which housed Disney’s Laugh-O-Gram Studio so that the memory of that time when so many creative minds, so many animators, lived in this city is preserved; so that Kansas Citians in the present and unknown future remember that art can be created here, and dreams first imagined here can grow into wonders for all humanity to behold.

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Copyright

Copyright – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a discussion of copyright expiration and what that means for this publication. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, a discussion of copyright expiration and what that means for this publication.

I’m a relatively cautious writer when it comes to many of my friends. The Wednesday Blog reflects this caution in its simplicity and dearth of music or asides. Since day 1, I’ve been concerned about avoiding copyright infringements that could sink this entire project. This fear may not be justified, as some of you my audience have told me, because of how small an audience I have; I could well get away with using audio clips from songs that are still copyrighted interspersed in my work so long as the owners of those clips don’t notice. I gape at this perspective with an astonishment that characterizes the litigious world in which we live today.

So, it was a delight to read several weeks ago that a great deal of music, film, and stories would be entering the public domain on New Year’s Day, just earlier this week. Films like Mickey Mouse’s first appearance in Steamboat Willie, characters like Peter Pan and Tigger, and the Marx Brothers musical Animal Crackers saw their copyright expire at the end of 2023 and start of 2024. What this means for me is complicated. I could use song recordings that were created before 1928 here in the Wednesday Blog, especially in episodes that deal with timely topics to those tunes, though so many of those older recordings have fared so poorly that I’ve chosen to avoid including them.

I did consider writing this week about Walt Disney’s influence on Kansas City––the place where he got his start, and his old Laugh-o-Gram Studio which is today being slowly renovated––and building that story around the audio track from Steamboat Willie, yet by my best understanding while the silent film itself is now in the public domain, the music and sound effects that go along with it were copyrighted by Disney in 1930 and remain so until that copyright expires in 2026. That’s a story for another day, then.

For at least two years now I’ve planned a story that would express my appreciation for the music of George Gershwin, the great American composer of a century ago whose work blended the classical orchestra with jazz in clever ways that created a certain American voice. Yet again, while many of Gershwin’s works are now in the public domain their recordings aren’t. A good solution to all of this would be for me to reach out to my musician friends and see if we can make new recordings of these public domain scores.

Copyright is a tricky issue for me. On the one hand, I want all of my work to remain my own. I’ve had moments in the past where others have taken credit for things I’ve done, and that really doesn’t feel good. Still, it makes things difficult for me in this instance of crafting a podcast each week because my best solution is to do everything myself, text and score, and record all of it by myself so that I own all of my own copyrights. This problem is less pronounced when it comes to the text of the Wednesday Blog itself. There I know exactly what to do, after all in my day job I spend a good deal of time citing sources and filling out footnotes in my historical research, something that I do actually enjoy in spite of how time-consuming it can be. Yet plagiarism is a different matter from violating someone’s copyright, and the two only overlap in that I know better than to try and use audio in the podcast without permission.

My friends are right when they say I’m a small enough fish that if I skirt along the hem of copyright law by using the odd audio-clip here or there it won’t be much of a problem. Yet I don’t want my work to remain that of a small fish in a big pond forever, I want what I write to make an impact on our world. As boastful as it may sound, I want to help, and this is the best way I know how. I want to help advise and inspire our world with the stories I tell whether through my non-fiction writing in this outlet or in my research, or through the occasional stories that I tell. To do this well, I need to cover all of my bases so that if I am fortunate enough to be in a position of impact, I won’t have any early-career problems that could harm my credibility.

I hope this new year 2024 brings a brighter future than the present we find ourselves in. For now, I’ll leave you with the Victor Mixed Chorus’s 1928 performance of “Auld Lang Syne” from their record Songs of Scotland. Happy New Year everyone!

Audio scanned by Internet Archive Python library 3.5.0, scanner George Blood, L.P.
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Doubt

Doubt – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

As we end 2023, I want to discuss doubt, one of the great drivers of my faith. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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As we end 2023, I want to discuss doubt, one of the great drivers of my faith.

One might say that doubt is the opposite of faith, the absence of faith in fact. I thought this in my teenage years and believed with an abandon that grew from both invention and tradition. I grew up with an expectation of faith, that my belief would always permeate my life and that there would always be wonders unseen which I could aspire to know through faith. In high school we were often told that our faith would diminish as adults and that our worldview would shift as we moved further away from the secure halls of our younger years where belief was fostered through frequent prayers and service.

For much of my adult life I’ve taken that warning as a challenge and maintained my belief just as I’ve maintained my optimism. The faith that I developed became thus far less performative and far more innate. It was a faith drawn to seeking the goodness in people and ideas more so than proclaiming my beliefs out loud for all to hear. In fact, I tend to view less serious if equally personal devotions as more worthy of public adulation, my passion for the Chicago Cubs being chief among these causes. While not hiding the light of my faith I have still let it retreat more into private spaces where it could continue to grow.

In the last decade I’ve also come to doubt a great many things. The commanding voice of faith which we hear in public, trumpeted as it often is from a position of great authority, often feels hollow to me. I hear the words spoken and think of the actions that same voice takes, and of the limits they place on our society to accept the goodness of all, and I am left feeling evermore jaded and unwilling to play along. I am certainly not the same person I was a decade ago, like all things I have changed with the passing of time. Both faith and doubt have their place in this decade, both gave me their shared wisdom to find my place in their midst, and I feel affirmed in my beliefs because of it.

I have long believed in my own ability to do anything I set my mind to; there’s a part of me deep down that still hasn’t quite given up on my childhood dream to pitch for the Cubs even though I’ve hardly ever shown any athletic talent whatsoever (except for one day in 6th Grade.) This part of me is what convinced me to pursue a left field idea of broadening the teaching section of my C.V., yet in that effort I found my limits to be resolute. I sit here now, at the end of 2023 looking back on that storm which overtook my life in August exhausted by my efforts and feeling drained of all the passion I poured into that project.

Do I now doubt my abilities to broaden my horizons? I’m not sure. I’ve wondered for many years now what people meant when they described how promising youths grew into adults stuck in a current of nostalgia incapable of achieving that promise which with maturity they ought to have grown into. I see what they meant now, it’s a pool like the ones in the Ozarks that I canoed past as a Boy Scout in the first decade of this century. I could well lean in and let that pool consume me, right now I’d rather rest than carry on, yet as always, I have far too much to look forward to in the coming year to give up now. I promised myself many years ago that I would not give up, that I would not let myself fail at making something of my life, and if anything, my doubt has made that resolve only strengthen and grow.

I don’t like to brag, it’s one of those central parts of my upbringing that I’ve hung onto all these years in spite of everything the world has thrown at me. Still, I have accomplished a good deal over these past three-plus decades. In my four high school years alone, the years when I discovered my writer’s voice, I wrote fourteen plays and even dabbled with choral and orchestral composition. In my adult years I’ve branched out and written constantly. Perhaps my greatest accomplishment to date is that I’ve learned to pace myself, to write bits at a time and trust that I will find the energy to finish what I’ve started, even if isn’t in the same day, week, month, or year. The sequel to my novel Erasmus Plumwood is one such project that I started in 2019 and still have tucked away in my computer’s files and in the back of my mind. I know how Plum in the Sun is going to go, and how it will end, I’ve just been waiting now for four years for the right mood to write the next chapter which is so joyous in its tone that it needs an exuberant mind filled with childlike joy to write it.

When I started writing the Wednesday Blog, I didn’t figure it’d run for very long. Either through embarrassment or frustration or boredom I figured it’d be something I write for a few months, maybe a year, and that would be that. I’ve been keeping a running tally of these posts in a document called “Wednesday Blog Full Text” since I started it, with the pre-podcast posts and each season of the podcast as an individual book within the whole collection. What you are reading, or listening to, now is Chapter 30 of Book 4. The greatest trial of endurance for the Wednesday Blog came in these last few months when I barely had the time to write it or record it amid a constant, pulsating, Shostakovichian work schedule. Like the 4th movement of that Russian composer’s 5th Symphony, I came to feel as though the life within my body was holding on rather than directing the machinery of my days. Seeing my place to exit that brief phase of my life, and finally creating the time to rest during this Christmas season is something I am more convinced is the right thing than most other things I’ve yet done.Do I still doubt that I’m making the right decision today? Absolutely, I embrace the ever present doubts of my mind, for they will right my path amid all the bucolic and proud visions which will come to pass. Yet at least for this moment, writing now at the end of December at the end of 2023 and at the beginning of this next year in my life, I know I made a choice that was right for me.

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The author sitting in a railway station in Belgium looking tired after a transatlantic flight.

Milestones

Milestones – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Today it's my birthday. So, some words about milestones. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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Today it’s my birthday. So, some words about milestones.

It’s not often that my birthday lines up with a Wednesday, in fact except for this one circumstance the occurrence of my birthday on a Wednesday would hold no significance, unless I happened to find myself in a Wednesday afternoon camel ride to mark midweek. Yet baring a visit to the Sahara in one of those often photographed camel rides, or better yet a visit from the rare descendant of Hadji Ali’s camels in the Arizona desert, a Wednesday birthday has no significance to me.

In most years, I can expect what will occur in the coming year, where I’ll go, who I’ll see, what I’ll do, and where I’ll work in the coming year. This year now ending was in one part predictable and in another surprising. I returned to Kansas City expecting to speak at conferences in Puerto Rico, Europe, and across the United States during the first year of my thirties. Yet I didn’t expect to work at the Kauffman Center, let alone that I’d possibly find myself teaching middle school history and geography full time. This year now ending held a great many surprises for me, which I embraced as unexpected turns in the road.

This birthday is also significant in that it coincides with my last day in that middle school position. Today marks the end of the first semester, or the second quarter as we’re officially calling it. I have many mixed emotions about my decision to leave this role, there are parts of teaching these classes that I loved, and the people are charming. Still, my 31st birthday feels like one that will come and go without much fanfare. Perhaps I’ll take some quiet time to myself in between leaving my desk at midday and the usual birthday festivities in the evening and relax, something I haven’t done much of lately.

The thing I’ve learned most over this past year is that I’m more resilient than I’ve traditionally given myself credit for. In spite of the trials that I’ve put myself through each year I find a way to rebound and redouble my efforts and to rise above the trouble I’ve put myself in. This year is the perfect example of this; while I didn’t accomplish all I hoped to do as a thirty year old, I still achieved a great deal. Working in two intensely public roles has brought my gregarious side out far more than before. In past years I could be outgoing and even bubbly from time to time, yet often my doubts and fears kept me quiet as a church mouse in public, preferring my own counsel over others, and stumbling over my words trying to impress the people around me.

I realized in high school that a great tool I could use to get my point across was humor. If my audience would laugh with me then they would be able to connect with me directly. The first problem to solve in public speaking is figuring out how to speak to your public, how to get your message across. I’ve continued to use humor to do this, to varying effect. Yet relying on one technique without exploring more options can fashion a tool into a crutch and prove limiting.

As much as I enjoy making jokes, and love getting laughs, I’ve grown as a professional and found that my work is beginning to speak for itself without the need to frame it in jokes and gags. I may find life to be humorous in our human complexity and folly, yet this doesn’t feel like the day to praise our innate charm. There will certainly be another.

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A Sunrise

A Sunrise – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, a reflection on the rising Sun. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week on the Wednesday Blog, a reflection on the rising Sun.

Last Friday as I drove south to reach my classroom in the morning I was awed by the pink and yellow rays of the rising Sun that appeared in the east. It seemed to echo some sort of hope of things to come. These last months have felt as though I’ve been caught up in a storm both unfamiliar and of my own shaping, and it has left much of my life from my part time work to even this Wednesday Blog to be written at the eleventh hour each week. Unable to set foot on solid ground over these months, I’ve prioritized staying upright in my life while putting my best efforts into my work. Still, even that hasn’t seemed to be enough to balance everything.

I am more used to the pattern of having several part-time jobs which fit together however imperfectly, so the introduction of a full-time position on top of everything else sank all those other things that I previously worked on to the detriment of all. There were weeks when I even ignored my own needs as my new duties required every shred of focus, every aspiration of my emotions. This has left me exhausted of many of the things which kept me going and I feel hollowed out by the harsh tides of the world.

This sunrise then spoke to me of hope. It was a sunrise that only the long nights of winter could forebode, a bright eastern glow whose radiance was more pronounced because it followed a long, dark night. I gazed up at it when I could on my drive south and thought of all that had transpired, and all the possible futures that these next months and years might hold. I know, of course, that the Sun appears to rise as our planet continues in its revolutionary course, the Earth spinning on its axis with each passing day so that this sunrise has surely been seen by many before and will indeed return again to grace our mornings. Yet amid all that the sciences can tell my emotions speak louder in my interpretation of its very natural phenomena.

There have been many sunrises in my life that have moved me, after all I’m traditionally far more a night owl than an early bird, so until recently I rarely saw the sunrise. In my childhood my bedroom looked out to the west and each evening was warmed in the glow of the setting sun. With all our popular fears and worries about endings today, they are far louder than any wonderings about new beginnings, it seems that we as a civilization looks to the setting more than the rising Sun. We see our future as a fading echo of distant glories, our lives existing in the ruined monuments of earlier generations. Our stories are populated with more Ozymandiases and fewer Abrahams and Jacobs in spite of the newness of so much of our built world here in the Americas and the other old settler colonies.

I think our transition from the early decades of this new century into the first of the middle decades has a great deal to do with all of this. The generations now being born will surely see the last century as something in the past existing behind a veil just remote enough to not be touched. When I show pictures from my travels of old monuments today my audience and I are both struck that often they were infants or even yet to be born in that same moment. The first decades of this century are to them what the 1970s and 1980s are to me; and as we continue our inevitable march forward in time we will move ever further away from those years and generations in which our world here in the United States, and especially here in the Great Plains and West, was still young. It seems to me that we have a great deal to learn of change; that we will always need a reminder that the passage of time is something to be admired as much as it is feared. The oldest people I knew as a child would now be reaching their centenary if they were still alive, and surely someday I too will be in that moment where the power of my life fades as my time recedes from life and into memory.

The rising Sun speaks to me then of both hope and the truth that after many sunrises there will be one which will be seen in a moment when my world and all who I know are gone. There will be a sunrise after my time, yet in the meantime I hope I can make all the days that follow the sunrises of my life fruitful. With that light there are a great many things I can see, a great many marvels to behold; for all of us are individual marvels in all our complexity, our wants, our passions, and our fears. As long as I am able, I yearn to experience those marvels like that pink and yellow sunrise from a few days ago and live to the fullest of my ability.

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St. Nicholas

St. Nicholas – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, some words about St. Nick. — Click Here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week on the Wednesday Blog, some words about St. Nick.

We find ourselves again in the last month of the year, at a holiday that I wasn’t aware of until elementary school. According to tradition, on the night leading up to the 6th of December, St. Nicholas will come around to everyone’s houses and leave presents in our shoes. I remember thinking that was an exciting idea at first but today I wonder about the sanitation of that, let alone the sanity of it as well. Then again, to quote the late, great Chico Marx “there ain’t no such thing as a sanity clause!” I always imagined St. Nicholas as a winter saint, in line with the old Green Man figure of folklore. So, for me this feast day is more about the beginning of Advent, of December, and of the Holiday Season than it is about the sainted fellow himself.

There are many elements which go into this season that conflate the ancient, medieval, & modern, the sacred & secular, the busy & serene. I feel as though my life has been caught in a whirling storm, a tempest raised by some staffed soul seeking to prove a point about the possible and limits of my own ability. I can now sit at peace with my own limitations and know that in spite of what might be seen as a failure is its own kind of success, a fulfilled experience across eighteen weeks that proved to me where my own road leads.

This Christmas, I find myself thinking as well about the remarkable Christmases past. Christmas 2012 stands out to me now. That year, I had my one and only experience sitting beside my grandfather Kane at the table as one of the adults. He told me stories about his own childhood and twenties that I hadn’t heard before. It’s been ten years now since he made the voyage to the great Christmas dinner in the sky, where I hope we’ll sit beside each other again someday. That promise of a future may well be the chief reason why I believe at all, for belief on its own is hard to justify. I look at the charming, gregarious, and quite vocal people I’ve spent my days with now for the last few months and think about all the Christmases to come they will know. Even as our roads come to their divergence, I smile thinking about them and all they will become.

These long December nights are a time when the ancient returns to life again in my imagination; when the dancing dreams of an idealized past reignites itself with the flames that inspired our modern electric lights which keep us comfortable amid the darkness. The early mornings still feel alien, and they are something I will not miss from this time now ending, yet the fact I could make that time my own is something I’m quite proud of.

All of this is to say that I have chosen to leave the school I am currently teaching at as of the end of this semester on Wednesday, 20 December. If you couldn’t tell, I don’t often know what the conclusion of these Wednesday Blog posts will be when I start writing them. St. Nicholas may be in my mind, yet life continues to catch my attention. I set out in July to see if I could teach middle school children, ages 11 to 14, and I’ve found the difficulties outweigh the tremendous successes. I’ve learned where my abilities lie and where I have room to grow. So, I now prepare to leave as I see the wind change on the eastern horizon. Like the staff-bearer, this role “I here abjure,” and leave it happy at the fortune of having held it if only for a while so best to speak the truth as I know it. This moment will one day be another person’s ancient history even as I now see the present moment; and when it is their history, I hope they will see all the interwoven vines and threads which connect this moment with its own historic foundations and see all the things that from it are yet to come.

Like St. Nicholas’s Day, these months serving as a teacher have touched on a great many historic rhymes, and I hope moments of it will live on as another one of my own Christmas memories.

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