Tag Archives: Reading

A view from behind a church on the Greek island of Santorini.

On Simplicity

On Simplicity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:Photo by Elizabeth Duke.[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.
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This week, how the greatest wisdom is simple in nature.

Over the last several weeks I’ve written about forms of knowledge and knowledge collecting. Knowledge is easier to identify, as it is empirical in its core. Yet on a scale even beyond knowledge lies wisdom, the cumulative sum of humanity’s understanding of the underlying character of human nature. It’s very easy for me to get bogged down in words, words, words and tie myself in knots which I find nigh unbreakable and even more undecipherable. Yet amid all those layers of paint there are often gems which merely need good editing to illuminate. This is what fills my days today, a big edit which I hope will signal the beginning of the end of my years of doctoral study.

In these years, while I’ve devoted my days to reading histories of the Renaissance intersections between the Americas and France, I’ve made a point of reading for fun all the same. I need to read things not related to my research for the escape they provide. At times these fun readings have been more thoroughly connected to my research, as in my recent choice of Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing, yet in Binghamton I spent many happy evening hours reading Star Trek anthologies and novels while returning to my vocation each day. Of the stories that I’m drawn to, I enjoy reading books and watching films with characters that embody a certain lived experience that begats wisdom. Recently, this desire for such a character led me to read Peter Bien’s new translation of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba. This is phronesis. Zorba’s wisdom is one that’s been gathered over the sixty years of his life and funneled toward living a good life as he sees fit. His is a simple wisdom which recognizes the physical limitations of the body in opposition to the limitless potential of the soul. I loved the first dance scene in Zorba the Greek in which the old miner erupted upward from his dinner and began to leap about. Kazantzakis describes it as though his soul could not be contained by his body and that it was that spiritual essence which spoke so fervently and wordlessly of its own joy. Kazantzakis can make even the simplest of scenes appear elegant and luminous. His description of the passage of time on the Mediterranean reaching up from Africa to the southern shore of Crete is one of my favorites. Here, I quote from Bien’s translation with the affection that beautiful prose deserves:

“The immense sea reached African shores. Every so often a warm southwest wind blew from distant red-hot deserts. In the morning the sea smelled like watermelons; at midday it vented haze, surged upward discharging miniature unripe breasts; in the evening, rose pink, wine red, eggplant mauve, dark blue, it kept continuously sighing.”[1]

The wisdom inherent in Kazantzakis’s prose lies in his ability to evoke the variable texture of nature, the changing face of it with the passage of the day. I remember once in Binghamton I have the idea to take a selfie once an hour throughout the day to see how my face, hair, stubble, and what not changed as the hours passed. I know for instance that if I want to have a lower register in my recordings of this Wednesday Blog that I need to record first thing in the morning when my tenor is closer to a baritone. This week, owing to a general sense of exhaustion, I haven’t gotten around to writing this essay until nearly 90 minutes before when the podcast normally publishes. Rather than force myself to write something earlier in the day I waited and gave myself the time to think of something good.

Wisdom is knowing that worrying won’t get you anywhere; it lies in the peace of mind and heart that keeps us happy and healthy. This evening, while I was having dinner with one of my best friends and his wife and young son, I brought up my particular conundrum of the day. Jokingly, the suggestion that I write about simplicity was made. I shrugged, thinking of William of Ockham, one of Bill Nye’s favorite history of science examples to use, and decided to run with it. After all, often the wisest people that I’ve met are the ones who embrace the simplicity of living a life embracing their own nature. The wise know that they are going to grow old and die and don’t worry about it. I find myself thinking of this as I watch without much resource as my hair recedes. I’ve joked that my particularly follicly impaired genes may require an eventual investment in a variety of hairpieces for different degrees of formality. I’ve grown in my own comfort with taking care of myself, applying sunscreen before going out on walks around the neighborhood now to mitigate the inevitable that comes from having largely Irish genes and living in the far sunnier Midwestern climate than my ancestors’ rain soaked home soil in Mayo. In his Saint’s Life, Alexis Zorba often doesn’t worry about these things and expresses frustration and even anger when the narrator, his boss, frets about the things he cannot control. I’m better at this than I have been, which is reassuring in some ways of looking at things, yet I still have room to grow.

Wisdom is trusting the people around you to do what they feel is best. If the simplest solution is often the best, then why aim to make things overly complex? Complexity requires forethought, or sometimes is the result of a lack of forethought. Last summer I delighted in writing several essays for the Wednesday Blog attempting to adapt chaos theory to explain human behavior.[2] We need both complexity and simplicity to understand ourselves and the world in which we live. Think about it: we cannot narrow things down to binary options. More often, the binary is one of a series of binaries which together form a logical thought or series. I marvel at the fact that computers most fundamentally work in the binary language of 1s and 0s, and that in this manner language and thought are boiled down to so rudimentary an interpretation. It’s for this reason that while I’m concerned by the rise and development of artificial intelligence and its misuse, I feel a sense of assurance that it is still limited by its basic functions and limited by the abilities of its artifice.[3] The human brain is a wonderous and ever complicated organ which evolved to fulfill its own very particular needs. On the simplest level the brain thinks, it sends directions to the rest of the body to keep the body operating. In a theological framework, I’ve argued that the brain may be the seat of the soul, the consciousness that is at the core of our thought. My earliest memory that I’ve written about here was the first time I recognized that particular voice of my own consciousness, which occurred sometime when I was 3 years old.[4]

Wisdom is intangible, it’s something that you have to learn to recognize. This is perhaps the most complex tenant that represents something simple. In order to truly become wise, one must understand that wisdom isn’t something you can buy off the shelf or write your way into. For all the words which Zorba’s boss writes, allowing them to consume him, he remains feeling unfulfilled in life. It’s why the narrator of the novel struck out from his books and sought to live among ordinary people, buying a stake in a lignite mine on the southern shore of Crete. On his way there in the Piraeus he met Zorba, the man who within a few pages became his foreman and the one who’d realize his idea of finding wisdom in the living world. The simplest explanations are often best. Zorba lives to enjoy the life he has, and when things go wrong––as they often do––he finds something to build upon and start over again.

A couple of months from now I’m going to be contributing my own experiences to a tacit knowledge panel at the History of Science Society’s conference in New Orleans about how I’ve been able to maintain a full research load and writing all year round with hardly any funding at all. I recognize that the circumstances of these past few years have been marked by my own poor decisions and mistakes that I’ve made along the way. Yet in spite of those, and bad luck in many respects, I’ve been able to continue with my work and to produce historical studies that are beginning to make a decent contribution to the history of science in the Renaissance and specifically to the history of animals in that same period. I’m looking forward to that panel, and to the two papers I’m presenting during the same weekend. Maybe, like Zorba, when things feel like they are about to go well I’ll feel the need to rise to my feet and leap into the air as though my soul were attempting to escape from my body. Simply put, for all the trouble that life has brought, joy is overpowering when pure.

[1] Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek: The Saint’s Life of Alexis Zorba, trans. Peter Bien, (Simon and Schuster, 1946, 2014), 81.

[2] “Elephant Tails,” Wednesday Blog 5.24.

[3] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

[4] “On Political Violence,” Wednesday Blog 5.17.

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The author pulling a face at the camera.

On Writing

On Writing – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about the art, and the craft, of writing.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Links in this episode:Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer, “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power,” The New York Times Magazine, (11 July 2025).John McWhorter, “It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’,” The New York Times, (10 July 2025).Bishop Mark J. Seitz, D.D., “The Living Vein of Compassion’: Immigration & the Catholic Church at this moment,” Commonweal Magazine, (June 2025), 26–32.“On Technology,” The Wednesday Blog 5.2.“Artificial Intelligence,” The Wednesday Blog 4.1.
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This week, some words about the art, and the craft, of writing.

In the last week I’ve been hard at work on what I hope is the last great effort toward completing my dissertation and earning my doctorate. Yet unlike so much of that work which currently stands at 102,803 words across 295 U.S. Letter sized pages inclusive of footnotes, front matter, and the rolling credits of my bibliography I am now sat at my desk day in and day out not writing but reading intently and thoroughly books that I’ve read before yet now find the need for a refresher on their arguments as they pertain to the subject of my dissertation: that André Thevet’s use of the French word sauvage, which can be translated into English as either savage or wild, is characteristic of the manner in which the French understood Brazil as the site of its first American colony and the Americas overall within the broader context of French conceptions of civility in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. I know, it’s a long sentence. Those of you listening may want to rewind a few seconds to hear that again. Those of you reading can do what my eyes do so often, darting back and forth between lines.

As I’ve undertaken this last great measure, I’ve dedicated myself almost entirely to completing it, clearing my calendar as much as I see reasonable to finish this job and move on with my life to what I am sure will be better days ahead. Still, I remain committed to exercising, usually 5 km walks around the neighborhood for an hour each morning, and the occasional break for my mind to think about the things I’ve read while I distract myself with something else. That distraction has truly been found on YouTube since I started high school and had a laptop of my own. This week, I was planning on writing a blog post which compared the way that my generation embraced the innovation of school-issued laptops in the classroom and the way that starting next month schools and universities across this country will be introducing artificial intelligence tools to classrooms. I see the benefits, and I see tremendous risks as well, yet I will save that for a lofty second half of this particular essay.

I’ve fairly well trained the YouTube algorithm to show me the sorts of videos that I tend to enjoy most. Opening it now I see a segment from this past weekend’s broadcast of CBS Sunday Morning, several tracks from classical music albums, a clip from the Marx Brothers’ film A Night at the Opera, the source of my favorite Halloween joke, and a variety of comic videos from Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend to old Whose Line is it Anyway clips. Further down are the documentary videos I enjoy from history, language, urbanist, and transportation YouTubers. Yet in the last week or so I’ve been seeing more short videos of a minute or less with clips from Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln. I loved this film when I saw it that Thanksgiving at my local cinema. As longtime readers of the Wednesday Blog know, I like to call Mr. Lincoln my patron saint within the American civic religion. As a young boy in Illinois in the ‘90s, he was the hero from our state who saved the Union and led the fight to abolish slavery during the Civil War 130 years before. Now, 30 years later and 160 years out from that most horrific of American wars I decided to watch that film again for the first time in a decade. In fact, I’m writing this just after watching it so some of the inspiration from Mr. Lincoln’s lofty words performed by the great Daniel Day-Lewis might rub off on my writing just enough to make something inspirational this week before I return in the morning to my historiography reading.

Mr. Lincoln knew what every writer has ever known, that putting words to paper preserves them for longer than uttering even the longest string of syllables can last. What I mean to say is they’ll remember what you had to say longer if you write it down. He knew for a fact that the oft quoted and oft mocked maxim that the pen is mightier than the sword is the truth. After all, a sword can take a life, as so many have done down our history and into our deepest past to the proverbial Cain, yet pens give life to ideas that outlive any flesh and bone. I believe writing is the greatest human invention because it is the key to immortality. Through our writing generations from now people will seek to learn more about us in our moment in the long human story. I admit a certain boldness in my thinking about this, after all I’ve seen how the readership and listener numbers for the Wednesday Blog ebb and flow, and I know full well that there’s a good chance no one in the week I publish this will read it. Yet I hold out hope that someday there’ll be some graduate student looking for something to build a career on who might just stumble across my name in a seminar on a sunny afternoon and think “that sounds curious,” only to then find some old book of my essays called The Wednesday Blog and then that student will be reading these words. 

I write because I want to be heard, yet I’ve lived long enough to know that it takes time for people to be willing to listen, that’s fair. I’ve got a growing stack of newspaper articles of the affairs of our time growing while my attention is drawn solely to my dissertation. I want, for instance, to read the work of New York Times reporters Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer in a lengthy and thorough piece on how Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu “prolonged the War in Gaza to stay in power” which was published last Friday.[1] I also want to read John McWhorter’s latest opinion column “It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’”; I’m always curious to read about suggestions in the realm of language.[2] Likewise there are sure to be fascinating and thoughtful arguments in the June 2025 issue of Commonweal Magazine, like the article titled “’The Living Vein of Compassion’: Immigration & the Catholic Church at this moment” by Bishop Mark Seitz, DD of the Diocese of El Paso.[3] I’m always curious to read what others are writing because often I’ll get ideas from what I read. There was a good while there at the start of this year when I was combing through the pages of Commonweal looking for short takes and articles which I could respond to with my own expertise here in the Wednesday Blog. By writing we build a conversation that spans geography and time alike. That’s the whole purpose of historiography, it’s more than just a literature review, though that’s often how I describe what I’m doing now to family and friends outside of my profession who may not be familiar with the word historiography or staireagrafaíocht as it is in Irish. 

Historiography is writing about the history that’s already been written. It’s a required core introductory class for every graduate history program that I’m familiar with, I took that class four times between my undergraduate senior seminar (the Great Historians), our introductory Master’s seminar at UMKC (How to History I), and twice at Binghamton in courses titled Historiography and On History. The former at Binghamton was essentially the same as UMKC’s How to History I while the latter was taught by my first doctoral advisor and friend Dr. Richard Mackenney. He challenged us to read the older histories going back to Herodotus and consider what historians in the Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Nineteenth Century had to say about our profession. Looking at it now, the final paper I wrote for On History was titled “Perspectives from Spain and Italy on the Discovery of the New World, 1492–1550.” I barely remember writing it because it was penned in March and April 2020 as our world collapsed under the awesome weight of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Looking through it, I see how the early stages of the pandemic limited what I could access for source material. For instance, rather than rely on an interlibrary loan copy of an English translation, perhaps even a more recent edition, of Edmundo O’Gorman’s The Invention of America, I instead was left working with the Spanish original that had been digitized at some point in the last couple decades. Likewise, I relied on books I had on hand in my Binghamton apartment, notably the three volumes of Fernand Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, in this case in their 1984 English translations. I wrote this paper and then forgot about it amid all the other things that were on my mind that Spring, only to now read it again. So, yes, I can say to the scared and lonely 27 year old who wrote this five years ago that someone did eventually read it after all.

What’s most delightful about reading this paper again is I’m reminded of when I first came across several names of fellow historians who I now know through professional conferences and have confided in for advice on my own career. The ideas first written in the isolation of lockdown have begun to bear fruit in the renewed interactions of my professional life half a decade later. What more will come of those same vines planted in solitude as this decade continues into its second half? Stretching that question further back in my life, I can marvel at the friendships I’ve cultivated with people I met in my first year of high school, now 18 years ago. That year, 2007, we began our education at St. James Academy where many of us were drawn to the promise of each student getting their own MacBook to work on. I wrote here in March 2024 about how having access to that technology changed my life forever.[4] So, in the last week when I read in one of my morning email newsletters from the papers about the soon-to-be introduction of artificial intelligence to classrooms across this country in much the same way that laptops in classrooms were heralded as the new great innovation in my youth I paused for a few moments longer before turning to my daily labor.

I remain committed to the belief that having access to a laptop was a benefit to my education; in many ways it played a significant role in shaping me into the person I am today. I wrote 14 plays on that laptop in my 4 years in high school, and many of my early essays to boot. I learned how to edit videos and audio and still use Apple products today because I was introduced to them at that early age. It helps that the Apple keyboard comes with easy ways to type accented characters like the fada in my name, Seán. Still, on a laptop I was able to write much the same that I had throughout my life to that point. I began learning to type when I was 3 years old and mastered the art in my middle school computer class. When I graduated onto my undergraduate studies though I found I could take notes far better that I could remember by hand than if I typed them. This is crucial to my story: the notes that I took in my Renaissance seminar at UMKC in Fall 2017 were written by hand, in French no less, and so when I was searching for a dissertation topic involving Renaissance natural history in August 2019, I remembered writing something about animals in that black notebook. Would I have remembered it so readily had I typed those notes out? After all, I couldn’t remember the title of that term paper I wrote for On History in April 2020 until I reopened the file just now.

Artificial intelligence is different than giving students access to laptops because unlike our MacBooks in 2007, A.I. can type for the student, not only through dictation but it can suggest a topic, a thesis, a structure, and supporting evidence all in one go. Such a mechanical suggestion is not inherently a suggestion of quality however, and here lies the problem. I’ve read a lot of student essays in the years I’ve been teaching, some good, some bad. Yet almost all of them were written in that student’s own voice. After a while the author’s voice becomes clear; with my current round of historiography reading, I’m delighting in finding that some of these historians who I know write in the same manner that they speak without different registers between the different formats. That authorial voice is more important than the thesis because it at least shows curiosity and the individual personality of the author can shine through the typeface’s uniformity. Artificial intelligence removes the sapiens from we Homo sapiens and leaves our pride in merely being the last survivor of our genus rather than being the ones who were thinkers who sought wisdom. Can an artificial intelligence develop wisdom? Certainly, it can read works of philosophy both illustrious and indescribably dull yet how well can it differentiate between those twin categories to give a fair and reasoned assessment of questions of wisdom?These are some of my concerns with artificial intelligence as it exists today in July 2025. I have equally pressing concerns that we’ve developed this wonderous new tool before addressing how it will impact our lived organic world through its environmental impact. With both of these concerns in mind I’ve chosen to refrain from using A.I. for the foreseeable future, a slight change in tone from the last time I wrote about it in theWednesday Blog on 7 June 2023.[5] I’m a historian first and foremost, yet I suspect based on the results when you search my name on Google or any other search engine that I am better known to the computer as a writer, and in that capacity I don’t want to see my voice as soft as it already is quieted further by the growing cacophony of computer-generated ideas that would make Aristophanes’ chorus of frogs croak. Today, that’s what I have to say.

[1] Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer, “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power,” The New York Times Magazine, (11 July 2025).

[2] John McWhorter, “It’s Time to Let Go of ‘African American’,” The New York Times, (10 July 2025).

[3] Bishop Mark J. Seitz, D.D., “The Living Vein of Compassion’: Immigration & the Catholic Church at this moment,” Commonweal Magazine, (June 2025), 26–32.

[4] “On Technology,” The Wednesday Blog 5.2.

[5] “Artificial Intelligence,” The Wednesday Blog 4.1.

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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. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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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 150th 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 6th 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.

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On Technology

On Technology – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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Last week, I returned to Chicago, this time on a business trip to attend a conference, and on the way took time to slow things down and enjoy the lived experience.

On Wednesday last week I boarded Amtrak’s Southwest Chief at Kansas City Union Station bound for Chicago. This visit to the metropolis of my birth was less for family affairs and instead for business. I spoke on Friday at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference at the Palmer House Hotel about how toucans were seen by sixteenth-century French merchants as economic commodities first and foremost. It was an unusual topic, but one that fluttered enough feathers in the organizers to earn me a travel grant from the RSA and a matching grant from my own History Department back in Binghamton to cover about half of my overall expenses for the trip.

In recent months, as I’ve had this trip and all the other ones planned in 2024 in mind, I’ve found myself growing evermore tired of being in constant contact with people near and far. Our technology allows us to make wonders, and to inspire ourselves to newer and greater heights with those wonders, yet I’ve found myself asking more lately how much we really ought to rely entirely on our technology? Every so often throughout the year I will find myself with a physical book, whether a paperback or a hardcover, that seems appealing, and I’ll stop and read. I used to read constantly. 

When I was in elementary school my grandparents gave me their 1979 World Book Encyclopedia set that had gone through several moves with them over the years. That year, feeling the effects of insomnia for the first time that I can remember in my life, I often stayed up late in my room reading these encyclopedia volumes. My parents eventually gave that set away, admittedly now the knowledge contained in them is 45 years out of date, it still showed Jimmy Carter as the sitting President, yet I remain forever grateful for that gift in all its thousands of pages. I can still remember the smell of those books in particular, and the charming and sometimes funny black-and-white pictures they contained.

Later, when I was in middle school I read several large and complex books in a row, including Thomas Kinsella’s translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge, an Irish epic set 2,000 years ago, and Frank Delaney’s book Ireland: A Novel, which my Dad bought for me at a Hudson’s in O’Hare on the way back from another trip up to Chicago to see family during my eighth grade year. Perhaps the last of these memories of endless hours reading for fun was in preparation for the release of the last Harry Potter book, the Deathly Hallows, when I read the other 6 books in 3 days.

All of this changed when I started high school. I chose St. James Academy for two main reasons: they offered Latin as a foreign language, and they offered MacBooks for all of their students. With easier internet access than ever before and the creation of YouTube around that time, I found myself hooked reading more things online and watching videos. Today, I’m often more likely to open YouTube on my computer during some downtime than I am to pull up a book on my phone. I’ve gone through waves of enjoying reading books on my phone here and there, yet these are again just waves.

I spoke to my friend, Carmelita Bahamonde, who I’ve known now for over a decade since we met as undergraduates at Rockhurst University. She gives up her social media accounts every year for Lent, and now during Holy Week is nearing the end of that technological fast for its 2024 occurrence. 

Seán: “I worry that because it’s how I connect with so many people professionally, and cousins in Europe and across the United States, that it’ll minimize how much I’m in touch with them.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, I do, and I do take time off during Lent, yet I take it further, so the longest I’ve gone was to the end of June and start of July. It’s hard to keep that up.”

Seán: “June or July! That’s a long time to keep that up.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, the first time I did it I think I made it through May, and I came back for my Masters, and I decided this was something to come back for.”

So, when I saw that I could afford to purchase roundtrip sleeper tickets on the Southwest Chief for this trip, I jumped at the opportunity to not only enjoy the best that Amtrak’s western services have to offer, but to also enjoy 7 hours of disconnection from my technology. I spent those 7 hours reading Megan Kate Nelson’s book Saving Yellowstone about the first federal expeditions to the Yellowstone Basin, the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the decline of the Lakota’s autonomy, and the foundation of Yellowstone National Park. I brought two other books, three magazines, and all the books downloaded on my phone with me on this trip, figuring I’d have a fair bit of time to read. (On the return trip, rather than reading the materials I brought with me I ended up reading a book I bought in Chicago at the Field Museum’s bookstore by Jay Kirk called Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animalsabout Carl Akelely, the first Taxidermist-in-Chief at the Field Museum. I’m going off script here to say how wonderful it is.)

Seán: “And, I know people who have very full and happy and lovely lives and they’re not on social media, so it’s not necessary to be on it. Yet, it seems that’s how people connect nowadays, right?”

Carmelita: “Yeah, though I only post happy, lovely things, even when I’m at my lowest. So, I always see that so and so is travelling, and man I’m falling behind this year. Yet I wonder how much over time they’ve been doing this year that they can do that?”

Beyond even disconnecting to read, I feel a pull towards stepping back a bit from my complete adoption of all of this technology. I see myself looking more at the screens before me than at the world around me. A friend recently pointed me toward a book which considers that the decline in recreational bowling leagues in this country can be tied to an overall decline in a communal spirit and a deconstruction of our bonds of trust, which have contributed to the current sense of mass isolation, fear, and mistrust which have contributed in turn toward our present political paradigm. I haven’t read this book yet, to be clear, yet I see how the premise works. I love coming to conferences like the RSA to experience the community that these events foster. There are people here who I met last Fall at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in Baltimore or last March at the 2023 RSA in Puerto Rico. I’ve had the opportunity to tell people here how much I appreciate their work, and to talk a bit about my own, to hear the affirmations that I so often miss in my daily life about the actual research I do.

Carmelita: “Yeah, you have both positives and negatives, you get to connect with family and peers who are far away, yet you also can lose yourself in our technology.”

We could certainly meet remotely using our technology to foster connections, yet those bonds would be far less strong than they are now that we’ve met and know some more about each other. Our technology allows us to instantaneously talk with people whole continents and oceans away, even to the astronauts orbiting our planet on the International Space Station. It has allowed us to even communicate with our furthest satellites that have reached far beyond where any human has gone before. Yet those connections are proxies for the real, physical connections we inherently desire by our basic evolutionary biology. I have trouble sometimes overcoming my own shyness in public settings, I certainly felt that at certain points on this trip, at times I’ve found conferences unbearable because I don’t feel up to talking to people I don’t already know, even when I’ve read and enjoyed their work. I do feel I would be more comfortable in these situations if I were less technologically connected and more connected to the human.

Seán: “What are some alternatives to social media that you’ve found useful?”

Carmelita: “I still have [Facebook] Messenger on my phone, so I use that to stay in touch with people. I sent a message this year to my friend in the Netherlands to say ‘Hey, just to let you know I’m taking my yearly break from social media,’ and she said ‘hey, no problem,’ and she’ll continuously text me and send me things, and my parents will show me things on social media if they’re really necessary. The people who, like you, really want to stay in touch will do so, and I really appreciate that.”

Seán: “It speaks to Robin Dunbar, who’s a primatologist and sociologist, who wrote about this idea called Dunbar’s number where there’s this maximum number that a human can have in their social circles, and I think it really speaks to that culling of that number. I’ve probably got 1700 friends on Facebook, and excluding family which is 30-40 people, there might be 10 people who I stay in touch with, and you’re one of them.”

Carmelita: “Yeah, and you are too. And I’ve actually had people reach out to me in the past and say ‘Hey, I haven’t seen anything from you, are you actually alive?’ and I’ll reply, ‘Hey, yeah I’m actually kind of better!'” (laughs)

My roomette on the Southwest Chief on the way up to Chicago.

I admire my friends and family who can give up some of this technology for extended periods of time. There are things to appreciate about the connectedness our technology provides to be sure, I appreciate seeing the social media posts of those who I care most deeply about, yet within that outer circle there are the few who I see on a daily basis, and I wonder how much I really pay attention to them, or them to me, with these screens in front of us all the time?

It strikes me that more often than not, when I’m mindlessly scrolling through YouTube on a given evening at home, I’m often finding the same music as I had the evening before, listening to the same songs or variations of those songs over and over again. Those songs evoke certain emotions for me, emotions tied to dreams and memories both. Yet I ought to really be focused on the people around me, for as much as our creations may have achieved a sense of immortality with their technological life spans far outpacing our own, those whom I love will only be with me for so long.

Carmelita: “It feels like if you didn’t post it, it didn’t happen; and so last year I went on a family trip, and at the end of the year I didn’t have any pictures and it feels like it didn’t happen, so that’s why I appreciate my social media. Yet like you said earlier today, you don’t have to post everything.”

There ought to be a balance between connection and relief, between all our noise and the silence, which is an acquired taste to be sure, yet is beautiful in its own way. I appreciate the assistance that my technology can provide in my work; it is far easier to do my research using PDF copies of these sixteenth-century books than having to rely on quickly written notes made during a rare research trip to a distant library. When I did my first research trip as an undergrad in 2013 to the Library of Congress, I actually took handwritten notes of the books I read. I quickly realized it was far more efficient to take notes by computer, to type things out at 70 words per minute than to write them by hand in my elegant if at times slow cursive script. This has meant that in the 11 years since I’ve found myself writing by hand less and less, even perhaps risking the loss of the art of penmanship, and calligraphy (if I may be bold to call it that).

Seán: “What’s the underlying purpose of posting? Is it self-gratification, is it to say ‘look what I did!’ is it say ‘look at how cool I am,’ or something like that? I always try to think of the underlying reasons for what I do.”

Carmelita: “I once had a friend who asked me why I post everything, and I said ‘well, I wanted to post pictures of this trip,’ and I think it’s a good way to show what I’m doing to more distant family who I haven’t seen in twenty years. I do sometimes wonder, ‘is this for showing off?’ I don’t like to post things that are show-offy. Several years ago, I got a promotion at work and I wanted to post about it but I sat on it for a while and ended up deleting it because I can’t brag, and so it is a double-edged sword, because you don’t want to brag but you should at the same time. It comes down to perspective: who do you want to know about your successes? Graduating from my Masters, I wanted everyone to know, ‘hey, look I worked my butt off!’ but a trip to Disney isn’t something for everyone to see.”

Let me close with this: I could have all the efficiency in the world with my computer and smart watch and smart phone and voice-activation software in my car and my headphones that connect wirelessly to my other devices so I can talk and take notes on my phone at the same time. I can learn so much from watching all the videos anyone has ever made on a subject and imagine wonders I might never otherwise consider with the invention of film, television, and the videos we upload to the internet. Yet none of it is as rewarding or as joyous as seeing a friend smile, and feeling the warmth of our interaction in that one specific moment in which we are living. Perhaps we need a little more of our human nature in our lives after all.

Seán: “Let me ask you one final question and then we’ll get back to lunch here, this meatball sandwich is giving me a look: do you think technology makes us more or less human? If you think about how we originally evolved in our nature as humans, as Homo sapiens, as wise people, as learned people, and yet do our creations diminish our base humanity if we’re too focused on them?”

Carmelita: “I think it depends on what you post on social media and if you’re fake about them. We talk about influencers who post amazing photos but are broke because of it, then it’s not worth it. Social media allows us to stay connected, and that’s a wonderful thing. So, as long as you’re being true to yourself then that’s the key.”

Seán: “Excellent, I like the connection between philosophy and real life there.”

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Finally, for your viewing pleasure my view facing north crossing the Mississippi at Ft. Madison, Iowa.

Correction

Corrected on 28 March 2024 to reflect the correct spelling of Carl Akeley’s name. I’ve misread it now for 31 years as Akerely.

How Reading James Joyce Prepared Me for my Doctorate

How Reading James Joyce Helped Prepare me for my Doctorate – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in honor of Bloomsday, how reading Joyce helped prepare me for my doctorate. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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Last Friday was the annual commemoration of Bloomsday. 16 June 1904 was the date when all of the action in James Joyce’s 1922 episodic novel Ulysses takes place. Bloomsday is named for the main character, the sometimes hapless Leopold Bloom who fits perfectly into the wider scope of Irish main characters who may want things to go one way but often find their life taking ever weirder and sometimes darker turns. It reminds me of An Béal Bocht.

I’ll fully admit, I’ve never read Ulysses through the entire way before. I’ve seen the stage adaptation that they used to put on that the Irish Center of Kansas City a handful of times and have participated here and there in the day-long reading of Ulysses at the same cultural center, but to date I’ve never actually sat down and tried to read this work from cover to cover. For one thing, Ulysses evades expectations of literary formalities and standards. For another, a fair bit of the text really only makes sense when read aloud. And finally, because of several scenes it was banned here in the United States for a while, a nod to the puritan roots of our American culture.

So, on Friday I went over to Rainy Day Books, the finest local bookstore I’ve stepped foot in, located just across the border in Fairway, Kansas, to buy a copy of Ulysses for myself. My goal on Friday was to record an Instagram reel of me reading my favorite passage from the novel, a scene with an ever increasingly ridiculous list of foreign dignitaries attending the Ascot Gold Cup, which took place on the same day as the story at large. Yet, the eccentricity of Ulysses befuddled me enough that I ended up choosing a different passage from Part II’s Episode 12, “Cyclops” in which an ancient hero wearing a leather belt adorned with the portraits of a series of Irish heroes is described. Again, this series of Irish heroes steadily becomes more ridiculous as it goes on. As a matter of fact, I’ll read this passage for you now:

Joyce’s Ulysses makes far more sense when read aloud than if read silently, a style of reading that was pioneered in the 5th century CE by none other than St. Augustine of Hippo no less. It’s a far older style of literature that way, something which gives it an air of antiquity that I for one appreciate a great deal. This is also something that I find regular among my primary sources for my dissertation, books which were written for a very different audience who lived 450 years ago in France. In my case, I often find reading those aloud gives me the greatest clarity of what they’re actually trying to say. My translation of André Thevet’s 1557 book The Singularities of France Antarctique is one such book that is best read in full voice, and I have a feeling when I go through and edit my translation that I’ll have to soften some of the eccentricities of my initial interpretation of Thevet’s text, or at least that’s what I’ve been finding as I incorporate it into my dissertation.I find Joyce’s writing daunting, a proper challenge, yet still something that is immensely relatable to my own way of thinking about writing. I love his fluid use of adjectives to describe his characters, they bring even the most marginal of figures to life in a way that echoes down the last century to the present moment. Now, 119 years after Leopold Bloom’s eventful day in Dublin, and 101 years after Joyce’s first edition was published in one volume under the title of Ulysses, there’s a connection to that story which continues to live on for me.

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Fiction

Fiction – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to explain how fiction is necessary for my survival.

I am in the business of writing serious, analytical, and factual accounts about the human experience. As a historian, that’s my job. I do write fiction as well, though I keep both as separate as the church and state are supposed to be in this country. Still, as much as I enjoy my work, as much as I like the feeling of getting my academic writings on paper and presenting them at conferences, when I’m looking for some fun reading, I usually turn to fiction. Fiction is fundamental to the human spirit, it allows us to dream, to imagine alternate possibilities, to envision possible futures.

At any given moment I’m usually reading 2 or 3 books for fun, normally there’s at least one sci-fi novel, maybe a memoir, and possibly something relating to natural history. I admit, 2 out of 3 of those are nonfiction, depending on how you understand the truth of that memoir, but if I had to choose between those three genres when I’m sitting alone in a restaurant at lunch or dinner or looking for something to read before bed, I’ll go for the fiction ahead of the others. I also tend to disagree with the trend of late that prefers dystopian fiction over anything else. There are so many of those stories out there, from the Ender’s Game books by Orson Scott Card, to the Blade Runner and Mad Max films, to even my old favorite Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t like dystopia, and I don’t honestly understand how it could be enjoyable to read or watch a story talking about such a future. 

Rather, I prefer the opposite, utopian fiction, stories that offer us a vision of what our future could be like. I think that’s why I’ve been drawn to Star Trek since the pandemic began, and have now watched several of the TV series, a few of the films, and even read some of the accompanying novels. There’s something about a vision of humanity’s future as a contributing member of an interstellar community that really seems heartening to me, that as distant as that potential future seems now, we might well reach it someday. This is one area where my work and my favorite stories intersect; my historical research deals squarely with exploration, in my case mostly set in Brazil in the 1550s. In many respects, my research is a cautionary story of all the horrible things that the explorers fanning out from Europe did to the peoples they encountered. Normally, academic history books aren’t read by many people, and certainly there are only a few that get much public attention. So, I hope that if anyone eventually reads my work, they’ll recognize in it my efforts at warning our own generations and generations to come of the rocks and shoals that threaten any present or future explorer who seeks to venture out without harming others in the process.

So yes, my love of fiction does influence my work, but only indirectly. When it comes to my writing, when I need to refresh and rethink my work, I’ll turn to those same novels and bask in their eloquence and style. As a writer, as a dreamer, as an optimist, fiction is necessary to my survival.