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Carruthers Smith’s Museum

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

Part I.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sir, are you here alone?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s correct, Agent Wilson.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And when did he leave?”

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

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

“Indeed,” Carruthers affirmed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which languages do you speak?”

“English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.”

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

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

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

“Right.”

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

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

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

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

“What happened then?”

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

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

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

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

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

Penny smiled, “what was her name?”

“Delia McGinty.”

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

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

“What did they do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

“He needed a rest from his troubles.”

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

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

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

“Are you okay?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Gladly,” Bill said.

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

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

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

“How long has it been, my love?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Strenuous Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Face

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On Pauses

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This week, some words about silence in communication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On Editing

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This week, I want to write to you about the revealed joys found in the experience of editing.

I spent most of last Thursday editing a chapter I’m contributing to a new book about Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. My contribution argues that the bard was inspired in his descriptions of Caliban and the play’s island setting by André Thevet’s accounts of Tupinambá beliefs and the role of magic in their society, and the sense of Brazil as the archetype of the insular natural world across the sea at the turn of the seventeenth century. There’s a lot in its 32 pages, and it’s been a good effort on my part since I first saw the call for papers for this book two years ago. I wrote the first draft between March and June of this year both here at home in Kansas City, and while I was on my European trip this June; I spent most of my time in the San Francisco International Airport G Concourse United Club writing paragraphs for this chapter.

Until last Thursday, I’d only edited it on my computer. This is a far faster way to edit text, it allows me to work as I’m reading through the draft. This method is still relatively new to me, I feel fortunate that I was taught to write by hand first and to edit with pen and paper. That’s been more challenging with my dissertation, in Binghamton I didn’t own a printer and because I could never figure out how to use the university printers, I relied heavily on the local print shop across the road from the University to print anything I needed. That meant then that up until the sixth or seventh draft I never saw it on paper, always on the computer screen for both economical and environmental reasons.

The week before last Thursday, when I returned to my Tempest chapter after finishing several other major projects, I found myself thinking that it could benefit my editing if I printed this document out at least for my last full read through before sending it off to the editor. So, returning to it just before noon on Thursday, I decided to print draft 4 of the full document, all 34 pages of it. As it turned out, there was something heartwarming about editing this chapter with pen and paper. Sure, I knew I’d save myself time by editing it while I was reading it on my computer, but I’ve found more and more that if I really need to work on a sentence, I’ll have to copy it out of the draft and into a separate document where I can look at it on its own separate from the rest of the text. This works, and this is what I often end up doing, but it’s not a problem I have reading lines on a printed page. I find I can read faster when reading something printed rather than something digitized, and now that I’m doing so many more things than just writing and editing my dissertation, moving towards these postdoctoral projects, I’m finding that I’m returning to how I read and wrote before I fully adopted all this technology.

Even though I now edit using more review bubble comments and review tracking on Microsoft Word or Google Docs than the old shorthand symbols that I learned in my elementary school English classes, I could still return to them with an ease that felt native to my sensibilities and origins as a writer and a reader. I even left the odd marginal note on draft 4 of my Tempest chapter should anyone else ever find this printed copy to see some of the things I was referencing in the additions and changes I made to this draft.

One of the greatest lessons I’ve yet learned about writing came from a policy writer who at the time worked for the offices of the European Union in Brussels. He came to the University of Westminster for a couple of days in March 2016 to run a policy writing workshop for all of us who were interested. I joined in and wrote a brief about a hypothetical crisis along the Danube between Hungary, Croatia, and Serbia (I think). While I’m less likely to become a professional political policy writer anytime soon, the most impactful thing he taught us was to leave whatever it is we’re writing aside once we’re done with a draft and return to it later. Like a good dough, our writing needs to rise for a while before we return to it and work on it some more. I took a week between finishing draft 4 and returning to it to complete the edits that make up draft 5 of this Tempest chapter, and I’m certain the finished draft benefits from that gap. It’s something I do here with the Wednesday Blog on those weeks when I’m able to write things in advance. The words you’re reading, or hearing, now were written on Thursday afternoon about an hour after I sent draft 5 off to the editor. I’ll return to them sometime on Tuesday, October 15^th, and read through them again when I record them for the podcast.

The Wednesday Blog podcast actually grew out of my editing sessions for the blog. You see, I traditionally edit by reading my writing aloud; if it doesn’t make sense to my ear then it needs to be rewritten. Nearly three years ago then, at the end of November 2021, I decided one night after dinner to start recording those read-throughs and release them as a podcast version of my blog. Of course, the version you get in your podcast player each week is more polished than the first draft, but with these essays I usually don’t need to do as many edits. This is a different style of writing than my academic work, less formal, and more personal.

Editing also reminds me to express what I’m thinking in a clearer way. An early lesson in teaching that I received, and nearly all of my lessons in teaching have been on the job while I’m teaching, was to speak to my audience in their own language. This is a no-brainer when it comes to speaking French in Paris, or German in Vienna, yet what I mean here is speaking to your audience in a way that they’ll understand. I like to use the words they’ve just used in my answers. This is a grammatical thing in Irish where instead of having words for yes or no we instead say the positive or negative of the verb in question. I’ve begun doing this in my English too: responding not only with a yes or a no but with a yes, I do or yes, I can, or no, I don’t understand. Clarity is the best friend of writing and good communication. A common comment I get from editors is that what I’m trying to say is just under the surface or not quite clear yet. This is a symptom of how I developed my writing voice first in poetry and plays and later in short stories and now factual and highly researched non-fiction blog posts and academic essays. It’s been a weakness in my writing up until now that I’ve had a hard time getting over, but I think I may have figured it out by closely reading what I’ve already done with those comments up on a screen where I can clearly see them as I read.

Sometimes the thesis or plot of what I’m writing will change significantly in the edit. There are times where my original argument simply doesn’t work, and I need to adjust drastically to save the essay or story. This happened early on with this Tempest chapter, and I’m glad I saw the flaws in my original approach as early as I did because it made the chapter I’ve written in the five drafts since all the stronger. While that may be frustrating at first, I love the way that things work when all the pieces of the story or all the sources behind the thesis line up. I love how a good edit can inspire me to keep writing and get closer to my record average of writing 1000 words per hour. This is more possible outside of my academic writing where I often stop to consult a source to make sure I’m getting it right, but even there when I can write with a great fluidity, and I know what I’m trying to say it reminds me why I do what I do.

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Correction: in my initial publication of this blog post I miswrote my average writing speed as “1000 words per minute,” when I meant to say “1000 words per hour.” I’m not Lt. Cmdr. Data.

A Matter of Grammar

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This week, after going down the rabbit hole of the Chicago Manual of Style‘s monthly Q&A newsletter, I thought I’d talk a bit about grammar.

One of my favorite newsletters to read is the Chicago Manual of Style‘s monthly Q&A email which tries to answer some pressing questions regarding the English language in this particularly formal academic setting that I often write in professionally. We historians in the United States use the Chicago Manual of Style as our main style guide, both for its system of extensive footnotes and for its grammatical rules. I am familiar and have used several other systems, including the AP Style Guide, and the MLA, APA, and Harvard citation systems, yet my preference remains Chicago for its clarity. Chicago is the preferred style guide for us historians as well as the basis of the style used by the American Anthropological Association.

English is an unusual language in that we don’t have a single central authoritative language academy as does French, Spanish, Irish, and German. Our best bet is to see what our two major dictionaries say: the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The former is the standard in the United Kingdom and throughout the Commonwealth, while the latter is the American standard developed first during the Early Republic when its initial author Noah Webster sought to better differentiate American English from its imperial counterpart, the better to craft a specifically republican national language fit for our young Union. I’ve had my problems with Webster’s dictionary for a while now in part because I don’t see the point of most of his spelling reforms, and for a good part of my teens and twenties I used British spellings over American ones. Today though, I’ve reverted to the American standards in what might well be a sign of my general weariness of the constant fight over so many different topics and issues; this was one that fell by the wayside.

This month then, the Chicago Manual‘s Q&A included a question about whether it was fine for an academic writer to write in the first or second person, to use the pronouns I and you. We are taught to always restrict our writing to the third person, to avoid the subjectivity that is implicit in the first person. I’ve begrudgingly accepted this, to the extent that amid the 96,276 words that comprise the ninth draft of my dissertation only three of those are the pronoun I. All three instances where I drift into the first person are in the footnotes where it is necessary to explain my decisions regarding certain translations or connections that would otherwise not be possible in the English language. By contrast, I use this pronoun a great deal here in the Wednesday Blog, where I am writing to you, dear reader, in a more personal manner that I hope is evident in this text. Of the 189,993 words that I’ve written for the Wednesday Blog before this week, 3,360 of those are the pronoun I.

The response in the Q&A about using the pronoun I spoke to that concern for subjectivity, yet also spoke of a need that our academic writing ought to be “more lively and personal.” I see both sides of this, more and more books written by my fellow academics do include more of the first person in them, yet at the same time Kate Turabian’s writer’s manual––an abridged version of the Chicago Manual––suggests that writers “avoid beginning your sentences with I believe or I think (which go without saying).” I am often frustrated to hear people use fillers like these, or like “it goes without saying,” or “to be honest,” when those are things I hope they would be adhering to in the first place. On the other hand, I’ve heard papers at conferences where the author reads out “this author finds that _____,” which sounds ludicrous. Two weeks ago, at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference I did make it clear where I was presenting my own theories based on the evidence that my primary sources provided. A spoken context is different than a written one, not only can there be more repetition of material to bring a point home, one can also use more personal elements, bring oneself into the topic and show the audience why they ought to care about it the way you do.

Academic writing is quite formal, and it follows set patterns and standards. It is in many ways an intricate dance, whether a waltz or an older minuet, which we follow in order to write to one another in the same methods and manners that we will all recognize. One may want to deconstruct some of these Elements of Style, to borrow a title, yet those standards exist to facilitate communication. Language proscription has its place along with all the innovations that happen each and every day in speech and writing. I might use this pronoun more in my academic writing in the future, especially if I choose to write a prologue which tells my reader why I am fascinated by a topic that will invite them to consider it as well.

I would like it if there were an English Language Academy in the same vein as the Académie Française, yet I would prefer to have a say in its decisions. Is that bold of me, sure. Yet that academy’s function is best served by the continued writing and publication of those of us who use the English language to express our thoughts on a daily basis. For every article or book I submit for publication about the history of animals in the Renaissance there will be countless other works published in all manner of settings which demonstrate the versatility of this language and its uses. We academics have just as much a claim to it as anyone else, and my own English is not everyone’s English. Still, we have our common grammar that keeps this language together, and that is something worthwhile.

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Corrections

3 April 2024: Soon after publication, I corrected this week’s blog post for grammar, naturally.

On Technology

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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.

Copyright

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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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Author vs Writer

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Recently I noticed when someone referred to a guy as “the author of x”, in my mind I thought about what it means that they were called “the author” and not “the writer.” This whole question came to me considering that in Irish, I’d introduce myself with “Is staraí agus scríbhneoir mé,” or rather “I’m a historian and a writer,” and the same goes in French « Je suis historien et écrivain, » yet in neither context would I introduce myself at a party as “I’m an author.” Both words have their origins and similar yet separate meanings in every language, and that distinction is worth noting.

Author comes to us from the Latin auctor via Old French autor, it’s a cognate of the modern French auteur. The Irish version of this, údar also comes from the Latin auctor, demonstrating that the core idea of an author may well have spread northwards with the Romans. On the other hand, writer is an inherently English word, a writer is most fundamentally someone who writes. I like words that make their function this clear, words that are built off of the verb that they accomplish. When I’ve thought about trying to emulate Tolkien’s work it’s been less to create my own massive legendarium of fantasy literature and more to devise new ways of understanding the world through constructed languages like his own Quenya and Sindarin. In those thought experiments one of the key principles, I’ve wanted to address is crafting a language where there is a relatively small vocabulary because every word is a stem upon which one adds grammatical endings to make it a noun, adjective, verb, or adverb, or to include prepositional elements to it. This is something you see in older languages like Latin with its declensions and conjugations or in Finnish with its 14 noun cases. So, these simplest of English words like writer that demonstrate what they do as efficiently as possible are among my favorites.

Author too in its Latin origins was a word like writer. An auctor is someone who increases or nourishes their object (augeō in Latin). In classical literature the story comes from the muses, In the Loeb translation Ovid began his Metamorphoses acknowledging “my mind is bent to tell” the stories that will follow, for “ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time.” (Met. 1.1.1–4) Shakespeare picked up on this in his reading and began Henry V with the chorus uttering the line

“O, for a muse of fire that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention!” (Henry V, 1.0.1–2.)

In my mind an author is both someone who has received inspiration for their work and an active participant in the creation of those works. There is a wonderful print of Dickens dreaming at his desk with all his myriad of characters he nourished into existence in his stories floating about him. I sometimes wish that this is the way that I’ll be remembered, as a storyteller who crafted so many lives that while they only exist in my writings therein is encapsulated a little world, an imagined reality all its own. In this act of creation, I am an author, but I am also a writer, for it’s my job to translate these worlds from my imagination onto paper where others can experience these characters’ lives.

A writer is a craftsman busy in their workshop devising new ways of getting information across. They could be writing serious factual information, reports of the events of the modern world, or setting the scene of stories more fantastical than anyone before could’ve imagined. I think of Dr. Franklin in his printing shop as the archetypal writer his sleeves rolled up hard at work, a stark contrast to the image of Dickens asleep in his chair dreaming of his many creations. Yet we rarely have authors without writers anymore, they are of course more often than not the same person, still in older times there were stories that existed without the written word. The Gaelic file tradition which I hope my own stories can be worthy heirs to is one such form of authorship beyond the boundaries of the written word.

So perhaps I don’t like to introduce myself as an author because of the world-building implications of authorship. Day-to-day I am a writer, a craftsman of words, scrawled onto paper, typed into a computer, and printed onto the page. I am an author of some stories, there are characters you’ve met here on the Wednesday Blog like Dr. Noël Felix and Captain Amelia Daedalus from a few weeks ago. I hope to get back into writing more fiction again in the coming months and years, to telling those kinds of stories. Yet perhaps because my authorship is so much more personal than my craftsmanship as a writer, I am left preferring to keep my creations closer to my chest and instead hold my craft out for all the world to see.

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Essay Writing

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I’m at a rather fun point in my doctoral studies. Today, I get to spend my days working on my dissertation and serving as a Teaching Assistant for a class. In my TA duties here at Binghamton, I’ve been assigned two sections of 25 students each, so when they submit essays, I find myself grading 50 of those in the course of a few days. It’s a lot of work, and in the moment the grading inspires a variety of emotions in me, from joy at a wonderfully written essay to disappointment at one that could’ve done better with just a little more effort.

One of the greatest boons to my work as a teacher is that now, after 12 years in college and 27 years overall as a student, I’ve finally made sense of how to write an essay. This word, used so often in academic writing, never really clicked for me. I knew I was supposed to write a research paper that had a introduction, body, and conclusion, but never really got the structure my teachers and professors were going for beyond that. It took my own transition from student to teacher for me to really understand that an essay is an extended argument.

It also took for me to start studying Renaissance French Humanism and Natural History for me to really understand the origins of the essay with Michel de Montaigne’s 1580 book of Essays, where the term originated. These were reflections on a variety of topics, from children’s education to cannibalism and everything in between. My own Wednesday Blog is in some ways a nod to Montaigne in format. Montaigne’s essays sought to describe his world as he saw it and understood it, in all its rich detail and complexity.

In the academic essays that I write, from the quick 3 to 5 page papers I used to write for my undergrad history classes at Rockhurst to my dissertation, which in many aspects is itself a long essay, all have the same core structure and spirit. Yes, at its barest bones the essay is made up of an introduction, body, and conclusion, but there’s so much more rich detail to a good essay than just that.

This semester it really occurred to me that the introduction ought to be made up of three main things: something to catch the reader’s attention, a thesis statement laying out the essay’s argument, and a brief summary of the main points with some context in the existing literature included if you’re writing on a graduate or professional level. Any of my colleagues reading or listening to this will either find their eyes are glazing over here or are instead laughing that I only really figured this out this late in the game as I was writing my dissertation.

The body is more than just the main points of the essay, it’s the real meat of the work, the rich quotes and analyses of the sources, the connections made to other works in all their intricate splendor, the quotable lines that help the essay stick in the reader’s memory and look forward to reading more of your work in the future. I still would say though that the thesis remains more important than the body, after all the body isn’t going to make sense without a strong central argument, a beating heart at the core of the entire work. I often tell my students this and have even begun advising them to underline their thesis statements to help them keep that heart in mind as they continue to flesh out the rest of their written creation.

Finally, there’s the conclusion. It’s a summary of the main points of the essay, a restating of the thesis with the memory of the body fresh in the reader’s mind. The conclusion is a chance to leave your reader with a really strong impact from your essay, something to find them wanting more.

For a while now I’ve often thought of the essay as a form functioning for scholarship and literature as the symphony functions for music. In both cases there are different styles and methods of elevating the pure form into an art that reflects the writer or composer’s personality and craft, that leaves the audience feeling something different, something that they can best describe as emblematic of that work’s author. In symphonic music there are clear distinctions between the classical composers like Haydn & Mozart and the romantic composers like Beethoven & Brahms. Sometimes, the best way to end an essay is to borrow an idea from the romantic symphonies and even the romantic operas of composers like Gounod and Wagner: let the main themes finish and then have a sigh to really round things off. If you listen to the finale of Wagner’s Götterdammerung, you’ll hear this very sigh, as if all the energy built up in the composition over the last few hours is nearly extinguished but has one last breath. If you can write an essay like that then bravo.

I’m writing this in the midst of an extensive round of edits to my dissertation, going line by line making corrections, clarifications, and all around tightening down my work until it really just elevates the core form of my thesis. In the last year since I started writing this dissertation, I’ve learned a great deal about how to do this job, and I hope I will in future avoid some of the great pitfalls that I’ve caught myself up in time and again in my studies.If you’re a fellow academic, or interested in academic writing, I highly suggest you go listen to my friend Kate Carpenter’s podcast Drafting the Past, which is all about the process of writing history. It’s a wonderful service to the profession that Kate’s doing. Enjoy your week!

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Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

New Posts on Wednesdays

Tag Archives: Writing

Carruthers Smith’s Museum

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

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

Part I.

Part II.

Part III.

The Strenuous Life

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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

The Face

The Face – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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

On Pauses

On Pauses – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about silence in communication.

On Editing

On Editing – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to write to you about the revealed joys found in the experience of editing.

A Matter of Grammar

A Matter of Grammar – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, after going down the rabbit hole of the Chicago Manual of Style‘s monthly Q&A newsletter, I thought I’d talk a bit about grammar.

Corrections

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.

Correction

Copyright

Copyright – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a discussion of copyright expiration and what that means for this publication.

Author vs Writer

Author vs Writer – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

Essay Writing

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

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

Part I.

Part II.

Part III.

Share this:

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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

Share this:

The Face – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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

Share this:

On Pauses – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some words about silence in communication.

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On Editing – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to write to you about the revealed joys found in the experience of editing.

Share this:

A Matter of Grammar – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, after going down the rabbit hole of the Chicago Manual of Style‘s monthly Q&A newsletter, I thought I’d talk a bit about grammar.

Corrections

Share this:

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.

Correction

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Copyright – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a discussion of copyright expiration and what that means for this publication.

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Author vs Writer – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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