Đó là mười (It's a 10)
Another origin story from the real-life nutty professor of American studies
Welcome to The Book of Sean M. P.—aka “The B.O.S.M.P.”—for Friday, January 3rd, Gregorian year 2025.
I insist on that modifier of “Gregorian” to remind myself foremost—if you, dear reader, also benefit, so much the better—that time is relative, which means its value depends on the register you use to calculate it.
In this case, the Gregorian calendar went into effect all the way back in 1582 when it replaced the Julian calendar, which had been à la mode since—wait for it—45 B.C.
B.C. stands for “Before Christ.”
To switch registers for a moment—
Ahem.
When I was growing up in America in the 1980s and ’90s—first in a hamlet on Long Island named Syosset, then in a town in Northern Virginia called Herndon, after the 19th-century seaman William Lewis Herndon—I didn’t know that time was contingent on context.
Nor, for that matter, did I know that Herndon, the town, memorialized Herndon, the sailor, who commanded a ship christened the Central America from Panama bound for New York City in 1857 till it sank following a hurricane in the South Atlantic. Herndon and 425 of his passengers perished and the event made national news.
What I then discovered (“Eureka!”) is that the SS Central America had a second name: the Ship of Gold because it carried mail and other cargo—including the precious metal—on the Atlantic leg of the California–to-New York shipping route (which connected to the Pacific by rail). According to Wikipedia, this particular voyage of the Central America “was laden with 10 short tons” of gold—which, unlike the lost human lives, turned out to be recoverable.
Well, some of it was—the actual amount of extant treasure remains speculative. But in 1989—a hundred-and-thirty-one years after the golden boat sank—an investment vehicle based in Columbus, Ohio, successfully prospected the wreck, illustrating that even in the face of fearsome scales, where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Not incidentally, Captain Herndon’s daughter, Ellen, would later marry Chester A. Arthur, who became the twenty-first president of the USA twenty-four years after his wife’s father’s death at sea.
Alas, Ellen herself had died the year before—in 1880—and didn’t get the chance to serve as First Lady when her widower (Arthur) replaced the assassinated James A. Garfield in the White House.
On the topic of the mail and to return to my initial thread about space and time (“spacetime”): My family and I—the Kennedys—didn’t actually move to the town of Herndon during Columbus Day weekend 1990 but to the postal address of Herndon; our new street address, 13126 New Parkland Drive, put us technically outside the town limits in an ambiguous zone of subdivisions.
That’s why my brother and I went to Franklin Middle School in Chantilly, a Census-designated place, and not Herndon Middle, and why he went to Oakton High School outside the town of Vienna and not Herndon High.
Meanwhile, I went to secondary school at a magnet across the county: TJHSST, or the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the highly selective showpiece of Fairfax County Public Schools. I recall the STEM hub receiving substantial funding from Washington and private industry when I attended from 1992 till 1996, but at the moment I can’t find any sources to corroborate that memory.
Anyway.
What I was trying to say, my friends, before I dropped down both a historic and a geographic rabbit hole, is that during my schooling in the first two decades of my present life on the planet known as Earth, I learned the temporal markers of “Before Christ” and “Anno Domini” (A.D.) were going the way of the dodo bird (this latter reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland unintentional).
Instead, we were taught—and here I must issue a trigger warning given how sensitive people have become about so-called “D.E.I.”—that the more inclusive designations of B.C.E. (for “Before the Common Era”) and C.E. (for “Common Era”) were the current custom for denoting either side of Jesus’s birth.
Although the semantic change still centered Christianity as the point of distinction, the broader framework of the “common” made sense to me as a kid, especially in Syosset, where it seemed half my friends were Jewish and half were Gentile—though in reality Hinduism and other faiths outside the Abrahamic triumvirate were also represented among my classmates at South Grove Elementary.
Certainly my best friend Jordan was a Jew, just as my other best friend Cindy was a Christian. To me that was the Judeo-Christian tradition right there: balance.
Too, it was Jordan who displayed a poster in his bedroom of Hendon, the site of the London Aerodrome—a proper name a single letter short of the one our family eventually donned in the state of Virginia.
At the time our address was 19 Virginia Road.
Greetings, friends. I haunt your attention from the city of Glendale, California, sandwiched between Burbank and the Disney campus to my northwest, the Los Angeles River and—across it—Griffith Park to my west, and the neighborhoods of the City of Los Angeles to my south and east, among other locations that might sound familiar.
Indeed, I live across the street from Columbus Elementary School, home of the Eagles.
Friends, greetings. I’m over the moon—and we’re in a major Capricorn cycle right now, in addition to our regularly scheduled Capricorn season—to announce that the next phase of my Substack journey is here!
Today I’m re-upping my flagship publication—this public journal, The Book of Sean M. P.—and—on this coming Tuesday, October 7th—a new scroll, Paralipomena, the title of which echoes both the scriptural Book of Chronicles and the last chapter of Theodor Adorno’s 1970 work on aesthetic theory (among other enjoyable resonances). I’m also preparing a third “vertical” to launch with an explicit religious-studies focus to promulgate my latest scholarship and creative research. It’ll run more sparingly than the other two columns but its themes are reflected through all my writing now.
If you’d like to unsubscribe from this dispatch at any point, for any reason, please by all means do so. I don’t take such “churn” personally. It’s simply part of the process of building an audience—perhaps the best skill I’ve picked up the past three years in Los Angeles County.
On the flip side of the coin, if you like what I’m doing here, please spread the word. It’s as easy as sharing this post.
Moving forward I’ll be charging for the bulk of my content on Substack, though my first ten origin stories will always be free.
I started this experiment in self-publishing almost two years ago while navigating my still-new life in Southern California. As I pivot towards academia and the East Coast in 2025 in support of re-establishing my “bicoastality,” I hope you’ll continue to travel with me.
QUÍMICA DIVINA UPDATE #1
It’s no secret I’ve been working on a creative nonfiction project, Química Divina: A Testimony of Sexual—and Spiritual—Healing. I’ve previously appealed for your financial support of it, and it remains an ongoing concern.
But—believe it or not—it’s taken me a full four years to process what happened to me at Gettysburg College in 2019 and 2020, after I was retaliated against for advocating for student and worker safety amid the “state of exception” inaugurated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
As I say in a YouTube video I recorded this past December 18th, one day after receiving a PTSD diagnosis as part of a thorough hearing of my psychosomatic challenges since that experience, it was the “cognitive dissonance” of teaching at an educational institution where the history of the Civil War was everywhere present but nowhere engaged “that sent me into a fugue state” and “changed the course of my life.”
This core truth, my life before it was interrupted (girl!)—the lingering dissonance in my bodymind resolved as I wrapped a paperback of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous for a holiday gift exchange. I hadn’t remembered till then that it was Arthur’s copy of the 2019 novel that I’d read first when we merged households that last summer pre-pandemic. And then I read it a second time when I included it on my syllabus for a seminar on “Rethinking Race and Nation” for the Gettysburg English department that fall.
In short, Ocean’s autobiographical fiction about growing up as an outsider in America amid polyphonic personal, political, and generational trauma significantly altered my own autobiography.
(By the way, I never ended up gifting that copy of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which I inscribed in Sharpie with a special message. Any founding member of the emergent B.O.S.M.P. Pantheon can claim it as their reward, but act fast—as with all prizes, it’s first come, first served!)
NON-BLIND ITEM #2
In other news (literally), I don’t care even a whit about The New York Times. If I had the power to restore the original Gawker by unplugging the Old Gray Lady I would—the former being a massive influence on my critical (and comedic) development, the latter frankly a menace to society for its refusal to accurately cover the world in deference to oligarchy.
In response to Justin Baldoni and his publicists’ meritless lawsuit against the onetime paper of record, the Sulzbergers and co. describe their enterprise as “independent.” But how can the Times be independent when it constantly shows its unwillingness to call a spade a spade, instead preferring to record—yes, “uncritically”—the talking points of the powerful?
“Uncritically.” That’s the one thing Baldoni et al. get right in their legal filing: that the Times uncritically shares its information from high-level sources to its readers. Whether manufacturing the case for WMD in Iraq or—in similar fashion—obfuscating the role of the U.S. in the Middle East since 10/7, the Times has been consistent in carrying water for the ruling class.
And yet not all sources are the same (obviously).
Blake Lively, for one, is a very credible speaker.
First of all, she filed her complaint about sexual harassment and character assassination in connection with the recent movie It Ends With Us to the California Civil Rights Commission before going to a formal court. This action is being spun by the Baldoni team as an underhanded way to subvert discovery when—in the real world—the step actually makes Blake’s case stronger.
Why?
Because if Blake’s accusations are false, then that means she lied to the state of California.
(Beat.)
I don’t think Blake Lively lied to the state of California.
Do you?
(Beat.)
More to the heart of the matter, for Blake’s accusations to be false, then all the documentary evidence on which her filing relies, including the text messages of Baldoni and his fellow defendants, would have to be false. And no one is arguing they are.
Hence the reason I say their suit is meritless—indeed, just pure retaliatory “lawfare” designed to further damage Blake’s reputation.
But Blake doesn’t need any defending from me—her hubby’s Ryan Reynolds after all (who—full disclosure—provides my cellular service) and her bestie is Taylor.
I will, however, praise her for shining a light on how little has changed since the #MeToo wave crashed and receded in Hollywood.
To wit:
Again, Baldoni and his cronies haven’t disputed this detailed account of Blake’s experiences on the set of It Ends With Us (ironically an intellectual property about stopping gender-based harm) or any other representation she’s put forward to date. Instead, they’ve responded with their own inventory of charges in a wild document that appears like a prank.
Lost in the “mixed messaging”—a strategy attested to by one of Baldoni’s flacks—is that the harassment and retaliation suffered by Blake is straight outta Harvey Weinstein’s playbook.
Speaking of whom, fun fact about me: I once delivered a package to Miramax’s offices in Tribeca when I worked at Interview magazine. Ingrid Sischy, my boss, was friends with Harvey.
Everyone in the image business was.
Till they weren’t.
QUANTUM SPACETIME CLOCK
Finally for this number of the B.O.S.M.P.—which will now publish every Friday—I note that today in history (thank you, History.com!) the former dictator of Panama, Manuel Noriega, was apprehended by U.S. troops in Panama City after a 10-day siege.
George H. W. Bush—father of George W.M.D. Bush and a former director of the CIA—commanded the military operation, dubbed “Just Cause,” in which twenty-three American soldiers, 450 of their Panamanian counterparts, and “several hundred to several thousand” Panamanian civilians died.
Talk about chutes—and ladders. Now return to the top of this post and read (or watch) it again.
Ciao for now,
Sean M. P.