January 15, 2026 : Wondercab Mini (104A)

WELCOME

A pair of rhyming pieces, Rainey Knudson from just the other day, and one of Ren’s from twenty years ago, both asking, just how different were people way back when? (And then later, back to the dire present in Uganda.)

I suppose I should start this pairing by noting how much and how long I have cherished the cultural reportage of Houston’s own Rainey Knudson (some of you may remember her inclusion in our Bookshelf issue last year). She was founding editor and publisher of the essential Glasstire online digest, and in the years since her retirement from that post she has been tending her own garden over at her The Impatient Reader blog, compiling sequences of short, exquisitely faceted jewel-like essays (250 words each) around such things as her one hundred favorite objects over at the local museum, or one hundred favorite songs, or now, as she has shifted over to her own substack, 250 words a day on 250 favorite objects from the greater American provenance, one a day (five days a week) across the coming year, the country’s own 250th. In between she has also feathered in longer (though still exquisitely succinct) pieces on a variety of other subjects, such as the one below from a few weeks back, which starts out being about the Roman statues in a current Texas museum show and then gracefully pirouettes far afield—into territory which in turn reminded me of a piece of my own, from over twenty years ago, when I was contributing the sequence of Convegence pieces to McSweeneys that would eventually get collected into my Everything that Rises book.

To begin with, though, Ms Knudson:

THE IMPATIENT READER

WHAT DO WE WANT FROM ANTIQUITY?
Our nation turns into lonely eyes to Rome.

Rainey Knudson, 12/27/25

“I could, I suppose, start this off with another complaint about the state of the world today, except that’s how we got into this state. People wishing for a past that never existed.”
— A Christmas Movie a Day

Why can’t life look like the ancient marble statues? We encounter these glorious objects and we recognize our own experience in them—a distilled and idealized version of our experience anyway, if only our lives weren’t so messy and mundane. If only the world hadn’t descended as it has.

Right now the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth has a remarkable exhibition¹ of Roman sculptures that presents them in a way I’ve never seen before. Each one has an accompanying line drawing with shaded areas that show what is original; what is ancient but not original to the sculpture; and what is “modern” (which could mean a restoration carved during the Renaissance). The drawings clearly show how we get a Roman torso with an ancient head from another statue stuck on, a Renaissance arm, and 19th-century additions “in the style of.”

You stand there, looking back and forth between the marble perfection and the shaded drawing, and you realize that these figures we imagine to be wholly authentic are pastiches, cobbled together from broken bits over centuries of tinkering, adding, and—in the case of Renaissance artisans—scraping off any residual paint.

Because we know the statues were originally painted, we’ve all heard that. We know that the people who made these things had no interest in plain stone. But we still believe, reflexively, in the authenticity of the white marble. When we see the occasional digital re-creations showing the statues brightly painted—and there is a video at the Kimbell showing just that—they look garish, ridiculous.² These days, museums have whole conservation departments that specialize in cleaning paintings and restoring bronze patinas. But we never repaint the old marble statues. A replica maybe, like the giant Pallas Athena in the Nashville Parthenon. But never the original.

Except, the Kimbell exhibition shows plainly, there is no such thing as the original. Details of the poses, the hand gestures and objects held, have been guessed at in the subsequent centuries. In a few cases, marble critters have even been added to the base. In short: these statues look nothing like their ancient originals, no matter how much we unconsciously project a sense of noble, unified authenticity onto them. And of course, the same is true of our understanding of Rome itself.

Since the Renaissance, we’ve looked back on the Roman Empire, compressed and distantly visible on the far shore of the centuries we call Dark. The story goes that Rome shone; Rome fell; the lights went out; and Florence switched them back on. Suddenly, artists remembered how to depict muscles.

This compulsion to partition history—and art history—into simplified chunks of Antiquity-Medieval-Modern is understandable, given our species’ hardwiring to pattern-seek. We organize history into eras, and eras into life cycles with births and deaths. We cheer for the rise; we bemoan the fall. In the United States, we project ourselves onto Rome’s bell curve of glory and decay, and the decline we fear we’re experiencing is reflected in Rome’s own fall from grace from a rational republic to a decadent, brutal empire of conquest.

But of course the lived experience was not so neatly segmented; was not segmented at all! The roughly 76 generations since the rise of Rome represent a continuum of humanity, of civilizations and cultures shifting and overlapping each other like ocean waves. The exhibition at the Kimbell is a metaphor for how pieced-together our understanding of history really is, how it is all but impossible to know in our bones what life was like back then.

Except that we do—we do know in our bones. Because of course, their concerns were our concerns. The jockeying for position through wealth or intelligence or beauty or force, the existential wondering about our purpose, the cosmos, and most of all: the reason for the existence of suffering. We tell ourselves that all this hideous suffering around us is a symptom of the broken present, that it wasn’t always this way. But it was. The Romans themselves looked back at a more noble time. That’s what their own mythology, their stories about the Greeks, are all about.

What if we reverse our gaze and imagine two millennia into the future, imagine people looking back on this time, on us, as some Eden? And even more incredibly, what if those future-people are right? What if this is an Eden? What if it is always an Eden, always has been and always will be, if only we can see it?

FN 1:
Myth and Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia Collection is on view at the Kimbell Art Museum through January 25, 2026.

FN 2:
In a fascinating article recently published by Works in Progress, Ralph S. Weir posits that contemporary renderings of repainted ancient statues get it horribly wrong. He says it’s like trying to recreate the Mona Lisa from a few bits of residual pigment on an empty canvas.

* * *

From the Archive

A CUNEIFORM CHICAGO CONVERGENCE

McSweeney’s/Everything That Rises

This other time, I happened to be in Chicago for a few days and decided to pay a call on my Assyriologist friend, Dr. Matt Stolper, over at the University’s Oriental Institute. I’d never actually been to his office, which as it turns out is on the third floor of the Institute’s Museum (just down the block, as it happens—though on the far, far side of the History of Civilization—from Frank Lloyd Wright’s low-slung modernist masterpiece, the Robie House). Matt’s office proved a wide, low-slung affair in its own right, a cavernous warren of tome-lined shelves and narrow-drawered filing cabinets beneath a down-sloping ceiling. The cabinets, as Matt now proceeded to demonstrate for me, were brimming with dozens, hundreds, thousands of cuneiform-engraved clay tablets, one lying snug beside the next, each neatly catalogued on its own little cotton mat—the treasure haul from a university archeological expedition more than sixty-five years {now almost a century} ago.

Back then, in the depths of the Depression, as Matt explained to me, the University had dispatched teams of archaeologists, one of which included his own eventual teacher George Cameron, to unearth the palaces of the Achaemenid Persian kings Darius and Xerxes (legendary scourges of the Attic Hellenes, when they weren’t busy managing a continental empire unmatched for size until the rise of the Romans) at Persepolis, near modern-day Shiraz, in Iran. Over half of the resultant haul has yet to be translated, and translating the individual tablets, one by one, at a grueling, meticulous pace, is essentially Matt’s principal occupation.

He picked one up at random: about the size of a dry cake of Shredded Wheat, and just about as legible, at least to my untrained eye. But Matt had no problem: “This one here, for example,” he said, palming the tablet and leaning it slightly so as to rake the light just so over its chicken-scratch jumble of markings, “it’s in a variant of the Elamite language, and it concerns, let’s see, ‘one thousand… eight hundred, thirty… eight… and-a-half units of barley’—a unit: that would be about ten quarts—let’s see: ‘received as rations for workers, for one month,’ various numbers of men and women, boys and girls—here’s the total: ‘702 workers.’ And then down here we have, hmmm, yes, ‘eleven units of wine’—again, about ten quarts each—‘for rations for women who have had babies, for one month,’ with the women who had boys getting twice as much as the women who had girls.”

Matt went on to explain how the core of that haul, sixty-five years ago, had proved to be an administrative-legal archive: “Pretty dry stuff, though not without its occasional charms.” He recalled, for example, the jolt he’d experienced one day as he suddenly divined that the envoy whose activities and expenses were being documented on a particular shard before him—a certain figure named Belshunu, in Babylonian, with the title of “Governor of Across-the-River,” which is to say Syria/Palestine—had to be the same Belesys, “former governor of Syria,” who figured so prominently in the famous account of Cyrus-the-Younger’s rebellion in Xenophon’s Anabasis, “the greatest story ever told to students of elementary Greek,” as he put it. “And to actually hold a thing like that right there in your hands,” he positively beamed, “it can get to be quite thrilling.”

However, even more thrilling, he went on, were those occasions when, after hours of painstaking work, he could begin to make out evidence of people, in effect, cheating on their income tax, or blackmailing their superiors at court with threatened revelations of embarrassing improprieties, or hoodwinking their associates in other sorts of ways. “Just like today,” Matt marveled, “only fully twenty-five hundred years ago!”

Driving back north up the shore of Lake Michigan toward my downtown lodgings later that evening, I found myself recalling one of those magnificent sustained epic similes from Homer’s Iliad, or, more specifically, from Christopher Logue’s modern English reworking of same in his sinewy slim volume War Music, to wit:

Try to recall the pause, thock, pause,
Made by axe blades as they pace
Each other through a valuable wood.
Though the work takes place on the far
Side of a valley, and the axe strokes are
Muted by depths of warm, still standing air,
They throb, throb, closely in your ear;
And now and then you catch a phrase
Exchanged between the men who work
More than a mile away, with perfect clarity.
Likewise the sound of spear on spear,
Shield against shield, shield against spear
Around Sarpedon’s body.

Of course, part of what makes that passage so powerful (apart from Homer’s typically startling trick of likening senseless mayhem to peace-filled industry) is that specific, spine-tinglingly synaesthetic line about “catching a phrase exchanged between men who work more than a mile away, with perfect clarity.” The image seems to toll and toll, perfectly capturing the relation of Homer, the blind singer, to his subject, a battle that took place five hundred years earlier and hundreds of miles across the sea; and then, of that blind singer to his (seeing) audience, gathered around the fire, listening intently; and then, centuries later, Logue’s relation to Homer; and later yet, our relation to Logue. And, of course, as well, my friend Matt’s relation to those thousands of crumbly clay shards, the focus of his entire life’s work.

A volume of Logue’s Iliad; one of Breytenbach’s prison drawings.

Speeding northward, the skyscrapers of the city gleaming up ahead, I was in turn reminded of some comments Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaner poet and painter, had made to me, as we sat in a Paris bistro one fine afternoon not long after his release from a seven-and-a-half-year stint in apartheid South Africa’s prisons on various trumped-up charges of political subversion. He and I were recording his recollections for a radio documentary, and he’d taken to reminiscing about the nights on death row in Pretoria Central Prison. (Though Breyten himself had never been condemned to death, his warders had placed him in a cell there in one of their many attempts to undermine his sanity.) Breyten recalled:

The hanging room—the actual chamber where they executed prisoners—was, of course, the central characteristic of the place. Even though you never saw the room, you could hear it—you could hear the trapdoor opening. It would send a sort of shuddering through the entire building the mornings people were being hanged. And before that you’d hear the singing with all its different qualities.

You could definitely hear when somebody sang—and there’d be singing every evening—that that person was going to die in a few days, as opposed to somebody who still had a few weeks or months. And the interesting thing, or the touching thing, when one person sang alone like that in the middle of the night and you knew he was due to be hanged in two days’ time, was how you could actually hear the quality of the listening of the other people, because you knew that everybody else in that prison was awake, lying there with their ears cocked close to the bars or the walls, listening.

You could hear the listening.

Driving along, I could hear Breyten all over again, telling his story, just as I likewise recalled what it had been like subsequently to hear that story over the radio. (It had been an ur-radio moment, listening and imagining I could hear everybody else out there in the radio audience, hushed, straining to listen as well.)

{You can hear the entirety of that half hour radio documentary, including that passage, here. And for more on Breyten Bretyenbach generally, see our back issues #81 and #81A, from back in November 2024, at the time of his recent passing.}

And now these sounds and images and silences all began to swim in my mind, and I fancied I could almost hear Logue straining to hear Homer, along with every earlier interpreter of Homer—Virgil and Pope and Chapman and Lattimore—all of them straining to hear, hushed, listening in on all the mayhem and the artifice, the suffering and the cheating: the great silent resounding vault of history, welling forth.

And now I was easing off the highway, heading into downtown, and straight ahead, eerie, loomed an uncannily curious building—a modernist white marble monolith, a soaring flatiron wedge slit by a chicken-scratch grid of ultra-narrow windows—which suddenly looked to me for all the world like a giant clay cuneiform tablet.

I had no idea what it was.

The next day I asked someone, and it turned out to be the William J. Campbell United States Courthouse Annex, otherwise known as the Metropolitan Correctional Center—otherwise known as the city jail.

* * *

Meanwhile
Back in the here and now

Today’s presidential election in Uganda

The ever-swelling firehose of chaos spewing forth from out of the Trump regime, each provocation seemingly overwhelming the one before, exhausting (as intended) every sort of considered response, scattering (as intended) every attempt at sustained attention (a situation exquisitely captured the other day in another of Jon Stewart’s brilliant monologs), on top of everything else saps our capacity to tend to other things transpiring around the world and urgently calling out for our care and focused regard.

Musevini and Wine.

Case in point: The presidential election taking place in Uganda today, a rematch between the intractable authoritarian leader Yoweri Musevini, 81 years old and just concluding the fortieth year of his grim suzerainity, and the Kampala-slum-bred Afropop legend turned activist parliamentarian Bobi Wine, tribune in particular of the country’s younger and more urban generations, who was likely defrauded of victory the last time out, and looks headed for the same fate once again. Veterans of this Cabinet will perhaps recall our extensive coverage of Wine’s story back in issue 48A, how five years ago Wine’s rallies were regularly upended by baton-wielding, tear-gas-spewing regime troops and plain-clothed marauding gangs, with Wine himself repeatedly arrested, viciously tortured and in at least two cases almost assassinated; and how in the immediate lead-up to and follow-on from the election itself, his party workers, parliamentary allies, election monitors, and mere ordinary citizens were subjected to savage campaigns of intimidation, with thousands arrested, abducted and in many still-unresolved cases disappeared (and with some of the worst violations actually taking place after the election in a frenzy of rampant retribution). (See as well the Oscar-nominated documentary on the subject—and do watch it if you can, it’s really good—here.) Well, the same sorts of things appear to have been happening once again this time out, if anything more efficiently on the regime’s part (see the indispensable Al Jazeera’s coverage of unfolding events here); and notwithstanding the defiant crowd-size and enthusiasm evinced at his rallies, as recently as a climactic one earlier this week (note how Wine has taken to addressing his supporters in a bulletproof helmet and vest),

there is virtually no chance that Bobi Wine will be declared the winner, no matter how the vote turns out. Just to be on the safe side, in a seemingly Iran-inspired move, two days ago the regime cut off all internet service into and throughout the country, a smothering gambit that remains in effect. But even more unsettling—and a situation that cries out even more urgently for renewed focus on the unfolding events—is the way that Musevini’s son and heir-presumptive, the army chief and four-star (!!****!!) General Muhoozi Kainerugaba has been calling for Wine’s “beheading” as punishment for the activist’s treasonous presumption in ever having challenged the regime in the first place. And, to reiterate, it is precisely after Ugandan elections that these sorts of threats take on their most ominous overtones.

So, now more than ever, and notwithstanding all the other sorts of urgencies calling out for our concern, attention here too needs be paid and sustained.

(One way of registering your concern is by contacting the Washington offices of the ranking Democratic member of the Africa subcommittee of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs committee, Cory Booker (NJ), or any of his colleagues on that subcommittee, Chris Coons (DE), Jeff Merkley (OR), Chris Van Hollen (MD), and Jeanne Shaheen (NH). Or else their House counterparts Sara Jacobs (CA—ranking member), Jonathan Jackson (IL), Joaquin Castro (TX) and the squad stalwart Pramila Jayapal (WA). It’s easy to get their phone numbers and other contact information on the web—thus for example Senator Booker is at 202: 224-3224, Representative Castro at 202: 225-3236 and Jayapal at 202: 225-3106—and especially effective if you happen to come from their states or districts. Urge them to contact the State Department or better yet the US embassy in Kampala directly to register our concern for Bobi Wine’s welfare in particular and, for that matter, for that of all of his supporters in that benighted country as well.)

* * *

JANUARY SPECIAL !

We have postponed increasing our annual subscription rate from $60 to $70 until February 2 (Groundhog Day), having extended our special holiday half-price sale through then — only $30 for annual subscriptions, either for yourself (if you have yet to have joined us at the paid rate) or as a New Year’s gift to your farflung friends

Thank you for giving Wondercabinet some of your reading time! We welcome not only your public comments (button above), but also any feedback you may care to send us directly: weschlerswondercabinet@gmail.com.

Here’s a shortcut to the COMPLETE WONDERCABINET ARCHIVE.