#a couple of days ago one of my colleagues who is a historian was like RIGHT youre an archaeologist you like human remains i forgot that

[corpsoir]

a 2400 year long nap in a raised peat bog would fix me

#i wanna feel the sphagnum hug me and the juices work me to leather #just a really nice nap you know can you imagine being a bog body for a second #a couple of days ago one of my colleagues who is a historian was like RIGHT youre an archaeologist you like human remains i forgot that #one of the funniest things someone has said about me #corp.krax

[taanoir]

15 QUESTIONS FOR 15 MUTUALS

Thanks @viktorviolettaenterprises for tagging me!

Are you named after anyone?  I was named by my father's ex-wife who is a Buddhist after the Bodhisattva Tara (long story, there was lots of "free love" going around). I was supposed to bring my father back to Earth.

When was the last time you cried? A couple weeks ago, went to the Renaissance Faire with my kiddos. It was loud and crowded, and I'm weird.

Do you have kids? Yes, 25 and 22 plus my bonus kid 26. Also all my friends call me Mamas (I'm the mom friend that takes care of everyone).

Do you use sarcasm a lot? In person, yes.

 What sports do you play/have you played? I lack coordination so no sports. I do enjoy roller skating though.

What’s the first thing you notice about other people?  Their eyes, they are the window to the soul.

Eye colour? Grey blue/ blue grey.

Scary movies or happy endings?  Neither.

Any special talents? Not really, I just pay attention. Which makes me the magical finder of lost things, keeper of the group memory, Historian for 3 different groups and phone-a-friend for colleagues past and present.

Where were you born? California U.S.A

What are your hobbies?  Sims, painting, sculpting miniatures, crafts. I used to do embroidery but my hands are too bad for it these days.

Do you have any pets? Nope

How tall are you? 5'4" or 162.5 cm

Favourite subject in school? Art (photography, videography, Drama Tech, drawing, painting, metal working, wood working). Basically anything hands on creative that didn't involve writing or speaking in front of people.

Dream job? I never had one. I knew that I wanted my time to positively effect the world, even in a small way and I think it does. I work in Labor Compliance.

I'm not going to tag anyone, if you'd like to answer some questions, consider yourself tagged.

#non sims #tag game

[thexfridax]

Translated interview with Adèle Haenel on ‘The Bloom of Yesterday’ (2016)

Interviewer [I] Adèle Haenel [AH] Translator [T]

I: You won the César twice as Best Actress [T: Best actress in a Supporting Role for ‘Suzanne’ in 2014, Best Actress for ‘Love at First Fight’ in 2015] in France, and were invited multiple times to compete in Cannes. Why did you want to take part in a German film?

AH: I liked the screenplay. I really don’t care about the market mechanism. I acted on instinct for all my films, and here I was interested in the story, and the extreme [T: nature of the] character of course. I was also familiar with Lars Eidinger’s work [T: who played Totila/Toto Blumen]. He is famous in France, and contemporary German theatre is also recognised. I’ve just done a play in Paris by Marius von Mayenburg, who is the author-in-residence for the Schaubühne [T: a theatre] in Berlin, and all roles had the names of the real actors, Lars Eidinger was one of them of course.

I: And how was it working with Lars Eidinger on set?

AH: Lars made a lot of suggestions, that’s always refreshing. When he unexpectedly changes the rhythm while acting, when the scene’s tone shifts a little – I really liked this about him. And that he can be so funny. This helped me to feel at ease abroad [T: she uses ‘in der Fremde’ here, which is actually more poetic than abroad but is hard to translate]. I didn’t feel as free and confident of course as I would when shooting in French, especially for improvisations. And we often improvised when we felt that the scenes became too static. Lars was sort of the driving force, so that I could react without words and create something new. And I always felt that he never just acted for himself. The most interesting thing about acting is not to always reproduce your own life, with your own private feeling – but what’s happening if you meet someone special, a partner in crime, and through them [T: she uses the male pronoun him here] something unexpected happens, something new altogether. This is what I think is the most interesting part of our job, and Lars is doing this quite well.

I: How was it for you to work in a foreign language?

AH: It was important to me that I didn’t have to hide the difficulties in speaking. That doesn’t make any sense, it has no soul. To prep I watched a couple of films with French actors, who acted in German, and this was the biggest problem in my opinion, it had no soul. It was too neat, like German lessons. But it’s a way to protect yourself as actor. Chris Kraus [T: the director] understood that I didn’t want it that way, I needed uncertainty for the character. We went along with this uncertainty for the character. He wasn’t too fussed about certain words that were too difficult for me. That worked quite well.

I: How did you learn German so quickly for the film?

AH: I had a German teacher in France first, with whom I worked for a couple of months. Afterwards I went to Dresden, and spent two weeks there and passed the [T: language] test at Goethe-Institute. I went to Berlin for rehearsals and had to speak German all the time. I didn’t want a French assistant, or a dialogue coach, I really wanted to immerse myself in this country. That’s why I made a lot of progress. Voilá …

I: What’s the difference between working in Germany and in France?

AH: It was quite new for me here. I had never worked like this. Chris Kraus cleared the set at the beginning of each scene, and we rehearsed the whole scene like in theatre. Some scenes were quite long, i.e. we shot these scenes in bits and pieces over three days – and we rehearsed the full scene on the first day to figure out the rhythm and outline the characters’ psychology. That’s great. It’s great to just spend time on the acting. But of course, it is also quite a privilege.

Bonus

Lars Eidinger [LE] on working with Adèle Haenel

I: Your character experiences an extraordinary love story of great intensity against this background [T: of facing his family’s fascist past]. How was it to work with Adèle Haenel?

LE: With Adèle I always had the feeling that I found my female counterpart. We have similar ideas about acting. Adèle is not the person who plays against another colleague, or who is self-absorbed, on the contrary. Everything she does in the film works through me as partner, and vice versa, everything she takes, she takes out of me. That is absolutely satisfying. It doesn’t mean that it’s absolutely harmonious. There are of course difficulties and moments, where it takes long to find each other. But there was always the same ambition. And that’s why it was possible for us to go into emotionality together, you usually don’t experience it like this at work.

[…]

On the other hand, I must say: I thought that the screenplay was really funny. It was quite a good Litmus-Test, when the driver picked us up at the hotel in the morning, and Adèle and I rehearsed our scenes, and he then cracked up. You actually get a good idea how much comical potential those scenes have.

Jan Josef Liefers [JJL] on Zazie Lindeau and Adèle Haenel

I: How do you see your character of Balthasar Thomas?

JJL: First and foremost, Balthasar loves a madwoman. That speaks in his favour. […] Balthasar loves Zazie, he is also a bit obsessed with her, he is even separating from his wife, but he really has no clue – and that’s his limitation – what’s behind the things that she reveals of herself. She gives him her affection, and her body, and also two, three thoughts – but this is not what this woman is really about. And what this woman is about, what makes her complicated, what makes her so vulnerable, and also hurt, this is something that Balthasar never sees. All of this is only for Toto to see.

I: How was it working with Adèle Haenel?

JJL: Adèle is the kind of person, she just comes along – as Adèle and not as a film star that she is in France – and then goes on to Saxony, to stay with friends for a while and study German. She was really that unpretentious. And incredibly disciplined. Adèle spoke German so well during rehearsals that Chris even asked, it would be nice, if you could maybe say again: [T: Isn’t it? but with a French accent] – because she could almost say Isn’t it? without an accent. Adèle is the kind of person, who likes to laugh and approaches people, who as an actress is very much connected with her counterpart, and only retreats if something is not quite right for her. It’s a special kind of blend of intellect, talent and instinct.

Chris Kraus [CK] about Zazie (and Toto) and Adèle Haenel

I: You just mentioned the aspect of reconciliation in the film. Toto seems quite unforgiving.

CK: Yes, exactly, that’s why it’s so hard for him and the film’s overall goal [T: to attain reconciliation]. Toto doesn’t forgive himself at all. And to punish himself, he also doesn’t forgive other people anything. Punishment is always linked to morals. Of course, morals which failed.

I: What about the character of Zazie, who Toto falls in love with?

CK: Zazie was for me always as traumatised as Toto by her family’s past, but psychologically this manifested differently due to her temper. The destruction in both characters is comparable. That’s what brings them together. Their deficits and trauma. It unites them.

I: Why did you choose Adèle Haenel, who has become such a big star in France?

CK: This was originally the idea of the Casting Director Nina Haun, with whom I did almost all my films together. I met Adèle three years ago, when she was an up-and-coming young actress, not the French super star of today. We were really lucky that she wanted to be part of a German film for personal reasons, to explore her German-Austrian roots.

I: How is it that Adèle Haenel is almost fluent in German?

CK: It’s quite a miracle. Adèle hardly spoke any German apart from two, three words, when I first met her. But her character really had to speak this language quite well. We planned to give her a language coach, as we did with Tambet Tuisk in ‘Poll’. But Adèle adamantly refused [T: assistance], found it inauthentic and chased the guy off. She told me: ‘Give me three months, and I will speak like Goethe.’ And that’s how it was. She lived in Dresden for a couple of weeks, took a private tutor in Paris, and when she finally arrived in Berlin for the shoot, she was quite chatty and could also swear like the taxi drivers in Berlin. That was quite impressive.

—

Note: CK, LE and JJL also spoke about quite profound topics / themes that the film dealt with (like the Holocaust or the perpetrator-victim dynamic). However, I focused on translating the bits about working with AH here. If you can, please watch the film and let me know if you have further queries about the film / their interviews. I’m not a historian, but I do hope that history (and maybe this film) can teach a lesson or two about the persistent threat of fascism, and the difficulties of reconciliation in the face of past and present atrocities. And yes, this film is also funny, which is quite a feat in this context.

#The Bloom of Yesterday #Die Blumen von gestern #2016 #Chris Kraus #Adèle Haenel #Lars Eidinger #Jan-Josef Liefers #German film #My translation #Got a bit heavy at the end #Comedy and tragedy #Two sides of the same coin #No idea why they didn't ask Adèle #about the more serious side #of her character #There are a couple of BTS vids out there #I think these were put as text on the film's website #And someone corrected Adèle's German #How dare #long post

[padfootagain]

Welcome To Hell (III)

Part 3 : The Appointment

 I'm coming back with a new chapter for this series for Logan! I haven't updated it in ages, but I still like this AU.

I hope you all like this. It's the last fic for my 3.6k followers event!! I do hope you've enjoyed the event and the stories I have written for it.

Gif not mine

Word Count : 1951

There is an hour, right before dusk, when San Francisco and its bay are particularly quiet. People are still lost in a deep slumber, cars have quietened and no honks ring through the city. In the harbour and through the bay, the boats have stopped their engines, and even the sails are folded to rest. The sky, though still dark, is slowly becoming a little more luminous, the stars disappearing as the ink turns into greyish shades. This moment is undoubtedly the favourite for demons and angels to relax and meet up.

After all, they are similar creatures, who merely have lived different lives before their deaths, that drove them towards the side of light or darkness. But they are similar in more ways than they are different, and thus, they get along very well. After all, both demons and angels – or at least the agents that meet up at this hour of the night – are struggling with their jobs and to keep their status. Which means they are struggling not to be destroyed forever. Or well, that was the case for demons, angels merely got to no longer be able to visit Earth and instead of being burnt for eternity, got to drink pina colladas for the rest of time while watching constellations move through the nothingness of space. It was much less dramatic a fate indeed.

There is a bar on Broadway, in the Financial District, right at the corner leading to the bay and the embarcadero. It had once been made of wood, then rebuilt a couple of times when after being destroyed by earthquakes or simply to fit better in the district as the building materials changed. It was now made of red bricks. No one in town could actually decide on a date to fix the opening of the Grey Wings. Some historians place it right at the foundation of the city, others after the Second World War. If there is one thing they all agree on though is that it is a perfectly regular establishment that probably does not deserve its extreme longevity. But they come to this conclusion solely because they don't know about the second floor.

On the second floor of the Grey Wings, there is a second bar, that only angelic and demonic creatures have access to. The door to the staircase leading upstairs can only appear to creatures who have died, thus ensuring that only angels and demons have access, as all know that the zombies and other ridiculous creatures of the kind are not real.

Logan was one of the customers at the Grey Wings that night, like most nights since his assignment to San Francisco, actually. He was emptying his third glass of whiskey when a middle-aged woman came to sit next to him.

"Are my eyes deceiving me? Are you drinking alone?" Martha asked him with a playful smile, ordering a glass of whiskey as well to the impassable barman.

"So… you've learnt about my mission, huh?"

"Why do you say that?"

"I know I'm not your type."

Martha couldn't refrain a laugh.

"I know you're targeting Y/N Y/L/N, yes. But I can hardly see why though. She's one of the good ones. You don't stand a chance."

"That's what you think."

"Do you really have to do this one? I mean… there is no point in wasting both our time on people who are so fully on one side of the balance."

"I wouldn't be so confident if I were you. I'm going to make her turn."

"You will not, Logan. Don't be stupid."

"I'm going to destroy her world, and she'll be so desperate, she will be ready to do anything to get it back."

She rolled her eyes.

"Right, I guess we're doing this then."

"So… you'll be the one I have to fight against for the soul of a mortal…"

"You make it sound way more dramatic than it is. I didn't see your colleague though. Two against one is hardly a fair fight."

"Since when demons are supposed to play fair?"

"You have a point."

"Besides, Natasha is just a pun, I'm the one who will do most of the work."

"You know, one day, playing with the heart of people is going to get you into trouble."

"Only the good kind I hope."

"The kind that will break your heart too one day. One day, it'll backfire, and you'll be the heartbroken one."

"Don't you know, Martha? The heart is torn out of demons' chest when they're recruited. Hard to break something that isn't there."

She shook her head, taking her drink with her as she began to move away.

"We don't love with the pomp in our chest, Logan. We love with our brains, no matter what people say. And you still have a brain, don't you?"

Logan didn't reply. Out of habit, he ran his hand across his shirt, tracing the long scar that coloured his chest under the soft fabric. He barely noticed the absence of a beating in his ribcage these days. Only when he focused on what he should be feeling did he notice that there was nothing in his chest to feel. He drank up another gulp of whiskey.

Angels were ridiculous sometimes. Like all demons, Logan had lost his ability to love a long time ago, and the absence of a beating heart in his chest, well… it was a way for his boss to always remind him he was not human anymore.

 ---------------------------------------------------------

 You were getting ready for your appointment with Natasha about her wedding. Ahlem was rearranging the roses on one side of the shop, while you waited for the couple to arrive. You loved taking care of weddings. They oozed happiness and there was nothing quite like the thought of participating in making such a happy day for two people even better.

The sun was hot and bright on California that day, but a fresh breeze was climbing up the busy streets of San Francisco to bring a little bit of salty scent up from the sea. A truck selling ice-creams passed before your shop. You smiled, it was a good day.

Natasha finally arrived, opening the door with a smile, her eyes hidden behind her pair of Ray-bans. And you welcomed her with a warm smile…

… until you recognized the man behind her.

"Hello, Y/N."

You couldn't hide the shock on your face as you recognized Paul stepping in your shop.

It couldn't be happening… very obviously, you were dreaming, or had been drugged, or had hit your head at one point and were now hallucinating…

Your ex-fiancé could not be coming to your shop to prepare his wedding with another… that… that couldn't be happening to you…

"Paul told me you knew each other well, it was obvious we had to come to you for our wedding," Natasha grinned a toothy smile.

"Yeah… we… do know each other very well," you slowly nodded. "Did he tell you how we met?"

"Oh, you mean… that you're his ex? Of course, he did! But it doesn't matter. I know it's important for him to close this chapter of his life."

Paul and Natasha exchanged a smile that made you feel a little sick. It was too sweet to be true.

"She really understands how I feel. She understands me so well," he added, with a look towards you that seemed a little accusatory.

You chose to ignore his behaviour.

"Well, I hope I can help you with your happy project," you replied with a neutral tone.

You let them sit down around the counter and started to talk about their wedding.

Wedding… your ex… after two months of relationship…

The two of you had broken up three months before and he had spent a month begging you to give him a second chance and make your life hell when you said no. And then one day it had stopped. Now, you knew why he had suddenly disappeared.

"So… do you have any ideas already? Where are you getting married?"

"Oh, we would like some white flowers. Roses, and also lilies," Natasha answered. "Nothing too extraordinary, but elegant and simple, you see."

"Sure," you nodded, taking notes. "Anything else?"

"We're getting married in three weeks, is that a problem for you?"

"No, not at all."

Natasha continued to describe the flowers she wanted. And what started with a couple of simple flowers ended up with a complicated description of a lot of bouquets. You reckoned that it would require a lot of work from you. A few sleepless nights awaited ahead.

You thought all had been said, and Natasha stood up to leave, but Paul asked for a moment alone with you. And Natasha didn't protest at all. On the contrary, she thanked you again and left the shop to wait outside. Your colleague was out of the room as well, you weren't sure if she was in the backroom or outside though.

"I meant to tell you about it myself, that's why I came to the shop the other day," Paul explained.

"Ahlem told me you came."

"You didn't call me back or anything."

"I didn't think it would do us any good."

"We don't have to be enemies."

"We're not. Not to me. But after what happened when we broke up, I can't imagine we can be friends either."

Paul looked down at his feet, before watching you carefully again. He seemed to be looking for the right words for a moment, and when he spoke again, he wore a soft voice.

"No, no, I guess we can't be just friends."

"I'm glad you've found someone else though. She seems nice."

Before you could push him away, he was reaching for your hands.

"Y/N… It doesn't have to be that way. We could still change it all…"

You snatched your hands away, taking a step back and shaking your head.

"Paul, don't be stupid. Don't say things like that."

"Don't tell me you didn't feel anything when you saw me walking in with her. I saw the look on your face."

"I was surprised, that's all! And I'm pretty sure you can understand why! Wouldn't you be shocked if you learnt I was engaged just three months after we broke up?!"

A thought formed in your mind, and you narrowed your eyes at him.

"You didn't get engaged and come here just in attempt for us to get back together, did you? To make me jealous or something."

"Of course not!" Paul defended himself, but you were not fully convinced. "Natasha is amazing."

"Then, how could you offer me something like this?"

"She's not you."

"Why are you marrying her then?"

"Apparently, I can't have you."

You heaved a sigh.

"You can't say things like that, Paul. It doesn't work between us."

"Because you didn't want to make it work. But we can both make some changes and it'll work."

"I don't want to make changes in my life, Paul. I love it."

"We could try…"

"No, we can't. I've told you, many times already."

"So, you don't care about that fact that I'm getting married to someone else?"

You chose to not reply. It was useless. He wouldn't listen to you anyway.

"Paul, you should go now."

He slowly nodded, his jaw clenched, and something in his eyes told you that if he yielded for now, to him the conversation was far from over. He left anyway, and you saw him and Natasha walk away from the shop hand in hand. You let yourself fall back on your stool.

What the hell was happening in your life right now? 

******************************************************

Tag list :@ponycake27 @horsesreign @xinyourdreamsx @jbluevelvet @notkeppeki @daynigt-dreamer-stuff @fudgeflyss @stuckupstucky @snek-shit @suchatinyinfinity @i-padfootblack-things  @buckybsarmy @heyohheyitsgabi

@presstocontinue @ilmiopiccolounivers0 @madamrogers @drinix @sad-orange-thoughts @mxrihollxd

@geeksareunique @giggleberts @sad-orange-thoughts @benbarnes-world @ladyblablabla @madamrogers @drinix @joelynnp @mxrihollxnd @rockintensse @newtstarmander

@whovianayesha @raquelbc2003 @millionsleeplessnights

#Logan #logan delos #logan delos x reader #logan delos fanfiction #logan delos imagine #logan x reader #westworld #westworld imagine #imagine #fanfiction #fanfic #writing

[tevivinter]

marel + 17 for the oc codex prompt?

17. A description of your OC’s family by a future historian

———

I have seen many historians write about the Inquisitor, also known as Marel Lavellan. His former clan, however, is barely mentioned among my colleagues’ studies. I took the liberty to research about it in hopes of better understanding the past.

Ishan and Ineria Lavellan — those were the Inquisitor’s parents, a herbalist and a hunter respectively. Ineria was arguably the best hunter among the clan, but she did not have a good relationship with her son. She died when Marel was still a teenager. Letters indicate that they had an argument before she left on a hunt. Her dead body was found in the woods a couple weeks after.

Ishan was also an important figure in the clan. He spent years studying herbs and their numerous effects on people. The clan looked up to him not only for his abilities but also for his wisdom. Marel admired his father and they exchanged many letters after he left for the Conclave. Ishan lived until 9:41 Dragon, when an unfortunate tragedy led to the clan’s slaughter. 

Ghilana Lavellan was the only known survivor. She was also Marel’s oldest sister, a mage who trained to be the next clan’s Keeper. Ghilana escaped from Wycome and followed her brother’s whereabouts until she finally arrived at Skyhold. She offered her full support to the Inquisition within the span of three years. The Lavellan siblings shared different — if not opposite — worldviews that often led to arguments. Still, people knew better than trying to separate them. Their bond was undeniably strong, and Ghilana played a crucial role in all of this. Had she died at Wycome, I fear the Inquisitor would have lost his sanity long ago, and the world would be much different from what we see now.

I was not able to gather more information about his clan, since all possible evidences were destroyed during the battle. What I do know is that Marel moved to Kirkwall for a couple years. Then, he married Dorian Pavus, a Tevinter magister who also took part in the former  Inquisition. Most Tevinters didn’t approve of their relationship, after all, an elf marrying a human — especially a magister — was outright impossible until that day.

I am currently trying to discover more about their son, Edan. According to my sources, not only he studied magic in one of the most prestigious Imperial Circles, but he also received combat training from the Inquisitor himself. I do not know if he is still alive, but I know for sure that I would not like to anger him.

— From The Inquisition’s Past: A Study of Former Inquisitors by Sister Audere

#my writing #prompt fill #oc codex #marel lavellan #thanks for the ask!

[hissyreviews]

September Reads!

Sooooo, who’s 12 days late to show all the books I read last month?

This bitch!

So here’s how I decided to do this end of the month wrap ups. I’m going to add a read more, give the back of the book summary, my snap thoughts, and then a rating. That way, if you don’t care for long posts you don’t have to suffer.

You’re welcome.

The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

A young FBI trainee. An evil genius locked away for unspeakable crimes. A plunge into the darkest chambers of a psychopath’s mind- in the deadly search for a serial killer. . . .

Thoughts: MMMM yes, this is the good shit. Hell to the bells yes. This is my shit. One of my faves. Top ten books read ever.

Rating: 10/10 would recommend

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is a profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which a father and his son, “each the other’s world entire”, are sustained by love.

Thoughts: Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. This book is rough. This world is absolutely horrifying but the relationship that McCarthy crafts between the father and son is so emotional. I have heard that this is one of McCarthy’s least rough books to read in both emotional trauma and philosophical nihilism. (Also I think there was a Jesus allegory in the son. I don’t know why but it felt like he was the future religion. Look, I was too busy crying. I don’t think I could handle reading another McCarthy, alright?)

Rating: 4/10 I didn’t really like it but I think it’s like Pulp Fiction. Everyone should read it once.

The Beguiled by Thomas Cullinan

Wounded and near death, a young Union Army corporal is found in the woods of Virginia during the height of the Civil War and brought to the nearby Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. Almost immediately he sets about beguiling the three women and five teenage girls stranded in this outpost of Southern gentility, eliciting their love and fear, pity and infatuation, and pitting them against one another in a bid for his freedom. But as the women are revealed for who they really are, a sense of ominous foreboding closes in on the soldier, and the question becomes: Just who is the beguiled?

Thoughts: This is one of those books that I came into with high hopes. The story itself was good. I liked the overall story. I was not fond of the writing style. It’s the 1960′s trying to emulate the 1860′s. Overall, it went over like a lead balloon.

Rating: 5/10 Take it or leave it. You’ll either like it or you wont. (Check it out at the library.)

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

It’s the summer of 1854, and London is seized by a violent outbreak of cholera that no one knows how to stop. As the epidemic spreads, a maverick physicians and a local curate are spurred to action, working to solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time. Ina a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of disease, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a thrilling account of the most intense cholera outbreak to strike Victorian London and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.

Thoughts: I loved this. I know that history can be dry and dull but this had a dynamic way of speaking about the past. The writer is a journalist not a “true” historian so it makes for good reading. No shade, but many historians just write like dust. Sooo dry. Mmm, book good, much education. I feel illuminated.

Rating: 9/10 would recommend

Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, they rode in chauffeured cars and lived in mansions.Then one by one, the Osage began to be killed. Mollie Burkhart watched as her family became a prime target. Her relatives were shot and poisoned. Other Osage were also dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who investigated the crimes were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the case was taken up by the newly created FBI and its young, secretive director, J. Edgar Hoover. Struggling to crack the mystery, Hoover turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White, who put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent. They infiltrated this last remnant of the Wild West, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American History.

Thoughts: This is a book that will make your blood boil. It shows the blatant racism with an unapologetic stare. As an Irish Cherokee living in Oklahoma, I was biting my fist in rage throughout this entire book. These crimes, these absolutely disgusting crimes should be taught in history books. If you have no idea what this is about. Read the damn book. If you have an idea of the events. Read the damn book. If you live in Europe. Read the damn book. Events like this should never be forgotten. And God bless Mollie Burkhart. Read the book and you will feel that way too. Just read the book.

Rating: 10/10 read the damn book

The Circle by Dave Eggers

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime - even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.

Thoughts: Holy shit. This is why I don’t own a smart phone. Read this book and you will second glance at every piece of technology that you own. In thrillers I try to guess what is going to happen and I was wrong about the ending of this book. Which, to tell the truth, made me happy but I was paranoid about the ending. Like it feels like life is moving towards this kind of universe and I don’t like it. May I just say that I am Mercer.

Rating: 8/10 would recommend

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown - from innocent civilians to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster - and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.

Thoughts: This book  will take you through every possible emotion known to man kind. Alright. Do not read this if you are in an emotionally compromised state. It will make it worse. That said, I truly believe that this is a pivotal piece to understand the Chernobyl disaster from the ground up instead of the top down view that much of the western world understands. Also, with that Chernobyl series this seems an apropos time to read this.

Rating: 9/10 Everyone should read this once.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Every Tuesday mornign for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

Thoughts: You know a book that makes you frustrated with the author when they did something you know that they would regret in the past? I felt that. I won’t spoil it but I did say on multiple occasions “You asked for this!” This book is living proof of the old adage “Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.” Yeah, that’s what I felt and pity. There was some pity going on.

Rating: 8/10 Read it if you are interested in Middle Eastern history or women’s studies. I don’t think it’s everyone’s cup of tea.

The Perfect Girlfriend by Karen Hamilton

Juliette loves Nate. She will follow him anywhere. She’s even become a flight attendant for his airline so she can keep a closer eye on him. They are meant to be. The fact that Nate broke up with her six months ago means nothing. Because Juliette has a plan to win him back. She is the perfect girlfriend. And she’ll make sure no one stops her from getting exactly what she wants. True love hurts, but Juliette knows it’s worth all the pain. . .

Thoughts: This book is an easy read. It’s a day and a half for someone who reads a lot. Easy to get into, easy to understand, but it doesn’t act like it thinks you’re stupid. Creepy in the same way You was creepy. If you liked You you will like this book. If stalkers aren’t your thing avoid this one. I will say that I found the ending underwhelming. It felt like the author was tired of writing and just wanted to end the freaking book. Other than that, it was fine.

Rating: 6/10 Like You? Read this one.

The Trial of Lizzie Borden by Cara Robertson

When Andy and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August of 1892, the arrest of the couple’s daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and her trial into a spectacle unparalleled in American history. Reporter flocked to the scene. Well-known columnists took up conspicuous seats in the courtroom. The defendant was relentlessly scrutinized for signs of guilt or innocence. Everyone - rich and poor, suffragists and social conservatives, legal scholars and laypeople - had an opinion about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence. The popular fascination with the Borden murders and its central, enigmatic character has endured for more than a hundred years, but the legend often outstrips the story. Based on transcripts of the Borden legal proceedings, contemporary newspaper articles, previously withheld lawyer’s journals, unpublished local reports, and recently unearthed letters from Lizzie herself, The Trial of Lizzie Borden is a definitive account fo the Borden murder case and offers a window into America in the Gilded Age, showcasing its most deeply held convictions and its most troubling social anxieties.

Thoughts: I have always been fascinated with this case. It is one of the first nationally publicized cases and as such everyone knew. Can you imagine never being able to go anywhere without being recognized as the one woman who got away with murder? In America we still sing “Lizzie Borden took an axe, gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, gave her father forty-one.” No one alive in America doesn’t know who Lizzie Borden is. If you like true crime and history you will like this. I think you probably would even if you aren’t a connoisseur of those genres. P.S. I still think Lizzie did it.

Rating: 9/10 would recommend

Jane Austen, the Secret Radical by Helena Kelly

An illuminating reassessment of the life and work of Jane Austen that makes clear how Austen has been misread for the past two centuries and how she intended her books to be read. In Jane Austen, the Secret Radical, Helena Kelly, dazzling Jane Austen authority, looks a the writer and her work in the context of Austen’s own time to reveal this popular, beloved artist as daring, even subversive in reaction to her roiling world and to show, novel by novel, how Austen imbued her books with radical, sometimes revolutionary ideas - on slavery, poverty, feminism and marriage as trapping women, on the Church, and evolution. We see that Austen was writing in a time when revolution was in the air (she was born the year before the American Revolution; the French Revolution began when she was thirteen). England had become a totalitarian state; Britain was at war with France. Habeas corpus had been suspended; treason, redefined, was no longer limited to actively conspiring to overthrow and to kill. It now included thinking, writing, printing, and reading (Tom Paine was convicted of seditious libel in 1792 for ideas considered dangerous to the state), the intention being to pressure writers and publishers to police themselves; those who criticized the government or who turned away from the Church of England were seen as betraying their country in its hour of need. In this revelatory, brilliant book, Kelly discusses each of Austen’s novels in the order in which they were written. Whether writing about the fundamental unfairness of primogeniture in Sense and Sensibility (influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women) or about property and inheritance, war, revolution, and counterrevolution in Pride and Prejudice (Kelly describes the novel as a revolutionary fairy tale written in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France) or about Mansfield Park, with its issues of slavery and the hypocrisy of the Church of England, we see Austen not as someone creating a procession of undifferentiated romances but as someone whose novels reflect back to her readers the world as it is - and was then - complicated, messy, and filled with error and injustice. We see a writer who understood that the novel - seen as mindless “trash” - could be a great art form and who, perhaps more than any other writer up to that time, imbued it with its particular greatness. And finally we see Austen - the writer; the artist; the serious, ambitious, clear-sighted woman “of information” - fully aware of what was going on in the world around her, clear about what she thought of it, and clear that she set out to write about it and to quietly, artfully make her ideas known.

Thoughts: Damn that synopsis. Advice for publishers: create an engaging synopsis in one to three paragraphs. That being said this was a fascinating read. I love Austen so I enjoyed having more context to the stories. Great for women’s studies, english literature and a perspective of slavery rarely mentioned (at least in my readings).

Rating: 9/10 will enjoy if you enjoy Austen

#books #literature #end of the month #jane austen #lizzie borden #chernobyl #cormac mccarthy #thomas harris #clarice starling #hannibal lecter

[salixj]

UPDATED: An eight-year-old Swedish-American girl came across an exciting find swimming at her local lake, when she pulled an ancient sword from its depths.

"It's not every day that one steps on a sword in the lake!" Mikael Nordström from Jönköpings Läns Museum said when explaining the significance of the find.

But that's exactly what happened to Saga Vanecek, who found the relic at the Vidöstern lake in Tånnö, Småland earlier this summer.

"I was outside in the water, throwing sticks and stones and stuff to see how far they skip, and then I found some kind of stick," Saga told The Local.

"I picked it up and was going to drop it back in the water, but it had a handle, and I saw that it was a little bit pointy at the end and all rusty. I held it up in the air and I said 'Daddy, I found a sword!' When he saw that it bent and was rusty, he came running up and took it," she continued.

The water at the lake by the family's summer house was low this year due to drought, which may have been part of the reason Saga was able to reach the sword. Because of this, the family was putting a buoy out in the lake to warn other boats of an underwater slab of concrete which was dangerous in the low water levels.

"I asked Saga to bring the buoy, but she was taking her time like a kid does, playing in the water," her father, Andy Vanecek, recalled. "I was getting impatient because the World Cup game was about to start!"

At first he thought his daughter had found a stick or a branch, but realized from the way it bent that it could be a sword -- although even then, he thought it could be a modern toy. The family asked their neighbours and one of Vanecek's colleagues, who has an interest in history and archaeology, and they said the relic was likely authentic and should be reported to authorities, which the Vaneceks did.

It was initially reported that the sword was at least 1,000 years old, but the museum later contacted The Local to clarify that they believe it may be even older, estimated to date back to the 5th or 6th century AD, pre-Viking Age. The find has prompted huge interest from archaeologists and historians.

"It's about 85 centimentres long, and there is also preserved wood and metal around it," explained Mikael Nordström from the museum. "We are very keen to see the conservation staff do their work and see more of the details of the sword."

Anyone hoping to see the sword will have to wait at least a year, Nordström told The Local, explaining: "The conservation process takes quite a long time because it's a complicated environment with wood and leather, so they have several steps to make sure it's preserved for the future."

"Why it has come to be there, we don't know," he said. "When we searched a couple of weeks ago, we found another prehistoric object; a brooch from around the same period as the sword, so that means – we don't know yet – but perhaps it's a place of sacrifice. At first we thought it could be graves situated nearby the lake, but we don't think that any more."

The sword has prompted teams including museum staff to carry out further searches in the area, though none have resulted in such an important find. The first led to the discovery of the brooch but the oldest object found in the second search, on Wednesday, was a coin from the 18th century.

"We asked Saga [not to tell anyone about the sword] because we were afraid that if this find would go public too soon, there would be a lot of people there, perhaps destroying our possibility to find things later," he added.

Saga confirmed to The Local that the only person she told was her best friend, who she really trusts. Thursday was the first day she could reveal her story to her classmates, and her teacher threw a party to celebrate, handing out ice creams and showing Saga's TV and radio interviews to the class.

"They thought that it was very fun and interesting to know about my story," said Saga.

"I think maybe I found it harder to keep secret than she did," her father added. "It's cool that it will be in a museum and it might even say 'Saga's sword' and it might be there for thousands of years. We didn't put it on Facebook or anything until yesterday, and now it's really blowing up!"

He said that several friends had joked that the discovery made Saga the new Queen of Sweden, a conclusion also drawn by many of The Local's readers.

However, the eight-year-old's experience hasn't made her want to pursue a career in archaeology, saying she currently hopes to be a doctor, vet, or an actress in Paris, although she does enjoy learning about "old stuff".

She moved to Småland only last year, having grown up in Minneapolis in her father's home state of Minnesota, USA. The family moved back to Sweden in 2017 to be closer to the maternal side of Saga's family.

"The cool thing is that I'm a huge Minnesota Vikings fan, and this looks just like a Viking sword!" said Vanecek.

As for whether Saga will be involved in future projects or receive a reward for her discovery, the case has now been handed over to the National Archives of Sweden, who will be responsible for making the decision.

#Sweden #archaeology

[like-bunnies]

Winter Dreams Pt. II ‘Pudding’ -- an Ichabbie Holidays AU Fic

Abbie Mills is closing up her bakery on Christmas Eve when a stranger comes in desperately looking for something. What will the two of them manage to find together? 

An Ichabbie AU that can be read as the next part of Winter Dreams or can be all on its own. One of these years, I will get a Christmas story done by Christmas. Oh, who am I kidding? And this is like Hallmark Channel Christmas Movie silly fluff. But with a little smut added in. And AUs really aren’t something I’m very good at but I’m trying! 

Abbie was ready for the holidays to be over. It had been exceptionally busy in her quaint bakeshop and there was an endless stream of people picking up their orders for Christmas Eve. Her sister, Jenny, was helping by getting all the internet orders shipped on time and even Jenny’s boyfriend, Joe, pitched in early mornings before his shift at the ER.

Still, she was glad that they would be closing soon and tomorrow was Christmas so she could sleep in for the first time in a very long time. The last customer had shuffled out with their goodies and Jenny was about to turn the sign on the door over to “Closed” when a tall, bearded man came rushing in from the snow.

“There’s not much left,” Jenny said as he rushed by her and to the counter, looking pleadingly at Abbie.

“I desperately need a Christmas pudding,” he said and Abbie’s ears perked up at both his accent and his weird request.

“I… sorry… a what?” Abbie stammered, still staring at him as he shook the snowflakes out of his hair. It was longer than she normally liked on guys but thankfully not long enough to pull it into a man bun. She had seen enough of those with the college in the next town. This man’s hair had the cutest curls near his neck and… he did have a lovely neck. And face. And eyes. What was it he wanted again?

“A Christmas pudding. I have tried and tried to get one right and they have all failed. I’m hosting the history department’s ‘holiday away from home’ dinner tomorrow for all my colleagues who are, well, away from home, and I promised there would be a pudding,” the man said, his hands flying around expressively as he spoke.

“I don’t have any puddings. I do have some pies left. Oh, here… these are also good,” Abbie said, offering him something from a bag.

“I can’t serve my guests something from a bag,” he said as he reached in and popped one in his mouth. “Oh, these are good.”

“Listen… Doctor… what’s your name?” Abbie asked.

“How did you know I’m a doctor?” he asked, licking the cinnamon sugar off of his fingertips.

“History department. Colleagues. Away from home so I’m guessing you’re at the university as a teacher? It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to work that one out,”Abbie said as he grabbed another donut hole and shoved it in his mouth.

“Besides, she used to be a police officer. Was going to be a detective one day had she not been injured,” Jenny said as she continued to clean up the small store, wiping down the few tables they had so customers could enjoy their pastry in the morning. The front door was now locked, the keys dangling from the lock so they’d be able to let this last minute customer out when he was ready to go.

“Ah. I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sure that was a great loss to the local police force, And it’s Crane. Doctor Crane. Or professor if you like. I’m actually here to teach about the American Revolution from the British perspective and to work on my book,” Crane said.

“Isn’t the British perspective that we kicked your ass?” Jenny asked. Abbie rolled her eyes at her sister but Jenny always liked a good argument.

“Only because you had the French,” he said, pointing a finger in Jenny’s direction.

“You had the Hessians. You had the best navy in the world at the time. You had an organized army with excellent leadership and still you lost,” Jenny continued on in a sing-song fashion.

“I see you’ve taken my class,” he said with a slight, wry smile.

“Jenny, could you go in back and make sure I didn’t forget anyone’s order? I can drop anything off on the way home. Now, Doctor Crane, would you like a pie or what?” Abbie interrupted, hoping to end this thing between the professor and her sister. Jenny went off to the back, whistling Yankee Doodle. “I apologize for my sister.”

“No, she does have a point, which is actually why I’m at the university here. I am researching how the Americans did overcome the odds and win. This region is filled with so much history and I’m enjoying all of it immensely. I just can’t find a bakery that has a Christmas pudding!” he said.

Abbie bit her lip and thought for a minute. If he wasn’t so cute, she would have sent him back out into the snow a long time ago but there he was in that pretty navy coat that made his blue eyes even more blue and she felt for him. Felt a lot of things for him, actually. It had to be the accent.

Jenny called out from the back that there was nothing there and she was going to go make a quick trip to the grocery store before the market closed early. Abbie mumbled that she would see her later for Christmas Eve dinner and listened as Jenny locked the back door. Both doors were now locked and she was all alone with Doctor Crane.

“What’s your first name?” she asked. “I’m Abbie, by the way.”

“I guessed that one,” he said, arching an eyebrow up at her. She looked at him puzzled until she remembered she had her name on the front of the bakery. On her apron. On her shirt. On her name tag. She never in her life thought she’d own a bakery. She wasn’t even that great at it at first but she learned and came to love the whole thing, accepting help wherever it came from.

“Yes… Abbie Mills. Formerly Lieutenant Abbie Mills. Now baker Mills. Who knows what’s next. Maybe candlestick maker,” she said, laughing nervously. He had put his hands on the counter and was leaning in her direction.

“Oh, Lieutenant. I like the sound of that,” he said, the timbre of his voice dropping even lower. “And my name is Ichabod.”

She couldn’t help herself. She let out something more than a nervous chuckle this time.

“Ichabod?”

“You can call me Crane if you’d prefer,” he said. “Ichabod was an old family name. I had some relative who came to America centuries ago with the same name. I should look up where he’s buried whilst I’m here.”

They seemed to be getting further and further away from the topic of baked goods. Abbie closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to focus. When she opened her eyes, he was still staring at her.

“Okay, Crane. How about we look up your pudding on the internet and see what we can do,” Abbie said. He looked incredibly relieved to have help. She, on the other hand, was wondering what the hell she was getting herself into.

*^*^*^*^*^^*^*^*^*^*^*^

“Well, I think we’re pretty much screwed when it comes to a Christmas pudding,” Abbie said as she scrolled through recipe after recipe. “You needed to start two weeks ago at the very least for something authentic.”

“I see that now,” Crane said as he stared over her shoulder. They were both in her tiny office near the back of the store, staring at her monitor. She normally just handled orders and inventory in here but there was a handful of personal photos around. She couldn’t help but notice him look at a few of them, especially the one of her and some of her former police colleagues. Many had died in that raid a couple of years ago. She was thankful she had lived. She missed Andy and Luke a lot but there was no changing the past.

“This one says you need to start it at the end of November,” Abbie said, trying to draw his attention back to the matter at hand.

“Surely there must be a recipe somewhere for bumbling professors who forget to do this ahead of time and can’t even figure out how to work their oven?” he asked. He placed his hand over hers on the mouse, moving the cursor so he could click back and try a different search on Google. He leaned over her and typed in instant Christmas pudding.

“How do you plan on hosting an entire dinner if you can’t work the oven?” Abbie asked, turning in her seat to look at him.

“Frozen lasagna in a pan?” he said with a laugh. Her eyes opened in shock. “I’m teasing, Lieutenant. I can work the oven. I’m an excellent cook. I just can’t get the hang of this damnable pudding. Sadly, baking is my downfall.”

She looked back at one of the recipes he had found. It was much faster than the ones they had been looking at and she did have most of the ingredients for it. She might need to make a quick trip to the market or call Jenny while she was still there. She hit print, wiggled out from under his arms, grabbed the copy of the recipe and went into her bakery with him following behind.

“I’ll make a deal with you, Doctor Crane. I will make this and bring it to you tomorrow if I can taste just how good of a cook you really are,” Abbie said. She felt her cheeks grow warmer as she realized she just invited herself to this man’s Christmas dinner. Jenny and Joe usually did their own thing on Christmas day while she spent the day in peaceful slumber but this would be nice. At least it would be if he said yes.

He didn’t say anything right away. She was worried she had read something wrong. Maybe he was married and his wife was back home in England. Maybe he had a whole family.

“You want to spend the day with a gathering of boring historians?” he asked incredulously. She found it strange that he didn’t seem to realize exactly how cute he was. That he seemed to think he didn’t have any game.

“No, I want to spend the day with you,” Abbie said, her cheeks on fire now.

“I’d like nothing more,” he said, looking down like he was shy, his eyelashes fluttering away, before he looked up at her and smiled. She smiled right back and hoped like hell she could actually figure out how to make a pudding in one night.

*^*^*^*^*^^*^*^*^*^*^*^

Abbie had a hard time finding the right address in the blowing snow but eventually she made it, Christmas pudding in hand along with as many other of her baked goods as she could carry. Dinner with Jenny and Joe the night before had been wonderful and she crawled into her bed soon after the gifts were exchanged and they left for the evening. Up early, she was at her bakery trying her best to make this pudding seem authentic. There was no way she could make up for the time it really needed, but she thought she did a good job. If the guests didn’t like that, they could always fill up on the pies.

She used the heavy door knocker and waited with all her parcels for Doctor Crane to open the door. His eyes lit up when he saw that it was her and he took as many of the packages from her as he could.

“Lieutenant! I’m so happy you’re here! I was worried that the weather would prevent you from traveling to my home…as it has some of my other guests. Two couples have canceled out so far,” he said as he started toward the kitchen.

“You can call me Abbie… where would you like for me to leave my boots?” Abbie asked, not wanting to track snow through the house. Both had their arms filled with desserts and Crane motioned for her to follow him. Abbie did as he led her down a narrow hall to a warm and cozy kitchen. Everything smelled delicious and she could see that he had been chopping vegetables when she had interrupted him with her knock at the door. “You really can cook.”

“As I said, cooking I can do. Baking just goes wrong. All those precise measurements makes it like a science experiment. I prefer the magic of cooking instead. A little bit of this. A little bit of that,” Crane said, taking more baked goods from her arms and stacking them up on one of his granite counter tops. Abbie slipped off her scarf and coat and pulled her snow boots off, leaving her in just her stocking feet. She had her favorite lace-up boots in the large tote she had brought with her but Crane had whisked her wet winter gear off to where it could dry by the fire and was already back, asking her questions about what she had brought with. And if she had brought more donut holes.

“Yes, I did and some other donuts you might enjoy. You can save them for tomorrow, if you’d like. They would go great with a cappuccino,” she said, noticing the gourmet coffee maker he had tucked beside the toaster. “I thought you said you were only here for a short time.”

He followed her gaze and smiled. “Doesn’t matter how short the time might be, I can’t go without my coffee,” he said, going back to his chopping. “So, Lieutenant…”

“Abbie.”

“So, Abbie, how did you end up with a bakery?” he asked. Abbie fell silent as she collected her thoughts. She watched Cranes hands and his fingers as he deftly chopped vegetables, adding them to a stew that already smelled delicious. He was smartly dressed in a pair of dark gray flannel trousers and the most beautiful blue cable knit sweater she had ever seen on a man. She wanted to touch it to see if it was as soft as it looked. Instead, she focused on what he had asked.

“I…uh… after I got shot and I couldn’t come back to work, or at least not the way I wanted to, I thought it would be nice to have a place like that. It was supposed to just be a coffee shop but there are too many of those in town already,” she said.

“Starbucks on every block, cutting out any local coffee houses with precision,” Crane said, his kitchen knife stabbing into the air as if to illustrate his point.

“So I opened the bakery that would also serve coffee. Honestly, after the incident… after I lost a few very good friends in that incident…”

“I sense one of them might have been more than good friends?” he asked, looking at her as if he was trying to suss out everything there was to know about her.

“Mind your business, professor. Anyway, after that, I thought it would be a great place where the local LEOs could come in the morning. I’d serve them some warm apple pie if their shift was ending or a blueberry muffin and a cup of coffee if their shift was just starting. It was a way to stay connected, you know,” Abbie said, remembering how desperately she needed to keep close with the people she relied on for so long. “I wasn’t the best baker at first but I was determined. I learned from some of the best and now my little shop is doing rather well, and my friends are all still there bright and early in the morning. Good thing I love mornings, right?”

He had stopped chopping and was staring at her intently, taking in every word she said. Just looking in his eyes sent a wave of heat through her and she crossed her arms, trying to protect herself from this feeling. It had been a long time since Luke had died. And then Corbin was killed a year later. She had shut herself off from most everyone. She had that one fling with that visiting FBI agent but she even kept him distant. But this… was charged with some sort of electricity she hadn’t felt with anyone in so long.

“That’s really incredible,” he said, still focused only on her.

“It’s just a bakery. Look at you, Doctor Crane. Where did you go to school anyway? How did you get involved with American history when you have ages of history of your own?” Abbie asked, trying to deflect the attention away from herself.

“I grew up in London, went to Oxford… Merton College. I ended up in America when a friend talked me into doing further studies here, I was married for a very short while but she then ran off with that same so-called friend. I got my doctorate from Penn, which is where I discovered the answer to the other part of your question. The history of our two countries is entwined and I found it fascinating. Now I’m doing more research into the British officers who turned. What would drive them to fight for a land that was not their home? And this is a great area in which to do so,” Crane said.

He was starting to clean up the scraps of vegetables when his cellphone rang. He wiped his hands off on a dishtowel and answered the call. Abbie listened as he went through a series of “uh huhs” followed by a “that’s too bad.”

“Now the Andrews can’t make it. They don’t want to venture out into what might become a blizzard. They are new here, from somewhere in Georgia, so that’s understandable but still… I hope the others can make it,” Crane said.

“Do you miss England? London?” Abbie asked. He paused from his mixing and stirring and thought about it for a beat.

“Have you ever been there?” he asked instead of answering.

“No. I made it to Paris after I started the bakery but didn’t make it to London,” she answered.

“It was my home. Yes, I miss it but home isn’t necessarily always a place. It’s the people. I try to find the right people wherever I go. My ex-wife, Kat, didn’t like that. She wanted to settle down in one place and with Abe, she could. I wanted to keep moving. To keep learning. To keep meeting people,” he said. He looked at her and smiled brightly. “People like you. I would have never met you had I stayed in England.”

“You never know. Fate might have stepped in. I might have been there on vacation and bumped into you in a coffee shop,” Abbie said.

“Our fates are entwined, just like our nations?” he asked.

“Maybe,” she said, feeling her cheeks flush again from the way he was looking at her. “Maybe.”

*^*^*^*^*^^*^*^*^*^*^*^

Abbie was putting the finishing touches on the dining room table, enjoying how nicely the place was decorated. It wasn’t over the top for Christmas but he had a fresh tree and candles everywhere and a nice table setting. Crane even had Christmas crackers at every place setting, waiting to be popped open by cheerful guests.

She stopped moving when she heard Crane’s phone ring again. Another guest was canceling because of the snow. She felt a bad for him because of all the work he had put into preparing this meal but then again, she wouldn’t mind eating with him… alone. She returned to the kitchen to find him opening a bottle of wine. He poured himself some and took a sip before pouring her a glass, too. It was a fantastic red wine and now she was also glad they didn’t have to share that bottle with as many people.

“That was Trevor, one of the doctoral candidates I’m helping out. He said the snow on his side of town is getting too deep for him to venture out on foot and he doesn’t want to pay for an Uber. Too be honest, I think Trevor would rather spend his day with his new X-Box but what do I know?” he asked with a disappointed shrug “I haven’t even taken my new one out of the box yet. Trevor is the lucky one.”

“So, who is left?”Abbie asked. She would have to go clear another place setting, which only left four.

“Doctor Hashemi and her husband. That’s it. I didn’t expect so much snow on Christmas. Everyone kept saying they never get a white Christmas. They’re getting one this year!” he said, taking another sip of wine and looking out the window. “I’m going to have to go shovel the path soon. If you want to get home before the roads get too treacherous, you can. I don’t want you to feel that you have to stay here,” he said, pouting a little as he considered the snow.

“No, I’m good. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve driven in worse than this. Besides, I can help you shovel the sidewalk,” she said, standing beside him as they looked out of the kitchen window over the sink. His narrow backyard was pristine white now and although she wasn’t fond of shoveling, it did look like it would be fun to play in. If that involved playing with him.

“They are going to miss out on the best pudding ever,” Crane said with a smile.

“How did you end up responsible for this Christmas dinner?” Abbie asked.

“I do like to cook. I thought it would be nice to get together with friends and colleagues and enjoy a nice meal,” he said. The phone rang again and he looked at it and sighed heavily. He turned away from the window and took the call. When he hung up, he looked at her and shook his head. “Samira and Bahram will not be able to make it, either.”

“You wanted dinner with your friends but now instead, you’re stuck with a stranger,” Abbie said, honestly feeling sorry for him.

“If we do get snowed in here, at least we will have plenty of food,” he said, looking around the kitchen at everything. He didn’t say anything else for a moment before he turned to her. “And I don’t consider spending time with you as 'stuck’ and I don’t feel like you’re a stranger at all. I feel like I’ve known you longer than just one day. It’s like we’ve been friends forever.”

She laughed nervously because she had been feeling the same way.

“At least I don’t have to worry about serving that rushed Christmas pudding to anyone. Unless you plan on eating it?” she asked.

“God, no. I never liked them in the first place but I had promised the Andrews. We can just stick to the donut holes,” he said and they both laughed.

*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^

He had put on a suit coat over his button-down shirt and his gorgeous sweater and Abbie finally put on her shoes, not wanting to dine without them on while he was trying his best to look like the perfect holiday host. They had agreed that shoveling the walk could wait until after dinner and he poured her more wine before they put the last side dish on the table. He pulled out her chair for her and helped her take her seat before tucking himself in.

“This is all good. Next Christmas, I’m going to make you some of my mama’s mac and cheese, though. That’s the only thing missing,” Abbie said.

“Next Christmas?” he asked, his one eyebrow arching up on his forehead.

“I’ll still be here. How about you?” she asked, taking another serving of the stew she had found him preparing when she arrived.

“I don’t know, to be honest. I’d have to have a pretty good reason to stay,” he said, tilting his head slightly, asking so many questions without using a single word.

“So, do you believe in fate?” Abbie asked. It was a pretty serious question for holiday dinner conversation but she wanted to know everything he felt and believed.

“Do you mean that two people are supposed to meet? Across time and space and all that? Over and over?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. Does this mean that I keep meeting my ex-wife first? Because to be honest with you, getting my heart broken like that over and over and over would become rather exhausting. And annoying,” he said and they both laughed.  

“So she wasn’t your soulmate but she taught you a lot, I’m sure. All part of the path to the right thing?” Abbie asked.

“I did learn a lot about who to trust and that sometimes you just have to do your thing first before you can bring someone else into your life. That is one thing she did teach me,” he said with a shrug. “Thankfully we didn’t have children together. That would have been a disaster!”

They both fell silent. She watched him as the flickering candles sent shadows over his face. He was watching her right back, nervously smoothing out his beard before focusing back on the dinner at hand.

“Dessert?” she asked, breaking the tension filling the air.

“Capital idea! And I’ll make coffee!”

*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^

With their stomachs full, the dishes done, and fueled up on coffee, they bundled up in protective gear and headed outside during a break in the snow to shovel the walk. He only had one snow shovel so they took turns while one of his neighbors up the street used his noisy snowblower. Finally, he finished and went inside, leaving the two of them alone in the eerie stillness. There was the sound of the shovel scraping and him asking her questions about her life and her taking the shovel from him and asking him more questions about his.

Just when they had finished, the snow starting drifting down again and Abbie sighed. The good thing about her apartment was someone else did this! Crane put the shovel near the front door and returned to where Abbie was standing, catching snowflakes on her tongue.

“You are so beautiful,” he said, taking her gloved hand in his. “I have not even known you for an entire day and I’m smitten, Abbie. If this was fate, then yes I believe in it. Absolutely. Completely.”

Abbie’s heart starting beating hard in her chest when he said those words and she didn’t know what to say. She felt the same way about him but… it was so fast. Is this how it worked? You met the one and it was like throwing a switch?

Instead of saying anything, she led him toward the part of the yard where the snow wasn’t too deep but was packed just enough and pulled him down into it, urging him to make a snow angel. He complained about the wet and the cold only briefly before he joined in. As her arms were forming the angel wings, he propped himself up beside her to look at her.

“What?” she asked, crossing her arms over here.

“You truly are heaven sent,” he said, pulling her scarf away from her face just enough so he could lean in to kiss her. It was slow and soft at first, like the snow drifting around them. Slowly. Softly. The snow was falling and Abbie was falling, too. Her lips explored his and she wanted to feel more. To explore every bit of him. She touched his face but her damn gloves were in the way. He pulled away, his eyes searching hers. She shivered from the cold and from the way his eyes were devouring her.

“Should we go in and warm up?” Abbie asked.

“I have some wonderful ideas on how we can do that,” he said, his voice dropping. She scrunched up her nose and giggled at him. “No! I meant we could sit by the fire and have a drink… I didn’t mean to sound so forward! Abbie, I’m sorry!”

“I wasn’t laughing about you being so forward. I was laughing because I had plenty of ideas of my own. But starting with a drink by the fire would be good,”she said. He stood up, put his hand out to assist her to her feet, and wrapped an arm around her shoulder as they walked to the door.

“What ideas do you have?” he asked.

“I’ll just have to show you.”

*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^

She swallowed the Scotch and felt it warm her all the way down. After getting out of her snow boots and her coat again, she settled down on his couch while he tuned in to a satellite radio channel playing jazzy Christmas music. The old house had several fireplaces in different rooms and the one in the living room was now stoked to a roar.

Abbie made herself at home and covered up with a soft and worn plaid quilt that had been over the back of the couch. Crane sat beside her and took a long sip from his glass.

“I have to tell you… I don’t do this very often. I rarely have the bakers I meet on Christmas Eve spend the next day at my house helping shovel snow and set the table,” he said.

“I rarely go home with my customers,” she said. “Only the special ones who are desperate for a Christmas pudding.”

“Yes, I only invite over the bakers with the best donut holes,” he joked. They both fell silent for a quiet, comfortable minute. “I want to see you again. I don’t want to do anything that would make you not want to come back.”

“You haven’t done anything yet.”

“I want to.”

“I want you to.”

He set his glass aside and pulled her to him. His mouth was warm and tasted of Scotch. The blue sweater he had on was as soft as she imagined it. Didn’t matter. She wanted it off of him. Wanted everything off of him. Wanted him on the floor in front of the fire. Wanted him.

A moan escaped his throat as her tongue delved past his lips, meeting his. Heat burned through her, settling between her thighs and she thought about how crazy this all was but she certainly wasn’t going to stop. She pulled away from his kiss and stood up, putting the quilt over her shoulder and reaching out to him. He grabbed her hands and she knew he’d follow her anywhere right now. She put the quilt down in front of the fire and they both sank down to their knees on it. The twinkling lights from the Christmas tree danced across their skin and she pulled his sweater off over his head. He unbuttoned his shirt and shed it quickly. Abbie looked at his chest, gasping when she saw a scar across his heart.

“What happened?” she asked, her fingers running across it.

“It’s silly, really. I was doing some research in grad school at a battlefield reenactment and I got in the way of something I shouldn’t have. Thankfully, I had modern medical care and an ambulance that arrived in a matter of minutes,” he said. She leaned in to kiss the scar, running her lips across it, her tongue teasingly flicking out at his nipple. He moaned and leaned back away from her, sitting on his heels.

“I have scars, too,” she said.

“I’d like to see them,” he said and she pulled off her wool sweater, revealing her silky black bra.

“Here,” she said, pointing to a bullet wound on her abdomen. Abbie then unfastened her trousers and wiggled out of them, showing him the wound on her thigh that ended her career. “And here.”

Now his fingers explored her flesh, feeling where she had to be put back together with titanium and screws and stitches.

“Does it still hurt?” he asked.

“Not as much as it used to. Sometimes when it’s cold and I have to shovel snow for some guy I barely know…” she teased and he rolled his eyes.

He motioned for her to lie down and she did, shivering as he continued his study of her with his mouth. Her thighs fell open to his gentlest demand and her back arched up when he kissed her clit through her thong. Crane tugged the tiny scrap of fabric down her legs and off and she closed her eyes, hardly able to believe this was happening.

He kissed up and down her thighs, teasing her until she couldn’t take it anymore. She reached for him and showed him exactly what she wanted. His tongue danced over her clit and then inside of her and she couldn’t stop moaning. His beard tickled and his hair kept flopping into his face and he’d have to push it back before diving back in. His hands would grab her hips and pull her closer but there was no way to be closer. Abbie’s back arched as she came and all the lights seemed to grow brighter before fading into nothing. When her body finally calmed down, Crane climbed up beside her and kissed her. She could taste herself on his lips, a combination of the two of them, and it was sweet.

“Better than any Christmas pudding could possibly ever be,” he said. She reached up and tucked a loose lock of his hair behind his ear.

“Since I didn’t really expect anything like this to happen… I mean, I only expected dinner… I didn’t exactly come prepared. Except with a lot of baked goods,” Abbie said.

“I haven’t been with anyone in a long while – not since Kat. I was tested afterward because of that whole thing with… well, you know. So. I’m clean,” he said. She knew this was stupid. She was on birth control but still. Why did she want this person so badly that she’d throw away common sense and wisdom?

“So am I. Clean. And on birth control,” Abbie said.

“Well, then, Lieutenant… do you want to move somewhere more comfortable or do you prefer right here, by the warmth of the fire?” he asked. She liked it here, with the crackling fire and the lights filling the room. It looked and felt like Christmas. She always imagined being with a man she loved on Christmas, enjoying each other. This might not be love yet… but she was certain it could be soon enough.

She took off her bra and then fumbled with the buttons on his pants (who wore button-fly anything anymore?) but finally slid them down his narrow hips along with his silly Christmas boxers.

“Who was supposed to see these?” she asked, laughing at the ridiculousness of them.

“Can’t a man enjoy some festive underwear for the holidays?” he asked. She was looking over his lean body and when her eyes got to parts she hadn’t seen already, she forgot all about the boxers. He was already hard and it was impressive.

“Well, Merry Christmas to me,” she said, licking her lips in anticipation. He blushed, his eyes turned down shyly until she wrapped her hand around his cock and stroked it a few times. The thrust into her grip and she leaned in to flick the head of it with her tongue as her fingers kept moving.

“Uggh,”he managed to say as her tongue continued to dance around him. They surely looked ridiculous here in the middle of the living room on nothing but a quilt on the floor, nearly naked except for their socks. It was too cold to go without socks.

He moved quickly, and was on his knees with her legs wrapped around his hips and her arms around his neck, slipping into her body. He filled her completely and she was mesmerized by the way he was staring into her very soul as he thrust in and out of her. It was like he had known her forever. Like this wasn’t their first time together.

Everything was a bit hurried and frantic but they could take it slow later. Right now they both needed to satiate this thing that was between them. He threw his head back when he came and cried out her name over and over and she never wanted this precise moment to end.

They fell down next to each other on the quilt, Crane struggling to catch his breath. She was only supposed to deliver a pudding. Just a pudding. Not pudding and sex.

Oh, but she was so glad it turned out that way.

“Please say you’re staying the night?” he asked when he could finally speak coherently again.

“I have to go into my store at about 3 am and prepare for the day,” she said and he sighed with disappointment. “Unless I call my sister and ask her to go open the store. That’s always an option. Or I could tell her I can’t make it because of the snow but she’d never believe it.”

“I have nowhere to go tomorrow. I could come in with you and watch you while you bake,” he said and she looked at him with disbelief. “Oh, Abbie, I’d go anywhere to watch you.”

She laughed.

“You sure it’s not to get more donut holes?” she asked.

“There is that, too,” he said.

She was snuggled in his arms under the glow of the tree, the quilt now partially wrapped around them. And Abbie knew without a doubt that fate was real and they were meant to be together this Christmas and every Christmas for the rest of their days.

*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*^*

fin

#ichabbie holidays #ichabbie au #fluff and smut #ichabbie fic #long post

[madewithonerib]

How St Paul changed the world (Full Show) | Tom Wright & Holland

Justin Brierley is joined by leading New Testament scholar NT (Tom) Wright & popular historical writer Tom Holland to discuss how the apostle Paul changed the world as described in Wright’s recent book Paul: A Biography.

An agnostic in terms of his religious commitments, Tom Holland has nevertheless described the way that the birth of Christianity has shaped much of what we value in Western society in terms of human rights, culture and rule of law.

He engages with NT Wright on the way that Paul & the early Christian movement stood in stark contrast to the prevailing Roman culture of its day.

Introduction: Tom Wright

Today on unbelievable, we're asking: how did St.Paul change the world?

NT Wright (or Tom Wright) as he's popularly known is one of the world's most influential BIBLE scholars.

And his new book: “Paul a Biography” is a detailed study of the Apostle

           who brought Christianity            from Jerusalem            to the rest of the world.

Saint Paul's influence is almost incalculable, 2nd only in the world to JESUS CHRIST HIMSELF.

As he took the good news of a Jewish Messiah to the Roman Empire that ruled the world.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has described Tom Wright's book as:

           "An enthralling journey into the mind of Paul            by one of the great theologians of our time.            A work full of insight, depth &            generosity of understanding."

So it's pretty good when you can get endorsements like that on your book jacket.

Introduction: Tom Holland

Opposite Tom Wright for today's discussion is another Tom.

Tom Holland, popular historian whose best-selling books such as Rubicon & Dynasty have told the story of the rise & fall of the Roman Empire.

While not a believer himself, Tom Holland is also working on a new book on the way that Christianity became the most revolutionary force for changing the world & it'll be interesting to hear how you've been getting on in that endeavour Tom.

Connection between Toms

Today is really an exchange of collegial discussion between two people who are simply fascinated in this era of history.

What can we know from Acts & the letters in the NT about Paul, & what are the gaps that we need to fill in about:

       ●  Who Paul was, &        ●  How Paul went about his mission, &        ●  We’ll also talk about his famous conversion, &        ●  The unique way his theology developed as he            brought Jewish monotheism &            JESUS the Messiah together.

So Tom Holland & Tom Wright, welcome to the show, it’s great to have you both joining me today.

We’ll come to you first of all Tom Wright, I'm probably going to have to use surnames to distinguish you both today.

But you've been writing & researching Paul for decades now haven't you? (yes) I mean the last, well, a couple of years ago I had you on when you wrote your magnum opus—which was

(that's actually amazing that's 5 years ago that it came out, yes extraordinary) The two volumes sort of very academic (yes Paul & the Faithfulness of GOD)

Q1: And is this really I suppose in a sense the popular level version of what you wrote then?

Tom Wright: Sort of yes & no, when I did that big book, several people (both including colleagues in the discipline said:

           "Wish you'd do a shorter one"

Of course part of the point of the longer one was that I've been writing shorter things & articles.

And people had always said,

           "Yeah, but you didn't explain this or             yes but surely that has to be contextualized there."

Okay, you want the big thing, here it is.

Then of course they all said it was far too long, so it's as JESUS said:

          "We danced for you & you wouldn't even sing;           & we wept & you wouldn't mourn."

But this isn't exactly a potted down version, because that was a book on Paul's mind & theology.

Now there's a lot of mind & theology in here, but part of the whole point of it is that what Paul was thinking & saying was contextualized in a rich multi-layered life,

           which was to do with both            his Jewish upbringing            & his amazing knowledge of            the Jewish SCRIPTURES.

And with his contextualizing in the Roman world, where he was a citizen, & in the Greek world where he knew his Epicureans from his Stoics.

And we see Paul navigating these things in a multi-layered way, which I find just perpetually enthralling because I grew up with a Paul who was basically

           a brainbox who said prayers as it were.

And then the rest of it was off on the side.

The older I've got the more, the whole man (of Paul) speaks to this whole man. And that's been really exciting.

Justin Brierley: You probably feel like you know his era almost as well as you know your own now.

Tom Wright: Well let's put it like this, "My students mock me,

           because when I say the war, I mean            the Jewish-Roman war of (66–70 AD)            —not World War one or two.

And they say, "well yeah I sort of mentally live in the 1st century, though I've tried to diversify more recently, & get back towards our days as well.

Justin Brierley: And just kind of give us a sense of how you structure this particular because you called it a biography & in that sense you are trying to write something that's sort of a narrative.

Tom Wright: “oh yes"

Justin Brierley: It's not a sort of academic book, in the traditional sense.

Tom Wright: No. It's not at all, I mean the only footnotes are basically references to bits of the BIBLE, or bits of classical sources & so on.

So there's no discussion of other scholarly views or if I do say there are various views here, I don't actually go into details as to who said it. You can find those elsewhere.

So this is going through from what we know about or can infer about his early life; &

           how he got to the point where            he was on the road to Damascus when dot-dot-dot,            & then what happened next...[4:33]

And as with virtually all ancient history, there are gaps.

That's quite normal, but when you have gaps in any narrative (ancient or modern) what you can do is probe cautiously—from either side, as it were, with the bits you do know & say:

           "Well it's possibly this, it's likely that, or             it’s almost certain that such & such.

And that's what I tried to do to construct a whole story.

Justin Brierley: And something of a gift to us, 2K years later; that he was obviously a prolific letter writer.

Tom Wright: Well he was comparatively prolific, but actually the letters are short, you know:

           How many volumes do we have of Cicero's letters            in the lower classics? I mean just...[5:09]

Tom Holland: They go on & on..have you read them all? Tom Wright: Exactly! Exactly they do go on & on.

And they're fascinating, they shed a flood of light & all sorts of things in the 1st century BC Roman culture.

           But for Paul we've just got these snippets            because he's writing on the go.

He's not leisured sitting there all day to compose, he's really sending bulletins from the front as it were [5:33]

Tom Holland: Yeah

Tom Wright: So most of his time, he isn't writing letters, so far as we know:

           he's talking with people, he's preaching,            he's praying. He's always trying to organize            these little communities;

And then from time to time, he has to buzz off a letter to somebody.

Justin Brierley: Yes & you're always obviously hearing one side of the conversation, (yup) & you sort of have to fill in gaps (yeah).

And you have to, I suppose as a historian Tom, what you're doing as well as saying:

           Well here is what we know is going on in the            wider culture, & that makes sense of why            Paul said this & did this..

Tom Wright: And particularly I am very fortunate in that

I came of age as a scholar just when the contemporary revolution in modern Jewish studies was happening.

So that we've got the Dead Sea Scrolls, in good modern editions, we've got new good editions of Josephus.

We know much much more about the early rabbis, than we did 50 years ago because of massive work that's gone on. [6:23]

           So we can reconstruct quite a lot about            how Jews in that period were thinking.

And of course that's controversial too.

But we can see a big picture, within which then the way Paul is going after things—makes sense if you say take somebody in that world, who is also very much alive to the Greek & Roman context.

           But who then happens to believe that            GOD has fulfilled HIS promises            by sending a Messiah, who was then crucified.

That's bizzare.

But the sense Paul makes of it, is the sense that it would make within that Jewish world. [6:53]

Justin Brierley: And just before we come to Tom Holland here, that was going to be my next question.

Will people reading this book simply know a lot more about Paul by the end of it, or will it give us a better picture of JESUS?

The person, he was obviously speaking of.

Tom Wright: I’m not sure it would necessarily give you a better picture of JESUS, but it would give you a

           better picture of how the very first            followers of JESUS were wrestling with            the question:

           What does it mean that GOD's Messiah            was crucified & raised from the dead?

You know that's not part of the game plan, but if that's what we've got: How does that reconfigure everything?

Obviously I & many others have written quite a lot about JESUS as well. That's another story.

But so it's probing back & I mean for me, I just go on being fascinated by the fact that within I would say:

"20 or so years after the crucifixion,"

           here is a highly intelligent man saying            he loved me & gave himself for me.

You know that is extraordinary! [7:42]

           It's hard to imagine anybody saying that,            about anybody else in the last 20 years (right).

Unless all sorts of other things were true as well.

And yet Paul says it [7:53]

Justin Brierley: Tom Holland, thank you for joining us on the program today. We've thrown you in at the deep end.

Tom Holland: You really have.

Justin Brierley: Well thank you for putting yourself in the, you know, the opposite chair. As I say, this isn't, sometimes this program is combative, I have a feeling that won't be the case today.

It'll very much be a meeting of the minds.

But tell us where your interest in the whole Classical Age really began. You've sort of been doing this all of your adult working life, haven't you? [8:24]

Tom Holland: Well it goes right the way back to childhood & I was the kind of child who loved dinosaurs & I liked them because they were big & they were fierce & they were glamourous. And they were extinct, & my interest, I suppose, was really in the Roman army then by extension the Roman empire.

           Well it kind of was a seamless movement from            Tyrannosaurus Rex to Caesar.

And so the kind of the glamour & beauty & the power, & the cruelty of the Greeks & the Romans, I found very appealing. [8:58]

The contrast to that, although I went to Sunday School & I was very interested in biblical history as well.

           I found them all a bit poor-faced.            Kind of I didn't like their beards,

I preferred the clean-shaven look of Apollo.

And in a way I was kind of seduced by the glamour (yes) of Greece & Rome, I suppose. [9:20]

           So the first books I wrote about of history            were about Greece & Rome, & in many ways            —you know the appeal particularly I think of           Rome is that in certain ways they do seem very           like as you were talking about Cicero's letters

This is a man who, you know, is:

       ●  worrying about property prices,        ●  he's worrying about the weather,        ●  he's complaining apparently (people),

yes in all kinds of ways, he seems very familiar. [9:46]

But the more you live in the minds of the Romans, & I think even more the Greeks, the more alien they come to seem. [9:53]

And the more frightening they come to seem.

           What becomes most frightening really            is a kind of quality of callousness,            that I think is terrifying because I think            it is completely taken for granted.

           There's a kind of innocent quality            about it; nobody really questions it.

Justin Brierley: And what sort of form would that take? [10:13]

Tom Holland: Well if you know, within the age of Cicero, you know Cicero's great contemporary Ceasar is by some accounts slaughtering a million Gauls & enslaving another million, in the cause of boosting his political career.

And far from feeling in any way embarrassed about this, he's kind of promoting it & say when he holds his triumph:

People are going through the streets of Rome carrying billboards boasting about how many people he's killed.

           This is a really terrifyingly alien world            & the more you look at it, the more you realize            that it is built on systematic exploitations.

So the entire economy is founded on slave labour (right), the sexual economy is founded on the absolute right of free Roman males to have sex with anyone that they want in any way that they like.

           And in almost every way this is a world that is            unspeakably cruel to our way of thinking.

And so this worried me more & more, & it was kind of like, I was thinking...well you know:

            I'm clearly not as I had vaguely imagined,             the era of the Greeks & the Romans in             any way really.

And so where am I coming from?

            It was like a kind of itch, you know,             on your back & you can't find it.

Then this was enhanced for me, by then writing a book about the late antiquity & the emergence of Islam from the late religious conflict that caught the religious & imperial context of late antiquity [11:42]

            And again finding in Islam, a profound             quality of the alien, that you know there             were aspects that were familiar, but             there were many aspects of it that             again seemed deeply deeply alien.

And I began to realize that actually:

            in almost every way I am Christian.

I began to realize that actually Paul, although in many ways he seems a much less familiar figure than Cicero, in the kind of urbane man with his property problems.

            Paul never had any property [12:11],             he just made tents.

In almost every what is it? Seven letters?

Conventionally that people absolutely accepted, & as Tom Wright was saying this is not a very lengthy amount of writing.

           But compacted into this very small amount            of writing, was almost everything that            explains the modern world [12:39]

JB: Well the Western world as we take for granted, yeah.

Tom Holland: Yes but also the way that the West has then moved on to shape.

You know concepts, like international law for instance.

           So the facts that, the concepts of human rights,            all these kind of things.. Ultimately they don't go            back to Greek philosophers, they don't go back to            Roman empiricism

           >> They go back to Paul & his letters [13:02]

And I think are along with the 4 GOSPELS the most influential, the most impactful, the most revolutionary writings that have emerged from the ancient world.

JB: When you penned that article for the New Statesman, where you said, what I got wrong & you sort of came out as it were & said, "as far as my values & background are concerned I am a Christian." (yeah)

It was interesting to see the response to that.

Because I saw lots of atheists & humanists saying,

           "Oh hang-on, you know we democracy goes             back to the Greeks, don't pretend that             Christianity gave us everything             we're grateful for.”

But you honestly think that actually

            people simply haven't appreciated just             how much we owe to Christianity? [13:51]

Tom Holland: Well I think that, I mean if we're talking of Paul, I think of him as a kind of depth charge, deep beneath the foundations of the classical world. [13:59]

           And it's not anything that you particularly            notice if you're in Corinth or Alexandria.

Then you start feeling this kind of rippling outwards [14:10]

By the time you get to the 11th century, in Latin Christendom everything has changed. And you have this guy, essentially what is Paul's significance is that:

           He sets up ripple effects of revolution            throughout Western history [14:28]

So the 11th century where with the Papacy Revolution, essentially establishes this idea that

            Society has to be reborn/reconfigured.

And the vested interests has to be torn down, & then the Reformation, is a further ripple effect of that [14:47]

The Enlightenment is a further ripple effect of that.

Tom Wright: Very interesting.

Tom Holland: You know it's spilled out so much that now, in the 21st century, we don't even realize where these ripple effects are coming from.

We just take them for granted. [14:58]

JB: I can hear Tom Wright, you want to come in on this..

Tom Wright: Well I was just thinking

I haven't actually read from cover to cover, but Steven Pinker's two books where he's saying effectively

JB: Well I had him on the show recently.

Tom Wright: Oh really? Okay he's saying, “Forget all that religion stuff, we invented the real world as it should be in the Enlightenment, & all we have to do is apply it more & more rigorously.

And just kick that religion stuff into touch.”

And it's very interesting that some commentators have said, "Well if that was going to be the case, it would work in America better than anywhere else & look at America & you'll see that it doesn't.”

But I think I want to respond with what Pope Benedict said 10 years ago when he was speaking at the United Nations, when he said:

           The whole idea of human rights is absolutely            rooted in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, & if you            try & get the fruits of that without the roots,            all you'll get is the thing will collapse..            into shrill special-interest rhetoric.

           Everyone claiming the status of victim analogous            when I had these, which is exactly where we are.

           [15:39-15:54]

Tom Holland: But the power of victimhood (yeah yeah) is again something that is part of the Revolutionary inheritance of Christianity—because that is the point of the crucifixion.

Tom Wright: Yes & nobody in Caesar's world would have said, “Oh I'm a victim therefore I've got to be prioritized.”

Tom Holland: Cause that'd be a scandal. [16:10]

JB: We actually had Steven Pinker in the very chair you’re sitting on (right now) Tom Wright.

His response to this argument which at this point was being put by Nick Spencer, who's written a very good book as well on the evolution of the West making this very odd move.

His argument was,

           "No, Christians may have given us some             good principles. But all we need to recognize             is our universal humanity—that we're part of             the same species, we're all sentient. [16:31]

That gives us every grounding we need for treating each other with dignity & human rights [16:37]

Tom Wright: And who thought like that in the 1st century?

I mean Paul talking about Adam & CHRIST basically. [16:39]

JB: So are you saying that kind of a belief simply can’t emerge in a vacuum in a sense?

Tom Wright: Yeah the idea of universal humanists is something that even in the 18th century they struggled with.

You know when missionaries went to America & came back arguing about whether the American Indians had souls or not?!

Were they really the same species as us?

And then John Wesley & George Whitfield & so on saying,

          "No these people have to be              taught to love GOD like any of us.

And so there's stuff going on there, which is again rooted in human rights.

JB: And you’re part of the push back on this (Tom Holland)?

Tom Holland: In a way it seems to me that the most influence, the single most influential phrase for why we have a notion of a kind of common humanity is in Galatians where:

           Paul says, "There is neither Jew nor Greek,            neither slave nor free, neither male nor female."

And it's there you have this idea that we are (of course he goes on to say: "in CHRIST JESUS")

And that for the contemporary world is...(we just). [17:12-17:45]

Tom Wright: That's what people want to do without.

Tom Holland: But of course there is an issue there, as Daniel Boyarin, a faceted Jewish scholar writing about Paul says,

           "So Jewishness & Greekness gets dissolved into            this universal humanity, but:            What if I as a Jew want to stay a Jew?

And so in a sense, there also you have the kind of you know: The issues that continue to obsess our society, which is essentially—

            if you don't want to be part of a kind of             universal commonality—what then do you do?

Tom Wright: The dangerous thing, I was at a conference, in America a couple years ago. Two-three years ago, based on the big book on Paul, & there was an African-American Theologian woman at Fuller Seminary who basically pushed back on me on this & said:

            "The danger is when you say we're             all one in CHRIST JESUS, what that             means is that everyone else is an             honourary white male, & the white males             have got it. And that everyone else has to say,             "OK, we're sort of part of your team as it were."

            [18:17-18:40]

And I said, If that's what you're hearing, that's certainly not what I was intending; & certainly not what Paul was intending either.

And I know Danny Boyarin, we've had this debate, it's great fun. Because I think what we're seeing there is very interesting cultural moment, on the cusp of modernity & post-modernity.

And David Horrell in Exeter, his book on Paul 'Solidarity & Difference" says it all:

           That on the one hand, we've got this cutlural drive            towards we're all part of this together.

It's what's going on in the European debate, at the moment. (Yes) Solidarity, we're all just part of this nice big family & that's how it all works in economy of scale, & so on.

And then lots of people, including in Scotland, where I now live.

           Saying, "No that's squelching our identity, &            we're not going to let you do it.

And the interesting thing is that Paul in 1 Corinthians, is faced with the same issues:

           How do you navigate past this theologically            where you're simultaneously saying:

           "We've all got to be one family;             & then you're saying, but if              your conscience means that             this is where you are at the moment             here's how we'll live with that &             how we have to respect that.

And he's basically wrestling with the big issues that we're wrestling with as well.

Doing so very sophisticatedly. [19:45]

JB: Let's come to some of his specific story, because you do a fabulous job in the opening chapters of the book, in setting the scene of:

       ●  Who Paul was,        ●  What we can know about his background,        ●  the sort of Judaism that he came from.

And for me, one of the fascinating bits was you kind of speculating on what he might have been thinking about when he was on that famous road to Damascus.

Because I thought that was quite interesting, you know what was occupying Paul's mind—at the moment when that famous event occurred.

Do you just want to walk us through that?

Because I think this is probably the most famous conversion in all of history, in a way. [20:23]

Tom Wright: Yes if conversion is the right word. [lol]

But right off the top the danger with saying conversion is that what that word means in our world:

           If I say so-and-so has just got converted,            the chances are this means that so-and-so            was probably an atheist or an agnostic; &            they have now found some sort of faith.            And one would hope it might be for me,           my new Christian faith.

That's not really at all what's going on for Paul; & it's certainly not about swapping from one religion to another.

That's the layers of misunderstanding there, in terms of what the word religion meant in the ancient world

—in terms of what the word religion means in our world.

Neither of those fit what's happening to Paul. [21:01]

           Paul always had believed in the GOD of            Abraham, Isaac, & Jacob—the CREATOR GOD,           he never for a moment stopped believing in GOD.

He was living in a narrative which said,

           "All those ancient promises have got            to come true, GOD's got to show that            HE's in the right.

That HE meant what HE said, & that HE's going to renew the whole world.

Quite possibly, not all Jews believed this through a Messiah—who will come & do justice & re-establish the Temple in Jerusalem, so that GOD will come back & live there gloriously et cetra. [21:27]

So Paul is living with that narrative, & in particular within that, & you see this in the later Rabbis, but it's clearly there in Maccabees as well.

There are two figures in the ancient world, Jewish world, who Paul is identifying with: [1] Elijah & [2] Phineas.

They're the great messengers of zeal.

           If you like, bad things are happening,            we've got to do some sacred violence,            to stamp out the nonsense & get Israel            back on track [21:52]

And Paul is role-modeling Phineas & Elijah, and the texts which embody their stories are clearly present.

JB: And he was very much part of this movement that wanted to keep the law better, yeah, so that we hasten on this event through will. [22:07]

Tom Wright: And let's be quite clear, this is not as used to be said in Protestant rhetoric about:

           Earning my ticket to Heaven, or            doing enough good works so that            GOD will be pleased with me.

           It's GOD wants to            renew & restore this world,            & for the sake of that            HE's called Israel out            to be a special people,            as HIS holy people.

And so it's for the sake of GOD's purposes they have to do this, & make more & more Jews do this stuff. [22:28]

           So here's this bunch you are letting slide down;            & going off after a crucified Messiah,            who ever heard such nonsense? [22:34]

So Paul is off to do the Phineas thing, the Elijah thing

These are like the new prophets of Baal, & we know what we have to do with them. [22:40]

And then if you're in that mode, how do you pray?

We know from everything Paul says, he was a person suffused with prayer & there are standard Jewish prayers.

And it's a guess, but I'm not the only one to make this guess that on the road to Damascus,

             he was meditating like many people              in his tradition did on the throne chariot              in the beginning of the Book of Ezekiel,

where the Prophet sees the whirling wheels & then the chariot, & then his eye is raised up & he sees the figure sitting on the throne & he falls down (crash as though dead).

And then the Prophet is commissioned et cetera. [23:15]

I think Paul was meditating on the Throne Chariot.

            Longing to get a glimpse of the GOD             he'd worshipped all his life, & I think             he gets to that glimpse & it's             JESUS of Nazareth.

           And simultaneously,            all his life is fulfilled            & all his life is shattered.

And that is just the most devastating & the most fulfilling moment. [23:35-39]

And in a sense he spends the rest of his life working out what that means, & encouraging other people to explore with him.

What I wouldn't want to say is forcing them to do & believe that because you can't force people to do & believe that kind of stuff.

But helping them to share the sense that JESUS really is Israel's Messiah. [23:58]

JB: Lots of people have given different explanations for what happened to Paul, psychological, some epileptic fit maybe who knows.

Where do you go as a historian Tom Holland, with this, obviously very significant event that I think you'd agree there's some historical basis to it that something happened on the road to Damascus. [24:17]

What do you think happened there in your view?

Tom Holland: I think in the broadest context, Paul is negotiating a tension that is inherent within the understanding of the GOD of Israel.

Because HE is on the one hand the GOD of Israel, & HE is on the other hand the Creator of the entire world.

So how do you negotiate that tension? (Yes)

And in the globalizing world of the Roman Empire, which many Jews lived. This becomes a particularly pressing issue. So to what extent is GOD the Creator of the Greeks, Romans, & the Egyptians, & whoever else..

This is somewhere & anywhere kind of question. [24:58]

That you know we were talking about earlier; that we still have today (human rights issues)..

And I would suspect Paul is struggling to negotiate that as a Greek speaking Pharisee.

>> What persuades him to think the things that he does? I think it’s profoundly mysterious! [25:19]

And I have no doubt that he did think that: He had seen JESUS. I mean I can’t think of any other reason that would explain why he does what he does.

I mean it’s mysterious in 2 ways really:

    1.] He chucks over what presumably would have been          a very comfortable career, to essentially embark on          a life as a kind of wandering bum, where he’s going          to face repeated beatings, ultimately face death.

    2.] The other is why it would ever cross his mind?          That in some way a crucified criminal is a part of          the ONE GOD of Israel?!

And the strange thing about all his letters is that although he’s arguing repeatedly for his understanding of who JESUS is & HE should be understood, & how HE should be comprehended..

I mean I may be corrected on this, but I don’t think at any point does he feel the need to actually argue that JESUS is in some way a part of GOD.

I mean this is just taken for granted; & everyone seems to understand this. [26:27]

Tom Wright: You’re absolutely right, it used to be so. And when you had Larry Hurtado on the show, you presumably discussed these kinds of things.

It used to be thought that JESUS only was regarded as fully divine much later, like the end of the first generation or even early second century. And only at the end of the NT period.

And I think now most NT scholars are convinced (actually) this is on the table from the beginning. It’s certainly taken for granted in Galatians, which I think is Paul’s earliest blessing [26:49]

Tom Holland: Yes, & the strangeness of that is something that we perhaps are kind of immune to, because it’s in the BIBLE, so you read it.

But you think though, why would he think this??

Why would anyone thing this?! [27:01]

JB: Yeah in this context, it is a very strange thing for a devout Jew to have thought.

Tom Holland: But I would guess, & I can’t remember whether you say this in your book because I read it a couple years ago, when in proof.

But having had presumably this kind of convulsive experience, presumably then he turns to SCRIPTURE to try & work out what’s happened. (JB: Yeah to try & process)

In essentially he reads through all the passages; & kind of constructs this theology. [27:33]

Tom Wright: I think one of the thins we fail to realize, often in modern Western Christianity—never mind the secular world —is the stories that people had in their heads about what GOD was going to do.

And particularly the end of the Book of Ezekiel hugely important, 7 parallels in Isaiah 40 & 52 particularly are GOD’s promised that HE will one day come back visibly in person. [27:53]

           Isaiah 40:1-31 | “Comfort, comfort MY people,”            says your GOD. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,            & proclaim to her that her forced labor has been            completed; her iniquity has been pardoned.            For she has received from the hand of the LORD            double for all her sins.” A voice of one calling:

           “Prepare the way for the LORD in the wilderness;            make a straight highway for our GOD in the desert.            Every valley shall be lifted up,            & every mountain & hill made low;            the uneven ground will become smooth,            & the rugged land a plain.

           And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,            & all humanity together will see it.

           For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”            A voice says, “Cry out!” And I asked,            “What should I cry out?”

           “All flesh is like grass, & all its glory like the            flowers of the field. The grass withers & the            lowers fall when the breath of the LORD blows            on them; indeed, the people are grass.

           The grass withers & the flowers fall, but the            WORD of our GOD stands forever.” Go up on            a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good news.            Raise your voice loudly, O Jerusalem, herald            of good news. Lift it up, do not be afraid!            Say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your GOD!”            Behold, the LORD GOD comes with might, &            HIS arm establishes HIS rule. HIS reward is            with HIM, & HIS recompense accompanies HIM.            HE tends HIS flock like a shepherd; HE gathers            the lambs in HIS arms & carries them close to            HIS heart. HE gently leads the nursing ewes.            Who has measured the waters in the hollow            of his hand, or marked off the heavens with the            span of his hand?            Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket,            or weighed the mountains on a scale & the            hills with a balance?            Who has directed the SPIRIT of the LORD,            or informed HIM as HIS counselor?            Whom did HE consult to enlighten HIM,            & who taught HIM the paths of justice?            Who imparted knowledge to HIM & showed HIM            the way of understanding?

           Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket;            they are considered a speck of dust on the scales;            HE lifts up the islands like fine dust.

           Lebanon is not sufficient for fuel, nor its animals            enough for a burnt offering.

           All the nations are as nothing before HIM;            HE regards them as nothingness & emptiness.            To whom will you liken GOD?            To what image will you compare HIM?

           To an idol that a craftsman casts & a metalworker            overlays with gold & fits with silver chains?

           To one bereft of an offering who chooses wood            that will not rot, who seeks a skilled craftsman to            set up an idol that will not topple?

           Do you not know?            Have you not heard?            Has it not been declared to you from the beginning?

           Have you not understood since the foundation            of the earth? HE sits enthroned above the circle of            the earth; its dwellers are like grasshoppers.

           HE stretches out the heavens like a curtain,            & spreads them out like a tent to live in.

           HE brings the princes to nothing & makes the rulers            of the earth meaningless. No sooner are they            planted, no sooner are they sown, no sooner            have their stems taken root in the ground,            than HE blows on them & they wither, & a            whirlwind sweeps them away like stubble.

           “To whom will you compare ME,            or who is MY equal?” asks the Holy One.

           Lift up your eyes on high:            Who created all these?            HE leads forth the starry host by number;            HE calls each one by name.            Because of HIS great power & mighty strength,            not one of them is missing.

           Why do you say, O Jacob, & why do you assert,            O Israel, “My way is hidden from the LORD,            & my claim is ignored by my GOD”?

           Do you not know?            Have you not heard?

           The LORD is the everlasting GOD,            the Creator of the ends of the earth.            HE never grows faint or weary;            HIS understanding is beyond searching out.

           HE gives power to the faint & increases the            strength of the weak. Even youths may faint &            grow weary, & young men stumble & fall.

           But those who wait upon the LORD will renew            their strength; they will mount up with wings like            eagles; they will run & not grow weary,            they will walk & not faint.

To dwell in the Temple, to rescue HIS people, to do what has to be done et cetera, etc.

And those promises are kind of shimmering in the background; & some people in the Jewish world like the author of the book called Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus—seems to think that this sort of has happened because wisdom has come to dwell in the Temple in the form of the teaching of the Torah.

Now most Jews in Paul’s day, I don’t think believed that. [28:13] They still taught there was something major yet to happen.

And it is as though with Paul & indeed with the GOSPELS, it isn’t just that they are telling JESUS stories; & somehow saying btw there’s another dimension to this.

      They are telling the story which is Israel’s       story about GOD coming back, but the only       way they can tell it is by talking about JESUS.

So it’s not just a JESUS story with a GOD dimension, it’s actually the GOD story with the JESUS focus. [28:39]

And it’s hard for us to realize that because the last 200 years, philosophically & theologically, we haven’t been there.

So when I look at how Paul is handling Isaiah, how he’s handling the passages about the new Exodus with the pillar of cloud & fire coming. Only now it’s JESUS & the SPIRIT.

You see he’s drawing on Jewish traditions about the Presence & saving power of GOD.

And then of course they all get focused not least on that middle chunk of Isaiah—where you get the so called suffering servant.

And the suffering servant seems to be GOD saying actually when you look to see what it’s like when I come back to rescue you:

      Oh my! It’s going to be like this; &       we see Jewish exegesis at the time       struggling with Isaiah 53.

       ●  Some of them thinking, it’s a Messiah, but actually            the suffering is what HE inflicts on other people

       ●  And other people thinking: “No it’s real suffering            but it’s the martyrs, it’s not the Messiah.”

      And JESUS, then Paul picking this up       —seemed to have fused these two together.

with this extraordinary notion of a suffering Messiah. [29:40]

Who turns out to be the personal embodiment of Israel’s GOD.

And then we see this already, by early on in Paul woven into fresh prayings of Central Jewish prayers the famous one in 1 Corinthians 8, where it’s hear O Israel, the LORD our GOD the LORD is one, & Paul astonishingly finds JESUS inside that, so he says for us there is one GOD  the FATHER from whom are all things we to HIM & one LORD JESUS the Messiah through whom are all things. [30:14]

           1 Corinthians 8:4-6 | So about eating food sacrificed            to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the            world, & that there is no GOD but one.            For even if there are so-called gods, whether in            heaven or on earth [as there are many so-called            gods & lords], yet for us there is but one GOD,            the FATHER, from whom all things came & for            whom we exist. And there is but one LORD,            JESUS CHRIST, through whom all things came            & through whom we exist.

So you’ve got he’s the Oscar, he’s curious, but it’s GOD & JESUS.

At the heart of Jewish monotheism Paul finds this bifurcation.

JB: And in a sense that is a massive transformation, but at the same time somehow—for Paul it is a fulfillment.

Tom Wright: It’s a final revelation because he then obviously looks back & says “Whoa! we now read the SCRIPTURES with this in mind. [30:38]

      HE is the image of the invisible GOD, so when       humans were made in GOD’s image—       HE is the image in whom we were made.

JB: And just how strange would this idea of a GOD who— or a Messiah or whatever, who becomes crucified have been in the Roman world that this message was being delivered? 

Tom Holland: Beyond weird, it’d be totally beyond weird. As Paul repeatedly says, I mean, he says that you know “it’s foolishness, scandalous, outrageous, it’s ridiculous, & he’s aware of this the whole time [30:58-31:12]

JB: Just how embarrassing this is in a sense.

Tom Holland: Well it is kind of I mean & that is the whole point that (yeah) to suffer death on a cross is [31:20]

It’s the worst death that the Roman state can inflict, but it is also shaming in the context of the Mosaic law which also says that to be hung on a tree as a cause of (a curse).

JB: We often forget with our stylized depictions of the crucifixion just how gory & shameful it was.

Tom Holland: Yes, absolutely & so what is happening is that it’s like a kind of the ultimate judo throw—where you turn the strength of your opponent against them.

The Roman power is affirmed by brutality, the governor of a Province has the right to burn, to throw to beasts, to crucify anyone who he feels is a danger to Roman power. [32:05]

And governors did that absolutely at the drop of a hat.

So what is happening with Paul’s proclamation of the one GOD in some way suffering this fate is to absolutely upend the very fabric & basis—not just of Roman power, but of powerful stock because of course the Assumption through from reading the Jewish SCRIPTURES was that GOD is a warrior & GOD will overthrow Roman power.

The establishment of a kingdom of peace will in some way be effected by the sword & what Paul is saying is that actually the true source of power is to suffer.

And that notion, you know, that to be a victim can somehow be a source of power is unbelievably subversive in the context of classical antiquity. [32:56-33:05]

JB: And it’s still today to some extent, but I mean you know it’s not as though we all believe that today.

Tom Holland: Although you see it all the time in the news at the moment—that to cast yourself as a victim is somehow to give yourself power. And you would only have power by virtue of being a victim if you existed in the context of a society that was still in its fundamentals Christian.

In the Roman world if you said I’m a victim, they’d say: “Yeah, and...?? I’ll enslave you!” (lol) [33:27]

Tom Wright: Exactly thanks very much. Tom Holland: Or I’ll rape you whatever.

JB: And on top of this there was also this statement, which I think was being used in quite a political way of saying, “JESUS is LORD” which was obvious.

Set against the idea that well, “No Caesar is lord.”

Tom Holland: If we think of Paul arriving in Galatia, it would seem that in some way that the Galatians feel that they have a particular relationship to the figure of Augustus. [33:58]

So they transcribe the ray’s guessed by his account of his achievements. And it seems to have been done to a far greater degree than anywhere else in the Roman Empire.

So they are inscribing this idea of Augustus, who describes himself as (divi filius) son of god, son of Caesar but you know he’s been raised up to the heavens.

He has been a prince of peace, he has established a universal amnesty across the world & this is uangei leon, this is good news to be proclaimed. [34:35]

But the statues of Augustus, the Res Gestae of Augustus, the very essence of Augustus is that the peace that he has brought has been brought by a sword.

He is an imperato, he is a general who is victorious.

This is what an emperor is, &so in the cities that Paul is arriving at, this cult of Caesar—which is the fastest growing cult, probably in history up until that point, you know it’s spread like wildfire & it’s not a kind of frigid cult.

It’s a cult that people across the Roman world, invest in with a deep emotional sense. This idea of a conquering human, who is ‘divine’ & who has risen from the earth & “gone to the heavens.”

Augustus is the epitome of earthly power (of his day).

And so in that context, the subversion that Paul is affecting by turning up & saying actually the SON of GOD that I preach is someone who was crucified by Roman power.

I mean you, it’s kind of makes you wince.

JB: But why did it work then? Why did anyone listen to such a crazy message? [35:52]

Tom Wright: That’s a great question, I just want to endorse everything that Tom said, I think it is one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in history that the symbolism of crucifixion said: “we run this world, & if you get in our way, we’ll rub you out.”

And that is callous brutal power.

Then to have within 20 years, the crucifixion as a symbol of all conquering self giving love, that’s just quite extraordinary.

And as you said, we in the modern Christian world see crucifixes we have them, we wear them, you know..as jewelry decoration, or nice pretty things in Churches.

           But actually this was like an electric chair           or a horrible gallows or something.

So why did it work?

I think if we’d have asked Paul that, he would have said because when you announce the crucified JESUS as LORD, there is a strange power, which he sometimes calls the GOSPEL or other times calls the SPIRIT.

And that power goes to work in people’s minds & hearts.

And stuff happens, they find themselves gripped & grasped by it; & I think Paul would have said there is no logical explanation. Of course, there is no one who actually wants to sign off this.

But it’s everything that Tom Holland was saying just now was reminding me of Mark 8, where JESUS says,

      “We’re going to Jerusalem & it’s all going to happen;       & if you want to come after ME, you’ve got to be       prepared to die. Take up your cross as well.” [37:06]

      I think they thought it was a metaphor.       But in fact, JESUS really meant it.

Then in Mark 10 when HE says (when James & John want to sit int the best seats, to be HIS right & left-hand men) & HE said:

      “Don’t you realize the rulers of the nations bully people,        & harassed & lauded. We’re not going to do it that way;        we’re going to do it the other way.

            Anyone who wants to be great             must be your servant.

Because the SON of MAN did not come to be served, but to serve & to give HIS life as a ransom for many.

            JESUS HIMSELF is precisely articulating             the redefinition of power with              the cross at the center of that.

Paul picks up from that, & says what he’d actually want to say:

[1] On the cross JESUS did in fact defeat the principalities,      & powers. He says that in 2 or 3 passages. HE disarms      the powers & made a public example.

     Of course it didn’t look like that.

     This is the theological interpretation in the light of the      resurrection. But then when you’ve got that interpretation,      you can go to work & say [38:04]

            “Now actually JESUS crucified is the             fulcrum around which world history             turns & ppl find that it’s true for them"

JB: I mean this brings us to that interesting tension, that you sit in a sense as both a believer & a historian of the SCRIPTURES, Tom Wright. [38:16-38:31]

Because in a sense you’re saying the explanation Paul would have given is that something supernatural happened.

This GOSPEL changed people, or are you? (lol)

And are you allowed to as a historian to say it? [38:39]

Tom Wright: It will be interesting to see what happens when Tom Holland gets past Galileo & onto the 18th & 19th century.

Because this word supernatural has changed its meaning (OK) the word supernatural in the Middle Ages as far as I understand

—meant a super abundance of godness over on top of, but not excluding what goes on, so it’s what normally goes on plus some extra dimensions.

But from the 18th century onwards, something very interesting happened culturally & the ancient philosophy called Epicureanism really became the dominant philosophy of the west. [39:09]

Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based on the teachings of Epicurus, founded around 307 B.C.

It teaches that the greatest good is to seek modest pleasures in order to attain a state of tranquility, freedom from fear ("ataraxia") and absence from bodily pain ("aponia").

And with Epicureanism the gods & our world are totally sepparate.

They’re made of the same stuff, they’re made of atoms, but they have nothing to do with us—so supernatural means something out there, as opposed to something down here. [39:23]

Then Christians trying to make sense of the faith within a basically epicurean world, think of GOD quote intervening—so you either have natural events or supernatural events [providence of GOD]

And I resist that dichotomy, I think it’s a product of agency.

JB: And this is of course, if you want more on this, “the Gifford lectures” that you gave this year. [39:38]

Tom Wright: Thank you, yes. Tom Holland: Brilliantly done [lol]

Tom Wright: That’s very nice, but unfortunately it’s gonna take a little while before they get published. Because I’ve got some work to do, but they are available online.

Yeah YouTube, goodness.

But the point is this, that we still in our culture & I think I say this in on of the Givens actually. The only real question that the great British public knows theologically:

           “Does GOD intervene in the world or doesn’t HE?”

Which is why a journalist faced with the new archbishop says: “Do you believe in the virgin birth & resurrection?”

In other words, “Are you going to be one of those embarrassing fundamentalists, who says you believe it all? Or are you going to be one of those equally dodgy liberals, who says you disbelieve it all?” [40:21]

It’s a horrible dilemma.

          And I’m going to say: “Wrong question”

For me as a historian, the more I know about hisotry, the more I think yeah all sorts of odd things happen in the world.

And the idea that everything is just a closed continuum is a very particular philosophical thing.

So I want to have it both ways actually. [40:41]

JB: How do you approach this, because we can talk about metaphysical commitments on your part Tom Holland.

But at the end of the day, someone like you’re sitting opposite Tom Wright. Obviously, does believe the BIBLE to be both a historical document that we can both agree on.

You can pull apart & dissect & look at.

But it’s also  a source of divine revelation at some level. [41:02]

Tom Holland: [missed initial opening, JB talked over TH]

...Rather as a kind of Darwinian rite, in the sense that I assume Christianity triumphs, or you know achieves what it achieves.

Because it gives something that people want (yes)

They haven’t previously been given, so there’s a social survival of the fittest.

It’s evident, most famously, from St. Paul’s stay in Athens that there is in a sense a marketplace for gods in antiquity.

So if you think of Paul arriving in Galatia, the Galatian gods are famously horrible. [41:38]

There’s one god that supposedly goes around punching women in the breasts; & you think this is not kind or particularly pleasant.

The other deity in Galatia is Keyblade, who sits on a mighty mountain & in the ecstasy of their worship, men will castrate themselves in her honour [41:59]

And Paul kind of makes a grim joke about this, saying if his opponents: I wish that they would castrate gods.

(Tom Wright: cut the whole lot of them)

So these are a kind of intimidating gods, these are gods who certainly don’t love you. 

Maybe you’re a philosopher & you look at the god of Aristotle, you had to love this fixed mover, but there’s no implication at all that it loved you back.

JB: And if it was a relationship, it was quite transactional. (yeah) it was to keep them happy, & then we can get on with our lives? [42:30]

Tom Holland: And that is also true of D.V. Phileas Augustus.

You know this is also a kind of transactional relationship, we were worshiping & then please don’t come & kill us.

[Tom Wright: yeah]

Now so in that context, the GOD of the Jews, “you know, it provokes a lot of mockery, a lot of kind of contempt” [42:47]

           But also a fair degree of envy.

Because actually I think it’s pretty clear, that there are lots of people (in the Greco-Roman world) who were quite jealous of this idea of a GOD who loves the Jews. [42:58]

And who particularly cares for them.

And who would like to be a FATHER; & so you have these kind of liminal figures who you know (they’re Gentiles) but they kind of would like to have a part of this kind of Jewish vibe.

In anthropology, liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold") is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.

And in that context Paul turning up & saying: You don’t have to give up all, you don’t have to be circumcised.

And this GOD loves you, as HE loves me! [43:22]

JB: I can see why that would have been attractive.

Tom Holland: I think you can absolutely see why that would have been attractive (right).

And I think that clearly this does cut through to people who are relatively prosperous & Paul mentions them in his letters. [43:35]

Women as well as men who can provide him with funding & with backing. But it must also have given (I mean what) the impact it must have had on slaves. [43:49]

          To be told, that you are one with the free.

To be told, you know, a slave in Rome (in a household of a Christian) to be told you are a child of GOD.

At the time when Nero is absolutely in his pomp, & Nero is kind of dramatizing what it is to be a 'son of' (you know) the ‘son of a god’...

In the Augustan sense, to an astonishingly historic degree.

For a slave in the attic, in the suburbs of Rome, to be told (I mean) it must have been overwhelming. [44:22]

Tom Wright: Also for women, it’s a point that Rodney Stark makes in his book “The Rise of Christianity” & I think it needs to be drawn out particularly in today’s culture [44:30]

But the valuing of women, there is no fe/male in Galatians 3, that is almost unthinkable in a post Aristotle world—where wo/men are almost differnt species.

And you know who’s in charge here..

Then when you see the way that Paul treats his female co-workers in the way that..when he writes this extraordinary letter called Romans.

One of the most amazing pieces of writing in the ancient world.

He entrusted to Phoebe, who is a deacon in the Church in Kencreo. She takes it to Rome. [45:01]

I mean to know Tom Holland’s take on this, but my understanding is when you give a letter to somebody to take to somebody (or to a group); she is likely to be the person who reads it out & quite possibly explains it [45:12]

May be the first to..

JB: There is another brilliant book, that I’m sure you’re aware of by Paula Gouda, on this very subject. 

Her novelization of Phoebe’s..

Tom Wright: I know of that.

I’m very proud of Paula, she’s a former student of mine; & I’m looking forward to reading that book, yes. [45:25]

JB: A different, actually, interlocutor—that was a Francesca Stavrakopoulou

(Tom Holland: Ohh she doesn’t like Paul)

JB: Well she likes Paula, & funnily enough Francesca was a student of Paula’s (Tom Wright: right, lol, okay) so yes its the world of books.

Tom Wright: I’m very much interested & would like to press this further, because I do totally agree that this idea that you can all be one. [45:49]

There is a new community, & you are loved & valued.

I was thinking about this in relation to forgiveness, the other day. The ancient gods didn’t forgive people.

I mean Zeus & Poseidon code, you might be able to placate them, or you might be able to sneak around when they weren’t watching [46:04]

But the idea that they would forgive you..is quite different.

I don’t think you’d find that in the Greco-Roman world. [46:10]

And people didn’t as far as I know reckon that they were going around needing forgiveness in that sense. [46:16]

JB: But I’m still confused at one level, as to..

I mean I accept this thesis that the reason it caught on was because it allowed slaves to suddenly feel like they were people who maybe wanted in on this. [46:30]

But at the same time, you make it very clear in teh book [Tom Wirght] just how socially inconvenient it was to be a Christian. [TW: It’s massively so]

It’s like this is a way to climb the ladder. [46:39]

Tom Wright: I mean no, absolutely not.

This is part of the problem all the way through, in the first Thessalonians—Paul was looking back to the time when they became believers just a few weeks earlier.

He says: “You turned from idols to serve the living & true GOD.

Now it’s hard for us to imagine what that’s like, but an ancient city like Thessalonica or Corinth or Ephesus, or any where..

You’ve got idol temples, or temples on every street corner.

You’ve got processions & you’ve got games in honour of the lord god so-and-so; particularly lord Caesar, [47:00-47:08]

You’ve got celebrations, regular festivals, & regular holidays, & everyone shows up.

people areregularly coming through the streets with sacrificial animals, it’s what you do.

And in a world where there is no such thing as private life, except for the very very rich—everybody knows if you suddenly aren’t showing up..

      “You know that family down the street, they haven’t        been to anything this last month—what’s going on?”

      “Oh haven’t you hard they’ve joined this funny new        group,...(Well who are they?) They say they’re Jews,        but they’re not—so we don’t know who they are..”

And so suddenly, you’re not doing all the things that people in your world would normally do..[47:35-47:40]

JB: You liken it, in the modern world, as simple as say going into Wall Street & sort of saying:

      “Right we have got to abandon all of these financial        institutions..& the way we run our lives.” [47:48]

Tom Wright: Or you know, I sometimes say to people when they ask why didn’t Paul say: Slavery was wrong?

I say, “Well, when did you last go into the pulpit on a Sunday morning & say, “BTW it’s quite clear that motorcars are polluting our planet & destroying our world, so I want you to leave your cars in the parking lot & we’ll have them take them to the dump later on. Because we’re all going to be either walking or on horseback from now on.” [48:06]

Most congregations would not think that was a very good sermon, but actually when you’re talking about a major social revolution—you’re just not going to be doing those processions anymore. [48:17]

This is why in southern Greece, they get permission to shelter under the Jewish (law) because the Jews had permission not to do that stuff.

And this is where a lot of the hassle comes from.

Because then when suddenly there’s a bunch of non-Jews claiming the same permission—the authorities want to know who are...?

Then they’ll go around to the Jewish communities: Who are these people?

JB: Then they sense things getting out of control.

Tom Wright: I think this is the best explanation for a lot that’s going on in Galatians particularly & I’m very interested in Tom Holland’s insight. [48:45]

Tom Holland: Well I’ve got a slightly edgier comparison (JB: OK go on) any comparison between the 21st century & the 1st century is obviously you know, they’re so different.

But if you think about the spread of radical Islam, if you think about the way people worry about their family members becoming radicalized.

I think might have some faint echo of how it’s working.

And we were talking about Paul’s use of letters—the reason that he can communicate across the Roman world is because there is an enormous road system.

Which is being used by Caesar & by governors to communicate (JB: “their gospel”), yeah.

So it’s the kind of ganglion that’s connecting the fabric of the mighty brain of Rome. [48:55-49:31]

And Paul is kind of piggybacking on that rather in the way that Islamic radicals are piggybacking on the internet.

Which was originally developed by the American Defense establishment.

JB: The internet is our Roman Road Systems of today?

Tom Holland: Yeah, & so it’s using technology & infrastructure of a superpower, to come up with things that are profoundly opposed to it.

And in a sense part of the appeal of radical Islam, is precisely that it is subversive of  almost everything that people in secular society take for granted. [50:05]

I’m not saying that Paul is with...I’m not comparing Paul to a kind of ISIS.

JB: Sure, I understand the principle you’re employing.

Tom Holland: But part of that, people say, “Why would anyone run off to Syria?”

And you know, sign-up to this terrifying cult?

      In a sense, it’s precisely the challenge of it       —that becomes the appeal. [50:28]

And Paul talks a lot about the SPIRIT bringing freedom; & that idea of being free in a world where everyone else is not free—gives you a kind of dignity & status that in the long run will enable people to suffer torture & even death in the cause of affirming that. [50:55]

            And to this extent, I think that Paul & the             early Christians are the ancestors of ISIS.

And are the ancestors of almost every group that defines themselves in terms of belief.

Because they’re willing to suffer martyrdom for belief.

You don’t really get—I mean you know there’s Socrates—is kind of an example...

But the idea that you as a slave—you’re willing to suffer death for a belief that is really something that originates from Paul.

Tom Wright: Obviously there are parallels, & it’s very interesting to explore those; & they go back of course to the pre-Christian Jewish radical zealots.

As in the Maccabean period who were perepared to die for their hope that GOD was going to renew the world [51:47]

And you see that in the book called 2nd Maccabees, particularly..

The Second Book of Maccabees, also known as 2 Maccabees, is a deuterocanonical book originally in Greek which focuses on the Maccabean Revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes & concludes with the defeat of the Seleucid Empire general Nicanor in 161 BC by Judas Maccabeus, the hero of the hard work.

Tom Holland: I mean that’s also about kind of defending land. That’s always something there. [51:55]

Tom Wright: Defending land, re-establishing the temple, et cetra, etc. etc. sure. Yes, but what we see in Paul is the taking of that radical ttradition which is also a violent tradition.

I mean some of them are martyred, but some of them are going to sharpen their swords & win an extraordinary battle.

In the 2nd century AD, you see this with the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 132-135, we have a brief little messianic kingdom of Judea.

The Bar Kokhba revolt was a rebellion of the Jews of the Roman province of Judea, led by Simon bar Kokhba, against the Roman Empire. Fought circa 132–136 AD, it was the last of three major Jewish–Roman wars, so it is also known as The Third Jewish–Roman War or The Third Jewish Revolt.

Under the rule of this man, the son of the star, & they are going to have (they think) an astonishing victory over the Romans. So that continues on...[52:26]

What you see in Paul has all of that energy, but turned upside down—exactly as what Tom Hollands was saying before through the notion of the crucifixion & resurrection of JESUS. [52:37]

            That this is a different kind of victory,             won by a different kind of means.

And we see if there is a sense in which Paul is the ancestor of ISIS, then Paul is also the ancestor of St. Francis & of Mother Theresa.

And to the people who are saying,

           “No there is a different way to            transform the world & it is the            the way of love, it is the way            of self-giving.” [52:57]

And the ancestor of people like Desmond Tutu, who you know we forget that in the 70s, Desmond Tutu was standing in-front of crowds of angry people (his own people) who wanted to use violence & he was saying that is not the way we transformed the world. [53:11]

And astonishingly, that message got through & won the day.

Though, South Africa is still difficult—but there is a message of love & forgiveness. [53:20]

Tom Holland: Well I hesitate to bring up the subject of Paul & the LORD in the presence of Tom Wright. [53:26]

I mean it’s a hubristic thing to do, but Paul is clearly also (I think) the ancestor of the modern notions of international law that ISIS is committed to overthrowing.

Because what Paul introduces in to the bloodstream of the West; & then by extension because the West spreads those ideas across the world.

The entire kind of global framework of how international law is structured, is the idea that:

            GOD’s law can be written on the heart.

That you no longer need the Torah, the SPIRIT will write it on the heart & therefore you will know what is right.

And that will be illumined.

What that gives in the long run, the West is a notion that law can be human & can be morally valid.

And that’s the great contrast with the Islamic world —where law is in a sense (the Torah & Talmud) you know Sharia is about the idea of GOD having directly revealed a kind of legal rulings. [54:36]

Tom Wright: Which is imposed on people whether they like it or not. (Yes)

Tom Holland: Whereas in the West the idea that law can be something that is of human origin is absolutely taken for granted.

      And this is kind of the great gripe that Islamic radicals       have with international law; it’s precisely that they       recognize it’s Christian origins. [54:53-54:59]

So there’s a guy (Al Makdessi), a Palestinian Jordanian radical, who was hugely influential intellectually on ISIS & Al Qaeda.

And he destests Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia is part of the United Nations; & he’s saying:

      “Well the charter of the UN is of human origins”       >>  It is not of divine origin.

So essentially his argument is with the Pauline idea that..

Tom Wright: That is fascinating & it goes (I mean) obviously that’s an ancient Jewish idea..[55:27] (The 10 Commandments).

The writing of the law on the heart is in Jeremiah & Ezekiel—& it fits with this whole idea that basically Pauline Christianity is to coin an odd phrase: Judaism for the masses.

I mean Nietzsche said it was Platonism for the masses.

That’s absolutely wrong, it s in the 19th century many Christians were Platonists & that’s a problem.

But the idea that this Jewish insight about a loving GOD who will inscribe the law in the hearts of HIS people; & now this could happen to anyone!? [55:51]

Tom Holland: Just as liberalism is Christianity for the masses.

Tom Wright: In a sense, up to a point lord copper. (lol) Let’s not go there.

But then what we get with that is with Paul this extraordinary thing which (when I was writing this book) it impinged on me again that:

      What we already see when there’s a rumour       that there’s going to be a famine coming the       Church in Antioch instantly, instead of stockpiling       food, they said we’ve got to help them down in       Jerusalem. [56:16]

And you have a sense of a trans local community, as well as a trans-ethnic community in a way which I think is unprecedented in ancient world.

The Jewish communities, the synagogue communities were trans local, they were across the world.

They sort of knew about one another.

And were in touch with one anther, but it was basically Jews & proselytes, or GOD-fearers or whoever.

And there were trans local communities of the Roman Imperial administration & the Roman army.

But that was all jolly well, loyal to Caesar, thank you very much. [56:47]

What you have in Christianity is a community, which Paul insists is one. It’s a united community, & has to struggle for that unity.

And that is precisely the origin of the UN.

That’s a Christian Pauline idea.

            The problem is if you try to get it             without the roots, in an explicit belief             in this particular GOD who has rescued             the world in this particular way...

Well you can see, go to the UN today.

You can whistle for it. [57:13]

Because it’s falling apart. Because we’ve tried to get it without the basis.

JB: Gonna have to leave it there. I wish we had more time, but thank you so much gentlemen.

Both Tom Holland & Tom Wright for joining me on the program today. And Tom Holland we want you back when your book is available; & we’ll get you in another interesting discussion about it.

Tom Wright, looking forward (we’ve got alittle bit of a plan in the pipeline), for a regular podcast with you.

So watch this space if you’re a Tom Wright fan.

You might be able to get more conversations like this coming to you, in the future. But for the moment thank you both for being with me on Unbelievable.

Tom Holland: Thank you. Tom Wright: It’s been a pleasure.

Unbelievable Christian Radio | Jul 20, 2018 Video: youtube.com/watch?v=nlf_ULB26cU

—

#providence of GOD #supernatural events

[jeannereames]

I just finished ‘Becoming’ and I absolutely loved it! I just wondered if you believe that AtG and Hephaistion continued their romantic relationship throughout their lives or if you think they let that side of their friendship go as they got older as was more common at the time? Anyway! I absolutely loved ‘Becoming’ and I can’t wait to read ‘Rise’!

I’m guessing you’re asking about the historical people, as opposed to the fictional characters? I do hope/plan to continue the Dancing with the Lion series, and in it, yes, they will remain romantically involved. Whether or not future novels are bought, however, rests on how well Becoming and Rise do. (So if you want more, get the word out and post reviews. *grin*)

Yet, with regard to the historical men, I think it’s very hard to know whether they remained sexual partners as adults. And the reason it’s hard to know involves the difficulty of our surviving sources.

As soon as historians start talking SOURCES, a lot of folks tune out. It’s BORING. *grin* But in order to give an honest answer, I kinda have to Go There.

First, let me give the TL;DR version. If they were still sexually involved as adults, I suspect it was quite occasional. And the fact it was quite occasional (if at all), may be why we don’t hear anything about it in the sources (discussion to follow). After all, they were both extremely busy men with duties and responsibilities that sometimes kept them apart for months. If they were still sexually/romantically involved, they had what we’d today call a long-distance relationship at points…and without the benefit of cell phones.

It may have been a gradual “weaning” from each other, rather than anything sharp. So they may have been lovers as teens, then over time, each took younger beloveds, and finally, wives—all while remaining emotionally very, very close. (Although I suspect that, like any friendship OR love affair, they had ups-and-downs, fights and reconciliations.)

Now, here’s why the TL;DR summary above gets a big fat label: “SPECULATION.”

The sources are the only way we know anything about the past, and if they can’t be trusted, or at least not trusted in toto, we have a Really Big Problem. So let me lay it out.

Before I do, however, I want to remind readers that I DO think Alexander and Hephaistion were lovers, at least in their youth. But no, it’s not “obvious.” Theirs wasn’t a world especially reticent about same-sex affairs (*cough* see below), even if post-Christian, modern historians had trouble with it until the last 40 years or so. So if the (surviving) ancient authors don’t talk about them as lovers, even while discussing other same-sex pairs in the same damn text, we have to ask…why? One very real possibility is that they didn’t talk about them as lovers because they weren’t. Full stop. There could have been other reasons (I think there were), but let’s not flinch from being honest, here.

(This could have been a lot more graphic, but then I’d have to post a warning on my blog.)

So…back to our Persnickety Sources.

First, nothing has survived that Alexander wrote himself. We have a couple public inscriptions, but not one piece of writing, even a letter, from Alexander. (Any surviving letters are quoted in later sources, and probably aren’t real.*)

Second, nothing has survived written by anyone who actually knew Alexander, or even lived when he did, except forensic speeches from Athenian demagogues who mostly hated him (and weren’t writing histories anyway). One may as well trust Demosthenes on Philip.

The sources we do still have used histories written by those who knew Alexander, such as Ptolemy, Aristobulos, Nearchos, Marsyas, and even the court historian, Kallisthenes. They also used other texts of dubious worth, such as Onesikritos, who was made fun of even in his own day for writing “historical fiction.” And sometimes our later authors were using texts who, themselves, were using earlier texts. So we’ve got three (or more) layers, not just two!

Third, we have not just layers of sources, but layers in the CULTURE behind those sources.

The first layer is, of course, Macedonian. How did the Macedonians themselves view Alexander? We don’t know—not truly. Nothing survives from a Macedonian source, such as Marsyas or Ptolemy. (Some of you “in the know” might be thinking, But Polyaenus! No. Polyaenus lived 500 years after ATG; that was a very different Macedonia. [Yes, I used the Latin spelling, as he was Roman. ;p])

The second layer is Greek, but we have to qualify this. Layer 2.0 is Greece of the 4th century, especially Athenian reactionism, writing about the emerging Macedonian kingdom. There could be huge cultural differences even among Greek city-states. Case in point: Athens vs. Sparta. Greeks didn’t always understand Macedonians (sometimes, I swear, on purpose).

BUT we also have the increasingly homogenized Hellenistic world of the Successors, which was sorta like when you throw in a bunch of different colored shirts and wash them in hot water. You get a color-bleeding mess. Your red shirt (Attic-Ionic) might have a big blue streak (Doric) on it now. That’s sort of what happened to Greek culture as the Hellenistic era progressed. Lots of bleed. This had begun prior to Alexander, but he accelerated it like kerosene on a trash fire. We can call that Greek Layer 2.1, or something.

Then we have the Romans, and their culture, which, if similar to Greek, definitively wasn’t Greek in key ways. All our surviving sources were written as the Republic was collapsing and the Empire emerging, and by that point, Greece was a Roman province.

Again, we’ve got two groups here: Greeks living under Roman rule, such as Plutarch, Diodorus, and Arrian—who wrote in Greek—and then Roman authors such as Curtius, and later Justin, who wrote in Latin. But the Greeks under Rome shouldn’t be conflated with Athenians in ATG’s own day, or even under the Successors. The culture evolved and took on Roman shadings.

So that’s not just layers of sources, but layers of cultures trying to understand what people who lived a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years before them thought/believed.

Ergo, are we hearing what Alexander (or anybody else around him) really thought or intended? Or just what writers of the Second Sophistic (such as Plutarch) wanted him to model? Or how even later authors, such as Arrian, wanted to use him to flatter his patron, Hadrian?

What’s Roman, what’s Greek, and what’s Macedonian? Can we tease that out? I’d say it’s damn tricky, and often, flat impossible—although unlike some of my colleagues, I don’t believe it’s all Roman overlay. That goes too far in the other direction, IMO.

Last, we have several authors who weren’t writing about Alexander specifically, but have bits of Alexander lore embedded in their texts: Athenaeus’s “Supper Party,” or Polyaenus’s “Strategems,” or even Plutarch’s “Moralia,” just to name three.

Among these, especially later, we have authors writing material they (or later readers) tried to pass off as written by earlier authors. We often refer to these authors with the preface “Pseudo-” as in “Pseudo-Kallisthenes.” It was NOT written by Kallisthenes, but was later attributed to him.

So, now you have some idea of why Alexander historians want to pull our hair out!

But I detail that to explain why it’s so hard for me to give you any clear answer about whether Alexander and Hephaistion remained lovers as adults. Or even if they were lovers at all.

In none of our five primary histories of Alexander, nor in Plutarch’s other stuff, nor Athenaeus, etc. is Hephaistion ever called Alexander’s lover. This includes sources that do mention with apparent unconcern other pairs of male lovers. So this isn’t “the love that dared not speak it’s name.” The Greeks were pretty okay with talking about their boyfriends.

There could be OTHER reasons for deep-sixing mention of Hephaistion and Alexander as lovers, mostly having to do with status (some of which I touched on in the novels), yet the lack of clear affirmation is a problem. The only mentions we do have come from late sources, one of which belongs to that category of “pseudo-” authors I mentioned: Pseudo-Diogenes (in Aelian), as well as Arrian recording the Stoic Epiktatos. The philosophers are trying to make a point about the dangers of giving in to physical desire, so it’s hard to know how much credit to give these references.

Thus, we’re left with little besides the indirect (e.g., the Achilles-Patroklos allusions, etc.). Those have their own problems, which I’ll not go into now, as I’ve already written a small essay.

One potential reason for a lack of mention in our surviving sources is that any sexual love affair had been a product of their youth. What remained was a fiercely deep and passionate devotion. Before you pooh-pooh that—Of course they were still having sex!—consider modern marriages that have lasted for decades but no longer include sexual activity, at least between the married partners. Don’t be sucked in by Romance novel tropes.

When I was doing bereavement counseling (et al.), I ran into all sorts of arrangements that married couples made across time. Some marriages break up when the partners stop being sexually attracted to each other, and “cheat.” But others don’t, because it’s not “cheating” if it’s mutually agreed to. Or in some cases, the partners simply lost interest in sex as they aged…but didn’t fall out of love with each other. So they might have sex once a year? Maybe? That was enough. Or they had sex on the side, with permission. People don’t fit into boxes well, IME. Honesty was the hallmark of marriages that lasted even when they weren’t still having sex. I’ve known of marriages where the couples had stopped having sex years ago, but when one of them died, the other was completely devastated because of the enormous EMOTIONAL investment. I think that’s what hit Alexander when Hephaistion died. Maybe they were still having sex, at least once in a blue moon. Maybe they weren’t. That didn’t matter.

LOVE is deeper than sex, by a long shot. Which is why the Greeks counted PHILIA (true friendship) as the superior love to eros (desire).

So whether Alexander and Hephaistion were still sexually involved—or had ever had sex—doesn’t reflect the depth of their love for each other. We might not be told by the sources that they were lovers, physically, either as youths or continuing into adulthood. But the sources are abundantly clear that they loved each other best of all. When Hephaistion died, Alexander followed him about 10 months later.

(Final note: what I intend to do in the series, going forward, is a bit different from what I described here, but that’s why I specified this involves the historical men, not necessarily my fictional characters.)

*My reference to quoted material, such as letters—or speeches—not being real: it was a common practice in the ancient world for the author of histories, especially starting with Thucydides, to just MAKE SHIT UP. It was all about showing off one’s own rhetorical skills. I think, in a lot of cases, we are probably getting at least the gist of what was said. But NEVER, EVER, EVER trust the “transcription” of an ancient speech…unless it was actually recorded later by the author. So, say, Demosthenes’ Philippics are probably a cleaned up version of the speeches he delivered. But Alexander’s “Speech at Opis” is NOT what Alexander actually said.

#Alexander the Great #Alexanderthegreat #Hephaistion #Hephaestion #Dancing with the Lion #DwtL #Homoeroticism in the ancient world #Alexander x Hephaistion #alexander x hephaestion #Classics #tagamemnon #ancient history #historiography #asks

[waveridden]

FIC: greatest story ever told, boy

Steven has a lot of things. A master’s. A lot of unpaid student debt. Four copies of the Constitution. A tenure-track position at a moderately nice university. And, for some goddamn reason, he has Cib as his best friend. Cib, who really loves pissing Steven off with conspiracy theories. (A National Treasure AU. 1.5k, gen.)

AUcember || title lyric

#

“Okay, okay, hear me out.” Cib claps his hands together.

Steven waits. When Cib doesn’t say anything, he waves a hand without looking up.

“Ahem,” Cib says. Not like he’s clearing his throat, just saying the word “ahem.”

Steven gestures again, a little more impatiently, which must be enough for him, because he claps his hands again. “Are you familiar with the book known as the Constitution?”

“Not a book,” Steven says, “and also not a great joke you’re making.”

“So you have heard of it?”

“I’m a historian.”

“Steve, it’s a yes or no question.”

Steven finally, finally looks up at him, and Cib is staring in wide-eyed seriousness. “You know that I’m a literal historian with a concentration in revolutionary America, right?”

“Duh,” Cib says, “I’m just checking. For context.”

“I have four copies of the Constitution in this office, right now.”

“You’re a professor, you don’t have anything.”

Steven has a lot of things. A master’s. A doctorate. A lot of unpaid student debt. Four copies of the Constitution. Several dozen published papers on early American history. A tenure-track position at a moderately nice university. And, for some goddamn reason, he has Cib as his best friend. Cib, who makes money bussing tables and selling copies of his EP to strangers, and who really loves pissing Steven off with conspiracy theories. Cib, who he wouldn’t change anything about for the world.

“I,” Steven says with dignity, “am going to shove one of those copies up your ass.”

“Good,” Cib says. “Could use a little freedom in me.”

“Ew.”

“Point is!” Cib claps his hands three times in a row and smacks them down on his knees. “We’re not talking about that.”

“About what?”

“The Constitution.”

“What are we talking about?”

“Declaration of Independence, idiot.”

“What the fuck about it?”

“I think it has secrets.”

“What kind of secrets?”

“Secret map to buried treasure, dude!”

Steven snorts so loudly he has to clap a hand over his mouth. “You’re not serious?”

“I’m so serious!”

“You think there’s a treasure map on the Declaration of Independence?”

“Yes, dude.”

“Are you fucking with me right now?”

“No, dude!” Cib leans in, looking suddenly serious. “I know things.”

“Mmhm, what kind of things?”

“Things I can’t repeat.”

“Legally, or because you can’t remember?”

“Legally,” Cib says. “You know, we’re not supposed to tell you these things.”

“Who the fuck is we?”

“My organization.”

“What organization?”

“The one I’m in. I can’t tell you, dude.”

Steven sits back in his chair, eyeing Cib. It sounds like the normal bullshit he spits out, about Illuminati and aliens and whatever else, but he’s not saying it like it’s normal. It sounds weirdly earnest, the way a lot of his secrets do.

“Cib,” he says warily, “are you trying to say you’re a member of a secret society?”

“Course not,” Cib says, but he nods emphatically.

“I don’t know how to take that.”

“Take whatever you want from it, I’ve told you what I can.”

“About a map on the back of the Declaration of Independence? And a secret organization that knows about the map?”

“I think I have friends in it,” Cib says. “I think you do, too.”

Steven shakes his head. “You lost me. You’ve gone straight past acceptable crazy and into too weird for me, man.”

Cib looks disappointed, but he shrugs and moves on. “Why do you have four copies of the Constitution, anyways?”

“Oh, my god, it’s my actual job.”

“To have four copies? Not fourteen?”

“I am a professor,” Steven says, loudly, like that’s going to make Cib fuck off. It never does. It’s not going to work this time.

“Sure, dude,” Cib says, but he’s grinning lopsidedly, and Steven decides to let it go. Just this once.

#

And then Cib’s gone.

It takes Steven a couple days to figure it out, because sometimes Cib doesn’t answer texts. But then he keeps not answering them. And then he keeps not showing up at Steven’s office or apartment to bug him. And then Steven goes to Cib’s apartment and it’s… empty. Messy as ever, looking lived-in and warm, but Cib’s not there. It looks like he hasn’t been there in a few days.

“Shit,” Steven says out loud, standing in the middle of the apartment. “Shit.”

He files a missing persons report. He calls his friends. He does everything he can, which is a ton of fucking nothing. And he goes back to work.

Around the one-week mark, when Steven doesn’t have anything left to do, he finally remembers that last conversation. And secret societies. Which aren’t really Steven’s area of expertise, but he works at a big university. He has a lot of colleagues. So he goes door-knocking.

The guy who knows about secret societies is named James, and he laughs when Steven asks him if he knows anything. “Only, like, all the things.”

“Really.”

“Well, not all of them. They still have secrets.” James shrugs. “But a lot of things.”

“Okay, great.” Steven sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Cool. I have a crazy question.”

“What kind of crazy?”

“My best friend went missing a week ago.”

The smile vanishes off James’s face. “Shit, dude, I’m so sorry. Are the police looking?”

“Yeah, but that’s- not the point. Right before he disappeared, I think he said he was a member of a secret society.”

“Really.”

“Maybe?”

James raises his eyebrows. “Okay, what kind of society are we talking here?”

Steven sighs. He doesn’t remember much, because he wasn’t completely listening to Cib, why wasn’t he completely listening to Cib? And it’s not like it made sense anyways, but he could’ve remembered… more. “He said something about a map on the Declaration of Independence.”

“Like, the original?”

“I mean, I would assume.”

“Huh,” James says thoughtfully. “You know, I’ve heard a couple things along those lines.”

“Really,” Steven says flatly. “You know, not that I know you well enough to accuse you of this, but if you’re fucking with me after my best friend literally went missing-”

“Nonono, dude, swear.” James goes over to his bookshelf and runs his thumb along the spines of a few books, pulling a couple out at random and shuffling them around. “Right! Okay. Don’t have it with me, that’s cool. But there are stories about Freemasons and stuff, and them hiding maps on documents.”

“Freemasons?”

“Don’t you teach early American stuff?”

“Well, yeah,” Steven says, because he definitely knows what the Freemasons are. “But… you’re being serious.”

James shrugs. “Is it any crazier than you asking me if I know where your best friend went?”

“He’s Canadian, can he be a Freemason?”

“Freemasons technically aren’t a secret society, on the surface.”

“And if anyone could get under the surface, it’s Cib,” Steven mutters. “Okay. Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that the Freemasons actually kidnapped my best friend. What can we do about it?”

“Do about it?” James repeats. “I mean, you can’t tell the cops a secret society took him, but you probably knew that.”

“But is there anything we can actually do?”

“Well, why would they have kidnapped him?”

“I don’t know, because he told me he was a Freemason?” Steven shakes his head. “No, I didn’t even think he was serious.”

“Well, maybe the society wasn’t what mattered,” James suggests. “Like, he didn’t say it by name, but he said that there was a treasure map on the Declaration. Maybe they don’t want people knowing that.”

“So you think it’s something to do with the map?”

“What else could it be?”

“Okay,” Steven says. “So the Freemasons don’t want people knowing about the map.”

“Or,” James says, eyes wide, “maybe they want the map.”

“You mean the Declaration of Independence.”

“Yeah, that.”

“One of the founding documents of our nation.”

“Get over yourself,” says James. “It’s a map right now. And they took your best friend to get it, dude.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

James shrugs. “Take the map, I bet they’d give him back.”

“That seems like an escalation.”

“Think about it. He knows about the map, maybe more than the average person.”

“This is verging into conspiracy territory.”

“Says the guy who thinks his best friend was kidnapped for being a member of a secret society.”

Steven sighs. Hate it though he does, James has a point. There’s not anything really conventional about this, and if he’s going to commit to this, he might as well commit all the way. “Okay. So they want the map.”

“They want the map,” James repeats.

“And we don’t want them to have it.”

“No, we don’t.”

“So we need to get the map.”

James points at him with both hands. “Bingo.”

“And by which you mean we need to get the Declaration of Independence.”

“To get your friend back.”

Steven’s best friend has been missing for a week. And, fuck, stealing the Declaration of Independence isn’t a great idea, but if there’s a chance in hell it helps him figure out where Cib is? Then that’s worth it. It’s worth it any day.

“Fuck it,” Steven sighs. “Let’s go steal the Declaration of Independence, I guess.”

#ship pine 7 #shipping pine 7 #ragehappy #waveridden.fic #aucember17 #rpf for ts #again not really shippy but eh. take what you can get #also HEY happy halfway point! #idek how many people read these it's hard to get a gauge but for the record if you have read any of aucember: thank you i love you #sixteen down fifteen to go!!!

[maxihealth]

Health Care Bills’ Financial Toxicity – Remembering the Jones’ of Whatcom County, WA

“In an extreme example of angst over expensive medical bills, an elderly Washington couple who lived near the U.S.-Canadian border died in a murder-suicide this week after leaving notes that detailed concerns about paying for medical care,” USA Today reported on August 10, 2019.

Five years ago, financial toxicity as a side-effect was noted by two Sloan Kettering Medical Center in a landmark report on 60 Minutes in October 2014. Epidemiologist Peter Bach and oncologist Leonard Saltz told CBS’s Lesley Stahl, “A cancer diagnosis is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy…We need to take into account the financial consequences of the decisions that we make for our patients,” observing that new cancer therapies launching on the market were costing more than previous products — costs that were borne increasingly by patients.

A timely report from Optum Bank (a unit of UnitedHealth Group) asks, “is financially preparing for a chronic condition possible?”

The report aggregates data on the state of Americans’ general finances then focuses in on health care costs. One-third of Americans with chronic conditions say they have struggled to pay medical bills in the past year, noted in the pie chart from the Optum report.

The numbers of people that represents can be calculated by the first statistic, that 60% of Americans live with at least one chronic condition. That’s about 150 million people.

Now consider the stress that health care costs can cause someone living with, and paying for, a chronic condition.

 The text excerpted here from the Optum report summarizes that emotional impact. “At some point they (patients with chronic conditions) began to feel stress caused by symptoms and fear of the unknown….their world was turned upside down as they struggled to understand the impact of their diagnosis and understand options for insurance, doctors and their work situation. In some cases, this stress led to anxiety depression and even substance abuse.”

Moreover, “many patients are now preoccupied with managing logistical details like transportation, insurance claims and finances.”

Ultimately, “Most patients feel guilty about the financial toll their condition has on their family and caregivers,” Optum soberly observed.

Health and finances are highly intertwined, Optum concludes, explaining how health savings accounts and proactive planning can help risk-manage the stresses of chronic medical expenses.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  In 2014, Dr. Bach and Dr. Saltz were referring to innovative therapeutics like Gleevec and Zaltrap, each priced then at over $10,000 a month.

In 2019, today, we see CAR-T therapy can cost $1.5 million all-in. The treatment was approved last week for payment by Medicare for some patients.

To Optum’s point about creative financing for health care, Bluebird Therapeutics has designed a payment-on-installment-plan-by-outcomes for Zynteglo, which I discussed here on Health Populi. Bluebird set the price of Zynteglo at about $1.8 million.

I describe this uniquely-American phenomenon in my book, HealthConsuming, in the chapter titled, “The Patient Is the Payor.” Americans don’t have a great savings habit compared with other health citizens around the world. The range of what U.S. adults have saved in a bank range from about $400 to about $1,000, depending on the source. That savings wouldn’t cover the cost of a month’s worth of insulin for many managing diabetes.

In that context, you don’t have to look at a seven-figure specialty drug price to find financial toxicity as a mainstream issue for patients in America. The cost of insulin has driven some patients to ration or abandon the prescription, to tragic outcomes like the death of Josh Wilkerson in June  Josh’s death was not a one-off statistic: he represents other patients with diabetes who have made the choice to ration the life-saving drug. “It’s the Prices, Stupid,” as our friend Uwe Reinhardt and colleagues reminded us, over and over.

I heard the historian Jon Meacham, author of the book The Soul of America, say the other day in the wake of the El Paso and Dayton shootings, that America’s “work-flow” (my phrase) tends to be very last-minute. Throughout history, U.S. leaders haven’t been effective at or valued planning ahead the way I might engage my clients in scenario planning for the future. No doubt there are strategic “war rooms” dotted throughout U.S. administrations through 200+ years, but Meacham’s research on the soul of America has revealed that American leadership has tended to do things only when faced with that bull in the ring, close-up and facing death squarely in the eye, in the last moment of truth.

This is how the Jones’ must have felt, in that bull ring, between rock and the hard place of health care costs they couldn’t afford. Will we learn from their tragic choice?

The post Health Care Bills’ Financial Toxicity – Remembering the Jones’ of Whatcom County, WA appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Health Care Bills’ Financial Toxicity – Remembering the Jones’ of Whatcom County, WA posted first on https://carilloncitydental.blogspot.com

[johnbutlersbuzz]

ON THE ROAD AGAIN WITH BONNIE & CLYDE

Well, I’m on the road again. Cue Willie Nelson’s song.

What, wait-a-minute?

I’m just told that Willie’s music publishers want some green-dough, some cabbage, some buckaroos, to play his song in public. That’s okay, I’ll just mumble the words and hum it in my mind. Trouble is, that song is hard to get out of your head once you start it playing inside there. Know what I mean?

I’m driving north on Highway 83 in ARGO. Wearing an un-tucked light blue Columbia fly-fishing shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and loafers without socks, I am easily identified by locals along the way as a “yur-not-fum-round-here” guy.

If you want to quickly find the road, I’m traveling. Pick up a paper map of the U.S.A. (remember those?). If you can’t find one, do this mentally: hold the map out in front of you with the west side of it in your left hand and east side in your right.

Yes, of course, with north at the top.

Now, fold it in half from left to right (ah, note for dyslexics: a right to left folding of the map also works, with, of course, north still at the top), then crease it in the middle. Now open it back up.

Look at the crease in the middle. Highway 83 should be right there in the crease, or, at least, close to it, just to the left side, from top to bottom.

Some writers have called Highway 83, “The Last American Highway.” One guidebook dubbed this highway, “The Road To Nowhere,” which, in all due respect to the travel guide, seems disparaging, belittling, and frankly, stupid. I wasn’t the best student in my high school geography class, but I can see the road does go somewhere, and on both ends of it: old Mexico to Canada. Two exciting, diverse places, albeit, one very violent, the other passive and peaceful. So in my humble opinion, this demeaned Highway 83 needs a more notable name.

I’m naming it: HEARTLAND HIGHWAY.

It’s a more fitting moniker don’t you think?  Much more appropriate, especially when you come to know it for what it really is and what it represents for America and the world.

Highway 83, Heartland Highway, is 1,885 miles long, traversing south from old Mexico, through the length of Texas, the panhandle of Oklahoma, the western side of Kansas, Nebraska, and straight across South Dakota and North Dakota, and on north into Manitoba, Canada.

This mostly two-lane road unfolds, with narrow shoulders most of the way, and occasional trucks hauling everything from mammoth round-bails of hay, to cattle, to large farm equipment; all whizzing by, way to close in the opposing lane.

Heartland Highway is dotted, sparsely, with small classic American towns. The kind of towns that reflect the soul of a great country.

Sturdy people who live in those towns and on farms scattered around. They are all in the middle of the nation’s bread-basket-fields of corn, wheat, and grain. And if providing food for the country and the world is not enough along Heartland Highway, oil is brought up from below the surface to produce energy, and brought from above via huge wind-turbines.

Over those 1,885 miles, there are a million stories; many lost in the wind and dust; others told and retold. Historians begin with stories of roaming dinosaurs embedded in rock thousands of years ago, to stories of Indian tribes fighting each other; then Indian and European settlers fighting each other. There are stories of railroaders, smugglers, drug runners, bank robbers, and on and on.

Ranchers and farmers began scratching out an existence in the 1800’s along the route, back when it was just wagon ruts with a strip of grass growing in-between, much of the way. Modern day “Snow-birds,” use 83 to flee winter heading south for warmer climes.

As I drive north through the panhandle of Texas, nearing the panhandle of Oklahoma, I stop at a little rest area on the west side of 83, Heartland Highway. I’m about seven miles north of Wellington, Texas (birthplace of composer and songwriter Jimmy Webb).

I’m standing near the spot that almost ended the criminal career of the notorious Bonnie and Clyde on June 10, 1933. The final ending for the pair would come later, but this specific spot at the top of Texas, next to the Salt Fork Red River, changed Bonnie’s life in a significant way and added a story to the area’s history that is still compelling to this day.

Bonnie and Clyde were a couple of outlaws, famous depression-era desperados in the early thirties: Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrows.

Maybe Clyde’s parents bestowing a middle name on him, like “Chestnut,” had something to do with the anger he carried inside. Okay, I’m playing armchair analyst here, but it’s a thought worth pondering.

Bonnie and Clyde centered on robbing banks, along with Clyde’s brother and their various gang members who joined up with them from time to time. Their crime spree wrecked havoc that included murder, from  Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, to Illinois.

On a side note, as a teenager, I had the intriguing experience of interviewing one of their colleagues, Frank Hardy. He had retired to Waco, Texas after his life in crime, which included an extended stay behind bars. He died of a heart attack shortly after our interview. This is while I was in high school writing for the student newspaper. I’ll tell you about that another time.

So, back in 1933, Bonnie and Clyde were driving the same route I’m on today, but with a little more motivation. They were desperately trying to reach the Oklahoma state line to meet up with Clyde’s brother, and fleeing the Texas law. Fortunately, I am able to take my time, meandering, with no one chasing after me (as far as I know).

Bonnie and Clyde, along with a gang member, William Jones, raced to the state border on that hot June 10th day. Getting to the state line was a key strategy because law enforcement officers lost the authority to enforce their state laws if they crossed their state boundaries. Before cell phones, the internet, and sparsity of land-line telephones, communicating was not as easy as it is today, all to the benefit of the bad guys.

Reaching the Oklahoma/Texas state line for Bonnie and Clyde meant a reprieve from the immediate pursuit of the Texas police. An escape from justice, for the moment.

In the hasty flee for the border they apparently didn’t see the detour sign warning the bridge had been washed away. Bonnie and Clyde’s Ford coup plunged into a dry creek bed off the Salt Fork of the Red River.

The whole incidence, starting with the car speeding past the barriers, then plunging into the creek bed, was witnessed by a farmer, John Pritchard, and his family, from their farmhouse nearby.

John Pritchard, his dad, and brother-in-law, being good citizens rushed to the scene, helping to save Bonnie, Clyde and his brother from the burning car rolled over on its side. Not knowing the victims were criminals, the Pritchard family cared for them in their home.

Bonnie’s leg was burnt from the car fire and splashing battery acid, resulting in her being afflicted with a limp, needing assistance to walk, the rest of her life. The Clyde Barrow was nicked-up and bruised. They required medical attention, so Pritchard’s son-in-law, Alonzo Cartwright, drove into town to get a doctor.

Before the doctor arrived, the Sheriff and his deputy showed up at the farmhouse. Clyde reacted, and Bonnie suddenly came to life. They took their guns, handcuffed them, and proceeded to kidnap them in their own car. A scuffle resulted in the farmer’s daughter being shot in one hand, while in her other hand she held her baby.

To ensure the farmer couldn’t follow them, the gangsters shot out the tires of the Pritchard family automobile. Before leaving, Clyde offered money to Pritchard saying, “… for all the trouble we’ve been to you.”

“No,” said Pritchard, “if a man can’t help another man, things are in pretty bad shape.”

After crossing into Oklahoma, the gang tied the Sheriff and deputy to a tree with barbed wire near the town of Sayre.

Bonnie and Clyde would live nearly another year before being gunned down by Texas Rangers.

In the wrecked Ford coupe abandoned in the riverbed, Bonnie left one of her leather gloves. Clyde got his guns but overlooked an ammo clip, still loaded with twenty rounds of bullets.

Those two items are kept to this day at the Collingsworth County Museum in Wellington. A reminder of the day Bonnie and Clyde made a mark on the otherwise quiet little community.

Just one of the stories along the Heartland Highway. And it’s back on in ARGO for me, headed north on 83, discovering America, one story at a time.

See you down the road #JohnButlersBuzz

  (Special thanks to the Collingsworth County Museum and the Texas Historical Commission.)

[jahillmusings-blog]

How meeting and interviewing a WW2 veteran helped my mental health...

I haven’t had the greatest year so far in 2017, experiencing a few personal and professional knockbacks and a physical health issue which still isn’t properly resolved. In fact I think it’s been so bad that I plan to get levels of Phil Mitchell drunk on New Years Eve to bid it farewell.

In the middle of a few negative experiences came my personal highlight of the year, which commenced in the form of a seemingly run-of-the-mill email. I received it one Friday at work, and it was sent from a 91 year old man called Ken. He introduced himself as a badge collector and wanted to pick my brain about a particular badge relating to a regiment. I had absolutely no idea, as badges aren’t really my forte, so I followed the usual protocol, and referred him to an esteemed expert from a separate institution. He replied to say thanks for my efforts and I thought nothing more of it for about a week. I then had the sudden urge to google him, and sure enough, one or two hits down there was an article about how somebody with the same name had been a POW in Poland during the Second World War. I then searched the internal records and found 30 pages of his memoirs from a regimental magazine from 2010. I poured through them, not stopping for around two hours – completely taken in by his writing. I got back in touch with Ken, to say sadly we couldn’t help regarding the badge as my colleague suspected it was a replica, but I’d be extremely interested in coming down to video interview him if that’s something he’d be happy doing. We then had a long telephone conversation where he briefly summarised his fascinating personal story of the War and we fixed a date for us to meet to record his memories.

I took the following Friday off work and enlisted the support of my Dad (a self-confessed military history geek) to help me carry the equipment and conduct the interview. We arrived early and nervously sat in the car further up the road for about 15 mins. My Dad and I have always felt a tremendous amount of respect for Second World War veterans, given the fact that my Grandpa, Harry Hill (the original one, not the unfunny comic) had fought on Omaha Beach with the Americans on D-Day. Any anxiety we had was quickly crushed by a warm greeting from Ken. He explained that he’d been living on his own since his wife passed away 6 ½ years ago, but had family close by, and friends from the Royal British Legion branch that he’d previously been President. For somebody who left school at 17, Ken was extremely eloquent. He’d experienced the Blitz as a young lad in the Home Guard, joined up at 17 and found himself in Normandy around two weeks after D-Day. After being in the house for approximately three minutes, we were ushered upstairs to see Ken’s immense badge collection. It took up an entire large office and spanned into his bedroom and even his toilet! You could tell a lot of time and effort had been poured into procuring these items and they were displayed beautifully.

We started the first stage of the interview and Ken told his story with barely a pause for breath. He spoke honestly about his feelings upon seeing his first dead body, hero-worshipping his elder brother, who’d been a commando at the St Nazaire Raid, and how he felt about the War in general. Ken’s war took an unpleasant turn when on patrol, he was captured by an SS Unit. Of the 30 men on patrol with him, 16 made it back, (including his brother) 5 were captured, and 9 of his mates were killed. He was subject to intimidatory tactics, including being isolated and vigorously questioned about his unit.

We broke abruptly when Ken’s friend Len arrived for lunch. Like Ken, Len is a larger-than-life character, perfectly understandably preferring to answer with a joke whenever we approached a serious subject. I then found myself sat in Pizza Express with Len and Ken - a combined age of 185, but out-drinking me as I sipped a coke whilst they indulged in a couple of beers. By an extraordinary coincidence, it turned out Len had been on Omaha Beach with my Grandad, and they were also both North London Jews. At first my Dad and I thought this would be too farcical to be true, but subject to later research we confirmed that Len and my Grandad were just two of a small band of British people on the American beach, Omaha, of course infamously depicted by Saving Private Ryan. Could it have been possible that they knew each other? or had conversed on the boat out there? It sounds absurd and not even something you’d make up, but really, who knows?! My grandpa never really spoke about his experiences, save an extremely watered down account of his War for a primary school project. The lack of conversation about their experiences seems to be a common trend for that generation, and something as historians, we must respect, but are also challenged with as their numbers start to diminish and we look to collate their memories before it is too late.

After Ken generously offering to settle the bill, we got back to it. The next part of Ken’s interview was some of the most fascinating personal history I have ever experienced. He recalled his memories like they’d happened last week, remarking that another coincidence was that he landed in France 73 years to the day that we were sat talking with each other. After spending a bit of time in camps in France, Ken was taken by Cattle Wagon to Aachen, in extremely cramped and unhygienic conditions. His first memory of Germany was opening a tin of sausages from a red cross parcel, with a newly made friend, only to find that the label stated they’d been produced just 50 yards from where he was born! Ken then looked over to me, said ‘bare with me’ and proceeded to venture upstairs. I looked over at my father, slightly perplexed, but intrigued at what he was going to bring down. After a few minutes Ken emerged with the label of the sausages, that he’d kept for 73 years. He described how it gave him a lift, that he was so far away from home, but there was something there with him from home. I promptly feigned a toilet visit so I could prevent him seeing me welling up.

Ken eventually ended up just over the border in Poland, only a few miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau, although he said he had no inkling that he was near there at the time. He was seconded to working in a mine with some locals, supervised by the camp guards. This was backbreaking work, both physically and mentally demanding. He shared with us a story about how on Christmas Eve he began to sing Silent Night, or ‘Stille Nacht’ in German. The local miner picked up on this, telling him: “good tune Tommy’. This broke the ice and they began talking. Somehow they got chatting about football. The local miner was only aware of two British sides, both of which had toured the region pre-war, Bolton Wanderers and Arsenal. Due to the language barrier, Ken managed to convince him that he was Arsenal’s goalkeeper. He got extra rations!

As the Allies began to liberate Nazi held land, Ken was taken on a series of marches aimed to evade the Russians from the East and the Brits/Americans pushing through from the west. He stated that this was some of the most difficult times for him during his whole experience, once even lying down in the snow prepared to meet his fate, only to be dragged on his feet by a fellow POW. Ken was liberated in April, 1945 and began repairing his life. He emotionally recalled landing back in Blighty, getting the train home and seeing his mum and family for the first time. I was at Ken’s house (discounting the break for lunch) for six hours, and managed to get two and a half hours worth of edited footage. Ken’s interview will be made publicly available in the future and I am extremely committed to ensure that his story will not be lost to the annals of time.

Thank you Ken for sharing your experiences, giving me some perspective, and revitalising my passion for the subject matter. I am currently in the process of constructing a podcast surrounding the interview which I hope will be of interest. If you know of any WW2 veterans I’d urge you to go and talk to them and to hear their story. You won’t regret it.

#ww2 mentalhealth personalhistory

[iph2017]

Question of the Week

Who said this?

“If any member of our college of visitors could  justifiably withdraw from this sacred duty it would be myself, who, quadragenis stipendiis jamdudum peractis, have neither vigor of body nor mind left to keep the field; but I will die in the last ditch, and so I hope you will, my friend, as well as our firm breasted brothers and colleagues...Nature will not give you a second life wherein to atone for the omissions of this. Pray then, dear and very dear Sir, do not think of deserting us, but view the sacrifices which seem to stand in your way, as the lesser duties, and such as ought to be postponed to this, the greatest of all. Continue with us in these holy labors, until having seen their accomplishment, we may say with old age ‘Nunc dimittis, Domine.’ Under all circumstances, however, of praise or blame, I shall be affectionately yours.”

--Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C Cabell, January 31, 1821

Presumably the battle had already been won. The land grant passed in 1817, the university charter given in 1819. The University of Virginia was established. Except that the future of the fledgling was very much in doubt. The General Assembly did not want to appropriate a large amount of money to a new University when they already had two other schools to support. Joseph Cabell, Jefferson’s closest ally and champion in the General Assembly, had fought since the early 1810s for the school. The battle took a high toll on Cabell’s health and he wanted to lay down his arms. But Jefferson knew they were not done yet, and persuaded Cabell to keep fighting.

It’s my last day, so please indulge some rambling musings. Apologies in advance. Feel free to skip to the end for the actual tally of all work accomplished this summer.

I found this quote/letter my very first week of the internship and it stuck with me. More so than a regular quote about never giving up, which you often hear in association with when things are looking down, this quote shows the importance of giving 110% even when it seems like you could stop and be proud of what you did. Because what if you could make it even better. What if you could create something which lasts over 200 years. And yes, you “may not live to see our glory” to quote Hamilton (I realize Hamilton and Jefferson were not the best of friends in any sense of the word but it seems appropriate) nor is it about creating a legacy (“planting seeds in a garden you never get to see” pardon my musical obsession). When Jefferson founded the University of Virginia, he had already accomplished so many things, more than most people could ever hope to do. But the thing which he cared most about, and fought so hard for at the end of his life, was the University. It was education for the people.

Jefferson always gets a bad rap, and I’m not trying to give Jefferson a total pass. I’m not going to get into discussions on slavery, or any other topics. Just UVA. The University I love. It certainly looks different today from Jefferson’s original vision (and not just the buildings and layout). It was a school for white men, primarily well off, for most of its history. The first African American Student wasn’t admitted until 1950. The first coed undergraduate class matriculated in 1970. (Although women had been admitted to graduate level programs since the late 1910s and earlier to any level if they were daughters/wives of faculty). The first organization of gay students wasn’t until 1972. Do we wish that the University had always been open and egalitarian towards all? Absolutely. Are there parts of the University’s history we would rather sweep under the rug? Of course. But the trick with history is to figure out the best way to understand it and help others understand. It is not my place to say if Jefferson would approve of UVA now or speculate his opinion of its history. It is my job as a historian to gather and present the relevant material that will enable people to engage with their history and what was happening to cause those events to occurs.

I realize that this is perhaps a little long winded and stream of conscious. So again, I thank you for your patience.

(Funnily enough, me being the history and musical theater fan I am,“Is Anybody There” from 1776 just started playing. Jefferson might appreciate this comparison a little more than the Hamilton reference. But at this point in the song, it looks like independence is not going to happen. John Adams sings of his vision and wants to know if anyone else can see it. With a few changes, this could be Jefferson singing to Cabell about Jefferson’s vision for UVA)

BICENTENNIAL NEWS

Tickets are selling like challah on Thursdays (Shout out to Challah for Hunger). A few weeks ago UVA Today published a quiz about UVA alumni based on some of our research.

This week has mainly focused on cleaning up documents and making sure everything is still accessible after today. Wrote a few more profiles, added/wrote a couple new timelines, started a new notes compilation. The Cornerstone project has also come together nicely, although there is still room for them to add things once I leave.

This summer Caroline and I wrote approximately 72 profiles, 22 timelines, 9 themes/note compilations, 2 lists of event write ups, plus some top secret work for Illimitable. The Illimitable work includes about 30 write ups(quotes, description, and picture). We read over 25 books and countless articles. We interviewed one person for the Cornerstone project. I worked on the Cornerstone project more, adding/editing information and pictures for their StoryMap on UVA staff. We ran discussions at the June all Commission meeting about our work. We attended multiple meetings every week and learned a lot about what goes into putting an event of this scale.

Going forward, our work will be used in the actual events of the Bicentennial launch weekend and other events during the Bicentennial celebration.  A website will be launched containing our timelines and profiles. The Cornerstone project will be revealed in a few months. And of course there is the top secret Illimitable project. Caroline and I plan on remaining involved with the Bicentennial by joining the Commemorating our History division of the Bicentennial Commission. I personally plan on being a member of the documentary team for the Bicentennial. Our work will probably feature in some other ways. Because that’s the thing about history: it’s never truly a thing of the past.

It has been a pleasure and an honor. Thank you,

Colleen

#final #fun fact friday #bicentennial commission

[andreaeppolitoevents]

You Belong On the Cover of a Magazine!

No one else is doing this...which makes it very exciting for me to share!

Every couple I meet has a story.  And every couple wants to share that story in a way that is unique and personal.  Couples want to affect their guests.  They want to share their lives, and take their guests on a journey.  In a world of pretty, pretty Instagram pictures, many want to unveil something that guests haven't seen, something real, authentic, and true.

Which is why I am now offering something previously reserved only to my couples to all people who have something to celebrate - with planners, without planners, anyone, everyone.  

Introducing The Wedding Editorialist!

About a year ago, I began publishing personal "wedding planning" magazines for my couples.  Originally conceived as a Thank You gift from me to them, I wanted to create a momento of our time together.  The magazines included a style profile of the couple, articles showcasing their love story, engagement photos, emails, and text messages.  I included biographies on their photography team, videographers, and designers, along with a history of their venue and notes from any other creatives that came together to create their day.  I snapped photos during tastings and demos, at coffee meetings, and during dress fittings all with the intention of presenting a completely customized journal of our time together.  

The moment that I received my first "issue" in the mail I knew that we had created something so wildly unique; and my couple was blown away!  It was like giving and receiving the greatest gift in the world.  In that moment, that feeling was enough.

I was shortsighted.  I thought that my couples would only want one or two copies for themselves, perhaps a few extra to share with a parent or bridal party.  But my people are extraordinary, and they took it to whole other level!  My brides and grooms started sharing their magazines digitally, then ordering them in mass quantities and sending them to all of the guests that came to the wedding as a part of the Thank You note and favor process.  Some of my couples began sharing their publications with other brides and grooms that they had connected with, and soon I was being asked to create pieces from past events, for couples that had used other planners, and - eventually - I was tasked with creating a piece that could be shared with guests in advance of the wedding.  "Well," I thought, "how am I going to do that without giving it all away?"  But where there is a will, there is a way, and the final piece became a magazine that will be waiting for guests in their suite when they check into their rooms this summer.  It will be sitting there on top of the other publications, as if it was pulled from the racks of Barnes and Noble.

As time went on, it became clear that doing this properly meant partnering with people who know more than I do about graphic design and poduction.  My long term friend and collaborator Brian Derck and I met to discuss the project, and just like that....The Wedding Editorialist was born.

Today, I am so proud to unveil The Wedding Editorialist to you, and give you a glimpse into all of the ways our issues are being used.

The Features Issue is a favorite among couples that was something special to commemorate their day.  The Features Issue allows couples to share their love story in their own words, with fun, candid behind the sciences photos mixing in with professional images from their photographers.

The Luxe Issue is for couples who want something beyond basic.  These brides and grooms cement their celebrity status among friends and relatives by working with our editors to create full color magazines that are larger, more detailed, and beautifully bound.  

These pieces do not compete with the couple's wedding album, they compliment it.

Our Destinations Issue was inspired by my design pattern Ashley Schnippel from DBD who asked out loud, "Do you think you could make one of these for me before my wedding?"  Her Luxe Destinations Issue is in production now, and will soon be featured on our website.  The Destinations Issue can be printed, emailed, or downloaded to a smart phone.  With all of the amazing articles and behind the scenes teases from wedding planning, this is the perfect favor to get gets excited about your upcoming event.  More than that, though, by providing guests with a FAQ section about the hotel, a curated list of things to see, dine, and do while visiting, and a heavily detailed itinerary, we guarantee that your guests will have a resource on hand that they can turn to with questions....Without bothering you!

And lastly, we have our Pro Piece.  One of the most fulfilling and meaningful things I get to do as a part of this crazy industry is work with other professionals that I respect and admire.  Sometimes I am the mentor; sometimes I am the mentee.  No matter - we are always working together, learning from each other, making each other better.  The Professional Edition was created to give my colleagues an opportunity to make use of what Brian and I have spent a year learning in the click of a button!  Wedding Planners can create their own annual issue, which is a perfect way to catalogue and showcase their work to prospective clients and partners.  Or, they can purchase a Features Issue that can be created for their clients as a gift.  Wedding Photographers are working with us to not only share their perspectives and curate their work, but they are joining the Ambassador program, selling magazines directly to their clients as a one of a kind piece to go along with their albums.  I have venues and designers that want to show off the best of their work, and even entertainment agencies, musicians, and hair and make up artists creating pieces that they can send and share.

The Wedding Editorialist can be emailed as a link, embedded in website, shared in a Facebook post, or added to an email signature.  Every issue includes a digitally hosted e-zine, a printed copy of the magazine, and a social media icon you can use to share your piece online.  Want additional copies?  Easy!  We simply send you the link to our wholesale printing partner, and you can order as many (or as few) as you would like.

I am a wedding planner, first, last, and always.  But part of what I love about being a wedding planner is that I get to be a story teller, an artist, a designer, and a historian.  Through my professional partnerships and speaking engagements I get to be a teacher and a student.  Now, as a co-founder and partner in The Wedding Editorialist, I get to be all that and maybe, if I'm lucky, a little bit more.

Interested in working with our team to create your very own magazine?  It's never too early to begin!  Check out The Wedding Editorialist now!

Follow.  Friend.  Tweet.  

The Wedding Editorialist welcomes you and cannot wait to connect!

Always....

 PS - Our parent company, The Editorial Collective, will be launching our sister project, The Corporate Editorialist, in the coming months.  Designed to help businesses quickly and easily create and modify digital marketing pieces, The Corporate Editorialist will bring a bit of the style and romance of the wedding industry to more austere professions looking to shake things up a bit,

And for our lifetime legacy clients, we don't want to stop at your wedding!  Buy any issue we offer and for the rest of your life we will work with you to create magazines that celebrate and document all of life's most important moments.  From maternity sessions to new babies, international summer vacations to high school graduations, if you have a story, we want to tell it. You name the issue, we create it.

TO VIEW SAMPLES OF THE WEDDING EDITORIALIST, CLICK HERE!

*Design and digital publication for a 24 page magazine begins at $500.  Printing and shipping charges will apply.