[Earlier episode The Messenger]

Altan carefully selected a charcoal pencil from his calligraphy box, which was ornately embedded with jewels.

Batu and the small circle of chieftains went quiet.

Sensing their rapt attention, Altan made a show of crunching his features and frowned in great thought. He brought his pencil to the tiny piece of rough Chinese paper, laid flat and neat on the low table.

The men leaned in. Waited with unblinking eyes. Somewhere in the sprawling encampment outside, a dog barked and received a rebuke from its master. It whined and fell silent.

Their khan hesitated and the men expressed mild disappointment.

Altan studied the point of the charcoal with his undivided interest. From his calligraphy box, he produced a thin blade, no broader than the width of a child’s small finger, and proceeded to sharpen the charcoal.

His men looked at one another and nodded…

In the Deep South, football is a religion.

My mother was no-nonsense, even when it came to planning weddings. “For God’s sake, don’t book it on religious holidays: Christmas, Easter, and football season. You’ll have no-shows around New Year’s, spring break, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day.  Mother’s Day is sacred, too. Father’s Day? Oh, men get over it.”

“Forget August,” Mom added. Her excuse was like a bad weather forecast. “Too much humid hair frizz and perspiration.” (In the South, “sweat” is verboten. Yes, we “glisten” on steamy afternoons.)

She waved away any bride’s dithering and checked off the key players within three days of the engagement announcement: the preacher, the church, the florist, the photographer, the caterer, and the reception location. Her lifelong sewing club demanded immediate notification because they were drowning in showers. All their daughters were coming of age.

Mom didn’t sweat some details…

This is a conversation I’ve had twice in the last two days with doctoral candidates, so I thought it might be useful to talk about here.

Graduate researchers often feel the need to produce a long, detailed defence of the theory or methodology they plan to use in their thesis. Usually, this is not necessary.

What you do need is to show what the method/theory enables you to do with your data, and how that helps you produce the kind of conclusions you are aiming for. 

As with all advice, there are exceptions. For my thesis: My methodology is to do a social historical study of the period (focusing on the economic transactions and social networks of artists and patrons), and then do close analysis of the art work. If I were only doing literary study, or musicology, that sentence would be sufficient. However, in order to do an interdisciplinary thesis I had…

Some dread Monday mornings, need until Wednesday to crank up. Others embrace the start of the week and can’t wait to get going. Most, probably fell somewhere between these two extremes.

For me, every week is strewn with opportunities – crying out to be mined! Patience my friend, while I ready my shovel and pan 🙂

He who plods, a step a day

Towards his goals, moves faster

Than he who zooms past and gives up

Rabbit — ?

Tortoise — ?

Torbbit — ?

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They said the LST could ride higher in the water when landing in trim. She hit the sloping beach, and the bow door fell and disgorged jeeps and tanks and finally men with hands to work. It was gray all round, the water, the sky, ship after ship beside, around, and behind as far as he could see, if he dared to look back.

He looked forward only. German mortar and artillery shells exploded, but he looked forward only—wreckage, strewn wreckage of metal, of flipped, ripped jeeps, of wire, of bodies, whole and fallen, of twitching pieces, arms here and legs there, of detached trunks spilling guts, of oozing, foaming blood.

His automatic-motion hands dragged and patched the broken living and passed them to other hands that stretchered them up the ramp.

The day thundered, but he distanced the noise. He heard nothing but the whir in his brain, punctuated…

Fear seized the gathering. It did not ripple pass or cause any swaying in the crowd. The fear simply froze everyone.

Lily, Jasmine and Rose were all part of that harvest, all robust, brilliant and bright. All damned, all wished they were wrinkled and withered, or at least bruised. However, not many lived to be that old, not among their kind.

It made no difference what colour or even smell, they exuded. Of course, the sweet smelling among them were favoured and felled first.

The man moved down the row, pointing them out, so casually, so callously.

“This, that.”

“How about this one?” Another asked.

“Yes, that whole lot over there,” said the man with a sweep of his finger, with that same indifferent and even bored expression. “She loves colour.” He added as an after thought.

Jasmine and her group shrieked, as the second man came for them, literally…