Tony Cooke Quotes

She'd cook like an angel and fuck like a whore

The past was a consumable, subject to the national preference for familiar products. And history, in America, is a dish best served plain. The first course could include a dollop of Italian in 1492, but not Spanish spice or French sauce or too much Indian corn. Nothing too filling or fancy ahead of the turkey and pumpkin pie, just the way Grandma used to cook it.

Cook,” the historian Bernard Smith speculates, “increasingly realised that wherever he went he was spreading the curses much more liberally than the benefits of European civilization.

What do you know about somebody not being good enough for somebody else? And since when did you care whether Corinthians stood up or fell down? You've been laughing at us all your life. Corinthians. Mama. Me. Using us, ordering us, and judging us: how we cook your food; how we keep your house. But now, all of a sudden, you have Corinthians' welfare at heart and break her up from a man you don't approve of. Who are you to approve or disapprove anybody or anything? I was breathing air in the world thirteen years before your lungs were even formed. Corinthians, twelve. . . . but now you know what's best for the very woman who wiped the dribble from your chin because you were too young to know how to spit. Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you. You have yet to . . . move a fleck of your dirt from one place to another. And to this day, you have never asked one of us if we were tired, or sad, or wanted a cup of coffee. . . . Where do you get the RIGHT to decide our lives? . . . I'll tell you where. From that hog's gut that hangs down between your legs. . . . I didn't go to college because of him. Because I was afraid of what he might do to Mama. You think because you hit him once that we all believe you were protecting her. Taking her side. It's a lie. You were taking over, letting us know you had the right to tell her and all of us what to do. . . . I don't make roses anymore, and you have pissed your last in this house.

If there was an overriding message in his journals, it was that people, the world over, were alike in their essential nature—even if they ate their enemies, made love in public, worshipped idols, or, like Aborigines, cared not at all for material goods.

The world of the rural poor remained what it had been for generations: a day’s walk in radius, a tight, well-trod loop between home, field, church, and, finally, a crowded family grave plot.

In their attitude to history, some New Zealanders resembled die-hard white Southerners in America, who enshrined Confederate leaders and symbols without acknowledging the offense this might cause to others. Sheila

Seventeen evangelicals, plus five of their wives and three children, disembarked at Tahiti in 1797. Eight missionaries fled on the next boat out, to Sydney. One of the remaining missionaries married a native woman and left the church.

Charred, blackened, and cooked, the morsel was brought to the mouth and chewed, contemplated, and swallowed with relish. There was no sauce or seasoning and no consideration for aesthetics or art. Yet the combination of meat and fire yielded something revolutionary. Cooked meat made man happy.

Rebuffed from his fine feelings, Milkman matched her cold tone. "You loved those white folks that much?" "Love?" she asked. "Love?" "Well, what are you taking care of their dogs for?" "Do you know why she killed herself? She couldn't stand to see the place go to ruin. She couldn't live without servants and money and what it could buy. Every cent was gone and the taxes took whatever came in. She had to let the upstairs maids go, then the cook, then the dog trainer, then the yardman, then the chauffeur, then the car, then the woman who washed once a week. Then she started selling bits and pieces––land, jewels, furniture. The last few years we ate out of the garden. Finally she couldn't take it anymore. The thought of having no help, no money––well, she couldn't take that. She had to let everything go." "But she didn't let you go." Milkman had no trouble letting his words snarl. "No, she didn't let me go. She killed herself." "And you still loyal." "You don't listen to people. Your ear is on your head, but it's not connected to your brain. I said she killed herself rather than do the work I'd been doing all my life!" Circe stood up, and the dogs too. "Do you hear me? She saw the work I did all her days and died, you hear me, died rather than live like me. Now, what do you suppose she thought I was! If the way I lived and the work I did was so hateful to her she killed herself to keep from having to do it, and you think I stay on here because I loved her, then you have about as much sense as a fart!

Black seamen - or "Black Jacks" as African sailors were known - enjoyed a refreshing world of liberty and equality. Even if they were generally regulated to jobs such as cooks, servants, and muscians and endured thier fellow seamen's racism, they were still freemen in the Royal Navy. One famous black sailor wrote, "I liked this little ship very much. I now became the captian's steward, in which I was very happy; for I was extremely well treated by all on board, and I had the leisure to improve myself in reading and writing.

You Say You Want a Revolution: Interviews with Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, Tony Fadell, Paul Otellini. All Things

While Americans tried to justify and glorify their Indian-killers, George Armstrong Custer in particular,

It's only by spending time with Jesus that our thoughts, words, and actions will ever be transformed into His image.

Several of Cook’s charts—perfected on his two later voyages—remained in use until 1994, when the Royal New Zealand Navy finally updated his surveys with its own soundings and satellite readings.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.” Sethe put her hand on his knee and rubbed. Paul D had only begun, what he was telling her was only the beginning when her fingers on his knee, soft and reassuring, stopped him. Just as well. Just as well. Saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him. And it would hurt her to know that there was no red heart bright as Mister’s comb beating in him.

Eventually, as I studied grace more in-depth, I began to see the truth: After being saved it was still His grace that made me His, kept me His, and would enable me to live in a way that pleased Him.

Good attitudes are contagious; they inspire and encourage others. Bad attitudes are also contagious; they create a negative and hostile work environment and make others feel uncomfortable - like they have to walk on eggshells all the time.

looked about as romantic and welcoming as a tar pit. I later learned that producers of the 1962 Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty had imported white sand from America so Matavai Bay would match the Hollywood image of a tropical island.

Before the cook arrived when she stood in a space no wider than a bench is long, back behind and to the left of the milk cans. Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to start the day’s serious work of beating back the past.

Servants prepared the kava by chewing the plant into pulp before spitting it into bowls and adding water. Ever the diplomat and gastronomic adventurer, Cook—alone among his men—sampled the beverage. “The manner of brewing,” he dryly observed, “had quenished the thirst of every one else.

Our girlhood was spent like a found nickel on you. When you slept, we were quiet; when you were hungry, we cooked; when you wanted to play, we entertained you; and when you got grown enough to know the difference between a woman and a two-toned Ford, everything in this house stopped for you.

Like modern-day Sioux, Aborigines seemed caught between two worlds, unable to reclaim their traditional life but ill equipped, or disinclined, to enter mainstream society. The result, as often as not, was dependence on drink, drugs, and welfare, all of which deepened the racism of rural whites.

Tony Blair had just been elected prime-minister and he and his foreign secretary, Robin Cook, were totally uninterested. In the pouring rain they were looking at the military parade from underneath their umbrella, for the transfer at midnight. Their entire attitude signalled something like: ‘’Can we go now?

They sleep as sound in a small hovel or even in the open as the King in His Pallace on a Bed of down,” Cook later wrote of Aborigines in a letter to a Yorkshire friend. To a degree, these words also described Cook, a man who uncomplainingly endured—even enjoyed—whatever sustenance and shelter the world afforded him.

Beaner Weens, head cook at the Vicar’s Knickers, verbal dueling partner of Ann Tenna, and infamous character known for collecting bottles, cans, and golf balls while disguised as a moose, had by some unknown manner transformed himself into a popular guest on various paranormal podcasts. It earned him dozens of dollars.

In many respects, this history mirrored the United States’ hideous treatment of its own natives, as well as its oppression of imported slaves and their descendants. But there were crucial differences. The United States, like Canada and New Zealand, often paid for native land, as well as signing—and quickly breaking—countless treaties.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you'd be cooking a rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me. I was something else and that something was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub.

he lived long enough to lament some of the consequences of his own discoveries. Returning to New Zealand in 1773, and again in 1777, Cook found the Maori prone to thievery, deploying Western hatchets as weapons rather than tools, afflicted with venereal disease, and eager to prostitute their wives and daughters in exchange for spike nails.

Many of the women held hands, and some men locked fingers with other men. But there was no such contact between the sexes—a restraint absent in Cook’s day, when the English observed Tongans making love in public. While the Tongans had escaped colonialism, they had fervently embraced Western missionaries, Methodists and Mormons in particular.

Rather, they’d picked up “kangaroo” from the English and guessed that it referred to all large beasts. So a word that originated with an encounter between Cook and a small clan in north Queensland traveled to England with the Endeavour, then back to Botany Bay with the First Fleet, and eventually became the universal name for Australia’s symbol.

At one stop in New Zealand, an Englishman bartered for sex. He was presented with a boy; when he complained, he was presented with another. The English related this incident with amusement, as a cruel joke. But the Maori may have supposed that homosexuality was the English norm. How else to account for the absence among them of women and children?

Reg’s attraction to Cook was entirely different from my own. While I was drawn to Cook’s restless adventuring and plunge into the unknown, Reg worshipped the man’s modesty, sense of duty, loyalty to home and country. Maybe it was good that we knew so little of Cook’s inner life. As it was, each of us could fill him up with our own longings and imagination.

If cool, damp New Zealand seemed a mirror of Britain, much of Australia—thirty times the size of the U.K.—represented its opposite: dry and harsh, with only 6 percent of its land arable. Yet colonists at Botany Bay, and across Australia, imported English notions of land management to terrain that was horribly ill suited to European husbandry and agriculture.

Cook always wrote about the livestock and seeds he left at every island. We think of him as a mariner, but he was a farm boy first, and he never lost that.” I sensed something else. Growing up on a farm, working a plow and herding stock beneath Yorkshire’s inclement skies, he would have developed an instinct for reading the weather, which served him well at sea.

A boy about the same age as Young Nick, named Te Horeta, stood watching the ship’s approach from shore and lived long enough to share his memory with colonists, several of whom recorded his words. Te Horeta’s vivid and poetic detail, corroborated by the journals of Cook and his men, makes his story one of the most remarkable accounts in the annals of exploration.

Purpose transcends personality. It is important for supportive ministers to serve based on their awareness of God's purpose. His purpose is foundational and will remain steady when personality conflicts and other difficulties arise.... Challenges come to all types of relationships. Only the relationships that are built on a strong foundation will survive and thrive.

In his sweeping survey of human history, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond posits two keys to the development of agriculture and technology: exposure to the ideas and tools of other societies, and easy access to resources such as timber, iron, fertile soil, and large animals to domesticate. Aborigines, sequestered on a predominantly arid and intractable continent, lacked all these advantages.

An Underground that knew all about this, knew all about Les, was preparing to wake up the world and invite it to a Canada’s Wonderland made of bodies. Giant bloodslides. Houses of torture where children’s kidneys are twisted like sponges in the fat hands of musclemen. There would be buns crammed with the cooked knuckles of teenagers, and a king, sitting on a mountain of kings, eating his own shoulder.

Even the quality in Cook that least appealed to me, his customary humorlessness, was in the Advices; they warned against “foolish jesting” and “long and frequent conversation on temporal matters” because “there is leaven therein, which, being suffered to prevail, indisposes and benumbs the soul.” Reading this, I realized how often, and usually in vain, I’d searched Cook’s journals for some leaven therein.

Niue had the world’s smallest phone company but the highest “penetration” on the globe, with almost every one of the island’s eight hundred households hooked up. Niue also had thousands of excess lines. It leased this surplus to Asia Pacific Telecom, which used the lines for the sort of 900 calls advertised in tabloid magazines and on late-night television. Niue Telecom was now the island’s largest generator of revenue.

This so enraged Warren that he’d sponsored an alternative Olympics in Cooktown, called the Complete Relaxation Games. Events included chair sleeping, wave watching, and synchronized drinking. The Cooktown Games even had an Olympic-style scandal. “We had to disqualify some participants in the armchair-sleeping competition because they’d been on the grog,” Warren said. “In that event, alcohol’s a performance-enhancing drug.

While Americans tried to justify and glorify their Indian-killers, George Armstrong Custer in particular, Australians simply wrote blacks, and the slaughter of them, out of the nation’s history. Until about 1970, history books and school texts hardly mentioned Aborigines at all. “The great Australian silence,” the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner termed this amnesia in 1968. “A cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale.

In the wake of Cook’s voyages, Europeans looked to the Pacific to understand their own “primitive” past, as noble savages or barbarous heathens, depending on the writer’s perspective. Tonga in the twenty-first century offered something else: a portal into premodern Europe, with its absolute monarchy, its barons and serfs, its union of church and state. Tonga wasn’t the land where time began. It was the place where time had gone back.

But the most profound difference between the United States and Australia was the way in which the two countries regarded natives themselves. Americans often romanticized Indians, even as the natives were being slaughtered and dispossessed. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were calls to preserve both the American wilderness and its inhabitants before plows and guns extinguished them. Writers and artists sentimentalized Apaches and Mohicans;

Most businesses closed at noon. By Sunday morning, the capital was so quiet you could hear a coconut drop. Movie houses and bars closed for the day, fishing and swimming were prohibited, planes didn’t fly, and any contract signed on the Sabbath was considered void. “I never looked forward to Monday until I came here,” a Fijian doctor told me, settling in for a long day at the hotel snack bar, about the only place in town serving food and drink.

Massacres of Aborigines continued on the frontier until 1928. In the following four decades, state and church officials routinely took light-skinned Aboriginal children from their families and placed them in orphanages, or with childless white families, in an attempt to assimilate Aborigines and “breed out” black blood. Aboriginal mothers were so fearful of losing pale offspring that they smeared ash or boot-blacking on their children to make them appear darker.

Cook wrote, in one of the most despairing passages he ever penned. “We debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquility they and their fore Fathers had injoy’d. If any one denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.

Cook, once again, proved remarkably prescient. Within two centuries of his visit, resource-rich New Zealand would enjoy the highest per capita income on earth. But Cook’s remarks were also unsettling. They presaged the fate of New Zealand’s natives and their environment, just as Lewis and Clark’s journals foretold the ravaging of the American West. With hindsight, the line between exploration and exploitation, between investigation and imperialism, seems perilously thin.

Who’s teasing? I’m telling him the truth. He ain’t going to have it. Neither one of ‘em going to have it. And I’ll tell you something else you not going to have. You not going to have no private coach with four red velvet chairs that swivel around in one place whenever you want ‘em to. No. and you not going to have your own special toilet and your own special-made eight-foot bed either. And a valet and a cook and a secretary to travel with you and do everything you say. Everything: get the right temperature in your hot-water bottle and make sure the smoking tobacco in the silver humidor is fresh each and every day. There’s something else you not going to have. You ever have five thousand dollars of cold cash money in your pocket and walk into a bank and tell the bank man you want such and such a house on such and such a street and he sell it to you right then? Well, you won’t ever have it. And you not going to have a governor’s mansion, or eight thousand acres of timber to sell. And you not going to have no ship under your command to sail on, no train to run, and you can join the 332nd if you want to and shoot down a thousand German planes all by yourself and land in Hitler’s backyard and whip him with your own hands, but you never going to have four stars on your shirt front, or even three. And you not going to have no breakfast tray brought in to you early in the morning with a red rose on it and two warm croissants and a cup of hot chocolate. Nope. Never. And no pheasant buried in coconut leaves for twenty days and stuffed with wild rice and cooked over a wood fire so tender and delicate it make you cry. And no Rothschild ’29 or even Beaujolais to go with it.” A few men passing by stopped to listen to Tommy’s lecture. “What’s going on?” they asked Hospital Tommy. “Feather refused them a beer,” said. The men laughed. “And no baked Alaska!” Railroad Tommy went on. “None! You never going to have that.” “No baked Alaska?” Guitar opened his eyes wide with horror and grabbed his throat.” You breaking my heart!” “Well, now. That’s something you will have—a broken heart.” Railroad Tommy’s eyes softened, but the merriment in them died suddenly. “And folly. A whole lot of folly. You can count on it.” “Mr. Tommy, suh,” Guitar sang in mock humility, “we just wanted a bottle of beer is all.” “Yeah,” said Tommy. “Yeah, well, welcome aboard.

This gesture, like the rewriting of the national anthem, was a minor masterpiece of Orwellian doublethink. A metropolis that had virtually exterminated or expelled its original population, and polluted a place Cook described as a botanical paradise, could now proclaim itself a champion of Aborigines and the environment. The council had also fingered a culprit for its wrongs: Cook, the invader, yesterday’s man, to be airbrushed from public record like a disgraced Soviet commissar.

He wore a lemon Nehru jacket over an ankle-length robe from under which poked heavy sandals. Very stooped, he looked much less formidable than in his portraits. Exercise, as well as illness, had diminished his stature from his Guinness World Records days. Still, at six foot three and three hundred pounds, he was very large, particularly for a man of eighty-two. As he slowly settled his bulk into the high-backed oak throne and gazed in my direction with hooded eyes, I felt as though

First the arrival of the waka. Then Cook. Then the commerce and change. It all happened within view of this spot.” “If it’d been whalers or traders who arrived first, ahead of Cook, we wouldn’t have the observations and records that we do, of what life was like before European contact,” Sheila added. “That’s why this place is important to me. Cook first landed here, and as a result we are who we are today, both Maori and Pakeha. This is the real ground. I can’t get that feeling at a museum.

I found myself unexpectedly moved, less by the memory of Cook than by the people gathered to honor him. The British were brilliant at this sort of ceremony: sincere, stoic, and understated—nothing like cynical Australians or syrupy Americans. Watching these few dozen faces lashed by freezing rain, their breath clouding as they uttered “God Save the Queen,” I caught a glimpse of the grit and pride that had sustained Cook and his men, and that had once enabled this small, damp country to rule so much of the globe.

I found myself unexpectedly moved, less by the memory of Cook than by the people gathered to honor him. The British were brilliant at this sort of ceremony: sincere, stoic, and understated - nothing like cynical Australians or syrupy Americans. Watching these few dozen faces lashed by freezing rain, their breath clouding as they uttered "God Save the Queen," I caught a glimpse of the grit and pride that had sustained Cook and his men, and that had once enabled this small, damp country to rule so much of the globe.

Their father, meanwhile, was becoming ever more eccentric with age. He’d issued a royal decree naming as “court jester” an American Buddhist who was also entrusted with managing the country’s trust fund. The jester gambled most of the fund on America’s unregulated “viatical industry”—buying the insurance policies of elderly or terminally ill patients, in hopes they’d die while the policy was still worth more than its cost—and promptly lost $20 million U.S., or more than half the annual budget of Tonga’s government.

Tonga was even more feudal than I’d supposed. Diplomats said that it was still almost impossible for commoners to own land; most Tongans lived as tenants of the nobility. The nobles also asked for periodic “contributions” from their vassals, such as food for a daughter’s wedding. Churches made even greater demands, exacting donations that often totaled a fifth of a household’s income, and publicly announcing each family’s giving. The annual budget of the Mormon Church alone was half that of the Tongan government’s.

Eric flipped through Cook’s journal to the strange incident in which native men took umbrage at the sight of captive birds and turtles. “It’s no longer true that Aborigines live at one with the land, but in those days it was so,” Eric said. “The belief was that all creatures deserve life, each have a place in the world. If a bird or kangaroo got away when you were hunting, the attitude was ‘Good on him, he’s got his rights too.’ Also, you only hunted what you needed for that day; you didn’t take more than you needed.

London was as close to a home as the adult Cook ever had: his domestic base for the latter half of his life, and the place where he readied his ships and plotted his voyages with the Admiralty and Royal Society. It was also in London that the impact of his discoveries was most keenly felt: in science, commerce, and the arts. Cook’s achievements contributed, in no small way, to London’s becoming the headquarters of an empire that would ultimately span eleven thousand miles of the globe and rule over 400 million subjects.

Nine years later, Britain’s Parliament began canvassing sites for a convict settlement to replace the rebellious American colonies, which had long provided a dumping ground for prisoners sentenced to “transportation.” Parliament sought a “distant part of the Globe, from whence [convicts’] Escape might be difficult,” and where they would be able to “maintain themselves…with little or no aid from the Mother Country.” Joseph Banks recommended Botany Bay, which he said enjoyed a gentle Mediterranean climate and could support “a very large Number of People.

He’d quizzed Aboriginal elders about stories they’d heard of Cook and his men. “At first, our people thought they were overgrown babies,” he said. Aboriginal newborns, Eric explained, are often much paler than adults. But once the Guugu Yimidhirr saw the newcomers’ power, particularly the noise and smoke from their guns, they came to believe the strangers were white spirits, or ghosts of deceased Aborigines. “Lucky for Cook, white spirits are viewed as benign,” Eric said. “If they’d been seen as dark spirits, my ancestors probably would have speared them.

This stubborn Enlightenment faith in firsthand observation, rather than in received opinion, extended to everything Cook did. As a navigator, he remained unswayed by “expert” theories about the existence of a southern continent. So, too, as an observer of strange lands, he suspended judgment about cannibalistic Maori or naked Aborigines whom men of superior education and social standing regarded as “brutes.” Also, having experienced class prejudice, Cook may have seen value in a life undisturbed “by the Inequality of Condition” in a way that Banks could not.

In 1960s America, Martin Luther King, Jr., cited Christianity and the words of America’s founding fathers to craft a plea for civil rights that spoke to many whites. A generation later, at the far side of the world, Maori were using much the same tactic, seeking their own racial justice by deploying old treaties, English common law, and the journals of a man regarded by many Pakeha as New Zealand’s founding father. When I suggested this analogy to Tracey, she smiled tightly. “We admire King, and we’re Christians, too. But we’re not so keen as he was on turning the other cheek.

I was especially struck by the book’s list of “Quaker Advices” current in northern England during Cook’s youth, which stated in part: “Keep to that which is modest, decent, plain and useful…. Be prudent in all manner of behaviour, both in public and private; avoiding all intemperance in eating and drinking…. Walk wisely and circumspectly towards all men, in a peaceable spirit…. Let our moderation and prudence, as well as truth and justice, appear to all men, and in all things, in trading and commerce, in speech and communication.” To me, this read like a blueprint of Cook’s adult character.

The only way to understand Cook’s mistake, if you could call it that, was to view both Botany Bay and Sydney Harbour from sea. I had my first chance to do this on Australia Day, which commemorates the First Fleet’s arrival at Port Jackson on January 26, 1788. The ships’ landing launched white settlement on the continent, and therefore marked the birth of modern Australia. But few present-day Australians regard the holiday with patriotic fervor. It’s hard, first of all, to celebrate the founding of a penitentiary—except, perhaps, to appreciate the long-term irony; thanks to the First Fleet, today’s Sydneysiders occupy a semitropical paradise instead of wet, chill England.

It is the production of a man, who has not had the advantage of much school education, but who has been constantly at sea from his youth; and though, with the assistance of a few good friends, he has passed through all the stations belonging to a seaman, from an apprentice boy in the coal trade, to a Post Captain in the Royal Navy, he has had no opportunity of cultivating letters. After this account of myself, the Public must not expect from me the elegance of a fine writer, or the plausibility of a professed bookmaker; but will, I hope, consider me as a plain man, zealously exerting himself in the service of his Country, and determined to give the best account he is able of his proceedings.

They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon Earth, but in reality they are far more happier than we Europeans: being wholy unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing the use of them. They live in a Tranquility which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life…. They seem’d to setno Value upon any thing we gave them, nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any one article we could offer them; this in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life.

Trying to get to 124 for the second time now, he regretted that conversation: the high tone he took; his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain. Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last. And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, "What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" When he got to his house he was too tired to eat the food his sister and nephews had prepared. He sat on the porch in the cold till way past dark and went to his bed only because his sister's voice calling him was getting nervous. He kept the ribbon; the skin smell nagged him, and his weakened marrow made him dwell on Baby Suggs' wish to consider what in the world was harmless. He hoped she stuck to blue, yellow, maybe green, and never fixed on red. Mistaking her, upbraiding her, owing her, now he needed to let her know he knew, and to get right with her and her kin. So, in spite of his exhausted marrow, he kept on through the voices and tried once more to knock at the door of 124. This time, although he couldn't cipher but one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons. What a roaring.

Decimated but stubborn, they were among those who chose a fugitive life rather than Oklahoma. The illness that swept them now was reminiscent of the one that had killed half their number two hundred years earlier. In between that calamity and this, they had visited George III in London, published a newspaper, made baskets, led Oglethorpe through forests, helped Andrew Jackson fight Creek, cooked maize, drawn up a constitution, petitioned the King of Spain, been experimented on by Dartmouth, established asylums, wrote their language, resisted settlers, shot bear and translated scripture. All to no avail. The forced move to the Arkansas River, insisted upon by the same president they fought for against the Creek, destroyed another quarter of their already shattered number.

The dogs scratched at our feet, hoping for a scrap of candy. “Think about it,” Roger went on. “Those blokes on the Dolphin? They were scurvy-racked, sex-mad, fed on biscuits full of weevils. Anyplace off that ship would have looked like paradise.” He tossed a dog half his chocolate bar. “Then came Bougainville and his ship full of Frogs. They’re sex-mad, too, only they write better than the Brits. So the myth takes off. Noble savages, New Cythera, the whole romantic rot. No mention of human sacrifice.” He fed the dog the rest of his chocolate. “Cook, he’s clear-eyed, but no one listens to a lowly Yorkshireman. So we get Gauguin, another French wanker, painting his fourteen-year-old crumpet. Fifty years later, Michener and the Yanks show up. Then come the travel hacks, who have to justify their fancy rooms and plane fare by telling us this shithole is paradise.

In fact, it seems unlikely that any vessel had approached the North Island from open sea for six centuries or more. Most scholars believe that sailing canoes set off from the Society Isles, or the nearby Cook Islands, between A.D 800 and 1200, carrying pioneers as well as plants and animals. They landed on the unpopulated North Island and gradually spread out, making New Zealand the last major landmass on earth to be settled. Then, nothing—until Cook arrived, the first intruder on the North Island since roughly the time of the Crusades. To me, this was the most extraordinary and enviable facet of Cook’s travels: the moment of first contact between the “discoverer” and the “discovered.” No matter how far a man traveled today, he couldn’t hope to reach a land and society as untouched by the West as the North Island was in 1769. Cook, at least, anticipated first contact; finding new lands and peoples was part of his job description.

Cook had no way of knowing that the Endeavour’s pinnace and yawl were about to pierce a community that had remained cocooned from the rest of humanity for millennia. “Aborigine” is Latin for “from the beginning”—an apt name for a people whose culture is probably the oldest surviving on earth. Most scholars believe that the first Australians island-hopped from Southeast Asia in small craft before 40,000 B.C., roughly the time that Cro-Magnons supplanted Neanderthals in Europe. As the Australian pioneers spread across the continent, rising sea levels cut them off from their neighbors. Apart from a few tribes along Australia’s northern rim, who had intermittent contact with Asian fishermen, Aborigines, scattered in clans across an island the size of the continental United States, were completely isolated from every other people on the planet. Those living around Botany Bay in 1770 are believed to have dwelled there, undisturbed, for eight thousand years.

This would prove the most consequential of all Cook’s acts of possession, effectively laying the foundation for white settlement in the Pacific. But it was also the most confusing of Cook’s many land claims. He obviously hadn’t acquired the consent of the natives, as he’d been instructed to do; the few Aborigines whom Cook encountered on this northernmost bit of land, which he named Possession Island, appeared intent on opposing the English before suddenly retreating. Cook’s claim was also oddly imprecise: “a vague assertion of authority over a quite vague area,” Beaglehole writes. How far inland, for instance, did his claim to the coast extend? Cook didn’t help matters by naming this nebulous possession New South Wales. No one knows why. The east coast of Australia doesn’t bear any discernible resemblance to the Welsh shore. And why South Wales? Also, Cook’s cumbersome name already existed on the world’s map, attached to a bit of land in northern Ontario.

We talked into the night, the room blurring around us as it had done at the dance in West Side Story when Tony and Maria first saw each other across a crowd of people. Tonight, tonight, it all began tonight. My friends giggled and sipped wine at the table where I’d abandoned them earlier in the night, oblivious to the fact that their redheaded amiga had just been struck by a lightning bolt. Before I could internally break into the second chorus of song, my version of Tony--this mysterious cowboy--announced abruptly that he had to go. Go? I thought. Go where? There’s no place on earth but this smoky bar…But there was for him: he and his brother had plans to cook Christmas turkeys for some needy folks in his small town. Mmmm. He’s nice, too, I thought as a pang stabbed my insides. “Bye,” he said with a gentle smile. And with that, his delicious boots walked right out of the J-Bar, his dark blue Wranglers cloaking a body that I was sure had to have been chiseled out of granite. My lungs felt tight, and I still smelled his scent through the bar smoke in the air. I didn’t even know his name. I prayed it wasn’t Billy Bob.

The sky is a dark bowl, the stars die and fall. The celestial bows quiver, the bones of the earthgods shake and planets come to a halt when they sight the king in all his power, the god who feeds on his father and eats his mother. The king is such a tower of wisdom even his mother can't discern his name. His glory is in the sky, his strength lies in the horizon like that of his father the sungod Atum who conceived him. Atum conceived the king, but the dead king has greater dominion. His vital spirits surround him, his qualities lie below his feet, he is cloaked in gods and cobras coil on his forehead. His guiding snakes decorate his brow and peer into souls, ready to spit fire against his enemies. The king's head is on his torso. He is the bull of the sky who charges and vanquishes all. He lives on the stuff of the gods, he feeds on their limbs and entrails, even when they have bloated their bodies with magic at Nesisi, the island of fire. He cooks the leftover gods into a bone soup. Their souls belong to him and their shadows as well. In his pyramid among those who live on the earth of Egypt, the dead king ascends and appears forever and forever.

MONKEY BREAD   Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 1 and ¼ cups white (granulated) sugar 1 and ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon 4 cans (7.5 ounce tube) unbaked refrigerated biscuits (I used Pillsbury) 1 cup chopped nuts of your choice (optional) 1 cup chocolate chips (optional) (that’s a 6-ounce size bag) ½ cup salted butter (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) Hannah’s 1st Note: If you prefer, you can use 16.3 ounce tubes of Pillsbury Grands. If you do this, buy only 2 tubes. They are larger—you will use half a tube for each layer. Tony’s Note: If you use chocolate chips and/or nuts, place them between each biscuit layer. Spray the inside of a Bundt pan with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray. Set your prepared pan on a drip pan just in case the butter overflows. Then you won’t have to clean your oven. Mix the white sugar and cinnamon together in a mixing bowl. (I used a fork to mix it up so that the cinnamon was evenly distributed.) Open 1 can of biscuits at a time and break or cut them into quarters. You want bite-size pieces. Roll the pieces in the cinnamon and sugar mixture, and place them in the bottom of the Bundt pan. Sprinkle one-third of the chopped nuts and one-third of the chocolate chips on top of the layer, if you decided to use them. Open the second can of biscuits, quarter them, roll them in the cinnamon and sugar, and place them on top of the first layer. (If you used Pillsbury Grands, you’ll do this with the remainder of the first tube.) Sprinkle on half of the remaining nuts and chocolate chips, if you decided to use them. Repeat with the third can of biscuits (or the first half of the second tube of Grands). Sprinkle on the remainder of the nuts and chocolate chips, if you decided to use them. Repeat with the fourth can of biscuits (or the rest of the Grands) to make a top layer in your Bundt pan. Melt the butter and the remaining cinnamon and sugar mixture in a microwave safe bowl on HIGH for 45 seconds. Give it a final stir and pour it over the top of your Bundt pan. Bake your Monkey Bread at 350 degrees F. for 40 to 45 minutes, or until nice and golden on top. Take the Bundt pan out of the oven and let it cool on a cold burner or a wire rack for 10 minutes while you find a plate that will fit over the top of the Bundt pan. Using potholders or oven mitts invert the plate over the top of the Bundt pan and turn it upside down to unmold your delicious Monkey Bread. To serve, you can cut this into slices like Bundt cake, but it’s more fun to just let people pull off pieces with their fingers. Hannah’s 2nd Note: If you’d like to make Caramel Monkey Bread, use only ¾ cup of white sugar. Mix it with the cinnamon the way you’d do if it was the full amount of white sugar. At the very end when you melt the butter with the leftover cinnamon and sugar mixture, add ¾ cup of brown sugar to the bowl before you put it in the microwave. Pour that hot mixture over the top of your Bundt pan before baking and it will form a luscious caramel topping when you unmold your Monkey Bread. Hannah’s 3rd Note: I don’t know why this is called “Monkey Bread”. Norman thinks it has something to do with the old story about the monkey that couldn’t get his hand out of the hole in the tree because he wouldn’t let go of the nut he was holding in his fist. Mike thinks it’s because monkeys eat with their hands and you can pull this bread apart and eat it with your hands. Mother says it’s because monkeys are social animals and you can put this bread in the center of the table and everyone can sit around it and eat. Tracey says it’s because it’s a cute name. Bethie doesn’t care. She just wants to eat it.

The best you can do is catch an echo of the man. You can never reach out and touch him.

Cook, judging from his journals, was not a pious man. A product of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, he valued reason above all else, and showed little patience for what he called “Priest craft” and “superstition.

Shrimp and Grits The combination of creamy grits with slightly spicy, tomatoey shrimp is a classic coastal dish in the South. It’s comforting and hearty, but in an elegant serving bowl it can also be a perfect meal to serve at a dinner party. FOR THE GRITS 11/2 cup grits (not quick-cooking—I like stone-ground) 1 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter FOR THE SHRIMP 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon butter 1 medium onion, chopped 1 small green pepper, chopped 3 cloves garlic, minced 1 (14 oz.) can diced tomatoes with liquid 1 teaspoon Cajun seasoning (I like Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning) 2 tablespoons tomato paste 2 pounds medium-large raw shrimp, peeled 1/2 cup water 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce

lingering

It was there I learned how I was not a person from my country, nor from my families. I was negrita. Everything. Language, dress, gods, dance, habits, decoration, song - all of it cooked together in the color of my skin.

Tony tells Melfi that he knew he had a golden moment after Junior shot him, and that he let it slip away; the implication is that his Las Vegas trip was a half-assed attempt to create a new chance for epiphany. But is such a thing possible, for Tony or anyone else? Especially when it’s just so easy to dwell on old grudges and feuds—to keep stewing in the juices, like the steak Christopher was cooking in “Walk Like a Man,” long after the flame’s turned off?

So the meal needn't be elegant, its participants well-versed in etiquette. Every dish doesn't have to be cooked to perfection, or adequately warmed, for that matter. What's important is that we not throw away yet another moment of sacredness in our desperate quest to distract ourselves. These fleeting moments of beauty and joy are all we have to shore ourselves up against the sorrow that inevitably finds anyone who has the courage to bind his heart to another.

As a Christian university administrator, it has been my life’s work to integrate faith and learning to equip students to be Christian servant leaders in their respective callings. In this book a dear friend of mine, Tony Carvalho, does not just integrate faith and learning, but rather he aids Christians in going beyond that into our central calling of integrating faith and living. Beyond Sunday Morning is a wonderful guide from a gifted business leader who has implemented these practices into his own life and work. This book is insightful, challenging, and inspiring.

Also, emancipation is feeling satisfied. Take the case of a hungry man who, on encountering sweet dishes, devours them, and there is no end of eating. The case of emancipation is not like this. If one partakes of milk-cooked porridge, one no longer feels the need to eat. No longer feeling any need to eat may well be likened to emancipation. True emancipation is the Tathagata.

Well, Mamá says you need to come over more often and eat more.” Tony’s mother, Ana, was always cooking something. Chilaquiles was a typical breakfast in their home—corn tortillas, scrambled eggs, cheese, and green chili. It was Cedric’s favorite Mexican dish.

By the light of the hominy fire Sixo straightens. He is through with his song. He laughs. A rippling sound like Sethe's sons make when they tumble in hay or splash in rainwater. His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs. Something is funny. Paul D guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, "Seven-O! Seven-O!

Because of its frequent use in Scripture, grace should be an oft-preached topic, and a frequent subject of discussion among believers. Consider the following descriptions of grace found in the Bible.

Grace saves us and empowers us to live a life pleasing to God: We are saved by grace and through grace (Acts 15:11; Ephesians 2:8). It is through the grace of God that we believe (Acts 18:27). Grace builds us up and gives us an inheritance (Acts 20:32). We are justified freely by His grace (Romans 3:24). Grace makes the promise sure to all those who are of faith (Romans 4:16). Paul ministered through the grace that was given to him (Romans 12:3). We have gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us (Romans 12:6). Grace causes us to be enriched by Him in all utterance and in all knowledge (1 Corinthians 1:4-5).

These two verses are the hello and goodbye in the book of Ephesians. The standard greeting before Jesus came on the scene was shalom, the word for God’s peace in the Hebrew language.1 Paul and other New Testament writers added grace (charis) to the greeting, making it a very powerful statement.

Seventeen times in the New Testament, some variation of “Grace and peace to you” is used in expressing blessing to God’s people. In bringing God’s grace to mankind, Jesus also brought the peace every Old Testament believer had sought. The fact that grace is always used first indicates that grace is the root of what God did for us through Jesus, while peace follows as the fruit of His gracious work.

The prophets of old prophesied of the grace that should come to us (1 Peter 1:10). This grace came by Jesus (John 1:17). Jesus was full of grace, and it is from His fullness that we receive one grace after another (John 1:14,16). The grace of God was upon Jesus and gracious words proceeded out of His mouth (Luke 2:40; 4:22). It was by grace that Jesus tasted of death for every man (Hebrews 2:9).

Continue in grace (Acts 13:43). Abound in grace (2 Corinthians 8:7). Be strong in grace (2 Timothy 2:1). Grow in grace (2 Peter 3:18). The Word of God speaks of: Great grace (Acts 4:33). The abundance of grace (Romans 5:17). The exceeding grace of God (2 Corinthians 9:14). The glory of His grace (Ephesians 1:6). The riches of His grace (Ephesians 1:7). The exceeding riches of His grace (Ephesians 2:7). The dispensation of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:2). The gift of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:7). The grace of life (1 Peter 3:7). The manifold grace of God (1 Peter 4:10). The true grace of God (1 Peter 5:12).

Shown (Ezra 9:8). Poured (Psalm 45:2). Received (Romans 1:5). Seen and perceived (Acts 11:23; Galatians 2:9).

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace be with all those who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. Amen. Ephesians 1:2; 6:24

There is a depth of meaning every time the Holy Spirit greets us with some form of, “Grace and peace.” Today, few understand this. We greet one another with, “Hello! How are you?” But in most cases we are not expecting a revealing or meaningful answer, nor are we saying something profound in our greeting. Likewise, our goodbyes are usually something like, “See ya later,” or a simple, “Bye.” No weighty communication there! Perhaps this is the reason most of us give little thought to the beginning and ending of the epistles. We assume the writers were simply expressing a formality, and we believe the true substance of Scripture is between what are called the salutations and benedictions.

However, the Word gives us a different perspective. Paul wrote, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable” (2 Timothy 3:16), and this includes the salutations and benedictions of the epistles. I am convinced they are not superficial formalities. They were inspired by the Holy Spirit to impart powerful spiritual blessing to all who read them.

Grace makes us what we are and works in us and through us (1 Corinthians 15:10).

It is the grace of God that makes us rich (2 Corinthians 8:9). God’s grace is sufficient for us and causes us to reign in life (2 Corinthians 12:9; Romans 5:17). We are called by grace into grace (Galatians 1:6,15). Grace enables us to preach the unsearchable riches of Christ (Ephesians 3:8). Our words can impart grace to others (Ephesians 4:29). We are partakers of grace (Philippians 1:7). We sing with grace in our hearts, and our words are to be seasoned with grace (Colossians 3:16; 4:6). Grace gives us everlasting consolation and good hope (2 Thessalonians 2:16). Grace teaches us to live holy lives (Titus 2:11-12). Grace helps us in time of need (Hebrews 4:16). Grace enables us to serve God acceptably (Hebrews 12:28). Grace establishes our hearts (Hebrews 13:9). Grace is obtained by coming boldly before His throne (Hebrews 4:16).

As you read, remember that God is completely committed to you. Don't just read for information but seek the transformation He offers.