Comets, asteroids, … and writers

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, astronomy, comets, asteroids, astronomers, poetry

My introduction to the Internet was when my company made it available to our desktop computers in June, 1994. Just a month later I was able to see the wonderful telescopic pictures of Jupiter, bruised and battered by Comet Shoemaker-Levy. At night, I would get out my 3-inch diameter telescope and look at Jupiter. I could just see the black spots of the impacts at 120x, which is about the limit with such a small telescope. The planet appeared about the size of a pea.

In preparation for an online lecture by David H. Levy, co-discoverer of the comet, a friend in a local astronomy club gave me a copy of Levy's recent book Star Gazers: Finding Joy in the Night Sky. It is a lovely little book; I finished reading it in two days. I could have finished even faster, but Dr. Levy's writing rewards close reading.

I find that he has discovered or co-discovered 23 comets and hundreds of asteroids. Once in a while a comet gets bright enough for any of us to see, and then star parties like this one multiply (Image generated by GPT-Image 2.5 via Leonardo AI).

In this memoir he also reports witnessing about 200 eclipses, mostly lunar eclipses, but including at least ten solar eclipses. In Chapter 4 he includes the discovery photos of Comet Shoemaker-Levy. Most comets are discovered photographically, by taking a photo of a likely spot (generally along the ecliptic, the Sun's apparent path in the sky), and then another one of the same spot an hour or two later. Looking at the images as a stereo pair, you can see something that moved as an object that seems to hover above the apparent plane of view. This also works for finding an asteroid, which appears as a "hovering" star, while a comet image is more like a smudge or tiny cloud. Right up until today, human binocular vision is superior to any technological imaging method. It is why asteroid hunting with wide-frame cameras is being carried out by citizen science to verify tentative machine identifications.

The book is composed of small essays, just one or two or three pages each, that the author has published elsewhere, with added introductions to most chapters. They are arranged by topic, not chronologically. The book ends with an ode to his late wife Wendee.

I wish to comment on writing itself. Dr. Levy writes lyrically without any loss to scientific merit. He calls himself an amateur astronomer, as do the references to him I have found. He is perhaps the poster child for amateur science, understanding that "amateur" derives from a Latin word for "lover". He has his own observatory with a few telescopes in it, named Jarnac Observatory. Many of his discoveries were made there, but numerous others were made in the company of friends, including Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, co-discoverers with him of the "hammer that hit Jupiter." 

His doctoral dissertation dwelt on references to astronomy and astronomical objects in the writings of Shakespeare, and he has written of other literary lights who loved astronomy. He tells of reciting or reading poetry at most meetings of astronomical societies he attends. Many great scientists have also been lovers of the arts, from Leonardo DaVinci, of course, to Albert Einstein, who played violin to relax, and a great many others. Having an artistic mind seems to lend itself to having a scientific outlook.

For this reason I prefer STEAM to STEM: Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Math. They all wrap up together and buttress one another in a wonderful synergy.

I intend to track down other books he has published, and I look forward in just a couple more days to attending his online lecture.

Final Fourteen

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past couple of days, I've finished the last fourteen pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. There were two (of six) bits of verse I'm sorry I read, and four others that were "OK". One was clearly well-written prose broken into a "poem" in lines of nearly equal visible length; otherwise unremarkable. Another is worth a short remark:

"Blue" by Erin Wilson is short, and very sad (gut-punch sad), and I dare not say more because it's too easy to spoil.

Three of the prose pieces are worth mentioning:

• "Dear Damage" by Ashley Marie Farmer – Apparently a true story, of an attempted (and failed) murder-suicide brought on by unimaginable pain. Where's a Kevorkian when you need one? Though I am a Christian, I understand, and sympathize with, the need to determinedly end one's own life in certain circumstances.
• "Dreaming of Water With Tiger Salamanders" – This is also nonfiction. Most of it is an essay compounded of equal parts pandemic panic and climate panic, in a setting of "development" of land that ought not be developed. The author (or narrator) is the token biologist who must accompany a development crew, by California law. The two panics are overhyped. On the other hand, I am in favor of strong laws forbidding "development" of arable land (with a Capital penalty) and forbidding destruction of habitat for vulnerable species (slightly-less-than-Capital).
• "Black Land Matters: Climate Solutions in Black Agrarianism" by Leah Penniman – An excellent essay on the efficacy of traditional soil enrichment. The historical flow as I have observed it is sadly almost predictable: in recent years it has been determined that the Amazon rainforest is not a "jungle" but a now-neglected (and much abused) garden, which includes huge areas enriched by biochar and river-bottom muck to make it more fertile. It is only now becoming clear that significant parts of the African continent have a similar history of cultivation. I learned of the impressive usefulness of biochar when I edited a PhD dissertation for a friend who did research with biochar. This essay focuses on many traditional practices, and on their continuation by American Blacks, where they have been permitted to own land. A formative experience in my own young life was a visit to Malabar Farm in Ohio, where conservation tillage was "rediscovered" a millennium after the fact, as it happens.

There were several other stories that were good reading, but rather thin on ideas. The four noted above have strong ideas, and I am an idea guy. I read, not just for escape, but to see what people are thinking, to glean good ideas.

I've finished the Pushcart volume. At 462 pages, it took me a while. Mostly, it was well worth it.

Four out of five — Not so bad

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past day or so I've had time to read only five pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. I'll ignore one of the five. The others:

• "A Most Generous Offer" by Joy Guo – It took a while to see where this story was going. Superficially, it's about an inherited apartment. Really, lack of communication risks loss of everything.

• "The Blob" by Molly Gallentine – Flashing forward and back, with the old film The Blob as a metaphor for climate anxiety, while the protagonists attempts artistic climate activism. The image is the beginning of the movie theater scene from the 1958 film.
• "Marmalade" by Fred D'Aguiar – In the aftermath of a breakup, the kids are hurt the most. Of many treatments on this old theme, this is one of the best.
• "Toward a Unified Theory" by Wayne Miller – It's hard to say if it is intended to be one poem: very short bits of free verse with a strong TITLE every 4-8 lines, and lots of white space. No relationship to the overall title that I can discern.

Sometimes, being puzzled is as valuable as being gratified.

Leaning into the Apocalypse

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry, essays

The eight items I read today in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others, are evenly matched, four in verse and four stories/essays (sometimes it's hard to tell the difference). I'll touch on most of them.

"Memorials" by Tyler Sones – Remembering the localized apocalypses in the author's memory, one near Waco, Texas and the other at Ruby Ridge, in Idaho. The word "apocalypse" just means "taking off the cover", and by extension "revelation". It is, by itself, the title of the last book of the Bible. The content of the apostle John's visions has colored our understanding of the term. The author describes a fiercely Bible-centered culture in which the two attacked homesteads were embedded.

The image was produced using Playground AI; a milder view than what is warranted by the text, but a more appropriate prompt would have been rejected.

The verse "Dawn 2040" by Jorie Graham is intended to evoke a post-apocalyptic scene, set just sixteen years in the future (perhaps 17-18 when the piece was written). Overblown, in my view.

"Fight Week" by Laura Van Den Berg – A young woman, a prize fighter, is drawn into a drama and inadvertently does a good deed. It leads to a step change in her fighting skills.

I'll limn three other pieces with the two words that came to mind as I finished each:

• "Nomad Palindrome" – Extended palindrome. [At 87 words, one of the longest I've encountered]
• "Jorie, Jr" by Michael Czyzniejewski – Superman metaphor. [there's no relationship with the author of "Dawn 2040"...I think]
• "The Emperor Concerto" by Julie Hecht – Musical rumination.

Four hits in a row!

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past 24 hours I read just four pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. Surprise, I liked all four, so I'll give all four "the treatment".

"Two Breaths" by Christina Rivera Cogswell – A wife and husband scuba dive at night to observe Manta rays off Kailua-Kona in Hawaii. The Hawaiian word for the Manta, hahalua, means "two breaths". The woman cannot get her mind off her two children, asleep at home. Much of the story is her stream of consciousness as she copes with near-panic, something she didn't experience before becoming a mother (mothers reading the story will sympathize). The image was created using Playground AI.

"It is Once Again the Season of Corn" by Onyekachi Hoh – Thirteen couplets of free verse, full of observations and wishes. One of these, "let all the rifles become violins…" evoked the image. The final wish is for an orchestra. The image was created using Dall-E3, which threw a horse into the image I liked most.

"The Magician's Assistant" by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick – Four quatrains of free verse: after the act is over and the magician has sawn her in half, the assistant sews herself back together. Her thought near the end is poignant: "the applause is for his miracle and not hers". I also used Dall-E3 to produce this image. Dall-E3 didn't like the first prompt I tried, "too violent", so a more innocuous one produced this image.

"Tomorrows" by Lakiesha Carr – A slot machine addict, coping as best she can. It's no surprise that her familial feeling for fellow slots players exceeds all others. At least she has an income. This image was created using Playground AI. Note that we can control the aspect ratio of PG-AI images.

At this point I am just past halfway done with the volume.

Fifteen more, half pointless

 kw: story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

In the past two-plus days I have read fifteen more pieces in 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others. Of the fifteen, nine are "poems". One of these, "Chemo Becomes Me" by Lily Jarman-Reisch resonated with me. I have been on chemo, and though I didn't lose hair (as the poet did), there were other effects. Also, this poem has rhyme and rhythm, being in couplets with a coda.

If the other eight free verse items are a kind of intelligence test, I utterly failed. To me, they are a waste of words. I suppose they really, really meant something to their authors.

I particularly liked "The Locksmith" by Grey Wolfe LaJoie. Though the words "autism" or "spectrum" never appear, the locksmith's condition is evident. Nonetheless, he copes. I was sympathetic to someone who must ride a bicycle because he can't get a driver's license. For about a year I didn't drive; because of an accident, the "best" insurance premium I could obtain was the cost of my car, per year. So I rode bicycle until the points dropped off my record.

The pieces that were stories affected me variously. Two worth mention are "The Ba'al Shem's Daughter" by Glenn Gitomer and "Everychild" by Alix Christie. From very different perspectives, they tell of parents who have lost control of a child, and cope about as badly as possible. I'll leave it to you to read and find out.

And I do hope you will read this volume and these stories. Maybe you'll even like the poems.

Coda: I prompted Dall-E3 with "A pushcart in the style of a bookplate sticker". Here are a couple of its offerings:

Some items worth reading, some not so much

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

Since the prior post I've had time to read seven more pieces from 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses, edited by Bill Henderson and others.

Some of them had me wondering, as this fellow is, "What could possibly have led the author to write this?" I'll comment on the others, though there was only one that I actually liked. It comes first, then the others.

• "Dreamers Awaken" by Scott Spencer – A memory of someone about my age of Jim Crow America in the 1950's. The real core of the story is his longing for acceptance, which transcends culture, race, and time.
• "Two People" by James Langenbach – Free verse vignettes of a couple's lives. Saved from total obscurity by sort of going somewhere.
• "What if Putin Laughed" by Steve Stern – A long discursion on the meaning of "schlemiel" (a Yiddish term for a semi-lovable loser), which is found to be a long lead-up to a two-line joke about V. Zelenskyy confronting V. Putin. A clever joke, really.

Just as a side note: I used Dall-E3 to produce the image above. It took a few tries. I was tempted to use this image instead, but none of the pieces really made my head explode.

Some of this year's Pushcart items

 kw: book reviews, story reviews, anthologies, literature, fiction, poetry

The cover illustration for 2024 Pushcart Prize XLVIII: Best of the Small Presses is red on orange, as seen here (the colors change almost yearly). It was edited by Bill Henderson and an editorial board. For my purposes, the appeal of these stories varies from year to year. This year seems average, with eleven of the 63 items under my belt so far. I'll comment briefly on a few that I liked.

As is my habit, if I really don't like a story, I don't mention it. In this case, though, I've picked four to comment on, of these first eleven. I sorta-liked most of the other seven. As I read more, I'll post successive portions.

• "Sunny Talks" by Lydia Conklin – A cross-generational coming-of-age story about the trans experience. An older woman who wanted to transition to male gender, who now calls herself non-binary, is aunt to a trans boy who had the opportunity to transition (at least chemically so far), who is an Internet influencer in the trans community. The feelings are raw; this will make many uncomfortable. For that alone, it is worth reading, and even the more because it is brilliantly written.
• "Tender" by Sophie Klahr – A rare bit of free verse that I actually enjoyed. That is very rare! The theme is loneliness and death. The writing is sufficiently tight that I cannot see how setting it to rhymed, metric verse could avoid ruining it. There are but 14 lines, though I would not call it a sonnet (perhaps free verse aficionados would do so).
• "Backsiders" by Kathryn Scanlon – Horse people, as told by a horse person, apparently over several interviews. This one isn't stated to be fiction, so I take it as genuine. From what I know of people in the horse racing circuit, this is straight-up journalism, from a more personal viewpoint than usual.
• "The Future is a Click Away" by Allegra Hyde – A fantasy on "The Algorithm", as it becomes so aware of our inner rhythms that it anticipates what we want and delivers it just before we might have requested it…until it overdoes it. I have lost count of how many times I have checked reviews for something—and forgotten to use DuckDuckGo—and purchased something, then seen ad after ad for that thing for a period of several weeks. I've wanted to write to Google, "I already bought it. Leave me alone! Don't you have a record of my purchases, also?" But I always think, I don't want to give them ideas…

As is usual for this annual volume, the writing is excellent, even if the subjects are not always to my liking. So far there is only one story I got a page into and then skipped the rest.

If BARD is a poet, I wouldn't know it

 kw: analysis, artificial intelligence, experimental linguistics, poetry

My first queries to BARD were related to Shakespeare. BARD bungled the iambic meter of a soliloquy. I decided to try poetry in a more general sense. I will comment in each section.

P07: There are 3 kinds of photosynthesis: C3, C4 and CAM. Please write a sonnet about photosynthesis in the Italian rhyming style.

Bard: Sure, here is a sonnet about photosynthesis in the Italian rhyming style:

Photosynthesis

The leaves unfurl, the sun shines bright,
And plants begin their daily flight.
They take in carbon dioxide,
And water from the ground below.
 
They use the energy from the sun,
To turn these things into one.
A sugar called glucose,
And oxygen, which is released into the air.
 
There are three main types of photosynthesis,
C3, C4, and CAM.
Each type has its own advantages and disadvantages,
And they are all used by different plants.
 
C3 photosynthesis is the most common type,
And it is used by most plants.
It is not as efficient as C4 or CAM photosynthesis,
But it is less demanding of water.
 
C4 photosynthesis is more efficient than C3 photosynthesis,
But it requires more water.
It is used by plants that live in hot, dry climates,
Such as cacti and succulents.
 
CAM photosynthesis is the most efficient type of photosynthesis,
But it is also the most demanding of water.
It is used by plants that live in very hot, dry climates,
Such as cacti and succulents.
 
No matter what type of photosynthesis they use,
All plants play an important role in the environment.
They help to clean the air,
And they provide food and oxygen for animals.

A sonnet has 14 lines. Here we have 28. The Italian rhyming style is ABBAABBA CDECDE, although there are various ways the last six lines are handled, including CDCDCD and CDDCDD. None of the quartos above has an ABBA rhyming pattern. Also, sonnets are typically in iambic meter, but none of that is found here.

P07: Please write a limerick about a coder named Larry

Bard: Sure, here is a limerick about a coder named Larry:

There once was a coder named Larry,
Whose code was as tight as a curry.
He could write in any language,
From C++ to Python,
And his programs always ran merrily.

This limerick was in a box, so maybe Bard copied it from somewhere…but it doesn’t rhyme lines 3&4. There were two other drafts:

There once was a coder named Larry,
Whose code was quite hairy and scary.
He said, "I'll rewrite it,
But first I must write it,
Then I'll test it, and then maybe I'll marry."
 
There once was a coder named Larry,
Whose code was quite hairy.
He said, "I'll rewrite it,
So it's not so tight,
And maybe I'll get a raise, maybe."

The first alternate draft is a near-perfect Limerick; just remove "and" from the last line. The other draft, and the original version, are quite klutzy.

P07: Describe the common feet in prodosy: iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, and spondee

Bard: Sure. In prosody, a foot is the basic repeating rhythmic unit that forms part of a line of verse. The most common feet in English are the iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, and spondee.

Iambic

An iamb is a two-syllable foot with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. For example, the word "today" is an iamb, with the unstressed syllable "to" followed by the stressed syllable "day."

Trochaic

A trochee is a two-syllable foot with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. For example, the word "about" is a trochee, with the stressed syllable "a" followed by the unstressed syllable "bout."

Anapestic

An anapest is a three-syllable foot with two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. For example, the word "telephone" is an anapest, with the two unstressed syllables "tele" followed by the stressed syllable "phone."

Dactylic

A dactyl is a three-syllable foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. For example, the word "hammer" is a dactyl, with the stressed syllable "ham" followed by the two unstressed syllables "mer."

Spondaic

A spondee is a two-syllable foot with two stressed syllables. For example, the word "forever" is a spondee, with both syllables "for" and "ever" stressed.

These are just a few of the most common feet in prosody. There are many other types of feet, as well as more complex meters that combine multiple feet.

The descriptions are good but not all the examples are apt. “About” is not a Trochee but an Iamb; a better choice would have been “under”, or the example used for Dactyl, “hammer”. A better choice for a Dactyl would have been “murmuring” or “mockingbird”. “Forever” is not a Spondee but an Amphibrach (rare as a repeated foot in English poetry); a better choice for a spondee would be a “smokestack”, or more common examples of repeated one-syllable words such as “woe, woe!”. In another draft, BARD used these apt examples: “report”, “daily”, “serenade”, “merrily”, and “he who”. A third draft used some four-syllable words as examples!

That's enough. I have read here and there about the poetic abilities of ChatGPT. I suspect they are overhyped. I didn't ask BARD to write free verse, which I don't consider to be verse at all. Maybe that's what folks have written about.

A narrow view of art

kw: musings, poetry, art

I work the puzzles in the daily newspaper, including a feature titled Cryptic Byword, compiled by Luis Campos. A few days ago the deciphered quote was this:

"The best poetry jolts and shocks; it mines language for what we have not seen, have not heard" —Canadian Poet Dionne Brand.

My first reaction was, "What a stupid statement! This 'poet' lacks imagination." Of course, I had to look her up. Ms Brand has impressive credentials, including a term as the Poet Laureate of Toronto (9/2009 - 11/2012). From the bits of her writing available on various web sites, I find she is indeed an very talented writer. She has also, as a past Professor of Women's Studies and now a Research Professor of Theater and English Studies, ensconced herself in a narrow academic setting in which perpetual outrage is encouraged and rewarded. She is doing great work in her chosen field, so I do not blame her for the view expressed above, though the adjective "polemic" should be inserted before "poetry".

Before looking up her vitae, I mused about poetry, and about art in general, and its purposes. I like poetry, but I don't obsess over it as some do. I have bought precious few of the multitude of poetic anthologies, and most of those I own were gifts. According to the accepted taxonomy, poems come in three species:

• Structured verse with meter and rhyme. For generations this was "poetry," whether the heroic couplets of so much English verse including Shakespeare's frequent rhymed couplets, the dactylic hexameter of Homer and classical Greek poetry in general, or the tight structures of the few subspecies of Sonnet. Even Limericks and Clerihews, which the "serious" literati might despise, have solid structures that require creativity.
• Blank verse. This is a specialty of playwrights of the Elizabethan theater. There is the metrical structure (variously violated, particularly by Shakespeare) of the ten-syllable iambic line, but with no rhyme scheme.
• Free verse. This is the prevailing genre of the Poetry Slam, where jolts and shocks abound. I look upon most free verse as prose with the lines broken in sundry places. Some free verse is very well written. Some.

Whichever species a poem belongs to, what functions does it perform? Must it shock? I have at hand Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The turns of language may induce the occasional jolt, but such is not the poet's aim. She was expressing her emotions during her courtship with Robert Browning, before they married. A simple view is that her aim was to express Love. In a more nuanced view she was working through the cloud of feelings surrounding her growing love, first her doubt and fear and then affection and awe, and finally acceptance and comfort. They show her growth until, in the 43'd of the 44 sonnets, she could pen one of the most famous lines in English: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." She goes on to enumerate seven, with clear indications that she is just beginning, but has run out of "sonnet space"!

My all-time favorite books of poetry are When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six by A.A. Milne. I have the 1956 editions, given me by my parents when I was about ten years old. Surprised? Although I love Frost and Dickinson and Stevenson (I have A Child's Garden of Verses), it is to Milne I most frequently turn…for what? For humor, for insight into the child within, and for their lovely sound! I read them aloud. Our son used to love it when I would recite "Disobedience", which begins

James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree
Took great care of his mother, though he was only three.

Opening each line with a dispondee (two long, stressed syllables) is genius personified! The following anapestic feet, and variations on them, keep the poem galloping along. Although there is a shock when a reader realizes the boy's mother is not returning, the light tone of the poem indicates it is an object lesson, not a report of a tragedy. It is a poem of turning-the-tables.

A.A. Milne's children's poems remind me to smile, to slow down and smell the flowers. I have a rather dour personality, and therein I find balm for my soul.

While I prefer rhyming verse, I can be stirred by blank verse…but it has to be very good! There is nothing better than the inspiring speech from Henry V by Shakespeare known as "St. Crispin's Day", which brought "band of brothers" into the English vocabulary. This is poetry that both ennobles and motivates.

Do I have any favorites among the lengthy ranks of purveyors of free verse? Not a one. Having read a few poems by Professor Brand, I can admire her skill, but I am otherwise left cold. I have also partaken of portions by Tony Morrison; though she was not a poet, her prose has poetical power (I have read only portions, no complete novels, because they go places I don't wish to go), and is frequently polemical also. I can analyze a work and discern its polemical intent—and so far, everything of Brand's I have seen has polemical intent—but I am not motivated. Polemics are for motivating, but you have to hit the right buttons. Sorry, Ms Brand!

And what of the other arts? There are painters and sculptors who make it their business to jolt and shock, but they are generally inferior, if not in craft, then in vision. There is "art" that demeans, and I don't mean only pornography. In the performance arts in particular, a few modern comedians carry on the uplifting tradition of Jack Benny or Red Skelton, but they are few. Far more must be "blue" to be funny, although they elicit mostly snickers rather than honest laughter.

In my folk-singing-in-coffee-shops years, I was sometimes asked why I sang certain songs. I would reply that I wished to raise my audience up, not knock them down. Every artist, of any genre, has this choice: ennoble others, or debase them.

I would agree with the second half of the quote above, that poetry ought to "mine language". To what purpose? Here is my shorter proverb (and you can substitute "art" for "poetry"):

The best poetry helps the reader grow.

Poetry Postscript

kw: continuation reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

Speak of a mental block! In yesterday's review I utterly forgot to mention a most valuable bit of the author's advice. First among several points he makes is one I was taught when a child: Read a poem the first time, aloud, as if it were not a poem. Do not sing-song the rhythm, but read it sentence by sentence. Indeed, the author of How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (Thomas C. Foster) says in a few places that the unit of thought and feeling in a poem is not the line, but the sentence. For some poems, it can be hard to determine where a sentence ends, but it is usually no problem. Try it out with this, presented not in poetic lines, but as though it were prose:

If you must love me, let it be for nought except for love's sake only. Do not say, "I love her for her smile—her look—her way of speaking gently; for a trick of thought that falls in well with mine, and doubtless brought a sense of pleasant ease on such a day." For these things in themselves, Belovèd, may be changed, or change for you; and love, so wrought, may be unwrought so. Neither love me for your own dear pity's wiping my cheeks dry; a creature might forget to weep, who bore your comfort long, and lose your love thereby! But love me for love's sake, that evermore you may love on, through love's eternity.

There you go, five sentences, though if you replace the semicolons with full stops it comes to seven. I took slight liberties with this, to update certain grammar elements and punctuation marks, for the poet preferred a comma-dash (,—) to a semicolon, for example. Doing so, I did not disturb the meter.

Perhaps you know enough of poetry to recognize the meter when read aloud, that it is iambic pentameter, the rhythm de rigueur for sonnets. Can you then tease out the fourteen lines? Yet there are not fourteen thoughts here, just five. The discipline of putting such emotions into sonnet form induce the poet to compress the expression. Here is a scan of the page I 'translated':

A very few people might recognize this as one of the Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is the 1902 edition. The 44 sonnets therein are among the great classics of English-language literature. I daresay, if you've never read them before, that reading this sonnet first in the sentence-by-sentence way, you will enjoy it more than you might have had you first read the scan, and you may find it enjoyable to get a copy of the book (it is still reprinted). Or, if you like lighter fare, perhaps you could instead get When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne, who is best known for Winnie-The-Pooh. Milne wrote some of the most recitable poems I know (also still in print; my copy is the 1945 edition, my very first book).

Making poetry accessible

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, poems, poetry, reading

While we lived in Oklahoma, from 1986 to 1995, we were members of the Stillwater Gem and Mineral Society. For part of 1994 I edited their monthly journal, The Rockhound Gazette. In the July 1994 issue I placed a little ditty I had written, shown here. About the end of the year, much to my surprise, the regular editor, Ruby Lingelbach, presented me with a plaque and award letter! She had entered the "poem" in some sort of contest at a conference of the Rocky Mountain Federation of Mineralogical Societies. It won first place.

So, can I call myself a "prize winning poet"? Just maybe!

For the aficionado, the meter is Trochaic Heptameter followed by an unaccented syllable, a 15-syllable line. That is rare for "ordinary" poetry, but is a meter useful in song. In fact, were I to add an appropriate chorus after the second and fourth verses, it could be sung to "O! Susanna".

You're not an aficionado? No worries. You can get a bit of grounding in such matters in How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: A Quippy and Sonorous Guide to Verse, by Thomas C. Foster.

Now, maybe you don't want to read poetry "like a professor". After all, when I read a poem, I don't really want it to be hanged, drawn and quartered and dragged to the four winds. I just want to enjoy it. I suspect most folks are the same.

Frequently, knowing a bit can help us enjoy a poem more. In this book, should it interest you, you can indeed learn a few things about drawing out more of the meaning the poet put in there. The author covers a lot of ground, from the way a poem strikes both eye and ear (much poetry is intended to be heard), to the various structures the poem or the lines might have – including whether there are rhymes; and the matters of symbols and symbolism. Although, on that latter point, it is well to remember what Sigmund Freud said about symbols in psychology, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."

I am glad I had a few years of classical education before starting public school, even though the level of poetical understanding I got was rather basic. So I know that the word "iamb" is a trochee, and "trochee" is an iamb; that is, both are two-syllable "feet", but an iamb trips along with the emphasis on the second syllable while the trochee resembles a heartbeat, "LUB dub". The other two sorts of common poetic feet actually sound their meaning: "dactylic" is emphasized like "pówdery", while "anapest" is emphasized like "underfóot".

I have often said that a poem needs structure, and if it has "neither rhyme nor reason [rhythm]", it isn't poetry. The author shows how some "free verse" isn't as free as we might think, having structure just as rigid as a sonnet (with its 14 lines of 10 syllables in primarily iambic meter, in 8- and 6-line sections). However, he concedes that there is a huge amount of "bad" verse of any kind we might imagine, and for free verse in particular, it frequently differs from plain prose only in having the lines broken off short. So I continue in my belief that, if it can't be chanted or sung, it is probably not a poem.

However, read the book and judge for yourself. Perhaps if you tend to avoid poetry, you'll find it more enjoyable in the future. A fun read, this book!

Poems are her bread and butter

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, poetry

The title was enough: Poetry Will Save Your Life, by Joan Bialosky. I like poetry, though more in a now-and-then kind of way. Breading her memoir, we find that for Ms Bialosky, poems are her life. Not only is she a poet and author, someone who manages to craft a living from her craft; she finds sustenance and guidance in the poems she has gathered.

I imagine that she has collected a great many of others' poems over the past five or six decades. How she culled 43 special ones around which to weave her own coming of age story, only she knows. She likes poems that rhyme and those that don't; poems with rhythmic structure and poems that seem structureless (maybe she sees structure I cannot fathom). Her taste is wide-ranging, from the famous (such as Robert Frost or R.L. Stevenson) to the scarcely known (Li-Young Lee or Yehuda Amichai), at least to me.

I don't know what to say beyond that. I have a very few, very special poems that I treasure, but I'll keep them to myself here. Did they save my life? I don't know; we all have our own elixir, can we but find it. Simply this: I enjoyed the book.

Three more and it is done

kw: continued review, story reviews, collections, short stories, poetry, literature

The final third of Pushcart Prize XL, edited by Bill Henderson and (many) others, contains three stories I thought worth mentioning:

"Constance Bailey in the Year of Monica Lewinsky" by Sarah Vallance is nonfiction, evoking a year she spent visiting an impoverished, elderly black woman and attaining a loving friendship with her. While there are several threads to this, the chief is that being unabashedly oneself tends to lower barriers, given time. To one such as I, who spent decades behind a constructed personality (but no more), this is refreshing.

Meghan O'Gieblyn presents herself as a former Evangelical Christian in "Hell"; it presents her experience the weirdo fringe of the evangelical movement, those who tend to have the bumper sticker, "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." Trouble is, the source of the "God said it" part is typically an over-enthusiastic, theologically undereducated preacher. Ms O'Gieblyn begins with an interesting description of a project by Chris Herron to re-brand Hell. This is actually real, though it is an ironic exercise in public relations. Kind of like a Fabergé egg: much prettier than the original and entirely non-functional. Her theme is the watering down of the concept of Hell, such that now it is never mentioned in many congregations. This parallels her own disillusionment with evangelicalism. I can't resist quoting a wise Bible teacher: "Do not limit the breadth of God. When He is loving, He is very, very loving, and when He is severe, He is very, very severe."

One never knows what will resolve the hurt in a heart. In the story "Night Movers" by Perry Janes, Zeke (first person voice) and his boss Tye labor overnight to clear out houses of all sizes that need emptying in a hurry. One of several reasons why is on the last day before a foreclosure that a homebuyer has fought and lost. Zeke's brother recently died in a horrible accident. After an extra-busy night of emptying a veritable mansion, the two find a large school bell in a dank basement. This is the kind of bell that usually requires a crane to move. To say more would spoil a unique resolution.

I'd like to stop here, but I must mention one other story. It is not just fiction, it is pathological fiction. Character assassination of President Reagan, of the worst kind, attributing thoughts to him that he could not have thought, motivations that are so below reason I must conclude that the author is a stranger to fact and to reason. Neither author nor title is worth mention, lest this miserable person accidentally profit therefrom.

Sturgeon's Law states, "90% of everything is junk." So if a little junk got into a collection that I consider the best yearly anthology, it is no surprise. In the Pushcart Prize series, there is way less than 90% junk.

Some little escape pieces

kw: continued review, story reviews, collections, short stories, poetry, literature

A few more pieces I liked over the past four days of readings in Pushcart Prize XL (2016), edited by Bill Henderson and many others:

Anthony Doerr brings us a capsule history of Boise, Idaho, as lived by the first family to settle there, in "The Thing With Feathers That Perches in the Soul", which is a line from Emily Dickinson. It is told in a third person, personal style that feels like second person. One feels placed within the family cabin.

I have read two other dystopian stories of the forced demise of print. "The Knowledge Gallery" by Joanna Scott comes at it from a new angle. The writers that matter most engage in a kind of aggressive samizdat, fiercely deflecting all attempts to describe them or to collect their work, in a society that punishes excessive use of paper.

"The Soldier of Michtlán" by Rigoberto Gonzalez, seems an experiment in building a pounding heartbeat by ending every line with the same word, "soldier". Not entirely rhythmic, the lines flirt among tetrameter and pentameter and hexameter, keeping the reader off balance. I must admit that this item really is poetry.

Another very uncomfortable piece, a new kind of reportage: "Food and Worker Safety Across the Globe: A Nervous and Incomplete Case Study". It will make you wonder if your iPhone, tablet or other similar gadgets are really worth their human cost; and a parallel thread shows how some of "the elite" pay for farm worker exploitation because of the incredibly poor sanitation that results. E. coli salad, anyone?

I am nearing page 400, with about 150 to go. I don't plan to do more than skim the apparatuses.

The small presses outwrite the giants

kw: book reviews, story reviews, collections, short stories, poetry, literature

Bill Henderson has now been the chief editor of the Pushcart Prize series, which he and some friends founded, for forty years. One thing I like about a collection is, if I don't like something, I haven't carried a whole book home in vain. I can skip or skim, and soon find something more worth reading (to me). I am about a third of the way through the current volume, Pushcart Prize XL: Best of the Small Presses, and so far I have skipped or skimmed very little, though as I noted for volume XXXVIII, I have little liking for "free verse", which to me seems an oxymoron.

Having around 100 co-editors, Mr. Henderson naturally gathers a great variety of literature. I'll remark on three items among those I've read to date, that particularly spoke to me.

The opening piece, "Miss Adele Amidst the Corsets" by Zadie Smith, was an uncomfortable read. Miss Adele is an aging, cross-dressing performer. The corset she needs to approximate the female shape, starting with a pudgy male body, has split, and a new one must be obtained quickly. The intersection of her requirements with a corset shop owner who really doesn't want to do business with her provides a stage for a piquant confrontation in which nobody can possibly win. Life is like that. When we fail, it is either by doing too little or doing too much. Miss Adele manages both, but does get a corset.

"The Branch Way of Doing" by Wendell Berry is a pleasure from all angles. Nobody can limn a character, and through him or her, take the measure of a society, better than Wendell Berry. The Branch family, descended from Danny Branch—who was unusually sired, unusually raised, and a hyper-steady throwback to values of pre-technological America—are a window into what is possible for those who, somehow, think through ahead of time those things worth doing and worth having, and eschew the rest.

Did you ever see one of those adds for "Russian Brides", and wonder whether they are for real, or whether they ever get what they are looking for? Although "Wanderlust" by Laleh Khadivi is labeled as fiction, it evokes the lives of young Russian women, what drives some of them to sign up to be, effectively, mail-order brides, and where most such assignations wind up. If you take a moment to consider, "What kind of American man looks for an overseas bride (or mistress, usually)?", you can predict much of the outcome, but you'd have to be a topnotch writer to express it so well as Ms Khadavi.

If I come across a bit of actual verse among the purported poetry, I'll be sure to include it in a later post as I work my way through the book. The pieces themselves take up just under 550 pages. Being an omnibus, anniversary volume, more than 100 pages of apparatus follow, including a comprehensive index of all the pieces published in the series since 1976.

Sandwich Generation - the rubber hits the road

kw: book reviews, short fiction, short stories, poetry, caregiving

One of my earliest memories is of leading my grandfather by the hand to take a walk around the front yard of his winter house in the desert. I was about six years old. My last memory of him comes about six years later, shortly before he died; it is my only memory of him speaking. In those days it was called "hardening of the arteries." It was probably Alzheimer Syndrome. He was peaceable in his dotage and my grandmother cared for him until the end.

Take a look at this face. This is his grandmother Elizabeth when she was about sixty. This is an Alzheimer face. He wore a similar face much of the time: disconnected and vaguely unhappy. This woman's daughter, my great-grandmother, died in her fifties. From dementia? We don't know.

My mother and her sister inherited the syndrome. My aunt was more cheerful about the prospect, telling me (before she lost the power of speech), "If I'm going to go crazy, I intend to enjoy it!" My mother coped the best she could, and we felt fortunate she didn't stop speaking.

My last memories of my mother, just a month before her death, began when I walked into my parents' sitting room where her gurney-bed was: she looked up and called me by name. She hadn't spoken my name for five years or more. During that last visit, which lasted just four days, she called me by name a few more times. I am told this is common. In both her case and her father's case there was a rallying and greater clarity in the last month or two of life. Somehow I knew this without being told, and expected she would not long survive my visit. Six weeks later I crossed the country again to attend her funeral.

My father would tell a more arduous story. Until he was 80 he cared for her himself, but he had to hire a nurse to help during the last year or so. He got so burned out. So did the nurse. After Mom died she went into a different line of work.

Now I sometimes wonder whether I'll be next in line. It used to worry me a lot. Here is a poem I wrote to my mother (but never showed her) a few months before that last visit:

I held your father’s hand
When I was just a little boy.
He needed help to find his way around.
He was like a friendly puppy,
And he liked to be with me.
When I’d walk around the block, he’d come along.

The only time I heard him speak,
I was nearly 12.
I was asking for some tweezers for a thorn.
He spoke up, and said, “I have some!”
And he led me down the hall
To his tool bench at the back of the garage.

A retired piano tuner,
He had tools of every kind:
Wrenches, screwdrivers, a tuning hammer, saws.
The tweezers that he handed me
Were longer than my hand.
But I managed to pull out that thorn with them…

More than forty years have passed,
And as we walk around the block
I must hold your hand, so you can find your way.
This is something in our family,
They say it’s in the genes.
When it is my turn, who will hold my hand?

Had I known a certain volume was being prepared, I'd have submitted this, perhaps with some small chance it would be accepted. I've just read Living in the Land of Limbo, edited by Carol Levine. It is subtitled "Fiction and Poetry about Family Caregiving", and is one of the more touching and memorable volumes I've read.

Ms Levine has organized the book well, because "family" means relationships in all directions, up, down and sideways. I noticed that many of the writers are Chinese or other Easterners. The Western way seems to be to warehouse people when we get uncomfortable with them, and then feel virtuous if we happen to visit at least weekly. Folks seem to add it to their list of duties right on a par with "going to church". "OK, an hour for church on Sunday morning. Check. An hour with Dad (or Mom or Aunt Rose…) on Wednesday afternoon. Check." If you've never heard the song by Harry Chapin, "The Cat's in the Cradle", click and listen to it now.

I usually abhor "free verse", but the poems in this book are so touching I didn't mind. The various pieces got me to think about all my relationships. I am so glad I knew all my grandparents, and that our son got to know all four of his. I am glad for "immediate family" of course, but also for aunts (one still living) and uncles and cousins, and those second and even third cousins I've been privileged to meet. One good friend of ours helps out his cousin frequently. He wonders how she goes on, with so many ailments, and a husband in even worse shape! They are fortunate he is available to help out.

Well, it is clear a book like this is hard to write about. It is the best kind of book, one that triggers self-reflection and self-revelation. I have little fear of Alzheimer's Syndrome now. I seem to have inherited my father's brain (he is 93 and still pretty competent) rather than my mother's. And if I do succumb to dementia? It is in God's hands. A wonderful book like this shows we need not feel alone when we need to care for someone, or need care ourselves. We have plenty of company.

Now I must reveal my identity explicitly, which I haven't done before in this blog. The poem above, titled "Memory", is Copyright, 2004 by Larry J. Van Stone. Please contact me if you wish to use it, using a Comment to tell me your e-mail address; I monitor Comments, so the Comment will not appear unless I Publish it to the blog, which I would not do without your permission.

A better collection I wish I'd found earlier

kw: book reviews, collections, short stories, poetry, literature

Hmmm. I see that a week has passed. I typically finish a book quicker than that, but a 550+ page tome takes me a bit longer, even when I skip certain items. The 2014 Pushcart Prize XXXVIII: Best of the Small Presses contains 70 pieces, just over half of them poetry. It was edited by Bill Henderson, who gives editorial credit to more than 200 others.

Solomon warned in Ecclesiastes, "Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body." The wise old king would be astonished to find that the number of publishers today exceeds the number of books that existed in the 11^th Century BCE. Indeed, it seems unlikely that one thousand books existed even ten centuries later, when his most famous descendant was preaching in Galilee.

Year by year I look for short story collections to be published. There are a great many, so perhaps it is not unusual that I did not earlier encounter the Pushcart collections. As I have written year after year, the quality of thought in Western literature has been on a long decline. It has gotten so I can barely tolerate five of the selections in my earlier favorite, the O. Henry Prize Stories series. This is not to say that writing skill is in decline. The collections all select skillfully written material. I frequently admire the way this or that writer can string words together, even as I deplore the item's vapidity and vacuity.

In general, I did not find this so with the Pushcart Prize volume. A welcome relief! That's why it took me a week to read. Bill Henderson and his collaborators not only gathered the most skillful writers, they found those with something to say. I reckon I read at least 400 of the nearly 560 pages of literature presented. I even read many of the poems. I am quite put off by most "free verse" (that is, non-verse), and seldom read past the first dozen lines or so. There is more genuine poetry in the best prose than in most of what passes for poetry these days. The free verse in this volume did not impress me.

Do you know the phrase, "It has no rhyme or reason"? The original proverb said "rhyme or rhythm". To break up overly-condensed prose into lines at about mid-page is not to produce poetry. It is usually to produce boredom. The only poem in this volume that has both rhyme and meter is a translation of Ballade des Pendus, originally written about 1462 by François Villon. The translation by Richard Wilbur is well crafted and very touching. While not as literal as other translations, I think it better renders Villon's thought into English idiom.

Now to the prose, the bulk of the volume, but less than half the chapters. Much is essay or reportage, and while I didn't enumerate the fiction pieces, as I recall there are about ten, and I read through half of them, including "Teen Culture" by Elizabeth Ellen. A woman and her daughter, spending time together with the daughter's friends: How can this turn out well? Somehow it does. Sort of. I've learned that, if I sit at a meal with a table of youngsters who know me, after a while I am forgotten and, as Yogi Berra said, "You can observe a lot just by watching." This is the mom's MO, mostly, and makes for an entertaining story. I imagine it is more than a little autobiographical.

The nonfiction pieces are by their nature bits of memoir. You may remember Eric Fair, the much-reviled whistle-blower about the torture carried out by "contractors" in Middle Eastern prisons. His piece "Consequence" is flat reporting, interleaving bits of the hate mail he's received, and a few morsels of support, with his experiences at Princeton Theological Seminary. It isn't clear at the end if he finished his degree in ministry.

I made a more personal connection with "Writing & Publishing a Memoir: What the Hell Have I Done?" by Andre Dubus III. I've been urged by my brother, who has a few published books under his belt, to write an autobiography or memoir (or several), but I've hesitated. Mr. Dubus explains why. If you change names "to protect the guilty", somebody's going to recognize themselves and they may hate you for it. If you keep real names you can get sued for libel. Furthermore, I have tried longer forms of writing than these blog essays, and I find I have little endurance to maintain a story line for many pages. Even if it is my story. But another item seems to have the solution.

In "Corn Maze" by Pam Houston, we find that Pam likes things in twelves. Urged by a fellow writer to put 100 of her short pieces together as a book, she recalls thinking, "No, not a hundred, but possibly a hundred and forty-four." She also tells us that her standard answer when asked how much of her writing is autobiography is, "82%"…whether she's writing nonfiction or fiction. No matter. In a book of 300 pages, around 100 items comes out to about 3 pages each, and I think I can manage that.

Let's see. Of the 60 years I remember, I can surely come up with five or six or even seven things I'd like to record for each. When I like a book my blog post is about three pages, so I'm already tuned up to write at that level. Will it be a piece of cake? No. Some things I have to say will cause me to relive certain episodes of sturm und drang. Some folks will indeed wish I'd forgotten them. I can't let that hold me back.

There, you see, from at least one writer I learned something new about myself, something that will help me. This is why I read. The time spent getting partway through a piece and then possibly skipping the rest, time after time, is well invested when I can also come across such a gem. There's more, but I'll leave it to the lucky reader.

As free as verse gets

kw: book reviews, poetry, free verse

Free verse puzzles me. I must not
Have the right kind of mind for it.
Rhyme and reason (rhythm) comfort me.

But blank verse has a certain Majesty.
Though rhyme be missing, still its rhythms soothe
My searching heart; they carry me along.

But enough of that. I like sonnets and other structured poems best, but I'm rather bad at producing them. I appreciate artistry in any mode. In The Bride of E by Mary Jo Bang, I read over page after page with little affect, then found nuggets of brilliant imagery:

. . . Look at him. He's on a stage.
He is silently sizing up the table he takes in
As he stares down. This is the world
When it's reduced down to a moment.
(from "F is for Forgetting")

This touched me particularly because it evokes the emotions I've seen on the faces of Alzheimer's Syndrome sufferers. The moment is all they have. But the author's work is as frequently parodic and humorous, as "Quoth the raven, 'Give me more—.'" followed a few stanzas later by "Her name is Lenore Nevermore."

The first part of the book, some 80% of the whole, is "traditional" free verse titled in acrostic order, usually several to a letter (e.g. "P Equals Pie" followed by "In the Present and Probably Future"). The second comprises five mostly longer pieces without the free verse line breaks. They could have been broken up, but instead run on thus:

A feeling I would be exposed. It stayed in my mind as a central element. The stage. The silver screen. Profound and pervasive coloring. At a distance from myself. I was born and raised to be set in relief. (1/4 of a paragraph from "G is Going")

The author's work is apparently very well received. This is her sixth book of poetry. I don't read a lot of poetry, and usually prefer more tightly structured work, but the artistry in this book is evident, and I'm glad I read it.

Echoes of the greatest generation

kw: musings, war, letters, poetry

I've been going through old family letters, putting them in protective sheets and binders. I hope some family historian will have the energy to transcribe them. It is a fascinating exercise. I've come to the wartime letters between my parents. The image just below is a V-MAIL letter my father wrote (I've obscured all but their first names; my mother's address no longer exists).


V-MAIL was a way of saving weight and space in the 1940s, when we didn't have that many airplanes yet; these standardized sheets were photographed onto microfilm and the undeveloped rolls were flown to the U.S. from overseas. One mail bag full of film could carry as much as 35-40 bags of "unshrunk" mail.

The film was developed and printed onto 3"x4" sheets—still readable if the soldier followed instructions and didn't write too small. The image above is probably that size on your monitor. These sheets were mailed to the recipient, who typically got a week's letters all at once. My father's letters indicate he would get 1-2 weeks' worth from his fiancée at once...but her letters were originals, not filmed.


This particular piece of V-MAIL had gotten wet, so it couldn't be filmed, as it wasn't clear enough. It was sent entire. The microfilmer's note is shown along with the standard instructions to the writer in this image. This image and the one above can be seen in a larger version by clicking on them.

A few weeks after this letter was sent, Dad(-to-be) realized he could not get home for Christmas. He was in the South Pacific, where he remained until early 1946. So he sent the following poem on Nov 18, 1943:

I'm many miles from Department Stores
There's nothing here to buy.
It makes be blue as I can be
But darling I'll not lie,
I must be frank and let you know
I'll not be sly or foxy.
I can't do my Christmas shopping
So - your gift I'll buy by proxy.

(He had asked his mother to buy a gift for her.) My son and I write occasional poetry. I guess it is one more thing we "come by naturally"...that is a family proverb. When one of my brothers, or I, would do something my Mom knew she or Dad once did, particularly the mischief, she'd say, "Well, you came by that naturally."

I wonder if any Americans today would tolerate the wartime restrictions that my parents learned to consider as routine. Some of the V-MAIL letters have a word or two blacked out by the censor (whose stamp appears upper-left in the first image above). Other mail was sometimes clipped—the offending word(s) cut out with a blade. One of the censor's clips looks like it started with a pinking wheel, then the slits were connected by razor cuts.

My dad's first half year of letters are written on one side of heavy foolscap. Whenever my Mom or his mother would send him onion skin, he could get more pages into a 6 cent Air Mail envelope...but many of the envelopes have postage due stamps on them. Later, all the foolscap letters are written on both sides, but the onion skin ones are still one-sided; the paper is so thin the ink shows through and writing on two sides is impractical. However, onion skin weighed 1/3 as much, so it was worth it.

The letters mention gas stamps and food rationing back home. There is a lot that they didn't talk about much. My parents weren't the type to berate us with how hard they'd had it. Their reason for urging restraint would not be "I had to wait THIS long for food coupons", but "It isn't right to be wasteful." They trained our consciences, for which I am thankful.

A lonely G.I. can write a lot. I am not yet through the first year, and I have four fat binders full of Dad's letters...and two-plus years to go! I get about two months per binder. Amazing.