There are two things I have known since childhood.
First, I can be arrogant. It's only too easy.
Next, I can take a beating. A sound, knuckle-scraping, face-stomping beating. I can walk into a buzz-saw of limbs and digits, joints and extremities, and welcome the pulverizing, tenderizing impact. In the end, I will be doubled over in agony, writhing and mewling like a cur, but I'll still be there. And tomorrow, I'll come back for more.
Yes, these two things always came easy to me. But something was always missing. Some essential tertiary term haunted me, kept me from feeling complete, made sure I was always one-third phantom, only ever almost whole.
Today, I am whole.
One of my favorite movies -- both for sentimental reasons and because it is, without hyperbole, easily the greatest film ever made -- is the 1991 Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Double Impact (imdb.com rating: 4.7/10). In it, Van Damme plays dual roles: twins named Alex, a streetwise tuff from Hong Kong who smuggles and steals and beats ass, and Chad, an effete Los Angeles karateka and dance instructor who wears salmon short-shorts and black silk underwear (the last of which details is an important plot point). Implausibly enough, they have the same accent, and Alex Van Damme calls Chad Van Damme a "faggot" more than once. It's as good as it sounds.
In an early scene, Chad Van Damme is teaching what appears to be a class on sexual innuendo to some ladies who probably seemed pretty in the late 80s but are now terrifying. "Because of my big legs and karate, I can do the splits no problem." Uncle Frank -- who, spoiler alert, isn't really his uncle -- calls him away to take over the karate class downstairs. "Dressed like this?" Van Damme asks. I think he looks good. Uncle Frank checks out his package.
Keeping with the theme of peculiar couture, for some reason, the karate class is dressed like this. An unruly Australian, identified as "the new guy," is picking on some poor kid, and Van Damme, following the Bushido code of honor, has to step in and defend the weak in his samurai spandex.
"Are you the ballet teacher or what?" the Aussie asks. "Dancing, yeah, dancing... also some, ah, karate," Van Damme responds nonchalantly. And so the web is laid -- the trap is set. It's all over but the pain and humiliation. (You could do worse, at this point, than to notice that the Aussie is wearing barrettes in his hair.)
"Show me one of your special kicks," Van Damme enjoins, pointing somewhere off-screen. This moment has always puzzled me. JCVD seems to be suggesting that the bully is well-known for his kicks, indeed that his kicks are perhaps even advertised at JCVD's own karate studio. Yet the bully is referred to only as the "new guy," and his belt matches his gi, which would normally mean he's a white belt -- and being a white belt in karate usually just means you haven't paid the first month's gym fees. On the other hand, perhaps the movie is trying to suggest that he's a light-pink belt, a rank so formidable it doesn't even exist.
At any rate, the Aussie obliges. And bitch, that's a mistake because you're gonna get KNOCKEDTHEFUCKOUT.
Ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha!
For some obscure reason, this Aussie became something of a hero to me. Something about his verve, his pomposity, the way he plowed headlong into the intractable foot of justice, appealed to me. He owned what an asshole he was -- he didn't pussyfoot or tiptoe. He laid it all out there, and he took what was coming to him. He showed his true face to the world -- and then Van Damme kicked him in it.
Perhaps it's as simple as this: I admired his style.
As the years wore on, it became clear what I couldn't do. The dullness of karate's katas doomed me to wash out early, far before I would ever develop any "special kicks" of my own. My hair thinned, and was summarily shaved clean, ensuring that barrettes would never be my calling card. No matter how hard I tried to sound suave and sunkissed, my accent remained a resolutely Midwestern twang, only undertoned by the last remaining evidence of my first decade in California and Massachusetts.
But there were three things -- the three most important things -- left over. We already know I can be arrogant. We know I can take a beating. But what about sartorial flamboyance?
Well, this morning, I dumped a package of Rit dye and 3 gallons of water into an empty garbage can, dropped in my spare jiu jitsu gi, and kneaded it until my fingers were blistered, cracked, and stained a regal hue.
Behold, mortals, the wages of my labor! I see this as having two related practical benefits. First, if you kick my ass in jiu jitsu class, of course you kicked my ass, I'm wearing purple -- you're supposed to kick my ass. Second, if I kick your ass -- dude, you just got your ass kicked by a guy wearing purple.
But far more important than this is that I am finally ready to become my destiny. I am ready to lead with my face into the foot that fate has in store for me. I am a new man.
I'm going to spend the next several years writing a dissertation somehow related to the concept of heroism in American literature. The first step in writing a dissertation is research, and the first step in researching is Google. This much is uncontroversial.
When you google "American hero myths," the second result is this amazing wingnut article about why America needs a hero myth to protect us from Marxism. I wouldn't have made much of this -- it's your standard-issue conservative True Believer stuff -- if it hadn't been for the about-the-author tagline at the bottom of the page.
Ron Liebermann is a contractor and manufacturer of mylar balloons in Louisville, Ky.
This article -- which begins by defining "hero" as "a legendary figure, often of divine descent, endowed with great strength or ability," and ends with the a "heroic call to greatness" which is "the path to freedom" --is by guy who makes balloons.
Now, far be it from me to castigate the mighty manufacturer. The balloon, after all, is a powerful metaphor for the ascent of the soul and for the enlargement of the mind. Thoreau's family made lead pencils, and he toiled many a weary day in the pencil factory... making pencils. Which are a great metaphor for writing... and also penises. Thoreau was able, in true Democratic fashion, to extricate himself from such a life of toil by elbow-grease, gumption, and a little cabin on a pond; and he landed himself in literary and political anthologies with his incisive insight about the state of men's souls and his vicious diagnosis of the modern world.
So let's see -- on a properly capitalist metric literary merit, in this case defined by how susceptible the source material is to satire -- how this guy stacks up. (Spoiler: Really super well.)
Somehow this article was written in 2002, 2 years into Dubya's phallic and virile reign. I didn't think the 2002 edition of the official Government Dictionary had already taken this stride, but Ron makes it clear that "the State defines heroism as triumph over adversity, or danger." We know on the other hand, comrades, that heroism is really about evil. But the state can't have that: "To call heroism a triumph over evil makes the state uncomfortable. It knows that an increasing number of Americans are engaged in a heroic battle against domestic tyranny, which is clearly evil. The State thus denies it's evil nature, all the while increasing it's tyranny." It's kinda hard to follow the logic here, so let me streamline it: the government is clearly evil, so it's uncomfortable being called evil. Cartoonish, mustache-twiddling villains are sensitive with the word "villain" the same way fat people are sensitive to the word "fat." It just hits a little too close to home, you know? I do dearly love the first of the typos that rounds out the quote -- The State denies it is evil nature. It's like that part in Army of Darkness where Ash gives shoulder-birth to his doppelganger, Bad Ash, who pokes him in the eyes and kicks him in the balls.
(Oh hai, what's domestic tyranny? Is someone tryin' to stop you from makin' balloons?)
So we've already seen good nature and evil nature, but hold on to your butts, because we're about to see supernature! "Government animosity towards heroism has it's roots in the conflict between Jeffersonian Democracy, and the Marxism we have today." It's very similar to the conflict 1985 Marty McFly had with 2015 Griff Tannen; all Marty (hero) wanted was to bring Jennifer safely back to 1985 and keep his future son from going to jail, but Griff (evil) wanted to hit him with his pneumatic bat and run over him with his gnarly Hoverboard. Similarly, all Jefferson wanted was to protect agrarian farmers from corrupt aristocrats and industrialists, and to provide a codified series of rights for all people regardless of wealth or social standing, but instead he had to travel to 2002 to rescue Jennifer from the evil Marxist government (Griff) and keep his principles (son) from falling into the hands of wicked bureaucrats (jail). The two line up so well it's barely even a metaphor.
Indeed, what really boggles the mind about evil Marxism is how it ever managed to dupe anybody in the first place, since it doesn't even try to hide its evilness (much like fat people before the invention of pinstripes). It might have something to do with the fact that Marxism is whatever the fuck this guy wants it to be. "Everyone knows, of course, that lack of effort does not create equality, it creates poverty." (C.f. the little-cited footnote on page 12 of The Communist Manifesto, "Nobody has to do anything under communism; no, I'm serious, you don't have to work, ever.")
Ron continues, "When a Marxist such as Al Sharpton promises to elevate the poor, he is really promising to deliver equality as an illusion." (Spoiler: in a second Ron will use Horatio Alger's protagonist Ragged Dick, the quintessential arbiter of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, as a central tenet of the American hero myth -- and while I knew Ragged Dick had a special place in American culture, I thought it was more because of our predilection for dry-humping in wool pants. Spoiler 2: Horatio Alger was white. Al Sharpton, not so much.)
But again, Ron: "Children are taught to expect reward without effort, and status without achievement. Military rank is a prime example: Promotion occurs as a result of political correctness. The ability to win battles is no longer a factor." I love this idea -- there's a whole new breed of kids rushing into the military because it's so easy. Seriously, boot camp? A breeze. Long tours overseas without contact with loved ones? A snap. Fear of death? A non-issue. All you have to do is not diddly-shit and you'll be promoted to Rear Admiral just because you're developmentally disabled, or Korean, or four inches shorter than average, or something. Affirmative action, baby! It's a disease! "The Marxist disconnection between effort and reward has resulted in a new pathology: The cult of non-effort." See, entitlement is emphatically not a problem among people whose parents are rich enough to provide for them, and to keep them from having to work for themselves. No, entitlement only rears its ugly head... well... in the military, I guess?
But the military isn't, after all, the best example of this new freeloader ethic now holding truck with the goddamn lazy kids. "To witness non-effort in action, tune to MTV. There, one can view young Anglo's Hanging Out and young blacks Chilling." Truer words, my friend -- truer words! It's some kind of wonderful zoo where you can go to see these fanciful creatures, "Anglo's" and "blacks," in their native habitat of narcotic indolence, a beautiful dance of idleness, "a celebration of sloth within a materialistic utopia." It's actually really beautiful. They don't do anything! MTV is straight out of a Keats poem, a pastoral choked with melody too soothingly beautiful to die yet too achingly beautiful to live.
But Ron, let's get specific, who are these anti-capitalists who want to cripple the free-market with their lazy-bonesed selves? "Kid Rock, Snoop Doggy Dog, and Puff Daddy are the primary arbiters of this worldview." Since it should be obvious that none of these men are proponents of the free market, and none of them have any interest doing stuff -- ie, Marxists -- we can forgive Ron for his indulgence in that time-honored defensive tactic, If I'm Such a Racist How Come I Included a White Guy? Marxists have no colors. Their color is evil.
But let's just take a look at a sample Snoop Doggy Dog [sic] lyric, in which he proclaims himself to be, "Rollin' down the street, smokin' indo, sippin' on gin and juice / Laid back, with my mind on my money and my money on my mind." Sure, it implies a certain degree of relaxation, but it sounds to me like the relaxation that comes with a hard day's work. Surely Snoop is driving home from another day at the mylar balloon factory, indulging himself in a pair of relaxing adult beverages in his automobile -- and after all, who is the government to step on his right to drink Seagram's and smoke a fat sack on the interstate? The time to toil is over, and what is this but ciphering up the day's credits and debits, the gains and losses in his head? Not only is Snoop a model for the free market and for non-interference, he's also a model for fiscal responsibility. This guy's management material!
So it's a good thing for Ron that this "cult takes other forms, as well. Consider the lottery. Everyone is equal in the eyes of Lady Luck, so effort is pointless. The lottery is self-funding Marxist propaganda."
I don't even know what to do with this one, so let's move on. Question: You know what my favorite extreme sport is? Answer: EXTREME SUPERFLUOUS DISPLAYS OF SUPERFICIAL LEARNEDNESS!!!! "St. Augustine wrote extensively on the subject, saying that the conflict between good and evil rages not only in mankind as a whole, but in every individual." When I read this, I nodded sagely. It's true, you know.
But let's not forget those ladies, y'all. In an all-new episode of Unlikely Allies, Freud is enlisted in the defense of that lovable underdog paradox, libertarian paternalism: "Fathers are the primary mythical heroes. Young men internalize the heroic myth, and use it to form an identity. This identity serves as a rudder, which helps each man to steer a course through a dangerous and complex world." Women, it should be noted, do not matter. But don't take my word for it: "The heroic myth is masculine, and chivalrous. It exists exclusively in the minds of men. It is Camelot, King Arthur, and the Damsel in distress. This fact is intolerable to female Marxists who demand, but can never achieve, heroic equality." So... sorry babe. No balloon factories for you. Plus, "Feminism encourages divorce, which separates fathers from sons, breaking the heroic myth continuum." Nothing says "freedom" like an unhappy marriage, eh comrades?!
Why wall between worlds of experience? Plunge into something, something that might be cold or warm, you're not sure, soft or grainy, wholly liquid or just mostly wet, you don't care. Fun does not have to be kept on a leash in a small house behind the large house where you live, miles away from the sad, drop-ceilinged office where you work to rhythm of the clock ticking whip cracking. That boundary is the business of the reifier, who puts tagged collars on dogs made of mist, who dresses spirits up in suits so form-fitting they chafe; the business of the boss and the business of the dog-catcher. To experience every experience as the dog you'll come home to, to prepare to plunge into grainy wet warmth or cold soft wet without anxiety -- the cold wet warm nose of the dog leads the way -- shouldn't this be enough?
This is the second time I've seen Cornell West describe himself as “a bluesman in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas, forever on the move.”
There's so much wrong with it I don't know where to start.
I mean, just obviously, it's arbitrary. It would be, presumably, just as easy to be a bluesman in the world of ideas or a jazzman in the life of the mind. But not just arbitrary; it's got the unsettling confluence of self-congratulation and arbitrariness. Name one person you care about who's a bluesman AND a jazzman. You can't do it. Pick one, motherfucker! You don't get to have it all the ways. I don't go around naming every career I respect or envy and then ascribing it to myself and my own day-to-day: "I'm a classical guitarist of the life of sitting on the couch watching TV, a neuropathologist of ordering pizza, a priest of not giving a shit about literary criticism, a really good chef of not exercising enough, forever on the move. I am a porn star of checking my email on my phone, forever fucking bitches (on my phone)." Besides, what's the relationship between being a bluesman or a jazzman and being forever on the move? Like, is there a predicative relationship? Or mightn't it be more accurate to describe oneself as a railroad hobo of the life of the mind, or a traveling salesman of in the world of ideas, forever on the move? Or is Cornell West ok with dismissing every stationary, non-itinerant blues and jazzman in the world? Dick move, Cornell.
Emily Dickinson wrote a poem called “I started Early – Took my Dog” which comes in, prestige-wise, right after the ones about “Funeral brains –” and “Slants of death –” that you had to read in high school. The early Dickinson impresario – and amusingly named – Yvor Winters declares “I started Early” to be one of Emily's “most nearly perfect poems.” The poem is so fucking good, as a matter of fact, that its “defects do not intrude momentarily in a crudely obvious form.” What an asshole.
The poem is also, in my opinion, entirely about sex. It is on this proposition that I propose to meditate.
Confession: I see sex everywhere. In every situation that admits doubt or calls for interpretation, my interpretation is invariably, “They're doing it.” If there's only one person, my interpretation is usually that he or she wishes he or she was somewhere else, doing it. If there are three or more people, I posit that all the people just did it together and are dealing with the attendant shame each in his or her own way, or – when one of them is fat or a eunuch or on the rag or something – that at least two of them wish they were somewhere else doing it together, and whoever's left over is feeling pretty jealous about it and would like to be somewhere else doing it, too.
Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe this is the stone-soberest, clean-livingest, no-private-parts-havingest poem there is. But...
Before the poem: a summary of what I imagine to be the poem's essential plot points, rendered in Edgy and Hip contemporary youth-speak:
“So I'm this girl, and I live in Solid Town with my folks. One day I told them that I was going to start walking the dog. They were cool with it. They figured the dog would protect me in case the shit goes down, like, “woof woof woof!” haha. I'm pretty stoked to get out of the house and be on my own, so I leave pretty early and start walking around with the dog, just checking people out. All these women look at me, but who cares about them, right? Meanwhile though, there are all these old guys and stuff who are like, flirting with me, like “Hey baby,” thinking I'm easy, like I'm naïve or innocent or something and they're all touching me and I'm like “gross!” None of the guys ever did it for me or kick-started my four-stroke or made my flame burn blue or whatever. Until... well, there was this One guy. He took me under the boardwalk, and he lifted up my dress, and then he put his mouth on me like he was going to eat me all up. [extrapolation] Then we had sex, [end extrapolation] and I came, and then he came right after me. I could tell because I felt it, and then it started dripping out of me. After, he walked me back to Solid Town. He was worried about running into somebody he knew, like he was embarrassed to be with me or something. We didn't run into anybody he knew for a while, but then we DID run into somebody he knew, and he acted all like we had this really innocent friendship and like he was my stupid uncle or something and then he took off.”
The poem:
I started Early – Took my Dog – And visited the Sea – The Mermaids in the Basement Came out to look at me –
And Frigates – in the Upper Floors – Extended Hempen Hands – Presuming Me to be a Mouse – Aground – opon the Sands –
But no Man moved Me – till the Tide Went past my simple Shoe – And past my Apron – and my Belt – And past my Boddice – too –
And made as He would eat me up – As wholly as a Dew Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve – And then – I started – too –
And He – He followed – close behind – I felt His Silver Heel Opon my Ancle – then My Shoes Would overflow with Pearl –
Until We met the Solid Town – No One He seemed to know – And bowing – with a Mighty look – At me – the Sea withdrew –
We, fellow argonauts, we are not the first to ponder upon the poem's meaning. It was Mr. Winters himself who made all of our all of our head-scratching worthwhile by misunderstanding the poem so badly out of the gate (1947) that one shudders to think he judged its quality in clear conscience: “The sea is here the traditional symbol of death.” (At this, in the margins, I noted: “I thought it was about fucking!”) Winters writes that the poems is about navigating “forces which tend towards the dissolution of human character and consciousness.” (I wrote, “Orgasm!”). Mr Winters does not mention orgasm.
A short while later, in 1951 – not coincidentally, the same year King Leopold III abdicated the Belgian throne in favor of his son Baudouin – a woman named Kate Flores took off the kid gloves and slapped Baby Yvor around something awful. Miss Dickinson, she writes, has been “rather misinterpreted... the sea can hardly be so understood” as a symbol of death. The poem is, on the contrary, “a study in fear, fear of love.” (Marginal comment: “?!?!”) The poet's “fear of the sea is based upon the very power to undo her.” Her “whole being is endangered” by the sea's awesome power to ablate her identity. In the final stroke, Flores deals Winters the blow that kills: the sea, she writes, threatens “the dissolution of human character and consciousness.”
No, I'm just kidding, she didn't write that. Remember? Winters wrote that! Then Flores said he was totally full of shit and rubbed it in by stealing his point.
But Ahh, but the bittersweetness of the poem! In the poetess's “blind terror of the sea [she] can know no man.” But though she's doomed to spinster virginism, untouched by man-hands and man-stuff and so forth, the poetess will not be swallowed by the sea; she succeeds, “by the strength of her intellect, her will, in turning to go.” This is a supreme celebration of the lady-poet's valor and ingenuity. It is a triumphant expression of her feministic overmanning. I have no idea what the fuck she's is talking about.
But still, Flores has saved her most persuasively unintelligible assertion for last. It “seems clear that [the poetess] will never venture forth again.” Ruh-roh. Good thing she lives under the floorboards of a sybian factory.
As you might imagine, it took the Dickinson industry no great time nor energy to totally disregard this bewildered Flores woman and her impossible ideas. In 1952, Laurence Perrine – a young paladin in the holy order of Not Reading All That Much Into Things – drove his rapier as deep into the debate as practically no effort at all could drive it: “Both Yvor Winters and Kate Flores... load Emily Dickinson's 'I Started Early, Took My Dog' with a weight of meaning, symbolism, and emotion which this wholly delightful bit of poetic fancy simply will not bear.”
Legend has it that, after writing this sentence, Perrine was so exhausted that he had no choice but to loosen his belt to play with his balls for a while in a kind of self-satisfied stupor. And yet, with a last gasp of effort – an impossible phrenzy of will – Perrine's vim rushed back and, summoning all his Inner Resources, he set the record straighter than a bunch of bankers in Hawaiian shirts and shit playing in a Jimmy Buffet cover band on Thursday nights in a guy named Maury's semi-finished basement: “The poet is describing a morning walk to the sea – real or imaginary.” After writing this, perhaps inevitably, all the capillaries and shit in Perrine's brain fucking exploded from just thinking too hard and his roommate Cooter had to spend days scraping brains and shit off the walls with a plastic fucking dustpan, and he didn't have any paper towels either. Nothing would ever be the same after this, Perrine's great doomed sally, which all but matches Jimmy Buffett in its undeniable elan vital.
The bitterness of critics, who actually had to work for a living, was palpable. In 1962, when the aftershock of Perrine's back-to-basics approach was showing first signs of settling, Eric W. Carlson desecrated the memory of our fallen Ur-Lebowski by claiming Perrine's interpretation “left unresolved the question of the basic meaning of this poem.” One cringes to think how much more the allegation would sting were there so much as a grain of truth in it.
But Carlson wasn't done. All simultaneously, he danced and pissed and puked and cried on Perrine's grave by claiming the poem is about the “frightening realization that toying with love may arouse a tide of emotion too powerful to control.” Make no mistake: “toying with love” is a singularly mean-spirited reference to Perrine's heroic, recuperative balls-fingering a decade earlier, and the “tide of emotions” is the typhoon of blood and gray matter bursting through skull, all of it looking like a stepped-on frog. And poor Cooter, who had to clean it up, synapses and dendrites and all, still alive to read such villainous calumny!
Yet Carlson's analysis is too dangerous to be ignored, too alluring to be cast aside – like the bag of weed you found outside Burger King, next to where the immigrants break down boxes.
Carlson's analysis is compelling because – Jesus Christ, took long enough – it introduces the notion of the narrator's “pleasure and desire.” No longer is she a wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, but a woman with wants – a woman on fire!
And yet, Carlson claims, the poem is haunted by a “power greater than romantic love.” Only in “mystic surrender to Nature” – as opposed to just the regular kind of surrender to Nature – “lies the most insidious threat – the loss of self-identity.” Cowardly editors expurgated the most significant conclusion Carlson draws from this point, still one of the most insightful observations in the history of the debate over the meaning of Dickinson's poem: “Didn't that Yvor Winters thing about this poem say something really similar? I think he said exactly what I'm saying about identity! And then that Flores lady introduced the idea of romantic love, but then she said exactly what Winters said about identity! And now I'm saying exactly what he said about identity to argue against this romantic love business that she said! Jesus Christ, I can't believe this is an actual job that people actually get paid to do. In fifteen years of tenured scholarship all we've agreed upon is that the ocean can threaten your identity. What a joke.”
After this, perhaps from shame or perhaps from confusion, critics forbore analyzing the poem for over two decades. They split into small groups, huddling together for warmth and debating in decreasingly affluent dialects about their next move.
Finally, in the wake of this Great Tribunal, there was an anointed one: Cristanne Miller – all the way in nineteen hundred and eighty seven – the first to mention the term “sexual” – god bless her, amen. The poem is, she claims, “deceptively innocent.” (But I think she means deceptively lascivious. I mean, right?) It begins as what seems like a single event – starting early, taking dog – but it quickly seems to be something “repeated” or “customary.” Our dear little poetess has been cruising the beach! On the regular! She “teases” the reader and she “teases” herself. She even teases – and I swear to God, there seems to be absolutely no registration that this is an all-time egg-on-the-face unintentional pun – the “Sea/man.”
She teases the “Sea/man.”
She “pretends to be entirely innocent in her motives” while she teases the “Sea/man.”
Then, having teased the “Sea/man” enough, the poetess gets “to the point of mutual arousal” with the “Sea/man” before she “runs away.” So, in this reading, the “Sea/man” becomes aroused, which is a lot like the Poop Monster in Dogma pooping. One can't help but feel that Ms. Miller could have pushed into herself just a knuckle or two deeper, analytically speaking.
In '88, Kenneth Stocks – I call him Ken, because he hates it and he's a douche – claimed that, in “the bad fright and the race for home,” our poor pretty poetess is “pursued by the rising tide of consciousness.” This avails nothing. We forge ahead.
Ahead! To a woman named Shakinovsky. In '99, we get from Shakinovsky – who is a Russian stripper/dancer or I will eat my hat – one of the more delightfully symptomatic readings of the poem. We should not, however, conclude from this that she's a “no means yes” kind of girl.
In Shakinovsky's adorably doe-ish eyes and easily terrified brain, the “welcoming, 'extend[ing] hands of the Frigate are not entirely friendly and contain a slight sense of threat, as 'Hempen' implies the possibility of trapping, tying, and strangling.” I know I, personally, cannot escape the throes of panic, when I'M STANDING ON A BEACH, that I am going to get TRAPPED, TIED, AND STRANGLED by the motherfucking SAILS OF BOATS WAY OUT IN THE OCEAN. It's a close cousin of that terror we none of us can escape: The fear of falling out of a tree you're not in. Which in turn has rent near as many hearts as the fear of slipping on ice you're not on. Pooping your pants when you're wearing a skirt.
[Here it is worth noting that Shakinovsky is the author of the classic studies, “I'm Afraid of My New Neighbors: They Might Be Foreign, or They're At Least Jewish or Something”; “Falling Coconuts: A Blight on The Nuclear Family”; “The Effects of Nuclear Fallout on the Coconuts of Enewetok Atoll”; and “Shark Attacks: Just Because They're Rare Doesn't Mean They're Not Still Scary.”]
Later, Shakinovksy writes, “This threat is made explicit as the Sea turns into a Man who follows the narrator, which serves to sexualize the image.”
[Be on the lookout for Shakinovsky's new book, “When My Cat Oliver Follows Me Up the Stairs I Feel Like He's Going to Rape Me and Sometimes I Get So Scared I Run and That Makes Him Run and Then I Scream and My Neighbors Call the Police,” forthcoming from Palgrave.]
This “increasing encroachment... and... personal threat... REACH THEIR CLIMAX [all-caps added] in 'And made as He would eat me up.' The threat here is that the narrator will be incorporated into the Sea and swallowed up... The relative size and impact of a drop of dew in relation to the ocean also serves to indicate the narrator's sense of her own powerlessness and fear of ravishment.”
[Shanikovsky doesn't date much. It's not that she doesn't want to meet somebody. It's just... it's complicated.]
So what about it? Who's going to lance these jokers off their steeds and be presented with my laurel-bush to wear around his head?
Russell Reising takes the prize (my bush). First, because he's the only critic who even comes close to acknowledging the weird, but also eyebrow-raisingly straightforward, female sexuality of the poem as something other than timidity and oppression and and running away from a cat named Oliver.
Second, because it does it in a fucking hilarious way.
So here it is: the only academic article I've seen which talks about the sexuality of “I started early,” and gets bonus points for doing it in terms that somehow manage to be over-the-top in their explicitness, and euphemistic, at the same time.
Reising doesn't wast time. He goes straight for the poem's “nearly pornographically fetishistic specificity.” Without, that is, specifying it. What's wonderful about this formulation is that not one of the critics perused above noticed the “nearly pornographically fetishistic specificity.”
Thought experiment: can you imagine any other form, any other medium, in which something could attain “nearly pornographically fetishistic specificity” and it would take experts in that field over fifty years just to notice it?
So wait, what's fetishistic? Well... each item of clothing – shoes, apron, boddice, and belt – takes up a “demarcating and fetishizing position on the speaker's body.” You see... shoes go on your feet. And feet are a fetishizing position. And then an apron goes over, like, your whole front area. And your front area, that's for fetishizers. And then your boddice, don't get me started on your boddice that covers pretty much the same stuff as your apron. And your belt, oh my stars, that's on roughly the same area as your belt and your apron. So, as we can see, this is a pervert's dream vacation. How many women have the common courtesy these days to highlight and demarcate their fetishizing positions by wearing clothes on them? They might as well just go naked and paint big florescent arrows on themselves towards their naughty bits. But not their normal naughty bits, just their weird naughty bits. Such as a belt would cover. Also, did you know the ocean is a pervert? We can tell this because Reising tells us that “fairly explicit sexual maneuvering [is] attributed to the sea.” He gets goo all in her shoes!
But is the ocean just a pervert, or is the poetess a pervertess, too? Reising notes that “I started” might be construed as a “sexual awakening.” IT ONLY TOOK US FIFTY YEARS to get from “The sea is here the traditional symbol of death” to “maybe 'I started' is kinda sorta a euphemism for orgasm.”
Ah, but the disgusting euphemisms will come hot and heavy now, because – in 1999 – women get to want to have sex in our interpretations of literature. This is the best thing that's ever happened to hermeneutics, if this is the kind of stuff it cranks out.
You see, “whereas the speaker 'started,' the sea could only 'follow' her lead.” So our new, dominant, desirous poetess “domesticates and limits the previously irresistible and overwhelming force of the sea within the phrases 'His Silver Heel' and 'Pearl,' both of which transfer the fetishistic specificity previously reserved for the representation of her own body to the body of the sea.”
CATECHISM
Q: What are we fetishizing?
A: The “ejaculatory culmination of the sexual act.”
Q: Why are we fetishizing the ejaculatory culmination of the sexual act?
A: Because of “the appropriation of the male emission as an object of female ownership (pearls and jewelry).”
Q: What weird, hard left turn are you about to take?
A: “Even if we read the image of her shoes overflowing with pearl as one of male sexual climax, the speaker nonetheless represents that climax as equally female – it is her shoes that overflow, suggesting the possibility that her desire, however generated, culminates in its own dripping fulfillment.”
Ladies: did you know this is what happens to your shoes?!
* * *
One Parting Reason to Fire All English Professors Post-Haste: “The 1862 composition date for this poem also enables us to read 'started' within a context capable of highlighting its responsiveness to the confinements and oppression peculiar to a slave culture, in this case reimagined by Dickinson to include the oppression of American women, even in the North. Frederick Douglass, to cite just one example, refers to his and his companions' planned escape from slavery as their 'intended start.'” The only way I could brook this is if Douglass wrote of his and his companions' planned escape from slavery as their “intended orgasm.”
My dream girl, the girl of my dreams, is a plot device on the NBC series Friday Night Lights.
Let me explain.
My dream girl is not Adrianne Palicki, which would have surprised me two days ago. Adrianne Palicki plays Tyra, a character who is apparently supposed to be the mutant offspring of some Apollonian Greek God who never appears onscreen because he's pure concentrated attractiveness so undeniable that if he's captured on film it mysteriously melts (I assume this is the implication), and a trailer trash train-wreck whose other daughter is a stripper, played by Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, seen below in a towel.
Now, when I used to watch Fletch a lot, I had a serious crush on Dana Wheeler-Nicholson -- there's something about her utter lack of personality in that movie, her abject tabula rasa-ness, that almost lets you think she's just really cool under pressure, and not just overmatched by the prospect of being the female lead in a major motion picture opposite Chevy Chase at his most bombastic. I really love her in that movie. Then, she was the tumultuous, bitchy, and laudinum-addicted love interest of, like, Kirk Russell or somebody in Tombstone. Then she disappeared, and popped up again, playing these horrific and de-glammed people. I saw her in an episode of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and her role was to play somebody who used to be beautiful, but then got all this plastic surgery and it all came out wrong and she was ugly and tragic. But the thing was, it just looked like Dana Wheeler-Nicholson, who I had a huge crush on as a teenager, so I'm like WTF! Come on, tv, there ain't nothing wrong with an aging Dana Wheeler-Nicholson. Then she popped up again on Friday Night Lights, as the absolutely hopeless Tyra's mom, the girl who gets dumped by the men who beat her and pops pills to stay homeostatic, until she falls through a plate-glass table and has to be rushed to the hospital by a bunch of drunk 15-year olds.
If you google image search "Dana Wheeler-Nicholson" with safesearch turned off, the first result is a vidcap of her doing what the website describes as a "drunken strip tease!" from, apparently, the first season of Sex & the City. It's pretty worth it.
Adrianne Palicki is one of those people who I find so attractive that it actually makes me recoil -- every time I see her -- with some emotionally confusing mixture of terror, rage, and, well, confusion.
I feel this heightened sense of danger, but I am totally stupefied. I know something very wrong is happening, but there's nothing I can do. Like a cow getting cattle-prodded down the conveyor belt to where the illegal immigrant is standing, knee-deep in the blood of my brethren and fallen comrades, with a rusty old knife to cut my throat. My friends, Adrianne Palicki is that illegal immigrant, and I am that cow. Her boobs might be the knife, or maybe it's the little mole between her eyes, I dunno... this trope needs some work.
So, Landry Clarke, played by Jesse Plemons -- who looks like Matt Damon if Matt Damon looked like a pancake with Matt Damon's facial features carved into it like a two-dimension Mount Rushmore --
is this geek. Actually, to call him a geek is to miss the point, because he's not a geek -- he's the culmination and fulfillment of the secret desires and fantasies of every geek, and he's masquerading as a real geek. He is the secret geek in every geek, the psychotic geek who follows his instincts even though that's exactly what geeks never do. He does all the things geeks don't do, while maintaining the appearance of something uncannily like geekery, like those aliens in Invasion of the Body Snatchers that look like people but are something else. Here's an abridged rundown: Landry beats a man to death to protect Tyra's honor. Then, he punches a starting quarterback in the face, inciting a lunchroom brawl that turns into a happy-go-lucky food fight, and then back into a brawl, in defense of Tyra's honor and also just because he's pissed. He joins the football team in order to win Tyra over, and then turns out to be unaccountably good at football -- so good it doesn't really make any sense at all, in terms of the fictional logic the show has been working with for, oh, I dunno, twenty episodes. Like, the coach repeatedly calls him "Lance" because he's so ignorable and forgettable and bad at football, and then suddenly he's going into games and making saving plays and scoring touchdowns and doing these implausibly athletic things in practice that have the coach saying "who's that guy?" and giving speeches about how he's "not the most talented athlete on the team" even though he just joined the team after what seems like a lifetime of absolutely sedimentary inactivity only to miraculously see playing time as the tight end (the tight end! the dude's like 130 pounds!) in a must-win game for a Division 1A state champion Texas high school football team. It gets to the point that, in the penultimate episode of the second season, the coach is running through the list of the devastating losses to the team's personnel, the players who aren't practicing that day, and he says, anxiously, "Landry, Saracen, and Smash." So the list goes: the geek who got, like, a two-minute montage of getting run over by people during his first practice because he was supposed to be so inept and is injured because he tripped over a curb... followed by the team's two stars and offensive juggernauts. It makes very little sense, except as ubergeek wish fulfillment. As ubergeek wish fulfillment, though, it makes every sense ever.
So anyway, the matter at hand is, my dream girl -- the girl of my dreams -- she's a plot device on this show. She appears, arbitrarily and out of nowhere, as Landry's "physics partner." She exists because Tyra is, in the logic of the show, the kind of person who Only Wants What She Can't Have, or, to be more precise, the kind of person who Has Something She Doesn't Want, Then Realizes She Might Lose It, And, In A State Of Panic, Goes Through Every Means Available To Possess It Even More Stringently And Exclusively And It Works Because She Can Have Whatever She Wants Which Is Why She Only Wants What She Might Lose, Until Eventually She Loses Interest And Doesn't Want It Anymore.
So the writers, they're thinking, "there is, at this point, nobody who believes that Tyra would be with Landry, and it's such an elephant in the room that we've actually written it into the show. Shit, we had Landry's Father accost Tyra and say 'you could have any man you wanted, so what do you want with my son.'"
(The sine qua non of ubergeek wish fulfillment.)
"So," the writers say, "we better do something -- anything! -- to make this make sense. Time for a plot device!" And thus is introduced my dream girl, the girl of my dreams.
When we first see her, she's just sitting there, across from Landry at the lunch table, being interesting. Knowing stuff. Being smart. Having a ton of pluck and just a zest of sass. Talking about cult movies and independent music. She is, in other words, carefully, meticulously calculated to be the girl of my dreams. She is manipulating me, owning me, conning me, and the bitch of it is, it's not even her that's doing it. It's the writers, the producers, the motherfucking Wizard of Oz. I'm being conned by the whore and her pimp. They cast her, knowing they could cast somebody as beautiful as they wanted, then give her glasses and a silly haircut and, instantly, she would suffer from the "I'm Rachel Leigh Cook and I'm in high school and I have glasses and a haircut carefully calculated to make me look slightly frumpy but also totally quirky and the kind of outfits middle aged women who don't yet know they're middle aged call 'funky'" effect. And they also knew that, in the last analysis, it wouldn't matter if the girl they cast was the prettiest girl in her high school, which she probably was, because she's very short, and Adrianne Palicki is very tall, and Adrianne Palicki is a motherfucking goddess. So, when the girl of my dreams, Jean, my dream girl, is placed side by side in the same frame with the impossibly awesomely named Adrianne Palicki, this six-foot firebrand with the upturned nose and the surprisingly black roots, who doubtless gave any number of junior high teachers incredibly guilty consciences about the content of their fantasy lives, the producers know Jean, the girl of my dreams, will fade into the margins. She'll bleed off the screen. She'll walk in like Buster Douglas, owning the joint, and then be carried out after 60 seconds in the ring with Tyson. The writers know this. They know that the difference between a 9.4 and a 9.8 is the difference between a yellow banana and a banana with a tiny bit of green just right at the top that can't possibly hurt, but when both of those bananas are crowding up your visual field, you can only really see one of them. Adrianne Palicki is that yellow banana. The writers know this. In the immortal words of Mitch Hedberg, "Yellow means go. Green means stop. And red means, where the fuck did you get that banana at."
The writers also know that, when Jean, the girl of my dreams, is allowed on-screen by herself to shine, she will be incomparable (as long as you're not being forced to compare her). Even if she's marginalized by the indominable presence of Adrianne Palicki, her presence is enough to dominate the memory Adrianne Palicki's presence. The writers, the casting directors know this. They know that in a show that has Adrianne Palicki in it, this one -- this person here -- is allowed to be "the ugly one."
"Hi, I'm the ugly one. I'm so ugly and gross and geeky! Want me to make you a mixtape?!" It's sort of like how, in an Ethiopian prison camp, Kate Moss is the fat one. Or like how, in the commercials for The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe, Corey Feldman was the one who wasn't that annoying. It's all relative.
People like me, watching this show because we absolutely love football but also have (unrelated) tiny brain-orgasms every time we meet a pretty girl who has opinions about sub-genres of heavy metal, will keel over and have a wistful aneurism when this startlingly gorgeous, four-foot-nothing creature with the blonde semi-dredlocks says, "My vinyl basically has two sections. Metal and non-metal," even though, in the last episode, she was talking about, like, Elvis Costello or something, because she has to be all things to all geeks, and goddamnit, she is everything to me. She mentions, probably for the first time in the history of network telvision, Carcass, Napalm Death, and, like, Agoraphobic Nosebleed or somebdoy, in a single sentence, while interrogating Landry about the influences of his grindcore / extreme-thrash band Crucifictorius. It's one of those moments that is calculated to be cherished by nerdlingers like me, and simultaneously digestable as a code for everyone else, signifying clearly enough that she is "in the know" about something Landry is "in the know" about, and that nobody else could possibly care about, and that they are probably the only two people who are attractive enough to put on television, and "and in the know" about this particular subject, in a 500 mile radius. It's sorta like that scene in the David Cronenberg Crash where James Spader and Holly Hunter both come to understand that they'll both really get their rocks off if they do it during a car wreck.
(Incidentally, FNL is the only long-form fictional motion picture I've ever seen that does a credible job of representing what it's like to be at a shitty rock and roll show. This, to me, is an accomplishment on par with setting water on fire.)
You know what she, Jean, the girl of my dreams does to flirt with Landry? Ok, he's like, ragging on power metal, so she makes him a power metal mix cd. Imagine you're this loser, right? And you're hanging out with this girl who is way out of your league. With me? Then, she prostrates herself and gives you a mix cd that has this on it.
You know what happens? You instantly melt into a puddle of goo that spreads out on the pavement and spells out "I love you." I'm so in love with this girl, it's embarrassing. I mean, every guy who watches this show probably finds himself seeing her and uttering, in the cramped quarters of his inner monologue, my single favorite sentence in the history of the world -- "I could love her." But more than that, it's because, from the moment she appeared, I knew I was destined to lose her.
She -- Jean -- the girl of my dreams -- my dream girl -- shows up spontaneously enough, and with so little exposition, that it is at no point in question that she is only present so that she can be accepted by Landry to spurn Tyra into a mortifying seizure of jealousy, and then renounced by Landry, in some kind of pathetically ersatz-Christ cartwheel of martyrdom, in order to win Tyra back. There is no question. And it happens, all in all, in a 3-episode arc that takes a total of maybe 12 minutes of screen time. And in this screen-time, she, Jean, the girl who is inevitably to be spurned and thrown into the metaphorical toilet like so much metaphorically used metaphorical tampon, becomes my dream girl. The girl of my dreams. She appears in the season finale of season 2, only to look crushed, disheartened, ashamed and alone when she sees Landry and Tyra walking along, holding hands blissfully and aloofly. Then, she disappears.
According to imdb, the character, Jean, the girl of my dreams, appears in 3 episodes of the series Friday Night Lights. So she's never coming back. This one selfish gesture of Landry Clark's managed not only to crush her and discourage her, to wound her and traumatize her; it also stole her away from me.
This means she's gone forever. In the immortal words of Jacques Lacan -- who I'm pretty sure was talking about something much different -- "the Woman does not exist."
This is only the most extreme example, though. Friday Night Lights has this remarkable way of casting remarkable people who, for one reason or another, haven't been snatched up to let their unfathomable gifts shine on another stage already, and then presenting them, in a way that is only barely believable, as, like, people with normal problems. Like, "Oh, no, the guy who looks like he could be cast in a TV show as the star quarterback, who is, on this TV show, the star quarterback, gets paralyzed... in a game of football!" Or, "the girl who looks like she could make Hugh Hefner's leg crank like Thumper Rabbit's is, get this, deeply religious and sleeping with her paralyzed boyfriend's best friend!" It is a show that is almost entirely made up of conventional commonplace tropes that somehow just manage to avoid being cliches and become, by some ineffable act of movie magic grace, absolutely fucking breathtaking. I don't get it.
I love this show, even as every fiber of my being is screaming at me, "this show is trying to make you love it!" It doesn't matter. I love it through my shame of loving it, the shame of my own tedious predictability, and I even love my tedious predictability.
Watching Friday Night Lights has done things to me like make me lie in bed and think about how much I think I secretly would have been good at football if I'd gone out for football in high school. I rationalize: in 5th grade, I came in 2nd in the 40 yard dash. In 6th grade, the soccer coach told me I was the quickest player on the team. Surely, then, I could have played high school football, been unspectacular but solid enough. I could have walked on at a Division 1 FBS college, proven my mettle and given a scholarship in my senior season. I could have made a play in a third-tier bowl game, been drafted in the 4th round by a hungry but rebuilding perennially second-class NFC team, impressed with my tenacity and work-ethic on the practice squad, moved to reserves, been put in the game because of an unfortunate injury to a defensive stalwart and team captain, and then impressed so much with my tenacity, good instincts, sticktoitiveness, and raw athleticism that I quickly erased so much as the last vestiges of his memory, then made the Pro Bowl as a third alternate. I'm pretty sure, at some point while I'm telling myself this story, in my head, which is on a pillow because I'm too lazy to get up, I actually believe it.
In my fantasy, I'm a cornerback.
*
Also, Kyle Chandler, holy shit. Why have I not seen this man in anything between Early Edition -- the show that guest starred Fisher Stevens (the guy who played The Plague in Hackers) and prominently featured a pet cat and was based on the idea that a guy got a newspaper from some mystical ghost-deliveryman and was able to solve the crimes that happened tomoorow today -- and Friday Night Lights? The motherfucker just oozes charisma. But more importantly -- when they cast him, why didn't they change the concept of the show?
Hear me out -- Early Edition 2: Saturday MorningPost. A high-school football coach gets the paper a day early, Friday morning, and discovers the outcome of the game he coaches that night! He has a mere 12 hours to game-plan a victory, or his team might miss the state tournament! Fisher Stevens guest-stars!
I don't have to be back in class for like 40 days and 40 nights and, as in the film of that name, I will count the break a success only if (if only) I can avoid having sex with Shannyn Sossamon. (Here she is praying I don't go through with it.)
(The 10th, and possibly the most harrowing google image result for "fleshy part.")
I am currently regretting the fact that I went with the 14" cheese-steak for the price of a 7" cheese-steak at a sports-bar called Bert's at lunch. It raises at least one interesting question -- what, legally, is the definition of "steak"? If you wanted to, say, level a lawsuit at a restaurant -- how far would their "steak" have to be from that normative legal standard "steak"? Because the first thing that pops up in my dictionary is, "A slice of meat cut from the fleshy part of an animal or large fish." Which doesn't carry with it any of the quality control that is, to my mind, implicit in and conveyed by the word. Can you imagine if they'd just decided not to invent the word steak and just gone with fleshy part? Going to a the local fleshy part house for a sirloin fleshy part? Firing up the grill and throwing down some t-bone fleshy parts? Groaning about having to watch those awful, awful hot men hock for Taco Bell's Triple Fleshy Part Burrito during every commercial break? Having the classic Simpsons' line instead be "Money's too tight for fleshy parts"? I can tell you one thing, and I will tell you that one thing -- if the special had been a 14" fleshy part sandwich for the price of just 7" of fleshy part, I'm pretty sure that's a sandwich I wouldn't be regretting.
Also -- Last week, I sat in on a lecture, and the lecturer said that "mutton" was a kind of cow meat. I wasn't so sure, so I went to the lecturer afterward and I said, "are you sure mutton is a kind of cow meat?" She was absolutely sure. Now, having thoroughly searched the surprisingly extensive wikipedia page for "mutton" for such phrases as "cow," "beef," "steak," "fleshy part," and "any other animal that's not a sheep or goat or lamb or something like that," it is becoming more and more clear that mutton can, under no circumstances, be a cow. Not even in Britain, where, it was intimated by the lecturer, it was more likely to be a cow. I know that because there's a "Britain" section to the wikipedia entry for mutton, no shit.
So now, I'm trying to find a way to reveal that I'm right about mutton, without it coming off as gloating. I'm thinking about wearing a t-shirt that says, "Mutton Can Under No Circumstances Be Cow," and explaining to everyone that it's the hot new fashion the kids are wearing, like No Fear and Shemalé in their day. I'm thinking I could organize a campus even called Mutton Week under the auspices of some shadow corporation called NoCow or Cows AREN'T Us (a limited liability corporation), with a mission of getting out the facts about mutton and ending all the pernicious misconceptions. I could get a bunch of freshman to stand on the quad and hand out literature and do something theme-appropriate like, I dunno, wail on some cowbells or something. I could dress up like the gypsy from Jane Eyre and go into her office hours eating some mutton, and then deliver a seemingly mad, yet curiously precise disquisition on the nature and history of mutton, and then jump out the window to evade campus security. I could revive the old theanonymouspervert@gmail.com gmail account and send her an anonmyous tip from the anonymous pervert, on the preconception that, as long as my name isn't attached, she won't know it's from me -- the only problem would be finding a way to say something perverted about mutton that's still actually about mutton, sort of like how I imagine it was sometimes difficult for Bill Nye the Science Guy or Beakman (either of the Beakmans) from Beakman's world to simultaneously follow every standard of scientific rigor and falsifiability and remain accessible, you know, for the kids. But I'll probably have to just go on letting her believe that mutton is cow, and infecting whole new generations of readers with this damned lie. The needle and the damage done. I just hope she doesn't get to you, or anyone you know.
There's nothing like standing over the dirty counter eating expired olives off a dirty spoon during a bout of stress-induced insomnia to make you think, "really? this is what my life is like? really?"
It's like that scene in Mrs. Doubtfire where... ah hell, what's the point...
I have a crush this big (--------------||--------------) on Mariska Hargitay. But watch out Mariska, cus here comes Alana de la Garza. It's like Angie Harmon was some kind of weak, broken prototype, like an Apple II or something, and then the Law and Order people were thought Hey, why don't we just invent new, faster, sleeker, slimmer quasi-cultural, powerful, vulnerable women who navigate positions of authority while still keeping in check ungovernable torrents of unsheathed, raw emotion? Aren't ethical undecidables always more affecting when they're being agonized over by attractive people? What sweetens the bitter rhubarb of a gristly murder or a toxic rape like a dip of nearly white, but not quite white sugar? Kid lost both parents, will never be the same? Who better to agonize over it, but ultimately not be able to help and be wrenched by the agony of impotence, like a butched-up whisp of cotton-down cloud blown in from the Big Rock Candy Mountain? When someone looks into your eyes and reads your very soul, who better to do it than somebody with gigantic eyes? They're like Bambi's mom all dolled up in formfitting polycotton blouses -- that old Law and Order staple that, try as it might, never gets old -- for Maxim's annual Hottest Jurisprudence issue.
The job gets to them, you know -- but they need it. They need the job.
"Why do you do it? What keeps you going?" asks one minor character per season.
"I have to," she responds, eyes glistening with Vaseline, lips trembling like jelly on a trampoline. "It keeps me single."
Law and Order, I have the biggest crush on your formula. It's like Doctor Pepper. All around the world, plug it in, and it just works.
