The gritty viewing gets grittier…

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Miranda Otto, 2006 (Photo by Diane Krauss, via Wikipedia, using Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Miranda Otto, 2006 (Photo by Diane Krauss, via Wikipedia, using Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0)

A few months ago I wrote a post called A day of gritty viewing. Since then I’ve blogged about more gritty Australian films: Disgrace, Beautiful Kate, and Balibo. And these aren’t the only gritty films to have been produced in Australia this year. The latest to hit the cinemas, though, is Blessed (directed by Ana Kokkinos). This is one hard-hitting film.

It is an adaptation (by several writers including Christos Tsiolkas) of a quite differently titled play – Who’s afraid of the working class? – and is told in two parts. The first part follows the lives of 7 children, most of whom roam the streets under little or no parental control; and the second part explores their mothers, all of whom are battlers in one way or another. No back stories are provided for them but they’re not needed. Theirs are pretty archetypical stories so you get the picture:

  • the single mother addicted to gambling (Miranda Otto);
  • the serial monogamist mother who needs a man no matter how much damage he does to the children (Frances O’Connor);
  • the working mother with a weak husband who leaves it to her to keep it all together  (Deborra-Lee Furness);
  • the single piece-worker (and also religious) mother struggling to make a good life for her children (Victoria Haralabidou); and
  • the now-elderly mother who adopted an Aboriginal child and kept him apart from his mother (Monica Maughan).

It’s a wonderful ensemble cast – and there are more, including Sophie Lowe who also starred in Beautiful Kate. Through interweaving stories that never feel forced, the film explores the love between mothers and children and how too often this is strained by those external circumstances (most often poverty and the struggle to survive) that can get in the way of the ability to express “true” feeling. Some of the children have been damaged by experiences they shouldn’t have experienced (and I’m talking about abuse here of course) … which brings me back to the title and the double whammy contained in its combination of truth and irony.

It’s nicely shot by Geoff Burton. The night scenes, the strong contrasts, the minimal use of colour evoke well the challenges confronted by the characters in the mostly less-than-pretty parts of their city. Kokkinos‘ direction is also sure, starting with the moving opening scenes of sleeping children which somehow manage to convey their innocence while also suggesting something darker lying beneath. If there’s a criticism to be made it could be that the film is just a little too politically correct. Not having seen the play I don’t know how closely it follows the original but there is a sense here of trying to get in all of society’s contemporary ills. That said, with strong stories and a cast that never goes near stepping over the bounds into melodrama, it works and you accept it.

I don’t always feel the need to avoid spoilers in a review – but I will here. I will simply say that it is gritty – but there is hope too, not in the sense of long-term answers but in a recognition that by reconnecting with the love that binds, you can keep going.

Price Warung, Tales of the early days

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Tales of the early days (Cover: Courtesy Sydney University Press)

Tales of the early days (Cover: Courtesy Sydney University Press)

Okay, I admit it, I have convict ancestors (plural even!). Consequently, I was particularly interested to read Price Warung’s 1894 collection of short stories, Tales of the early days, when I discovered it was part of the Australian Classics Library recently published by the Sydney University Press. My convicts include John Warby who, with another labourer, stole two donkeys and was transported to Australia on the Pitt in 1791, and Sarah Bentley who stole several items of clothing from her mistress in 1795 and was transported on the Indispensable. In 1796, John married the 16-year old Sarah. Fortunately (for me and for them), they were a hardworking pair. John had been given land by Governor Phillip in 1792, and he and Sarah made a good life for themselves, so much so that there is now a primary school named after him, the John Warby Public School in the Campbelltown area west of Sydney.

Enough about my family, though. What about Price Warung? He was, in fact, William Astley, and was born in Liverpool, England, in 1855 but came to Australia with his family in 1859. He became, according to the succinct little biography at the back of the book, a radical journalist and short-story writer, with particular interests in transportation (or, convict) literature, and the Labour and Federation movements.

Now to Tales of the early days. This was his second published collection, and comprises 8 stories set in Norfolk Island, Hobart, Sydney and London. They explore various aspects of convict life, and many draw on real people and events. In fact, my city’s new (and first) prison is named after the penal reformer/prison commandant, Alexander Maconochie, who features in the first two stories. The eight stories are worth listing for their titles, most of which convey a strong sense of personality:

  • Captain Maconochie’s ‘Bounty for Crime’
  • The Secret Society of the Ring
  • In the Granary
  • Parson Ford’s Confessional
  • The Heart-Breaking of Anstey’s Bess
  • The Amour of Constable Crake
  • The Pegging-Out of Overseer Franke
  • At Burford’s Panorama

These stories can be described as “historical fiction”. In a new introduction to this collection, Laurie Hergenham quotes Thomas Keneally, who has written a deal of historical fiction. Keneally says:

the novelist need not prove his reliability to scholars … the only warrant a writer needs for his ideas about the past is that they reek of human, poetic, dramatic, symbolic veracity and resound in his imagination.

Like many writers of historical fiction, Warung draws on documentary fact. He writes largely in the social realism style that was typical of the nineteenth century. A strong theme runs through the book, and it can be best described by quoting Robert Burns’ “man’s inhumanity to man”. Warung’s particular argument is that this inhumanity is worse in the “System” (aka The Establishment) than in the convicts.  As one of the convicts says in the longest and, generally regarded to be, the best story, “The Secret Society of the Ring”:

Th’ System finds orl its orf’cers men, an’ leaves ’em orl brutes. Orl o’ we don’t get ‘ardened, but there ain’t one o yer wot doesn’t.

And so Warung, with his own apparently anti-British sentiment in the lead up to Federation (and Australia’s independence), perpetuates the myth that the convicts were poor souls turned bad by the System: “the beast-nature with which the System had superseded that granted unto him by his Creator”. It is true, if you read the histories, that some (many?) convicts were victims of poverty in Britain and were transported for comparatively minor offences, but there were also many who were violent, serial offenders. It is also true, though, that the treatment of convicts in Australia was, overall, very harsh – particularly in the secondary penal establishments like Norfolk Island and Hobart (at nearby Port Arthur). It’s not for nothing that Warung, with the fire clearly in his belly, chooses these as the settings for most of his stories of horror.

The first story, “Captain Maconcochie’s Bounty of Crime” serves as a useful introduction to the longest and most complex in the book, “The Secret Society of the Ring”. It introduces us to Maconochie and his desire to improve “the monstrous conditions of penal life at Norfolk Island” but, we are told, the System does not want him to succeed because his failure would mean “that the System was right and its administrators were wise”. And so, the cynicism (or is it simply realism?) starts:

Therefore the failure was only to be expected. Men do not care about being proved wrong, even if it could be shown that a few dozen souls were saved in the process of correction.

This truth, as Warung conceives it  and which encompasses related truths relating to the behaviour of men in power, is played out again and again in the stories that follow – but it is no more ironically conveyed than in “The Secret Society of the Ring” in which the Ring, which is the convicts’ own “system”, turns out to be every bit as cruel and inflexible as the System that controls them. Maconochie’s attempt to appeal to convicts’ (“society’s wrecks”) sense of fraternity and loyalty to each other – and along the way provide them with a more comfortable prison life – is undermined by the loyalty demanded of the Ring. This is a devastating story – and the most sophisticated in the collection in terms of style and structure.

The third story, “In the granary”, is no less devastating, and turns on the irony of a granary, designed by “a genial officer”, being put to far from genial purposes. This story has an interesting, given Warung’s own work as a journalist, discussion of the power of newspapers. “Parson Ford’s Confessional” is the only one of the collection that doesn’t focus on convicts. Rather it explores corruption among those in power just, I suppose, to make sure we know that this corruption does not only occur in relation to convicts. The next three stories chronicle events in the life of a particular character: Anstey’s Bess, a convict woman whose maternal love nearly brings her down; Constable Crake whose lust does bring him down; and Overseer Franke, the ironically nick-named Cherub who selects the architect of his downfall (but the triumph here is rather Pyrrhic). The final story is set in London and nicely shows us what those “at home” were seeing of the colony while also providing a final opportunity for corruption and power to again ensure that the downtrodden remain that way. (It is also the only story to refer to the Aboriginal people of Australia – and the reference is surely ironic when he describes the “Savage King” Bennelong’s recognition of “the new era of civilisation”!)

Warung’s style is not subtle – he uses irony heavily, foreshadowing, symbolism, some wordplay, the occasional repetition and understatement, and authorial intrusion – and he can over-explain at times, not trusting always that the reader gets it. It would be a very dull reader, though, who didn’t! The tales are, it has to be said, pretty black and white. The System is demonstrated again and again to be corrupt and cruel, with no attempt made to explore the privations those in power also suffered. That said, the stories are powerful and, despite their lack of “balance”, convey enough truths to make reading them worthwhile for both their narratives and the messages underpinning them. It is good to see them brought to life again.

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

Kangaroo in the suburbs

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A propos of nothing really, but our lovely afternoon has just been made more lovely by the arrival across the road of:

Kangaroo in the garden across the road on a Spring afternoon

Kangaroo in the garden across the road on a Spring afternoon

I could write now about the role of kangaroos in Australian culture … but I think I’ll just leave it at this.

(PS For those interested in such things, it’s an Eastern Grey Kangaroo)

Library for a fiver!

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In May 1940, Professor Walter Murdoch (of the University of Western Australia) wrote three articles in The ABC Weekly arguing that, with £5, you could give yourself “a liberal education in so far as books can give it”. It takes three articles for him to list and justify his selections which are grouped under categories: Fiction, History, Philosophy, Poetry and Drama, Biography, and Sociology. For brevity’s same, I’m just going to list the fiction here:

Notice anything strange? There are no women writers, and there are no Australian writers. In fact they are all British and European writers. Signs of the times I suppose!

But wait, he has a supplementary list for “the judicious bargain-hunter” who is able to extend his/her fiver by buying second hand. The fiction in this supplementary list comprises:

  • Pendennis and The Newcomes, by William Makepeace Thackerary
  • Old mortality and The heart of Midlothian, by Walter Scott
  • Les miserables, by Victor Hugo
  • Crime and punishment, by Fyodor Dostoievsky
  • Pride and prejudice, by Jane Austen
  • Barchester Towers, by Anthony Trollope

Aha, a woman at last – and the right one too! As for references to Australia, there are none in the main lists, but the supplementary list includes Ernest Scott’s Short history of Australia.

Anyhow, while a modern compilation of books suited to a liberal education might be quite different to this, it is nonetheless interesting to see that most of the books he lists are still well-regarded today. It is also interesting to hear his criteria for choosing – he says he is not going to focus solely on “hoary old classics”:

People say that it’s only after a writer has been dead a number  of years that we can tell whether he is a great or a small man; and the same with books – you have to see it from a distance before you can say whether it’s a good book or not.

Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that men who are trying to climb Mount Everest don’t really know it’s a high mountain: they have to get away and look at it from a distance to get a sense of its real size? I don’t believe a word of it.

So, the books I am going to name for your consideration are not all classics, in the sense of being old. On the other hand, they’re not books conspicuous as bestsellers at the moment…

The Mount Everest analogy seems a bit odd really, and none of the novels listed were published after 1900, but I applaud his thinking. We should indeed be able to say now what a good book is – even if we can’t second guess which ones will last into the future. Has anyone read Pendennis or The ordeal of Richard Feverel?

Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is illuminated

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Jonathan Safran Foer (Photo by Elena Torre, from flickr.com, under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Jonathan Safran Foer (Photo by Elena Torre, from flickr.com, under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0)

He invented stories so fantastic she had to believe.

It’s hard to know where to start writing about Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated, so I’ll just start with a brief description of the plot. It concerns a search in the Ukraine by “the hero” (aka Jonathan Safran Foer) for the woman (Augustine?) who, he believes, saved his grandfather from the Nazis during World War 2. He is escorted on this trip by a translator Alex, a driver (Alex’s grandfather, also Alex), and their “seeing-eye bitch” dog, the absurdly named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior. This narrative is conveyed to us through three streams:

  • Alex’s (the translator, not the driver) story of the search for Augustine and Trachimbrod;
  • Jonathan Safran Foer’s (“the hero” and searcher) novel-in-progress about the history of his family in Trachimbrod (from 1791 to 1942); and
  • Alex’s (translator, again) letters to Foer about their search and his novel.

So far, so good, but if you have read my introductory post on the book you will know that this is a postmodern book and therefore a bit “tricksy”! And the first bit of “tricksiness” is that overlaying these narratives is the fact that Jonathan and Alex comment on each other’s writing, though we only hear this from Alex who comments in his letters on Jonathan’s work as well as responding to Jonathan’s comments on his work. Alex, then, is the main character in the book – if, that is, it can be said to have a main character. Certainly, Alex is the one whose character develops through the novel – from a rather callow youth who is full of bravado to a thoughtful young man (or “premium person”) ready to take on serious responsibilities.

At first, it is pretty funny – which, if you knew when you started that its subject is the Holocaust, could discomfort a little. I believe though that humour can deal effectively with the dark side, so I didn’t find it disconcerting – and, anyhow, the humour decreases as the book wears on. As Alex writes early in the novel:

I am able to understand now that it was the same laugh … the laugh that had the same darkness as Grandfather’s laugh and the hero’s laugh.

Humour and the multiple strand structure (combined with a convoluted but comprehensible chronology) are just two elements of this novel’s style. There are many others – too many really to cover in a short(ish) review – but fortunately I did refer to several of them in my introductory post. However, one I didn’t mention is Foer’s (the author this time!) use of different linguistic styles to represent the different characters and their strands, and to convey Alex’s growth towards maturity. It is with some disappointment, really, that we see his malaproprisms and other word-misuse (“I wore my peerless new jeans to oppress the hero”) disappear! There is also the magical realism in “the hero’s” story of Trachimbrod: the stories he tells about this shtetl stretch our credulity, but no more perhaps than does the cruelty of the Holocaust which is the point to which the narrative leads us. As the woman (Augustine? Lista? Does it matter?) who shows them what’s left of Trachimbrod says:

It is not a thing you can imagine. It only is. After that, there can be no imagining.

The book covers a lot of ground, including memory, history, place, names and identity, but two ideas that run throughout and that caught my attention are love and truth. “The hero’s” novel-within-the-novel speaks much about love, while Alex’s story of their search explores the notion of truth (though this distinction is not completely rigid). Why this is is not hard to understand when you know their (and their family’s) respective roles in the story: Alex would like to see through the “facts” to the “truth” (for some sort of absolution) while “the hero” would, it seems, like to believe that love can transcend all (to glean something from the wholesale destruction).

You can see the progression in Alex’s thinking in the following:

I also invented things that I thought might appease you, funny things and sad things. (p. 54)

This is a nice story. It’s true, I’m not making it up. (p. 158)

We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred? (p. 179)

I would never command you to write a story that is as it occurred, but I would command you to make your story faithful. (p. 240)

Meanwhile, “the hero” is writing of love: Brod (his great-great-great-great-great or, “very-great”, grandmother) and her love-match with the Kolker in early 19th century Trachimbrod; the time when all the people of Trachimbrod thought they had a novel in them with all these novels being “about love”; his grandfather’s love for the gypsy girl between 1934 and 1941 (the gypsy and the Jew!). One of the most poignant lines of the novel describes love messages made out of war-time newspaper headlines:

…each note a collage of love that could never be, and war that could.

Love – what people do and don’t do for it – is, really, the heart of the book.

It’s a full-on novel, and suffers somewhat from that new-writer problem of trying to do too much: you almost wonder what is left for his second novel. That said, it’s a rollicking read despite the seriousness of its subject – and provides plenty of challenges for the grey matter. I was taken by this little mind-twister about Brod:

She repeats things until they are true, or until she can’t tell whether they are true or not. She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be.

This conveys the essential problem of writing about the Holocaust: the sheer horror of it is almost beyond comprehension.

Early in the novel Alex asks “the hero”:

Are you being a humorous writer here or an informed one?

I see no reason why you can’t be both – and Foer, in this novel, has pretty well pulled it off.

Booker Prize 2009

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I received a voucher a couple of weeks ago for 25% off a 2009 Booker Prize shortlist book. What to buy? Hard choice as I hadn’t read any of them – I know, I know, how can I call myself a reader but, really, I am not driven to read shortlists per se. Awards are great – love them – but they don’t drive my reading. They simply provide one of the useful imprimaturs that inform my choices. Anyhow, back to the Booker, I settled on Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

Prescience perhaps? More like just good luck. Whatever it was, I would now be in the money had I been a betting woman because a few hours ago it was announced the winner and the bookmakers towards the end had her the favourite. Now I will have to read it eh? Don’t hold your breath as there are a few ahead of it, but I will try!

Marion on Marion (Halligan)

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A few days ago I posted a review of Marion Halligan’s latest book, Valley of Grace, and mentioned that Halligan had attended my bookgroup meeting at which we discussed the book. I didn’t, however, share in that post all of the things that Halligan told us – and I won’t in this post either. Some things are just not meant to be shared! Nonetheless, there are things we asked her that are of general interest to readers interested in writers and writing, and these I will share…

As readers often ask writers, we asked her about her writing process. She started off by saying that she never says she has writer’s block. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t get stumped at times but that when she does she just moves on to other writing she has on the go. Valley of Grace was, she said, written essentially over 20 years. She made notes for it back in 1989 when she was living in that apartment in Paris that overlooked the Val de Grâce church. And then, when she got a little stuck in her novel The point, which was published in 2004, she took out the notes she’d made back then and worked them up into a short story. Sometime later, she realised that it was more than a short story and voilà, we now have the book (though it took perhaps a little more than voilà for her to get from short story to book!).

Hand and pen, from Clker.Com

Hand and pen, from Clker.Com

Now, here’s the interesting bit: Halligan writes by hand! She says that the slowness of the eye-hand-paper process makes you think harder and results, for her anyhow, in fewer drafts. Essentially, she writes the story out by hand and then reads it over crossing out and adding in, etc. She then reads it again – often reversing the changes she’d made! It is only then that she types it into her computer, and the sense we got was that at this point it’s pretty much ready to go. We didn’t – silly us – ask her much about the publisher’s editors.

We talked a bit about the use of imagery, including metaphors. She says that much of this is unconscious, that if you are an experienced writer and you get into your story’s mode, the imagery seems to just come (such as the use of light, yellow etc in Valley of Grace). She talked specifically about the challenge of using metaphor and how writers often don’t think them through. Her example of a poorly thought through metaphor was  one writer’s description of a person’s bottom during lovemaking as “white dunes of sand”! The mind boggles rather. Anyhow, this brought to my mind a statement she makes in one of her more self-conscious books, The fog garden:

That is the trouble with metaphor, it may take you to places you don’t want to go.

She had more to say on writing, such as to beware of using too many adjective and adverbs, and that for her books are not about answers but about questions. In Valley of Grace the over-riding question, really, is about the soul, about what makes us human. Now, it’s hard to get a bigger question than that!

We also talked a little about reading and what we like. Halligan is not keen on issue(ideas)-based fiction: she doesn’t think it’s interesting. This is an issue I have referred to briefly in a couple of my reviews, specifically in This earth of mankind and The workingman’s paradise.

Finally, we couldn’t let her go without asking her about her literary influences. Not surprisingly, given that she’s been writing for a long time now, she couldn’t really say, but she did name some of her favourite writers. These included Margaret Drabble, William Trevor, and John Banville. Interesting, eh, that they are all Irish or English! Clearly, I really must read that William Trevor languishing my TBR pile!

Anyhow, you can probably tell from all this that Halligan was generous with her ideas and her time. It was a real treat having her there…

Challenge of the biopic, Redux

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Back in July I posted about biopics and about the tensions inherent between fact and fiction in what is, essentially, a dramatisation. Despite this – despite the fact that I know I can’t rely on them for the facts – I like biopics. Of course, I don’t like all biopics, and there are some I like more than others. The reasons I like them are, I was going to say, rather capricious, but perhaps idiosyncratic is a better word. Depending on the particular film, I may like it because:

  • I am interested in the person; and/or
  • I am interested in the subject (literature, dance, theatre, music, etc) or the era (World War 2, the Regency or Tudor periods, etc); and/or
  • I like the director; and/or
  • It is simply a good film!

In the case of biopics I’m a bit more relaxed about quality – and when I say this I mean I am more relaxed regarding cinematic style and innovation. Being relaxed about quality though doesn’t mean I like poor performance, poor scripts, poor direction. It just means I’m more tolerant of, shall we say, less cinematically challenging films if they are biopics. This probably doesn’t make sense to anyone else, but there you are!

And, I have to say, that most biopics we see are of the conventional variety. That’s not to say that there aren’t innovative biopics out there  – because there are  (such as, for example, the relatively recent and exciting I’m not there about Bob Dylan) – but most, it seems to me, are not. This is certainly the case with the one I saw this weekend, Mao’s Last Dancer. It is conventionally told – but the story itself is so powerful, who cares? From my memory of the book, the film is “true” to his story even if the facts have been stretched here and there for dramatic effect. It is, anyhow, worth seeing for the three actors who play Li Cunxin, and for the gorgeous dance sequences choreographed by Graeme Murphy and Janet Vernon.

Image courtesy Clker.Com

Image courtesy Clker.Com

It just so happens that in the October issue of Limelight is an article by Lynden Barber called “Hollywood goes classical”. It’s about biopics of musicians. In it he quotes Australian composer Nigel Westlake as saying:

I don’t think there would be any historian who would consider these films anything more than entertainment and as about as historically accurate as Gladiator.

Well, I ask, why would an historian, or anyone, expect a biopic to be historically accurate? A biopic is not a documentary but a dramatisation. Do we read/see Shakespeare’s history plays for history? No! And neither should we look to biopics for verifiable historical fact. We can, though, expect them to provide some truths. In the case of Mao’s Last Dancer those truths include the resilience and mental strength exhibited by a boy removed from his home at a young age by “the state” and forced to make his own way in the world.

I am of course being somewhat disingenuous here. A biopic does need to be reasonably factual – otherwise, why not make a film about a completely fictional character – but we should not expect it to be citable fact. This makes it a rather slippery beast – and one that is fun to talk and write about!

Indie Book Award, 2009

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The winner of this year’s Indie Book of the Year Award was announced last week – and it is Jasper Jones by Craig Silvey, which I reviewed here recently. The Indie Book Awards are made by Australian independent booksellers, and this is their second year. The winners in the four sections are chosen by a panel of judges, and then the overall winner is voted by independent booksellers from around Australia.

Cover image courtesy Allen & Unwin

Cover image courtesy Allen & Unwin

The shortlist – chosen by those judges – was:

  • Fiction: Jasper Jones, by Craig Silvey
  • Non-fiction: The tall man, by Chloe Hooper
  • Debut fiction: The virtuoso, by Sonia Orchard
  • Children’s book: Pearl verses the world, by Heather Potter

I guess I’m not really qualified to comment as I’ve only read two of these books but, if I was going to choose between those two, I would have chosen The tall man hands down. I enjoyed Jasper Jones rather a lot (to use my best reviewer language) but it won’t be my most memorable book of the year. It’s been many months, though, since I read The tall man, and I haven’t forgotten it: it was beautifully written and makes a thoughtful contribution to our literature on black-white relations. And yet, it has been consistently pipped at the post in awards around Australia this year (with the exception of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards). Why is this?

This of course doesn’t make any sense

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Foer, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0)

Foer, 2007 (Photo by David Shankbone, via Wikipedia, used under Creative Commons CC-BY-3.0)

Lisa, over at ANZLitLovers, has produced a list of some of the main features of postmodernism. It just so happens that I am also reading a postmodernist book, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is illuminated (from which the title of this post comes). I’ve only just started the book but it is exhibiting those features of postmodernism that I most enjoy:

  • metafiction – in this case highly self-conscious authoring
  • absurdity and irony thinly but uproariously disguising “real” meaning
  • visual playfulness – the titles of chapters by one character typeset in various curvy shapes, while the titles by the other are presented in the usual straight line; use of other typographical features such as upper case, italics, strikethroughs and the like
  • mixed genres – letters (ie correspondence), novel within novel, playscript, and so on.

All these are contained within a comprehensible story-line, once you get into it, and in language that is playful but not so playful that it’s obscure. But more anon. As a character in the novel says:

I do not have any luminous remarks because I must possess more of the novel in order to lumin.

Writing like this makes me laugh out loud…and that is always a good thing.