Run Through the Jungle

"Matterhorn" was a book that floated onto my shelf gradually (mentioned somewhere by someone, idly bought at Target of all places) and stayed there for almost a year, the subject of yearning glances while I slogged through a particularly thick 'to read' priority pile. So. AT LAST! I'll say that for all the build-up, the novel moved along briskly and used a "show, don't tell" approach where Marlantes didn't beat me over the head with philosophical interludes. As with any novel that deals with war, in this case Vietnam, it was a sobering yet necessary reflection on ugly things. Author bio (not sure why Bill Moyer is more complete than Wikipedia): Karl Marlantes 

Ray Mahon - Stars and Stripes
South Vietnam, October, 1966: A helicopter approaches the landing zone to deliver supplies and evacuate U.S. Marines wounded in the battle for Hill 484.

It wasn't until I assembled my quote list for this post that I realized the emphasis on choice and decisions throughout the novel. Yes, there are grander important themes like the insanity of war and what is honor and who is the enemy, but these particular passages jumped out and made me pause.  Here's a character/author who's endured horrific conditions and in the midst of senseless misery you see these nuggets of courage, faith, and belief in humanity -- why keep going, how to keep going.  I'm not going to get into details about the book or close-read shit in this post, other than to say it reminded me of Catch-22/Apocalypse Now/Platoon.  And some parts will absolutely sucker-punch you in the gut.    

"He would not slip into the jungle and save himself, because that self didn't look like anything worth saving. ... Dying this way was a better way to die because living this way was a better way to live."
(399-400)

"No, the jungle wasn't evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man had added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. ... Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact."
(500)

"Meaning could come only from his choices and actions. Meaning was made, not discovered. ... What he did and thought in the present would give him the answer, so he would not look for answers in the past or future."
(564)

"I see my friend Broyer get his face ripped off by a mine. What you think I do all night, sit around thankin' Sweet Jesus? Raise my palms to sweet heaven and cry hallelujah? You know what I do? You know what I do?  I lose my heart. ... Then, the sky turn gray again in the east, and you know what I do? I choose all over to keep believin'. All along I know Jesus could maybe be just some fairy tale, and I could be just this one big fool.  I choose anyway. ... It ain't no easy thing."
(466)

Don't Mess with Alaska, and other lessons

Before I do a little blurb about Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild", I have to link here (Grizzly Man) because it's a strikingly similar story and Werner Herzog is the shit.

In Search of the Miraculous:

 "Is there anybody out there still experiencing anything besides somebody else's book commenting on somebody else's book? Where do we turn to find the experience—preverbal, nonverbal, subverbal, transverbal—on which the books and reports must finally be based?"



Aside from the obvious irony that I'm commenting on Krakauer's book commenting on the above quote, Roszak totally has a point.  Though as a literature lover, I have to argue that the experience of reading a great book or a classic has merits -- if I had a choice between traveling the world and reading a library, I'd do both.  Do you really need to have been on a whaling ship to understand Moby Dick?  No.  And even if you had been, the book isn't really about whaling, in the same way that Lord Jim isn't about Indonesia.  I guess in answer to Roszak's question, you could turn to find experience anywhere (where is there greed, where is there racism -- with regard to Moby Dick/Lord Jim examples).

Now quoting Krakauer:
"[Chris] was so enthralled by these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction, constructions of the imagination that had more to do with [Jack] London's romantic sensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness." (44)

Ah!  So, he turns to find the experience in the wild, but ... the book's not really based on life in the wild.  No matter.  The ordeal is an exercise in solitude, based on the latter part of Tolstoy's life (who may I add died alone at a train station -- perhaps not the best role model for hermitage), and a weirdly selfish venture.  I had a more visceral "WTF" reaction to McCandless' story when I watched the movie adaptation a few years back, and I think Krakauer's writing was more understanding and empathetic because I found my position softening a little.  But only a little.  For a guy that was so interested in humanitarian crises and social injustice in the world (e.g. food shortage in Africa), he was remarkably self-absorbed.  Like the cliche, "Be the change you wish to see in the world" -- kinda hard if you remove yourself from society and the world. 

Krakauer notes that Chris was "relieved that he had again evaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messy emotional baggage that comes with it ..." (55).  For a student of Tolstoy, he was pretty anti-social -- because really "War & Peace" is an epic generation-long love story.  And of all experiences, isn't human intimacy the most difficult? 

And then this moment, which just broke my heart:

"When Alex left for Alaska," Franz remembers, "I prayed. I asked God to keep his finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he let Alex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided I couldn't believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boy like Alex ... [I] bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I went out into the desert and drank it. I wasn't used to drinking, so it made me sick. Hoped it'd kill me, but it didn't. Just made me real, real sick." (60)

"Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow." (132)

Bottom Line:  I suppose that gets at the heart of why I always find his story so ingratiating and tragic.  Like, go travel through Mexico and live off the Alaskan land if that's what it takes to have a revelation about life, but to have impacted others lives so negatively is sad.  I love Jack Kerouac because while he zoomed around the continent, he did it with friends and always sent his mom postcards.  He also penned several influential books and did not starve to death alone (with the nuance that it was slow alcoholism). 

This Happened.

Mr. [Philip] Roth says he wrote to Wikipedia directly about the issue and got back a note from a site administrator: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work, but we require secondary sources.”

- from NYTimes

To the Lighthouse and the Letter H

While I was in the midst of Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" (hark! a reprieve from Game of Thrones!), this article generated quite the buzz: The Top 10 Most Difficult Books.  Recalling the angst of many classmates during "Mrs. Dalloway" in college, it seems Woolf's writing inspires a love or hate reaction.  You either bang your head against the wall because WHAT DOES IT MEAN or you let the prose carry you forward.  After "Game of Thrones," reading a sentence by Virginia Woolf was like a refreshing splash of water on a hot day.  

There are so many levels to talking about "To the Lighthouse" that I've decided to focus on three of the big picture themes: structure, time, and (some) communication.  If for whatever reason I ever need to reconsider the socio-economic undertones of the book, well, then, that's another post.  Much of this post will be quotations, because sometimes my blabbering just dilutes things and this is one of those times.

Godrevy Island, St. Ives Bay, where Woolf visited

"Woolf described the structure of To the Lighthouse as if it were a letter H, 'Two blocks joined by a corridor,' in which the uprights, the first and third sections, recorded a day in the lives of the family on holiday, although substantial changes took place between the two."  (Cambridge Companion, Julia Briggs, p.74)

The above quote is brilliantly true and frames the entire novel in a simple yet elegant fashion.  In the book, spinster Lily Briscoe struggles with her painting hobby as Woolf presumably strugged with the novel; how to capture it all, how the light and shadows must interact, what's the structure that will be most perfect and illuminate fundamental truths of life:  "To say: 'But this is what I see, this is what I see,' and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast" (p.19).  I thought it was interesting how much the grey-green color is emphasized throughout but that Lily's painting attempts to buck that trend with bright blues and purples. In any case, the book IS the painting and Woolf says as much in her personal letters:

"I meant nothing by The Lighthouse.  One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together."  (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1923-1928)

Which is the same reason for Lily Briscoe's final artistic vision at the end of the novel; drawing the line of The Lighthouse down the middle of her painting.  It holds her vivid portrait of the Ramsays cottage (and her time with them) together.  The Lighthouse also functions as the bridge to the H structure; "Time Passes" but The Lighthouse remains.  Like the saying goes, the more things change the more things stay the same.

For as much as the book is about time passing and the transience of existence, it's also about repetition.  The waves, the beacon from The Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay pacing up and down the terrace, and the nostalgic repetition in the second half of the novel.  Woolf practically bangs the reader over the head with it: "It was to repeat that they met" (p.21) and, "He had made a definite contribution to philosophy in one little book when he was only five and twenty; what came after was more or less amplification, repetition" (p.23).  The subject of the latter being Mr. Ramsay the philosopher.  His work is described as imagining a kitchen table with no one there -- more or less what occurs in the "Time Passes" section -- and seems to connect with a quote from Mrs. Ramsay ("For it was extraordinary to think that they had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time" p.88).  Ramsay and, to a different extent, his wife are painfully aware of their mortality and insignificance. 

Mrs. Ramsay says that the sea "made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow -- this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror" (p.16).

Her husbands shares the shelter of domesticity a few pages later, with one of my favorite sentences of all time:  "He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes" (p.44).   

In both cases, the emphasis of nature eating away at civilization and humanity is tempered by domestic duties.  Mr. Ramsay glumly notes that, "The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare" (p.35) and Lily Briscoe picks up the theme on the beach, saying the "distant views seem to outlast the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest" (p.20).  Towards the end of the book, Lily seems to connect this mortal transience with the urgency of her painting:

"... She could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps the last time, as a traveler, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again" (p.194).

Sound advice for the reader in the aptly-titled "The Window" section, for one may never see Mrs. Ramsay or Prue or Andrew ever again.  Blink and you'll miss the parenthetical deaths. 

Lastly, sticking to a theme that really defines Virginia Woolf's work, the novel depends on relationships between characters.  The narrative floats from one to another and portrays attempts at understanding, at empathy and sympathy.  All the characters are perpetually trying to see what the other characters are thinking, to imagine or persuade their thoughts.  Much like Lily's translation from sight to canvas, the thoughts-to-actions route is imperfect and muddled, thus compounding the tragedy of mortality.  "She had done the usual trick -- been nice.  She would never know him.  He would never know her,"  Lily realizes after conversing with a guest (p.92).  Another acute moment occurs after Mrs. Ramsay's death, while Lily is trying to paint the empty steps where once she had sat (p.178; and likely mimicking Woolf's own grief after the death of her mother):

"For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? ... It was one's body feeling, not one's mind.  The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant.  To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain.  And then to want and not to have -- to want and want -- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!"

And finally, an equally poignant moment of non-communication between Mr. Ramsay and his two older children as they reach The Lighthouse, ten years past the initial expedition that never was (p.207):

"They both wanted to say, Ask us anything and we will give it you.  But he did not ask them anything.  He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, We perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I have reached it.  I have found it; but he said nothing."

The Castaway

On "Tropic of Cancer"

I used to get Henry Miller and Henry James mixed up, and always thought "Tropic of Cancer" was a book about some hot steamy island written in the 1970s.  Recent years have brought clarification.

Part of the incentive to read this novel was a reaction against "50 Shades of Grey" (I'll read some REAL literary erotica!) but there is actually very little sex in "Tropic,"  though there are plenty of sordid details about the female anatomy and an overabundance of the word 'cunt'.  Enough intimate scenes to warrant banning the book in 1930-40s America and igniting a censorship battle.  So, okay, yes this was scandalous in the pre-war years a la "Lady Chatterley's Lover" but the content pales in comparison to some of Chuck Palahniuk's books, for example, and it didn't really trigger a shocked/offensive reaction.  At this point, our culture is so saturated with sex that 'cunt' isn't so much a gasp-inducing dirty word as it is a physical fact (probably more like how Miller thought of it anyway).





The writing style and philosophy of "Tropic" reminded me of Hunter S. Thompson and particularly Jack Kerouac -- capturing a fast and disorganized, chaotic lifestyle in stream-consciousness format with a heap of absurd comedy.  A celebration of being poor/unemployed/drunk with friends.  Miller was surely an influence on Kerouac, but I adored "On the Road" and had a much more sympathetic reaction to that novel than I did "Tropic"  (maybe because of the location? Americana vs Paris?).  I kept picturing scenes from the movie "Moulin Rouge" with the stereotypical and romanticized Parisian brothels.

Bottom line:  "Tropic of Cancer" didn't hold any novelty for me, though it was moderately interesting and well-written.  In the 80-some years since it was written, most of the story's become cliche (oh a starving artist in Paris!  oh he has quite the rampant sex life!), but on second thought is probably still relevant via the Occupy movement.

Regarding Henry Miller & sexism:  The Devil at Large: Erica Jong and Henry Miller

Regarding recent criticism of "Tropic of Cancer":  The Male Mystique of Henry Miller and Response Letters

Regarding the awfulness of "50 Shades of Grey':  50 Shades of Argh by Erica Jong

The David Foster Wallace Experience

My purpose in grabbing "Consider the Lobster, And Other Essays" off the sale rack was to see if I'd be into this whole thing and willing to tackle "Infinite Jest" (a considerable investment) at some point in the near future.  Thanks to snippets of hearsay, I'd always been intimidated by Foster Wallace's writing and presumed it was exceedingly cerebral, etc etc.  But he's actually funny!  See:

This is probably the place for your SNOOT reviewer openly to concede that a certain number of traditional prescriptive rules really are stupid and the people who insist on them ... are that very most contemptible and dangerous kind of SNOOT, the SNOOT Who Is Wrong.
(p.100, Authority and American Usage)

Though the above-cited funniness is buried in the midst of one of the denser essays.  There were two particularly brilliant essays:  "Up, Simba" and "Host" that I will enthusiastically endorse to anyone who will listen to me.

In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about.
(p.187, Up, Simba)

... The single biggest reason why left-wing talk radio experiments ... are not likely to succeed, at least not on a national level, is that their potential audience is just not dissatisfied enough with today's mainstream news sources to feel that they have to patronize a special type of media to get the unbiased truth.
(p.316, Host)

It's these moments of  'WHY, YES!' clarity, combined with weird humor and amazing linguistic gymnastics ("Dostoevskynalia") that made me fall in love with David Foster Wallace.  And he writes like this about everything!  Lobsters, Kafka, 9/11, the dictionary, porn, whatever!  The total high of gleefully connecting with a new author is countered in this case with the fact that he's dead now and I missed all his book talks and I really feel that no one else is currently writing like this.  Some parts of Dave Eggers, Franzen at the end of "The Corrections" maybe, and definitely not Jonathan Safran Foer.

Well.  Looking forward to settling in with "Infinite Jest" at least.

Ebert & Didion

(Pet peeve:  being unable to find a library book that is allegedly on the shelf.  If I had a nickel for every time this has happened to me, I'd be able to cover all my overdue charges.)

Read Roger Ebert's autobiography "Life Itself" and Joan Didion's "After Henry."  I've been an Ebert fan since I started reading his reviews in the local newspaper years ago, and he has a fantastic blog here:  Roger Ebert's Journal.  Joan Didion I kept hearing about because of her now-popular "Year of Magical Thinking" -- a book that I have no interest in reading.  I wasn't able to get my hands on "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" (see above pet peeve), thus a second-rate settling.  

Didion does this thing where she leaves out certain punctuation, so it's a tad difficult to separate phrases and distracting when I need to reread a sentence several times.  Aside from that, I got a hoot out of her political essays.  Who knew 1988 was repeating itself this very year?  She quotes a NYTimes article: "Mr. Dukakis is no longer the candidate of 'inevitability' but the candidate of order" (p.79).  Mitt Romney, anyone?  I also loved her perspective on Bush the first: "That George Bush might have thrived in Texas not in spite of being but precisely because he was a member of the Northeastern elite was a shading that had no part in the narrative" (p.68).  Also mostly this (p.113-114):

I remembered each other member of this class as older and wiser than I had hope of ever being ... not only older and wiser but more experienced, more independent, more interesting, more possessed of an exotic past: marriages and the breaking up of marriages, money and the lack of it, sex and politics and the Adriatic seen at dawn: not only the stuff of grown-up life itself but, more poignantly to me at the time, the very stuff that might be transubstituted into five short stories.

Exactly how I felt the first time I sat down in Contemporary Drama at college.  And would probably still feel if I plopped down at particular workshops/salons/cafes today, even if I happen to see the Adriatic at dawn.  I am perpetually in awe of people with exotic experiences, real or perceived.

Ebert was great for introducing Sherman Paul and Studs Terkel (starting "Will the Circle be Unbroken?").  And if I ever get around to Milton, I'm to look up George Williamson from the University of Chicago.  Ebert is also a big Werner Herzog fan, and reading this made me want to go rent out every single Herzog movie.  Random fact:  Roger Ebert wrote "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls" -- WHAT? 

From "Life Itself," the passage I enjoyed the most was actually cited from another of his books, "Two Weeks in the Midday Sun":

Suddenly I was filled with an enormous happiness, such a feeling as comes not even once a year, and focused all my attention inward on a momentous feeling of joy, on the sense that in this moment everything is in harmony.  I sat very still.  I was alone at a table in a square where no one I knew was likely to come, in a land where I did not speak the language, in a place where, for the moment, I could not be found.

Lost in Translation: Barnes & Noble Edition

I finally plodded through the last couple chapters of "Dead Souls" by Gogol, wondering why every few pages an editor would note that portions of the manuscript were missing.  Turns out the entire Book II of Dead Souls was so bad that Gogol tried to burn all of it.  I don't blame him.  Later in his life, with the success of Book I hanging over him, Gogol became somewhat of a religious fanatic and wanted to write a second part that would show Tchichikov's moral redemption.  However, as Nabokov notes in "Lectures on Russian Literature": "Tchichikov's swindles are but the phantoms and parodies of crime, so that no 'real' retribution is possible without a distortion of the whole idea" (p.53).  Thus Book II ends up being an exercise in bland preaching, rather than a lively continuation of Book I.

Side note:  What the heck is with these Russian writers and bizarre end-of-life manias?  Dostoevsky had gambling, Tolstoy wanted to become a wandering ascetic, and now Gogol.

In paging back through the book (which I had started more than two months ago, yikes), a bunch of "haha" and "lol" notes popped out from the margins to remind me that yes, Book I was entertaining.  Gogol has a knack for disrupting the author-reader wall and commenting directly on his characters as real people:

It is no great matter to the reader whether Tchichikov is angry with him or not, but an author ought never under any circumstances to fall out with his hero--they have still to go a long way hand in hand together...

Nabokov points out the plethora of secondary, tertiary, and even one-sentence characters that pop out from metaphors and tangents: "I find pleasure in rounding up those peripheral characters that enliven the texture of its background."  People with ridiculous names like Sysoy Pafnutevich and Makdonald Karlovitch.  "Not only people, but things too indulge in these nomenclatorial orgies."  This emphasis on characters, description, and linguistic agility reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree"; no explicitly profound ideas, but a masterpiece of the language. Which brings me to the translation issue ...

YUCK!  Frown of disapproval for the Barnes & Noble edition as translated by Constance Garnett.  To illustrate, here's a final passage from Book I, with Nabokov's translation of the same:

B&N: "The ringing of the bells melts into music; the air, torn to shreds, whirs and rushes like the wind, everything there is on earth is flying by, and the other states and nations, with looks askance, make way for her and draw aside."

Nabokov: "The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes Wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way."

Bottom line is, look into what's the best translation before embarking on another Russian book.  Or any foreign-language book.

On Digging Deeper, Or Not

In regard to allusions and whether or not it's worthwhile to "understand" them:

NY Times: Grand Allusion

“If a poem catches a student’s interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary. . . . You can see what a nasty teacher I must be — but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them.” Bishop saw in her students’ resistance evidence of a bias against knowledge in favor of feeling: “They mostly seem to think that poetry — to read or to write — is a snap — one just has to feel..."

Bell Jars and Bildungsroman

This is a bell jar, and bildungsroman does not in fact refer to roman architecture but to a coming-of-age story.

In retrospect, I must not have had a typical literature class in high school because I didn't read "Pillars of the Earth," or "Catcher in the Rye," or "The Bell Jar". But it's well-known that Sylvia Plath is the novelist who killed herself by sticking her head in an oven.

Howard Moss argues (on Illness and Disclosure) that this makes a impure approach to the novel inevitable; you read it in the context of the author's situation, as an autobiography (though Plath admitted as much). It's interesting to compare Plath with Virginia Woolf, who also committed suicide--drowning--but whose literary merits overshadow her tragic/dramatic end. In Plath's case, it seems more like her death inspires curiosity about her work.

"The Bell Jar" is all about identity -- who is Esther? A coming-of-age novel about a woman in the late 1950s is bound to involve conflicting identities, and Plath takes it to the extreme. The book's been compared to "Catcher in the Rye" but really it's more like Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" where "women have their identity primarily through relationship to a man" (Bonds). Esther is powerless to act on her desires against the stifling norms of society (Wagner), and her subsequent madness has echoes of the Victorian "hysterics". The sense of entrapment which leads to her suicide attempt is darkly similar to Edna's end in "The Awakening", quoted here:

The children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her, who had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul's slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.

And this was in 1899, so it's ridiculous that these exact feelings are mirrored so closely more than 50 years later (and probably even today in some quarters).

Esther tries on various identities and friendships but finds herself more and more isolated. Much of the literary criticism on "The Bell Jar" mentions psuedo-psychiatrist R. D. Laing, whose work on "The Divided Self" explores the inner self vs outer self. We all have public masks, but Esther's is extreme to the point of insanity. I enjoyed this essay on Esther's identity crisis, specifically the idea that Dr. Nolan's character is the "anti-model" that forces her to become herself rather than adapt another insufficient role model. Going back to Laing, he viewed mental illness as a social issue instead of a biological one, since the self is always defined by others (i.e., I am what my friends see me as, and I am also what my neighbor sees me as, and I am also what the stranger on the street sees me as, etc.). This is very Foucault-ian. That being said, according to Foucault there is no such thing as individuality, so there would only be a false resolution (you only think you're not letting others define you).

This brought up the idea of something called ontological security, which is a person's sense of order and continuity in life -- the ability to give meaning to your life. Basically, Esther doesn't have this. Ontological security can be threatened by death, but if it's lacking to begin with then perhaps death isn't so scary and it might even be a welcome escape in Esther's case. This and the quote "the world itself is the bad dream" reminded me (again) of Kirsten Dunst's character in the movie "Melancholia" (so hey, I guess a woman's sense of entrapment/depression continues in the modern era).

Personally, I didn't feel that "The Bell Jar" spoke to me as it apparently did for teenager girls in the 60s-70s. As for coming-of-age novels, I adored "Catcher in the Rye" back in my younger teens. Salinger's style of writing is so much more real to me -- and maybe because I didn't study it and missed half the metaphors, I wanted to cry when I read:

And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be.