"After all one is always flattered"

Not quite up to the effort of moving on to the next chapter of Capital (that's chapter 9, for those of you scoring at home), or paying sufficient attention to David Harvey's relevant lecture, yesterday I read a significant chunk of Beckett's Letters. And so this impromptu week of Beckett blogging can continue. Turning now, then, to his efforts to get his work published, one of several themes running through the volume.

In 1936, Beckett sent out his novel Murphy to various publishers. His earlier publisher, Chatto and Windus, reluctantly rejected it on the grounds that business was tight. Another publisher rejected it because "On commercial grounds we could not justify it in our list." Beckett writes flatly to Thomas McGreevy, "And of course what other grounds of justification could there be." Quite so. And he doesn't hear from Simon & Schuster at all, at least not by November. It's clear that Beckett would rather drop the whole thing than deal with such matters. And, true enough, though he expresses much annoyance with his sort-of agent George Reavey, he decides to have him deal directly with the publishers instead. Not that things go much better.

So Murphy is sent on to Houghton Mifflin. Via a letter to Reavey (and the accompanying notes), we learn that Ferris Greenslet, editor at Houghton Mifflin, has requested that Beckett make some cuts to the novel. November 14, 1936, from Hamburg, he writes about it to his friend Mary Manning Howe:

Reavey wrote enclosing a letter from Greensletandhindrance. I am exhorted to ablate 33.3 recurring to all eternity of my work. I have thought of a better plan. Take every 500th word, punctuate carefully and publish a poem in prose in the Paris Daily Mail. Then the rest separately and privately, with a forewarning from Geoffrey, as the ravings of a schizoid, or serially, in translation, in the Zeitschrift für Kitsch ["Magazine for Kitsch", non-existent - RC]. My next work shall be on rice paper wound about a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots. The length of each chapter will be carefully calculated to suit with the average free motion. And with every copy a free sample of some laxative to promote sales. The Beckett Bowel Books. Jesus in farto. Issued in imperishable tissue. Thistledown end papers. All edges disinfected. 1000 wipes of clean fun. Also in Braile for anal pruritics. All Sturm and no Drang.

I replied, dear agente provocatrice, that I would not have a finger laid on the section entitled Amor intellectualis etc., nor on the Thema Coeli, nor on Endon's Affence, nor on the last will and fundament, but that so far as the rest was concerned I would willingly remove all ties and supports, dripstones, keystones, cornerstones, buttresses, and, with especial pleasure, the entire foundations, and accept full and entire responsibility for the ensuing detritus. The owls, cats, foxes and toads of the higher criticism could be relied on to complete the picture, a romantic one.

After all one is always flattered. It is only from the highest unities that a third can be negligently carved away and the remainder live. The amoeba's neck is not easily broken. Nor his countenance put out.

I think my favorite part is the dry "and accept full and entire responsibility for the ensuing detritus". And I was immediately reminded of David Markson's experience with his great book Wittgenstein's Mistress, which was famously rejected 54 times. In this interview with Joseph Tabbi, Markson mentions that he'd read that Murphy was rejected 42 times (so it seems our man Sam has much to look forward to in the rest of this volume of the Letters). Tabbi asks, "For a novel that well thought of since? Wasn't one editor in fifty-four capable of seeing 'something' in it?":

DM: Obviously it wasn't all black and white. Oh, about a third of them didn't like it at all, and perhaps another third made it inadvertently evident that they didn't understand a word. And ok, you can't fault the totally negative responses—or the vapid ones either, since they pretty much correspond with the percentage of editors you know are C students to begin with. But it's the other third that really cause grief. I mean when the letters practically sound like Nobel Prize citations—"Brilliant," "Twenty years ahead of its time," "We're honored that you thought of us". . .

JT: And?

DM: The predictable kicker, of course. It won't sell. Or worse, we couldn't get it past the salespeople. Actually acknowledging that those semiliterates don't simply participate in the editorial process, but dictate its decisions. God Almighty.

The haiku is not for me

This n+1 essay, about Roberto Bolaño and his reception by American readers and critics, includes this passage (italics in original):

American critics and regular readers alike usually don't care for sweeping literary-historical arguments. And yet in recent years we have been celebrating Sebald and Bolaño as if we really do believe in some big metanarrative about the novel—one that proclaims that, even post postmodernism, the form remains in crisis. Sure, Sebald and Bolaño deal with fascism, and both died at the height of their powers. More decisive is that neither fiction writer writes as if he believes in fiction. Our canonization of these writers implies a sense, even a conviction, that you can't be a really important novelist anymore unless you can't really write novels.

In a post responding to this essay, Scott Esposito addresses this passage thus:

Of course, when the unsigned editorialist says "can't really write novels," he/she is referring to novels in the 19th century (and maybe early 20th century) sense. Sebald's and Bolano's works are certainly novels, just not in the sense that some critics would like novels to only be viewed as."

I've wondered why we insist on having the word "novel" encompass so much. Why must it be asserted that the books written by Sebald and Bolaño "are certainly" novels? Are they? What is a novel? A novel is, presumably, everything, the genre-less genre, as I've said previously. Those critics, such as perhaps James Wood, who appear to be seeking to "limit" the novel, must then emerge as the enemy. (Though even for Wood, the novel is so flexible as to be just about anything, so long as it is "real".)

I was recently reading through the archives at zunguzungu, the excellent blog written by Aaron Bady that has too late come to my attention, and I came across this post from March, about a talk given at Berkeley by Franco Moretti. Moretti made the "provocative point that the high aesthetic novel is more of an epiphenomena of a mass commodity culture than the transcendence of it", and the "major question . . . was why the Chinese novel didn't develop like the novel did in Europe" . . . there are all sorts of obvious historical factors Moretti addresses: capitalism, imperialism, China's pre-industrial development, and so on. For Bady, these sorts of questions normally bother him, because "Why shouldn't [the Chinese novel] be different?" The question for him is "why the Chinese novel even gets called a novel in the first place, why a term of art derived from the French word for 'new' under a very historically contingent set of circumstances, in Europe, would be considered appropriate (to anyone) for reference to the classic long fictive prose narratives in China." He goes on (italics his):

the intractable problem at its roots, which is whether a novel is a novel because of historical or formal characteristics. One narrative of the rise of the novel points to the historical circumstances, the social factors that produce a particular kind of textual object and invest it with particular meanings and significance. Another narrative derives it from a structural form: the novel is a fictional narrative which is long and written in prose. That these "objective" features are historically defined (what it means to be fictional, for example, requires a secular consciousness) needs to be suppressed, as does the fact that giving history a legible form requires treating unreliably contingent objective forms as if they really were objective. But while history and form define each other, and are really separable, neither do the narratives collapse into each other. Is Robinson Crusoe a novel because that's what it was called at a certain point in history, or because it achieved some essentially novelistic form? If the former, a historical paradigm, then there can be no Chinese novel at all, just something that looks superficially similar from a distance. Yet if its the latter, a formalist definition, then how can a Chinese novel be Chinese?

I remember I used to think it was strange that there were Japanese novels. In part, I'm sure this had something to do with the logographic form of writing: I had a hard time imagining such works reading as novels. (Are Japanese prose works even written logographically?) I generally dismissed this puzzlement as my own problem, but the question nagged at me on occasion, though usually it remained just out of focus. Anyway, pondering the Japanese novel, I would think about those forms we're taught in grade school that belong to this or that national culture. We would write imitations for class assigments--haiku being the example that comes most readily to mind. But clearly haiku is not a form truly available to the writer writing in English. Later I would think of older European forms--the sonnet, say--and think to myself that the sonnet is not available to the contemporary writer. I could set out to compose a sonnet, yes, but it would be at best pastiche; however well done, however beautiful (or, more likely, ugly), it would stand awkwardly in relation to literary history, imitative, inappropriate, suspect, wrong. Its form is not for me, just as I understood intuitively that the haiku is not for me.

I was never really sure what precisely to think about my problem with the Japanese novel, but Bady's post zeroes in on some of what was troubling me. What is a novel? It seems to me that it's become defined down as simply "prose narrative of a certain length". Gabriel Josipovici has argued that the narrative mode of the 19th century novel became so dominant (not least because of England's--and to lesser extent France's--role as imperial power, I would add), that we expect it to hold true for very different sorts of narratives. The Bible, for example, we approach as if it should yield the same sorts of effects as would a George Eliot novel. When it does not yield these effects, we find it wanting, incomprehensible; or, we read effects into it that are not there, and could not be, an approach with numerous interpretative and affective pitfalls of its own. Why should the effects be similar? Why should we read a Japanese prose narrative as if it followed the same rules, created the same effects, as a Dickens novel? Why should contemporary prose works necessarily be treated as novels? Why do we insist that of course a given work is a novel, just not the kind of novel some readers expect? Why, indeed, should adventurous or exploratory or so-called experimental prose writing be subject to the same expectations as a novel? Why called a novel at all? (As always, I am ignoring the needs of the publishing industry.) Are Thomas Bernhard's works novels? Or might it be better to call them, simply, "prose works"? What about Blanchot's récit? Is Josipovici's Everything Passes a novel? David Markson's This Is Not A Novel was titled, so I understand, in response to what one reviewer reportedly actually wrote in dismissing Reader's Block, his previous work. But what if we just saw the title as simply accurate and then worked from there?

Checking in

I've been tired. . . busy. . . just a brief reading update.

I finished reading Time Regained the other day, thus coming to the end of In Search of Lost Time. What can I say? I won't get into too much just now, though it's funny: people--friends, co-workers--congratulate me on having finished it. Like it's an accomplishment. To be fair, I tell these people I've finished it. And I had, over the last several months, reported on my progress. Why? Is it simply a pointless boast? I'd like to think not! (Is it substantially different from blogging?) People are curious. They like to talk about what they read, too, and they've heard of Proust, see me with whichever volume I'm reading, want to know something about it. But what can I tell them? I like it? Will anything I say convey anything of interest about the book? Maybe. And, yeah, it's long. But, the thing is, Proust isn't difficult to read, not really, not in the manner of some writers. Blah blah blah. . . Anyway, it feels weird now, not having Proust to read. Granted, I wasn't reading the book exclusively--and there was quite a big gap of time between volumes 4 & 5--but there was always it to return to. I could just read it again, of course, but I'm not going to, not right now. I mentioned earlier that it felt wrong to read any other fiction while in the midst of In Search of Lost Time, and I meant it. Then I was having trouble getting started on The Captive (mostly because I was so often exhausted and having a hard time focusing on Proust's rhythm through the fog). Several passes at the opening got me nowhere, hence the big gap. But I felt the need for some narrative. I pulled books down from our shelves, looking for something worth breaking my self-imposed rule. Finally, Molloy was just the ticket to get me moving again. More on that experience, and the experience of reading Beckett's prose trilogy, in another post.

I made some noise about reading Blanchot's The Space of Literature. Naturally, since then I haven't made it much further into it. However, on recommendations from Mark and Steve, I picked up a copy of Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought and am, unexpectedly, finding it much easier going than Blanchot. Which is not to say it's an easy read. Far from it. But there's a lot to chew on, and I know I'll be having something to say about it here. (And, yes, I will be returning to my Blanchot reading and notes.)

Months ago, I packed up a lot of my books into storage in anticipation of the arrival of the baby, and more of them will be going into storage soon. I made a small pile of books that I thought were most likely to be read over the next several months. From this pile, I've begun reading Enrique Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co. How many of us are bloggers of the No? (Not enough of us?) It turns out that this is the perfect time for me to be reading this book. I hope to be able to explore some of my thinking on it here. Time permitting. On the fiction reading horizon: Vila-Matas' Montano's Malady, of course, but then some women. I've noticed that every book I've read this year, fiction or not, was written by a man. Now, in fiction, with Proust and Beckett as my major projects for the year, that's understandable, but still. Anyway: perhaps some Virginia Woolf? I have not read Orlando (acquired years ago, after I read an enthusiastic passage or two on the novel by William H. Gass) or To the Lighthouse, both of which we have on hand, plus a re-read of Mrs. Dalloway may be in order. I expect I'll be reading a fair amount of Marguerite Duras, with six titles awaiting me. And Carole Maso. I've always liked Carole Maso, and it could finally be time for AVA.

But then, maybe I'll just scrap it all and read Capital along with David Harvey. . . if the introductory video is any indication, it's really worth it (link originally via From Despair to Where?, but also via ReadySteadyBlog... ). Which of course reminds me of all the political posts I haven't written (apparently there's some election campaign on), all the food- and oil- and war- and housing- and money-related articles I've meant to link to and write about, but haven't. . . (summary: things are mess)

Notes on David Markson and the facts

The piece on anti-Semitism that I linked to in my last post reminded me that sometime last year I almost set out to write something similar, if less comprehensive, but my attention strayed to other things and I never got around to it (as happens to so many of my great unwritten posts). It was while I was in the midst of reading David Markson's Reader's Block. Something in the book troubled me. Reader's Block is the first in Markson's quartet of books following a similar form: an elderly writer sick unto death of making up stories, characters, plots, etc., but who writes anyway, bits of narrative emerging amidst short paragraphs, no more than a sentence or two usually, recounting facts, usually facts about artists, their lives, deaths, poverty, and so on. . .

In Reader's Block, the narrator seems especially obsessed with the Holocaust, and artists' and writers' ugly attitudes towards Jews over time. In this context we encounter many sentences that assert that x or y writer "was an anti-Semite". For example, from throughout the book:

"D.H. Lawrence was an anti-Semite."
"Saint Augustine was an anti-Semite."
"Erasmus was an anti-Semite."
"Henry Adams was an anti-Semite."
"James Baldwin was an anti-Semite."
"Seneca was an anti-Semite."
"Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite."

The accumulation of such sentences began to bother me. I began to fixate on them, to mouth the words, stare at them till they became nonsensical. What is an anti-Semite, after all? Markson clearly uses it to mean, simply, "hater of Jews" or "prejudiced against Jews", and, of course, this reflects the common use of the term today. But anti-Semitism, I thought while reading, is not mere bigotry or prejudice. Anti-Semitism was a political movement, with a historical context. So, while it makes perfect sense to write "Ezra Pound was an anti-Semite"--Pound specifically subscribed to a politics blaming Jewish "moneylenders" and financiers for the world's ills, and he did so in the midst of a very particular historical moment--it makes less sense to write "Seneca was an anti-Semite" for the very reasons described so well in Gabriel Ash's post at Jews sans frontieres.

I don't have a whole lot else to say at this point (since Ash said the rest of it), but I do recall Ellis Sharp's problem with This Is Not a Novel, the follow-up to Reader's Block. Ellis' post is titled "David Markson slanders Jean Genet". Here's Ellis:

As a body of writing it relies on the authenticity of the biographical materials it recycles. It rests on the assumption that the narrator knows far more than the reader and that the reader will find this new information interesting and entertaining. Everything is factual. Except that it isn't. Most of the material that Markson displays was new to me. I chuckled, I gasped, I thought: how ironic! But then I came up against a reference to an author whose biography I've recently read. And the alarm bells started ringing.

Then he encounters the following sentence: "Jean Genet was a paid informer for the Nazis in World War II." Which Ellis says is "simply not true". Ellis refers to Edmund White's massive biography Genet, which was published well before Markson's book, meaning, Ellis says, "there's not really any excuse for Markson getting it wrong". I appreciate the point Ellis is making in that post, though I think Markson's not really about getting it "right" or "wrong" in these pieces of trivia. At the time, I'd thought Matt Christie's idea that they are more like bits of cocktail party gossip was apt--Markson's novels are hardly reference books. But I think, more than gossip, they are the knowledge and trivia accumulated over a lifetime of reading, the preoccupations of an elderly writer. As they appear in the books, the "factual" statements do not give the air of someone having looked something up (and thus having gotten it right or wrong), but rather of things occurring to the writer as he avoids writing. So, in this context, that some of them are not factually true is beside the point. And yet those "wrong" ones nag, I can't deny it. (And of course the questions of fiction and historical fact, which I raised, for example, in my posts last December concerning Aharon Appelfeld, do not go away. . .)

The same book over and over

I have not yet read David Markson's new book, The Last Novel. Even so, I was a little surprised to see this review at Quiet Bubble, in which Markson is said to have "licked this flavor of ice cream too many times" and The Last Novel is said to be "a retread of This Is Not A Novel, only more reticent about the narrator and less emotionally engaging". I clicked over to the review from The Reading Experience, where Dan Green admits that he "[has] to agree" with the assessment--also surprising. Well, less surprising, I guess, than strange, or unexpected. A strange thing to say about Markson and this book, an unexpected criticism to see leveled by readers open to work like Markson's. After all, Quiet Bubble doesn't say that The Last Novel is bad, or even weak. In fact, The Last Novel "is terrific if you’ve never read Markson before". As with the previous books in what Quiet Bubble calls the Markson Quartet (which I like: no doubt we can expect the collected set to be reissued in an attractive Everyman edition, just like Updike's Rabbit books or Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, right?), Markson (or Markson's proxy) is preoccupied with death--the deaths of artists, of people he's known, with his own mortality. Quiet Bubble says:

...outliving his usefulness—being outdated—is one of the primary anguishes motivating The Last Novel. [...] More here than any previous novel, Markson (excuse me, Writer) worries about getting old. Again, though, he’s done this better—in the far superior and deeply moving Vanishing Point.

Of course, I can't argue this last point, not yet. But it seems to me that, instead of simply comparing the latest one with the previous three, a better course might be to think of them as a quartet, as a collective. I prefer to think of them in the kinds of terms described by Derik Badman in his much more positive review of The Last Novel, which appeared in The Quarterly Conversation. Derik is an unabashed fan of Markson's work, but still his take on the book appeals to me. He admits that The Last Novel "will be familiar" to readers who have read the previous three, but that "it is not worn of pleasures and novelty. Markson is not working from a cookie cutter; rather his four most recent works display a planned and well-executed set of variations". He quotes from the book, on exactly this topic:

Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over.

Like their grandly perspicacious uncles--who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.

I think it's impressive that Markson has made it four books into "writing in his own personal genre, as it were" before there have been grumblings that he is repeating himself (though I suppose the quoted passage implies that my perception of a lack of such grumblings is not correct). We expect writers, somehow, to always be doing something "new". The "experimental" writer, especially, must always be innovating. But how can a writer always be innovating? Always be shaking up the form he or she uses? Markson, it seems to me, has hit upon a form that is his own, and he has written in it, and continued to write in it, because it is of aesthetic interest to him.

I'm reminded of the jazz musician who blazed a trail in the 1960s and has explored what was then a new, exciting sound ever since, only to be accused of no longer blazing a trail in his dotage, to be found aesthetically conservtive. Even those artists who go against the grain, we all too often demand that they write as we would have them write, play as we would have them play, we who are the consumers of the off-beat, the difficult, the idiosyncratic. We demand, almost, that even they be career-conscious, that they be wary of the reception, that they not bore us through repetition. As if the artistic choices aren't theirs to make. As if the writing isn't its own reward.

Derik closes his review of The Last Novel musing on the question of variations:

This brief passage [quoted above] makes an excellent point about the novel in contrast to other forms of art. Variations and repetitions are much more frequent in painting or music than novels. While many authors take up the same themes time after time (Paul Auster is a good example of this), Markson's recent works are very similar in form and content (though as far as I can tell he does not repeat his facts). Such variations are difficult to compare from one to the next. . .

In isolation, then, The Last Novel can stand alone--as Quiet Bubble allows. But we can also read it as part of a set of variations on a theme, or as another entry in a writer's "own personal genre", or both. If, in fact, as Quiet Bubble and Dan Green both claim, this particular variation is not as strong or compelling as the previous examples, this need not mean that Markson has simply gone to the well once too often ("licked this flavor of ice cream one too many times"). Maybe it just means that it's not as good. Maybe a subsequent effort in the same vein would be better. Maybe not. Maybe such assessments are in some respects beside the point. Quiet Bubble's review ends with the suggestion that now is the time for Markson "to step back, regroup, and perhaps rediscover the pleasures of old things." It strikes me as extremely unlikely that Markson, having found his own genre, his own style, would, at his age, with his history of writing, do anything of the kind.

Unfilmable

Via this discussion at Jeff VanderMeer's blog, I came across this entertaining list of "unfilmable novels". The list includes One Hundred Years of Solitude, Ulysses, Beckett, Proust, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, etc. There are well over a hundred comments, with readers chiming in with their own pet nomination for unfilmable novel. I've had discussions like this before, and I always feel like people are talking about different things when they say a book "can't be made into a movie". Often people are simply worried that their favorite novel will be sullied by some hack screenwriter's attempt to force it into 90 minutes or two hours. Or they think that it's just too much, they could never "get it right". Something like The Lord of the Rings was thought unfilmable, I suppose, because of the sheer scale, along with the problem of special effects. In the event, of course, those obstacles were overcome, and yet, to hear some Rings enthusiasts (e.g., my brother, who has not only read the trilogy countless times, but has read The Silmarillion at least four times, which is just wrong) tell it, the movies succeeded on the level of spectacle, but missed the point--the essential theme--of the books (by, for example, leaving out the scouring of the Shire). Perhaps. But that's another thing readers worry about, the undermining of theme to please some imagined desires of a mass audience. Obviously, there's no rule that says this must necessarily happen, so it's not really relevant to the question of "unfilmability".

What, then, are we talking about when we say a book is "unfilmable"? I think that visual imagery (special effects) does not qualify; that's only a question of filmmakers' (and effects makers) imagination and ingenuity (which is not to say that any given reader would approve of a given filmmaker's interpretation). Similarly hugeness of scale: a novel's length might make it unlikely to be filmed, but that's not the same thing as "unfilmable". I think what we mean, in principle, by "unfilmable" is that we think that a film version would not be able to be the same as the book, would be unable to provide the same aesthetic experience, or even approximate the experience of the book. In some respects, I think readers need to get over this: movies are not the same as books. It seems silly to write it, but somehow necessary. Movies should be treated as independent of their source material.

Well, ok, we approach the movie as its own thing. Great. But I think the question of the filmability of certain written works is still of interest.

Jan at Jahsonic has attempted to define the characteristics of a novel that might make it unfilmable. He came up with two: plotlessness and philosophical introspection. And in an earlier post "on the nature of the 20th century reading experience", he described a kind of reading experience in which the book "is so good that it provides a unique experience that cannot be duplicated in any other medium". In both posts he offers Martin Amis' Time's Arrow as a perfect example of this. It's an interesting selection. Certainly reading Time's Arrow (in which the story is told in reverse order) can be a disorienting experience. I recall having to adjust myself to the normal flow of the day after having been immersed in the book. And of course Amis has a distinctive prose style. But the story, surely a movie could be made of the story, including its reverse order? In the wake of Christopher Nolan's Memento? It seems to me that it could be, but that's not to say that the experience of reading the novel would be replicated. It would be a different experience, if possibly still disorienting. Here, of course, we end up reducing novels to their content--where's the story underneath all this literary gunk, anyway?

Looking at it this way, I think there are novels that can't be reduced so simply to their content (even so, I object to the reduction elsewhere), which are therefore effectively unfilmable. As mentioned above, Jan suggests plotlessness and philosophical introspection. Neither of these strike me as anathema to film.

In the comment thread to one of the Jahsonic posts, Harry Tuttle mentions Georges Perec’s La Disparition (which famously was written without the letter 'e'). And here I think we get to the crux of the problem. Experimental fiction. Formally inventive fiction. I'm thinking of the recent work of David Markson (what would be the point of a movie of This Is Not A Novel?). Or Gilbert Sorrentino. Or, imagine the "stories" in Stanley Elkin's novels without his wondrously inventive prose. Unthinkable. These narratives must be read. I think these books and many others highlight what is finally unfilmable about even more conventional novels. If too often novels are reduced to what they're "about", formally experimental novels draw our attention to how they are made, to how they achieve their effects, which might remind us to think more about how the others are made. I think that any book or story or whatever can be the source material for a film, but that which is literary about a novel--that which makes it a novel--cannot be transmitted to film, because reading is the whole point.

In the course of writing this post, I noticed that Steve at This Space has touched on this today, too. He says, in response to Jahsonic's question, What makes a novel unfilmable?:

"Being a novel" would be my first suggestion. A novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else. The hype generated by an adaptation as an adaptation indicates a lack of faith in its original form, most obviously a lack in the original's cultural authority, but also the residual lack inherent to all art. A question borne on this lack is the one that excites me, drives my entire interest in writing: what cannot be written?

I like that: "a novel should be a novel because it cannot be anything else". Of course, the rest of this paragraph suggests much else to think about, many other potential posts (the kinds of writing we often find at Steve's blog). But, not wanting to be any more long-winded here than I already am, I'll end on this note.