Charity Drops

Another move imminent, and time to send some more things to the charity shop. I've at least dipped into most of them.

Beaumont and Fletcher are author-names that will always be paired, like Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. (And that's a rather inelegant way of contriving to mention The Man Who Went Up In Smoke, another recent and speedy read that was moved on too swiftly to even get in the photo; books like that circulate fast. It's the second in their 10-novel sequence, maybe not as searching as Rosanna but more satisfying overall; a month later I'm still turning over the immaculate design in my mind, the floundering Martin Beck finding his way through tiny details, dissonances, possibilities... In one respect the novel describes a definitively lost era, when passport photos were hardly checked because they never looked like their subjects anyway. But is our world better now?)

Anyway, Francis Beaumont's career as a dramatist was brief and he mostly wrote with his friend John Fletcher but The Knight of the Burning Pestle seems to be by him alone. It's a play I'd never really tuned into until I found this book (in a charity shop), and I was quite surprised to learn of its enduring popularity and how many times it's been staged, especially in the last 100 years. Without repeating the details you can look up in Wikipedia, it's basically a fantastical fourth-wall-breaking burlesque city comedy, and is probably a lot of fun to act in. Beaumont's style, witty without malice and prone to sheer enjoyment of different registers and melodies, is very appealing. An interesting thing is the clear influence  of Cervantes' Don Quixote, not long after the publication of the First Part and some years before the first English translation. (See especially Don Quixote Chs 17-18; even the title of Beaumont's play springs from here.) It's a less reverential and predictable influence than we're used to. The pairing of the distracted Don Quixote with the down-to-earth Sancho Panza became a template for later English authors to build their own master-servant teams; to interrogate, moderate, and in the final analysis usually celebrate the class distinctions of their time. Once a book becomes an established classic our readings tend to align with each other, like the helpless tweeters we are. The well-born Francis Beaumont was certainly no enemy to class distinctions, but his untutored reading of Cervantes found other potential, and his own fantastical knight is a romantic grocer's apprentice.

Something else I can't help wondering. The Wife tells us this story about Ralph:

When he had lost our child, (you know it was strayed almost alone to Puddle-Wharf, and the criers were abroad for it, and there it had drowned itself but for a sculler,) Ralph was the most comfortablest to me: "Peace, mistress," says he, "let it go; I'll get you another as good." (Act II Scene 6)

Calling to mind an anecdote about Alfred Jarry: 

Jarry also took to carrying a loaded revolver. In response to a neighbour's complaint that his target shooting endangered her children, he replied, "If that should ever happen, ma-da-me, we should ourselves be happy to get new ones with you." (Wikipedia .)

Could the inventor of absurdist theatre have been an admirer of The Knight of the Burning Pestle? Surely not? And yet it wouldn't be wholly inappropriate... 

Online text:

 https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/beaumontfletcher-knightpestle/beaumontfletcher-knightpestle-00-h-dir/beaumontfletcher-knightpestle-00-h.html

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From the incomplete Happy Families pack. The game was invented in 1851. On older packs the pictures are often grotesques like these ones, which were not credited but are reminiscent of Sir John Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland (1865).

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I'm still waiting for the day when I truly connect with Tennyson's poetry. I need an angle, even just a single poem that I more than enjoy and more than admire, a poem I really care about. But it still eludes me. Take Morte d'Arthur, much of which I know by heart. 

So all day long the noise of battle roll'd
Among the mountains by the winter sea...

Tennyson discovered life at its most intense -- or perhaps most picturable -- within the chamber of death, when the life that was a life has come to feel like a vain dream. But I'm thinking: How comes it that Arthur and Bedivere are alone by the mere? What happened to everyone else? Tennyson himself felt the question pressing, and when he later came to write the Idylls of the King he fully described this strangest of battles, yet even added to its mysterious power. 

The three queens come, and the tallest and fairest rests Arthur's head in her lap, but I'm aware that their own powerful presence arises from being voiceless, and that Tennyson's poem is consciously at the end of an era, centuries of exclusive conversation within the male mind. 

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The suffragettes were willing to die to change that, and some did. Reading them now, I still find a spirit of radicalism beyond what would be expressed in any modern newspaper. Not the first wave, who tried to make their case within the established structures of society. That seemed to go nowhere, because MPs didn't need to care what women thought, but probably without the first wave there couldn't have been a second wave who committed to going further. The case was made, but only revolution could implement it. Once implemented, society tried to forget all about the revolutionaries and their disagreeable behaviour; even more so, the disagreeable counter-measures of outraged authority. But in the west, whatever your politics, it's hard to imagine a democracy in which women have no share. (And doubtless in some parts of the world that's a very cogent reason for not having democracy at all.)

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From the Apocrypha (passed on to me by my Dad, who found it useful when studying ancient coins), I decided to sample the Book of Judith, vaguely recalling a host of sensational paintings and frequent references to the story in medieval literature.  

But taak kepe of the deeth of Oloferne;
Amydde his hoost he dronke lay a-nyght,
Withinne his tente, large as is a berne;
And yet, for al his pompe and al his myght
Judith, a womman, as he lay upright
Slepynge, his heed of smoot, and from his tente
Ful prively she stal from every wight,
And with his heed unto hir toun she wente.

(Chaucer's Monk's Tale)

The Book of Judith is very good reading. It starts off like chronicle history: 

In the twelfth year of the reign of Nabuchodonosor, who reigned in Nineve, the great city; in the days of Arphaxad, which reigned over the Medes in Ecbatane ... (Judith 1:1)

But this Nabuchodonosor is king of the Assyrians (1:7), and that can't be right: the name isn't Assyrian but Babylonian (e.g. Nebuchadnezzar II, whose reign began a few years after the final collapse of the Assyrian empire). 

The name Arphaxad isn't Median either; it's been repurposed from a son of Shem in Genesis. 

No wonder some people have suggested that the Book of Judith is best seen as a pseudohistorical adventure story. It's a well-shaped treatment in 16 chapters of a single storyline, building up our expectation by a circuitous approach (totally unlike real chronicle histories that record diffuse events). The first couple of chapters describe how the Assyrian king comes to be offended by all the peoples along his western frontier and orders a fearsome retribution, to be carried out by his top general Holofernes at the head of a massive army. Only in the third chapter do we home in on the Israelites and the dire implications for them. A mildly interested Holofernes asks "So who are these Israelites anyway?", and the heathen Achior says, basically, "Pretty tough cookies, don't take them for granted" and nearly gets himself killed for his negative attitude. Holofernes first has to deal with the border hill-town of Bethulia*; he cuts off the water supply and waits. After a while the suffering townsfolk start barracking the town authorities to capitulate. And only now, at the eleventh hour and half-way through the book, do we hear of a pious and beautiful widow named Judith... 

You can see the sort of cheaply effective artistry on display here. There's a certain fittingness to one of the earliest American feature films being Judith of Bethulia (1914); though I must say compared to Thomas Bailey Aldrich and D. W. Griffith the original Book of Judith seems quite subtle. It survives in Greek, but was perhaps originally composed in Aramaic c. 150-100 BCE. It isn't in the Hebrew canon. Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept it as scriptural, but not Protestants. 

* Fictional place-name; commonly identified with Shechem. 

An excellent account of Judith of Bethulia by Nitrate Glow: https://nitrateglow.wordpress.com/2024/03/28/beauty-vs-beast-thoughts-on-judith-of-bethulia-1914/ .

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Liverpool's Hidden History is about Catholicism in SW Lancashire, especially under the Persecution of Elizabeth I and later. Liverpool was still a very small town. The whole area was a centre of staunch recusancy. Church services took place in secret. The government considered a practising priest as equivalent to a traitor and hence liable to execution by being hanged, drawn and quartered. 

That happened to Ambrose Barlow in 1641. He was perfectly prepared for martyrdom. Here's some extracts from a friend's memoir:

A notable thing he told me at Easter was two years. That he had been about 20 years in England and no one day thereof omitted to celebrate. ...

His house was the only sure refuge that I knew for poor folk and penitents. His solemn days of invitation were three; Christmas, Easter and Whitsunday, and then he entertained all that would dine with him. Their cheer was boiled beef and pottage, mince pies, goose and groats, and to every man a grey coat at parting. ...

When he travelled abroad he went the ordinary way, and even through the town of Leigh when his business was that way, and I think he was as well known there as their parson. Some talk much of discretion, but his fortitude hath sure brought out good fruit. Upon a time speaking of some of the gentry, that would not be seen by any at Mass, he said: I like not those that will be peeping at God. ...

Although it be a common thing amongst many good men that would be loath to fight to wear swords, yet our martyr would wear none; and thus merrily he answered me when I took notice thereof, saying: Indeed I dare not wear a sword, because I am of a choleric nature . . . he loved to observe how time passed, but he had no pocket watch; and once I asked him why he had not a watch to take abroad with, as it was usual; and he answered me that it was pride, pride . . .

At that time, being Easter was two years, when I had his last blessing, he told me upon occasion, as oft he had done before, that they would not leave till they had him at Lancaster; whereat I did wonder that he should have such a conceipt,  things going so well with Catholics that there was great hopes of better and better . . . But he told me that Mr [Edmund] Arrowsmith, the last martyr at Lancaster, had appeared to him and did bid him to have a care of his words when he came before the judges; to which I answering in these words: I am sure, Sir, that you will talk to them . . . at my blunt reply he did laugh heartily...

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Maria Goretti was another martyr, one of the youngest recent saints. She came from a poor but devout family who were sharecroppers near the Lazio coast, south of Rome. At 11 she was running the household so her mother could work in the fields with her brothers, when another farm-labourer, 20-year-old Alessandro, tried to coerce sex with her. She said "No, God doesn't want this. If you do this you'll go to hell." It was July 5th, 1902; the threshing was in progress and hid all sound. He stabbed her 14 times. On her death-bed she forgave him; so did her family. Years later Alessandro fully repented and after release from prison spent the rest of his long life as a lay brother. 

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I suppose the era of field guides is coming to an end, replaced by smartphones. Anyway, I felt I didn't really need John Gooders' bird guide any more, though its clarity and vast information have been much admired. It's forty years old now, and some things have changed dramatically; kites, rare then, are now an everyday sight. You are far more likely to see an egret than a hawfinch. The Yellow-Legged Gull is now a thing. 

Like every field guide it has its eccentric moments, electing to call the dunnock the Hedge Accentor and describing the wren's explosive song as a warble. 

There was an art to describing bird-song in books, and we still need it; without it we can hear recordings on our smartphones but we can't talk about the songs or share our impressions or how we recognize them. You can use onomatopoeic coinages like tuk-tuk-tuk (often surprisingly unhelpful) or you can attempt descriptive words; John Gooders writes of the Grasshopper Warbler's "ventroloquial reeling". Perhaps "ventriloquial" means that it sounds like mimicry even though it isn't. He's talking about the song's uncanny resemblance to the sound of a fly-fisher's reel.  

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That copy of A Doll's House witnesses to my vague feeling of wanting to read Ibsen again, but I didn't manage it this time. However, a timely cold meant that I did finally read The Great Gatsby, something I promised myself a few years ago. Of course I read it hungrily and with delight -- Well, who doesn't? The world probably doesn't need any more thoughts on such an exhaustively discussed book, but if I think of anything I'll put it in another post.

To add to the enjoyment, my copy (rescued from the paper-recycling skip at the dump, as were the suffragettes) was prismatically annotated by an enthusiastic student. 

[I did write that other post:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2026/04/picturing-great-gatsby.html .]

Notes on Roseanna (1965)

Roseanna (1965) is the first of the celebrated ten-novel series, featuring the detective Martin Beck, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

Spoilers inevitably follow, though I won’t be recounting the story.

Bucket Dredger / Gripskopemudderverk

[Image source: http://www.bjorko.net/dumpning/document/Bilaga_1_Teknisk_beskrivning.pdf .]

QUESTION: Have you identified the corpse?

   (Superintendent Larsson, with a quick glance, threw the ball over to Ahlberg, sat down, and demonstratively took a cigar out of his breast pocket.)

ANSWER: No.

QUESTION: Is it possible that she is from this city or somewhere around here?

ANSWER: It doesn’t seem likely.

QUESTION: Why not?

ANSWER: If that were the case we would have been able to identify her.

QUESTION: Is that your only reason for suspecting that she comes from another part of the country?

   (Ahlberg looked dismally at the Chief of Police who was devoting all his attention to his

cigar.)

ANSWER: Yes.

QUESTION: Has the search of the bottom near the breakwater produced any results?

ANSWER: We have found a number of things.

QUESTION: Do these things have anything to do with the crime?

ANSWER: That is not easy to answer.

QUESTION: How old was she?

ANSWER: Presumably between twenty-five and thirty.

QUESTION: Exactly how long had she been dead when she was found?

ANSWER: That isn’t easy to answer, either. Between three and four days.

QUESTION: The information that has been given to the public is very vague. Isn’t it possible to tell us something more exact, information which really says something?

ANSWER: That’s what we are trying to do here. We have also retouched a picture of her face which you are welcome to, if you want to have it.

   (Ahlberg reached for a group of papers on the desk and started to hand them out. The air in the room was heavy and humid.)

QUESTION: Did she have any particular marks on her body?

ANSWER: Not as far as we know.

QUESTION: What does that mean?

ANSWER: Simply, that she had no marks at all.

QUESTION: Has a dental examination given any special clues?

ANSWER: She had good teeth.

   (A long and pressing pause followed. Martin Beck noted that the reporter in front of him was still doodling with the star he had drawn.)

QUESTION: Is it possible that the body was thrown into the water at some other place and that it was brought to the breakwater by the current?

ANSWER: It doesn’t seem likely.

QUESTION: Have you learned anything by knocking on doors?

ANSWER: We are still working on that.

QUESTION: To sum up, isn’t it true that the police have a complete mystery on their hands?

It was the Public Prosecutor that answered:

   ‘Most crimes are a mystery in the beginning.’

   With that, the press conference ended.

   On the way out, one of the older reporters stopped Martin Beck, laid his hand on his arm and said: ‘Don’t you know anything at all?’ Martin Beck shook his head.

(from Roseanna, Ch 5)

"city":  In Swedish there is only one term, "stad", for anything bigger than a village. Motala in the novel has a population of 27,000 (and it isn't much more populous today), much smaller than Linköping or Norrköping. Nevertheless it's regarded as an important regional centre, so perhaps "city" is defensible.  

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö in 1971

[Image source: https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/i-host-kommer-boken-om-sjowall-wahloo/ .]

Ten novels of thirty chapters each, centred on detective Martin Beck ...  Sjöwall and Wahlöö, already experienced writers, needed money to support their growing family, but they had higher ambitions too, a radical critique of modern Swedish society from a Marxist perspective. (They didn't make a lot of money, but they sold a lot of books; Martin Beck has become a regular TV and movie detective in Sweden, played by various actors over the years.)

The thirty-chapter format, the authors writing alternate chapters, was both realist (the toil of police procedurals, not the dazzling logic of a Christie sleuth) and modernist, something cubist about it, a refracted and many-angled portrait of society. It tends to brilliant set-pieces, for instance in Roseanna the press conference in which there's nothing to say (Ch 5), the interview transcripts with e.g. Mulvaney (Ch 12), the conversation with the deaf retired colonel and the blaring TV (Ch 17), the stop-start film-show of the trip (Ch 19). Sometimes lucid, more often deflating, sometimes hilarious and usually sad, these set-pieces inch the case forward while constantly enlarging and challenging our understanding of what's real, who someone is, what life consists of...

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Quotations from Lois Roth's English translation of Roseanna. (1968, I think.)

Full text here:  https://yes-pdf.com/book/1927

Ch 1 (p. 2) "The vessel was called The Pig ..." This is the bucket dredger that pulls up the body of a woman from the bottom of the lock. Lois Roth evidently didn't want to bog down the English version of Roseanna, and her text is actually even tauter than the original Swedish text. There, for instance, it's explained that the vessel's real name is Gripen (The Griffin) but is inevitably nicknamed Grisen (The Pig). We're also told that the useful engineer who knows about such things is known as Slamsnuskaren ("the sludge nutter", roughly speaking) by his mates.

Ch 2 , p. 6. A tiny bit of missing dialogue in the car: "Ugly bruises." "Yes." "You'll keep me informed" etc.

Ch 3, p. 11 . "'Yes, no. Yes, no. What's the difference?' Martin Beck thought to himself." 

(His wife has asked him if he's taking his pistol.)  Actually, what Martin Beck is internally reciting is a Swedish equivalent of "eeny meeny miney mo":  "Essike, dessike, lonton, tonton, semelimaka, kuckelikaka, ärtan, pärtan.. " That's what gives him the faint amusement that his wife picks up on. 

Ch 8. The telephone conversation between Kafka and Martin Beck is in English in the original text. (Hence Martin Beck is immediately shown reporting the key information to Kollberg, in Swedish:  in the English translation it might strike a very attentive reader as a bit repetitious.)

Ch 14 (p. 98) "Sundyberg" is an error for Sundbyberg, which like Hagalund is a northern suburb of Stockholm.

Ch 14.(p. 99) "That boat, the Kalajoki. It's just leaving Holmsund. It's tied up at Söderhamn for the night ...." This ought to say something like "It is going to be tying up at Söderhamn for the night...." The distance from Holmsund to Söderhamn is no less than 400km. Given that it's already early afternoon when this conversation takes place, I should think the boat wouldn't reach Söderhamn until pretty late at night.  Meanwhile Ahlberg and one of his men drive all the way from Motala to Söderhamn (also about 400km), arrest the seaman Eriksson, and then immediately drive all the way back to Motala. By 7 am the next day Ahlberg has already interviewed the suspect.  You might wonder why Ahlberg needs to go all the way to Söderhamn himself. Or why they don't send someone from Stockholm, which would be a significantly shorter journey? The upshot is that the next morning Martin Beck has to travel to Motala to interview Eriksson, and he spends three days there. Why arrange it that way -- I mean, from the authors' point of view? I think, simply to bring Martin Beck (and consequently, us), back to Motala for a third time, and perhaps particularly because the visit is disappointing; nothing happens in Motala, and the interview is a washout. The novel is telling us that location isn't important, that holidaymakers travel right across Sweden (and in fact the whole novel turns on this) but we the readers aren't being invited to take a holiday. Remember that brief anomalous moment, in Ch 5, when Martin Beck is beside the canal  and "He drank in the cool, clear odour of wild flowers and wet grass. It reminded him of his childhood, but that was before tobacco smoke, petrol odours and mucus had robbed his sense of their sharpness. Nowadays it wasn't often he had this pleasure." Nor will we: as the novel takes us through seven months of investigation, seven months of autumn and winter. 

Ch 29, p. 233. 

'In August was the jackal born,

The rains fell in September.

"Now such a fearful flood as this,"

Says he, "I can't remember!"

Kollberg's quotation comes from Rudyard Kipling's remarkable story "The Undertakers" in The Second Jungle Book. He quotes it in Swedish: 

Augustifödd schakalen såg

septemberregn i dalen.

Nej, maken till sån syndaflod

knappt jag minnes, skrek schakalen.

In Swedish, as in English, Kipling's epigram gained a certain currency as a comment on people who make strong assertions based on minimal experience. Presumably, in this case, Stenström's assertion that "You can take anyone with that" (Kollberg's paratrooper move).

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The voyage of the Diana

Swedish readers would have taken it all for granted. The route is a longstanding popular tourist experience, crossing Sweden between Stockholm and Gothenburg along the “blå band” waterway that includes the Göta and Trollhätte canals as well as areas of open water. The Diana is a real boat and is still plying the same route today. 

The trip takes six days (with numerous sightseeing stops). From Stockholm the boat goes west into Mälaren, then south to Södertälje and out into the Baltic around Trosa, going south past Oxelösund (this is when they ran into fog), threading through lots of islands, then turning into a narrow inlet past Stegeborg (where the engine broke), reaching the start of the canal at Mem, then Söderköping (where the engine was repaired), then the lakes of Asplången, Roxen, Boren and so to Borenshult (Motala) where, four days later, the body is found. The route continues into the massive lakes Vättern and (via Hajstorp)  Vänern, exiting the latter at Trollhättan and so down to Gothenburg and the west coast on the Trollhätte canal / Göta river.

Roseanna

At the deepest level, the novel is about judgment of its title character. For the first seven chapters she has no name, is only a corpse. An individual body, young, vigorous, not classically shapely, strangled and brutally violated. This extended prelude makes us think about her in depth, with nothing to go on but her body. A human being, a bare forked animal. 

Then we finally receive a relative flood of information about the librarian from Lincoln, Nebraska ("I would even venture to say that we know all the important factors about her," says Kollberg.) She's sexually active and takes the initiative; she wants regular sex but doesn't want a relationship. It stirs potential judgments, for example from the girl friend ("friend"?) who calls her "cheap trash ... a bitch on heat" (Ch 13) and isn't surprised she came to a bad end. And of course from the man who feels called upon to punish girls who are "disgusting" (Ch 30). Even her ex-boyfriend, the engineer Edgar M. Mulvaney, confesses "[F]irst I thought that she was just an ordinary, cheap tramp although she had not given that impression at all in the beginning. Then I thought that she was a nymphomaniac. One idea was crazier than the other. Now, here, especially since she is dead, it seems absurd that I ever could have thought either of those things" (Ch 12).

Then Mulvaney fell in love with her.

M. You have to understand that Roseanna was the most upright person I have ever met. She liked me a lot and above all, she liked to sleep with me. But she didn't want to live with me. She never made any secret of that. Both she and I knew precisely why we would meet. (Ch 12)

Kollberg only means that we know everything about her salient to the investigation. We don't really know so very much about her: what, for example, was she writing during her solitary evenings? 

She is certainly unusual in her solitariness. As early as Ch 4, Martin Beck theorizes about the unknown victim: 

She was young and he was sure that she had been pretty. She must have had someone who loved her. Someone close to her who was wondering what had happened to her. She must have had friends, colleagues, parents, maybe sisters and brothers. No human being, particularly a young, attractive woman, is so alone that there is no-one to miss her when she disappears.

Even in those days, when people travelling abroad would not be expected to make regular contact with loved ones at home, it's unexpected that Roseanna is so little missed for so long; it will be three months before Martin Beck learns her name. In fact both her parents were dead, she had moved from Colorado to Nebraska, she had apparently no really close friends, or at any rate her independent spirit resisted being watched over.

The novel never glances at the reader, the police themselves never discuss the case from this point of view, but the question is insistent: do you, the reader, also have some prejudices? Do you really accept the range of variety in human beings, especially women? Is it OK with you, her being Roseanna?

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https://michaeltapper.se/hem/artiklar/sommarmordet-som-symtom-pa-samhallssjukdom/

Interesting article (in Swedish) about the novel's cultural context, and about Tore Sjöberg's 1967 movie Roseanna, a glamorous romp that utterly traduced the spirit of the novel, though Sjöwall and Wahlöö themselves contributed to the screenplay: they really needed the money.

Watch the trailer, though, it's great.

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In 2014 there was a BBC radio dramatisation of Roseanna and several other books in the series. To me it seems to lose much of the subtlety of the original (for instance, the police are made to voice conventional social judgments of the murder victim in exactly the way that the novel avoids). I dare say I'd be just as disappointed with the Swedish TV adaptations. 

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On the Sjöwall/Wahlöö series in general, I recommend Neil Nyren's lively introduction: https://crimereads.com/maj-sjowall-and-per-wahloo-a-crime-readers-guide-to-the-classics/ .

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"Someone once said that our country is a small but hungry capitalist state. This judgement is correct ..." (The defence lawyer Braxén in The Terrorists, Ch 24).

So I've also read the final novel in the series, Terroristerna (The Terrorists) (1975). I was in Spain, not far from where they wrote it, which was in a rented bungalow in Malaga. Per Wahlöö did most of the writing, and Sjöwall tidied it up. He was terribly ill (he died of a morphine overdose soon afterwards). I think this background shows through. The social critiques are fierce, sometimes with the lucid encapsulation of a last testament; some of the writing, for instance about the ways of the murdered porn king Walter Petrus, couldn't be more concise and conclusive. But there are shortcomings too. ULAG, the novel's terrorist organisation, doesn't make much sense; and maybe that's why its agents aren't credible characters, they're just instruments (of the organisation, sure, but also of the novel). Some of the assaults on everything Swedish, no matter how trivial (the weather, the airport, Malmö), feel like reheated patter from other and lesser writers. A killer who quotes Elmer Diktonius ... ; that's a weary mainstream recipe for spicing things up with a bit of second-hand culture. The Terrorists is maybe a good place too to reflect on the limitations of this social analysis, for instance when it came to media and technology, never mind postcolonial exploitation or environmental ruin. Easy to say from half a century later, maybe.