"Joy Williams is the best at her business. She's an amazing writer, one sentence to the next and one book to the next, and a consummate artist, entirely unique -- and she has been for the last 30 years." -- William Gass
"Joy Williams is simply a wonder." -- Raymond Carver
"To put it simply, Joy Williams is the most gifted writer of her generation'" -- Harold Brodkey
"One of a kind fiction- there's nothing to compare it to." -- Bret Easton Ellis
"Works of maverick insight and rash and beautiful bursts of language." -- Don DeLillo
_______________
from 'Why I Write'
"The writer doesn't write for the reader. He doesn't write for himself, either. He writes to serve ... something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness -- those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings."
"The good piece of writing startles the reader back into life. This work -- this other, this other thing -- this false life that is even less than the seeming of the lived life, is more than the lived life too."
"Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve -- hopelesly he writes in the hope that he might serve -- not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace that knows us."
Artist Alice Cohen animates and scores a sentence from author Joy Williams' 'Baba Iaga and the Pelican Child'
_________
3 excerpts:
So. You don't believe in a future life.
Then do we have a place for you!
You'd be home now if you lived here, as the old sign promised.
But first a few questions. To determine if you qualify.
What is the difference between being not yet born and having lived
being now dead?
Don't use reason without imagination here.
A hare is the determinative sign defining the concept of being. Say you catch an actual hare of the desert and place a mirror to his nose; you will observe that a moist breath will appear on the glass. The moisture comes from the hare, though there is not a drop of moisture going into him. Does this disprove the axiom "Out of nothing, nothing comes?"
Do you consider the gulf between the material and spiritual worlds only apparent?
Don't worry about catching the hare.
Do you believe that what has been is also now and that what is to be has already been?
The dead have certain obligations. Is one of them to remember us?
Do you find that offensive?
Do you find the dead ridiculous? How about the dead finding the living ridiculous?
Nothing we do is inevitable but everything we do is irreversible. How do you propose to remember that in time?
Which would you prefer to have your life compared to, wind or dust?
Why?
Sorry.
*****
-- Corvus said, "In the house where my grandmother died, the night she died, her refrigerator put on a light in the living room."
-- "How did it do that?"
-- "My father explained it. He said it was the vibration of the refrigerator's motor turning on a loose switch on the lamp."
-- What was it trying to say, I wonder."
-- "My grandmother was so proud of that refrigerator. She'd just bought it."
-- "I think that happens a lot," Alice said. "People buy a new refrigerator and something bad happens."
from The Quick and the Dead
read more from the novel
*
-- She crouched there and they pressed against her, the warmth of night in their coats. She traced the deep horn of fur above their eyes, the hard caskets of their skulls. She smelled the different odors of their skin, felt their black scalloped jaws. They scrubbed the sour folds of her skin with their rough tongues. They unraveled her tangled hair softly with their nails. The air was still and fresh. The only sound was of the animals breathing in the summer night. The animals who were children.
-- Animals like little flowers with only the smallest threads as their roots.
-- Animals like little stars with their past lives flickering.
-- Animals part of one large animal of God, the heart pounding and never breaking.
-- It was summer night. Always it was summer in the womanish, childish, animal houseshape of God.
from The Changeling
*
-- Clem had appeared at the glass door. The woman looked at him with delight and let him in.
-- "This," she said, pointing her bare, slender foot at him, "is a disguise, correct?" She smiled at Clem.
-- "The disguise of a repressed idea," Willie said. He was still pale. He held his arm behind his back as though it embarassed him.
-- "I understand," the woman said. "He probably knows too much to have an actual personality. I like him very much." She unbuckled the weighted belt from around her waist and laid it on the floor. "What were you planning on taking?" she asked Willie.
-- "Nothing."
-- She looked at Liberty. "Why don't you sit down, dear."
-- Liberty sat down.
-- "Is this your husband?"
-- Liberty nodded.
-- "I've marked him now, dear, you know. He'll never forget me."
-- "These marks," Willie said, looking at his arm, "will last a week at the most."
-- She turned her back on them and flexed her muscles.
-- "You're really ripped," Willie said. "Your definition is spectacular."
-- "Why thank you," the woman said. "That's true. I'm peaking today. I like to peak each year on my birthday. It takes about four months. I stick with a basic split system routine. Monday, chest and back; Tuesday, shoulders and biceps; Wednesday, legs and triceps. I train each body part twice a week. At first I was consuming thirty-five hundred calories a day but I gradually decreased that to four hundred. I also lightened the wights one some of my lifts. For example, I've been doing only two hundred pounds in the squat recently."
-- "Today is your birthday?" Liberty asked. She felt disturbingly like the woman's birthday gift, delivered.
-- "Yes it is. I am seventy-five years of age today." She hit a pose, on leg flexed, hands clasped, smiling. Then she bent over and picked Clem up in her arms. She held him for a moment, then put him down again.
-- "He really is extraordinary," she said. "I can lift twice my body weight, but no more. Of course, he's not twice my body weight. He weighs around one forty, I imagine." She picked Clem up again and walked around the room with him. She thrust her arms out straight and held him close against the wall for a moment. It was an unnerving sight.
-- "He's very close to being the shade of the walls, isn't he and the shade of the walls is exactly the color of the inside of of Rothko's forearm. That's the color he always wanted as the backdrop for his paintings, you know. Pale ivory with a slight yellowish cast, the color of Cellutex." She pursed her lips. "It was the crook of his arm where he slashed himself, severing the brachial artery on February twenty-fourth, 1970."
from Breaking and Entering
from 'The Quick and the Dead', based on Joy Williams' novel
_____
Essay
Shifting Things
by Joy Williams
courtesy of Tao Lin
My father is a congregational minister. My grandfather was a minister. My family is Welsh. I grew up, an only child, in Maine. This is not a paragraph from one of my stories. It is a paragraph from my life. My real life.
I was fascinated by the words in the Bible, and the stories. The stories aren’t comforting or sentimental, they’re tremendous and ruthless, and the words—horses and fish, blind men and dead men—all those words meant something other than what they appeared to mean, they were representations of other things, things I could and couldn’t imagine. Water wasn’t water, seeds weren’t seeds. This thrilled me. Everything, as image, was totally something else. There were levels of meanings in images, in sentences, in stories.
*
I wanted to write.
*
The year I went to college I received three copies of Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling for Christmas. It was as though my loved ones were saying—So you want to be a writer! Well, it took this woman seventeen years to write this book which is about the search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It’s pretty much unreadable but it’s supposed to be a work of art. We guess this is how it’s done and it’s by a woman too so... good luck.
*
I wrote to Flannery O’Connor’s mother once. I said I really liked her daughter’s stories and could I have a picture of her. Meaning her daughter, of course. She wrote back and said I sure could not.
*
At the time I didn’t realize what it was, the true nature of the peculiar gift the writer gives the reader.
*
I like the short story as a form. The intensity of it, the swiftness. Assemble the ambulances. Something is going to happen.
*
More can probably be found out about a writer from a single paragraph of work than from any interview or essay. Gertrude Stein said that paragraphs are emotional whereas sentences are not. She also said that the American way of writing was the disembodied way of disconnecting something from anything and anything from something. She suggested that something was always floating above the American paragraph—the well-done American paragraph—something detached from what it said and what it did.
*
Here is a paragraph of mine. Turnupseed lived on the mainland in a little cement block house on land sucked senseless by the phosphate interests. Every time he tried to plant a tree in the queer, floppy soil, it perished. What does that tell you about me? It tells you that I sometimes find safety in the comic, because really there is a pit, a panic beneath everything and the comic is a safety net there to keep from falling further. It swings there kindly and yet it should be removed, really. Don’t count on the net. Fall further.
*
I write out of a sense of guilt. I believe in guilt. There’s not enough guilt around these days for my taste.
*
A woman recently told me that after reading my first novel, State of Grace, she kept dreaming that her house was burning down. I was charmed by this of course. At the same time, I suspected it had been said before about someone else. Words, you know. They’re around. They’ve been used a lot.
*
I don’t dream much. I know this is not a good signifier. Writers are supposed to dream and keep diaries. Woman writers are supposed to, that is. Men don’t have to necessarily. I frequently have nightmares. They take two inarticulatable forms. There are no images in them at all. They are pure fear and dismay, a sense of the tremendous strength of the dark, a sense that I have not done what it was I knew I should have done.
*
What I can conjure up in the daylight hours when I close my eyes tight are the faces of people. They are all totally unique, people I have never seen before or written about, blooming and fading one after another behind my shut lids. I don’t understand it. They come in the bright Florida sunlight. I would prefer them to be in the shape of animals... other things. But they are the faces of people. Strangers, very clear, but without their stories.
*
The writer has to maintain a curious disassociation with the world. The act of writing in itself is a highly self-conscious retreat from the world. I live in beautiful places but I have to stay cooped up in a small, almost dark room if I’m ever going to get anything done. And I have to stay there for hours and hours, day after day, making this thing, setting this created, unreal thing in motion, a story. The literal isn’t interesting, but the literal must be perfectly, surprisingly rendered because the search is always to see things in a new way. That is essential.
*
And then it just seems preposterous. There I am, choosing my words so carefully, trying to build this pure, unanalyzable, transparent, honest thing in this dim room with the shades drawn and out there is the world, indecent, cruel, apathetic, a world where the seas are being trashed, the desert bladed, the wolves shot, the eagles poisoned, where people show up at planning and zoning meetings waving signs that say My Family Can’t Eat the Environment. That sentence is ill, it is a virus of a sentence, and as a writer, I should be able to defeat it and its defenders handily. With the perfect words, I should be able to point out, reasonably, that in fact the individual’s family is eating the environment, that they are consuming it with sprawl and greed and materialistic hungers and turning it into—shit. But perfect words fail me. I don’t want my words. I want to throttle this person, beat him over the head with his stupid sign.
*
I think what happens to many writers is that they reach a certain age and they look around and think, My God, what an indulgence this writing is—stories! I mean, really—and then they go out and involve themselves in a more active way with the world. Writers must never engage the world in their stories. The writer must write stories. Or get out in the world and beat people over the head with their stupid signs.
*
Oh thou lord of life, send my roots rain, Hopkins wrote. Some writers write too much. The rain doesn’t come, but they write still. And they are wilting while pretending they are a tree in bloom. Sometimes the literary establishment encourages them in this belief.
*
I was once at lunch with a well-known writer and his family. It was our first meeting. Other people were there as well. It was a beautiful winter day in Key West. There I was, being friendly, drinking my eleven martinis or what have you, hair brushed as well as possible, napkin in lap, nibbling and chatting away, only to have the well-known writer remark later—“I expected her to be more twisted.”
*
Jean Rhys once said that to be a writer you have to be a demon or a fraud. I don’t feel myself to be particularly demonic and in person I am an absolute fraud. Everything rests on the awareness that a hidden life exists.
*
There’s a lot of flash in the story form these days. A lot of dazzle and dependence upon the net. Houdini said that of all his tricks the most difficult to perform was the wet sheet escape. The wet sheet treatment was used in lunatic asylums to restrain violent patients. It was very difficult to escape from being bound in a wet sheet. But this escape was not popular with the audiences. They wanted him to escape from chains and dead whales and water-filled safes. These things were easier to do than they appeared. A lot of fiction is stagey now—the equivalent of making an elephant disappear—right before your eyes. It’s easy to make an elephant disappear. The farmers of Zimbabwe are doing it every day.
*
The equivalent of the wet sheet escape in fiction, perhaps, would be to create a character who gets out of life having lived it, having truly spectacularly lived it, used it all up. This would have to be done with words of course.
*
The surface of a good story is severely simple. Clean and treacherous as new ice. Below the surface is accident, chaos, uncertainty—beautiful, shifting things. I believe in the mystery of things, their spiritual rhythm. I am not interested in man-woman things much. In-out. Or love. I am interested in loneliness, obsession, desperation. Well, perhaps I am interested in love. I am not interested in woman-woman matters much. Feminist matters. Support and consolation matters. Transformation is what I’m interested in the most. What it is that is beyond and beneath things. Moments, the levels in moments.
*
None of this is what I long to say. I long to say other things. I write stories in my attempt to say them.
_____
Links
1. Joy Williams: Bio & information page
2. Joy Williams interviewed on Bookworm (audio, 2005)
3. Joy Williams interviewed on Bookworm (audio, 1991)
4. 'The Case Against Babies,' an essay by Joy Williams
5. An excerpt from Joy Williams' 'Honored Guest'
6. Joy Williams interviewed in the LA Weekly
-----
*
p.s. Hey. Today's post retrieval is elderly enough that one of the d.l.s in charge is long gone and the other has become a rare guest star-type visitor, but Joy Williams is so great, in my opinion, and she's so rarely written about these days that a resurrection seemed in order. Enjoy it, I hope, and my great thanks to you Gregoryedwin and Morgan if you're out there somewhere. Oh, due to late breaking plans, I most likely will not be able to do a full-fledged p.s. tomorrow because Gisele and others and I are going to Disneyland Paris in the morning on a research mission vis-a-vis the rides there vis-a-vis our upcoming maze piece, 'Last Spring'. I say most likely because the current weather forecast says it's going to rain all day tomorrow, in which case the trip would get delayed. So, there will probably just be a brief hi and post introduction tomorrow, in which case I will catch up with the comments from today and tomorrow on Saturday, but if it's pouring when I wake up, you might just find me here doing my usual. And, oh, for what it's worth, my elderly laptop, which has been on its last legs for months, actually died briefly this morning and, while I somehow managed to revive it, at least temporarily, it's dying and could die at any moment, but hopefully not while I'm doing this p.s., and hopefully not before I have my first opportunity to buy a new one on Saturday. Anyway, be aware that I'm writing this today in a state of nervous anticipation of the bad kind. ** Cap'm, Hey! How cool to see you and, yes, so sad about her. Wow, there's some awesome new stuff on your blog. That new 'A Cock is a Whole World' totally kills, for instance. I'm going to do some serious catching up over there later. Everyone, Cap'm's blog is awesome, and you should go over there, and especially check out 'A Cock is a Whole World' at the top. Kudos, and thanks a lot! ** David Ehrenstein, Oh, I see, that does sound terrific. The Vitello thing, I mean. Yeah, I'll definitely go give that a close listen in a short while. Thanks, David. ** Postitbreakup, I don't know that caring too much was necessarily the problem. I feel like when you come here seeking support, you get a lot of support from me and others here, or as much support as the nature and formatting of the blog can allow. When you come here complaining of imaginary slights and acting competitive, I and others try to explain the actual situation to you as we understand it in hopes of clearing up your misunderstanding and causing you to realize when your worries are baseless and when your behavior in this context seems productive for you or not. That's a form of support too. I wish you could figure out what this blog is and isn't so you can be here without having your insecurities and passive-aggressive side aggravated to the point where these little messes happen and where you choose a solution -- leaving the blog forever -- that allows you to feel sorriest for yourself. If you feel that staying away from here is the best thing for you, then that's that. But you're always welcome here. ** Colin, Hey, C. I love what you said in the Q&A, and I would love a copy. Thank you! Everyone, here's Colin with a great offer, and please listen up: 'If anyone at the blog wants to send anything for the next issue of 'anything anymore anywhere', (or has a manuscript they think might be suitable for a new series of books and chaps we're starting) the appropriate info and address is at the website.' Take care, man. ** Sypha, Hey. Oh, thanks for that, James. I've learned a lot from you about great writers and books I wouldn't have pursued otherwise, believe me. May our mutual influencing long continue. Well, yeah, if dusting off the Kenneth Grant Day is okay and interesting for you, I would love to have it. Thank you a lot for the offer, my friend. ** James, Hey. Oh, I know House of Pies well. My LA apartment is a five minute walk from Skylight. I'm hoping I'll get to do the event at Skylight. It's my favorite bookstore. Just have to wait and see if they're interested, I guess. Oh, 'TMS' should best be read in book form not because of any art in there. There's no art, just words. It's the way the book works conceptually that makes the book form ideal. I don't want to say too much about that, but you'll see what I mean. Thanks for the wishes. You too. I don't think the Wedding is being broadcast live on TV here, so I should be in the clear. ** Math, Only when Robert's last name begins with an M, ha ha. Oh, and dude, got your email. So awesome. Word to the wise in that regard: Next Thursday. Thanks a quadrillion! ** Hyrule Dungeon, Hey, HD. Guitars with bows? What next?! Ha ha. I have never read '1984'. Crazy, right? When I was assigned it back in school, I just read the jacket copy and faked it. Better late than never maybe. No, I have never done a Day on William Kentridge, and I would completely love it if you would do one. He's awesome, and the blog is in sore need of him. Yeah, if you can and don't mind, that would be fantastic! Thanks! ** David, Hi, D. Thanks a lot. ** Michael-karo, Well, greetings, Mr. Karo! Always a joy! Blogger definitely has some weird fetish regarding that cookies thing. I get it on my end half the time too. I don't comprehend it. Oh, baby, gets those pounds outta that thing and bring it on! Didn't know about that Replacements doc. Not even their music? Strange. Hm, I don't know. Let me know. Declassify that secret project when the time's right or slip me the code or something. As for your linked and available project, which is quite charismatic and lonesome by the way, I think I can pass it on. Everyone, d.l. Michael Karo wants me to link you up to this, and I do so happily and mysteriously. Don't eat the yellow snow, man. ** Schoolboyerrors, Hey. That book is firmly ensconced at the top of my hunt. Or ... the front of my hunt, I guess. You get the idea. Wait, you can look out your window and see the childhood home of Ivy Compton Burnett? Wow. Did you choose where you live specifically to be close to it? I would have if I had known where she had been sequestered as a child. I hope you will throw yourself in front of any wrecking ball. Why isn't it a ICB Museum? I guess you probably don't know the answer to that question. Anyway, obviously, you've gotten my brain cells percolating with that view of yours. ** Dusty Rose, Hey. Oh, that sounds really, really interesting, obviously. The multimedia presentation-slash-writing thing. Here's hoping your friend's honeymoon phase is a quick one. I mean, a really nice one, but a quick one. Yeah, exciting stuff, Dusty. I want. ** Oscar B, You're back! You snuck in! There's a flower thing here with your name on it. I'll call when I dot the final 'i' here. Disneyland tomorrow? Interested? Anyway, blah blah, talk to you in just a few. ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, You have stubble? No, I don't believe it. Me too! Stubble can be our Zwan. I have Bicycle cards just like that! Several packs. None complete anymore, I don't think. All in LA. That bread of yours sounds actually kind of great, but not for cinnamon, no. Or for French Toast, although, hm. Maybe to use as insole support inside your shoes? Or with a big giant chunk of cheese in between two slices. Melted cheese. Swiss. Oh, man. ** _Black_Acrylic, No way, it's ours at last? Ladies and Gentlemen and Others, after one of the most nervewracking delays in recorded zine history, the new issue of everyone of any note's favorite zine Yuck 'n' Yum is finally ready to swallow those of us who have no access to the print copy. It contains work by all sorts of magnificent people including the blog's very own OB De Alessi (Oscar B) and Ben Robinson (_Black_Acrylic himself), and all you have to do to either view or download its embarrassment of riches is click this little thing right here, and please do so now in an orderly fashion, thank you. Looks superb at my first glance, man, and I'll give it a thorough going over a bit later on. ** Steevee, Hey. Oh, gosh, the number of clips is up to you, I guess. I don't have a figure in mind. Maybe, if it's okay, could you send me an email with the links when you get it all gathered? That would be the easiest for me in terms of setting up the post. I so appreciate you doing this, and it sounds like it's going to be really killer. Yeah, thanks so much, Steve, and I hope you're feeling by the time you read this. ** Chris Cochrane, Hey. No nibbles? Hm, grr, well, I think we should figure out a conference call opportunity as soon as everyone is available so we can put our heads together again about this. I think we need to keep the momentum going and not let your energies and ambitions wane. ** Misanthrope, I think we need to get Donald Trump to authenticate that letter. I have long fingers? Aw, thanks, man. I think Twink Pube Day is a job for ... you! I like grabbing things, so that sounds like a plan, G. Dude, you're nice. ** Andrew, Hey, man! Well, Bernard has been strangely silent. Perhaps he's shuffling through the deleted scenes in search of worthy extras we speak. They show South Park over here, in French, but I will peel my eyes for that episode anyway. Sounds, you know, yeah. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, Without the Golden Boys, the blog's penis quotient has been reduced by about 90%. I liked how dark the trailer was, and I liked how it didn't seem like it needed to be in 3D, so maybe the 3D is really stylish and, well, French. Post-its are nasty. I use them to write down my shopping lists, and then I attach them carefully to the plastic cover of my passport, and slide it carefully into my pocket, and no matter what I do, when I fish them out at the store, they look like spiders. Nice walk you had. I wish I didn't go to sleep at 11 pm so I could take late night walks. My day: Still spending a lot of time editing and in-putting that interview. It's driving me crazy, but I'm getting there. Originally, I was going to be interviewed for Love Magazine yesterday, but they delayed it until early next week. I was told that I have been shipped some copies of the galley of 'The Marbled Swarm', and I was given a DHL tracking number, so I kept checking it, and right now it's on the delivery truck here in Paris, and I'm nervous that no one is going to be in the Recollets office to accept the package today, because the bosses come and go, because then I'd have to go pick it up at the DHL office, which is really far away, and then carry the box back here on the metro, and the box apparently weighs 18 lbs. Gisele was installing a gallery exhibition of some of the photos from the 'Through Their Tears' part of 'Jerk/TTT', and she wanted me to come give her my opinion on the installation, so I walked to the gallery and did that for about two hours. Her show opens tonight, and I'm going, obviously. She told me we have a big meeting with the curators of the Centre Pompidou today to discuss all of our possible gigs and exhibitions there, so I'm going to do that in a bit. After that, I just did the interview editing thing basically until I got hungry, whereupon I ate, and until Yury came home, whereupon we visited, and until I got sleepy, whereupon I slept. How was your Thursday? ** Frank Jaffe, Hey, Frank! Oh, hm, you know who would be a really good person to give you advice about Otis is Alistair McCartney because he teaches there. Alistair McCartney, are you out there? Frank Jaffe's bf is considering applying to the MFA Creative Writing program at Otis. Any advice or anything you can give him? Thanks, A! From what I know, it's a pretty good program. Some really good writers/ literary types and friends of mine teach there. Benjamin Weissman, Douglas Messerli, Ben Ehrenreich, .... Some great people guest-teach there like Dodie Bellamy, for instance. The location is good, meaning it's really pretty close to the goings on in LA and easy if you have a car. If Alistair sees this and gives his opinion, that would be ideal 'cos I don't really know the school and its quality and stuff intimately. I will see what I can find out for you, though. ** Brendan, Hey, B! One comment a week isn't bad at all. You're a mess? Sorry, man. If I can do anything or ... let me know, okay? I'm so behind on LA trip plans. It's getting scary. But those dates of your show sound pretty right on in terms of me being there unless I'm forced to delay due to money worries and procrastination. Anyway, I have to get my plans in order immediately. Dude, let the dude be excited. Lordy mama. Dude knows real excitement when he finds it, no doubt. Love, me. ** Schlix, That does sound really nice. Walking, rare drunkenness. I haven't been drunk in ... wow. Since I was a child. Not really, ha ha, but it feels like it. Oh, I know Notwist. Hm, yeah, I don't remember being especially thrilled by them, bit it's been a while. Maybe I'll try again, and I will check out Kreidler for better or worse because I don't think I know them at all. You never know. Thanks, Uli! It's great to hear you sounding so content! ** Slatted Light, Hey, dudemeister D. How does that feel? I kind of liked the way the C one felt. You're reading 'TMS', gulp. And so far so good? Phew, very cool. The stuff you're saying about the writing in the first part is totally right on. Awesome. This probably won't surprise you, but I actually spent a ridiculous amount of time debating about whether to a comma in that spot or not, and I ultimately went with not because I think the sliding there is ultimately more fruitful and true to my strategy, but, yeah, I get what you mean. There was a comma there for a long time, and maybe you're right, but, since the book is now locked down and unchangeable, I think I'll try to rely on my final decision even if I can't recall the details of the reasoning behind that decision anymore, oops, ha ha. Anyway, dude, so happy and proud that you're reading it, and your thoughts on it are serious manna for me. Great to see you, man! ** My computer didn't die (yet), which is good. I just got a notice that the package full of 'TMS' galleys is waiting for me downstairs, so I'm super psyched to see it. I hope you enjoy the Joy Williams Day. I probably will just say hi, like I said, tomorrow as far as the p.s. goes, but the sky sure does look impendingly very wet, so we'll see. Bye.
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