April 2007 Archives

'There is a relationship between the gamut of sounds and the spectrum of colors. Long study has brought me to the conclusion that white must correspond to do, blue to re, pink to mi, black to fa, green to sol. When the relationships between colors and sounds have been found, music may be translated into landscapes and portraits by replacing the colors, and by marking the halftones with sharps and flats.'

'Ernest Cabaner, barman, bohemian musician, and Arthur Rimbaud's piano teacher, mid-nineteenth century Paris; Pierre Petitfuls, Rimbaud, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1987.

'This language will be of the soul and for the soul, embracing everything, scents, sounds, colors, thought catching thought and pulling.'

'Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Dem'ny, 1871.

'SIR EPICURE MAMMON: This night, I'll change
All that is metal, in my house, to gold:
And, early in the morning, will I send
To all the plumbers and the pewterers,
and buy their tin and lead up; and to Lothbury
For all the copper.

PERTINAX SURLY: What, and turn that too'

SIR EPICURE MAMMON: Yes, and I'll purchase Devonshire, and Cornwall,
And make them perfect Indies!'

'Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1610.

'SIR EPICURE MAMMON: How now!
Do we succeed' Is our day come' and holds it'

FACE: The evening will set red upon you sir;
You have colour for it, crimson: the red ferment
Has done his office; three hours hence prepare you
to see projection. . . .

I have blown, sir,
Hard for your worship; thrown by many a coal,
When 'twas not beech; weigh'd those I put in, just,
To keep your heat still even; these blear'd eyes
Have wak'd to read your several colours, sir,
Of the pale citron, the green lion, the crow,
The peacock's tail, the plumed swan.

SIR EPICURE MAMMON: And lastly,
Thou has descry'd the flower, the sanguis agni'

FACE: Yes, sir.'

'Ben Jonson, The Alchemist, 1610.

'He sat there in silence, without moving a muscle.

Then something very odd began to happen to Noboru Wataya's face. Little by little, it started to turn red. But it did this in the strangest way. Certain patches turned a deep red, while others reddened only slightly, and the rest appeared to have become weirdly pale. This made me think of an autumn wood of blotchy colors where deciduous and evergreen trees grew in a chaotic mix.'

'Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

'The man had on a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie, all of the same degree of cheapness, and all worn out to the same degree. The color of the suit was reminiscent of an amateur paint job on an old jalopy. The deep wrinkles in the pants and jacket looked as permanent as valleys in an aerial photograph. The white shirt had taken on a yellow tinge, and one button on the chest was ready to fall off. It also looked one or two sizes too small, with its top button open and the collar crooked. The tie, with its strange pattern of ill-formed ectoplasm, looked as if it had been left in place since the days of the Osmond Brothers. Anyone looking at him would have seen immediately that this was a man who paid absolutely no attention to the phenomenon of clothing.'

'Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

'The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to Asian influenza.'

'Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Fates Worse than Death, 1991.

I am finding this to be true. For years, maybe even decades, I have been envisioning a film, a movie, that I might one day make. It's not as odd an idea as you might think: I do have an undergraduate degree in Radio, Television and Motion Pictures, from the University of North Carolina!

But at this point in my life (I recently turned 49) the movie does not seem to be as inevitable as it once was. So, I am turning it into a novel, the comic science-fiction novel I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. There are some great advantages to the novel format. For instance, to conjure up my friend Chuck's fantasy of a room papered entirely with the classic Herb Albert album cover Whipped Cream And Other Delights in a FILM, a room would have to be covered with Whipped Cream And Other Delights albums, and this would required great effort and expense. Over the last decade or so I have only collected about 20 copies of this record at thrift stores and yard sales . . . so it would have to be a special effects job, and you can see that the situation is now sprawling out of control. But, in writing a novel, all I have to do is put a few words in the right order. Easy peasy! Easy as pie.

But, to get back to Kurt Vonnegut's point, the thought process that takes place behind a movie or a novel is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT! I am in the process of reconsidering my whole story, with alien concepts like "character" and "motivation" in mind. It's another world, it's taking a while, it might take all summer, but at least now it's within my budget.

You know what they used to say about staring directly at the sun' Well, now we can! NASA has taken pictures of OUR STAR with its Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory satellites, acronymically known as STEREO (I am not making this up), and these pics are now available online. Just get out your red and cyan 3-D glasses, and click here.

'I pulled up my feet, bent my knees, and rested my chin on my hand. Then I closed my eyes. . . . The darkness behind my closed eyelids was like the cloud-covered sky, but the gray was somewhat deeper. Every few minutes, someone would come and paint over the gray with a different-textured gray'one with a touch of gold or green or red. I was impressed with the variety of grays that existed. Human beings were so strange. All you had to do was sit still for ten minutes, and you could see this amazing variety of grays.'

'Haruki Murakami, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, translated by Jay Rubin, 1997.

'I thought it best . . . to throw out two five-pound pieces of ballast. . . . In a few seconds after my leaving the cloud, a flash of vivid lightning shot from one end of it to the other, and caused it to kindle up, throughout its vast extent, like a mass of ignited and glowing charcoal. This, it must be remembered, was in the broad light of day. No fancy may picture the sublimity which might have been exhibited by a similar phenomenon taking place amid the darkness of the night. Hell itself might have been found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it were, and stalk about in the strange vaulted halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of the hideous and unfathomable fire. I had indeed made a narrow escape.'

'Edgar Allen Poe, The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall, 1840.

'Alchemy is the science the object of which is the production of the philosopher's stone, or the philosopher's gold. . . .

There are seven stages, or processes, in the production of gold: calcination, putrefaction, solution, distillation, sublimation, conjunction and finally fixation. They produce, during the processes, and in their correct progression, the various colours which are proof that the experiment is proceeding satisfactorily. There are three main colours. First the black'the indication of dissolution and putrefaction'and when it appears it is a sign that the experiment is going well, that the calcination has had its proper effect of breaking down the various substances. Next comes the white, the colour of purification; and the third is the red, the colour of complete success. There are intermediary colours as well, passing through all the shades of the rainbow. Grey is the passage from black to white, yellow from wihte to red. Sometimes the gold is not produced even when the red appears, then . . . it moves on to green, remains there for a time and turns blue. Care must be taken at this point that it does not return to black, for then the process would have to be begun all over again. If success comes then the gold should appear after the blue, grains of philosopher's gold. Sometimes the gold is in grains, but sometimes in liquid form, aurum potabile it is called, the elixir of long life. The whole process is sometimes described as the four ages, or the four seasons.'

'Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, 1961.

A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue : vowels,
I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel smells,

Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;

O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!

'Arthur Rimabuad, Vowels (Voyelles), 1871, translated by Oliver Bernard, 1962.

'It will be seen that in the poem [Voyelles], Rimbaud suggests that the poet is a practiser of alchemy, and 'A', the colour of black, evokes the images of dissolution and putrefaction. In alchemy one of the symbols for the white colour is the letter 'E', and also the word 'vapeur'; and the images which the poet links to the vowel 'I' are amongst those . . . to designate the alchemical experiment which has reached the stage of the red colour. Green is the colour of Venus, and she was born of the sea. . . . Finally, last of all, comes the blue, the suspense before the gold appears, the sound of the trumpet announcing victory. In alchemy the final achievement of the gold is often taken as a symbol of attaining the vision of God.'

'Enid Starkie, Arthur Rimbaud, 1961.

'Sometimes I see in the sky endless beaches covered with white joyous nations. A huge golden vessel, above me, waves its multicolored flags in the morning wind. I have created all celebrations, all triumphs, all dramas. I have tried to invent new flowers, new stars, new flesh, new tongues.'

'Arthur Rimbaud; Pierre Petitfils, Rimbaud, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1987.

'He [Arthur Rimbaud] had brown hair, and blue eyes, of a double blue, the areas of which, deeper or lighter, expanded or merged together at moments of reverie, or intense thought: when he was thinking, when he was staring into the unknown, he carried his mental gaze very far, his eyelids moved closer, like a cat's, the long silky lashes fluttered slightly, while his head remained still.'

'Ernest Delahay; Pierre Petitfils, Rimbaud, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1987.

Click here for the startling truth, if you think you can handle it.

'Individual tulip bulbs fetched higher and higher prices in the seventeenth century, setting off the frenzy known as tulip mania. . . .

The speculation was fed by a random, and poorly understood, element to the flower's coloration. . . . [S]ome tulips had a tendency to 'break''to emerge with wild, flaming white or yellow streaks across the petals. The broken flowers were highly sought after, but no one knew what caused the flamboyant patterns. . . .

At the time, no once could have guessed that the true cause was a virus. In fact, it was not until the early twentieth century that the tulip breaking virus, also called tulip mosaic virus, was finally identified. The virus is spread by aphids and works by inhibiting the amount of anthocyanin . . . that is stored in the vacuoles of each cell. When that pigment isn't present, the ordinary white or yellow surface of the petal shows through, creating streaks of white or yellow against a jewel-colored background.'

'Amy Stewart, Flower Confidential, 2007.

'It was the height of French fashion around 1610 for a woman to wear a tulip the way she might wear a jewel.'

'Amy Stewart, Flower Confidential, 2007.

'The quest for a blue rose is nothing new. The mere fact that it doesn't exist, that it can't exist in nature, seems to inspire all kinds of ludicrous attempts to force it into being. Roses are utterly lacking in delphinidin, the pigment that produces blue petal colors. No amount of crossbreeding can change that.'

'Amy Stewart, Flower Confidential, 2007.

'They did the boogie real slow
With the blue lights way down low'

'Jessie Mae Robinson, Blue Light Boogie, 1950.

If you're curious, if you like startling images, click here to see a great collection of rare cloud formations.

'His eyes were abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. The pupils, too, upon any accession or diminution of light, underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun; yet their ordinary condition was so totally vapid, filmy, and dull as to convey the idea of the eyes of a long-interred corpse.'

'Edgar Allen Poe, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains.

'Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch'as distinct too, yet as intimately blended.'

'Edgar Allen Poe, Berenice.

'If you have attended the free lectures at the College of Misery, for a short time even, and have paid attention to what you have seen with your own eyes and heard with your own ears, you will reap a firm faith and learn more than you can express in words. He that hath eyes to see, let him see.'

'Vincent Van Gogh, July 1880.

'Color gives joy, it can also drive a person crazy. It can heal, in the polychromatic hospital. It is a formidable raw material, as indispensable to life as water or fire. . . . It can be dosed . . . in infinite degrees, beginning with the nuance and ending with the explosion.'

'Fernand L'ger, Painting and Reality, Transition, no. 25, 1936.

The daily special.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Chili.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Porter house steak.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Ketchup.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Mixed ice cream.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Salt.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

With powdered sugar.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Eggs fried on one side.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Sunny side up, fried eggs.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Egg.

'www.wordorigins.org, Diner Slang.

Vanilla milkshake.

'www.hamiltonbeach.com, Soda Jerk Jargon.

A chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream.

'Soda jerk jargon, early 20th century; Marilyn Powell, Ice Cream: The Delicious History, 2006.

A chocolate ice-cream cone.

'Soda jerk jargon, early 20th century; Marilyn Powell, Ice Cream: The Delicious History, 2006.

The boss is on his way.

'Soda jerk jargon, early 20th century; Marilyn Powell, Ice Cream: The Delicious History, 2006.

'According to The Handy Weather Answer Book, snow that falls at a temperature near feezing is denser than snow that falls at a higher temperature, and, when it's extremely cold and the sky is clear, ice crystals may condense and fall as what is known as diamond dust.'

'Marilyn Powell, Ice Cream: The Delicious History, 2006.

'The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves.'

'Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

''There is a red carnation in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many-petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stiff with silver-tinted leaves'a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.''

'Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

''Look how the light becomes richer, second by second, and bloom and ripeness lie everywhere; and our eyes, as they range round this room with all its tables, seem to push through curtains of colour, red, orange, umber and queer ambiguous tints, which yield like veils and close behind them, and one thing melts into another.''

'Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

'The afternoon sun warmed the fields, poured blue into the shadows and reddened the corn.'

'Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

'So here's to the golden moon
And here's to the silver sea
But most of all a toast to you and me'

'Don Ho, Tiny Bubbles, 1967.

''When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook'a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come 'Butterfly powder.' If, in my novel, I describe the sun on my window-sill, I shall look under B and find butterfly powder. That will be useful.''

'Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

''My eyes are hard. Jinny's eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda's are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. Yours grow full and brim and never break.''

'Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

''Those are white words,' said Susan, 'like stones one picks up by the seashore.''

'Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

Orange juice is actually yellow. Discuss.

Tipping ain't no city in China, denial is not just a river in Egypt, hedging does not always involve bushes, and projection can occur outside of a movie theater.

Starr Glazer jumps her Simple Seven off the road, a difficult skip at night, and then pedals up to the top of the levee. The path is smooth here, lit by a sky streaked with orange clouds, reflecting the myriad light of the chemical plants across the river. She looks to her left and takes in the view. From this distance, at night, the massive zig-zagging assemblages, dotted with silver and gold lights, look like cosmic tinker-toys, and like spiralling chromosomes as they glitter across the shifting black water.

She rounds the bend to the right, and glides toward a steaming pot of Green Dragon, the best white tea at The Beige Fez, West Baton Rouge's finest tiki-bar.

I am pretending to be famous enough to call this booklet 'Paul Dean's Stereobook.' Hah! . . . I just finished photoshopping the front cover and a few spreads from this, the second edition of Stereobook, and thought I'd post them for you. The publisher, The Barefoot Press of Raleigh NC, recently sent me two cases of this vintage chestnut, and so it will soon be available online for purchase at papershrine.com. Not IMMEDIATELY, not right now, not QUITE yet . . . but soon.

Today's sad news of passing is of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Kurt Funnygut as my father calls him. The obituaries are out on the net.

So it goes.

Did you know that his first wife and their two daughters are born-again Christians' How did that marriage not work out'

'The thing is this.

That of the all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best'I'm sure it is the most religious'for I begin with writing the first sentence'and trusting to Almighty God for the second.'

'Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, vol 8, 1765.

In re: the previous post:

Welcome to my comic science fiction novel. Whoa-ah-ha-ha-ha-ha!

I finished editing my Color Quotes last week, over LSU's spring break. Now I have days that, even with my classes, yawn with spare hours. What to do' I figure I'll just spill my debut novel out onto the internet and see what happens.

Is it not funny, my comic science fiction novel' Franz Kafka thought his novels were hilarious, and would laugh while reading selections aloud to his horrified friends. But I understand. Funny is that which makes you laugh. If you haven't laughed yet, then check back. Maybe you'll laugh later.

Revolutions. What a laugh.

The first psychedelic song, the birth of the genre, was the last song on the Beatles' album Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows. Now, THAT was a revolution.

One chord. ONE chord! And yet the permutations of that chord, of that sound, seemed infinite. Loop the track and you might not notice the segue for days.

That was 1967, so now it's, what, 58 years later and nothing, NOTHING, has matched that one song. What happened' Where, and wither, went the revolution' It was all on the flip side of Revolver, the back of the black and white album cover with the band a chiaroscuro silhouette, as black as the vinyl. The fab four posing by a grand piano, serious artists now, in black silhouette. Ringo's hilarious and gear horizontally-striped sunglasses. All the possiblity in the world, right there in black and white.

The vinyl spiral runs counterclockwise, but the turntable spins clockwise. And the sound swells up from the black spinning disk. It's all black and morbid and final now, the Beatles all dead, all except Pete Best, a TV star now, but the first pyschedelic song is still alive, rising from the black depths, still calling: turn off your mind, relax and float downstream.

Downstream.

Star eyes
When if ever, will your heart know
That it's you for whom these eyes glow'

'Don Raye & Gene De Paul, Star Eyes, 1943.

Just when I think I'm
Free as a dove
Old devil moon
Deep in your eyes
Blinds me with love

'E.Y. Harburg & B. Lane, Old Devil Moon, 1947.

'In the 1980s zoologists became aware that many amphibians around the world, principally frogs but also salamanders, were in steep decline. . . . The golden toad of Costa Rica (Bufo periglenes) population . . . plummeted. Its color was spectacular: males in the breeding season looked as though they had been dipped whole in orange Day-Glo paint. . . . In the spring of 1987 hundred of thousands of breeding toads made their annual appearance on schedule in the only place the species occurred. . . . The following year a team . . . could find only five individuals. No golden toad has been seen since, and the species is presumed extinct.'

'Edward O. Wilson, The Future Of Life, 2002.

'At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly onto a pasture dotted here and there with black and white cows and sloping down, tier after tier, to a broad orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond.'

'Flannery O'Connor, The River, A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories, 1955.

'With his red and blue pencil the blue-eyed, red-faced official made little crosses here and there on the papers, showing Krug where to sign.'

'Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.

'. . . when Krug mentioned once that the word 'loyalty' phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk, Maximov replied somewhat stiffly that to him loyalty was limited to its dictionary denotation.'

'Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.

I've been obsessively collecting these color quotes for about three years, and it's almost time to stop. I am editing these into chapters that I am categorizing by hue, etcetera, and the process is nearly complete.

I'll self-publish it if I have to, such things can be done these days, but it only counts as credit in academia if someone else publishes it. This is 'peer review.' So I'm about to begin my search for a publisher, someone who will take these color quotes off my hands and then make us both famous. I personally think this book could be very big.

Does anyone know a publisher, or a book agent' I am seriously looking. I think I want a book agent. Are they anything like secret agents' Do they just show up at your door'

'The cat was asleep in the stuffy room of the President's daughter who was dreaming of not being able to find a certain pot of apple jelly which she knew was a ship she had once seen in Bervok and a sailor was leaning and spitting overboard, watching his spit fall, fall, fall, into the apple jelly of the heart-rending sea for her dream was shot with golden-yellow, as she had not put out the lamp, wishing to keep awake until her old father's guests had gone.'

'Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.

'It is all inky black with a pale blue inky sky''runs blue, writes black' as that ink bottle said, but it did not, nor does the sky, but the trees do with their trillions of twigs.'

'Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.

'Toward the end of the afternoon, a mauve mist veils the avenues so that you do not know where they end, and the unexpected discovery of a wild hyacinth, with its three slender bells of artless blue swaying in the wind, has all the charm of a stolen joy.'

'Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

'The thin rain, falling past the square of my lighted window, looks like damp, finely-sifted flour, white against the black background of the road.'

'Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

'His hair and his eyebrows and lashes are as black as the devil, and it needed a very bright ray of sunshine one day to show me that, beneath all that black, my admirer's eyes are a tawny brown, and very deep set.'

'Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.

'Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.'

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

'He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with widespread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of the centuries had skated.'

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

'When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, Jos' Arcadio Buendia ventured a murmur:

'It's the largest diamond in the world.'

'No,' the gypsy countered. 'It's ice.''

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

'On Saturday night, Jos' Arcadio wrapped a red cloth around his head and left with the gypsies.'

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

'In the meantime . . . the candy animals made in the house were still being sold in the town. Children and adults sucked with delight on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite pink fish of insomnia, and the tender yellow ponies of insomnia, so that dawn on Monday found the whole town awake.'

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

'The new house, white, like a dove, was inaugurated with a dance.'

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

'With her terrible practical sense she could not understand the colonel's business as he exchanged little fishes for gold coins and then converted the coins into little fishes, and so on, with the result that he had to work all the harder with the more he sold in order to satisfy an exasperating vicious circle.'

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

'One morning she saw that the red ants had left the undermined foundations, crossed the garden, climbed up the railing, where the begonias had taken on an earthen color, and had penetrated into the heart of the house.'

'Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.

A new collage by Paul Dean. The overall structure of this 30" diameter piece is a frontal view of a brilliant cut (88 facet) diamond. Cutting an actual diamond in this manner is known as 'brillianteering.' Cutting paper and gluing it down is known as 'collage.' Posting these thoughts online is known as 'blogging.'