CBR9 #11: Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

I'm not exactly sure how Rupi Kaur became such a publicly praised and well-known poet, but the first time I read anything of hers was just a snippet on Instagram – which incidentally is what brought on the backlash. How dare this millennial poet use a millennial mode of social interaction to publicize her millennial words? The word instapoets may be descriptive – "young poets publishing verse primarily on social media," says that Guardian article I linked to – but it also sounds so dismissive, so much like a verbal slight created by a person who is bitter that someone younger than him/her has been brought into prominence.

So the piece I saw on Instagram many months ago was selfish, and it is actually in this collection of poems, Milk and Honey. I would hardly call it a poem; it's written almost like an essay:

i will tell you about selfish people. even when they know they will hurt you they walk into your life to taste you because you are the type of being they don't want to miss out on. you are too much shine to not be felt. so when they have gotten a good look at everything you have to offer. when they have taken your skin your hair your secrets with them. when they realize how real this is. how much of a storm you are and it hits them.  

that is when the corwardice sets in. that is when the person you thought they were is replaced by the sad reality of what they are. that is when they lose every fighting bone in their body and leave after saying you will find better than me. 

I read this during a particularly tumultuous time in my last relationship, which imploded about a month later. But I knew right then, when I read this, that I recognized something in it in us.

We can mock Kaur's poems for being simplistic, for having those line breaks in the middle of hyper-emotive sentences. But the truth is that much of what she is writing about is that it is universal, and that's why it resonates with the Instagram crowd. I mean, this next poem pretty much captures my feelings three months after I read selfish and a month after my break-up:

you leave
but you don't stay gone
why do you do that
why do you
abandon the thing you want to keep
why do you linger
in a place you do not want to stay
why do you think it's okay to do both
go and return all at once

and this, relevant six months after the break-up:

people go
but how
they left
always stays

or this, which basically describes my emotional make-up of this year:

i don't know what living a balanced life feels like
when i am sad
i don't cry i pour
when i am happy
i don't smile i glow
when i am angry
i don't yell i burn

Is it so terrible to have poetry that strikes you straight in the heart? Even if it was made famous by millennials sharing it on Instagram? Is it a crime to identify with something so universal?

I don't think so. If anything, I think this has opened me up to giving poetry more of a chance. I have a short attention span for poetry, but after reading this and Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth earlier this year, this makes me a bit more eager to give this genre a shot.

CBR9 #9: We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I started reading this essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie many months ago, when I felt inspired to download it. It is very simply written as it was originally a TED talk delivered by the author. She gave very clear examples, with some humor and snark, on why it is absolutely silly to deny women equal rights to exist in the world they inhabit.

Halfway through, I stopped, and didn’t pick it up until last week. While much of the “rah rah feminism” sentiment still resonated, I couldn’t help but feel like her essay was structured in a very black-and-white manner. What I mean is that it was written to preach to the choir, and anyone reading it would likely already consider themselves a feminist. What’s more, the feminism that she explores is so basic, somewhat akin to how a student might approach addition and subtraction before being able to move on to physics.

Blame my niggling unease on the post-Weinstein consciousness that we are now seeped in. Now that the media is talking about the nuanced ways in which being a female can be considered dangerous in the workplace – whether if its due to sexual or gendered discrimination – simply stating “I am a feminist” doesn’t feel quite enough. In fact, in some cases, it might even feel fake and performative, like how certain men in Hollywood are saying that they had no idea about Weinstein (or Brett Ratner, or Charlie Rose, or [insert-prominent-male-figure-here) even though it should be clear by the coverage that the level of sexual harassment and abuse happening was an open industry secret.

Reading this now, what particularly strikes me is how little room for nuance Adichie has for how one should express their strength or feminism – an odd revelation considering that Americanah was one of the most nuanced depictions of race and societal’s perception of it that I’ve read.

For example, I find a lot of her notions of masculinity and femininity to be troubling. She said that when she gave a lecture once, she wish she had dressed more feminine instead of opting for a more masculine suit, because she felt that by wearing the suit, it was a way for her to try and be taken more seriously instead of being true to herself. I found that anecdote to be revealing of what she thinks of women who dress in “masculine” ways, or who engage in “masculine” acts. Does she mean that a women dressed in a feminine manner should be taken more seriously as she is being true to her feminine self – whatever that word means nowadays – and that we as women should adhere to a feminine way of dressing?

If I may be stuck on the fashion choices bit for a while, I also just find it troubling to ascribe fashion under definitions of masculine and feminine, especially in a world where Rihanna exists (She can wear a “masculine” or “feminine” garbage bag, and it would just be amazing because she’s Riri.) And tack on the troubling things she has said in the past (after this essay was published) about trans people and their experiences as women, I now also get the sense that she thinks the “feminine” experience is something that has qualities that *she * deems feminine.

In short, I find her description of strength and asserting your “feminine” self to be told in as binary a way as… say perhaps how chauvinists might see women’s role in society. Her point of view of the female experience – at least as I read it in this essay – appears to be as stringent and culture-based as the very society she accuses of engaging in gender discrimination.

It also really bothered me at the end when she said that her brother was the best feminist. It rubs me the wrong way, because it reminds me of how men nowadays would have performative feminist declarations (Obvious: “Women should have the right to choose what to do with their bodies.”), yet still engage in subtle acts that show their gender bias (Not so obvious: “She is always bitching about how the boss doesn’t like her because she’s a woman; she’s just being overly sensitive.”).

All of us have been raised in a patriarchy, so of course our point of view might be skewed, even women. But to say that the best feminist she knows is her brother feels odd – like she’s discounting any possible feminist role models she might have. She’s so eager to prove that her brother is one of the good ones, that men could – gasp! – be feminists that she somehow has forgotten to mention the female figures in her life and her education that might have shaped her feminist point of views. Some guy who’s supportive of his sister is the best feminist, whereas all the other women in her life don’t get nary a mention. It’s like propping him up for doing the bare minimum, being a not shitty brother. If that’s feminism, then it sounds an awful lot still like subscribing to the patriarchy. 

CBR7 #3 and #4: Shift and Dust by Hugh Howey

I should say that I have let way too much time lapse since I read both these books. Coming off my high on Wool, the first of a three-part series by Hugh Howey, I was very eager to get into the other two and bought them both pretty much immediately. My memory on some of the details are spotty, but I'll try to keep this about my feelings regarding the two books. (Possible spoilers ahead for people who haven't read Wool. In which case, you should totally read it because I loved that book.)

Shift Omnibus

Shift is separated into three sections, and it begins in the not-so-distant future, where reality is still somewhat recognizable to our present. We meet Donald, a young newbie congressman who gets roped into designing a giant structure for Senator Thurman. The project is strictly off-the-books, and Donald only gets enlisted because the senator trusts him due to their history (he used to date Sen. Thurman's daughter, Anna) and trusts his background in architecture. Obviously, from reading Wool, we know that what Donald is actually designing is the silo, but he doesn't yet know exactly what it's for, and is clueless about how it would affect his future.

There is a sense of political expediency in this first part -- do what you're told and don't question too much about it or it will make your life difficult. The problem with this concept, which we can see in real life as well, is that we tend to carry out the ideas of those in power without fully seeing the consequences. Donald's involvement in the project, and his inability -- or, really, perhaps his obstinate refusal -- to see past just the drawing board where he designed the silo, is tantamount to the survival of human kind. Yet he does not ask Thurman exactly what it's for, does not question the high level of secrecy, and plays along with keeping others in the dark for Thurman.

When his world finally ends, morphing into the world that we saw in Wool, he is enlisted to "maintain order." Like the rest of the crew in Silo 1 who is woken up to work six-month shifts, Donald is given pills to suppress his old memories, to keep him dull and unquestioning. The other two sections chronicle each time he is woken up to take on a new shift, jolting him up into a grey reality that seems unchanging and surreal. We also get to revisit other characters that we knew in Wool, which I found a welcome call-back, a nice reminder that they are all part of this same world even though we are exploring a different element of it. .

Donald's struggle with his memories and understanding why the silos exist in this new world was somewhat reminiscent to my reading of the young adult dystopia novel, The Giver (another brilliant book that absolutely needs to be read.) He's reaching for enlightenment, for better clarity on why Thurman did what he did, for better direction on how to keep each silos "alive," but he does not understand his place in this whole new world. Nobody in Silo 1 really feels -- all are too numbed by the drugs and the unending mundanity of having to wait up every couple years for a six-month shift -- and Donald fights beneath the surface of trying to keep his feelings and memories at bay for his contribution to this world, and the betrayal of his mentor.

This book is extremely well-written. It really, really is. It's dark and depressing -- there are moments when Donald contemplates, and attempts to carry out, suicide, and you get the hopelessness that he feels. I've read some other reviews online that said Shift Omnibus is slow, but I personally disagree. I liked the slow burn of dread throughout, of a man who is rendered almost unrecognisable by the end of the book. I enjoyed the existential crisis of a human who should not be a part of this new reality, who knew and wanted none of it, and yet is instrumental in keeping it afloat.

Dust

We come back to Juliette, our awesome badass heroine from Wool and part of Shift. Turns out she spends most of her days fighting with Donald over in Silo 1, who is trying to convince her that he's on her side, while carrying out her duties as mayor of 18. She and Lukas have embarked on a relationship, and she's also trying to use a massive digger to tunnel her way to Silo 17 so that Solo and the children there can join their Silo.

Meanwhile, over at Silo 1, Donald and his pilot-fighter sister are trying to figure the end-game of this whole silos underground reality, and how to get out of it. The glimpse of green and blue -- colours that have never been seen in their current world -- is the tantalizing thread of hope that keeps them working to get to there. But they are in a race against time as Donald is slowly dying from being exposed to the outside air in Shift Omnibus.

So I mentioned in my above review how politicians, and people in general, tend to follow orders from up-high without questioning the reasons and its consequences, and how that can often lead to outcomes that one does not want but is immutably a part of? I saw the exact opposite here happen with Juliette's character, and to a degree where it just was not smart. Her hatred of Donald -- she does not recognize him to be any different from Bernard or the head of Silo 1 before because of the voice technology that renders everyone's vocals to sound the same -- blinds her to what he is trying to tell her. Lukas is a little bit more receptive to Donald and able to realise that there is truth in what he says. He asks Donald questions about the Books, which contain history about the Old World. But Juliette angrily dismisses everything he says as lies, making it difficult sometimes to side with someone so unwilling see any good in her opponent.

Dust is the conclusion to the trilogy, and it actually leaves some things up for debate. I admire Howey's restraint when it comes to not tying things up neatly. It allows past grievances to remain unresolved, past questions to remain unanswered. That's just how life is -- we don't get to have every answer to every problem, and frankly, I'm not sure if we necessarily want to be cluttered with so much information. In Juliette's world, she is looking forward, charging ahead, unfettered by the worries and restraints that weighed Donald down when he first started as a leader in his role as congressman.

I've kept my reviews vague on purpose. I genuinely want more people to read this and be surprised by it. Be surprised by who you root for, how we change our point of views on certain characters, and how much grey there is in the decisions made by the people who just want to typecast as "good" and "evil." Howey did a brilliant job with the Silo series, and I think I'm due for a reread soon.

I'm reading and reviewing for Pajiba's Cannonball Read 7, so part of this review appears on their website as well. 

CBR6 #10: Wool by Hugh Howey

It's been a long time since I was so thoroughly sucked into a fictional universe of a book as I was with Wool. Honestly, that's what I miss about fantasy, historical fiction and sci-fi books -- while the writing may be good, it is rare that I would feel totally enfolded into the history, the context and the world that an author creates. I think the last time that happened was with the first book of the Chaos Trilogy, The Knife of Never Letting Go.

Hugh Howey does this for me again with Wool, which chronicles an unraveling mystery in post-apocalyptic Earth where the surviving humanity are housed in a silo -- an underground city that extends more than a hundred levels beneath the Earth's surface. He kicks off the book from the perspective of Holston, the sheriff of the silo, who is tortured by the mystery of why his wife decided to kill herself. In this world, uttering the words "I want to go out" is considered so taboo, so treasonous, that a citizen will immediately be exiled according to his wish -- and that is just what Holston's wife did three years prior, leaving her beloved husband in the wake of her death to try and understand the reasons behind her "madness."

And how will they be exiled, you ask? They will sent out of the silo in a space suit, armed only with a piece of wool and a bucket. Their sole punishment is to clean the wide gleaming windows of the silo, the only way the residents, cramped in this subterranean hell, are able to see out into the world. After they are done cleaning, the condemned would go off into the uninhabitable world, now made up of an environment that kills them after a short period of walking. Residents of the silo are able to see the small pile of suits and bodies that make up all the people who have ever been executed.

Holston, as Allison did before him, always wondered why these people, who was treated so poorly and tossed out by their community, would decide to give this gift back to them. Investigating this mystery is what drove Allison mad, and since her exile, Holston has driven himself crazy trying to figure it out.

That's kind of the best part of Wool. It may be a brand new world, it may be post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but we are immediately thrown into the mysteries of how humans work and what makes them tick. Why did my wife kill herself? Why does the condemned, who are essentially dead men walking the minute they are suited out to go Outside, still perform this thankless task for us? Why is Outside such a taboo concept?

And seriously, that's only the first chapter. Holston's investigation of his wife's death sets up the entire book, which is seriously an insane maze of human nature, of how societies function, of historical repeats. The silo is a fascinating place, and I wanted Howey to explore the different levels as much as possible so I really feel like I live there. (Also, I was perplexed as to how they have all this insane technology but couldn't figure out how to create elevators for this place, having to instead resort to physically climbing up and down the steps to get to different levels within the silo. I have an idea why the Powers That Be in the silo relied on a stairs system but it seems absurd to me that nobody else would go, "Yo, I leg 20 flights of stairs a day -- can we get some mechanical systems up in here man?") There is a part of Wool that feels a bit like the movie Snowpiercer, but whatever the comparisons, it really is in a league of its own, and very much Howey's creation.

Go read it. Go. It's on Kindle. It's amazing. I fucking loved it and now that I am finally reviewing it three months after I've read it (*guilty look*) I want to go re-read it.

I'm reading and reviewing for Pajiba's Cannonball Read 6, so part of this review also appears on their website. 

CBRIII #6: Naked Heat by Richard Castle

So I caved and bought the second book that ABC put out for Castle. I got the first book, Heat Wave, a year ago and liked it because the only criteria for enjoying it is that I enjoy Castle the TV show.

I also enjoy Captain Tight Pants.

Naked Heat is pretty much a parallel to the beginning of the third season of Castle. Jameson Rook is being ignored by Nikki Heat and her other detectives because he wrote an article that was overly laudatory of Nikki, and failed to recognize that detective work is a team effort that takes a lot of grunt work. As a result of the article, Nikki has been dealing with the unwanted aspects of celebrity, with people gawking at her when she's trying to investigate a crime.

Celebrity seems to be the theme as the latest murder victim is a Six-Page-style writer that dishes dirt on celebrities. Cassidy Towne is reviled by famous people for her scathing, yet truthful, take downs of them, so Nikki has plenty of suspects on her list when her body turns up in her apartment with signs of having withstood torture. Rook is allowed to ride along on this case again because before Towne was murdered, he was following her to ride an article about the life of a gossip columnist.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town, a second dead body of a truck driver turns up. The team hits a dead end on this case but, as is usually the case with these stories, the two cases are actually connected.

"I aim to misbehave."

On the personal front, Jameson Rook is not winning any fans in the police precinct. Both the Ryan and Esposito characters (no, I'm not going to look up their names in the book because - what's the point? Same people!) are pissed at Rook for revealing personal, sensitive information about them in the article; and Nikki is pissed that Rook had featured her, and her personal life, so prominently. There's a lot of frosty, punn-y exchanges but of course, in the end, Nikki warms up – or should I say, heats up – to him.

"Oh, I'm going to that special hell..."

Though the plot of this book was better than the last one – and I didn't see the ending coming! – I really should stop reading these Castle books. No, seriously, I need to not buy these books anymore just because I like watching the TV show. Because reading a 200-plus-page book where these characters are mimicked is not the same as watching a silly murder/mystery procedural where Nathan Fillion acts like a complete charming doofus. Sure, Castle is fluffy popcorn, but at least I know it only lasts an hour. With these books, I just feel like I could have had a better experience having actors read lines onscreen versus seeing the back-and-forth being performed stiltedly on page. Some serious TV-watching time was wasted, in my opinion. (For instance, I could have rewatched Firefly.)

Verdict? The plot is good (the writing could use some serious editing though); and the reveal is pretty killer (I'll stop, I'll stop). But it would have still been better on TV. Because everything is better with Nathan's cute smile.

"I really am ruggedly handsome!"

Cannonball Read #14: American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Blakspring and Jen K. recommended American Gods to me in my quest for more Gaiman. After reading it, I realized that this book has been reviewed many times by Cannonballers (Pajiba has even previously published a review of it) so I'm not sure if there is much more I can add to it.

The basic premise is that the gods of the old world and the gods of the new world are about to wage a battle, and one man, Shadow, is in for the ride of it. Shadow, a recently convicted gentle giant (I kept thinking that as I read on), was released a couple days early from jail because his wife was killed in a car accident. He is promptly hired by the mysterious Wednesday, who is later revealed to be the Norse god Odin, the All-Father, to just basically be an errand boy. Wednesday is trying to convince all the other old-world gods to join their forces and go to war with the gods of the new world, like the god of Media, or the god of the Internet.

Reading this felt a little like swimming underwater without goggles. I never knew which direction it was going - I was confused whether if this was reality or fantasy, and once I realized it was both, I was confused about the Bigger Picture. There was not much exposition or explanation. I definitely had to read behind the lines of the actual story in order to really understand it, and even then, I'm not sure if I quite get it. It was the story of Shadow that really kept me going. In addition, Gaiman's writing is fantastic. My favorite parts of the book (besides just following Shadow's adventures) were the little sections tucked in between the main story of how the gods are currently living in America.

After reading three books by him (Coraline, Stardust, and this), I still cannot see much similarities in writing except that it is phenomenal. If I had to quibble about this book, I would say that a lot of the events are a little too dream-like and whimsical for me. Hopefully, I will be able to understand it better/get more out of it when I re-read it.

Cannonball Read #13: The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

I picked this up in a bookstore in Singapore because the cover looked interesting, and was immediately drawn in by the beginning. It's just the right kind of compelling and quirky and mysterious (ah-hah!) that I decided, after leaving the bookstore without purchasing it there (English books in Singapore are very expensive), to get it on my Kindle. It was my first impulse buy on my Kindle, and I bought it because I wanted to continue reading it. Unfortunately, the middle-to-the-end-parts of the novel do not mirror its beginnings in awesomeness.

The beginning has Reynie Muldoon taking a series of exams after he spotted an ad in the paper. The ad had read, "Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?" with a phone number. Reynie, being a gifted child who is bored with his studies in the orphanage he lives in, decides to try his luck. The tests were really interesting and clever, and were my favorite parts of the book. Reynie also made some new friends, Sticky and Kate, during the tests, and they all eventually passed them and moved on to meet Mr. Benedict, who wants to send them on a highly dangerous mission. Apparently, children are the best people to send.

The four children (Mr. Benedict randomly introduces a fourth girl named Constance who proves to be very irritable and contrary in nature) are to go under cover into a Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened (L.I.V.E.) where they are to try and learn what the Ultimate Objective is for L.I.V.E's leader, Ledroptha Curtain. Curtain has been sending out subliminal messages through television waves to try and influence the public's thinking, and Benedict wants to know if the subliminal messages will get louder and more aggressive and to what aim. That's why children are the best people to send in as undercover agents: Because they question everything, and their minds are not yet molded to think what society wants them to think.

OK, potential SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER, but this book is like 2 parts Harry Potter (the relationship that Reynie has with his friends is very similar to Harry-Ron-Hermione friendship triangle) and 5 parts Josie and The Pussycats The Movie (guess which parts?) END SPOILER. While reading The Mysterious Benedict Society I kept seeing how much more it could have been. The biggest problem with the story is that Stewart does not think big enough, or even detailed enough for his story to be great. If we think about some of the best, most well-known childrens' books, they were fantastic because the authors were willing to take an idea and just RUN WITH IT. J.K. Rowling created an amazingly detailed world that resembled reality; Philip Pullman boldly transformed metaphorical and allegorical ideas into his book's reality (Crazy Catholics be damned!).

Looking back at those two examples, the books written were clearly fantasy, and The Mysterious Benedict Society seemed to be wavering between reality and fantasy. I kept wishing Stewart would just go crazy and surprise us with something extraordinary, but it never happened. I'm not saying that a children's book has be a fantasy in order for it to be interesting. It's just that some of the ideas (the main conflict in the story, for example) was never properly fleshed out – Mr. Benedict says "SUBLIMINAL MESSAGES!!!" and then we never get a proper explanation of how it works except that the messages are "subliminal." Well, no shit, Sherlock. Stewart tends to gloss over the details of things that could have been used to its full potential, and it's such a pity because instead of aiming for "good," The Mysterious Benedict Society could have been "AWESOME."

All that being said, I will probably read the sequels, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey and The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma. What? I'm a sucker for children's adventure books! And I'm still searching for the next His Dark Materials...

I should name my Kindle...

I'm having a little bit of trouble falling asleep tonight* so I figure I should entertain a request of Blakspring, who asked me about my experience using a Kindle. As I mentioned in my previous post, my uncle and his girlfriend gave it to me as birthday gift, and I was pretty excited about it. The first thing I read on it was Stardust, and one immediate observation was how... the lack of pages really affects my reading experience. It seems an obvious lack ("What? A Kindle doesn't have pages?") but I honestly did not factor that in when I started the first chapter of Stardust.

If you are like me, you anticipate the turning of the page by holding it between your two fingers. I found myself unconsciously doing that and feeling nothing. Instead, when I first started using it, I had to keep looking down at the "Next Page" button before pressing it. It was not an automatic action.

Once I got the hang of it however, I was just clicking through the pages. It's not hard for your brain to get used to and I can see why there might be many converts out there. You can also highlight a passage, or make a note in your reading by using the typing area. Then later, if you want to go back to that passage, you can go to My Notes, and just click through it until you finally get to the passage you crave to remember.

The other fantastically convenient thing is the Kindle shop, which you can access from your "hand-held device." (When I was reading the instruction manual for the Kindle, those words kept reappearing, which I found kinda funny because 10 years ago, a "hand-held device" was a euphemism for the new-fangled cellular phone.) You can subscribe to newspapers and magazines on it. I didn't, but I wondered if there can be colored pictures if I do subscribe to it. As far as I have been able to tell, everything that appears on my Kindle is black-and-white.

This reminds me of something I read, possibly from Jess and Josh (but I'm just going off memory here), about how if The New York Times bought every one of their subscribers a Kindle, and their readers started getting their news electronically transferred to them, the company could save a fortune on not printing millions of copies everyday, and probably avoid all the layoffs and buyouts we see announced in the paper.

If we are fast approaching a time when we would have to seriously consider giving up on certain items for the sake of the environment, I sincerely hope (very selfishly, I must point out) that it will be a long time til newspapers meet their demise. I love the feel of paper in my hands. All that stuff the old-fashions say about feeling more connected to the news/story is true: As stupid as it sounds, the inability to flip through pages to get to a certain part of the book, and instead having to click click click click to that part, makes it harder for me to feel like those words I'm reading – the story that I am absorbing – is something that should be remembered. Imagine clicking through a PDF document to find a certain piece of information. Does that feel like you are reliving your experience of having read that document?

This could all very well be nostalgia speaking. I don't want you to think that I dislike using it – I get really excited when I find a book worthy of purchase on the Kindle. But I have definitely narrowed my Kindle-reading to books that I hope that I would really like (Stardust, Heat Wave) but that I don't really care if I love yet. When I decide that I love those books, I will buy them in book form.

One more super cool thing about the Kindle: Whenever it goes to power save, a portrait of a famous author will appear. So far, I've had Virginia Wolf, Ralph Ellison (he comes on a lot), Jules Verne, Jane Austen, and John Steinbeck. Probably more, but those are the ones that I remember. Steinbeck has only appeared once so far (we can't choose, unfortunately. If we could, I would choose to have Ellison taken off the sleep screen) and I got so excited about him that I didn't want to "wake" it. Maybe I should name my Kindle Cal, just to psychically encourage it to go to the Steinbeck screen saver.

*I am currently reading a novel about a serial killer in New York in the 1800s and it is so, so interesting and keeping me up with its gruesome facts.