The Shaggy-dog Story: A Metaphor for Life

The term shaggy-dog story has come to be associated with a long, meandering narrative, replete with irrelevant or distracting details, ending with an outrageous, groan-producing play on words--my homework ate the dog--or on a totally irrelevant note. In either case, the dramatic point of the shaggy-dog story resides in the unexpected, leading the reader or hearer--because shaggy-dog stories may be oral--in the lurch, at the mercy of the teller.

One of the great glosses on the shaggy-dog story comes from one of the great written and oral story tellers, the man known as Mark Twain. Check out "The Grandfather's Ram" story in Twain's splendid, autobiographical tour of Nevada and California, Roughing It, one of at least four Twain must reads (the others including Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, and Huckleberry Finn.

Ernest Hemingway said all of American literature began with Huck Finn; I'll trump that by saying most of what one needs to know about story telling can be found in these five books.

In "The Grandfather's Ram," Twain writes of his days as a reporter for the Territorial-Enterprise,the free-wheeling Virginia City, Nevada newspaper for which Twain wrote during the early bonanza years of the Comstock Lode. A group of locals had sold Twain on the remarkable tale a certain old gent who loved to tipple was wont to tell of a ram once owned by his grandfather. Trouble was, the locals assured Twain, the teller of the tale had to have reached just the right, reflective state of tipsiness before he would begin to reminisce.

After a number of false starts, the boys assured Twain that the time was now; if he wanted to hear the story, he'd best drop everything and hurry on over to where the teller was holding forth, before a growing audience.

"My grandfather's ram," the old boy recalled with a smile at the memory. "I don't reckon them times will ever come again." And he is off, his brain cells, lubricated with spiritus fermenti, firmly focused. And Twain was hooked.

Trouble was, the old man never referred to the ram again, ranging from gossip in his home town to politics, religious preferences, and a remarkable story of a rug weaver who'd fallen into a machine-driven weaving machine and was woven into a six-ply broadloom carpet, making it necessary to bury him rolled up in long, narrow bundle. The story went on from there until the teller began to nod, then drop off to an early nap. Twain realized this was always the scenario, that the details of the grandfather's ram were largely unknowable, and that he'd been "had" by his friends.

This is not to propose that Twain invented the shaggy-dog story, but he expertly demonstrated it in all its living potential. By this time in his career, he already had an instinctive if not well articulated sense of story, which he later set down in another keeper, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," a critical diatribe against a writer who was the Tom Clancy of his day, embedded in a useful re-embodiment of Aristotle's Poetics.

Life is a shaggy-dog story, a series of often contradictory events or events competing for our attention, ending with some awful howler of a conclusion, or worse, ending with no proper conclusive inertia.

When we turn to memoir or biography or fiction, we look for travel writing--writing that takes us somewhere, a place where the laws of causality and determinism have greater effect than they do in real life. This is a place where justice is done, virtue is often rewarded, patience pays off, the good people get laid on occasion, and women are not reduced to having to marry just to get away from home (only to find themselves transported from one dreadful situation to another).

The message here is not that there is more satisfaction in literature than in everyday life but that the two can and should engage in a dialog, exchange notes, develop a rapport.

One good place to bring this metaphorical pairing of Israel and Palestine together is in the expectations we bring to our lives and to our reading.

All too often when discussing a particular story,we hear the disclaimer: That could never happen in real life. Just as often, when discussing the effect of a story and hearing an observation of disbelief about an element, the author will fiercely defend with the observation, "But it really happened that way." And increasingly, looking at the advertisements for films and TV shows, we see the inducement, "Based on a real story."

One of the Oscars--Wilde or Levant--once observed that in order for history to be effective, it must be rewritten. This observation sets the worm of cynicism into the apple of reality, leaving us with another potent observation. What is worse than finding a worm in an apple? Answer: Finding half a worm in half an apple.

Particularly since 2000 and the advent of the Bush administration (if it can be called an administrative function) we have lived in the midst of a shaggy-dog story, with distractions, myths, and ignorant armies clashing by night. We have found a half-eaten worm in our apple.

We must hasten to rewrite the more egregious histories we have allowed to befall us, using our understanding of story and the need to transport ourselves to a kinder, more civil place.

The Well-Tampered Clavichord

One of my many reasons for favoring the mystery novel resides in the opportunity to identify with an individual working within the constraints of a bureaucracy as he or she pursues the truth regardless of outcome.

The pursuit is multifarious, simultaneously in spite of and against established order, frequently under some time constraint, just as frequently making some discovery that will damage the intent or reputation of someone in power.

Private investigators also intrigue me because they frequently have become private, as, say, Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer became private out of a contempt for the limitations and corruption inherent in bureaucracy.

And of course the man or woman on the street, the innocent victim who is wrongly accused and must in his or her own self-interest, solve the crime, becomes another grand source of identification for me.

Although a fan of justice being done, both in the abstract and the specific, I don't care if the murderer is actually caught as much as I care that the murderer is identified and given some literary equivalent of the scarlet letter to wear. Seeing justice represented in drama satisfied me by reminding me of what could happen in real life, what very well might happen in real life.

Mystery fiction draws me into its labyrinthine and devious pages because of its focus on discovery--discovery of motive, of fact, or information. I read on for the flare-up of awareness that a character is not all he or she seems, that a relationship has some hidden common denominator, that some social or ethical more has been breached and someone is trying to cover it up. I read for the delicious moments in which the suspects of a crime are set scurrying in the fear that the investigation will reveal some misadventure of their own, completely collateral to the investigation in progress.

As I hope you will see of me, I relish this genre not for the sense of dramatic revenge in which the miscreant is punished, because, in fact, I am in addition to being naive, optimistic, and given to think well of my fellow humans, also a bit conflicted in my cynicism, my occasions of bigotry, and my willingness to suspect what I do not understand. I neither sit on nor aspire to the moral high ground, if for no other reason than that position would occlude my greater vision of myself and the humanity of which I am a part.

I relish the mystery because the truly good ones lead me to ask of myself:

What new miracle have you seen today? Where have you looked? What small miracle have you missed in search of the colossal, effulgent beauty? What story might you have missed? What opportunity did you allow to go uninvestigated? What equivalent of the purloined letter has been sitting on your desk all this while? What small pleasure have you missed because you were too busy to look? What question have you left unasked? What sincerely felt complement have you failed to convey to someone who evoked it within you? What crime have you committed upon another today? What crime have you committed upon yourself? What thing did you fear today that you took no step to understand or overcome? What,if anything, has made you feel happy today? What have you done to exercise and hone your craft today? What line did you step over today in the reach of accomplishment? What line held you back? Who are you? What is your motive? What is your opportunity?

Means, motive, and opportunity, are the factors that identify the major suspects in a mystery novel. What do yours say of you at any time?

Where is the mystery in you?

What will you do about it?

May the Farce Be with You

Physicists have been identifying and measuring subatomic particles for some time now, looking for predictable behavior they can catalog with the same detail and certainty Aristotle employed in his examination of drama, narrative, and verse in Poetics.

It is comforting to learn how matter behaves; it is inspiring to predict how animals and people will behave, then achieve some measure of accuracy in our predictions. So far,we have tried a number of diagnostic tools on humans, including religion, political science, and psychology,but these disciplines, while helpful to a degree, leave much to be desired. Just as quantum physicists search for a unified field theory that will provide acceptable answers to any questions, we look for a way to understand ourselves in ways that will help us face existential problems that beset us.

The scientist has had frequent recourse to accelerators, devices that speed particles to unbelievable magnitude, then cause them to collide with one another or with some rough analog of flypaper, on which they become imprisoned and vulnerable to change.

The artist has another approach. In writing, the accelerator is recognized as a poem, a short story, a novel, perhaps even an essay, because essay means a test or trial,, doesn't it? And that begins to sound almost like a hypothesis, which most grant-writing scientists appreciate. If my hypothesis is correct, they say in the application, then we will have learned X, which we dearly need to know, curious species that we are.

In the linear accelerator of story, we take two or more elements known as characters and find ways to speed them up, cause them to collide, then note the results. Sometimes the speeding device is comedy, which is humor in a big hurry. We can make almost anything seem comic if we speed it up. If we enhance the vibratory rate of tragedy, we often get humor, which helps prove out that humor is dramatic in nature because tragedy is much more tragic if the dramatic elements of Poetics are in place.

Farce comes from forcing dramatic events to the point where the reader begins to understand that the people involved in this drama have surrendered any pretense at being taken seriously, but they still think they're at war.

I have spoken of story as being life inside a crucible, which wasn't a bad observation for its time, but life inside a linear accelerator has more of an edge. Understanding the way things work, even human behavior, requires an edge, which means the writer has to apply more then heat to the crucible; the writer needs to force the issue to the point where there is no going back.

When there is no going back, there is is a rush to get the collision out of the way, the victims pulled from the wreckage, and the results cataloged, so that the reader can see that these characters are no different than we who apply the kinds of force to ourselves and others that come from our own unique periodic table of elements, our chemistry, if you will, our valence.

If a reader is not made to anticipate a collision, that reader will go to a place where a significant collision can not only be anticipated, it can be found, the wreckage strewn about the landscape with an energetic and irreverent abandon.

Slipping on One's Inner Banana Peel

We are all of us funny, if not to ourselves, at least to some of the others who see us during the warp and weft of our day.

It helps to have those night-vision glasses that allow us to see ourself as funny. Many of the great humorists of all times had access to such glasses, frequently appearing in public while wearing them.

Humorists are essentially travel writers, moving from place to place, situation to situation, sending dispatches back to the loyal readers at home. When one of them--such as the most recently departed Kurt Vonnegut--dies, we are quick to immortalize them by drawing attention away from their humor and plunking the attention, as though it were a large funeral wreath, at the foot of Seriousness of Purpose.

Humorists are, in fact, deadly serious, as different from comics as night is from day.

Humorists are propelled by a combination of impatience, anger, and morality. Comics tend to be more physical, relying on schtick, Yiddish for gimmick, on punch lines--"That was no lady; that was my masseuer."

Humorists and comics may repeat routines before different audiences, but one quick way to spot the difference between them is that the laughter--if it comes at all--from the comic arrives at the same place in the routine. The humorist's audiences will laugh in different places.


This is, of course, more a dissection than a practical examination, a sense that the subject is dead.

I have learned much of this from a man who in many ways reminds me of the private detective protagonist of the Raymond Chandler mysteries, Philip Marlowe, of whom its creator once wrote:

"...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid...the detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man...he is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks -- that is, with a rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.

The teacher in this case not only invented but supervised as head writer all hundred forty episodes of Laugh-In,an iconic presence on the cusp of American humor and comedy. Digby Wolfe. By degrees angry, impatient, and moral, he is every bit a humorist and his connection with Philip Marlowe profound. The block quote above comes from a piece Raymond Chandler published in The Atlantic Monthly in its November,1945 issue, "The Simple Art of Murder."

In it, Chandler also said:

The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.

Yes, yes; I know: By placing such a weighty metaphorical burden on Wolfe's shoulders, I walk the cusp of inflating the seriousness of the humorist's intent and become in my seriousness a prime target for the humorist's heat-seeking missiles. But it is to me an apt comparison and so I venture it in this public forum, making myself vulnerable.

Vulnerability is another great tool for the humorist and for other artists; vulnerability leaves one open to accountability and to consequences, two things the pompous and self-inflated dare not risk.

Accountability and consequences now, in this early Arpil of 2007, bear heavily on a man in our midst who professes himself as a humorist and, to translate from that impressive-sounding German word, meneschkenner, an understander of the Human Condition. The man is Mr. Don Imus. And there, I have already shot a barb in the service of the universal condition of Humor. Mister Don Imus. How inflated that makes him appear to be, the simple act of calling him by his name and attaching the honorific accorded to many American males over the age of thirteen.

Imus could have gotten away with his most recent trespass over the boundaries of civility and good taste by using only one epithet, either the racial or the gender. He used both and got caught and in the process embarrassed us to the point where we had to speak up. Fortunately, there were those who were offended by each transgression separately, and said, in effect, no more, standing up in protest.

I believe fully in such concepts as apology and the philosophy of immunization against self-incrimination as expressed in the Fifth Amendment to The Constitution of the United States. Mr. Don Imus has as of this date wrapped himself in apology and the equivalent of The Fifth Amendment, I was just trying to make a joke.

Look at the flap John Kerry generated with his bungled joke explanation, a flap paid for not with the financial support of his Swift-Boat detractors but rather with the emotional and intellectual support of those very, dare I say Republican, sources.

Humor means to topple intransigence, self-importance, established rule, hypocrisy. Humor means to soak the shoes of all who attempt to walk on water. Humor means we get to laugh at them because they freaking deserve it.

Raymond Chandler, who once shot a hole in the ceiling of his stall shower while trying to commit suicide, was right sixty-two years ago when he crystallized his observation that the streets are meaner.

The streets of the Moral High Ground, whether they are in Jerusalem, the parking lot of Rev. Rick Warren's purpose-driven church, where purpose-driven BMWs clamor for parking spaces; or W.C. Fields' favorite target, Lompoc, are just as mean as Howard Street south of The Slot in San Francisco or Santee Street in downtown L.A. The humorist recognizes this and reports on it. The social conservative rushes to forgive Mr. Don Imus and sign up to be a guest on his show. The Conservative talk show host, never a standout in mathematics, rushes to construct a formula in which the blame may be attributed to Bill Clinton.

A man's character is his fate.--Heraclitus

What are the qualities in real life that draw us to some individuals and cause us to shun others?

What are the qualities in fiction that draw us to some individuals and bring us even closer to others?

What are the qualities in a biography or history that cause the reader to avidly pursue a narrative he might otherwise have ignored?

These are questions I ask myself with some regularity, hopeful of a useful answer, questions I ask my students, hopeful of useful answers from them, questions of every book I might easily not have picked up in the first place, much less read all the way through.

Was Heraclituson to something way back there, before the Common Era, or was his pronouncement merely a lucky discovery? He was also the one who observed that one could not bathe in the same river twice, or as Ezra Pound put it, "all things are flowing, Sage Heraclitus says..." It begins to add up: Heraclitus had a handle on things--and on us as a species. In a lovely kind of calculus, Heraclitus should get writing credits on that lyric we associate with Frank Sinatra, "I gotta be me," and by extension, some of his buddies, whose song could well have been, "I gotta be Frank."

Characters are agendas and forces, set in motion. You don't have to read very far into Shakespeare's Richard III to find out who he is, what he wants, nor indeed what he is willing to do to get it. In Act I, Scene II, we see him in action, trying to take steps toward that goal, catching some remarkable flack along the way from Lady Anne, on whose husband and father-in-law he has just had a twofer Soprano job performed.

Scene II begins at the funeral, and Lady Anne says:

Set down, set down your honourable load,
If honour may be shrouded in a hearse,
Whilst I awhile obsequiously lament
The untimely fall of virtuous Lancaster.
Poor key-cold figure of a holy king!
Pale ashes of the house of Lancaster!
Thou bloodless remnant of that royal blood!
Be it lawful that I invocate thy ghost,
To hear the lamentations of Poor Anne,
Wife to thy Edward, to thy slaughter'd son,
Stabb'd by the selfsame hand that made these wounds!
Lo, in these windows that let forth thy life,
I pour the helpless balm of my poor eyes.
Cursed be the hand that made these fatal holes!
Cursed be the heart that had the heart to do it!
Cursed the blood that let this blood from hence!
More direful hap betide that hated wretch,
That makes us wretched by the death of thee,
Than I can wish to adders, spiders, toads,
Or any creeping venom'd thing that lives!
If ever he have child, abortive be it,
Prodigious, and untimely brought to light,
Whose ugly and unnatural aspect
May fright the hopeful mother at the view;
And that be heir to his unhappiness!
If ever he have wife, let her he made
A miserable by the death of him
As I am made by my poor lord and thee!
Come, now towards Chertsey with your holy load,
Taken from Paul's to be interred there;
And still, as you are weary of the weight,
Rest you, whiles I lament King Henry's corse.

Whereupon Glouster, he who wants to become Richard III, enters, and we get the relentless pursuit of character, his and Lady Anne's:

Enter GLOUCESTER

GLOUCESTER

Stay, you that bear the corpse, and set it down.

LADY ANNE

What black magician conjures up this fiend,
To stop devoted charitable deeds?

GLOUCESTER

Villains, set down the corpse; or, by Saint Paul,
I'll make a corpse of him that disobeys.

Having worked the room as it were and securing Lady Anne's grudging assent for him to court her romantically, Gloucester is now alone on stage, reflecting:

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars
against me,
And I nothing to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!

There, in that remarkable scene, we see not only poetic evidence of Shakespeare's sublime reach but proof of his mastery of character. We see character in all its gritty, complex splendor.

My approach for getting at the essence of character is the three-part quiz stated earlier: Who are they? What do they want? What are they willing to do to get what they want?

You could with some great effect add two more questions to the list: What are they most fearful of being discovered about them? How do they behave if they get what they want?

Another approach is to discover the character's basic need. Not just money to pay the rent or to rent a tux for the prom, but the quintessential need, the existential need each of us is thought to have.

One of the reasons we turn to biography and fiction is because many of those we see in real life have so adumbrated and buried their needs and goals as to seem lackluster, guarded, boring. For various reasons of our own, we want people who crave achievement or possession or power or freedom or-- We want people who have their wishes on a cosmic gift registry, because we know that people who want are likely to take steps.

We also know that people who get what they want also do things, but that, as they say, is another story, one writers love to exploit.

We cannot begin to exploit until we know them, those intriguing cultural alter egos, Characters. We love to warn them off, identify with them, second-guess them, relish in their pratfalls, even though we know at heart that we are being manipulated by their author. We remember them well beyond the point of remembering the plot points in which they are set. It would be virtually impossible for all but the most devoted Mark Twain scholar to recount the full plot, the Auto Club marked map, as it were, of Huckleberry Finn, but we all know that there ain't no more to write and I'm rotten glad of it," and we all know that Huck is about to take off for the territory ahead because Aunt Sally wants to civilize him, and he can't stand it, because he's been there before.

Sitting through a play or a movie, our interest quickly lags if the needs and agendas of the characters seem stripped of true ambition. As completely out of sympathy as I am for the brother in Joe Orton's stunning play, Entertaining Mr. Sloan,I empathize with him because he has revealed his desire for something to the point where he has effected a compromise with the known universe, his known universe, to achieve it. And so I am made to empathize with him.

By turning the kaleidoscope of character just a tad, I come to see Hamlet in yet another perspective. Through the simple expedient of imagining the protagonist to be King Claudius rather than his nephew, I empathize with him and see that all he wanted was to be king and perhaps get a few licks in with Gertrude, for whom he always had a sneaker.

Boils down to this: All characters in a narrative think they are right. Even serial killers are acting out a scenario they have somehow come by. As writers, we need to understand how they come by their scenario, what it is, and how it informs their subsequent behavior.

Just remember, they'll lie to you if they have to.

The Prescience of Sir Walter Scott

There it is, for all to see, but how many of us saw it? I mean really saw it? Sir Walter saw it.

Marmion, canto vi, verse 17:

Oh what a tangled web we weave...

The tangled web runs from under my bed and the five-drawer chest left to me by my mother, across a narrow aisle to the Queen Anne secretary she also left me. It trips me at least once a day, and it causes me to look with reverent awe at features in Architectural Digest, showing how a room--any room--ought to look.

Whenever The New York Times runs its Circuits feature, I browse with great interest at the range of gadgets and advertisements that promise an end to the tangled web, which is, of course, a sinuous, treacherous network of wires connecting computer, printer,router, modem, iPod recharger, telephone answering machine,a Maxtor external hard drive for back-up (about which more in a Moment), and for all I know, an electric can opener.

Some day, I tell myself, it will all be wireless. Even the wireless modem will be wireless, and there will be fewer things to trip on.

Some day.

Some day, also, the Carbonite back-up system will have completed its initial back-up of my hard drive, allowing me to remove aforementioned Maxtor external hard drive from its notional connection and store it in The Closet, which is to say that eclectic catch-all space wherein I contribute to the science of archaeology. Since we are on a Some-day sort of roll, some day, future archaeologists will discover The Closet and reconstruct from it what it was like to live in the twenty-first century. Surely by then my Carbonite backup will have completed its download and provided some tiny wedge into the world of bloggery (sounds almost sexual, doesn't it?), from which the bigger picture can be reconstructed.

For the nonce, it is all a tangle, every last bit of it, and as I go my way, tripping over it and cursing, and waiting for Carbonite to download (yet another word to be added to the tangle within the Oxford English Dictionary), I take fierce joy in not being a Luddite. I actually enjoy the inherent promise of gadgets. Only yesterday, I bookmarked (would Chaucer have bookmarked?) a neat little package called Coordinator, which indeed attempts some housekeeping with The Tangle.

In fact, I look to gadgets to solve societal ills the way some look to science to solve other existential problems.

Meanwhile, my mantra is: Watch out for the tangled web and keep your eye on Carbonite.

Occupational Night Female Horses

Being a chancy amalgam of three separate work choices--writer, editor, teacher--I not only dream in each valence, I have nightmares in them.

This may have been a part of my waking-sleeping chemistry ever since I came to the triple fork in the road, but if so, my nightmares were as memorable as an agent's promise, and did not manifest themselves in memory until a series of conversations with another triple-hitter, Digby Wolfe, actor, writer, and teacher.

The actor's nightmare, Digby assured me, has the dreamer appearing on stage, preferably in a setting where other actors and an audience are present. It is a nice touch of the nightmare mentality that the dreamer is acutely aware of the audience, because the horrifying part of the dream is the focus on the dreamer having forgotten his lines, and now, everyone is waiting, waiting. The longer the wait, the more agonizing or nightmare-ish the nightmare.

The writer's nightmare does not necessarily require a sleeping state, although being asleep adds a kind of surreal stage direction to the venture. What next? What next? The question persists. Where do I go from here? This nightmare has the lovely bifurcation of the insistent belief that there simply is no more--the last thing to be written was, in fact, just that; the last thing. Now the tank is empty. No calling Auto Club, no visit from the Muse, not even a relative who wants to give you a real story to write about instead of all that stuff you'd been writing about.

Teachers are used to one or more students nodding off during the arc of a class, but a lovely teacher-related nightmare is when the entire class drowses out, their eyes not merely glazed over but shut, their chins tucked. I had this nightmare a number of times and was thus prepared when it came about in a graduate seminar, when all four students were well off into the alpha-wave range.

The mare of nightmare has nothing at all to do with a horse, but rather a presence, an uninvited guest who has come to perch on the dreamer's chest, causing a depressing, morbid weight.

I have asked some musicians if they had occupational nightmares and have heard a range of answers such as being tone deaf, appearing before an audience with an instrument other than one's own and with no knowledge of how to play it, as well as having one's instrument resolutely out of tune.

In jest, I asked a pizza delivery man, who responded gravely that he regularly nightmared about being lost, not finding his way in the maze of Santa Barbara neighborhoods known as The Mesa.

Tony, one of the service reps at Santa Barbara-Goleta Toyota, has had dreams of lifting the hood of an auto, only to discover that the engine is missing.

What a revealing, defining study, not only for the serious academic (and if not an oxymoron, the humorous academic) but for the, shall we say, secular writer, he or she who surfs the reefs and shoals of fiction. How splendid to know the nightmares of the doctor, the lawyer, the used car salesperson. Does the fine artist run out of canvas or oils? Does the dancer nightmare--I'm making a verb of a noun, which is Kosher in English--arthritis? Does a baseball player dream of misplacing his steroids? Does the Australian Cattle Dog or Border Collie have dreams in which cows or sheep already know where to go?

Nightmares, the dream version of the unthinkable, come to pass.

How instructive to know what nightmares press down on the chest of the President of the United States and if, indeed, the thing he sees in his sleep is us. The reverse is surely true: He is the worst nightmare of all.