X X

Imagine picking up a book of American history and finding one of our presidents and all that happened during his term omitted.

Pick your omit: No Jefferson and Louisiana Purchase. No Polk and Mexican War. No FDR and New Deal.

Or pick up a dictionary and imagine all words beginning with one of the 26 letters left out. Cancel L. Suppress S. X X. Bleep U.

How about a map of North America with no Great Lakes? Just five oddly shaped, unexplained blank spots.

Imagine one of those and you might approximate the sensation that shook me in the Newbury Public Library when the young woman at the desk responded to my inquiry by turning to her laptop:

“Let me see if this library carries books by that author.”*

Had I been hit by a bullet I could not have been more stunned. She looked up in alarm when I voiced a spontaneous reaction:

“This is an American public library! ‘That author‘ is Herman Melville. Herman Melville! Unless he has suddenly become very popular and is flying off the shelves, how can he not be here, not a single book?”

She turned back to her laptop and hurriedly repeated the same answer. Verbatim.

Something made me take a few backward steps, and I waved a hand back toward her: “No, no, forget it, I’m sorry.” And I quickly reeled out the door.

That something, in retrospect, had to be the realization that we now have people graduating from American colleges with degrees in Library Science who do not recognize the names of writers whose books helped shape American ideals and values.

Yes, I have already noticed and written of “weeding” in public libraries. Columns in the local paper last summer and the summer before both drew considerable responses from library patrons who had also noticed the trend. One told me it had happened in the periodical section where scholarly magazines are also giving way to fan ‘zines and pop culture. Another informs me of the weeding of classical music from the CD collection at the Jones Public Library in Amherst, Mass.

In the past year, I’ve visited eight public libraries I drive by in the course of a week and taken counts in the shelves. The number of volumes for classic authors such as Melville, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, and even John Steinbeck have hovered in the two to six range. East and west of Steinbeck, those of Danielle Steel and Jacqueline Susann range from the sixties well into the eighties every time.

All the while, I have swallowed hard and held my tongue at endless kudos posted on social media for many public libraries that display and encourage the circulation of books, mostly contemporary, being banned in schools in Florida and other parts of the country. Glad they do it, but isn’t weeding just as much a dumbing down?

Librarians at two stops tell me weeding is a national trend. Friends around the state in Lowell, Northampton (where it is called “deaccessioning”), and Wareham have noticed it, as have others as far away as Santa Rosa and Seattle on the west coast. Last summer, in Harper’s August issue, Joyce Carol Oates described weeding without using the word in “The Return,” a short story set in New Jersey.

According to one librarian, computer programs now tell librarians how much a book circulates each month. Those that gather dust and once were dusted are now tossed with no regard for who wrote them, much less than for any obscure places they might have in American history.

“Obscure places”? Melville’s Moby-Dick may retain prominence, especially with a recent US president so eerily comparable to a captain bent on revenge and willing to take his ship down with him.

But how many Americans know that his previous book, White-Jacket, was an expose of the US Navy that led to many reforms, including a ban on the practice of flogging?

Or that Redburn, the one before that, offers a first hand look at waves of immigrants boarding a ship in Liverpool and making the trans-Atlantic passage to America?

More to the point, how many might find such books? All of them—by Cather, Lewis, Steinbeck, and the rest—reveal people and places that may be historically obscure but which are endlessly relevant.

That’s why we call it literature.

Today, the logic, both practical and legal, of Melville’s comprehensive analysis of flogging could strengthen any case made for the regulation of automatic weapons.

Likewise, his account of desperate immigrants hoping for a new life may help nail a convincing, pro-active plank into the platform offered by the Democratic National Convention this summer.

I can say it “may” because I sent a summary to a delegate from my district who says she has forwarded it to the rest of the Massachusetts delegation.

Good to know, as there’s little chance of finding it on the shelves of what’s left of America’s public libraries.

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*When I related this story to a friend over pints of Guinness, he stopped me here and insisted, “That is a canned response!” I realized right away that it was the identical Let-me-see-if… line that we always hear from customer service reps in person, on the phone, and on those on-line chats that utility and other companies have on their websites. Just fill in the blanks: this library and that author. I also knew what she said next, and told him so: “And I’m about to prove you right!”

First reason always given for weeding is that more shelf space is needed. This pic was taken about a year ago at the Newburyport Public Library, a year after my first newspaper column on the subject. But it could just as easily have been taken in Newbury, Rowley, Topsfield, Methuen and elsewhere, including Ipswich where entire rows were empty last fall. Still could, although since then, many of those blank spaces now contain a book on display, propped up on a small stand, facing out and angled to eye-level. These are the books shown by algorithms to be most popular. As one approving librarian puts it: “Less is more.” Photo by Ann O’Nimmis.

Weeding Shakespeare

Sounds like a statewide lobotomy.

Shockwaves continue to ripple north following reports of Florida teachers censoring Romeo & Juliet to comply with the recent mandates of Gov. Ron DeSenseless to whitewash and dumb down history and literature taught in the state’s public schools, K thru Post-Grad.

Most reactions do little more than exclaim two words that should never be heard together: Censor and Shakespeare. But I wonder if liberal reaction is due more to the choice of play.

Romeo & Juliet, fair to say, is the English-speaking world’s ultimate love story–which masks the fact that it is also the ultimate statement against vengeance. For both reasons, it has had countless adaptations to fit various nations, ethnic groups, and as many generations as have been since 1595 when it first appeared on a London stage.

That includes, of course, West Side Story, as American a tale as any, which itself has spawned a healthy, colorful, vibrant share of adaptations for both stage and film. Conceived and written by my Lawrence homeboy, Leonard Berstein, its songs have lives of their own, something that British rocker Keith Emerson noted when he compiled his “America” pastiche.

His band, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, included everything from the theme of the classic television westerm, Bonanza, to the opening of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” from “Camptown Races” to clips of John Philip Sousa. For the warp and woof holding it all together, we keep hearing “Maria” and “I Want to Live in America.”*

To most Americans since 1960, those songs and others from West Side Story–“I Feel Pretty” and the “Jet Song”–are like the very names, “Romeo” and “Juliet,” known even by those unfamiliar with the full story.

Which is why I wonder: Would we be so shocked if the reports from Florida named one of Shakespeare’s lesser known plays, say, Titus Andronicus or King John, or even Twelfth Night or Love’s Labor’s Lost? Would our reaction be mixed if it were a play now deemed tainted by “political incorrectness” such as The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice?

Forgive me. My perception has been warped by recent trips to public libraries well north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Up here, “censorship” is a dirty word, and “dumbing down” a crime against humanity, as they should be. Problem is that, when you call them by a harmless sounding name and give them the veneer of technology, the result gives you the very thing you profess to be against.

That name is “weeding,” and it is now a term of art for librarians nationwide as they depend on the algorithms to tell them the frequency of circulation of each book to determine what they keep and what they discard, no thought required.

If you doubt this, here’s a challenge for you: Pick the writer you consider the most consequential in American history (say, pre-1970), walk into a public library, and count the number of volumes by that writer. Then pick a present day author who caters to pop culture and count his or her volumes.

Here, for example, in this northeast corner of deep blue Massachusetts, Danielle Steele wipes the floor with Herman Melville every time: Ipswich PL, 88-6; Newburyport PL, 82-4, Methuen PL, 65-5; Topsfield PL, 62-4; Newbury PL, 49-1.

That one, of course, is Moby-Dick, the only title of Melville’s nine novels that you can count on finding. Likewise, if you pick Willa Cather, you have a fair chance of finding My Antonia, but Death Comes for the Archbishop? Forget it. Steinbeck? Good chance you’ll find Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, but you’ll likely need interlibrary loan to get In Dubious Battle or The Winter of Our Discontent. So much for browsing.

That last title, coincidentally, is a line from Shakespeare’s Richard III, which brings us back to the question. Good chance that DeSenseless and his thought-police might back off from, or at least distance themselves from that particular play. Far more than any chance of libraries bringing back Cather’s Archbishop, Steinbeck’s Battle, or Melville’s Redburn, the most eloquent, humane, and irrefutable description, explanation, and defense of immigration to America I’ve ever read.

So the question remains: What is the difference between sanitizing Florida schools and weeding American libraries?

The answer, my friend, is negligible, but the implication is huge. Call it a national lobotomy.

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*I first heard ELP’s “America” played by Jethro Tull in a concert in Connecticut 16 years ago. Tull added several quotes that are not in the original. Here’s a recording of it on the same tour, followed by ELP’s own much wilder, hyperventilating version made longer by a drum solo.

A Note to Subscribers

All these forty years I’ve been writing columns for the Newburyport Daily News, one of the most, perhaps the most frequently asked question is, Have you ever been censored?

Happily, save for a handful of phrases that I have harmlessly softened at an editor’s request (always for the better I’d later realize), the answer has always been no.

Until now.

Here’s advance notice that tomorrow I will post a blog headlined “Both Sides of the Mouth.” You may recognize passages from at least three recent “Mouth of the River” blogs. Originally intended for the Daily News, it is now the first column–of about 500–the paper has rejected.

Editor says that the dialogue with the mayor’s chief of staff “feels like a personal beef” and cannot be substantiated. I countered that nothing personal is said, that it is very specifically about a posting on a city-sponsored website that is itself unsubstantiated with any specifics. And anyway, there’s not much to substantiate about one and two word responses.

Still, no go.

And so I intend to post it as a blog with hopes of circulating it on a Newburyport website or a local page on social media. That requires a link. As the chief-of-staff himself said of people smeared on a city site, they are free to respond. Well, so is he.

As consolation for those hoping for something brand new, here’s a response to “The Return,” a new short story by Joyce Carol Oates just published in the new (August) issue of Harper’s. Yes, it is indirectly related to the controversy hinted at above, more directly to two blogs I have written about “weeding,” now a term of art in libraries across the country, although the story, set in rural New Jersey, does not use the word:

Weeding Our Reading

When the widow in “The Return” (August), wonders what to do with her late husband’s books, I wonder if author Joyce Carol Oates knows her complaint is about a national trend in American libraries called “weeding.”

Says the widow: “Libraries no longer want such special collections, eighteenth and nineteenth-century first editions, classics of science….” As librarians from here in Massachusetts to the west coast have told me, the higher-ups are now using computer programs to show how often a book is checked-out. Books gathering too much dust get weeded; those in demand are available in multiple volumes.

Hence, today, in the Ipswich (Mass.) Public Library, you can count 82 books by Danielle Steele compared to four by Herman Melville, one of them a Modern Library of America edition. His other three MLA entries are not available in Ipswich but can be obtained on interlibrary loan. So much for browsing.

Oates’ widow goes on to say that a library would not accept “the complete works of Charles Darwin, his Life and Letters.” Harper’s readers may think that a part of her prolonged delusion. Not at all. In the past year, the Newburyport (Mass.) Public Library weeded two volumes of The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, published in 1895, no matter that Whittier lived barely ten miles from Newburyport and was a friend and sometimes ally of Newburyport native William Lloyd Garrison.

The widow concludes: “The local library is always downsizing, selling books, it’s shocking to me to see the books they sell, priced at a dollar in a bin like something at Walmart.”

As crude as the word is, “weeding” is a euphemism for dumbing down. Republican governors do it with legislation. All public libraries need is an algorithm.

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We call this one “Jack at the Mailbox,” taken at the end of my driveway, March 2006. Photo by Michael Boer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums

Of Paradise & Parking Lots

Once or twice a month, two women, one who barely qualifies for a senior discount and another with but a year or two to go, arrive at the Screening Room for a Wednesday matinee.

Since that’s my day as a projectionist, we’ve been on a first name basis since about a year ago when they first made a habit of spending a day in Newburyport and taking in a movie. They have always remembered my name after I made it easy for them by pointing out that I’m in the trunk of every car.

That would include the car that takes them the 30 or so miles back and forth to where they live. I’m not going to name the town, nor am I going to use their real names in what I’m about to report. Not because they asked to remain anonymous, but because it wasn’t until the show was over and the lights were out that my own light went on.

This past Wednesday was very slow. When Nikki and Liz arrived some 20 minutes early, I was in a chatty mood, telling of the Nao Trinidad, the replica of Magellan’s ship that had been docked in Newburyport during the week of the 4th. They saw it with their husbands, and Nikki mentioned a conversation about history that included an aside, “I’m a librarian.”

Couldn’t help but file that away until the subject of Magellan had sailed out the door of the Screening Room lobby and was safely onto State Street. I gave the pause a three-count and looked at Nikki:

“You’re a librarian?”

“Yes! In X——, and Liz is on the board of the X—– Public Library.”

Looking back and forth at both: “I’m about a decade older than you. My introduction to the Lawrence Public Library would have been about when you were born. I’m sure I was assigned certain books to find, but overall, those grade-school visits were more like discovery than anything else, like Magellan sailing round the Horn into an ocean full of islands unknown and unimagined.”

They smiled, no doubt thinking they were in for a pleasant, nostalgic trip into their own profession. I paused, keeping eye-contact, one to the other: “May I ask what might be a contentious question?”

They glanced at each other and both said yes.

“Does the word ‘weeding’ mean anything to you?”

Both women registered mild surprise that a non-librarian would know what is now a librarian’s term of art, though I’d say “artlessness” would be more honest. Nikki’s explanation was consistent with what I’ve heard from librarians, what few I know, from here to the west coast, citing a computer program that lets librarians know just how often a book is checked out. She looked over at Liz who nodded agreement, and I could see that both were reading skepticism on my face.

I hoped to soften my response with a brief laugh: “That suggests that some algorithm decides what books remain and what get tossed out.”

They seemed to speak at once: “Well, no, we do look at it.” Liz went on, “We also have to consider the condition of the book, and whether it’s in or out of print.”

Sounds to me like an urgent reason to keep older volumes, but I couldn’t tell if being out of print was considered a strike against them. I told the two that such was the case in Newburyport where, among other literary and historical treasures, a two-volume collection of John Greenleaf Whittier’s letters and journals published by his family in 1894 is no more.

Nikki seemed to commiserate: “But I bet there’s plenty of Danielle Steele!”

“That’s my point. Something already well-known, safe, expected. Don’t let Magellan round that Horn!”

Liz noted that the concern was for shelf-space, and Nikki nodded, adding that X—— has a very small library. I don’t doubt that’s true in X—–, but in N-port there is no lack of empty shelves. A day after this conversation, I happened to be in the Ipswich Public Library where entire rows were empty.

Nikki turned the tables on me: “What do you think weeding is?”

I kept making eye-contact with both of them: “I think the word is a euphemism for ‘dumbing down’.”

The two women looked stunned.

“And I mean that literally! You’re paving a paradise of literature and history, and putting up a parking lot of pop-culture. Is there no difference between a library and a bookstore? And what’s the difference between weeding and what the governor of Florida has ordered for public schools?”

Liz: “That’s a total ban. We might weed books, but you can still find and read them”

Me: “No! That’s just what DeSantis says, anyone in Florida can still find and buy and read those books. That rationale is identical whether the reference is to bookstores, to interlibrary consortiums, or to websites. So much for libraries as places of discovery!”

Nikki: “But we aren’t stigmatizing books the way these right wing groups are.”

Me: “No, not at all, but you are erasing them. So the result is the same. We’re erasing history at the same time we accuse others of suppressing it. And we wonder why they laugh at us? Only real difference is that right-wingers claim credit for and boast of what they erase. Algorithms allow us to wash our hands. Who’s in denial now?”

Again, they seemed to speak as one, as well as glancing at a clock on the wall approaching showtime: “Well, yes, we do need to keep an eye on that!”

“And I thank you!”

They slid into the theater as another customer approached to buy a ticket. What I have recorded above is but an extract of a longer conversation far more in agreement than debate, and the quotes are approximate. I was glad that I mentioned my involvement in the annual marathon readings of Moby-Dick in New Bedford and my recent, public feud with the N-port Public Library without getting lost in the (forgive me) weeds of controversy. That ensures that, if they want to know more, it’s all there, a matter of public record. (As well as covered in recent blogs.)

My one regret is that my stop in Ipswich was a day after rather than a day before this conversation. The IPL at the time had just four volumes of Herman Melville at the end of a shelf of over a dozen by pop-fiction writer Brad Meltzer. Recalling Nikki’s crack, I wandered into the aisle marked by the letter S. Danielle Steele had 82.

At that moment, I hoped I had made it clear to them that my argument isn’t about any contest, or any score, or lessening anything for the sake of anything else. Beyond the aisles with S and T was just one that offered everything from U to Z.

Past that were two rows of of stacks, I think five shelves each, top to bottom, perhaps twenty feet long, completely empty.

Don’t know about X—–, but like Newburyport, that’s quite a parking lot.

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Lobby of the Philips Exeter Academy Library, architect Louis Kahn. Photo: Michael Boer https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261/with/6859625645/

What’s in Your Library?

Call this an update.

With few exceptions, newspaper columnists avoid writing follow-ups or sequels to what we put in print.

We’re a century and a half removed from the days of Dickens and Twain when writers could serialize their work. As Boston University professor Natalie McKnight, author of Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens, reports:

[Dickens] characters would become part of their lives, and readers couldn’t wait to get the next installment. There’s the famous (and true) story of people standing on the docks in New York City waiting for ships coming in with the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop, desperate to find out whether Little Nell would live.

Most renditions of that story tell us that the shipment of magazines was not on board, and a riot ensued. Ah, the days when the public craved the written word!

Today, we write stand-alone commentaries with ever decreasing word-counts to accommodate a rapidly disappearing attention span. So let me simply state that last summer I wrote one headlined, “Weeding our reading,” regarding a recent policy of public libraries across the USA that took hold at the Newburyport Public Library.

Makes no difference now whether or not “weeding” is related to the head librarian’s recently announced resignation. What does matter is that a replacement be more committed to reading than to weeding.

Put another way, in a bookstore, you might expect a pop-culture novelist such as Brad Meltzer to have ample shelf space while literary giants from the 19th and early 20th centuries have but one or two volumes of their best-known titles. That’s commerce.

Nothing wrong with libraries providing everything Meltzer ever wrote, but shouldn’t there be a commitment to writers who have stood the test of time and helped shape American history and culture?

The NPL’s answer to this question–de facto or otherwise–is an emphatic no. And it has been “no” for at least a year when I started noticing that directly under the eight or nine novels of Brad Meltzer would be just one or two by Herman Melville.

Fiction is arranged alphabetically, so this is easy to find and see for yourself. A week ago this day, you likely saw two. Of course, that assumes that they put the partial anthology I returned the day before—a gift of the late and beloved former mayor, Edward G. Molin—on the shelf rather than weeding it. The other is an unweedable but highly readable copy of Moby-Dick.

No Billy Budd, no Confidence Man, no Redburn, no Piazza Tales that include “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Enchanted Isles.”

Other valued, spirited literary chroniclers of American history and geography fare not much better at NPL. Of course, if I based my case on, say, Willa Cather or John Steinbeck, a narrow mind might interrupt me to ask: What do Cather’s O Pioneers! on the Plains or Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle in California have to do with an historic Massachusetts seaport?

With Melville, the question answers itself.

Imagine going to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and finding a few slight mentions of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Satchel Paige and Roberto Clemente, while images of popular players in this year’s line-ups dominate the hallowed halls of America’s pastime. What chance would Louis Sockalexis or Josh Gibson have of being known at all?

That’s NPL.

Fortunately for Newburyport, all of those titles are available at Jabberwocky Bookshop which, while commercial, has dedicated itself to literature of all tastes, ages, and fields.

Wish I could recommended Illume, a new bookstore in Market Square, but its “highly curated” minimalist vibe is 180 degrees from Jabberwocky’s relaxed keep-browsing ambience.

Single copies of books face you from the shelves, each with a handwritten one-line recommendation, mostly pithy and memorable, such as Winston Churchill calling Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels “the one book I’d want to take with me to Purgatory.”

But then you see All Quiet on the Western Front named “one of the greatest books ever written,” and you might stagger out onto the sidewalk wondering which is worse: A bookstore offering recommendations by Donald Trump or a library curated by Bottom Line, Inc.

Yes, let’s give the library credit for its many educational and other civic programs, for its esteemed archival center, and for featuring books lately banned in schools elsewhere in the country.

Still, the brakes must be slammed on weeding done for the sake of a bottom line as much as for cultural conformity.

After all, isn’t a strict adherence to a bottom line itself cultural conformity?

One of Moby-Dick’s most descriptive chapters concludes that “Nantucket is no Illinois.” Today, the NPL must show that Newburyport is no more Walmart than it is Tallahassee.

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Don’t know how architectural groups rate “best” and “worst” when they decide their top and bottom lists and give out awards, but the section that connects the modern addition on the left to the Federalist Tracy House on the right deserves at least an honorable mention. Inside, the transition is seamless, and the entire building feels as one.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/newburyport-public-library-52-squares-of-north-country-unfading-black-roofing-slate–391250286359115418/

Why Weed What We Read?

Call me Herman.

While sitting on Plum Island overlooking the marsh reading Melville’s early novels, it’s easy to imagine I’m on a lush tour of the South Pacific.

A headset offering “virtual reality”? I would prefer not to.

In semi-retirement and with an insistent preference for hardcover, I’d go broke buying Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White Jacket—not to mention tired and blind trying to find them in bookstores.

Among many other things—civic archives and events, children’s reading programs, on-line resources and the computers to access them, not to mention technical assistance for all of the above—this is what libraries are for.

So, off to the Newburyport Public Library I went searching for Omoo (Tahitian for “rover”). Not there. The Modern Library of America’s four Melville compilations I had borrowed in the past? All gone. In fact, all I found was a single copy of Moby-Dick.

The on-line catalogue for the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium listed just one Omoo, and so I had it sent from Methuen. Next day, I spotted a friend from out-of-town who works at a library upriver photographing City Hall’s Juneteenth celebration and inquired.

He told me it’s called “weeding.” With so much on-line, many books never circulate. And then there’s MVLC.

“So, one Omoo is enough for over 30 city and town libraries?” I asked. He shrugged, I shrugged, and the mayor began to speak. That night, I sent him a message asking if weeding was a secret.

Here’s something that’s not a secret: Public libraries are as high as public education, public transportation, public everything on the Republican Party’s hit list. Are librarians now doing their dirty work for them?

While mulling that over, I received this:

It’s no secret. All libraries weed. If a book doesn’t circulate over a period of time, it’s removed. If the book is worn, meaning well read, we purchase another copy, if still in print.

Some are replaced by new trendy volumes on the same subject. You may not be able to get contemporary accounts of historical events, he cracked, but you can always get some “name-the time-or-place History for Dummies.”

If another MVLC library has the same title, removal is to avoid duplication, unless it’s a hot title:

“You can see it for yourself. Just walk through the literature and poetry sections.”

I did. As he says, “pretty anemic.” The Reference section looks empty. A bookcase on the 3rd floor with coffee table books—atlases, photography, fashion, art, etc.—is now gone, “so too the oversized books because they didn’t circulate.”

His voice rose in print:

Of course not! Too big to take home. But I witnessed many patrons read/browse/enjoy them in our library. Most people can’t afford to buy those books. The library can.

I saw many parents with children looking at atlases and photography books together and teens sharing books. We’re weeding not just books, we’re weeding people.

Given the overall demise of print, I asked, shouldn’t public libraries be increasingly vigilant safeguarding books?

Ha! A story from your own library circulated throughout MVLC that a patron wanted a second look at the two volumes of The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier. Perhaps that patron delighted to think someone else had them, but when unable to place a hold, he inquired.

Weeded.

No matter that Whittier has deep Newburyport connections and that the books, published by a relative in 1894, contain his letters, always of deep local, historical value.

How are empty spaces on shelves better than those books? Than any books? This is not the product of careful thought, but of “policy and procedure,” the very antithesis of thought that turns thinking people into badly programmed robots. At a library no less.

Oh, the irony! Just 21 years ago NPL expanded to the tune of $6.8 million for what? More books, they said back then. Maybe they think Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, and John Quincy Adams are coming back through their door and they need bunk beds.

From my first inquiry, my librarian friend and I kept using a phrase: “with so much on-line.” Yet more irony! This dialogue began at a celebration of an American historical event as overlooked—perhaps as weeded—as Omoo all these years.

What’s on-line? I would prefer we start thinking of what’s on the line.

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