“The world is on fire. Or so it appears in this image from NASA’s Worldview. The red points overlaid on the image designate those areas that by using thermal bands detect actively burning fires.”
The image and caption above come from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. On a related page, they go into some more detail, explaining why good parts of Africa, Chile, Brazil and North America are aflame this summer. Droughts, extreme temperatures, agricultural practices–they’re all part of a worrying picture. View NASA’s picture in a larger format here.
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As even his harshest critics admitted, V.S. Naipaul knew how to write. The death earlier this month of the author ofA House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River, and The Enigma of Arrival got readers thinking again about the nature of his art. A Trinidad-born Indian who went to England on a government scholarship to Oxford, he eventually achieved a literary mastery of the English language that few of his peers in England — or anyone else there, for that matter — could hope to match.
Like any celebrated creator, Naipaul has long had his imitators. But instead of trying to replicate what they read in his books, they would do better to replicate how he made himself a writer. “It took a lot of work to do it,” Naipaul once told an interviewer. “In the beginning I had to forget everything I had written by the age of 22. I abandoned everything and began to write like a child at school. Almost writing ‘the cat sat on the mat.’” Amitava Kumar quotes that line in an essay on his own development as a writer, influenced not just by Naipaul’s memories of starting out but Naipaul’s seven rules.
“There was a pen-and-ink portrait of Naipaul on the wall,” writes Kumar about his first day working at the Indian newspaper Tehelka. “High above someone’s computer was a sheet of paper that said ‘V. S. Naipaul’s Rules for Beginners.’ ” Tehelka reporters had asked the famed writer “if he could give them some basic suggestions for improving their language. Naipaul had come up with some rules. He had fussed over their formulation, corrected them, and then faxed back the corrections.” Kumar decided to follow the rules and found they were “a wonderful antidote to my practice of using academic jargon, and they made me conscious of my own writing habits. I was discovering language as if it were a new country.”
Naipaul’s list of rules for beginning writers runs as follows:
Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than 10 or 12 words.
Each sentence should make a clear statement. It should add to the statement that went before. A good paragraph is a series of clear, linked statements.
Do not use big words. If your computer tells you that your average word is more than five letters long, there is something wrong. The use of small words compels you to think about what you are writing. Even difficult ideas can be broken down into small words.
Never use words whose meanings you are not sure of. If you break this rule you should look for other work.
The beginner should avoid using adjectives, except those of color, size and number. Use as few adverbs as possible.
Avoid the abstract. Always go for the concrete.
Every day, for six months at least, practice writing in this way. Small words; clear, concrete sentences. It may be awkward, but it’s training you in the use of language. It may even be getting rid of the bad language habits you picked up at the university. You may go beyond these rules after you have thoroughly understood and mastered them.
If you’ve read other writers’ tips, especially those we’ve featured before here on Open Culture, some of Naipaul’s rules may sound familiar. “Never use a long word where a short one will do,” says George Orwell. “The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses,” says Nietzsche. “The adverb is not your friend,” says Stephen King. Naipaul’s rules may strike you as overly restrictive, but bear in mind that he composed them for newspapermen looking to make improvements in their prose, and recommended following them for six months as a kind of course of treatment to rid themselves of “bad language habits.”
The seasoned writer, however, can work according to rules of his own. Naipaul once explained this in no uncertain terms to Knopf editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta. “It happens that English — the history of the language — was my subject at Oxford,” he wrote in a letter reprimanding the house for its overzealous copy editing, laboriously adherent to French-style “court rules,” of one of his manuscripts. “The glory of English is that it is without these court rules: it is a language made by the people who write it. My name goes on my book. I am responsible for the way the words are put together. It is one reason why I became a writer.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
I’d be happy if I could think that the role of the library was sustained and even enhanced in the age of the computer. —Bill Gates
The New York Public Library excels at keeping a foot in both worlds, particularly when it comes to engaging younger readers.
Visitors from all over the world make the pilgrimage to see the real live Winnie-the-Pooh and friends in the main branch’s hopping children’s center.
And now anyone with a smartphone and an Instagram account can “check out” their digital age take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—no library card required. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Working with the design firm Mother, the library has found a way to make great page-turning use of the Instagram Stories platform—more commonly used to share blow-by-blow photographic evidence of road trips, restaurant outings, and hash-tagged weddings.
The Wonderland experience remains primarily text-based.
In other words, sorry, harried caregivers! There’s no handing your phone off to the pre-reading set this time around!
No trippy Disney teacups…
Sir John Tenniel’s classic illustrations won’t be springing to animated life. Instead, you’ll find conceptual artist Magoz’s bright minimalist dingbats of keyholes, teacups, and pocket watches in the lower right hand corner. Tap your screen in rapid succession and they function as a crowd-pleasing, all ages flip book.
Elsewhere, animation allows the text to take on clever shapes or reveal itself line by line—a pleasantly theatrical, Cheshire Cat like approach to Carroll’s impudent poetry.
Navigating this new media can be a bit confusing for those whose social media fluency is not quite up to speed, but it’s not hard once you get the hang of the controls.
Tapping the right side of the screen turns the page.
Tapping left goes back a page.
And keeping a thumb (or any finger, actually) on the screen will keep the page as is until you’re ready to move on. You’ll definitely want to do this on animated pages like the one cited above. Pretend you’re playing the flute and you’ll save a lot of frustration.
The library plans to introduce your phone to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis via Instagram Stories over the next couple of months. Like Alice, both works are in the public domain and share an appropriate common theme: transformation.
Use these links to go directly to part 1 and part 2 of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland on Instagram Stories. Both parts are currently pinned to the top of the library’s Instagram account.
In 1945, Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí began collaborating on an animated film. 58 years later, with Dalí long gone and Disney gone longer still, it came out. The delayed arrival of Destino had to do with money trouble at the Walt Disney Studios not long after the project began, and it seems that few laid eyes on its unfinished materials again until Disney’s nephew Roy E. Disney came across them in 1999. Completed, it premiered at the 2003 New York Film Festival and received an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film. Now, fifteen years later, we know for sure that Destino has found a place in the culture, because someone has mashed it up with Pink Floyd.
Though in many ways a more visual experience than a narrative one — if completed in the 1940s, it might have become part of a Fantasia-like “package film” — Destino does tell a story, showing a graceful woman who catches the eye of Chronos, the mythical personification of time itself. This allows the film to indulge in some clock imagery, which one might expect from Dalí, though it also includes clocks of the non-melting variety.
Only with “Time” as its soundtrack does Destino include the sound of clocks as well. All the ringing and bonging that opens the song came as a contribution from famed producer Alan Parsons, who worked onDark Side of the Moon as an engineer. Before the album’s sessions, he’d happened to go out to an antique shop and record its clocks as a test of the then-novel Quadraphonic recording technique. The transition from Parsons’ clocks to Nick Mason’s drums fits uncannily well with the opening of Destino, as does much that follows. “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time,” sings David Gilmour. “Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines.” Though Disney and Dalí came up with much more than half a page of scribbled lines, both of them probably assumed Destino had come to naught. Or might they have suspected that the project would find its way in time?
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Rather, it’s a portrait of ambivalence, viewed at some remove.
The same cannot be said for Young Americans, the wholly imaginary midcentury pulp novel.
One look at the lurid cover, above, and one can guess the sort of steamy passages contained within. Bowie’s sweaty palmed classmates at Bromley Technical High School could probably have recited them from memory!
He’s also got quite a knack for extracting lyrics from their original context and rendering them in the period font, magically retooling them as the sort of suggestive quotes that once beckoned from drugstore book racks.
Font has been important to him since the age of 13, when a school art project required him to combine text with an image:
I decided that I wanted the text to look like the text I’d seen in an ad for a John Lennon album, so I copied that font style. I didn’t know that the font style had a name, but I knew that my instincts for how to draw those letters didn’t match how the letters ended up looking. The font, as it turns out, was Franklin Gothic, and, as a 13-year-old, all I remember was that I would start to draw the “S” and then realize that my “S” didn’t look like Franklin Gothic’s “S,” and that the curvy letters, like “G” and “O,” didn’t look right when they sat on the lines I’d made for the other letters, because of course for a font, the curvy letters have to be a little bit bigger than the straight letters, or else they end up looking too small. I became fascinated with that kind of thing, how one font would give off one kind of feeling, and other one would give off a completely different feeling. And it turns out there’s a reason for all of that, that every font carries with it a specific cultural connotation whether the reader is aware of it or not. When I drive down the street in LA, I see billboards and I can’t just look at one and say “Okay, got it,” I get a whole other layer of meaning from them because their design and font choices tell me a whole history of the people who designed them.
While Alcott discovers many of his visuals online, he has a soft spot for the battered originals he finds in second hand shops. Their wear and tear confers the sort of verisimilitude he seeks. The rest is equal parts inspiration, Photoshop, and a growing understanding of a design form he once dismissed as the tawdry fruit of Low Culture:
I’d never understood pulp design until I started this project. As I started looking at it, I realized that the aesthetic of pulp is so deeply attached to its product that it’s impossible to separate the two. And that’s what great design is, a graphic representation of ideas. When I started examining the designs, to see why some work and some don’t, I was overwhelmed with the sheer amount of artistry involved in the covers. Pulp was a huge cultural force, there were dozens of magazines and publishers, cranking out stuff every month for decades, detective stories and police stories and noir stories and mysteries. It employed thousands of artists, writers and painters and illustrators. And the energy of the paintings is just off the charts. It had to be, because any given book cover had to compete with the ten thousand other covers that were on display. It had to grab the viewer fast, and make that person pick up the book instead of some other book. I love all kinds of midcentury stuff, but nothing grabs you the way a good pulp cover does.
Not all of his mash ups traffic in mid-century drugstore rack nymphomania.
Needless to say, Alcott’s covers are also a tribute to the musicians he lists as authors, particularly those dating to his New Wave era youth—Bowie, Costello, Joy Division, Talking Heads, King Crimson…
I know I could find more popular contemporary artists to make tributes for, but these are the artists I love, I connect to their work on a deep level, and I try to make things that they would see and think “Yeah, this guy gets me.”
My favorite thing is when people think the pieces are real. That’s the highest compliment I can receive. I’ve had band members contact me and say “Where did you find this?” or “I don’t even remember doing this album” or “Where did you find this?” That’s when I know I’ve successfully combined ideas.
There are many ways for travel writers to get their subject badly wrong. Perhaps the worst is solely relying on uninformed observation rather than seeking the wisdom and experience of knowledgeable locals. To his credit, celebrated Nobel prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul—who passed away on August 11th at age 85—met, mingled, and spoke freely with individuals from every walk of life (including Eudora Welty) in the process of writing A Turn in the South, a travelogue of his sojourn through the much-mythologized and maligned Southern states of the U.S.
Naipaul’s voice alone might have overwhelmed the work with the extremely harsh, some have said bigoted, judgments he became known for in novels like A Bend in the River, Guerillas, and The Enigma of Arrival. Instead, he won praise from reviewers like Southern historian C. Vann Woodward, who wrote that Naipaul “brings new understanding of the subject to his reader.” Woodward also noted that Naipaul “confesses to ‘writing anxieties’ about undertaking this book on people unknown to him.”
Though he consulted and quoted local voices in his survey of the South, it is ultimately Naipaul’s voice that organizes the work, and his precise, erudite prose the reader hears. It was a voice he took great pride in, as he should. For his many faults, Naipaul was a masterful literary stylist. One wonders, then, why a copy editor at Knopf would feel it necessary to make extensive revisions to the manuscript of A Turn in the South before its publication.
Copy-editing is an essential function, writes Letters of Note, without which many books would go to print “peppered with redundant hyphens, needless repetition, misplaced semicolons,” etc. But it is also a task that should interfere as little as possible with the matters of diction, style, and syntax that characterize an authorial voice. Like a conscientious backpacker, a good copy editor should endeavor to leave almost no trace unless the text is full of serious problems.
Clearly, as Naipaul’s irritated letter below shows, something went wrong. Upon receiving the copy-edited text, he writes, he was obliged to restore the original from memory. Naipaul assures Knopf’s editor-in-chief Sonny Mehta that he understands the English language and its history very well, and knows that, unlike French, it has no “court rules,” and can be bent any number of ways without breaking. He implies it is the job of every “serious or dedicated” writer in English to use the language as they see fit, and the job of an editor to mostly get out of the way.
No doubt this relationship can prove complicated and frustrating for both parties. Still, though we only get Naipaul’s side of the story, it’s hard not to take it when he points out he had written 20 books by that time, all of them acclaimed for the quality of their writing. “My name goes on my book,” he declares. (So does the name “Knopf,” Mehta might have replied.) “I am responsible for the way the words are put together.” Read the letter in full below. And see Literary Hub for Naipaul’s Ten Rules of Writing if you’re interested in his prescriptions for clear English prose—advice he had earned license to take or leave in his own work.
10 May 1988
Dear Sonny,
The copy-edited text of A Turn in the South came yesterday; it is such an appalling piece of work that I feel I have to write about it. This kind of copy-editing gets in the way of creative reading. I spend so much time restoring the text I wrote (and as a result know rather well). I thought it might have been known in the office that after 34 years and 20 books I knew certain things about writing and didn’t want a copy-editor’s help with punctuation or the thing called repetition; and certainly didn’t want help with ways of getting round repetition. It is utterly absurd to have someone pointing out to me repetitions in the use of “and” or “like” or “that” or “she”. I didn’t want anyone undoing my semi-colons; with all their different ways of linking.
It happens that English — the history of the language — was my subject at Oxford. It happens that I know very well that these so-called “rules” have nothing to do with the language and are really rules about French usage. The glory of English is that it is without these court rules: it is a language made by the people who write it. My name goes on my book. I am responsible for the way the words are put together. It is one reason why I became a writer.
Every writer has his own voice. (Every serious or dedicated writer.) This is achieved by the way he punctuates; the rhythm of his phrases; the way the writing reflects the processes of the writer’s thought: all the nervousness, all the links, all the curious associations. An assiduous copy-editor can undo this very quickly, can make A write like B and Ms C.
And what a waste of spirit it is for the writer, who is in effect re-doing bits of his manuscript all the time instead of giving it a truly creative, revising read. Consider how it has made me sit down this morning, not to my work, but to write this enraged letter.
Dallas, TX cinephile Andrew Saladino has a fabulous film critique channel called The Royal Ocean Film Society, which he’s been operating since 2016, following in the footsteps of Every Frame a Painting (RIP) and Press Play (RIP). In this recent essay, he turns his eye to the mostly forgotten and never particularly good “dead genre” known as the Beach Party film.
You’ve probably seen one, or at least a parody of one, somewhere along the way–formulaic and harmless surf’n’fun films sold to teens, set in a world with very few adults, and most probably starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello as the central will-they-or-won’t-they romantic couple. These weren’t troubled juvenile delinquents like ones played by Marlon Brando or James Dean–these were squeaky clean kids. These weren’t movies *about* teens like John Hughes films, he points out, but they were sold to teens.
The Beach Party genre drew from two early films–Gidget (1959) and Where the Boys Are (1960)–and dumbed them down into pure formula. And hell yes they were successful after the premiere of the first Frankie and Annette team-up, Beach Party (1963).
Saladino uses his essay to make a case for the films not as great cinema–his greatest compliment is “they’re not evil”–but as the beginning of modern marketing practices in Hollywood. And if you take a glance at the superhero and YA dystopian fantasy genres still filling up our multiplexes, these marketing ideas are still with us. Especially in how a good idea is copied over and over until audiences stop coming.
It was American International Pictures, home to filmmakers Roger Corman (now considered an indie film legend), James Nicholson, and Samuel Z. Arkoff, that started it all. Cheaply made, these films would start with a cool poster, raise funds based on the promise of the artwork, and only then would they write a script. (If you don’t think that happens anymore, check out Snakes on a Plane.)
Of interest to the casual viewer these days are the various cameos of older stars in some of these films as comic relief. Vincent Price stars in the original Beach Party. Buster Keaton, Don Rickles, and Paul Lynde appear in Beach Blanket Bingo (1965).
One can also watch these for the musical acts: surf guitarist Dick Dale appears in Beach Party:
And Stevie Wonder pops up in Muscle Beach Party:
The original AIP run of beach party films topped out at seven, but in total Saladino counts over 30 films from various indie companies that finally ran aground in 1967 with the execrable (and Mystery Science Theater 3000/em> favorite) Catalina Caper, which features an allegedly very coked out Little Richard. Then it was on to another fad–outlaw racing films apparently.
Andrew Saladino has many other essays worth checking out on his site, and he funds it all through a Patreon account, so do check him out.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Hasn’t every child dreamed of a having a hollowed-out book on their shelf, inside of which they can hide whatever forbidden objects of mischief they like without fear of discovery? The idea surely goes back many generations, and possibly even to the era when not many adults, let along children, owned any books at all. A decade ago, a hollowed-out book dated 1682 went up on the auction block at German house Hermann Historica, and these photos of its elaborate design have captivated the imaginations of even we 21st-century beholders. But what are all the spaces within meant to contain?
Herrman Historica’s listing describes the item as “a hollow book used as secret poison cabinet,” a conclusion presumably arrived at after examining its drawers’ “handwritten paper labels with the Latin names of different poisonous plants (among them castor-oil plant, thorn apple, deadly nightshade, valerian, etc.).” My Modern Met’s Jessica Stewart adds that “calling it an assassin’s cabinet may be a bit exaggerated,” noting that “many of these plants, while poisonous, were also part of herbal remedies —making it equally possible we are looking at an ornate medicine cabinet.”
Book Addiction breaks down the nature and uses of the plants meant to be stored in the drawers, including Hyoscyamus Niger, which in medieval times “was often used in combination with other plants to a make ‘magic brews’ with psychoactive properties”; Aconitum Napellus, which in ancient Roman times “was a such a common poison of choice among murders and assassins that its cultivation was prohibited”; and Cicuta Virosa, which some have speculated “was the hemlock used by the ancient Greek Republic as the state poison but as it is a native of northern Europe this may not be true,” but “is so toxic that a single bite into its root can be fatal” regardless.
Strong stuff, whether for killing or curing. The ambiguity between those two purposes has surely stoked our modern interest in this secretly repurposed book, as has its nature as what Herrman Historica calls an “elaborately worked Kunstkammer object” — a “cabinet of curiosities” of the kind that has long fascinated mankind — “with strong reference to the memento mori theme.” That reference comes chiefly in the form of not just the proud-looking skeleton on the inside cover, but the label on the bottle provided its own compartment in the book: “Statutum est hominibus semel mori,” or “It is a fact that man must die one day.” But did the owner of this book and the tools hidden within want to hasten that day, or delay it?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
“Cartography was not born full-fledged as a science or even an art,” wrote map historian Lloyd Brown in 1949. “It evolved slowly and painfully from obscure origins.” Many ancient maps made no attempt to reproduce actual geography but served as abstract visual representations of political or theological concepts. Written geography has an ancient pedigree, usually traced back to the Greeks and Phoenicians and the Roman historian Strabo. But the making of visual approximations of the world seemed of little interest until later in world history. As “mediators between an inner mental world and an outer physical world”—in the words of historian J.B. Harley—the maps of the ancients tended to favor the former. This is, at least, a very general outline of the early history of maps.
The University of Chicago project, begun in the mid-80s, combines “essays based on original research by authoritative scholars with extensive illustrations of rare and unusual maps.” Unlike histories like Brown’s, however, this one aims to move beyond “a deeply entrenched Eurocentricity.” The project includes non-Western and pre-medieval maps, presenting itself as “the first serious global attempt” to describe the cartography of African, American, Arctic, Asian, Australian, and Pacific societies as well as European. In so doing, it illuminates many of those “obscure origins.”
You might expect such an ambitious offering to come with an equally ambitious pricetag, and you’d be right. But rather than pay over $200 dollars for each individual book in the series, you can read and download Volumes One through Three and Volume Six as free PDFs at the University of Chicago Press’s site. In these extraordinary scholarly works, you’ll find maps reproduced nowhere else—like the Star Fresco from Jordan just above—with deeply learned commentary explaining how they correspond to very different ways of seeing the world.
At the links below, see images of maps from all over the globe and throughout recorded human history, and begin to see the history of cartography in very different ways yourself.
Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any homeless individual, but back in the America of the late 19th and early 20th century, to be a hobo meant something more. It meant, specifically, to count yourself as part of a robust culture of itinerant laborers who criss-crossed the country by hitching illegal rides on freight trains. Living such a lifestyle on the margins of society demanded the mastery of certain techniques as well as a body of secret knowledge, an aspect of the heyday of hobodom symbolized in the “hobo code,” a special hieroglyphic language explained in the Vox video above.
“Wandering from place to place and performing odd jobs in exchange for food and money, hobos were met with both open arms and firearms,” writes Antique Archaeology’s Sarah Buckholtz. “From illegally jumping trains to stealing scraps from a farmers market, the hobo community needed to create a secret language to warn and welcome fellow hobos that were either new to town or just passing through.”
The code, written on brick walls, bases of water towers, or any other surface that didn’t move, “assigned circles and arrows for general directions like, where to find a meal or the best place to camp. Hashtags signaled danger ahead, like bad water or an inhospitable town.”
Hashtags sounds a bit Millennial for hobo culture, but on some level the term does make sense. Some of the abstracted symbols of the hobo code look a bit more like emoji: a locomotive meaning “good place to catch a train,” a building with a barred door meaning “this is a well-guarded house,” a cat meaning “a kind lady lives here.” But how much use did the hobo code actually see? “The problem is, all this information came from hobos, a group that took pride in their elusiveness and embellished storytelling,” says the Vox video’s narrator. “The truth is, there really isn’t any evidence that these signs were as widely used as the literature suggests.”
“Hobos used their mythology as a kind of cover,” says hobo historian Bill Daniel. “The tall tales, the drawings, even the books” — especially volumes penned by “A‑No.1,” the most famous hobo of them all — “were ways to project an image of themselves that both blew them up, but also kept them hidden.” Yet hobo ways, which encompassed even an ethical code that we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, have their descendants. Take, for instance, the hobo practice of writing their nicknames, or “monikers,” on trains and elsewhere to show the world where they’d been and where they were headed. The line to modern urban graffiti almost draws itself, especially in the practice of subway-car “bombing” in 1970s and 80s New York. The hobo has gone, but the characteristically hardy hobo spirit finds a way to live on.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
A Karlheinz Stockhausen Opel. That’s what Kenneth Goldsmith (poet, critic and founding editor of UbuWeb)spotted in Trieste, Italy several days ago.
No, it’s not an official model. It’s just an Opel Karl lovingly re-branded by its owner, an homage to one of the groundbreaking electronic composers of the 20th century.
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