I have been prodded.
I was there (at the book festival) for a few hours yesterday and will probably go back again today for a spell. Yesterday was going to be busy, no matter what, and I didn't get to do everything I wanted or see everyone I could, but oh well. My buddy Todd Cincala couldn't make it to town for personal reasons, and I wished he had been here, but it was too crazy anyway. Todd is an excellent poet, and would make a great reader for a reading series. He has a sestina about watching and listening to a girl on her cell phone in an airport bar that kicks ass, and if it's not in a magazine somewhere already, it fucking should be.
So, I saw some friends at the book festival who would also make good reading series candidates:
1) Thomas Lux: Thom kicks ass. When there are not direct literary allusions in his work (which is fun when you're a literature dork like me and you get them all), and sometimes when there are, he has some of the most surprisingly absurd and surreal moments. "Toad on Golf Tee," from his latest book, "God Particles," comes to mind.
2) Mike Dockins: This is the world's largest 2-bit goon. He's also a great poet. His "Dead Critics Society" made it into 2007's Best American Poetry. Right now he's finishing up a manuscript of letters, inspired by Richard Hugo's "31 Letters and 13 Dreams," where he's writing to other poets from sometimes real places (Playa Del Carmen, Mexico), sometimes fake places (Wherever, Wherever), and soetimes not places at all (Hurricane Ivan). He also has a letter written to me, and a letter from me to him, except that Mike wrote it in my voice, or at least it immitates (makes fun of?) my voice, my idosyncracies in writing. It's confusing.
3) Travis Denton: T's the associate director of Poetry @ Tech, Georgia Tech, that is. He works over there with Thomas Lux. Again, with the good times and weird shit: Travis is working on a series of poems, all spoken by biblical characters, with each poem starting with the phrase "The fuck was that?"
There are plenty more folks (Katie Chaple, Chad Prevost, Natasha Trethewey (the friggin Pulitzer Prize winner, yes for right now I'm relegating her to this short list, but I have reasons for that) Rupert Fike, Collin Kelly, Kodac Harrison, etc.), but I figure I can get on talking about the rest of my day.
Oh, I was able to pick up my contributor copy of the Java Monkey Speaks Anthology. Speaking of reading series: Kodac Harrison hosts Java Monkey Speaks, at Java Monkey in Decatur every Sunday night. He always has a feature during the middle of this open mic reading. Most of the folks who show up to read are spoken word artists, or slam poets, so they're a little different from me, or what most of the poeple I know do. I guess we're "page poets," as opposed to "performance poets." Anyway, Kodac's features are usually well-published poets, or spoken word artists with some pedigree. Jon Goode, for example, has been a frequenter of the open mic, as well as a feature. The anthology contributors are all the featured authors for last year, and includes poems by myself, along with Kodac, Collin Kelly, Travis, Katie Chaple, Lux, Trethewey, etc. If the font's a little funny-looking that can be offset (hm hm, a little layout humor there; I'm here all night) by the kick-ass writing you'll find in the book. A couple years ago the anthology was the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, so hopefully some folks will be in the running for that again this year.
I was getting to the fiction/prose writers. After hanging at the festival for a while, Sarah picked me up and we headed up to Man Martin's house to hang in his pool and barbecue. So, for some prose writers who I know are great readers:
1) Man Martin: Not only is his novel Days of the Endless Corvette a lot of fun to read when you're by your lonesome, it's great to see Man perform it. One minute you're watching this little southern guy talk about writing this book and coming up with his quirky characters, all in his southern accent, and then you realize that he's not just slipped into telling you the story of his novel, he's reciting the novel, because he's memorized the fucker. It's quite interesting to see him do this.
2) Chris Bundy has a story coming out in The Rambler that's titled something to the effect of "You Will Have Just Lost Some Contest." It's second person piece, very short, but gets to some great imagery that breaks your heart. Like a soft drizzle at sunset, the horizon purpling up at the end of a storm. Pure sweetness.
3) Josh Russell: He won an NEA grant last year to finish up his second novel, "My Bright Midnight," which was a finalist for the 2008 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Prize awarded by the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society. I believe this book will be coming out soon. His first, "Yellow Jack," is set in the late 19th Century in New Orleans. Also, Josh I know is a big lover of Stuart Dybek, so he's certainly got my vote as a writer I want to hear read.
There are many more fiction/prose writers that would make good candidates for areading series here in Atlanta. These are just some of the folks who I ran into yesterday, in all my ramblings. So Blake and I need a venue. The Composition Gallery in Candler Park comes to mind. I've read there, and it's nice, if not a little small. But there's no problem with having snacks and beer and wine. Also, now that Wordsmith's Books in Decatur isn't dead, I know they're open to hosting readings, and want to get people in to the store to buy books.
Keep an eye out on this. There may be a reading coming your way SOON.
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
On the MFA vs. PhD. in Creative Writing
I'm writing this in response to Blake Butler's (www.blakebutler.blogspot.com/) post today about the MFA Program. In general, I'd agree with everything Blake said about MFA programs, the feelings about which are complicated. To attempt to summarize: students in MFA programs sometimes get pissed at fellow students and their instructors because they both make ridiculous and apropos-of-nothing comments on the regular, but the program is indispensible for forcing students to read and write extensively, and introducing them to new ideas, a community of writers, etc.
This post is jumping off of Blake's to talk about the difference between a PhD. program in creative writing as opposed to the MFA. I'm finishing up my PhD. at Georgia State University, and I can say that my experience here hasn't been all that different that the experience Blake lays out: some people love your writing and can't offer constructive criticism, others hate it and can't offer constructive criticism, most folks are somewhere in between and you sit around in workshop scrawling illegible notes that you never re-read before you revise your writing anyway. But, the experience--having a group of ever-changing folks read your work and provide feedback on it, reading writers that you may not have encountered on your own, meeting professional writers through readings or as visitors to the workshop, and the opportunity to work on literary journals--is wonderful and, if anything, provides the young writer with the opportunity to work in and around nothing but writing for a few years.
My fellow writers and I have gone back and forth on the MFA/PhD thing. Most of my writer buddies have MFAs: Mike Dockins, Chris Bundy, Man Martin, Sara Bartlett, etc. I, however, do not. I have an MA in Literature and the Environment (yikes). However, my professors during my MA (who kicked ass, by the way)--Mike Branch and Scott Slovic, namely--knew that I was a writer, and allowed me to focus my program of study around creative writing, so many of my classes were writing workshops. So the ups, it seems, to having an MFA before the PhD: most of my friends have far more experience with writing and the workshop than I did once I began the PhD program; some had studied with pretty heavy hitters (James Tate, Andre Dubus III, Dara Wier, Martin Espada) and learned much from them before beginning the PhD program; and many of them had already published in good mags before starting the program. The problems I saw with this: some of them seemed to almost have programmed responses to work presented in the workshops; sometimes their aesthetic had been beaten into them so severely, they couldn't fathom writing that challenged their ideas of what a poem or story could or should do; and there was uniformity in the writing. Sometimes you couldn't distinguish one writer's work from another's, they were so similar. I guess this is what Blake meant when he referrred to MFA-izing the work.
Among the advantages of not having been in an MFA program: everything in this graduate program was new. I didn't know what it was like to be in a creative writing program at all. We had separate meetings, a separate community from the Lit and Comp-Rhet people, and a separate sense of identity in the department. The fiction workshop at Georgia State was new and exciting for me, as I had really only been in one fiction workshop previously, as an undergrad.
As far as weighing the differences between a PhD. and MFA in creative writing? It seems like the PhD. is the professional wave to ride right now. The PhD. is an inherently more academic degree than the MFA. The MFA is--at most campuses--a studio degree. Writers attend workshops, some contemporary lit courses, and maybe some craft or form and theory courses before they're finished. The PhD. requires students to take a number of literature, linguisitics, and foreign language courses (or a competence exam), in addition to the creative writing-related courses. So, the PhD. can make a writer more marketable and diverse, due to the extent of their expertise. At Georgia State, creative writing PhD. students are required to focus their minor field of study on the other genre. That is, since at GSU one can only study either fiction or poetry, the fiction writer's minor must be poetry. So, the secondary comprehensive exam covers (in the case of fiction writers), basically, every major poem, poet, and poetic movement from Beowulf to Natasha Tretheway, to use just one contemporary poet. This was great for me, since I began my writing career as a poet, and just happened to go to GSU as a fiction writer. I loved studying poetry and, as grueling as the course with Leon Stokesbury was, I learned more in his form and theory of poetry course than I think I've ever learned in any class, period. Last, the number of MFA programs out there far outnumber the PhDs. So, statistically, it makes sense if there are fewer PhDs than MFAs when one applies for a job in creative writing, and this can make the applicant stand out.
Ultimately, I can't nay-say graduate creative writing programs for a number of reasons: I'm a product of one of them, and it'd be pretty hypocritical of me to say that they all suck. I met many of my friends, the folks whom I drink with, and who read my work regularly and give me critical feedback. This is perhaps the greatest benefit to the creative writer. There were people in workshops whom I learned to ignore. But there were also people who were indispensible to my improvement as a writer. I wouldn't have met my fellow Perambulators Man Martin and Chris Bundy if it weren't for the fiction workshop at Georgia State. Also, on the poetry side of things, through GSU I met Mike Dockins, Travis Denton, Chad Prevost, and Katie Chaple. Together we all started a great magazine: Terminus. Mike and I read each other's work on a regular basis before getting stuff in the mail, and Mike and I have poems that we've written to each other, or in each other's voice, and making fun of each other's style (some of these, by the way, will appear in issue three of Limp Wrist). And I'm not sure if I would have studied many of the great pieces I did if I hadn't the PhD program to push me along. Probably, but I might have worked at a much slower rate. I've met some great writers through the program as well. Steve Almond lit a fire under my ass when he tore into a story draft of mine in workshop. He only made me want to work harder.
I don't think the kinds of problems one runs into in a graduate creative writing program are avoidable, nor do I think they can be confined to the creative writing program. Sarah always says that the political battles in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so small. I think I'd run into the same--if slightly modified--bullshit, if I was a physicist, instead of a writer.
Here's another cliche that's true: the graduate program has given me time to work on nothing but writing, whether I was doing the writing, reading, and critiquing myself, or for my own undergraduate students. I don't have to sell suits at the Men's Wearhouse any longer. I made more money there, though . . .
This post is jumping off of Blake's to talk about the difference between a PhD. program in creative writing as opposed to the MFA. I'm finishing up my PhD. at Georgia State University, and I can say that my experience here hasn't been all that different that the experience Blake lays out: some people love your writing and can't offer constructive criticism, others hate it and can't offer constructive criticism, most folks are somewhere in between and you sit around in workshop scrawling illegible notes that you never re-read before you revise your writing anyway. But, the experience--having a group of ever-changing folks read your work and provide feedback on it, reading writers that you may not have encountered on your own, meeting professional writers through readings or as visitors to the workshop, and the opportunity to work on literary journals--is wonderful and, if anything, provides the young writer with the opportunity to work in and around nothing but writing for a few years.
My fellow writers and I have gone back and forth on the MFA/PhD thing. Most of my writer buddies have MFAs: Mike Dockins, Chris Bundy, Man Martin, Sara Bartlett, etc. I, however, do not. I have an MA in Literature and the Environment (yikes). However, my professors during my MA (who kicked ass, by the way)--Mike Branch and Scott Slovic, namely--knew that I was a writer, and allowed me to focus my program of study around creative writing, so many of my classes were writing workshops. So the ups, it seems, to having an MFA before the PhD: most of my friends have far more experience with writing and the workshop than I did once I began the PhD program; some had studied with pretty heavy hitters (James Tate, Andre Dubus III, Dara Wier, Martin Espada) and learned much from them before beginning the PhD program; and many of them had already published in good mags before starting the program. The problems I saw with this: some of them seemed to almost have programmed responses to work presented in the workshops; sometimes their aesthetic had been beaten into them so severely, they couldn't fathom writing that challenged their ideas of what a poem or story could or should do; and there was uniformity in the writing. Sometimes you couldn't distinguish one writer's work from another's, they were so similar. I guess this is what Blake meant when he referrred to MFA-izing the work.
Among the advantages of not having been in an MFA program: everything in this graduate program was new. I didn't know what it was like to be in a creative writing program at all. We had separate meetings, a separate community from the Lit and Comp-Rhet people, and a separate sense of identity in the department. The fiction workshop at Georgia State was new and exciting for me, as I had really only been in one fiction workshop previously, as an undergrad.
As far as weighing the differences between a PhD. and MFA in creative writing? It seems like the PhD. is the professional wave to ride right now. The PhD. is an inherently more academic degree than the MFA. The MFA is--at most campuses--a studio degree. Writers attend workshops, some contemporary lit courses, and maybe some craft or form and theory courses before they're finished. The PhD. requires students to take a number of literature, linguisitics, and foreign language courses (or a competence exam), in addition to the creative writing-related courses. So, the PhD. can make a writer more marketable and diverse, due to the extent of their expertise. At Georgia State, creative writing PhD. students are required to focus their minor field of study on the other genre. That is, since at GSU one can only study either fiction or poetry, the fiction writer's minor must be poetry. So, the secondary comprehensive exam covers (in the case of fiction writers), basically, every major poem, poet, and poetic movement from Beowulf to Natasha Tretheway, to use just one contemporary poet. This was great for me, since I began my writing career as a poet, and just happened to go to GSU as a fiction writer. I loved studying poetry and, as grueling as the course with Leon Stokesbury was, I learned more in his form and theory of poetry course than I think I've ever learned in any class, period. Last, the number of MFA programs out there far outnumber the PhDs. So, statistically, it makes sense if there are fewer PhDs than MFAs when one applies for a job in creative writing, and this can make the applicant stand out.
Ultimately, I can't nay-say graduate creative writing programs for a number of reasons: I'm a product of one of them, and it'd be pretty hypocritical of me to say that they all suck. I met many of my friends, the folks whom I drink with, and who read my work regularly and give me critical feedback. This is perhaps the greatest benefit to the creative writer. There were people in workshops whom I learned to ignore. But there were also people who were indispensible to my improvement as a writer. I wouldn't have met my fellow Perambulators Man Martin and Chris Bundy if it weren't for the fiction workshop at Georgia State. Also, on the poetry side of things, through GSU I met Mike Dockins, Travis Denton, Chad Prevost, and Katie Chaple. Together we all started a great magazine: Terminus. Mike and I read each other's work on a regular basis before getting stuff in the mail, and Mike and I have poems that we've written to each other, or in each other's voice, and making fun of each other's style (some of these, by the way, will appear in issue three of Limp Wrist). And I'm not sure if I would have studied many of the great pieces I did if I hadn't the PhD program to push me along. Probably, but I might have worked at a much slower rate. I've met some great writers through the program as well. Steve Almond lit a fire under my ass when he tore into a story draft of mine in workshop. He only made me want to work harder.
I don't think the kinds of problems one runs into in a graduate creative writing program are avoidable, nor do I think they can be confined to the creative writing program. Sarah always says that the political battles in academia are so fierce because the stakes are so small. I think I'd run into the same--if slightly modified--bullshit, if I was a physicist, instead of a writer.
Here's another cliche that's true: the graduate program has given me time to work on nothing but writing, whether I was doing the writing, reading, and critiquing myself, or for my own undergraduate students. I don't have to sell suits at the Men's Wearhouse any longer. I made more money there, though . . .
Friday, August 15, 2008
An Evening with You
The beach in North Carolina is gorgeous right now, other than all the tourists walking and biking and driving up the roadways. This is a nice vacation after trying to get settled into our new apartment. I have hardly written at all in two weeks, and I'm jonesing. We still live out of boxes.
The other day I had to attend a GTA (Graduate Teaching Assistant) conference for the college where I'm finishing up this PhD. I wish that these conferences--which come twice a year, and are mandatory--could be more useful. I especially wish they could be more useful to creative writers. But composition and rhetoric rules the Department. My buddy and I lamented the three hours of sitting and listening to mostly thanks and announcements, and another hour of "how to use technology in the classroom": there's this thing called the "Internet", and on this "Internet" you can find "websites", and these "websites" can be useful when teaching your classes. After lunch we went to a session for helpful hints on completing the dissertation. These were helpful, if you're a literature major. We had hoped that we'd get practical information, such as how to upload our diss to the university's website, when to do it, when to sit down with the director of graduate studies, and find out exactly what all we had left to do so we could get the hell out of here. Instead I learned that it would be a good idea for me to carry a notebook and actually write in it. Then I learned that I should be prepared to think of my dissertaiton as a book. Then I learned that I would benefit from having someone other than myself read my dissertation and provide feedback on it. Finally, I learned that I should be prepared to revise my dissertation--maybe up to four times!--before turning it in to be defended. Since these basic parts of the writing process seem to be news to literature and composition and rhetoric folks, it's no wonder that no one reads their books. So, the session was mostly about how to write, period, not so much how to complete a dissertation. My buddy scrawled a note: "we ARE writers; they're ACADEMICS." Too true. These sessions are never helpful for creative writers. I could've learned what we talked about in this session by attending my own English 101 course.
So, since Wednesday afternoon I started feeling really horrible (Atlanta Mexican food, yikes), and decided that Sarah and I should follow our previously-scheduled plans and drive to the Outer Banks and chill in her beach house, walk into the ocean, swim in the pool, eat at a good restaurant or two, watch the Olympics, and finish my syllabus. Blah. Unfortunately, I had to miss the second Wednesday session and all of Thursday for the GTA conference. I am happiness.
In other news: 2-bit goon Mike Dockins should be returning to Atlanta after a harrowing couple months of drinking and teaching young genii in PA for CTY. He will then resume drinking, teaching young idiots at GSU, and finishing his doctorate along with me. I am excited to see this goon, because he's funny, a great poet, and I miss drinking whisky and PBR with the goon. When it comes to Dockins, the word "goon" is 66% of my vocabulary. My summer has consisted of hanging and drinking and talking (mostly) fiction with Man Martin and Chris Bundy, which kicks ass, but I like having the balance of hanging out with MIke because we talk almost exclusively of stupid things (i.e., the levels of peatiness in various scotches) and poetry. Ah whimsy.
I have a chapbook coming out from The Greying Ghost Press. I sent a batch of prose pieces to Carl Annarummo, editor of the press, and of their literary magazine The Corduroy Mtn. Carl got back to me saying he loved the pieces and would like to have them for TCM, and if I had any more, he'd love to look at a chapbook. I thought "funny you should ask . . ." My chapbook had previously been a finalist this summer at THE DIAGRAM'S competition. So I sent it to Carl, and after some fuck-ups from Hotmail (which sucks, by the way, and if you have an account, get rid of it, and switch to gmail, or something that actually sends and recieves your messages), he said he'd like to publish the book. So, I'm stoked. I had previously ordered a couple of the GG's previous chapbooks (Chris Rizzo's "Naturalistless" and Allen Bramhall's "Walden Book") and they're fucking beautiful, handmade deals, on nice soft paper, with cool covers. Carl said of my book, that it "will blow your mind up." Now that's just awesome. I love it when soemone admires your work, and says such things publicly about it. So, I'm looking forward to ordering more of GGs books, and those that are forthcoming: my friends': Laura Carter's "At the Pulse," and Brooklyn Copeland's "Borrowed House," along with a book by Carl himself, and by other folks. By the way, Brooklyn also has a chapbook up at Ungovernable Press that you can read here: http://ungovernablepress.blogspot.com. So, rock on Carl, and everyone else writing away out there.
I am sentimentality.
The other day I had to attend a GTA (Graduate Teaching Assistant) conference for the college where I'm finishing up this PhD. I wish that these conferences--which come twice a year, and are mandatory--could be more useful. I especially wish they could be more useful to creative writers. But composition and rhetoric rules the Department. My buddy and I lamented the three hours of sitting and listening to mostly thanks and announcements, and another hour of "how to use technology in the classroom": there's this thing called the "Internet", and on this "Internet" you can find "websites", and these "websites" can be useful when teaching your classes. After lunch we went to a session for helpful hints on completing the dissertation. These were helpful, if you're a literature major. We had hoped that we'd get practical information, such as how to upload our diss to the university's website, when to do it, when to sit down with the director of graduate studies, and find out exactly what all we had left to do so we could get the hell out of here. Instead I learned that it would be a good idea for me to carry a notebook and actually write in it. Then I learned that I should be prepared to think of my dissertaiton as a book. Then I learned that I would benefit from having someone other than myself read my dissertation and provide feedback on it. Finally, I learned that I should be prepared to revise my dissertation--maybe up to four times!--before turning it in to be defended. Since these basic parts of the writing process seem to be news to literature and composition and rhetoric folks, it's no wonder that no one reads their books. So, the session was mostly about how to write, period, not so much how to complete a dissertation. My buddy scrawled a note: "we ARE writers; they're ACADEMICS." Too true. These sessions are never helpful for creative writers. I could've learned what we talked about in this session by attending my own English 101 course.
So, since Wednesday afternoon I started feeling really horrible (Atlanta Mexican food, yikes), and decided that Sarah and I should follow our previously-scheduled plans and drive to the Outer Banks and chill in her beach house, walk into the ocean, swim in the pool, eat at a good restaurant or two, watch the Olympics, and finish my syllabus. Blah. Unfortunately, I had to miss the second Wednesday session and all of Thursday for the GTA conference. I am happiness.
In other news: 2-bit goon Mike Dockins should be returning to Atlanta after a harrowing couple months of drinking and teaching young genii in PA for CTY. He will then resume drinking, teaching young idiots at GSU, and finishing his doctorate along with me. I am excited to see this goon, because he's funny, a great poet, and I miss drinking whisky and PBR with the goon. When it comes to Dockins, the word "goon" is 66% of my vocabulary. My summer has consisted of hanging and drinking and talking (mostly) fiction with Man Martin and Chris Bundy, which kicks ass, but I like having the balance of hanging out with MIke because we talk almost exclusively of stupid things (i.e., the levels of peatiness in various scotches) and poetry. Ah whimsy.
I have a chapbook coming out from The Greying Ghost Press. I sent a batch of prose pieces to Carl Annarummo, editor of the press, and of their literary magazine The Corduroy Mtn. Carl got back to me saying he loved the pieces and would like to have them for TCM, and if I had any more, he'd love to look at a chapbook. I thought "funny you should ask . . ." My chapbook had previously been a finalist this summer at THE DIAGRAM'S competition. So I sent it to Carl, and after some fuck-ups from Hotmail (which sucks, by the way, and if you have an account, get rid of it, and switch to gmail, or something that actually sends and recieves your messages), he said he'd like to publish the book. So, I'm stoked. I had previously ordered a couple of the GG's previous chapbooks (Chris Rizzo's "Naturalistless" and Allen Bramhall's "Walden Book") and they're fucking beautiful, handmade deals, on nice soft paper, with cool covers. Carl said of my book, that it "will blow your mind up." Now that's just awesome. I love it when soemone admires your work, and says such things publicly about it. So, I'm looking forward to ordering more of GGs books, and those that are forthcoming: my friends': Laura Carter's "At the Pulse," and Brooklyn Copeland's "Borrowed House," along with a book by Carl himself, and by other folks. By the way, Brooklyn also has a chapbook up at Ungovernable Press that you can read here: http://ungovernablepress.blogspot.com. So, rock on Carl, and everyone else writing away out there.
I am sentimentality.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Moving Sucks--and So Do Target Book Cases
So, Sarah and I have been moving since last weekend. I've been busy doing all that, that I haven't had much of a chance to write anything, not to mention posting on this blog. Target's $32 book cases suck. All right, they're only $32. What should I expect? I guess I should expect $32-worth of workability. But apparently, National Georgraphic Magazines are too much for Target book cases, so don't load your Target shelves up with those. I'm a subscriber, and I'm cheap, so I haven't bought the nifty cases that NG provides to subsribers, so that one can categorize all his/her old Natty G issues, and make knifing through them library-wise relatively painless. The magazines themselves are heavy. NG uses a heavy paper for their awesome photography, so when you put together a few years' worth of issues, it weighs in pretty good. And it weighs too much for cheap-ass Target brand book cases. I found out today, because the fucking book cases Sarah and I bought last Sunday just took a shit and spilt all my NGs all over my cardboard box-littered living room floor. So now the book case is trashed (it split its sides, ripping up the particle board) and I've got to invest in some serious book storage. I should've done that in the first place. As Sarah said, if there's one thing we won't look back on and say, "That was a waste of money," it would be good book cases. On top of all this, we've only moved me, so far. We move Sarah this weekend. So I'll be tired out again Saturday night. Then we'll go through the grueling two or three months of getting our shit situated before having a house-warming party so everyone can fuck our shit up again.
American is greatest.
American is greatest.
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