(no subject)
I was going to write about The Apocalypse. But I think I will write about The Apocalypse tomorrow and tonight I am going to write about how much I hate Paulo Coelho.
I hate Paulo Coelho more than I hate Forrest Gump and almost as much as I hate Life is Beautiful.
My first experience with Paulo Coelho came about because I have fits of vanity whenever I see a book with my name in the title. This comes from growing up with a name that was not only unusual, but also weirdly archaic/unpopular. There were other girls with unusual names among my peer circles of Lenas and Katyas and Natashas, but their names could usually be found in "Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece" (my parents considered such names a sign of vulgarity) or were derived from revolutionary icons and such. "Zoya" is a Greek name that wasn't terribly frequent in Russia but you can bet that after the Nazis tortured the young Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya into bronzed immortality, lots of little Zoyas played "Gestapo" in the Moscow schoolyards during recess. So other kids with "weird" names nevertheless found those names reflected back at themselves from the pages of the Soviet "young adult" ouvre and the movie screens. My name was probably borderline crossover Jewish/bougie enough that thirty years earlier it would have been prosecutable under Article 58, but as it was, it was just weird. I longed for the friendship rituals of two blonde Natashas, sought out by everyone for the purpose of standing between them and making a wish (Russian childish superstition). I didn't want to have a name that, when modified with a colloquializing suffix "ka," acquired "kaka" at the end, an unfortunate side effect that seemingly constituted the high note of my older cousin's childhood. I hated the fact that people modified my name to "Vera" and I hated it even more after "Little Vera," the first Soviet movie to show a topless woman came out when I was 12. For a year at some point in the 1980s I refused to answer to any name besides Katya, which eventually resulted in a parent-teacher conference. The only fictional character I remember encountering throughout my childhood was some random secondary villain in one of Theodore Hoffman's fairy tales. She was a provincial wannabe bride with no imagination who tried employing black magic to keep her potential suitor from pursuing his true love, the Salamander's daughter, who lived in an art nouveau world of enchanted Victorian gardens. As far as role models, or even objects for projected affinity go, she pretty much sucked.
So the point is, I cannot resist a book with my name in the title. I mean, it could be called Mein Kampf: Special Edition for Girls Named Veronica and I'd probably shell out for it. The first book I happened upon in this fashion was a gem that became one of my favorite fantasy novels ever. Then Paulo Coelho happened.
When I was 24 I was browsing around in a Borders store and I came across a book called Veronika Decides to Die. I flipped it over and read the following synopsis:
Twenty-four-year-old Veronika seems to have everything -- youth and beauty, boyfriends and a loving family, a fulfilling job. But something is missing in her life. So, one cold November morning Veronika decides to die. She takes a handful of sleeping pills expecting never to wake up. But she does -- at a mental hospital where she is told that she has only days to live.
Well, I just had to get it. And I got it. And I hated it from the get-go. I read and I hated, I hated and I read. Like a weeping crocodile that nevertheless keeps eathing his victim I seizured and I read. I kept reading passages out loud to my protesting friends in the spirit of "ew, this tastes awful, try it!"
My father told me that in the 1970s in the "Soviet Writer" publishing house a chart was affixed to the wall of the office that was responsible for blurbs, press releases and reviews. The chart listed the prominent writers of the day and the adjectives that were designated as appropriate for each one. Some writers had to be described as "important," others as "influential," some were "great" and others were "solid" and if someone fucked up the taxonomy and promoted someone from "original" to "talented" by mistake in a release, they would be reprimanded or fired.
Paulo Coelho made me realize that analogous categories existed in the American book market--not concentrated in kafkaesque instututions, but reified in public consciousness. You know those writers whose prose is "raw"? Whose poetry is "honest"? Whose memoirs are "poignant"?
It's a Turf where, Celebrity Deathmatch Style it's Vladimirrrrr Nabokov vs. Ernest "Earnest" Hemingway! (And that was before na-na-la-la!!)
I think my favorite moment in American literature is in the introduction to The Annotated Lolita when Nabokov describes how he was encouraged to rewrite Lolita in a style more similar to Hemingway's. And to make Lolita a 12-year old boy.
But anyway, back to Coelho. Coelho writes "beautiful" books. "Beautiful" books are "good" but so are "raw" books and hordes of readers seize onto each category and then the turf war plays out in some bizarre milieu that is beyond post-intellectualism vs. antiintellectalism, it's more like anti-anti-anti-intellectualism vs. post-post-everything. Forget Adorno's and Benjamin's debates about Mickey Mouse As Proletariat: Repressive Desublimation vs. Revolutionary Jouissance. You've got The Alchemist vs. Blindness. And the scary part? The Alchemist is the thinking man's alternative to The Da Vinci Code.
"Beautiful writing" is more insidious than kitsch, or maybe it is the true kitsch. Kitsch as a recognizable category today encompasses tchotchkes from different decade brackets that enjoy their predictable aura of Schrodinger's Irony. I mean, "kitschy" is a lively and hopping search category on ebay, what does that tell you? But "beautiful" is refined, Trojan-horse kitsch for those who think QVC is lowbrow but will earnestly debate Terri Schiavo vs. Cremains Diamonds at dinner parties. "Beautiful" writing makes me viscerally remember why I wanted to be Dominique Francon at sixteen.
Not only is Paulo Coelho guilty of manufacturing "beautiful writing" with Intent to Distribute, he is also self-congratulatory and happy about it like a pig rolling around in dirt. He even thinks he knows what "meta" means.
Exhibit A: The opening of Veronika Decides to Die
She picked up the four packs of sleeping pills from the her bedside table. Instead of crushing them and mixing them with water, she decided to take them one by one, because there is always a gap between intention and action, and she wanted to feel free to turn back halfway. With each pill she swallowed, however, she felt more convinced: after five minutes the packs were empty.
Since she didn't know exactly how long it would take her to lose consciousness, she had placed on her bed that month's issue of a French magazine, Homme, which had just arrived in the library where she worked. She had no particular interest in computer science, but, as she leafed through the magazine, she came across an article about a computer game (one of those CD-ROMS) created by Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian writer she had happened to meet at a lecture in the cafe at Grand Union Hotel. They had exchanged a few words and she had ended up being invited by his published to join him for supper. There were a lot of people there, though, and they hadn't had a chance to talk in depth about anything.
The fact that she had met the author led her to think that he was a part of her world, and that reading an article baout his work could help pass the time. While she was waiting for death, Veronica started reading about computer science, a subject in which she was not the least bit interested, but then that was in keeping with what she had done all her life, always looking for the easy option, for whatever was nearest at hand. Like the magazine, for example.
To her surprise, though, the first line of text shook her out of her natural passivity (the tranquilizers had not yet dissolved in her stomach, but Veronika was by nature passive), and, for the first time in her life, it made her ponder the truth of a saying that was very fashionable among her friends: "Nothing in this world happens by chance."
Why that first line, at precisely the moemnt when she had begun to die? Wht was the hidden message she saw before her, assuming there are such things as hidden messages rather than mere coincidences?
Veronika is then taken to a mental hospital where the wise old doctor in charge really likes um...unconventional..."shock" treatments. Like insulin shock therapy. And telling Veronika that she has one week to live, which, of course, in the spirit of gathering rosebuds while they may, teaches her to Love Life, and, I think, there is an Erotic Awakening somewhere in there too. At the end of the week she is totally not dead AND she loves life!
People. I am retarded in a very particular way where I cannot see the dumbest, most obvious plot twists in Jerry Bruckheimer films. I cannot guess "Twilight Zone" "surprises"! BUT I totally knew Veronika was gonna be hoodwinked into carpe-dieming herself out of her ennui from, like, page 5 on.
It gets worse. It gets a lot worse. I blame it on my fear of flying that somehow triggered subconscious masochism and not the healthy/exploratory kind either, but for my flight back to the States I bought Eleven Minutes, Paulo Coelho's contribution to the crossover "Edgy Beautiful" genre. Oh-Em-Gee, doesn't that sound like a Kirstin Dunst movie? My iPod is like a mood ring and my bookshelf is like the Kaballah and in the morning I was Sad and I listened to "Pretty (Ugly Before)" and after lunch I read me some Coelho and now English language cannot contain me, um, I feel saudade!
So. Exhibit B: Eleven Minutes tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heart-broken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that "love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer..." A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune yet ends up working as a prostitute.
Any paragraph that includes "Maria," "innocent," "tender age" and "prostitute" makes me want to gouge my eyes out. But what really made me want to kill myself in a meta Veronica-decides-to-die way was the "dedication," and I apologize that this is turning into the longest entry in the history of el-jay but I need to get this off my chest, Paulo Coelho has turned me into a psychologically incontinent Catholic confession addict:
On 29th May 2002, just hours before I put the finishing touches to this book, I visited the Grotto in Lourdes, in France, to fill a few bottles with miraculous water from the spring. Inside the Basilica, a gentleman in his seventies said to me: "you know, you look just like Paulo Coelho." I said that I was Paulo Coelho. the man embraced me and introduced me to his wife and granddaighter. He spoke of the imporance of my books in his life, concluding: "They make me dream." I have often heard these words before, and they always please me greatly. At that moment, however, I felt really frightened, because I knew that my new novel, Eleven Minutes dealt with a subject that was harsh, difficult, shocking. I went over to the spring, filled by bottles, then came back and asked him where he lived (in Northern France, near Belgium) and noted down his name.
This book is dedicated to you, Maurice Gravelines. I have a duty to you, your wife and grand-daughter and to myself to talk about the things that concern me and not only about what everyone would like to hear. Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.
This totally gave me a flashback to when my high school boyfriend gave me Kahlin Gibran's The Prophet for my 17th birthday, and as overdetermined as I was to find anything coming from him Extremely Meaningful (as Too Much Joy sang in "Crush Story," "everything you've ever said is brilliant"), I had trouble processing why, exactly, this was was a Solemn Object in the game of Clue. Then, again, I also laughed during the "suicide" scene in "The Royal Tenenbaums" to the great displeasure of the other people in the movie theater.
Anyway, Maria prostitutes herself in the most unsexy literary narrataive of prostitution in history, and that includes Lydia Lunch texts, which are, to be fair, infinitely more interesting to read. Then she falls in love with an artist who picks her up with the following line: "could you please stop talking? I can see your light now." Maria insists that she be a whore, but the painter sees the Madonna in her that he will cajole out through some ad hoc painting and gentle non-penetrative "lovemaking."
Their courting proceeds through a kind of perverted negative dialectic where he declares that he wants to "know her" and she says shit like "Well there are three of me, the Innocent Girl, the Femme Fatale and the Understanding Mother, which one would you like to meet?" And he sez...wait for it..."YOU."
Oh, it should be noted that her romance, in her own narrative, stems out of a repetition compulsion vis-a-vis a boy she asked for a pencil when she was 7 and then he moved away. She also writes italicized entries in her diary that are kind of similar to my pre-el-jay paper journals from when I was 15 that say things like "Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it--which of thse two attitudes is the least destructive?
-----I don't know-------"
I think the thing that pissed me off the most was that there was one point where the book seemed like it was about to go to an interesting place, when Maria went off with a "special customer" who was into Dom/Sub S&M play. She enjoys herself but later the agenda of the author becomes clear through the mouthpiece of the "painter of light" (not Thomas Kinkade) who makes it clear that no one could POSSIBLY enjoy that kind of filth unless they had low self-esteem and rejected their inner light. He saves her, though, and fiats her lux by seemingly magically meeting her in Paris as she is on her route to Brazil after finally realizing, in some "Women Who Love The Men Who Run With The Wolves Under The Moon" epiphany that loving him unselfishly, for the sake of love itself is totally sufficient and so she can leave him. It's like, after Kelly Taylor "chooses herself" she can be with Brandon and then Dylan.
I am sorry, dear readers, if you have been led to believe that Paulo Coelho can be meaningful in your life, meaningful in a way that offers an "alternative" to the official monopoly on "meaningful" that has metastasized since the Pope's death. I am sorry. But I have a duty to you, your wife and grand-daughter and to myself to talk about the things that concern me and not only about what everyone would like to hear.
I think I just exhausted my per vita allotment of quotation marks and now I can never use quotation marks again, ever. Oh well, punctuation was just the jetsam of Gretel's crumbs marking the exodus of irony from my (and your) life anyway.
I hate Paulo Coelho more than I hate Forrest Gump and almost as much as I hate Life is Beautiful.
My first experience with Paulo Coelho came about because I have fits of vanity whenever I see a book with my name in the title. This comes from growing up with a name that was not only unusual, but also weirdly archaic/unpopular. There were other girls with unusual names among my peer circles of Lenas and Katyas and Natashas, but their names could usually be found in "Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece" (my parents considered such names a sign of vulgarity) or were derived from revolutionary icons and such. "Zoya" is a Greek name that wasn't terribly frequent in Russia but you can bet that after the Nazis tortured the young Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya into bronzed immortality, lots of little Zoyas played "Gestapo" in the Moscow schoolyards during recess. So other kids with "weird" names nevertheless found those names reflected back at themselves from the pages of the Soviet "young adult" ouvre and the movie screens. My name was probably borderline crossover Jewish/bougie enough that thirty years earlier it would have been prosecutable under Article 58, but as it was, it was just weird. I longed for the friendship rituals of two blonde Natashas, sought out by everyone for the purpose of standing between them and making a wish (Russian childish superstition). I didn't want to have a name that, when modified with a colloquializing suffix "ka," acquired "kaka" at the end, an unfortunate side effect that seemingly constituted the high note of my older cousin's childhood. I hated the fact that people modified my name to "Vera" and I hated it even more after "Little Vera," the first Soviet movie to show a topless woman came out when I was 12. For a year at some point in the 1980s I refused to answer to any name besides Katya, which eventually resulted in a parent-teacher conference. The only fictional character I remember encountering throughout my childhood was some random secondary villain in one of Theodore Hoffman's fairy tales. She was a provincial wannabe bride with no imagination who tried employing black magic to keep her potential suitor from pursuing his true love, the Salamander's daughter, who lived in an art nouveau world of enchanted Victorian gardens. As far as role models, or even objects for projected affinity go, she pretty much sucked.
So the point is, I cannot resist a book with my name in the title. I mean, it could be called Mein Kampf: Special Edition for Girls Named Veronica and I'd probably shell out for it. The first book I happened upon in this fashion was a gem that became one of my favorite fantasy novels ever. Then Paulo Coelho happened.
When I was 24 I was browsing around in a Borders store and I came across a book called Veronika Decides to Die. I flipped it over and read the following synopsis:
Twenty-four-year-old Veronika seems to have everything -- youth and beauty, boyfriends and a loving family, a fulfilling job. But something is missing in her life. So, one cold November morning Veronika decides to die. She takes a handful of sleeping pills expecting never to wake up. But she does -- at a mental hospital where she is told that she has only days to live.
Well, I just had to get it. And I got it. And I hated it from the get-go. I read and I hated, I hated and I read. Like a weeping crocodile that nevertheless keeps eathing his victim I seizured and I read. I kept reading passages out loud to my protesting friends in the spirit of "ew, this tastes awful, try it!"
My father told me that in the 1970s in the "Soviet Writer" publishing house a chart was affixed to the wall of the office that was responsible for blurbs, press releases and reviews. The chart listed the prominent writers of the day and the adjectives that were designated as appropriate for each one. Some writers had to be described as "important," others as "influential," some were "great" and others were "solid" and if someone fucked up the taxonomy and promoted someone from "original" to "talented" by mistake in a release, they would be reprimanded or fired.
Paulo Coelho made me realize that analogous categories existed in the American book market--not concentrated in kafkaesque instututions, but reified in public consciousness. You know those writers whose prose is "raw"? Whose poetry is "honest"? Whose memoirs are "poignant"?
It's a Turf where, Celebrity Deathmatch Style it's Vladimirrrrr Nabokov vs. Ernest "Earnest" Hemingway! (And that was before na-na-la-la!!)
I think my favorite moment in American literature is in the introduction to The Annotated Lolita when Nabokov describes how he was encouraged to rewrite Lolita in a style more similar to Hemingway's. And to make Lolita a 12-year old boy.
But anyway, back to Coelho. Coelho writes "beautiful" books. "Beautiful" books are "good" but so are "raw" books and hordes of readers seize onto each category and then the turf war plays out in some bizarre milieu that is beyond post-intellectualism vs. antiintellectalism, it's more like anti-anti-anti-intellectualism vs. post-post-everything. Forget Adorno's and Benjamin's debates about Mickey Mouse As Proletariat: Repressive Desublimation vs. Revolutionary Jouissance. You've got The Alchemist vs. Blindness. And the scary part? The Alchemist is the thinking man's alternative to The Da Vinci Code.
"Beautiful writing" is more insidious than kitsch, or maybe it is the true kitsch. Kitsch as a recognizable category today encompasses tchotchkes from different decade brackets that enjoy their predictable aura of Schrodinger's Irony. I mean, "kitschy" is a lively and hopping search category on ebay, what does that tell you? But "beautiful" is refined, Trojan-horse kitsch for those who think QVC is lowbrow but will earnestly debate Terri Schiavo vs. Cremains Diamonds at dinner parties. "Beautiful" writing makes me viscerally remember why I wanted to be Dominique Francon at sixteen.
Not only is Paulo Coelho guilty of manufacturing "beautiful writing" with Intent to Distribute, he is also self-congratulatory and happy about it like a pig rolling around in dirt. He even thinks he knows what "meta" means.
Exhibit A: The opening of Veronika Decides to Die
She picked up the four packs of sleeping pills from the her bedside table. Instead of crushing them and mixing them with water, she decided to take them one by one, because there is always a gap between intention and action, and she wanted to feel free to turn back halfway. With each pill she swallowed, however, she felt more convinced: after five minutes the packs were empty.
Since she didn't know exactly how long it would take her to lose consciousness, she had placed on her bed that month's issue of a French magazine, Homme, which had just arrived in the library where she worked. She had no particular interest in computer science, but, as she leafed through the magazine, she came across an article about a computer game (one of those CD-ROMS) created by Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian writer she had happened to meet at a lecture in the cafe at Grand Union Hotel. They had exchanged a few words and she had ended up being invited by his published to join him for supper. There were a lot of people there, though, and they hadn't had a chance to talk in depth about anything.
The fact that she had met the author led her to think that he was a part of her world, and that reading an article baout his work could help pass the time. While she was waiting for death, Veronica started reading about computer science, a subject in which she was not the least bit interested, but then that was in keeping with what she had done all her life, always looking for the easy option, for whatever was nearest at hand. Like the magazine, for example.
To her surprise, though, the first line of text shook her out of her natural passivity (the tranquilizers had not yet dissolved in her stomach, but Veronika was by nature passive), and, for the first time in her life, it made her ponder the truth of a saying that was very fashionable among her friends: "Nothing in this world happens by chance."
Why that first line, at precisely the moemnt when she had begun to die? Wht was the hidden message she saw before her, assuming there are such things as hidden messages rather than mere coincidences?
Veronika is then taken to a mental hospital where the wise old doctor in charge really likes um...unconventional..."shock" treatments. Like insulin shock therapy. And telling Veronika that she has one week to live, which, of course, in the spirit of gathering rosebuds while they may, teaches her to Love Life, and, I think, there is an Erotic Awakening somewhere in there too. At the end of the week she is totally not dead AND she loves life!
People. I am retarded in a very particular way where I cannot see the dumbest, most obvious plot twists in Jerry Bruckheimer films. I cannot guess "Twilight Zone" "surprises"! BUT I totally knew Veronika was gonna be hoodwinked into carpe-dieming herself out of her ennui from, like, page 5 on.
It gets worse. It gets a lot worse. I blame it on my fear of flying that somehow triggered subconscious masochism and not the healthy/exploratory kind either, but for my flight back to the States I bought Eleven Minutes, Paulo Coelho's contribution to the crossover "Edgy Beautiful" genre. Oh-Em-Gee, doesn't that sound like a Kirstin Dunst movie? My iPod is like a mood ring and my bookshelf is like the Kaballah and in the morning I was Sad and I listened to "Pretty (Ugly Before)" and after lunch I read me some Coelho and now English language cannot contain me, um, I feel saudade!
So. Exhibit B: Eleven Minutes tells the story of Maria, a young girl from a Brazilian village, whose first innocent brushes with love leave her heart-broken. At a tender age, she becomes convinced that she will never find true love, instead believing that "love is a terrible thing that will make you suffer..." A chance meeting in Rio takes her to Geneva, where she dreams of finding fame and fortune yet ends up working as a prostitute.
Any paragraph that includes "Maria," "innocent," "tender age" and "prostitute" makes me want to gouge my eyes out. But what really made me want to kill myself in a meta Veronica-decides-to-die way was the "dedication," and I apologize that this is turning into the longest entry in the history of el-jay but I need to get this off my chest, Paulo Coelho has turned me into a psychologically incontinent Catholic confession addict:
On 29th May 2002, just hours before I put the finishing touches to this book, I visited the Grotto in Lourdes, in France, to fill a few bottles with miraculous water from the spring. Inside the Basilica, a gentleman in his seventies said to me: "you know, you look just like Paulo Coelho." I said that I was Paulo Coelho. the man embraced me and introduced me to his wife and granddaighter. He spoke of the imporance of my books in his life, concluding: "They make me dream." I have often heard these words before, and they always please me greatly. At that moment, however, I felt really frightened, because I knew that my new novel, Eleven Minutes dealt with a subject that was harsh, difficult, shocking. I went over to the spring, filled by bottles, then came back and asked him where he lived (in Northern France, near Belgium) and noted down his name.
This book is dedicated to you, Maurice Gravelines. I have a duty to you, your wife and grand-daughter and to myself to talk about the things that concern me and not only about what everyone would like to hear. Some books make us dream, others bring us face to face with reality, but what matters most to the author is the honesty with which a book is written.
This totally gave me a flashback to when my high school boyfriend gave me Kahlin Gibran's The Prophet for my 17th birthday, and as overdetermined as I was to find anything coming from him Extremely Meaningful (as Too Much Joy sang in "Crush Story," "everything you've ever said is brilliant"), I had trouble processing why, exactly, this was was a Solemn Object in the game of Clue. Then, again, I also laughed during the "suicide" scene in "The Royal Tenenbaums" to the great displeasure of the other people in the movie theater.
Anyway, Maria prostitutes herself in the most unsexy literary narrataive of prostitution in history, and that includes Lydia Lunch texts, which are, to be fair, infinitely more interesting to read. Then she falls in love with an artist who picks her up with the following line: "could you please stop talking? I can see your light now." Maria insists that she be a whore, but the painter sees the Madonna in her that he will cajole out through some ad hoc painting and gentle non-penetrative "lovemaking."
Their courting proceeds through a kind of perverted negative dialectic where he declares that he wants to "know her" and she says shit like "Well there are three of me, the Innocent Girl, the Femme Fatale and the Understanding Mother, which one would you like to meet?" And he sez...wait for it..."YOU."
Oh, it should be noted that her romance, in her own narrative, stems out of a repetition compulsion vis-a-vis a boy she asked for a pencil when she was 7 and then he moved away. She also writes italicized entries in her diary that are kind of similar to my pre-el-jay paper journals from when I was 15 that say things like "Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it--which of thse two attitudes is the least destructive?
-----I don't know-------"
I think the thing that pissed me off the most was that there was one point where the book seemed like it was about to go to an interesting place, when Maria went off with a "special customer" who was into Dom/Sub S&M play. She enjoys herself but later the agenda of the author becomes clear through the mouthpiece of the "painter of light" (not Thomas Kinkade) who makes it clear that no one could POSSIBLY enjoy that kind of filth unless they had low self-esteem and rejected their inner light. He saves her, though, and fiats her lux by seemingly magically meeting her in Paris as she is on her route to Brazil after finally realizing, in some "Women Who Love The Men Who Run With The Wolves Under The Moon" epiphany that loving him unselfishly, for the sake of love itself is totally sufficient and so she can leave him. It's like, after Kelly Taylor "chooses herself" she can be with Brandon and then Dylan.
I am sorry, dear readers, if you have been led to believe that Paulo Coelho can be meaningful in your life, meaningful in a way that offers an "alternative" to the official monopoly on "meaningful" that has metastasized since the Pope's death. I am sorry. But I have a duty to you, your wife and grand-daughter and to myself to talk about the things that concern me and not only about what everyone would like to hear.
I think I just exhausted my per vita allotment of quotation marks and now I can never use quotation marks again, ever. Oh well, punctuation was just the jetsam of Gretel's crumbs marking the exodus of irony from my (and your) life anyway.