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The spectacle of grown men and women competing for and/or gushing over prizes never fails to fill me with profound disgust for the human race.

The only prizes worth paying any attention to, I think, are the kind that draw attention to otherwise scorned or neglected efforts.

LITERATURE: The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters – General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others – each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

PEACE: Claire Rind and Peter Simmons of Newcastle University, in the U.K., for electrically monitoring the activity of a brain cell in a locust while that locust was watching selected highlights from the movie “Star Wars.”

Name me any other major awards ceremony the news of which must prompt tens of thousands of people all around the world to jump up and do a little jig of pure happiness. Truly ennobling.

I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason–
John Keats, letter to his brothers, Dec. 21, 1817

This week witnessed the birth of a new group blog, qarrtsiluni. Beth explained better than I could what we are about. K. of Lucid Moment is the Managing Editor and blog host; he, Beth, whiskey river and I make up the editorial team for September and October. After that, we hope to pass the baton to others.

Go take a look. And please consider contributing original prose, poetry and/or artwork; all modes, moods and themes are welcome within the broad parameters of a monthly theme.

To be “capable of being in uncertainties” is to be literally in the midst. The poet is in the midst. The poem, too, is in the midst, a kind of magnet for complex historical, literary, and psychological forces, as well as a way of maintaining oneself in the face of the multiplicity.

There are serious consequences to being in the midst. For instance, one is subject to influences. One experiences crises of identity. One suffers from self-consciousness. One longs for self-knowledge while realizing at the same time that under the circumstances self-knowledge can never be complete.

Charles Simic, “Negative Capability and Its Children,” in The Uncertain Certainty

Here’s a brief selection of links to some blog posts that have helped me grapple with the aftermath of Katrina in the last few days.

Two Cabbies in New Orleans, from the marvelous garden, is my favorite appreciation of the city so far. Never mind all the rampant corruption, endemic poverty, police brutality – it’s through stories like this that you learn the true flavor of a place. And in an update yesterday, Patry reported that she and her husband have made contact with one of the cabbies they befriended.

“The state of the city, and the number of the dead is far worse than anything you see on TV,” he said, his voice briefly cracking. “But I feel grateful to be alive, grateful that my children are safe. People have shown us so much love.”

“What do you need?” my husband asked.

Briefly, Chris faltered, his needs so clearly overwhelming. “I try not to think about that,” he said, attempting a laugh. “Because we need just about everything.”

Then he told us how his son had broken down in a particularly vulnerable moment.

“Where will we go? What will we do now?” the son asked.

And Chris responded, “We’ll be like Job. We’ll praise God more than ever and he’ll triple our bounty.”

Artist and former New Orleanian James W. Bailey wonders, Is America Really Prepared to Allow the Hoodoo Culture of New Orleans to be Destroyed by Hurricane Katrina? (thanks to Marja-Leena for the link). Black Cat Bone is an enjoyable new blog whose mission is

to burn the flesh off modern art to get down to the raw bone of what’s really happening with art in American society. Black Cat Bone is a free road trip through the wild, chaotic and blissful world of the contemporary visual arts and originates with a down-home Blues-based root philosophy born in the Delta of Mississippi. Broadcast live on the Internets on a daily basis from just outside our nation’s capital of Washington, D.C., Black Cat Bone utilizes advanced digital technology designed, engineered and manufactured by the Devil to tap into the cosmic positive powers of Hoodoo to better serve its world-wide audience…

The most linked-to essay in the blogosphere right now is all about Being Poor. I hope that its popularity, and the passion evinced in its lengthy message string, are signs of the start of a national conversation on poverty and class, and are not just a flash in the pan.

Maria of alembic has written a great screed on Blinders.

For the social narcissist there can be no such thing as the working poor. It is inconceivable that people should be working and not have anything to show for it. For the social narcissist, it is better to think of the poor as dependent on the government or charity rather than not having a living wage. This way, the social narcissist doesn’t have to be accountable for his or her part in this distribution of the garden’s yield … or, to bring it home to the backyard, the possibility that our little paradise in Marin is not exactly a realization of our pure will in shaping the landscape. Better to feel sorry for the poor than to see how we are implicated in their plight…

Should we succumb to anger, though? Does anger ever really solve anything? After a couple briefer attempts to explain himself, Dale of mole lets loose with what he calls My official Buddhist sermon on the subject. I found little to disagree with, surprisingly enough.

Finally, Pica at Feathers of Hope asks, What Can I Do? I like her answers.

White shooting star or flowering tobacco (Nicotiana sylvestris). Note the bumblebee stealing nectar from the base of one of the flowers

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The bread dough after it has been punched down – the primordial origin of the fabled knuckle sandwich

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Landscape with dried tomatoes (a live shot, not a collage). The blood of the tomato is evaporated as an offering to the sun

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For the first part of this chain of quotes, see here.

The Eskimo song duel is famous for its disputative function in a cultural context where normally the airing of grievances was forbidden….

The song duel owes much of its effectiveness to the ambiguity created by the fact that the single event can at all times be interpreted in two ways: it is at once an artistic festive event and an airing of grievances. An opponent can at any time be said to be doing two things: composing humorous songs and hurling accusations and insults. It should be emphasized that the singer is in fact doing both things at once; it is not a case of pretending to have artistic fun while making veiled attacks. Both aspects of the performance are important, real and inter-connected. The ambiguity of the event itself is compounded by the humorous key: participants are constrained at all times to behave as if all statements in the duel are ironic. At the most essential level, the duality of the event allows the community to continue to function after the duel, since the loser of the duel (if there is one) has not been publicly declared guilty of any serious transgressions. The loser is guilty simply of having performed less well than his opponent in a song contest, and any accusations leveled against him were only ironic.

Songs were of great importance to the Eskimo, and the duelling song was just one of a wide genre. Orpingalik, a Netsilik shaman, expressed the significance of song as an integral part of his culture in a reply to [Knud] Rasmussen’s question regarding the number of songs he had composed:

How many songs I have I cannot tell you. I keep no count of such things. There are so many occasions in one’s life when a sorrow is felt in such a way that the desire comes to sing; and so I know that I have many songs. All my being is song, and I sing as I draw breath.

Good dueling songs – and in fact entire duels – were immortalized. While Rasmussen gathered some of his songs first hand, many of them were sung to him by people who had learned them from their elders. These immortalized songs were occasionally sung in other contexts, providing entertainment and amused reminiscence on informal occasion. A performance in a song duel, therefore, was a contribution to an important and extensive art form.

– Penelope Eckert and Russell Newmark, “Central Eskimo Song Duels: A Contextual Analysis of Ritual Ambiguity,” Ethnology vol. xix, no. 2

By far the most important social context in which zamil poetry is composed [by Yemenis] is in the dispute mediation. When a serious conflict breaks out between two or more villages or tribes or two different tribal sections – a conflict that might involve a dispute over land (private property or tribal boundaries), women (abductions, runaways, adulteries), or water rights – warfare among the contending parties often results…. The fighting at first is often a kind of symbolic violence in which the offended party tries to restore its honor by a show of force, and almost immediately after the first shots have rung out, intermediaries arrive to try and persuade the parties to agree to a truce…

The intermediaries may arrive chanting a zamil poem…announcing their intention of mediating the dispute and offering up cows or sheep for sacrifice in token of their sincerity and good faith. If…the plaintiff…agrees to a truce, it sets the conditions in numbers of cows, sheep, guns, and, in the most serious conflicts, even hostages… These demands are put forward by the intermediaries in the form of zamil poetry….

It is practically impossible to delimit a class of occasions on which someone might use zamil poetry for his own personal ends…. Once I was riding a bus on which more boarding tickets had been sold than there were seats available for passengers, with the result that a luckless passenger who happened to be an old tribesman had to sit on the floor of the vehicle. Resenting the injustice of not having been given a seat like everyone else when he had paid for one, he composed a zamil on the spot voicing his complaint. It had its intended effect: everyone on the bus started to laugh when they heard the poem and taunted the ticket seller, who in turn relinquished his seat to the now greatly mollified old man.

– Stephen C. Caton, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe

Egil Skallagrimson received word that there was a new king in Norway and that Arinbjorn had returned to his lands there and was held in high esteem. The Egil composed a poem in Arinbjorn’s praise and sent it to him in Norway, and this is the beginning of it:

I am quick to sing
a noble man’s praises,
but stumble for words
about misers;
freely I speak
of a king’s deeds,
but stay silent
about the people’s lies.

Replete with taunts
for the bearer of lies,
I sing the favours
of my friends;
I have visited many
seats of mild kings,
with the ingenuous
intent of a poet.

Once I had
incurred the wrath
of a mighty king
of Yngling’s line;
I drew a bold hat
over my black hair,
paid a visit
to the war-lord

where that mighty
maker of men
ruled the land from beneath
his helmet of terror.
In York
the king reigned,
rigid of mind,
over rainy shores.

The shining glare
from Eirik’s brow
was not safe to behold
nor free from terror;
when the moons
of that tyrant’s face
shone, serpent-like,
with their awesome glow.

Yet I ventured
my poem to the king,
the bed-prize that Odin
had slithered to claim,
his frothing horn
passed around
to quench
all men’s ears.

No one praised
the beauty of the prize
my poetry earned
in that lavish house
when I accepted from the king
in reward for my verse
my own sable head
to stand my hat on.

My head I won
and with it the two
dark jewels
of my beetling brows,
and the mouth
that had delivered
my head’s ransom
at the king’s knee.

A field of teeth
and my tongue I took back,
and my flapping ears
endowed with sound;
such a gift
was prized higher
than earning gold
from a famous king.

By my side, better
than every other
spreader of treasure,
stood my loyal friend
whom I truly trusted,
growing in stature
with his every deed.

Arinbjorn,
paragon of men . . .

– Bernard Scudder, trans., Egil’s Saga, attributed to Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241)
__________

For more on Inuit poetics, see Qarrtsiluni and Building Dwelling Eating. For more on Egil Skallagrimson and Norse poetics – including a description of the origin myth of poetry, alluded to in Egil’s sixth stanza above – see Poetry or vomit?

O.K., “Free Willy” fans! Time for another heart-warming story of a captive killer whale who is really just like us. We could call this one “Free Lunch”:

First, the young whale spit regurgitated fish onto the surface of the water, then sank below the water and waited.

If a hungry gull landed on the water, the whale would surge up to the surface, sometimes catching a free meal of his own.

Noonan watched as the same whale set the same trap again and again.

Within a few months, the whale’s younger half brother adopted the practice. Eventually the behavior spread and now five Marineland whales supplement their diet with fresh fowl, the scientist said.

“It looked liked one was watching while the other tried,” Noonan said of the whale’s initial behavior.

The capacity to come up with the gull-baiting strategy and then share the technique with others — known as cultural learning in the scientific world — was once believed to be one of those abilities that separated humans from other animals.

But biologists have since proven certain animals, including dolphins and chimps, do this.

“This is an example in which a new behavior spread through a population,” Noonan said. “We had the opportunity to see a tradition form and spread in exactly the way that cultures do in humans.”

A more sober article in New Scientist summarizes this and several other recent examples of cultural learning, including a new study on chimps:

Chimpanzees appear to be capable of communicating using sounds that refer to specific objects, according to a study of sounds made in response to different foods. It is the first time this ability has been demonstrated in chimps.

Primatologist Katie Slocombe of the University of St Andrews, UK, recorded the grunts made by chimps at nearby Edinburgh Zoo as they collected food at two feeders. One dispensed bread, considered a high-quality treat, and the other doled out apples, a much less sought-after snack.

Slocombe then played back the recordings and watched the reactions of a 6-year-old male named Liberius. The results were striking. After hearing a bread grunt, Liberius spent far more time searching around the bread feeder, while an apple grunt would send him hunting under the apple feeder. Slocombe presented the work at the US Animal Behavior Society meeting in Snowbird, Utah, this month.

This is the first convincing evidence of “referential communication” in chimps, says primatologist Amy Pollick of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Earlier research with a close cousin of the chimpanzee – a male pygmy chimpanzee, or bonobo, named Kanzi – showed that he made specific sounds for four different things: bananas, grapes, juice and yes. But the researchers did not test if the sounds conveyed any meaning to other bonobos, and the same experiments have never been done in chimpanzees.

Liberius, on the other hand, was able to take cues from apple and bread grunts made by at least three different chimpanzees.

This follows closely on the heels of another report of cultural learning among captive chimpanzees. I imagine that in a few years there will be dozens of other examples from many different species of mammals and birds, now that the taboo against studying animal cultures seems finally to have been lifted.

But here’s what I wonder. Suppose the “Free Willy” crowd organizes for the release of the Marineland orcas back into the wild, and they then transmit their new-found bait-and-snatch lore to other killer whales. What will this do to wild populations of seabirds? Will they all prove equally, um, gullible? Take fulmars, for instance. Their diet is described as “oily offal and refuse, fish and cuttles.” Seems as if they might be at high risk here – except that nature (or culture?) may have left them well equipped to retaliate. “Fulmar” means “foul gull” in Icelandic. When disturbed, fulmars hurl a stream of bright-orange, foul-smelling projectile vomit with great accuracy into the eye or other orifice of their attackers. Things could get interesting out on the high seas.

Space and time can bend into a vanishing point: we know this, or think we do. Light disappears like water down a drain; from this inverse star, no visions come. We have only the words, black hole, and the idea of suction, the horror of no-place and its irresistible gravity. But doubt still clouds the imagination, and we clutch at whatever flotsam our worldy experience can provide. Surely it is a portal, we say – the same kind of logic that leads us to become entranced by the orifices of the beautiful. How could such a perfect mouth do more than sip or nibble? None but the thinnest of ties can bind its owner to the earth. Surely this is no gaping maw, no staring eye, no ravenous sex. The gaze is hidden behind sunglasses, the flat belly flaunts its false window and our eager glances cluster, like the flies that crowd the eyes and mouths of starving children, walking in and out with impunity. But no, it isn’t like that. The blank at the end of space and time refuses nothing, like a bull’s-eye that’s impossible to miss. If it were a doorway, it would have just one side, and if it were a mouth, one word: Yes.

Years ago, when I was a student of Japanese literature, I loved the blog-like Tsurezuregusa, by the 14th-century monk Kenkí´, which Donald Keene translated as Essays in Idleness. “What a strange, demented feeling it gives me,” Kenkí´ began, “when I realize that I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.”

A similar spirit of nonsense animates the inventions of Chindogu founder Kawakami Kenji. Kawakami has invented such indispensable devices as duster slippers for cats (get your house clean while your kitty pads about), the hydrophobe’s bath body suit (for people who want to bathe without getting wet), and beginner high heels, complete with training wheels.

A new article in Japan Focus points out the serious side of Kawakami’s farce. “If people laugh, that’s fine,” Kawakami tells the author. “We need more of it. I believe in rejecting society by laughing at it.” Though pictures of his wacky inventions have been a staple of widely circulated, jokey emails for years, the subtler points of his consumerist critique have been lost on those who arguably stand to benefit the most from it – Japanese and Americans.

“I despise materialism and how everything is turned into a commodity,” says the 57-year-old inventor, while chugging on the first of an endless supply of cigarettes. “Things that should belong to everyone are patented and turned into private property. I’ve never registered a patent and I never will because the world of patents is dirty, full of greed and competition.” …

Murakami’s anti-materialism appears genuine: He has the casual everyman look of an off-duty corporate worker and has not changed the oversized glasses he has worn for years. He is not married and has no children to send to private school. The only apparent concession to bourgeois luxury is the old 7-series BMW that sits outside his office, but a thick layer of dust makes it clear that the car has not moved in years. “I’m not much of a driver,” says its owner.

Definitely a man after my own heart! Though Kawakami’s inventions may strike many as the apotheosis of all that is Western about modern Japan, his critique is firmly rooted in the native thinking of eccentric aesthetes like Kenkí´, who, seven centuries before, was already convinced that the world was growing steadily more tawdry. “A house which multitudes of workmen have polished with every care, where strange and rare Chinese and Japanese furnishings are displayed, and even the grasses and trees of the garden have been trained unnaturally, is ugly to look at and most depressing,” Kenkí´ wrote. In Chapter 72 of the Tsurezuregusa, he enumerated “Things which seem in poor taste: too many personal effects cluttering up the place where one is sitting; too many brushes in an inkbox; too many Buddhas in a family temple; too many stones and plants in a garden…”

It’s strangely comforting to think that the mania for accumulation was just as mindless then as it is now.

Buddha statue partially melted by the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Photo by Hiromi Tsuchida.

Much has been written about the premeditated nature of the atomic bomb attacks, the extent to which Hiroshima and Nagasaki functioned as laboratories for testing the effects of this horrifying new weapon. The official justification for America’s use of atomic bombs – that it would hasten the end of the war – never made much sense. But then, little about war ever does.

The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan’s messages had been intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace…” Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: “Having broken the Japanese code before the war, American Intelligence was able to – and did – relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to a conclusion.”

– Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

What makes the bombings even more cynical, to me, is that their actual targets, however carefully preserved for the purpose, were wholly incidental. The real, political target of the blasts was the Soviet Union, which had been set to enter the Pacific War on August 8. We could’ve dropped the bombs anywhere, really. In the minds of the military planners, the victims were complete ciphers – zeros, like the fighter planes deployed by the Japanese with such devastating effect. But Japan was the most logical direct target for the new weapon, because the European war was over, and several years of successful propaganda portraying Japanese as uniquely reptilian and fanatical had prepared the U.S. population to accept the official rationale.

Two events associated with World War II in the Pacific virtually obliterated the distinction between combatant and noncombatant, that fragile distinction at the heart of international efforts of the last five centuries to regulate the conduct of war and restrict human and environmental destruction. These were:
– The Japanese onslaught against the peoples of China and Southeast Asia as exemplified by the bombing of Shanghai, the rape of Nanking, and the attacks on civilians as in the “three-all policy” (burn all, kill all, destroy all) directed against rural North China.
– The use of air strikes by the major powers to terrorize and destroy cities and their populations, notably in the firebombing of European and Japanese cities and the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The common element linking these events, directing the awesome technological might of modern war against combatant and noncombatant alike, denied the humanity of enemy populations and legitimated their wholesale annihilation.

– Mark Selden, “Introduction,” The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ed. by Kyoko Selden and Mark Selden

* * *

I visited Hiroshima in 1986. Here’s a prose poem that came out of that visit.

HIROSHIMA MEMORIAL

We dropped our duffle at the youth hostel and hustled over to Ground Zero at the Peace Park, the Atomic Bomb Dome – it’s most striking at sunset, they told us. We took care to speak in hushed tones. I was thinking, we Americans are so weird, we take pictures of things you wouldn’t even want to pose in front of. I was thinking, a botched mastectomy. An unfinished stupa. The next morning, in broad daylight, the dome looked sort of lonely, despite the constant stream of tourists that kept circling it. I overheard an Australian say, “If you wanna make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.”

*

“Remember Hiroshima!” the guardians of national conscience intone, as if this thriving port on a poisoned sea were nothing but a mirage, the real city a platonic Idea translated aloft by Little Boy’s flash. But if that were true, there would be no possibility of speech, tears, atonement, anything. Reduced to stuttering silence like Schoenberg’s Moses, who could resist that Burning, with its final Word?

*

“But we’re innocent!” the cry goes up – on both sides of the Pacific. To be sure: we were naive, my girlfriend & I. I remember what clarity, unnumbed, could come from shock. Like the vajra in esoteric Buddhism, a double-sided thing, both sudden & impenetrable. I remember how an hour in the museum faced by photo after gruesome photo made us afraid to touch or even catch the other’s eye. And despite our leftist posturing, how really all-American we must’ve been, so typical in our assumption of bedrock national virtue, our proprietary interest in all the military exploits fit to print in a high school history text. When a peace activist confronted us by the Paper Crane Shrine we said Yes – Yes – to each of his accusations. We were twenty years old. The world would have to change.

*

And Hiroshima? A twinge of guilt still interposes when I recall our lightheartedness the rest of that rainy weekend, as silly and self-involved as only a young couple can be. Forced by poor planning and empty pockets to wander the city all Sunday long, we took turns posing for comic snapshots in front of the city’s unofficial memorials: coffee shops and noodle bars, concrete levees hiding riverside bicycle dumps, playgrounds given over to great yellow monkey-bar castles, a backstreet Shinto shrine where the cedars were already big enough to merit their own collars of sacred rope.

* * *

My point is not that we must, in telling history, accuse, judge, condemn Columbus in absentia. It is too late for that; it would be a useless scholarly exercise in morality. But the easy acceptance of atrocities as a deplorable but necessary price to pay for progress (Hiroshima and Vietnam, to save Western civilization; Kronstadt and Hungary, to save socialism; nuclear proliferation, to save us all) – that is still with us. One reason these atrocities are still with us is that we have learned to bury them in a mass of other facts, as radioactive wastes are buried in containers in the earth.

Howard Zinn, op. cit.

Tomorrow marks the 60th anniversary of the rise of the United States to world domination. On these days of remembrance and introspection, let us pray that the end of empire come soon and be as painless as possible. Let us renew our commitment to bring about in our own lives and through our relationships with others a world where coercive social structures win no allegiance and war is unthinkable.
__________

I encourage those who may be skeptical about the ability of violent societies to become peaceful to check out two scholarly articles recently added to my father’s Peaceful Societies website: “The Peace Puzzle in Ufipa” (review here) and “‘Respect for the Rights of Others Is Peace’: Learning Aggression Versus Nonaggression among the Zapotec” (review here).

My newspaperman friend and fellow blogger Alan forwarded me this story from today’s Science Times (the only part of the New York Times that’s too important to miss). Readers of my review of Tim Gallagher’s book will remember that I couldn’t understand why the skeptics weren’t convinced by the audio recordings. Now, it seems, a new set of audio recordings from the White River National Wildlife Refuge has persuaded two out of the three scientists who had authored a paper questioning the rediscovery to withdraw their objections. (The third is out of the country and hasn’t had the opportunity to hear the new tapes yet.)

Even more exciting is the fact that these newly released recordings clearly feature a pair of ivorybills. The immense White River NWR appears to harbor a breeding population of ivorybills, just as Gallagher and his friend Bobby Harrison always suspected.

“We felt all along that the White River was probably the core of the bird’s habitat and it was dispersing out,” said Sam Hamilton, the Southeast regional director for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and chairman of a panel overseeing the drafting of a recovery plan for the bird.

The scientific consensus on the strength of the sound recordings from that region was “very, very exciting,” Mr. Hamilton said. “It gives you chill bumps to think about that vast bottomland hardwood being certainly home to more than one bird.”

This is a real vindication for the Cornell Lab and for the audio-birding techniques that its specialists have pioneered. I imagine they’ll have their hands full now with requests to help set up recording stations in every likely forest from the Carolinas to east Texas.
__________

Incidentally, according to my brother Mark, who teaches at Delta State University right across the Mississippi from the White River NWR, birders should not feel that they should stay away in order to protect the woodpeckers. The swamps where the ivorybills hang out are pretty much impenetrable anyway, but just to be on the safe side, the Fish and Wildlife Service has set up limited-access reserves and has designated areas just outside their boundaries where birders might have a chance of seeing or hearing an ivorybill. (Recall that several sightings were made right from Interstate 40.) And the friendly folks in rural Arkansas can use your tourist dollars. They have generally gone along with the state’s decision to support large-scale conservation efforts and to push hunting, fishing and ecotourism to “the Natural State,” so it’s only appropriate that we show our gratitude by paying them a visit. I’m planning to go down in November.