GREENLAND, debut QUILTBAG novel about Blackness meeting Queerness

GREENLAND
DAVID SANTOS DONALDSON
Amistad
$26.99 hardcover, available now

FINALIST for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction!

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed's story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed's story.

Kip has only three weeks until his publisher's deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed's story—and then Mohammed himself—begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist's journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility.

Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson's tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't think anyone on Earth could've wanted to love this book more than I did. I'm in an intergenerational Black/white gay relationship. I am the very epitome of this debut novel's audience!

And here's the four-plus-star review to tell you why; and where it fell short for me.

Start with the pace. Kip(ling, as in the white Empire apologist) is Black, his lover...a strange hybrid of presence and absence...is white. Kip's main focus in the novel he needs to write in three weeks to meet his deadline is E.M. Forster's Black Egyptian lover, Mohammed's, treacherous path to being with an older white man. That needs set-up...but almost the first quarter of the book? It was drawn-out and in view of the excitement potential of this tale of discovery and personal growth through identification with Otherness, sapped the energy out of the tale for this reader.

Next, the sexuality...I am a lifelong admirer of and votary to the phallus, but good gravy, the erections and the spontaneous orgasms in here are, um, over the top. You should forgive. I'm also, as a survivor of maternal incest, permaybehaps a bit oversensitive to the juxtaposition of sexuality and those who really should be too young for such to occur to them. I accept, though, that this isn't done by the author for a lascivious purpose but as a fact of a certain kind of life. Still squicked me out.

But the core, the beating heart of the book, is the quest to be one's own power, to set one's own course, when Black and Other. Ben (Kip's lover) wants badly to be supportive, yet can't help but be a force for assimilation. No one white can help that. It's a fact of racist society...that we exist in our priviliege is enough for us to exert metaphysical gravity towards that end. The fact that Mohammed is in love with a man of great public eminence means he's under even greater assimilationist pressures. And let's face it, the assimilation can never be complete or seamless. One's skin color is not subject to change.

Kip's literary efforts are to deliver an acceptable manuscript. To a publisher, white. Who might, or might not, care to read, sign, publish his work...he has to do this. And he's got his companion, Mohammed, in his semblance of ever-increasing corporeality, as a guide, a distraction, a hectoring nuisance of a muse. Upstairs, he's got his loving, exasperated, uncomprehending white lover Ben.

This is the way we're going to go...through the hard, scary, fiercely fought battlefields of love and relationship and the deep dependence we all have on the illusion of the world we carry in our heads. Ben's illusions about marriage to the creative and exciting Kip didn't include the hard, slogging reality of living with a writer's frequent descents into insanity. Kip's fantasy of the way white privilege works was that it was transitive, like so many other senses of the verb "to fuck". One of them, dear Kip, is "to fuck over" and that is what Kip's fears and senses are telling him is happening. His embodied Blackness in Mohammed, the muse and weirdly corporeal fantasy, is there to tell him how getting fucked is only fun if it's not "over," and that's what the white men they truly love are inevitably going to do.

Well, there's something in that...there's no relationship that has perfect parity of partners, and there's a lot fewer relationships that have both Black and white men in them that get too close to that fantasy of parity. It's a tough enough thing to get the whole world's ideas about men in love with each other..."who's the woman? is what they say about Black men true?"...out of your bed, then you've got to get it out of your head. That's where things just crash for most people I've known who are in these relationships. Ben and Kip are separated by the powerful pull of ease.

Ben's crash comes while Kip's at his most vulnerable, and his most destructive. Ben looks into the void of Kip's unfillable maw of need, validation and identity and control and power and acceptance and love, and realizes "I can't do that...I can't be that." This being the nature of intimate relationships, Kip simply stalls out when he is Seen and abandoned on the existential level by the man he wanted to save him. Mohammed, the fantasy of Blackness and betrayed Otherness, and Kip have to make a run for it, or else be consumed into invisibiliy.

These struggles are, I suppose it pays to say out loud here, basic human ones. They're not different for different people, no matter their manifold other oppositions. What they represent is the endless, victoryless battle to be better at being yourself in a world that does not care in the tiniest degree about you. And what Kip must do is see that battle through. What makes his battle relatable, we've established in its basics. What makes it unique is Kip's thriving, driving need to create. And Ben? He isn't there in that battle. So Kip's on the field by himself. With Mohammed's fantastical, corporeal shade. That betrayed and abandoned, bitterly wounded, foully abused Black body is what Kip's life needs to incorporate because it is the very center of his Jungian Selfness.

The final scenes of Greenland, taking place with Black men in cold, searing whiteness, are some of the most profound explications of the Union of the Self I've ever read. And, faithful to Chekhov's gun rule, the ending of the novel is the end. The true end.

Remember, though, that all endings are also beginnings.

LET'S GET BACK TO THE PARTY, Zak Salih's debut novel

LET'S GET BACK TO THE PARTY
ZAK SALIH
Algonquin Books
$10.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: What Does It Mean to Be a Gay Man Today?

It’s just weeks after the historic Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame.

So when he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties; friends getting married, having babies.

While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Sebastian with one of his students and Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must come reckon not just with one another, but with themselves.

Rich with sharply drawn characters and contemporary detail, provocative, and emotionally profound, Let’s Get Back to the Party is sure to appeal to readers of Garth Greenwell, Alan Hollinghurst, Claire Messud, and Rebecca Makkai.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU!

My Review: There are a lot of things to celebrate among queer Americans at the moment. Progress has been made that, when I was a babyqueer, was inconceivable. (And yes, I do know what that word means.) Legal marriage? Common surrogate fatherhood?! Even, in some places, adoption?!? All this presupposes joint mortgages, life insurance left to one's partner, joint bank accounts, Social Security survivor benefits...holy carp, the GOP tomb-raiders who oppose even straight people getting back the money they put into the system must be plotzing. Believe you me, under-40s, not one bit of this was probable in a world with Don't-Ask Don't-Tell witchhunts in all branches of the military and the ever so inaptly named Defense of Marriage Act specifically, and unConstitutionally, forbidding same-sex couples from receiving the 1,049 (by some counts) benefits available to heterosexuals simply by speaking a few words to a County Clerk. (If you're wondering, the religious idiots do not have any thing at all to say about marriage. They can refuse to perform a marriage ceremony for anyone they choose, for any reason they choose; but the State is the only entity that can declare you married, and this has always been so in the United States.)

But what laws give, they can take away; and these rights which are justly ours as much as theirs can, with the wrong (aka right-wing) party at the helm of government, be taken away again by legal chicanery. And Oscar Burnham is bitterly aware of this. Beyond the fact that the extension of legal access to protection for couples strikes at one of the defining qualities of gay-manhood, unbridled and unfettered and unceremonious couple/uncouple relationships where everyone is Mr. Right Now, he's grouchy and squicked out about how the gays are becoming hipsters instead of threatening outsiders to be envied and feared. When he meets Sean, the elderqueer, the survivor of the AIDS years (aka "my direct contemporary") they bond over the Sad State of Things. Sean remembers what it was to be Other with a capital Q when one came out or was outed. Oscar, bless him, tries his damnedest to be there in Sean's head, attaches himself to the older man, becomes his happy shadow.

Sebastian Mote teaches for a living. Sebastian, after re-encountering youthful friend Oscar at a wedding, begins to think...well...sense...maybe perceive will do...that the unfinished business he brings to the table where Oscar's sitting should get more attention from them both. A dance begins, one that ended a decade before; one that wasn't ever resolved, though, so the emotional bonds are still firmly seated. Sebastian's so involved with his students, in the not-squicky way, that he doesn't quite see how Arthur is becoming an obsession...doesn't quite want to let go of his access to the youth's open, happy life awaiting him with boyfriend Raymond.

There is so much about what happens that you'll hate having spoiled. I need you to know, though, one big facet of this story is tragic and painful and life- and generation-defining. It will leave or open wounds for its ferocity and its outrageous reminder that Hate trumps all values thrown in its way because humans love the raw, red, bloody gobbets of The Other's flesh. I don't like that it's true, but nothing in my over-sixty years on Earth has ever come close to persuading me that it isn't.

I am, in a lot of ways, like Oscar: Grumpy, disillusioned by mainstreaming, in a strange, intergenerational love relationship that doesn't look like one anyone outside it understands. (I hope like hell that Rob doesn't feel conflicted about the same things Oscar does!) For that reason, I found this read very much an involving one. The relationship Oscar has with his parents, the emotional ties that bind but are ever looser he feels with Sebastian...all very much like my own life.

What in the end worked best for me about this read was my sense of its reality, its groundedness, and thus it earned my trust. I was always glad to read more and I returned to the read without hesitation. I'm so pleased that the publisher decided to offer me the book to review, and I'm just as pleased that the author wrote such a deeply personal story. The one thing you shouldn't expect is detailed sex scenes, à la Garth Greenwell mentioned in the blurb. It's just not needed to tell this tale the best way it could be told, so Author Salih doesn't do it for the sake of doing it. A big point in his favor.

Then there's the Tragedy I alluded to above, while handled sensitively, isn't so delightful; I wasn't all the way convinced that the event's aftermath was, in fact, not given short shrift. It felt to me as though it was no longer useful in the plot so let's just go now, k? And they did. It wasn't what I felt was enough given the scope of it.

While it did reinforce the solipsism of these men's on-again, off-again intimacy, it felt off, almost reductive, as it's presented in the book. That's a matter of opinion, I know, so take it as such and decide for yourself what you think of the ending.

Now we all have to sit and twiddle our thumbs until Author Salih brings us his next idea. I'm looking forward, and expect you will be too.

SHUCK, a gay man's roman à clef of 90s Manhattan

SHUCK
DANIEL ALLEN COX
Arsenal Pulp Press
$14.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: “Set in the late 1990s, Shuck describes with great clarity and verve the last gasp of a gritty Manhattan.”—Bruce LaBruce, film director

Shuck is the intense, dazzling diary of a male hustler in New York who tries to manage his reputation as the city’s porn star du jour when he’s not dumpster diving, tweaking, or trying to get published. A remarkable peep show of a novel about what binds artists and prostitutes, and the collateral damage of what happens when they try to recover what they have lost.

Daniel Allen Cox is a former porn star. This is his first novel.

My Review: In the late 1990s, hustler/street trash Jaeven Marshall gets rescued by remittance man/blocked perfectionsit artist Derek Brathwaite, who grooves on Jaeven's bruised and abused body. The two begin a peculiar and passionate love affair that never involves sex, but truly touches the heart of any romantic in its deep and vital connection. Jaeven uses Derek as a home base, a touchstone, and a security blanket. He rises (!) in the just-then-efflorescing porn world as a porn performer and a model, taking it as his 22-yr-old naif would: His due.

What no one but Derek, and the strange photographer/trick Richard, know is that Jaeven is a writer. A real one, one who writes and who sponges up images...the book is littered with lists Jaeven keeps of the "shit and ephemera" that Manhattan excels at putting in the path of the observant, letting the reader in on Jaeven's private coping mechanism for his rampant ADD (and his inability to break past the surface of anything, too)...so while he's using himself to live and eat and keep moving, he's fueling the creative rage inside himself. Derek, blocked because surfaces are all he knows, uses Jaeven's unpublished writing to break through into an actual creative frenzy, painting at last the gaudy and exciting colors that he's seen but never managed to reach inside to create before. Jaeven's downward track is, well, inevitable: He gets into meth, gets meth-mouth, stops getting calls from his various munificent tricks (except the peculiarly loyal Richard), and even manages to make Derek so angry that he gets thrown back onto the streets he's only just clawed his way up from. In the end, though, as is inevitable in a first novel, the redemption occurs and all is well.

It's a first novel, or I would've been more chary with my stars. I think it's a fun ride through a Manhattan that's been sanitized out of existence. I liked that Manhattan, I trolled it, and I felt at home in it; I'm inclined to spot Mr. Cox some points for that. It's reasonably clear to me that it's also a roman à clef, and that also counts in my ratings. I have no way of knowing how much of it is self-referential, but at a guess I'll say a lot. I like a writer whose take on himself isn't in any way reverential. I like reading about the world that my thirties were spent in. I like a lot the amiably nihilistic, irretrievably broken kid comes out (!) with hope, and therefore a future. It's not perfect, but damn it's good. Read it!

EROMENOS, the love/hate of Antinous for Hadrian told at last

EROMENOS
MELANIE J. MCDONALD
Seriously Good Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Eros and Thanatos converge in the story of a glorious youth, an untimely death, and an imperial love affair that gives rise to the last pagan god of antiquity. In this coming-of-age novel set in the second century AD, Antinous of Bithynia, a Greek youth from Asia Minor, recounts his seven-year affair with Hadrian, fourteenth emperor of Rome. In a partnership more intimate than Hadrian's sanctioned political marriage to Sabina, Antinous captivates the most powerful ruler on earth both in life and after death. This version of the affair between the emperor and his beloved ephebe vindicates the youth scorned by early Christian church fathers as a "shameless and scandalous boy" and "sordid and loathsome instrument of his master's lust." EROMENOS envisions the personal history of the young man who achieved apotheosis as a pagan god of antiquity, whose cult of worship lasted for hundreds of years far longer than the cult of the emperor Hadrian.

In EROMENOS, the young man Antinous, whose beautiful image still may be found in works of art in museums around the world, finds a voice of his own at last.

I RECEIVED A REVIEW COPY FROM THE AUTHOR. THANK YOU.

My Review: There have been books aplenty about, and even in the voice of, Hadrian the Emperor of Rome, but so far as I know none in the voice of his beloved Antinous of Bithynia. Antinous is portrayed in this book as he reflects on his life at its end. How and why his life is ending, if one isn't familiar with the story, is a question still of some interest to scholars, who don't have a solid consensus about causes and motivations. Hey, it's almost 2,000 years ago! No one knows *any*thing for sure at that distance in time. But Melanie McDonald creates a composed, mature voice for this important and vital character in her novel, titled after the Greek word describing Antinous's relationship to Hadrian. The course of Antinous's life, the exciting events in it, and the reasons for his long tenure as Hadrian's eromenos, are presented in swift, sure prose; the inevitable, it would seem, conclusion is very nicely handled; and the narrative frame, the temple offering of a manuscript in Serapis's sacrificial fire, gives the book a very agreeable frisson of the supernatural.

This is a first novel for both author and publisher. The degree to which this surprises me is a testament to the very high design, production, and editorial standards the publisher adhered to. I think the book is very, very well-conceived, but I know that it owes a great deal to the vision of a small, new publishing venture that it came out at all, and that it looks and feels so good in its present form.

Experiencing the joy, pain, humiliation, love, lust, and hate that Antinous feels for his old-man lover is extraordinary. That the author is a married straight lady (among other things, she was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2008 to work on this very book) makes me think she's channeling a past life! (That was a joke, Ms. McD, should you chance to read this review...I think it is, anyway....)

The book posits a reason for the mysterious death of Antinous, an event that caused Hadrian such acute agony that his final eight years were spent in a kind of mourning haze for his lost love, that had not occurred to me...an explanation that accounts for some of the strangeness of the timing of his death, which has always made me think that the hints and rumors of murder were just off. It's a valid reason, or complex of reasons, and it rings true enough that I wish it were possible to research it. (Absent time travel to the past, an unlikely development, it isn't. Drat you, Albert Einstein! I bitterly resent being poked in the back by Time's Arrow!)

My quibbles are few, the largest being that I find references made by Antinous to Christianity to be extremely unlikely to be accurate; a minor Jewish cult would not have made the radar screens of a person at such a rareified remove from ancient Palestine's nasty, squabbling inhabitants; the Christians hadn't made it big enough yet for someone not Palestinian to know the things Antinous is portrayed as knowing.

It didn't ruin the book for me, though, and I certainly hope you'll all zip right out to Amazon or somewhere and get a copy of this beautiful, well-written, and very engrossing story.

DOGFIGHTERS by Alex Beecroft, UNDER THE HILL #2

DOGFIGHTERS Under the Hill #2
Alex Beecroft
Pronoun Publishing
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Kidnapped by the Faerie Queen, Ben is confronted with his own supernatural heritage, a royal family and a lover he doesn’t remember. His first instinct is to turn his back on them all and get back to Earth. Compared to this, Chris and his wacky cohorts seem almost…normal.

Back on Earth, Chris Gatrell is having trouble convincing the police that he didn’t do away with Ben and hide the body. Determined not to lose another sweetheart to the elves’ treachery, he presses his motley crew of ghost hunters to steal a Mosquito bomber…and prays the ghosts of his WWII crew will carry them through the portal to Ben’s rescue.

Meanwhile, Chris’s elf-trapped WWII love, Geoff, has a dragon and he’s not afraid to use it. If only he could be entirely sure which of the elf queens is the real enemy—the one whose army is poised to take back planet Earth for elf-kind.

In the cataclysmic battle to come, more than one lover—human and elf alike—may be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice.

My Review: Well. That was fun.

This being the second of two parts, and part one ending on what can only be described as a coitus interruptus-level cliffhanger, it's a darn good thing for my sanity and the health of those around me that this volume was already teed up on the Kindle.

Only Mrs. Beecroft could keep me up all night reading two back-to-back (!) romantic stories about faeries and dragons and Lancaster bombers and pretty, pretty mens NOT having hot monkey sex despite wanting to.

Some things jarred me, though, and I re-read the book to see what they were, before I wrote this review. No, no, you of little faith, it wasn't the lack of hot monkey sex (well, yes it was but I'm not admitting it publically), it was...well...it was the fact that this story needed more.

Yes, that's correct, Mr. Crabby Pants said the story needed more. More words, more scenes, more time spent in the Raelmes of Phauntaieesee explainin' stuff and makin' the unreality realer.

Fast-drawn lines and suggested histories are fine in shorter works. One expects them. This read, in aggregate tree book form, probably takes 400 or so pages to tell. Make it six hundred, don't break it into two bits, and give me more!

I hear crickets. It's not that amazing, really, when you think about it. I'm always grousing and moaning about the fact that the bajillion-page nonillionologies are fatty, padded, poofy-marshmallow-dipped-in-saccharine idealess attempts to empty the wallets of the bored. And here's a book whose two worlds, well three really, could profitably be expanded to make them intersect more satisfyingly with the sweet guys who populate Beecroftite tales. Love, the falling-in kind as well as the milder, friendlier kind, is at the heart of any story Beecroftly. But the background story has such a huge impact on the tale of love she spins here that it really needed to be fuller, though not richer.

So here I am plunking a mean-spirited 3.5 stars on what should have been a five-star read. The ending, which I won't spoiler, is the main reason I got over three stars. I cried soft, sentimental tears, sniffing into my hanky, as the ending played out. Oh goodness I am a sappy old queen some days. I even called the now-former gentleman caller and we had a good mutual sniveling about the ending. (To his current man's vocal annoyance, which I confess gave me a most unworthy stab of satisfaction...guy doesn't read, and you're gonna leave me for him? Fool.)

Ahem. Sorry.

So, well, I'm certainly not yodeling rapturously from the housetops, but I would very much suggest the squeamish "ewww-ick" homophobics who have a weakness for knight-errantry, dragons, and the warm, healing glow of love rewarded by love.

BOMBER'S MOON: Under the Hill #1

BOMBER'S MOON (Under the Hill #1)
Alex Beecroft
Pronoun Publishing
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.6* of five

The Publisher Says:The faeries at the bottom of the garden are coming back—with an army.

Under the Hill, Part 1

Ben is a modern, sceptical man but the fairies are trying to abduct him. When he hires Chris's paranormal defence agency to protect him, he doesn't expect to fall in love.

Chris is a refugee from his own time. He's lost one lover to the elves already. Terrified, but determined that this time he'll do better, he promises Ben that the elves will get him over his dead body.

If only that wasn't looking so likely.

Under The Hill was voted Best Multicultural Fantasy 2013 in the M/M romance Swirl Awards. Bomber's Moon is the first book of the complete story. If you love KJ Charles' Green Men and Magpie Lord books, you'll love this.

My Review: Exactly and precisely as the book description says it is. Now, anyone who has ever interacted with me knows I'm no fan of fantasy, but there is nothing on earth more useless than a hermetically sealed mind so I tried this out. Fantasy plus men having sex with each other *must* be better than the straight kind.

Well, yeah, of course.

But there isn't any serious sex in here, so get a big ol' two-fisted grip! One little scene, nothing even close to explicit. The point of this novel isn't the zeal of the organs for each other, it's the Hero's Journey. And the Hero has a wonderful journey, from WWII to 1995 in a blink, then living through the birth of our 21st-century world, and meeting someone whose own Hero's Journey is crossgrained to his own. Ben is Indian, living in Bakewell, and working in a bank; Chris is as English as spotted dick, living in Bakewell, and fighting the forces of supernatural invasion as he once fought the Luftwaffe. They aren't instantly obviously going to fit together. And that's the fun, romantic part of the story.

But then there's the fantasy bit, complete with German fairies invading and occupying English Elven territory; an ancient prophecy that demands an English bomber crew be brought to the other world; an air force of modern fighters in the elven lands, ready to rain destruction on...well, anyone; and a princess hostage damsel in distress to satisfy the conventions, one whose seductiveness can straighten the crooked path of a lost navigator.

I've read Beecroft's Hearts-of-Oaky smexy romances, and so I knew what to expect from the prose. It's direct, it's unfussy, and it's effective. (It also needs copyediting, but that's not Beecroft's fault, it's Samhain's...I mean, calling someone "died-in-the-wool"? It's DYED and that should have knocked the publisher's eye out!) I had sort-of hoped for the Age of Sail's smut content, since I like that kind of thing, but was steeled for the mildness of the entry by previous reviews.

The issues for me, apart from the copyediting, were focused around the hanging-together-ness of the plot's big points. Why, I wondered, does it not occur to modern-day Ben (20s) to ask why Chris (late 30s) is SO old-fashioned? It's right completely out of the modern day, the way Chris behaves towards Ben, even after Chris comes out to him. How has Chris managed to live almost 20 years in the modern era and not had more of it rub off on him? How on earth does he live, I mean money-wise? They're niggles. But they're niggles about big points.

But, and this is why I rated this book at least a full star above any other with issues that size, this is a thumping good read, with lots of very interesting urban-fantasy takes on old fantasy tropes, and characters whose happiness I actually care about. Yes, yes, teenaged girls are people too, but I don't care about their Special Uniqueness and Awesome Powers even a little bit. I do care about Ben's. And Chris's. And I want them to have a happily ever after.

Because they're man-lovin' men. For once someone is talking to ME. And I like it. Thanks, Mrs. Beecroft, for doing your usual solid job of entertaining me.