Final Exam Essay

As more Mennonite Literature is produced, the question is raised as to whether this literature is serving to renew the culture or becoming a barrier for readers from the traditions of the Mennonite ethnicity and its culture due to outdatedness and difficult subject matter that is hard for more contemporary readers to relate to. Looking at the Canadian Mennonite literature we studied in this course shows that the literature is doing a bit of both.

Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many, as an older, more pessimistic novel about Russian Mennonites in Canada, does little to renew interest in heritage and culture. Wiebe writes of the Mennonite Brethren roots in Canada in a very off-putting way. In the end, the reader discovers that none of the characters is sympathetic, they are all portrayed negatively and hopelessly. For example, Thom Wiens' violence in the end, and apparent total religious personality switch. Or the general awfulness of characters like Block and the Ungers. Stories like this make me ashamed of my ancestry.

Katya, too, made me feel this way. The history of Mennonites in Russia and then their migration to Canada is undeniably ugly. Perhaps this is how it is (kind of) for Catholics thinking of persecuting anabaptists, or the way Christians relate to stories of the Crusades. It is uncomfortable for us to confront the negativity in our past. For this reason, I think novels like PSDM and Katya aren't serving to renew the community and its culture, because, for many, these are things we'd like to sweep under the rug. However, these are stories that do need to be told, as a legitimate part of the Mennonite history. So it is hard to say only that they create barriers to identifying culturally with one's community.

A Complicated Kindness was our third Canadian Mennonite novel, and, while not really optimistic, this novel was more renewing for the Mennonite community than the other two, especially when considering contemporary audiences, particularly younger Mennonites who have little to relate to in PSDM and Katya.

ACK and Toews' excellent telling of Nomi's struggle with growing up in this strict religious community, learning that she ought to be in the world, not of it, is a great anchor for younger Mennonites.

Really, though, all the works are renewing in the way that they are telling the stories of our heritage--stories that need and deserve to be told.

Canadian Poets

Reading the Canadian poets' poems in A Capella felt a little bit like I was reading the first half of Sleeping Preacher. A lot of the poems felt to me to be written around a focal event, a historical event, a familial event, like Kasdorf's were.

Though I don't read much poetry, it seems to me as though most of the non-Mennonite poetry I've encountered hasn't been so family-focused as the Mennonite poetry we've read this semester. Of course, family and heritage and the earth are hugely important things to Mennonites, but there are many many groups and sects producing poets (aren't there?) and aren't family and heritage important to everyone?

I especially enjoy the poems about nature and the earth, that speak of the rawness of the world around us, and how we are blessed by it. For example, Patrick Friesen's "clearing poems" or David Waltner-Toews' "How the Earth Loves You" with its mix of body and nature imagery. Leonard Neufeldt's poems, like "Dyke View Berry Farm," and "The tree with a hole in our front yard."

A Complicated Kindness

I was impressed by Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness. Though a fairly dark novel, it looked at coming of age in a really unique way. I'm curious to know how much of the story reflected Toews' own upbringing and how much of it was fiction.

I was extremely taken with the way Toews' emphasis wasn't on "Mennonites" specifically or overtly, but, as a Mennonite, there seemed to me to be a lot of "commentary" on the ways of Mennonites, and not just the kind in the Nickels' church.

The Nickels weren't really that "Mennonite" in the way Rhoda Janzen's family was, talking about borscht and frugality. In fact, the only really overtly Mennonite mention in A Complicated Kindness seems to be Nomi's mentions of Menno. ACK kind of seemed like it was halfway between Searching for Intruders and Peace Shall Destroy Many on a scale of overt Mennoniteness.

At least in terms of my own experience, Nomi Nickel portrayed a coming of age that I felt mirrored my own in ways, though mine lacked the drugs and sex of Nomi's. Her struggles with hell, the conflict between her sister and parents, her reaction to The Mouth, and dealing with abandonment were all themes that reflected my own experience growing up Mennonite in a generation that feels as though it differs greatly from my parents'. Toews explored these themes tenderly and effectively through Nomi.

Katya

I thought that an interesting parallel between Katya and Peace Shall Destroy Many was the way in which pacifism/non-resistance is addressed.

In Peace Shall Destroy Many the protagonist, Thom Wiens, struggles throughout the book with many theological questions, but seems, to me at least, to have one ideal that he sticks to fervently: pacifism. This is the oft-repeated reason for his dislike of Herb, and one of the things that Thom proudly points out as one of the differences between the two young men. But in the end, Thom gets into a brawl with two other young men for no real discernible reason other than he wants to punch Herb.

In Katya, the titular character's father is a very peaceful pacifist man. Even in the face of the death of himself and many of his friends and family, Peter sticks to his beliefs. And then they all (or most of them) die.

This paints a less than favorable or appealing picture of pacifists. Though one could say that Peter's death is similar to that of the Anabaptist Martyrs, it is hardly glorified in the same way. And Thom's betrayal of the beliefs he claimed for so long to adhere to hardly made Mennonites look convicted or admirable.

Simplicity of the Mennonites, or Just the Martens?

One day in high school someone stole 15 dollars from my locker. Of course, I hadn’t attempted to make it difficult for a would-be thief – like all the rest of my lazy classmates, I had jammed my locker on the first day of school to avoid the hassle of dialing the combination between every class, but despite this I still thought it fine to hang my purse cavalierly next to my backpack while my locker door swung wide at whim. It wasn’t that I was stupid – I hope – I was simply naive. A 14-year-old at a private, Mennonite high school, I was shocked that such a thing had happened, or could happen at such a place. Since I had begun attending Bethany Christian Schools in sixth grade, the school, and my purebred Mennonite background, had engrained in me a deep trust in the surrounding community, and I had never before had cause to doubt the total security in which I lived.

Even this breach of that total security didn’t change my assumption of the general goodness of my community. I still left my locker open, and neither I, nor the classmates of mine who’d also been stolen from, pursued any sort of justice in this situation. It was simply a fact: somebody stole, but no one had a desire for vengeance of any sort, and no attempt to uncover the identity of the thief was ever made.

This is not to say that there was nothing that came of the event. When someone stole that negligible denomination from my locker, I suddenly developed an anxiety complex about wealth. Several classmates not so sympathetically pointed out that it had happened not just to me, but to three other students in my grade whose fathers, like mine, were all doctors, and therefore among the wealthiest of Bethany’s students. This implanted in me a deep feeling of shame and insecurity about, and, worst of all, awareness of wealth disparities amongst myself and my peers. Ignorance is bliss, and I had long been blissfully unaware of there being people in my community and even in my country to whom the adjectives “poor” and “rich” could be applied.

I had never before been given cause to think about the socioeconomic status of my family being any different from that of any of my classmates’ families, but after this jolt into awareness all I could think about was whether people perceived me as different, and if so, whether they resented me for it. I downplayed greatly my dad’s occupation and I became hypersensitive to any conversation in which matters of money are mentioned, even things as trivial as the price of a candy bar at the snack shop at school. I still haven’t been able to dull this aversion to matters of money, and while I’d love to chalk it up to that classic affliction of Mennonites – frugality – I know that’s not it.

In my Mennonite Literature class at Goshen College, we are keeping blogs on which to opine about the readings, lectures and/or activities from class. For one of my recent posts, I hopped up on my soapbox and bashed lightly (and, I hope fairly politely) on a former GC student whose essay on Mennonite Identity we had read in class. In it, the author of the essay, Ted Houser, wrote about his pride in belonging to a wealthy Mennonite community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and how he and his friends were all given cars for their 16^th birthdays and how they partied at their parents’ vacation homes.

Here I was confronted with someone who took pride in the thing I’d been long trying to shake – the affect of wealth – and it irked me. How could someone who calls himself a Mennonite be so proud of a lifestyle that seemed, to me, so overtly privileged? Because, despite my father’s occupation, my parents strived to live simply. The simple living value was instilled in me from an early age, and my assumption of it being something derived from our Mennonite faith and ethnicity rather than the whim and ethics of my parents was flipped on its head when I read Houser’s essay. There are Mennonites that have second homes, and cars for each child and don’t buy their clothes from Goodwill? What a disappointing discovery.

Growing up, I filled my bedroom with knick-knacks, candy, hair products and other random odds and ends that I had found in the basement of my dad’s parents’ miniscule house. It was a magical basement to me, crammed full of so many things to discover -- all of the unneeded things my grandpa had rescued from dumpsters around town, unused, and collecting dust, but unable to be thrown away. This seemed normal to me when I was younger – my 10-year-old self never suspected that dumpster diving wasn’t what all grandfathers did, or that it might be odd to have a house so tiny but so packed to the brim with totally unnecessary items that probably hadn’t been touched in a decade or two except to have more things piled on top of them.

After I developed the awareness that puberty often brings, I began eavesdropping on my parents’ conversations on the way home from a visit to the grandparents – “John, there is just so much stuff in that basement. What’ll we do with all of it when they have to move out?” and my dad’s response,

“Yea, that’s gonna be a hassle. But you know how it was for him – this is a compulsion. He’s a packrat.”

And that’s why the word “packrat” came to be part of my lexicon. As I was slowly exposed to more and more of my parents’, and grandparents’ history, and the stories of their parents, I started to understand the reason my grandfather was such a hoarder of things, incapable of throwing anything out.

My grandfather’s parents were among those Mennonites who had taken advantage of the beneficence of Catherine the Great and become farmers in Russia. As the Mennonites started to prosper there, their presence began to be resented, and they were forced to emigrate from Russia, and in this emigration faced great hardship. My ancestors – my grandfather’s parents and their children in the second wave of migrants – ended up in Canada, quite poor, and suffering from the memory of recently being near starvation. Forced to abandon most belongings during their exodus, it was difficult to regain their footing, and they remained impoverished for a long while in Canada.

So it is this memory of starvation and of always having less than he needed that has made my grandpa unable to resist his compulsion to collect things, and always fix rather than replace. And my father, growing up in his influence, has retained some of this, and some more. Despite the years my dad spent getting an education to become a surgeon, he’s started to feel the call of the land – a tellingly cyclical return to the occupation of his ancestors. Nearly every waking hour not spent at the hospital is spent trudging around on his “farm,” taking care of the cattle that have usurped the position of his real children, watering his huge garden, guarding his chickens from coyotes and coons.

This dying profession has captured his interest, the allure of the wealthy life of a surgeon completely gone, replaced with the allure of the simple life. It is this simplicity that I’ve come to most closely identify with my Mennonite ethnicity. And perhaps I only find it to be such a Mennonite value because it is what I grew up with – like the way little kids whose fathers have beards believe that all fathers have beards, that anyone with a beard is a father and a clean-shaven man couldn’t possibly be a dad – I assumed for a long, long time, and even still cling to the idea, that all Mennonites are simple people at heart, have the “plain people” –ness deep in them somewhere, defining them somehow.

Peace Shall Destroy Many

As Ann warned, the first part of Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many was fairly slow going. There was a lot of exposition and theologizing -- while on the plow, whilst transferring a heap of rocks from one location to another, and while pitching hay -- in the first part. This section I only learned to appreciate after having read the second half of the book, which, in contrast, was practically a Michael Crichton novel for how much action there suddenly was (comparatively).

I found myself reading the book much more hungrily during Elizabeth's ordeal and the following drama. Then, with the arrival of Razia Tantamount, I could tell that things were about to get juicy. Wiebe's setup of the final drama offered great, but obvious, foreshadowing. Pregnancy within the community + Sexy lady teacher from outside the community = probable sex scandal within the community.

I found it interesting what the characters of Deacon Block and Razia Tantamount illustrated about power within this Mennonite community -- who has it, how, and why?

Block is respected, though strict, and many of the families within the community are grateful to him for having helped them get on their feet when they first arrived from Russia, as Mrs. Wiens expresses on p 262 during a conversation with Thom about the virtues and faults of Block. People in the community turn to Block when they have problems and need advice, and even Thom finds himself seeking advice (of some sort -- maybe more seeking an opinion) from Block.

Razia is another illustration of power, though a completely different one. Her power is derived from being an attractive and (fairly) level-headed woman, confident and ambitious. It seems as though the Wapiti community is fairly taken in by powerful figures. Even Thom finds himself acknowledging the allure of Razia and the ease with which his mind can turn to thoughts of her figure.

Interesting, also, is how both Razia and The Deacon experience (and try to hide) moments of great weakness as well.

In the fight scene in the barn, we see three young men of the community, each with a differing level of piety, fighting with each other because Razia and Hank are having (or have just had) sex. Though perhaps not a power that many women would want to have, Razia, undeniably, possesses a great amount of power over men, though obviously there is vulnerability in this as well, as, it seems, with all power.

Storytelling as a vital aspect of the Mennonite community

Storytelling is a traditional aspect of the Mennonite faith. Apart from the religious text, The Bible, the defining aspects, qualities and values of the church are perpetuated through the transferal of the stories of the faith community. This is why, at most Mennonite churches, one can usually find a little church library tucked into some neglected corner, where there are scads of Mennonite or Christian children's books, written to educate children in a more receivable manner than lectures or history lessons. These books range in topic and target age-group, though generally stick to the classic subject matter – non-violence, service and the global community, or histories of some sort. Books like The Yellow Star, which is a story from Denmark during World War II, in which the Danish king devises a non-violent method of protecting the Jews from the Nazis, are staples of the childrens’ section of Mennonite church libraries.

Children in the Mennonite church are raised on storytelling (children’s time during worship being a highlight of every Sunday Service for some kids) but it isn’t only children who enjoy hearing stories. Adults in the church also enjoy “story time,” and for reasons beyond those of the childrens’ enjoyment. Stories of the faith are highly important to people of Mennonite ethnicity. Stories are a way of passing on not only history but values. As the church evolves with every generation, becoming less and less separate, and gaining more secularity, the stories are a reminder of the way things used to be, and can serve as an inspiration to maintain the values of the past in the church of the present.

Jack Dueck tells a story about how a woman used her Mennonite values (love, compassion, service) to help some troubled young boys try to stay out of trouble. It is this type of story that demonstrates the relevance of the values of the Mennonite church and helps inspire those who have not had the privilege of being surrounded with stories like these since childhood to maintain the faith and the ethnicity, even as the definitions of these evolve.

Another way it seems that Mennonites use their stories is in attempting to reach the outside world, especially in trying to inform regarding Mennonites. An excellent example of this is Sydney King’s film, Pearl Diver. Though most Mennonites would recognize that King does a lot of blending of aspects of Mennonite history, the film remains a good means of introducing Mennonites to those who may be unaware of the faith group. Stories are told as illustrations of who one is, or who a people are, and Mennonites seem to have perfected telling to show.

And then there are Julia Kasdorf's poems in Sleeping Preacher. While some poems are less "story-telling" oriented, there are some, especially many of htose in the first half of the book, like, "I Carry Dead Vesta" and "Vesta's Father" that have a distinct storytelling element to them. In Kasdorf's poetry, the aim seems to be self-expression and documentation, but also there is a feeling of a desire for continuation of her ancestry and the stories of her ancestors.

These three artists are quite diverse, and they demonstrate how there is no limit to the number of stories to be told or who is able to tell them. All it takes is finding some part of one's identity in the community, and valuing that identity enought o desire to perpetuate it.

Considering these three artists and their work, it is easy to say that the future of storytelling in the Mennonite community is safe. Storytelling is and has long been a primary way of passing on stories that are vital to the identity of the community, and even the secularization of the future generations of Mennonites and increasing technology won't be able to curb the interest of the community in the stories of their origins and their convictions. How better to learn about the present than to examine the past?

Jack Dueck's visit

I really enjoyed having storyteller Jack Dueck speak to us in class on Wednesday. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but whatever my expectations were, Jack exceeded them. I was touched by his dedication to the stories he tells and the way they continue to move him, despite being stories he's no doubt told numerous times.

Jack was full of good little anecdotes about Mennonites, and stories and writing. It was refreshing to see someone so satisfied in what he was doing, especially since (as I've recently been learning in Memoir and Feature Writing) it is rare that writers are able to reap tangible rewards for their efforts. So it's nice to see that even if the rewards of writing aren't tangible, at least they're meaningful.

I particularly enjoyed the story Jack told about the two Mennonite families in a tiff, and despite the tiff one family's son marries the other family's daughter. I thought I detected Jack getting a little emotionaly during the end of this story, and it made me hope that I can someday tell stories that are as meaningful to me as Jack's are to him.

Searching for Intruders

The first three chapters of Searching for Intruders left me feeling horrible. It's so frustrating to read stories in which none of the characters are sympathetic. I felt disgusted after reading the first 6 stories -- how could someone even write something this depressing? I get writer's block if my character is unsympathetic -- where is the motivation in continuing the story of someone who has little to offer? Or perhaps this is kind of a hedonistic thing to say. I've never been able to acknowledge that pain might have as much value as pleasure, if any at all.

The character of Wilson makes me feel very unhappy. The opening story, Roaches, was repulsive in many ways, least of which was the description of the floor of the apartment swarming with roaches. In Roaches and Floating, the reader gets a fairly strong impression of Wilson being a pretty bad husband/boyfriend. Even the short-shorts set between the chapters don't inspire sympathy in me for Wilson, despite the hardship they hint at.

I read a few more chapters of the book, and it helps expand the story and give me a little reason to empathize with Wilson, but still not much.

There is something to be said, however, for the way that, despite not feeling any sort of connection with the characters, something about them makes me want to keep reading. Though maybe that has to do with having to read it for class. :)

How Julia Kasdorf Changed My Life

The essays in Danny Cruz's How Julia Kasdorf Changed My Life were hugely varying. While I loved the theme of the essays -- college students discussing their Mennonite identity or how they've been affected by the Mennonite church in some way -- I felt that there were certainly some that succeeded far more than others.

For example, the essay by Ted Houser, who wrote of his appreciation for being a privileged Mennonite growing up in "The County" (which, for all you who, like me, are NOT "insiders," means Lancaster County, PA), an area that was wealthified* by Hans Herr, one of the original Mennonite inhabitants of The County.

The essay's tone made the author seem completely unsympathetic, as he writes about the cars his friends received on turning 16, or the vacation houses of their parents that he and his friends would retreat to on breaks. As both a Mennonite and the daughter of a surgeon, people have always had a mistaken assumption of the wealth of my upbringing, which, while comfortable, couldn't be called anything other than simple in just the way I've been taught "real" Mennonites do it.

I've always found myself ultra-resistant to having an image of wealth. So Houser writing an essay that gives people the impression that Mennonites are wealthy, and proud of it, offends the sensibility of simplicity that I've grown up with and (though total simplicity is no longer something I really conscientiously go for due to its inconvenience) still value.

The essay I particularly enjoyed was Clarissa Gaff's. Gaff covers a wide range of "Mennonite things" while remaining entertaining, and while some are stereotypical, almost cliche Mennonite sentiments and images, Gaff's voice gave them new life. She was candid without being obnoxiously so and this made her essay quite relatable. Plus, Gaff and her siblings grew up in the same church as I did growing up, so maybe I've got a little bias.


*Yes, I know this is not an actual word, but sometimes I feel like the vocabularial* shortcomings of English can be made amends for by employing all those suffixes we so handily borrowed from other languages.

The Mennonite poems

I'm really NOT into poetry, prowess in writing stunted lines doesn't impress me, and I usually find it to be a waste of a person's writing talent.

However, I really enjoyed two of the poems from A Capella we were assigned to read.

As far as Julia Kasdorf's Mennonites go, it's the one I enjoy the least, though there is definitely a lot of appeal in how relatable the subject matter is, which can also be said of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Kasdorf uses such strong images while also spanning a lot of Mennonite history.

My favorite, Jeff Gundy's poem How to Write the New Mennonite Poem does a lot of really nice things playing with humor and parody. While sometimes I felt like the humor was getting a little base ("...many dead Mennonites were really good. Work in two or three. Dirk Willems is hot this year.") I thought Gundy mostly succeeded in writing a Mennonite poem that both addressed the now-cliches of Mennonite-ism, but also turned them on their head, working in the new stereotypes, drinking exotic coffee, granola, the Peace Tax Fund.

Of the trio of poems, I found David Wright's to be the least relatable, and therefore the one I enjoyed the least. However, it is interesting in that Wright is a Mennonite in a way that is unfamiliar to me, and that is intriguing.

One of the major things these poems brought up in my mind was the issue of audience. THere are many instances in both Gundy and Kasdorf's poems, as well as in MLBD where I feel as though the author is pandering to an audience outside of the Mennonite world, trying through a certain type of humor that I can't quite put a word to (Janzen doing the check-box thing, Gundy talking about liking sex, etc) to make people besides Mennonites like them. Though, of course, I could just be hypersensitive.(I love this picture of Gundy, and it makes me like his poem even more)

Thoughts on Mennonite in a LBD

Reading Rhoda Janzen's memoir riles me up a little bit. I feel at times like she's being a little too flippant, boiling Mennonites down to the stereotypical bits like borscht and a Quirky mother (as Jeff Gundy puts it). While it's fine and even fun to read these little Mennonite "inside jokes" (borscht- haha, it turns your tupperwares pink, etc) I get a little frustrated with Janzen for taking the easy way out with these things.

Of course, I justify what she does by saying she needs and was intending to reach a wider audience than just Mennonites, and in attempting to do so must de-dynamize some of what she writes.

At times it seems to me as though she's trivializing a community that I feel a very strong tie to, that I truly love and feel fortunate to belong in.

Which brings me to the question I asked in my previous post, which was, in thinking about MLBD in relation to Pearl Diver, Why does Janzen choose to tell the stories she does and where might she have taken a cue from Hannah and chosen to leave something out in respect to her community or someone she was close to?

Though Janzen does have some fairly interesting and honest and insightful things to say about growing up in a Mennonite family and really speaks to me as a reader in the way that I feel I can relate to the way she's grown up and the struggles she faces as a person nebulously of the Mennonite faith today, she still strikes me as taking advantage of the quirks and intricacies of the Mennonite community to sell her book (oh my goodness! a Menno in a little black dress -- so scandalous! she talks about tits, what a rebel!). I wish she didn't rely so heavily on generalizations and shock value for the success of the story.

Which all makes me feel more negatively in retrospect than I actually feel while reading the book. It's an engaging, entertaining read, which makes me struggle all the more with the question I asked in my last post, and feel like I'll be asking throughout this class, "How does a writer decide what stories to tell, especially a writer that feels they owe something to someone or some community?"

Pearl Diver Response

What interested me most about Pearl Diver is what affects me the most as a (wannabe) writer: Hannah's dilemma in knowing what to write, how to write about it, and who it affects. There is always the question, in writing, about what stories need to be told, what stories do people need to hear.
I was very interested to see how Hannah handled this, because she very obviously NEEDED to tell the story of her mother's murder. She had the same thing happen as I do when I have inspiration and find myself needing to write about something -- she sat down and just wrote and wrote and wrote. We get the impression that writing is cathartic for her (as, obviously, it is for lots of writers.. big deal, Annie), and so, by the end of the movie, regardless of the revelation that's just been made about Sam's innocence, I desperately wanted her to publish the story, if only because there is something about the story that needs to be told, and I can empathize with Hannah in the way that I don't want her to waste everything she's just done. Though, obviously, it made a much better movie that she tossed the pages into the pond, however painful it was to see all that hard work literally washing away.
This ending didn't help me at all grapple with "What is the role of the Mennonite writer?" because our example in Hannah leads us to believe that our role is first to be a Mennonite, and only if writing fits peacefully into that lifestyle should we attempt it. Or at least that's how I interpreted it.

This tied in well with our class discussion of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress today. Though obviously there were different circumstances involved in Rhoda Janzen's life and the lives of Marion and Hannah, I find it interesting to think about why Janzen told what she told of her story, and whether or not she should have taken a page from Hannah's book (not literally. Heh) and chosen to respect the feelings of people she loves or once loved, or even Mennonites in general, instead of cashing in on their stories, which is what I felt she was doing at times.

The other aspect of the movie that I found particularly interesting, especially as an ethnically Mennonite viewer who spent a lot of my most formative years bumming around the town in which this movie was filmed, was how the film painted and explored the differences between Hannah and Marion as characters and the worlds they inhabit, and used these differences to speak to larger issues of what it means to be a Mennonite today, and how "ought" Mennonites to behave/believe/dress, etc? Though at times, as an "insider" in this world, I found myself getting a little frustrated with the use of stereotype in portraying the sisters, I also found a lot of things about their identities resonating with me, as someone who is neither a city mouse Mennonite like Hannah or a country mouse Mennonite like Marion, but perhaps a college mouse for now.

THIS IS SO EXCITING

my very first blog.
it's going to be about mennonite literature.


EDITOR'S NOTE: "my very first blog." CORRECTION: this was misleading. this, apparently, is my 2nd blog, though hopefully it won't also vanish from my memory as did the first one.