a bountiful answer that fits all questions

"It is like a barber's chair that fits all buttocks: the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn-buttock, or any buttock."

(All's Well That Ends Well)

where my heart lies

Thanks to caskared for these links. (Caskared:I hope you don't mind being referred to by that particular handle - if so, let me know and I can change it in the blink of an eye.) I was recently knocked sideways by the strength of feeling induced in me by the sight of the cement works swathed in fog as my train drew in to Rugby station. They probably shouldn't be burning tyres there. But they certainly shouldn't be on a list of the ten worst buildings in the UK. Odd list, this - almost every one a wonder, seems to me.

Bacon's prose

According to Shelley, Bacon's prose 'is a strain which distends, and then bursts the circumference of the hearer’s mind, and pours itself forth together with it into the universal element with which it has perpetual sympathy'. So be mighty careful with it.

I like the sound of this Vespasian fellow. Wonder what else he got up to?

Three Peas Suite

wandering minstrel takes well-earned break (3,9)

A Brew

The South-Sea House

'The simultaneous sound of his [Evans the clerk's] well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of never-failing mirth in families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte, his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history!'

Charles Lamb

I can't stand another minute

In the 'Foreword' to 'Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage' the author recalls delivering his 'Lecture on Nothing' in 'about 1949 ... at the Artists' Club on Eighth Street in New York City ... Jeanne Rynal, I remember, stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, "John, I dearly love you, but I can't bear another minute." She then walked out. Later, during the question period, I gave one of six previously prepared answers regardless of the question asked. This was a reflection of my engagement in Zen.'

He also shares this memory: 'As I look back, I realize that a concern with poetry was always with me. At Pomona College, in response to questions about the Lake poets, I wrote in the manner of Gertrude Stein, irrelevantly and repetitiously. I got an A. The second time I did it I was failed.'

The King of Aberdeen

UNHEMMED has reason to believe that this man accessed the site from Aberdeen today at 6-02am, or thenabouts. Good on him!

Lojalna Jola, nielojalna Jola

Tongue twisters po polsku.

George Szirtes digging Jeff Bridges

"Paterson points to the twin dangers, as he sees them, of Populism on the one side and Postmodernism on the other. I'll leave Postmodernism out of it because it seems to me he uses the term loosely to mean people who are in fact Modernists in the post-Poundian sense. I am more interested here in his idea of Populism. He never quite defines the term, talking merely about "chicken-soup anthologies full of lousy poems". I have an idea what anthologies he might have been talking about, but it would have been good had he pointed to a few examples of lousy poems as illustration, for lousiness is a self-validating term. "Yeh, well that's just your opinion, man," as the Dude says in The Big Lebowski. I don't see why anyone should have a problem with chicken-soup. Nor would anyone who was genuinely hungry. What are they supposed to do? Starve until they can eat what the committee has chosen to call cake?"

This year's T S Eliot lecture taking issue with last year's T S Eliot lecture.

My brain has got so bent out of shape that I can't stop myself suggesting that the phrase 'genuinely hungry' is also the phrase 'genuinely Hungary' in disguise.

Looks to me like Jeff Bridges's gaff rocks pretty hard.

Haemony

Name given by Milton to an imaginary plant having supernatural virtues.

1634 MILTON Comus 638 He called it Hæmony, and gave it me..as of sovran use 'Gainst all enchantments, mildew blast, or damp, Or ghastly Furies' apparition.

5'nizza

common sense

The tiniest snippet of Ivor Cutlery. Borrowed from the official site,

It was that John Donne who said

On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will
Reach her, about must, and about must goe;

Did Elias Canetti approve of the 'in-joke'?

So, it turns out that

22 Across : Law, cheating it (anag) (5,8)

is just an anagram, and the solution - Wigan Athletic - has no obvious connection with illegal activity. That made it pretty plain that

15 Down : Knocking sound (3-3)

would be 'tat-tat' as in 'rat-a-tat-tat'. I was stumped by

12 Down : Celebration (8)

for an eternity or two, but I realised they wanted, as a solution to a different clue, not 'leitmotif', but rather 'leitmotiv', the v at the end of which meshed beautifully with the sixth letter of 'festival'.

Problem solved.

Moravia-mania

The Kingdom of Moravia, now in the SE of the Czech Republic. Its major city is Brno, which is currently my favourite placename of all time. Sigmund Freud was born in Moravia, in Freiberg, today known as Pribor. The malt used to brew Budvar is supposed to be Moravian.

George Moore

"On 27 May his ashes were buried on Castle Island in Lough Carra, co. Mayo, where he had played as a boy. Over his crypt was erected a wooden marker inscribed ‘He deserted his family and friends for his art’; however, ‘deserted’ was softened to ‘forsook’ when carved on a permanent stone monument."
DNB

the latest stop-press information on literature 003

"Tennyson has always weighed on me as the original National Heritage Poet - all that is bogus, empty, self-parodic, dishonest, false and dead-as-doornails in the culture is epitomized by his verse. Alfred Lawn Tennyson, as Joyce called him. His cadences remind me of cheap firetongs, flat clangy tin trays furred with velvet, the boring sonorities of Gielgud's voice. But I can't let go of 'In Memorian VII', one of the saddest love lyrics in the language ...
"The simple-minded patriotism, the deep racism, the professional Angst and gravid sonorous chill of the verse all remind me of a solemn Victorian statue of King Alfred which I once saw in a dreary market town somewhere in the south of England."
(Tom Paulin, TLS, 2 October 1992)

Wantage, coming back to haunt me.

South Park

Wantage: Where Dreams Become Realities

Blake

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is, in the eyes of others, only a green thing which stands in the way."

Charles Lamb

from his essay 'All Fools' Day':

'I had more yearnings towards that simple architect, that built his house upon the sand, than I entertained for his more cautious neighbour ... I venerate an honest obliquity of understanding. The more laughable blunders a man shall commit in your company, the more tests he giveth you, that he will not betray or overreach you.'

The acer tree

"That the acer tree is a maple I was hitherto unaware."

The Secretary of the Stanley Cavell Fan Club Writes ...

b. Home Counties, the counties nearest to London, namely Surrey, Kent, Essex (and formerly Middlesex); sometimes with the addition of Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, and occasionally Sussex.

1898 Mddx. & Herts. N. & Q. IV. 153 The publication,..will..relate not only to London, Middlesex and Hertfordshire, but also to Essex, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Surrey and Kent; that is, to the Home Counties. 1959 I. & P. OPIE Lore & Lang. Schoolch. xii. 233 In London and the Home Counties the police now chase off the streets even the simple waits singing Christmas carols. 1966 Listener 11 Aug. 218/1 The chances are..small that a writer setting his play in outer suburbia or inner Home County will make of it more than a painful banality. 1972 J. BLACKBURN For Fear of Little Men ii. 29 Her accent clashed dramatically with the jargon of Home Counties suburbia.

Wendy News

At Wendy's on Broad Street you can buy Fakt for one pound ten.

Abingdon - Oxford

On the outside of the Abingdon-Oxford express are advertised: designer interiors.

Lazarus Breaks His Fast

Walter Sickert, 1927

the latest stop-press information on literature 002

'Ezra Pound was originally in the highly subjective phase 12, but Yeats moved him among the humanitarians of the late objective phases after seeing him feed all the cats at Rapallo.'
(Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks)

Muchomor

scrapbook(s)

Don't like his poems so much, or the bits of waffle and witter that he turns out for the TLS (though possibly - certainly - I'm inordinately jealous), but I've just been through the selection of his work in a Penguin Modern Poets that I borrowed from the British Council library for the Michael Donaghy, and I got curious enough to Google Hugo, and turned this up pronto -

Hugo Williams often spends the evening pasting memorabilia into his scrapbook. Everything goes in: newspaper clippings about him, party invitations, train tickets, photographs of Williams and his family, as well as people whose names he can't remember. Sometimes, at literary events, he just walks about snapping randomly. There are even letters in his own handwriting, which he never got round to posting. The scrapbook is running close to 60 volumes by now. The later chapters are in bright colour, but the really precious stuff is in black and white. Here is Hugo in short trousers, just after the war, with his father the actor Hugh Williams, and his mother Margaret Vyner, a model for Paris couturier Jean Patou, and later an actress herself. Here is Hugo, aged 14, on his way back to Eton after the holidays. In the colour scrapbook, he receives a major poetry prize for his latest collection, Billy's Rain; beside the photograph is a disgruntled commentary on the award by the Guardian's poetry critic. The juxtaposition amuses Williams. It simply all has to be recorded. As one of his poems has it, "The past is out of bounds. / But where else is there to go?"

I find such a predilection more than mildly interesting, and sympathise with it. It put me in mind of Julian Barnes's description of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet (although what Williams gets up to is clearly very different):

a novel about two earnest, illusion-filled clerks who try to understand the whole of human striving and the whole of human knowledge, who are defeated and then go back to being copyists - [it] is extraordinarily modern. And the second part of the book, the thought of simply giving the reader an accumulated heap of rubbish that the two heroes decide to copy down, is a phenomenally advanced idea for 1880; it is amazingly bold.

(this is from The Paris Review 157, Fall 2000)

Ralph in Maine, 1841, out loud

"How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily they pass from it to another! The crystal sphere of thought is as concentrical as the geological structure of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in strata, concentric strata, so do all men's thinkings run laterally, never vertically. Here comes by a great inquisitor with auger and plumb-line, and will bore an Artesian well through our conventions and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But as soon as he probes the crust, behold gimlet, plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral direction, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong wind took everything off its feet, and if you come month after month to see what progress our reformer has made, not an inch has he pierced, you still find him with new words in the old place, floating about in new parts of the same old vein or crust. The new book says, 'I will give you the key to nature,' and we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre. But the thunder is a surface phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the sage. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. Thus a man lasts but a very little while, for his monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a few months. It is so with every book and person: and yet - and yet - we do not take up a new book, or meet a new man, without a pulse-beat of expectation. And this invincible hope of a more adequate interpreter is the sure prediction of his advent."

I particularly like The wedge turns out to be a rocket. The whole jing-bang here.

Pragnę być pośród ludzi

the latest stop-press information on literature (001)

George Eliot held George Meredith's The Shaving of Shagpat to be a 'work of genius'.

Nothing like an interest in statistics as an index of rude health

.

Now, don’t just write, ‘I did this, and then I did that. And then I ... and then I ...’ See if you can make it more interesting than that, won’t you?


19.08.05
(a) Depart from Warszawa: 0843. Arrive in Ostroleka: 1106. 123km. 2hrs 23mins. Average speed: 52km/h.
(b) Depart from Ostroleka: 1150. Arrive in Augustow: 1353. 143km. 2hrs 3mins. 67km/h.
(c) Depart from Augustow: 1500. Arrive in Wilno: 1820 (Polish time). 247km. 3hrs 20mins. 74km/h.
Total distance: 513km. Car hours: 7hrs 46mins.

22.08.05
(d) Depart from Wilno: 0832 (Polish time). Arrive in Suwalki: 1150. 227km. 3hrs 18mins. 69km/h.
(e) Depart from Suwalki: 1328. Arrive in Bialystok: 1520. 124km. 1hr 52mins. 66km/h.
(f) Depart from Bialystok: 1631. Arrive in Warsaw: 1915. 204km. 2hrs 44mins. 74km/h.
Total distance: 555km. Car hours: 7hrs 54mins.

There and back: 1068km. Car hours: 15hrs 40mins.

(this may have the appearance of precision, but there is some guesswork going on)

(it may also have the appearance of some kind of advanced neurotic symptom, but rest assured - if I may take a moment to reassure you, whilst we're in parentheses - it's actually an accumulation of hard evidence to back up my suspicion that Schnucki is better at overtaking lorries than I am - you'll probably have already noticed that one of the many things conspicuously absent from the data above is the name of the driver - as August recedes into the very recent past and it becomes harder to remember who actually was driving, guessing is the only thing any of us will be able to do - so the 'evidence' ain't going to be up to much, hein? well? always making the mistake of trying to explain yourself ... always making the mistake of trying to explain yourself)

Coming Attractions:

* Fantasy Arboretum *

(Sorry, I guess it should say 'Coming Attraction'. Although there's always that essay about Lithuania to look forward to.)

Wakefield rocks

As of about nine hours ago, unhemmed is head over heels in love with The Research & thought maybe you might like them too.

skad to foto? i to ...

the great literature of nonsense

Reviewing Julian Barnes's tremendous new novel Arthur & George, Theo Tait in the current LRB:

Chesterton summed up one great appeal of the Holmes stories when he said that ‘the thread of irony which runs through all the solemn impossibilities of the narrative’ makes them ‘a really brilliant addition to the great literature of nonsense’.

Pedalo

Love lists, me

Though obviously it can be taken too far.

In response to the kind request from one drmigs here is is what I be mostly digging of late:

1. My First Lover - Gillian Welch (this is the business)
2. Letters - Laura Cantrell (and this is the business, too)
3. I Need You Back - Ben Kweller (I'm a sucker for this kind of thing - I wish I had made this record myself)
4. Barstool Blues - Neil Young, but what I have in mind is the flaky Evan Dando solo version
5. Levi Stubb's Tears - Billy Bragg (he might live in a big white house in Burton Bradstock, but I love him dear)

I don't know if I have the html skills for tagging the next bunch of dudes. In fact, I'm not even sure that I know five dudes I could tag. Does Elmore Leonard have a blog?

Imagine?

We here at unhemmed thought you might be interested in, and perhaps slightly terrified by, this.

1976

'One day I'll die, and on my grave it will say: "Here lies Reginald Iolanthe Perrin. He didn't know the names of the trees and the flowers, but he knew the rhubarb crumble sales figures for Schleswig Holstein." Look outside at those trees - beautiful.'

Holding Post

Schnucki and I are safely back from Lithuania, a little saddle-sore. We had a fantastic time in Vilnius (or Wilno) - many thanks to Cas, our wonderful hostess. Expect to hear more about it here shortly (a statistical excursion is in the offing), but in the meantime there are eggs to be eaten.

Halliwell's Film Guide my bottom

Best Guest Leaderboard 1

Those of you with the eagle eyes will have spotted another fantastic link just over on the right there somewhere. Really an extraordinary thing, it will tell you where you have come from to be here on . It's not quite live - it updates hourly - so in fact the name of the link is a little misleading, it rather tells you where everybody else has come from. For each of the last 20 visitors (have there even been that many?) a little virtual pin gets pushed into a map of the world that you can scroll and zoom in on and even see as a satellite picture. Thanks to my mild but chronic paranoia, I feel almost certain that the lion's share of these international flags are flying thanks to machines rather than people, but I am particularly taken with some of the data nonetheless. This is the leaderboard as it stands this morning:

1. ESZTERGOM, KOMAROM-ESZTERGOM
Time: August 17, 2005 1:24 am
(not sure if that's Hungary or Slovakia, but a clear winner I think you'll agree)

2. RUSSIAVILLE, INDIANA
Time: August 17, 2005 1:43 am
(get outta town!)

3. TALLINN, HARJUMAA
Time: August 17, 2005 1:44 am
(there were some Estonians at our party the other night)

The good people here can arrange this for your site, should you so desire. It's dead easy.

A far, far better thing

Calling all techies, would-be geeks and HTML-ers. What would be the
easiest way of uploading an MP3 file on to unhemmed?

on the right bank, indeed, we did see

and mere moments earlier, i kid you not, we had seen

CHAPTER 37 A little Cold Water

"My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was stronger than ever in those tremendous practical resolutions that I felt the crisis required. I continued to walk extremely fast, and to have a general idea that I was getting on. I made it a rule to take as much out of myself as I possibly could, in my way of doing everything to which I applied my energies. I made a perfect victim of myself. I even entertained some idea of putting myself on a vegetable diet, vaguely conceiving that, in becoming a graminivorous animal, I should sacrifice to Dora."
Charles Dickens, DAVID COPPERFIELD

Phil and Don

"The first gig I ever went to was The Everly Brothers in the early eighties with my dad and my brother. It was fucking fantastic, they are playing Cardiff in November and I will be there to watch 'em again."

Always a joy to hear from El Capitano.

Get into the folkmobile and drive

Resources 001-3

001 How to go klang - you'll have to follow the links. And you'll be happy to hear that klang is not the only thing they can teach you how to go.

002 And this is the Burryman:

"On the day preceding the Queensferry Fair, the Burry Man who requires to be either a stout man or robust lad, as weakly persons, like the man in complete steel who annually sacrifices his life to the Lord Mayors Show in London, have been known to faint under the heat and fatigue of the dressing, is indued in his flannels; face, arms, and legs, body all being covered, so as nearly to resemble a man in chain amour, from the adhesion of the burrs; and the head, as well as the tops of the staves grasped with extended arms, being beautifully dressed with flowers; whilst the victim, thus accoutered, is led from door to door by two attendants who likewise assist in holding up his arms by grasping the staves. At every door in succession, a shout is raised, and the inhabitants, severally come forth, bestow there kindly greetings and donatives of money on the Burry Man who in this way collects, we believe, considerable sums of money to be eventually divided and spent at the Fair by the youth associated in this exploit." -- W. W. Fyffe, 1865

You're supposed to give him whisky as well. They (those same from whom I've borrowed the above) say that this has gone on for thousands of years.

003 I first met the Burryman just yesterday in the Paul Farley poem 'Thorns' (from his second and most recent book, The Ice Age). He also makes use of the word zareba. I had no idea the web was so hot on pronunciation.

As far as I know, Farley has never used the word 'klang'.

Brzozowskiego

Hala Ludowa

Zielone wrony

Rewriting The Phrasebook

If I've told you once, I've told you again.
Better to be safe than dangerous.

mousetram

Qui est-ce?

There might be a prize.

some people will eat any old tripe

"I've found very little that was actually beyond the boundary of the edible. One example was the Swedish dish surströmming. This is herring that is 'preserved' in salt water but has started to rot. You buy surströmming in cans that bulge slightly because of the continuing 'fermentation' process. It is always prepared and served outdoors because, although it looks like normal herring, it smells quite startlingly of shit. Once, while staying in Sweden, I served it to some of my relations who had often spoken of the dish but never actually eaten it. Before opening the can you have to bang a nail into it to release the pressure. I did so and was hit in the face by a miniature geyser of shit-smelling spray. After having a shower, I opened the can and served the fish in the traditional way, on a soft, thin bread with chopped red onion and sour cream. According to strict local tradition, we drank milk with it. Did it taste like shit? I don't know. I've never eaten shit. But shit certainly could taste like that. Having ingested a surströmming sandwich each, we all discovered an unexpected effect. The fermentation process continued in our stomachs, and we all began to burp uncontrollably. Having eaten shit, we were now farting through our mouths."

- Sean French, from Granta, some years ago

awaiting animation

Tintin et Milou

Massive Expansion Of Interweb Profile

A stack of theodolites, one of them mine.

(I'm slightly prouder of this. And let us not forget the glory days, nor erstwhile pop stardom.)

Let's Get Nijinsky

Why 'unhemmed'?

It's an anal reference to Finnegans Wake, of all the things in the world, where Joyce rewrites the Lord's Prayer, or part of it, like this:

"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of
Plurabilities, halved be her eve, her signtime sung, her rill be run,
unhemmed as it is in heaven."

Which is pretty cool, I think. Also I just like the idea of things
being unhemmed.

There is a slightly different version, however, on this page:

"In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be run, unhemmed as it is uneven!"

This version is corroborated on this rather extraordinary page. I need a copy of the book. I copied my version down from Hugh Kearney's Transitions (1988), page 43, sometime in the second half of 2003. And I could well have introduced some 'mistakes' of my own. I hope that it is 'signtime', and not 'singtime' - but on the other hand I hope that they are right about 'unhemmed as it is uneven'. As far as 'halved' and 'haloed' goes, I'd be happy with either.

Some lovely lody

One of the best!

THE LOAF

When I put my finger to the hole they've cut for a dimmer switch
in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair
it seems I've scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch

with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.

When I put my ear to the hole I'm suddenly aware
of spades and shovels turning up the gain
all the way from Raritan to the Delaware

with a clink and a clink and a clinky-click.

When I put my nose to the hole I smell the flood-plain
of the canal after a hurricane
and the spots of green grass where thousands of the Irish have lain

with a stink and a stink and a stinky-stick.

When I put my eye to the hole I see one holding horse dung to the rain
in the hope, indeed, indeed,
of washing out a few whole ears of grain

with a wink and a wink and a winkie-wick.

And when I do at last succeed
in putting my mouth to the horsehair-fringed niche
I can taste the small loaf of bread he baked from that whole seed

with a link and a link and a linky-lick.



(You can hear it here.)

Rock and roll

Kolysz i trzas

the impossibility of irrelevance

"A more genuinely Hartleyan Associationist than Richards, Empson typically suggests the impossibility of irrelevance. The suspicion that there are subterranean links between every point on the compass of signification informs what can legitimately be called Empson’s semiotic." (Paul H Fry in Norris & Mapp 1993, p. 162)

"What a beautiful thing it is, in a pot, urine."

Latin lesson.

EADEM [the same way] SED [but] ALITER [otherwise, differently]

EHEU [alas]

Kate Bush

KateBush
Originally uploaded by Jon George.

Mokotow Monkey is sponsored by Kate Bush.

Wifewatching

Good golly. Here's Tommy looking ever-so-slightly evil, and here's Tom and the 'new' drummer. They were live at The Spitz on September 9th last year, lucky little lambkins.

Ozdobny

This word 'ozdobny' has been bugging me. 'Podobny' means 'similar'. 'Oz' is an affectionate name for the land of Australia. I have a notion that 'ozdobny' means 'exotic', but perhaps that is just because of its exotic sound.

Alrighty. It means 'decorative'. Polish language, of you I approve.

And here's another one. 'Zaplatalem sie troche' = 'I got a little bit confused'. 'Zaplatac' (with nasal a in the middle) is the perfective of 'platac' which means 'to tangle (up)', 'to mix (up)', and when used as a reflexive verb means 'to tangle', 'to falter' and 'to hang around'.

wszystko mi sie placze = I'm all confused

jezyk mu sie placze = he can't find his tongue

I needed to say 'Zaplatalem sie troche!' to describe the worst teaching experience so far at UW, when I embarked upon a reading of Heaney's 'Broagh' that somehow transmogrified into a panicky exercise in deconstruction. The poem, I declared, was importantly unreadable, and as such was a good model for the sectarian conflict. I'm such a wally.

The Fatherland of the Tomato

What is a tomato?
And where can they be found?
Help is at hand. Fear not. At hand is help. Don't be fearing now.

Let's hear it then!

Here you go.
I mean here you go.
Sorry, I mean here you go.

Jean DuBuffet is not in the Penguin Book of Facts.

Neither am I.

The time is a lie. The Blogware thinks I am in California, not Warszawa. When I get to grips a bit with all this new-fangled-ness, that's one of the little problems I hope to solve.

The Penguin Book of Facts

dubuffet
Originally uploaded by Jon George.

Jean DuBuffet. Is there a painter with a better name?

Charles Ives is there in the index, which sends us to pages 642 and (gulp) 666. On the former we discover that he was born in 1874 in Danbury, Connecticut; he died in 1954. That means that he was either 79 or 80 years of age when he logged off. There is a selection of orchestral works, reproduced below in full. On the latter we are told that in 1947 his Symphony No 3 was awarded the annual 'Pulitzer Prize in music'. Ives was the fifth composer to be so honoured.

Were Rubinstein and Horowitz fans?

And as promised that little list -

- Holidays Symphony (in the plural? where did he go?)
- The Unanswered Question (that old chestnut!)
- Central Park in the Dark (great title)
- Symphonies 1-3 (which is your favourite?)
- Variations on 'America'

Alan

lomax
Originally uploaded by Jon George.

At the tender of age of 17, Alan set off with his father to do some field work. Here we see him a few years later, writing something up.