The Little Professor

Where have all the trick-or-treaters gone?

It's a Friday night; it's fairly warm for this time of year; it isn't raining, snowing, or otherwise precipitating.  And yet...very few trick-or-treaters.  (We rarely see much trick-or-treating action after 8:30, so I'm probably done handing out candy for the night.)  This is worrisome, because now I have a very large stash of chocolate goodies, and the Rules of Academic Calories do not apply to Halloween candy when it is in my house.  

This Week's Acquisitions

• George E. Sargent, Richard Hunne: A Story of Old London (RTS, [1871]).  Historical novel, set in the early sixteenth century, about Lollard sympathizer Richard Hunne and his mysterious end.  For an RTS publication, this copy has an unusually upscale binding (gold-stamped leather with raised bands and marbled endpapers); it was given as a prize book by Ridley College (then Bishop Ridley College) in 1896.  (eBay)
• Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News? (Little, Brown, 2008).  Third of Atkinson's novels about PI Jackson Brodie.  (BOMC)
• Benjamin Markovits, A Quiet Adjustment (Norton, 2008).  Second part of Markovits' trilogy about Lord Byron, this time focusing on Annabella (Anne Isabella) Milbanke.  (BOMC)
• Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (FSG, 2008).  The Ibis travels to Mauritania in 1838; first part of an intended trilogy.  (What is it with trilogies this week?) (BOMC)
• Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (Verso, 1999).  Literary history, cartographically speaking.  (Amazon)
• Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeVoise (Harvard, 2007).  The constitution of modern "world literature."  (Amazon)
• Judith Wilt, Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward (Virginia, 2005).  Study of the novelist usually billed as Mrs. Humphry Ward.  (eBay)
• John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660-1688 (Cambridge, 2008).  Oh dear, James II.  (If you haven't noticed, Cambridge has been reprinting books in relatively affordable paperbacks.)  (Amazon [secondhand])

Review of Charles Robinson's new edition of Frankenstein

A very interesting assessment by Lynda Pratt in the TLS.  (Via NASSR-L.) 

Haweswater

Sarah Hall's Haweswater is the third novel I've read about drowning English villages to create reservoirs, along with Robert Edric's Gathering the Water and Reginald Hill's On Beulah Height.  One can see why the topic would appeal to a historically-minded novelist: the demands of modern life literally submerge the remnants of rural English culture, disrupting the landscape in the process.  Haweswater reimagines the building of the Haweswater reservoir dam through an ill-starred romance between Janet Lightburn, daughter of the grimly Christian Ella and her husband Samuel, and Jack Ligget, a self-made man of sorts who represents the Manchester Water Works.  (Readers should ignore the back cover, which not only confuses Janet with her mother when it comes to religious faith, but also misspells the village's name.)  Janet possesses striking features, intelligence, and independence, nurtured by the radical village teacher and by her father's shy support; her character, thinks her father, is "above and beyond" all norms of gender (73). While Janet's unique nature and interests seem to ally her with the forces of modernity, both positive and negative, her passionate attachment to Mardale also makes her a chthonic force.  She is simultaneously grounded in the natural cycles of the region and at odds with the local culture, but the landscape takes precedence: "Her body chemistry alters as the terrain decomposes, turns, begins again.  She would have her ashes scattered to the open face of the scar.  She has given herself over to this saturated strip of Westmoreland" (112).  The boundaries between the landscape and the woman are porous, in an organic relationship that is part symbiosis and part romance.  

Jack Ligget, by contrast, is instantly identified with new technologies, thanks to his sleek automobile. And where Janet's relationship to her surroundings has been "as unconscious and simple as the mechanisms of breathing" (112), Jack performs the role of a man born to fine things: "He knew how to enter a room of applause without seeming relieved, was wasteful enough with pate and champagne at social gatherings not to seem unaccustomed"; notes the narrator, the sole flaw of this "performance" is "its perfection" (144).  Jack produces himself out of a careful study of all the outward signifiers of class difference, ranging from the right clothes to the right physical carriage.  Unlike Janet's imbrication in the landscape, which makes it impossible to separate her body from its surroundings, Jack's performance requires hyper-consciousness, an ongoing adjustment of the self to other's expectations.  This performance is Jack's desperate attempt to escape his brutal upbringing in Manchester, where "[t]o breathe was a waste of time" (131). Janet is all natural cycles; Jack all urban rhythms.  But, as their identical initials suggest, the fissures in their relations to place and time destine them for each other.  Janet's entire being may be bound up in this valley, but her education has made her aware of other potentialities elsewhere.  Similarly, Jack's coming warns of the large-scale urban appetites that will obliterate this small-scale rural community, but Jack also feels for the valley and its graces. 

While the merging of Jack and Janet coincides with the onslaught of the city against the country, there are larger forces at work.  Haweswater is an interwar novel set in the 1930s, and the characters both bear the scars of WWI (Ella was a nurse; Samuel her patient; another resident lost an arm) and glimpse, more or less dimly, the approach of another war.  Hall repeatedly slips in similes that link the construction of the dam to war: workers "like a disparate army of discharged soldiers" (163); badly injured men who "might have been returning from the front lines of trench warfare for their so-often sorry states" (166); the remnants of buildings, discovered years later, that resemble "forgotten war veterans.  Or skeletal prisoners left in a concentration camp" (226).  And the impending threat of WWII manifests itself in the British Army's demolition of the village with explosives.  Mardale, apparently so insignificant and isolated, cannot help but register the memories and effects of worldwide destruction.  Both the figurative language and the Army presence disrupt the apparent (and very traditional) binary opposition of country vs. city, since the coming war threatens Manchester as much as Manchester threatens Mardale.  But the technologies that destroy bodies and the technologies that rework the landscape unite to submerge Mardale.

Not surprisingly, Janet's and Jack's wildly passionate relationship is itself marked by violence; Janet, in particular, has a thing for whacking Jack around, but Jack can be fairly brutal himself.   While Jack's love for Janet temporarily "naturalizes" him, a forgotten arrangement with a poacher during Jack's citified phase precipitates his death--by precipitating him off an icy ridge--and causes Janet to collapse in raving madness, not soothed by the arrival of their illegitimate child.  (I must admit that this is probably the weakest part of the novel, since it feels driven by the plot's exigencies rather than any convincing characterization on Hall's part; the novel's romantic elements tip over into stereotypical Victorian melodrama here.)  As the poacher's sudden reappearance suggests, Jack cannot shuck off the weight of his past choices.  If, in a sense, he becomes one with the landscape by dying in it, it's still true that he cannot leave Manchester behind and remain alive.  Jack's accidental death is in stark contrast to that of Samuel's friend Nathaniel, who deliberately chooses the place and time of his death like the "great and wise animals," and melds with the landscape until he is almost indistinguishable from the rocks around him (184).  But where Nathaniel's death becomes one more marker of the village's impending erasure (187-88), Jack's has no lasting significance for the dam.  Even Janet's suicidal assault on the dam near the end accomplishes nothing but the most cosmetic of damage, although it horrifically obliterates her.  Several years later, Janet's Little Father Time-esque younger brother, Isaac, who loves immersing himself in water, contentedly commits suicide in the reservoir and comes "home" (266).   History inexorably drowns everyone who tries to resist it. 

Nevertheless, Jack's and Janet's daughter Miriam manages to survive, the bearer of the country's and the city's joint legacies; significantly, she is an adult before she learns the truth about her conception.  Miriam, projected into the future, exists in part because she discovers her parents' history as story, rather than lived experience.  Janet, we discover, has already passed on into folklore as a ghost, "Janet Tree" (absorbing Janet back into the landscape again).    Ella's deathbed story of Jack's and Janet's love prompts Miriam to "dream and imagine, and speculate about the sort of romance that shakes up history and devastates valleys" (254), but even the terminology suggests that Miriam can only experience this apparently world-historic passion as an imaginative narrative.  This is a historical loss, but for Jack and Janet, it is also a kind of immortality, released into the grand emotional sweep of a romance that outlasts everything that history can throw at it.      

Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910

Epic poetry was once considered the most exalted form of poetry; not coincidentally, writing a great epic was supposed to be part and parcel of the career trajectory of any major poet.  Herbert F. Tucker's Epic: Britain's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910 is, suitably enough, not just about the epic, but at 737 pages (counting the index), manages to be epic in scope.  (The division into twelve chapters may be a sly joke, given the magic number of "twelve books" in nineteenth-century epic.)  In heft and, to a slightly lesser extent, subject matter, Epic shares shelf space with its acknowledged forebears, Howard Weinbrot's rumbustious Britannia's Issue and Isobel Armstrong's Victorian Poetry.  Given the trend towards shorter and shorter books, especially in recent years, a "big" book is itself a tribute to the author's academic capital.  Moreover, the literary-historical subject matter departs in focus from Tucker's two well-known monographs on Browning and Tennyson: instead of closely studying an individual, canonical author, Tucker now ranges widely over what is frequently uncharted territory.  This is the literary historian as Odysseus, as it were. 

Suitably enough, given the role of warfare in the history of epic, there's a bit of disciplinary warfare in both the historical narrative and in the text itself.  In nineteenth-century studies, there has been a traditional division of labor between Romanticists, who mostly do poetry, and Victorianists, who mostly do fiction.  Obviously, this division has never been a hard-and-fast rule, but this state of "genre attraction" has something to do with the relative critical reputations of poetry and fiction during the respective periods.  Armstrong's book was an attempt to hew out some space for poetry in a sea of Victorian fiction, but Tucker goes a step further: while arguing that epic poets and novelists spent the nineteenth century competing, in effect, for the same literary territory, he also makes the stronger claim that attempts to differentiate epic from the novel have foundered rather badly. Or, as Tucker puts it, "a great deal of what Lukacs and Bakhtin say about the prose fiction of the nineteenth century will also find exemplification among the period's verse epics" (15).  Even more bluntly, Tucker argues that "verse narrative" actually enjoyed considerably greater "flexibility of focus and agility of pace"than did those other, non-versified forms (21); anything fiction can do, the epic can do better--or, at least, as well.  This includes taking in next-door genres like a hyped-up vacuum cleaner, a point that Tucker dryly suggests has been omitted from "prevailing literary histories," which celebrate such absorption in the novel but neglect to note the same activity in the epic (268).  Instead of the novel springing from the epic's corpse, then, Tucker paints a picture of the novel and epic spurring each other on to new formal and aesthetic heights.  Which, by extension, suggests that the professional Victorianist may wish to (at least temporarily) close his Dickens and open his Morris.

Tucker's project is traditional literary history in the best sense of the word: the survey aims for completeness (while admitting that it can never quite be complete); mixes its canonical authors, like Browning and Tennyson, with their less-canonical counterparts, like Robert Pollok (while noting, properly, that the latter were sometimes more popular than the former); and doesn't skimp on the qualitative judgments (while occasionally turning up some surprising gems languishing among the forgotten verses).  Not surprisingly, given the vast quantities of text under discussion, Tucker moves through the shelves according to chronology, although he frequently finds his chronological groups cohering according to theme or subject matter.  Thus, we have apocalyptic epics, Spasmodic epics, and so forth, which usually refuse to stay put neatly in their assigned spaces.  (Tucker's periodization, which looks draconian if considered solely from the POV of the table of contents, is far less so in execution.)   I note with some interest that this may be the first major literary history to incorporate rare texts made available courtesy of Project Gutenberg and GoogleBooks.  Most chapters restrict themselves to five or ten years, so the reader knows something is afoot--or, rather, not afoot--when chapter eleven suddenly swallows up a quarter-century.  While Tucker does tack shifts in literary priorities to contemporary politico-religious ebbs and swells, he disarmingly admits that "[t]he chapter arguments are  seldom if ever arrestingly new; they conform more often than not to the received political and social history of the long nineteenth century" (9), and the book is really at its strongest when dealing with interrelationships among literary texts.  This is not the type of historicist or new historicist project that reads literary texts against other discourses, whether theology, medicine, or ad copy.  

Of course, Tucker has quite enough to read as it is.  The book is big, and its argument is big to match; trying to narrow it down to a few lines or so is a perilous enterprise indeed.  Nevertheless, Tucker often returns to a point made fairly early on in the long introduction: "From nebula to tissue, from testament to syllable, one had to learn that nothing had always been or would forever be.  But that meant one might aspire to find the law of the change, integrate its differential into a compensatory performance by writing its code" (23).  Tucker's heroic poets are always in the process of inventing and reinventing a personal, national, international, or even universal past, while trying to project that history forward into the future--sometimes, as in the case of the apocalyptic epics, into the next world.  By the same token, while epic always retained certain essential elements (like scope), new topics meant new challenges to the boundary of the genre; apocalyptic epics, as Tucker points out, certainly brought new meaning to the term "comprehensiveness" (249).  Epic's changeability leads us to another of Tucker's key arguments, which is that reports of epic's "death" (4 ff.) after Milton, are, like Mark Twain's, exaggerated.  Poets may feel more or less angsty about taking epic on, and some poets only feel comfortable writing epic when the epic in question is mock-epic, but the genre was clearly not in a state of cryogenic suspension.  While the reader may cavil at some point or another, that's a feature, not a bug: a history of such sweep is supposed to produce a critical conversation, not beat the Gentle Reader into whimpering submission.

If there's anything in the method that may cause some readers to demur, even slightly, it's Tucker's decision to avoid close work with language in favor of analyzing narrative constructions.  Given that the section of the book's bibliography devoted only to the epics runs from pp. 602 to 626, this choice makes perfectly good sense; anyone who works on non-canonical works quickly learns the agonies of navigating between the Scylla of extensive quotation and the Charybdis of overarching plot summary.  Moreover, as he correctly notes, close reading and epic don't necessarily go together (9)--although the distinction there between oral and written epic probably could have been theorized a little more explicitly. In fact, close reading occasionally crops up in quirky moments, as when Tucker seems mesmerized by the sheer oddity of Charles M. Doughty's The Dawn in Britain (1906) (571-83).  From the POV of user-friendliness, though, this Gentle Reader occasionally found herself yearning to nail Tucker's more sweeping generalizations down to a quotation...sometimes, any quotation.  E.g., when encountering Tucker on Swinburne: "As this narrative flashed at large from blaze to black across the thermodynamic inane, or as [backstage at the accidental theater of human consciousness] it was microscopically rehearsed at the speed of synaptic discharge, it demanded expression in lyric forms" (524).   Still, Tucker's frequently punning, alliterative prose, while it requires close attention, never bogs down in forbidding jargon, and even comes ornamented with--dare one say it?--a sense of humor.  Readers will find much to ponder.           

Words dreaded by all US air travelers

"Change planes at ORD." 

Also known as O'Hare Airport, located in wonderfully balmy Chicago.  Changing planes there is exciting at the best of times, given that being delayed is the Platonic essence of O'Hare, but these instructions are particularly nerve-wracking when the ticket is for December.  One always wonders if it will be necessary to dig out the plane.  Or the airport. 

As a one-time Chicago resident, I speak only with love, of course. 

Halloween Blogging 2008: "Residents" of Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, 1886

Never underestimate the fervent Victorian passion for all things criminal, sensational, sexual (yep), murderous, and, in general, bloody.  Exhibit A: the ever-popular Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's.  What follows is a hyperlinked listing of the ladies and gentlemen modeled for waxwork posterity in the Chamber of Horrors, taken from the Tussaud's guidebook for 1886.  Some of these folks are still (in)famous (e.g., William Palmer, the Mannings, Burke and Hare); some of them have faded out of the pop consciousness.  Most of the waxworks themselves have vanished, but I've linked to the few of which photos are available.   "See also" links may take you to all sorts of criminous locales, ranging from the Old Bailey to collections of street ballads.   

• James Carey of the Phoenix Park Murders. 
• The burglar and murderer Charles Peace.  Peace appears twice, once in disguise and once as himself. (See also 1 2 3)
• William Marwood the executioner.  (Link goes to the Tussaud's waxwork.)  Of the folks on this list, Marwood executed Mapleton, Peace, and Webster.  (See also 1 2 3 4) 
• PC Edward Robinson, who arrested Peace.  
• Henri Pranzini, murderer of Marie Regnault and others, now perhaps best known for the interest that St. Therese of Lisieux took in him. 
• Catherine (Kate) Webster, murderer of Julia Thomas.  (See also 1 2)
• Benson.  I haven't managed to I.D. this gentleman, although Punch noted his addition to the Chamber in 1877. ETA: ID, thanks to Wordweaverlynn.  This is Harry Benson, who with William Kurr managed to run a gambling scam--thanks to the help of some detectives.  (See also 1) 
• Percy Lefroy Mapleton, murdered Isaac Gold on a railway train.  (See also 1)
• Mary Ann Cotton, who has the dubious honor of being Britain's most "successful" (or, at least, most thorough) female serial killer.  (See also 1)
• Walter Miller, murderer of the Rev. Huelin and his housekeeper, Mrs. Boss.  (See also 1)
• Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, mass murderer who killed the entire Kinck family. (See also 1 [French])
• James Greenacre, murderer (with Sarah Gale) of Hannah Brown.  (See also 1 2) 
• Luigi Buranelli, murderer; his execution was controversial because of his insanity.
• Charlotte Winsor, notorious "baby farmer." (See also 1 2)
• Emanuel Barthelemy, murderer of George Moore and Charles Collard.
• William Godfrey Youngman, Walworth Place murderer.  (See also 1 2 3)
• Henry Wainwright, murdered and dismembered his lover, Harriet Lane; not to be confused with Wainwright the poisoner.  (See also 1 2)
• Marguerite Dixblanc, servant who murdered her employer, Mme. Riel.  (See also 1 2)
• Louis James Paine.  Manslaughter; no further information available.
• John Jones (or Owen), murderer of the Marshall family.
• Count de Lorge.  Supposedly a prisoner in the Bastille.  
• John Lee, perpetually unexecuted murderer of Emma Keyse.  
• Henry Perry, robber.  No further information available. 
• Patrick and Louis Staunton, who murdered Louis' wife Harriet Staunton--the "Penge Mystery."  (See also 1 2)
• William Burke and William Hare, the infamous resurrectionists.  (See also 1 2 3 4 5 6 [many others at this site] 7 8 9 10 11)       
• Franz Felix Stumm, forger.  No full-text information available. ETA: Link added, thanks to Arnold.
• Richard Coates, child-murderer. 
• James Bloomfield Rush, murderer of Isaac Jermy and his son.  (See also 1 2)
• William Herbert, murderer of his sister-in-law, Jane Messenger.  
• Mrs. [Catherine] Flannagan/Flanagan and Mrs. [Mary] Higgins, poisoners/sisters-in-crime.  (See also 1 2)
• Catherine Wilson, poisoner and serial killer.   (See also 1)
• William Sheward, who murdered and dismembered his wife.  (See also 1 2) 
• William Fish, barber and child-murderer.  (See also 1 2 3)
• Dr. Edmond-Désiré Couty de la Pommerais, poisoner of his mistress, Mme. de Pauw.  (See also 1)
• Dennis Collins, tried to stone William IV.
• Giuseppe Marco Fieschi, attempted assassin of Louis Philippe. 
• James Lee, murderer of Inspector Thomas Simmons.  
• James Mullins, ex-policeman and murderer of Mary Emsley.
• Israel Lipski, acid murderer.  
• Charles J. Guiteau, assassin of President Garfield.  (See also 1)
• Thomas William Currell, murderer of Lydia Green. (See also 1)
• Franz Muller, responsible for the very first murder on an English railway train. (See also 1 2 3 4)
• Felice Orsini, attempted assassin of Napoleon III.  (See also 1)
• Giovanni Pianori, another attempted assassin of Napoleon III.
• Pierri, conspired with Orsini.
• William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner.  (Link goes to Tussaud's waxwork.)  (See also 1 2 3 4 5)
• Martin Dumollard and his wife, vampiric serial killers.  (See also 1 [warning: this is the preserved skin from Dumollard's face])
• Thomas Henry Orrock, murdered policeman George Cole.   
• Frederick Hinson, murdered his lover Maria Death. 
• William Wheatley, burglar (in cahoots with James Wright, below).  No detailed information available.  ETA: Link added, thanks to Arnold.
• Miles Wetherill (or Weatherill), the Todmorden Murderer.  (See also 1)
• James Wright, burglar.  No detailed information available.  ETA: See Wheatley link.
• George Pavey, murdered a ten-year-old girl, Ada Shepherd.  
• Maria and Frederick George Manning, husband-and-wife team who murdered Maria's lover.  (See also 1 2 3 4) 
• Daniel Good, murdered and dismembered Jane Jones.  (See also 1 [Welsh] 2)
• Elizabeth Gibbons, murdered her husband, James Gibbons.
• Edward Oxford, first man (of seven) to attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria.  
• John Martin, Anthony Benjamin Rudge, and James Baker, who burgled Netherby Hall and murdered a policeman.  (Martin is also connected with James Lee, above.)  (See also 1)
• John Thurtell, murdered William Weare.  (Link includes Tussaud's waxwork.)  (See also 1 2 3)
• Jean Paul Marat, leader of the French Revolution, murdered by Charlotte Corday.  (Link goes to Tussaud's waxwork.)  (See also 1)
• Heads of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Jacques-Rene Hebert, Fouquier Tinville, and Jean-Baptiste Carrier.  Mme. Tussaud modeled the heads immediately after these gentlefolks were guillotined.  (Link goes to Tussaud's waxworks.)  (See also 1 and the flickr set that follows)
  

This Week's Acquisitions

• H. H.  Milman, The Martyr of Antioch: A Dramatic  Poem (John Murray, 1823).  A new edition of Milman's closet drama, in a uniform binding with the poem below.  These two volumes belonged to clergyman and poetaster John Lea Simcox, who died in July 1840 at the age of 26; they were taken as a memorial by a friend, Laura Price, from Birmingham.  (eBay)
• ---, The Fall of Jerusalem: A Dramatic Poem (John Murray, 1825).  Another new edition.  Milman, of course, is now much better known as an ecclesiastical historian, but he got his start as a bestselling poet.  (eBay)
• Margaret Elphinstone, Voyageurs (Canongate, 2005).  In the early nineteenth century, a man treks into Canada, looking for his lost sister.  (eBay)
• Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford, 2002).  Afterlife of the 12th-c. mystic Joachim de Fiore and his influence on prophetic interpretation, etc.  (Oxford)
• Robert C. Fuller, Naming the Antichrist: A History of an American Obsession (Oxford, 1996).  Apocalyptics, US-style.  (eBay)
• John Demos, The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World (Viking, 2008).  Synthetic work by a well-known specialist in colonial American history.  (BOMC)
• Kathryn Shevelow, For the Love of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement (Holt, 2008).  Roots of animal protection in eighteenth-century England.  (HBC)

If an undergraduate prefaced an essay this way, I'd be mighty annoyed

By devoting more time and labour, the narrative might have been less imperfect ; but I did not commence it with the view or in the expectation of producing a perfect composition, and I trust that those who feel an interest in the subject will favourably receive what is now submitted to their notice. (viii)

--James Lord, Sister Theresa, nee Ryan, the Abducted Nun.  A Metrical Narrative

Granted, given the title, my expectations were already low, but this takes the modesty trope to new heights.  (Never mind "I worked so hard"; how about "I couldn't be bothered to work all that hard, but I hope you'll be cool with it anyway?")

ETA: Oh, good heavens.  It's worse than I imagined.  A random sample of the versifying:

From Mile-end to Great Ormond-street—
And here begins a tale,
Which, could it but be fully told,
Would make one weep and wail — 

From Mile-end to Great Ormond-street,
The distance is not great ;
Whether three miles, or more or less,
'Twere bootless here to state. (4)

Even the reviewer for the Bulwark has to concede that the poem's worth is "not so much as a piece of poetry, for we cannot say much of it in that aspect..."

Two thoughts inspired by reading some nineteenth-century novel criticism

1.  There's a certain clandestine delight to be found in the knowledge that many Victorians would regard an apparently innocuous course like "The Victorian Novel" as a sign of our absolute moral and intellectual corruption.  (Teaching novels?! To impressionable youth?! Heavens forfend!)

2.  Many Victorian complaints about novel-reading boil down to "people refuse to read boring stuff."  This seems familiar, somehow.