Jean Baudrillard did not die on March 6, 2007

The acknowledged philosopher, who is famous for blurring the boundaries between reality and simulation, passed away. Yet for him, dying was pointless, one has to know how to disappear...

Following a long illness, French sociologist and leading postmodernist thinker Jean Baudrillard died at the age of 77. Once he wrote “Dying is pointless. You have to know how to disappear”. Did he disappear? Well, speaking his theory, his death might not have taken place...He once said “What I am I do not know. I am the simulacrum of myself”.

Here comes Baudrillard’s most renowned term “simulacrum”, meaning the virtuality of signs that are generated by culture and media that create the reality we perceive. Baudrillard posed that our perception is captured and accordingly shaped by the simulacra which creates a “simulation” of the real. This simulacra of the real surpasses the real world and thus becomes “hyperreal”, a world that is more real than real. It presupposes and precedes the real.


The Matrix of the matrix  
If you are confused, think of the famous Matrix Trilogy of Wachowski Brothers: “Welcome to the desert of the real”. This quote, voiced by the rebel chief Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) in the first episode is Baudrillard’s most famous formula. Believe it or not, Baudrillard was invited to collaborate in the sequels, but he declined. Later, he accused the film Matrix of misunderstanding his philosophy. He found the film too “Platonic” and said “The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce”.

Baudrillard is famous for his “outraging” remarks that shocked the audiences and intellectual faculties alike giving him a “notorious” title or “philosophic clown” attributes.

He attracted attentions by predicting that the first Gulf War in 1991 would not take place. During the war he insisted that it was not taking place. And after the war concluded, he went on saying it did not actually take place.

What Baudrillard actually wanted to point out was that the war was conducted as a media spectacle, quite similar to a war game, or a simulation. Considering under his terms of simulacra and simulation; during the war media replaced reality with simulation through reproducing the images of the real, which were selected and displayed according to a certain ideology. People around the world watched the images of war with the same attitude that they watch an advertisement on telly. They just watched the war on TV and went to bed afterwards. Thus, the war did not take place in the realm of the real.

Baudrillard later on went on discussing that there was no need for the media to virtualise events, as in Gulf War, since the war’s participants had thoroughly internalised the rules of simulation. That means, we are all captives in the hyperreality...

Baudrillard uses a famous tale by Borges to crystallise the term “hyperreal”: A great Empire created a map that was so detailed it was as large as the Empire itself. The actual map grew and decayed as the Empire conquered or lost lands. When the Empire collapsed, all that was left was the map itself. In Baudrillard's rendition, it is the map that we are living in, the simulation of reality, and it is reality that is decomposing due to disuse.

Well, a sparkling genius in this desert of the real, Baudrillard tried to travel beyond the hyperreal to “see what happens beyond”, as he put it in his words. It remains a mystery whether he achieved or not. Jean Baudrillard, born on July 29, 1929, died on March 6, 2007.

***Published in Caretta, 2007.

A French Poet in Cyprus: Arthur Rimbaud

“It has been found again! What? Eternity.
It is the sea mingled with the sun.”

Island means escape. It means freedom. It means isolation. It calls one to chase one’s own utopia in the far distance of every civilisation. Cyprus meant all these to the French poet Arthur Rimbaud; a newfound eternity.

Imagine a stone quarry in Cyprus... Then, place a supervisor in this scene... Let this be a French fellow who mostly enjoyed hard work... Let this be Arthur Rimbaud, the poet who charmed the literary scene of Paris with his poems he wrote in his teens only; one who wrote the most innovative and influencing poem of the age when he was only 17. He burnt out all the poems he had written at once, left Europe, and came here, to Cyprus...
Renowned French poet Paul Verlaine mentioned him, “He was neither Devil nor the holy God; he was Rimbaud, a great poet, (...) a distinctive boy!”
Rimbaud was doubtless a genius who shaped the world of poetry with his four-year work, from the age of 16 to the age of 20. He took poetry out of drawing rooms and placed it in the middle of modern life by crying “from your dark poems, let strange flowers burst out, and electric butterflies! See – it’s the century of Hell!” The life of the poet, who claimed, “I is another”, passed quite congruent to this aphorism of him, extending from the world of letters into a world of hard work incorporating two different others.

The Beginning
Rimbaud is known to have a quick start in life in every aspect. He is said to be born with his eyes open in the morning of October 20, 1854. Then, we see him as an obstreperous teenager. He is young, rebellious, and restless, pushing the borders all the time. Given this image of Rimbaud, a photograph of the poet, retouched to show him wearing jeans, was used as a symbol of the student revolt in Paris in May 1968. The restless soul of Rimbaud, which pushed him leave home several times, finally took him thousands of miles, even continents far from his homeland...
The renowned French poet Verlaine receives a letter in a morning of the year 1871. This was a set of poems, one like which he receives a thousand maybe every day. But this time, it was different. The letter was signed ‘Arthur Rimbaud’, and Verlaine was impressed by the imagery of these poems. He sends a reply to Rimbaud, “We await you; we desire you” with a train ticket to Paris attached.
A forerunner of the Decadence movement in France, standing for “art for art’s sake” which will give way to later Symbolism and Aestheticism, Verlaine is shocked upon meeting Rimbaud, for what he was expecting was a 30-year old man; but what he found instead was a 17-year old countryboy. He patrons him in Paris and introduces him to the literary circles in the city. In the meantime, Rimbaud and Verlaine, whose wife is pregnant, get into a homosexual relationship. In his masterpiece ‘A Season in Hell’, Rimbaud traces this relationship. He mentions Verlaine as “a demon” whose “mysterious ways” seduced him.
When Rimbaud attempted to break apart with Verlaine, the poet shoots him in the arm and he was sent into a Belgian gaol for two years. Upon this, Rimbaud shuts him in his room for some time and writes poetry. At the point that he has many poems to fill a book, he takes them and heads for publishing houses. Nevertheless, the society of letters accuses Rimbaud for spoiling Verlaine’s life by first destroying his marriage and then putting him in the jail. Therefore, he is refused by every little publishing house he takes his poems. The young genius is deeply depressed. And this moment is the exact moment in which everything comes to an end. He throws all his poems into fire at once, the ones that compose his masterpiece ‘A Season in Hell’ mostly, and leaves the country. To become an ‘other’... It is the year 1875...

The Escape
“My day is done: I am leaving Europe. The marine air will burn my lungs; unknown climates will tan my skin.” (A Season in Hell)

The year 1878... After stopping by several cities in Africa, Cyprus welcomes Rimbaud with its tranquillity. Here in Cyprus, he works as a supervisor at a stone quarry. He turns out to be a “man of action” totally leaving aside his personality of a “ man of thought”. He takes fancy in doing hard work. Poetry is dead for him. He never mentions his ‘previous’ life and his glorious days in Paris. No one, not even his employer, knows where he is from or who he is. Upon the inquiries concerning his past he replies, “absurd” and goes on “ridiculous, disgusting”. Rimbaud, has become somebody else. He is leading a tranquil and silent life in Cyprus, where he escaped from his past or maybe from himself.
The first letter he wrote from Cyprus to his mother carries the evidences of that dense feeling of isolated loneliness that would seal his life from then on: “The nearest village is one hour away on foot. There is nothing here but a jumble of rocks, a river, and the sea. There are no houses. No soil, no gardens, no trees”. And of course, no poetry...
How come did Rimbaud end up in Cyprus? Is it an escape from love, or from poetry? Or was he only seeking adventure? Maybe... However, a more detailed look will reveal another perspective: The years that covered Rimbaud’s life was an age in which modernism was climbing very fast. Many values underwent a rapid change with the Industrial Revolution that took place in the beginning of the century. Bourgeoisie was the enemy and everything that belonged to the bourgeois world was fought against. Poets were losing their place in the society.
However, towards the end of the 19th century, bourgeoisie started to gain power steadily. In the face of all these rapid changes, the poets and writers questioned their social idealism, had problems of concern and under this pressure preferred to escape. The literary movement that found roots in this circle of writers is the ‘Escapism’.
Under the suddenly changing values of the city, poets and writers escaped to the wilderness and pristine countries. Can we say then Rimbaud was an ‘escapist’? Considering his sudden escape and disappearing from Europe, he can be labelled as an escapist for sure. The word ‘escape’ in literature brings to mind ‘island’. Island means escape, a place far from the traces of civilisation.
Considering that transportation to islands was possible only via ships in the middle of the 19th century, the most attractive place to chase one’s personal utopia was an island.
Nevertheless, Rimbaud did not have a magnificent life in Cyprus. His letters to his mother tell us that he had hard times on this island. However, who can say this life was not what he pursued, his personal utopia? Especially thinking of the dark bohemian character we have here...
Rimbaud leaves the island in 1880 upon a quarrel he has with the workers, and heads for Aden via the Red Sea gradually getting farther and farther from Europe. After 11 years of exile, he sails to Marseille, worried for a fatal ache in his right leg. Diagnosed as cancer, his right leg is amputated and only six months later Rimbaud dies at the age of thirty-seven.

The End
“Let us go... All the filthy memories are disappearing... At dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter into the splendid cities...” (A Season in Hell)

Teenage rebel, innovative poet, passionate lover, lonely heart...
The poet who came to Paris on a ‘Drunken Boat’ and lived ‘A Season in Hell’ and then had his ‘Illuminations’... Today Rimbaud is renowned neither as a stone quarry supervisor nor as a foreman. He has taken his place in the history of literature as the forerunner of Parnassian movement in literature which gave way to symbolism and decadence later on by seeking “art for art’s sake”. He is remembered as an influential poet who wrote the most innovative poetry of his age though only for four years in his lifetime... He is the great poet who passed by our land that we live on...


Rimbaud’s Oeuvre
The Drunken Boat (Le Bateau Ivre) 1871
The Illuminations (Les Illuminations) 1874
A Season in Hell (Une Saison en Enfer) 1873
(copies of it discovered at a Belgian publisher in 1901)


A Poem by Rimbaud
Sensation
Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.

Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature - as happily as with a woman.


Rimbaud in various disciplines of art
Though composed poetry for only four years in his lifetime, Rimbaud was influential not only in poetry and literature but also in various fields of art. His has impacts in the powerful movements of the 20th century such as Symbolism, Expressionism, and Aestheticism. The famous composer Benjamin Britten composed his poetry in ‘Les Illuminations’ (the Illuminations). Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison take him for inspiration. The film ‘Paris Blues’ (1961) narrates the poet’s life and his masterpiece ‘A Season in Hell’ was adapted for the screen. A retouched photography of Rimbaud showing him wearing jeans was the symbol of the student revolt in Paris in 1968.
*published in Caretta Magazine, Feb 2008

Arthur C. Clarke and Intergalactic Pop Art

Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author died on March 18, 2008 at his home in Sri Lanka. Clarke wrote more than 100 books during his career spanning seventy years. Many people worldwide know him for his unforgettable and stunning masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey’, filmed by Stanley Kubrick.
Clarke's diagnosis of an age marked by the rapid advances in technology that emnacipated the imagination of a whole generation fascinated many.
'2001: A Space Odyssey' is a pseudo history of the evolution of humankind drawing from Engels and concluding in Clarke's foresight. It starts with a depiction of the daily lives of apes, in far past times. An ape, among the many, at some point starts using its hand, operating with it. The movie does not show us a detailed process of making tools. Quite the contrary, it takes us to the very first moment when the ape was stricken by the thought to move its hand up and handle a bone. The moment is backgrounded with a score of Richard Strauss' magisterial piece 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'. In all its implications, there is a leap to a new phase in human evolution/history. We hear Nietzsche, we watch Engels (see Engels' article 'The Part Played by Labour in the Evolution of Man). Clarke thought this new phase was coming to an end in his lifetime. The hopes for a moon landing triggered the imagination of a whole generation. These rapid advances in technology, so Clarke thought, meant a leap to a new phase: the Starchild. Starting with an ape tribe, the movie links to some thousands years far with a dissolve effect that links the bone and the space ship (in the shape of a bone, as well). The movie ends with another Strauss score (this time Johann Strauss, the son - "the next generation") 'The Blue Danube', showing an embryo in the space - "the starchild", the new phase.


Intergalactic voyages and moon landing
The context that triggered the imagination of Arthur C. Clarke, which later on triggered others’ imagination, is worth mentioning for a better understanding. The excitement about the 'Space Race' between the USSR and the USA was at its height in the 60s. People were excited about the advances in technology, new life style imposed by modernity, consuming boom, and increased popularity of images.
‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ appeared in 1968 in novel and film form. The talks of a possible trip to the moon, which was realised in 1969, changed the perception of the world for many, especially the Americans. It is not hard to find a pile of fiction, films, paintings, songs, and more produced in this era, which is marked by the fascination of the possibility to conquer the space. Celebrated Pop Artist Richard Hamilton placed the moon as the ceiling of the interior of a household in his famous collage called "Just What is it that makes today's home so different, so appealing?” This was in 1956. In 1962, Hamilton paints “Towards a Definitive Statement on the Coming Trends in Men's Wear and Accessories (a) Together Let Us Explore the Stars” – a young fellow in astronaut garments - combined elements from advertising and media. The idea for the painting came from an article on male fashion in Playboy magazine. In 1968 Joe Tilson reproduces a TV capture image of Yuri Gagarin – a work of art he entitled “Transparency I: Yuri Gagarin 12 April 1961”. ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ came the same year, nominated for four Oscars, winning only one for visual effects. The film/book gave an account of the moment that triggered the history of civilisation in the sense we understand it today: the moment when an ape starts using his hand – an important step in the history of human kind as Engels noted in a famous article. Convinced by the Engels argument, the audience are left convinced by the future foreseen in the movie: a baby in space – the history of humankind is to be written somewhere in space.
When Neil Armstrong travelled to the moon in 1969, he immediately became the most popular person all over the world. His picture was everywhere, reproduced on magazines, newspapers, and so on. Everyone was almost convinced that this was a huge step taken towards the sort of life depicted by Clarke and Kubrick in the film/novel. David Bowie sang Space Oddity the next year, in 1969, to coincide with the moon-landing. In the UK, it was used in conjunction with the BBC's coverage of the landing. The song was about the alienation feeling man encountered in his voyage in the space, staring the Earth from a long distance.

Clarke was right
The astronomer Patrick Moore, a friend of Clarke's since the 1930s "He foresaw communications satellites, a nationwide network of computers, interplanetary travel; he said there would be a man on the moon by 1970 - and he was right." In 1983, Clarke wrote: "At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years." Was he right? I think he was. He sounds even far too optimistic with the concluding phrase "few hundred years". The rapid advances in technology, and the growing cyberspace (money database, identity database, image database, and so much and so on) seems like swallowing the whole world that surrounds us and at the same time gives existence to us. Imagine the representations of your identity in the cyberspace: you have this amount of money in this bank, which means you get this credit card and you can do this, this, and that - you can buy more oil, drive more, travel more; you can buy the latest fashion and with this you can wear a new trendy identity; you can get a visa for the US, or Australia, or France, or whatever. If you do not have this amount of money, you can't get a credit card, you can't go abroad, you can't get a mobile phone, and etc. The cyberspace draws the borders of identities, we become embryos in the cyber-Space.

8 Books About Women’s World By Women

On the occassion of the International Women’s Day, I have chosen eight books that best reflect the nature of womanhood and that are penned by celebrated women writers who are concerned about the women issues worldwide.

A little note: International Women’s Day should not be understood as a day in the whole year to gift flowers to women; quite the opposite, 8 March should stand as a disturbing day, a reminder that prompts the situation of women anywhere in the world. This is the day when we should urge solutions for the unsolved problems concerning the women’s rights and conditions around the world, especially in the third world countries.
The writers mentioned here are the women, who have used their pen and courage to communicate what their sensitive souls noticed and what has passed and has been passing unnoticed by many.

1) Mrs.Dolloway by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf remains to be one of the most influential feminist writers in Western Literature. Her unconventional technique of stream of consciousness serves a good deal in entering the mind of her female protagonists. Mrs Dalloway details one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, who tries to arrange a party, goes out to buy flowers, encounter her old love, and go deep in her memories and thoughts. It is a marvellous account of the gulf between a woman’s inner world and her exposed self.

2) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The semi-autobiographical novel is an account of the protagonist's descent into mental illness paralleling Plath's own experiences with bipolar disorder, or clinical depression. Plath committed suicide a month after its first publication. The book mainly deals with the situation of women in the 1950s America, and the codes of social and moral conduct for women.

3) The Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Taking place mostly in rural Georgia, the story focuses on female African - American life during the 1930's in southern America, addressing the numerous issues in the black female life, including their exceedingly low position in black social culture. Because of the novel's sometimes-explicit content, particularly in terms of violence, it has been the frequent target of censors. It received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name.

4) The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
This novel by the Nobel Prize winner authoress Doris Lessing is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. After the opening section, ironically called "Free Women", the book fragments into Anna's four notebooks, coloured black, red, yellow, and blue, respectively. The black is for Anna's memories of her life in Central Africa, the red for her experiences with the British Communist Party; the yellow for a fiction she writes that is based on the painful ending of her own love affair; and the blue for recording her memories, dreams, and emotional life. All four notebooks and the frame narrative testify to women's struggles with the conflicts of work, sex, love, maternity, and politics.

5) Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
The novel is a postmodern and postcolonial response to Jane Eyre, famous British novel by Charlotte Bronte. It is the story of the first Mrs Rochester, Antoinette (Bertha) Mason, a white Creole heiress, from the time of her youth in the Caribbean to her unhappy marriage and relocation to England. Caught in an oppressive patriarchal society in which she belongs neither to the white Europeans nor the black Jamaicans, Rhys' novel re-imagines Brontë's devilish madwoman in the attic. As with many postcolonial works, the novel deals largely with the themes of racial inequality and the harshness of displacement and assimilation from the perspective of women.

6) Other Side of the Mountain by Erendiz Atasü
This novel, which features the aspects of matrilineage, tells the story of three generation of women in the time of the foundation of Turkey and Turkish reforms. Parallel to its historical context, it narrates the modernisation process from the perspective of women, their adventure of integration to the new modernised Turkish society. That the story develops in three generations of women help the readers to see what sudden differences the period brought to the woman identity.

7) Memoirs of Halide Edib by Halide Edip Adivar
Halide Edib (1882-1964) was one of Turkey's leading feminists in the Young Turk and early Republican period. In Memoirs, Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality. Halide Edip is best known as a Turkish novelist, political activist, and feminist. She lived through the period about which Erendiz Atasü was writing in her abovementioned novel. Halide Edip is maybe the most important and authentic woman in the Turkish modernisation and Turkey’s foundation. Yet, what makes Halide Edib a motif related to feminism should be evaluated within its historical context - nationalist struggle of independence, which required women to step out of their private space and go to the front, entitled them equality before the law, yet forced them back into their own private spaces at the dawn of the independence.

8) The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak
An ardent feminist, Elif Shafak populates her novel with women characters of varied nature. This is a book in which women play the central role. An exuberant, dramatic novel that features vigorous, unforgettable female characters, the novel explores issues of gender and cultural identity as well as addressing contemporary political and religious topics in Turkey. When this novel was published in Turkey, Shafak was accused of insulting Turkish identity. The charges were later dropped, and now readers can discover for themselves this bold and powerful tale, one that confirms its author as a rising star of fiction.

Orhan Pamuk’s parallel universes

Introvert like Marcel Proust, adventurer like Umberto Eco, fantastic like Italo Calvino, complex like Joyce, multi-faceted like Borges, magical like Marquez, and courageous like Dante... Included in the jury of Cannes Film Festival, Orhan Pamuk made headlines once again with two symposiums held in his name.

I remember a time when shelves in supermarkets and bookshops were packed with copies of My Name is Red. As I took one copy of the book in my hands, I faced his image lost in contemplation, directly looking at me from the backcover of the book. Suddenly I thought that this face was so familiar and I was sure he had something to reveal me and he knew something that might bring a change in my life. Although there were a hundred copies around, I was taken by his looks in the photograph reaching to me from behind those thick glasses whispering: “I have so much to tell you”.
Orhan Pamuk took me by the hand and opened the gates of new universes with ‘My Name is Red’. My Virgil from then on, Pamuk took me to a ‘New Life’... I remember a character in this book who was underlining the books while reading. I immediately underlined the sentence and many other sentences thereafter.
Reality and dream intermingled in his books, the borders blurred; characters got into each other... A dark atmosphere dominated and memory was deceptive as ever... Parallel universes were created with puns and riddles... Complex plots followed like corridors of the Library of Babel... The Silent House, The White Castle, Other Colours, Snow... Introvert like Marcel Proust, adventurer like Umberto Eco, fantastic like Italo Calvino, complex like Joyce, multi-faceted like Borges, magical like Marquez, and courageous as Dante... Pamuk’s books suddenly became indispensable to my life.

Understanding Orhan Pamuk
I remember a time when everyone was angry with this man whose books were advertised on billboards. They said, literature should not be popularised. I remember those claiming “A lot of people buy Orhan Pamuk books, but very few read them”. I remember reading statistics stating that “only one person out of ten people can read New Life until the end”. I was watching all these with a certain idea on my mind; they understood nothing of and about Orhan Pamuk.
It was on such a day that I encountered a book prepared by Engin Kılıç; ‘A Guide to Understanding Orhan Pamuk’. The articles in this book were collected with an aim to suggest new readings of Pamuk’s works. No doubt they were written by academics who understood Orhan Pamuk for those who want to understand Orhan Pamuk. Those who do not want to understand Orhan Pamuk did not read this book. Furthermore, they drove him to courts and even burnt his books.
Prizes, as the Nobel, are usually handled critically in literary circles, as it should be. It is widely known that Sartre denied the Prize. However, the aftershocks of Pamuk’s winning the Nobel Prize were quite controversial as many comments had no depth, and therefore no value. Those who invited Pamuk to renounce the prize “like Sartre did” failed to remember something. In the 1960s, Jean Paul Sartre made a series of controversial statements during a public lecture, upon which a group of French conservatives turned to Charles De Gaulle to caution the man of letters. After listening to their complaints, De Gaulle said to them "No way. Sartre is also France".
The most important and appropriate comment on Pamuk’s winning of the Nobel Prize emphasised the significance of the Prize in raising a world-wide interest in Turkish Literature and culture.
Not much later, Pamuk was invited to take a place in the jury of Cannes Film Festival. In its 60th year, Cannes also saw a big promotional campaign on Turkish culture.

Birthday present
Forget those who do not take pains to understand Orhan Pamuk; the city of İstanbul witnessed symposiums organised in name of the writer, for those who wish to understand him better. Kadir Has University organised a conference, entitled ‘the Literature of Orhan Pamuk’, on May 11, 2007. Subsequently Boğaziçi University held a two-day symposium where the works of the writer were discussed on May 14 and 15, 2007.
The conference at Kadir Has University focused on the international readings of Pamuk, with the participation of mainly foreign academics and critics; whereas Boğaziçi University housed many acknowledged Turkish academics such as Murat Belge, Engin Kılıç, and Jale Parla, who have been working on Pamuk’s works for some time. The symposium at Boğaziçi University was launched on May 14 with a ceremony, in which Mr.Pamuk was presented a honorary doctorate. Maureen Freely, translator of Pamuk’s works into English, joined the two symposiums and related the adventure and responsibilities of translating Pamuk.
Pamuk came to İstanbul in order to receive his honorary doctorate from Boğaziçi University and he gave a speech to mark the opening of the conference. “This is the place where I learned that books were not to be scared, or to be worshipped; instead books were to be understood”, he said emphasising the significance of mutual understanding.Pamuk celebrates his 55th birthday on June 7. It seems that the excitement he lived through at Cannes and his native city İstanbul in the month of May have been the best presents for him...