Memoir as Self-Discovery

"Self- Discovery: The First Frontier" was just one of the mind-blowing panels at the 2017 LA Times Festival of Books (Conversation #1083).

"Being intersex was not an issue throughout my childhood at all," said Hida Viloria.  "The exclusion I felt was in being the only Latina at my school."

Nevertheless, she was relieved to check her private parts with a mirror at age 8 and discover "I was a girl after all" because she did not pee through her large clitoris.

Her memoir is titled Born Both: An Intersex Life.  Meeting her was very moving, and I hope Virginia Ramey Mollenkott will review her book for Christian Feminism Today's website, www.eewc.com.

"Being born as something that's not supposed to exist--that's difficult," she said.

Tash Aw described being an ethnically Chinese person raised in Malaysia in his memoir, The Face: Strangers on a Pier.  It was nominated for the new Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, which was won by Wesley Lowery for They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice.

"We were taught not to examine or interrogate anything that goes on inside," Aw said.  "For poor migrants, new life is dependent on scrubbing out everything that came before."

"My cousins work in factories and as bus drivers," he said, though he teaches at Columbia University.  "I think about them every day," he added.

Steph Jagger went on a ski trip around the world and skied "some 4 million vertical feet" in search of something more in her life.  Her memoir is Unbound: A Story of Snow and Self-Discovery.

"I pushed away the models of mother, sisters, aunts," she said.  "I took a solo journey with the mountains."

Each of these speakers was enchanting to meet.

I bought Faces and Born Both, resisting Unbound, much as I would have liked to buy and read it.  Later.

Moderators

Daniel Hernandez

Hernandez is a journalist, editor, correspondent, long-time blogger, and the author of "Down & Delirious in Mexico City," a beloved exploration of youth subcultures in contemporary Mexico. He is a former staff reporter at the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly. While living in Mexico City, he became editor of VICE Mexico and then chief of VICE News for Latin America. He is working on a second book of non-fiction, and recently joined a... Read More →

Speakers

Tash Aw

Aw is the prize-winning author of three novels, including, most recently, "Five Star Billionaire", as well as a memoir, "The Face: Strangers on a Pier.” His fiction has been translated into more than twenty languages, while his non-fiction appears in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, and The Guardian, among others. “The Face: Strangers on a Pier,” is a finalist for the 2016 L.A. Times' Christopher Isherwood Prize for... Read More →

Steph Jagger

Jagger splits her time between Southern California and British Columbia where she dreams big dreams, writes her heart out, and runs an executive & life coaching practice. She holds a CEC (certified Executive Coach) degree from Royal Roads University and she believes courageous living doesn't happen with one toe dangling in, but that we jump in, fully submerge, and sit in the juice. Think pickle, not cucumber. Her book is “Unbound: A... Read More →

Hida Viloria

Viloria is a writer and intersex activist, chairperson of the Organization Intersex International (OII), and founding director of its American affiliate the Intersex Campaign for Equality, also known as OII-USA. Hida's mission is to obtain equality for intersex and nonbinary people as part of a broader vision for a world that accepts and values difference of every kind. Her memoir "Born Both" was published in March.

Deutschland uber alles?

What a jarring moment in The Promise, just released film about a love triangle during the Armenian genocide, 1915-1923.

German officers in Constantinople standing at a party with Turkish leaders in 1915 began singing their national anthem "Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles..."  

That really threw me, hearing Hayden's beautiful tune sung in this context.  I associate the melody with a beloved hymn, "Glorious things of thee are spoken, Zion, city of our God...."

I'd never before heard the tune sung to the ugly words "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles."

I ended up doing an internet search on the subject afterwards.

The German lyrics, written in 1841, begin: "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, / Über alles in der Welt."

The correct translation is "Germany, Germany, over all other things, over all in the world," a personal statement of loyalty to Germany above other things one might value: city, family, health, even life.

As Wikipedia says, it "meant that the most important goal of 19th-century German liberal revolutionaries should be a unified Germany which would overcome loyalties to the local kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and palatines (Kleinstaaterei) of then-fragmented Germany."

In order to mean "Germany over all other nations," it would have to be "Deutschland uber alle," not "alles," as in "Deutschland uber alle anderen Nationen."

Nevertheless, Germans don't sing the first two verses today because after the two world wars, any extreme statement of nationalism feels inappropriate. They sing only the third verse, which is about unity, freedom, and justice.

At any rate, it's a chilling moment in the film to hear German soldiers sing these words as World War I begins, three years before the National Socialist German Workers Party is founded, and eighteen years before Adolf Hitler gained power over Germany.

It's also a revelation in the film to see the close relationship between Turks and Germans in 1915.  Here's part of what Wikipedia has to say on it: 

The Ottoman–German Alliance was an alliance between the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire made on August 2, 1914, shortly following the outbreak of World War I. The alliance was created as part of a joint-cooperative effort that would strengthen and modernize the failing Ottoman military, as well as provide Germany safe passage into neighboring British colonies. The treaty came from the initiative of he Ottomans. It was replaced in January 1915 by a full-scale military alliance that promised Ottoman entry into the war.^[6][7][8]

On the positive side, Germany came out in January, 2016, as officially recognizing the Turkish killing 1915-1923 as a genocide, just after the 100th anniversary of its beginning in 1915.  

Injustice: From Police to Prisons

The title of this panel was "Nonfiction: Police, Prisons & Justice" but actually it was about injustice (Panel 2031).  

Margot Roosevelt did a great job of introducing the heaviness of the books to be discussed: "Sometimes I just had to stop and take deep breaths just to recover from the shock and shame of what I was reading."

Leslie Klinger, on the board of the Mystery Writers of America, is a Sherlock Holmes expert.  With Laura Caldwell, he edited Anatomy of Innocence, a book that presents true stories of wrongly convicted persons, each alongside a matching story taken from murder mystery fiction.

"Estimates are that 5-10% of the people in prison have been wrongfully convicted," he said.  "That comes to about 200,000 people."

If police investigators or prosecutors don't have enough evidence to convict, they still press charges.  They're "certain [the accused] are guilty of something," Klinger said, "If not this crime, they've done something else," they reason, excusing themselves for fudging on facts or testimony. 

"America leads the world in the number of people in prison," he reported. "One third of the women in prison in the whole world are in the US."

"We have such faith in the system.  "If people go to jail, there must have been a reason,'" they say.

"The book reads beautifully like fiction, only it's entirely factual," one panelist commented.

Heather Ann Thompson won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in history for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy.  She was also nominated in history at the LA Book Prizes, but the award went to Benjamin Madley for his book on the planned genocide of California Indians 1846-1873.  She's a professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

She revealed how the State of New York refused to release documents about the deaths in Attica Prison in 1971 and claimed that inmates had killed 39 and injured 138.  Actually, she learned, it was guards and sheriffs who killed the 39--but treatment of prisoners became harsher because of the widespread claim that inmates had done the killing.

She wrote from documents exclusively, not interviews.  In fact, she found a whole cache of documents that NY State didn't know existed, and now they have all disappeared again, except for her photocopies.  

"We have the most mass incarceration in the world.  In most cases people never see a jury.  They are forced to take a plea deal because public defenders are overworked."

"How many days a year does the criminal justice system in the US keep people in solitary confinement? It's not known--no records are kept."

Gary Younge was educated in England and lives in London.  He wrote Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives.  Using the fact that an average of 7 children and teens are killed every day in the US, he chose November 23, 2013, and researched the lives of the ten young Americans shot on that day.  He interviewed families and friends as well as reading the brief notices in local newspapers.

"None of them gets much press attention," he charged. "It's just the collateral damage of another day in America."

When he asked journalists why a particular death did not get a full article about the person and the situation, they answer, "It's just not so surprising that a kid would be shot in that area.  It's just not news."
"If a killing doesn't challenge the way America thinks about itself," he concluded, "It's not news."  Some killings do, especially those in white neighborhoods.  

"In no other country in the developed world would this be possible," he said.  "Americans see guns the way they see traffic.  It's here.  They can't imagine a world without them."

"Everywhere I go in promoting this book, people have asked me two questions about Americans," Younge said. "The first was about health care: why wouldn't they want it?  The second was guns: why would they want them?"

"Gun violence is seen as essentially American, but there's nothing natural or essential about it.  These deaths are the result of policy decisions."

Younge also pointed out the chronic lack of empathy he hears in comments like "They must have had it coming" or "The kids are ______ (whatever)" or "The parents are negligent--that's why they die."

"It's shocking how achingly normal these kids are," he said. "They go to school, have friends, use Facebook.  What they have in common is that they live in areas where they've been used to people being killed."

Victor M. Rios spoke about his new book Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth.  

He's now a professor of sociology at UC Santa Barbara, but at age 15 he was dealing drugs and found himself with a gun placed against his head.  At this point ..."he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job.  That job would alter the course of his whole life--putting him on the road to college and eventually a Ph.D," his book jacket reports.

"Instead of heart-breaking stories, we need to tell heart-making stories," he said. "We have to change people's hearts.  If there's a change of heart in authority figures, there will be a change of outcomes."

Right now we often see "a significant stripping away of dignity."  

"We see them as at-risk, so the solution is from a risk-based perspective.  Let's see them as at-promise and implement an asset-based perspective.  Instead of seeing him as a gang member, see him as a son, an employee, a student.  He may be gang-associated, but he's also a person with other worlds in which he moves."

All the panelists except Rios were angry, and their urgency about gun violence in the US was contagious. After vowing to buy no more books, I bought all except Klinger's.

Moderators

Margot Roosevelt

Roosevelt covers the economy for the Orange County Register. Before that, she covered environment and energy news for the Los Angeles Times, and was TIME Magazine's National Correspondent. She was also a foreign correspondent for TIME, based in Paris. She covered Congress for the Washington Post and was the Post's New York bureau chief.

Speakers

Leslie S Klinger

Klinger is the New York Times-best-selling editor of the Edgar®-winning "New Annotated Sherlock Holmes" as well as numerous other anthologies, books, and articles on Holmes, Dracula, H. P. Lovecraft, and classic mysteries and horror. His latest book is "Anatomy of Innocence: Testimonies of the Wrongfully Convicted,” co-edited by Laura Caldwell, true stories about the experiences of exonerees (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2017).

Victor Rios

Rios is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of “Human Targets: Schools, Police, and the Criminalization of Latino Youth.”

Heather Ann Thompson

Thompson is an historian at the University of Michigan. Her book, "Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy,” is a finalist for the 2016 L.A. Times Book Prize in History, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been named on more than a dozen Best Books of 2016 lists as well as a Best Human Rights Books of 2016. It has also been optioned by TriStar Pictures and will be adapted for film by screenwriters... Read More →

Gary Younge

Younge, an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Nation Institute, is an award-winning columnist for the Guardian and Nation. In 2015, he was awarded Foreign Commentator of the Year Award in Britain and the David Nyhan Prize for political journalism by Harvard's Shorenstein's Center. He is author of "The Speech,” "Who Are We—and Should it Matter in the Twenty-First Century?,” "Stranger in a Strange Land,” and "No Place Like Home.”

Memoirs of Troubled Times

"Memoir: Troubled Times" was one of my favorite at the LA Times Festival of Books this year (Panel 1044).  

Freddy Negrete discussed his memoir Smile Now, Cry Later and his current career as a tatoo artist.  His book reveals how he was recruited by an LA gang, sold drugs, and escaped that life.

Maggie Rowe's memoir is titled Sin Bravely: A Memoir of Spiritual Disobedience.  It's a brave story of growing up in a conservative Christian family where the fear of hellfire and damnation was drilled into her.  As a young adult, she becomes so fearful that she spends time in a psychiatric ward.  Today she is a stand-up comedian, actress, and screenplay writer.  

Rob Roberge writes in his memoir Liar about being bipolar, using drugs, recovery, and lying his way out of situations.

Moderator of the panel was Samantha Dunn, with whom I took several memoir courses a few years ago.  Since then she's married and now has an 8-year-old son.

I only bought one book from this session, much as I would have liked to buy all three.  Of course, that book is Sin Bravely.  I will review it for the Christian Feminism Today website, www.eewc.com.

I mentioned the website to Maggie, and she visited it.  She like the article "Was Esther a Post-Colonial Feminist?" by Princess O'Nika Auguste.  https://eewc.com/esther-post-colonial-feminist/

Moderators

Samantha Dunn

Dunn is a journalist and the author of the critically acclaimed novel “Failing Paris” and the bestselling memoirs, “Not By | Accident; Reconstructing a Careless Life” and “Faith in Carlos Gomez.” Dunn teaches at both the UCLA Writers Program and Idyllwild Arts Academy. She works as associate editor of Coast Magazine, a regional arts and lifestyle publication.

Speakers

Freddy Negrete

Negrete's memoir "Smile Now, Cry Later" is a riveting narrative that takes the reader from Freddy's days as a cholo gang member to pioneering black-and-gray tattoo artist to evangelical preacher to Hollywood body-art consultant to addiction counselor. His story is a testament to the spark within us all that gives us the strength to survive and transform what would otherwise destroy us.

Rob Roberge

Roberge is the author of four books of fiction and most recently the memoir, "Liar" (Crown, 2016), which was a Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers selection, chosen for several best of 2016 lists, with the New Yorker saying "…both the smallest and biggest pieces of this memoir fascinate." His work has been described as "Drop dead gorgeous and mind-bendingly smart" by Cheryl Strayed.

Maggie Rowe

For the last fifteen years, Rowe has performed in and produced the Comedy Central stage show “sit ‘n’ spin,” Los Angeles' longest running spoken word show, having taken over the reins from creator, Jill Soloway. She has written for “Arrested Development” and “Flaked” for Netflix. She co-wrote the screenplay for and directed the New Age mockumentary "Bright | Day" and is the creator of the theatrical satires Hollywood Hellhouse... Read More →

Bakersfield debate re migrants

Cesar Chavez, 1966

Bakersfield is a town famous for its migrant farm workers in the 1930s.  Cesar Chavez helped later workers to organize in the 1970s, and Chavez National Monument now honors him near Keene, CA.

John Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath about a family who migrated to the lower San Joaquin Valley during the Great Depression.

Pete Seeger wrote ballads such as "This Land Is My Land" about these workers.

But now Bakersfield's sheriff Donny Youngblood has proposed declaring Kern County, which includes Bakersfield, to be a "non-sanctuary county."

He wants to make a dramatic statement against cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are sanctuary cities.

This would dishonor all the migrant workers who have built agriculture in Kern County.

Thank you to The Bakersfield Californian for its editorial today speaking out against the proposal by Youngblood.

http://www.bakersfield.com/opinion/our-view-non-sanctuary-proposal-sends-a-bad-message/article_c33596ef-ffe9-5ed1-b724-d16ef79f108a.html#tncms-source=article-nav-prev

Genocide Begets Genocide

New film on Armenian genocide

I had never heard Hitler's famous quote before invading Poland until I read this column by Robin Abcarian.

http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-abcarian-armenian-genocide-20170426-story.html

"Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Hitler said in 1939.  

Our collective amnesia gave him license to invade another nation and take its Jewish citizens captive, killing them in concentration camps over the next six years.

Remembering is so important. 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turkey, starting on April 24, 1915, and lasting through 1923.

Now April 24 is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, observed annually in Los Angeles by a march of 1.5 miles.

Not to be confused with Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom haShoah, occurring on the 27th day of Nisan (also April 24 this year), marking the date of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  

And let's not forget the UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on January 27, 1945, the day Russian troops entered and liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps.

Robin's grandfather, Mike Abcarian, left Armenia in 1912 to seek his fortune in America, planning to send for his family after he got established.

"He never got the chance," writes Robin.  "They were murdered in 1915.  Only his younger sister, who was pinned under her mother's body, survived."

Today there are deniers of this holocaust, as of the Jewish holocaust during World War II.  

No American president has recognized this horror using the word genocide.
Turkey today refuses to admit that it engaged in systematic extermination 100 years ago.
Small planes flew above the march with a Turkish flag and a banner reading "Stop Armenian Lies."  Some news reports on marches qualify the genocide with "many say" and "most historians say...."

What can you do to show your caring?  Go to see the new film The Promise, a "big-budget American feature" about this genocide, released April 21. It's showing in Los Angeles at AMC, Landmark, iPic, Arclight,and Cinemark theatres, as well as other places.

It screened at the Vatican on April 4. 

https://www.moviefone.com/movie/the-promise/UwL7Ulwzp3NHZN8Rx7g0u6/main/?qsearch=the%20promise

In fact, this film has been challenged by a matching Turkish film produced by those who deny that the Armenian genocide took place.

IMDb reports: “It’s an Erdogan propaganda film released as a feature film in the United States, remarkably, just ahead of us,” the director said. “The Ottoman Lieutenant,” which stars Josh Hartnett and Ben Kingsley, was produced by a Turkish company called Eastern Sunrise Films.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/movies/the-promise-the-ottoman-lieutenant-turkey-armenian-genocide.html?_r=0

Thank you to Robin for her heart-breaking reminder with a photo of a seven-year-old today marching for his ancestors,

Women Who Changed the World

"The Women Behind the Power" panel provided an exciting start to my two days at the 2017 LA Times Festival of Books.  After the presentations and comments that began at 10:30 am on Saturday, April 22, I was sure that I'd already heard the best panel of the weekend.

These biographies all focused on women--

• Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of FDR -- Eleanor Roosevelt: The War Years and After, third and final volume of ER's biography by Blanche Wiesen Cook,
• Lorena Hickok, one of the top female reporters in the US who gave up her career to serve Eleanor Roosevelt -- Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn,
• Joan Kroc, wife of the McDonald's mogul Ray Kroc, an abusive alcoholic, who stayed in the marriage to donate $3 billion to worthy causes, including the fight against alcoholism -- Ray and Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away by Lisa Napoli, and
• Anna Murray, first wife of Frederick Douglass, and other women who supported him in his education and his work as social reformer and abolitionist -- Women in the World of Douglass by Leigh Fought.

"I've spent most of my youth with one dead general," said Cook, explaining why she was happy to turn to the life of Eleanor Roosevelt.  

Eleanor's father died at age 34 of his alcoholism, when she was ten years old.  Her mother had died when she was eight years old.  She was raised by family members (her uncle was Teddy Roosevelt).

Quinn voiced many favorite quotations by Eleanor, using her upper-class tone and intonation:

ER to people everywhere: "Tell me, what do you want?  What do you need?"

"Courage can be as contagious as fear."

"Everything that happens to anybody anywhere happens to everybody everywhere" (quoting Wendell Wilkie).

"We need free public education for everybody."

Of FDR and ER, Cook said "She was his conscience, and he was her barometer."

Susan Quinn explained how at first Lorena Hickok didn't want to cover Eleanor; she wanted to do top political reporting, focusing on FDR.

She'd started life in a little railroad town in South Dakota, and her mother died when she was 13.

Eventually, however, she bonded with Eleanor and "helped her to shape her first ladyhood."

Lisa Napoli was fascinating on the life of Joan Kroc.

Leigh Fought documented the women who made Frederick Douglass the  man he was.

In short: 

Reader, I bought them all.

Moderators

Bill Boyarsky

Boyarsky, author of “Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times,” is a political correspondent for Truthdig, blogs for LA Observed and is a columnist for the Jewish Journal. His other books include “Los Angeles: City of Dreams” and “Big Daddy: Jesse Unruh and the Art of Power Politics.”

Speakers

Blanche Wiesen Cook

Cook is a distinguished professor of history at John Jay College and Graduate Center, City University of New York. In addition to her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, her other books include "The Declassified Eisenhower" and "Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution.” She was featured on air in Ken Burns's recent documentary, “The Roosevelts.”

Leigh Fought

Fought is the author of "Women in the World of Frederick Douglass" and a professor history at Le Moyne College, Syracuse, New York. She was formerly an editor of the first volume of Frederick Douglass's correspondence, and her previous works include "Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa McCord" and "Mystic, Connecticut: From Pequot Village to Tourist Town."

Lisa Napoli

Napoli, a veteran journalist (NY Times, MSNBC, public radio's Marketplace), has lived in Los Angeles for over a dozen years. Her first book, "Radio Shangri-La,” is about media influence and disenchantment in and around the Kingdom of Bhutan. She leads an award-winning volunteer cooking group on Skid Row at the Downtown Women's Center and her newest book is “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All... Read More →

Susan Quinn

Quinn is the author of "Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times,” "Marie Curie: A Life” and her latest, “Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady,” among other books. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and other publications. She is the former chair of PEN New England and lives outside Boston, Massachusetts.

California's Planned Genocide...

Speaking of genocide--the 1.5 Armenians during World War I, the 6 million Jews during World War II, the 800,000  Rwandans killed in the Tutsi genocide of 1994--there's one more that has been hiding in plain sight.

That's the planned genocide of California's American Indians from 1846 to 1873.

"The state of California paid $1 million to kill off American Indians," reports Benjamin Madley.  Not surprisingly, he won the prize for best book of history written in 2016 at Friday night's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.

His book is An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indiana Catastrophe 1846-1873, published by Yale University Press.  

"Between 1846 and 1873, California's Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000," reads the inside flap of the book cover.

"Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter.  He reveals the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, and who did the killing and why the killing ended."

"He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and broad societal, judicial, and political support for the genocide."

I bought this book and plan to read it.

I heard him speak on a panel titled
Nonfiction: Tragedies of Our Past, Conversation 2014


The moderator and other authors, equally compelling, were:

Moderators

William Deverell

Deverell is a historian focusing on the American West. A co-editor of the Blackwell Companion to California History, he is | a professor of history at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.

Speakers

Sharla M. Fett

Fett is an Associate Professor of History at Occidental College. She is the author of "Recaptured Africans: Surviving Slave Ships, Detention, and Dislocation in the Final Years of the Slave Trade,” and her previous book, "Working Cures,” won the Southern Historical Association's Frank L. and Harriet Owsley Prize and the Organization of American Historian's James A. Rawley Prize (co-winner). She lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Benjamin Madley

Madley is an historian of Native America, the United States, and colonialism in world history. Born in Redding, California, | Ben spent much of his childhood in Karuk Country near the Oregon border where he became interested in the relationship between colonizers and indigenous peoples. He writes about American Indians as well as colonial genocides in Africa, Australia, and Europe, often applying a transnational and comparative approach. His... Read More →

Christina Snyder

Snyder is an award-winning historian who teaches at Indiana University. Her first book, "Slavery in Indian Country," earned a wide range of accolades, including the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, the James H. Broussard Prize, and the John C. Ewers Prize. Snyder's most recent book, published in early 2017, is "Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson."