Math and Race, Respectively

by Weston Cutter

Lewis Carroll in Numberland by Robin Wilson

 

            (This first one’s another of the Missed in 2008 series—the book originally was released in November by Norton.)

            Can I just go ahead and admit I’m a huge sucker for math stuff? There’s something wildly satisfying about math, specifically arithmetic, linear math: I’m a hopeless algebra junkie, and the best math provides an aesthetic click not much different from great fiction or poetry. So, all that as preamble: Robin Wilson’s Lewis Carroll in Numberland is a dynamite, knock-yr-socks-off book that’s about as satisfying a book as any I’ve read in ages—and I really specifically mean satisfying, the satisfaction that comes from being curious about an answer to something and then getting an unambiguous answer (it’s akin to the sort of satisfaction one gets on reading, say, a good mystery).

            Carroll, of course, wrote the Alice books and may or may not (not at all, according to Wilson, though others’ve disagreed) have been a little too keenly interested in little Alice Lidell (for the coolest explication of that relationship, the place to go is F. Prose’s dynamite Lives of the Muses).  Carroll was also, maybe less well-known, a dynamite mathematician, and spent his life at Oxford writing far, far more mathematical books than kids books.

            What Mr. Wilson offers the reader in Numberland is the same playful madcapper who wrote the Alice books, but we’re given this insider-ish view of the logician behind the kiddie tale. What’s funniest and most amazing/interesting about the Alice books is how rigorously logical they are, and how many logic games and puzzles are in play therein, all of which Mr. Wilson does a fantastic job of highlighting and, when necessary, explicating.

            I don’t have many friends who get amped up to read math books, and while I get that most people equate reading about math with unaesthetized dental work, I’d argue heartily that books like Lewis Carroll in Numberland—unthreatening but smart, uncondescendingly helpful—are the exact sort needed to bring the (gulp) fun of math to more people.

 

Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss

 

            It’s appropriate, given that it’s Oscar weekend, that we acknowledge that most contests and prizes are garbage; how many prizes can you think of that’ve always been given to what you believe or consider to be fully worthy? VVoice‘s Pazz and Jop always misses some hugely important release, and the annual NYTimes list of ten books can’t possibly contain all the awesomeness each year offers, and do we even need to talk about National Book Awards and Pulitzers and Nobels and etc.?

            However, don’t lose faith! Don’t lose hope! Graywolf, America’s absolute best publisher, has a Nonfiction prize, and the winning book’s released every spring, and if you want pure amazement, get the books that’ve won that award: Kate Braverman’s dazzler about LA started things off, Monson’s freakishly great Neck Deep won it the next year, then came T. Svoboda’s almost-shattering Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, and now Eula Biss’s No Man’s Land is this year’s champ. That, for you Sabermetricians, is that rarest thing—a perfect batting average.

            I can hardly speak of this book, honestly: it’s heartrendingly amazing and so completely/complexly itself that the idea of trying to encapsulate it’s laughable. What it is, for sure, is this: it’s Eula Biss wondering about and poring over and looping back on/through ideas about race and self and home and America. I know that that process—someone at the wheel, driving into the big dark map of self/race/America—is only fully magnificent in the hands/words of a few artists, but let’s here be totally clear that Eula Biss is one of those artists, someone whose work, if made mandatory consumption for the country, would enrich and enlarge each of us to a point of fullness that’s almost scary. It’s really that good a book, seriously: buy it for yourself, and then buy ten copies, hand them out to friends, start petitions to get a national Eula Biss day (and, of course, as always: stand in slack-jawed amazement at Graywolf—their whole spring catalog’s freaky good).

Antonya Nelson Will Rip Yr Heart Out

by Weston Cutter

            Like most of the big readers I know, I came to Antonya Nelson because she got blurbed and recommended by names I knew and liked (DFWallace looming largest on the book jackets). It’s a dicey and somewhat frustrating thing, coming to writers through other writers, because Nelson’s not someone I should associate, mentally, with Wallace, or Chabon (another blurber), or Eggers (ditto), or anyone at all: Ms. Nelson’s alarmingly singular, totally her own.

            If you haven’t read any Antonya Nelson, you for sure have to get right on it, but I can’t imagine what to read first: everything she’s written that I’ve read is great. If you want something to compare her (or at least compare the feeling of reading her) work with, think of the best, scariest, shakiest stuff by AM Homes (short stories, I’m talking about here: I’ve [stupidly] read none of Ms. Nelson’s novels). None of those previous two sentences really matter, though: the only question you need to consider re: ANelson’s stuff is to ask yrself if you care about sentences and about great American short stories, and if the answer’s affirmative in either case, then you read Antonya Nelson.

            One of the best parts about great art is its ability to mute the spectator, or to render the recipient speechless, unable to articulate what’s been seen/witnessed. Ms. Nelson’s work does this to me, hugely, and in ways that are somewhat akin to Alice Munro: you can be right there, looking at the page, following the story word by word, but somehow the story moves faster than you can or do, and then the story’s become this big, other, mysterious thing that you somehow watched get built but which still surprises you. All of which, I admit, is way too abstract; let’s get concrete.

            In “Biodegradable,” maybe my favorite story in here, the story starts at a bar, where a woman says to a man “You remind me of somebody,” and, it turns out, the man reminds the woman of himself—it turns out they’d met five years earlier. This is in a bar far from her home, by the way—she travels for work. And once they’re in bed later, the woman realizes the man reminds her of her neighbor Garrett, too, a man hurt by a former love and who, now, carries an ache that’s become essential, fundamental.

            Actually, even as I try to get the story down, it’s impossible. This, maybe, is how Nelson and Munro are most alike: I defy anyone to casually, simply summarize a story by either woman. There’s just too much: in “Biodegradable,” the woman cheats on her husband, her lover sells his home, the romance falters, the neighbor dies, a photographer takes a key picture of the story’s main character along with her son…there’s just too much. Which, of course, is why these stories are so ravishing: they feel just like life. Sadness needn’t necessarily be developed to come and undo characters; memories rise up moment-to-moment to keep haunting; attempts at helping those we love never quite translate; attempts to help ourselves never quite go as smoothly as hoped for.

            It’s got to be pointed out, too, and emphatically: Ms. Nelson’s not bleak, not by a longshot (or, perhaps, I’m just biased and depressive, and I’m therefore no judge, but I don’t think that’s it at all). There’s heartbreak in every story in this book, but there’s something rivetingly gorgeous and…I don’t even know what you’d call it. Not hopeful, necessarily, about the stories, but there’s something maybe generative, something so full that the sorrows and falls are bouyed by coming not just next to but through these good intentions, these hopeful acts.

            This feels like a silly review, and if there’s any redemption in it, it’s this: whatever I’m trying and failing to articulate is out there, in hardcover, on shelves at bookstores. Go buy Nothing Right, and read it fast, and then buy the rest of her short stories and read them. Read as much of her stuff as you possibly can.

Haskell and the Now Fiction

by Weston Cutter

            John Haskell’s I Am Jackson Pollock and American Purgatorio were both weirdly incredible books, and his new one, Out of My Skin, is maybe my favorite of the three yet. I’m tempted to say it’s the best of the three, but for writing-power alone I think it’s probably a toss-up between this one and Jackson Pollock. Either way: dude’s dynamite, and if there’s a spectrum of sentences, and if Lutz and Lish and Diane Williams mark the far end of that spectrum (each of whom write sentences that are so faceted and rich and glinting that it’s absolutely possible in their stuff to sort of lose track of the story itself and just get wrapped up and around the sentences themselves [read Lutz's take on sentences in a recent Believer for a good primer]), Haskell’s somewhere toward those writers on the spectrum but, I’d argue, his sentences are a bit more approachable, a bit more digestible.

            Out of My Skin might have his most accessable sentences yet, actually, though that might simply be a trick of the narrative: the story is that a man named Jack moves from New York to Los Angeles, meets a woman named Jane, profiles a Steve Martin impersonator, and then, in a discursive and just about limitlessly self-aware style, Jack wonders about authenticity and the creation of self and, most uncomfortably hilariously, is self-awarely curious about self-awareness and -identity. It’s a bizarre little rabbit’s hole he’s tossed down. Because what happens soon after Jack meets Scott, the Steve Martin impersonator, is that Jack finds himself trying on various levels of Steve-ness as well: “And it was strange. Although I knew I looked nothing like Steve Martin, as I paced back and forth, I couldn’t help smiling, and it felt like the smile Steve Martin would smile. With the suitcoat and the walk and the role model in front of me, I was beginning to feel, slightly, like dancing.”

            The thing that’s got to be acknowledged right at the start of this is that Haskell, like Charlie Kaufman, has picked the perfect person to center a book around: Steve Martin and John Malkovich have little in common aside from the fact that some small but finite percentage of each’s life has been videotaped, yet each actor/’persona’/person both is and represents more than just a person, a face, a role (J. Wood claimed J. O’Neill had struck on the perfect framing device for post-9/11 America in writing about a Trinidadian in NY trying to start a cricket club in Netherland, and Haskell could likewise be praised for picking celebrity-impersonators in post-millenianial LA as the perfect frame for understanding contemporary selfhood [in fairness, there could be hints or winks in this book toward Harmony Korrine's Mister Lonely, but I've never seen the thing]). There are things which are, fundamentally, Malkovich-ian; similarly, there are elements which are fundamentally Martin-ian (if you don’t believe it, go back and watch, for instance, The Spanish Prisoner and see Martin escape his fundamentally understood filmed persona and, though he slips into another, he’s still there, recognizable). For this sort of choosing there should be an award, and, if there already is an award for this sort of thing, than Haskell gets this year’s prize.

            What ends up happening to Jack as he gets more and more involved in his Steve-ness (which is not, properly, a Steve-ness, but a Scott-as-Steve-ness) is that all the stuff about self and identity and self-creation are all but unavoidable, and so Jack ends up questioning all these things in ways which it’s hard to just encapsulate or quote from. Perfectly, I think, Jack’s frustrations and confusions about self are wildly, awfully normal and contemporary: I’d just love to meet anyone who is not in any way aware of her- or himself; I’d love to talk with the contemporary American who doesn’t ever spend time calculating, basically, these real fundamental and overt issues of self.

            Which, for me (this might be admitting too much), is the greatest part of Out of My Skin: it’s perfectly, perfectly understandable and feels, to me, very closely akin to how it feels on the worst days in my own head. Don’t we all do this? Don’t we dress one way because we want to look like X, don’t we walk a certain way to be more like Y, don’t we drink Americanos instead of regular old black coffee because we like to think we share something in common with Z? In great and incriminating ways, Out of My Skin feels like it’s about not just Jack but about all of us, everyone who does this, every day. For what it’s worth, too: I got the book on a Saturday, opened it casually, thinking I’d read a few pages, and three hours later had finished it: it’s a book you not only can but all but have to simply devour, quickly and directly and well. Read it. Get in on John Haskell now.

An Interview with Leanne Shapton

by Weston Cutter

Leanne Shapton’s Important Artifacts… already has my vote for 2009′s book of the year, and I actually spent the last week or so arguing with a good friend (Matthew Vollmer, whose Future Missionaries of America just came out and is dynamite, really really really good in all sorts of ways, and of course I’m tempted to review it but fear that whole reviewing-one’s-friends dictum…who knows. Buy it, read it, write MVollmer and tell him how great the book is) about why Important Artifacts is so good and cool, which argument has really only further cemented my opinion of the book’s greatness. Here’s the main point that I had cleared up for me: Shapton’s Important Artifacts is a weirdly fragile book—fragile in that it could be easy to approach the thing with the usual post-millenial-American dose of irony and dismiss and/or tear down the thing as cloying and clever and gimmicky. I’d like to here argue full-throatedly, again, that the book’s as great as it is (which is really, really great) precisely because of this fragility, because of its willingness to risk what could be (by some) brushed off as mere gimmickry or whatever, and because it actually overcomes or moves beyond the cutely could-be-gimmick and is, in huge ways, a complete and moving and sincere and real story, interestingly and well told and, as if all that weren’t enough, gorgeous to boot. Anyway, enough: I’ve blathered more about this book than’s probably healthy at this point.

 

Miss Shapton, in addition to having written three books, works at the NYTimes and has been enormously obliging and kind and has answered some questions, all of which here follow:

 

In the most general possible way, what’s the stuff you listen to/read/see/taste/etc. that plays some role in yr stuff? I know that’s exceptionally vague; I also know/have read that plenty of people who create stuff have inputs that are beyond the field/discipline of just their work (which is especially interesting/true with you, since you’re doing both visual and textual work, which makes me doubly or triply curious).

I read a lot of fiction, and look at a lot of art books and pictures. Lately I’ve been reading DeLillo, James, Wharton, Richard Hughes, Japanese ghost stories and Jane Bowles. I’ve been looking at a book of photographs by and of David Hockney (and I have a picture of him in a green jacket and bow tie that I can’t get out of my head!) Have also been flipping through Casa Vogue, World of Interiors and a dummy of my friend Jason Fulford’s new pictures from Key West. I’m constantly ripping pages out of magazines and stuffing them into my bag or piling in a basket with the intention of filing or pasting somewhere. I am a huge bibliophile, and am very happy looking at books in bookstores. In my job I’m always looking at people’s work with an eye to op-ed page contributions. I spent some time on Guido Scarabottolo’s website: scarabottolo.com, and Tim Barber’s genius site tinyvices.com today.

Along those same lines, do you see yourself as part of some artistic disciple/group/etc? I feel like Important Artifacts… might get considered more as a visual than narrative thing, or might be considered like some sort of photographic off-shoot from graphic novels. Do you have a sense of the terrain you’re working (since, really, Was She Pretty? wasn’t a graphic novel at all, either)?

 

I have a very generous but critical group of friends, and we all either write or make pictures and books. I’ll run stuff past them and if they seem to get what I’m doing I’m happy. I look at a lot of graphic novels and art books, and am really interested in finding new ways of telling stories. Chris Oliveros at Drawn and Quarterly publishes amazing books by Seth, David Collier, Julie Doucet,  and Adrian Tomine. I think there is a long and rich tradition of work by people who both draw and write, well outside of the children’s book world, and sometimes they’re called graphic novels, sometimes not. I love William Steig’s books, which he wrote and drew. When I was trying to get Was She Pretty? published I showed my agent a few Steig books. He grabbed them, shook his head and yelled: “CRIMINAL! IT’S CRIMINAL that these are out of print!” I felt he’d understand what I was trying to make. He’s been hugely supportive. After Was She Pretty? he encouraged me to do something weirder.

Without killing the fun mystery behind it, can you write a bit about how Important Artifacts… came to be the way it is? In the back you thank (the incredible) S. Heti for helping you see what the book really was. Had you begun with the intention of tracking a relationship but not an auction catalog, or a catalog but not a single romantic relationship? Go as much or as little into this as you’d like (I always get enervated/made uncomfortable by interviews where a book/album/whatever gets too unpacked by the artist, so don’t at all feel like you’ve got to set up some This Is Up roadmap-type thing).

One of my favorite books is “All The Clothes Of A Woman” by Hans Peter Feldmann, which is a small books of black and white pictures of a young woman’s wardrobe. I’ve treasured this book for years, giving it to friends and taking pictures of objects based on his. But I knew I wanted to use the auction catalog form after getting ahold of the Bonhams catalog for a Truman Capote single owner auction. At first I thought I might make an invented biography. I then found a beautiful hardcover exhibition catalog from the Grolier Club for a show of Ted and Sylvia Plath’s correspondence. Which got me thinking it could be the story of two people. I didn’t want it to end in death, but I wanted something to end, and finally came to the idea of a failed relationship. At the same time, I was moving in with my boyfriend, we were consolidating lives, and the opportunity came to throw a lot of my junk away. I had a pretty hard time of it and was constantly thinking about the past and what place it had in my reality. I kept thinking about relationships that don’t work, the stories like Annie Hall, the people we love but can’t live with etc. I wanted to write one of those love stories, where the pair were not meant to be, but not too tragically so. I wrote and shot the book, but towards the end of the shoot I was still puzzled as to what the introduction should be. I tried so many different ones, getting a few friends and my editor Sarah Crichton to read them and weigh in. I was talking to Sheila about it the night before she left New York to go back to Toronto (where she lives in an apartment I once occupied), and she suggested she interview me about the book. (She was working on a book of interviews at the time.) She transcribed as we spoke. A few questions in she started to interview me as Hal, who was the character I felt I understood slightly more instinctively. This led to the character bluntly articulating his feelings of regret, which then informed the intro. That exercise was crucial to how the book is set up and understood, at least by me. We stayed up till 5 talking about how hard it is to put dead relationships to rest.

In both Important Artifacts… and Was She Pretty?, there’s this way that the actual story is absent: the reader gets sort of ancillary, sideline-type stuff (not in a bad or limiting way). Important Artifacts lets the reader apprehend the whole story strictly through the stuff on display; Was She Pretty? doesn’t ever articulate some central character and his or her hurt or jealousy, but instead simply moves around different former lovers, establishing/inducing this very specific feeling without necessarily giving the reader a ‘story’ to hang that feeling upon. I haven’t read your Toledo, but on the J+L page the book’s advertised as being something you wrote when you were away from home and was written out of homesickness. The point of all of this is just a question about something like Longing: there seems, at least in Pretty and Artifacts, this ache that animates things, yet the ache itself doesn’t get just head-on engaged (for instance, there’s actual stuff that’s Present as Absence–the removed lots). Does this even make sense? I’m curious about all of this stuff, about how you feel your work is attempting to tell a complete story while leaving real key elements missing (and while using those missing things as actual, generative things); how your work seems more about a sort of flowing feeling (jealousy, homesickness, ache at a relationship) instead of the thing that caused those feelings.

 

            What is this? Therapy? This is such a good question, as it addresses a major motivating force for me– which is trying to reconcile my reality to what is NOT there.

            I will admit here that I am deeply, paralytically afraid of the dark. As soon as night falls I convince myself that there are things there that are not. My imagination can drive me to incredible levels of anxiety.

            Another way this plays out is that I am hyper aware of repercussions, choices not made, roads not taken and I am highly susceptible to regret. I’m not indecisive, but it is a weirdly delicious and compulsive agony for me think back on something I (probably falsely) thought was within my control. Or, in the case of Was She Pretty?, imagine the power other women once held over someone I love.

            The ache you describe is less longing and more a haunting. I let myself be haunted by the past, I invite these ghosts in and cower in a corner while they dance!

            In terms of trying to tell a complete story– perhaps what I do is more like telling a ghost story, there is mysterious evidence, maybe a legend, usually a great loss, but the story is delivered through the clues, inference, and implication. I read piles of ghost stories– am always reading them– and while finishing this book I read the short ghost story The Romance of Certain Old Clothes by Henry James, (which I liked a hundred times better than Turn Of The Screw.) It involves female competition, old clothes and ghosts– it’s like the perfect meal for me. I suppose what you’re picking up on is that I’m much more interested and driven by what ISN’T there, what is difficult to see, explain, examine, analyze– than by what is. Is that romantic? Or just tragic?

Sort of along the lines of the first question: who are the people that are doing work akin to yr own work (if there are people who are doing work like yours) that you admire/enjoy/etc?

I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying who is doing work like mine in case it caused offense, but I’ll give you a list of people whose work I admire: Alice Munro, Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Lydia Davis, Julie Hecht, Jem Cohen, Ed Ruscha, Raymond Pettibon,  Maira Kalman, Seth, Sophie Calle, David Hockney, Hans Peter Feldmann, Jason Logan, Benoit Van Innis, Folon, Floch, Paul Cox, Emmanuel Pierre, Peter Doig, Sam Taylor-Wood, Rachel Whiteread, Vanessa Bell, Luc Tuymans, Lucian Freud, Saul Steinberg, Pierre Le-Tan, Louise Bourgeois, Giorgio Morandi, Henri Fantin- Latour, Susan Sontag, Cindy Sherman, Paul Graham, Duncan Grant, Hugo Guinness, Rupert Brooke, Vladimir Nabokov, John Currin, Sophie Dahl, James Ensor, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly… I could go on and on.

            Oh and I should mention the editors of McSweeneys are coming out with a book fall 2009 of art that uses both words and pictures– called More Things Like This. It’ll be put out by Chronicle Books

How much, if at all, does your day job play on your work in your books? I’m maybe ridiculously curious about this because you work not just at a newspaper, but at the newspaper of record, and not just at the newspaper of record, but on it’s op-ed page (know that I attach/harbor all sorts of romanticism to newspapers, stupid though that maybe be and archaic though it probably makes me). I have no idea if this question’s even got something akin to an ‘answer,’ but it seemed worth asking.

            Well I got the Op-ed page job two months before I finished the book, so at the time it didn’t have much impact.

            However, since beginning the job I’ve become a much better reader. The department is small and the editors I work with are all brilliant and it’s pretty thrilling to work closely with them. It’s been jarring to go from a very quiet (me, dog, teapot, in my studio) pictures and fiction-driven life to a place where so much crystal clear, nationwide, factual communication has to occur overnight. Another great perk is that I get to work with brilliant illustrators, designer and art directors every day. And it’s part of my job to seek out good work to publish.

Jesse Ball’s Way Through Doors

by Weston Cutter

            I missed Jesse Ball’s Samedi the Deafness when it came out, though when I finally got around to it, I thought it was interesting and strange and wild and narrative-exploding but almost overwhelmingly cerebral (which, in fairness, it probably was and is: my desire for a story with overt heart’s my own thing). For sure, in Samedi, the writing betrays a sort of logician’s fever: the book’s clearly been written by someone for whom the mathematical satisfaction of things fitting together (story elements, in- or convoluted mysteries, etc.) must’ve packed a sort of emphatic emotional punch.

            And now there’s The Way Through Doors, Ball’s second novel and a serious leap from Samedi, far as I’m concerned, though that’s not quite fair: the guiding joy or spirit or whatever through both books is similar, and anyone who’s read her share of Cortazar or Calvino or Borges is gonna be able to grasp a fair share of Doors‘s (as well as Samedi‘s) DNA. It seems like every review I’ve seen so far of this book (all two of them, Bookslut’s and Book Forum’s, plus an interview between J. Ball and the great Blake Butler) establish the same thing: that the novel’s central character around whom everything else wraps is named Selah Morse, and within the first ten or so pages he is given a job as a municipal inspector and then witnesses a young woman get hit by a car. He takes her to the hospital, names her, and takes her home where, he’s been told by her doctors, he must keep her awake for twenty-four hours (there’s a wink in there, obviously, to those of us for whom Fight Club‘s a significant cultural touchstone, and I’m sure there could be a real interesting paper written about the two stories’ overlap, but it’s not gonna be herein touched). When Morse gets “Mora Klein” (it’s a name he literally makes up/gives her) home, the story begins: Morse begins the told-to-Klein story right at the beginning of Doors‘s actual story, meaning we re-read how he gets his job, how he sees her get hit by the car, etc. From there, though, the story takes wildly off and, accompanied by a Guess Artist (a great, great character who can read people’s minds), Morse tracks through landscapes that are never quite real (and in plenty of places are overtly fable-ish), meets people, etc.

            That’s really it: the book is set up as an almost clinically pure work not even just of fiction, but of storytelling: The Way Through Doors is Selah Morse telling stories. It’s not quite that simple, though: this isn’t some Arabian Nights, straightly told and direct. Selah’s narrative pushes forward and back, loops around on itself and then pushes (somehow) into itself: there’s a level of meta- here that’s disconcerting and literally ungrounding: for those of us who enjoy having some fundamental framework in place on which to enjoy a story, Doors will cause, at very best, a twinge of vertigo.

            Which, for me, was the trouble, in lots of ways: I found the book just grossly addictive, and I read it in maybe three stretches, and by and large the overwhelming emotion I read because of and toward was an ache to figure out what the hell was going on (please know that I fear that my cool-kid postmodernism/metafiction pass is gonna be rescinded now, since I honestly don’t think I understood the book in some fundamental ways). There isn’t, however, anything to ‘get,’ not fundamentally: The Way Through Doors is essentially about the power of story, about how readers and tellers hope to find and/or create themselves in stories, and so the weirdly satisfying (aesthetically, not necessarily sensically) ending worked for me because it offers a sort of in—the story we’ve been told for these few hundred pages gets pushed toward and at again, and it’s cool and interesting and weird.

            Still, all that said: I don’t understand this book. I don’t. I’m not this smart, and if I’ve read it correctly, and if the fundamental ‘point’ of the book is to offer the reader some new way of seeing how pivotal and vital the border between story and identity, between ‘acual’ self and ‘made’ self, then I still have questions. Who knows. I really, really wanted to write a glowingly cool and great review of this book, but I honestly don’t think I’m smart enough for it. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing when, on finishing a work, the reader feels an urge to apologize to the author for not getting it, but that’s how I felt on finishing this.