Conversations: Rone Shavers and Terese Svoboda

Rone Shavers is the author of the novel Silverfish (Clash Books 2020), an experimental Afrofuturist work that was a finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Award in fiction and was named a “Best Book of 2020” by The Brooklyn Rail. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including Another Chicago Magazine, Big Other, Black Warrior Review, Identity Theory, PANK, and The Operating System. Shavers’ non-fiction essays and essay-length reviews have appeared in such publications as American Book Review, BOMB, Electronic Book Review, Fiction Writers Review, and The Quarterly Conversation.

Terese Svoboda is the author of eighteen books, most recently Theatrix: Poetry Plays (Anhinga Press, 20210). She has won the Bobst Prize in fiction, the Iowa Prize for poetry, an NEH grant for translation, the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, a Jerome Foundation prize for video, the O. Henry award for the short story, a Bobst prize for the novel, and a Pushcart Prize for the essay. She has been awarded Headlands, James Merrill, Hawthornden, Yaddo, McDowell, and Bellagio residencies.

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Terese Svoboda: Silverfish reminds me of Brian Evenson’s speculative fiction—provocative, always probing at the overarching meaning of why we write. Or think. Or think we write. You have taken the bloviating rhetoric of human resources and the financial world and dipped it into the perversities of military recruitment. I was also reminded of Matthew Derby’s brief novel, The Sound Gun, which has the same post-Catch-22 laconic attitude toward war-making. Your protagonist is a black soldier essentially asking to quit his commission in order to go to school. Did you skip the naturalist route because Afrofuturism intrigued you, or did you embrace the speculative because you already read and admired the genre?

Rone Shavers: Great question! The answer, in many respects, is all of the above. But to spill all the beans, I’m not really that enamored with most realist or naturalist fiction. A lot of it bores me. I’m much more excited by works that play with literary form in some way, that takes risks. Of course, this isn’t to say that realist/naturalist fiction doesn’t take (emotional, stylistic, socio-cultural) risks. Rather, it’s more that I can generally recognize the form those risks are going to take, how it’s all going to play out on the page. So yes, I embrace the speculative. In a sense, you can say that I’m attracted to formally speculative work: work that explores the range(s) of how a story can and can’t be told, what a novel can and cannot do.

RS: I’d like to start by bringing up your use of brackets. You once asked me if I had a particular method for using of brackets in my work; I’d like to ask you the same thing. In your poems, brackets are often used to add an additional layer of meaning to the line, but in many respects this additional layer of meaning is intrusive—in fact, one can almost say that it’s contrapuntal. What do you hope a reader gains from reading things set up/bracketed in a way that collides meaning?

TS: Brackets, their strange angularity, allow me to include more voices [insights] [she says in a bracketable comment worthy of Emily Dickinson’s “variant wordings]. They are “punctuation marks used within a sentence to include information that is not essential to the main point.” As if poetry had a main point! Perhaps the brackets collide with the formation of meaning at times, but I would like to think they offer another opinion. The mind often entertains two conflicting responses at a time.

Having begun writing with voiced-poetry in which the speaker was assumed to be the sole source of poetic wisdom, true or false, I wanted to widen the flow of communication, and not just Browning-wise, in dialogue or monologue, but with asides and mutterings, part of the talk that half-registers tone and affect but nonetheless infiltrates the poem to suggest more of the non-integrated self that we all inhabit. Italics, empty spaces, the occasional parentheses also produce voice and sotto voce, but different from [and outside] the little bracket closets. Free punctuation! Either take it out and let space do its work, or bring it forward and play with it.

RS: Maybe a better way to phrase things would be to ask, precisely how do these brackets add to a complete or better understanding of each piece?

TS: Maybe it’s an ADD perception of the world, the non sequitur that self-consciously [Freud here?] breaks the union of reader to meaning, or maybe it’s richness, the bounty of interjection and surprise.

TS: You’re also a Paul Beatty and Percival “every novel is experimental” Everett fan. Do you know the work of William Melvin Kelley? His first novel, A Different Drummer, published in 1962, is speculative. Afrofuturism has been around a long time. Actually, the first science fiction was written by an African, Ibn al-Nafis’ Theologus Autodidactus in 1270. We’ve all been looking at the same moon. I particularly admire the film “Afronauts” but wonder whether you feel that it denigrates the efforts of the Zambians who tried to emulate the space race.

RS: Yes, I know of Kelley’s work. Thanks for bringing him up, because he’s really under-appreciated. I’m partial to Dunfords Travels Everywheres, but that’s neither here nor there. And yes, while I only recently saw the Afronauts movie, I learned about the Zambian space program a few years ago. And well, I’m somewhat torn about whether it denigrates the Zambians or not. Especially since, honestly, there were some things about the program that definitely deserve to be called into question. The movie really doesn’t touch upon those things, but still. We may all be looking at the same moon, but some of us want to insist that it’s made of green cheese, no matter what science says. 

RS: The subtitle of the collection is “Poetry Plays,” and the idea of “play” is both literally—just like a theater play, there’s a cast of characters, two distinct “acts,” speaking parts, etc.—and figuratively —the poems are full of puns and jokes, wordplay and asides (for example, see “Silverware Dialogue”)—referenced throughout the work. So then, can you speak about the concept of play, and how it contributed to your writing and assembling the collection, as well as its importance to your aesthetic? 

TS: Play is often forgotten as the first inspiration for poetry. Yes, a broken heart is often just as crucial but don’t forget that the babbling infant experiences profound delight in mouthing those early words and discovering that using them produces results. Play in poetry is more than using traditional forms in nonsensical sound, more than just limericks or rhyming couplets [although ballads give a frisson of delight when the drama comes together in both content and form], poetry delights in finding the right line break, the perfect assonance, even god forbid, puns [play of words and play on words]. Words for rhetorical devices, words used as the main subject, wordplay to show off wit. What associative / connotative / historic / personal reverberations does this word set off that might delight? Can I bend this syntax to open up something new within that continuum? That is the play of a poet.

TS: Your protagonist Clayton, a soldier, or rather a “combat associate,” is protecting the Dow, and is convinced by an Angel—a brain who lives in a vat—to learn enough language to negotiate rather than kill. How did you resist the sci-fi impulse to rename everything? Along the same lines, you humanize the dehumanized with a phrase like “calm their nerves” in the middle of such jargon as: “The projected ETA includes time to perform pre-invasion bombardment, calm their nerves, and wait for the invasion order from corporate command.” Did you have to continually monitor the diction to be sure to lighten it up, or did that come naturally?

RS: I’m a codeswitcher. I’m always codeswitching, and because I do, it came naturally. All to say that the book is an intentional mishmash of various jargons, and one of them comes directly from the language of finance. I mean, I remember one of the first times I heard Marketplace, the NPR business show. There was this moment where I had to ask myself, “Just what the fuck is a 10-year T note?” I mean, I find it all sort of fascinating, in a sick sort of way. Once you begin to really listen to some of that macho, dude-bro, finance lingo, you quickly realize that it’s a code all its own. So much of finance terminology is just code, and it’s one that’s meant to deliberately obfuscate the rationale behind what are, essentially, methods of gambling, exploitation, and usury—and all of it sanctioned by the nation-state. 

RS: Qui parle? I use the phrase to highlight that the notion of “who speaks” functions on two levels in your collection: 1) as a general thematic concern—that’s to say, who ultimately gets the last word; who gets to create the dominant narrative, and why? Then there’s also: 2) who is willing to speak, and to what end(s)? That is to say, who are the people willing to risk their personal safety through the use of honest speech, said in order to reveal or expose us to greater truths?

Both senses of “who speaks” are at play here, so my question is as follows: How will highlighting these things that often go unsaid, things both great and small, trivial and monumental, how will highlighting them change the world, if at all? Do you believe it will effectively alter a reader’s personal perception or worldview?

TS: Writers never know what readers will perceive, that’s both the beauty and the horror of it. Things misperceived are just as powerful as those understood. The dominant narrative is understood, the Greeks wrote it up in their plays. “Dad or God?” drags in Catherine the Great’s tendency to torture dwarves, and the death of Saddam Hussein, but at the end when Dad jokes “flies arrive out of nowhere.” I was bowled over by Latasha Nevada Diggs’ TwERK, with its in-your-face subject matter and multi-lingual tour-de-force sandwiches of Japanese, Cherokee, English and Maori. My worldview was adjusted. We hear this speech because we need it now. More honest speech begets more honest speech, the possibility of conversation. But that doesn’t necessarily mean straightforward speech.

TS: “Nothing civilizes like money; everybody knows that. To have money is proof that my social status has been rightfully earned.” Very nicely put sarcasm, (a felony in your world) but then you up the ante: “They [unenhanced humans who hold no shares in civilization] will die, but to maim them, to sever their arms and legs, would be better. Prices on unadulterated bone marrow are especially high…” Was Jonathan Swift an important forebear?

RS: Actually, I wasn’t thinking of Swift at all, but Swift makes total sense. I was thinking of our contemporary moment, what with all these influencers, and the kids who want to grow up to be influencers, and the people who treat “influencer” like it’s some sort of legitimate career path and everything. I mean, a lot of it strikes me as absurd. And I have to view it and treat it and call it out as absurd, because the reality is that otherwise I’ll have to accept how truly, really tragic it all is. Money can buy you social status in America, and with social status comes more money, which earns you more status. Wash, rinse, repeat. And as for the latter phrase, well, that’s just commodity capitalism taken to its logical extreme. Yes, it’s Swiftian. You’re right, it’s definitely Swiftian. But all Swift did was point out the socio-political absurdity of his time.

RS: What are we to make of the fact that many of the poems are centered around persona(s)— strong personalities and different aspects of personality—as opposed to, you know, general, generic themes such as “love” or “justice”? 

TS: I’m not much interested in conveying abstracts unless they’re couched in complexity and that comes only by honoring experience. When I set out to write “Alphabet,” an elegy to a friend who became a provincial governor in Sudan, I kept getting drawn back to the theatre of the backyard where men seated in a semi-circle tried democracy—you could hear the longing in their voices—turning it, testing it. That’s what he was tortured and died for. That’s not abstract.

TS: I was ecstatic to see you’ve used the bric-a-brac of punctuation, brackets, italics and bolding (it’s like learning a whole new language!) “sometimes contextualizing, sometimes describing, sometimes challenging the supposed reason for events as they happened, as well as simultaneously alluding to other historical documents.” I stumbled upon these variations myself in Theatrix, as a way to increase my range of speakers in poetry, beating my way out of “the voice” that unified the persona that pretends to be me. In your book you use these signifiers a lot. Did you have a mentor in place for this experiment?

RS: Geez, if only! Which is to say, nope, not at all. Part of how and why I wrote the book in the way that it is was because I had a moment of very specific awareness where I realized that the act of reading is a visual process. That is to say, I knew that in order for these different styles and voices to work, they had to appear to be different on the page. In that sense, you can say that for one brief, shining, crystal-clear moment, I thought like a poet. So yeah, poetry really does change lives! For what it’s worth, there are also aural clues, certain verbal sayings and ticks that I give to each character, too. That’s one of the many things I learned from reading William Gaddis. I should  say, from carefully reading William Gaddis, whom I definitely consider to be a literary influence. 

RS: There are several recurring issues/themes (dominance and submission, personal and social control, the yoke and subtle expectations of socio-economic class and gender[ed] roles) that appear throughout the collection, but many of them are what I’d call “nested.” That is to say, they’re couched in either literary or historical allusions and events, and sometimes even referencing something that’s simultaneously literary and historical (note the works “Groundlings,” and “Helen Jewett,” for example).

Can you speak about this deep attention to history in your work, even when it’s a fictional or “made-up” history? Are you using history and the historical reference as a means by which to highlight those things that are sometimes viewed as minor or that otherwise go unnoticed? Or is there something else, something completely different at play? What does the foregrounding of an historical framework do both to and for each piece?

TS: The poem, to contradict poet Dorothy Lasky, is not “always about the speaker.” I did a lot of work on personal history in earlier books, and some with regard to my experiences in Sudan and the Pacific The second let me understand the world quite a bit more broadly than my personal history, and led me to history.

Stranger than fiction and the lived life, history is seldom singular and seldom accurate, meaning that it’s a lot like everyone’s daily incongruent experience, only pruned to reflect one writer’s view of what happened, not necessarily what actually happened, which is too multitudinous to document. Like a poet’s work? Foregrounding history gives the reader room to assume that it couldn’t happen to him, foregrounding history that resonates with the present warns the reader that history comes around, foregrounding history that just seems weird informs the reader that humans have a lot more options than they, in the present, imagine. 

“HBO’s Chernobyl” does not forgive the media’s romanticizing human folly. In “Emma’s Play,” Goldman’s corpse speaks to us still, and is reprised in the present of an anonymous woman who plays in “Nobody Knows How To Put Her Out.”  An usher becomes the link to Poe and of course the creepy 19th Century Usher house in “Usher,” and the WWII schipperkes that chase through “Schipperkes” unite the 70s misdeeds of Cointelpro. Years ago I designed a cell phone tour about the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett in 1850s Lower Manhattan, fascinated by its congruence with the O.J. Simpson trial and the experience of listening to the tour guide conflate the locations of the past with the present. The tour ended with the guide suggesting that the listener’s location was also known. Funders did not like that aspect. That kind of Matrix time simultaneity is referred to in the movie as “bullet time,” when the camera moves through a slo-mo in “real time.” Exactly the work of historians—and plays, which began as re-enactments of history.

TS: I love that the protagonist of Silverfish is the eponymous silverfish, the mundane vermin of the bathroom, that’s neither silver nor a fish, and eats tech. You quote Whitman (“I am multitudes”) when Beagel, Angel’s interrogator reveals he’s the silverfish. There’s a whole new (at least to me) branch of psychotherapy that emphasizes that personality is not stable, (see above “voice”), it’s made of various interlocking parts, so Beagel’s makeup is au courant. Of course, that idea is from the Hindu. Does such a concept give you great latitude in creating character, or is it a liability?

RS: Oh wow, what a question! Well, about 15 years ago I was made aware of the concept of a “situational self.” That just means that people act differently according to the situations they find themselves in. For example, you’re more apt to be reserved and respectful in a court of law than you would be in a sports arena, or you’re more likely to act one way around your priest than you would act around your best friend. I’m not sure if that totally tracks with what you mean—I don’t really know much about the psychological referent—but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that it does.

With that in mind I think I’d have to say that the answer is both. The concept that we all have an “unstable” personality is both a liability and a way to carve out some latitude, especially when writing fiction. I mean, you can say that an unreliable narrator is someone who tells a story from their skewed, situational perspective.

Then again, you can also say that in order for characterization to work properly a character has to be consistent and believable, so having a character act differently according to each situation would strain credulity. The bottom line is that a skilled writer can make either way work. A skilled writer can take the concept and play with it in innumerable interesting ways, including thematically or formally… All to say that I may be taking your question in a way you didn’t mean it to go, but I’m having lots of fun just riding along, thinking about it. 

RS: It also strikes me that essentially, this collection really reads like a sort of gestalt. The collection works as a singular, unified document—a “Poetry Play”—but one could also view the individual works as separate pieces that add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. Since, when reading a poetry collection, meaning can be derived from each poem (and as with any collection of separate poems, the whole thing doesn’t necessarily have to cohere together narratively), I have to ask, was this intentionally done? And if so, what benefits do you think you got by working this way? Better still, do you think this is indicative of your overall work as a writer?

TS: One has to be thoughtless to write fluently and trust that one’s preoccupations overlap. In Theatrix: Poetry Plays, I wiggle around in the very experimental and the very straightforward, using ragged lines suspended in white as well as neat couplets, all circling the concept of the theatrical. As the collection began to cohere, I stuck up for its variety, trusting that the reader would appreciate the theme, as it were, played on many instruments.

Silverfish is wonderfully provocative, taking your basic “brain-in-a-bucket” story and having its Frankensteinian creator propose “a new system of thinking and being through the manipulation of language itself.” It poses the question: “What if the apocalypse happened and no one noticed?” and answers it with the Orwellian: “the apocalypse happened when humans saw fit to end metaphor and use euphemism in its place.” But isn’t that what language is always doing as a lively human endeavor, creating metaphor and discarding stereotype?

RS: You know, I if could rewrite any line in the novel, it would be that one. I mean, I still think about whether I should have made an explicit, deliberate distinction between connotation and denotation, how we’re steadily attempting to diminish the importance of the former and over-privilege the latter. I think it would be a much stronger book if I were to say something akin to that, instead of what’s there now. Oh well (#novelproblems)…

Still, there’s a phrase that the angel says which is also key to understanding a lot of the WTFs people have when reading the book: Everything is metaphor. Better yet, everything can be understood metaphorically, even the text(s) within the text that is Silverfish. I’m not sure if I agree with you that language discards stereotypes—in some respects, metaphors tend to reinforce them, especially through rote usage—but yeah, you’re pretty much spot-on when you say language is always metaphorical. We’re hard-wired (See what I did there? Guess what I just used?) to create metaphor. We use them even when we’re not aware that we’re using them, just like the characters in the book. 

RS: And just as a quick follow-up, since you also write novels, among other things—to be honest, you’ve written works in a variety of genres—would you describe this collection as an example of literary “hybridity”? Why or why not? Given that the way you’ve chosen to conceive of and construct this text is so unique, how would you describe your particular aesthetic approach here?

TS: The hybridity in Theatrix was only pointed out to me recently. And I’ve decided to revel [wallow] in it. I never imagined I’d hybridize anything I am so face down in trying to have fun and still express myself seriously and yet fulfill the genre but I do find it hard to contain work narratively or thematically. The very idea of a container makes me itch to deconstruct it.

TS: You pepper the book with Haitian creole and a Hindi love song, yet now it’s no more difficult to discover meaning than a quick google. The web has flattened the “social stock” of the acquisition of language skills – but it also allows allusions beyond the quotidian, a new world-view. Or is this new skill just further exploitation?

RS: I’m not exactly sure if the web actually helps people acquire language skills or if it’s just the best means we have right now to avoid the consistent practice of literary language skills altogether. I mean, try as I might, I can barely parse my way through a string of emojis, and don’t even get me started on GIFs! I think both things “flatten” our use of expression(s) to a homogenized, bland-looking paste. And when you add the fact that both are often stock or commercial images, and that there are companies out there mass producing them, well then, then I gotta say that it’s all exploitation disguised as digital shenanigans.

It’s also because to make mention of the internet as a wonderful resource activates all my latent grandpa genes and I start to get extremely cranky. While the internet is wonderful spot to find content, it’s not that great of a place to find context. And there’s a contextual component to a lot of Beagel’s phrasing and the Angel’s “alter-narrative” that gets missed if one focuses on just the translation or definition of the words and phrases used.

RS: A lot of the poems here have an almost Russian-doll sort of construction to them. They are stories that tell stories about the story of X, done in a way that alludes to another story; oftentimes a hidden or lesser-known herstory, but sometimes not. In this manner, they inform readers about things they otherwise might have missed, gaps in their knowledge. 

So then, the question buried in the above statement is as follows: Why? What do you think the poems achieve through their excavating or revealing the edges, the liminal spaces of history? What additional power or force is gained when the poem functions as both a document of a specific moment in time with a physical and emotional impact, but also as evidence of the literary and historical documentation that has come before it in the past? 

TS: You are an excellent reader. I love finding the obscure detail that illuminates the whole. Sometimes a gesture reveals that the wedding’s off, or the lice in a soldier’s blanket entertain a whole barracks. The lice tidbit was found in a soldier’s journal written in the late 1800s Midwest and included in my novel, Bohemian Girl. The quiver of existence in which we experience the present is fraught and interpenetrated with the past and the future, longing and anticipation. There’s a lot of power in circling that. That Edward Hopper beat his wife was useful in “Blank Pink Mall,” in picturing what goes on in today’s cheap motels.

TS: I particularly admired your aphorism “Every culture begins with ‘cult’.” 

RS: Yeah, I love that line, but it’s not my own. It’s from the poet Johnny Horton. Quite a while ago we did a residency at Ragdale together and he was working on a poem with that in it. As soon as he said it, the phrase just seared into my brain. I love it. I love that line more than I love some people…

RS: There are tons of historical allusions and personages in your poems, but instead of those whom we commonly recognize as either “historic” or the supposed “heroes” of history, these works are about those individuals who are often the victims of history, in that they become inadvertently mired in it. (For example, I’m particularly reminded of “Spectacle,” with its allusions to the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford). Could you speak more about the relation of history and the historic, especially as it pertains to the personal and the individual, in this collection? 

TS: Ford, cast into the gladiator’s ring, stands for the whistleblower, and all poets should have a whistle. My biographical subject, the poet Lola Ridge, was an anarchist who consistently chose to be free, even when it was detrimental to her writing and her life. Every poem I write is both an acknowledgment of history’s debt—I am this person with this history at this time with these ideas because of those who wrote before me—and a struggle to free myself—how can I make this new?  Heroes are always individuals held up by community, some heroes just need more community.

TS: I hate tech talk, so I celebrate every crumb of humor: “My template is a variation on the wood-wide-web.” Did you find yourself having to break up the more technical aspects of speculation with humor or did the pacing come naturally?

RS: It’s basically Codeswitching 101, so the pacing came totally naturally to me. That, and it’s probably because I’m a constant tinkerer and editor. I have what I like to call “Flaubert’s disease,” meaning that I’ll work and re-work and continue to work on words, phrases, sentences, lines, passages, paragraphs well past the point of literary exhaustion, and then I’ll do it all over again, sometimes for weeks on end. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to do. I regret nothing. To emphasize, je ne regrette rien. 

RS: I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the fact that many of the pieces in the collection either feature or make reference to dogs. I’m sure there’s some significance there, so my question is a simple one. Basically, why so many dogs? Is it simply because you like them, or do they represent something greater?

TS: I have a chapbook entitled “Dogs are Not Cats” in which the dog barks for something greater. To have a companion that is not of your own species is pretty damn weird. It’s as if you’ve made friends with (or dominated) [the word “tamed” is apt] what is essentially an alien. I’m struck by the fact of the alien, how many degrees it takes. I’m working on a novel about harpies who save abused children, and their difference makes them a target.

TS: After grilling Clayton insistently at the end of the book, the sergeant gives up: “Our interview requires that we end on a positive note, so let me say that I hope you enjoy your act of deliberate fiscal and physical suicide.” On my own positive note, I applaud your act of deliberate satire and finely honed sarcasm with great admiration and hope for its immortality.

RS: Thanks! That’s means a lot coming from someone like you. Especially because, I gotta say, having read your work, you are most excellent with the wordplay, especially in Theatrix. So yeah, thanks again. 

TS: Hilda Hilst! There’s an amazing list of authors cited as worthy of retrieval from the past. You thank Jeffery Renard Allen and Alan Michael Parker, two wildly divergent (and diverging) writers. How have they been an influence?

RS: I met Jeff Allen, like, 27-kajillion years ago when I was pursuing my MFA at The New School. He was my teacher and a mentor. We quickly became fast friends and have remained that way. He’s also the one who encouraged me to go get a PhD, so yeah, I definitely consider him an influence. If not stylistically, then at least in terms of the trajectory of my life choices. And Alan Michael Parker has just been so wonderfully generous, both in his engagement with my writing as well as with my writing career, that I’d be totally remiss if I neglected to thank him, too. And if I’m to cite influences, then I also have to cite novelist Cris Mazza and the Program for Writers at UIC. Mazza was really influential in ways both great and small, and the literature professors I also studied with while there (most notably, Nicholas Brown, Madhu Dubey, Sharon Holland, Walter Benn Michaels, and Joseph Tabbi), well, they’re at least partially responsible for all my dime-store philosophizing and my need to deliberately complicate relatively simple things. Really, I should thank all of my teachers, as well as my literary forebears and peers, because they’ve all taught me something.

RS: Works such as “She Said” and “Glassine” draw a reader’s attention to (what I assume to be) the joy you have when playing with the linguistic and syntactic possibilities within language. Simply put, some of your poems riff and revolve around un/common English grammar and syntax conventions. Besides the obvious, wizened axiom of a “a writer works in words,” what is it that draws you to specifically highlight grammar and syntax, the basic building blocks of language, in your work?  

TS: Might as well move the biggest blocks. Without revelry in grammar and syntax, you have the newspaper, says the poetic content provider. Subject matter, one atrocity after another, one more wringing of hands does not do the trick. “She Said He Said” is trying to avoid blame after a child’s death. “Glassine” is more fun, calling attention to the [apparent] transparency of punctuation.

RS: Finally, I have to ask the most necessary, perfunctory interview question of all: Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you want to mention, that you really want readers to know?

TS: This book was bottled up in me for decades. A pleasure to write, a sadness that it took me so long to release it. But what is pleasure without sadness? Flat, no fizz.