Dove's Eye View

Make your own yogurt

Crunchy Chicken discusses making your own yogurt.

Here is the old-fashioned Lebanese method for yogurt-making I learned from my father. I remember he taught all our American friends to do this back in the 70s. I watched him and did it myself as a young teen. Still do every once in a while.

The Lebanese way to make yogurt involves no yogurt maker, cooler, thermos or any special equipment.

First organize your yogurt container. A glass or ceramic covered bowl or crock is best. I like those Corning or Anchor Hocking glass casseroles with glass lids, but a sturdy plastic container would do. Boil water and rinse the clean container and lid, let air dry.

Scald enough milk to fill the container - that means heat milk until bubbles form at the edge of the pot. Don't let it foam over, or heavens forbid burn it! Let cool until you can hold your (clean) finger in the milk for the rapid count of 10. About 110 degrees Fahrenheit I believe, but I never use a thermometer. (Update: Google is our yogurt making friend. Kitchen science link below says cool to 112-115; it will reach 110 when you add the starter).

Pour milk into your prepared container.

Stir up some yogurt in a cup. Let's say about a half cup for a half gallon of milk. This is the starter, which in our village we call the "rowbih." I pour a little hot milk into the yogurt, too, to bring it to temperature. You want to "break" the yogurt curds. Use a yogurt with live cultures, and don't use one that has pectin or gelatin (or anything else) added.

Then stir the starter into the hot milk and put the lid on. To keep yogurt warm, set container on a folded blanket or towel, and then wrap it up with old blankets, parka, whatever will keep it nice and warm. Let sit for 6 to 8 hours.

Over the years Americans have suggested all manner of ways to keep the yogurt warm. A haybox, if you already use one, seems like a simple solution; also I suppose a styrofoam "cooler" would also work but I have not tried this. If you already have a warming method you like, go for it. Personally I would not keep yogurt in an oven warmed to 200 degrees (F) for 6 hours - what a waste of fuel. But people do.

The yogurt should look firm and have solidified bubbles on the top. When it has set, refrigerate.

The kitchen-science, USDA-approved method. Includes non-fat dry milk powder, which many people can taste and don't like. OK it tells you to use a double boiler which makes it impossible to scorch the milk. Whatever.

For bonus points, make yogurt cheese (lebneh):

Take your fresh yogurt, leaving some aside for another starter, and put it into a sterilized muslin bag. Add salt. Tie the bag shut and hang it from an olive tree branch. (Or your sink faucet, or anyplace else it can drain. Or put it in a colander).

Let drain until it's the consistency you like, from gooey to solid. Turn out onto a plate and drizzle with olive oil. Serve with olives, tomatoes, mint, cucumbers, and pita bread. Or eat unadorned with bread. But must add good olive oil.

Alternative draining methods I have seen include using coffee filters, layered cheesecloth or even paper towels in a colander.

Your own olive oil from the tree where the lebneh drained would of course be optimal but even Lebanese can't achieve that too often. Most of them buy their lebneh in plastic tubs like the rest of us, these days.

The Atom Spy, My Dad, and Me

For First Time, Figure in Rosenberg Case Admits Spying for Soviets - NYTimes.com.

In 1951, Morton Sobell was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on espionage charges. He served more than 18 years in Alcatraz and other federal prisons, traveled to Cuba and Vietnam after his release in 1969 and became an advocate for progressive causes.

Through it all, he maintained his innocence.

But on Thursday, Mr. Sobell, 91, dramatically reversed himself, shedding new light on a case that still fans smoldering political passions. In an interview, he admitted for the first time that he had been a Soviet spy.

1969: Elias Abu-Saba teaches Existentialism at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pennsylvania, as pro bono community service. Befriends Morton Sobell.
Helen Sobell, Morton's first wife, stays with Abu-Saba family in Lewisburg overnight during her visits to Morton.
Morton is released from prison.
Abu-Saba family drive to New York City and celebrate Sobell's release at a dim sum parlor in Chinatown.

1977: Abu-Saba family visits New York City. Morton Sobell comes for lunch with host family and Abu-Sabas. Leila, 15, asks Sobell about the Equal Rights Amendment. Sobell answers that the Communist Party of America is against the ERA because under communism there is no sex discrimination. Therefore to fight for the ERA is unnecessary, since he is fighting for communism.

The conversation turns to the Rosenbergs and Sobell's imprisonment by the U.S. Government for atom-bomb spying. Leila's brother, 12, asks Sobell directly: "Did you do it?"

Sobell refuses to answer the question. Brother presses. Sobell dodges.
Leila Abu-Saba concludes that Morton Sobell may actually be guilty, even though her father says the US Government persecuted an innocent man. She also decides she is never, ever going to be a Communist.

If you ever wonder why I walk the middle of the road and refuse to be counted among the true believers in any cause, look at this story. Such an episode might have made a neo-conservative out of some people of my generation but I don't go for opposite extremes, either. Life is complicated and nobody is a total hero, nor is any cause or movement totally just and pure.

My good wishes to Sobell, who is 91 and frail, for his peace of mind and reconciliation of contradictions in the winter of his life. I hope we live long enough to hear Dick Cheney confess his sins. In the scheme of things I believe Richard Cheney caused more harm and loss of life than Morton Sobell ever did.

Dumbing Down

Colonel Patrick Lang over at Sic Semper Tyrannis wrote the following about The Republican "Brand" as metaphor:

A classics professor once told his class in my presence that there no longer existed the possibility of the creation of an American national epic poem, something like the Iliad, Aeneid, the "Divine Comedy," "John Brown's Body," etc., because the declining cultural level and the lack of common values among the "American people" had destroyed the basis of wide comprehension and acceptance that would be needed for such an effort. That was fifty years ago. What would he think now?

I wrote in comments:

Poetry - any kind, whether epic or not - depends upon a spoken culture, whether literate or not. Very few of us today sit around in groups talking to each other, except at business meetings. Perhaps because of TV, or the automobile, or both (internet makes it worse but this began happening much earlier during radio era) - we no longer sit around and gossip to pass the time with our friends and relations. Therefore we no longer sit around and recite poetry.

In Lebanon (and Peru, Greece, and many other traditional societies, by report) people were still sitting around and talking within my memory, and I'm 45. This casual gossip sometimes led to poetry competitions. Some poems were self-composed and of low-medium quality; often they were poems, ancient or contemporary, by great poets. Simple country people would memorize sections of epic national poetry to recite for the amusement of their friends and relations. Men (and women - see Lila Abu-Lughod's research on Bedouin women's poetry) competed with each other to recite poems, their own or others', which would move or impress or amaze. Nowadays in Lebanon at least, the TV is always turned on, and it's the size of the living room wall, so idle chatter and spontaneous verse are drowned out by CNN or LBC.

My dad wrote Arabic poetry as an avocation.* I was always impressed at how the silliest, most materialistic Lebanese housewife would listen to his poetry with attention and offer intelligent comment. The fact that he wrote and recited poems made him worthy of attention and respect, and even people I thought were uneducated and uninterested in culture became alert and happy if Dad decided to recite. Whereas we Americans, including his ungrateful children, thought the whole business embarrassing.

Did Applachian mountain people recite poetry to each other? I don't know, but they sang each other songs, which are *lyrics*.

I don't know about the Irish either but they have such a gift for gab and verse that I assume there must have been an Irish tradition of popular poetry.

Great epic poetry, or great poetry of any form, needs the fertile soil of a living poetic culture. It can't arise out of a sterile medium. It needs plenty of manure, bugs, worms and weeds around it in order to take root, flower and thrive. I say that popular poetry is the manure etc. The true critics among you can discuss whether Bob Dylan is manure, earthworm, cover crop (vetch? clover?) or the coveted flower itself. (an earlier commenter had offered Dylan as an American bard)

Today the poetry slam has become popular among younger folk. People get together at a cafe or auditorium and read or recite their poems aloud, usually with lots of emphasis and pizazz, looking to wow the crowd. Whatever you may think of the poems arising from this movement, at least it's popular and it's poetry and it's face to face.

I believe a poem spoken aloud has greater power when heard in the presence of the speaker - the breath is spirit you know. Recordings give you a flavor but nothing beats being in a room with other human beings, listening to a poet (preferably acoustic, unmiked) recite.

When the oil runs out and we have to turn to homemade amusements, we have a better chance of developing some national epic poem or another. Maybe in the future an anonymous Lebanese-Irish-Japanese-African-American bard in the camps of California will compose an epic poem about the wars of Iraq and Iran and the bloody trials of Americans therein. (end comment).

I was on vacation when I wrote this so the internet ban was temporarily suspended. (Told you I'd be sneaky.)

*The poem reproduced here was written in casual, dialect Arabic. I doubt my Dad would want it to stand for all of his work, but it's the only Arabic poem I have of his scanned into a JPEG file. He cared about classical Arabic very much and was careful to write with clarity and formality. He also spoke Lebanese dialect with care in casual conversation, eschewing elisions and foreign words, and enunciating clearly.

My Father the Arab Feminist

Just now on the radio (Fresh Air with Terry Gross) I heard a snippet of an American woman's story about her custody battle with her Arab ex-husband.

I'm certain that there is more to Deborah Kanafani's memoir than "I unveil the terrible way Arab men treat women" but boy, that's sure what I heard driving down the road. Maybe it's all true - for her.

But I wonder if my own story, about my feminist Arab father, would ever get a book deal or air time on NPR. It's not about scary Arab men oppressing their women and children, you see. There's no conflict, no villain, and it doesn't fit the story that sells books in America.

My father was a feminist before he came to America. He was strongly influenced by the new ideas roiling the Arab world in the nineteen-fifties: nationalism, yes, and socialism, and democracy, and the rights of women. He was determined to modernize his country, his people, and he believed that making women equal members of society was part of that. In his personal life, he tried to get his parents to keep his youngest sister in school. Later, he paid for his orphaned niece to go to a very good private school, giving her English skills which helped her support her family during the upheavals of the civil war.

When he went to America for graduate school and met my American mother, Dad found that some of his ideas were too forward for the USA in 1959. He didn't think women had to get married before having sex, for instance. My mother disagreed. Since he respected her - and all women - he didn't force his ideas upon her.

When they married, he encouraged her to start graduate school right away. She did, but decided she really wanted to have babies. So she had me, and very soon after began teaching part time. Fine with Dad. Mom always taught and did other work throughout my childhood. Then after my younger brother and I began school, she went back to grad school for her masters degree and then Ph.D.

This was the 1960s. Some of my readers don't know what America was like in the 1960s. It wasn't all hippies and Gloria Steinem. The college professors in my parents' circle (all men, with wives who mostly stayed at home and didn't work) were rather traditional fellows. My dad ruffled a lot of feathers among his colleagues, because he insisted on doing laundry, caring for us kids, and cooking meals. One of his friends got very offended when my dad bragged too much about washing his socks, and how he (Dad) washed his socks by hand and made them last a really long time. (My dad was eccentric about being thrifty) The friend told my dad that he was causing problems in the friend's marriage, because HIS wife was wondering why she had to do all the laundry?

When my mother got her Ph.D. my dad completely supported her in her career goals. We were always clear in our house that my parents made all decisions together, that they each earned money and contributed to the family finances, and that they were autonomous people who worked together in partnership as well.

Much later, in the 1990s, my mother got a teaching position at the American University of Beirut, and my dad retired from his job earlier than he had planned. He went to Beirut with her and basically kept house so she could do a very demanding job. He cooked and dealt with the daily details of life. His egalitarianism persisted - they were living in an apartment hotel, with daily maid service, but my father insisted on doing the dishes himself, before the maids could come in. He didn't want the maids cleaning after him.

As a young girl growing up, I was told that I should study and go to college and have a good career. In fact, when I did badly in algebra in 8th grade, my father got upset, because he said girls in Lebanon didn't have the same chances I did. He helped me with my homework, natch, but he also let me know that it was really important to him that I do well. He tried to be supportive of me, even when I careened about being a slacker American bohemian. Later in life, when I settled down and began putting together a more normal, grown-up career, my father encouraged me. He was so happy when I went to grad school (at age 42). He believed everybody deserves a second chance - and a third chance too.

Oh yes, and when my cousin N, a girl, wanted to come to America to study, even though she wasn't married or even engaged, my father welcomed her. N's father, my beloved, departed uncle Adib, was also enlightened, and sent N to us to get her college education. Most other fathers in our village would not do the same. The war in Lebanon had made it too dangerous for her to commute to Beirut to university, so he took the risk of sending her across the world. N became a successful computer engineer, and later married a great guy. Now her daughter is a recent college graduate with a terrific job in corporate America, climbing the ladder. This is normal now, but thirty years ago it was new, for Americans as well as Lebanese. We have to give credit to men like my Dad, who adapted with the times, and encouraged their wives and daughters to succeed.

There are more stories I could tell, but they're all positive, about what a mensch Dad was, how much women loved him, how he loved women, how he was a big hit in the lesbian community in North Carolina where they lived for years, how he loved and respected my mother. Oh yes, and how he told all the Lebanese male immigrants why they ought to help their wives with the housework, and support them in developing their own careers. It got through, to some of them, more or less.

That's it. That was my dad, the Arab feminist. The picture shows him on my 44th birthday, just after he received the diagnosis of the lung cancer which killed him two months later; he stands behind the tabbouli he insisted on making to celebrate my day.

Do you think Terry Gross will put me on Fresh Air with a story like that? Probably not. There's no story there, the editors would say. Just some guy doing the right thing by his women, a little ahead of his time. Plus he's an Arab. Who wants to know about feminist Arab men? Doesn't sell papers.

My Life, The Hollywood Edition

I just came back from a weekend in Los Angeles that reads completely out of character for me: movie stars, shopping, comedy shows, the beach.

The actress Camryn Manheim has been a friend of mine since we were in third grade and her father hired my father to teach engineering at a university in central Illinois. We lived down the street from each other for four idyllic years, until both our dads got jobs on opposite ends of the country. Our parents remained close friends and we kept our relationship going through college and afterwards in New York, when our lifestyles seemed to diverge. She went on to big successes in the theater and then in television and the movies, and while she has always been open and welcoming, I felt shy about invading her world. Now we have children the same age, and as we grow older our shared past means more than the differences in our life circumstances. After my first bout with chemo, Camryn invited us to visit her in L.A. - a memorable vacation. Picture below from April 2005, when my hair first started to grow back.

Last Monday Camryn invited me to Venice Beach for the weekend, so I flew down on Friday. The first thing she did was take me to an exclusive Hollywood restaurantfor a party sponsored by Coach bags. The point of the event was to create buzz for Coach, tied to the Golden Globe awards which had already been canceled. We went anyway.

Now let me tell you that the Dove carries a Victorinix messenger bag in black, with plenty of gear hooks on it: room for books, notebooks, pens, money, snacks and occasionally a cel phone. This bag is the preferred Bay Area software geek commuter gear and is a hand-me-down from my husband. When I want to be stylish I carry a two-year-old red leather pocketbook I bought in a discount store. Camryn gave me a black and red Kate Spade bag (she has more stuff than she needs - vendors give her things - and she shares with her friends) to carry to the party so I didn't feel like a big Bay Area computer dork. However I would never buy a Coach, Spade or Prada bag unless it were on sale at the consignment store for $20. I will spend good money on shoes because they are equipment for the feet, but I won't throw money at a handbag.

We ate great Italian food and sat around in the tent watching the hired papparazzi photograph Mandy Moore, Wilmer Valderrama, Debra Messing
and Milla Jovovich. Debora Messing, who was brilliant in the series Will and Grace, is a friend of Camryn's so I got to meet her - she's a lovely person.

The most interesting moment was in the parking lot, as we waited endlessly for our car to arrive; a gaggle of marauding papparazzi huddled at the edge of the driveway, and when Mandy Moore appeared they swooped down, darting around the Coach flacks and waiters to point their cameras in her face. She immediately turned and hid amongst her entourage, who escorted her to her car (a black Prius) while the photographers jostled and shoved. The photogs looked like either skate punks or L.A. gang members. The frenzy was both alarming and ridiculous - as the papparazzi swarmed poor Mandy, children across the street in a schoolyard played kickball. Surreal.

That night, Camryn invited her close friends for an intimate card game with Chinese takeout food. One of the card players is a comic actress who I recognized from Saturday Night Live - she was hilarious, of course, but the whole gang kept me in stitches. I have not laughed so hard and so long since graduate school. All my aches and fatigue from chemo seemed to dissolve, and I stayed up until midnight.

The next morning I walked alone to the beach, where I saw Angelica Huston walking her dogs. She looked me in the eye and smiled. I was staggered. Is that really Angelica Huston? And why is she smiling at me? I think she was acknowledging my chemo turban... rumor has it that she, too is a breast cancer survivor. She's also handsome and classy.

Saturday night Camryn told me we had tickets to see her friend do some standup comedy. I envisioned a supper club with beat-up black walls and patrons stumbling over my knees. The comedienne was Kathy Griffin, and the venue was the Kodak Theater, where they hold the Oscar ceremony. We had fourth row, center orchestra seats. The place was sold out - 3,000 people - and unimaginably grand. A 6'9" drag queen in full length glitter approached Camryn and we all made friends - I hope she sends me the photos soon. So many regular people come up to Camryn as she goes about her life, telling her how much they love and respect her. The Kodak theater show was hilarious - I screamed with laughter at Kathy Griffin - and really enjoyed seeing the fans mob Camryn. We went backstage and milled about looking at people who looked at us to see if we were "somebodies." But the best part was carousing with Camryn at dinner and during the show, enjoying her friends and laughing.

I stayed up too late every night. I sat on the third floor balcony and admired the canals, palm trees and Santa Monica mountains. I walked around Venice and sat on the beach. I ate lunch at Mao's Kitchen "Chinese country-style cooking with red memories." I rode behind Camryn on her little moped to Venice's main shopping street. Try to imagine me riding behind Camryn Manheim on a sage green Indian motorcycle, wearing a helmet over the clever spiral knit skullcap my sister-in-law made for me. At midnight Sunday I tried on Camryn's wigs from her L-Word gig and we ordered a white/silver version for me online. (She sent me home with a loaner, short and blonde, that I must return in case she goes back on the L-Word.) I told her about the video installation traveling the world with my father talking about impermanence, so we looked at a Youtube video excerpt and wept to hear my dad reminding us of our transience on this planet.

(watch to the end to see my father)

Camryn said as I packed up yesterday morning "You just don't seem sick." Laughter and good friends cure all ills. As long as I don't listen to my doctor, I don't think I am sick. In fact, I feel very, very well.

Dad in the Slammer

penitentiary_id014
Originally uploaded by bedouina

My brother found and scanned this ID card from the US Penitentiary at Lewisburg, PA, where my father taught Existentialist philosophy to prisoners like Jimmy Hoffa and Morton Sobel.

Why was my father teaching contemporary religion when he was a professor of engineering? Well, he spent a year on a fellowship at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley - the grant was to allow people in the sciences to study any aspect of religion they liked. My dad got into Kierkegaard in a big way. He then went on to earn his Ph.D. in structural engineering at Virginia Tech, and landed a job at Bucknell University right out of grad school. Hence the Lewisburg, PA location.

"Atom bomb spy" and Communist Morton Sobel became a longtime family friend because of Dad's prison work. Helen Sobel used to stay with us when she'd travel by bus from New York City to visit Morton. In later years, when Morton was out of jail and we would visit them in New York, I was disappointed by his answers to my political questions. Communism didn't sound so great to my 14-year-old mind. And my brother never got a straight answer to the question: "Did you do it?" (i.e. pass secrets to the Russians). Doesn't change my feeling that the Rosenbergs were electrocuted for political reasons.

Jimmy Hoffa only attended Dad's class once. Guess he didn't think Kierkegaard was The Man.

Image of Bishop Salim Ghazal

Bishop Salim Ghazal holding my son, Joseph, in the monastery of Deir MKhalles, September 2000. My late father, Elias Abu-Saba, is in the left background. We had just visited with Father Salim during his Sunday tea hour, and he was about to go down to dinner with the brethren of his order, of which he is still the Superior.

This blog gets about twenty referrals a day from search engines, in which people look for images of Bishop Ghazal. His tour of the States must be prompting all the activity. Here's hoping they all try again and find what I believe is the only close up portrait of the Bishop on the Internet.

Tragedy in Blacksburg

The list of the dead at Tech includes at least two (so far) Arabic names: Reema Samaha and Ross Alameddine. Another Arab-American, Jamal Albarghouti, survived the attack and has been seen in the media discussing the celphone video he took of some of the shooting.

UPDATE: The Lebanese foreign ministry confirms that Samaha and Alameddine are of Lebanese ancestry. A new name added to the list, Waleed Shalaan, seems as if it could be Arab, as well.

My profound condolences to the Samaha and Alameddine families, and to all the other people mourning their dead in Virginia today.

Already we have seen a few comments on the internet about the ethnicity and national origin of the shooter. I posted a remark about this at Kevin Drum's site which I want to reproduce here:

My father arrived at Virginia Tech in 1957 as a foreign student from Lebanon. He went there to get a masters' degree - and VPI was cheaper than the other schools he got into - see Cal Tech.

Dad lived at International House in those days, which was full of foreigners. (that's how he met my mom, a student at a nearby women's college and a Southerner of nine or ten generations)

Looking at the list of the Virginia Tech dead, and the interviews with survivors, I notice several Middle Eastern names just for a start. There are also immigrants from all the rest of the world, including the Romanian Holocaust survivor who died protecting his students.

People who hate immigrants will of course use this tragedy as an excuse to bash immigration, but Virginia Tech has a long tradition of welcoming foreign students, and including many who are permanent residents or naturalized citizens.

You would have to find boxcars and send out battalions of troops to purge Virginia Tech of the non-native-born, and then you would still be left with the children of immigrants, people like me with funny names who maybe have an immigrant father. To get rid of all of them, you would have to purge people like Barack Obama. And you would have to decide which immigrants' children you're going to purge - Irish? Mexicans? English? Indians?

Oh yes, and how about all the professors who are naturalized citizens, or children of naturalized citizens with attendant "funny names"? I have a friend on the faculty at Virginia Tech who is an Arab-American, born here; his father, like mine, graduated from Virginia Tech. Shall we get rid of him, too? Probably a quarter of the faculty at most American colleges would have to leave.

And would such ethnic cleansing prevent future gun massacres? Not bloody likely.

Just saying. The logic of immigrant student goes crazy = get rid of immigrants really doesn't hold up.

(end quote)

My thanks to Blue Girl for linking to me, and welcome to those of you who found me via Kevin Drum.

Elias Abu-Saba Poems in Greensboro

My father lived for two decades in Greensboro, NC, where he taught architectural engineering at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University (A&T). After he and my mother moved to Beirut in the early 90s, they continued to use Greensboro as their home base in the States for another decade.

During those years Dad wrote and read lots of poems! He attended many public readings in Greensboro and was active in the community. No party was complete without one of Dad's poems, often composed on the spot and inscribed on a paper placemat or styrofoam cup.

Now his work is being celebrated as part of Greensboro's month-long poetry festival. It appears that a dozen of his friends are going to read his poems on April 23. Mom has just asked me to choose my favorites from his enormous oeuvre.

If you click on the link, you'll see a handsome photo of him in his beret and a tweed jacket. Dearest Daddy! I still miss him.

Impermanence: The time of man

For Christmas, here's another story about my father, Elias Abu-Saba.

Dad had this friend, David Hodge, who is a filmmaker and video artist here in California. Mr. Hodge was doing a piece on Impermanence as part of an artistic tribute to the Dalai Lama, and asked Dad to give his thoughts in a long video interview.

Hodge used Dad's voice in an installation of 16 I-pods broadcasting the words of 108 people, playing simultaneously in a large room. Read about it here: Impermanence: The time of man.

Last May, months before his death, Mom and Dad got to view/hear the installation. Mom says that Dad was particularly articulate and that his words were really moving. He didn't know he was dying when he made the interview or when they listened to the whole piece; he was diagnosed with cancer two months later.

I hope I get to experience this unusual art installation devoted to impermanence and to peace.

My father did some amazing things in his life, but this one surprises me. Even after his death, he still gets to tour the world, talking, in an avant-garde performance piece using I-pods. That would be my dad, an earthy peasant poet immortalized in the latest technology. He had this paradoxical quality of being cutting edge and completely old-world at the same time. Part of him loved the land, olives, and history, and part of him loved computers, engineering, new architecture, and gadgets. Both of these aspects are very Lebanese. You can see this paradox at work in Beirut today - and all over Lebanon.

People are impermanent. Love the ones around you because tomorrow they will be gone. Everything changes, everything passes.

Merry Christmas, everybody. And Dad, wherever you are, we love you and think of you each day.

Update: read the comments for links to the virtual tour of the art gallery, and more info on the main show. The video installation is part of a large group exhibit including Laurie Anderson, Bill Viola and Jenny Holzer. I am just staggered.