Educated Guesswork

Sea Of Grass, by Conrad Richter (1936)

This very brief (just over a hundred pages, in the edition I read) narrative is a prose poem, a threnody for a lost time and place, New Mexico when it was new in the American imagination. As well, it is a meditation on the mystery of marriage and the ways of men with women. It is also a Western novel mistakenly assigned to schoolchildren, perhaps with the notion that it is short and therefore the little ones might actually complete their assigned reading, or perhaps because the narrator is himself a youth in the opening chapters and thus some identification is expected by the priests and priestesses of pedagogy. The book is mistakenly compared to Zane Grey’s work, about which the less said the better. The author seems to have been yet another example of a man bewitched by the wide open spaces of the Southwest, like the creator of Krazy Kat, though Conrad Richter never personally experienced the lost era he so obviously longs for, although ….

His rude empire is dead and quartered today like a steer on the meat-block, but I still lie in bed at night and see it tossing, pitching, leaping in the golden sunlight of more than fifty years ago, sweeping up to his very door, stretching a hundred and twenty miles north and south along the river, and rolling as far into the sunset as stock could roam

Reading this paean to the now lost days when the great cattle ranches and even greater cattle herds dominated the mythic West, you know that the author truly lived this life he remembers, that he experienced as a young man the unceasing mutability of this ‘sea of grass’. You would be wrong. That is, Conrad Richter only moved to Albuquerque when he was almost forty years old, and you would be wrong if you thought, as did I, that Richter had lived through the last years of the crowd of beeves and antelopes that once rode over thousands of square miles of New Mexico grassland with nary a town, home, or even outbuilding in sight. Such is the poetic power of his language that we can be forgiven this mistake (yes, I forgive myself in this instance), and can almost be persuaded that he speaks of real events and real people reflected in the mirror of memory a half century later. Such is the benison granted to fiction, to make more true than artless nature the vision of other peoples and other times.

To the newcomer in our Southwestern land it seems that the days are very much alike, the same blue sky and unchanging sunshine and endless heat waves rising from the plain. But after he is here a year he learns to distinguish nuances in the weather he would never have noticed under a more violent sky; that one day may be clear enough, and yet some time during the night, without benefit of rain or cloud, a mysterious desert influence sweeps the heavens. And the following morning there is air clearer by half than yesterday, as if freshly rinsed by storm and rain.

Conrad Richter’s Sea Of Grass is like an Icelandic saga writ small upon a landscape writ large. The intricate genealogies and intertwined characters of the sagas are whittled down to only three, four, five actors in the brief drama of this novelette, while the twisted paths leading through the mountains between the narrow fjords of the tiny island of the North are replaced by the most expansive horizons imaginable beneath a hot but nurturing sun. And while the sagas seem always to involve violent action—and often burning—and carefully cultivated hatred, in Sea Of Grass the action is nuanced and often ‘offstage’, the emotional turmoil only guessed at for every character save the memorializing narrator. At the heart of the story is the helpless love of Colonel Brewton for the lovely Lutie from St. Louis, the lord of cattlemen hopeless before the strange female power of the woman who detests the large and lonely land from which the Colonel’s own power derives. Lutie turns heads wherever she appears, including that of our narrator, Colonel Brewton’s nephew, Hal. A dark and unspoken shadow lies between Lutie and her husband, a shadow which reflects the clash between the Colonel and the new district attorney Brice Chamberlain. The up and coming lawyer means to break up the endless ranch of the Bar B brand—the Brewton brand—and to support the ‘nesters’, immigrants who seek to turn the ‘sea of grass’ of the title into farmland. With deft strokes Richter limns the clash between Brewton and Chamberlain, and this almost stream-of-consciousness narrative shows the collapse into desuetude and decay of the empire of cattle giants under a misguided idea of progress.

Written in 1936, this dirge for the Southwestern grasslands may have been influenced by the ecological disaster underway at the time, that devastation of the soil we now call “The Dust Bowl”. And it is true that much of the western United States is better grassland than farmland. But the king of New Mexico beeves that Richter portrays in Sea Of Grass owes more to a devotion to strong men than to ecological, economic, or even Western history. (Clashes between cowmen and farmers, or the related dust-ups between the cattle ranchers and sheepherders, rarely ended up only in the courtroom, and at times erupted into full-scale war.) But Richter has created an almost godlike father figure doomed to fall into tragedy, just as all fathers must eventually be revealed to have feet of clay. Here the tragedy, in all its aspects—the Colonel’s marriage, the fights between ranch and farm, between country and city—the tragedy is visited upon and fulfilled by the youngest son of Colonel and Mrs. Brewton, Brock. Spoiled and erring, Brock sneers at the Brewton name and its import, and the young man’s fate ties together the dark threads of the story in a heartrending climax to this elegy of the old west and the towering figures that once rode across the vast plains as their rightful dominion, only to subside once more under the waves of time.

I believe now that every piece of news about Brock my uncle read in the Albuquerque and Denver papers was a secret Apache lance in his heart. His forehead was incommunicable as an old rawhide and branded like one with the mark of the band of his hat. And of what went on behind it he never spoke.

The prose of Sea Of Grass has been compared to that of Zane Grey’s Riders Of The Purple Sage, but that is to compare poetry with doggerel. Richter’s genius is to present a poetry of just those men and women who never speak their innermost truths, but live them in their every act and choice. The first-person narrative of Hal flows true and natural through this book like a burbling brook in spring, and his memory of his uncle and Lutie evokes clearly their deep character and the sway they still have upon him years later. But it is the silences that Richter somehow manages to convey in his writing, the unknowableness of the inner life of the two main protagonists of the novel and their secret thoughts over all that came between them. And the flowing narrative with its sparse dialogue also conjures up just the sort of inner monologue a man used to riding for miles across an endless land beneath an infinite sky might have. Some loves are not made stronger by talking about them, but by living inside them and through them and, at times, in spite of them.

The MONTH at Goodspeed’s Book Shop (May 1930, Vol. I, No. 8), by Norman Dodge

Just one of the many delightful issues of the “PAMPHLET concerning books, prints and autographs” found in the famous Boston book store Goodspeed’s Book Shop, this slim staple-bound tract shows off brilliantly the lucent prose of Norman Dodge, whose trenchant wit, catholic knowledge, and wry observations made every number of this catalogue from the past a treasure perhaps more worthy of esteem than some of the books which The MONTH detailed. The store, alas, is no more; the owner, George Talbot Goodspeed, finally closed the doors in 1995, hoping to move to an online business, only to pass away himself two years later. And so the storied bookstore, first opened by George’s father Charles Eliot Goodspeed in 1898, became defunct, a mere three years shy of the century mark, ending an era, perhaps only a small era in the larger era which sees the final extinction of all bookstores and perhaps all books.

Some bibliographical distinctions may seem of small consequence to those who prefer to do other things than unmask an elusive anonymity or a puzzling colophon, yet the process of solving the mystery of a book’s origin frequently leads to the discovery of facts of unquestioned importance in the history of printing or of literature.

You buys your ticket and you takes your chances

But something of Goodspeed’s Book Shop lives on in these tiny almost monthly (The MONTH was published ten times a year) pamphlets, and somehow one can almost smell the delightful scent of aging yet well tended paper when reading the brief notes and observations about the books, prints, and ephemera which wended into the Boston book shop. The love of the products of the press is obvious in every word, every wry remark, of Mr. Dodge, supported by a large team of experts in the various departments of Mr. Goodspeed’s stores. The editor’s erudition is obvious, and perhaps to be expected in an antiquarian bookseller (and graduate of Harvard), but what is a continual surprise is the humane irony with which Dodge views the products he finds at hand. While honestly describing the products he is (very gently) hawking, he never fails to connect each piece to the larger tapestry of books, history, or even human nature, of which each is a part.

on the South Sea atolls the native sons and daughters were lazy, benighted, and happy. They had never been obliged to make virtue of necessity nor confer nobility on labor. There was little cookery, fewer clothes, some art, small science. Now, we have heard, they shiver in overcoats.

Oh, the power of civilization

Norman Dodge was the editor of this unique antiquarian resource for the entirety of its forty year run, beginning in the year of the Great Depression, 1929. I only have a portion of the complete set, fifty-eight issues from 1930 to 1939 (alas, my collection begins with the seventh number, so I have to content myself with observations following the Great Disaster, not those of the Disaster itself). The entire set is available on microfilm, if you know what that is beyond hearing about it in Cold War movies. The catalogue—or rather, the survey of selections—is still prized by bookpeople for the historical information about prices contained therein, in addition to the many and varied notes about various editions and states passing through Goodspeed’s. Always scrupulous and honest, Dodge spends a little time, for example, in the tract we’re considering now, detailing the various points of difference between the true first edition of Sense And Sensibility and the particular mongrel copy that somehow came to be in the Boston book shop and under the study of the experts at Goodspeed’s. After showing that the book sold in 1912 as a first edition for $175 cannot possibly be so, he speculates as to why various pages were grafted into the volume at hand, and offers the old-but-not-quite-old-enough book for $40. How much this drastic price cut is due to the defects of the book itself, and how much due to the Depression, is a question to which I am ignorant of the answer.

It is amusing to think that instances of carelessness or ignorance are nearly always the causes of the “points” in the most sought books. An author, perhaps being young and more poet than grammarian, misspells the name of a Sanskrit deity. His manuscript goes to press and it is not until the small first issue has been dispersed that some roving eye in a wagging head fixes on the offending letter. In subsequent issues the fault is corrected, but the original sin remains to vex the poet and delight the bibliophile who harries relentlessly all blemishes. From a taint the misspelling becomes a distinction and a badge of priority.

Now the cause is autocorrect, and the mistake will never be corrected

In this one tiny tract we learn about Julia A. Moore, the “Sweet Singer of Michigan”, the Texian Navy (which invites autocorrect to blemish its name), The Daniel Catcher (a poem from 1713 anent the life of the prophet), Enrico Caruso’s caricatures (by, not of), an actual Pequot Indian harpooner, the famous Lord Timothy who authored A Pickle For The Knowing Ones, and McDonald Clarke, who seems to have been the Damon Runyon of early 18th-Century Broadway. As well, there are brief mentions of the Rogerenes (q.v.), Audubon (whom Goodspeed’s were one of the first to notice), and much more.

Clarke resembled Villon with his trick of turning the gossip of the Main Stem to metrical account, yet he differed also, because they say Clarke had no vices. He attended Grace Church, married an actress, was drowned in a cell of the city prison, and done in an oil

Runyon, on the other hand, smoked incessantly and married a dancer, briefly

There are many books in each edition of The MONTH for which modern collectors would give their eyeteeth (or more likely simply extend themselves through the medium of Visa), as well as many offerings for which we must remain puzzled as to why anyone ever—ever!—paid so high a price, especially in 193os dollars. Among the latter are the many prints and etchings being sold hundreds of dollars whilst finer 19th-Century books may be bought for a mere sawbuck. Somewhere in between these two extremes are such works as that mentioned briefly above, and discussed at fair length in this issue of The MONTH, the book which pushed Julia A. Moore into American awareness, The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public. This book of bad obituary poetry by one of the most famous bad poets of all time—and surely the most famous bad American poet—is described in the leading article of this pamphlet with the same anguished love that caused Mark Twain to become devoted to the execrable Mrs. Moore. In May of 1930, you could have bought this terrible poetry book for the same $10; now I see a copy in much worse shape for sale at €750. Alas, that for lack of a time machine we are all forced to live in these pestilential days.

So much poetry! But this is the May number. But so much execrable poetry! Then we can be more certain that you haven’t read it before.

The final remarks from this issue of The MONTH

Unfortunately, one of the rusted staples has just broken off entirely, so I need to put this pamphlet into protective material. Until next time.

The Scarlet Letters & The Glass Village, by Ellery Queen

In my notice of (not really) reaching the “500 Books Read” milestone, I mentioned briefly the book we’re looking at today, which consists of two previously published mysteries slammed together in one volume by Signet in an effort to cash in on the seemingly bottomless wallets of mystery readers. The two books thus combined were The Scarlet Letters (published originally in 1953) and The Glass Village (1954) by the writing team of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee—better known to most as Ellery Queen. Under this pseudonym the two cousins produced a long string of books, of varying quality, and through those mysteries as well as many anthologies and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (edited by Dannay) they cast a very long shadow over the field of American mystery. Most, though not all, of their mystery stories featured the detective Ellery Queen. And they were also among the first to franchise their popular name, allowing other authors to ghostwrite novels under the ‘Ellery Queen’ imprimatur based on plots provided by Dannay, though none of those ghostwritten books featured their eponymous detective. (The noted science fiction author Jack Vance even wrote a couple of these novels.)

I first became interested in the specific titles in this 2 novels volume—well, one of them, at least—through my perusal of Mike Grost’s interesting mystery Web pages, “A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection“, and (of course) specifically his page about Ellery Queen. If you are interested in older stories in the mystery genre, Mr. Grost provides many recommendations and some excellent background and history for tales from the earlier days of this strongest of all genres. He can be a tad frustrating, though, to me at least, through his fervent analytical approach, breaking apart each author and each book as if its essence could be captured thusly; I doubt, for example, that I shall follow his recommendations as to which specific chapters to read for some novels he mentions on his site, as I do insist on reading all the intervening chapters between ‘Chapters 1-10’ and ‘Chapters 21, 24, 30’ (not just for mystery novels, though it does seem especially important for those). Still, I have found good suggestions from his pages, and his tastes seem to dovetail quite often with my own—Melville Davisson Post deserves to be read by every American, in my opinion—and so when he placed The Scarlet Letters 4th among his list of the top novels of Ellery Queen, I had no hesitation in grabbing a copy, which happened to be contained in the 2-in-1 paperback pictured above.

I hated it. No, that’s two strong. I hate only one thing, and never books or music. I can say, rather, that I did not like it, and did not like it very strongly. Indeed, The Scarlet Letters has some interesting points, and there is a persuasive build-up to the final denouement which comes as a nice bit of writerly legerdemain, but ….

The Scarlet Letters finds our author cum amateur detective Ellery Queen and his personal secretary Nikki Porter becoming involved in the lives of a married millionaire couple, Dirk and Martha Lawrence. (This is back when being a millionaire meant something, and in 1953, it meant quite a lot.) This power couple has the perfect marriage, until they don’t, and they begin to show the strain in public, at which point Martha reaches out to Ellery for help. Turns out that Dirk is insanely jealous of Martha, although Martha is a loving, devoted wife worthy of Caesar himself. Dirk has taken to drinking heavily, suffering from severe writer’s block (he and Ellery first met at Mystery Writers of America gatherings), and Martha is at her wit’s end. The solution to this contretemps, or at least Ellery Queen’s solution, is to introduce his own secretary, Nikki, into this stressed and stressful house so that close tabs may be kept upon the situation. So Nikki—who also happens to be Martha’s best friend—goes to live with the Lawrences as a writer’s secretary for Dirk. And then things get worse. And then worse still. And even worse. There is screaming, crying, drunken rages, violence, and what is generally named ‘abuse’ in today’s world, though in 1953 they obviously had a different word for it, if they named it at all. At the end of a long, very long time and seemingly longer novel, there is a big blow-up, some plot twists, and lives are shattered. There is also a crazy ending, made a little more palatable by the fact that our amateur detective learns a little about the law that he really might have known if he had been keeping up on the subject, say by reading Perry Mason mysteries.

Now I’m not going to give too much away, not only because mystery books should be a surprise to the reader, but also because I believe that the less you know about a book at first approach the more its power can take you whither it will. Too much knowledge or hype can ruin your experience, just as the old joke talking about steak points out. If you come to see Citizen Kane for the first time focused solely upon the nickname for Marion Davis’s clitoris, you miss pretty much the entire movie. (Afterwards, sure, go nuts, delve into every detail, nuance, allusion; though you still won’t watch it as often as The Fifth Element.) But I spent perhaps half of this novel ready to scream “Get out!” at the characters. I wanted to tell both Ellery Queen and Nikki Porter to leave what was obviously a bad situation. I particularly blamed Mr. Queen (the character, though obviously the writer shares the blame) for allowing Nikki to remain in a home where the tension was obviously racing towards the breaking point, and not entirely because of the bad husband’s actions. The story also took far too long to develop, and relied upon some fairly silly plot devices (though they did manage to provide the title). I found myself all too distracted, though you may very well have a different experience (as Mr. Grost obviously had), by the menace of encroaching domestic violence and the problem of unbearable marital tension which cannot be solved as easily as one solves a mystery in fiction. And then, after enduring an interminable set of maddening situations to which the only correct response would be, I repeat, “Get out!”, the book ended with tragedy and farce which could not repair the damage to my reader’s soul done by the previous pages.

But hey, that’s just my opinion. At least one other disagrees quite strongly.

In addition, had I not gone out of my way to get this novel, I likely would not have read The Glass Village, which I loved, loved, loved. So just like the old canard about the Chinese old man, I cannot be sure what is bad and what is good.

This story is a very different animal than the tale of privileged power couples among the New York City smart set just discussed, though it also combines tragedy and farce, and our Mr. Ellery Queen (the fictional detective, not the pseudonymous author) does not appear at all. In fact, The Glass Village is the very first novel under the Ellery Queen pseudonym to eschew the eponymous amateur detective. The reasons for this writerly choice are both obvious and intriguing, for the story is set in a (very) small town in New England into which it would have been very difficult to introduce the oh-so-urbane author and sometime sleuth (although this difficulty did not stop Dannay and Lee from grafting Ellery Queen onto a Sherlock Holmes story a dozen years later). The smallness of the town is crucial to the plot, both in terms of the town’s size as well as its mindset. This is not, however, a mere tale of prejudiced yokels, but is a much deeper recounting of a tightly bound community carrying not only the weight of decades of prejudice against outsiders, but also the burden of some of the weightiest ideals which gave birth to the United States of America.

Briefly told, The Glass Village tells of an almost incestuously small village in which a terrible murder is committed, the culprit is apprehended, and the entire town rushes to punish the brutal crime. In a feat of creative brilliance, the novel foists upon the reader a plot founded upon an almost unbelievable notion, that of a kangaroo court condoned by the larger state government for the purpose of quelling possible rebellion and likely further bloodshed. Though the bucolic staging of the small town life seems slow and almost ponderous at the very beginning of the novel, and this reader at least feared that I was reading another story as disengaging as The Scarlet Letters, every pastoral step through the bovine village in the opening chapters turned out to be both necessary and efficient at crafting the perfect setting for the jewel of a story to follow. Without giving too much away—heck, I’m hardly going to talk about the actual story at all—the slow pace of the first pages turns out to tell us everything we need to know and to make credible the incredible events which are to follow.

The book was originally published in 1954, and it is no accident that it came out in the same year as the Army hearings which finally began to unravel to maddening grip of Joseph McCarthy upon the very neck of democracy in the USA. The Glass Village is a jeremiad against that insensate rage and rush to judgment which forms all too large a part of the American history of Red Scares, anti-immigrant laws and movements, and—to our eternal shame—lynchings. But somehow Dannay and Lee have crafted in this novel a tale which does not wallow in ungainly allegory, does not hit the reader over the head with the hammer of Truth. Instead, their story reveals a deeper strain of high morality, and shows the very real passions which propel men and women into both the highest and the lowest actions which are both called by the name ‘patriotism’. The characters in The Glass Village are not so easily distinguished as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ as those of, say, The Crucible, though some take similar unjustifiable actions. Instead, they are shown as very human, in the worst but also the best sense of the word.

But this is also a mystery story, and a darn good one at that (though I confess I spotted the key point early on). Where The Scarlet Letters had an all-too-believable plot ruined by unbelievable actions on the part of some of the main characters, The Glass Village has an altogether ridiculous plot—tragedy as farce, and comedy as terror—which somehow works on every level. It is a worthy successor to the best of the Uncle Abner stories. The main protagonist, a world-weary major recently returned from his second war (in Korea) who had lived in Shinn Corners (the titular village) as a child, is almost a prototypical outsider, but one who has a claim to belong. Strangely touched by his brief encounter with the true beauty residing in this fragile town, his cynicism will be forever changed, transmuted into something not entirely free of skepticism, but no longer resistant to those stirrings of the human heart which we moderns expend so much effort trying to suppress.

If you are looking for a Catechism for your young Catholic friend or family member who thinks that The Lego Movie was cool and who might possibly believe that Raiders of the Lost Ark is still relevant, you need look no farther than Kevin and Mary O’Neill’s Catechism of the Seven Sacraments, a comic book version of part of the larger Catechism of the Catholic Church, illustrated with LEGO®, with all the ‘Nihil obstat’ and Imprimaturs you need to feel doctrinally safe giving it to kids. Additionally, you get the latest interpretations of Covenant Theology from Pope Emeritus (!) Benedict XVI et. al., with its fancy focus on the Abrahamic covenant instead of the pesky Mosaic one. Written by a couple with an axe to grind against another’s LEGO® Bible, so the back of the book copy says, “this book makes profound theological concepts accessible to both the Catholic and the curious, the child and the adult.”

Of course, this is not a LEGO® production, as the publisher makes clear on the copyright page, as well as right there on the back of the book. No, this product is one of a host of Christian products using LEGO® but hiding behind the fig leaf of “brick-illustrated” denomination for their productions. At some point, I may pursue more deeply the legal intricacies of this use of LEGO® products for Christian wares, as I did in my investigation of so-called “Christian parody music”. My favorite example of LEGO® Christian products is Father Leopold Celebrates, which includes a Roman Missal and Lectionary, as well as Father Leopold’s collar, made especially for this item. (Full disclosure, I get nothing if you bought that item by clicking that link, except a small sad feeling deep inside.) Yes, some day I may delve more deeply into the world of LEGO® Christian warez, but that day is not that day.

And I honestly learned some things from this book, which isn’t too surprising, as I was not raised Catholic, but rather lapsed Baptist. (Though I turned out to be a crypto-Methodist, which is an entirely different story.) I learned just what to do with a Rosary, and some deets about the sacrament of Holy Orders, and …. Well, that’s mostly it. The rest is interesting doctrinal assertions, but having just read Voltaire’s “Ingenuous” I wasn’t completely convinced by the “brick-illustrated” argument placing the rite of confession in the Bible, and of course R. W. Morgan’s St. Paul In Britain—whatever else its faults may be—makes a strong case against the Bishop of Rome being more than just one among many bishops. But this is a Catholic book, so I am not surprised by any of these. And I wasn’t surprised by the bloody Jesus, either. Oh, the scourging. LEGO® Jesus does suffer here.

Inspired by “questionable interpretations in a popular brick illustrated Bible”, the authors set out to create this doctrinally safe story of the Seven Sacraments, and they quite honestly do a pretty good job. They are especially good with water scenes, and their set pieces—such as King David’s throne, or the plagues of Egypt—are worth the price of this book. The price I paid, that is, being next to nothing as I discovered it in a Little Library whilst walking our dogs. I suggest you pick up your copy in the same manner.

Perhaps the doctrinal issues with the popular “brick-illustrated” Bible are deeper than the fact that it (I’m guessing that The Brick Bible is what’s meant) uses a ghost figure for the Holy Ghost, or that sex and birth are depicted. Perhaps not. Certainly Catechism of the Seven Sacraments avoids using a ghost, and instead uses a funny little figure that I’m guessing is a dove, though it at times looks like a white rubber ducky about to drown itself.

And maybe it’s just being catty to despise the horrid font used, with the ‘H’ that is simply distracting and pointless, though I’m sure that’s the font the software came with. But reading through the nearly 300 pages is hard going, and as cloying as you might suspect. A lot of work went into this production, and I wonder what the kids think about this now that they’re older. (Not that much older; this was published in 2018, in the Before Time.)

There is also the Pentecost, which in this LEGO® version makes the descent of the Holy Spirit look like the apostles have flaming bags of poop on their heads.

But these are mere foibles, and though I was tempted to file this under The Banality Of Feeble, it is no worse than many other Christian tracts that I have read, and that I have and still do love. So you can check it out, if you’re into that sort of thing. In fact, you can get it on Amazon in a package deal with Father Leo celebrating mass.

And you can use the extravagant church backgrounds for your Zoom meetings, or just to remember what going to church was like.

Hopefully, you won’t have the same issue with this book that finally became a deal breaker for me: the lead narrator in the book, Fulton by name (which just happens to be the name of one of the authors’ kids), goes through the entire book wearing a backwards baseball cap. I guess that’s supposed to be … cool? (This is a slight exaggeration; he has his hat off once, whilst talking to some priests.) You know what’s cool? Smores. Though I’m not sure that LEGO® Smores are for me.

So … it’s the kind of thing that people who enjoy this kind of thing will find enjoyable. Maybe that means you. In which case, you can enjoy the spectacle. Even Charlton Heston couldn’t chew this scenery, that’s for sure.

And don’t forget the scourging.