R.S. Benedict
Welcome to this month’s bonus episode of Rite Gud, the podcast that helps you write good for this edition of the book club, we’re talking about Leonora carrington’s The hearing trumpet. Joining me is Gwen C Katz. Gwen, you recommended this book. Would you like to tell us why?
Gwen C. Katz
Well, Leonora Carrington is an artist who I’ve been really interested in ever since I studied pottery in college, and she’s one of those people who just her work is so magnetically fascinating, you just get drawn into it. But her literary career, I feel like, is a lot less known. I think it exists in this kind of interesting space between like fantasy and literary fiction that I find really fascinating and also just really, really fun. Yeah, this
R.S. Benedict
is a really fun book to read. Everything that happens is a big surprise. You don’t really see anything coming in this book.
Gwen C. Katz
No, no. Like you’re preparing yourself, if you’re reading this, preparing yourself for, like, what wacky thing is going to happen. I assure you, the actual stuff that happens is wilder than what you’re thinking. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
it’s it’s fun. And putting together an outline, because I always put together an outline for every episode. It was kind of difficult for this book because I don’t know how to outline a work like this, I kind of scrawled out some some disoriented notes. I feel like I maybe did a disservice to the book by using Google Documents instead of, like scrolling it on a napkin in crayon or something that would have might have been more appropriate. Well,
Gwen C. Katz
the unruliness is definitely like very much part of it, right? It’s like even the structure of the book just refuses to obey your social strictures about how things
R.S. Benedict
work. Yeah, the structure of this book is wild. It’s all over the place. Crazy shit just keeps happening. There are illustrations, some really, I think, deliberately shitty illustrations, for no reason. There’s there. Do they add anything? I don’t know, but they’re there. I appreciate them. It just gets weirder and crazier and crazier in unexpected ways as it goes on, it starts off as a story about an old woman whose kids, whose ungrateful son dumps her in a nursing home. Then it ends up being about a weird cult like nursing home. And then it goes even wackier. But even throughout this progression, like there’s a huge section where it’s very obvious that someone has just accidentally ingested poison, and then we just taken aside for like, what is it? 75 pages to talk about a horny pagan nun,
Gwen C. Katz
right? It’s this enormous filibuster that’s also itself equally wacky and completely off the rails, but yes, it’s just this wild diversion from the main story.
R.S. Benedict
I think you you made a note that there were a lot of discarded plot threads, like there’s the whole thing about this institution. We sort of expect in this kind of story that the the heroine will sort of triumph over the institution and put the crappy doctors in their place and beat them up. And that doesn’t really happen. We don’t they just sort of go away.
Gwen C. Katz
We eventually expect like we’re gonna expose the institution, right? Yeah, weird, and we’re not really sure what they’re making these ladies do these weird exercises and stuff. And then we’re gonna figure out what, what, what they’re trying to accomplish. And it’s gonna be something nefarious, like she certainly goes in there, certain that they’re up to something very, very dark, right? And and we just don’t, they just, they just become irrelevant. And then there’s this other part where Natasha, one of the women there, is doing her own occult stuff that’s secret from the people who are running the institution. She’s doing this on her own, and she invites the protagonist to join in, and we just never find out what she was doing. Yeah, it feels
R.S. Benedict
like the setup for some sort. Gothic horror story, but then where it’s gonna you’re gonna find out they’re trying to summon some evil gut. But no, just it just stops. They just leave. She just leaves, and that’s how she just leaves, because because of poisoning. Mod,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah, the best character. Oh, poor mod. Poor
R.S. Benedict
mod got done. So, dirty man,
Gwen C. Katz
she did. She did, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I am. I am upset for mod. I am. She just wanted some fudge. She just wanted fudge and weed. I mean, whom among us?
Gwen C. Katz
Yeah, mod is, and she is interesting because she is the kind of, the most feminine of the women, right? She’s the one who does all the, all the classic old lady stuff her knitting, and her little frilly Lacey, you
R.S. Benedict
know, and she’s very demure, too. And, yeah, you know, whereas the other old women, there’s like a, there’s like a super horny G mill, if there’s the Marquise who sees herself as, like a word general, there’s, you know, all these really wild characters. And then Paul is just who
Gwen C. Katz
just never stops talking.
R.S. Benedict
She cannot stop talking,
Gwen C. Katz
just a constant monolog. And you just have to just leave at some point, just let her keep talking.
R.S. Benedict
And then Maude is just this sweet old lady doing needlework. And her name, Maude is the most like little old lady name ever. And then you find out that she’s got this secret double life as like a weed dealer hiding from the cops.
Gwen C. Katz
Yeah, yeah. So it’s kind of interesting that we have this cast of all these women who old ladies, who are so different, and that they’re kind of the the entire main cast of the story. Because I think in most works, you know, old women don’t appear at all in the cast of most fiction. And if they do, usually their role is like the old lady, like that’s their personality. She’s
R.S. Benedict
the little old lady who like bakes cookies and it says, Hello, dear everywhere this
Gwen C. Katz
and so seeing them present here as the all these very distinct people who are all really unique is really kind of pushing back against kind of our cultural idea that old ladies are irrelevant, that they don’t have individuality. They’re not people. You can there’s any reason you’d like get to know who might be interesting, who might be individual,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, just thinking about JD Vance’s whole weird spiel about what is the purpose of post menopausal women? The purpose of post menopausal women is to raise their grandchildren, basically, and that’s it. Well, I can’t impregnate you anymore. I don’t want to sexually objectify you anymore. Go raise children. This is why you exist. Fuck you don’t. That’s it. That’s, that’s all. And I’m not trying to knock like, taking care of your grandkids, that’s, that’s a beautiful, wonderful thing. But, like, that’s not, that’s not the only thing.
Gwen C. Katz
Well, and these women, we see the what do you then? What are you when you get to the point where you can’t do that or don’t need to do that anymore, right?
R.S. Benedict
Because she has a grandson, he’s an at he’s a failed son, he’s a failed grandson, He’s trash, and her son is trash, and her daughter in law is trash who won’t share her fucking candy. No one in this book is sharing candy with anyone else, unless there’s rat poison in it and it’s some shit.
Gwen C. Katz
This book does kind of give you mixed messages about sharing candy, doesn’t it? Like,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, yeah. I mean, Carmela shares chocolate biscuits, and she’s a queen. She’s the best fucking character in this book. She rocks. I fucking love Carmella. Carmela, so fucking cool. I love a bit everything she says is insane, and it all turns out to be true. I loved her. A bit about her, she’s like, Oh, police dogs aren’t animals. What do you mean they’re not animals? Well, policemen aren’t people, so police dogs aren’t animals. God did Hell yeah, impeccable
Gwen C. Katz
logic, Carmela.
Gwen C. Katz
Carmela, like we’ve all had, like the Dottie great aunt or something, who’s always going off on some weird nabbing about something weird. But what I love about Carmilla is that she’s very Batty, but she also feels very powerful to me because she goes off on these weird tangents of imaginary ideas about what the institute is going to be like, or writing a letter to a complete stranger and making up this elaborate backstory about what this guy is like, and giving their entire personality and stuff. But when she does is it draws people in like she forces people to engage with her imaginary world on her terms, right? Yeah, and nobody just tells her, or they don’t succeed at telling her, like, okay, but this is nonsense. They end up being like, what are we gonna do about the police dogs? The 40 police dogs that are gonna attack me while you’re busting me out of the day the Institute, in some sense,
R.S. Benedict
I’ll get a tommy gun. Obviously,
Gwen C. Katz
I
R.S. Benedict
love that too. That her plan to dig a tunnel, you know, to The Great Escape. It like it doesn’t work out, but not because it’s impossible, but because she simply stumbles upon a uranium mine and becomes fabulously rich in the process, and just pays a guy to drive her in.
Gwen C. Katz
It feels like her, like imagination has just kind of warped the actual world, ultimately, and kind of created her own reality just out of all this totally wild stuff she’s been saying,
R.S. Benedict
God, Carmel is so fucking cool. I love Carmel.
Gwen C. Katz
She’s the rattle. She’s absolutely why she would, you would want her to be your best friend, right?
R.S. Benedict
Absolutely like, but, but so much of this book, this is very much a feminist novel, and much of it is about the way old women are dismissed and discarded when it’s like, you know, you’re not reproductive anymore. Go away now, please. So I feel like the purpose of postmenopausal women in this novel is to do witchcraft and to restore the holy grail to its rightful owner, the, you know, the goddess of bees,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah, try to explain the plot.
R.S. Benedict
I don’t I, I don’t know. I don’t think I can’t, but there’s, there’s a lot of shenanigans. They just become involved in all kinds of feminist pagan witchcraft and go to war against all sorts of patriarchal institutions, including psychiatry and the Knights Templar and, of course, the Catholic Church. It’s kind of funny to follow up a very Catholic ish book with this book, you know, going from the sparrow, which is about a Jesuit who has a very bad time to the hearing trumpet.
Gwen C. Katz
Well, I’m sure the Jesuits were having a bad time here too. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
they weren’t having a good time in this one either. They did get attacked by bees. Yeah, attacked by bees, which, of course, you know, bees are like a matriarchal species, and the only fertile bee in the hive is the queen. Most worker bees, you know, they’re sterile females. So it’s like, again, non reproductive females, like our like our protagonist and like the main characters. No, they’re getting shit done. They’re making honey. They’re they’re stinging people. They’re reclaiming the holy grail from the sterile, from the sterile male conspiracy. It’s pretty rad. And it’s just like, in a way, obviously, these women are discarded by society, and that’s that’s bad. But also, outside of society, they turn completely feral because there’s no sense in there’s this artificial attempt to get them to conform to this weird cult like self improvement regimen, and they’re just like, No fuck that we’re adopting wolves. We are fucking going for it.
Gwen C. Katz
So there’s definitely this space that we see, you know, a lot of people outside the societal mainstream can capture where it’s just there’s no place for you to exist in society’s framework. And that can be a kind of freedom you can claim, right? Yeah, like she was just minding her own business, living in the back of the house, you know, brushing her cats and bothering nobody. But that was still unacceptable, and so she gets packed off. So, you know, if, if just living in the back of the house, brushing the caps is already like too intrusive on society, like, why would you try to conform to societal rules? You’re clearly never gonna succeed. You’re clearly always, just by your very existence, gonna be a problem and something that needs to be gotten rid of. So you may as well just, you know, find the Bee Goddess and and steal the Holy Grail and revolt against the people running your your old folks home,
R.S. Benedict
right? Destabilize the polar ice caps. It’s fine. Yeah, it’s fine. If they had just given her candy, the equator would have stayed put. Everything would be normal. They just couldn’t share their fucking candy
Gwen C. Katz
or let her walk through the house that she lives in.
R.S. Benedict
I think it’s so interesting that it’s called the hearing trumpet, because that’s like, a lot of horrible stuff happens that isn’t really commented on as being horrible. It’s just treated in this very offhand dismissive way, like the death of Maude, not just that she, she’s, I guess, I don’t know if you’d call it murder, because she wasn’t the target of it, but that she, you know, died in such a she. Be unfair way, but also that the institution just doesn’t give a shit, and is so incredible that she’s treated with so much disrespect after her after she dies, too, that there’s absolutely zero interest in like doing a proper autopsy and finding the culprit and punishing the culprit, that the the women, the other women of the of this institution have to go on a hunger strike to just to get the murderers kicked out, because it’s like, we don’t, we don’t want to hang out with these fucking people who poison and then people we and they get scolded for it, like, you were mean to these people just because they poisoned someone. Like, yeah, yeah, we were. And then
Gwen C. Katz
they ultimately get rid of them. Carmela pays the institution off, and that’s how they’re right. It’s not because they finally decided, like, actually, we don’t want these old ladies to starve to death on their hunger strike or anything like that. No, they don’t give a shit. No, they don’t. Yeah, and the like, oh no. She just died of kidney failure. She’s old, so whatever old people die, right? Who cares? Right? Is very much their attitude, like, we just put these people here as a place to store them until they die. So when they do, like, okay,
R.S. Benedict
okay, bye, whatever. I just want to fudge man. Rip. Mod, Sif, poor. We love you mud. Love so fucking cool stitching marijuana pillows.
Gwen C. Katz
That’s just such a wonderful like the old ladies get up to so many wild shenanigans, and they’re all connected to, like, old lady stuff. It’s kind of amazing sewing, sewing, needlepoint, but it’s poison fudge and weed pillows,
R.S. Benedict
gardening in a uranium mine. You know, just normal things, normal old lady things, like, one of the things in this book that’s not overtly commented on, but when you think about it, is so fucked up. Is okay? This book’s called the hearing trumpet. And it’s called the hearing trumpet because our protagonist is hearing impaired, and it starts with her receiving a very dangerous, in some ways, gift that changes her life, which is the gift from Carmella as always, of a hearing trumpet, one of those like old timey. You know, before you had hearing aids, you just had basically a tube you’d stick to your ears so you could hear good. You know, she gets a hearing trumpet, so now she can actually hear things if she wants to. And she starts hearing how shitty her son’s family actually talks about her, and all the shitty things people say about her or to her. And you sit for a moment, you realize, like, okay, her son didn’t even give her a fucking hearing aid, like her son obviously knew she was half deaf, yeah, because they complained about it her, but it did not occur to him to just get her a hearing trumpet. And this is not an expensive, high tech gadget. This is literally a tube. Is a tube. He couldn’t get her a tube so she could hear. Good, nope,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah. It’s just considered irrelevant. Why would she need to know what’s going on, right? Yeah, as long as she goes with you and doesn’t make a fuss when you when you shove her into the old folks home, like it’s not relevant that she’d be able to, like, be part of your family and communicate, and her speech is another thing, right? She has no teeth. She’s 92 she’s lost all her teeth, and they constantly refer to her family does like gibbering, like this awful, drilling, gibbering, horrific thing and but the thing is, nobody ever actually has trouble understanding her, right? It?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it’s
Gwen C. Katz
just they. They don’t like, I guess, the way she talks, but they act like she’s this incomprehensible, like thing that’s beyond being able to communicate. But when she actually does talk to them, they understand her perfectly fine, right? They just kind of want to dismiss what she has to say, because they don’t care.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it’s just this real casual cruelty to these old ladies, just so many of them throughout the book, just incredible casual cruelty about how they’re treated in general. But yeah, it God. How do you how do you even talk about this? But how do you even seg from one point to another? All I can think is, I want to know when Yorgos lanthanos is going to turn this book into a movie, because it seems like it was made for him. I don’t know who Emma Stone would play. Maybe he’s gonna wait for her to get really old so she can play the main lady. But like, yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
wait, wait till she turns 90, and then cast her. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. Because this book feels very, very much like the sort of thing he would love. And that it’s fucking weird. And it’s about old women, and it just goes completely bonkers.
Gwen C. Katz
Yes, yeah, no. I mean, this will look amazing on the screen some of the stuff that happens in the second half, I definitely want to see, like a big screen version of the
R.S. Benedict
old folks home with the separate bungalows shaped like mushrooms and shoes.
Gwen C. Katz
Yeah, they’re always
R.S. Benedict
fucking mummy.
Gwen C. Katz
There’s like, there’s literally a little old lady who lives in a shoe, yeah? And there’s really no explanation for that. They just show up. And that’s how it is. And you’re living in the lighthouse. That’s that’s your house, okay?
R.S. Benedict
Except somebody’s trapped in a tower.
Gwen C. Katz
Somebody is trapped in the tower, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
which is used in kind of like a fortune cookie joke, because that, you know, there’s a bit where somebody, a character, gives everybody these basically fortune cookies, and each of them has some kind of really well chosen prophecy, or something very relevant to the story, or relevant to each individual character, and then our protagonist gets one that says, Help. I’m trapped in a tower, which is very much one of those old jokes of like this fortune cookie. My fortune is help. I’m a prisoner in a fortune cookie factory. What the but like, there is actually an entity trapped in a tower that that gets out and with an explosion and just sort of goes around as the end of the world happens. And from the center of this institution,
Gwen C. Katz
that aspect is so enigmatic, who or what this creature is, even after we see it like it busts out of the tower and then it just leaves. There’s been a bunch of setup about this creature. And when they’re gonna find out what it is, how they’re gonna get it out of the tower or things, and then just tower blows up, it flies away.
R.S. Benedict
It goes, yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
just, just out there. Now,
R.S. Benedict
just flying around. There it is. It’s also, there’s an immortal postman who just kind of shows up. There’s a werewolf there. There’s a lady werewolf who has puppies Good for her. There’s like an what is it? An atomic arc?
Gwen C. Katz
Oh yeah, yeah. Gosh. There’s so much going on in this book that I forgot about the atomic art.
R.S. Benedict
The atomic art, I know because, like, the atomic arc is just in the background, because its function is to escort the werewolf queen.
Gwen C. Katz
Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
that’s really why it exists.
Gwen C. Katz
The king of wolves,
R.S. Benedict
with the wolf King,
Gwen C. Katz
right? Yeah, all this stuff that just shows up in the third act. And, you know, it really kind of starts with Mod. I think that’s really the moment in the plot where it goes from kind of vaguely following being odd, but vaguely kind of following the structure of a story and having a logical through line to just all bets are off, from the part where, like, mod secret is discovered, and then it’s just like social strictures have been thrown off, and everything goes out the window, and all this stuff that’s like, either been concealed or suppressed or just not had A chance to kind of come to the surface, just all busts out at the same time. And now your your friend’s sister, who you never met, turns out to be a werewolf. And, yeah, there’s this postman and the ice caps shift positions and just everything just goes absolutely haywire, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
and I find it interesting too. It’s the death of Maude, and also that her secret is discovered. And you know, we’re giving away everything in the book, so we might as well give away the fact mod is trans, and she’s not the only gender non conforming character in this book, because around, around the time of the death of Maude, we also get this aside, where we get the this very, very long narrative about a nun who her portrait of this. This winking nun appears on the wall of the dining hall in this old folks home slash cult compound. And our protagonist doesn’t like the nun. She thinks this, this lady sinister. She must be bad. She must have been up to no good. But then we get this long, long, long, long account by a hostile priest about how this nun never should have been sanctified, because she was actually very bad, because she did lots of very, very naughty things. She engaged in witchcraft and anti gravity, or magic sex, yeah, midair orgies and that. Like you gotta fuck in order to fly like you can’t just rub the juice on you. You gotta have sex in order to defy gravity. You gotta do it. You gotta screw around. It’s that, that she you. Kidnapped people, murdered people, and also disguised herself as a man wearing a beard in order to try to steal the holy grail from the Knights Templar and return it to its rightful owner.
Gwen C. Katz
But this very elaborate disguise as a man, he had this whole identity, and he had this very opulent costume and stuff, so you know, outfits and this whole carriage, fancy carriage, and everything. So it didn’t feel totally it was very much like a very full persona she was taking on. It wasn’t just like, you know, put on some dude’s clothes so you can sneak in real quick.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t just draw a mustache on. Like, she was really living as this dude. So there’s, there’s a lot of like right in the center of this book is these two gender non conforming characters who, again, both run afoul of the authorities, although one has an easier time defying the authorities throughout most of their life. And that’s a really big part of this book, not just sort of gender but the blurring of lines, or the breaking down of categories. A lot of what’s happening in this book is categories and established rules becoming broken, established categories becoming completely undone, not just violating gender roles, but also, I mean, we have this interspecies creature, the werewolf. We
Gwen C. Katz
have the werewolf. The nun gets pregnant while she’s infiltrating the Knights Templar, and then has this weirdo pregnancy that leads to her giving birth to this like cherub and then she, like, explodes. She explodes, freaking explodes. She
R.S. Benedict
just fucking explodes and leaves, like some really nice perfume,
Gwen C. Katz
a tiny little rag of flesh is all that’s left of her, and that’s what they bury, and that’s her sanctified, like relic of her that everyone is coming and worshiping it’s
R.S. Benedict
just bananas. She just straight up explodes.
Gwen C. Katz
And then the creature in the tower ends up being this, like six winged, feathery humanoid thing. So there’s another kind of animal, human hybrid creature there. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I had trouble figuring this out. Was the creature in the tower, sephirah, because there’s a lot of talk of sephirah. Is that sephirah is, is? I couldn’t help it. They keep making these little, oh, sephirah and his mother. I’m like, well, well, I know about this. I played that game Sephora. He’s mad because the Shinra corporation created Him as the Son of headless clone in order to harness the materia that they are, that they are harvesting from the world. So that’s I don’t, I don’t remember, you know, Final Fantasy seven didn’t make any sense to me either. So made about as much sense as this book, I don’t, I don’t know where Cloud Strife comes into this book. Maybe he’s the immortal postman. I
Gwen C. Katz
mean, the immortal postman, he had quite a long career. He’s been around for, you know, like, 1000 years. So I assume he could, he could have just moonlighted us a lot of things in that time.
R.S. Benedict
I just have to say, What have I just found it absolutely delightful that while he’s out on his rounds, as we’ve entered a new ice age in this book, and he’s still delivering the mail through the snow, through through packs of wolves, the the ladies invite him in for something nice to drink in their cave, because they’re all They’re living in a cave now They’re becoming extremely feral and witchy and, and, you know, living in the heart of the earth here, and his response is to wiggle his fingers and say, Don’t mind if I do,
Gwen C. Katz
you know, I mean, there’s still inviting you in for a cup of raw goat’s milk that just from their goats, that they’re keeping that are, yeah, they got goats. Now there’s goats now, stock on Earth. Who knows, probably billions of people are dead. But you know,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, the postman, very casually, talks about like, Oh yeah, yeah, cities are all dead. Volcanoes everywhere. It’s pretty bad anyway.
Gwen C. Katz
I mean, talk about neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night, like even the freaking polls changing places cannot stop this postman from delivering the mail, right?
R.S. Benedict
But I do kind of like that. I like that. I mean, the messenger God is such a, such a an archetype throughout different cultures, and it’s like, well, yeah, why wouldn’t there be a postman that is a pretty important job. We take it for granted. That’s I, you know what that is? Another like structure of society that we wildly take for granted, like, oh yeah, the Postal Service. Like, it’s a pretty big fucking deal to have that when you read how goddamn hard it was to get a message around, before that existed, before the system existed. It’s like. Holy shit. You just had to find a guy to just go to the place where hopefully you want your shit to go. That’s that was super hard. Imagine if you want on a horse, maybe you’re on a boat, or some shit like every or even back in the day, just on foot. You just had to find a guy like, imagine, every time you wanted to send a message, you just had to fucking find a guy, that’s ridiculous, who happened
Gwen C. Katz
to be going somewhere. Yeah. So these liminal figures, the postman, who can just go across any border, and you just have the sense that, like, they can go anywhere, right? They you can send a letter to any spot in the United States, and a guy will show up there in a little truck and, you know, a little hat, and hand you a letter. And there is a figure, an aspect of that that feels like a lot like those liminal figures like Hermes and everyone who they just go places. Yeah, he just goes places.
R.S. Benedict
He he’s delivering mail to the cave, to the old lady cave, where they’re living with their goats and communing with the bees
Gwen C. Katz
and the and the wolves and the yes, yeah, I love
R.S. Benedict
that. I think it’s Anne just adopts a wolf and refuses to understand that this is, in fact, a
Gwen C. Katz
wolf, right, right? She’s convinced it’s a dog.
R.S. Benedict
She’s a very fluffy dog.
Gwen C. Katz
There’s a pack of very fluffy Alsatians out there, and she doesn’t understand why the goats are suddenly really, really agitated. But I what I like is carmilla’s response, where she is talking about, oh, well, like the tropical and like the elephants are gonna have to grow coats and become wooly mammoths again, and, and some of the tropical animals are probably gonna die or freeze to death, but there’ll be a lot to eat because, you know, all the humans are dying, so, you know, there’s a lot of, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
the remaining animals will have plenty of dead humans to eat. Good for them. She
Gwen C. Katz
just, just does not care at all that, like, civilization is ending here. But, you know, I’m really concerned about how the elephants are doing.
R.S. Benedict
She’s got her lavender limousine and, like, why measures her hair color, which, like, that’s incredible.
Gwen C. Katz
Why should these old ladies care, right? But,
R.S. Benedict
Billy, yeah, why should they give a shit?
Gwen C. Katz
Why should they, like, like,
R.S. Benedict
if any of those people had shared candy with them,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah? Like, clearly the people, like, quite literally, did not give a shit. Like, when one of them dies, yeah, yeah.
R.S. Benedict
Justice for mod, the two, the two poisoners who had to leave the institution. We assume they died. They froze. I hope they were eaten by wolves.
Gwen C. Katz
I guess we just got to assume that anyone who doesn’t actively appear at the end was probably frozen to death. I assume her family was and her her horrible grandson, her
R.S. Benedict
piece of shit grandson, yeah, yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
fine. The cats are carmella’s got the cats and, yeah, the only people she cared about. So yeah, there’s a great bit where her son and daughter in law come to visit her and are telling her, like, oh, Robert’s gotten engaged. Isn’t that wonderful? And and she’s like, I don’t, I don’t care about how my cats, right? Yeah, why would I be happy that Robert got engaged? He’s the asshole who had me kicked out of my house.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah? Fuck Robert, man. He’s terrible. I just love how shitty he is. Love how fucking shitty it’s,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah, yeah. Like so much he did, yeah, riding his loud motorcycle all hours of the day, you know, and he just demands that she get kicked out and sent to a home because she walked through the living room. Well, he was visiting with his friends and like that was so horrible, like she can’t be allowed to do that walk through the living room for 10 seconds.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
what a jerk.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I love how there’s absolutely no attempt to make you feel sorry for him. There’s no flashback explaining why any of the assholes are the way they are. There’s like this bitch sucks.
Gwen C. Katz
Yeah? I mean,
R.S. Benedict
she freezes to death. Fuck her, man. They
Gwen C. Katz
die implicitly, like, even the gambit the couple that are, yeah, you
R.S. Benedict
don’t hear anything about them, but we assume they’re buried under the snow. Yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
I think, I think she says, like that. She’s like, Oh yeah, the Institute where the gambits are probably buried under all the rubble from when the tower exploded and the whole place, bros, like, but yeah, there’s no, like, big comeuppance here. Like, the world kicked these ladies out and didn’t care what happened to them. And so, like, in return, the ladies do not care what happens to the entire rest of the world. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
the world ends. And they’re just like, okay, that’s fine. Let’s kick. We got this, yeah, we got some chocolate biscuits. We’ll be okay for a while, yeah, as long
Gwen C. Katz
as we can keep excavating supplies out of the out of the frozen wastes,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, they’ll be okay. They got Mahjong to help. Mahjong the the the
Gwen C. Katz
chauffeur, yes,
R.S. Benedict
the trusty chauffeur.
Gwen C. Katz
But these ladies who are supposed to be, like, one of them’s 98 like Veronica’s 98 Yeah, they do kind of get more and more powerful as the story goes on, right? Like they’re basically on this Arctic expedition. And they seem fine, right? They seem they seem like they’re just perfectly spry and active, and they’re going around. They’re teaching the little wolf pups to drive a sledge and stuff and or pull a sledge rather,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, and that, Mrs. Leatherby, our protagonist gets better by by killing and eating herself in a cauldron, like a fairy tale that is such a wild scene, she just goes into this tower, or whatever, where she sees herself, but like a little healthier and a little better just being very witchy over a cauldron, and then her other self sticks A big like fork into her, shoves her into the pot, and cooks her and eats her. And then she’s fine. And then she’s, I love the way that happens, where it’s like, she she’s experiencing being speared and shoved into a pot, and then suddenly she’s stirring the pot, and she’s like, which of these was me?
Gwen C. Katz
Which?
R.S. Benedict
I don’t know. I just feel a little better now. I feel pretty good now, I don’t know, into
Gwen C. Katz
the pot with two onions and one carrot, very specific number of vegetables there. Yes, this like alchemical rebirth, where, you know, very, very witchy. There’s so much witchy shit that happens in this, in this book, and the fact that it doesn’t make a lot of sense. I love this because it’s really the opposite of these books that have these very strict, like hard magic systems that operate by rules, and they define here’s how the rules work. Here’s how magic works. You can do this, this and this. You have to do this to make this happen. And then the rest of the book will be them, following and exploiting the rules and using them to do magic and win battles or whatever they’re trying to do. And this idea of magic in surrealist circles is so opposite. This is very wild, untamed, like primal magic, and it does not operate by rules. It does not operate by logic at all. It wouldn’t really be magical. It’s just freaking, you know, a different kind of science, if it is all by rules, right? What makes it magical is just absolutely anything can happen.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it’s interesting that you mentioned that that this is, there are a lot of fantastic elements, but I don’t think anyone would really call this a fantasy novel, and that is noted in the afterword. In my edition has an afterword by Olga tokarzuk. I’m probably mispronouncing that name. Who notes? Well, part of the reason that this doesn’t get that label is that genre, fantasy genre, speculative fiction, you know, it has certain expectations of structures and rules. What you expect certain things to happen in a fantasy novel, like if there’s if a tower explodes and a beast flies out of it, we expect that our hero is going to have to deal with the beast right? Our hero is going to have to, like, battle the beast, or maybe he’s going to befriend it and ride it, right? And that doesn’t happen. It just fucks off. We expect, you know, all these like, little things happen that are some feel like in a typical genre novel. This would be a setup for a mystery. This would be a setup for a Lovecraftian Horror Story. This would be a setup for this kind of story, that kind of plot, with this kind of structure, and these were going to expect certain beats, and it doesn’t happen. It’s just Nope. There is a monster there. It is,
Gwen C. Katz
like, there’s a bit where one of these other ladies tells the protagonist that she needs to solve three riddles to get into the tower and find out what’s in it. Yeah. And she does solve all three riddles, but she doesn’t need to do so in order to get into the tower, because it just fucking blows up, right? And it just explodes. Yeah. It was not caused by her solving the riddles. Also, I love that these three riddles like the first one is a logical riddle with a solution that makes sense. The second one sort of makes sense, but feels like kind of a reach and has some bits in it that are kind of weird, esoterica. And then the third one is complete non. That’s right. Third one is just complete esoterica that nobody could possibly solve, right?
R.S. Benedict
It’s fantastic. It fucking rocks, and I love it. And I would love to take every like I would love to just force Brandon Sanderson to read this book, to buy a little Vico treatment, you know, just like open, force his eyes open, and be like you’re gonna fucking read this. This is what magic is, piece of shit,
Gwen C. Katz
right? And magic, you know, it ties in really closely with the women’s experience with surrealism. Specifically, right? This was women were kind of believed to have, like this, closer tie to magic, the mystical, mystical. They’re mad women. They’re like, inherently like, less rational, they’re kind of childlike. They’re kind of connected to nature. But this is all you know, the ideas they had at the time in this movement. And that meant that they could access this kind of magical power that men were just like too, too rational and too civilized to connect with, which on the one hand is very powerful, and on the other hand, is very patronizing and obnoxious. But the women who were involved in this movement really, really harnessed the power side of it, and they really rejected the part, really just rejected the male assumed role in that kind of duality entirely. It’s like, nope, nope. We’re just eating that entire concept. You guys can just just just fuck off like you’re not contributing anything here. You know, if we can act like this magical, primal essence, that what do we even need you for?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah. Like, why we’re the primal essence, you’re there to harness it. What if I don’t want to wear a fucking harness for you? Right? Right?
Gwen C. Katz
Because the idea is like, you know, and then this male artist will date this, you know, creative, wonderful, magical, younger woman, and she’ll inspire him and inspire his art and be his muse. But once women start making art themselves, then it becomes like, well, what? Yeah, this paradigm no longer fits. Like, if the woman can be her own Muse and create her own art, then then it’s like, it just seems like the men are just kind of rubbish at art, right? Yeah, like you’re just, if you guys are cut off from, you know, by your masculinity, from the magic that makes people creative and makes people discover stuff then, like, what are we? What are you even here for? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, you mentioned. You’ve mentioned in the discord that Carrington fucking hated the the whole obsession with the female muse. She just hated that shit.
Gwen C. Katz
She hated it. Yeah, yeah, because she had joined the surrealist group she’d run off when she was 19 with Max Ernst, this surrealist artist who was 40 and married at the time, and and they, in one sense, filled this very typical Muse and artist relationship. But on the other hand, she was herself, this really accomplished, talented artist, and she really chafe against the idea that the group had, that women just, you know, you just inspire us. You just sit there and, you know, be pretty and and maybe, like, a little bit odd and
R.S. Benedict
little manic pixie dream girl for me,
Gwen C. Katz
exactly. Yeah. I’m interested in, rather, whether you could think of like surrealism as kind of the roots of the Manic pixie dream girl. I feel like there’s some like investigation that could be done on that front, because there’s, like, a lot of connection there. That’s that said, I’m not positive The Surrealists made that one up. I imagine it’s probably, I’m
R.S. Benedict
sure it’s a much older thing, going back a long way. You also noted that in the little story within a story of the abbess, aka the winking nun that we have sort of a the abbess is kind of creepy friend who has a male muse, like, Who’s this young choir boy, and it’s such an icky relationship,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s
R.S. Benedict
uncomfortable. This
Gwen C. Katz
older bishop who just like, as a recall, just freaking kidnaps this choir boy, pretty much, and is holding him prisoner and definitely having sex with him, like, pretty clearly, and also using him as this source of like, amazing inspiration he’s. So spiritual, you know, and he’s so young and innocent, and it’s so inspiring to, you know, having me in my life. And, yeah, we both see like, it’s interesting how weird that feels when it’s a male character in that role. And it just brings to the surface, this was always a super creepy dynamic, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
and even our abbess almost has that going too with this young prince who she’s kid kidnapped. But he’s like, not cool with this, so her solution is to feed him enough magic juice in the hopes of getting him into her. But it goes very wrong. He becomes can, like, like in a lot of 1960s PSAs against psychedelic drugs, he became, comes convinced that he’s a bird and tries to fly off the towers.
Gwen C. Katz
Yes, another like human animal. Uh, connection there. But,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, he’s too masculine. He can’t do it. He can’t turn into a bird because he’s too manly.
Gwen C. Katz
He doesn’t quite make that connection.
R.S. Benedict
I don’t know. I just saw it as I don’t know if this is intentional, but that is very much the 1960s like this is what happens when you smoke too much marijuana, things like one hippie got two turns on with the devil’s lettuce and thought he was a bird and tried to fly by flapping his arms and jumped off of an overpass. And this one totally groovy babysitter took too much marijuana and put a baby in the oven.
Gwen C. Katz
Well, the connection I made there is Max Ernst. He is like animal Alter Ego. Was a bird, and he had this whole thing it, where he kind of confused humans with birds, and he it was a lifelong thing, like ever since he was a small child, conflating humans and birds. Yeah. So we see that. I’m not sure how much of a direct connection that is to what happens with the the abbesses guy, but that’s definitely something that popped into my mind. Oh, yeah. And then again, with, of course, with so far, the another bird humanoid. It’s got a wings covered with feathers, and, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, the one winged angel with animator, we gotta flash out a lot of really big summons. But if you get, but if you go through the Knights of the Round subquest, he’s pretty easy to get. Sorry,
Gwen C. Katz
I have absolutely no idea who or what Safira is supposed to be referencing, like, if it’s a thing from folklore, I’m not familiar with it. I
R.S. Benedict
should have looked this up. I assume it’s a thing. I put no effort into this. I’m sorry. No, no, no. I mean, I
Gwen C. Katz
don’t know either. Not, I
R.S. Benedict
just raw dogged this book,
Gwen C. Katz
not that I know of, because, I mean, it would also be very on brand to just straight up makeup. Oh yeah, Zafira. Don’t you know who that is, the six wing bird dude?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, that’s like, that really expensive makeup counter.
R.S. Benedict
No, I’m sorry.
Gwen C. Katz
No, no, my autocorrect keeps wanting me to say Sephora. Like
exactly,
Gwen C. Katz
actively hard to Google this topic, but Google
R.S. Benedict
right now is just gonna be like you meant Sephiroth, right? Like, no, you meant Sephora, right. No,
R.S. Benedict
I did not mean either of those things.
Gwen C. Katz
But we do see connections to folklore and mythology in here. There’s references to, like, Epona, the Celtic goddess. There’s references to the to the seed. Who are these? Like, it’s Celtic race of, like, elven people who were very magical,
R.S. Benedict
hecka T Goddess of witchcraft, yeah, yeah.
Gwen C. Katz
Because Carrington was, she was raised by this British aristocratic family, and her dad was English, but her mom was Irish, and so she was raised with her grandma telling her all these stories from, oh, hell yeah. Celtic folklore, her awesome, her own awesome, cool old lady, magical, witchy lady who was in her life when she was a child, and she said that she was descended from the from the seed, and that was one of her kind of origin stories about her own magical side.
R.S. Benedict
I Hell yeah,
R.S. Benedict
that’s sick. That’s so fucking cool,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah. And in fact, Carrington lived to be 94 so, and she was doing art and everything straight up to the end of her life. So she. Live to be older than Marion Leatherby, who’s now
R.S. Benedict
you look to be, did she live to be as old as Marion leatherby’s mother?
Gwen C. Katz
No, that’s
R.S. Benedict
an amazing reveal that our heroine, Marion Leatherby, she’s a super old lady, and her mom’s still alive. Her
Gwen C. Katz
mom’s still alive. Her mom’s 110 and according to her caretaker, still quite spry. She’s still kicking it. So cool. Spry in a wheelchair. And, yeah, I love that too, because, you know, it’s like, shoving in your face. Like, oh, our does our society kind of pretend that old ladies don’t exist? Like, we’ll have some even older ladies, right? Like, yeah, yeah. How far back does it go,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, the oldest human alive always ends up being some super old woman, right? Yes. Who’s who’s always, like, the secret to living forever, smoking cigars, drinking whiskey and staying the away from men, yeah? Like, it’s always a super old maid as we we’d call it as, like, a woman’s just like, No, I’ve literally never had a boyfriend. That’s why I’m still alive. What?
Gwen C. Katz
And the the ladies at this institution do all seem to be all in on vices for the most part, right? Yeah, there’s fucking rocks, there’s there’s Georgina, who she’s just
R.S. Benedict
Georgina. She’s really horny, and she’s so caught. I love her confidence. I love her, just being like, yeah, you all want to fuck me, yeah.
Gwen C. Katz
She’s just absolutely convinced that, like, Dr Gambit wants to fuck her. Maybe she’s right.
Gwen C. Katz
She made it, yeah. I mean, we don’t, she’s
R.S. Benedict
probably right. Yeah. I’m picturing like, a Susan Sarandon type, like an older lady who’s legit, like, super fucking hot,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah. Well, we don’t, we don’t know. I mean, she seems like we don’t know. She seems like she’s gotten plenty over the course of her life. She seems like, yeah, she
R.S. Benedict
seems like she has had a very good time. And I am so happy for her.
Gwen C. Katz
Yeah. And some of the women are kind of not, not just mod, but some of the other women are kind of Butch, gender presenting. Oh,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, the Marquise,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah, there’s, there’s, yeah, is it the marquees? Who? Yeah, I think it is. Who kind of dresses in kind of male clothes and and the gambits. Don’t approve of it, but everyone else has
R.S. Benedict
a bunch of war stories, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Gwen C. Katz
But everyone else is like, what are you talking about her, her the way she dresses, is totally rad. It’s everyone else just thinks she’s extremely cool and, and even Marion cool. Marion has a beard, so she’s also kind of house, right, a little bit outside of feminine presenting gender space. She has a beard and, and she she likes it, right? She’s, like a lot of people, to find it hideous, but, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
she’s not embarrassed.
Gwen C. Katz
I think it’s really dashing.
R.S. Benedict
She’s so cool. Love the old ladies in this book, except for Natasha. And what’s her face. Natasha’s
Gwen C. Katz
like, torched, who? I
R.S. Benedict
feel like, fuck that bitch.
Gwen C. Katz
I feel like she’s the weakest of the old ladies, like her role is just like, she’s very, very fat, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. This book is not very size positive. Unfortunately, it’s
Gwen C. Katz
not.
R.S. Benedict
It’s a little mean. It’s a little mean, like, yeah, it’s so savage, though, in that like, old British lady way where it’s talking about, like, Dr gambits lecturing me about self control. But he’s fat as fuck, and I know he’s got a killer snack drawer. Yeah, I did. I admit I did, kind of like the bit where she’s like, imagining what’s in his snack drawer. And it’s like, this two tiered snack drawer system where it’s like, you know, drawer number one is, like, savory, and he’s got, like, a grilled cheese in there, and this and that, and then drawer number two is, like, sweets, and he’s got all these bon bons. And I’m going, like, Damn this. I’m sick. When I get back to the office, I gotta, like, update my snack drawer, man, because I am, I want to be like, Dr Gambit snack shower that is god tier,
Gwen C. Katz
and she’s not getting enough to eat because she doesn’t have meat and they won’t give her extra vegetables, so I assume that this meeting, she’s just really, really hungry, and all she can think about is snacks.
R.S. Benedict
I know you got a grill. She’s in there, you fucker. Yeah, you’re holding out on me.
Gwen C. Katz
And the daughter in law also is also fat, and also, candy, yeah, yeah, that, you know that fat bitch who won’t share her candy? Yeah? It’s definitely, yeah, it’s
R.S. Benedict
not very nice. It’s
Gwen C. Katz
definitely very mean on the on the fat phobia side, of course, Marion’s also a character, right? So that’s also, yeah, we’re capturing the character of this, like, of this super cranky old lady who,
R.S. Benedict
you know that is a very super cranky old lady thing to be absolutely like, savage about other people. Sweet. They do not give a fuck. They will just tell you, damn, you got fat. But they don’t. Don’t care. It’s like Grandma, what
R.S. Benedict
the fuck you can’t just say that? What is true? Yeah, yeah. It is very real.
Gwen C. Katz
So we’re definitely seeing some of that from her perspective, and also in the treatment, I think of christabelle, we see some of that, like old lady gawking at the person who’s different the
R.S. Benedict
fact that the Chinese chauffeur is named Mahjong, oh, my God, that’s a bit mush, yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
that’s a little much.
Gwen C. Katz
Yeah, yeah,
it’s not PC.
Gwen C. Katz
I still fucking love this book for its race representation. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I would argue that it is at least as good as the house on the Cerulean sea or whatever I have not actually, honestly, I think it’s as good, at least it’s better written. So you know what, if you’re gonna be problematic, you you need to at least write good yeah, that’s what I say. Yeah, I’ll forgive you if your book is cool and shit as shit and has like, Catholic intrigue. One of our Discord members got so fucking excited there’s Catholic intrigue in this book. Hell yeah,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah, yeah. They all like, what is the church up to? I assume they’re all just doing horrible debauch stuff, which a lot of the time they, in fact, were, you know, you lock a bunch of people up in a building and tell them they can never leave, and they will get up to some stuff in there when nobody’s watching. For sure, definitely did
R.S. Benedict
that. She had that the Knights Templar get attacked by bees. It’s so interesting how, that’s how the great battles is structured, where just so matter of fact and very offhand, there’s no like chapter 12, the the ultimate battle, where they’re talking about how, you know, and then, and then we raised our swords, and this happened, and that happened. It’s just very like in the within the span of a paragraph, we went outside and screamed and pretended we were being attacked by wolves, and then the bees rushed in and stung everybody and took the goblet back, and that was that, like, Oh, all right, yeah.
Gwen C. Katz
But then we’re back. Went back to our cave and had some snacks. Yeah, yeah. Then
R.S. Benedict
we had some then we had some more milk. Yeah. What is happening? What is this book?
Gwen C. Katz
I mean, by the time civilization has fallen, because the polls changed place, I just assume there’s, there’s a less, uh, zealous defense of the Grail anymore, if it’s falling lower on people’s priority list,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. And I just, I love how matter of fact all this strangeness is there’s, I mean, there’s one, one moment where she comments on, oh, at first, it felt a little weird to chant around the B pond and dance and go crazy, but then I started feeling fine, and then everything else is handled with such nonchalance. Oh yeah, yeah, the polar ice caps are shifting. The equator is cold now. Or just how, when she emerges from the tower after like, killing and eating herself, she says, Wow, you guys, crazy thing happens. Oh yeah, you saw yourself right and threw yourself into a giant pot. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened, yeah, that’ll happen.
Gwen C. Katz
And they asked him, like, like, did you like the soup?
R.S. Benedict
Was it any good? Like, yeah, it was great. I feel really good now. What God, yeah, we
Gwen C. Katz
talked about. Marion is very judgy, but she’s also not like, great at putting things together. No,
R.S. Benedict
it’s so frustrating how she’s observant, like she she observes that, what is it? Mrs. Van tucked I think you know, is asking for rat poison, but there are no signs of rats and that she could just get a cat. But she says, ah, the Mrs. Gambit is allergic to cats. And Mrs. Gambit is obviously not allergic to cats. And then she observes, and then she observes her making this fudge and poking little holes in it and throwing putting a powder in it and then covering it up with chocolate. And she observes all of these facts, but does not put two and two together until after our poor darling mod sneaks some fudge. Oh yeah, she
Gwen C. Katz
just sits down and reads her book for like hours, just
R.S. Benedict
reads the the story about the winking nun,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah,
R.S. Benedict
no, Marion, Mary, that is Marion’s greatest failure in saving Maude. You could have saved Maude, Marion, come on,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah. You could have, could have found you could have given
R.S. Benedict
her something. You could have given her a head. It’s up there.
Gwen C. Katz
Well, we see this shift, kind of at pretty much at that point in the story, where we go from the first half, where Marion’s just going along with everything, and seemingly all the ladies, other than Carmilla, who’s not institutionalized, she still lives independently, just go along with everything, and they have this societal expectation that, like, Oh, she’s just gonna go along. When we put her in the old folks home, she’s not gonna kick up a fuss. And even if she did, there’s still nothing she can do about it. Yeah? And she believes that as well, right? She just also, and then once you’re in the old folks home, like, okay, there we’re doing weird exercises now. We’re rubbing our tummy and patting our heads, and I’m living in a blank house. And, okay, this is what’s happening, I guess. But then we hit this moment when Maude dies, when they finally revolt against that and become active characters in their own story and start they start telling the gambits like, no, actually, we’re not gonna just go along with you telling us to be nice to the murderers who are who it wasn’t even their chosen victim there
R.S. Benedict
they were trying to kill Georgette for being too sexy. Yeah, and
Gwen C. Katz
and clearly, we’ll probably try again, since they didn’t go the first time. And now that they know that they’re not going to get punished or investigated at all, and they can totally get away with it, right? And they go on their hunger strike, and they start doing all their wacky magical rituals on their own and stuff, and kind of come into their own power. But too late for mod Moore’s the pity,
R.S. Benedict
too late for mod mod who who was a rebel her whole life. Yeah, the death of mod is, like, heartbreaking, legit.
Gwen C. Katz
It is fair. It is I do appreciate that. The big question they have when they all learn, learn mods, old story, the part of it they’re really confused about is just, why would she pick the name mod? That’s a terrible name.
R.S. Benedict
Pick something cooler. Yeah, if
Gwen C. Katz
you’re going to going to live as a woman like surely the the big benefit there is that you could give yourself the raddest name you want. Why would you pick Maude? Yeah, although it didn’t seem to be very good cover, it was. It
R.S. Benedict
was very good cover. It was very effective. A lot of people wanted Maude dead for for her crimes, for her drug smuggling,
Gwen C. Katz
yeah, and she got to spend, spend her twilight years, yeah, secret, secretly hooking up with her girlfriend, who’s who’s also in the institution and and doing needlepoint and being an adorable little old lady, you know,
R.S. Benedict
enviable up until she gets murdered. I guess, you know, up until that it’s a it’s a pretty sick life. It’s pretty sweet. Yeah, war mode.
Gwen C. Katz
So we do see, like really, really strong anti institutional themes in this book, for sure, and it’s both, yeah, yeah, both the institution, also the Knights Templar and the church and the religious orders, like the nuns and all of these institutions are [tape runs out]
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