Month / March 2007

by Edward Champion

Lev Grossman Muzzled for Conducting Journalism?

New York Magazine: “In January, Time published an exclusive story on the new iPhone, in which writer Lev Grossman tweaked Apple CEO Steve Jobs about his secretive access to the product (‘I don’t call Steve, Steve calls me’) and suggested that Apple had ‘some explaining’ to do about backdated stock options. When the story hit the Web, Jobs called Stengel to complain (as it happens, Apple is a major advertiser in Time, and Jobs is a good friend of Huey’s). Stengel reacted by immediately excising the offending paragraphs from the Web (they have since been restored). Then he had Grossman come into the office to rewrite part of the piece for the print edition. Grossman was infuriated.” (via CJR Daily)

by Edward Champion

Ice Ages Are a Great Sartorial Motivator

New York Times: “If people first became nudists 3.3 million years ago, when did they start to wear clothes? Surprisingly, lice once again furnish the answer. Though humans may long have worn loose garments like animal skin cloaks, the first tailored clothing would have been close-fitting enough to tempt the head louse to expand its territory. It evolved a new variety, the body louse, with claws adapted for clinging to fabric, not hairs. In 2003, Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated from DNA differences that the body louse evolved from the head louse about 107,000 years ago. The first sewn clothes were presumably made shortly before this time.”

by Edward Champion

Hands-On Science

The Sun: “Masturbating an elephant in the cause of science isn’t an easy job – just ask wildlife expert Dr Thomas Hildebrandt. Just touching a jumbo penis – they measure more than 1.5metres when aroused – can have painful consequences as German scientist Dr Hildebrandt reveals. He said: ‘One guy I know got a black eye from being hit by an elephant’s penis.'”

by Edward Champion

Can’t Miss Panel at the L.A. Times Festival of Books

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is going down the weekend of Coachella. I won’t be there. (And I won’t be at Coachella either.) But if you can make it, Tod Goldberg is moderating a panel about books and blogging featuring none other than Carolyn Kellogg, Ron Hogan, and a gentleman by the name of Andrew Keen, who has written a book called The Cult of the Amateur, which describes “how the democratization of the digital world is assaulting our economy, our culture, and our values.” And here I was thinking that the fault could be leveled at the Bush Administration. But no matter.

This promises some serious fireworks, particularly with one of the Goldbergs at the helm.

As it so happens, I have obtained a pre-pub copy of Mr. Keen’s book and I plan to devote a future post on this subject.

by Edward Champion

The Sidebar

In light of the redesign, I’ve received a few emails from folks who are upset that I didn’t include them on my blogroll.

Let me explain the situation.

First off, the blogroll on the right hasn’t been touched in two years, meaning that it doesn’t really account for the sites I now read. Redesign-wise, the only thing I did in relation to the blogroll was remove sites that had not been updated in the past year. And I have every intention of one day going through the blogroll with a fine tooth comb. But this is the least of my priorities right now. Because such a task involves an entire day that I don’t have. And I’d rather spend this time meeting deadlines, generating content, turning out podcasts and otherwise being a verbal wiseacre. Sorry, but staring at code is about as appealing as suffering under a Nazi dentist’s chair. Which brings us to a corollary.

COROLLARY: Since I do not have the time to tweak the blogroll, I have attempted to atone for this by trying to link to any posts I find interesting. And, rest assured, I do read you, if I know about you. And if you have found a link that I find interesting, something that I have not found, I accredit.

I assure you that I am not consciously trying to hurt or exclude. In fact, I even accredit to sites that I don’t particularly care for. And has it ever occurred to you that I may not even be aware of you? Of course, if you want to make me aware, send me an email with an RSS link and I’ll happily add you to the hundreds (thousands?) of blogs I have in Bloglines and, if your stuff is interesting to me at some future point, link you accordingly.

I assure you there is no grand conspiracy. I am not interested in link exchanges or reciprocal links. I simply don’t have time for this. But I am interested in the exchange of information across multiple blogs, which I will happily track and link to.

If this makes me an asshole, so be it. I’m genuinely baffled that people pay attention to my prattle. I try to respond to emails. I try to be equitable about the breadth of my linkage. I’m doing the best that I can.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • I don’t ever want to be accused of shirking any reporting duties pertaining to my literary neighbors up north. So I’d be remiss if I didn’t point you to this year’s Writers’ Trust Award winners. Kenneth Harvey won the $15,000 fiction prize for Inside. And Dragan Todorovic nabbed the non-fiction prize for The Book of Revenge: A Blues for Yugoslavia. Todorovic was forced out of Yugoslavia because he wrote negative essays about Slobodan Milosevic. Which isn’t a hard thing to do. Aside from being a specialist in genocide, the late dictator also had no penis. You might think I’m lying about that last factoid, but I happen to know that the Uncyclopedia would never steer me wrong.
  • The Guardian asks, “How old is a young novelist?” That’s a very good quesiton. Granta may be in the business of celebrating the best writers under 40 or under 35. But what of debut novelists like Sam Savage? Or late start biographers like Claire Tomalin? I hereby demand that Granta create the Old Fogey Award, where thirtysomething naifs are barred from the awards ceremony and writers who have spent many years living life and collecting wisdom are rewarded for their labors. Besides, what does age matter anyway? It’s the fiction, stupid.
  • Ed Park captures the bibliophile’s dilemma perfectly: “the shelves were maxed out ages ago, and volumes have begun rising from the ground like apartment projects in some totalitarian state.” What Ed doesn’t tell you is that most of us spend considerable time negotiating with mysterious customer service reps about reading our books in installments instead of all of them straight away, as these books insist we must do. There is also talk about how not reading these books right away will affect our reading credit reports. It is only the most disciplined bibliophile who is able to up his limit.
  • Tom Lutz: “I don’t want to stir up the dying embers of the theory wars or the culture wars, but why do Prose and Bloom open their guides with attacks against these mythical creatures?” Any visit to an English department or sampling of a graduate course catalog will reveal that fitting literature into neat -isms is the current criteria. Take the courses at San Francisco State University: “The Short Story,” with a course description revealing five -isms alone in a sentence, “Literature and Ecology,” “Language in Context” (which examines how “various aspects of society influence language”), and, instead of teaching at-risk kids the joys of the text itself, we have “Reading Theories and Methods,” which is less about investigating reader response and more concerned with boring kids with theory. It’s not all like this, but these courses are hardly “mythical creatures,” unless you prefer, like Mr. Lutz, to keep your severely uninformed skull cloistered in the sand, pretending, Baudelaire-like, that these courses don’t exist and that they aren’t having an effect upon the way the next generation reads and teaches literature.
  • Zelda Music of Golden Proportions.
  • 19,000 British men and women have revealed their sexual fantasies. 18,500 involve the missionary position.
  • It’s good to know that nipple paint has, at long last, become “kiss-proof and water-resistant.” I was beginning to get worried about the shifty-eyed men in raincoats leaving hotel rooms with colorful streaks on their chins.
  • Mikita Brottman probes into The Garfunkel Library. (via Quill and Quire)
by Edward Champion

More than a Mere Orientation Meeting

Washington Post: “Just weeks ago, Fernando Araújo’s only connection to the outside world was his shortwave radio. In six years as a hostage of Marxist rebels, his life had been reduced to a grim routine of forced marches, a diet of soggy beans and rice and the realization that freedom might never come. Now, after a confused and miraculous dash to freedom that has captivated Colombians, Araújo has become foreign minister, a critical post in a country highly dependent on foreign aid, especially from Washington.”

by Edward Champion

In Defense of Alphabet Soup

I’m an advocate of alphabet soup, for many of the reasons suggested here by PBS Kids.

Some skeptics have suggested that alphabet soup is the exclusive province of children and that writers have no real reason to pay heed to this canned delicacy. But they are wrong. Dead wrong. They are wronger than Ptolemy and they simply aren’t worth your time. Don’t worry. We’re working on executing them.

alsoup2.JPGHere’s the thing about alphabet soup: it gets results. Accept no substitute. You may not know this, but every writer named Jonathan eats nothing but alphabet soup when working on a novel. You should see the inside of Jonathan Lethem’s pantry. There’s nothing but Campbell’s cans in there.

Jonathan Franzen teaches a very unique workshop in which he manacles his students’ ankles to carrels and serves them nothing but alphabet soup. If the students complain about having a story massacred by the other students, Franzen removes their laptops and demands that the student create a story using only the alphabet noodles in his bowl. This may seem a cruel form of pedantry, but results are results. This is the kind of teaching that puts them on Granta‘s radar. (It is worth noting that the Granta staff eats alphabet soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 365 days a year.) Nearly every student from Franzen’s program has found a job as an underpaid editorial assistant at a New York magazine and these B&T geniuses can be readily observed on a Friday night replacing lines of fine cocaine with alphabet soup that they proudly snort up their noses, no matter how scalding hot or warm the temperature.

You may recall Jonathan Ames’ famous essay about his experimental period, when he replaced alphabet soup with saltine crackers while trying to finish a crucial chapter in Wake Up, Sir! Without the alphabet soup, Ames was insufferable to his friends and family. He began to walk the Brooklyn streets, shouting verses from “Jabberwocky” at the top of his lungs and trying to discuss the finer points of Wodehouse with any stray dogs who would listen. (The most traumatic point of this period occurred when Ames believed he heard a dog say “Jacques,” in reference to Derrida, when the dog had merely barked.) But once the alphabet soup returned into Ames’ life, Ames once again found focus and finished his novel. And he never fell off the wagon.

Even editors who face vertiginous slush piles because of this relationship between fiction writing and alphabet soup can have use for it. They can pour a tureen of alphabet soup on a pile of manuscripts and, should the writer follow up, claim “they never received it.” And aside from alphabet soup’s palliative functions, what do you think they serve in soup kitchens? Rack of lamb? Alphabet soup enables the homeless to ask for more money, thus securing our great capitalist system, which clearly distinguishes between the soup eaters and the soup eater nots.

While there is a small band of literary groupies who use alphabet soup for kinkier purposes, most literary people acknowledge that alphabet soup is the one and only way to be a writer. If you’re reading this, I’m confident you understand this fact. Let us work together to crush the other writers who think they can go about this fiction writing business without soup, without alphabet noodles, and without fulfilling their patriotic duties.

[UPDATE: Apparently, the accompanying image was unwittingly stolen from this site. We will replace it tomorrow with another photo, since certain parties have informed us that their boxers are in a bunch.]

by Edward Champion

An Interviewer Who Cannot Rise to the Occasion

If you want to know how not to interview someone, Kevin Maher offers a textbook example of journalistic ineptitude. Maher interviews Ghost Rider star Eva Mendes, declaring that she is a beautiful woman who transforms “the most insightful of male interviewers into puddles of fawning inarticulacy.” He then declares, with a journalistic swagger unseen since Norman Mailer, that “in my hands this Mendes woman will be putty!” Yeah, that’ll keep Mendes in her place! But Mendes surprises Maher by flirting with him and, instead of Maher flirting right back and not letting Mendes’ beauty get in the way of a good interview, he claims he doesn’t even remember her nude scene in Training Day and, when Mendes brings up her breasts, he doesn’t have the intelligence to tie this into the conversation. He even confesses that he “can’t think of a quick enough quip.”

The problems here are manifold: Maher’s inability to respect her Mendes as a person, Maher’s inability to be honest about her charisma (complete with the Eisenhower-inspired sexism of “the Mendes woman” becoming putty in his hands), and Maher’s inability to play right back, no matter what the subject. Spontaneity is often an ineluctable part of a great interview and, if a journalist doesn’t have the wit, confidence and playfulness to negotiate these tricky waters, he doesn’t belong on the beat.

If anything, Mendes sounds like a very interesting person with a playful streak. It’s too bad that this is an interview conducted by an idiot, signifying nothing.

by Edward Champion

Vollmann Club Update

One lingering side project: I plan to update the Vollmann Club site to incorporate all current Vollmann-related writings by VC members. Again, the only requirements of joining the Vollmann Club is (a) having a blog and (b) seeing Bill Vollmann at a reading. He’s currently on tour for Poor People. So there’s ample opportunity to fulfill the second criterion. If you want to hop on board, shoot me an email and I’ll hook you up. There are a few volumes that haven’t yet been commented upon.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • I was extremely bothered by this piece of wankery from the NBCC. And it wasn’t because my “nemesis” Lev Grossman was involved. The NBCC, you see, is hosting a panel on just how gosh darn hard it is to look at them crazy genre spooks that threaten to drive down the neighborhood property values, when the critic’s goal is to remain high-minded. “High-minded,” of course, meaning elitist. After all, the Grand Wizard told us that NOTHING WHATSOEVER OF LITERARY WORTH can come from mysteries, thrillers, romances, science fiction, comic books, mis lit, chick lit, cock lit, cunt lit, or whatever other bullshit lit label affixed to a book.

    For we all know that these books must drink from a different fountain and should do nothing more than carry our suitcases up to our hotel rooms. Thank goodness we all remain liberal about literature, heeding the wisdom of the great D.W. Griffith film classic The Birth of a Novel, as we continue to smile as these books say “Thankya, suh,” after we tip them generously.

    I was prepared to respond to the wholesale arrogance and anti-intellectual nature of this panel and the fact that, aside from genre-friendly EW critic Jennifer Reese, John Freeman didn’t have the good sense to, oh say, get a regular mystery columnist on the panel to discuss many sides of the issue. He seemed more content to stack the deck against genre.

    Thankfully, Jennifer Weiner has done my work for me. This is a useless panel that practices needless segregation. The NBCC stands for “National Book Critics Circle.” Last I heard, tomes that fell outside mainstream literary fiction were books too.

  • Joshua Ferris discovers the Hold Steady two years after everybody else has. Next year, Ferris plans on raving about how great LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” is.
  • Colleen Mondor emailed Scarlett Thomas and collected her correspondence into a thoughtful interview with one of today’s most underrated writers.
  • I love these kids. (via Gwenda)
  • Callie has more on the “to MFA or not to MFA” controversy.
  • Jessa Crispin, with typical insouciant ignorance, suggests, “Pick up any other book review section — particular in Chicago [sic] — tear off the header, and you would have no idea where it came from.” Well, that’s just plain wrong. For example, I doubt you’d ever see the sentences, “The drinks mounted frightfully: a pale ale, a lager, a few beers, several gin-and-French cocktails, a double shot of gin (drunk from a toothbrush glass). I began to feel a bit lightheaded myself, and still the river flowed on: wine, gin and lime juice, more beer, whisky,” in the NYTBR (at least not under Tanenhaus’s watch).

    I think any person who follows the book review sections can probably guess where the above sentences came from. While I agree that there’s something of a homogeneity in current book review coverage (i.e., an apparent moratorium on fun and enthusiasm, which I’m doing my best to uproot with my own contributions), even an elementary literary enthusiast would be hard-pressed to look at a piece written by Daniel Mendelsohn, Liesl Schillinger, Laura Miller, David Orr, or the ever-thoughtful Ed Park and claim that it came from somebody else.

  • RIP Jean Baudrillard. Wow, there are no words. There is no reality. I will post a roundup when reactions come in.
  • A.L. Kennedy on the Granta list. (via Bookninja)
  • Newsweek asked readers the five books they’ve always wanted to read but haven’t gotten around to. Here are the top choices. (via Classical Bookworm)
  • The beginning of the end.
  • Who knew that Farnham’s Freehold was so “controversial?” I’m all for this bizarre Heinlein novel, which I first read when I was thirteen, being reissued, but I’m wondering if Heinlein is becoming so passe that publishers will resort to anything to draw attention.
  • In Praise of Ethel Muggs.
  • Maud conducts a fascinating contest.
  • If you’re a writer who needs a day job, Justine Larbalesiter has been soliciting queries on this point.
by Edward Champion

Reports of the Film Industry’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Hollywood Reporter: “The U.S. boxoffice recovered last year from its 2005 slump as it climbed to $9.49 billion in ticket sales — a 5.5% increase over the previous year’s level of $8.99 billion. The domestic boxoffice also rebounded from a three-year decline in admissions. For 2006, according to the MPAA, admissions grew to 1.45 billion, up 3.3% from 2005’s 1.4 billion. The rise in admissions combined with a slight rise in the cost of individual tickets to produce the boost in boxoffice revenue.”

by Edward Champion

Philip Roth Goes Hollywood

Variety reports that Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal is headed for the big screen, with Nicholas Meyer scripting and Penelope Cruz, Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson starring. Meyer previously wrote The Human Stain. No word yet on whether Meyer will be addressing David Kepesh’s previous existence as a human-sized mammary gland, but Lakeshore, the company behind this production, is also trying to get a film version of American Pastoral off the ground with director Phillip Noyce attached. So while Noyce may not be much of a breast man, we can only hope that Meyer is.

by Edward Champion

Kurt Eichenwald: $2,000 for “Editorial Integrity”

Remember that Kurt Eichenwald essay from December? Eichenwald wrote a New York Times Magazine story investigating a 13-year-old boy who was sexually exploited through the Internet. But today’s New York Times Corrections page revealed a very interesting development:

The essay was intended to describe how Mr. Eichenwald persuaded Justin Berry, then 18, to talk about his situation. But Mr. Eichenwald did not disclose to his editors or readers that he had sent Mr. Berry a $2,000 check. Mr. Eichenwald said he was trying to maintain contact out of concern for a young man in danger, and did not consider himself to be acting as a journalist when he sent the check.

The Associated Press’s David Caruso reports that Eichenwald sent Berry the check in an effort to learn the boy’s true name and address. I think it’s important to note that Eichenwald’s piece yielded him the 2006 Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism, awarded for “preserving the editorial integrity of an important story while reaching out to assist his source.”

eichenwald.jpgBut if this story was an exercise in total candor and perspicacious judgment, why didn’t Eichenwald inform his editors at the Times? Were the judges at the University of Oregon aware of this check before they relayed the Payne? If the Payne Award is indeed one of the highest honors a journalist can receive, will the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication rescind the award in light of Eichenwald failing to report the $2,000 check?

The correction observed that “Times policy forbids paying the subjects of articles for information or interviews.” So aside from the Times policy, let’s examine why this issue is troubling. Here is a reporter investigating a boy who had amassed hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct lewd acts in front of strangers. If Eichenwald himself is paying money to Berry, does not this behavioral association (Berry accepting check from a stranger) color Berry’s answers? Can we count on total candor when an interview subject receives money? Eichenwald noted, “We were gambling $2,000 on the possibility of saving a kid’s life.” If “saving a kid’s life” was Eichenwald’s motivation, then does not a four-figure check color even this subjectivity?

In my review of William T. Vollmann’s Poor People, I criticized Vollmann for paying his interview subjects, contemplating whether Vollmann’s guilt had clouded his judgment. Whether this was a wrong move or not, one can at least commend Vollmann for revealing this practice to his readers. Even Nick Broomfield was candid enough to include former LAPD chief Daryl Gates accepting a cash payment on camera in his documentary, Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam. Good subjective journalism, perhaps because it deals in partiality, demands complete transparency if one is expected to believe in the truth it presents.

Eichenwald may view his failure to disclose the check as innocent. But his lack of candor calls his “editorial integrity” of his story into question. Since the story was very much about Eichenwald’s efforts to save Berry, and since Eichenwald led us to believe that he was following New York Times standards, it would be lacking great integrity indeed if Eichenwald did not return his award to the University of Oregon.

Eichenwald has since moved on to a position as investigative reporter at Portfolio, Condé Nast’s forthcoming business magazine. If Eichenwald plans to investigate corporations, I’m thinking that Condé Nast Legal might want to be careful with Eichenwald still assigned to a beat. While Berry’s family may have had to return a mere $2,000, the Fortune 500 has whole armies of lawyers ready to descend upon 4 Times Square. And if Eichenwald manages to “forget” another detail, it may prove a costly resolution.

by Edward Champion

Roundup

  • Mike Ponder: “I’d say I am a businessman. A businessman who was lucky enough to have the talent to paint.” Ah, but what is talent when your true calling is generating money? It’s true that poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance man and it would be naive in the extreme to suggest that artists give up their day jobs and shirk their breadwinning duties. But does the true artist spend nearly moment possible producing art first and foremost, no matter what the circumstances? More advice from Ponder: “At the end of the day, if you are going to be successful as an artist you have to be successful as a businessman.” If this is true, then why doesn’t Thomas Pynchon taking meetings?
  • Jonathan Lethem talks with theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin. Video also available.
  • It seems that scrotum-shock isn’t confined to the States. The Hamas Education Ministry is removing Palestinian folk tales from school libraries because of “sexual innuendo.” Of course, an offhand reference to genitals is far less suggestive than a Mae West line and certainly less pernicious than a schoolyard taunt. But what’s even crazier is that Hamas has not only removed the book in question, but destroyed 1,500 copies.
  • Are Oscar Ameringer’s literary contributions being overlooked in Oklahoma because of his politics?
  • Nilanjana S Roy: “They have the air of seasoned explorers, emerging from the rain forest of literature with advice about how to avoid media pythons, the malarial interview (where you speak in a kind of delirium that lasts until you see what you’ve said the next morning in the paper) and other hazards of the festival life. The festival enthusiasts are the ones who’re comfortable leading the life of rockstars on a long world tour, sans the groupies and the psychedelic drugs.” I can report with some authority that authors are not immune to groupies and psychedelic drugs. And I’m certain that Alice Denham can agree.
  • Rose Wilder Lane, overlooked literary journalist?
  • Gwenda’s reports of bad AWP fashion have been memorialized by Carolyn Kellogg, although it would seem that Tayari Jones was the exception.
  • The horrors of 1980s stickers. (via Quiddity)
  • Seamus Kearney makes the case for epilogues.
  • 30 dead at a Baghdad book market.
  • Joshua Ferris observes that, of Granta’s recently announced Best Young American Novelists, 15 of 21 had MFAs. Maybe this was one of the reasons I wasn’t nearly as excited about Granta’s list as I wanted to be. In the end, isn’t good writing not about workshops, but about sitting on your ass and trying to write the best damn story you can? Personally, I find greater value showing my work to people I trust instead of sitting in front of a bunch of emaciated students who are more driven by uninformed envy than collective no-bullshit encouragement. An open environment in which you can count upon people to tell you the truth is far better than a stuffed classroom in which the same textbook tropes are encouraged. I feel the sorriest for bleary-eyed editors looking for something different.
by Edward Champion

Pardon the Shifting Design

In testing mode.

[UPDATE: Okay, I’m going to play with this design for a while, seeing as how there hasn’t been a drastic overhaul in more than a year. If you have any specific requests, please let me know and I’ll do my best to accommodate.]

[UPDATE 2: As an experiment, I have added BlogAds and a donations button to this site. This was not an easy decision for me to make, because, despite turning down many offers from advertisers over the years, I have tried to keep this site ad-free. But if even small literary quarterlies can ask for advertisers or donors, I have begun to wonder if my own diligent labors constitute a service.

I realize that some of you might view this as “selling out,” but I would rather be perfectly transparent with you. When I revived this website in December 2003 in an effort to track literary news, I had no idea then that, years later, it would transform into a second full-time job. I had no idea that I would be producing podcasts.

Now granted, I greatly enjoy doing all this. And I’m perfectly happy to carry on doing this, whether you contribute or not. But with newspaper book review sections dying and the media ecology changing, I figured that the time had come to take a chance. If the newspapers lack the resources to cover literature, then the burden shifts to us.

I’ve been footing the bill now for over three years, paying for extensive bandwidth so that people can listen to the many podcasts without interruption, spending at least twenty hours per podcast arranging interviews, carefully reading books, doing my best to ask the best questions I can under the circumstances, tweaking audio to the best of my ability, often staying up to an ungodly hour so that these podcasts are turned out on a weekly schedule.

If any of this has been of value to you, then feel free to donate or display your ad. If not, or you don’t have the cash, that’s okay too. The site, as it exists, will continue to operate for free. The only difference will be the advertisements in the top right corner.

I can assure you that any advertisements will not hinder my muckraking proclivities nor will they prevent me from pursuing tough questions. I can also assure you that, should this experiment prove somewhat successful, with even meager monies flowing in, I will work my hump off to give you additional content and track down unexpected individuals for future podcasts. If anything, my work ethic on this point is strong.

However you decide, I’d like to once again thank you for reading and listening.]

[UPDATE 3: Okay, I’ve discovered the culprit for IE users. I’ve temporarily disabled the top graphic, so that IE users can peruse this site with the content at the top of the screen. More enhancements to come. Thank you for your patience while I sort out the snags here!]