This is a short inventory of confessions and convictions emitted by an editor working in arts publishing. Please get comfortable for three scenes composed of four variations of a peculiar assertion, one manifesto in its first iteration, and a humble attempt to bring the notion of reading beyond the confines of knowledge accumulation and into the echo-sensualities[1] of plurivocal linguistic presence(s) found in aglossal aurality[2] and crowded reading.[3] Notes are served as an integral part of the reading experience; readers are encouraged to consult them along the way like requisite condiments.
I am not a washing machine.
Språkvasking, or “language washing”[4] in Norwegian, the “father tongue” I never learned, tries to capture the essence of “copy editing” as an act of care composed of various cleansing agents and repetitive nudging gestures. Caution: too much heat, vigour, and rigour may cause damage to clothing. Recommendation: intense treatment composed of care and scrutiny allows languages to grow. Anecdote on shifting text(ile)s: while working as an assistant sewer in an haute couture atelier in Paris, I was instructed to thoroughly iron certain fabrics before engaging in the subsequent procedures of measuring, cutting, pinning, and sewing. The threads required heat exposure on a padded table, a safe(r) space upon which to understand their own shrinking and expanding desires. I realised that hidden within the weave of the fabric’s seemingly flat surface were invisible dimensions, and I learned to sense their scope through repetitive caressing and stroking instead of relying on misleading visual cues. This helped prevent the unwanted consequence of unexpected behaviour emerging when the garment was asked to move elegantly around a human body. Texts also need strokes and caresses in order to figure out how they are able to move through time with the reader in the echo-dimensions of a contextually specified room.
I am not a washing machine.
I would like to be treated as what I aspire to be, which on most days is “the marvellous practitioner of an embodied-technical poetics of listening”.[5] I am listening to you, dear writer, and my replies are a sincere reaction to the essence of your habits and thought patterns, the speed of your rationale, and the timbre of your enquiry. And you, dear reader, may be tempted to ask why the letters dance. The cheeky reply involves words dancing to the quaint melody of my curiosity. More truthfully, I first noticed the incessant movement of letters when I started to tackle my difficult relationship to reading. It took me a long time to realise that I am probably dyslexic. As a child, the pictograms of my “mother tongue” had stood still with the quiet composure and certitude of zen rock gardens. (Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the linguistic principles in Japanese have a different relationship to phonetics through its combined logographic and syllabary systems.[6]) Inversions of letters in English and French made me a frequent recipient of bad marks in school, and I still struggle to “see” how words are spelled in my mind’s eye, no matter the focus and effort involved. I could never comfortably hang out with the words written in Latin script that I was getting to know as a teenager. My interest in them was apparently insufficient; we never truly bonded. Yet, no matter how much the dancing letters eluded me, my shy brain always swayed and twirled to the thought-frequencies hiding in every text. The sound of reason is never silent. I often find reason compounding its own internal dissonance while murmuring to me from up close or from a distance. Investing in the practice of text editing has enabled me to become a skilled reader. Training my mind for nimble reading agility has in turn healed my relationship to languages, which I now heed as boundaryless oceans instead of refined cultural autobahns with no exit ramps onto alternative side streets.
I am not a washing machine.
Editing a text can feel like walking into a layer of fog in order to perceive more clearly the muffled ideas that lurk beyond. Editing a text has nothing to do with perfectionism, knowing better, or being “right”.[7] Editing a text requires engagement in a distinct register of attentive listening, an engagement that can also be described as mindful reading in calibrated techniques of attunement. If writing a text reveals a story through a compression of affect, then reading a text is the performance that invokes its expansion. As an editor, I am entrusted with the job of embodying a multiplicity. I perform the guileless reader who picks up the text in a small bookshop somewhere, out of context, meandering. I perform the informed cultural worker who has already acquired the critical contexture required to perceive the text with its yet-to-incarnate audience in mind. I perform the curious reader who patiently tries to figure out what the writer may have wished to express (instead of putting the book down and picking up another). Attraction towards books is often rooted in the access they grant to places, stories, and ideas. What captured my passion for publishing was the possibility of impactful mediation, which encompasses questions of access and knowledge exchange. Rebalancing global history is a grand undertaking, but one I could positively contribute to through continually rectifying biases and omissions. Such a realm of mediation requires my commitment to the respectfully articulated revelation of no-longer-anomalous factuality.
I am not a washing machine.
But if my designated inner language washing machine were to flood the floors with the afterthoughts of its moil {drudgery}, it would surely spawn an orchestra of unionised editorial apparatuses. Audible splashes would sway to a koro koro, a goshi goshi, a shīn shīn, a karankoron karankoron, a birīn birīn, a pisha pisha, a shuwā shuwā. Each apparatus would proclaim a hankering call for manifestation {palpable evidence} of invigorated relationships to language and its usage. I have listened and transcribed such a splatter of ideas.
a MANIFESTO in service of AGLOSSAL AURALITY — Variation 1, November 2024
Reading is aglossal {having no tongue} aurality {relating to the ear}; listening precedes understanding.
Crowded reading prevails; reading is never a solitary act.
Languages coexist, beyond the constraints of linguistic monovocality; do not isolate languages from each other.
The concept of “native speaker” (as a measure) should be banned, because the essentialising identitarian qualities (of this outdated colonial suggestion) reinforce delusional precepts {rules for action} that no longer function.
Authenticity is a fugitive practice; monocultural inheritance is not the tote bag of ontic {pertaining to being} qualities; start with “being human as praxis” {Sylvia Wynter} and find satisfaction in the complexity of language’s ability to serve such a praxis.
Do not confuse reading with attention; the cognitive process of reading is an acquired capacity, while attention is a variable that signals the articulation of subjectivity.
Editing implicates listening to the cry of the material; editing any material is an act of mediation between evinced traces and an incubating future.
Publishing is a reproductive act of collective preoccupation; not to be mistaken with distribution logistics.
Independent arts publishing must aspire to be more than a service industry based on an economy of hype; an impossible task while its valuation continues to be modelled on rarity, scarcity, and exclusivity.
Personal relations with the default settings of any word processor should be considered when assessing the passive effects of lingering linguistic hegemony, especially of (neo)colonial origins.
The status quo is background noise filtered out by the brain, it is easy to miss its presence; readers and writers must always attend to that noise which accompanies any articulated sound of reason.
If belief is fed a diet of ideology marinated in experience and served on a plate of biases, so must attention become a knife that is continually reshaped in service of metramorphosis {Bracha L. Ettinger, matrixial theory} and elaboration.
The power of language is best harnessed with two leashes: humour tied to insight and passion restrained by proficiency.
Translation is a practice of ventriloquism and participatory silence in fellowship with the source material and the pleasure of its circumstance.
The choreography of words requires an attunement to spatial boundaries, alignments, flow, and repetition; the scenography of reading is inscribed in time.
Context is an essential component in the formation of an auditorium for living speech; in a vacuum, externalised orality would be unable to bounce back to its own aurality.
Echo-sensualities define the zone of aglossal aurality; an echo requires positionality, and sensuality requires a body.
Let us first (re)consider the act of reading, which arrives “as if we are offered a gift from the outside world (by our elders, by those who first speak to us) but the ability to grasp the gift is our own”.[8] It is an elusive gift because language is more of a skill than an organ, even if it can be felt resonating within the boundaries of a singular body. Language is also not merely “the immaterial propagation of propositional content from one human being to another across empty space”,[9] for its existence implies an intentional resonant exchange manifesting between defined perimeters, be it skin-bound or algorithmic. Language exists through its collective usage, modulating and shifting while balancing vital instability with integration. Languages are constantly evolving through usage: (sometimes) crawling unnoticed, (sometimes) breathlessly inhibited, (sometimes) percolating with inspired assistance. Every language, along with its diversity of speakers, bears witness to a collective desire to correlate meaning and reciprocate communication. Every language contains plurivocality of diverse origins and accumulated influences that have given way to adaptation. It is imperative to acknowledge this pluripotent essence of language because without it, languages would sediment in their own material accumulations — what is often hastily categorised as factuality[10] — instead of continually reconstituting themselves as tools capable of reinvesting in the relational dimension of communication.
I am indeed tendering {offering for acceptance} an invitation (for everyone and anyone) to reconsider the practice of reading. The desired outcome of such an initiative is a modification in how language operates as a fluid tool that is able to permeate horizontally (past and future) and delineate vertically (position, structure, context, and power) through its usage in constructing attentive articulation. Language junctures with writing and the accumulation of knowledge, which lineages of scholarship have separated into (insufficiently complex) cultural and historical categories. Portending {foreshadowing} swerve: “An extraordinary consequence of thinking linguistically on human cognition is that we became repositories of very productive and flexible kinds of classification capacities.”[11] (I have not yet worked out how the problems of classification and accumulation intersect in relation to contemporary practices of reading.) What does it even mean to write and to read in an era measured by the promise of unfettered access to information? Although languages evolve collectively, reading can be convened at the level of the individual. The process of reading implicates “the almost instantaneous fusion of cognitive, linguistic, and affective processes”.[12] Research into the history of reading makes apparent how reading conventions have been repeatedly reinvented to serve disparate socio-cultural needs. As Maryanne Wolf explains, the biology of reading is also unique: “Unlike its component parts such as vision and speech, which are genetically organized, reading has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations.”[13] Because “no reading can ever be definitive”,[14] changing how material is read[15] and how attention is dispensed may be the most direct path towards forging invigorated relationships[16] to language; relationships which are necessary in order to embody the decolonial, transfeminist, and queer transformations that are beckoning consideration and implementation. The urgency for this shift cannot be overstated.
Situational interlude: It has been my experience that certain important considerations seem to be muffed {handled clumsily} in texts written around artworks and within artworlds. These include questions about who is being addressed by the text, who the text is representing, when the reader is implicated, when the writer is implicated, and what purpose the text is serving. In an era of informational abundance, the mere effort to “explain” or “reveal” something risks producing an insufficient impulse for anchoring cultural production. The structural ambiguity of address, which is often left (un)intentionally circuitous, creates a conundrum where the medium of expression, in this case the written language, fails to serve the broader ambitions of the ideas being synthesised in the text itself. The lack of clarity reduces positionality to harmful defaults, such as the essentialised identities of the writer and the reader. The locus of contextualisation thus migrates from constructive to assumptive, and with it emerge pathways of dislocation and separation. (I will return to this question of identity in approximately 1454 words.)
It is also possible to start here: How is knowledge acquired? Does knowledge acquisition occur when beliefs align with a trusted source of information? Are these questions even helpful? I find myself suspicious of the profundity with which decisions are affected by truth biases that emerge from the co-occurrence of comprehending and believing. Even when knowledge is increasingly “shared” and not directly experienced, the body must still orient and anchor this process of receiving and comprehending information and emotions.[17] Possessing the ability to decode a language does not protect against faulty pattern recognition and biased interpretation. A crucible {severe test} of improbable yet believable factoids circulating like decontextualised gossip incites treacherous {unreliable} slippage into unfastened mistrust and fear. With such risks of misalignment, it is imperative to foster “grow[th] from fluent decoders into strategic readers”.[18] Strategic reading requires attunement to at least two layers of contextual intent, that of the writer and that of the reader. As an editor who specialises in printed matter, I engage primarily with the responsibility for contextual clarity within the process of writing and publishing. The act of writing reveals the frontier between comprehension and explorative curiosity, while reading[19] is the cyclical act of seeding those frontiers. I understand the performance of reading as the “transmigration of meaning [enacted by the reader that] can enlarge or impoverish the text itself”.[20] Ontic {pertaining to being} writing requires quality of presence and self-awareness. When I am editing, I seek to augment and clarify the space occupied by the writer’s voice, which is inhabited with ideas, stories, and references. This space, which allows for echo-sensualities to form, is the playground allocated to reading. The concept of “echo-sensualities” designates the stimulation of cognition and affect by the transmission of language between multiple skin-bound or algorithmic entities. Alberto Manguel writes in The History of Reading that “we readers, like Narcissus, like to believe that the text into which we gaze holds our reflection”.[21] Is it possible that writers also tend to imagine that the audience whom they address holds their reflection? Texts must seek to understand their own disjointed dialectic process; not because each author knows their audience, rather, because the author has engaged in the task of articulating the framework of their knowledge production in such a way that permits sufficient echo-sensualities.
My approach to editing is well suited for envisioning every text and book as a container that provides a dynamic and consistent context within which ideas and conversations are carried with the intended movement and flow. The configuration and direction (of the whole performance of words and images) must offer spatio-temporal coherence. Anne Carson writes that, “[o]ver the years of working at it, I came to think of translating as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch”.[22] I also find it helpful to think of texts and books in spatial terms: a room can fit a lot of things inside, but never everything, and a text is no different. When Wendell Berry writes that “[t]he fallibility of a human system of thought is always the result of incompleteness”, he is astute in pointing out that “[t]he incompleteness of a system is rarely if ever perceptible to those who made it or to those who benefit from it”.[23] To write with such awareness is, to borrow Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s formulation, to “offer errata in retro-prospect”.[24] The desire for a decolonial framing of information does not easily lend itself to knowing what needs adaptation or recognising one’s own automatisms and assumptions. What are the errata awaiting your address?
Lineages of scholarship, authorship, and design exist in a continuum with contemporary historiography; and as Yuk Hui suggests, “a thinker of the people is one who reactivates the historical resources sedimented among the people in order to call for and welcome a new becoming”.[25] My preoccupation remains with the “room” storing those (historical) resources. Is the figure whom Hui calls “a thinker” — the figure I have been calling “the writer” — able to proffer {present for acceptance} a communicative architecture for (co)inhabitation that accompanies the reactivation of (historical) resources? To articulate signifies “to put into words” and “to become united or connected by or as if by a joint”.[26] I would like the thinker/writer to be understood as an articulator who serves as a joint, a hinge, a juncture, a combine {harvesting machine}. The spaces created by articulated language are an elusive yet powerful mechanism; they constitute a transferable structure which enables crowded reading.[27] It is not enough to say that “[a] standpoint defines the direction of the gaze, but also limits it and affects the body to which the gaze belongs”,[28] because in order to define the location and direction with/of a body, there must be spatial orientation and a sojourn {temporary stay}. I appreciate the ways in which Hui has diagnosed the contemporary manifestation of the feeling of Heimatlosigkeit (which can be explained as the condition of being without home or sense of belonging): “A thinker can only go beyond the nation-state by becoming heimatlos, that is to say, by looking at the world from the standpoint of not being at home.”[29] Such desired uprooting can, however, make it difficult to define positionality, one’s own gaze, and how far one wishes to reach with that gaze. The dilemma of heimatlos as an orientation (for the articulator) inevitably returns to the problem of initiating a shared space of inhabitation (through language). The articulator may recognise themself as heimatlos, but this does not deny their own participation in the medium of plurivocal linguistic presence(s).
There is too much focus on the identity (of the articulator) as the agent responsible for sculpting an assumed positionality (nationality, age, gender, sexual orientation, etc.), instead of paying attention to the space of address and content of address proposed by the language (of the articulator). As an editor, my sincere desire is to support practitioners working in the arts and its adjacent disciplines in the process of considering each space of address. Defining the “room” does not need to be perceived as a constraint just because the dream is to commune with the world; in other words, ditching the generic we that is creating more unnecessary exclusions than the necessary inclusions due to the failure of the “universal” as a measure of commoning humanity. If sovereignty in self-expression can be found through the expansion of context and the complexity of considerations,[30] the reader will find their own performative clarity within the echo-sensual potential of space structured by the writer-cum{along with being}-articulator. It is not about belonging to or identifying with an idea, it is about sharing the echoes and reverberations of, and even possibly the commitment to, an idea. What “we” are you working with and what does it account for?[31]
Before you, dear reader, move on to other activities and thoughts today, I would like to extend one more idea into the echo-sensualities that we have been sharing. The borderlines and borderlands of an individual are continually shifting. (I have long refused to take refuge in the chimerical {extremely unlikely to ever come true} stability of a stagnant mind with rigid cognitive and psycho-emotional capacities.) Adoption of what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “rooted cosmopolitanism”[32] may provide an adequate description for the aspects of existence which are inseparable from the conversation, coexistence, association, hybridisation, and heterogeneity that constitute one’s own borderlines and borderlands. Is it not indispensable to aim for an embodied pluralism, situated within a partial cosmopolitanism? Here, I am not ignoring the fact that identity is a construct that is often imposed by forces of oppression and is not always chosen voluntarily. However, I am suggesting that it is possible to reorient context from something based on identity towards something constructed through positioned commonality, which is enacted through a shared performance of echo-sensual plurivocality.
An essay[33] about my editorial practices has ultimately become cued to its Urmaterial, the materiality of reading itself, and an attempt to untangle the echo-sensualities offered by the process of reading. No word is ever alone. Even if it is not combined with any other words, it is still situated in a context, occupying a certain size or volume, with a quiet pause or animated noise that proceeds and follows. Dare I forget that letters do not want to be washed. They would like to dance in a well-choreographed routine that follows a carefully considered tune, which could be the amplified sound of reason lurking in every heart before it finds refuge in every evanescent ear.
1
The concept of “echo-sensualities” designates the potential(s) in affect and reverberation(s) of cognition that are present in the spatio-temporal tenantry of reading as a praxis. The metaphor of the “room”, a space which is shared by both articulator and receiver of language, will be further explored in Scene 3.
2
The notion of “aglossal aurality”, a sense of hearing without the tongue, proposes a framework in which discernible frequencies of thought bypass the schism and the chasm that result from conventions of aural and visual bifurcation.
3
The practice of “crowded reading” seeks to acknowledge that every reader is informed by the reading of others, a collectivity which contributes to the experience of echo-sensualities and further complicates the singular orientation of transmission from writer to reader.
4
Source: https://glosbe.com/nb/en/spr%C3%A5kvasking.
5
Michael Nardone, “Aural Poetics: An Editorial Afterword”, OEI: Aural Poetics, no. 98–99, 2023, p. 361.
6
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain [2007], Harper Perennial, 2008, p. 47.
7
“[W]ords like ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ make sense only relative to particular customs, conventions, cultures.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, W. W. Norton, New York, 2006, p. 15.
8
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, Flamingo, London, 1997, p. 35. Emphasis added.
9
D. Graham Barnett and Justin E. H. Smith (eds.), “Introduction: Thinking Attention”, in Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses, Columbia University Press, New York, 2023, p. 5.
10
This broad statement about factuality and the material accumulation of language in the form of archives and repositories of cultural artefacts is meant to include anything on the spectrum of what is commonly called knowledge, tradition, religion, heritage, history, etc.
11
Carlos Montemayor, “Mechanism and Virtue”, in Scenes of Attention, p. 117. Montemayor is citing the work of Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky, Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2016.
12
Wolf, Proust and the Squid, p. 145.
13
Wolf, p. 11.
14
Manguel, A History of Reading, p. 173.
15
“The methods by which we learn to read not only embody the conventions of our particular society regarding literacy — the channelling of information, the hierarchies of knowledge and power — they also determine and limit the ways in which our ability to read is put to use.” Manguel, p. 67.
16
“As David Rose, a prominent translator of theoretical neuroscience into applied educational technology, puts it, the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling.” Wolf, Proust and the Squid, p. 140.
17
I have asked myself whether dinosaurs watched the sunset. The dinosaurs probably noticed changes in temperature and a shift in reverberation of the insect and bird songs emerging from the surrounding vegetation, but such a speculation does not signify “the cathexis [{investment of mental or emotional energy in a person, object, or idea}] of attention” (Julian Chehirian, “Attention, Art, and Psychotherapeutics”, in Scenes of Attention, p. 87) that I equate to watching the sunset. The idea of dinosaurs watching the sunset also has little in common with the knowledge of whether in fact they did. Perhaps dinosaurs believed that a spectacularly colourful sunset was a sign of the sun god feeling gorgeous and camp that day. Dinosaurs probably knew that the sun was an intermittent source of heat. Perhaps dinosaurs also found it suitable to indulge in the possibility that the sun god sometimes chose to punish them for no obvious cause because making sense of their own precarious existence was otherwise too barren an effort. What do you think?
18
“[…] readers who know how to activate prior knowledge before, during, and after reading; decide what’s important in a text; synthesize information; draw inferences during and after reading; ask questions; and self-monitor and repair faulty comprehension.” Richard T. Vacca, “From Efficient Decoders to Strategic Readers”, Educational Leadership: Journal of the Department of Supervision and Curriculum Development 60, no. 3, November 2002, p. 6–11, here 7. Vacca is citing the work of Laura Robb, Teaching Reading in Middle School, Scholastic, New York, 2000.
19
“We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences. Our ancestors’ invention could come about only because of the human brain’s extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain’s ability to be shaped by experience. This plasticity at the heart of the brain’s design forms the basis for much of who we are, and who we might become.” Wolf, Proust and the Squid, p. 3.
20
“Faced with a text, the reader can transform the words into a message that deciphers for him or her a question historically unrelated to the text itself or to its author. This transmigration of meaning can enlarge or impoverish the text itself; invariably it imbues the text with the circumstances of the reader. Through ignorance, through faith, through intelligence, through trickery and cunning, through illumination, the reader rewrites the text with the same words of the original but under another heading, re-creating it, as it were, in the very act of bringing it into being.” Manguel, A History of Reading, p. 211.
21
Manguel, A History of Reading, p. 267.
22
Anne Carson, NOX, New Directions, New York, 2010, section 7.1.
23
“The fallibility of a human system of thought is always the result of incompleteness. In order to include some things, we invariably exclude others. We can’t include everything because we don’t know everything; we can’t comprehend what comprehends us. The incompleteness of a system is rarely if ever perceptible to those who made it or to those who benefit from it. To those who are excluded from it, the incompleteness of a system is, or eventually becomes, plain enough.” Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition, Counterpoint, Washington DC, 2000, p. 34–35.
24
“Imagine errata in retro-prospect as a form of going on strike, of ceasing to be the respectable operators of the technology that keeps imperial archives in place, and refusing their temporal, spatial, and political commands. These are unruly errata that reject the rules of the game — that is, the truth claim of imperial categories.” Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “Errata in retro-prospect”, The A-Line: a journal of progressive thought 2, no. 1, 2020, https://alinejournal.com/convergence/errata-in-retro-prospect. Emphasis original.
25
Yuk Hui, “Planetarization and Heimatlosigkeit, Part 2”, e-flux Journal, no. 148, October 2024, p. 6.
26
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/articulate.
27
My next challenge will be to continue exploring the notion of “crowded reading” and its impact on experimental translation.
28
Hui, p. 4.
29
Hui, p. 7. Emphasis original.
30
“Freedom in both science and art probably depends upon enlarging the context of our work, increasing (rather than decreasing) the number of considerations we allow to bear upon it. This is because the ultimate context of our work is the world, which is always larger than the context of our thought.” Berry, Life is a Miracle, p. 84.
31
This question’s formulation is inspired by a moment in Christina Sharpe’s conversation with David Naimon on his podcast Between The Covers: Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry, Tin House Books, 1 May 2023.
32
“So there are two strands that intertwine in the notion of cosmopolitanism. One is the idea that we have obligations to others, obligations that stretch beyond those to whom we are related by the ties of kith and kind, or even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship. The other is that we take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance. People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to learn from our differences.” Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, W. W. Norton, New York, 2006, p. xv.
33
The wonderful individuals who commissioned this series were perhaps more interested in a practical guide that explores useful and relevant editorial practices, accompanied by examples from some of the books to which I have had the honour of contributing my input. I am grateful for their passion for pedagogy that has inevitably pushed me to better understand and research the motivations underscoring the technical aspects of my editorial practice. Thank you for letting me use my own hybrid stylesheet of omni-continental inspiration.