READING CHINESE POET LU YU

Earlier today I was reading in a book I've had at least thirty years by 12th century Chinese Poet, Lu Yu. It is mostly his poems with a selection from his Diary of a Trip to Shu, in the book titled, The Old Man Who Does As He Pleases. The diary is kept along the ride with his family by commercial sailboat in the Grand Canal that connects Beijing with Nanking, then connects to the Yangtze river for a long ride inland. In the diary, which I'd not read until now, he describes sunrises, mountains, bridges, people, other boats. They stop at inns beside the river for the night. In this reading, I noticed that I am able to visualize the people, their clothes, the boat, the river, the inns, the pagodas, the landscape from years of seeing Chinese films, reading contemporary Chinese fiction and histories of China. There was a time I read a lot of Chinese poetry over several centuries, but I missed all subtleties. All I had to go by was words in translation. Therein lies the beauty of Chinese poetry, that just the words themselves, completely out of context can read as freshly as from inside the culture.

 

 

The first time around with Lu Yu, I had not seen the films or read the histories. It was poets like Lu Yu that inspired me to investigate Chinese writing, and through the writing, the culture, how people lived in the old days and how they live now. Reading Lu Yu brought up memory of a movie I almost took out of the drawer to watch before sitting down to write, The King of Masks, one of my favorites.  I've seen it so many times it's memorized, but still love to see the story unfold. A beautiful story and SO Chinese. I feel like I am in China seeing these people all around. I may watch it next time without subtitles to enjoy the music of the language without mental overlay. I saw another Chinese film, Ju Dou, without subtitles the first time. The film had such beauty as I've not seen since with subtitles. The only thing I missed without knowing the words was names and relationships, like uncle or aunt, mother, son, cousin. I found the story was told visually and the talk was an overlay.

 

 

Without understanding the language, I get the story, which, in films, is told visually. I will watch The King of Masks again soon without subtitles, and enjoy hearing the Chinese language spoken. I was reading in Lu Yu's Diary on the Trip to Shu and realized I was seeing him, his clothes, family's clothes, the boat, the people working the boat, the river, the landscapes, like I'd not seen in my Chinese readings before I had the help of films to give me visuals from the old ways in China and the new ways. I'd been waiting for China to open up and let us see what is happening there in the visual arts, in writing, film making. The film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, signaled to me there is something going on with Chinese film making worth investigating. I found some treasures. Director Zhang Yimou takes my breath in every film of his I've seen. He is one of many directors in mainland China who make extraordinary films. I find refreshing in mainland Chinese films that guns don't solve problems.

 

 

It surprised me to be seeing the scene while reading in Lu Yu's account of having tea with someone he knew, whose tea was not up to standard because of something to do with weather, something in the flavor that is so subtle only someone from China would notice. He is well thought of every stop along the way, known for his poetry. He has conversations about poetry with people in restaurants and inns along the river. I could see the people, like in a movie. I saw the buildings, the rooms, due to familiarity through seeing so many films from China, historical as well as contemporary. I read through several of the poems and noticed they had come to life for me. I could see the visuals. Before, they were words and the images associated with the words. Now I can see the visuals as in a slide-show in my head with a Chinese context I'm somewhat familiar with. I don't pay attention to present politics in China. I don't understand it at all. I prefer the history, before, during and after the Revolution, then after Mao. Writer Mo Yan received the Nobel Prize in 2012, and writer Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize in 2000.  

 

 

 

 

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SEEING SHANGHAI TRIAD THE MOVIE THE FOURTH TIME

 

Saw one of my favorite films again, Shanghai Triad, by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li. It's the story of a mafia boss and his girlfriend, Bijou, in Shanghai, 1930s. We see what a fourteen year old boy sees. The story begins when he arrives in Shanghai from his rural village. His uncle works for the Tang Triad, found the boy, a Tang, to work with the Triad as servant to the Boss's girlfriend, Bijou, a nightclub singer played by Gong Li. The Boss only trusted family in his Tang organization. The boy, the nephew of the Boss's fourth cousin, just happened to enter the story as a story behind the scenes, out of sight, was on the verge of rising to the surface. We see the boy's first week, one day at a time, learn what he learned about the world he fell into, and see him begin the process of becoming that world, himself. He is in a kind of shock by the end that we know he will recover from as he acclimatizes to the world of hard core gangsters that mean business. The boy entered the story when the Boss knew about his girlfriend's infidelities with his partner in crime he called his blood brother, who the Boss knew was plotting to kill the Boss and take over his role as Boss. The story we see is the working out of the Boss's trap to set up a moment to ensnare traitor and girlfriend together on a small island in the big river where Boss could off them and no traces be found.

 

the boss, his blood brothers and bijou

 

Just a week seeing the Boss's plan play out, not knowing this is what is happening until near the end when he sits down friend-turned-enemy and girlfriend-turned-enemy, explains to them how he found them out and how he set them up, how he lured them to the island they would never leave. I like about the story telling in the film that it tells the story seen on the surface, then retells the story by way of the undercurrents invisible from the surface. A gang war is way below the surface, another Boss is conspiring to take over the Boss whose story we are following. They tried to kill our friend the Boss, but he survived. Luring friend and girlfriend to the island was a part of his bigger scheme to undo the Boss attempting to undo him. He told friend-turned-enemy he would arrange it so it looked like the other Boss was responsible for his disappearance. This would undermine the other Boss, and be instrumental in his fall. By end of story, the boy's uncle is dead who brought him into the Triad leaving the boy with revenge in his heart. All he had witnessed in his first week was so extreme, just knowing what he saw drew him into the Triad, as he could not leave the Triad knowing what he knows. He committed to a world that is upside-down in relation to his life at home in the village. The boy is last seen hanging upside-down from a sailboat's mast, seeing the world upside-down. In the words of the Boss, he was being trained, like a dog.

 

uncle, the boy, bijou

 

The story has layers of stories going on that are connected by being the same story seen from different points of view at once. This was my fourth time seeing it, and I remember from every viewing, toward the end, when we are finding out what certain people in the story knew all along, how surprised I was to see people I felt were background characters turn out to be foreground, even contributors to the underlying stories. The people involved, from both factions, are merciless people, merciless in a particularly Chinese way. This brings up another aspect of the film that draws me to it, that it is a peep into Chinese culture, Shanghai in the Thirties, customs, beliefs, issues such as trust, loyalty, commitment. The story was made from a contemporary Chinese novel, made by a Chinese director and film crew, Chinese without Western influence in story-telling, no sense that the Chinese are inferior to whites. Plenty of Westerners were in Shanghai at the time, but they were peripheral to the world of the Chinese in their own city. I like a story from another culture told from the inside, from the culture itself by people whose lives are the culture.

gong li as bijou

Recalling the boring WW2 movie, Red Tails, about a squadron of black pilots. They acted like white guys, talked like white guys, obviously the screenplay written by a white guy, who had no sense for black culture, no appreciation. It was a bunch of white guys in black face to such a boring degree it killed the movie for me. I'd rather see a Chinese film made in China, a total Chinese production. Recalling Diary of a Geisha, good film, Japanese story, the actresses mostly Chinese playing Japanese, the novel and screenplay written by Anglo Americans with second-hand knowledge of the culture. Shanghai Triad is core Chinese. Zhang Yimou, the director, has made half a dozen of my favorite films. His films are so visually stimulating that last night, while watching it with friends, Lucas and Judy, Lucas noted a couple times that each second in the film would make a beautiful art photograph. The beauty of the production, interiors, exteriors, cars, clothes, Gong Li, atmospheres, were bathed in light that glowed, gave every scene an aura of light. Even in the night, light defined the dark. The quality of light and the beauty of the photography took the edge off the sinister goings on behind the scenes, such that the final deed was all the more shocking in its soft surroundings.

zhang Yimou

 

 

 

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GOODBYE, DRAGON INN THE MOVIE

Turned the laptop on after seeing a film I have a hard time finding anything to say about. It would take an ocean of things to say or nothing. Made in Taiwan by director, Tsai Ming-liang. I'd seen three other films by him, all of them telling me I want to see any I had not yet seen. This one came to the top of my netflix Q today, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. It was a brave film to make. I can't imagine how he found a producer. It was the ultimate anti-action film made around an action film from 1967, Dragon Inn, a Chinese (Taiwan) kung-fu sword-fight version of a Japanese samurai film. The film mostly happens inside an old movie theater in Taipei, its last night open. This was closing night. Half a dozen people in the theater. They're watching Dragon Inn. The film amounts to a series of still scenes inside the theater with someone moving through the scene, or not. A woman with a brace of some sort on her leg walks throughout the theater looking for the projectionist to give him something to eat. She never finds him. We look at the different individuals in the theater, watch them watch the movie. The camera work is worth mention. A couple times looking down the aisle of steps between the rows of seats, the steps will be going almost straight up on the screen. It doesn't seem unusual. It seems like the film was a review of the inside of the theater, looking at it from outside, seeing how once the theater was important, and by closing night in 2003, it had become irrelevant, showing kung-fu slasher films. The stillness throughout the film was not boring. Each scene had a quiet tension, wondering if something might happen in the scene. Never does. Brief word exchanges happened a few times. 

One guy tried to pick up another guy in a hallway. The guy he tried to pick up told him the theater was known to be haunted, had ghosts, and walked away. Watched the woman with the leg problem walk throughout the theater. One shot looked at the shadow cast by the vertical bars of a stair rail for a long time, listening to the woman climb the steps, one at a time, until she reached the level with the camera, came into view and slowly walked out of the scene. One of the half dozen in the seats was an old man sitting alone. Tears ran down his cheeks. Another old man was there with a child of about three. Sometimes a scene in the movie, acrobatic spinning dances with flowing robes and quick swords, shouting in Chinese. The soundtrack of the film is heard in the background in all the scenes throughout the building. The film playing, Dragon Inn, is always in the air. A film with as little action as a Japanese garden mixed with a kung-fu action movie. The flickering on the screen is a movie within a movie, the action generating no emotional commitment, the same as looking down an empty hallway for a long time, waiting for something to happen, and nothing happens. It's not frustrating. Right away, I caught onto the rhythm of the film, which did remind me of a documentary I saw once of Japanese gardens, action in stillness. In this way, it felt like the director's attitude was reverential toward the theater, sad to see it end. The lights came on, everyone was gone. Out front, the two old men recognized each other. They were actors in the 1967 film, living in Taipei, who came to see it perhaps the last time, the one bringing his grandbaby. They spoke briefly and stood still, looking back at the entrance to the theater.

The projectionist and the woman with the leg I took for his wife, tie up the loose ends, closing the theater, turning off the water to the urinals in the men's room, turning out lights, closing up for the last time. Curiously, by the end of a film in which nothing happens, I'd become acquainted with the half dozen people in the theater and the two people working the theater. It is a film so beautiful I'd like to recommend it to my film-watching friends, but when I think about who I know can sit through a movie in which nothing at all happens, it comes down to Lucas and Judy Carpenter. I feel like I have been in the presence of pure art, art for art's sake. If I didn't have the race to watch tomorrow, I'd see it again. I googled Tsai Ming-liang, director, to see what other films he'd made. I'd seen them all. This was the last of his I had not seen. At the end, I saw previews of three of his other films. I enjoyed reviewing them, remembering liking them all as much as Goodbye, Dragon Inn. One, The River, was among the strangest films I've ever seen, and among the most beautiful. Again, nothing much going on in Hong Kong where the weather is tropical. People sit around, walk around, ride around. And then one surprise moment in silence that could never be spoken of, but never forgotten. The movie goes on like before, but everything is different. Tsai Ming-liang, the director, has a subtle mind, so subtle I don't understand how he finds a producer. His films are not about making money. They're about winning international film awards, good marketing for a film that only shows in art theaters. Though every scene was shot by a still camera, like a still photograph, on one wall, or hallway, or in the rows of seats, each frame was a work of art in its composition and colors, like a wall-sized abstract or surrealist painting. Then someone walks through it, or stands in it, or sits in it.

The film seemed to me in the "school" of minimalism in cinema. It was as simple as stacked blocks of wood by Carl Andre, or tiles on the floor that a sign on the wall in the Museum of Modern Art invites you to walk on. The film was a series of beautiful compositions of plain spaces lasting half a minute or more. I never got bored, was never restless wondering when it will be over. I was held by the suspense of an empty space, an essentially abstract backdrop and people passing through it. I've been longing for a really good Chinese film I've not yet seen. This one was it. The trailers, previews, of Tsai Ming-liang films in the special features brought back memories of each one, making me want to see them again. I've seen too many straight-forward movies for awhile, needed one to hold me like this one did in its indirectness. The last three movies I've seen, before Goodbye, Dragon Inn, I had to take a nap half way into them. Good films, but slow, making me want to crank up the metronome. And this one today, so slow it stood still, I never looked at the clock one time. Never got the first case of jitters wanting this thing to move on, get in motion. Like a piece of music, it moved forward through time visually. This is one of the many aspects of netflix I love. I see a film I love, look for others by the same director, and I can have a film festival of movies I love. Will see Romanian films for the next couple weeks. I understand they're depressing, but don't care. Like Latvian films, Ukrainian films, Mongolian films, a look at life behind the Iron Curtain, to see how the people lived in the places we had little to no news about. I found Soviet satellite countries severely depressed, both economically and psychologically. The Soviet system, I can only assess from what I've seen, dismantled the cultures of the people in these countries. The stories show people having a slow time getting culture going again. The Soviet occupation made them dependent, then dumped them all overnight with strings attached. I love tapping into cultures around the globe by way of film. This one, Goodbye, Dragon Inn, rang my chimes. 

tsai ming-liang, director

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OBSERVING THE FACETS OF SELF

rufino tamayo

I can't get these French films I saw the other day out of my mind, Jean de Florette / Manon of the Spring. The French for spring is source. Source is more the word, but spring is just as right and requires no explanation in English. Turns out the telling of the story used the form of Greek tragedy. The Yves Montand character set the story in motion with a whim, his tragic flaw, automatic dislike for an outsider, someone not self. This a common characteristic among country people. These were French hill people, the people of the mountains of southern France, isolated and unto themselves. What happens on the mountain stays on the mountain sort of place. They are not different from American mountain people. Suspicion of outsiders is a common characteristic in a small community. He sets out to destroy a man who had what he wanted, a spring on his land, and did destroy him all the way unto him dying. He then took what he wanted and lived happily ever after. Until one day an old woman in the village who was blind asked him about a letter he'd received when he was in the Army. He didn't remember the letter. Later, at home, he found the old letter he had never opened. Turned out the man who moved in next door, the man he tormented unto death, was his own son, and the people in the village knew it, but weren't saying. He was struggling against not-self and it turned out to be self. He realized what he'd done and shut down his life by force of will. A sentence I'll carry the rest of my life as so poignant, telling its meaning directly, "I'm so ashamed, I don't want even the trees to see me." It threw me over the edge when he said that.

 

rufino Tamayo

 

The story was told so well I believed him when he said he didn't want the trees to see him. I have to give it to Marcel Pagnol, who wrote the stories, for making a true Greek tragedy among humble working people. The stories were written about the same time Arthur Miller was writing Death of a Salesman. There was talk among the intellectuals of the time searching for ways to make a true tragedy in the context of the common man instead of royalty. I felt Miller's Death of a Salesman was a bit forced, holding it to the outline of a definition of tragedy. Pagnol's tragedy seemed to unfold naturally, like the story came before the explication instead of the story being made to fit the explication. In Pagnol's story, I didn't see any of it coming. I wondered a few times why certain karmic returns had been passed over, didn't happen, when the deeds were such that indeed get some kind of return, especially the deeds done by design, with intent. The return came gradually at first, then all at once a tsunami of grief overwhelmed him such that it shut down his heart and mind, couldn't live with it. He wrote his will and told the story to the priest in confession. Sitting here staring at the end credits, I was hoping there was nothing in my past I'd set in motion without knowing it that would bring me to the same fate. I sat there thinking I don't ever want this experience. I really, really don't. The very same as I don't want the experience of the man who lived through the story, Twelve Years a Slave. There is a lot I don't want to be, like a political prisoner. Pagnol's story knocked me for a roll across the floor.  

 

rufino tamayo

 

I didn't want to write about it, because I'm hesitant to recommend movies anymore. I'm also reading DCP a positive thinking, highly conscientious collection of people, and I don't know many of those kinds of people. Yes I do, I know a lot. I identify with the people of positive thinking consciousness and I identify with people who are sarcastic and have a rude sense of humor, who laugh at positive thinking. I'm pointing to these people outside myself, particular individuals a given facet of myself is drawn to. It's that odd feeling meeting somebody who is a friend of a friend of mine. This person is entirely different from me, yet meets a facet of our friend, and I meet another facet. I look around at the people I know and they each represent a facet of myself. By facet, I mean like facets on a gemstone, a ruby, for example. It is the sparkle of the different facets, each reflecting the light different from any of the others that gives a diamond its bling. The various facets of ourselves give us our living bling too. Each of our facets have someone outside ourselves it is drawn to. I heard once of a project I've never took the time to do, but have always thought I might some day. That day never came. Anyway, I think I get it. The project is to sit on the floor with a little space around. Have twelve rocks, or ten or however many, and place one on the floor with the name of someone you're close with. Put the rocks in a circle around self, each with the name of someone in your life. Then get to know those aspects of self as seen in the other who has an aspect that accords with given aspect of self. Wondering about friends drifting apart or breaking up in one way or another, does the aspect in self change first and then does not reflect that individual any more? I've noticed that when I go through a change within, some of the people around me change. Some drift away and some new ones come in. Facets change because the light changes, the light within.

 

rufino Tamayo

 

I feel a little bit not right for evidently influencing my friend Lee to see it. She was so struck down by it she wrote a poem and a blog entry about the intensity of her grief. She provided me with the phrase, "tsunami of grief." Much as I don't feel comfortable that I put her through that without warning, it tells me this is the apex of art, to leave the observer with a powerful lesson learned from somebody else's story. I don't have a problem with films or novels or poetry that drag bottom in sorrow. Sorrow is one of the facets of human existence. Art is about the whole of the human experience. Chinese writing and film is loaded with really sad stories. I remember one, especially, The Blue Kite. Sorrow upon sorrow and ends in agonizing grief. There was one about the Japanese invasion of Nanking that wrings the heart to the last drop. And from the aftermath of an earthquake that takes the viewer to the extremity of grief. It ends with a woman falling to the floor, limp in her sorrow, saying, "I'm so ashamed." Evidently the Chinese love a good mournful cry. We want to feel good so bad in the West we enhance our brain chemistry with mood enhancers. Some people are asking why Americans haven't revolted yet against the corporate police state we have for government now. We're a no-problem society, stressed to the max, taking prescription pills to calm down into denial. I have a little problem of my own seeing up close what American working class people are having to do to get by, I see people of the middle class engaged in political correctness and positive thinking, I think about the black people who have it much worse than the white working class, and I can't get on board the positive thinking gospel ship. As a facet of human existence, it has its place, I am happy for it and I love it, but it is one of many facets. Art explores all the facets of human emotion. Art taught me to allow.

 

rufino Tamayo

 

 

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THE HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS - ZHANG YIMOU

Watched The House Of Flying Daggers again tonight with my friends from Georgia visiting for a few days. It's my friends the Carpenters, Lucas and Judy, from Conyers, Georgia, off I-20 east of Atlanta. Daughter Meredith and her husband Greg, here from San Francisco, came with them, and Greg's mother, Ruth, from Chicago. We ate a good meal prepared by Meredith and Greg, PhDs in biology and chemistry, respectively, as good in the kitchen as they are in the laboratory. Meredith is working in a new field involving DNA from ancient teeth, like Leakey's Lucy, that kind of ancient. I'd left about a dozen DVDs there last time Lucas and Judy were here. Greg and Meredith chose The House Of Flying Daggers. I was happy to see it again. Haven't seen it in a few years. Looking at what I love about it, I find it is largely a visual fest of colors and flowing lines. The story is simple and complex. It actually is both. It's very simple. And it's rather complex. Early on, Judy asked of one of the actors, Takeshi Kaneshiro, "Is he a bad guy?" I didn't know what to say. I never think of characters in terms of good guys and bad guys. I just watch and see what happens. I said I didn't know. I've seen the film half a dozen times, but never thought of him as a good or bad guy. Now that it's over, I can't see that either word has meaning for his character. He was both and neither.


It always does me good to see Zhang Ziyi in any film she's in. I believe she had a small, but notable role in Lust-Caution, the film of the underground resistance during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s. She was the ninja girl who stole the sword and flew through the air with it in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. She had a role in The Hero with Jet Li, most memorable in the sword fight among the trees full of falling red leaves blowing around them in the wind, her last scene. I think it's Maggie Chung who defeated her in the scene of swirling reds. Zhang Yimou, the director, makes some gorgeous films, lush with colors, with flow, with feeling. His stories are minimal, yet emotionally complex. In a big gray palace with huge columns, silk draperies of yellow-green suspended from the ceiling made a flowing labyrinth for a sword fight between the king and a would-be assassin. In The House Of The Flying Daggers, the sword fight at the end happens in a landscape of autumn in full color. Snow starts falling as the sword fight goes on. By the time the fight is over, the snow is about 4 inches deep. Another time, I watched the brief documentary, the Making Of, that goes with the film. Zhang Yimou said while they were filming the sword fight the snow started falling and he decided to go ahead and keep on filming as the snow fell. It made a scene that was out of this world and very much of this world.


The visuals in varieties of forest in autumn, vertical dark lines with the pointilist orange and yellow dots of leaves among them, vertical white lines with pointilist yellow leaves. Then there is the bamboo grove of vertical green bamboo poles with leaves growing up high in the canopy. Running through the vertical green lines, soldiers in green uniforms striding through leafy air above, chasing Zhang Ziyi and her partner, Takeshi Kaneshiro the good guy/bad guy. She's in love with him, but the other one, Andy Lau, is in love with her, has waited for her 3 years. They're the ones who sword fought in the end. At the beginning, they were army buddies stationed together, men loyal to the emperor, or so we believed then. Much deception going on, which is uncovered, step by step, by sequence of events, until at the very end all deceptions come clean. Andy Lau played the man in waiting for three years, a member of the House of the Flying Daggers, also a spy inside the Chinese army. In Hong Kong, Andy Lau is a director of some good men-with-guns films, romantic comedies, and he acts in several of his films. He's one of the Chinese actors and directors of note in this time. He makes a good gangster movie. Search his name at netflix and a long list of movies come up.


By now I've seen most of Zhang Yimou's films, all the ones I can find at netflix, each of them several times. They're the kinds of films I watch a second time before returning them. Landscape is important in all his films. This one used the landscape of forest from the inside, then at the end seeing it from a meadow outside the forest. In a forest like the horses were running and walking through, no limbs were on the ground, no low-growing limbs, the ground evenly carpeted in fallen leaves at the same time the trees are full of colored leaves. The entire screen is covered with golden reddish orange of autumn leaves on the ground and in the trees, vertical dark lines of tree trunks, a man in a purple robe riding his horse through the scene, sometimes walking, sometimes running. Zhang Ziyi wears a flowing yellow-green outfit -- can't call it a dress, can't call it a robe -- running through the bamboo forest of vertical green lines just a shade darker than her clothes. He, the Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, wore purple through the scenes of vertical green lines and the scenes of the vertical dark lines with the golden ground below and leaves above.


I hold Zhang Yimou up there with other directors like Ole Bornedal of Denmark, Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, Kristof Kieslowski and Roman Polanski of Poland, Andrei Tarkovsky of Russia, several from France, Kurosawa of Japan, Peter Greenaway from England, Lars von Trier of Denmark. I know before I start a film by Zhang Yimou, I will be satisfied all the way through it, every scene. He also made Raise The Red Lantern from a short novel by Su Tong. He enhanced the story visually, made it a fest of colors and shapes, beautifully dressed people moving among the symphonies of both brilliant and dull, warm colors around them that sometimes are cold. His film, Ju Dou, with Gong Li, happens in a place that dyes silk red. Red silk banners hang drying and flowing in the breeze through much of the film. The first time I saw it was without subtitles. Saw it later with subtitles and all I missed was names and relationships, like uncle, cousin, like that. I've seen Raise The Red Lantern several times and read the novel, know the story fairly well. It's time to see it without subtitles. I may want to look at other of his films without subtitles. I find I see the colors and compositions much better without the words to read. I don't mind reading them, but that time I saw Ju Dou without subtitles was memorably beautiful. It taught me I don't need to understand literal meanings. The tone of voice of what the actors are saying often carries the meaning. I like to hear the Chinese language too. I hear it best without subtitles. The House Of The Flying Daggers would be good without subtitles. The visuals tell the story and words fill in the blanks.


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