Excursus NY
Spring 1971
An Austrian
Cultural Package Arrives for a 21 events
in 28 days USA marathon...
By the time
the Austrian threesome
- Handke, Kolleritsch, Libgart Schwarz -
arrived in New York in the Spring of 1971
I had been beseeched by Siegfried Unseld,
as he does the Left-Handed Woman
to become the Suhrkamp agent to replace
the fine ex-Berliner Joan Daves, who had
her nose full of that representation. See
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.htm
for a
detailed account of what transpired during
the two years I endured working for the
Obergauner and his Foreign Rights Hyena,
Helene Ritzerfeld, also for the
relationship with Farrar, Straus + Giroux.
I had managed to put
Handke’s work over at Farrar, Straus with
support from Susan Sontag – barely: had it
not been for Robert Giroux realizing
Handke’s talent that ass-licking
stiletto man Michael DeCapua - as I will
memorialize him justly in the annals of
literature - would have had his way
again and as he would have once more in
the future and shot down another of my
projects. KASPAR AND OTHER PLAYS had
been published, to some fine reviews, of
as yet officially unperformed plays. I
had given up my own royalties as
translator to get two plays finally
done, officially, at B.A.M. A clown
named Schulz, a clown in every which way
in American parlance and a clown suit
made for him by his American hippie girl
friend Barbara Becker [a.k.a. "Slave
girl"] had appeared in my office who
wanted to do them, since I had not
gotten anywhere in a couple of years I
had no reason to say no.
http://www.schulz-keil.faithweb.com/photo.html
Since Princeton 1966 [see
Footnote for Princeton] I had seen Handke
once more, in 1969, in Berlin, to discuss
my translation of KASPAR ["more abstract,
as abstract as possible" had been the
author’s wish] and my heart had sunk at
the prospect of finding the German
originals for the quotes from American
black mask type novels that DER HAUSIERER
contains, I might have asked Handke
whether he could help me find them. As it
was, GOALIE was substituted for HAUSIERER
in the contract I had drawn prior to
becoming Suhrkamp agent and thus also Handke’s U.S.
agent. I had translated GOALIE, too, by
then.
I had already run around
town with a wild ex-pat troupe that had
re-appeared from San Miguel de Allende
with my friend the actor and writer
Michael Locascio and a certain JB in whose
scrawny arms “the Hammer” – Neil Cassidy -
had expired one cold Mexican Tequila night on some railroad tracks - to give a hint of how
relatively hardcore down-low hippie
precincts we are now in - and will not
except for mere mention indicate what
the weed they brought with them elicited
in me… - and arranged for one shot performances of PUBLIC
INSULT and SELF-ACCUSATION at any venue
that would have us, me and my trusty
Sony tape recorder, weight about 20
pounds those days. I had worked with
Herbert Berghof and E.G. Marshall at his
HB studio on two two week performances
of these plays and of KASPAR. E.G.
Marshall! A memorably intelligent actor.
NY was a fairly wide open town those
days, it would become far more open in
the next ten years. [FN-2]
In Berlin Handke had shown
me Baby Amina as we left his dank prince’s
apartment in the Uhlandstrasse, Adorno had
told me of the ownership of this anything but
princely rat hole, and
I had thought it perfectly normal - look
at Handke’s A CHILD’S STORY, a pretty good account [but for
its leaving out the lay-a-broad’s
womanizing or any real mention of the
girl’s mother!] of those years that also
touch on Berlin, and am I ever glad that
I like little more than liebäugeln with babies - as compared to
the revolutionaries who lacked time and
interest for the like in their
self-important endeavors. Handke’s
“showing” and invariably wanting to go
quickly outdoors [we worked at a table
at an outdoor at my old familiar
Ku-Damm] would eventually become to seem
other than “normal.” I had also
translated all of the early plays but
for Quodlibet, which I would do a few years
later during a half year’s trip half way
round the world and back on the Hellenic Splendor.
The
Austrian Threesome appeared to think that
the Suhrkamp Rep’s small apartment was
their home away from home. Handke at once
moved them out of the Austrian assigned
hotel on Lexington Avenue into his
there-after forever preferred New York
abode, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Algonquin.
Uwe Johnson would stay in the next door,
far cheaper, Iroquois. I was beginning to
learn the odd ways of the once fabulous
seeming writers’ – who it turned out “all
scratched themselves at the same spots” as
did ordinary mortals - invariable
eccentricities. We trouped to the premiere
of what struck me as a barely good enough
performance, the reviewers, Steve Kroll in
Newsweek still comes to mind, seemed to
like it fine, so did Mel Gussow at the NY
Times. Not so Herr Handke who felt it was
just as well it had been done in Brooklyn,
of course how would he know that B.A.M.
and being outside Manhattan was becoming
an “in” thing. He went backstage and must
have had unhappy words with the director,
Wieland Schulz [passport name, a.k.a.
Schulz-Keil.
for during
our ride back to Manhattan, to Elaine’s, my home
away from home since 1965 when it had just
been a hole in the wall on Second Avenue,
Handke said that he thought Schulz was
very dark. When I, who had no particular
reason to be apprehensive, questioned that
assessment, Handke qualified himself by
saying “at least very German.” I of course
was keenly aware that Handke was a genius,
but learned to appreciate his x-ray vision
for character only with time; that he,
too, would prove “very dark” and “very
German”, differently of course and with
that admixture of salvaging Slovenian
Maria Sivec, and incomparable to the
ultimate masochist Schulz whom John
Houston sent to Mexico City to bring some
real whores on to the set in Cuernavaca
of Under the Volcano, proud of
being a pimp, I could not imagine such
perverse character structures at the time
– live and learn, never live long enough -
came as a surprise only because Handke’s
genius had made me forget all about my
initial 1966 impressions. Translating
these works – challenging, but to
understand them would take half a life
time, to understand what genius can
accomplish.
I had not
had time to attend rehearsals, the
Jezebel, the only one who could have
accomplished this, for whom I had broken
out of a six year marriage, had had the
part of the woman in Self-Accusation; however,
Pamela Bellwood [King] who had been
married to Peter Bellwood of The
Fringe had got a good part, in the
touring company of Butterflies Are Free I
think it was, and had fluttered the coop
[sorry I couldn’t resist], and had
mentioned that the director shouted. What
German director did not shout? – well, I
never saw Herbert Berghof shout. It was a
first alert, like others tucked away in
the underground storage bin. Handke I
imagine was unaware of most of the
preceding, and he never asked, as a matter
of fact during the 20 years that the
relationship translator author lasted he
never asked the simplest of questions,
such as where were you born, when did you
get to the U.S., where did you go to
school, whose parents child are you – and
so I have to agree with Marie Colbin’s
assessment that Handke is a one-eyed
mono-maniac, entirely self-involved to
which numerous documents testify that
Malte Herwig provides in his MEISTER DER
DAEMMERUNG, especially the letter to
Siegfried Unseld seceding from Suhrkamp
Verlag because Siegfried is also
publishing the Reichs-Kanickel, and the
lengthy diary complaint about Sophie
Semin’s son from an earlier affair
behaving as unselfconscious possessor of
Handke’s space in his house in Chaville. I
was never at ease with Handke even prior
to what he did with my girlfriend Judith
Thurman, and I don’t think just because I
was awed by his genius, the early
impressions that that then proved so
premonitiously accurate [Footnote 1] I
expect played into that, if there had been
a chessboard out during my visits to Rue
Montmorency in the 70s we might have
gotten something on, those days when some
of us at Elaine’s and the crossstreet bar
Eric’s followed every move of Bobby
Fischer’s championship games was the last
hey-day of my chess. According to a letter
Handke wrote to Kolleritsch [see their
published correspondence] I was
"pleasantly boring" - I imagine he could
not imagine how boorish I found someone
who didn't have a glass of water for a
city walker who had walked some miles to
his place and unless we went out really
didn't seem to want his guest around for
at most ten minutes. One must read WEIGHT
OF THE WORLD and MOMENT OF TRUE FEELING to appreciate Handke's
state of mind during those days after his
mother had committed suicide and his
insulted and neglected wife had split. - I
was at ease and talkative as could be with
no end of people but my then
uncomprehended gut feelings made me freeze
in the presence of murderers and major
criminals. Schulz with his act of being
one of the guys and saying “shit” at the
right moment - it took me a long time to
admit that Handke had been right about him
and in five minutes.
At Elaine’s
it seemed perfectly normal, as though we
had been flirting for a long time, for
Libgart and me to play footsie and hold
hands under Table 3 while the
Bicyle-built-for-Two Kolleritsch-Handke
was entwined intellectually. As we left
Elaine’s Handke wanted to take a photo of
the three of us, Libgart in the center. I
realized by the way she moved my hand away
from her tush and placed it around her
right hip that she was a woman with
finesse. I wanted to “walk back” – to the
Algonquin, a mere two miles, but Handke
was tired. I seemed to have lacked the
finesse to instruct Libgart to spend an
afternoon at “a hairdressers.” Either by
that evening or subsequently, at the
Austrian Institute, on its long winding
staircase, I saw Libgart “perform” an
entrance from that marvel THE RIDE ACROSS
LAKE CONSTANCE – I noticed how proud
Handke was of her as a bewitching and
light as air performer. That damned
peripheral vision again! Within a day or
so I gave a party at my three room
apartment at 55th and 6th Avenue
and invited two of Handke’s earliest
American backers, the critics Richard
Gilman and Stanley Kaufman, maybe a dozen
people, no one from Farrar, Straus best as
I recall, and it was when the two critics
and Handke and I were a foursome, and
Gilman who had noticed Handke’s use of
Wittgensteinian [Philosophical
Investigations] forms of querying language
in RIDE [Gilman had not experienced a
performance and so we, good friends to be,
would forever argue about the irrelevance
of Wittgenstein to what an audience
undergoes as the ordinary logic of their
word world is destroyed and they are set
free], it may have been Gilman asking some
lit-crit question along those lines that
Handke dropped out down to the left and
squatted down by my record player on the
lowest shelf of a book case and put on a
Beatles Record [?] that I subsequently
realized something had been … too much…
perhaps one of those episodes that he
terms “autistic” to Herbert Gamper. The
“dark fellow” with the Alan Ginsberg Karl
Marx visage all the time stood by the
window to the apartment building shaft
into which I had once tossed my wedding
ring. After everyone had left, it occurred
to Handke, it was the first thing he said,
to say that I had was gay. This might have
made for more than an awkward moment, but
Libgart who might have of course pointed
to herself, quickly mentioned the also
departed flaxen-haired beauty, Renate
Karlin, who had had to leave to look after
her two splendid kids. In retrospect what
strikes me as odd about myself that here I
am having this passionate affair with
Renate, which founders on insane jealousy
on my part, and I’d have been willing,
money allowing, to run off with Libgart,
to wherever. Handke would have had his
breakdown a year or so earlier. Renate was
a recently divorced professor of art at
Sarah Lawrence, who could what my even
harder working beautiful
painter-illustrator teacher wife had been
too stubborn and socially incompetent to
do, .e.g. hold her own, and not be fazed
by the tough talk at the so male oriented
Table 4, the “big table”, at Elaine’s – it
took very little really to be admitted to
the circle if you were a woman, but only
two other women come to mind who could
handle it, Anthea Sylbert who was married
to my close friend and author Paul
Sylbert, and the woman who did the
acrostics for the New York Magazine, Mary
Ann Madden, and tended to hang with friend
Tom Buckley, a New York Times reporter who
had been in 'Nam, she had a touch of that
forties hard drinking reporter gal about
her that seemed to admit you to the male
club. Renate was entirely feminine but
smart, and charming, and had fine hind
legs of her own. And yet… so much for my
sainthood. Perhaps Handke still had
Ginsberg’s pass at him via me of 5 years
earlier in mind, or noticed that I held my
cigarette the way my mother had. I might
have pointed out to him that he had
squatted down by my record player like a
woman!
At the
Threesome’s return from 21 cities in 28
days jaunt through the US, that is
memorialized in SHORT LETTER, they seemed
to have headed straight for my apartment,
Fredi Kolleritch collapsed on what had
been my marriage bed, tachycardia,
Libgart, too, was exhausted and got to
rest on the daybed in my work space, all I
did was some liebaeugeln as Handke
seemingly energized by the trip experience
asked whether there were any international
news stands about: indeed, he had come to
the right area, both Rizzoli’s and a fancy
hotel, the Carlton [?] had them and were
within about a block. Had there been
images of him in those pages? I failed to
ask at his return. Oh yes, Handke asked me
whether I could guess whose signature they
had wheeled during a flight to Atlanta. I
threw up my arms. Muhamed Ali’s on their
way to Atlanta. What kids we all were,
straight out of the Ride Across Lake
Constance, not to forget its
sinister bass line. Libgart and I
continued where we had left off with our
secret little touches and feelies - all
this ever evoked from the twosome, it was
Kolleritch who spoke up: "Libgart du bist
so anders." Was she ever! Anyhow, I made
her feel desired who had not been made
love to since the birth of her daughter
several years before. And so her finally
leaving the monster came as no surprise to
me.
We also had lunch one time at the
Russian Tea Room on West 57th, they had
gone to see a musical play I think with
Lauren Bacall in it, Handke was
disappointed in her of whom he of course
had those marvelous memories as a film
actress. At one point we also met with the
translator Joachim Neugroeschel, another
mama's boy whose mother via the Austrian
Institute had arranged for the meeting.
Handke nearly threw up at the physical
ugliness of Neugroeschel, whose character
would turn out to match his physique. The
people I was willing to put up with!
Joachim was a pretty good translator, I
used him a lot later at Urizen, and when I
read my translations of INNERWORLD at the
Goethe House asked him to join me with his
Celan. There would be a second time that
Handke nearly puked, at Barbara Rose as
the then wife of the friend Jerry Leiber
when I was working on putting some songs
into THEY ARE DYING OUT, this was in
Paris, at the Rue Montmorency. Her
character, too, would match her physique,
like her daughter, Rachel Stella by whom I
would allow myself to be seduced in 1979
and have a great two old shoes year with
until I had to make myself impossible at a
time I could not have a lead shoe dragging
on me, Barbara had been cute when young,
but aged badly. Thus Handke's sense of the
aesthetic and the moral seem to match. No
wonder he sometimes is overcome with
self-disgust.
Later, back
on the West Coast in the 80s, I heard of
Handke’s behavior at UC Riverside’s
Austrian shin-dig, he had cursed everyone
as idiots and gone off with a woman not
his wife. Donald Daviau who ran that
operation before he took Summers off to
drive the USA in his Goldwing, of French
Canadian working class origins, in many
ways a splendid man, did not take kindly
to Handke’s Tourettism, and it cost Handke
a special issue of the magazine he edited.
FOOT
NOTE [1]
Allow
me to put my initial impressions of
Peter Handk in summary
fashion, and let
me start with my initial
involvement with
this great writer, “The first
time I saw your face, so much like a
fifth Beatle, wearing those gangsta
shades” I suppose it would be in an
Amurrican musical – at Princeton 1966. After
Handke’s famous first major –
quite a few prior minor ones in
Austria - public performance at
Princeton, and
after the party that I and Jakov Lind
and Pannah Grady gave for the Gruppe at Pannah’s
splendid apartment in
the Dakota
a complex
most famous as the scene of
the murder of John Lennon in fall
1980, I knew the following matters
about
Peter Handke:
1] That
he was an
exhibitionist – a
matter I knew
not only from his first performance
where he so famously attacked what had
been
read at the Gruppe meeting
for being
descriptively impotent – which his
first novel, the 1964 DIE HORNISSEN
certainly is not - but because Handke
announced to West German media from
the
Empire State building that he was “the
new Kafka.” We recall the first
announcing that he was “the first.”
And later Handke would confide the
full extent
of his exhibitionism to me. Handke has
made a spectacle of himself – since
age
2 says someone who had a number of
affairs with single mothers whose
children
were none too happy to see Mommy in
bed fucking someone else! Once
analytically
trained I became more discreet and
aware, at least in that respect.
2] That
he was a potential
revolutionary
who
lacked deference for his elders,
that he would break rules.
3] That here was a
killer I
noticed at the look that came over
Handke’s face at
the sight of a Max Frisch book lying
on a display table as the assembled
filed
out of the hall. The look of murderous
envy and ambition that passed over his
face! Looks like that are not easily
forgotten, but they can go
underground. –
Herwig’s MEISTER DER DAEMMERUNG
contains Handke’s own admissions along
those
lines, unless you fail to glean so
from his texts. Potentially a compleat
psychopath if literature were not his
salvation. He wanted to murder Marie
Colbin we find out in Moravian
Nights.
Herwig’s book is complicitous with
Handke in the way it elides Colbin’s
famous set of charges, nor does Herwig
call Handke when he lies to his face
that he “maybe gave her a kick in the
ass, I don’t know I may have slapped
her
too.” Handke is the man who once said
that if he is caught out he will lie
at
once, and I don’t think he was lying
when he said that. Sing sorrow!
4] That
as someone dressed like the
fifth Beatle Handke might have an identity
problems, “I want
to be someone like someone
else was once” – say Franz Kafka -
that he was possibly modish, a photo
model.
http://picasaweb.google.com/mikerol/HANDKE3ONLINE#
5] That
he had eye problems, as he
mentioned to me the first time I, one
of his hosts, talked to him, his
glasses
affording, seemingly, a better opening
line than what was really on my mind –
a
set of specifics as to his charge at
Princeton, and whose work did he
really
like, for example was William Faulkner
a hero of his as he was of mine, I
wanted to talk literature, after all
this was a literature party and I did
not
know his work, but did of quite a few
young Austrians at that point… What
made
him wear dark glasses even in well
modulated lighting conditions of
Pannah
Grady’s multi-millionaire apartment
where Pannah’s Beat writer friends
would
then smash some Persian vases. “Nausea
of the eye balls.” Eye
problems. In The Lesson
of St. Victoire Handke mentions
occasional moments of
total color blindness and is
speculating whether anyone else in the
family
suffers the same, perhaps the trove of
letters from Peter Handke to his
biological
father Schönemann that Herwig
unearthed mention that.
I once spent a week checking on this
of the plethora of psycho-somatic
symptoms from which Handke suffers
or used to, did not reach a definite
conclusion; hysteria is a frequent
cause, but my guess is that the
proverb “he
saw black” might be most fitting in
the case of someone who has half a
dozen
moments per day that he wants to run
amok – what if we all did? - or a
combination of hysteria and amok. Aside
Handke's autistic episodes, hysteria and
rage are the prime
candidates for an explanation. It is one
of a plethora of Handke's
psychosomatic symptoms that fit the
profile of someone who was exposed to
traumatizing violent drunken primal
scenes from age 2 until 12. Handke’s Essay on
Tiredness lists
everything that used to make Handke
tired and angry, or rather tired so
angry.
If Handke were entirely color blind
he could of course not respond to
Cezanne as he does, etc.
6] That
he was a village
sadist as my
peripheral vision caught sight of the
grin on his
face as Alan Ginsberg asked me to
translate that he wanted to fuck
Handke.
Ginsberg insisting to repeat this
demand then elicited my rare steel
blue
Prussian dagger looks and Ginsberg
backed off. I saw this dreadful
self-advertizer only once more, at the
end of my stint at the PEN central
committee. Ginsberg wore tie and suit,
another clown. Handke it turned out
really did not have enough English at
the time and thought it was I being
propositioned, to put it mildly; a
misunderstanding not cleared up until
I paid
Handke a visit on the Moenchsberg in
1980
The excess of
sadism and the
impulses to run amok, entitlement
and feeling superior, I imagine play
into
these gratuitous injurious acts
towards those closest to Handke.
Masochism, an
even more disgusting feature,
although you may wish for it in this
instance, I
do not detect in our adventurer.
On the
basis of Princeton and Pannah’s Party
Handke I can’t say was someone I was
interested getting to know.
Turns out he was an utterly confident
fellow who on the basis of having
written
DIE HORNISSEN and PUBLIC INSULT had
dropped out of law school and was
announcing, as he would throughout his
career, here I am, it’s me, I, Peter
Handke-Sivec-Schönemann-Filip
Kobal-Loser-Percival-Goethe-II! Of
course there existed the possibility
that he
was more than just a show-off, that
he really had something to show.
7]
Reading Handke’s texts within the
year, that is by 1968 I had read
everything then published – a
profusion of
other plays and essays and the second
novel, DER HAUSIERER, followed in
short
order - it dawned on me that there was
more to this man than what I had seen
and experienced at Princeton and in
New York – and that he would then
prove to
be a true darling, not just the
budding monster, came I imagine as far
more of
a surprise and of course so did his
texts. Playing around with translating
the
first play texts to see who might be
the right translator for him they
proved
so delightful, both serious and
playful, that I decided to do them
myself – and
the world has not been the same since,
my world.
8] That
Handke could also be the most
insulting person I have ever not
kicked out of my house and life is due
entirely to my always knowing that he
was a genius. I am awed, up to a
point.
[see above]
9] That
he could also be, especially at
a remove, the most marvelous person I
have ever met – was no doubt the
biggest
surprise of all, and which accounts, I
expect, why his few loyal friends, all
gratuitously injured over the years,
bear with him and have not told him to
go
jump in a lake. But accounts for the
fact that in the
70s in Paris he could write
Kolleritsch: "Have not seen anyone the
past ten days but the Portuguese
cleaning lady." [It is understood that
daughter Amina has to suffer her
father always wanting to write and not
taking her potty when she wants to
go!]
10] That
he would take my girlfriend
and take her hard at the time and
within a few weeks claim that he had
not had
any woman adventures – either points
to his splitness, his ability to lie
as
Marie Colbin points out in her famous
charge,
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/literatur/0,1518,24228,00.html
or to
dissociation, but it sure spooked
me – on the
other hand, the girlfriend the
relationship with whom his act ruined,
turned out to be a habitual liar, too.
11]
That he threatened to abort a
non-existent friendship when I fought,
in a manner not to his liking, for
what
he said, at the time, was the best
translation he had ever seen, of his
greatest text, and the best
collaboration I had had it was too,
with him the
“elbow holder,” WALK ABOUT THE
VILLAGES, finally struck the kind of
chord
within me that said: “You know kid,
aren’t we lucky, if Libgart and I had
eloped as I would have with your so
insulted and neglected and needy
dazzling, rasante
wife in 1971, and if you and
Judith had not, aren’t we lucky – your
work would not have found an equally
fine translator responder.” Life with
Peter Handke, two adventurers, meet
and
part. He has the talent, I have the
sense of humor and am better at cards.
Long distance shock administered from
the St. Monica Mts. in 1986.
[Footnote-2]
During the five years 1961
to 1966 before I got a job at
Farrar, Straus I had not only been a scout
in Germany but been a reader for a lot of
U.S. publishers, for George Braziller’s
Book Find Club, had been a reader for my
friend the Trotskyite novelist Danny
Gordon’s Columbia Pictures Reading
Service, to which Publisher's Weekly
supplied all publishers galleys in return
for one page evaluation - Hollywood got
the "story" outlines from Danny's readers.
- The writer critic general darling, not a
bad bone one of the few really good guys
Robert Phelps had proved to provide a
whole new dimension to my appreciation of
British and American literature. I was the
Suhrkamp Scout in NY and so got to read a
lot of wonderful things in manuscripts and
got to know a lot of agents, my
recollection of the aging emigre agents -
Joan Daves, Max Becker, Robbie Lantz,
Sanford Greenberger, Kurt Bernheim -
continues to grow fonder. I had had a
magazine, Metamorphosis whose publisher Michael Lebeck
from one day to the next started to lift
imaginary rocks in his head as he joined
a Sufi sect, and that was that. Later I
would inherit his apartment at 19th and
8th Avenue, but he had sold most of his
books. When I got married in 1966 I gave
the apartment to the fine translator
from the French and Japanese, Lane Dunlo
whom I came to know because he had left
a huge window drawer full of books in
the Hotel Chelsea, all checked out in
his name from the New York Public
Library. He had superb taste, and after
reading
the trove I located him. This is the
kind of incident that makes me believe
one might write a novel called "Worm
Holes".
I had translated quite a bit and wanted to stay out of
offices of any kind. I had a contract to
write a biography of the anti-Hitler
conspirator Abwehr colonel
Kurt Grosskurth, chiefly because both
parents had been in the German
resistance who had improbably survived,
as had my grandfather four concentration
camps, and Grosskurt seemed an
interesting parallel to what might be
transpiring in certain quarters of the US Army in
the 60s, and though I eventually became
disenchanted with Grosskurt, who did
nothing more than toss a rock at the Reichs
Chancellory and, sent to the
Eastern Front, was captured at
Stalingrad, and died a Russian P.O.W.,
as I did with the German resistance as a
whole, I put in my 5 K advance’s
research worth in D.C. and the Institut
für Zeitgeschichte in Munich.
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