Madel(e)ine

In the book In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, as every poseur knows, writes about a tiny cookie--a madeleine--which has the power to transport him back to his childhood, or, in the other direction, to bring his childhood into the present. One whiff of this little cookie and back he goes (or here it comes), and he can feel his little-boy cheeks squeezed by all manner of aunt.


When I hear the song "Be My Baby" by The Ronettes, I don't think of my childhood--it was recorded 19 years before I was born--but I do experience an immediate association, a kind of Madeline Moment.

I misspell that for a reason. Because "Be My Baby" puts me back with Madeline Adams herself, a young woman I met in my formative years. This Madeline was very beautiful, almost mythically so, and I've never heard the opening four-beat drum-burst of "BMB" without thinking of her smiling and then riding off on a school bus with me, farther and farther into the distance, oh won't you please.


Fine. So Madeline may have been made-up, a character from The Wonder Years on whom Kevin Arnold had a desperate and scandalous crush, but my cause-and-effect memory of her is very real. Be My Baby = Madeline + the creepy-sweet teen lust she seemed to represent.

I'll make you happy, baby. Just wait and see. For every kiss you give me, I'll give you three.

(Quick aside: until this week, I'd never considered that the title The Wonder Years is a double meaning, encapsulating both nostalgia--the noun--and debilitating adolescent doubt--the verb.)

(Quicker aside: "Be My Baby" was written and produced by notable murderer Phil Spector, a fact which only adds to its haunting nature).

You know I will adore you 'til eternity.

I can't dance about architecture or write about music, but I think what's so effective about the song is the mix of a sweet, intimate declaration--"Be My Little Baby"--with the sultry, invasive backup-singer repetition of that declaration. The speaker of the song is the ultimate crush-come-true who, unfortunately, turns out not to be in full possession of her marbles. She has multiple personalities or, at the very least, she's got some home-girl-voyeurs chanting from her closet, and they all really want you to stay over and make mistakes. Both the angel and devil on your broad shoulders are whispering "Be Her Little Baby," and it's too late to run.



And if I had the chance I'd--never let you go.

***

In the years since I saw that Wonder Years episode--"Heartbreak" it's called--I've played the soundtracked scene back in my brain--my consciousmess, my wit mine, my thoughtjockey, my grey lady, my me blob, my skullbug--an estaimted eleven times. Kevin and Winnie are on a field trip. They've broken up because Winnie saw Kevin standing with Madeline and because Winnie likes another fellow. They board their buses--K & W are now at separate high schools so they've got separate rides--and the buses turn in different directions. Madeline, the symbol of all this teen-anguish, is still on Kevin's bus and she's still totally smoking. But he doesn't care any more: "Be My Baby" plays: I tingle.

It's all very simple. And it's so cemented in my wit mine--I'm sorry, my brain--that I've told Megan about its effect on me whenever we hear The Ronettes. Or any band I mistake for The Ronettes, including: The Marvelletes, the Chirelles, the Shantelles, the Shrangri-la's, and the Velvelettes). I sometimes share this Wonder Years plotline even when I listen to "Please Mr. Postman," which is the virginal twin-sister of "Be My Baby."

At every rate, the scene is a dominant memory.



When I was a sophomore, I constantly shirked my Chemistry homework to watch Wonder Years reruns from 9 to 10, so I probably saw "Heartbreak" half-a-dozen times (poetic clause). Maybe that constant watching set me up to have some strange romantic expectations. Anyway, I'd just started going to a school that had girls, I was a serial idolizer of them, and, reinforcing that unfair perception, I took doses of girl-next-door-schmaltz in the form of The Wonder Years every night. I was hoping that, just as I tried to jump into the screen, my very own Winnie-Madeline would jump off of it and save me with her virtue.

All that is to say that there was no way I wasn't going to check out that episode when it became available to me on Netflix the other day. I shepherded Megan toward the TV, as she shepherds me toward certain episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I asked her to wait 21-minutes for the knee-buckling conclusion.

First she lightly chastised me for still having a TV-crush on Madeline. I proposed to her that this was an instance of Alex-Mackification; that is, TV characters, like Alex Mack, who were older than us when we first watched their shows will always be remembered as grown-ups, so therefore it isn't totally creepy when we're retroactively fond of their formerly contemporary 14-year old faces.

(Totally more than a year older than me).

Megan mostly agreed with the logic--probably because she still has a crush on Rufio from Hook--and then we found out that Julie Condra, who played Madeline, had been 20 when the episode aired. So I was absolved of any suspected fourth-degree-skeeviness.

Meanwhile, in the show, the buses pulled away, here it came, oh since the day I saw you, I have been waiting for you. . .

And then the Beach Boys' song "God Only Knows" started playing. If you should ever leave me, well, life would still go ON believe me. This was totally wrong. How could a memory so specific and, let's be honest, obsessive, turn out to be invaded by Brian Wilson?

I stammered only for a minute, and then refused to give up on my own Mem-o-matic (again, I'm referring to my brain. Please try to keep up). "Be My Baby" must have been featured in another episode. And I did find, after a time, that "Be My Baby" had played during "Ninth Grade Man," a minute of which is included below.



Madeline appears while the song plays, and it's ominous. I was right. But wrong. And I had to wonder at/about my own memory, which had been sharp enough to connect a pop-song from the 60s with a 20-year-old actress in a 20-year old dramedy, and sharp enough to develop an uncanny association. But it was also too dull to actually be accurate.

Here, we see the beginning of the end of Kevin and Winnie and "Be My Baby" plays. In a later episode, Madeline actually figures in the end of their relationship and it's "God Only Knows" that plays. My patternsmith--i.e., brain--must have decided that the songs ought to have been switched, and would have been even more unsettling if they had been.

Or, more likely, the frazzled traffic cop above my neck--i.e., ibid--just threw up its hands at my memory-jam and said, as Ronnie Spector does in "Be My Baby," wait, oh wait, wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Hydrants

Megan came home a couple days ago, surprised. She'd heard from a few local friends that they didn't have fire hydrants in their neighborhoods, and that when the occasion arose, firefighters would pump water from a lake before rushing to the hypothetical scene. This was another reminder of how rural the surrounding area is.

"But, wait," I said, ever the curious contrarian. In my own 0ff-the-sewer-grid childhood neighborhood, did we have fire hydrants?

I never danced in the flow of a broken hydrant on a pavement-shimmering summer afternoon. And I can't remember using hydrants as finish lines in bike races. So I called my mom yesterday to check on the geography of my nostalgia. She couldn't confirm anything.

"We've had fires, so we must have hydrants," she declared, laughing at her logic before she'd even finished the sentence.

And, in fact, we have had some fires on Brookside Avenue, a post-war outcropping of single-family homes about three miles from Greenfield Center. The most ironic one came only a few hours after the decommisioning of our volunteer fire department, a tiny garage at the first loop of Brookside that blocked the path to the Gravel Pit (I never, ever went to the Gravel Pit, which, if my mom was to be believed, is about as dangerous as a motorcycle ride; playing there would result in gruesome dismemberment--or at least some pretty nasty abrasions).

In that tiny garage, a tiny fire truck lay idle, breeding ghosts (besides ghosts, there were also many beetles).

That early-morning fire--The Koblanski Fire--has always been my symbol of Harlot Fortune: HF being the nasty, androgynous world-spirit who plays arsonist just a few hours after anything can be done about the flames.

But besides that attention-getting neighborhood legend--only retold because the Koblanski house was spared--fire was never on my mind. Maybe we didn't have hydrants. Maybe we too would have had to wait for a pumping truck if our fireplace-flue ever got really gunked up, or if a wayward casserole went forgotten in all its blackening-Durkee-Onion-glory.

My belief in my own hydrantless childhood grew.

"Nutmeg never peed on a fire hydrant. And if we had hydrants in the neighborhood, we would have joked about her going on them," I told my mom, with the sort of air-loose logic that might be hereditary.

"Girl dogs don't go on hydrants," she countered, echoing Megan's, "she was a girl dog so she wouldn't lift a leg."

Why must they always gang up on me? I knew my dog. And if there had been a hydrant in her realm, she would have figured out a way to do something disgusting to it. And if she did that, I would remember it, I thought.

But as today's photographic evidence proves, I was wrong:

(This hydrant sits near where an old, excellent VW bug with white window shutters used to hang out. The green house in the background always had very scary dogs. Across the street in a vermillion colonial (not-pictured) lived a witch).

(The opposite curve of our circle was filled with very ancient people, all nice, all with sun-porches).

(I can barely even see this hydrant so I almost refuse to believe in its existence. Even if I stipulate to the pictorial evidence, I assert that this hydrant is a post-2000 addition).

(My mother points to the memory-jogging hydrant. Seeing my breath, enduring my soggy feet, I almost feel Nutmeg pulling me with her flexi towards this oasis of urine. The red house behind it is not ours; the house behind that house is ours. I probably should have remembered this one, seeing as how it's a couple dozen yards from my old bedroom).

English Interlude

Here are some lines from Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," most of which I knew and could quote back during the Wanczytron era. They (the bolded) were sort of my early-college slogan (important to note that Holy Cross was extremely hilly). Now that I read them again in context, they seem even better.

"While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills, when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all--I cannot paint
What then I was.
_____

I mean, I can kinda paint what then I was, but I take W's point.

Mrs. Megs51015 Wanczytron

For the last many years, I've been a crank about online socialness, but I should always remember my 21-year-old self, churning away at Instant Messenger until 2am, craftily crafting perfect away messages, sometimes in Polish, to project just the right image of me--flippant, unafraid, socially disastrous in that cool way, intelligent, impenetrable.

Impenetrable because one of the great joys of Instant Messenger was the ability to write with candor while at the same time being concealed, to mean what I said without having to own it. IM was a Halloween costume, a foreign language. It topsy-turvied who I could be, and as much as I too-strongly decry facebook for doing the same thing for my self-conscious students, IM may have allowed me to get married.

Explanation: at Holy Cross, Megan was only Megs51015, a pale blue collection of letters that rarely popped up on my screen of their own volition, but which dutifully appeared when called upon. Megs51015 wrote in complete, well-punctuated sentences. Megs51015 seemed to be on my side. Megs51015 also put up craftily crafted away messages, sometimes from British novels.

Megs, the real person, though she was much more compelling than a pale collection of intermittent letters, tended to stay to herself. In the guise of Megs51015, she could interact with Wanczytron. Wanczytron was a fine collection of red letters, perfectly safe. Wanczytron was, after all, easy to turn off. But Dave was an over-tall, overly-stumbling goofball who wanted way too much to type/talk to both versions of Megs. But that would never work.

So, we slowly built up some trust with weekly IMs, mine too-clever to be understood (and so not really very clever at all--those of you who knew me between 1997-2006ish know the sort of interaction I'm talking about).

Her writing, meanwhile, was perfectly patient, full of witty deflections and actual communications about life-stuff, meals, things people actually care about. Really, I'm not proud of the fact that this is how we kept alive a tiny paramecium of friendship, but I can't help thinking that, without those chats, we might not be together at all, might never have become, to continue the metaphor, as close as a Paramecium Aurelia and its bacterial endosymbionts.



In fact, after I asked her out blurtingly over the phone, and then months later, blurtingly in person, it was an IM response that sparked out first date: ice cream at Friendly's, three hours of built-up talkativeness, followed, ultimately, by eight years of built up long-winditude. Now, we never shut up.

So, are technologies that allow for low-impact friendships actually gateways to high-impact, see-your-smile, possibly-make-some-babies friendships? I obviously see how they can be. But what continues to worry me is that most low-impact friendships are actually giving us just enough social nourishment to stay to ourselves. Like images of Italy instead of Italy itself, they give us a warm feeling, just enough to convince us that we're worldly, connected. And, in too many cases, they may not taste as nice as the real gelato.

When the image of Italy encourages the trip, of course, I'm all for it.

And I'm thankful there was a Megs51015. I'm glad there was a Wanczytron, too. But I'm glad they've retired now, traveled to Florence. When I looked at Megs51015, I had to keep staring at Wanczytron, right at all of my silliness. When I look at Megan, there aren't any blinks or beeps, and there's none of my own fooling.

All of A.D. History, Most of It Incorrectly Thought to Involve Alexander the Great

Can I list something that happened in every century, A.D.? (If you want to try this, too, take a few minutes and then compare your results with mine. You will feel great about yourself, I'm sure).

This shouldn't be hard. There are only 21 spans, and I know at least 21 Red Sox, more than 21 phone numbers, a couple dozen British Monarchs, bazillions of capitals, and the name of each of Megan's 21 cousins (approximate). But I think I'll have a blank spot somewhen. How can that be? I think I've been reckless with my time, and with my time-knowing. But here I go.

1st. Jesus exists. Born, strangely, 4 B.C. (riddle: Who was the only person born before himself?). Did some (sometimes angry) stuff in the temple, made some (sometimes reliable) friends, spent a lot of time alone in the desert, empathized with the suffering of humanity, died (but then there's this really shocking twist).

2nd. And we're finally, after a tenacious struggle to get through the torrential centuries on a raft of facts, overwhelmed. What, oh what, could have happened between 100 and 199? I've heard the Gospels got written quite a bit after Jesus's life, but more than 70 years? I can't be sure. Something undoubtedly occurred in Rome--however, that something is unconfirmed by my dullard, hot-cocoa-sipping synapses. Was there someone once named Theodocius? It sounds like he would have lived around then. I'll come back to it. (Update: I've come back to it with a guess: Paul writes letters to Corinthians. Many future weddings are made pleasantly cheesy by his quilled-in declarations about love and its somewhat vague qualities. Then we all eat shrimp.

I'll check and let you know how I did at the end).

(Was Hadrian's Wall constructed in the 2nd Century? Would I have known that an hour ago?)

3rd. Again, trouble. So, at first glance, there's a good 100-200 years of human history on which I have nothing. When was Alexander the Great? I'm going to have to venture AtG in one of these slots. (Update: last ditch guess: Eli Whitney's ancestors invent grain).

4th. Make that 200-300 common era years of which I have no knowledge. Fine: Alexander the Great plunders world.

5th. Ok, I've got this one. Rome falls to the Ostrogoths, 476. 1300 hundred years later, to the day (unconfirmed), a portion of Britain falls to the Washingtongoths. Alright!

In Rome, July 4th would have been known as Julius IV (unconfirmed). In the Ostrogoth language, July would have been denoted by a series of shield-thrusts and plenty of public executions.

Working backwards, it may be safe to say that Rome was falling for those last 300 years. And is that all I've got?

6th. St. Benedict starts a bunch of monasteries.

7th. Muhammad, in around 622, gets some revelations from God, spoken to him from the length of two bows (what does this mean? I don't know exactly. I read it today. I think it means God spoke to him from the distance that an arrow, shot twice, might travel. So, like a football field? I've never hunted, or received prophecies, or taken a reasonable history survey, but I can guess that God might speak to one from beyond the goalposts); founds Islam.

8th. Well, I'm once again gobsmacked. Council of Something? Battle of Whichway Bridge? Alexander the Great?

9th. Charlemagne had a lot of power in France/Gaul. Yes!

10th. Is it possible Charlemagne was still alive? Doubtful.

11th. Battle of Hastings, 1066. Normans conquer England/Saxony(?).

12th. Genghis Khan born. I know this from a video game.



13th. Genghis Khan takes over much of the world, including Country 12, which is led by Qelkubud. Ibid.

14th. I want to say Printing Press.

15th. Columbus sails the ocean blue, lands on the island brown, stares at the vegetation green, gets a sunburn red.

16th. Shakespeare born and active.

17th. Protestant Reformation. Also, Guy Fawkes invents fireworks.

18th. American, et al. Revolution(s).

19th. John Quincy Adams becomes a congressman after losing presidency.

20th. Cola wars fought in 80s. Sprite gains market share.



21st. (This took me a long time because I was unsure of the tone of the above: am I mocking my own intellect, or the collective intellect, or cursorily exploring how small facts plant themselves, or actually trying to win a self-imposed quiz?).

Regardless: Parks and Recreation debuts; Lady Gaga emerges; Samoa crosses international dateline for reasons of Australian Trade; All of the above.

How'd I do? 1. Jesus! Correct! 2. Obviously wrong. St. Paul lived in the 1st century. 3. Eli Whitney's ancestors did not invent grain. 4. Right number century. Wrong suffix. Alexander the Great was waaaay B.C. 5. Rome fell. Correct! September 4th, not July 4th. 6. Shoots and scores on St. Benedict. 7. Yep. 8. Alright! The Second Council of Nicaea. I answered "Council of Something." 1/4 credit. 9. Sweet. Charlemagne was alive and crushin'. 10. Sour. Charlemagne was long dead (814). 11. This--1066, Norman Conquest--is the fact everyone knows about this 1000 year span. And I know it too. And for a long time anything that cost $9.99 rang up as $10.66, and then I thought about the Battle of Hastings, took my mid-priced bottle of wine off the gas station counter, and felt extremely satisfied. Now, Ohio sales tax is slightly higher and I have no inkling about 1068. My guess is William was still conquering and levying slightly higher sales taxes on his new vassals. 12. Genghis Khan was indeed born, sometime around 1162, but I'm only giving myself half a point because, at the time of his emergence, he was named Temujin (which I should have known from my video game). 13. Genghis Khan did do some business, but I can't suss out the identity of a Qelkubud, either historical or Nintendonical. 1/2 Credit again. 14. Bah! Take away my English degree. Give it back again when I can behave. 15. Columbus. Correct. 16. Shakespeare. Good. 17. Embarrassingly wrong. I was thinking of The Glorious Revolution. 18-21. Correct. Even the thing about Sprite.

13 and 1/4 out of 21. 63. D-. I pass!

Boethius and Bowser

Yesterday, at the public library, grading short papers on St. Augustine's understanding of Original Sin (strangely, it has something to do with the molecular composition of Edenic semen), I found myself stopping every arcane paragraph or so because a middle-aged man sitting at the next carrel over was loudly playing Super Mario Bros. 3 on some new device--an Acer or Pad--and, for some reason, had chosen not to turn the sound down, thereby sending a cascade of coin-twinkles throughout the entire reading room every time his Italian-avatar jumped, boobeepishly, over a mushroom and onto a spinning piece of gold.



When this got egregious--as it did while he no doubt encountered, via pipe, an underground cache of life-giving bullion--I gestured to the air and sighed, muttering, "really, why is this allowed to continue," as if appealing to a cosmic jury. Unfortunately, God, or his twelve small-claims court sub-angels, declared a mistrial.

It is odd to me that this man didn't seem to have any public consideration at all. And it's odd that collecting coins gives you extra life in Super Mario Bros. 3.

"Are riches naturally precious, or are they precious because of some virtue of yours?" asked the character, Philosophy, in Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. "What is precious about them, the gold metal or the pile of money? [. . .] Riches are miserable and troublesome."

Philosophy might have been surprised to find that by the early 1990s, gold would actually have palliative powers for animated video game characters, giving to the player of those games, as I used to say, "Extra Guys."

I couldn't take the implications, or the noise. Rather than giving life, those video-riches were sapping mine.

So I stood up to approach the man, steeled myself for confrontation, but found that I just couldn't be the one to chastise him even though his behavior was really unsupportable. Returning to St. Augustine, I held my useless tongue. Just as the Bishop of Hippo predicted in the 5th Century, my free will was powerless in the face of sin and Super Mario.




And yet, for Boethius's character Philosophy, "nothing is miserable unless you think it so"; I, therefore, ate my granola bar, grew to twice my size, and stormed through that august stack of freshman papers, undaunted by the local man's considerable and vexatious skill.

Now, my dear Philosophy, spurred by that experience, I'm home. And I'm ready to count my blessings and my coins as I once-and-for-all defeat the offending Nintendo game, alone and silently. "How can glory be great that is severely limited by such narrow boundaries?" you ask. Good question. But for the next 45 minutes, I choose to ignore it.

Super-Hasty Best Of Movie Party List

I always want to do a best-of movie list at the end of each year and then cop-out because I also always want to wait until I've seen more, and then it's April by the time I've seen more, and more reviews loom, and such a list seems worn out. Enough of that! These are the 18 movies I saw in a theater in 2011, in order of greatness:

1. We Bought a Zoo

At one point, I had a tear tracking down my right cheek in the precise place that Matt Damon had a tear tracking down his right cheek. He is my favorite non-Pullman movie star. And this movie is so charming (Elle Fanning) and happy-sad (there's a devastating setting, but there are cute animals, kids, and Johanssons). My concerns that it's cheesy are overcome for now. And there is no Crowe-ish manic-pixie-dream-girl even though there easily could have been three.

No one really teaches anyone any lessons. Also, Lowell Mather.

1a. Midnight in Paris

I'm somewhat worried that I put a tear-jerker first and that, in the coming weeks, the immediate power will diminish (I saw WBaZ on New Year's Eve), so Midnight in Paris comes in at 1a. Its humor and its cleverness about nostalgia (and Salvador Dali) won't diminish. The only marks against it is that Rachel McAdams is too one-notedly mean, and, as in some Woody Allen movies, the characters don't necessarily have real human feelings. What's French for Human feelings are sometimes over-rated?

2. The Tree of Life

LACRIMOSA!

A see-by-yourself movie.

3. The Muppets

I'm a very manly muppet!

4. Moneyball

Constantly entertaining and funny. Brad Pitt is a great non-Pullman/Damon movie star. We have solid movie stars these days. They'll be looked on fondly, I think.

5. Captain America

Speaking of nostalgia, this is a movie set in the 40s which, like The Rocketeer, knows it's being schmaltzy about said-40s. Exciting and funny.

6. Rise of the Planet of the Apes

I enjoy it when I love movies that graduate-school-me has pre-decided he won't like. Ergo, I may go see Contraband with Mark Wahlberg. James Franco is a fabulous movie star. We have great movie stars these days.

7. Winnie the Pooh

Saw this at the drive-in and it was 56-minutes, catchy, and sweet as honey. Fantastic evening with Megan (despite the bottom of this list).

8. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I was 80 percent confused by this movie because whenever the phrase "double-agent" is uttered, I start to turn off a little bit. But every British-y detail made me envious of (and scared for) anyone who was in London in 1971. I dream of owning a giant red phone booth in which I can store my various cell-phone chargers.

Also, a dude duels an owl.


9. Bridesmaids

Funny, but I don't really understand what was so groundbreaking. Many of the jokes seemed to come from the same 14-year old boy's mind that's imagined most buddy comedies of the last decade. I'm cool with that brain.

10. Water for Elephants

Classy. Solid. Saw it in Nelsonville.

11. The Adjustment Bureau

Sharp. Semi-solid. Saw it in Nelsonville.

12. Rango

Imaginative. Draggy: I might think that because a little girl's light-up shoes and a little boy's terrible, sopping cough had me feeling a skosh uneasy. Saw it in Nelsonville.

13. Margin Call

A movie about stockbrokers making shady decisions. Not much else.

14. Super 8

This is so low because it was my biggest disappointment. The first half was so perfect and Elle Fanning is a great pre-Winnie Cooper, with all of the attendant middle-school charm. Then there are aliens and the people become much less important. Why? Why must there be unsustainable twists, J.J. Abrams?

15. Submarine

I thought I was liking this while I saw it, but I don't remember much. Maudlin standing in for edgy?

16. Buck

Good enough documentary about a horse-whisperer, but not a lot of conflict or purpose.

17. Cowboys and Aliens

This was the second half of the drive-in, Winnie-the-Pooh-begun double-feature. I thought it would be the perfect idiocy for such a setting, but it was a little more idiotic still, and I fell asleep.

Meanwhile, today I read the following in Elaine Pagels' Adam, Eve, and the Serpent:

"In Greek, the term 'Idiot' literally referred to a person concerned solely with personal or private matters instead of the public and social life of the larger community."

Cowboys and Aliens was not concerned with the larger community of the folks at the Skyview Drive-in in Lancaster, Ohio. On a scale of zero to five, I give it zero extraordinarily large milkshakes.

_______

UPDATE on my complete movie list: I finished the wikipedia scan and have found that I've seen approximately 1,011 movies that were released between the years 1896 and 2011, including the very enjoyable Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896) and the very enjoyable Adventures of Tin Tin (2011), which I took in yesterday. I've seen no movies released in 1930, and I intend to remedy that swiftly in 2012.