Alexander Chee's Blog, page 8

In My Book Bag This Week – August 12

Mike Albo's hilarious tell-all roman-a-clef of life as a freelance writer, The Junket. Get it.
For weeks now I've had a galley for The Stranger's Child, by Alan Hollinghurst. I love it. Don't you want me to review it? Yes you do.
My novel. Still editing.
Drew Magary's The Postmortal. So funny and smart.
Just arrived: Krys Lee's Drifting House, coming out from Viking. Short stories by a Korean American author on the rise. Comes out in February of 2012.

My Hedge Witch Chronicles

This week I published a review for Lev Grossman's The Magician King over at NPR, and then followed up with an essay at the Morning News of me, well, wanting to be a Magician King, though I think, on reading Grossman's novel, I had more in common with his Julia character, the hedge witch—the girl who learns her magic by herself, with no help from any special school for wizards.

I was a hedge witch, then.

This essay is called "The Querent", and is about my relationship to the Tarot, magic and fortunetelling.

I love the stunner of an illustration with it (above), commissioned for it from the amazing Lauren Nassef. Lauren, if you read this, you should consider doing a whole deck. It would be a big success, I think.

And now, back to revising my novel.

Savage Beauty

It felt like a cross between a movie premiere, a post office line and a funeral for a head of state. The lying in state of the body of work.

Friday my partner Dustin and I went to see Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty with our friend Eric McNatt. We stood in line for the show for two hours, a line that wound through the Met starting in the Asian Arts, going past the atrium on the 2nd floor and into the Assyrian angels through to the Greeks and Romans and the 19th Century gallery, until we ended in the gallery for the show. It had the feeling of going past the eons of influences that went into the McQueen show–as if the show was some sumptuous culmination of it all.

During life, McQueen's work was hidden by the cost and exclusivity of his work. Who can and can't be at the show, buy the dress, see the image, and so on, the vagaries of fashion's ecosystem. Now we have the show, composed entirely of donated items from private collections, giving the public a view not even McQueen had of McQueen. When the show is over, the collected items will perhaps disband and return to their separate corners, but not before a finale—this week, the Met is open until midnight.

My memory of the show is composed partly of the throngs moving slowly and uncoordinatedly, as people began in a sort of initial incurious blankness and moved into a dull frenzy. Some were texting, as if to say "I'm at McQueen", as if that had been the entire point of the line, to get inside. Others were filming or taking photos despite prohibitions otherwise. If security had simply removed everyone taking photos illegally it would have drastically cut down on the lines. The spectacle reminded me a little of when a deceased courtesan's clothes and jewels would be put up for auction back in 19th Century France. Or of the ladies of the court who would try to sneak in and view a famous courtesan's apartments. Though if anyone understood the vagaries of the Parisian courtesans' legacy of success de scandale, if anyone was their male heir and modern protector, as it were, it was him. Among the most moving of the exhibits was his hologram of Kate Moss, a finale to a show appearing at a time when Kate had been caught up in a tabloid scandal [Usually they did not affect her]. As the audio tour pointed out, her appearance in the show, as a dazzling holographic muse dancing in the air, was a bravura stroke that also restored her.

I remembered at the time how soon after that scandal she was bigger than before. I marveled at it, but in the room with the crowd hunched over the glass where it was exhibited, some too impatient to wait even for it to start, I felt I understood it.

I kept my camera in my pocket.

I can imagine McQueen getting some sort of delight from the spectacle of people waiting in line that long just to text their way through the exhibit and miss it. It would have proved his longstanding misanthropy as justified, too.

Dustin, Eric and I went through with the audio tour, which had the effect of putting a wall between myself and the offending parties, as if I were inside a private story of the collection, a narrative forcefield. Most people did not opt for the audio, and instead just ran gawking between the items on display. The audio tour had a mix of personal information, anecdotes and descriptors that beautifully fulfilled the show.

The conversation we had afterward was, though, of the thrill of seeing artistic genius like that being celebrated. So much of what our culture celebrates now comes to us after focus groups and careful niche marketing, it often has very little real point of view left when it gets to us. To see someone making clothes that were also about the body, genocide, sexuality, global warming and technology, was, well, amazing. But I suppose the irony of something produced at the very highest level of consumer culture is that it not only can disregard the ways more modest things are marketed, but it should—the disregard it shows proves it is what it is. If he was seen to pull a punch, the bad boy show would fold. He was the ruling class' official rebel knight, and while it is tragic that he's dead—he truly was a genius—his work has a freedom now, an influence it never had before, for being available this way.

It's strange, the transfiguration death brings, and it is often resented, and it can't be chosen. It is only undeniable when it comes.

Home

I am back in my apartment, home, my things a little unfamiliar to me. I don't know where the colander is, the cutting boards, this book or that one. I go into the kitchen with purpose, look around blankly, waiting.

I am still making coffee in a Bialetti I used only occasionally before, if it happens that the other kind of coffee I preferred even two months ago somehow fails me. A little over a month ago I found this coffee disagreeable and missed the kind I now look at warily. How have I done this, how did it happen?

I have been away. I was in Iowa, teaching, then in Italy, writing, then on vacation in Spain, but that makes it seem orderly, as if I did not write in Iowa, or did not teach somehow in Italy, or left all of it behind by the time I was in Spain. Instead it all spilled around me, it made noise. I grew used to not knowing where things were in a kitchen, until it was time to feel that way in my own, and now I work against it. I go to the corners of our kitchen, I study what's there so the feeling of unfamiliarity goes away.

The borders, of course, the apartment itself, is deeply familiar, the red bedroom covered in paintings, photos, books, the ancient white wardrobe we consider replacing but haven't, not yet, the old wood floors, my lucky chandelier in said kitchen, which has followed me through several homes, but has not been hung until this last year. The apartment is much like, I think, this blog, which became a little strange to me also, as I've worked to complete my novel and do all of these other things. And yet here I am, back inside its walls much like the apartment, thinking, "Did I leave that there? Where does this go? Is that really where I want that?"

There are times when I pass through the world and one place speaks to me such that I imagine living there, and Dustin and I even had one of those, with a tiny Medieval village on the coast of Spain. I stand in the courtyard, I look up at the stones, I imagine sitting down and staying.

Tonight I go to see my friend Tayari Jones speak with Sara Nelson of O Magazine, and it is a warm, inspiring conversation at the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York. Part of what I love about my friend Tayari is her generous spirit, and today is a day the world gave a lot back to her: a great review in the LA Times, a mention from Jennifer Weiner on the Today Show as a top pick, the Diane Rehm show. I go home afterward, to my bookshelf here ,and I flip a book open. It is Charles Baxter's Burning Down the House. I do this when I want to be ambushed by an insight. Here is the first quote I find, from his chapter The Donald Barthelme Blues:

The price one pays for being loyal to certain kinds of anomalies is typically melancholy or acedia. Barthelme's fiction asserts that one of the first loyalties serious people give up in the theater of adulthood is a claim upon what they actually want. Of course, other desires are available, and can be acquired, but they are curious grafts, what other people want you to want—not desires so much as temptations, desires-of-convenience. Barthelme's stories are obviously and constantly about such temptations, which might itself be called the temptation to become unconscious and let others program your yearnings.

The places I've been, all my life, seem, in this light, like grafts themselves, as if I'm a tree made entirely of them. I read on.

The Barthelmean character is tempted not by ordinary sins but by the ordinary itself. Does God care about adultery? Sins generally? "You think about this staggering concept, the mind of God, and then you think He's sitting around worrying about this guy and this woman at the Beechnut Travelodge? I think not." (Paradise).

It wasn't activities like adultery that caught Barthelme's attention, but the inclination to disown one's wishes and to give in to the  omnipresence of the Universal Banal.

Well, yes. And then Baxter quotes a beautiful passage from a catalogue copy Barthelme wrote, for a Sherrie Levine exhibit:

Where does desire go? Always a traveling salesperson, desire goes hounding off into the trees, frequently without direction from its putative master or mistress. This is tragic and comic at the same time. I should, in a well-ordered world, marry the intellectual hero my wicked uncle has selected for me. Instead I run off with William of Ockham or Daffy Duck.

I can think of no better metaphor for the experience of a fiction writer than this one. But also, a beautiful idea, the idea of sin being unfaithful to your wishes, to the person who would do the wanting. In any case, I have been homesick, was homesick for New York, for Dustin, for here. I wanted to be home and I am home.

Silver Sparrow

Tayari's novel, taking in the view with me at Civitella Ranieri's kitchen.

One of the moments I love best in my interview with Tayari Jones over at Algonquin Books' blog is when I ask her about something she said in another interview about a year previous, right after she'd finished the novel: "It seems that an ordinary black life isn't seen as remarkable or worthy of attention. This concerns me."

And Tayari said something about this in our interview that took my own thinking in another direction:

It seems to me that African American lives are seen to illustrate an American problem, as though we are an "issue," rather than human beings. So, the stories about us are expected to elucidate a series of social problems or to raise awareness of one thing or another. I have no quarrel with anyone's subject matter, I am making the case for more inclusion of ordinary lives. When I taught an African-American literature class, one of my students, a woman in her 40s who was a returning ed student, said, "Can't we read some about how regular people live their lives? I want to read a book about me."

Well, yes.

Tayari and I, for being friends, have spoken before on topics near this issue before. And what I thought of when she said this was how the year before, in the Asian American Literary Review's forum, I wrote something addressing a phenomenon that disturbed me: how often I saw the American literary establishment promote the works of African writers over African American ones, Japanese writers over Japanese American ones, and so on. If we were immigrants, we had the chance to be treated as an international writer. If we were raised here, we were something less than minor regionalists. What I said then was something like what Tayari said, though coming at it from another angle.

For at least the last 20 years, I do think we've allowed ourselves, as Asian American writers, and as writers of color in general, to be made into the culture's referees, performing our ethnicity in a literary Epcot center, and we're given a voice usually when the white culture wants to know if they've been prejudiced in X matter or not. Yes, we say, as we appear on stage, or, No, depending. But that is what our role has become. And we adjudicate more than we write, we are seduced into performing that role, and…then we are tired of it, and so we need a different kind of liberation, an artistic one.

Tayari Jones' novel is that, I think. It is having a tremendous reception, and I'd bet money the success of the novel is in part due how it speaks to a gap—it is, as that woman in her class said, "a book about me." But I think we can all say that. Reading Tayari's novel, I felt like afterward I knew more about my life, the people in it, and the women in it in particular, though, the men also. And I felt like I knew more about my country, too. I also laughed, and read portions of it out loud to Dustin, who learned to say "Tayari's novel?" when I laughed while reading.

What I think is happening, as I see her Facebook wall covered in fan notes, is that her readers are reading her not to be "more aware" specifically, and not because the novel solemnly intones on a "social problem"—it doesn't—they read because it is exciting. It is a moving novel, beautifully written and conceived. And it makes me happy also because an institution like Algonquin Books has published work that moves past the narrow ways other publishers and literary culture in general often treat writers of color. Silver Sparrow isn't about the "problem" of bigamy, as it were, though that is obviously a part of the novel. It is about two sisters, who love each other in a way that is almost too difficult to bear, and the circumstances both bringing them together and pulling them apart.

I can't recommend it enough. Get your copy of Silver Sparrow today.

Fanboy

Over at the Morning News, my new essay "Fanboy" is up. The artwork here is a beautiful illustration commissioned from an artist by the name of Katie Turner. This is an essay that began about a year ago in a comic book store in New York, when I did a doubletake and noticed that the comics I was reading had an overwhelming common them: white superheroes on black ops teams, working for the United States government.

As the essay details, I've long had a theory about comics, that they have an uncanny ability to reflect our dreams and our unconscious projections, and Freud did too—he used a comic to illustrate his groundbreaking work on dreams, in fact, and used it without comment. Which is to say, even Freud unconsciously saw the ability of comics to communicate or illustrate dreams. The essay I wrote then turned into something about two comic book moments separated by 35 years—the first, when I was a child, the second, last year, as an adult. And tells the story of how I survived growing up mixed-race with the help of the X-Men, the racial unconscious of the United States, as Colorlines puts it, and the whitewashing of superheroes, per the New Yorker magazine's Bookbench blog. I'm grateful to them for linking and commenting on the essay, and also to The Morning News, where I've just been made a Contributing Writer. It's been my homepage for over a year now, as I find it a funny, smart place to start my day—I don't freak out as easily about the bad news when I start there—so, I'm thrilled to join up with them. I look forward to seeing my pencil sketch profile portrait on that masthead.

My days are for now starting at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbertide, Italy, for the next month, where, after a hectic and sad goodbye to my friends and students in Iowa at the Writers' Workshop, I've come here as a fellow, to write, and, apparently, live in a castle and be fed very delicious Italian food, which is easing a little of the pain of being away from my boyfriend. If you are ever given the chance to apply, do apply. Did I ever mention as a kid I always wanted to live in a castle? Anyway, for one month now, I do.

My Glee Madonna Episode Nationals in New York Fantasy League Fan Mix.

I'm not much of a musical theater person. I do not normally love live theater, either.  I apparently like production values, though, as all the musicals I do love are films. Elvis musicals, for example, I have loved since I was a kid, also the Sound of Music.

Lately, television musicals have my attention. It first became apparent with the now legendary Buffy musical episode, and then Whedon's cultish follow-up, the Dr. Horrible Sing-a-long Blog. When Glee first came out a year ago, I really was prepared to dislike it, but then I saw the pilot and kept watching it on Hulu. When I started watching the webisode content, I knew… I was in trouble.

One thing I've realized: whether you love it or not, you have to give it credit for how it is quietly a show with the most Asian American actors on television, and it is set in Ohio. That is awesome all on its own. Whatever else you want to say about it, between the major characters and the minor, the Glee universe is one where Asian Americans have storylines that are not always about being Asian in America.  Or even being Asian While American.  And for that reason, I can watch it and not feel creeped out, because while I did not grow up in Ohio, it looks like my world, even despite its other comedic distortions.

Last year, the much-anticipated all-Madonna episode came down and the build-up had been extraordinary, as it was the second episode after the return. I was a little disappointed only in that there are, well, enough Madonna songs to do an all-Madonna season, and they were given the entire Madonna songbook to use, as I understand it. In my anticipation for the Nationals in New York episode, I have, occasionally, say…read on my IMDB app about future episodes, the cast who might be there, and as Jesse St. James is due to come back, per rumors on IMDB, after this most recent break, and there ARE more Madonna songs, I found I was just kind of scripting up a Glee Fan Mix episode for the aforementioned upcoming nationals in New York. And as I haven't posted in, oh, eons, due to a bruising reading, teaching and writing schedule I've been on this spring semester (I put myself on that schedule, I'd add), I decided to just do something completely different over here.

In the original Madonna Glee episode at this time last year, Sue jokes of a plan to send the Glee kids to New York with just 35 dollars to get by, the way Madonna did when she arrived from Michigan back in the 80s. I'll admit: I wanted to see that. Thus, I present my personal Glee Madonna Episode Nationals in New York Fantasy League Fan Mix:

In the lead-up to nationals in New York, Rachel reaches out to Jesse St. James to brag that her team is going to go all the way with original songs. Jesse, impressed but also still technically trying to undo Rachel, quietly renews their relationship online via gchat and texts, and soon, despite Jesse's betrayal of her last year, Rachel trusts him again. Jesse notes her love of Madonna and when Rachel mentions how much she admires Madonna but could never imagine running off to New York alone, like she did, and yet maybe that's what she needs to do to be a star… he decides to use the mythology of Madonna to get her to leave with him for New York, to be a star—with just 35 dollars a piece, just like Madonna.

When they see how little it buys now, they adjust it for inflation, to 100. They sing a duet of "Lucky Star" as they meet up and run away, hitchhiking to New York, with cross cuts of them in different cars and dancing on the side of the road and chair dancing in the cars with the various people they catch rides with on the way.

Once in New York, Jesse's plan is to keep Rachel there just long enough that she is kicked out of school–and unable to be on the team. Her gay dads, who we've never met, are introduced finally when they appear at school and demand to know where she is. The Glee team is horrified but Brittany, who still regularly check Rachel's Myspace* for her daily song posts, especially now that Britanny's favorite song is "My Headband", tells the group that Rachel has posted on an update to her Myspace with a single update: "doing it Madonna-style, stay tuned", which she didn't mention as she understood it to be something sexual. While her parents are initially horrified, Mercedes and Kurt immediately clue in that she has run away to NYC, most likely with Jesse. As the team decides to head to the city to look for her, Finn sings "Borderline", with backup from Puck and the boys, and crosscut with Jesse in NYC, singing it as well, who, much against his will, is falling for Rachel for real. This segways into a group performance for the Glee kids of "Keep It Together", with the team members singing "Keep It Together" as they go home and pack to get what they need to go to NYC for the weekend and find Rachel. Kurt even gets himself a permission slip to leave Dalton, selling the trip to his fellow Warblers as research. When he gets out to his car, he finds Blaine, who insists on coming as well.

Rachel and Jesse, meanwhile, need a cheap place to stay.  They head to the East Village to find it vastly transformed from the time when Madonna arrived, and head out to Bushwick on a bogus Craigslist tip, where they meet a variety of stock characters—the white hipsters who think they're cute but crazy, and the black and Polish neighborhood residents who think they're just crazy. They decide they lack the wardrobe for what they're doing and are only obviously out-of-place Midwestern kids, and so they head back to the East Village to Trash and Vaudeville, where they get East Village Madonna makeovers and Rachel and Jesse sing "Dress You Up", in a number accompanied by the famed stylist there and the rest of the salespeople. Rachel pulls out the card she was given by her dads to use in case of emergencies and without realizing it can be used to trace her, pays for the purchases, deciding that Madonna would have done this.

Back in Ohio, though, Sue Sylvester has found out what's up, with her Cheerios telling her during their mandatory Sunday prayer meeting and she declares she smells "unauthorized school trip" and goes to the rule book to find out what does and doesn't qualify as a school trip. As she exultantly fantasizes about ridding the school of the show choir once and for all, she begins a "Bye Bye Baby" number, complete with a cabaret involving her Cheerio squad in the empty school.

Quinn, meanwhile, has guessed out that Jesse is likely the troublemaker in all of this, and stops off to confront the rival coach before she joins the Glee team in New York.  There the new coach denies any involvement but reveals that he knows what a good kisser Will Shuester is from the previous show choir director, Rachel's real mom. Horrified, Quinn runs off, while the rival coach performs a number of "Secret", backed up by his show choir, revealing her feelings for Will run deeper than even she knew. This crosscuts with Will and Emma in New York, desperately searching up and down the city, with Emma referring to Madonna's unauthorized biography for her old haunts, and as she turns this way and that, Will is singing "Secret" behind her back, guilty for having made out with the Vocal Adrenaline Coach but also still in love with her but also Ms. Holiday.

The Glee kids, meanwhile, are trying to act like everything is fine without Rachel even while also desperately searching for her, but they are also distracted by how exciting it is to be in New York and are having a hard time focusing–Santana and Brittany want to shop, for example, and express the hope that they could find Rachel at the sales. Kurt decides it is time to get pro-active, and creates a fake Myspace profile called Madonnafans and approaches Rachel through Myspace to tell her about a Madonna flashmob in Times Square at the waiting line for TKTS. Of course, it will really just be the team, performing Into the Groove (there is a brief moment when, presenting his flashmob idea to the group, Brittany tells him it should be "My Headband" if he really wants to get Rachel there). The next day, in the bleachers of the waiting area for Broadway tickets, Kurt almost passes out from the sheer excitement of it all. The flashmob is set to begin with Rachel, who has been given the opening bit by Kurt. The team is hidden around her on the bleachers, in various disguises.

In line for tickets is Rachel's mom, Shelby, the former Vocal Adrenaline coach who left the team to go and chase a better dream for herself. Life in New York has not been going her way. She was going to take a role as a villain in Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark, and it was cancelled, and so now she's there waiting for SRO tickets to cheer herself up by going to a show: Angels in America. When she hears Rachel's voice, she runs off the line and joins her, where she sees a shame-faced Jesse St. James and quickly understands what is going on, just as the rest of the Glee team joins in from their various hiding places. As the number builds to a climax, Will arrives with Emma in time to watch in amazement. Jesse, meanwhile, with Shelby glaring at him, abruptly kisses Rachel and tells her he can't go through with it, that she needs to go back so she isn't kicked out of school. And with that, he runs off through the crowd as a hurt and confused Rachel is held back from chasing after him by her mom, who looks meaningfully over at Will and a slowly dawning realization comes over the shocked team (and a shocked Emma) look on.

The End.

*It has to be Myspace instead of Facebook because Newscorp owns Myspace.

Sex and Salter at the Paris Review Daily

The Paris Review is giving James Salter their Hadada Prize this year, and to honor him they published a series of essays on Salter's work by Jhumpa Lahiri, Geoff Dyer, Porochista Khakpour, Ian Crouch and others. Mine, "Sex and Salter", is a meditation on reading Salter in order to learn how to write about sex, and is up now.

From my essay:

Reading Salter's sentences, I saw what I knew of sex, that sex is a moment in which you are known and knowable. Whatever it is you desire appears from behind the veil of shame or fantasy or nostalgia, or sheer impossibility, and in its presence, you are revealed to yourself. Porn obscures this; porn is about the fantasy of the viewer, not the mixed fantasies, realities, and disappointments of the actors in the room. Truth might get you off, but porn doesn't deal in maybes, was never interested in unreliable, unpredictable truth-telling. When my teacher told me to read James Salter, what she meant was that this kind of sex writing is about you, the reader, in a way a fantasy isn't. It describes sex so that it tells you something about the story and the characters and yourself, all at once.

On Writing This Blog As An Unfinished Book

When Kyle Minor at HTMLGiant wrote about reading this blog as a book two weeks ago, I decided to do a little of it myself to see what I could see. What I saw, interestingly, was not what I thought I'd see.

In 2007, when I began this blog, I had the idea that I would eventually publish a book of mixed autobiography and biography, which I would also call Koreanish, and that the blog would be a place that I could sketch out some of the book. That book is about me and my relationship to my Korean family, who once sued my mother for custody of my siblings and I in an attempt to be sure we were raised "Korean enough". I noticed some of the posts became very long, and when that happened, pulled them off the blog and put them into the manuscript—and did not publish them on the blog.

Gradually, as a result, I have kept writing that book apart from this blog, and this blog in the meantime became something else, something that looks like the shadow of that book.

Koreanish the blog, then, is, if read narratively, something of a dystopic novel, in which a writer is living inside a country that is blind to its own destruction, a destruction it pursues relentlessly, to his increasing dismay.

It was interesting, to read, say, about life moments before the Kindle appeared and changed publishing forever. But it was also depressing —and I actually found it too depressing, even frightening—to re-read my own blog this way, especially during the lead-up to the election of 2008. Mostly because I could see myself now sounding many of the same themes I was during the Bush administration, (though now I put my political links up on twitter, in case, you know, CNN will read them aloud…sort of kidding there). Back then I was worried about lies in the media being used to political ends, endless war, the destruction of the middle class, the creation of a permanent underclass, health insurance crises and the destruction of the environment. Still on those topics, much further in.

It was especially sad to read a post about the parties in the streets of Paris on the night of Obama's election, and then to track how Obama's presidency triggered an unprecedented attack on civil rights and the middle class, fueled by money from the country's richest conservatives. Not at all what we thought we'd get from a president and congress that could deliver universal health care, green energy initiatives and an end to the wars. Worse still is this president's habit of surrendering regularly to the GOP, first when he didn't have to and now increasingly because he does.

What I see in the posts from 2007-2008 how I became really convinced that the problem was about the presidency, and could be solved by a new president. What I see now is that we could change presidents all day and the problems this country faces would remain, for how they emerge from a political process that is too easily subverted by money and lies in the media.

If anything gives me hope now, it is the honest spirit of political protest happening around the globe, from the Arab nations to London to the state legislature in Wisconsin. And that really is the other point to make—the problems in the US are the problems in the world, really—few countries if any are inoculated from being subjects to a global financial elite that has figured out how to make money from firings and layoffs, foreclosures, highspeed computerized stock trades and stockpiled cash. Yes, I could move to about 60 other nations and receive socialized medicine, for example (one bright spot—soon may be able to add "Vermont" to that list of places), but wherever I go, this elite is indifferent to these crises, and no longer needs the good will or even the general population in order to be rich. They make money off each other, in brutal raids and corporate takedowns. They've manipulated the markets to the extent that we need their good will in order to survive them. It's as if they decided 30 years ago that the creation of a middle class was a mistake, and they're pulling up the gates.

At some point, I'm sure, book and shadow will merge, more than they have. It'll be interesting, to see how it all works out.

On Reading This Blog As An Unfinished Book

For those arriving from Kyle Minor's post at HTMLGiant on how to read this blog as a book that hasn't been finished yet, page 1 is here. If you'd like to read it front to back, that is, instead of in reverse order from most recent to first.