Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 30

Vendredi saint / Good Friday

A day less, for me, about events of the past or personal hopes for the future, than about the immense injustice and suffering of the world, and my place in it.

Here are a few of the pieces we'll be singing during an hour of meditation before the afternoon's solemn Eucharist.

Tomas Luis de Victoria: Tenebrae reponsories, Eram quasi agnus

Cecilia McDowall: The Lord is Good

Jason Noble: Corpus Christi (text by Evelyn Underhill, composed in 2015 for Patrick Wedd and our choir. Jason, who is one of our tenors, successfully defended his doctoral thesis at McGill yesterday)

Gregorio Allegri: Miserere mei

--

Unlike some of the places we have visited, Mexico and Sicily in particular, where there are huge Holy Week processions and traditional observances, Quebec is mostly secular , and what I'll be doing today runs counter to life here. As I went down to the cathedral last night to rehearse for the Maundy Thursday service, I saw a huge poster in the metro with an image of Christ on the cross in chocolate -- very much in keeping with the anti-church sentiments that arose when the province was rejecting Roman Catholicism during the Quiet Revolution of the late 60s and 70s, following a history of abuse and oppressive clerical authority over most aspects of personal life.

And yet, most French Canadians in Quebec still consider themselves Catholic, and many are believers: they just don't go to church, and are quite comfortable with the sacrilegious curses, puns, and anti-religious images that are part of present-day Quebec society. Today, though, we'll see quite a few strangers walking through the doors of the cathedral to sit and reflect, listen to the music, light a candle, offer some prayers. It's a very personal day of atonement, and I think it means different things to almost everyone who has grown up in the Christian church. Even in the years when I was completely out of the Church, I went on Good Friday. For me, it's about all of us, and our responsibility toward one another. The central words that have come down to us from the cross are these: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Vendredi sainte / Good Friday

A day less, for me, about events of the past or personal hopes for the future, than about the immense injustice and suffering of the world, and my place in it.

Here are a few of the pieces we'll be singing during an hour of meditation before the afternoon's solemn Eucharist.

Tomas Luis de Victoria: Tenebrae reponsories, Eram quasi agnus

Cecilia McDowall: The Lord is Good

Jason Noble: Corpus Christi (text by Evelyn Underhill, composed in 2015 for Patrick Wedd and our choir. Jason, who is one of our tenors, successfully defended his doctoral thesis at McGill yesterday)

Gregorio Allegri: Miserere mei

--

Unlike some of the places we have visited, Mexico and Sicily in particular, where there are huge Holy Week processions and traditional observances, Quebec is mostly secular , and what I'll be doing today runs counter to life here. As I went down to the cathedral last night to rehearse for the Maundy Thursday service, I saw a huge poster in the metro with an image of Christ on the cross in chocolate -- very much in keeping with the anti-church sentiments that arose when the province was rejecting Roman Catholicism during the Quiet Revolution of the late 60s and 70s, following a history of abuse and oppressive clerical authority over most aspects of personal life.

And yet, most French Canadians in Quebec still consider themselves Catholic, and many are believers: they just don't go to church, and are quite comfortable with the sacrilegious curses, puns, and anti-religious images that are part of present-day Quebec society. Today, though, we'll see quite a few strangers walking through the doors of the cathedral to sit and reflect, listen to the music, light a candle, offer some prayers. It's a very personal day of atonement, and I think it means different things to almost everyone who has grown up in the Christian church. Even in the years when I was completely out of the Church, I went on Good Friday. For me, it's about all of us, and our responsibility toward one another. The central words that have come down to us from the cross are these: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Olives

It's Holy Week, and so perhaps it's appropriate to think about olives and Palestine and the garden of Gethsemani -- but also about spring, and light on silver leaves. Over the weekend I did another gouache sketch in a toned-paper sketchbook, this time of an olive orchard we drove through in Sicily, one of many we saw, in the hills near Selinunte. It was actually harvest time, and we followed a small truck, laden with many boxes of large, just-picked olives, up a long winding road to a town at the top. There we saw a huge olive-processing plant, and many tents, occupied by migrant workers, all of whom were black, and, I suspect, refugees from Africa. I won't forget the sight of another truck we passed on the way back down, driven by a white man, but completely loaded with young black men hanging off the sides. Or the two young men walking their bicycles back up the hill toward the town - an impossible ride, because of the steepness.

But the olive orchards are sheer beauty. I fell in love with olive trees in Sicily, from the young sinuous saplings, covered with tongue-tingling, tiny, bitter fruit in every shade from grey to green to black, to the extremely old, twisted trees: noble and venerable elders that one sees, sometime in the middle of pastures or near an ancient temple, some of which have lived for centuries.

I'm familiar with the olive varieties that we buy in the markets, but have no idea what the different types look like as trees, or how they are chosen for orchards and different micro-climates, but in their great variety, shimmering in the light, they all seemed extraordinary to me and extremely beautiful. I saw for the first time, first-hand, why the precious olive became the symbol of victory and peace, and the symbol of grey-eyed Athena, always my favorite goddess and the particular patron of Athens and the Greeks.

So I've been starting to draw and paint them a bit, wishing I could go back and sit in the grass with my sketchbook. What is the essence of the olive tree? Van Gogh knew; I'm just beginning to learn.

Fifteen Years

A post 9/11 tile from lower Manhattan, June 2004

Fifteen years ago today, the U.S. invaded Iraq, and I started this blog. I just re-read what I wrote on March 20, 2003 (link here, scroll down to the last entry on the page), under my then-new moniker of "Cassandra," after the Trojan princess and prophetess who was cursed to be always right, but disbelieved. Those words from 2003 still sound like me, and I still think what I wrote then is true: that we're witnessing the death-throes of patriarchy and, especially, white male domination of the world and its systems, and that ultimately we'll see a world with greater justice and equality for all of its people -- though the fate of the natural world is not at all secure. In 2003 I tried to take a long view., and still do. But even I would not have prophesied that things would go from bad to so very much worse in the space of this decade and a half, with so much suffering for so many.

Ice fishing shacks on Lake Champlain, winter 2004, and Canadian cornfields

 

On the personal side, we did make some major decisions: we moved. 40% of my tax dollars are no longer being spent on the military, but on a mix of social services such as universal healthcare, prescription drug coverage, affordable daycare for children. I live further north, in a province which is the most progressive in North America, among many people who have a world view and values similar to my own. But though that may make my everyday life more consonant with my beliefs -- and the tax thing was a major moral issue for me -- I think resistance is imperative no matter where we live. As social media data becomes "harvested" for ill purposes, we are all complicit in these larger systems, unconfined by borders and unregulated by government. As migration due to violence, oppression, and hunger affects more and more of the world, are we really going to allow ourselves to be divided into two warring camps: people who have compassion for their neighbors as for themselves, and are willing to share, and those who will do whatever they can to protect what they have from the undeserving, fearful, and inferior "other?"

At a blogger meet-up in Montreal, in spring 2006l: Tom Montag, Lucy Boyce, and Dave Bonta

But, also on the personal side, my life changed because of this blog. In addition to the extremely valuable practice of near-daily writing, it has given me some of the best friends of my life, and relationships and conversations that continue to this day. In recent years it's given me a forum for sharing not just my thoughts in words and photographs, but my art, and all three of those personal pursuits have improved hugely as a result. In turn, I've been privileged to read your words and see your bodies of work develop and change. Out of those relationships have come several collaborative efforts, including a literary magazine, qarrtsiluni, and my own publishing venture, Phoenicia. And this blog also functions for me like the diaries I kept before: as a personal record of my life and thoughts that would now fill a small shelf of books. So I can't even find words for how significant blogging has been for me, but I'm extremely grateful.

An earlier version of us, in Montreal, 2006

For some of us who've hung in here for a long time, there's another factor that bears consideration. We've seen the rise of social media, and the exodus from blogging as a result -- and I understand why that has happened, both in terms of the ease of communication afforded by social media, and the decline in blog readership and commenting that many of us have found discouraging. I often wonder who is still reading here, beyond those who tell me so. But, just like the demise of the book, the prediction of the death of serious longer-form personal writing on the web seems to have been not only premature but wrong. I see the pendulum swinging back somewhat; for instance, this January, poets Donna Vorreyer and Kelli Russell Agodon suggested that writer-bloggers resolve to post on their blogs once a week, and the list who signed on became huge. My friend Dave Bonta has been making a weekly compendium of some of the best of those posts in his Poet Bloggers Revival Digest. Quite a few of us have gained readers through posting links to our blog from Instagram or Facebook; others use long-form platforms such as Medium.

In my studio, with a young Manon, and art inspired by Iceland, 2008.

But as we see the more nefarious side of social media, questions do (and should) arise about our own participation. I want to own my own content, and I want to control my own presence on the web -- the only way to do that is to maintain my own sites, and limit my use of social media. The incursions into  privacy that have happened over these fifteen years are way beyond anything I would have envisioned, and millions of us have rolled over and done exactly what the mega-corporations have wanted us to do, becoming unwitting pawns for financial gain and political exploitation. I'm going to be looking hard at this, and hope you will too.

 

After a Party

Orchid and Dishes with Embroidered Tablecloth, 6" x 9", pen and ink on paper.

These recent drawings represent, I guess, a more inclusive view than some of my older, close-up still-lives. I've been adding some background indications of the interior space of the rooms for some additional complexity and a bit of close/far focus. It's also good practice in the sort of non-academic perspective I'm trying to achieve.

But there's a personal story, too. This drawing is a reminder of a special and happy evening with friends; I did it early the next morning, before we had cleaned up all the dishes and folded the leaves of our table back to normal size. We like using this tablecloth when we have a lot of guests - it's a deep red cotton, large, with twelve napkins, and came from Damascus, when my husband went there with his elderly father and his brother in 2000, before the wars. Originally, this type of tablecloth, called "Aghabani," must have been embroidered by hand in an elaborate chain stitch and traditional patterns. Later they were made in the countryside around Damascus by seamstresses who used embroidery machines.

The word "damask," of course, comes from "Damascus" -- the city was a center of elaborate silk weaving in the early Middle Ages, up until about the 9th century, because of its location as a trading center on the silk road. In a traditional flat-weave damask, there are contrasting warp and weft yarns, one shiny and one dull, that create the typical difference in sheen that characterizes a damask pattern. I don't know if these embroidered linens were done as a substitute for woven silk damask, or if they pre-dated them, but they utilize the same idea of a shiny design on a matte background. Jonathan brought back two for us - this red one, and another in pure white, but we also have a smaller grey one with gold embroidery that's very lovely. I never thought to use them as a base for still-lives before.

On Guns, Men, and Fear

7,000 pairs of shoes were placed on the U.S. Capitol lawn on Tuesday to symbolize the number of children killed by gun violence in the United States since the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012.

This week I've read three loosely related articles that I wanted to recommend to others who may be thinking, as I am, about the continued and unabated rise in U.S. gun violence, the factors that drive white male rage, and the rise of far-right political ideologies in the western world. These are all thoughtful pieces, well worth your time. I'm trying to educate myself about where these trends can actually go, if unchecked, but also to understand the forces that attract people to guns, violence, and far-right ideologies in the first place. Not all gun violence is the same: many of the school shooters have been male loners who have targeted white children, and have not subscribed to a particular political ideology, while other mass killers have been politically motivated. Most, however, seem to have felt powerless in current society, and turned to guns as the ultimate means of expressing themselves.

Why are White Men Stockpiling Guns? Scientific American (thanks to Lorianne DiSabato at Hoarded Ordinaries for the link.)

According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile. These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

White Supremacists are Increasingly Using Public Banners to Spread their Message New York Times

From May 20, 2017, through this Monday, the A.D.L.’s Center on Extremism found, there were 72 such episodes. Before that period, the A.D.L. had not documented any white supremacist banners since Dec. 11, 2016... Most of those documented in Thursday’s report were racist or anti-immigrant in nature, with messages ranging from “America first: End immigration” to “‘Diversity’ is a code word for white genocide.” Others were anti-Muslim (a banner displayed on an overpass near Dearborn, Mich., home to one of the largest mosques in North America, read “DANGER: Sharia city ahead”), anti-Semitic (“UNjew HUMANITY”) or misogynistic (“Feminists deserve the rope”).

The Fascist Movement that Has Brought Mussolini back to the Mainstream The Guardian

"CasaPound presented itself as the house of the ideologically homeless too. Iannone said it offered “a space of liberty, where anyone who has something to say and can’t say it elsewhere will always find political asylum”. It adopted a pose of being not a part of the debate, but the receptacle of it. It reminded some of Mussolini’s line that “fascism is the church of all the heresies”.

 

A friend from a while ago, now an Episcopal priest, had a mantra I've never forgotten: "All anger is fear; all fear is fear of loss." While it's an oversimplification, it holds a lot of truth -- as I've found when asking myself, at times, what is the source of my own anger. And of course I'm angry when I look at the news of the world and, especially, in my former home of America. When I look deeper, I can see that this anger has its roots in a profound sense of fear that the entire fabric of American life is unraveling, and that the principles on which the country was founded have been irrevocably undermined. There has also been fear for individual people I know and love, including members of my own family, and myself by extension.

Of course, for a fairly large number of other Americans, the exact opposite fear is evoked: they feel that America was founded for, and should be run by, white men like themselves, and that immigration and racial diversity, as well as equality between men and women, and open acceptance of gender diversity, are all grave threats to their country and their own safety, security, and identity. Many liberals seem to believe the pendulum is going to swing back to some sort of tolerable middle, if we could just get rid of the current administration.

I think that's incredibly naive. The cat is out of the proverbial bag, and growing into a hungry, noisy, muscled tiger that can't be domesticated. Perhaps it will always stay on the fringes, growling and occasionally coming into the village under cover of darkness to claim some victims. You can believe that if you want to; history has often showed us otherwise. When human beings are afraid, they resort to behaviors that always blame, demonize, and eventually dehumanize "the other", allowing unacceptable acts from the establishment of police states -- they can be overt or subtle -- that excuse and allow the breakdown of privacy laws, to covert and open wars, to deportations and incarceration of people on ethnic or religious grounds, to forced interrogations and torture, and the rise of fascist political movements that make formerly illegal actions not only legal, but accepted as necessary.

And, as the article about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Italy points out, the new alt-right is astute, opening itself not just to a narrow political spectrum, but as a home for anyone who feels forgotten, voiceless, politically disenfranchised. The leaders are savvy about media and popular culture, using unlikely strategies to reach converts, as well as squishy messages -- drawn even from left-wing causes -- to popularize their groups and their message.

Canadians tend to look south across the border with a kind of well-meant, pitying bemusement, and we all tell ourselves, "that couldn't happen here." Maybe not - I certainly hope not - but there are far-right groups in Canada too. Until twenty years ago, I never thought I'd see what is happening in the U.S. happen there: I thought the people would never allow it. I was completely wrong. It's possible that #TurnThemOut will triumph in the U.S. mid-term election, but the power of groups like the NRA will continue, as will the spinelessness of most members of Congress who care more about being re-elected than about children's lives, and who refuse to stand up against hate crime, hate speech, privacy violations in the name of "security", and torture -- to name just a few of the actions that ought to be completely unacceptable and illegal in a modern democracy.

Regardless of what country we live in, we have to see clearly that western democracies are presently under grave threat. This does not mean that those governments were formerly blameless, without major issues, blind spots, and ongoing grievous sins that that they have failed to address throughout their own histories. I think you know what I mean. But we have to open our eyes and stop fooling ourselves that the forces that threaten the very underling principles of freedom and equality will slink back into the darkness, as the world becomes more migrant and more brown: they won't.

We need to remember, over and over, that only pressure from the grassroots will ultimately change governmental policies. The far-right is, after all, a grassroots movement that has been emboldened by the likes of Trump and Bannon and the resurgence of neo-Nazi and fascist groups worldwide: they are angry and fearful people who are racist, misogynistic, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim, believe in white supremacy, and see their worldview threatened by immigration, black presidents, women in power, diversity in formerly white cities and towns that threatens to become diversity in one's own family. Why do progressives tend to trust in top-down solutions? Why do we think that a vote alone is enough to combat such an ideology? We had eight years of Obama's presidency and what we are seeing now is not an aberration, it is in part a backlash by people who absolutely hated seeing a black man in that office.

It's been proven that people who experience and live with diversity have the most positive attitudes toward those who are different from themselves. It's also true that we tend to form into groups and communities with those who are like us. This makes it obvious and imperative that diversity must be encouraged by individuals, and be brought by us to all our organizations and social structures -- families, churches, informal and formal civic groups, workplaces, institutions and organizations. Within these structures, we can bring awareness to the ways in which we ourselves fail to see with the eyes of the other. Some people have hidebound attitudes, but it is crucial to believe that fundamental changes of heart are possible -- the ability to change is one of humanity's greatest attributes. If talk doesn't get us anywhere, we must openly live within the spirit of our convictions, and by doing so, we can actually gradually effect lasting, long-term change: I've seen this over and over again in the greater acceptance of homosexuality and gender diversity over the past few decades.

So some questions for today are these: how many friends do you have who are of different religions, different ethnic origins, different genders or sexual orientations? How often are you in the position of being in the minority, of listening to and learning from others who are different from yourself? How do you bring your own changed and evolving views back to your family, your circle of friends, your workplace, and the organizations to which you belong?

A Sicilian Landscape

The first sketch, View from Caccamo with Norman Castle. 8.5" x 5.5", gouache on paper.

After finishing Luisa Igloria's book and sending the files off to the printer, I was anxious to do some drawing or painting. Winter being what it is around here, my thoughts kept returning to Sicily, and some of the beautiful landscapes we had seen. I decided to sketch a view from the village of Caccamo, high up in the mountains south of Palermo, with its 10th century Norman castle. It had been a dark day with some rain and dramatic clouds that came and went. As we stood in this spot and watched, the sunlight hit the field in the center, turning it chartreuse. The terracotta tile roofs were echoed in the rocks below the castle, and in pomegranate fruits growing in the nearby bushes. The river wasn't blue, but muddy from the rain, creating a line of beige that was similar in hue to the stucco and the rocky outcrop below the castle. The bright ochre hill at center right found cousins in the sunlit leaves and rocks. And if handled adroitly (which hasn't happened yet!) the darkest green vegetation could serve like drawing ink, leading the eye in sinuous curves across the foreground, up the outcrop to the castle, across the fields in multiple lines, and back across the bank of the river. In actuality, I didn't see that possibility until now.

I did these two sketches, which ended up being paintings in gouache, in a small sketchbook of toned paper -- and I wish I had done them larger, on good watercolor paper. That's OK: live and learn. And I did learn quite a bit about gouache, or opaque watercolor -- it's not a medium I've worked with very much, but I do like it for its saturated color, easy workability, and versatility when combined with other media.

The sketch at the top of the post was the first one, done very quickly -- I like its spontaneity and freedom.

Then I did a more detailed drawing:

And worked over it with gouache, then added some colored pencil at the end.

The second sketch, View from Caccamo with Norman Castle. 8.5" x 5.5", gouache on paper.

I don't think either of these attempts is better than the other, they're just different, and neither was intended as an end in itself. My goal was to have fun with the process and the medium, to try to capture the feeling of the landscape, to aim for harmonious rather than realistic color, and freely suggest the details and variation in the landscape rather than depicting them tightly. This would be easier if working at a larger size.

The details that follow are larger than life-size (this would have been a better scale to work at!)

It's interesting to use gouache rather than transparent watercolor - a medium with which I'm more adept and familiar. For one thing, you can work back into it - the color on the surface dissolves and you can play with it. It's an excellent sketching medium on uncoated, toned paper because the pigment binder makes it sits up on the surface, whereas transparent watercolor would sink in and lose its luminosity. Highlights and lighter details can be added later with other media, such as pencil, ink, acrylic, or with white-based gouache.

These preliminary sketches were a good way to begin familiarizing myself with this scene in case I decide to do a larger watercolor, pastel or oil, any of which would be worth trying. I learned more about what I liked about the composition, how the colors work together across the landscape, and what gives the scene "life," as well as what to leave out or de-emphasize.

One of the challenges of these Italian landscapes is that what attracts and leads the eye is strong, often dramatic, structure -- but also a lot of enticing and beautiful detail -- orchards and vineyards, patchworks of fields, outbuildings, ruins, hedgerows, rocks and outcrops, streams. If all the detail were lost, it wouldn't look like Italy, but we aren't Renaissance painters who want to paint every leaf, so there are choices to be made, and no one "right way" to do it. Drawing and color sketching are the best ways I've found to search out the elements in any composition (not just a landscape) that are the most compelling and that serve -- like elements of a novel's plot -- to move the picture, or the story, where it wants to go. What I haven't captured successfully here is the play of light -- and in this scene, the light was the character most responsible for the drama.

All of Us, Together

Today and every day, until there's no need for such a day.

Spring Inklings

Last week's Nor'easter didn't reach Montreal, but I wasn't here -- we were in rural central New York State, and we got snowed in. For an entire day, no one moved. At the lake where we were staying, no cars passed, no snowplow broke a path. The entire world outside the windows was muffled and white, as if we were wrapped in a feather duvet.

As I dried the breakfast dishes, a dark shape crossed my peripheral vision. I turned and saw a deer walking down the driveway, a path it probably takes often because there are few people around. It stopped under the hemlock trees at the top of the bank and dug under the deep snow to eat some of the evergreen groundcover it obviously knew was there.

The light is higher and brighter, though; the days are longer, and we're clearly on our way toward spring. Back in Montreal I've banished the last dried branches of pine and holly from Christmas, and we've enjoyed an orchid and an amaryllis and a pot of hyacinths brought by a thoughtful dinner guest. My bougainvillea, overwintering in the studio windows, is trying to bloom.

Friends on the west coast, others considerably further south, and in England, are already posting pictures of snowdrops and daffodils, but it's going to be another six weeks here before we see many flowers. No wonder I've been staring at my plants, and fixing them in time and ink.

 

A book and its cover

This week at Phoenicia Publishing we've announced the pre-orders for this new book of poems by Luisa A. Igloria. As I wrote the posts for social media and the Phoenicia newsletter and blog, I thought back to when I first "met" Luisa, ten years ago -- she had submitted a poem to qarrtsiluni, which Dave Bonta and I were editing at the time, that blew us both away. Later Luisa edited an issue for us, and in November of 2010 she began writing a poem every day for Dave's Via Negativa site -- a practice she's continued to this day. It's an amazing and inspiring achievement, and I'm proud to consider her a friend, and to have published not one but two of her books at Phoenicia. The other, Night Willow, came out in 2009 and the title poem was inspired by an essay and watercolor that appeared on this blog.

The "Buddha poems" collected in this edition appeared in earlier forms on Via Negativa in 2016. They're humorous, poignant, down-to-earth, and both startling and revealing just as the best Buddhist stories are: they make us see our everyday world and our everyday selves in new ways. I've happy that Ivy Alvarez and Satya Robyn, both also longtime blog-friends of mine and Luisa's, are among the writers who have written blurbs for this book. I hope you'll buy a copy and support Luisa, but you can also enter to win one of two copies we'll be giving away on publication day in mid-March, by signing up for the Phoenicia email newsletter.

As part of the design process, I've been working hard on the cover art, using hand-painted paper, cut and glued onto a painted background as collage. I used a combination of gouache and acrylic for the color, and tried several papers before I was satisfied -- the background needs to be heavy enough not to curl, and the painted papers need to be substantial enough to hold the paint, but thin enough so that there is no shadow from their edges when they are pasted. It's a great technique closely related to some of my expressive calligraphies -- I love the rather enchanted feeling that results -- but it's very time-consuming and picky. Probably good for a Virgo like myself! Here's an earlier version that led, eventually, to the final one.

Making art is sometimes a lonely process, filled with doubts, but at other times, there's inspiration and collaboration. This design was my favorite of four I presented to Luisa, but at first she chose a different one. We took some time, and the next day she wrote to talk about this one with the brambles. Luisa told me what she liked here (the brambles and the ladyslipper) and said she'd like to see a bird rather than an eye. I also knew from her previous responses that she liked bright colors. Putting all of that together, and looking at some photographs of lady-slippers in their natural habitat filled with ferns and grasses in a woodland clearing, I was able to make the adjustments and changes that led to the final cover, which took several days of painting and cutting and gluing to complete because this is a new technique for me.