President's Speaker Series: Professor Amy Hungerford

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thank you a very good evening president Pericles newest guests professors fellow students welcome to the last of the three presidential speaker series for this week my name is Evan and I'm a student from yo and u.s. college and I'm very excited to introduce to you today a wonderful poet whose works I have become recently acquainted with he is Wallace Stevens an American poet to compose works of poetry laced with great philosophical meaning and understanding just to give you some background contemporary such as hell inventor characterized Stevens works as those heavily influenced by reductionistic approach in Paul Cezanne and the whimsical fanciful and humorous projections of reality in Paul T and interestingly this description reminded me of a poem I read by Stevens awhile ago named the continual conversation with a silent man he pens down a vivid description of mingling with nature and at the end he brings out the conversation that is really going on and here it is it is not a voice that is under the ease it is not speech not sound we hear in this conversation but the sound of things and their motion the other man a turquoise monster moving around and we hear we can see that the whimsical fanciful description in poem fee of a turquoise monster stands out and the color bringing our much intrigue and uniqueness to contemplate on and so this is the counter rough idea here for Wallace Stevens it's like a little simple and straightforward really accessible at first glance but each description rings a little deeper with meaning with every reread and so before I do Stevens anymore injustice I would like to invite our president Pericles Lewis to introduce professor Amy Hungerford who will bring us on a journey through Wallace Stevens own journey through literature and shed some new perspective on seeing the world as we see it now president party spirit please well the president speaker series is one of my favorite things that we do at Yale NUS one of the things I like about it is that it's a public speaker series open to you know open to the public and we try to advertise it widely and it's always good to see colleagues and students from NUS and from around Singapore here so because we we like to make create events where Yale and US and other and US students and faculty are intermingling and sharing ideas and so on so I'm welcome to everybody to Yale in us and it's a very great pleasure for me to introduce to welcome Amy Hungerford to Yale on us Amy and I have been colleagues for 15 years now she was remarkably young when they hired her at the English department at Yale where we taught together for 14 years and she's written remarkable scholarship some of it has to do some of her early work sure has to deal with deals with genocide in literature literary representations of genocide and concern with the fate of literature and of the book in an era of genocide and then how genocide then becomes gets turned into a metaphor for what happens to literature rather than an actual account of historical crimes which is a fascinating early study her next major book deals with religion in the postmodern age and literature and with discourses around religion and faith and I think relates a little bit to the topic of her talk today on Wallace Stevens and the way that that the that even in post in American post-war life there was a sort of devotion to faith in itself that it was good to have faith of some kind even though the actual thing that you had faith in might be blank or empty or you might not be sure what you had faith in and this resulted in a remarkable study of postmodern literature she's also very well known to those of us from Yale for her work with the Yale undergraduate curriculum as director of undergraduate studies in the English department as head of the course of studies committee for Yale College and her work with student life as master first of calhoune college and now Moores College and as chair of the Council of masters at Yale so she's been very active in in lots of dimensions graduate advising undergraduate advising and teaching and the broad student life so an exemplary colleague to bring to Yale in us to give a little more technical background her research and teaching focus on American literature in the period since 1945 and she studies how literature helps form the cultural imagination around subjects such as genocide religion and more recently social networking in the status of the book in the Internet age she's been an editor of Yale studies in English a new series called post 45 at Stanford University Press the journal contemporary literature I've always sort of envied a me because my field of literary study is the early 20th century which has the has certain advantages to it such as that the authors have all died now so I know exactly what books they wrote and even if I haven't finished reading those books I know that there's a finite number of them amy is in the interesting field of contemporary literature which means that the authors are writing new books and indeed there may even be new authors to study which I it's quite a different way of relating to literature she's also been a great supporter of other even younger scholars and bringing their work to larger audiences reaching out beyond the Academy with work on american Public Media's radio digest weekend America which is always fun to listen to blog posts for the Huffington Post a free online course the American Novel since 1945 that's on the open Yale courses platform and book reviews for the Yale Review DoubleX comm and other places she's working now on McSweeney's the publishing house run by Dave Eggers and a book about social justice and how it relates to the literary projects ad McSweeney's which is quite an interesting subject but she's speaking today on a very important American poet I won't try and do him any justice at all Wallace Stevens and so I invite you all to help me to welcome Amy Hungerford to speak on Wallace Stevens and the art of the empty mind Thank You president Lewis Thank You Evan for the introduction I'm delighted to be here and thank you to all of you for coming I remember being in a room at Yale and listening to President Levin float for the very first time I think he had two meetings with like 30 of us I think you were the other one Pericles and I remember hearing just the idea and the discussion began around the table and who knew that then I would be here a few years later a very short few years later looking at the first students of Yale and us and watching those amazing Towers rise so it's a tribute to the amazing work that you and your staff have have done and to the intellectual work that now you students are doing so in Brian Barton's lecture on solitude that I attended on Tuesday he talked about what the lecture is for and I loved what he said about trying out a line of thought I'm gonna give you a slightly different preliminary take on what the lecture is for and why we still bother to do it and that has to do with the human voice and the experience of hearing someone think in language live think live orally and we might note and I will note that as I I am about to talk about poetry that poems do the same thing that poems speak to us with the sensuality of the human voice and that they invite us to think with them and while Stevens is a poet who does this I think in a maximal way both in the sense of teaching us to think and in the sense of engaging our ears and eyes and imagination in a very bodily way so I'm going to jump right into a poem because that's what we're here to talk about so what I want to do is first read this poem from 1923 it's from Wallace Stevens first collection and it sets up what I want to think about with you today which is an effort in the early 20th century to imagine what it would mean to empty the mind and what you can see when you have emptied the mind in the following way so I'm gonna jump in to the reading one must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow and have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice the spruces rough in the distant glitter of the January Sun and not to think of any misery in the sound of the wind in the sound of a few leaves which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener who listens in the snow and noting himself be holds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is one thing I love about this poem is the way it is made you'll notice that it is a single sentence from start to finish it has lots of clauses piled up but it tricks you in its turns of thought so the first trick is here one must have a mind of winter to regard the frost in the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow you come to a stop there and you don't get the and not to think which is what's gonna come later and what you think he's saying to you is you have to be like the scene you're looking at you must have a mind of winter in order to regard the scene of winter so he tricks you into following him pausing there and then he says and to have been cold a long time to behold the junipers shagged with ice and the spruces rough in the distant glitter of this January Sun so there's another piece you have to be cold like this scene what he's actually saying is you have to have a kind of imaginative deadness in order to perceive anything at all outside of yourself you have to be frozen down into some state of emptiness in order to think not of something like misery well why misery you have to be dead and empty in order not to perceive misery and we perceive misery in this landscape because in the Western tradition certainly the deadness of nature has always connoted our own deadness or our own misery it's that pathetic fallacy a great literary term that you may have already learned if not it's a good one to have the pathetic fallacy is the mistake we make when we think that nature is actually all about us that when we look at a scene that it is really our feelings that are represented there out in front of us and what Wallace Stevens wants to do is wipe away the pathetic fallacy that's what he's doing in this poem he's wiping it away don't look at this and see misery cultivate a way of seeing it that is empty enough to see it for what it is and what is it then and here you get the beginnings of the lyric music that is so characteristic of Steven's the sound of the wind and the sound of a few leaves which is the sound of the land full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bear place those those repetitions of sound of same they kind of lull us and begin to gather us and take us to a new place what the listener shares with the scene in front of him if it's not misery is simply something like being their present to each other in some sense blowing full of the same wind that is blowing in the same bare place for the listener as for the trees that it bands right so the listener is like the trees in being subject to that wind and then you get that lovely very stevens ian concentrated claim at the bottom of the poem at that in the last two lines and noting himself be holds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is nothing that is not there that's that misery again the pathetic fallacy the human emotion is not out there so the nothing that's there is something else the nothing that's there it's something other than the human so i want to suggest that this poem sets up a problem at the beginning of the 20th century that is disturbing stevens how can you look upon the world and clear it away of old ideas and see it in a fresh way so modernist writers in the early 20th century we're thinking hard about how to do what the poet Ezra Pound called making it new how do you make art new for a new century now for Stevens the trouble with the old came in a slightly different form so if you think about TS Eliot and the wasteland published in 1922 much of the pain and deadness of that poem can be traced back to World War one and it's incredible devastation in Europe while Stevens during the time of World War one was making his career as a lawyer and an insurance man in New York City having a grand time hanging out and reading poems and looking at and buying paintings becoming wealthier and wealthier he was having a very successful career he'd gone to law school and was a graduate of Harvard the world was really his oyster and he liked the pleasures of life he was born in 1879 in Reading Pennsylvania and he lived in a small town where nature was very accessible to him and he walked out often into the woods and enjoyed that as a child so he did the same thing in New York City even throughout his early la life there he spent about 15 years living in the city before he moved to Connecticut so he would walk out into the woods in Long Island and areas around the city and that was a lifelong habit so one of the things that he brought with him to a poem like the Snowman was this sense that nature was a place where he found refuge and thought another thing that he brought with him was religion so his mother was presbyterian his father was a successful lawyer also and his mother was a schoolteacher it was a very learned family there were four children he described his house as a strange place where each member of the family could be found in one of the rooms reading all something different and so this was his early life but it came with a pretty strong sense of religious life and he served as a as an altar boy in his church but by the time he was a man he really had come to feel that religion was not for him his father was a very practical man as he was and that urged to earn a living and to be successful was part of that practical disposition it didn't seem to sit well with that sense of self deprivation and sacrifice that comes with a kind of strict Christianity what he described later in his life as having carried with him from that into adulthood was a dried up Presbyterianism that's how he described it and I think the desire for the satisfaction the compensations of religious life and moreover religious story remained at the heart of his poetry throughout his career and he he died in 1955 and so he had a good long career and religion remains a concern so if we think about what was wallace stevens trying to clear away what was cluttering the mind of the would-be snowman we might think of the effort to see and be in nature and we might think of religion I want to think about this as a feature of Romanticism one thing that for Stevens embodied both these things was the tradition of Romanticism we'll come back to the religious part but what I want to focus on right now is the sense of story in hearing in what you see so what I've got here is John Keats ode on a Grecian urn and I think some of you might have seen some of these kinds of jars on your trip I know Pericles you went to Greece with your students maybe you saw some of these kinds of jars this is the second and part of the third stanza of the poet of the poem that I want to reach you and I think it it plays up what exactly stevens objected to about romanticism and what he wanted to conserve from it so here Keith says heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter therefore ye soft pipes play on not to the sensual year but more endeared pipe to the spirit Diddy's of no tone fair youth beneath the trees thou canst not leave thy song nor ever can those trees be bare bold lover never never canst thou kiss the winning near the goal yet do not grieve she cannot fade though thou hast not thy bliss for ever thou wilt love and she be fair ah happy boughs that cannot shed your leaves nor ever been the spring of dew and happy mellitus unn we read forever piping songs forever new more happy love more happy happy love forever warm and still to be enjoyed forever panting and forever young of course that line now made banal by the store of the by the pop songs that use it forever young here he's describing the Grecian urn and what's on it as making the joy of youthful life and desire eternal but what I want to show you here and what I like to imagine Stevens was seeing in a poem like this or would have seen in a poem like this is the kind of deadness that has already crept into the language and I don't know if you can hear it or if you hear it the way I do but I hear it in repetition I had a great teacher of poetry where I went to graduate school he was a poet himself a man named Allen Grossman and he used to say repetition is destruction he was a very old man with a big voice and what I hear in this and his great example was London Bridge London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down London Bridge is falling down my fair lady is that repetition that destroys the meaning of language like if you say a word over and over again in your head it kind of becomes just a material sound typing away in your ear and I hear that kind of destruction of meaning when we hear a happy happy boughs that repetition the first you think oh he's just really happy but then that cannot shed reliefs nor ever bid the spring of joy and happy melody Meletus unwary the unwary to me is slipping in under the negative something like weariness and I really feel it in that line more happy love more happy happy love it's too much too much repetition the tragedy of the scene in the Grecian urn is that it lasts forever in becomes dead in that way in the final stanza you see it acknowledged in the middle o attic shaped fair attitude with breed of marbled men and maidens overwrought with forest branches in the trodden weed thou silent formed us tease us out of thought as does eternity cold pastoral what is the snow man but a cold pastoral here we find it even in the heart of Romanticism when old age shall this generation waste thou shalt remain in midst of other woe than ours a friend to man to whom thou sayst beauty is truth truth beauty that is all ye know on earth and all you need to know I'm struck too in this ending by the way the words of the urn speaking to us feel almost like a pat answer to a hard problem we love those lines beauty's truth truth beauty we quote them on lots of occasions that is all you know on earth and all you need to know I'm sorry there are a lot of questions that remain for me that's not all I want to know there's much more to know about what it might mean for the desires of youth the freshness of life to be caught and preserved what might that look like and what might we lose in it in a poem that's also part of the collection that includes the Snowman a poem called Sunday morning which I'll get back to there is a beautiful line where Stephen says death is the mother of beauty death is the mother of beauty this is the problem with the urn and this is the problem with that romantic vision of art making the freshness of youth immortal if you have no death for for Stephens beauty is not possible and what I like to think about when I talk about this with students is artificial flowers artificial flowers unless they're very very good very well made are not something you actually want around for very long they never change and the best artificial nature always has a flaw in it right there always the black spot and we marvel when you look at really well made sort of glass flowers for example you see a tiny broken leaf or a spot of mildew or rot it's it's the possibility of passing that makes the beauty touch us as human beings this is the problem that that Stevens was really resisting can you make it last forever No it puts art too far from life I think that's the objection Stevens has art becomes to set apart from life if it is frozen in the way that Keats freezes it in his poem what he wants to embrace however is the imagination that brings the urn to life in the poem that brings it to life Stephens then I think begins as I read his early work to produce two kinds of poems one is very abstract and it produces a kind of emptiness or a kind of freedom out of that abstraction and the other is very visual and sensual an I'm going to show you through a couple of examples this is of course the urn I wanted to just show it to you so you had an image in your mind this is Stephens version of ode on a Grecian urn it's called anecdote of the jar also from that first collection harmonium I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill it made the slovenly wilderness surround that hill the wilderness rose up to it and sprawled around no longer wild the jar was round upon the ground and tall and of a port in air it took Dominion everywhere the jar was gray and bare it did not give a bird or bush like nothing else in Tennessee I love this little poem when you read it next to the Grecian urn next to keith's you feel the diminution of the modern situation that Stephens is is in first of all it's an anecdote it's not an ode it's just a little story a little caught inconsequential story so that's one aspect of its smallness I placed a jar in Tennessee well Tennessee in the American imagination is not a place of greatness or grandeur oh you know it's kind of in the middle of everything and it's not marked for the cultural imagination as a place of particular beauty although I think it is a beautiful place but I think for Stevens it just sort of stands as the ordinary as an unformed ordinary and watch what happens when the jar is put down I always imagined one of those glass Ball jars you know that you do use for canning vegetables or whatever when you put it down the act of placing form in formless wilderness suddenly makes the wilderness into something other than it was it makes it surround that hill so what was once formless now surrounds and in this I think Stevens is showing us that the orderly form of art or of the made thing the jar the symmetry of the jar imposes on our perception a kind of order that radiates out from it I could talk for longer about this particular poem but I will run out of time what I just want to point out before I move on is that it's gray and bare and that it does not give of bird or bush this there's a kind of austerity and this kind of abstract art so he's making a philosophical point about what form does to formlessness when we place art in human context or in the natural context it creates a sort of set of orders but it is not a satisfying poem in a sort of spiritual way I come back to the jar because the next place we're going is that sensual kind of poem that I think is very characteristic of early Stevens and I want you to notice the difference between this kind of art and this which is Paul Cezanne French painter I'm gonna show you a poem about pears Stevens collected modernist art he bought it he had friends who were richer than he was who bought even better paintings and he spent a lot of time with those people and admired the paintings he was a great lover of Cezanne I like this as our representative painting of Paris for the poem about to show you and what I want you to notice before iced you know move from this image is how palpable the paint is so here Cezanne is showing us that these are painted pears these are not real pears he's showing us the sensuality of the paint the sensuality of the color of form but he's not trying to trick our eye into thinking that we're looking at anything but a painting so now this is Stevens in this very visual mode just gonna read a few of the stanzas this wonderful opening line visually wonderful as well as intellectually so opus coulomb peda Gogol it means little work or little teaching work Oh puss Coulomb is the diminutive diminutive of opus of work so it's like a little work and I like to think of it as like an etude in music the pairs are not Veals vials nudes or bottles they resemble nothing else and I'm gonna skip to three they are not flat surfaces having curved outlines they are round tapering toward the top in the way they are modelled there are bits of blue hard dry leaf hangs from the stem and then skipping to this Costanza the shadows of the pears are blobs on the green cloth the pears are not seen as the observer wills those shadows that are blobs they remind you like the Cezanne right before it that it's paint not pears that we're looking at what Stephens is doing is meditating on the visual particularly on visual art on painting and the lesson that you're to take from these little etudes is that the pears are not seen as the observer wills and the question is who is that observer and whose will do they negate so if you think of the observer as us reading the poem or the narrator looking at the painting then it is that you are forced to look at the pears at the real thing the way the painter did the painter is in control in that version of the poem but if you think about the observer as the painter himself then you can see see that the lesson is slightly different but it's not the problem the problem is not that someone has already seen the pears for you and therefore your will is negated but rather that there's something in the real world that negates the will of the painter himself or herself so the world is somehow an accentual fullness resistant to the effort to make it into a blob of paint so this is I think one of the another sort of small effort if you think of Stephens as having these two kinds of poems the very abstract and the very sensual and in all of them you can see that even in the small ones there's a philosophical payoff there's something of an aesthetic satisfaction and it might just be in the sound of the language even if you can never quite perceive what it is that he's trying to say and I would say that this is true if you look at a poem that Pericles urged me to talk about but I didn't have time it's too long an ordinary evening in New Haven very abstract home he talks about a scene which probably any Yale and USC student who all of you I think went to New Haven would read and wonder whether you could recognize it as an ordinary evening in New Haven is that really what New Haven looked like to you it's so preoccupied with the mind operation on what is outside of it so the effort to clear the mind if you think about these two kinds of poems in Stevens of produces two responses to solve that problem how can you see the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is and they come to this sort of balancing act between the incredibly abstract and the merely sensual we could say or the sensual that gives to an a sort of intellectual lesson at the end but there's another kind of poem that when Stevens is at his best he can produce that I think is really what makes him a great poet and what makes him able to take the more profound response to the need to clear away religion and our relationship to nature so I'm gonna now show you the first stanza of a wonderful poem called Sunday morning also from his first collection it is my favorite of all of Stephens poems I told you that Stevens replaced Sunday morning church-going as an adult with long long walks out into nature and at the end of his walk he would write either a letter to his fiancee in later years or earlier in his journal about what thoughts had occurred to him during his walk more long walks and so this is the poem that sort of crystallizes those walks in what he thought about them so I'll just read you this first stanza Sunday morning complaisance ease of the pen war and late coffee and oranges in a sunny chair and the green freedom of a cockatoo upon a rung mingle to dissipate the holy hush of ancient sacrifice she dreams a little and she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe as a calm darkens among water lights pungent orange and bright green wings seem things in some procession of the dead winding across wide water without sound the day is like wide water without sound stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet over the seas to silent Palestine dominion of the blood and the Sepulchre so what he gives us here is something that he both takes from romanticism and then takes further from romanticism in this poem he's taking something like a speaking human subject and a kind of lyrical conversation and Evans note about the poem that he read about being a conversation with the silent man is actually an excellent example of how the poem is for him a way of talking through in silent conversation a kind of interior life an interior life that Orient's you towards the world one way or another in Sunday morning he gives that human flesh in the woman in her nightgown relaxing on a Sunday morning what he's taking from modern art from the painting that he loved I think you see it in those beautiful words the color words the green and the orange for him the orange is useful because it's a painterly word just color and also the object itself and and just by appearing I think Stevens knows that when you say those words to a human being when we hear them we see color right we somehow in our experience see that richness of color so unlike the two pairs poem which I read which couches your experience of color in a kind of academic study an academic organization of thought here we're allowed to just come right up to it and be present to the greenness and the orange nests of that morning the other thing that he's taking from modern art is the interest in light water light is is his own little compound invention he's thinking I think also about Florida where he spent some time interesting fact about Wallace Stevens in Florida just so that you don't think he's all sort of complacency and light he actually knew a lot of interesting literary figures and he once started a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway and broke his hand on Hemingway's joy can you not so Stevens was a pugnacious man at times but this poem is filled with the kind of tropical light that you see in his Florida poems he has many of them you see that tropical light sort of diffusing the space but there's a meditation about religion in this poem that we have to come to terms with this woman is sitting in her in her house on a Sunday morning and by virtue of it being Sunday morning old habit brings her mind to the hush of ancient sacrifice she's thinking about the crucifixion of Christ about the habit of sacrifice in judeo-christian tradition more broadly about the ancientness of religious sacrifice the violence contrasts so sharply with the complacency of her mourning she dreams a little she feels the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe as calm darkness among water lights calm darkness among water lights this is the secular moment that Steven's dried up Presbyterianism brings him to it's a place where old catastrophe can be felt as darkness like a sort of calm darkness among water lights so the anteed mind and that brings you to a place where the strife and the struggle is left behind I love these lines about the oranges and the bright green wings winding across wide water the day's like wide water stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet over the seas to silent Palestine who else walks on water Jesus of course Christ walks on water but what Stevens gives us is a human being who in her imagination is able to walk on water so what's he saying to us he's saying that that the human imagination is the place where the world is infused with meaning and to do that freshly in the way that modern painting was able to make objects live on the canvas in a fresh way and the way that his own poetry strove to make you see the world in a fresh way so here her ability to sit in the sunny contentment with the parrot and the oranges allows her mind to travel and to do this amazing thing to transport her to a land of ancient meaning-making and ancient religion and the satisfactions will not last other stanzas of the poem introduce her worrying about whether really that old catastrophe can be left behind whether there is any compensation but the poem itself delivers such a powerful current of presence to us sensually but also to the mind and I think it's the addition of a character to embody the abstraction of the conversation really sets this poem apart from the simple abstract poems like anecdote of a jar of the jar where you don't have a person there other than the narrator him or herself so Stevens then empties the mind in order to fill it with a new kind of blend of imagination and perception a blend that for him was modeled by modern painting but taken further in his poetry and he replaces that blank gray jar that he places in Tennessee in the anecdote of the jar but he also replaces the classical abstraction of the Grecian urn remember the simple two color scheme of that urn he's a kind of destructive of abstraction he brings us to a place where the sensuality of art goes beyond abstraction and re-engages all of our human faculties our imagination and brings us something like the thing itself it is a place where poetry becomes a sensual object that is also a mode of thought and that's why I think he revered poetry as a tradition and as something where his own ambitions could be played out I will say in closing that Steven's throughout his life continued to be an insurance man even as he wrote many poems and was very successful he won the National Book Award big award in the United States towards the end of his career he became very wealthy from his work as a an insurance regulator he managed the bonds that ensured certain things like fires and so on all those practical parts of life continued in a powerful way for him even as his art continued in tandem and I think he lived the sort of dual life of a life of the mind and the imagination and this life of practical activity so in a way I think he teaches us more than even just as individual poems do as a person he teaches us a kind of embrace of the virtues and roots of study and reading and imagination and it's essential compatibility with the activities of life when you stop there I'm curious to know what you think about this poet which has anyone read Stevens before besides Evan so really I figured as much sort of unknown I am curious to know what you think of the poems that I've shown you today and you may not see in them what I see and I would love to know what you see thank you Amy the first feeling I had as you read to us from the wonderful poem the Snowman was that I missed reading poetry in class with students although when I was in Greece I got to read Cavafy with the students for a little bit so that was very nice
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Channel: yalenuscollege
Views: 10,201
Rating: 4.9487181 out of 5
Keywords: President's Speaker Series, Yale-NUS College, Yale University (Organization), Professor (Occupation), Amy Hungerford, Wallace Stevens (Author), American Modernism
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Length: 45min 10sec (2710 seconds)
Published: Sun Mar 23 2014
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