My life in books

Jill Lepore’s The Secret Life of Wonder Woman isn’t about Wonder Woman, so much as it is about the way that she became not just the perfect realisation of the lives and passions of the incredible group of people who were involved in the lives of her creators, but the crystalisation of the early suffragist, feminist, and to some degree socialist views of a generation of women and men who fought for women’s rights. Where Wonder Woman is Amazonian royalty, her creators were influenced by some of the fiercest voices for women,’s equality, suffrage, reproductive rights, and sexual freedom that existed during the early years of the 1900s. Where Wonder Woman fought for truth, one of her creators spent much of his professional life studying how to determine truth from deception in criminal cases, and determine the reliability of testimony in court.

Four people may be said to have taken a hand in creating the crucible in which Wonder Woman, the symbol of female power - who wears bracelets of iron to remind her and all Amazons that giving oneself into the power of a man means giving oneself into slavery - was shaped.

These four people, three women and one man, lived their own secret lives, and it was from their common experiences, beliefs, and philosophies that the idea of Wonder Woman took form. The feminist hero was a collaborative effort between William Moulton Marston and his three partners, Elizabeth Holloway, Olive Byrne, and Marjorie Huntley, all feminists, suffragists and free love radicals like himself - a polyamorous family collective.

Marsdon was a professor of philosophy and psychology, the two fields not being seen as particularly different at the time, who focused on the psychology and physiology of emotion, observation, and deception in his research. He was, with much input from his long-time partner and colleague, the inventor of the lie detector machine.

Something else he shared with his partner Elizabeth Holloway was a lifelong commitment to feminism, whom he met when they were both in grade school. Neither seems to have ever thought seriously about a future without the other, though both were often to be found in circles that approved of female emancipation and free love. Holloway, like Marsden, spent much of her early adult life in study, beginning her university education at Mount Holyoke, a hotbed of feminism and suffragette agitation, and earning both an MA from Radcyffe and a law degree.

Olive Byrne, who lived with the family in the role of nanny to the Marsdon children - hers and Holloway’s - was the one with the strongest ties to radical feminism. Her mother, Ethyl Byrne, sister of Margaret Sanger, was a suffragist, birth control advocate and socialist, who nearly died in prison in a well publicised hunger strike. Even when Sanger compromised with eugenicists and conservatives to get her arguments for birth control mainstreamed, Byrne remained a free love radical socialist, and Olive had much of her uncompromising spirit. Olive met Marsdon, several years her senior, when she took a course in experimental psychology with him at Tutfs, where she was majoring in English. She later became his research assistant and at some point his lover.

Marjorie Huntley was perhaps the most open-minded of the household, and more of an intermittent member of the household, the eccentric aunt who wanders off but keeps her home base with the rest of the family. Through Huntley’s radical and mystical ideas and connections, Marsdon, Holoway and Byrne became involved in a new age mix of feminism, bondage, free love and theosophy, a cult of female superiority through submission, that is frankly not particularly coherent in its principles and may have been a way for the four people involved to give themselves justification for the kind of relationships and family they wanted despite its extreme variance from not just convention, but some of the more established radical ways of organising sexual relationships currently being explored.

Marston wanted his wife and his lovers - all of them strong, intelligent women not easily manipulated - without having to work hard at it, and he wanted relationships where he could explore his interest in domination and submission. Holloway wanted Marston, but she also wanted to be both professional woman and mother in a world where one woman doing both was hard to imagine. Byrne wanted Marston, and after a childhood of insecurity, with mothers and aunts protesting and organising, being in prison, politically active, and dropping Olive off wherever someone could take care of her, wanted a committed family, and Huntley wanted lovers she could live out her unusual beliefs and bondage fantasies with. Some evidence from the letters and personal remembrances of surviving family members suggests that most if not all of them were at least open to the idea of bisexuality. With Marsdon as the nexus, they created an intentional family.

Despite his credentials, intelligence and charisma, Marsdon was the sort of person who was constantly getting involved in situations that seemed at best not well thought-out or unreasonably self-promoting and at worst vaguely unethical. Instead of rising in the ranks of academia, he slowly dropped, and soon was unable to keep a professional appointment. He tried and failed in a number of business ventures. Ultimately, he proved utterly incapable of supporting his family in any normal occupation. The household of three, sometimes four adults, and four children, was primarily supported by Holloway, with occasional lecturing fees from Marston and some money from Byrne’s writing as a regular contributor to Family Circle. The family made up its own amusements, many of which involved writing and drawing of comics - then in their infancy - by the children.

As Lepore describes the household at this point, “The kids read the comics. Holloway earned the money. Huntley burned incense in the attic. Olive took care of everyone, stealing time to write for Family Circle. And William Moulton Marston, the last of the Moultons of Moulton Castle, the lie detector who declared feminine rule a fact, was petted and indulged. He’d fume and he’d storm and he’d holler, and the women would whisper to the children, ‘It’s best to ignore him.’ “

In 1938, Olive Byrne’s brother, Jack Burns, who had been working in pulp publishing (and tried but failed to get Marsden an ‘in’ to pulp fiction writing), started a comics line that featured strong women like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Amazonia of the North in his new product, Fiction House’s Jumbo Comics. Superman and Batman had become icons for Maxwell Charles Gaines’ comic lines, but no one else was writing female heroes. As comics became more popular, the also received criticism for their violence and sexuality and its effect on children. After Olive Byrne wrote one of her ‘ask the psychiatrist’ articles for Family Circle in which Marsden was strongly approving of comics as long as they never showed successful murder or torture - trust bondage enthusiast Marsden to approve of stories of women tied up but rescued before anything bad can happen - Gaines hired him as a consultant. And Marsden convinced Gaines to introduce a new superhero - and thus, after development work in the Marsden household and the DC comics offices, Wonder Woman was born. Marsden wrote the story, and handed it over with the warning that none of the feminism was to be altered. It wasn’t, though there was opposition from many corners during the comic’s early years. Wonder Woman was a popular success, but its enemies were powerful, and there were many people, including some of those who later worked for Gaines at DC Comics after Marston contracted polio and became less able to be involved in the production of the comic, who rejected not just the comics in general, with their violence and crime, but Wonder Woman’s obvious feminism and rejection of traditional female roles.

And what about the bondage? At one level, they were using a visual language of woman in chains familiar to anyone who had lived through the era of women’s suffrage and extending it to include all women’s struggles. They were also putting into images their own family mythologies about the need for women to submit in order to gain full superiority. And they were playing out their family dynamics in public.

The Marsden family was a unique environment from which a genre-changing comic emerged, but there’s no hiding the strange dynamics and ethical choices here - and I’m not talking about either polyamory or bondage. First, there’s the obsession with lie detection, which strikes me as a consequence of the hidden lives and connections among these four people. Then, there’s the overwhelming focus on self promotion, and promotion of Marsden’s projects. And the utter lack of professional ethics. Holloway advances Marsden’s chances to write for the Encyclopedia Britannica without disclosing their relationship; Olive praises his psychiatric gifts and his projects without disclosure either, and even - before it’s known that he created Wonder Woman - solicits his advice to concerned parents about comic for their kids. Their authorial interrelationships are intricate, covert, and unethical.

And, yet, for all their flaws, these four people encapsulated a generation’s need for change, for freedom, for women’s independence and created a feminist icon that still resonates today, despite all attempts to diminish it.

It is a fact that when Henry VIII of England had his second wife executed, he tried to erase all record of his life with her. He was eager to wed his choice for wife number three, anxious to forget the woman who made him do a great many things he might not have wanted to do, and then failed to give him the one thing he desperately wanted, a son. Even though his agents did not succeed in making Anne Boleyn disappear completely, there are few primary sources that remain to tell us who she really was - letters, portraits, documents. We see Anne, always, through the eyes of others, often enemies. And throughout the past five centuries, those remaining sources have been used, weighed, interpreted, reinterpreted, endlessly. There are many ideas about Anne Boleyn, who she was, what she did, her choices, her motivations, her guilt or innocence.

In The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’ Most Notorious Queen, Susan Bordo attempts two rather different goals: the first, to examine the multitude of representations of Anne Boleyn, to show the many ways in which she has been imagined, and to attempt, as well as may be done, to tease out of what remains of the historical record, a sense of who she might actually have been.

“One goal of this book is to follow the cultural career of these mutating Annes, from the poisonous putain created by the Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys—a highly biased portrayal that became history for many later writers—to the radically revisioned Anne of the Internet generation. I’m not such a postmodernist, however, that I’m content to just write a history of competing narratives. I’m fascinated by their twists and turns, but even more fascinated by the real Anne, who has not been quite as disappeared as Henry wanted. Like Marilyn Monroe in our own time, she is an enigma who is hard to keep one’s hands off of; just as men dreamed of possessing her in the flesh, writers can’t resist the desire to solve the mysteries of how she came to be, to reign, to perish. I’m no exception. I have my own theories, and I won’t hide them. There are so many big questions that remain unanswered that this book would be very unsatisfying if I did not attempt to address them.”

Bordo begins with the main contemporary source, Eustace Chapuys, the ambassador of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, nephew of Henry’s first wife Katherine of Aragon. His letters and dispatches are extensive, and invaluable to an understanding of certain elements of the English court. They are also, and perhaps predictably, extremely critical of Anne, who is consistently referred to as ‘the concubine’ and ‘the whore.’ It is from Chapuys that the images of the saintly Queen Katherine, the licentious, seductive Anne, and the besotted, helpless Henry are derived. Chapuys’ extreme dislike and distrust of Anne is relentless, and in fact, he suggests that he nay have assisted in the gathering of charges against her when she fell out of favour; he certainly exulted at her downfall. He can hardly be considered an impartial witness, and yet he has shaped the way we see Anne and interpret her relationship with Henry. As Bordo notes in looking at the numerous historians’ treatment of Anne in biographies and histories of the Tudor era, “It’s virtually standard operating procedure for historians to warn the reader, in an introduction or the beginning of a chapter, about Chapuys’ biases and tendencies to believe the most vicious court gossip about Anne, and then go on to use him liberally and without qualification all the same.”

Setting aside as much of the biases as possible, and examining known facts in the light of what we known about the cultural roles and expectations, the ways that people thought, acted and expressed themselves, and the cultural milieu of the time, which was one of religious and philsophical ferment, with many intellectuals - with whom both Henry and Anne would have been familiar - engaged in questioning the traditions of the church and the proper relationship between God and men, Bordo attempts to reconstruct a probable narrative of their relationship and of Anne’s ultimate fate.

It is one that begins with a deep personal attraction, based in common interests, both intellectual and social (dancing, hunting) on both parts. They met at a time when Henry, deeply concerned that there was something wrong in his marriage that had prevented Katherine from bearing a male heir, was emotionally, and perhaps sexually, detached from Katherine but not yet prepared to set her aside. The arrival at court of a vivacious, European-educated and influenced, intelligent and witty young woman, who loved to dance and ride out and engage in witty conversation, not particularly beautiful but notably different in many ways not only from his older, modest wife but also from most of the other ladies of the court, would have been an irresistible challenge to Henry. Though at first he may have sought an ordinary affair, it is likely that the kind of attraction that developed, one based on personalities as much as sexuality, one that we might in our times call romantic love, in combination with a growing sense on Henry’s part that God was telling him to set Katherine aside, would have led to a desire to marry, to make Anne not just lover but partner.

It did not happen all at once. In the handful of letters from Henry to Anne that survive, despite his courtly protestations of eternal submission and devotion, he is asking her to be his official mistress, not his wife. But Anne’s role probable in bringing to his attention the new thinking about the relationship between kings and the church, which led to the strategy of establishing the Church of England and sidestepping the Pope’s refusal to nullify his marriage to Katherine, brought them closer, and when Anne eventually did become his lover, and soon after became pregnant, marriage was inevitable.

But marriage was the trap that failed Anne. She was the perfect companion, but not raised to be a queen, and not by nature suited to become what Henry and the rest of her world expected in a wife. She was not submissive, she did not behave with humility and did not accept being left out of any part of Henry’s life. And what was irresistible in a mistress was unacceptable in a wife. When she was unable to produce the crucial male heir, it was easy for enemies at court to use the very things Henry had fallen in love with to tarnish her reputation and lead to her death.

Bardo argues that in the end, Anne herself recognised this as the real reason for her downfall: “Anne recognized that she had overstepped the boundaries of appropriate wifely behavior. At her trial, insisting that she was “clear of all the offences which you have laid to my charge,” she went on to acknowledge not only her “jealous fancies” but also her failure to show the king “that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited.” Anne’s recognition that she had not shown the king enough humility, in this context, shows remarkable insight into the gender politics that undoubtedly played a role in her downfall. She stood accused of adultery and treason. Yet she did not simply refute those charges; she admitted to a different “crime”: not remaining in her proper “place.” In juxtaposing these two transgressions, Anne seems to be suggesting that not only did she recognize that she had overstepped the norms of wifely behavior, but that this transgression also was somehow related to the grim situation she now found herself in.”

After making this attempt to find a narrative that makes sense of Anne’s journey from a lady-in-waiting at the French court, to the English throne, to the gallows, Bardo turns to the ways that the facts of Anne’s life have been interpreted over the years, to produce images that range from a heartless, manipulative and grasping hedonist to a much maligned and virtuous innocent. One of the most significant factors, certainly for the first few centuries following Anne’s death, was religion; Catholics despised and demonised her, Protestants praised and sanctified her. By the 19th century, she was becoming, to some on the side favorable to her, a tragic heroine, one of the first women to be pictured as such in her own right.

The had always been some recognition of the gendered nature of the trap Anne found herself in, that her intellectual bent and desire to be a partner in ruling, not an appendage, were issues that an aging Henry, losing some of his athletic vigour, resented as a challenge to his supreme authority. But this level of analysis became more common as Anne became a subject of consideration as an agent in the English Reformation. At the same time, however, many historians - mostly men, as the women in this era who wrote about history were generally not granted the name of scholar - seemed content to make of Anne a doomed romantic heroine.

By the mid-twentieth century, Anne is a popular feature of histories, plays, novels, and films, with as many permutations on the key elements of her life and personality as authors. Anne becomes a mystery, an almost blank slate that each author writes their own creation on. Bardo summarises the significant elements of the many portrayals, from Margaret Campell Barnes’ Brief Gaudy Hour and Maxwell Anderson’s Anne of a Thousand Days (the play that was the source for the film starring Genevieve Bujold) to Natalie Dormer’s portrayal of Anne in the television series The Tudors and Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl - all with different perceptions of Anne’s character and motivations.

In many ways, what emerges from Bordo’s analysis is a concept of Anne Boleyn as a ‘woman for all seasons,’ whose actions, because so little exists to give us clues to her interior life, can be interpreted to suit the individual biases and needs of the interpreter. Her recorded actions give the suggestion of a multifaceted and complex individual, neither angel nor devil, victim nor villainess, saint nor whore, and perhaps that is the truest representation of all.

Paul Robeson is one of my personal heroes. Artist and activist, he gave his voice to the people, to entertain and also to speak for them. He was famous for his performances as an actor on stage and screen, as a singer of enormous talent - just to hear a recording of his voice is to be transported by it (and if you have never heard him singing what became his signature piece, Ol' Man River, the go and do it right now, I'll still be here when you get back) - but he was also an important International voice for peace, equality and justice.

Robeson was and remains important because his conception of justice was based on something as simple as our fundamental right to dignity. A true American, he had a Whitman-esque belief in the commonality of human experience, regardless of background or race. (“I realised that the fight of my Negro people in America and the fight of the oppressed workers everywhere was the same struggle,” he said of his political awakening.) The ability of his politics to contain multitudes made him a icon to rebels in the Spanish civil war, to miners in Britain, to anti-lynching marchers in the American south and to all those who heard in his voice a spirit of defiance undimmed by the persecution of his people – and by “his people”, I mean us all. (http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/11/voice-thunders)

The passion and eloquence and power that made him a voice to be heard, also made him a voice to be feared by governments caught up in Cold War hysteria and concerns about growing resistance to social injustice around the world.

Jordan Goodman's new biography, Paul Robeson: A Watched Man, is

... a story of passionate political struggle and conviction. Using archival material from the FBI, the State Department, MI5 and other secret agencies, Jordan Goodman reveals the true extent of the US government’s fear of this heroic individual. Robeson eventually appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he spiritedly defended his long-held convictions and refused to apologise, despite the potential damage to his career. (http://www.versobooks.com/books/1493-paul-robeson)

Goodman gives Robeson his due as an artist, but places particular focus on his activism and on the ways in which the American government tried to restrict his movements, silence his voice and tarnish his message.

I take great joy in hearing that Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave, has announced that his next film project will be a biopic of Paul Robeson. It's more than time for people to be reminded of who he was, and for his message to rise again.

The non-fiction I read in 2011 was a small and somewhat mixed assortment.


William H. Patterson, Jr., Robert A. Heinlein: In Dialogue With His Century, The Authorized Biography, Volume I: Learning Curve

This was somewhat interesting but essentially unsatisfying. Patterson does not appear to have the detachment or the analytical bent (at least when discussing this subject) to provide more than a highly detailed but ultimately superficial look at Heinlein as man or as writer, and both his accuracy and his treatment of sources is open to question. A biography must be more than a collection of everything one could find about the subject, set down without comment even when the various sources are contradictory.


Sarah Schulman, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and its Consequences

Schulman makes an interesting but not completely convincing argument that lack of full acceptance and support of queer people by their families is the basic cause, not only of social intolerance of queer people, but also of all the ills that can be found within the queer community. I think she has a point - that being that if families would fight for the rights of their queer members, both within the family and within the greater society, then much positive change would occur - but I think her argument simplifies the situation somewhat. But still, she poses some very interesting ideas and points out how easily gay men, lesbians other members of the queer community settle for the most modest shows of acceptance from their families of origin, and how much more many parents, siblings and other family members need to go in supporting, encouraging and defending the queer people in their lives just to provide the same kind of support that is automatically given to the straight people in their lives.


Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire

Roy is one of the most eloquent critics of the global imperialist project. These essays are from the periods of the Bush administration in the US and address issues having to do with the Iraq war as well as challenging imperialism and its effects around the world and in her own country.


Lee Maracle, I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism

Maracle's book is part personal narrative, part history of the development of the movements of resistance and change among First Nations peoples, and part sociological analysis of the situation of First Nations peoples, and First Nations women, in their own communities and within north American mainstream society.


Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life

A fascinating examination of the ways that women's lives are chronicled, and how the ways that biographers and women writing personal narratives structure and organise their work differs from traditional approaches taken toward the writing of the lives of men.


Jennifer K. Stoller, Ink-stained Amazons and Cinematic Warriors

Stoller offers the reader an interesting and lively survey of many of the fictional heroines that have become part of popular culture over the past 70-odd years, from Wonder Woman to Buffy and Xena.


Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

Ehrenreich looks at the history, the current manifestations and the effects of the positive thinking and self-help movements in American culture, and demonstrates how what appeared to be a beneficial response to the restrictive culture of Calvinist thought in the 19th century has become a dangerous mass delusion in the 21st.


Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Woman at the Dawn of the 1960s

Coontz does three things in this book, all of which are quite interesting - perhaps especially to someone like myself who remember when The Feminine Mystique was first published. First, she looks at the book itself. Second, she presents narratives of women who read the book and have described how it affected them. Third, she looks at the social history of women and the the women's movement in the US using the book as a touchstone.


And finally, a book that is not really classifiable, but which I am including here because taken in whole, it is an example of writing about a woman's life, and is hence no more a fiction than are the lives of any of us.

Karen Joy Fowler & Debbie Notkin (eds.), 80! Memories and Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin

To celebrate the occasion of Ursula Le Guin's 80th birthday, editors Fowler and Notkin invited contributions of many kinds from a variety of writers. Here are reminiscences of Le Guin, personal accounts of what her books have meant to various writers, poems and short stories presented in her honour, pieces of critical analysis, a brief biographical sketch by Julie Phillips (who wrote the definitive biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr.) and a few other kinds of things that one might produce in order to celebrate a most extraordinary woman.

Naomi Mitchison: A Biography, Jill Benton

The more I learn about Naomi Mitchison, the fascinated I am by the woman herself and by her vast (and alas, mostly out of print) literary legacy. Each of the books of hers that I have read so far has been very different, and yet each has spoken to me very strongly. This biography showed me more of the author herself, Mitchison the socialist, Mitchison the feminist and sexual radical, Mitchison the girl coming to womanhood, the woman coming into her own place and power, in the midst of a very highly over-achieving circle of family and friends.

Muhammed: A Biography of the Prophet, Karen Armstrong

Despite its title, in Muhammed: A Biography of the Prophet, Armstrong does much more than give us a biography of the founder of Islam. She carefully sets the time and place in which such a man could have such a series of revelations/inspirations, discusses how the social, political, economic and religious milieu of Mecca in the early 7th century CE and the events of Muhammed's life shaped the evolution of Islam and provides insight into the structure, nature and interpretation of the Qu'ran.

As with all of Armstrong's writing on world religions, I found this book informative, insightful, reasoned and respectful. I was particularly interested in the passages Armstrong devotes to discussions of Muhammed's attitudes toward women and the historical picture of what Islam meant in the 7th century to the position of women - many people forget that Muhammed's wife Khadija was a businesswoman in her own right, and that he trusted her judgement and that of his other wives. We also tend to forget that the institution of polygyny, which to modern eyes seems very anti-woman, was at the time the best way to ensure that widows and young orphans - of which there are many in a society where tribal warfare is common - will not be left without a family to support them. Armstrong notes that many of the verses regarding the rights and status of women in the Qu'ran in fact represent a step forward from the customs of the time.

Another excellent work from Armstrong.

James Tiptree Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, Julie Phillips

I remember when James Tiptree Jr burst onto the SF scene as a writer of absolutely amazing, mind-bending, gob-smacking short stories. There was no question that he was one of the finest SF writers of his time, possibly of all time. I remember when he became known as she - as two shes, actually, since Alice Sheldon was discovered to be writing as Raccona Sheldon as well. I don't actually remember being all that astonished, the way many others were. Maybe I've forgotten, maybe I didn't really care at the time whether a man or a woman had written those wonderful stories. I remember being shocked and saddened when she died, at the thought of no more stories like that - although I had, sort of, noticed that there had been less and less Tiptree since Tiptree became Sheldon, too.

And now Julie Phillips has written a much welcomed biography of the person who was Alice Bradley Sheldon and became Tiptree and Raccoona. I felt a strong sense of connection with Alice/Alli/Tip as I read this book. Partly it's the skill of the author, and partly it's the elements of brother/sister/outsiderhood that bring most SF people, writers and fans, together in the end. Plus, I really understand what it's like to grow up female in the shadow of an overpowering and highly accomplished mother, especially if you have some gifts of your own but no confidence in them.

I found the unfolding of Sheldon's life as a writer compelling, the exploration of her not-very ordinary life as a woman of her times quite fascinating, and the examination of her sexuality, and her awareness (or not) of her sexuality, both intriguing and sad. Again, I have some idea of what it's like to spend time wandering the the ambiguous waters of not-being-straight at a time when there's not a lot of information available about what that is, or means (and fortunately, I managed to work out what I am, which Sheldon never really did, it seems).

The source material for this book is rich, and the interpretation is penetrating, insightful, caring and respectful. The selections from Tiptree/Sheldon's correspondence with other writers of SF, including Joanna Russ and Ursula K. LeGuin, make one long desperately for a collected edition of her letters.

If you read SF, if you know Tiptree, this book will have something for you.


Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree Jr.
Meet Me at Infinity: The Uncollected Tiptree, James Tiptree Jr.

And of course, having read the bio, I had to go back again and read her. My two choices, very clever ones, I thought, were Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, which is a collection of many of her finest stories, under both of her writing names, and Meet Me at Infinity, a posthumous collection of previously unpublished or uncollected stories and essays. If you want a survey course on Tiptree, this fills the bill.

If you haven't read Tiptree, go out and read Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, as soon as you can. If you know her work well, but haven't read Meet Me at Infinity, I think you'll enjoy it getting to know her in some different lights and places.