HAND OVER FIST PRESS
SHEEP
IN THE ROAD
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in a rich man’s world Ah, money money money
it is so funny, that you fuckers
can’t take it with you
d
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a lot of odds in this issue, but fuck it!
The
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Edit & Design: Alan Rutherford Published online by www.handoverfistpress.com Cover photograph: Alan Rutherford Frontispiece: Hans Holbien Photographs, words and artwork sourced from ‘found in the scrapbook of life’, no intentional copyright infringement intended, credited whenever possible, so, for treading on any toes ... apologies all round! Photograph of Bill: Alan Rutherford
There is no deadline for submitting articles to be included in the next issue, it will appear whenever, or in your dreams!
Opening 03 John Berger
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The Lottery
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February 1917
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On the farm
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Law Centre
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Letters 65
Articles to: alanrutherford1@mac.com
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... the main poin again: war is pe freedom is slave ignorance is stre – and that was news, goodnigh
nts eace, ery, ength the ht
OPENING Blah-blahblah-blahblah––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
There is no reason for the end to justify the means as long as there is something worthwhile to be justified in the end Slyce n’Ice
Hello, Welcome to magazine number 21. Ignoring the media circus, lies and bullshit that parades as news ... mis-directing our attention, here is a magazine produced freely to be read freely. All articles and artwork supplied, or found in newspapers lining the bottom of the canary cage, were gratefully received and developed with love, enthusiasm and sympathy here at Hand Over Fist Press.
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Nobody got paid. Perhaps that is the problem? Anyway, ‘Sheep in the Road’ will now appear very sporadically. Without contributors this project has failed to live up to its original ideal! Maybe the last issue for a while (or maybe not?) ... in the meantime, a luta continua!
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JOHN BERGER’S RARE ART CRITICISM by Elisa Wouk Almino Berger’s art criticism succeeds because of its tangibility — it is grounded in human experience, historical events, and the physical artworks. “Reality is not a given: it has to be continually sought out, held — I am tempted to say salvaged,” John Berger writes in his 1983 essay “The Production of the World.” Berger, the art critic and author who died yesterday at age 90, believed reality was obscured by a “screen of clichés,” controlled by mainstream culture and those in power. For him, good art brought reality back into focus, and in that sense could be revolutionary. The job of the art critic was to distill and understand how and why an artist accomplished this, and why her work resonates.
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In 2017, reality seems to be quickly slipping from our grasp — in my lifetime, it seems, more than ever. Following the election of Donald Trump, Paul Holdengräber interviewed John Berger, who gave the following advice: “The less hot air you make and the more tangible you are, the better chance you have at this moment.” Berger’s art criticism succeeds, I think, because of its tangibility — it is grounded in human experience, specific historical events, and always the physical marks on the artworks. In art writing, these qualities are
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rare, as enough of it panders to an art market which has given every indication of carrying on with business as usual under Trump. However, the dearth of art criticism, which is a relatively nascent form in itself, is not a new problem. In 1957, Berger wrote an extensive article for the Universities & Left Review outlining the various shortcomings of Britain’s art critics and how they could improve their craft. Titled “Wanted — Critics,” the article condemns the still-common tendency for writers to rely on description and technical (or straight-up nonsensical) language. The result is that too many art writers avoid saying much at all.
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At graduate school, I was introduced to Berger’s larger body of work, besides his seminal book and TV series Ways of Seeing. He has since been among the critics who’ve kept me company, whose words have always seemed worth revisiting, referencing, and arguing with. Berger’s criticism is by no means perfect; his focus, like the art history most of us are taught, is overwhelmingly Western and male. But it is his approach that marked me, his uncommon ability to dive into the sensory details of an artwork and resurface with a politicized argument that applies far beyond the work itself. Writers, especially in art, tend to choose politics or aesthetics. Berger made no such distinction. I recently spoke with a group of college art journal students, and when asked to share reading material, I brought John Berger. I wanted to encourage them to do what I’ve been striving to do myself: write what I’m actually thinking, and with feeling. To let go of fear and be direct. Berger likes to ground his essays in a question. He asks of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, “What was it that he wanted to say in the
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stillness of his rooms which the light fills like water a tank?” And of the French Post-Impressionist Pierre Bonnard, “What was his color for?” Berger’s questions, while simply put, are not obvious. He often answers them by inhabiting the artist’s perspective, tracing back to her initial gestures, “invisible to us but imaginable,” like Rembrandt looking in the mirror while painting himself. Or, sometimes, Berger conjures the moments that inspired an artist to create, like JMW Turner observing the froth building in the sinks of his father’s barbershop, manifesting later as painted, violent waves. These accounts have not been verified, but that didn’t make them any less true for Berger. His keen interest in the process of making art, and the artist’s commitment to sharing a new way of looking at the world, was informed by Marxism. This is especially clear in the first essay I quoted by him, “The Production of the World,” where he finds reality “confirmed” in Vincent van Gogh’s paintings. For Berger, they “imitate the active existence — the labor of being — of what they depict.” “When he painted a road,” he confidently speculates of van Gogh, “the roadmakers were there in his imagination.” The artist, in his “endless yearning for reality,” is at work to produce and communicate it.
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Berger, who started off as an artist himself, was familiar with the labor of art. In an essay about drawing his father in his coffin, he describes how each successive line on the page carries with it its own moment in time. A drawing is a summary of acts of looking, of being with your subject. For Berger, the portrait offered “a door through which moments of a life” — his father’s — “could enter.” It transferred his father’s being more than any photograph or material object could.
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Berger’s art criticism, for me, functions almost as another mark on the artwork, imbuing more life and memory into its porous surface. Art, with Berger, is not an escape, but brings us back to earth, to what we love and why. Because good artists take the time to scrutinize the world around them. And right now, that’s the best advice we can get. John Berger died 2 January 2017. This essay taken from hyperallergic.com
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I have a couple of books by John Berger.
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THE LOTTERY A review of the Graphic Novel by Myles Hyman: a reincarnation of a sinister Shirley Jackson story. Hyman’s adaptation is a strong effort to retain the original tale’s sparse horror while making the most of its compelling visual possibilities Review by Rachel Elizabeth Jones Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is one of American literature’s most famous and crystalline examples of using the “banality of evil” — a theory put forth by Hannah Arendt to describe Nazi Adolf Eichman’s role in the Holocaust — to shock, enrage, and, hopefully, instruct. First published in The New Yorker on June 26, 1948, the 3,430-word short story describes the quaint hustle and bustle of a small town’s annual tradition: a systematic game of chance that ends in the stoning to death of one of the villagers.
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As the United States and the world struggle for purchase in the fog of Donald Trump’s election and reckon with the fascist trajectory of recent history, “The Lottery” has been reincarnated as a graphic novel by Jackson’s grandson, Myles Hyman. Hill and Wang released the Parisbased artist and illustrator’s visual adaptation in late October of 2016, amid a revival — and ad nauseam claims of a revival — of interest in Jackson’s work and persona.
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In his book’s preface, Hyman writes that his grandmother’s story is a “no-nonsense, largely hermetic structure, words joined with a jeweler’s precision.” Jackson wrote “The Lottery” in the same style as the action that unfolds: perfunctorily, with minimal fuss and negligible room for interpretation or change. (There has been much speculation about the degree to which the story expresses the way Jackson perceived life in the small New England town of North Bennington, Vermont. These discussions often include unconfirmed rumors that her family’s home was once vandalized with a swastika drawn in soap.) I Despite such narrative impermeability, Hyman deftly shapes his rendition by introducing some key visual elements: extreme shadow and contrast, attention to timepieces, and the repeated use of circles, which gesture toward both the shape of a clock and the heavy graphite dot that marks the lottery’s “winner.” Hyman also elongates and embellishes the original timeline, so that the story opens not on the morning of June 27 as Jackson had it, but on the night before. A full moon rises above the empty, shadow-mottled streets of a rural Small Town, U.S.A., as a lone car passes through the eerie town center, high beams aglow. Two men meet in a storefront, preparing folded slips of paper, which they then deposit into a black box through a single hand-sized hole in the top. Here, Hyman introduces the first of multiple views from within the box, an “impossible” perspective that suggests the involvement in the rite of a nonhuman force. For maximum effect, Jackson avoided foreshadowing anything sinister; Hyman’s distinctly noir opening sequence is a departure that — smartly
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— does not attempt to recreate the blasé horror of her original. It does, however, echo the story’s emphasis on both ritual and ordinariness; of course, someone would have to prepare the paper slips in advance. The drama of Hyman’s shadowing carries forward from that evening into the next morning — “The morning of June 27 was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day,” Jackson began. Hyman’s muted colors and heavy shadows negate summer airiness, just as the mundane scenes — chopping wood, looking out the window, a hand on a doorknob or fingers unbuttoning a shirt — are made meaningful through careful framing. Hyman also takes an early liberty with the story’s ultimate victim, Tessie Hutchinson, through his invention of a bath scene. Here, Tessie is young, slender, and mildly sexualized — a far cry from Olive Dunbar’s portrayal in the 1969 Encyclopedia Brittanica film adaptation, an educational 16mm that clocks in at just 19 minutes.
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Hyman’s return to timepieces throughout— the day-by-day wall calendar, a windowsill alarm clock, a pocket watch, clocks in the bank and the diner — match well with the time-centric lines he chose to extract from the text. Far more so than the grave, unsmiling faces of the villagers, Hyman’s focus on units of time captures Jackson’s insinuation of the dangers of tradition fiercely salvaged from the endless passing of days and generations.
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Another way Hyman’s contemporary visual interpretation of “The Lottery” is significant is that it presents the community as an entirely white one. Readers of the original story could have easily inferred this, but Hyman’s retelling confirms it. So while Jackson’s allegory offers layered warnings about the dangers of historically justified closed-mindedness and mob behavior — which, throughout time, has fueled violence against specific groups based on identity— at surface level, it uses a homogenous community to play out its point to its absurd, barbaric conclusion. Hyman’s adaptation is a strong effort to retain the original tale’s sparse horror while making the most of its compelling visual possibilities.
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Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” by Myles Hyman is now available from Hill and Wang. This review taken from hyperallergic.com I have bought this book: powerful images; thought provoking storyline.
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Artwork: Myles Hyman
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RUSSIA FEBRUARY 1917 From ‘1917: Russia’s Red Year’ by Tim Sanders and John Newsinger: After more than three years of war, the Russian Empire is at a turning point. Already two million Russians, soldiers and civilians, have been killed and yet Tsar Nicholas demands more sacrifice. In the cities, the workers are going hungry and cold while the rich get richer from the profits of war. The army and the navy are both in the grip of growing unrest. Across Petrograd meetings are being held in factories and workshops to vote whether or not to strike and demonstrate against the war on 23 February, International Women’s Day.
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From ‘Russia in Revolution’ by Harrison E. Salisbury: Few who lived through Monday February 27 in Petrograd ever forgot a detail of the day. Members of the Duma gathered early at the Tauride Palace. No one had issued a call for them to assemble. They simply gravitated there. Before noon the great place was filled with men trying to understand the meaning of what was in progress, trying to understand what their role should be. The Duma was not exactly a revolutionary stronghold. The members were parliamentarians, many of them Conservatives and supporters of the monarchy. The last thing which they wanted was to become the centre of a revolution which would bring down the 300-year rule of the Romanovs. Anonomous, 1920
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Yet it was quickly clear to men like Rodzyanko that the Duma had become the eye of the hurricane. As, one by one, the Czar’s crack regiments moved into the streets of Petrograd and joined the crowds in demolishing the symbols of Czarist power the Duma emerged as the only instrument of authority.
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Soon word spread through Tauride Palace that troops and workers were headed there. What was the Duma to do? It was a tricky question. The Duma had been prorogued by the Czar. Technically, at least, it had no legal function. Finally, it was agreed to form a ‘Provisional Committee’ of all the parties except those of the right. The purpose of the Committee was to restore order and establish contact with public organisations and institutions; in a word, to fill the power vacuum which was being created by the dissolution of the Czarist government. Hardly had the new Committee been formed than those within the Tauride Palace heard a distant murmur which grew louder until it swelled into a noise like rolling thunder. This was the sound of tramping feet, of shouting voices. It was the sound of the people of Petrograd, thousands upon thousands of them, marching to the Tauride Palace, surrounding it, enveloping it, engulfing it. The crowd filled the courtyards, it surged into the palace, it thronged the corridors and flowed into the halls and chambers. No Duma member had ever seen anything like it. Nor had anyone in Petrograd. There had never been anything like it. Some members wer in panic. they thought they would be lynched. But not Kerensky. He rushed to greet the soldiers and workers, to join and unify their aspirations and emotions with those of the Duma. Quickly other
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Duma leaders took up this posture, welcoming the people, haranguing them in the name of the Revolution. Without anyone quite noticing, the ‘February events’ became on that Monday afternoon the ‘February Revolution’, a revolution in which not a single revolutionary had yet played any role. It had been made by ordinary citizens, particularly by angry women, housewives sick and tired of standing in freezing queues before empty shops, and by sympathetic soldiers who felt their role was with the people rather than with the distant Czar and his bureaucrats. To only a few of those in Tauride Palace that afternoon was the meaning of this complex yet simple transition clear and even later confusion persisted over what had happened, how it had happened and why it had happened. In the course of attacks on the prisons some radicals and revolutionaries were released, most of them from the lower echelons, and these men and women began to drift toward the Tauride Palace. For several days the factories had been naming members to a Soviet or Council such as had been set up in 1905 and a meeting of these delegates, together with representatives of the troops, was called for the vening of the 27th at 7pm at the Tauride.
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Events moved swiftly, without support of the army the Duma’s provisional committee and the Czar were cast aside and by October, through popular demands and the necessary party discipline of vanguard revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks had become leaders of the many Soviets and Councils and ultimately the Russian Revolution ... a brief but glorious flash of Socialism!
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Royal Academy of Arts
REVOLUTION: RUSSIAN ART 1917-1932 on until 17 April 2017
Artwork on right by
Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev Bolshevik 1920.
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FREE FLIGHT GROUNDED & SQUASHED THE REVOLUTION
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BETRAYED Photograph: Alan Rutherford
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ON THE FARM
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PHOTOGRAPHS ALAN RUTHERFORD
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The LAW CENTRE in Gloucester: the early years
The Law Centre was opened by the then Mayor of Gloucester, Councillor Elsie Hedge, on 15 September 1985. The campaign to set up a Law Centre in Gloucester had begun in 1977, and following much hard work by the Steering Group the Labour and Liberal Democrat Groups on a balanced City Council voted to fund the project. The original staff team was one solicitor, three advice workers and one interpreter/administrator, and the following year the City Council accepted the need for an additional solicitor.
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For the first two years, the Law Centre was based in cramped, inaccessible premises in Park Road. On 11 August 1987 the Centre moved to Widden Street. The Chair of the Management Committee, local solicitor Jon Holmes, received the keys to the building from the Chairman of the landlords, the Muslim Welfare Association, and the building was officially opened by the then Mayor, Councillor Andrew Gravells. The Widden Street premises were fully accessible to wheelchair users and had enough space to involve volunteers in the running of the Centre.
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Posters: Alan Rutherford, 1987
Shortly after the Law Centre moved to Widden Street, the Conservative led Council elected in May 1987 announced plans to cut half a million pounds from its budget. The Law Centre was singled out as a target, with a proposed cut in funding of 50%, and the first of two campaigns to save the Law Centre began. Four hundred people marched through Gloucester protesting, petitions were signed by thousands, and eventually two Conservative councillors voted against their group to restore full funding for 1988/89.
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The following year, sfter the Law Centre supported and advised Gloucester Council tenants campaigning against the sell-off of their homes to a Housing Association based in Newcastle, the Conservative led Council announced plans to withdraw funding from the Law Centre completely from April 1989. A second, even omre vigorous campaign began, and a thousand people braved torrential rain to march through Gloucester in protest. In early March 1989 the Conservatives lost overall control of the Council after losing a by-election, and the Law Centre was saved again.
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Signage: Alan Rutherford, 1985
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Artwork & Photograph: Alan Rutherford, 1987
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CHELTENHAM 1987 FEBRUARY 2017
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Photograph: of Tewkesbury Alan Rutherford
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Scarecrow Photograp Peter Mitch and his publisher 54
Rudi Thoem
New book: A New Refutati Viking 4 Space
www.rrbphotobook http://strangelyfam
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w pher hell ... 55
emmes
ion of the e Mission
oks.com miliar.co.uk
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Crikey ... a virtual keyboard, use it at your own peril SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 14
deep breath comrades ... capitalism, war, brexit and a macho trump still sitting high on our compost heap stinking the place out ... they need to be turned over!
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford
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Writing worth reading Photos worth seeing
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http://www.coldtype.net
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Artwork: still unknown
oi matey editor ... we have had a few more comments and goodly remarks, but still no articles or things for publication
66 oh shit this letters page is just boring me to death
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WAFFLE LETTERS –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Dear Editor ... Same old same old! Absolutely damaged by the swiftly decaying state of the world ... Words fail me, what is the use of words when the person you are saying them to is unable to grasp your, and their, meaning? [again, is this the only letter we have? ... (‘yes’, ed.)] Worryingly, we have left even that irrational road, the one where stupidity reigns, and now follow a path where basic facts and knowledge acquired over time are being replaced by entrenched banal myths, hearsay and superstition. The shit-faced fudge of complacency and the mad spouters will now be defended to the death by the threat of nuclear war. Reason cannot be relied on in the present or near future (if ever?) and its utterly terrifying. Just who are the terrorists? For evidence of this I direct your attention to a President Donald Trump and his campaign to trump-trump-trumpety-trump all over the world. And, as Britain’s government is the happy lapdog of US mischief in the world ... and a blindly loyal follower of US foreign policy, what will our May government do now as Trump begins his Term of Ignorance?
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Whilst I remain optimistic about the future I am absolute in my scepticism about whether the business-arses and their sycophantic political stooges, Blairites and Tories – or the US circus and their trumping flunkies – will come up with anything remotely of benefit to anyone other than the rampantly corrupt ruling class wankers intent on fucking us all. FEBRUARY 2017
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1 9 8 6 2 0 1 7 SHEEP IN THE ROAD (as magazine) #3 October 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 2 Alan Rutherford 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 1 Alan Rutherford 2014
KAPUTALA The Diary of Arthur Beagle & The East Africa Campaign, 1916-1918 Alan Rutherford Updated 2nd edn: 2014
IRISH GRAFFITI some murals in the North, 1986 Alan Rutherford 2014
NICETO DE LARRINAGA a voyage, 1966 Alan Rutherford 2014
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IN THE ROAD Sheep in the Road as a magazine has writing, photography, cartoons and odd assemblages of ideas, rants and reviews ... eminating from a socialist and thoughtful core. Contributors have included: Brian Rutherford, Rudi Thoemmes, Joe Jenkins, Robert Arnott, Cam Rutherford, Steve Ashley, Lizzie Boyle, Chris Dillow, Chris Hoare, Joanna Rutherford, West Midland Hunt Saboteurs, Chris Bessant, Craig Atkinson, Martin Taylor, Martin Mitchell ... A pleasure to produce ... thank you
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