Where is he?

During what turned out to be rather a protracted journey - one doesn't want them to hurry up fixing a problem with an airplane window exactly, but sitting in an airport with a mere "estimate" for delayed departure isn't fun either - I finished Richard Powers' The Overstory. It's an ambitious, expansive and unobtrusively didactic book, which does some remarkable things with characters, some of whom are trees and others of which are computer algorithms. But finishing it also means recognizing where it hasn't gone. Beyond the demographic limitations I spotted going in - it's a settler colonial story - it's just weird that a story which tries to plug into the million-year planetary rhythms of plants stays entirely within the geographical limits of the continental United States of America. On the other hand it does include a reference to the Book of Job - the tree-loving 14:7-10 I've been brooding over myself - which here appears in an account of the work of an activist artist.

The journey begins!

MoMA

For my last day in New York for a while (I fly out tomorrow for California, then on to China, returning August 11th) I went to MoMA to see the Adrian Piper exhibition. It's huge, and well worth the time it takes to engage it. Piper's a philosopher as well as an artist and each piece is a think piece, from early conceptual pieces like Nine-Part Floating Square (1967), above (can you see the pencil lines on the wall between the mounted squares, completing the grid?), to incisive work in many media engaging the perception and construction of identity, especially racial constructions. When I got out, a few hours later, the heat wave promising to engulf most of the country this weekend had started, so I basked in the spray of this fountain on Ave of the Americas.

Anxiety supreme

Have you ever had that anxiety dream where you find you're on the wrong train? You look back and see the track you should have been on, looping ever farther away, until eventually you can't see it anymore. You think that if you get off at the next stop and take the next train back you'll still be able to catch your original train, but the one you're on turns out not to be making local stops. In fact, as the landscape becomes unfamiliar - a narrow mountain valley, perhaps - the train is speeding up. You realize it's too late to make your original train, or the next one, that you've missed the thing it was taking you to - a flight, perhaps, or meeting the unaccompanied child of a long lost friend.

Winning isn't all

I've never voted in a primary before, but a friend's daughter has been campaigning for an inspiring young challenger to our House represent- ative and I thought I should lend my support. In the end, he came close to upsetting the incumbent - 48.1% of the about 28,500 votes cast. Maybe next time! In a nearby precinct, a better known House Representative was upset by an even younger challenger.

Democracy at work! But this was a day when the gamability of the U. S. political system was on full display, with the announcement of shameful Supreme Court acquiescence in demagogic arguments from an imperial president who lost the popular vote. The slim 5-4 majority was determined by a justice in a seat the demagogic president's predecessor should by rights have filled, stonewalled by a conniving Senate majority leader... All are members of the same party, pulling out the stops using the apparatus of American government to perpetuate rule by what they know to be a dwindling minority.

That's not what the apparatus was for, of course, but every chain has weaker links, and they're exploiting each one, in violation of what one might call the spirit of the laws. It's what their imperial president calls "winning," the more clearly conniving the better. Unconstrained by the checks and balances of the Constitution's writers (all faithful readers of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws), or of a broader democratic scruple, they're likely to win a lot more in the coming years - to everyone's ultimate detriment, though the disenfranchised will suffer more and sooner. (That the SCOTUS majority knows the dangers is revealed by their taking the occasion belatedly to void the Korematsu ruling which permitted the internment of Japanese Americans in 1944.)

The turnout at our various primaries was small, as it always is. Most eligible voters didn't come (as in the past I didn't). Of those who wanted to, many probably could not afford the time. This is a weak link, too, the mechanism by which the "winning" party has been divested of moderates committed to the rules of the game by ideologues, often floated by anti-democratic plutocrats. One of the struggles of the coming years will be maintaining faith in a system which has allowed itself to be so gamed.

Classy

I'm a week away from a California stopover on my way to China where, at last, I'll be teaching! (I wasn't able to teach during my year in Shanghai, beyond a few guest lectures in others' classes.) The plan for the Beijing course, you'll be relieved to learn, is complete. I've decided to end with a 1984 novel by Muriel Spark, The Only Question, whose protagonist Harvey Gotham is obsessed with the Book of Job - as, it seems, was Dame Muriel. Harvey, we read, not only argued the problem of suffering, he suffered the problem of argument. And that is incurable. With often comic consequences, Harvey brings questions of the meaning of the Book of Job in to every conversation. And yet, like Job himself, his "suffering the problem of argument" is ultimately cured. Whether the Chinese students are by that time glad to have spent an intensive four weeks exploring Joban resonances in anglophone literature or not, Spark seems a suitably summery way to end.

But I'm thinking also about other classes, those which will start not many weeks after my return from China. One is a new thing, a pilot "sophomore tutorial," inspired by the "Buddhism and Liberal Arts" advising tutorials I've twice run but now with a particular focus on sophomore issues - and a broader Fragestellung than Buddhism. Its title: "Lives of Contemplation." We'll get to Buddhism eventually but I think I want to start with the sabbath, and how better to reflect on that than with Abraham Joshua Heschel? I'm not sure if I've ever read Heschel's The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man (1951) before, but reading it now I'm all tingly with delight. What glorious writing, and what profundity, often with the figure-ground inversions of the stories of the great rabbis. Look how he inverts our deluded sense that time is evanescent while the world of space offers permanence:

Looking out the window of a swiftly moving railroad car, we have the impression that the landscape is moving while we ourselves are sitting still. Similarly, when gazing at reality when our souls are carried away by spatial things, time appears to be in constant motion. However, when we learn to understand that it is the spatial things that are constantly running out, we realize that time is that which never expires, that it is the world of space which is rolling through the infinite expanse of time. (97)

When the saints come marching in

Had a new vantage on the Heritage of Pride parade today, at the Church of the Ascension offering water to passing marchers. Filling 30,000 cups (!) over seven hours - we were there for the latter half - leaves little 
time to take in the parade, though, or even to look up and see who's passing by. So I was happy to notice the corsetted Dia de los Muertos dandies from the Mexican group (right), and delighted to take in the fabulous procession of Queer Saints Resist! (above) celebrating Saints Keith Haring, Bayard Rustin, Harry Hay, Oscar Wilde, Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, Alan Turing, Bowie, Jane Addams, Billy Tipton, Eve Sedgwick, Harvey Milk, Michael Callen, Langston Hughes, Marsha Johnson, Robert Spike, Christine Jorgensen, James Baldwin, and Hibiscus. Grace abounding!

Nature's praise

I've just finished reading a quite wonderful book of theology, Elizabeth A. Johnson's Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (Bloomsbury 2014).

It was recommended to me at that religion and anthropocene conference in Indiana because the very title is taken from the Book of Job, from chapter 12, where Job appeals to the witness of nature to defend himself against the human-all-too-human wisdom of his friends.

⁷ “But ask the animals, and they will teach you;
    the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
⁸ ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you;
    and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
⁹ Who among all these does not know
    that the hand of the Lord has done this?
¹⁰ In his hand is the life of every living thing
    and the breath of every human being. (NRSV)

In fact, Johnson doesn't spend much time on Job. She let's his question frame her project, and later celebrates the theophany as a strong antidote to the human arrogance that has flowed in the modern era in the view of dominion as domination (269). God describes to Job a "community of creation" of which humans are a part, and which long preceded our arrival ("where were you when...?"). Citing Celia Deane-Drummond and Gustavo Gutierrez, she finds the divine speeches confront Job with the otherness of the cosmos.

This expands Job's horizon to the point where he deeply grasps that God's love does not act according to the rules of retribution which a penal view of history insists upon, but like all true love operates freely in a world of grace that completely enfolds and permeates him, even in pain. With new clarity of vision, his story moves toward healing and peace. (271)

Johnson doesn't loop back to Job's pre-conversion question... or perhaps she's left that to us. First you have to ask the beasts, then listen to what they say. Or maybe the voice of nature, which Job apparently knows and appeals to long before God spoke to him on the subject, needs theological amplification.

Not a problem: the rest of Ask the Beasts provides just such an amplification, a reminder and demonstration of what Christian theology can do. The book begins with a sensitive reading of Darwin's Origin of Species, capped with an update on evolutionary thinking today. As a Catholic it's not a problem for her to accept its picture of the origins and unfolding of life. And Origin is full of wonder too, at the remarkable variety, design and interdependence of life. A compelling retrieval of Aquinas' distinction between God as primary and natural laws as secondary causes allows Johnson to leave science to science, while not foreclosing the spiritual questions she finds even Darwin sensed.

But then things get really interesting. Johnson persuasively argues that the realm of "continuous creation" is the place for dialogue, leaving Genesis and Revelation for later. (When she gets to them she will deftly argue that they, too, are theological extensions of experiences - the Exodus, especially - in the lived present, not accounts of the to us entirely unthinkable before and after.) The processes Darwin helped uncover are compatible with the Nicene understanding of the Holy Spirit as the "giver of life," where this is taken to mean both constant indwelling and "free process" - allowing and empowering evolution to take its course, mixing law and chance. A flurry of natural images for the Spirit - wind, water, fire, birds, and of course sophia - suggest this is not a new but an ancient understanding of the vivificantem, if one which later Christianity lost sight of.

From pneumatology Johnson moves to Christology. A reckoning with the staggering scale of death and extinction, read through all creation's "groaning in labor " (Romans 8:22) and the heartbreaking example of pelicans' "backup chicks"(185-6), discerns that Christ is present to all creation, especially in its pain and death. The world evolution unveils, where death is the condition for new life, is indeed cruciform, and there is no reason to think that the resurrection announced by the "first born of the dead" is reserved only for us late-coming humans. When the word became flesh it was not human exclusively, since human flesh is the genetic kin of all terrestrial life. Humanity is a singularity, but fully part of the creation the Spirit allows to unfold and which is promised final fulfillment by Christ.

It's an exhilarating argument, more courageous in its Christian faith than I had thought possible in the face of the vastness of non-human space and time. The "healing and peace" this promises is powerful, a reminder of the scandalousness of Christianity. A creator who allows their creation freedom, even freedom to cause death? A God who is not content to maintain the world but chooses to become flesh like that of the creation, and to die its death? And then the eschatological hope that, just as no creature suffers alone, all will somehow be redeemed, every tear will somehow one day be dried?

Johnson doesn't claim to know how it will all end, any more than we know how it all began. Scientific discoveries are giving ever clearer ideas of each, but don't settle the religious question of what "original creation" and new "creation in the eschaton" by the agency known through continuous creation could be. But the Darwin-leavened experience of being part of a vast world continuously fired into being by the Giver of life and of solidarity with the perishing of Christ who shares its flesh allows hope that all are destined for resurrection (235).

I'm not sure my faith can soar so high. But I am encouraged by something Johnson draws from the assertion in the Creation Psalms (especially 104, 148, 96) that all creation praises God in its very being. At a time when prayer does not come easily to postmodern humans, becoming aware of nature’s praise may actually allow these other creatures to help us pray. … The more we attend to them, the more they can lift our hearts to God, borne on their praise. (278)

It may be that this is the story of Job's ecological conversion after all. In the weirdness of the theophany's animals, in their untamable majesty, their power and skill even in killing other animals (all that business about feeding the young lions, etc.) Job may have felt the Spirit's fire, and even Christ's redeeming tears. Wow!

A little Klimty

Brooklyn sky as the sun sets out over New Jersey

Offer of citizenship

I participated in a "virtual vigil" broadcast by Facebook live today. An Episcopal group, in a Methodist prayer space near the Capitol, broadcast some of the their reflections, as people from across the country posted prayers (and likes). With speakers from many different denominations, it was a tonic, a reminder that the religion of Washington's scary "prayer breakfasts" and White House "Bible studies" isn't the only Christianity in the land, and isn't the one which has made America good.

The most inspiring prayer came from Sister Simone Campbell, who called Matthew 18:6 on those in power and prayed that "we let our hearts be broken ... open," and the most heartbreaking from a Quaker who recalled that in her meeting house the babble of young children is seen as another kind of revelation. The greatest takeaway for me was the so-called "Immigrants' Creed," by José Luis Casal, a Presbyterian.

I believe in Almighty God,
who guided the people in exile and in exodus,
the God of Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon,
the God of foreigners and immigrants.

I believe in Jesus Christ, a displaced Galilean,
who was born away from his people and his home,
who fled his country with his parents
when his life was in danger.
When he returned to his own country
he suffered under the oppression of Pontius Pilate,
the servant of a foreign power.
Jesus was persecuted, beaten, tortured,
and unjustly condemned to death.
But on the third day Jesus rose from the dead,
not as a scorned foreigner
but to offer us citizenship in God’s kingdom.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the eternal immigrant
from God’s kingdom among us,
who speaks all languages,
lives in all countries,
and reunites all races.

I believe that the Church
is the secure home
for foreigners and for all believers.
I believe that the communion of saints
begins when we embrace all God’s people
in all their diversity.

I believe in forgiveness,
which makes us all equal before God,
and in reconciliation,
which heals our brokenness.

I believe that in the Resurrection
God will unite us as one people
in which all are distinct
and all are alike at the same time.

I believe in life eternal,
in which no one will be a foreigner
but all will be citizens of the kingdom
where God reigns forever and ever.

Amen.

It can happen here

Requesting asylum is not a crime.

Criminalizing it is

  

Gleefully tearing children from their parents...

Inhuman

Using these hostages for political points:

Demonic 

A typical group of New School pupils

What fun we're going to have complicating New School histories! Browsing the digitized New School Publicity Scrapbooks I found a picture of our unsung hero, the indefatigable Clara Mayer, at work! (vol 24, 16)

This picture, with accompanying article "Grown-Ups Return to School: Housewives and War Brides Crowd Classrooms of New School for Social Research," was seen in the final months of 1943 around the country, appearing in the Wilmington, DE News; the Troy, NY Morning Record; the Omaha, NE Morning World Herald; the Greensburg, PA Review; the Roanoke, VA Times; the Fort Wayne, IN Journal-Gazette; the Hartford, CT Courant; and the Toledo, OH Times. Women are hidden behind men's

names throughout the article (as in the article's relentlessly matrimonial title), but come into their own names decisively at the end, starting with New York's first woman judge. Just what was going on there?!

青々

These aren't exactly the colors of the woods above Kaaterskill Falls, I'm afraid. In reality, they're brighter and lighter, and the sky hovers close above, the clearest of blues. And of course everything's shimmering.

Catskills

Baby trees

Now it's official: summer is here.

A lot like life

Forget the frippery of "Heavenly Bodies." The Met blockbuster to see is "Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body" at the Breuer, an astonishing exhibition of sculptures of the human form from 1300 to the present. There's lots of religious art, too, but here it doesn't feel like it's being abused. Duane Hanson's 1984 "Housepainter II" opens the show.

Kusama Yayoi, "Phallic Girl" (1967) with other mannequins; Rigoberto Torres, "Shorty working in the C. & R. Statuary Corp" (1985); a naughty but somehow not malicious juxtaposition of a German Shrine of the Virgin (1300) and Damien Hirst's "Virgin (Exposed)" (2005), itself a take on a famous Degas sculpture of a young ballerina on view nearby.

John De Andrea "Self-Portrait with Sculpture" (1980) won't let you go; the huge Nellingen Crucifix (1430-35) with four of Lucia Fontana's heart-breaking "Crocifissi" (1948-55); Gregorio Fernández' glass-eyed "Dead Christ" (1625-30) and Alison Saar's metal-plated "Strange Fruit" (1995).

Louise Bourgeois' unnerving "Three Horizontals" (1998). Perhaps my favorite of many sly juxtapositions was Elmgreen and Dragset's 2012 "The Experiment" (the boy is looking into a mirror) with a c. 1625 Spanish or Mexican "Child Jesus Triumphant" (more divinely garbed than most of "Heavenly Bodies"). And the exhibition ends with Australian Ron Mueck's characteristically powerful "Old woman in bed" (2000).

June

Native North American rhododendron, backlit for effect. BBG of course!

Fall course

Looks like the set for a German expressionist film, doesn't it!

Sail away!

Our rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood's getting a little pricey so we're exploring New York City in a new way! (This 2008 work of subway art, Felipe Galindo's "Magic Realism in Kingsbridge," is in the Bronx.)

The price of liberty

Put aside your Greek and Icelandic; this is a moment to savor Canadian yogurt. It's not just delicious: it's the product of a dairy system which employs more farmers than its oversized neighbors to the south, while not wantonly overproducing milk (and methane). The secret is surely in the culture.

Divine brushwork

Finally got to see a show I missed at LACMA, now at the Met, "Painted in Mexico, 1700-1790: Pinxit Mexici." At first I was tickled pink by the lush religious allegories. What a dreamboat is Jesus in Miguel Cabreras' "Divine Spouse," one of several mystically erotic paintings for convents. Hidden among the flowers are symbols of the crucifixion, though, and if you look closely you'll notice healed scars on his hands. The hearts of faithful nuns compose the crown and scepter the angels are presenting to him as he holds his conjugal, white flowering lily. Other allegories

are similarly dense and fleshly; disembodied hearts, His and ours, abound. And then there's Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose appearance in Mexico was recognized by the Vatican in 1754, but not the miraculous provenance of the eponymous image. This didn't stop human painters from depicting what must have happened; we saw an anonymous copy of an original perhaps by Cabrera misleadingly entitled "God the Father Painting the Virgin of Guadalupe." Clearly it's the whole Trinity at work! Of course there was more than religious painting in colonial Mexico.

A room of grand portraits showed its gentry (including clerical gentry) decked out like folks back in Spain. Sometimes the genres merged, as in this work by Juan Rodríguez Juárez depicting Saint Rose of Lima (the New World's first canonized saint) and a donor. The caption notes that the donor's luxurious get-up includes an "elaborately embroidered huipil (indigenous tunic)," suggesting "pride in the land." I'll leave the awkward question of bejeweled fashion and Catholicism to decadent "Heavenly Bodies," but all this white Christian conquest of the New World gave me

pause - not that Protestants weren't doing the same thing in these parts. (Our Jesus is lily-white, as is the "Christian nationalism" of our marauder president's most enraptured supporters.) Tucked in a corridor between rooms was this revealing shocker, "Allegory of the Spanish Monarchy with the Kingdoms of Mexico and Peru," whose central figure is a personification of a matronly America. Its caption: Where in the world has one seen / what one sees here? / Her own sons lie groaning / while foreigners are suckling. This America is whiter than the Virgen!

Early religious studies at The New School

I'm excited to have an excuse to explore the New School archives again. Who knew that New School offered the only course in the US in Abyssinian in 1944? That was at the Oriental Institute, part of the École Libre des Hautes Études, where East Asian languages were taught, too. Who was Abbé Laurent Youn (aka Eul Sou Youn and Yun Ul-Su), who taught Chinese, Japanese and Korean language in 1942-43, as well as a course on "Religions de l'Extrême Orient"? Beyond that he published his 1939 dissertation on Confucianism in Korea and a study of Confucius in 1942, both in French (the latter translated into Spanish in 2003!), I can't find much. He's listed in the New School catalog only for '42-'43 - what brought him to America and where did he go next?

And check out this proto-New Age course offered in 1937!

Frustrating

Telling questions from an online quiz for potential New School students.

Coo-ool!

So Brooklyn really is a different world than Manhattan... the great Laurentide Ice Sheet ended right about where we live at its most
southerly point: we're part of the so-called terminal moraine, composed of cool junk pushed, scraped and dragged along from other places.

Strangely different and surprisingly better

In our Archives today I found a 1952 self-study which remarks on the distinctive experience of faculty at the New School. (They didn't capitalize "The" in those days, and, when speaking, seem to have put the emphasis on "School.") Its second sentence is ungainly, as "rough and tumble" as the classes it evokes, but worth following to the end:

[T]he teacher finds himself freed from the cumbersome restrictions he has elsewhere known, facing a group of mature men and women who are there because they want to be, because they are interested, have problems, face difficulties, need to understand better themselves and others. He finds them outspoken, often crude in their remarks, intruding into his abstractions the concrete tests of their own experience, disagreeing with him and with one another, sometimes without due restraint, taking the attention of the class away from him, but in a rough and tumble rarely experienced in an average college class, giving through shared thought, responding with sudden, eager enthusiasm to some discerning remark he has made, at length listening not in resigned boredom but in absorbed understanding to a lecture strangely different from the one he had prepared – and surprisingly better.

History of a school for social research

The coming year is a big one for New School history. Not just for The New School, which celebrates its centenary in 2019, but for my friend J and me, who have been the go-to people on the school's history for many years, and will have new opportunities to share what we've found. We'll be teaching a graduate course in Historical Studies in the Fall, and putting together a series of online presentations on interesting aspects of The New School - perhaps with podcasts! (We received a Provost's Office Innovations in Education Grant for the latter.)

Most excitingly, we'll be editing a "vertical" in the New School-based online journal Public Seminar on "New School Histories," which will involve writing or commissioning at least forty shortish articles over a year-and-a-half long period. This is most exciting because it's likely to reach the most people, and because the Public Seminar context (its modest brief: "Confronting Fundamental Problem of the Human Condition and Pressing Problems of the Day") invites us at every point to show the broader significance of local histories. Because we're not part of the official Marketing and Development-led festivities, we're free to be intellectual about New School's complicated legacies, telling difficult as well as pleasing stories - indeed telling multiple conflicting stories rather than one. We'll raise critical, future-oriented questions about our history, and through them about the ideals The New School and its family of institutions have sought to embody.

Not on our agenda: how we spent a century being "new"!

Image from a book I picked up in Bloomington:

Thomas Hart Benton and the Indiana Murals (2008, orig. 2000), 8

Historic

I was surprised to find S, one of our alums, at the Church of the Holy Apostles today. He's just received an MDiv at Harvard Divinity School, where his research on the theosophical sympathies of the founders of the Center for the Study of World Religions earned him an additional research fellowship. What was he doing at Holy Apostles? Turns out one of the subjects of his research was married at Holy Apostles in 1899, and another had some connection to it as well, so S thought he'd check it out as he was passing through New York City.

Fascinating - so much of our 173 year history we aren't aware of! What S didn't know was that he had come on a historic day in its own right - the first Eucharist celebrated by our new rector. When I told him Rev. Anna Pearson is the church's first woman rector, he couldn't believe it. Research he'd done on the church told of a long proud tradition of progressivism, including being the site one of the first women's ordinations in the Episcopal Church, an early same-sex wedding, etc., etc. What took us so long?

In her sermon Mother Anna quoted a prayer of Dag Hammerskjöld:

For all that has been, Thank you.

For all that is to come, Yes!

Puff!

 A tree on my way from the subway with huge puffs of pink blossom

The melody lingers on

Earlier this week we scored bargain tickets (and good ones!) to the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Carousel," the most-nominated show on Broadway and star-studded too. I was particularly excited to hear Renée Fleming in her post-opera career, though I learned it was also full of stars from Broadway and New York City Ballet, all dancing to vigorous new choreography by NYCB's resident choreographer.

I wish I could say I loved it but I didn't. The production assumes the audience knows the story so well it doesn't need to tell it. Cuts (I learned from reading some reviews afterwards) led to Julie Jordan's character being overshadowed by the story of the troubled man she loves - something which was always part of the story and something this production tries ineffectively to mitigate. The commendably colorblind casting made this even more muddled. And "Miss Fleming" had a cold and vanished after the first act, someone else picking up her part (in the same costume) and the anthem "You'll never walk alone."

And the music, in what all the reviews call the most beautiful score in musicals? Like the stage it seemed crowded and hurried - perhaps intentionally loud and lurid like a carnival (though that might just be Broadway!). The next morning I pored over reviews to try to understand why "Carousel" was so beloved, listening also to a few of the songs from the gritty but lyrical 1994 production (which I saw). While a perennial favorite of theaters large and small and Time's top musical of all time in 2001, I learned that "Carousel" has also always been a "problem musical" because of its celebration of domestic abuse: Billy beats Julie, she accepts it despite warnings from all around her, and somehow both are redeemed by their (her?) love. "I love Carousel," Frank Rich said somewhere, to which Nora Ephron replied "Yes, but you're a boy."

And yet, a few days later, I have to report that the score's gorgeous melodies have been coming back to me one by one, like timed seeds sprouting. In the welter of the production I didn't notice them being sown, but there I was humming not just "If I loved you" but "What's the use of wonderin'" and many others - this morning even "Blow high, blow low"! This amazes me. I grew up with my grandparents' LPs of mid-century musicals but "Carousel" wasn't one of them, so these aren't songs I thought I knew. I didn't particularly enjoy them Wednesday night. But here they are, like old friends. Because I'm a boy?

June!!