4 November 1999: Jane Jefferson

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From Betsy-Tacy, which happens when Betsy and Tacy are five and their sisters Julia and Katie eight:

The five-year-olds were the most important members of the large doll families. Everything pleasant happened to them. They had all the adventures.
The eight-year-olds lived very dull lives; and they were always given very plain names. They were Jane and Martha, usually, or Hannah and Jemima. Sometimes Betsy and Tacy forgot and called them Julia and Katie. But the five-year-olds have beautiful names. They were Lucille and Evelyn, or Madeline and Millicent.

This shows how names do go in and out of fashion. No Usan is named Jemima anymore because of the connotations, but Hannah is a very popular name. I think Jane might be coming back into fashion (maybe only because I like it), and The Climbing Tree help us but Martha Stewart is probably raising Martha up through the ranks too. Good thing she wasn't named Mary; Martha was the domestic of those two sisters. And my great-grandmother, born in 1896 when this series begins, was named Lucy (which I think highly preferable to Lucille) and her younger sister Evelyn (which I think is a lovely name). And I thought Ludwig Bemelmans made up Madeline to rhyme and the real name had always been Madeleine. And my father's much older sister is called Millie (which I hope, since I have no truck with naming people with nicknames, is short for Millicent. Yes, I am aware that Lisa is derived from Elisabeth. What does it mean, gift of god or consecrated by god? I forget. Anyway, at least my parents left off the god part).

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Columbine wrote that Debby has a print of Georgia O'Keeffe's Jack-in-the-Pulpit IV, which is on Speaking Confidentially's index page. I wrote demanding its source. He claimed the NGA. Hmph. He said they bought it two years ago and maybe they don't make it anymore? Hmph. I first saw IV and V in the summer of 1994, in the Gallery, when I was in DC over the weekend for a Dead show, which I'm not likely to forget, whither we drove along the coast opposite to another famous car scene, O.J. Simpson's "get-away" chase, which I'm also not likely to forget. Maybe they didn't make it five years ago. But I went to the on-line gallery shop and there! a print! Not V, malheuresment, but IV at least.

Sigh.

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Letter to my mother, very little modified:

3 November 1999
Denver, CO

Dear Mom and BDL:

A few months ago we moved the Mac from Rich's desk, where mostly only I used it, to my desk, which is smaller. The theory when we bought them was that our study couldn't fit two big ones and so the littler one would be a laptop station where I could also color or sew or do other projects, ha ha ha--sewing? We moved the Mac because let's face it, I seldom do any of those things and I really missed being surrounded by my own stuff.

Anyway what this means is that with big honking monitor and scanner (when I see how little the new ones are, I want to weep), I don't have a lot of room on my desk for a notebook where I do esoteric old-fashioned things like write with a pen. Plus our printer is now a footstool, so letters have to be with a pen when they're to primitive unwired folk like yourselves.

Anyway again, and where would I be without that word, what I wanted to tell you was how much you have in common with Martha Stewart. I trust you know who she is, and if you don't you should. Briefly, she is the Perfect Hostess (and Perfect Everything) who lives on Turkey Hill Farm in Westport [Connecticut, but I left that out because my mother doesn't need to be told where Westport is], where she produces ordinary New English things like apples but also, because she's so very Perfect, apparently things like papaya and nutmeg as well, because she's Perfect. She has a television show and magazine and has just had an IPO that put her at $1 billion, at least on paper.

So anyway I picked up a Martha by Mail catalog someone donated to the pile at work and flipped through it desultorily on the bus to find out what else she's doing better than everyone else lately and I saw something that made me laugh.
[Here I taped in the catalog clipping.]
Don't you have dishes like these? Perhaps not Francoma, but something similar? You, B---- L---, there you are collecting with Martha! Believe me, CLH and I are just busting our buttons with pride.

So here I am (later) at the bus stop. Does my pen not work because it's so cold? But it's not cold. Must be the pen.

Different pen. Yes, I carry more than one purple pen. They are my Cross to bear (actually I use Pilots almost exclusively).
[I expect BJWL will not understand that this is a pen pun instead of a Christian pun. God is my co-Pilot.]

Then I yammered about my plans for the coming week, which seem to fascinate her, and promised photographs Real Soon Now.

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Email to HAO, modified:

Subject: Thursdays, now and later

I'm going to make a quick stop in the mall on the way home to get RRP and MPR's present from Pottery Barn. Neither an exciting nor a protracted shop, because I want to get home in time for step.

This weekend though I would like to shop. RDC has claimed the car for both days, although maybe I'll drop him off at SPM's and have it Saturday. Sunday he doesn't need it until 2, I think. I am going to bus or bike or accompany you if you want to go to Cherry Creek North and go to the rubber stamp store because it's time for me to start doing my Christmas cards. I want to make Noël/solstice ones that don't say Christmas on them and send them all off for people to get them by the 21st. Another thing I want to look at in CCN is the make-your-own-pottery place, where you can glaze and doodle on raw pottery and they fire it for you. CLH wanted to take me to such a place in SF, but I haven't been yet.

RDC went to the Pub On Pearl last night expecting to meet Dexy and SPM. He came home telling me we're doing Thanksgiving, which transports me with joy because I was not looking forward to the loser-number of two. Clove asked directly. I am so glad she did. And tangoing A--- & children's books B---, who're moving to Boston for good on Thanksgiving weekend, never to be seen again. And other people I don't know well enough to assign a pseudonym that I'd remember.

This is going to be a much different group than two years ago, but at least Dexy & Clove will provide some continuity.

Dexy said even if it was just the five of us it'd be fun, whereupon RDC told him his expected fifth is going to Michigan, and Dexy was disappointed. As am I. We could make turkey-less stuffing for you, you know. [Remember this is email to HAO.]

And Patel. [I give him this pseudonym because he's Indian, but I don't know if Punjab or Bengali or what and I expect Patel is the Indian version of Smith in some but not all regions. Also I choose Patel because it has the middle t, as has his actual first name, but his first name is pronounced with a thorn (not an ash) through the wonders of Grimm's Law. Or Verner's, I forget.] And we'll invite CGK & Ken of course but they probably have plans with her sister and brother-in-law, but I'd rather have all four come chez nous instead. And SPM and JMJ will pro'ly go to JMJ's mother's house. Anyone who's enough of a loser to not come to us because of family should at least come in the evening for drinks dessert chat music games and to be clobbered by RDC.

Poor KMJ. [It was she whom RDC accidentally smacked in an ill-contained drunken gesture.] Well, it's not as if Massachusetts [where her parents live] is out of reach of Toronto for her, either geographically or financially.

I'll tell Dexy to bring his own music if it'll make him more comfortable. The only stuff of ours he can stand is Billy Joel's greatest hits. And the Beatles I guess. I thought of all this as I dressed and now I have Duran Duran "Reflex" in my head, which is what we all wound up dancing to on Hallowe'en.

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What else. Oh yes. This morning as I filled my water jug, I said g'morning type things to Coworker, who stood by the coffee machine filling her cup with hot water, which she drinks as a substitute for coffee or tea. Speaking of insane. She asked how my Thursday was going. I said I had not ten minutes before confused Jane Austen with Thomas Jefferson but I was otherwise fine. This is why I love me, that I do this, but she wanted explanation.

In Forbidden Knowledge [which is, remember, about how humans' curiosity and innovation and intelligence have gotten us into trouble from the apple to the bomb], Roger Shattuck (the author) is talking about the Human Genome Project and the issues of eugenics and whatnot.

In 1969, Robert Sinsheimer, a molecular biologist at the California Institute of Technology, published an article in Engineering and Science "favoring 'a new eugenics.' 'For the first time in all time, a living creature understands its origins and can undertake to design its future.'"

Cut to 1977, where the same person contradicted his earlier stance, calling for limits on rDNA research and saying it is 'no longer enough to wave the flag of Galileo': "Rights are not found in nature. Rights are conferred within a human society and for each there is expected a corresponding responsibility."

Now this got me thinking, doesn't that contradict the Declaration of Independence?

I cast back to Jefferson on rights, but what first appeared in my forebrain was "It is a truth universally acknowledged," and I was laughing at myself by the time "...that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" finished that sentence.

Coworker was laughing as well by this point in my narrative. Whew.

Then I remembered. "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation....We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Come to find out, the last paragraph's ellipsis isn't necessary, but I'm ignorant. And I only recited the second sentence to Coworker. I'm not stupid.

Anyway, "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and "It is a truth universally acknowledged"--it's reasonable to confuse those, isn't it?

But anyway, the reason I wanted the Declaration of Independence (not Pride and Prejudice) is that the molecular biologist, a Usan, explicitly contradicts Jefferson, which I think is very curious. "Rights are not found in nature" versus "We hold these truths to be self-evident...that [humans] are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

You can analyze Creator/God and nature/Darwin however you want, but Jefferson meant that those rights are implicit in us just as are our involuntary heartbeat and bipedalism. Sinsheimer says no. Some rights are found in a society, like free speech or not, but none? Are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness not inherent? How about the pursuit of knowledge, or of forbidden knowledge?

Otherwise, is the idea of a Creator conferred within a human society, so that the society creates the (idea of a) Creator who endows us with rights?

Anyway, Coworker exclaimed, "And this is what you think about on the bus? On the bus, I'm wondering if I remembered to take the chicken out of the freezer. Have you ever thought about starting a book club here?" ("Hey George! Did you ever think about running for class president?") She also wanted to know if I majored in philosophy. I was pleased: that's about the only major more pointless than English lit (and history and women's studies). Why didn't I do a quadruple major? Damn.

[end letter]

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I just read the Amazon reviews of Forbidden Knowledge for the first time. One person writes "This dazzling work of literary criticism (one of the few genuinely readable pieces of lit. crit. in a long while) defeats its own argument: Shattuck's book is just too smart and intellectually alive to believe that intellectual limits are a good thing." I haven't thought he argues for that. The man's 75 years old and if he's against pornography (I haven't gotten to the Marquis de la Sade yet), whatever and I hope I have the intellectual integrity to disagree with him; but overall, I believe his stance is that despite the apple and Pandora's box and Frankenstein's monster and the bomb, we're not, Faust-like, trading our souls for knowledge. Knowledge is the soul of humanity.

Or maybe that's only what I think.

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