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Sam Lipsyte and Lucinda Rosenfeld

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Herodotus on Bush and Gore

By Sam Lipsyte
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2000, at 1:17 PM ET

Lucinda,

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You're right, "Fruit of the Loom" really does have nice acoustic qualities, and we do, as a culture, take it too much for granted. (As far as the encasement of my nether-regions goes, I prefer to leave it to the imagination--mine most of all.) I've always been fond of the phrase "Clear Blue Easy" as well. What is the Clear Blue Easy anyway? It's one of those "feminine products," isn't it? I've always been enchanted by that phrase, too, though not for any inherent musicality. It's just the name of the aisle I have no business being in, even if I'm in the business of being in the drugstore. (Feminine Products might be a good title for a cable series about young, single, urban white women--time to pick up the pitch phone, that's the big red blinking one on my desk.)

I need to say now that I voted post-ironically on Nov. 7, but I still have that "not-so-fresh" feeling. I think we all do. All I know is that I served briefly as president of my New Jersey kindergarten class (this was March of '73, I believe), but I never really had a mandate and was quickly voted of out office the following month. I went home and cried a river. When my mother found me, genius that she was, she held me in her arms and said, "Well, there's only one thing left to do. Write your memoirs." So we got out the crayons and went to work. It was just a lot of pictures of me smiling and then crying, but like Al Gore after the '88 campaign, I was able to do some real soul-searching about my place in the game.

Best book I've read in a while is Michael Kimball's The Way the Family Got Away. It's really an incredible piece of writing, a new lease on language. I've been reading Herodotus in bed every night. I love his approach to the nexus of hearsay and history. I can imagine him writing about things now: "It is said Al Gore had 700 daughters, but I do not know if this is true. There is talk that he slaughtered an entire village in Vietnam, but others have a legend he was only a journalist. There is no way to ascertain if the boil that appeared on W.'s cheek was in fact a boil or not. Many in the East claim it was sent by Zeus, angered by any potential threat to a woman's right to choose. I take no sides, but merely record what others say."

Congratulations on your succession. Has Jong's daughter called to concede?

More Later,
Sam