Endless Knots

It means linden tree

I had a delicious assignment last week where I presented to the global HR team of a company in the early stages of weaving its disparate parts together. What am I talking about? It's an international financial services firm, one of the more critical ones that you've never heard of (at least I, and most people I've mentioned its name to, had never heard of it), yet we'd be up the proverbial creek if it didn't do its work. It controls 92% of the US domestic market in its space and plans to increase its global share significantly in the years to come. It's grown by dozens of acquisitions and now, as it takes its next leap, is working to increase it's cross-boundary efficiencies. Enter virtual working.

So what does this have to do with linden trees? In the audience was a woman from Poland. As I was signing books, I mentioned that my last name is Polish to which she said, yes, I figured that, Lipniak. Exacto. Original name, from this tiny village, pop. 60, Americanized to Lipnack when my grandfather, Chatzkel ("Charlie")  came to Ellis Island as a very young boy. Going back to its roots, so to speak, it means linden tree.

And...in the course of looking for a proper illustration of such arboreal splendor, I came across a photo by Massimiliano Cricco, who took this shot in Todi, Italy, that city on a hill in Umbria, where my friend Anne keeps an apartment (and where Daughter #1 and I were disappointed to find one of its great restaurants closed several years ago). If it weren't copyrighted, I'd post the photo here. Click and ye shall find.

What a scene - unusual request

Those reading closely know about my terrible hard drive crash of several weeks ago. Among its many sequela is the loss of all my mail for the past several years...which means the loss of all my email addresses. It's possible they will be recovered over time. I'm still waiting for the prognosis of the drive, which has been sent to data recovery specialists on another planet, so far as I can tell. I only get the faintest of signals back about its status.

So...here's what I need. If you have my email, please send me an email ASAP, which will then help with the short-term problem. I will then be able to capture it and begin to rebuild my list.

And if you want to be on my list, here's my spam'bot-protected email, no spaces of course: myfirstname dot mylastname at netage dot com.

If this is true, bye-bye MS

Thanks to Clara Shih, I've just come across this article reporting on research claiming that MS has been reversed in animals, namely mice. Researchers at Jewish General Hospital Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research and McGill University in Montreal are reporting that "a new experimental treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS) completely reverses the devastating autoimmune disorder in mice, and might work exactly the same way in humans."

According to the article in physorg.com:

The new treatment, appropriately named GIFT15, puts MS into remission by suppressing the immune response. This means it might also be effective against other autoimmune disorders like Crohn's disease, lupus and arthritis, the researchers said, and could theoretically also control immune responses in organ transplant patients. Moreover, unlike earlier immune-supppressing therapies which rely on chemical pharamaceuticals, this approach is a personalized form of cellular therapy which utilizes the body's own cells to suppress immunity in a much more targeted way.

GIFT15 was discovered by a team led by Dr. Jacques Galipeau of the JGH Lady Davis Institute and McGill's Faculty of Medicine. The results were published August 9 in the prestigious journal Nature Medicine.

The only proviso?

MS must be caught in its earliest stages, Galipeau cautioned, and clinical studies are needed to test the treatment's efficacy and safety in humans. No significant side-effects showed up in the mice, he said, and the treatment was fully effective with a single dose.

But when it was caught early, the treatment appears to be quite simple:

"It's easy to collect B-cells from a patient," he added. "It's just like donating blood. We purify them in the lab, treat them with GIFT15 in a petri dish, and give them back to the patient. That's what we did in mice, and that's what we believe we could do in people. It would be very easy to take the next step, it's just a question of finding the financial resources and partnerships to make this a reality."

Phenomenal.

"Perhaps" from The Persuasion

"Perhaps," the first chapter of my novel, The Persuasion, has been published in the literary journal, Melusine: Woman in the 21st Century.

 

How this happened bears telling: I was casting about, looking for literary journals to submit my work to, when I happened upon Melusine, whose subtitle stopped me right there, dead in my keys.

In the novel from which this chapter is taken, the main character, Mariana, is beseeched by the ghost of Margaret Fuller, the 19th-century phenom, to rewrite Fuller's classic treatise, Woman  in the Nineteenth Century. What Fuller wants Mariana to do is write "Woman in the 21st Century."

So I wrote to the editor, Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom, explaining the coincidence and submitting the first chapter. Two weeks later, Janelle accepted the submission. If you click through, you'll see why we both thought this chapter is a good fit for Melusine.

Thanks, Janelle.

Margaret Fuller's Bicentenarians

A dedicated group of people crazed (ok, some crazed, ahem, others deeply respectful) of the life and works of Margaret Fuller are scheming on a regular basis to make her bicentennial a spectacular event. With Rev Dorothy Emerson, I'm co-chairing the committee based here in New England and thus happily hosted one of our regular meetings this past Thursday.

I feel compelled to report that it was not raining. Normally, this is not news but alas given that the heavens have been weeping for more than a month, we took it as some sort of sign that we were able to meet at the picnic table.

And in the interest of full disclosure, I must add that as soon as the meeting was over...

* * * IT STARTED TO RAIN * * *

To prove the sun actually came out, two pictures for your enjoyment

That's Dorothy in the pool of light with Margaret framed behind her

 

This picture, just to see the refreshments, including cherries, grapes, and lattes for the caffeine-deprived

Icfai Business School's Effective Executive Interviews ... us!

We (not the royal - just Jeff Stamps and I) were pleased to participate in an interview on "Building High Performance Teams" for the May 2009 issue of Icfai Business School's publication, Effective Executive. Quite distinguished company we're in: others in the series include, well, all the big business-writer-types. You can download the interview by registering...and the print publication is quite lovely too.

I love this interview process. With the questions submitted in "writing," i.e. via email, one has time to think about the answers. Jeff took some of the questions, I took others, and presto, changeo, we submitted and, within a week or so, the print publication arrived.

Thanks to Dr. Nagendra V. Chowdary, who conducted the interview, and to V. Devi, who handled the logistics, including pestering us to make the deadline.

"Specter, of course"

This is not a post about Arlen Specter, the senator who switched party affiliations due to certain sharp turns by his part for the past gazillion years. It's about an affectionate memory I have from my early days as a reporter.

The Pottstown Mercury (according to Wikipedia, the smallest circulation newspaper in the US to win two Pulitzer Prizes and where I had my first job as a journalist) was then a "feeder paper" for the Philadelphia Bulletin (it lives no more). What this meant is that aspiring reporters cut their teeth at The Mercury, covering a wide range of stories and writing columns, before moving up to the big city 35 miles southeast of our small shtetl. The newsroom was small - and we were packed in together, leading to our getting to know one another quite well.

To this day, I remember precisely where everyone sat, as the desks were pushed together, leaving us face-to-face and side-by-side. To my left, Dolly Smith, who ran the "Social Page," what's now called "Style" in most papers; to my right, Charles Carter, who covered religion, which was quite big as it is/was in most small towns. Across from me sat Paul Levy, not the Boston one, in fact his physical opposite. In addition to his incredible output - he churned out more stories than anyone else - what was truly remarkable about him was his typing faster than anyone I've ever known with two fingers on a manual typewriter! I can still hear his key pounding.

At the next bank of tables was Bob Boyle, the editor whose shirt was always covered with ashes, the copyeditor, whose name I've repressed as he committed suicide during my second summer there, and the copyboy, Billy March, whose job was principally to rip stories off the wire machine and bring them to Bob, whose principal job, from my perspective, was teasing me.

Beyond that bank of desks - and the point of my indulging this reminiscence - was Gordy Griffiths, hands-down the best reporter for the paper, and one of the consistently happiest people I'd ever met. Although everyone was nice to me (I was only 16 when I started and thus a bit of an oddity, being one of only two "women," if you could call me that at that age, in the newsroom), Gordy stood out. He was interested in my ideas, gave me suggestions, and once wrote a lovely essay, expounding on one of my stranger ideas: dry rain.

Simply put, there are two kinds of rain - the drenching kind that requires protection and the drop-here, drop-there, not-very-wet-kind, which I believe to this day exists. Now there's probably a real science to explain this but Gordy listened to my exigesis one day as if what I was saying made actual sense. The next he presented me with his interpretation of my thinking, which I still have somewhere on crumbling newsprint and which was called something like, "The Theory of Dry Rain."

I don't know how old Gordy was at the time - maybe early thirties, much, much older to the eyes of a 16-year-old, and his engaging with me as a peer meant a lot. And I loved his work, which was consistently good and creative. He covered the hard news of our small town and wrote columns.

I worked at the paper for four summers, going back to high school in between, and when I came home for vacations, always stopped into the paper to say hi, sometimes writing columns on my adventures during the year. Which brings me to explaining the title of this post. One day when I came back to visit, there was Gordy, as usual, with his adorable grin, the kind where lips are tight together and the side of the mouth scrunches down, as if the person is about to burst out laughing. On his lapel a button: "Specter, of course."

Being about 18 at the time, I barely knew who Specter was, but it turned out he was the now-famous senator, running for DA in Philadelphia. I did know that he was more conservative than my parents, Roosevelt Democrats, and I remember saying to Gordy, "Specter?" And he said, with that smile, "Of course."

Gordy was managing Specter's first campaign, or at least that's how I remember it. Perhaps he was just his press secretary. Regardless, he was deeply involved, thought "Arlen" was great, and, as was the case in those days, suffered no job consequences at the newspaper for being involved in a political campaign.

Gordy died young. I can't remember when or how and a search on his name brings up no information at all. But every time I see Senator Specter - and walk in dry rain - I think of Gordy.

Who grows there? The annual contest!

What are these little beauties, already making their appearance?

Continuing plaudits to last year's winner!
Ms. Shelley Marlowe!

Here we go!

I'm so thrilled that I'm all exclamation points!
(Admittedly some are not herbs!)



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#9 (name the friend)

Margaret Fuller's 199th Birthday - May 23, 2009

Mark your calendars, Margaret Fuller fanatics, itinerant Transcendentalists, and anyone else looking for a good time on Saturday, May 23.

A group of us who admire and honor the work, life, and legacy of Margaret have come together to plan for the bicentennial of her birth, which takes place next May 23, 2010.

We're seizing the moment of her 199th birthday to kick off the festivities. Please join us at 5 PM, May 23 (drilling in the date) at First Parish, 3 Church Street, Cambridge, MA, right in the heart of Harvard Square for a reception, featuring a stellar crowd, including:

• “Margaret Fuller” (aka Jessa Piaia)
• Laurie James (actor, author, Bicentennial Committee—New York area)
• Megan Marshall (author, historian)
• Judith Strong Albert (independent scholar, American Literature Association)
• Jacqueline Schwab (pianist, historical documentaries by PBS filmmaker Ken Burns)
• Jessica Lipnack (filmmaker with Ron Mortara, author—oui, c'est moi)
• Melody Lee (First Parish in Cambridge Women’s Sacred Circle)
• Dorothy Emerson (Unitarian Universalist minister, Bicentennial Comm—New England)

Proceeds from the event benefit the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial and will be matched by the Fund for Unitarian Universalism ($25 donation, light refreshments, great people). It's our good fortune that the reception coincides with the American Literature Association's annual conference here in Boston, where two panels about Margaret will take place. The scholars from those panels will join us for the reception.

And, early birds, I'll lead my annual expedition (2008 and 2007, both recorded  here) to Margaret's memorial at  Mount Auburn Cemetery at 9:30 AM on that very same day, Sat, May 23. As per last year, John Halamka, Japanese flute  player and, oh, by the way, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, will be with us.  

The Bicentennial Committee has kindly published "By genius belonging to the world," my tribute to Margaret on the committee's website. Come along and learn about Margaret's relatives, many of whom are buried there, including her parents and her famous descendent, Bucky Fuller and his wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller (that link takes you to a chain of posts about the Fuller family).

Enjoy a short reading from Margaret's work, some tidbits about Margaret's life, and, of course, singing Happy Birthday to this most remarkable of women. 

Stay tuned for many more events listed on the brochure that I've uploaded here:
Margaret Fuller 199th Birthday Brochure

Facebook page here for the Bicentennial group, with a hilarious picture.

Six word stories

Just discovered that my "six word story," which I flagged earlier, was published back in February.

Met at antiwar rally; still fighting.

Thanks to Pete Berg for this great site and laying down the tremendous challenge to tell a story in six words.