Word: ancestored
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...called) known as la petite Morfil. Miss Murphy was an Irish girl whom the Pompadour pro cured for her flagging monarch by the utterly rococo device of getting Boucher to paint her as the Virgin Mary in a decoration for one of the royal chapels. She is the ancestor of all the midinettes and grisettes and rotund milkmaids that Renoir was to paint a century later...
...Cooley works the genealogical lode like a Forty-Niner. In a preface to his 607-page paperback epic, Cooley speaks pointedly of his Mexican great-grandmother and his Mexican-Welsh grandmother. Then he attempts a vast, three-generation dynastic "saga" of the Lewis family. It starts with a Yankee ancestor's jumping ship at Monterey to start a dynasty in the 1830s and ends in the 1960s with the business-and land-rich heirs grimacing over the pot parties of their young and wondering what catastrophes Cesar Chavez and his troublemakers are going to visit on the California dream...
...other hand, is alive, and he is at least as present in the show as his imaginary ancestor. He and Jeremiah have a good deal in common. Jim, like his great-uncle, prefers the company of his dog to membership in learned societies. Jim also shares with Jeremiah an appreciation of the purely aesthetic qualities of machinery. The workings of their engines are unfathomable, and unimportant. What matters is that they look powerful. With their gleaming metal fittings, their haloes of mysterious tubing, the no-nonsense names carefully lettered on their sides, and the earth-shaking noises they make, they...
Gore Vidal can leave Benedict Arnold alone, but he can not restrain himself from trying to polish the tarnished reputation of his maternal ancestor Burr. He does not try to turn Burr into a hero, but he does attempt to make him into something less two dimensional than the flip side of a coin. For this day and age, Vidal's attempt constitutes a rehabilitation of Burr. No one tries to write Parson Weems-type historical fiction anymore: larger-than-life heroes like Washington are no longer very appealing. To turn a villian into a hero of today's world...
Nevertheless, what a person was or thought or did thirty years ago is past and dead, even if that person is physically alive...feeling a deep familial piety for his defunct historical self, he indulges in ancestor worship, tidies up embarrassing disorders of his dead past, reverently conceals his own skeleton in a hidden closet...no writer enjoys total recall, every recollection is suspect...