OK, it was cold out there on the lake this morning. I think I saw a penguin
swim by. Now, it's true that I have in the recent past been in an equally small
boat in even colder weather, but I was wearing a drysuit at the time. And there
were icebergs. Even though that was hours ago and I had the car heater blasting
the whole way to work, I still don't think my body temperature has
recovered.
There are plenty of people who row in much colder
climates, but they solve this little problem by just not rowing this time of year
-- and certainly not in a single, alone, in the dark. The one thing that saves
this from being as stupid an idea as it sounds it that the water was actually
relatively warm today. We can have daily temperature swings of 30-40 degrees
during the day, so the warm afternoons heat the lake water.
Here's a
letter from a
rower in totally different circumstances, in an even warmer
climate.
OK, on to other stuff. I yield to few in my love of books,
but I thought the following, from a review of Nicholas Basbanes'
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-
/0060082879/qid=1076094111//ref=pd_ka_1/102-8916285-
1818501?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">A Splendor of Letters was downright
silly:
"A final section elaborates on the potential
threat of the e-book, but remains optimistic that love of the physical act of
reading will enable the printed page to
prevail.">
Threat? Prevail? Good grief, it's not a war,
any more than newspapers are at war with books. They have different capabilities.
I highly doubt e-books will put paper books out of print; they're not cuddly, they
don't smell right, and there's no thrill in thinking who else might have held that
-- file? -- in their hands decades ago. On the other hand, paper books tend not to
have search capabilities or the capacity to report exactly how many times
Shakespeare used the -eth suffix instead of the -es suffix, and it's harder to
find the exact words in which
href="http://dichroic.diaryland.com/notpickle.html">Jo March compared her father
to apickle bottle. People made the same arguments with movies and television,
and as in that case, there's room for both.
Speaking of the things a
sense of history will tell you... in Frances Hodgeson Burnett's
href="http://www.gutenberg.net/etext01/tmbrn10.txt">T. Tembarom, which I like
even better than A Secret
Garden, the elderly English Miss Alicia and the young American man Tem have
the following conversation:
"It has
sometimes even seemed to me that our Heavenly Father has a special objection to
ladies," she had once timorously confessed to Tembarom. "I suppose it is because
we are so much weaker than men, and so much more given to vanity and petty
vices."He had caught her in his arms and actually hugged her that
time. Their intimacy had reached the point where the affectionate outburst did not
alarm her."Say!" he had laughed. "It's not the men who are going to
have the biggest pull with the authorities when folks try to get into the place
where things are evened up. What I'm going to work my passage with is a list of
the few 'ladies' I've known. You and Ann will be at the head of it. I shall just
slide it in at the box-office window and say, 'Just look over this, will you?
These were friends of mine, and they were mighty good to me. I guess if they
didn't turn me down, you needn't. I know they're in here. Reserved seats. I'm not
expecting to be put with them but if I'm allowed to hang around where they are
that'll be heaven enough for me.'"
Miss Alicia
gets that attitude from her strict old clergyman father, but given how notable
Victorians were for putting women on pedestals, his attitude seems much more
natural. But I was thinking .... not long after she was speaking so, a few hundred
miles north and east women were being sent to the
href="http://users.erols.com/bcccsbs/bass/new_25magd.html">Magdalene Laundries
for getting pregnant, or even just being"in moral danger"; a fw years earlier and
a handred miles south no one much cared if girl as well as boy mudlarks scrounged
for a living in the stinking mud of the Thames and killed themselves with blue
ruin gin. Outside fiction, those pedestals were precious
hollow.
Sometimes too much knowledge makes mindless entertainment
more difficult.
Note: A few days after writing this entry, I came across
href="http://row2k.com/columns/index.cfm?action=read&ID=142">this answer to
the question in the title.