[lit-ideas] Re: Ducts, Jutland and Lexington Green
- From: david ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:18:30 -0800
On Dec 19, 2005, at 9:38 PM, Eric Yost wrote:
But heat costs nothing. Even now the windows are open. Even now I
wear a T-shirt and drink ice tea. Soon I will get my ukulele out of
the closet.
"Maika'i Kaua'i," "Mele No Ko'olau," and "Hanohano Waimea" will
echo in the calefactory glare.
I feel your madness and would love to help. Emily said last week
that she'd heard or read somewhere that one of the local high schools
had built a trebuchet. Deciding they had nowhere to store it, they
gave the thing away...without offering it to me. Had I but known, I
could even now be winging toward New York great lumps of cold air
from the further reaches of our house. Here we heat with gas. You
take cold air, heat it, send it along echoing ducts, release a
transformed version into the room's atmosphere. If the room is
higher than the heater or close to the heater, it gets warmed; if
not, not. "Re-balance," you cry. "Close the ducts that are close to
the heater or higher than the heater, so that others may get a shot
of heat." Hah! Pschaw! Theoretically a sound idea, but you forget
the psychological factor. As Mike will tell you, ducts are cunning
beasts.
If I misuse the term "psychological," I apologize; I've been reading
papers about how the advent of Modernism is related to the First
World War... giver of "gang-green" and the great "navel" battle of
Jutland. What exactly *was* the relationship between Modernism and
the First World War? It seems that it turns on "physiology" and
abstraction. "This was was the physiological changing point, due to
the destruction of the war through which people were forced to
create, and abstraction was intensified by the need to produce and
rebuild." I bet that sentence was written in a steam-heated room.
To temper some of this weirdness, I watched last night a program
about New England reenactors. For about fifteen hundred dollars they
can kit you out as a terrorist insurgent... or a loyal British
subject. You then get to walk down paved streets, past parked SAABs,
toward Lexington Green, holding a cell phone to your ear and saying
things like, "Are the British at the crossroads?"
Brill.
David Ritchie
Portland, Oregon.
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