Spektor’s sea song
QUESTION Which picture is Regina Spektor singing about in her song All The Rowboats?
REGINA Spektor is a Russianborn New York singer/pianist whose music lies between Kate Bush and Tori Amos.
In the single All The Rowboats, from her album What We Saw From The Cheap Seats, she takes on the role of a melancholy art museum tour guide. She sees the artworks as ‘the living dead’, eeking out their existence entombed ‘in their gold frames/ For forever, forever and a day’.
The song makes particular reference to: All the rowboats in the paintings They keep trying to row away And the captains’ worried faces Stay contorted and staring at the waves.
She is referring to the works of the great American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Boston-born Homer was apprenticed at 19 to a commercial lithographer, and became a prolific illustrator. He made his name recording scenes from the battlefields of the American Civil War.
Afterwards, he became an artist in earnest, beginning with oil paintings and moving on to watercolours, for which he is best known. In 1881, Homer went to Cullercoats, a windswept coastal town in Northumberland, northeast England. He was inspired by the heroism of the fishermen and women of the village and their battle with nature.
He depicted his subjects isolated against some aspect of nature: the sea, cliffs, rocks or mountains.
In 1883, Homer settled in Prout’s Neck, on the coast of Maine. This gave him the isolation he craved. With views of the rocks and churning waters of the Atlantic, he continued to capture the ferocity of nature and the struggle against the sea. Here, he painted his famous series of rowboat paintings, the most famous being The Fog Warning and The Herring Net, both painted in 1885.
Sonia Ferguson, Tiverton, Devon.
QUESTION Why did God bless Jacob in the Bible when Jacob was a liar and a deceiver?
THE account of Jacob’s deception is found in the book of Genesis. Rebekah is pregnant with twin boys and receives a message from God in which He tells her that the older child (Esau) will serve the younger (Jacob). When they are born, Jacob becomes her favourite. He takes advantage of Esau, who sells him his birthright as first-born for a single meal.
Esau’s willingness to forfeit his birthright so readily shows him to be unworthy of it.
When Rebekah hears that Isaac (her husband) is about to give his blessing to Esau, she comes up with a plan to ensure that the blessing goes instead to Jacob.
She has already been told by God that Jacob will be the dominant brother but rather than leave things in God’s hands she decides, Lady Macbeth-style, to ‘catch the nearest way’.
Between them, Rebekah and Jacob deceived Isaac and cheated Esau. Jacob receives his father’s blessing, taking advantage of Isaac’s failing eyesight and impersonating his older brother.
In this way, the purposes of God are worked out but Rebekah and Jacob have done wrong. They do not go unpunished; due to Esau’s anger, Jacob has to flee and we do not read that he met his mother again. Jacob, in turn, is the victim of his uncle Laban’s deception.
He lives in fear of Esau for years until they are reconciled. There is a commentary on this story in the New Testament, in Romans chapter nine. This explains that God is sovereign, and that He chose Jacob over Esau before their birth; here we see the doctrine of election, that God can bless who He chooses to bless. God can use people to carry out his purposes in spite of their faults.
The good news is that God can forgive sin and give His blessing to anyone who turns to Him in faith and repentance. Jacob met with God (Genesis chapter 32) and God blessed and changed him. As in Apostle Paul’s Damascus Road experience, Jacob was a changed man. He had now committed his life to God and changed his ways.
Stephen Kerry, by email.
QUESTION Were leaves on the line a problem during the age of steam?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, there are other points to consider about leaves on the line and locomotive adhesion.
Steam locos carried sand boxes which were mounted near or on the boiler, and pipes from these boxes were angled to put sand on the railhead either side of the wheels to improve traction when anything which would decrease wheel grip was on the railhead.
The sand could be discharged from the engine cab. Problems could arise if the sand was wet and did not flow to the track and the train might well stall, which was sometimes in a wet tunnel.
In this case there was a real possibility of asphyxiation and crews would lie on the cab floor with their mouths covered with wet handkerchiefs and hope the train would make it through.
If the driver thought the engine would stall, the fireman would take the water bucket, fill it with coal dust, crawl along the engine side and do his best to drop the coal dust on the rail head between the wheels.
No easy task in a dark tunnel or at night in bad weather! Alan Bowden, Bristol.
QUESTION Where does the expression ‘taking the Mickey’ come from?
IF you take the Mickey, you make fun of someone. There are various forms: take the Mick/Mickey/ Michael. The earliest reference is a 1935 book called Cockney Cavalcade: ‘he wouldn’t let pancake “take the Mike” out of him’.
It is generally accepted the phrase is rhyming slang. The idea being it is derived from a (yet to be identified) character called Mickey Bliss. Richard Dunn, Twickenham, Middx.
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