Working From Home

Today, the latest issue of The New Yorker (26 July, 2010) arrived in the mail. I was happily surprised to see that a cartoon on page 75 was actually dealing with rowing, well, sort of…

Being aware of the copyright issues, I do not dare to publish the cartoon, “He’s working from home today”, which is made by artist John Klossner, but I can always link to it. See the cartoon by clicking here.

For The Case Of Å, Ä and Ö

I do not like when people dwell on things, but I cannot help bringing up something that I was discussing in my previous entry, the use of the Swedish letters ‘å’, ‘ä’ and ‘ö’.

Being busy for weeks, it is just now that I have had the time to go through a pile of magazines that has arrived during the two last months. Flipping through the pages and reading here and there, in The New Yorker, July 5, 2010, I came across a piece by Nora Ephron. She is an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter (etc.), and in this issue she is trying to be a humorist, too, as she is writing under the vignette ‘Shouts & Murmurs’, which is the magazine’s ‘fun page’. What Ephron is paraphrasing and joking about is the Swedish writer Stieg Larsson’s popular crime novels about Kalle Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander. Now, I do not mind anyone making fun about Larsson’s books (and, no, I have not read any of them); I think his relatives will laugh or cry all the way to the bank. But what I do object to is Nora Ephron’s teasing, even mocking, way of the Swedish language’s use of the letters ‘å’, ‘ä’ and ‘ö’. Or, what Ephron thinks are ‘a’s and an ‘o’ with umlauts.

Nora Ephron’s “The Girl Who Fixed The Umlaut” is not only a good example of bad taste, it shows arrogance and a typical big-nation's superior attitude towards a smaller nation and something you do not understand, or even try to comprehend (this phenomenon has often previously been seen in American foreign policy). None of the Swedish words Ephron mentions in her article has an umlaut; instead they are geographical places, names of streets and roads, or surnames.

Of course, the whole idea of ‘the girl who fixed the umlaut’ falls apart when you know that all computers’ keyboards in Sweden already have three keys with ‘å’, ‘ä’ and ‘ö’; you do not have to look for them or press the Alt key and other keys to have these letters to appear on the screen. (On my American keyboard I have to press five keys to get the ‘ö’ in my first name…)

So, sorry Nöra Ephrön, your article is not funny, it is only snobbish!

I apologise to my readers, this is not an entry on rowing, and in the future I will really try to stay away from non-rowing related subjects!

A Rowing Article In The New Yorker, 1996

If you would like to read about the sport of rowing, nowadays you are referred to a few printed rowing magazines, like the beautiful Rowing & Regatta and Rowing News (which just the other day arrived in the mail with a new lay-out which did not impress me at all), and, if you know any Swedish, the eminent Svensk Rodd, which my dear friend Per Ekström is still the captain of, after 20 years at the helm – bravo, old boy, and congratulations!

There used to be two nice rowing magazines published in Australia and New Zealand, but I am not sure if they still exist. Of course, among present publications, let us not forget Rachel Quarrell’s and Christopher Dodd’s brilliant e-magazine Rowing Voice, and FISA’s e-newsletter/magazine. And, of course, in Great Britain you can read about rowing in the big newspapers, at least in and around the time of the Boat Race and the Henley Royal Regatta.

However, other sports receive coverage in non-sport magazines, it does not matter if it is a literary or cultural magazine, there will quite often be a feature article about baseball, football/soccer, basketball, cricket, or another big sport. But rowing, not very likely.

One of the magazines that I really like in America is The New Yorker. In the 1930s, for the annual Harvard-Yale Regatta, for a few years, there was always rowing on the cover. The New Yorker frequently has well-written articles about different sports. Although, I have no interest what so ever in the sport the article is about, I read it because it is splendidly written. Way back when, the magazine had some articles or short pieces published about rowing, however, the last time was in July 1996! Then John Seabrook, a staff writer for the magazine, had a good article about Steve Redgrave, when he still had a couple of Olympic gold medals to go and he was still just a commoner.

As a matter of fact, the article is available on the web, and you can read it by clicking here. Enjoy!