My current
desktop photo, above, covers three major interests: rock climbing (a practice long
since abandoned), high school physics and the curious nature of being a woman. Click pic to enlarge.
This is advanced
climbing demanding great strengths. Imagine climbing the wall of your living
room and then climbing (The verb is no longer apt: proceeding?) across the
underneath of the ceiling. Unnatural? Indeed! If she falls (but she isn't going
to) she will only dangle from the closest metal clip attached to the rock,
provided the other end of the rope is secure.
The comparatively
slack rope isn't supporting her, only her hands and (to a lesser extent) her
feet are doing that. The left appears to grip a conventional handhold, but the other handhold
consists of two fingers inserted into a small hole. Now note the muscle
definition in her arms and shoulders.
She's wearing
lycra pants, a golden bangle and has dyed her hair. Male climbers do these
things. She however takes advantage of her gender by wearing a decorative
sports bra. I am not drawn to this photo for conventional sexual reasons,
rather because it blurs previous gender-defined roles. Oh yeah? Yeah!
Blest Redeemer
(123,985 words written; target 150,000 approx, say about 400 pages) is about a
woman pushed to the limit and beyond. It’s quite horrible. So I’m a sadist? Not
that I know of (Want to psycho-analyse me?) since it’s her resistance to events
that’s of interest. As with Jana in Risen on Wings. I realise this sounds like
dubious territory and perhaps both books are lousy. But there’s no point in
writing purely for the money; you’ve got to enjoy the process. And of course
the subject.
There is something unusual in that photo.
ReplyDeleteYou may have wanted to comment on the point below, but it would have blown your maximum word discipline, so here goes.
On a climb of that severity one would normally be using two ropes so that they can be clipped into the carabiners approximately, alternately, or when points for fixing protection become wide apart from each other - this reduces drag on the rope as you proceed, and also when you want to pull the slack through to clip into the next carabiner. I think this is a bolted route where metal brackets have been fixed into the rock beforehand to clip carabiners into, and in that way protection points are more likely to be straightlining keeping rope drag to a minimum.
With conventional British rock climbing protection points are inserted into cracks and fissures as one proceeds and then removed by the second as they ascend, and locations are therefore dictated by nature and more random involving potential zig zagging of the rope, and thereby more drag.
That's a tutorial about advanced rock-climbing techniques (and their morality), not a mere feuilleton about women as tough climbers.
ReplyDeleteI'd be risking a huge drop in the heartening number of pageviews (by a factor of four) that the previous post announcing my apostasy engendered. No more stuff about sharps and flats, they might have said. And then: what's different about expander bolts and pifs (or wufs, or slyfes)?