Rilke, Tolstoy, and travel...

your house is just
this side of great distances

Of course this has to do with bikes and books ... but first, I figure about half of you out there use Internet Explorer to view Bicycle Diaries. Microsoft's nefarious product doesn't load it very well. It often center justifies the posts putting the right sidebar all the way down to the bottom of the page. Try instead Mozilla Firefox as your browser. It's FREE, only taking a few minutes to load. It also has a great reputation in contrast to the Windows-based Explorer.

Someone who wants to run Windows on servers should first be made to show what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo and Amazon don't know.

Paul Graham

You'll not only see my blog as I intend it to be viewed. You and your computer will both be very happy. Firefox is more secure against viruses and hackers as well as less buggy than Explorer.

Speaking of explorers, I've been wanting to post one of my favorite poems about travel.

Entering

Whoever you are: step out in the evening
from your room where all is known to you;
your house is just this side of great distances:
whoever you are.
With your eyes which, exhausted,
barely free themselves from the worn threshold,
you raise up, slowly, a black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you've made the world. And it is vast
and like a word which ripens still in silence.
And as your will begins to grasp its meaning,
your eyes release it gently.

In 1900 Rainer Maria Rilke, a rather restless traveler, sought refuge with Leo Tolstoy at his ancestral estate, Yasnaya Polyana. Rilke, only 25 years old, already had an impressive array of publications to his credit. Unfortunately, this had done almost nothing to help his anxieties about writing. He shared them Tolstoy; later describing their conversation in a letter to friend,

I still lack the discipline, the being able to work, and the being compelled to work, for which I have longed for years. Do I lack the strength? Is my will sick? Is it the dream in me that hinders all action? Days go by and sometimes I hear life going. And still nothing has happened, still there is nothing real about me . . . .

To which Tolstoy gave a completely unexpected response. With neither sympathy nor pity, he simply said, Write!

Tolstoy could have easily said, bike! At the age of 67, he started teaching himself to ride. Visitors to Yasnaya often commented rather humorously on the sight of the aging anarchist rolling around his estate. Tolstoy was as brief in his response to them as he had been to Rilke.

I feel that I am entitled to my share of lightheartedness and there is nothing wrong with enjoying one's self simply, like a boy.

You have to love pedestrians...

Pedestrians make up
the greater part of humanity.

And so begins The Little Golden Calf (Золотой телёнок or Zolotoy telyonok) by Soviet authors Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. A new English translation of the 1931 book, by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson, is getting a lot of enthusiastic reviews. When I went looking for it, I came upon another, but incomplete, translation by Maciej Ceglowski and Peter V. Gadjokov. The novel's hilarious and, much to my surprise, rather apropos to this humble blog. The opening pages continue with a clever, trenchant comparison of pedestrians and cagers!

... The best part, no less. Pedestrians created the world. It was they who built the cities, raised skyscrapers, laid sewage and water lines, paved the streets and lit them with electric lights. It was they who spread civilization throughout the world, invented movable type, thought up gunpowder, flung bridges across rivers, deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, introduced the safety razor, abolished the slave trade and established that soybeans can be used to prepare 114 tasty, nutritious dishes.

And when everything was ready, when our home planet had taken on a comparatively comfortable form, the drivers appeared.

We should note that the automobile was also invented by pedestrians. But drivers somehow instantly forgot about that. They started running over the peaceful, intelligent pedestrians. They took over the streets the pedestrians had created. The pavement doubled in width, the sidewalks narrowed to the size of a tobacco pouch, and pedestrians had to start pressing themselves against the walls of buildings in fear.

Pedestrians in the big city lead a martyr’s life. A kind of transportation ghetto has been created for them. They are only permitted to cross the streets at pedestrian crossings, that is, in precisely those places where traffic is the heaviest and where it is easiest to sever the hair by which a pedestrian’s life usually hangs.

In our expansive country, the ordinary automobile—designed by pedestrians for the transportation of goods and people—has taken on the terrifying outlines of a fratricidal missile. It mows down rows of union members and their families. And if a pedestrian somehow manages to escape from under the car’s silver nose, he is fined by police for violating the rules of the traffic catechesis.

And in general, the authority of the pedestrian has been rather severely shaken. Having given the world such notable persons as Horace, Boyle, Mariotte, Lobachevsky, Gutenberg, and Anatole France, he must now go the most undignified lengths simply to remind the world of his existence. Oh God, oh great God who does not actually exist, what have you brought the pedestrian to?

Dead certainties...

in the Amazon Basin

I just finished reading a fascinating book lent to me by a drinking buddy. The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, by New Yorker writer David Grann, is actually a tale of two obsessive journeys, separated by nearly a century, to the same place in the Amazon jungles. The first concerns the repeated attempts of Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett to find material evidence for a lost civilization, or El Dorado, in the Green Deserts. The other involves the author trying to find what happened to Fawcett and two others after they disappeared on there in 1925. After going to the region where Fawcett was last reported, Grann simply ends his narrative. It's the most surprising thing that's ever happened to me as a reader. We'll never know what happened to the early 2oth Century British explorer - FULL STOP.


His death as well as those of his son and son's best friend are certain. The cause (as in who or what did them in) will forever be uncertain, particularly as it is disputed by those tribes who continue to claim the best of hospitable intentions while accusing the others of deceitful murder. What is certain at the end, however, is that Fawcett was onto something. Today's anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered mounting evidence of ancient, complex civilisations in Amazon. Perhaps that's the better epitaph for Fawcett. He was right. Everyone else ... wrong.

We'll all be dead one day anyway.

And you thought computers suck...

what
about
books?

So one day that old mediator between Good & Evil, the Egyptian god Thoth, invents writing. Up till then, folks just filled up their noggins with pretty much everything. And Thoth proudly offering it as a gift to the Pharaoh of Egypt, claiming it'll be

an elixir of memory and wisdom.

Pharaoh ain't all that impressed. In fact, he's downright horrified, replying,

This invention will induce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written…rather than, from within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind.

So it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. And as for wisdom, you are equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth.

North by ...

by northwest

Vic McDaniel and Ray Francisco, just out of high school, set out from Santa Rosa, CA on second-hand bikes, bound for the great Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. Travelling on dusty roads, roads of logs, of planks, even of corn stalks, and often no roads at all, they pedaled, pushed, and walked a thousand miles north for fifty-four days.

They started out with only $5.65 between them. Camp was wherever, whenever the sun was gone; food was an occasional meal from a kindly farm wife and what they could fish, hunt, or glean. But they learned that all strangers were not kind, not even close. Vic and Ray reported their adventures to their home-town newspaper. And what adventures they had. They traveled paths beside railroad tracks, fought their way around boulders and up brushy hillsides, and crossed rivers layered with salmon.

Evelyn Gibb, daughter of one of the cyclists, has drawn on her father's recollections to tell this incredible adventure in his voice. Winner of the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Nonfiction Book Award, Two Wheels North is a fascinating account of a journey that today we can only dream about--one that finds two boys on the road not only to Seattle, but also to manhood.

Ode to cigarettes

Orwell’s obsession
with tobacco

Cigarette smoke so permeates George Orwell's stories it almost leaves stains on one’s fingers when reading his books.

So writes Josh Indar in Bumming Smokes in Paris and London. I was fascinated to read this last week in PopMatters' retrospective on the 60th anniversary of 1984. Anyone who's rolled with me knows that I'm a smoker ... an enthusiastic smoker! What started as the youthful urge to be cool has become a 2-pack a day habit. Having tried to quit cold-turkey several times, I certainly understand the power nicotine must've had over Orwell.

Skulking about smoke-free Eton College with a cigarette dangling provocatively from his lip gave Orwell that particular Bohemian air. Later, the ritual of rolling your own probably appealed to his machismo. Smoking also had its practical side. He writes in both Homage to Catalonia and Down and Out in Paris and London that appetite-suppressing nicotine helped him survive when food was scarce or too expensive.

I certainly can concur. My habit definitely took off when I was working in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war. While UN food convoys were often blocked by the warlords, Drina cigarettes always seemed to get through. And now, being woefully under-employed, I find myself subsisting on Winston Ultra Lights. There's nothing like war and poverty for reinforcing your existential view of life.

Indar points out that cigarettes were most often associated with the working class characters in Orwell's books. This should come as no surprise since much of his work championed the commoners. And perhaps by identifying with their daily struggles, smoking helped him to camouflage his middle class origins.

This is especially apparent in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's memoir of the Spanish Civil War. Tobacco is listed as one of the five basic necessities of soldiers in combat. The other four are firewood, food, candles and the enemy. Sharing them at the front also built trust and camaraderie. Describing street fighting in Barcelona, he gratefully acknowledges the small act of heroism performed by a fellow militiaman, who finds two packs of Lucky Strikes under terrible gunfire.

The strangling of Iran...

empowered women
in an historical perspective

To anyone who thinks that the local and widespread demonstrations against the recent Iranian presidential elections are starting to fail, I have one word: WOMEN! Certainly, much has been made of Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and a host of other web-based, social networking tools being used by the Iranian protesters. It reminds me of the students in Tienanmen Square who, 20 years ago, communicated by fax with the rest of the world and the young Bosnians who did the same thing in the early 90s using email and web-pages. But tools they only are. It's who wields them that really matters. As Anne Applebaum wrote yesterday in The Washington Post,

Not Obama, not Bush and not Twitter ... but years of work and effort lie behind the public display of defiance and, in particular, the number of women on the streets -- and their presence matters. Their presence could strike the deepest blow against the regime ... Its leadership is legitimate, as is its harsh repression of women, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of women, not just over the past weekend but over the past decade, has to weaken the Islamic Republic's claim to invincibility, in Iran and across the Middle East.

I can't agree more. To understand this, you should be reading W. Morgan Shuster's The Strangling of Persia. Published in 1912, it recounts his 8 month assignment as the Treasurer-General of the Persian Empire. He and a small group of American treasury experts had been invited by the new constitutional government in 1910 to strengthen the country's finances. It was hoped this would help resist the 1907 Anglo-Russian Entent that effectively divided Persia into two spheres of influence. Needless to say, neither Great Power was happy with Shuster's work. They supported a royalist insurgency against the popular constitutional government that successfully brought it down in 1911. Several months later, Shuster resigned and left Persia. After his return to the US, he wrote his damning indictment of Russian and British meddling in Persia affairs, stating:

[I]t was obvious that the people of Persia deserve much better than what they are getting, that they wanted us to succeed, but it was the British and the Russians who were determined not to let us succeed.

If you've ever wondered why Iranians are particularly paranoid about the Great Power influence over them, this book will give you great insights. What is especially tragic is that at the beginning of the 2oth Century Iranians strongly supported their constitutional democracy and fervently hoped the US would protect it against Russian and British encroachment. What is most surprising, though, is that Shuster's book includes a small section (pp. 191-199) on the significant role played by Iranian women during and after the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution. Except for its antique language (as well as attitudes) and the different personalities, it could easily describe the political role Iranian women are playing today.

The Persian women since 1907 had become at a bound the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world. That this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the fact.

You can read this section as well as the rest of The Strangling of Persian over at Google Books. I highly recommend that you do so!



For what is liberty
but the unhampered translation of will into act?

Cyril Connolly

Isaiah Berlin...

and the lost cosmonaut

The 65th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings in Normandy on 6 June greatly overshadowed the 100th birthday of Isaiah Berlin that same day. And I realize there haven't been any posts on Isaiah Berlin lately. It's not that I've stopped reading this spring. Much to the contrary: I'm a dipper who usually reads 3 or 4 books at a time. I try to balance the serious, long reads on philosophy or politics with the lighter stuff: historical novels or short story collections.

In the last few months I've stacked up my current reads in the living room and bedroom. Both stacks, typical of a fox, include historical espionage by Eric Ambler and Alan Furst, a series of fictional biographies on Winston Churchill, the Soviet experience of WWII, obscure historical figures, and bizarre travel adventures.

I just finished a book in that last category: Daniel Kalder's Lost Cosomonaut: Observations of an Anti-Tourist. I discovered it in a review at the Times Literary Supplement website. It is his first book in what I hope will be a prolific career. Kalder is a 20something Scot who has just returned from a five year stint working and travelling in the Russian Federation.

Kalder was not your typical tourist. He consciously rejected the I came, I partied, I got laid invasion route preferred by the Eurotrash. Instead, Kalder went to places that aren't listed in the Lonely Planet and Let's Go travel guides.

Finding his four destinations on current maps ain't easy. Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia lie along the lower end of the Volga River. Huddled in the southeastern corner of Russia, these semi-autonomous republics are largely ignored by Moscow and entirely forgotten the rest of the world. Together they are part of what Kalder calls Shadow Europe.

But adventure tourists beware! There is absolutely nothing to recommend these tiny republics. Whatever local authenticity there might have been faded long ago. The Russian Empire nearly wiped out the local pagan religions by imposing Orthodox Christianity. Later, the Soviet Union cruelly deported most of the native populations, replacing them with Russian settlers. Despite token Soviet efforts to promote quaint folk arts and crafts there was no room in the workers' paradise for authentic cultural diversity. Today, daily life is terribly nasty, thoroughly brutish, and desperately short.

Drawn to this Shadow Europe, Kalder is an anti-tourist. That makes his first book a uniquely fresh travelogue. During an all-night bender with fellow-travellers in Shymkent, the capital of South Kazakhstan Province, he declares the principles of Anti-Tourism.

As the world has become smaller so its wonders have diminished. There is nothing amazing about the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, or the Pyramids of Egypt. They are as banal and familiar as the face of a Cornflakes Packet.

Consequently the true unknown frontiers lie elsewhere.

The duty of the traveller therefore is to open up new zones of experience. In our over explored world these must of necessity be wastelands, black holes, and grim urban blackspots: all the places which, ordinarily, people choose to avoid.

The only true voyagers, therefore, are anti- tourists. Following this logic we declare that:

• The anti-tourist does not visit places that are in any way desirable.
• The anti-tourist eschews comfort.
• The anti-tourist embraces hunger and hallucinations and shit hotels.
• The anti-tourist seeks locked doors and demolished buildings.
• The anti-tourist scorns the bluster and bravado of the daredevil, who attempts to penetrate danger zones such as Afghanistan. The only thing that lies behind this is vanity and a desire to brag.
• The anti-tourist travels at the wrong time of year.
• The anti-tourist prefers dead things to living ones.
• The anti-tourist is humble and seeks invisibility.
• The anti-tourist is interested only in hidden histories, in delightful obscurities, in bad art.
• The anti-tourist believes beauty is in the street.
• The anti-tourist holds that whatever travel does, it rarely broadens the mind.
• The anti-tourist values disorientation over enlightenment.
• The anti-tourist loves truth, but he is also partial to lies. Especially his own.

What fascinates me about all this is Kalder's resemblance to Isaiah Berlin. Like Berlin, Kalder is a classic fox with a passion for seemingly contradictory, otherwise disconnected, things. Although he claims no interest in local history or current events, the book betrays a widely read, curious mind.

Kalder's voracious curiosity for the dark corners of humanity also parallels Berlin. The latter's defense of a live and let live liberalism was strongest when he invesitgated its obscure opponents. And to be frank, Berlin's descriptions of them were often more fascinating and ultimately more instructive than those of liberalism's defenders.

Perhaps it is their roles as consummate outiders; the Scottish European in southeastern Russia and the Latvian Jew in western Europe, that compels both Kalder and Berlin to explore of the shadowlands in the first place. Perhaps it also the source of their profound sympathies for lonely communities that struggle daily for survival largely unappreciated, if not unseen, by the wider world.

So why read The Lost Cosmonaut?

First, you'll discover the reason for its peculiar title. Second, you'll learn how not to be an asshole in other people's countries. Finally, it may convince you that going native in a desperate search for intimate connections is a contemptible delusion even for Kalder:

I didn't want to be a tourist. I wanted to be something more. But how can you ever be anything more than a tourist when you know you can leave? When you know, not that your stay is temporary, but that it need never not be temporary?

The nomadic alternative

wandering and wondering

Back in 2006, I posted a NYTimes op-ed piece by David Brooks eulogizing the passing of the old school, streetwise skeptics of the Chicago press corps. It, as well as comments from a couple of readers I wrote about in Second thoughts, reminded me of the author, Bruce Chatwin. Although he was sometimes careless with the facts, his writing reflected a connoisseur's fascination with the gritty details of people's lives around the world. I guess that's why I've been reading him recently after a ten year hiatus.

In 1989, I first read Chatwin's The Songlines. It was the year I started grad school at the Unieversity of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. It was also the year he died of what I later learned was AIDS. Not that I was ignorant of HIV/AIDS back in those early days of the epidemic. My cousin, a virologist living in Macon, GA, had just appeared in a photo for the National Geographic Magazine HIV/AIDS cover story ... or at least his hands did. They were in a photo of a rural AIDS hospice where my cousin was examining the residents.

Actually, the reason I was ignorant of Chatwin's illness is that he denied its cause until the last months of his life. Instead, he believed and convinced his family and closest friends that he had picked up a rare fungus in China. Even after it became apparent that this fungus was merely an opportunistic infection, Chatwin stoically refused to publicize his AIDS. His family and friends respected this silence.

Chatwin's death is a tragedy in both personal and literary terms. Salman Rushdie, a close friend who joined him on a road-trip through central Australia, has said that his books and essays, all of which dealt with travel as a way of life, have changed the way writers write and readers read travel books. Chatwin wouldn't have agreed though. He hated being pegged as a travel writer. He thought of himself as a writer who simply happened to travel ... a lot and everywhere.

Chatwin's great appeal for me lies in an apparent contradiction: he was a hedgehog with one big idea who pursued it like a fox. On the one hand, he believed that the nomads' travelling way of life is the natural state of humanity and having lost this for the most part, the world is now a more neurotic, violent place.

On the other hand, Chatwin rambled across six continents looking for this Nomadic Alternative. While many authors have written about exotic locales, from the comfortable security of their dens, Chatwin loved to visit them. Infamous for his non-stop, rapid chatter, he was yet a sensitive listener. He had intense discussions with a dizzying array of other travellers and writers as well as nomads, warriors, conquerors, cowboys, artists, shepherds, mystics, and mercenaries.

No matter how prickly or cautious the people he met, he wore down their defenses. No matter how confusing or murky the setting, he figured out what was really going on. Ultimately, Chatwin is an incredible storyteller; he combines the facts he observed with a brilliant imagination in a wholly novel and compelling way.

So I've returned to Bruce Chatwin as I write this blog. It seems to me that he offers a natural bridge between travel as a way of life and bikes as a means for travel. In purely Chatwinesque fashion, he asks questions... the right questions:

Why is man the most restless, dissatisfied of animals?

Why do wandering people conceive the world as perfect whereas sedentary ones always try to change it?

Why have the great teachers - Christ or the Buddha - recommended the Road as the way to salvation?

Do we agree with Pascal that all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room?

All I got to do now is answer them
by pointing my bike
in the right direction.
Yeah, yeah ...
it's a corny ending, I know %)

Pedaling Revolution

how cyclists
are changing
American cities

Over at the NYTimes, David Byrne reviews Jeff Mapes's new book, Pedaling Revolution. Byrne highlights two fascinating points. First, biking won't truly take off until more women join the Vélotariat. This is especially true with celebrity women such as actress Jennifer Aniston and model Agyness Deyn. Second, the challenge of getting women on bikes is the crazy, contradictory attitudes most Americans have about biking. On the one hand, bikes are viewed as bright, shiny toys. Angry cagers typically demostrate this when they yell at street bikers to get back on the sidewalks. On the other hand, bikes are aften associated with extreme sports. As Byrne writes,

For decades, Americans have too often seen cycling as a kind of macho extreme sport, which has actually done a lot to damage the cause of winning acceptance for biking as a legitimate form of transportation. If your association with bikes is guys in spandex narrowly missing you on the weekends or YouTube videos of kids flying over ramps on their clown-size bikes, you’re likely to think that bikes are for only the athletic and the risk-prone. Manufacturers in the United States have tended to make bikes that look like the two-wheeled equivalent of Hummers, with fat tires and stocky frames necessitating a hunched-over riding position that is downright unsafe for urban biking and commuting. But that’s been changing for at least a few years now. Whew.

Whew, indeed...

What velopunk isn't

a few thoughts in the
season of commodification

Over at AlterNet there's a great excerpt of Chris Carlsson's Nowtopia: How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant-Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today! It points to the rise of a new bikekultur with examples such as our own, local Rat Patrol. What makes this new sub-culture different from the wheelmen/women of the 19th and 20th Centuries as well as the Share the Road advocates of the 20th is it's emphasis on

... localism, a more human paced, more face-to-face interaction, hands- on technological self-sufficiency, reuse and recycling, and a healthy urban environment that is friendly to self-propulsion, pleasant smells and sights, and human conviviality.

The Rat Patrol, in particular, rejects the one-up-man-ship of 5k Bianchis, style-driven Lycra, and weekend warrior bike paths. As I read this and other insights I couldn't help thinking of my own sub-sub-culture of gentlemen & lady cyclists. While we don't share the Rat's love of homemade freakbikes, we do start with the same beaterbike medium in restoring the glories of lightweight touring. And in donning classic kit we certainly agree with with the Rat's rather exhaustive manifesto:

• Abnormal concern with perfect finish and perfect operation of the bicycle
• Keeps glossy bicycling magazines under the mattress
• Suggests you should buy new equipment instead of repairing old bicycle • Always rides in superhero tights
• When riding, is more concerned with speed and distance covered than scenery or places visited
• Unable to hold a conversation unrelated to bicycles or biking
• Paranoid delusion that he/she is being persecuted for his/her hobby
• Speech is sprinkled with component brand names
• Constant desire to witness bicycle's transforming power in his/her own life
• Believes that biking is a morally superior choice, therefore befitting a morally superior attitude
• Attempts to bring bicycle-related issues into every conversation
• Awkward duck walk caused by wearing cleated bike shoes into roadside businesses
• Easily impressed with expensive equipment and celebrity endorsements
• Wears helmet even when not on bike

The snowman cometh...

on winter cycling
1914

While I was on vacation last week in Ohio, Bikewinter got off to a wonderful start both there and here in The Windy City. Unfortunately, while my hosts have plenty of bikes, their rural location lacks easy access to the appropriate bike lanes. So all I could do was dream and scheme in anticipation of my return yesterday. Although I did find The History of Sports in Britain, 1880 - 1914 edited by Martin Polley. Polley chose articles from a wide range of journals including Blackwood's Magazine, Nineteenth Century, Fortnightly Review, and Contemporary Review. The result was five volumes that reveal the evolution of middle-class attitudes towards sports in general. He covered specific topics such as sports and education, commercial and financial aspects, sports and animals, the globalization of sports through empire-building, as well as this celebrating winter biking...