Writing a post to excuse oneself for not blogging for weeks, then excusing oneself for only blogging the bike-rides, and subsequently making an inventory of all the topics one would have liked to ‘blog’ but didn’t for lack of time, or whatever other reason.

So here I am: on the 23d of september, sitting in a deliciously hot sun on the roof of my apartment, catching up. And yes, that’s mainly catching up on the bike-rides, since nowadays this blog is the only place where I keep track of my rides. So that had to be done.

I would’ve like to blog the Night of the Unexpected, sometimes jokingly called the Night of the Usual Suspects, not so much because of the scheduled acts, but because you meet so many friends. This year’s Night was particularly good.

With a new set of MoHa (Morten Olsen and Anders Hana), suddenly doing a sort of fast and loud elektro-techno-free-rock. You can catch them tomorrow at DNK.

I should’ve blogged the performance of Goodiepal at DNK. He only talked. It was a concert. It was awesome. One of the best things I’ve ever seen.

I would like to write a bit on Zorn’s gamepieces, as I’m scheduled to do a small lecture on that in Groningen as part of a course on games and art. (Also because suddenly I see a connection between Zorn’s pre-game-pieces Theatre of Musical Optics and Goodiepal).

I would’ve given you my impressions of Andrew Delbanco’s Melville, His World and Work, a concise biography of Herman Melville and I guess a very good introduction to his works as well. (I find Melville mostly very difficult to read, well, not Typee, not Bartleby, but I’m still stuck in Moby Dick, Pierre and The Confidence Man.

I am now reading the new Gibson, Spook Country. Hmm, it’s not “a big disappointment”, but only because I wasn’t expecting it to be his masterwork. Honestly, I can’t ‘get into it’. I read on, because I want to finish it.

I’d rather get back to my Graphs, Maps, Trees, Abstract Models for Literary History of Franco Moretti. Sublime. Very good. Will write on that.

In the early eighties I was a ‘fan’ of the young English speaking pro-cyclists. With ‘fan’ I mean to say that I searched for their names in the results of Paris-Nice, the Criterium International and the Dauphine Libere. I’ve never seen them on the television, at least I do not remember seeing them. Their names: Paul Sherwen, Graham Jones, Robert Millar and Stephen Roche – a bit later also John Herety and Sean Yates and I could add Jonathan Boyer, but he’s American. (The poetry of names… I even remember the name of Alain de Roos, a South-African riding for Peugeot in, I think 1981).

I recently read [Brian, oops, no] Richard Moore’s biography of Robert Millar, entitled In Search of Robert Millar (as Millar disappeared, not liking publicity at all, cherishing his privacy), and while reading I realized that Millar is as much a cyclist of the late eighties and early nineties as he is of the early eighties. Yet for me he’s always associated with the years between 1981 and 1985, for me he stayed a Peugeot-rider. I’ve never been able to see him as a Panasonic-rider, a collegue of Eric Breukink, much less as a rider for TVM.

Reading his biography – a good one, by the way (the only blemish: that Moore calls Lucien van Impe a Dutchman…) – the same happened. My interest slackened once Millar’s career gets going after the Peugeot-era. He then quickly discovers he is not a leader, his career becomes a string of good performances in the Pyrenees in the Tour de France, followed by either a nice ‘classement’ or abandoning due to sickness. Of course, he stayed the same Robert Millar, a real climber, but well, maybe it just was the ugly TVM-shirt… (But the story about losing the Vuelta is a classic one).

Millar – and Moore really brings this out in a good way, without ever falling prey to easy gossip – is a true ‘character’. He chooses his own route, radically, always, without ever reckoning on the help (or anything) of others. He was very private. It is this aspect the makes the biography ‘gripping’. The book is not so much a record of Millar’s career, as it is the sketch of a character, a certain way to approach life – one that not many take.

Can you learn from it? Do you recognize yourself? Is it an example of how (not) to live one’s life? Does it show how one can live one’s life? Does it tell you what privacy is?

Why do you read biographies?

(And yeah, allright, I have to say something about it: after reading this biography the question of Robert Millar is now a woman – a question that again popped up in the last issue of the German magazine Tour, has become utterly uninteresting. I don’t care. Nobody should care about that).

Should I apologize for only logging my rides and nothing else? I am busy with a lot of other things too, finally regaining ‘the right spirit’ to write, now that home feels like home, and focussed on making the deadlines after missing two important ones in the past months. (Something I feel rather bad about).

Reading a lot too. (I read through all the Maximus Poems, still pondering what I really think about that ‘epic’, and knowing that I will come back to it, since I do not really know what to think of it…).

And following the Tour de France. The Tour that shows how disastrous the situation is, ‘thanks’ to the war between the UCI and the ASO a.o. I don’t feel compelled to give my opinion, since everything is said, something eloquently by the cycling journalists. There is nothing to add. It’s war, all involved parties are hypocrites, the stakes are too high, the cyclists are too divided amongst themselves (and that is not only a matter of ‘old cycling culture’ against ‘new cycling culture’ – if it were only that, why doesn’t the new hero of Belgian cycling Tom Boonen take a leading role, to organize the riders?). The UCI might be too weak, but the ASO plays a dirty role too.

(They also have a problem with the lacking of a French ‘star’, for a long time now. How to sell the Tour in France when the French do not play leading roles?)

Just imagine: next year we will have three professional leagues, three circuits of races: 1. that of the UCI, consisting of the non-ASO-races, a truly international league; 2. that of the ASO with most of the European classic races with a long history, a mostly West-European league; 3. a new wild hyper-commercial league, backed by money from Astana and Tinkoff, plus some new sponsors and commercial television station, with as riders Vinokourov, suspended riders, and those who cannot withstand the call of money; races in Central Asia, Russia, Eastern Europe and closed circuits in Western Europe and the USA.

The wild league is of course open to any team, but the ASO and the UCI will forbid riders who compete in that circuit entrance to ASO and UCI-races. The Giro and the Vuelta wil probably join the ASO, but well, maybe they won’t?

Then the war will be really on. What races will the NOS and Sporza bring to us?

As disgusted as I am with this situation, I still love cycling (and pro-cycling) as much as ever. But I do not believe in a pure sport. I never have. (Benjo Maso’s analysis in I think a NRC-interview of a few days ago was of course very apt: the fictitious believe in a pure sport). “Cheating”, bending the rules, will always be part of cycling – certainly when it’s professional sport. There are those who play it fair – and I am always a fan of those riders. There are those who are sly in terms of tactics and I admire them (the ‘intelligent’ riders). And there are those who keep pushing the boundaries, who play on the edge, the ones of whom you suspect that their ‘medical preparation’ is “a bit too experimental”. (Like Riis’s in the past). I sometimes admire them, but it is an admiration, or maybe fascination is a better word, that comes with a certain abhorrence too.

By the way: it is said that Lucien van Impe is the only Tour-winner of the past 50 years not to have been involved in any doping issue ever. And Hinault I wonder? That analysis states that Hinault was the leader of a strike protesting doping controls. So he was involved in a doping story. If I remember well, that protest was not so much a protest against doping controls as such, but against the way they were conducted at that time. I am not stating that I am sure Hinault never used doping in his life (how could I know such a thing?), but it characterises the current state of cycling that even speaking up for one’s social and political rights makes one suspect.

&c.

What I wanted to do, is write a little ‘plug’ for an excellent book on cycling: Roule Brittania by one of the best (if not the best) cycling journalists of the moment: William Fotheringham (also author of Put me back on my bike, a biography of Tom Simpson). I am reading it at the moment – getting up to date on British cycling, enjoying the always present undercurrent of the cultural difference between continental and English cycling, a difference that continues until today, that colours the stories of Brian Robinson, Alan Ramsbottom, Tom Simpson, Barry Hoban and all those that follow. (I’m halfway, and will still get to read about Paul Sherwen, Graham Jones, Robert Millar, Sean Yates, Chris Boardman and David Millar).

(Of course I would have liked to read about Phil Edwards too – right hand of Francesco Moser in the seventies, in teams like Sanson – but this is a book on English riders in the Tour, so no Edwards here.)

Finished reading Albert B. Lord’s The Singer of Tales: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LORSIY.html. There was nothing new for me in this book – I’d got it all studying Literary Theory and having Frans de Valk as a teacher – but it was a joy to read the full 220 pages. And I’d say it’s compulsory reading for anybody studying performance/poetry and/or rap and poetry.

Related: The Milman Parry Collection, http://www.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/index.html.

A not very precise entry for Lord at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lord.

“According to Fielding the whole world of letters was becoming a ‘democracy, or rather a downright anarchy’; and there was no one to enforce the old laws, since, as he wrote in the Covent Garden Journal (1752, no. 23,1), even the ‘offices of criticism’ had been taken over by ‘a large body of irregulars’ who had been admitted ‘into the realm of criticism without knowing one word of the ancient laws’.”

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957) p. 58.

“…this unsettled way of reading … which naturally seduces us into as undetermined a manner of thinking. … That assemblage of words which is called a style becomes utterly annihilated. … the common defence of these people is , that they have no design in reading but for pleasure, which I think should rather arise from reflection and remembrance of what one had read, than from the transient satisfaction of what one does, and we should be pleased proportionately as we are profited.”

Richard Steele, in the Guardian, 1713, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957). p. 48.

“‘The present age may be styled with great propriety, the Age of Authors; for perhaps the never was a time in which men of all degrees of ability, of every kind of education, of every profession and employment were posting with ardour so general to the press.’

‘The province of writing was formerly left to those who, by study or appearance of study, were supposed to have gained knowledge unattainable by the busy part of mankind.’

Dr. Johnson in the Adventurer, 1753, quoted in Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, The Hogarth Press, London, 1987 (1957), p. 58

And, well, what do you do with dome time on your hands in a city like Leeuwarden, your students apparently not needing your help right now and the weather not so nice to sit in a park and read? You walk into this so-so-second hand bookstore. And there it is, as if it’s waiting for you, as if its specially put here for you: Merci Freddy, Merci Lucien, by the Flemish journaliste Jan Cornand and Andre Blancke, an account of the cycling season 1976. This is the first book I read about cycling and I partly ‘blame’ this book for my love of cycling. It has certainly played a role in my ongoing interest in the cycling of the seventies. They had it in the public library of Almelo and I must’ve read it three times from cover to cover. I’ve never seen it in any second hand bookstore. I buy it (5 euro’s). And while eating my dinner in the Irish pub, I read the account of the Giro of 1976, the one Johan De Muynck should’ve won, the one that the Brooklyn-squad dominated, and I enjoy every single word of it.

Interestingly: I find out that in 1976 the Giro-director had tried to come up with some ‘inventions’ to make the race more interesting, namely: putting two new cols (well, a col and a climb) on the programme that both were not paved yet. There’s nothing new under the sun. The Valjolet ( a climb somewhere around the Sella) and the Manghen. (The Manghen comes easily in the top 10 of my favorite cols: when I ‘did it’ a narrow paved road of very black asphalt and no soul to see.)

And into Schmidt again as well, as I received a little booklet as a present: Arno Schmidt in Bargfeld, from the series “Menschen und Orte” (“People and Places): http://www.atelierfischer-berlin.de/menschenorte/menschenorte_re.html. A nice little book, that brings the Schmidt-fan nothing new, nothing but an opportunity to read again an account of his life, and his work (“Arbeit, Arbeit, Arbeit”). The photographs also are well-known, but because I do not own any books on Schmidt except for the Rowolth-biography, they are very welcome. I’m always fascinated by photographs of writers desks…. I enjoyed it so much (the nearness of Schmidt’s world) that this morning I quickly picked a Schmidt-book from my shelves to read on the train to work. I re-read the ‘short story’ Schwanze and am beginning to also see the humour of the later work of ‘der Arno’ leading up to Zettel’s Traum. I left the newspapers unread today.

Page 120 already! Two days of reading, well, just a few hours, and I’m on page 120 of the Maximus Poems! Of course the whole thing is more than 600 pages long, but still… This is possible thanks to the style of these poems. This is not poetry to re-read. This is not poetry of precise, quotable lines, there are hardly stanzas that one would like to go over again and again, to savour all the music and meaning. (Those that stand up to this test are those one will find in the anthologies). Approach it with an expectation of finding ‘finished poems’, and one will find Olson a rather messy and careless word-smith. Olson lets the sound determine the syntax and the flow of words; this is poetry to read, line after line, ‘listening’: imagine a big man speaking aloud to you (Olson was a big man). He (Maximus, not Olson) talks on and on, makes little mistakes, comes back to the same points, repeats. Speaks sometimes in prose and at other times in verse. And slowly, while reading, the image of Gloucester takes shape, the early history and economy of it, the ‘locality’, the muthos – Olson trying to be a Herodotos to Gloucester, not a Thucydides.

Read the Maximus Poems that way, and you’ll find it fascinating. (Well, I do). And the image of Gloucester becomes becomes more and more clearer and multifaceted the further the poem progresses, the more Maximus ‘talks’.

(Of course, I write this after having read ‘only’ 120 pages…)

(Now that I finally upload this account of my reading experience – written down on a train, travelling to Groningen – I’ve progressed unto page 180).