Lovely Bicycle blogs again!

[Joe Bernard]

I saw this on the iBob and thought you non-Bobbers (there's a few) would be interested. Hey, remember when I got in that big fight over there because I defended her not announcing the end of her cycling blog? That was great fun. Here's a new one which may or may not continue to be about bikes, it starts with knitting a jersey. Welcome back, Velouria! 🙂♥️


https://www.pancogcycle.com/blog/cycling-jersey-that-got-me-pregnant

[Patrick Moore]

There are hundreds if not thousands of cycling blogs of one sort or another "out there," but, at least for my tastes, few that one really looks forward to reading; the critical difference often (not always) being a certain literary quality; and this quality depends far less on education and learning than a certain wealth or "bigness," of imagination. The really interesting cycling blogs are written by those who have a sufficiently large view of life and the world outside of mere cycling. That is why, IMO, one of the great epic cycling travel books, Miles from Nowhere, was disappointing; the author simply hadn't the imaginative background -- hers was moderately upper middle class American bourgeois -- to write about her epic experiences in an interesting way. 

OTOH, Velouria somehow brings a wealth of interior, if not exterior, human experience to her cycling descriptions. Ditto Grant. He is interesting because he is (I assume, judging by his writings) an interesting person. 

At the cultural antipodes to Velouria is Dave Moulton, still blogging (Deo gratias!) well into his 80s. Moulton is working-class Brit of the poor (read his recent blog about the early 1950s flu epidemic!!) pre- and immediately post-WWII generation, without any literary pretensions at all; yet, again, IMO, he has a breadth of human outlook that make his (quite honestly, somewhat illiterate) blogs very interesting; and I take into account my own particular and very idiosyncratic interest in 1950s-1970s working class Brit cycling culture.

As a general principle, a certain breadth of imagination, that I cannot define, makes some bloggers interesting, while others, well qualified in so many ways, are not. Extending this to travel writing, of which I've read a great deal: Paul Theroux and Evelyn Waugh are or were nasty misanthropes --tho' perhaps Waugh per accidens* while Theroux -- sadly -- essentially, but their travel writings are interesting to read because they bring to their observations a context extending far beyond the details of the mere particular experiences they describe. Theroux comes across as a nasty SOB, but here too, his cultural or, let's just say, his mental amplitude makes even his misanthropic observations interesting, if not acceptable.

Back to Lovely Bicycle: I expect that Velouria and I share very little in basic presuppositions of the true and real and the good, but she seems to have a human amplitude that makes me, at least, exult that her blog is at least momentarily back for perusal.

 * (Someone chastised Waugh for claiming to be a Christian while being so nasty. He replied to the effect that, "Oh, if I weren't a Christian, I'd be far, far worse.")

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 1:22 PM Joe Bernard <joer...@gmail.com> wrote:

I saw this on the iBob and thought you non-Bobbers (there's a few) would be interested. Hey, remember when I got in that big fight over there because I defended her not announcing the end of her cycling blog? That was great fun. Here's a new one which may or may not continue to be about bikes, it starts with knitting a jersey. Welcome back, Velouria! 🙂♥️


https://www.pancogcycle.com/blog/cycling-jersey-that-got-me-pregnant

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Patrick Moore

Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum

[Joe Bernard]

Not big news on the Riv List apparently...

[Steve Cole]

Joe,
Thanks for pointing this out. It’s great news at least to this lister.

When I first encountered “Lovely Bicycle,” I was a little spellbound. Whatever Velouria wrote, it spoke to me. Her love of cycling, her childlike wonder was infectious. New blog entries never were frequent enough. The way she thought about cycling and bikes influenced me as much as or nearly as much as Grant’s writing.

When her entries stopped in early 2018, I didn’t believe it. This was especially true since Velouria had told of things she still planned to write about (e.g., a forthcoming experience with a RBW bike). Since she never told us the end had come, initially, I still checked daily for new blog entries. Then, I checked every few days, then weekly. I still retained a tab for the site. Last January - 2019, another entry appeared on aptitude if I recall correctly. I think it included some remarks on knitting, which seemingly had replaced cycling as Velouria’s passion. I waited for the next entry, which never came. Most recently, I still checked the site, but probably only every 3-4 months. It’s been a while as you can tell.

Cycling for me has many components; one is that it is a state of mind. I always felt from what I read on Lovely Bicycle, it was this way for Velouria as well. Even when she was not riding, she was thinking about riding, about past rides, future rides, bikes, etc. I learned a lot from what she wrote, not only about cycling. And it resonated. Not much more could I ask from anything I read.

I hope this new entry is a harbinger of more to come. Thanks for the heads up.

Steve Cole
Arlington, Virginia

[Tom M]

Hey, her blog got me to test ride a titanium bike. Seriously. Because she was so open and honest about her abilities as a cyclist, and because her impressions of whatever bike she was riding seemed so well thought out, I believed what she wrote about the Seven she had for a while. That convince me more than whatever else I'd read online. 

So, glad she's back to writing about bikes again. I do vaguely remember the online fight when she didn't disclose why she' stopped writing. Some people demand a lot of what they don't pay for.

Tom Milani

Alexandria, VA

[Dorothy C]

I first heard about Rivendell from Lovely Bicycle. I stumbled across her original blog when she wrote about her Raleigh. I'm originally from the UK and my first nice bike as a teenager was a dark blue Raleigh with white wall tires. At 12 years old, that bike was so tall for me that I had to use the push off with the right foot from a 2 o clock position technique and then get up on the saddle. I used to ride the 3/4 mile to high school on it.

[Dorothy C]

I am also a knitter - learnt when I was 7. I don't have much call for sweaters in SoCal where I live now, but I still knit hats.

[Gary L]

Hi Joe,

Thanks for sharing her new blog. I too have been checking periodically and have always been disappointed that she didn't resurface after she took a break. I'm so glad to see her back, even if tentatively.  It was just last week that I had deleted the Lovely Bicycle bookmark from my computer - and now I"m glad to have it back (even in its new form!