Book Recommendation

[Doug H.]

I recently read a fun book by Tom Eastham called Back on My Bike. It is the story of a 60 year old recent retiree who rediscovers cycling. It does touch on some ideas that will be familiar to Rivendell riders although i don't recall Rivendell being mentioned specifically as it is set in Great Britain. Check it out.

Doug

Athens, GA

[Patrick Moore]

I finally started reading Dervla Murphy's 1965 or so classic Full Tilt: Ireland to India With A Bicycle about her 1963 trip across Europe and Asia on a single speed. I have to say that this is truly the best bike travelogue I've read, and -- to place the book in a far more demanding category -- I have to say that it ranks among the best travel writing tout court. I've read much of Waugh, Theroux, Iyer, as well as Tim Moore etc etc, as well Toqueville etc, but Murphy is a real writer. I must buy more of her travelogues; they're $10 on Kindle.

Why is she so good? First, she's mostly interested in the travel and not on the bike. Now, there are some very good bike travelogues -- Tim Moore; and I do enjoy the technical bits in such works. But Murphy's Rosinante ("Roz") is almost an afterthought; look at the bike kit in her packing list! 1 spare tube and 4 links of chain! Murphy is interested in the movement, the scenery, and above all, the people and their cultures, and it is here she is so good: she is as observant and eloquent in her descriptions as Theroux but from the standpoint of an intelligent woman with a curious and -- the main point -- frank and open and sympathetic character; Theroux, for all his intelligence and eloquence has a nasty misanthropic quality that nags at one while reading -- and enjoying -- his writings. 

I suppose Murphy's background accounts for some of her openness to very foreign traditional cultures; perhaps paradoxically, the very traditional, and hugely alien to Western eyes, culture of rural, traditional Muslim Afghans in the early 1960s is less far from the near-peasant (outside of Dublin), old-fashioned Roman Catholic culture that dominated 1963 Ireland than to the much more secular and jaded globalist Westernism (for though it is global, it is entirely of the modern West) of 2022. 

And one is also struck very, very hard by the openness and friendliness of such hard-line Islamic traditionalists (and it is largely the men, too, in a grossly "patriarchal" society -- I dismiss that ideological term, but Pushtun -- as  Wahabi-ist S Arabian -- society is grossly patriarchal in the negative sense; but anyway) the friendliness, acceptance, helpfulness, and dignity of these patriarchal me toward a stray, solitary, White European female. I daresay that it was in part because Murphy carried in her own character the marks of a medieval religious peasant society that she was so well received; the other part doubtless is that open, engaging, respectful and friendly character that marks her. 

O poor Afghanistan, what have they done to thee! Google photos of Afghanistan in the 1960s; there's a portfolio going around taken by a visiting American teacher who spent time with his family in Kabul ("KAH-buhl) in the mid 1960s. I lived in India at the time and remember the general situation well: even then Afghanistan an ideological battlefield, large American presence, AID and so forth, to ideologically counteract the diabolical Soviets; even then the beginnings of the conflicts that would destroy the country and its society -- but the rural peasant Muslim tradition lives on; even amongst the debased and really modernist Taliban perversion of the religion, for fanatical narrowmindedness, proselytizing fury,*, and vicious cruelty is part of that pseudo-Islam that has generated the terrorism that really has its root in Western ideologies: Al Fatah and such Leninist-inspired radicals from the 1960s and '70s that morphed from Marxism into ideological fundamentalist (which means "superficial") faux-religious political activism.

* AK Coomaraswamy applied this wonderful epithet to the imperialist and racist Christian ideologue missionaries ravaging Asia and Africa in the 19th and first half of the 20th century; and I say this as a believing practicing Christian. Now, Coomaraswamy often wrote hyperbolically to make points for his antagonistic audence, the learned "elite" and "great-and-ideologically-good" opinion makers of his time in defense of religious tradition, but he was far, far too intelligent and culturally aware to deny that even fundamentalist Victorian Christian missionaries were often people of charity and selflessness who did at times some good for their charges, even if they did a lot of bad.

But back to Murphy: she is good because she is a. intelligent, b. open minded, c. very observant, d. eloquent; I mean that she has outstanding literary talent; e. intrepid and f. outgoing. Oh, so many bike travelogues are vitiated by the narrow minds and cultural narrowness of the authors! (Tim Moore is readable because besides being a very good writer, he is very funny; if he tried to be serious I daresay he'd be like the rest.)

https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan for example. These photos were taken by the American Podlich family, I think. 

https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-as-it-once-was-the-photographs-of-william-podlich/29222700.html

The Podlich girls were just a few years older than I.

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Patrick Moore

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

[Patrick Moore]

There's another bike travelogue book out there, last 10 or 15 years, written by a then-just-turned-60-year-old American retiree who decides to bike across the US. Quite good, but forget the name. 

On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 9:07 AM Doug H. <dhansf...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Patrick Moore]

One more post on Murphy and then I'll shut up.

Murphy is as perceptive and her observations as perceptive as those of Patrick Leigh Fermor, tho' she does not have his literary or cultural sophistication, thus his literary tools. But (IMO) she is good enough to warrant comparison with this model of modern travel writing, which is high praise for her indeed.

[rlti...@gmail.com]

I bought Full Tilt a while back and have yet to read it. I’ll need to fix that I think.

Robert Tilley

San Diego, CA

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 14, 2022, at 1:38 PM, Patrick Moore <bert...@gmail.com> wrote:



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[Nick Payne]

There's also a good documentary on her: "Who is Dervla Murphy". I rented it and watched it a while ago. Worth the money. The trailer is here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dervlamurphy.

Nick

[John G]

Thanks Patrick for the insightful commentary and link to those photos.  They are highly reminiscent of my parents photos from our time in Pakistan in the same era (circa 1964).

Attached is a photo of our good friends and co-workers, the Greggs, and how they got the family around Lahore.

I attempted to add a couple more photos, but Google (spit) tells me the message is too long.

John G

Union Bridge, MD

On Wednesday, September 14, 2022 at 4:38:01 PM UTC-4 Patrick Moore wrote:

[Susan Rosenblatt]

You might also enjoy 8 feet in the Andes about a trip she took with her young daughter and a donkey. So intrepid,even though not cycling. She died not long ago and the New York Times had a wonderful obituary. 

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[Patrick Moore]

John: Delightful photo, thanks for sharing it.

If you use the attach-photo feature (the little paperclip button) instead of pasting them into the message body I think you can get away with more KBs. Also, you can adjust the size; I use a Mac, but this involves opening them in Preview and clicking on Tools and then Adjust Size. This feature shows you the file size, too.

All that said in the hope that you will post more photos of the same time and place. It brings back fond memories, although we were on the other side of the border in New Delhi. (Remember the blackouts during the 1965-66 Indo Pak war and the downed Pakistani F 86 on display at a local maidan (not maiden). 

Is that little girl just plopped onto a flat seat? Poor Indian families would simply plop them on the handlebar when other family members occupied top tube and carrier -- recall families of 4 being slowly driven through busy roundabouts by small man standing to pedal, with toddler on bar, one or 2 on top tube, wife and baby on carrier. In flip flops of course.

Please do try to post more photos. Thanks.

BTW, I fully understand and wholeheartedly sympathize with the "spit" comment!

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