"...And What Is Good, Phaedrus?"

"Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" was first published forty years ago. That, among numerous other things, makes me feel old.

In which the blogger engages in some literary criticism of the 'chanson de geste'

Dear France,

Your boy Roland is an asshole.

Regards,

The Blogger.

Is there a Librarian in the house?

So I'm looking at the bookshelf, and I notice that "Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap" is on the shelf with the brewing books. Because Margaret Mead, I guess.

Details and background on "Song of the Sausage Creature"

A long time ago, in one of my very first posts, I quoted a passage from Hunter S. Thompson's essay, "The Song of the Sausage Creature. I noticed that the link I posted to the full text is broken, and it's getting harder to find a good source to link to, so I figured I'd cheat and post the full text below for posterity's sake.

But in looking, I also came across a great Cycle World article from December 2012, written by the poor woman whose job it was to try and get a publishable piece of writing from Thompson to CW's editors while he possessed their brand new, very expensive, very exotic motorcycle. Here's the article about the essay.

And here's the original "Song of the Sausage Creature" from Cycle World, March 1995:

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."

"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it... For that we need Fine Machinery.

Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find... I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....

And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."

...Sweet jeebus. That's how you write a product review.

"...He has given us a secular version of a sacred text."

Nice write-up on some of the back story and present-day significance of Robert Pirsig and ZATAOMM .

Summer Reading List

To help understand how we got here. In no particular order:

"Nixonland," Rick Perlstein. The original sin of contemporary American politics.
"The Looming Tower," Lawrence Wright. Al Qaeda without the hyperventilation.
"The Big Con," Jonathan Chait. Explaining modern snake oil economics. (Surprise: Dick Cheney was there at the creation)
"Legacy of Ashes," Tim Weiner. Why our relations with the world at large are so utterly dysfunctional.
"The Shock Doctrine," Naomi Klein. Chicago-school economics forced upon the world at gunpoint under the guise of "freedom."

"Nixonland" is particularly interesting for me because I grew up in a household that recognized Richard Milhous Nixon for the devil he was; the Watergate hearings were a seminal event in shaping my political consciousness. I've had to put "Shock Doctrine" aside several times since starting it over a year ago because what it describes is so...horrible.

Taken together, these books present a tightly woven narrative of how far modern American politics has strayed from our ideals. All these books interrelate to a significant degree. The question is if there is any way left for us to fix what has happened during the post-World War Two nightmare of American Exceptionalism.

The Great Beveragepalooza of 2009

My great expectations for a day-long roofing-fest were cruelly dashed by the carcass of Tropical Storm Ida, who waited until mid-November—MID-NOVEMBER—to come die on us. It started raining Tuesday night and rained and rained and rained straight on through into Thursday morning. So, no roofing for us!

But a cold grey rainy day laid the groundwork for The Great Beveragepalooza of 2009. It was a day-long campaign during which we managed to bottle fifteen gallons of hard cider and create a 2009 vintage apple wine. The process by which we made the apple wine was as convoluted as anything we’ve done—so convoluted it makes my head hurt to even think about it—so let me see if I can even remember the whole thing:

1. We gathered the dregs from four carboys worth of hard cider and set them aside.
2. Set aside one gallon of scrumpy from the six-gallon carboy.
3. Warmed up about 4-1/2 quarts of raw sweet cider (from the fridge) to room temperature, stirring vigorously with a whisk to aereate it thoroughly.
4. Warmed another quart of raw sweet cider enough to dissolve about 2 pounds of local honey in it, along with about ½ teaspoon of yeast nutrient.
5. Poured the dregs in the 2-1/2 gallon carboy; added both batches of sweet cider; topped it off with most of the gallon of scrumpy.

The initial gravity was in the neighborhood of 1.095, and with so many warm fat happy yeasties feasting on such a sugar-rich solution, the carbon dioxide output was almost immediate and phenomenal—one long stream of bubbles out the airlock even though the liquid volume is half that of a regular carboy. It’s about the ugliest stuff you’ve ever seen at this point, but in about a week it should calm a bit and get prettier, and once it’s racked, it can settle down for a nice long slow maturation process. I’m looking forward to it, anticipating a final ABV of about 10% with a dry finish. The question remains: Still or sparkling? Both?

The other benefit of The Great Beveragepalooza of 2009 is we now have four carboys freed up! Even anticipating the cider pressing to come when the gang is here for Thanksgiving, that still leaves us room to finally brew beer again! Woo-Hoo! Many, many good brewing ideas have been held in abeyance whilst the cider did its thing, and now it’s finally time to cry havoc! and let slip the yeasts of beer…

Awesome.

The Little Book of Shattered Expectations

I think anyone aspiring to creative writing would do well to get themselves on the mailing list of the Vermont Country Store. Their catalog starts showing up in our mailbox around the same time as the stinkbugs, and continues appearing as frequently and predictably. The VCS catalog is a staple—nay, a ritual—of bathroom reading from early fall to mid-winter, about the point when it slips its staples and finally falls apart.

It is a paragon of tautly-crafted manipulative prose, each product description a compact haiku-length dissertation cleverly crafted to push buttons you didn't know you had.

Each item in the catalog is worthy of a massive piling-on of scientifically selected adjectives and adverbs, each one specifically designed to trigger the release of repressed memories of a common idyllic childhood we never shared. The house was bigger, the windows frostier, the rooms cheerier, the beds both higher and cozier, the breakfasts heartier, the hot chocolate richer, the sledding swifter, our parents wiser, kinder, happier and more beautiful, the Christmas Tree taller, the tinsel brighter, the goose crispier and the presents more wonderful than we could ever have hoped.

I will confess we receive this epistle regularly because we purchased items from this land of make-believe in the past. And the thing is, once the goods arrive on this side of the catalog—reality chasm, they're just...stuff. Stuff like you could buy pretty much anywhere.

Sure, a lot of it is hard to find—but most of the time that's because people stopped buying it years ago and people stopped making it years ago because, hey, in truth back then it was crap, and by golly, it's still crap now.

Nostalgia does not by and of itself validate things; in most cases it's just stuff, like it was back then when we didn't buy it the first go-round. The items are, for the most part, things you have probably walked past in your regular rounds of shopping time and again, with good reason. (Creamed Chipped Beef, anyone?) Yet from their testimonial copy, each item means something special to someone out there, enough for them to resurrect it or recommission it in some cases and to make an effort to stock it at least for a little while. As they say, there's no accounting for taste.

I don't think I have ever gotten something from the VCS that didn't come packaged with its own certain tiny measure of disappointment. It may be that the VCS catalog's greatest value lies in its ability to gently teach children how to gracefully accept disappointment, how to read between the lines of artfully crafted marketing prose, and to understand in a simple way that things aren't always what they seem.

But I gotta say, the catalog itself never disappoints. I love the writing—the unrelenting Rockwellian optimism, the naive cheer, the three or four coats of bright shiny adjectives, the perky and artfully dated design sense, the creation of a whole world within the slick covers. The arrival of the first catalog marks the beginning of the imaginary season they taught us about back in second grade.

Get on their mailing list, if you aren't already. Read the catalog. Throw 'em a bone from time to time, just to prop that imaginary world up a little while longer. There's no harm in playing along.

Addendum: If you're ever in Vermont, you owe it to yourself to check out the brick-and-mortar VCS, which is actually made of wood & stuff. It's the real-life version of the catalog, and as I recall, there are at least two or three of them salted throughout the state. Visited the one in Weston on the grand Vermont tour of 2001, and it was worth the side trip.

A Lovecraftian Lexicon:

And just in time for the Holidays!

• Aeons
• Batrachean
• Biliferous
• Cacodaemoniacal
• Cyclopean
• Daemon
• Demonaic
• Effluence
• Eldritch
• Foetid
• Foetor
• Gelatinous
• Gibbous
• Gloaming
• Ichor
• Lambent
• Lucubration
• Mausolean
• Miasmal
• Necrophagous
• Noisome
• Obdurate
• Outre
• Piteous
• Rugose
• Sepulcral
• Terrene
• Ululate
• Vaporous
  

Use these three times in conversation, and they’re yours forever. No one—except the Great Old Ones, sleeping beneath the stars for the aeons—will have a clue what you’re talking about, but that’s not your problem, is it?

Oh My Freaking Dog!

The November 2009 issue of Harper's has an eleven-page article entitled "About Motorcycles," by Frederick Seidel.

The article (sadly, behind a pay-firewall for the time being) does not appear to be the least bit snarky or endulging in cheap stereotypes, but is a personal history of sorts, a memoir. Well, I haven't finished reading it yet. But I'll say, it's a bit refreshing to see the topic appear in such an esteemed and literate publication.

Addendum: The piece is a little reminiscent of HST's "Song of the Sausage Creature" minus the poetry, with an extended exposition on various Ducatis. I'd say, all in all, it's a nice addition to the literature.

...In which the blogger engages in some lit-crit

Sadly, it’s taken me almost nine months from the death of polymath author Michael Crichton to finally figure out the best way to read his many books. This knowledge will not be wasted, because I understand the last of his unpublished works will not be released until sometime late next year, so there will still be several opportunities to test this method.

Now, I have been a fan of Crichton's since "The Andromeda Strain" circa 1970 or so. Like countless air travelers, I bought "Jurassic Park" to help pass the time on a cross-country flight—then stayed up until 2:30 the night before reading it cover-to-cover, mostly in the bathroom so as not to disturb anyone. We even own a Spanish translation of Jurassic Park.

Crichton owns a few prime inches on my paperback bookshelf, even one or two hardcover volumes to boot, and a couple video adaptations of his various titles sit on the video shelf; and who could count the many lost hours spent watching "E.R."

But come on.

See if this method works for you:

1. Open any random M.C. book to the approximate mid-point, (excluding any faux end matter).

2. Go two full chapters further and begin reading.

3. Ta-Daaa!

This should be approximately the point where the McGuffin begins to come apart:

• The natural world reasserts itself in the face of human arrogance
• The hubristic industrialist finally is shown the folly of his ways
• The plucky-world-weary-academic-with-integrity survives, tossing a parting "I-told-you-so" over his shoulder before departing the scene of ruination with the winsome, tautly-muscled-plain-until-she-took-off-her-glasses-and-let-her-hair-down-grad student-who-dazzled-all-her-undergrad-instructors-with-her-insightful brilliance to try and recover the pieces of their upended lives in quiet anonymity (until the need for a sequel arises).
  

This method spares you from having to wade through all the pointless character introductions, including:

1. The long-suffering staffer(s) of above-mentioned industrialist.
2. The possibly duplicitous personal assistant, with whom the industrialist (always a he) may have had an intimate relationship sometime in the past
3. Several generic scientists/technicians who only serve to introduce factoids necessary to support the McGuffin. Many of them will die anyway in the shit storm that follows, but their amorality for accepting this line of work makes it okay...see "Storm Troopers, Imperial."
4. The mysterious consortium of impatient investors—usually foreign—who have already sunk millions/billions/trillions of dollars/yen/euro into the project and are anxious to see some results. They mostly serve for the lawsuits that flesh out the epilogue.
5. The somewhat sleazy competitors nipping at their heels, generally heading down the wrong track to discovering the true nature of the McGuffin.
6. The morally questionable facilitator, that non-traditional specialist who has the requisite esoteric knowledge necessary for the McGuffin to proceed. His fate (always a he) will preceed and foreshadow that of the industrialist. Note: His employment by the industrialist in pursuit of the McGuffin is distasteful, but ultimately unavoidable—a necessary evil.
7. The Cassandra, to whom if they had only listened…the rest of the book would have been obviated.
8. The short-lived generic staffer of the mysterious corporation. In the parlance, this person would be called a ‘red-shirt,’ for the anonymous character on "Star Trek" who beams down to the planet only to die before the first commercial break. The death of the generic staffer results from an unintended consequence of the McGuffin, and serves to tantalize us with its appalling, previously unthought-of gruesomeness, and uniqueness in the annals of literature. Death often occurs at the local hospital/clinic/vet, which—because the mysterious corporation must, of necessity, be located in a remote location—is generally primitive/inaccessible/understaffed. However, this allows for the introduction of—
9. The plucky, insightful, resourceful local, who came here to get away from their previous life as an Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter/Nobel-prize winning research scientist/Head of the Mayo Clinic/Adviser to the President. He/She will slowly begin putting the pieces together, only to run afoul of (6) above.

Skipping all this unnecessary verbiage allows you to get straight to the good stuff—the literary equivalent of pushing your Brussels spouts aside and diving straight into Crichton’s gooey six-layer chocolate cake of worlds run amok, of nemesis smiting hubris, of an unforgiving and vengeful mother nature giving man a big old smackdown into his rightful place for his deluded Promethean ambitions.

Crichton's works, beneath their slick glosses of technological familiarity, are ultimately nothing more than formulaic technophobic morality plays, made digestible by virtue of Crichton's ability to stay just far enough out in front of the crowd to show us something we haven't seen before. The hero embodies virtue; the villain, vice. Everyone else simply enables the kabuki-like duet of good-and-evil.