Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books
Posted by Blogmaster in Rain Jackets, tags: Books, Motorcycles, Reflections, Riding, Rilke
From Publishers Weekly
English professor Bishop trades “tweed for leather” and hurtles away from the University of Alberta (Canada) on his Ducati, which he rides south through the Western U.S. all the way to the University of Texas at Austin. His professional objective was research on Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room at the UT archives of British modernist writers, but his pledge along the way was “To seek out the smallest roads possible, to avoid the direct route, to eat in mom-and-pop diners.” For Bishop, riding “is an inward experience. Like reading,” a parallel that loosely links the elements of this discursive but engaging account—part travelogue, part ode to his bike and part literary criticism. He temporarily abandons his Woolf scholarship for a project on Joyce’s Ulysses, a venture that sidetracks him to New York City and Europe before he heads back to Austin to pick up his Ducati. The ride home ends in disaster when he wipes out at 105 mph, breaks his back in two places, but survives to walk again—and write this easygoing, romantic memoir infused with joie de vivre. (Sept.)
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From Booklist
Written while the author was recovering from a spectacular motorcycle crash, this unusual memoir chronicles Bishop’s road trip from Edmonton, Alberta, to Austin, Texas. While this trek offered a chance for Bishop to get his prized Ducati motorcycle out on the open road–to really see what she could do–it was also a business trip: when not astride the Ducati, Bishop is a university professor and Virginia Woolf scholar, and he was going to Austin to view a collection of Woolf manuscripts. This is a story of a man seduced by twin passions, travel and scholarship, and it tracks twin adventures, into the literary past and the uncharted present. It’s a joyful book, a celebration of intellectual pursuit and carefree exploration. If you can name another book about motorcycling that tells you about the tortured life of Virginia Woolf, or another book about the Bloomsbury Group that describes the rush you get from pulling a slow U-turn on a small-town Main Street in full biker regalia, then you probably don’t need this one. For the rest of us, Riding with Rilke is a one-of-a-kind treat. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Though the publisher’s blurb makes the inevitable comparison to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this book has none of the dour and depressing self introspection of Pirsig’s work. Author Ted Bishop is an enthusiastic, if somewhat inexperienced, rider. I say inexperienced as no one in their right mind would ride a Ducati Monster from Edmonton, Canada to Austin, Texas and back. However, this is what makes him a real motorcyclist. He gets the whole riding experience and compares it with the wonders of wandering through various library archives. While this might sound a bit boring, it is not. His description of holding Virginia Woolf’s suicide note in his hand is
stirring. His account of a tour of the Ducati factory is equally moving. The rider will learn about the wonders of rare books and the rare, and sometimes eccentric creatures that care for them. The reader will experience motorcycling through an enthusiast’s eyes and other senses. This book belongs on all riders’ bookshelves, right next to The Perfect Vehicle and Rebuilding the Indian.
Disclaimer: My motorcycle, and myself, are mentioned in this book. I’m not sure whether I should be upset that my bike gets more text than me. Typical motorcyclist!
Although there were portions of this book that were good, many of them seemed uninteresting to me. I had hoped it would be a story that provided interesting details of both a bike journey and book collecting. In the end I feel like a got less than I hoped for either. He seems to gloss over many of his actual riding journey but spends a lot of time on details that added nothing to the story for me. Perhaps I am spoiled by Peter Egan.
As a reader and rider, I enjoyed this book as a motorcycle travelogue with all its arcane bits of literary data strewn throughout.
If I have a small complaint it is that Bishop spends too much time in Austin and not exploring more of the places he is terrific at writing about. When we were traveling with him, he made some of those stops come alive and gave the book some fun and substance. When he halted (as he had to in order to do the archive research), so did the cycle action.
However, with that being said, some of the book’s best and most poignant passages are his ruminations on reading and riding – his description on p. 112 about the “readiness of books” has been accurate in my reading life. And the couple of pages (p. 124-6) about silence and listening were memorable.
So is the line: “I wrote on the bike and I rode in the reading room. I’m sure it’s the same in offices everywhere.” He’s right, of course, as I work while I ride and ride while I work in the form of a quick daydream. Nice to know others have the same feelings.