I figured that Paul Theroux title from yesterday needed a little explaining...so I went to Taps for lunch again and did just that.
So I should probably explain that title from yesterday. I started reading Riding the Iron Rooster wednesday night. Evidently Theroux, back in 1986, decided to journey from England to China via rail. Why he did this remains somewhat of a mystery to me. Every railroad book of his that I have read thus far make rail travel sound uninviting, an exercise in patience, tolerance, and iron will. His descriptions make it sound as though he's doing this as a sort of warning, so that his readers don't make the same mistake as him by taking a trip. Theroux seems to have no wonder at the human condition, no fascination with human behaviour. Doubt, annoyance, and frustration are his subjects de riguer, and his frequency at revisiting these same themes grows tiring. He travels and writes, but seems to enjoy neither. He complains of his American companions on the Trans-Siberian, draws out their flaws, and seemingly has no interest in their positives, their personalities. He admittedly is cold, offish, "the last to arrive and the first to leave" the dining car. His limited interaction seems to be only so as to paint depressing characitures of what he expects on the train: the outspoken ex-military gentlemen. the easily shocked evangelical middle-Americans, the quirky oddballs, the damaged young woman travelling alone - all the usual travelling stereotypes make the cut, and unflattering without fail. Theroux approaches these travellers with a haughty air - he is so experienced in this sort of travel, what could he possibly wind new or interesting from them? They are not fellow travellers but rather an annoyance, something to be tolerated and hopefully avoided, never embraced.
Theroux i think is best read in a train station in Bangkok waiting for an overnight train en route to somewhere else. Sitting on the upper level, trying to make sense of the ever changing timetable, with the not yet familiar peanut-spice and sewage scent of the city drifting through in the muggy heat, jet lagged and hungry, sipping a Chang to kill the time. He works well for commiseration during the inevitable days when travel is trying and frustrating, when cultural sensitivity has lost its lustre, and you need to just duck into a corner for a while and read someone who understands your pain. In that, he works very well. Otherwise, unfortunately, Theroux sees travel disappointingly different.
There is one other thing with Theroux that sticks in my craw: he wrote a fairly demeaning piece of criticism on Hemingway's Islands in the Stream. I deeply disagree with much of his criticism in that, and I'm going to re-read it again some time soon so I can weigh in on it as well.
Otherwise, this whole lunch and a beer at Taps and writing while I'm there thing is working out pretty good for me. Being there gets me away from the office so I can get some quality focused time in on my writing, and just being away from my desk for a little while is becoming a necessity for me.
Riding tomorrow, then down to San Diego on Sunday...should be a fun weekend.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Paul Theroux is a pessimist...
Wrote this over at Taps:
Makes for a great warm up to the blog writing back in the office later: a pint of California Gold, a BLATT sandwich, and writing at the bar. Great escape from the slow morning of the office. Those break-room type lunches, where we all sit around and discuss something other than what's been playing on my mind for a few hours before heading back to our desks just seem so trivial. A whole lot of discussion about nothing. Somtimes I feel like I don't fit in with anyone outside of the university type academics. As though those type of academics don't exist outside of a university setting, but instead are some sort of wierd genotype that exists only within a predetermined radius of academic environs. Delving into philosophic discussion aside from that radius is futile - no one is interested. Their views are ossified, rigid, reinforced by only what they choose to hear and never challenged. Entrenched in a narrow cleft, berift of the ability to meander and braid, to jump channels. Interesting analogy - witness the Mississippi, the Colorado; compare them to that prevalent body of thinking in this culture. I invite criticism of that. We are a nation of canyons, not deltas. Become so deeply entrenched that the surface can no longer be sighted from the deepened banks, and the ability to even slightly change course is lost, save for cataclysm. Even then, while oxbows and goosenecks can be plown through, destroyed, and lost, the only drastic change comes from the abandonment of a channel entirely. Jumping the bank into a new, quickly down-cutting material. Easily erodable, malleable, friable, pliant. Beds shifting under the newfound load, lost and reformed, redeposited inverted downstream, barely recognizable. Not lost in entirety, but irrevocably altered via upheval and cataclysm, not choice.
...so yeah, that was my lunchtime ramblings over a beer and a sandwich. I like the analogy in there though, the nation of canyons vs. deltas. I'm sure I can put that to use as an alliteration somewhere in the future.
Makes for a great warm up to the blog writing back in the office later: a pint of California Gold, a BLATT sandwich, and writing at the bar. Great escape from the slow morning of the office. Those break-room type lunches, where we all sit around and discuss something other than what's been playing on my mind for a few hours before heading back to our desks just seem so trivial. A whole lot of discussion about nothing. Somtimes I feel like I don't fit in with anyone outside of the university type academics. As though those type of academics don't exist outside of a university setting, but instead are some sort of wierd genotype that exists only within a predetermined radius of academic environs. Delving into philosophic discussion aside from that radius is futile - no one is interested. Their views are ossified, rigid, reinforced by only what they choose to hear and never challenged. Entrenched in a narrow cleft, berift of the ability to meander and braid, to jump channels. Interesting analogy - witness the Mississippi, the Colorado; compare them to that prevalent body of thinking in this culture. I invite criticism of that. We are a nation of canyons, not deltas. Become so deeply entrenched that the surface can no longer be sighted from the deepened banks, and the ability to even slightly change course is lost, save for cataclysm. Even then, while oxbows and goosenecks can be plown through, destroyed, and lost, the only drastic change comes from the abandonment of a channel entirely. Jumping the bank into a new, quickly down-cutting material. Easily erodable, malleable, friable, pliant. Beds shifting under the newfound load, lost and reformed, redeposited inverted downstream, barely recognizable. Not lost in entirety, but irrevocably altered via upheval and cataclysm, not choice.
...so yeah, that was my lunchtime ramblings over a beer and a sandwich. I like the analogy in there though, the nation of canyons vs. deltas. I'm sure I can put that to use as an alliteration somewhere in the future.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
the following tuesday...
So I'm having a difficult time getting into the habit of this. The writing itself isn't the hard part...I think it's that I've gotten so used to writing physically that to type out my stream of consciousness seems somewhat disingenuous, as though there's something lost between the weight of the journal and paper versus the soft click of the keyboard. Plus I can sit on my porch and journal, while here i'm surrounded by steel grey carpeted cube walls, which do little to lend themselves towards reflection. I've still got the same music going though that I would have coming through the open windows at home. The Miles Davis Quintet, Winter In Europe 1967. Bag's Groove is up next. Bag's Groove is one of those albums that, from the first few notes, puts me somewhere far from wherever I might physically be and gets my mind out of it. It's the sort of music that i expect to hear coming out a window while i walk up the narrow staricases from the Embarcadero to Coit tower. Up through the little alleyway gardens and shadowed benches, little bamboo watercatchers and mossy tiles hidden in little corners that I never even knew existed. It's not the music for the top, looking out at the bay or the bridges, standing on top of the city. Nor is it the music for back down on Market or at the ferry building, too hectic and distracting and busy. Rather , it's the music for those little hidden spots, the quiet places you never knew existed and yet that some anonymous person in one of those windows with a cat in it tends to, reflects upon, and somehow has put a quiet energy into without ever knowing you'd share in it.
I switched albums once i started writing that. It's still as good as I ever thought it was. It's not Kind of Blue cool, not Birth of the Cool bop. Somewhere in between, eminently enjoyable.
No riding the bike last night - got shut down by the supposed wind we're having. Or not. I drove all the way to Blackstar Canyon to get a good climb in on the singlespeed after work. Parked about a mile from the gate like usual, since the likelihood of having your car broken into out there seems to be inversely proportional to its proximity to the gate. Got changed and all ready to ride, and was just heading out, when i ran into another rider who work at one of the local bike shops (and that I worked with at REI years ago). Seems the Firewatch people were turning riders around at the gate due to fire danger. The Forest Service ha issued a red flag warning, which doesn't technically shut down the forest, but they were turning people around all the same. After the fires we had last year I can see being concerned, but there's this overblown panic that goes around now when the slightest wind blows. Chino Hills was shut down due to fire danger, and the wind was barely even blowing out here. It seems that these fire-watchers are going off something other than common sense - if there was a wind warning earlier, but it's not blowing anymore, the fire danger has passed. To add insult to injury, they were still letting big construction trucks in for construction up the road. In their logic, bikes that have no possible way to start a fire can't go up, but large trucks heading to a construction site are ok. Sigh.
I switched albums once i started writing that. It's still as good as I ever thought it was. It's not Kind of Blue cool, not Birth of the Cool bop. Somewhere in between, eminently enjoyable.
No riding the bike last night - got shut down by the supposed wind we're having. Or not. I drove all the way to Blackstar Canyon to get a good climb in on the singlespeed after work. Parked about a mile from the gate like usual, since the likelihood of having your car broken into out there seems to be inversely proportional to its proximity to the gate. Got changed and all ready to ride, and was just heading out, when i ran into another rider who work at one of the local bike shops (and that I worked with at REI years ago). Seems the Firewatch people were turning riders around at the gate due to fire danger. The Forest Service ha issued a red flag warning, which doesn't technically shut down the forest, but they were turning people around all the same. After the fires we had last year I can see being concerned, but there's this overblown panic that goes around now when the slightest wind blows. Chino Hills was shut down due to fire danger, and the wind was barely even blowing out here. It seems that these fire-watchers are going off something other than common sense - if there was a wind warning earlier, but it's not blowing anymore, the fire danger has passed. To add insult to injury, they were still letting big construction trucks in for construction up the road. In their logic, bikes that have no possible way to start a fire can't go up, but large trucks heading to a construction site are ok. Sigh.
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
Prelude to a beer tasting...
Sat down last night and read the ending of Garden of Eden again. Hemingway's last work. Whet I never realized was that there is. or was to be, a second part of this that never was published. It was unfinished when he killed himself, and came to Charles Scribner Jr in a paper bag, along with the mostly finished manuscript of Islands in the Stream, and most of A Moveable Feast. I can only imagine the gold mine he knew was in that bag, and being the first to delve into the final workings of that mind...
Anyway, Unibroue tasting tonight! If anything you'd have to love them just for the names of their beers:
La Fin du Monde (the end of the world)
Maudite (Damned - named after French-Canadien trappers who sold their souls to the devil to make it home in time for a party)
Trois Pistoles (named for a small town's cathedral in peril)
Eau Benite (holy water)
Quelque Chose (literally, Something - a beer that can be served chilled, warm, or mulled, and is delicious all 3 ways)
Sans Nom (no name)
Quatre-Centième Brassin Commémoratif (25th Anniversary Beer - what is the big new one tonight!)
...plus a bunch of Anniversary beers that age extremely well. I missed the last Unibroue night they put on, which was back in fall of 2001. That one had Paul Arnott, the head brewer, as guest speaker - this one we get their national rep, which is still fine by me. 7 years I've had to wait for this tasting. Most of the regularly available ones i've had multiple times, but the big draw tonight will be the 25th anniversary beer and the multiple years of previous anniversary beers that will be poured. Last time I had a vertical line-up of these anniversary beers it was 10, 11, 12, 14, and 15, and that was a year ago. Somehow they seem to jump around with the numbering of the years, since i think the entire 20's have been skipped to go straight to 25...i'll figure out why that is and write about it tomorrow, provided i remember.
No riding today, since i have the beer tasting. Yesterday made for a decent evening ride though, about 10 miles and still made it back before dark. Tomorrow's another slog up Blackstar Canyon, 8 miles of climbing a fire road. But it makes for a good training ride, which is what i need. 5 months to the day until Vision Quest. I'll take all the training i can get.
That's it for now...I'll probably have more after the beer tasting!
Anyway, Unibroue tasting tonight! If anything you'd have to love them just for the names of their beers:
La Fin du Monde (the end of the world)
Maudite (Damned - named after French-Canadien trappers who sold their souls to the devil to make it home in time for a party)
Trois Pistoles (named for a small town's cathedral in peril)
Eau Benite (holy water)
Quelque Chose (literally, Something - a beer that can be served chilled, warm, or mulled, and is delicious all 3 ways)
Sans Nom (no name)
Quatre-Centième Brassin Commémoratif (25th Anniversary Beer - what is the big new one tonight!)
...plus a bunch of Anniversary beers that age extremely well. I missed the last Unibroue night they put on, which was back in fall of 2001. That one had Paul Arnott, the head brewer, as guest speaker - this one we get their national rep, which is still fine by me. 7 years I've had to wait for this tasting. Most of the regularly available ones i've had multiple times, but the big draw tonight will be the 25th anniversary beer and the multiple years of previous anniversary beers that will be poured. Last time I had a vertical line-up of these anniversary beers it was 10, 11, 12, 14, and 15, and that was a year ago. Somehow they seem to jump around with the numbering of the years, since i think the entire 20's have been skipped to go straight to 25...i'll figure out why that is and write about it tomorrow, provided i remember.
No riding today, since i have the beer tasting. Yesterday made for a decent evening ride though, about 10 miles and still made it back before dark. Tomorrow's another slog up Blackstar Canyon, 8 miles of climbing a fire road. But it makes for a good training ride, which is what i need. 5 months to the day until Vision Quest. I'll take all the training i can get.
That's it for now...I'll probably have more after the beer tasting!
Monday, October 6, 2008
monday...
I'm bored at work...really bored. Bored enough to start the blog that I'd been meaning to start for, oh, since I started to get bored at my last job. Actually 2 jobs ago I started once which immediately failed, since i quit the job and then had things to do.
See, geology has that ring to it where you'd think "ooh, he's a geologist. He must live a life of high adventure and rollicking good times, out there in the mountains for weeks at a time. How rustic...", and then swoon. Which does happen, and is the reason that most geologists won't tell you that it's a whole lot more time sitting behind a computer than you'd ever think. I never thought it when I was in school either. The mountain part still does happen, it's just when I'm not at work!
1000 words a day is probably pretty cheesy - i challenge anyone reading this to find a group larger than 10 that doesn't have any clue that Jack London came up with that idea. Surveying out in front of the wal-mart in Moreno Valley doesn't count - it has to be in a county with a literacy rate above 50%. I think Riverside County is somewhere around 42%, so it's out of the running. If they can name the piece it was from, even better. If they know that John Barleycorn is another piece and not "the guy who runs that ethanol company, right?", well, I'll be duly impressed and start using Cormac McCarthy quotes instead. And if the general populace ever get to the point of recognizing those, I'll move on to Thomas Pynchon. And I know I won't have to get past that, because once the general populace starts recognizing Thomas Pynchon, the apocalypse is nigh. Though with Stephen King being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, maybe it is already nigh. Or was, rather, in 2005. I guess we're in a post-apocalyptic world already, and never even knew it. Kinda figured it would be more bleak and ashy, and have less winking. You'd never figure that Sarah Palin, end-of-times-monger that she may be, would brighten up the post-apocalyptic visage by winking all the time. I'm beginning to think her winking might be a tick. I've lived in Alaska. Alaskans don't wink. Sometimes they blink, but when they do it's to un-stick their eyelashes that have frozen together because it's 60 below. They conserve energy for things like cutting wood, or building pipelines, or shooing off Russians.
I really could use more coffee at this point...and I'm going to change the music too. Sonny Rollins is a great sax player, and Saxophone Colossus an incredible album, but right now it's just wearing me out. I could blame it on an after-lunch food coma, had I eaten more than half a peanut-butter sandwich and a pumpkin muffin. But i digress. On to...Ridgetop Session, by the Woodsmen. The best band no one I know has ever heard of, out of Santa Cruz. I'll plug 'em, and I don't even know them, just dig the music. I don't think they're making music anymore, but you can download all their albums at thewoodsmen.net. Not thewoodsmen.com - that's some gospel music, which is decidedly different from the woodsmen that I'm listening to right now. Actually just opened another window to make sure i got the right website (the .net one), and they have another album (called Frisco Frisco) that I'm downloading right now...I'll write about it tomorrow I guess. Unless I keep writing long enough to get through it before i leave the office...but i hope I leave before then.
Today's another single-speed day out on the mountain bike after work. If you don't know what that is, think of how most every bike you see has gears that you can shift through. All those gears are there basically for one reason: to make it easier to go up hill. Now think of the same bike with one cog in the front instead of 3, and one cog in the back instead of 9, and you have a single-speed. Going single-speed basically means that one has to expend more energy going up hills. A whole lot more, sometimes. It's not the torture machine it sounds like, though before i had one i thought it was kinda masochistic too. Sometimes you inadvertently end up being masochistic. I'll see a hill and think "I wonder if I can make it up that...", and then go abuse my knees torquing up some hill that I wouldn't want to climb on my geared bike. I did that riding down at the San Clemente singletracks the other day...started out thinking I'd brought the wrong bike since a lot of the climbs out are really steep, and ended up glad i had brought it since it actually made the climbing more fun. I'm a closet masochist I think.
Anyway, tonight riding out at Chino Hills state park until it's dark, and tomorrow a quick loop at the Fullerton loop and then beer tasting! An entire night of beers from Unibroue, the incredible Canadian brewery out of Chambly that puts out phenomenol Belgian-style beers. But i'll save that for tomorrow.
cheers.
See, geology has that ring to it where you'd think "ooh, he's a geologist. He must live a life of high adventure and rollicking good times, out there in the mountains for weeks at a time. How rustic...", and then swoon. Which does happen, and is the reason that most geologists won't tell you that it's a whole lot more time sitting behind a computer than you'd ever think. I never thought it when I was in school either. The mountain part still does happen, it's just when I'm not at work!
1000 words a day is probably pretty cheesy - i challenge anyone reading this to find a group larger than 10 that doesn't have any clue that Jack London came up with that idea. Surveying out in front of the wal-mart in Moreno Valley doesn't count - it has to be in a county with a literacy rate above 50%. I think Riverside County is somewhere around 42%, so it's out of the running. If they can name the piece it was from, even better. If they know that John Barleycorn is another piece and not "the guy who runs that ethanol company, right?", well, I'll be duly impressed and start using Cormac McCarthy quotes instead. And if the general populace ever get to the point of recognizing those, I'll move on to Thomas Pynchon. And I know I won't have to get past that, because once the general populace starts recognizing Thomas Pynchon, the apocalypse is nigh. Though with Stephen King being awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, maybe it is already nigh. Or was, rather, in 2005. I guess we're in a post-apocalyptic world already, and never even knew it. Kinda figured it would be more bleak and ashy, and have less winking. You'd never figure that Sarah Palin, end-of-times-monger that she may be, would brighten up the post-apocalyptic visage by winking all the time. I'm beginning to think her winking might be a tick. I've lived in Alaska. Alaskans don't wink. Sometimes they blink, but when they do it's to un-stick their eyelashes that have frozen together because it's 60 below. They conserve energy for things like cutting wood, or building pipelines, or shooing off Russians.
I really could use more coffee at this point...and I'm going to change the music too. Sonny Rollins is a great sax player, and Saxophone Colossus an incredible album, but right now it's just wearing me out. I could blame it on an after-lunch food coma, had I eaten more than half a peanut-butter sandwich and a pumpkin muffin. But i digress. On to...Ridgetop Session, by the Woodsmen. The best band no one I know has ever heard of, out of Santa Cruz. I'll plug 'em, and I don't even know them, just dig the music. I don't think they're making music anymore, but you can download all their albums at thewoodsmen.net. Not thewoodsmen.com - that's some gospel music, which is decidedly different from the woodsmen that I'm listening to right now. Actually just opened another window to make sure i got the right website (the .net one), and they have another album (called Frisco Frisco) that I'm downloading right now...I'll write about it tomorrow I guess. Unless I keep writing long enough to get through it before i leave the office...but i hope I leave before then.
Today's another single-speed day out on the mountain bike after work. If you don't know what that is, think of how most every bike you see has gears that you can shift through. All those gears are there basically for one reason: to make it easier to go up hill. Now think of the same bike with one cog in the front instead of 3, and one cog in the back instead of 9, and you have a single-speed. Going single-speed basically means that one has to expend more energy going up hills. A whole lot more, sometimes. It's not the torture machine it sounds like, though before i had one i thought it was kinda masochistic too. Sometimes you inadvertently end up being masochistic. I'll see a hill and think "I wonder if I can make it up that...", and then go abuse my knees torquing up some hill that I wouldn't want to climb on my geared bike. I did that riding down at the San Clemente singletracks the other day...started out thinking I'd brought the wrong bike since a lot of the climbs out are really steep, and ended up glad i had brought it since it actually made the climbing more fun. I'm a closet masochist I think.
Anyway, tonight riding out at Chino Hills state park until it's dark, and tomorrow a quick loop at the Fullerton loop and then beer tasting! An entire night of beers from Unibroue, the incredible Canadian brewery out of Chambly that puts out phenomenol Belgian-style beers. But i'll save that for tomorrow.
cheers.
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