This Friday's Ride
I'll be doing this bike ride on Friday morning, (planning to start around 7), if you wanna come share some miles.
I messed up on it last week and ended up riding an extra 35 miles. I won't do that this time!
Anyway, it's not too hilly and has luxuriously wide shoulders for most of it.
The Satanic Verses and the Art (?) of Provocation
I recently struggled through Salman Rushdie’s infamous book
The Satanic Verses. It was a little over 600 pages of gobbledy-gook alternatingly about two plane-wreck-survivors-turned-angel-and-demon-turned-back-into-regular-guys, an obvious re-working of the early days of the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), a butterfly-eating prophetess leading a village to a possible watery grave in the Arabian Sea, and a bunch of other stuff that I barely remember, which may or may not have incited any brain activity in the first place.
This was a complicated book that reminded me how much of an insulated dumb American I am.
Of course, when it came out, this book infuriated influential Muslims to the point that they wanted the author dead. Officially. As in “if you know where the author is hiding and don’t think you have the gumption or wherewithal to kill him, let us know. We’ll find someone who will kill him.”
This all got me to thinking about art and the goals with which one goes about creating art. I’m going to make a pretty big assumption from the outset- namely, that Rushdie knew that some ideas in the novel would upset some Conservative people of the Muslim faith. You don’t title your book after a possibly heretical story of errantism in the Qur’an and expect everything to be peachy keen. My favorite example of a similar action in the Western World would be if I were to write a book called
The Whorish Wife of Jesus. (Of course, my book would be about The Church, “the Bride of Christ,” so it would be ok. Heh.) Nor do you talk about the wives of the Prophet and prostitutes in the same breath and expect there to be no discussion among the faithful.
Rushdie is obviously no idiot. Even though I’m kind of surprised that the literary critics and English teachers of the day didn’t issue a fatwa against him for creating such an incoherent mess of a book, I can readily admit that he obviously has an extensive body of knowledge serving as the inkwell in which he dips his pen.
If Rushdie knew that people of the Islamic faith would have problems with some of these elements, then surely at least one of his goals was to provoke these folks. We sometimes soften this impulse by using language like “I wrote this to make people think…to question…to take their faith seriously, etc.” (see also Kevin Smith’s
Dogma.)
But I am now wondering: is provocation a noble goal for an artist? Does art
need to be noble? Does art
need anything at all? (I personally can’t escape the notion that art should uplift us out of negative states- of intolerance, of hopelessness, of base, cruel lives. I’m kind of old school that way and I also realize how subjective the notion is. So I’m not married to it.)
Another question- is a mere exercise in the freedom of speech necessarily “art?” For instance, when whoever it was that put the crucifix in urine and called it an artistic utterance did their thing, was the obvious shock and outrage that resulted a valid, complete appreciation of the creation? I don’t know.
Here’s the thing. Sometimes a guy like Rushdie wants to encourage thought and critique of ideas and open up the windows and let in some fresh air with provocative material. But as the publication of the
Verses showed, the result can sometimes be the exact opposite of his intentions. What happened instead? An influential cleric denounced the work as offensive, therefore well-meaning people of faith didn’t read the book, denounced it and the author as offensive (possibly evil) and demanded his life. The intended audience burned the book, bombed bookstores, et cetera, et cetera. So much for discussion and honest critique of one’s cherished ideas.
No, trenches were dug even deeper. Instead of fresh air and productive discourse, the same sides just retreat further away from each other.
It seems to me that human nature has always been thus and thus it shall ever be.
What say you?
Norman Conquest
Saturday’s long ride was a nice change of pace.
I was convinced by a friend at work to do The Norman Conquest- a benefit ride for the JD McCarthy Center- the longest distance being a 66 mile ride in and around Norman that claimed on the website to be “VERY hilly.”
They weren’t kidding. While, training-plan-wise, I wanted to get in a few more miles than 66 on Saturday, the elevation changes MORE than made up for it since I do not normally train on those kinds of grades. What a workout! A bunch of steep hills, and rolling country roads made for very interesting terrain. It’s interesting to do that kind of ride with other people. There isn’t a lot of talking. It’s kind of a ghostly quiet, the only sound you hear being a bunch of clicks as people shift at roughly the same time.
And as you probably know, the weather on Saturday morning was fantastic! Not hot, not windy. Unlike, I don’t know,
the last three months?!
After averaging 2 mph better than I expected to, (long descents and being around other people certainly helps), I feel like the relatively flat 100 mile ride in three weeks shall be no problem.
Bring it on!
Tongue Twisters
While entering doctors' information into a database I have created some tongue twisters in my head. You will notice an overall theme. They all involve languages spoken by one doctor in particular.
Say the following phrases to yourself as ridiculously quickly as possible. You might find that they have a pleasant ring to them:
Spanish Spinach- spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach spanish spinach
Urdu Underwear- urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear urdu underwear
Hindi Hyundai- hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai hindi hyundai
Terrible Arabic- terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic terrible arabic
Last Saturday's Ride
"How was it?"
It wound up being 76 miles.
I'm not going to lie...76 solitary miles are tough.
Almost 5 hours of myself, my mind, my bike and that's about it.
The relatively short section where I wasn't sharing the road with cars was mercifully broken up with some music, but it didn't last for very long.
Turns out I need people.
Why wasn't this an issue with running? Probably because I could have my tunes for the whole time, I suppose.
Friends of the blog--if you own a bike and haven't forgotten how to ride it, please consider getting up early on a Saturday soon and breaking up some of the monotony with me!
This Saturday's Ride...
I'll be biking this 74 miles on Saturday if anyone wants to ride along for some of the miles. Overholser and Hefner are pretty popular legs. But if you want something more challenging, the early hills in Yukon will make for a pretty good workout, [and a hellacious workout if the wind is up.:-)]
I'll be rolling out at 6 am and I'll have my phone with me if you want to synchronize.
Abondoned Ideas Volume 3
Back in the days when I was in the band Grandpa Griffith I had a fleeting glimpse of marketing genius.
Some background: When you self-finance an album, it actually costs about the same amount of money to make 1000 copies of your album as it does to make 500 copies. You wind up with boxes and boxes of CDs that, unless you're Kid Rock, will probably remain unsold, resting very safely in your closet for the rest of your life.
(If I ever move out of my house to another one at some point in the next two to sixty years, I will have to face a pretty big decision--namely, do I even bother to move all of these boxes of _Electric Scooter Holiday Blowout_ and _Jay_? Maybe I should place them on the curb for the garbagemen or leave them in the closet for the next homeowner or renter to discover, like a rare archaeological find...)
Back in the day, I thought a good way of selling the album, (besides the tried-and-true hard work of playing a lot of shows and developing an audience, etc.), would be to take a cue from the Girl Scouts and sell them like so many boxes of thin mints.
Stake a claim by a busy roadway, (I always had the corner of NW Expressway and Meridian in my head), make some signs and play an all-day marathon concert to draw drivers' attention.
Those CDs would sell like Straford Peaches! In my head, at least.
