Riding with Rilke: Reflections on Motorcycles and Books - Hardcover

Bishop, Ted

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393062619 ISBN 13: 9780393062618

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006

Synopsis

A motorcycle odyssey that combines the sensory seduction of the road with the intellectual rewards of archival research.

Ted Bishop took one last ride before the fall term. When he tried to pass a tractor-trailer at 80 miles per hour, his motorcycle began to vibrate out of control. Bishop was flung into a ditch, breaking his back in two places, shattering a wrist and ankle, and collapsing his lungs. Left with time to write and reflect, Bishop produced Riding with Rilke, an account of the epic motorcycle trip he had completed just before the crash. Here, Bishop takes readers from Edmonton to Austin, through the classic landscapes of the American West, and to a few of America and Europe's most famous cities as he reconciles what it means to be both a road dog and a researcher. Whether describing the shock of holding Virginia Woolf's suicide note in the British Library or the outlaw thrill of cruising small American towns on his Ducati, Bishop meditates with wit and honesty on the tangled interplay of life, work, and art.

About this title

About the Author

Ted Bishop has authored books and articles on Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and modernist publishing. His writing has also appeared in Cycle Canada, Enroute, and Rider. He lives in Edmonton, Canada, and teaches at the University of Alberta.

Reviews

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393062619
• ISBN 13: 9780393062618
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272