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| Author: Ted Bishop |
Bishop, an English professor, 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.
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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.
© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. |
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$23.95 (hardcover)
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