Jacquie Phelan's Weblog

There’s a book in everyone (so they say). There’s sure a few in me – all competing to come out first. That’s why I’ve started (several times) but never finished.

Maybe now is the time, maybe it’s too late, everyone I know seems to have published a bike book
Mel Allwood
Charlie Kelly
Marla Streb
Glance Strongarm
Elaine Mariolle
Scott Tinley
JP Partland
Kay Ryan…
dare I add F. Berto‘s fictional account, “The Dearth of Bert”?

And if they haven’t written, they’ve made a film.
Ted White
Biily Savage
Greta Snider
Nicole Hahn

hey, wait.. I made a movie about Critical Mass (Oct 31, 1997. Full moon.) My first day of owning a movie camera. I dressed as the Critical Mouse. I know it can work as a schlockumentary…I did all the right stuff – interviewed the primly dressed and made-up newscasters, stuck-in-traffic drivers, and tons of riders in costume. So cool..but anyway, it’s never been shown so it doesn’t count (yet).

I’ve globbed and blogged but can never sit still long enough to organise the thoughts, chapters, etc.

My friend John Stilgoe (teaches at Harvard) has the right idea. He practically wrote his history-of-landscape volume “Outside Lies Magic” from the back of his tandem (His wife steers, he scrutinizes while stoking). And Koren (the cartoonist and avid cyclist) put it this way (picture a shivery-drawn animal hands clasped, on bended knee– a tandem leaning against the tree, and the girlbeast telling him “I believe the word you’re looking for is “stoker”).

But Charlie never made a tandem. Hey what am I saying – like he’d ALLOW me, who weighs what he does, on the same BIKE? Affecting his SAFETY! As the Three Stooges put it: “Nyagggggg!!!”

It is to laugh.

Anyhows – the book. Well, I’m picturing sort of scrappy tea table book, with recipes and paper stock that stains nicely and all the sordid tales of early life, athletic prowess, how I infiltrated the bastions of testosteroni, waving the shirt of feminine freedom and permanently got on a few people’s bad side while pressing myself into the sidewak cement of history.. Perhaps a chapter called ‘Marin in my mind’. I played a role in the early days of the folklore origins of Mountain Biking – and it moulded my life. My memories of the time create picture in my mind, which I’ll flow through key-bored to page. But need to relieve the reader’s boredom with some fine photos.

If you have any from the early days of Marination or JP in the fanciest dresses, please drop me a mail. I will probably be seeing Tom Moran (great photgrapher from the earliest Pleistocene to the present) because his birthday (#50) is this month, and his mom lives a few miles from me…he will no doubt have a handle on some cool shots. People that I was ‘captured’ by: Carlo DePisis, Bob Allen, Michael (Nick) Nichols, Bev Harper, Jan Oswald, Hermann Seidl, Luc Cave…where are you all?

My pal Richard Ballantine (he belongs on the above list: he has written so many books, he has good (wait for it…)
Shelf Esteem!

RB called his publishing colleague Emma Barnes, and zhoop! all I have to do is type 35,000 words or so, I think that is how many words Books Are, unless you’re J.K. Rowling or Messrs. Tolstoi, Dickens, Clavell. Then they will decide if it’s good enough. (He said WORK HARD, PUT IN A GOOD RIDE). If they don’t like it, y’all are going to be pelted for ‘subscriptions’!

Yes, it’s crass, it’s rude, it’s my new job. Flogging my evanescent prose. Your job: turn the page, and turn and turn, and LIKE it.

Or is my palaver pithy?

(Eubie DeJudge.)

Gladys Notmi

Etc..

PS I’m finishing with a poem of Kay’s: If the Moon Happened Once

If the moon happened once
it wouldn’t matter much,
would it?

One evening’s ticket
punched with a
round or a crescent.

You could like it
or not like it,
as you chose.

It couldn’t alter
every time it rose;

it couldn’t do those
things with scarves
it does.

(From Elephant Rocks, Grove Press 1996)

~ by jacquiephelan on October 3, 2007.

Posted in Charlie Cunningham, Jacquie Phelan, MTB racing, The Book