Bob Mould as seminal moment

Bob Mould released Workbook in 1989. I bought it a week after I  dropped out of college. I'd come back to Nebraska with no money and fewer prospects. It was a dark, dark time.

The record was written while Bob lived on a farm in upstate New York, trying to recover from the implosion of Husker Du. (They broke up the night before they were supposed to play a gig in Omaha.)  When I first heard the album, I connected very quickly with its images of rural life: "I walk through the day / through the open fields." These peripatetic rambles through a rural countryside inspired his imaginative productivity:

Imagine yourself in the middle of nowhere
Imagination runs away for a while
I play games about once a day or so
I don't know, that's where I'd rather go
Brasilia crossed with Trenton

I wish that I could tell my story
To all the people that listened to my story long ago
I knew that this would happen sooner or later
That I'd get disillusioned with it all
Just throw my hands up to the sky and say
"Oh Lord, what happened, what happened
To make things run this way?"

Being isolated in an empty space sets the imagination free. You can create games. You can pretend the mundane has become mythological. But when this creative process stops, you're often left with new insights into the reality of your present circumstances. You start to see yourself a bit more clearly. After writing the fantasy, you can craft a new narrative about your reality. 

Our culture's conceptualization of "imagination" comes from Wordsworth, as does our notion of the artist as a solitary wanderer, releasing slivers from one's emotional life into an unsuspecting and indifferent word.

Much of Wordsworth's poetry examines how rural imagery stimulates his imagination, and Bob's lyrics describe a similar process. MY job now is to focus our attention on the material production underlying all of that imaginative work. I choose agriculture because I believe that its metaphors, its rhetoric, and its earthiness all permeate Romanticism. I believe that the same processes are strongly influencing our culture.

Bob talks about how "fertile" this rural setting became: "Up on the farm in 1988 for Workbook. I was just like, wow--environment was so important to where I was in my life." In the lyrics, the fields are "open." Empty. So was my life in the aftermath of 1989. I was open to new imaginative ideas and images.

As I come so close to the completion of this project, one which has consumed the last five or six years of my life, one that's led me from the open fields of eastern Nebraska to the open fields of the California Central Valley and back again, I wonder where in the hell the idea ever came from. "What happened to make things run this way?" The high school classroom where I first read "Tintern Abbey?" A grad. school seminar 20 years later? Or was it Bob Mould?

Bob writes, "I wish I could tell my story." Wordsworth laments, "I cannot paint what then I was." For both of them, it's a rhetoric of impossibility.

Maybe finding that narrative is all any of us can hope for.


Bob Mould discusses and performs “Hoover Dam”

Dorkiness is a warm bar mitt

Two new additions to my winter kit are on the way.

I know I'm going to get eviscerated the minute I show up with ugly-ass neoprene abominable-snowman mittens, so I'm just going to out myself now.

I stay warm on winter bike rides--except for my hands and feet. It's the same for everybody, right? But there were times last winter when I still couldn't feel my fingers and toes three hours after getting off the bike. That's dangerous.

So my options are: ride the trainer all winter and slowly go berserk, take spinning classes and quickly become homicidal, or acquire extreme warming options and endure endless ridicule.

So yeah, I've ordered Bar Mitts. Pearl Izumi lobster claws are okay for an hour or two in temperatures warmer than 20 degrees, but our longer gravel rides are frequently more demanding. I've got a pair of Bontrager's thickest five-fingered glove, but even with liners, they're still not warm enough. So the windproof neoprene Mitts, according to the icebike guys, are the warmest option. We're talking Alaskan I-bike-a-rod warm.

The shoes were a real toss-up: the store where I work part-part time is a Sidi dealer, so I've played with fitting them quite a bit. They're really, really well made shoes. But my existing road and mtb shoes are both Shimano, and their size 46 fits me well. I guess it came down to trust: I had a chance to talk with our rep. this summer, and he made me promise that the next pair of shoes I buy would be Sidis. The Diablo has a full Gore-tex liner and some fleece insulation, so between the shoes and Bontrager's crazy-thick fleeced RXL booties, I should be loaded for frost. Bryan just ordered a pair of the Shimano winter boots, so we're going to stage a side-by-side, on-bike test in a couple of weeks. Hopefully I'll have the Bar Mitts by then, too, so I won't break a knuckle when I slug him in the nose after enduring hours of his ridicule.

Come to think of it, I hope the Mitts are really durable. I'll probably have to smack Shim around, too......

Bob Mould as prime mover

I have a few pop music sacred cows. My favorites from the 80-90's were The Smiths, REM, The Waterboys, Bob Mould,  and Rollins. From the last the last ten years, Ryan Adams, Neko Case, The Drive-By Truckers, and the Decemberists.

Turns out, they all sort of like each other. At least some of them. The Decemberists have played with and covered songs by The Waterboys. Neko tweeted recently about how much she likes Morrissey. Ryan Adams is a huge Smiths fan. Michael Stipe and Morrissey like each other's work. (Rollins despises Morrissey, but how could he not?)

Bob Mould was feted in Los Angeles last month; Dave Grohl paid tribute to the obvious debt Nirvana owed to Husker Du, Spoon and The Hold Steady played mini-sets, and Ryan Adams....well, Ryan did this. This is my favorite Bob Mould song, sung by my favorite singer-songwriter (not named Neko) of the last ten years.

I'm amazed by diachronicity.

If anybody could read my mind
And share with me these thoughts
Of all the enemies left behind
And friends that time forgot
Pretending nothing could ever phase you
Well, some things never change
Tell me, why do these words ring home?
How can you heartbreak a stranger?

Plato asked the same question of poetry: how does its power drive men mad?

I met Bob once. My recently-departed and much-missed friend Thomas has spoken with him many, many times. But he's an enigma.

And sometimes, his words eviscerate us.

But sometimes, that heartbreak doesn't just rend. It also binds. One could say that I ride a bike today (and suffer all the madness that choice has fostered) because I ran into Miah at a Bob Mould show, four years after he and Thomas and I drove halfway across Iowa to watch Bob play a solo show in Ames. I'm thinking now of all the choices I've made because of the bike, all the new friends in my life today. Where I went to grad school. Those choices were catalyzed by a shared affection for Bob's work.

Sometimes, you can save a stranger. So thanks for that, Bob. We'll see you sometime on the road.

Autumn Leaves, and hope

I've written here before about the motivational challenges I face in the Fall, especially now that I'm living in the Midwest. Impending cold and enforced confinement looms over October and November, and I still carry the memory of the 87 straight days we spent with snow on the ground during that awful winter of 2009-10.

But Autumn holds eternal promise for the cyclists around here, even as our training time decreases and our waistlines expand. My friend Mark Savery is crushing the Master's 1/2 category on the 'cross bike, (he was 3 for 3 at Jingle Cross this weekend) and his Midwest Cycling teammate Matt Tillinghast has also taken a bunch of USGP podiums. Mark's ramping up for Master's nats and worlds. Wow. Jeremy Cook won the Cat 3 Nebraska State Championship in 'cross, and Bryan, well--he's had all sort of news about a new member of his clan.

But I've gone down the rabbit hole these last six weeks--and come back out with 155 new dissertation pages.

Not all of it is really new. This writing is the culmination of two years' worth of in-depth archival research, sorting, outlining, fretting, thinking, and cursing. But by the end of the year, I hope to stop spending my days hip deep in sheep dip. I'll get back to writing about poetry and literary theory, not just eighteenth-century agricultural writing.

So there's a light, as my man Mozzer used to say.

And cycling hopes remain. They're based on ephemera, but without our ridiculous dreams, would any of us ever bother to pin on a number? Looking back on the season that was, I got blown off the back of half the events I entered. I lost a chance to sprint for a master's championship when I dropped my chain 300 meters from the finish line after an excellent lead out from my friend Kevin. I attacked the shit out of three crits to help teammates establish the winning move. I missed a turn in a TT. I won a road race that Shim and I pretty much controlled by ourselves. I successfully raced four 'cross events without falling on my face.

And now, it's fall. I weigh less today than I have on any december 1st in 17 years--I'm just 2 pounds above this summer's race weight. I've usually ballooned past 205 by this point in the year, but so far, I'm doing okay at reducing my portion sizes to reflect my reduced training. I've forced myself to take a few days totally off the bike, and I feel refreshed and eager to start lifting and trainer workouts.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating: if I can come into march weighing 190 (vs. my usual 210) and still pushing ~325 watts at threshold, I can certainly build on a base of fitness. I could conceivably weigh 185 and push 350-375 watts by may. Assuming I can still sprint at that weight, I should be able to help the fast guys a lot more next year. I just have to hope that I can avoid packing on my normal autumn 15.

But the numbers don't matter as much as the hope. Hope gets you out the door when it's 30 degrees outside and you have a three-hour endurance ride on your schedule. Hope forces you onto the trainer in a dark basement at 6:00 AM. Hope makes you complete another set of Bulgarian split squats when all you want to do is puke instead. Hope makes you try to train totally unlike Shim and Spence, both of whom have 20 years of riding in their legs and can go fast all the freaking time.

Hope compels you to leave Omaha at 18, and it pushes you to persevere long enough to earn three Grammy nominations:



Hope makes you scour another archive and discover a use of adynaton that makes all of the dissertation bits look like they belong together. 

So I hope. When the days grow short and the light recedes, I remember, as always, Uncle Bill:

                    we have within ourselves
Enough to fill the present day with joy,
And overspread the future years with hope.

 I hope that it's enough.

Road Tubeless: a morality play

Two weeks ago, Velonews published the following letter of mine:

Dear Lennard,
Based in part on your review of their Alpha wheelset and your road tubeless advocacy, I have decided to make the jump to road tubeless using Stan’s Alpha 340 rims.
The mechanic at my LBS built me a rear wheel using my existing 28-hole Powertap SL+ in a two-cross pattern on both drive and non-drive sides. The spokes were double-butted round Wheelsmith 2.0, attached with alloy nipples. Tension was set to Stan’s recommended 95 kg.
I mounted a Hutchinson Intensive tire using Stan’s yellow tape and two ounces of their sealant and took off down the road. After about 10 miles of smooth pavement, the wheel’s non-drive-side spokes had lost almost all tension.
Here’s my question: assuming my friendly mechanic (who’s built hundreds of wheels) proceeded correctly, is there anything about that rim / tire / hub combo that might have caused the spokes to become detensioned so quickly? Have you noticed tubeless tire installation affecting spoke tension? Any advice about building the wheel so it stays nice and stout?
— Eric

A. Dear Eric,
If anything, the tire pressure is lower on a road tubeless tire than a road clincher, so that does not affect it any more than a standard clincher. All tires, when pumped, reduce spoke tension somewhat. He should have used DT ProLock nipples and, to even out the tension more (and his tension in general may be a bit low), he maybe ought to have laced it radially on the drive side; the two-cross should have been fine on the non-drive side.
— Lennard

The mechanic I mention  is Paul Uhlman at Trek Bicycle Store of Omaha, a friend and riding buddy.

I sent Stan's the same letter. Here's their response:

The Hutchinson Tubeless tires have a very tight bead made from Carbon fiber. It does not stretch like kevlar so when seated on a tubeless rim it will compress the rim and drop the spoke tension more than a tube and tube-type tire. We have found this to be true on Shimano and Campy tubeless rims also. Some hubs are more prone to lose significant tension. The powertap has such a design where the non-drive side requires about half the tension of the drive side for proper dish which results in much less initial tension and therefore very low tension once a tubeless tire is seated on the rim. The solution for you is to keep the tire mounted and inflated to riding pressure and retention the wheel - bring the drive side up to 80 to 85kgf and adjust the non-drive side accordingly.

Here's some chatter from the Velonews readers comments section:

Eric, you need to have your mechanic retension the wheel with the tire mounted. Mounting Hutchinson tubeless tires on low-tension Alpha 340 wheels causes a noticeable loss of tension.  There can also be lateral stability problems with the Alpha 340 on a Powertap because the Powertap offset creates a large difference in tension between the drive and non-drive side, so there's not much support for the relatively flimsy, lightweight Alpha 340. If you check the NoTubes forum they allow for a slightly higher tension with Powertap hubs (105 as I recall), but it's easy to deform the spoke holes on the Alpha 340 when you get above 100. Lennard's suggestion of radial lacing on the drive side, along with heavier spokes on the drive side can help even out the tension if you have problems with the rim rubbing the brake pads under power, or if the wheel won't stay true.

*      *      *

Bikerider34 is right about the Alpha 340 rims. If you search any of the popular forums for something like "notubes rims detension pressure" you will find this is a common problem, the cause of which seems to be twofold: 1. The rims are made so light that they can't take much in the way of tension due to a thin spoke bed (hence the recommended max tension that is lower than many other brands). Lower starting tension gives you less of a "tension margin" before loading will de-tension the spokes, either through acute or chronic loads 2. The light weight construction also is less resistant to the compressive force of tire pressure. As a result, wheels built with Alpha 340s (and the lighter MTB rims like the Crests) will lose more tension for a given tire pressure than a heavier and stiffer rim. Combine less tension margin and more tension loss and you have a wheel which is always riding at the limit of its integrity. Add in greater lateral flexibility (again due to the very light construction) and you have yourself a real problem. I agree with Lennard's suggestion that some sort of locking nipple would help minimize the further loss of tension through extended use, but the fact of the matter is the wheel is a lot closer to detensioning through acute loads regardless. 

One thing I love about cycling: riders and mechanics help each other out. A lot. With lots of snark, sometimes, but still--it's a community. 

I also bought a custom wheel from Handspun, QBP's in-house wheelbuilding concern. It has a 24-hole Dura-Ace 7900 hub laced to a Stan's Alpha rim with DT Swiss Aerolite spokes. I mounted the same kind of Hutchinson Intensive tubeless tire, but this time I checked tension both before and after mounting the tire. It decreased from an average of ~85 kg to ~60 after I mounted the tire, so I asked Jake at Trek Omaha to look over my shoulder while I re-tensioned the wheel with the tire mounted. It has held up very well for three weeks of riding.

However, I'm beginning to wonder if the rear wheel is flexing enough to cause sporadic brake rub--I seem to be pushing more watts. I haven't ridden with anybody in a while, so I'm going to ask Bryan to watch it for flex this weekend.

Writing

This paragraph took me two hours to construct:

Marshall’s main criticism of the Board of Agriculture's “tourist” surveyors is temporal, but it can be assuaged, in part, by spatial considerations: commissioning a local resident to survey his native county might make up for the haste with which the surveys needed to be conducted. Localism compensates for nationalism when time is of the essence. Stone lends a bit of support to this conceptualization of the efficacy of survey work; granting the major premise of haste in a way that Marshall never does, Stone argues that the surveyor must be local or “a habitual visitor [. . .] when a surveyor has not an oppourtunity of feeling land at different seasons of the year” (xi). Given the abbreviated timeline that the Board imposed on the surveyors’ work, Stone felt that hiring local residents was the only way to ensure accurate and in-depth information: “he would be careful in examining the soil which lies under the surface” (xii).

If one more civilian asks me how much longer until I'm done, I may just rip off his or her head and kick it down the street like a soccer ball. 

My boy William (no, not Wordsworth--the other Bill in my life) has this to say:

We sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, "A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world."

jump to 5:40

Yeah, Nirvana was important, but.....

I was flabbergasted that none of the "20th-anniversary of Nirvana" tributes mentioned their debt to Husker Du. Here's a survivor of post-punk still blowing people's doors off 30 years after he created the version of Hardcore that made Kurt Cobain possible:



In another cultural milestone, my second favorite band called it quits yesterday. I bought a few crappy records before I discovered "alternative" music, but my first real rock concert was an R.E.M. show. I'll be proud of that fact for the rest of my life. Although I haven't heard their last four albums, from 1987 to 1992, they were the best band in the world. And without IRS and R.E.M., there would have been no Subpop and Nirvana.


"The wise man built his words upon the rocks / But I’m not bound to follow suit"

I just learned that even though this song wasn't released until 20 years later, it dates from the same writing sessions that produced "Life's Rich Pageant." 1986--what an amazing year.