You might also enjoy 8 feet in the Andes about a trip she took with her
young daughter and a donkey. So intrepid,even though not cycling. She died
not long ago and the New York Times had a wonderful obituary.
On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 7:44 PM <rltil...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I bought Full Tilt a while back and have yet to read it. I’ll need to fix
> that I think.
>
> Robert Tilley
> San Diego, CA
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Sep 14, 2022, at 1:38 PM, Patrick Moore <bertin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> I finally started reading Dervla Murphy's 1965 or so classic *Full Tilt:
> Ireland to India With A Bicycle* about her 1963 trip across Europe and
> Asia on a single speed*.* I have to say that this is truly the best bike
> travelogue I've read, and -- to place the book in a far more demanding
> category -- I have to say that it ranks among the best travel writing *tout
> court.* I've read much of Waugh, Theroux, Iyer, as well as Tim Moore etc
> etc, as well Toqueville etc, but Murphy is a real writer. I must buy more
> of her travelogues; they're $10 on Kindle.
>
> Why is she so good? First, she's mostly interested in the travel and not
> on the bike. Now, there are some very good bike travelogues -- Tim Moore;
> and I do enjoy the technical bits in such works. But Murphy's Rosinante
> ("Roz") is almost an afterthought; look at the bike kit in her packing
> list! 1 spare tube and 4 links of chain! Murphy is interested in the
> movement, the scenery, and above all, the people and their cultures, and it
> is here she is so good: she is as observant and eloquent in her
> descriptions as Theroux but from the standpoint of an intelligent woman
> with a curious and -- the main point -- frank and open and sympathetic
> character; Theroux, for all his intelligence and eloquence has a nasty
> misanthropic quality that nags at one while reading -- and enjoying -- his
> writings.
>
> I suppose Murphy's background accounts for some of her openness to very
> foreign traditional cultures; perhaps paradoxically, the very traditional,
> and hugely alien to Western eyes, culture of rural, traditional Muslim
> Afghans in the early 1960s is less far from the near-peasant (outside of
> Dublin), old-fashioned Roman Catholic culture that dominated 1963 Ireland
> than to the much more secular and jaded globalist Westernism (for though it
> is global, it is entirely of the modern West) of 2022.
>
> And one is also struck very, very hard by the openness and friendliness of
> such hard-line Islamic traditionalists (and it is largely the men, too, in
> a grossly "patriarchal" society -- I dismiss that ideological term, but
> Pushtun -- as Wahabi-ist S Arabian -- society *is* grossly patriarchal
> in the negative sense; but anyway) the friendliness, acceptance,
> helpfulness, and dignity of these patriarchal me toward a stray, solitary,
> White European female. I daresay that it was in part because Murphy carried
> in her own character the marks of a medieval religious peasant society that
> she was so well received; the other part doubtless is that open, engaging,
> respectful and friendly character that marks her.
>
> O poor Afghanistan, what have they done to thee! Google photos of
> Afghanistan in the 1960s; there's a portfolio going around taken by a
> visiting American teacher who spent time with his family in Kabul
> ("KAH-buhl) in the mid 1960s. I lived in India at the time and remember the
> general situation well: even then Afghanistan an ideological battlefield,
> large American presence, AID and so forth, to ideologically counteract the
> diabolical Soviets; even then the beginnings of the conflicts that would
> destroy the country and its society -- but the rural peasant Muslim
> tradition lives on; even amongst the debased and really modernist Taliban
> perversion of the religion, for fanatical narrowmindedness, proselytizing
> fury,*, and vicious cruelty is part of that pseudo-Islam that has generated
> the terrorism that really has its root in Western ideologies: Al Fatah and
> such Leninist-inspired radicals from the 1960s and '70s that morphed from
> Marxism into ideological fundamentalist (which means "superficial")
> faux-religious political activism.
>
> * AK Coomaraswamy applied this wonderful epithet to the imperialist and
> racist Christian ideologue missionaries ravaging Asia and Africa in the
> 19th and first half of the 20th century; and I say this as a believing
> practicing Christian. Now, Coomaraswamy often wrote hyperbolically to make
> points for his antagonistic audence, the learned "elite" and
> "great-and-ideologically-good" opinion makers of his time in defense of
> religious tradition, but he was far, far too intelligent and culturally
> aware to deny that even fundamentalist Victorian Christian missionaries
> were often people of charity and selflessness who did at times some good
> for their charges, even if they did a lot of bad.
>
> But back to Murphy: she is good because she is a. intelligent, b. open
> minded, c. very observant, d. eloquent; I mean that she has outstanding
> literary talent; e. intrepid and f. outgoing. Oh, so many bike travelogues
> are vitiated by the narrow minds and cultural narrowness of the authors!
> (Tim Moore is readable because besides being a very good writer, he is very
> funny; if he tried to be serious I daresay he'd be like the rest.)
>
> https://allthatsinteresting.com/1960s-afghanistan for example. These
> photos were taken by the American Podlich family, I think.
>
>
> https://www.rferl.org/a/afghanistan-as-it-once-was-the-photographs-of-william-podlich/29222700.html
>
> The Podlich girls were just a few years older than I.
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 9:07 AM Doug H. <dhansford1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I recently read a fun book by Tom Eastham called Back on My Bike. It is
>> the story of a 60 year old recent retiree who rediscovers cycling. It does
>> touch on some ideas that will be familiar to Rivendell riders although i
>> don't recall Rivendell being mentioned specifically as it is set in Great
>> Britain. Check it out.
>> Doug
>> Athens, GA
>>
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>> .
>>
>
>
> --
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Patrick Moore
> Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum
>
>
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