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The Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time #329 - Further Reading

12.9.15

One or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives
for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities,
and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the
encounters they find there.

It's a bike ride.

Started by user nathansnider and user theroyalacademy.

It meets every Wednesday at 8:30pm
at California Donuts #21.
We ride at 9pm.
While we endeavor to return before the last red line trains (around midnight),
it is generally not possible. Please plan accordingly.

On this bike ride, you might expect:
- inconvenient passageways
- oblique strategies
- Oulipian constraints
- disorientation
- reorientation
- "cover" versions of other people's rides, performed with amateurish enthusiasm
- amateurish enthusiasm
- playgrounds, pool halls, bowling alleys, karaoke
- geocaching
- full moon picnics
- traffic median tea parties
- rivers that no longer exist
- smell tourism
- Couchwick v2.0

Furthermore:
- usually 20-35 miles
- usually some hills
- a medium pace (probably not for beginners; certainly not a hustle)
- few stops, short stops
- but we're not in a rush; we don't need to run every light
- victory donuts!

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This week:

We write these little descriptions each week, and sometimes lecture a bit during the ride about this topic or that, but all in all our ability to actually teach our riders about the city is rather maddeningly limited. We are limited by our modest speaking abilities, those lectures often ending up somewhat of a rambling mess. And then there is our naturally limited perspective, both being thirty-something white dudes, both relatively recent transplants from elsewhere in the country. And there is simply a limit to the extent that a bike ride can be a classroom; when too didactic, a ride can lose its other powers.

And what might those other powers be? On a bike, one can see that a city is both bigger and smaller than one imagines. So while we hope our riders become familiar with the city, of course, that they feel more connected to more parts of it, we also aim to defamiliarize the city -- not just to increase what riders know but to illustrate how much more there is to know. In a word, we hope to inspire curiosity. A Passage ride is intended less as an answer than a question.

So, to answer some of those questions, allow us to recommend some further reading!

Some of these books are on our bibliography (y'all know we have a bibliography, right?), some are not (though they really could be); some are specifically about L.A., some are about the idea of a city in general (or places, or spaces); some are history, some are theory, there's a guidebook, a novel, even some prose poetry. It's quite a short list, really, not exhaustive by any means, nor as diverse as it could be, but there's some good stuff in here. And good books tend to lead one to more good books (always check the bibliographies).

Akasegawa, Genpei. Hyperart: Thomasson. New York: Kaya Press, 2009.

Bag, Alice. Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage, A Chicana Punk Story. Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2011.

Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Deverell, William, and Greg Wise, eds. Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005.

Foster, Seshu. City Terrace Field Manual. New York: Kaya Press, 1996.

Hart, Dianne Walta. Undocumented in L.A.: An Immigrant's Story. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1997.

Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

Inman, Bob. Finding Los Angeles by Foot: Stairstreet, Bridge, Pathway, and Lane. Los Angeles: self-published, 2014.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961.

Klein, Norman. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. London: Verso, 1997.

MiÃ©ville, China. The City and the City. New York: Ballantine Books, 2009.

Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Sklar, Anna. Brown Acres: An Intimate History of the Los Angeles Sewers. Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2008.

Stecyk, Craig, and Glen E. Friedman. Dogtown: The Legend of the Z-Boys. New York: Burning Flag Press, 2002.

Wakida, Patricia, ed. LAtitudes: An Angeleno's Atlas. Berkeley: Heyday, 2015.

(~20 miles, all pretty darn flat, all paved)

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For the latest information about each week's ride, join our mailing list:
groups.google.com/group/the-passage-announcements

For more information about past rides, visit our website:
ThePassageRide.com

For miscellaneous images, information, and links, take a look at our tumblog:
thepassageride.tumblr.com

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Discuss

We must replace travel
as an adjunct to work
with travel as a pleasure.

Posted by theroyalacademy

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