to nose me is to love me

Emotions are to us what scents are to our animal cousins.

I’ve been reading, and obsessing a bit, about scent, smell, noses, olfactory goodness and badness. This idea is from a book by Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire. Herz is the world’s top expert in a field she more or less invented, a kind of combined psychological and physiological understanding of the nose. The book is full of surprising, sometimes shocking facts about our sense of smell, but what I most appreciate is when Herz makes connections from science to the sensual, from anatomy to aesthetics, and from human to animal. Also, there’s this: She likes the smell of skunk, and can explain why.

een hond met een hoed op

About halfway through the Brabantse Pijl, I knew I was not going to take the pill I had been supposed to take at the start. A little while later, after struggling with the decision to avoid the second pill as well, I realized that I wasn’t paying attention to the race at all. In fact, I was no longer in the first group. On the second or thir finishing circuits, I turned left and headed for the showers.
     I looked my bosses in the eyes and told them that what they had given me hadn’t worked and, in fact, had blocked my legs. For some reason they bought it. More importantly, I was able to meet my parents’ eyes when I explained that it just hadn’t been my day. At that moment in time, looking them in the face while they felt sorry for me was better than starting at their shoes while they offered their congratulations.

Joe Parkin, an American who lived and raced in Belgium (and across Europe) in the late ’80s — before it was normal for riders from the U.S. to do so — has written a book about his experience, A Dog In a Hat. I knew Joe a little bit, from when he was back in the States and racing mountain bikes in the ’90s, and then when he worked for the U.S. branch of Castelli. He’s a beautiful piece of work, and he turns out to be a better writer than I am a bike racer.

5,586

That’s how many words per ounce are in my book, Ten Points. So says Amazon, which has a feature called “concordance” that gives all kinds of odd information about the books. For instance, when you buy my book, you get 4,115 words per dollar. More interesting, I thought, was the list of 100 most frequently used words in the book (weeding out such common ones as “the,” I would guess):

across again against animal arms asked away bed behind beth between bike body came car come crit daddy day door down dream dropped enough even eyes face father feet felt few finger first four front get go going good got hand head home ing kept kind knew know lap left legs let life line little long look looked mother mouth myself nat natalie night nose now once onto open pack pedals points pulled put race racers ride riders right road rode room say second see shoulder side something sometimes still ten thing think three time turned two wanted wheel years

That’s them, alright. Damn.

room 28

“I prefer not to look behind me. It’s an exercise of will that I often practice when I find myself at the front in the mountains.”
That’s what Fausto Coppi said after catching then dropping Jean Robic on the way to winning atop Alpe d’Huez in the 1952 Tour de France, the first time the race had gone up the now legendary climb. I was thinking about this because as I drove around France following the Tour this year with Jimmy Startt, I was trying to explain Fausto’s appeal. (”I’ve never understood it . . . he only won two Tours,” Jim said.) It’s a complex thing I have with Fausto, dependent on his victories, yes, but in the end less about them than — just to get into it a little — about his elegance during stress on and off the bike, the trajectory of his life, what he meant and means to Italy, his place next to Bartali, the size and shape of his legs and his nose, the doggy, earnest sadness always with him, and, simply, I believe that he was born to legend. The quote comes from a book I just picked up, The Tour is Won on the Alpe. I already knew almost all of the information it has on Coppi, but it gathers into one spot some of the best: Fausto climbed the mountain is 45:22 (just 8:32 slower than Marco Pantani’s record in 1995), rode it only once and won it for a perfect record there (as well as taking over the yellow jersey on the stage), has his name on the sign for switchback 21 (the first as you climb the peak), and, with Lance Armstrong (in 2001 and 2004) and now Carlos Sastre, is one of the three racers in history who won the stage and the Tour in the same year.

Here’s something I didn’t know: Fausto stayed at the Christina hotel atop Alpe, and specifically asked for room 28, a small room on the third floor that, far from being one of the best rooms there, faced the back of the building and had no elevator access. “It was the least requested room in the entire hotel,” the owner is quoted as saying in the book.

new old writer, paris, tour de france downtime

It was a bad one, the Winter of 1933. Wading home that night through flames of snow, my toes burning, my ears on fire, the snow swirling around me like a flock of angry nuns, I stopped dead in my tracks. The time had come to take stock. Fair weather or foul, certain forces in the world were at work trying to destroy me.

Dominic Molise, I said, hold it. Is everything going according to plan? Examine your condition with care, take an impartial survey of your situation. What goes on here, Dom?

There I was in Roper, Colorado, growing older by the minute. In six months I would be eighteen and graduated from high school. I was sixty-four inches tall and had not grown one centimeter in three years. I was bowlegged and pigeontoed and my ears protruded like Pinocchio’s. My teeth were crooked, and my face was as freckled as a bird’s egg.

I was the son of a bricklayer who had not worked in five months. I didn’t own an overcoat. I wore three sweaters, and my mother had already begun a series of novenas for the new suit I needed to graduate in June.
That’s the opening of John Fante’s “1933 Was a Bad Year,”  a short, great book I read over the course of a day in Jame’s Startt’s apartment in Paris. I’d never heard of Fante at all, let alone read anything by him. It’s great to discover new writers this deep into life.

wim

Mr. Vansevenant, who is considering retirement at the end of this season, hasn’t won a race in more than 10 years and has dedicated his career to the role of domestique. He’s the rider who carries bottles and food for the team leader, shelters him from the wind, moves him up through the pack when needed for strategy, chases down breakaways that contain the leader’s rivals and, if necessary, stops to hand over one of his own wheels or even his bike if the leader needs a replacement. He seems, characteristically, blithely unimpressed by his shot at history. “I do my job for Cadel,” he said before the start of Thursday’s stage, “and afterwards what happens doesn’t matter anymore. Actually, I haven’t looked at the General Classification for a couple of days. I’ve been having a hard enough time I haven’t been paying attention.”

That’s from my Wall Street Journal story on the Lanterne Rouge . . . I post it here because Wim Vansevenant is one of my favorite riders — a short list that also includes Fausto Coppi, Federico Bahamontes, Marco Pantani and Jacky Durand — and because it will eternally crack me up that I had to actually refer to someone as “Mr.” in print, since it’s WSJ style.

oh, chute

(47) HINCAPIE (THR)
Chute au km 95.
Plaies et contusions du cote gauche.

That’s the word on George Hincapie’s ride, from the official medical report of the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France. You sit in the press room, and people walk up and down every aisle (and there are seven here today, each about 50 meters long) handing out papers that give all sorts of information, such as medical reports, fines, the stage finish times to the General Classification, to the Most Aggressive Rider award (from a jury today of Thierry Adam, Philippe Bouvet, Jacky Durand, Bernard Hinault, Laurent Jalabert, Jean Montois, Christian Ollivier and Jean-Francoise Pescheux).

you is someone, too

I is someone else.

Rimbaud wrote that somewhere, in what context I have no idea, though I think it was a letter. I know he says something next like, “no matter for the violin who finds itself wood.” Hell, it might be one of his poems . . . I just don’t know. But the phrase sticks with me, reminding that every time you start to write about yourself you’ve distanced yourself from who you are and you’re writing about character and, maybe, even creating or recreating or, at the least, revising who you are as you set that person down in words.

working both ends

“What a fiction writer has to do is take little snippets of the dull and tone it up so that it’s interesting, and take little pieces of the bizarre and tone them down so they’re believable.”

In the late ’80s, I interviewed W.P. Kinsella, the author of, most famously, the baseball novel Shoeless Joe. I never got around to publishing the interview. A few days ago I was going through some old files and found the transcript. He says a lot of good things in there, talks a lot about what he drew from real life and how he changed it, how he did research, how he plots . . . I’m glad I decided to clean up my writing room.

the open opening

They went on anyway,

What a way to start a novel. Four words that have a history, a present, and are going someplace. Richard Bausch is one of my favorite American writers, favorite writers, favorite favorites. Here’s the rest of that sentence, from his eleventh novel, Peace: “putting one foot in front of the other, holding their carbines barrel down to keep the water out, trying, in their misery and confusion — and their exhaustion — to remain watchful.