French Lit Bike Advocacy Blogging

My sister once bought me a French bestseller, "La première gorgée de bière" by Philippe Delerm. A collection of essays on the "minuscule pleasures of life" such as that first [this is where I realise to my surprise that English doesn't have a word for gorgée. Neither gulp nor sip nor swig are quite right. Russian, though, has an almost direct translation - глоток.] gulp of beer. I mention it because, surprisingly, it has a message about biking that I want to talk about.

This is a book which is bad in general and good specifically. The mawkish nostalgic sentimentality of it all can make you roll your eyes (my sister and I jokingly looked for the part of each essay where Delerm talks about how the subject thing/action reminds him of youth - and indeed, everything from carrying a pocket knife to ordering port to shelling peas does get that mention). On the other hand, the book is rife with tiny mundane observations that you've never made but that strike you as exactly right when you read them. And the language is perfectly crisp and precise in a way even I, whose French is quite bad, can appreciate. It's a trifling book, written terrifically well.

The book, sez Google, has been translated into English as "The Small Pleasures of Life", or "We Could Almost Eat Outside". You can check out a couple chapters on google books. It seems to lack some of the charm and the crispness in English. Also, somehow the "you" pronoun just doesn't seem right.

The second to last essay in the collection is called "La bicyclette et le vélo". I couldn't find online in English so here it is in the original French. I would translate it "The Cycle and the Bike", but I see the actual translator called it "Cycle or Bicycle?" I would encourage you to read it, but the point I want to make is this: Delerm talks about two kinds of people who ride bicycles: "cycle people" and "bike people". For the former, biking is about lightness. For the latter, it's about heaviness. It's a good classification. Kind of an Unbearable Lightness of Biking, if you will.

The kind of people who bike in Seattle are predominantly "cycle people". They wear spandex and have clip-in pedals. Their bikes are good and they ride fast. (and yes, hipsters on fixies are "cycle people" too, just a different breed). These people are the people who care most about biking, so they are most involved in bike advocacy. They take the exercise and/or hobby aspects of biking quite seriously. In this I agree with them, but they are not good authorities on what to do in terms of bicycle policy if you want to get more people to bicycle. Seattle has very few "bike people". Where are they all?