February 2012
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“Good is something you do, not something you talk... →
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"Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports…
… but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.”
David Foster Wallace: ‘Federer as Religious Experience’. New York Times, August 20 2006
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January 2012
6 posts
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"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go…
“I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”
Robert Louis Stevenson: Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.
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December 2011
6 posts
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Andrew Losowsky on print in Turning Pages:
…the survival of the physical product only makes sense where its physicality is a deliberately curated part of its design…
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"My sensations are good / We were fought by men... →
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November 2011
14 posts
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Some terms relating to drunkenness from Francis...
ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. One who from drunkenness vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite to him.
ALTITUDES. The man is in his altitudes, i.e. he is drunk.
TO CAT, or SHOOT THE CAT. To vomit from drunkenness.
CORNED. Drunk.
CUP-SHOT. Drunk.
DUTCH FEAST. Where the entertainer gets drunk before his guest.
HALF SEAS OVER. Almost drunk.
NAZY. Drunken. Nazy cove or mort; a...
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Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance...
– Gustave Flaubert
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Our occasional pretensions come from some source mysteriously inerasable to us,...
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October 2011
10 posts
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Metaphysics and aesthetics
“I’m not greatly interested in results, frankly, but the metaphysics and aesthetics of cycle racing excite me enormously.”
Graeme Fife, interviewed on PodiumCafe
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On attend Godeau…
It seems that Samuel Beckett, resident in Paris for much of his life, visited the Vélodrome d’Hiver (which had been requisitioned as a staging point for Parisian Jews on their way to Nazi camps) in the ’40s, to watch the famous cyclist Roger Godeau. He asked the young autograph hounds outside what they were doing. “On attend Godeau” they replied. We’re waiting for...
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Remember that you are faster and freer than...
Piece by me on city cycling now on the Rapha site.
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September 2011
5 posts
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Replacement therapy →
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"The world is full of objects, more or less...
… I do not wish to add any more. I prefer, simply, to state the existence of things in time and/or space.”
Douglas Huebler, 1959.
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August 2011
14 posts
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Courier stories are like fishing stories, and are told not to inform the...
– Interview on Moving Target with Paul Fournel, Oulipo writer and author of Need for the Bike.
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