Book Review: More Proficient Motorcycling: Mastering the Ride 2nd Edition

If I’d have made it this far, this would have been a doubly fun book to review in life. I met David at the 2013 VBR3 in Duluth and got to speak with him, extensively, about motorcycling, motorcycle training, and other radical ideas. It spawned a whole lot of thought and writing that probably ended when I died. This is an excellent book and a thoughtful analysis of motorcycling. I’m publishing this review on what would have been my 68th birthday. Happy Birthday me!

More Proficient Motorcycling: Mastering the Ride 2nd Edition

by David L. Hough, 2012

All Rights Reserved © 2013 Thomas W. Day

    David Hough and, through his writing for Motorcycle Consumer News, Sound RIDER!, and BMW Owners News has been a strong advocate for motorcycle training and safety for most of his 75 years. Hough was inducted into the AMA's Motorcycle Museum Hall of Fame in 2009. As a motorcycle safety advocate, Hough has won the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Excellence in Motorcycle Journalism award twice, but he isn't one of the MSF's fans. In fact, in this 220 page book, the MSF is mentioned exactly three times and mostly in an unfavorable light. In 2004, through a short series of MCN articles ("Trouble in Rider Training 1 & 2") Hough championed the argument that the MSF is more committed to selling motorcycles than promoting motorcycle safety and crash and fatality reduction. In 2012, he obviously holds the same positions to be true.  There are numerous references to rider training programs that Hough considers to be worthwhile, but the MSF is not among them. With that as a background, the newest edition of Mastering the Ride takes on many of the issues Hough believes are driving motorcycle fatality statistics into public discussion.
    Hough has some excellent arguments regarding how we ride and how that relates to the frequency that we end up in hospitals and cemeteries. Marketing gurus say "perception is everything" and that goes for motorcycling, too. Several sections of Mastering the Ride are dedicated to discussions of safe following distance, scanning for hazards and escape routes, visibility, and evasive maneuvers. In many piloting, automotive, and motorcycle training programs, this translates to SIPDE (search, identify, predict, decide, and execute). This takes the MSF's SEE (search, evaluate, and execute) to a more functional and detailed level by forcing riders and drivers to think about all of the steps necessary in avoiding catastrophe on the road.
    All of this stuff is about learning how to accurate gauge and react to typical situations with exceptional skill. Since Hough managed to overshoot his own limits at a ride in August 2012 and crashed Lee Park's Triumph in an emergency stopping maneuver, some people might take his advice with a small block of salt. However, most experienced riders know that there are only two kinds of motorcyclists: those who have crashed and those who haven't crashed yet. Hough isn't shy about illustrating this book with pictures of his own off-pavement misadventures and self-deprecating examples of moments when his mental state resulted in (or could have) his sliding down the road shiny-side-down. Crashing is just one possible result from riding a vehicle that doesn't balance itself.
    There are a lot of valuable, but subtle, riding tips that could be missed by a first pass through Mastering the Ride. As an example, in MSF classes, instructors always challenge riders to "look where you want to go," but Hough extends that further by saying "point your nose . . . in the direction you want to go." Using the fighter pilots' tactic of both looking in the intended target direction and keeping your eyes level to force a commitment to a direction change, this hint goes a long ways toward minimizing "target fixation." Just for this tip, I'm glad to have read the book.
    Hough's take on preoccupied drivers is accurate and usually far more politically correct than my own. When he describes the reckless homicide rear end crash that took Anita Zaffke's life in 2009, he doesn't provide more than the first name of the victim or much of a condemnation of the homicidal fingernail-painting driver. In a similar fashion, he refrains from seriously criticizing modern driving skills or in-vehicle distractions. Hough is less politically correct when he describes most US highway law enforcement tactics as being "revenue generating" rather than safety-oriented. Having been hooked by speed traps in some pretty silly locations and even sillier law enforcement legal interpretations, I'm totally on board with Hough in this regard.
    Hough mistakes bicycle habits or newbie fear for skill when he describes using two or three finger-braking as an advanced riding skill. If you watch the extras on the Faster DVD, you'll see that Valentino Rossi often uses all four fingers and I suspect Hough is rethinking his own braking skills after flipping Park's Triumph this past summer. There are times when two finger braking is more than enough, but making that a regular habit is a formula for reduced braking when you really need it and a busted finger or two when the bars slam to the ground in a right turn low-side. His take on advanced braking systems (ABS and linked) seems to be pretty "old guy biased," too.
    Where this book shines is in the street riding strategies. Hough describes a roadway that is in constant flux and a high state of hazard; just like the roads we all ride. His tips for evaluating traffic, turn radii and camber, road surfaces, and other road risks are valuable and expert. There are two appendix entries that the majority of American riders should read: "The Aging Rider" and "Travel." Since the average age of American motorcyclists is moving right along with the Boomer generation, we're all heading toward that moment when we have to consider being too old to ride. Goofy "solutions" like trikes and sidecars aside, it is simply a matter of time for all of us. Hough is close to that point himself and discusses aging and declining skills honestly and factually. His admonition that we all need to ride somewhere on our motorcycles is just good sense. Ride someplace you've always dreamed of visiting. 

Book Review: Modern Motorcycle Technology: How Every Part of Your Motorcycle Works

Modern Motorcycle Technology: How Every Part of Your Motorcycle Works

by Massimo Clarke, 2010

All Rights Reserved © 2012 Thomas W. Day
 
    Massimo Clarke is an Italian version of Cycle World's Kevin Cameron. Clarke has several motorcycle books to his name, was the technical editor of Motosprint, and is currently a Director for Assomotoracing. (If you can figure out what this organization does, please explain.) Clarke's grasp of technology is excellent and his ability to quickly describe the function, advantages and disadvantages, and evolution of machines and their parts is why this book is worth reading. The photographs and illustrations, on the other hand, are what make Modern Motorcycle Technology fun to look at and browse through.
    For me, this was not a cover-to-cover read. Instead, I skipped around to read about subjects that interested me at the moment; starting with "Intake and Exhaust." I followed that with going back to the beginning for "Engine Design" and "Structure and Function." While I have a decent basic understanding of internal combustion engine operation, there is no subtlety to what I know. When I'm troubleshooting, "suck, squeeze, bang, and blow" is about all the theory I use to stumble my way through solving engine problems. Clarke's detailed explanation of how the myriad of engine systems work and how the various one, two, three, and four cylinder configurations provide power, reduce vibration and instability, control heat, convert fuel to energy, and how design engineers compensate for the weaknesses of the basic design they have chosen was worth the price of the book. There are useful descriptions of the reliability sacrifices several engine designs make in the hunt for superior performance.
    If you ever wanted to know what manufacturing processes were used for the various parts of your motorcycle, this book is for you. If you're interested in more than surface-level motorcycle metallurgy, fuel system chemistry, and frame and suspension geometry and physics, this book is for you. If you want to know the real effect of exhaust and intake modifications on the design intention of your motorcycle, Clark has a whole chapter just for you. Transmission? Exhaust emissions? Frame geometry? Suspension parts? Wheels and tires? Electronic components? It's all there and with enough detail to provide a decent background on how each of these bike bits works.
    I can't decide if I'm going to keep my copy of Modern Motorcycle Technology in the bathroom/library or in the garage. It's good recreational reading, but it's also detailed enough to be useful as reinforcement to my service and owner's manuals, when I'm stuck troubleshooting some unusual problem. I might need two copies.

Book Review - Zen and Now

Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

by Mark Richardson, 2008
All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day

    There are a lot of books with Minnesota for scenery and there are a lot of Minnesota authors, but there are only a few books, from anywhere, that change lives. Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is, unquestionably, one of those books. Minnesota is prominent in the original Zen and there are more than a few references to our home state in Zen and Now. Pirsig's life began here, both his technical writing and teaching career had roots in his life in Minnesota, and, for a time, he came back to Minnesota to live and write. Richardson follows that path, while creating his own Zen trip on a grossly overloaded 1980's Suzuki dual purpose bike. Richardson starts at the beginning, 458 Otis Avenue in St. Paul, and ends on the street in San Francisco where Chris Pirsig was murdered. For many of Zen and Pirsig's fans, too much of the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance portion of the story ended, sadly, with the author visiting the site of Chris' death and some of the motivation for Pirsig's self-imposed exile.

    I stumbled on to Zen and Now looking for something to use as a road map reference to Pirsig's original journey. The map you see at the bottom of this review was what I found and it is one of the few illustrations in Richardson's book. There have been more than a few times in my life when I needed a Zen trip to clear out the crap that naturally clutters the remains of my mind. Lots of reminders have arrived lately to inform me that the capacity to actually follow the Pirsig path is nearly at an end for me. If I'm going to do it, it will have to be soon.
    Richardson was approaching his 42nd birthday when he began his Zen mapped trip. Richardson packed his wife and two sons off for a visit with family in England and began a well-researched retracing of Robert and Chris Pirsig's trip from Minnesota to California about the same time of year as the original journey. It only takes a few pages of Zen and Now to realize you are reading a midlife crisis book. Far too many motorcycle books are about this subject and after Richardson has a drunken, near-carnal moment with a 21-year-old girl he met at a motel in Lemmon, South Dakota I was pretty much tired of Mark Richardson and his story. His self-absorption and arrogance were too damn familiar and uncomfortable, maybe. The trick to writing a travel/self-realization book is exposure. Essentially, you have to pull down your pants, stick your ass out the window, and moon people you might have to face the next day. Richardson did exactly that with this segment and he continues to make himself less perfectly likeable throughout Zen and Now. The point in downgrading himself as a protagonist might have been to illuminate the humanity and complexity of the people he meets along the way. If it was, it worked. If it wasn't, it still worked. A lot of the people Pirsig touched in his book are illuminated and fleshed-out in Zen and Now. Richardson’s timing was excellent. Some of those characters didn’t live much past his last contact with them. He is a sensitive and insightful writer and it would have been a shame not to get to know these people a little better.
    A side "trip" bonus from Zen and Now is the background story of Robert Pirsig and his family. I knew just enough about Chris’ short life to pretty much completely misunderstand the tragedy of his story. Cursed by being identified by fools as “that whiny kid,” Chris and his brother, Ted, had a tough time with adolescence. It is exceptionally sad for me to think that Chris was saddled with that along with his dysfunctional father. I don’t remember ever considering his book character as whiny. I will always think of him as a brave, overwhelmed, loving kid struggling to save and regain his father’s love and life. If you know of a more courageous thing for a kid to do, I probably don’t have the stomach to hear about it.
    Part of Richardson’s purpose in writing Zen and Now was to introduce new readers to an American classic novel and to inspire the rest of us to read it again or to the end for the first time. It worked for me.

BOOK REVIEW: Shop Class as Soulcraft, An Inquiry into the Value of Work

by Matthew Crawford, 2009

All Rights Reserved © 2009 Thomas W. Day

This book could easily have been a lot like most R&R records. It opens with a lot of good stuff in the first pages and Crawford could have been satisfied with being a 20-page wonder. But that isn't the case. Matthew Crawford has thought a lot about Work, the value of doing things rather than having them done, and the effect outsourcing the most basic tasks of invention and maintenance has on the quality of the lives we live.

Crawford isn't just talking about doing real work for the sake of personal satisfaction. "The craftsman has an impoverished fantasy life compared to the ideal consumer' he is more utilitarian and less given to soaring hopes. But he is also more independent." Crawford suggests that people who know how to tighten a bolt, perform precision measurements, or make a useful piece of furniture are less likely to be suckers for a con from a salesperson, marketing schemes, a boss, or politicians.

Shop Class provides Insights on culture and technology on practically every page. One of my favorite bits was the comparison between Yamaha's Harley-copycat ad campaign for the Warrior's collection of Star Custom Accessories ("Life is what you make it. Start making it your own.") and Betty Crocker cake mixes.  General Mills found that the product was more desirable when the "cook" had to add a couple of her own ingredients, providing the satisfaction of pretending to be part of the creative process. Crawford links that to a range of simulated "creative" products such as "Build Your Own Bear" teddy bear stores, Japan and the USA's "customizing" features for cars and motorcycles, and a variety of "creative products" that require nothing more than desire and money to become involved in the "creative process." Convincing consumers that selection options are akin to invention and creativity was a clever marketing tactic, but that doesn't make it real. Shop Class is about the kind of effort it takes to "be the master of your own stuff." Tacking leather and chrome to an existing framework is as far from motorcycle maintenance as playing a video war-game is from battle.

Occasionally, Crawford engages in an academic complexity that limits access to some his best ideas to patient, well-educated readers; not the young people for whom his argument might educate and inspire. Crawford, sometimes, uses complicated language to explain simple concepts but he is at his best when his irritation with consumerism and ignorance overwhelms his academic background and he says what he thinks plainly and with power.

I believe a lot of the media's reviewers completely missed Shop Class's purpose. Crawford is not celebrating menial, physical work over the modern "knowledge worker." He's saying the latter sort of work has no "objective standards" of performance and "is not terribly demanding on the brain, or even requires the active suppression of intelligence." I once had a job where I was supposed to browse through all of the descriptions of medical device product failures and rewrite that text to disguise the failure similarities to prevent FDA from spotting a trend. Cleaning toilets is more satisfying than that kind of "work." Unclogging toilets, wiring homes and businesses, and a variety of skilled labor jobs pay better, even at the entry level, than many clerical "knowledge work" positions. If the work isn't intellectually valuable to the worker, it devolves to Crawford's definition, "Work is toilsome, and necessarily serves someone else's interests. That's why you get paid." 

Crawford argues that society is better served by skilled tradesmen than by docile clerks. This is probably his best message to the few young people who will read Shop Class. From consumerism and marketing tactics to "self-esteem building" education systems to job outsourcing to the decline of our national GNP, Shop Class is full of insights and observations. Crawford is opinionated and unafraid of pissing off a good percentage of the people who might read his book. His opinion of modern American management, for example, is that it is a destructive force that only serves to "push details down and pull credit up" while destroying motivation and creativity in phony "team building" exercises. He saves his most clear (and derisive) writing for when he goes after the management and marketing gurus who promote and worship this kind of self-serving activity. He describes the business-maligned "teamwork" concept, as it applies to modern management techniques as not having a "progressive character" and being amorally dependent on "group dynamics, which are inherently unstable and subject to manipulation." 

As with his beginning, Crawford concludes Shop Class with power, "What defenders of free markets forget that what we really want is free men." If you work on your bike or car, maintain your home, create any kind of art or product from raw materials, and read at a true college-educated level, you'll be reinforced in your activities and your opinions by Shop Class. If you think Mercedes did a cool thing when they removed the oil dipstick from their top-of-the-line luxury cars, you're going to feel a bit picked-on when Crawford explains to you that Mercedes engineers didn't think you were smart enough to deal with "idiot lights."

Shop Class as Soulcraft is the kind of book that could be read a few times over the course of several years and each reading might turn on a new light. Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it's an added bonus that Crawford uses motorcycles and motorcyclists to illustrate his key points. There are moments in Shop Class where Crawford makes it clear how he feels about motorcycles and the people who ride them, "People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it . . . "

Shop Class as Soulcraft is available from RiderWearhouse (www.aerostich.com).

Book Review: Down and Out in Patagonia, Kamchatka, and Timbuktu

by Dr. Gregory W. Frazier, 2014

All Rights Reserved © 2014 Thomas W. Day

While I've met, talked to, and even sat on a discussion panel with Dr. Frazier, Down and Out introduced me to more things about him and his past and his motorcycling adventures than I knew was available to learn. For one, who knew that Dr. Frazier was a Texas hippie? Not me. If I had, we'd have had completely different post-VBR-session beer drinking events. For two, Dr. Frazier's experiences with Harleys and Indians was a complete surprise to me.

A segment of the Motobooks press release has this to say about Dr. Frazier and his motorcycle history, "The first-ever, first-hand chronicle of Dr. Gregory W. Frazier's never-ending motorcycle ride. A little over 40 years ago, a man named Gregory W. Frazier got on his motorcycle, went for a ride, and never returned. He's still out there, circumnavigating the globe: exploring the jungles of Asia in the winter, trout fishing in Alaska in the summer, and covering all points in between during the rest of the year. He's been shot at by rebels, jailed b y unfriendly authorities, bitten by snakes, run over by Pamplona bulls, and smitten by a product of Adam's rib. He's circled the globe five times and has covered well over one million miles (and counting). During those past four decades, Dr. Frazier has been chronicling and photographing his around-the-world adventures, publishing 13 books on the subject (including one previous title with Motorbooks), the majority of which have been manuals for touring specific locations or general how-to-tour-by-motorcycle books. He has also produced 9 documentary DVDs, but until now, nothing in print has encompassed the entirety of his worldwide motorcycle adventures. . ."

I don't think any readable book could hope to have "encompassed the entirety of his worldwide motorcycle adventures," but this book does a pretty good job of explaining who Dr. Frazier is and where he's been. For $35 list ($26.15 on Amazon.com and $26.25 on Motobooks.com) you can read about Dr. Frazier's early exile from his family due to his motorcycle fixation and mediocre study habits (I never did figure out where the "Dr." comes from.) all the way to his inventive methods of financing his around-the-world adventures and his trip around the world with a handicapped passenger. In between, are his adventures, his motorcycle "education," and a lot more about the man than I've gleaned from his previous books. Fraizer is a complicated combination of humble aware-of-his-Ugly-Americanism tourist and a confident, in-crowd world traveler. He's hard not to like.

In 2010, Frazier retired from round-the-world travelling, which does not mean the same thing for him as it does for mortals, "I’m not done tasting the environments, economies and cultures of the world from atop a motorcycle. There are still plans to attempt reach distance places, as well as to return to some I want to see more of, like Colombia and Brazil in South America, as well as more of Eastern Asia and Africa. I merely plan to quit this foolish squandering of travel funds to transport motorcycles over water. 75% of the earth is water and the increasing costs and bureaucratic hassles associated with transporting motorcycles to the remaining 25% have been seriously cutting into my remaining travel years and project budgets."

Down and Out provides a lot details about the cost and complication of those "projects," but it would require a whole book to fill in the blanks if you are hoping that reading this book will put you in a position to fill Fraizer's shoes. As he says, more than once, he was fortunate to have been bitten by the travel bug at a rare moment when politics, economics, accessibility, and temperament all aligned to allow him to go the places he went relatively safely and inexpensively. Many of those places are unstable and insanely violent today. Even more of those places are specially hostile to Americans (although Fraizer often identified himself as a "Canadian"). So, reading Down and Out has an aspect of a time piece and a history book. Still, brave people are riding motorcycles in remote and hostile places every day and Dr. Gregory Fraizer has been an inspiration to many world travelers. This book will be one more stone in the staircase he has built to put us all on the roads around the world.