miscellany « Sarah Cypher

miscellany

Review of Republic bikes

Friday, January 27th, 2012

I usually don’t talk about bikes here. But I still consider myself an Oregonian at heart, so where book talk is present, you may also expect to hear about coffee, beer, or bikes. So here we are now, talking about the build-your-own-online Republic bike sensation, between a conversation about typos and one about Cormac McCarthy.

Disclosure: I am not a hipster. I am not a roadie. I try to balance cost, style, and practicality, and know a thing or two about all three: I use a bike as a primary mode of transportation (yes, even here in Texas), have built my own bike from scratch before, and do most of my own repairs. I got a fixed gear because my partner wanted one, too, and she will not ride with me if I can shift gears on a hill and leave her in the dust.

At $450 plus shipping, a full, new bike is a great price. And let’s face it, getting to pick your colors is nice. So is the convenience of getting a bike all in one piece (more or less) rather than piecemeal and wondering if the 25.4mm seatpost is right, or if you need a 1″ or a 1 1/8″ stem. I ended up wondering about this, anyway, but more on that in a minute.

If you are new to fixed gear riding, don’t plan to race your new bike, plan to lock it up anywhere, and have the willingness to upgrade a few parts as needed, then you will agree with me that the Republic-bike-haters need to lay off the espresso. Overall, it’s a fun bike, with the following modifications:

I swapped the saddle for a $17 Nashbar clearance saddle with nice lines and a cutout;
I swapped the pedals for $50 SPD mountain pedals, since I already use them for my other bike;
I ended up putting a $30 90mm +/- 7-degree Soma stem on both my and my partner’s bike, because the original stem is ridiculously long for small and extra-small bikes.

I have only three gripes. One is that when I ride the bike as a one-speed, and am on a hill or otherwise putting a lot of power into the drivetrain, something clanks softly 2-3 times per pedal stroke. I’m guessing it is a cheap freehub. I could replace it with a $100 White Industries one, but now we’re defeating the point of a $450 bike. When I finally turn the rear wheel around and ride it as a true fixed gear, the noise will go away.

The second gripe is that, yes, it’s heavy. It is the same weight as my aluminum Klein Shimano 105 road bike loaded up with tools and water. This will make me stronger, yes, but if I see an aluminum 25.4 seatpost in the right length sometime in the future, I will replace my steel one. And maybe someday get lighter wheels–but again, at that point, I will be looking at Bianchi Pistas instead. (Note: some 2009 reviews criticized Republic for using high-ten steel in the frame–heavy and rusty–but the new frames seem to be cromoly steel = better and lighter).

Finally, the folks at Republic bike don’t figure that their customer base will be making as many tweaks to the components as I have. The bikes are user-serviceable, with a a little guesswork. The spec list on their site has a few holes (e.g., leaving out the stem size, which is 25.4, the bar size, etc.). For other questions, though, they were friendly on the phone, and I imagine I could call to double-check a part with them if needed.

In conclusion: The bike is comfortable. I love riding it. My legs are getting stronger on San Antonio’s hills. There are other fixie options with higher-quality but slightly more expensive basics, I know, but I would be likely to make these same modifications to any new bike, and Republic has a good system going–inexpensive bikes in fun colors that make my wife happy in the midst of a grueling semester of school. And any day on a bike is better than one in a chair, so I am happy, too.

The design...

...and build!

Tags: fixie reviews, miscellany, republic bike
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To love better.

Monday, November 7th, 2011

Flowers from E.

I’m 31 today. Every birthday, I write wishes for the coming year on a slip of paper and then stuff it inside a tiny metal owl on my desk. One of my wishes this year is to love better.

I mean love everything better. Not pick it apart as a corporate conspiracy or a self-replicating cultural mistake. Not rush to find the right word for it. As I research the next novel, I am more aware than ever that knowledge requires words, categories, differences, hierarchies. The problem, however, is that when used without perspective or care in politics, a little bit of knowledge does nothing but underscore the differences between people.

The very best emotion you can bring to the act of acquiring knowledge is curiosity. Any other emotion creates a bias. Art doesn’t like bias, either–though there is a fundamental difference between art and knowledge. You can’t jump straight from knowledge of a subject to an artistic rendering of it. Art happens when you shut your eyes and smear away the words, and quietly observe what impressions remain. Good art requires knowledge, but the quietness and listening… Those are acts of love. An attitude of love is a gateway to art.

For my birthday this year, my parents gave me a piece of art that I admired at San Antonio’s Uptown Art Stroll; I loved that it rendered the image of St. George–beloved from the holy icons of my childhood in the Orthodox Church–in a collage using found art and warm, earthy acrylics. The saintly meets the earthly here, and somehow, it speaks to this same mysterious gateway between mind and spirit.

Art from Mom: St. George by Jorge Garza

This year, I wish for lots of quietness and listening, those two loving midwives of the creative soul. I wish it for everybody. I also wish:

To look at art more often.
To resume Spanish.
To see my family as often, or more so.
To make the trips I have in mind.
To master the art of attitude adjustments. (See above.)

What else? I always wish for writing to go well. Loving better is a means to two ends: a happy day-to-day home life, and a happy year-to-year growth of my writing skills. Last week I spoke to a literary agent about what I can do better, and she advised that I keep asking myself, “Why speculative fiction?” My training is in realism, but my heart lies in the imaginative power of storytelling. This year, I want to get better at finding the gateway between knowledge and art.

In the same vein, here are a few lines from Jane Hirshfield’s new collection of poetry.

FRENCH HORN

For a few days only,

the plum tree outside the window

shoulders perfection.

No matter the plums will be small,

eaten only by squirrels and jays.

I feast on the one thing, they on another,

the shoaling bees on a third.

What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction?

…

Tags: miscellany, Writing
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Who’s Controlling YOUR Internet?: A Review of the Book You Don’t Know You Need to Read

Friday, October 28th, 2011

Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack L. Goldsmith

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Written accessibly by a Harvard law professor and one from Columbia, this is the kind of “new history” that should probably, soon, become an essential part of our standard education about the world. It explains how the Internet came to be, why it failed as a truly borderless space, and how and why meatspace issues such as censorship, commerce, politics, and even warfare have begun to duplicate themselves in cyberspace.

Although published in 2006, this book is worth talking about now for two reasons. First, it’s interesting. I have been studying power and coercion for a while, and these ought to be issues relegated to the physical world, a.k.a., meatspace. The body is the ultimate place of enforcement. Without the threat of pain or imprisonment, there is no ultimate consequence to lend force to a demand. The Internet’s early popularity in the late 80s and early 90s was due in part to the recognition that cyberspace was different: there was no such thing as a painful consequence. When people organized themselves there, they did it anarchically, and the system worked because no one could aggregate disproportionate force.

Which brings me to the second reason why the book is important. The Internet’s history ought to be taught in classrooms: It has founders, inventors, competing systems of governance, and international drama. For instance, the Internet’s early anarchic structure failed when the U.S. government reasserted its rights to the root servers (citing that the Internet’s invention in the 60s was funded by a DARPA contract). The reason was money. Capitalism. Now is an opportune time to mention that I believe that history, as a course of study, exists to give us perspective on why we do what we do, and why our environment looks the way it does; as opposed to just acting on guesswork, assumption, and blind tradition. And given this premise, I will also voice a supposition that if this particular history is excluded from public school curricula, the cause is not mere oversight. As long as the Internet is a cornerstone of U.S. commerce, its historical, anarchic roots are a threat to the cultural assumption that unregulated capitalism is the only route to freedom.

As Dave Clark, one of the Internet’s founding minds, says: “We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.” And for over thirty years, this was the Internet’s credo. Without ideal anarchy, the Internet would not exist as it does today.

If you’re reading this review, I’m guessing you spend a fair chunk of time on the Internet. As long as the Internet is a tool that consumes a great deal of our lives, influences our understanding of the world, and can fail or be forcibly removed from our lives, it is worth understanding–therein lies the ability to judge fair and worthy use from trivial, stupid, or malicious use.

Note: I may change my rating to five stars after finishing the book, but I have not yet finished digesting the authors’ premise that the nation-state is in fact essential to the Internet’s stability. From a pragmatic standpoint (which is perhaps the only relevant one), they are likely correct. But my bias is toward idealism, and I would yet like to find some possibility for a stable, long-term form of Dave Clark’s manifesto on cyberspace.

View all my reviews

Tags: Book reviews, miscellany, work in progress
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Some goals, and the not-quite WIP

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

Since finishing SHAHIDA in April (and again in August), I’ve been researching the next novel. It is a low-level obsession, always at a simmer, which is how I know the idea has the staying-power to keep me interested in the project for the next two to three years. Still lacking an outline, or even a logline, I cannot call it my work-in-progress yet: But I can finally identify the obsession. It’s that America has been at war for ten years, but until I met my wife, who is a decorated participant therein, it was easy to, well… forget, most days, that we are fighting.

From this side of the gun (or console), why does war look so much like peace? Should it?
Is it a war between the United States and al-Qaeda, or between the nation-state and a borderless state?
What does victory look like? How do we know for sure if we’ve won?
Who is responsible for this quasi-amnesia, and is it needed to win a war on terror?
What does Internet freedom have to do with it?

I know the standard answers to these questions. Those answers fit on placards. The longer versions fit in op-eds. But there is a dystopia, a speculative novel, something, simmering between the lines, too. My goal is to outline the story soon, and then fill a few more months with research; I will say more later, but for now, I trust there is an important effect on human identity, and therefore relationships, that matters here. And that effect is worth a novel.

Besides that goal, here are the others in no order: Finish the marathon on Nov. 13. Stay on schedule at work. Plant some flowers around the tree in the backyard. Find a damn agent, finally. Walk the dogs in this beautiful warm autumn weather. Sleep well two nights in a row. And life is good; therefore, to live it in awareness that it is not good for everyone, and write something that might make a difference.

Tags: miscellany, work in progress
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Defining marriage, one friend at a time.

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Last week began with a phone call in the dark hours of Monday morning and ended 1,233 miles away in Miamiville, Ohio. In other words, it began with a death and ended in a wedding; and along this arc between one human experience and another, I felt a Merlin-esque sense of aging backwards, of seeing still-young friends gathered in hope and celebration while at precisely the same time, my wife attended her 48-year-old aunt’s funeral.

A friend says that the more you cry, the more room you make in your head for information. He was trying to put a silver lining on being a frazzled medical student–but there is some general wisdom here, too. As two people who do not often cry, my wife and I felt sort of blown open by loss and love. And this is good. Because life is short, and it’s hard to remember exactly what love is, and all the forms it takes; but when I found myself crying at Mari’s bedside and several days later at Faith’s wedding, moved by emotions I couldn’t articulate, my mind kept traveling back to a wordless sense of how much I loved my wife and how much we depend on each other’s love. And from that, I felt more empathy than I thought possible for Mari’s bereaved family, and for Faith and Travis’s joyful new marriage.

As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about the human experience. And I probably spend more time than is good thinking about politics and arguments and fairness and what “ought to be done.” But weddings, funerals, reunions, babies, journeys, dreams at night; we can’t control those, but they remind us of ourselves in relation to other people. Faith and Travis’s minister knows this, too, because after the “I do’s,” he asked for a series of “We will’s” from the audience; e.g., “We will recognize their union,” “We will listen without judgment when they need us.” Modern marriage creates vows between all people in a community, not just the bride and groom, because those ties will be important as life gives us more and more events beyond our control.

My wife and I, we had no wedding. DADT existed at the time, and DOMA still exists. Sometimes I hedge on talking about my personal life, out of fear that when I say “wife” the person I’m talking to will startle a little behind their eyes and I’ll see it; and then have to embark on a lot of aimless chattering while they figure out whether their opinion of me is different because I’m not as heterosexual as they had assumed. (It happens about 30 percent of the time. And it’s always uncomfortable.) But this weekend at the wedding I couldn’t help talking about my wife because I missed her so much, and in return, I was met with the most commonplace and kind responses. People asked me about her. We talked about our spouses, our jobs, our homes.

And likewise, 1,233 miles away at the funeral, my wife’s family asked her where I was and said to say hi.

We are married, one friend and family member at a time, every day. And this is what I want to say: There is nothing more political than living in your own skin honestly.