Previously Posted Enthusiasms

	Grant Peterson & Rivendell Bicycle Works
	I spent all of 1991 devoted to one thing: Riding my Bridgestone RB-1 around the San Francisco Bay Area, while following the maps and ride suggestions I found in a book called Roads to Ride. I didn't know it at the time, but, curiously, both the bike and the book were the work of the same man, Grant Peterson. Today Grant is the head of Rivendell Bicycle Works. Rivendell is a mail order house that sells bicycles and parts that Grant designs, as well as other cycling gear. Since I started riding, the bicycle has fallen victim to high-tech fashion. I think modern bikes are ugly. I see very few that I'd want to ride. Rivendell has defied the trends, avoiding nonsense while making a stand for common sense. And their bikes are beautiful. Anybody can buy from Rivendell, but for only $20 a year you can also become a member, which brings you the Rivendell Reader, a catalog, and member prices.

	"A Reader's Manifesto" by B.R. Myers
	One day, shortly before publication of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a friend asked me which fiction writers I liked. I told her I'd stopped reading fiction a long time ago because it bored me. I felt that, accompanying the general decline in literacy, we were witnessing the death of the novel. I didn't see any up-and-coming writers who I thought had much value. Given my complaints, she thought I might enjoy the book A Reader's Manifesto by B.R. Myers. She lent it to me. I did read it, and reread it and reread it and reread it. Meyers' point is that most contemporary fiction is pretentious and unskilled. He takes five highly regarded modern authors--Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, David Guterson--and skewers them. It's one of the smartest and truest books I've ever read. One of the funniest, too.

	Stephen Gaskin
	One day in 1973, as I was hitchiking along Highway 1, a big school bus drove by. Somebody on the bus threw a rolled-up poster at me. I retrieved the poster, which was an advertisement for a talk by somebody named Stephen Gaskin. "Oh," I thought to myself. "Another lame hippie guru." I tossed the poster aside and resumed hitchhiking. Two years later I came across one of Stephen's books. It took me awhile to get comfortable with the hippie argot he was using, but once I did I saw that he was not lame at all. He was a highly intelligent man, genuinely trying to help a bunch of people by talking to them in their own language. (A decent thing to do, you know.) He's still doing it today. Many a time I've read something he's said and thought, "that's good," and then realized that it was a rephrasing of something from one of the ancient wisdom texts, but said in a way to make it fresh and real.

Charlie Musselwhite

One morning in summer 2005, while at a shuttle bus stop in front of a hotel in Reno (I'd been there to give a reading), I suddenly realized that the man standing next to me was the bluesman Charlie Musselwhite. Decades earlier his bride-to-be, Henrietta, had hired me to work at their wedding, which took place in a blues club in North Beach. He didn't remember me--I wouldn't have expected him to--but he is a kind man, and we had a pleasant conversation on the way to the airport. I think it's fair to say that most of today's roots players--especially white roots players--learned their stuff from records and CDs. Charlie Musselwhite actually grew up and learned the music in the land where it was born. There aren't many like him. Levon Helm and Dr. John are two others that come to mind. Rather than stick with tradition, though, Charlie has expanded the music's reach, but as someone who knows its core.

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