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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Byrne's keen-eyed blogs transformed into book

Reviewed by: Wayne Tefs

21/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Bicycle Diaries

By David Byrne

Viking, 297 pages, $32.50

DAVID Byrne, co-founder of the pop group Talking Heads and resident of New York, likes to travel around cities he visits on a fold-up bicycle.

It affords him a view of things that is "faster than a walk, slower than a train, often slightly higher than a person."

It's a good place to gather information about humanity's most advanced cultural expression, cities, "like navigating the collective neural pathways of some vast global mind."

But cyclists be warned: this is not a book about cycling. Byrne confesses to having no interest in the bicycle per se, has never worn Spandex, and sports as head protection a skateboard helmet.

He's a commuter on a global scale. The journey is not what he's after, at least as understood by serious cyclists.

His book is transformed blog entries, 90-some in 274 pages, most of them short. He has a keen eye. In the United States, he spots telling signs and billboards, bits of Americana that reflect its crumbling inner cities, what he calls its "postapocalyptic landscape."

Wonderful photographs supplement his words: decaying Detroit mansions, a horrific Pittsburgh skyscape, dense coal smoke and foundry effulgence. It is, as he says, "visceral and heartbreaking."

When he turns to the larger world, he makes a number of acute observations. Ruminating on how blacks in Zimbabwe now claim compensation for land lost under a previous regime, Byrne asks, "Can everyone simply make history go backward when it's their time in power?"

The International style of architecture, he muses, replaced the singular monuments of earlier eras with "a vast global conceptual monument," sterile steel and glass structures, forming "one city, in many locations."

There's a lot of New York in this book. Like many who live there, Byrne assumes that NYC is not only America's most important cultural centre (dubious, perhaps defensible), but the only one (total arrogance). The imperialist boot fits many heels, including Byrne's.

At times he makes assertions, however tantalizing on the surface, that are merely claims with no scientific basis or theoretical support: "There needs to be sufficient [population] density for it [creativity] to develop."

Often, whacky leaps are made between science, where a word like instinct means something specific, and sweeping social reference: "Some tiny part of our DNA tells us how to make and maintain places like this [marketplace kiosks] in the same way that genetic codes tell the body how to make an eye."

Because it originates as a blog, the difficulty with the book is that it is snippets, bits of commentary that flit from one place -- one subject -- to another at rapid speed and without much useful analysis of any one thing.

Neither cycling guide, social history, nor travelogue, yet at times one or all of these together, it's a peculiar literary collage.

Its photographs intrigue but its text frustrates. Many observations are informative, a few tease the reader's intellect, but mostly they do not push into meaningful cultural or social analysis.

They remain the work of a pop artist, surface and superficial, not sufficiently insightful or challenging. If they were not penned by Byrne, they'd be gathering dust in the bottom drawer of a literary agent's desk.

Winnipeg writer Wayne Tefs is a serious cyclist whose most recent book is the short story collection Meteor Storm.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 21, 2009 H7

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