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Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Eccentric bicyclist and author Alfred Jarry turned Paris on its head:
Bound by rods to their machines, the crew of a five man bicycle hurtle across Europe and Asia in a grotesquely dehumanised race against an express train. The riders, who are paced by jet cars and flying machines, reach speeds of 300 kilometres an hour thanks to their diet of Perpetual Motion Food, a volatile mixture of alcohol and strychnine. One of the riders dies in the saddle, an event hardly noticed in the farcical pandemonium of technology in which the race ends after ten thousand miles. The race is a key episode in 'The Supermale', a French novel written in Paris in 1902, which speculates on how our minds and bodies may be overwhelmed by technology. The author, Alfred Jarry, was fascinated by bicycles, and they often appeared in his barbed and often shocking writings. He was also notorious for his wild eccentricity and his outrageously unconventional cycling.Read more about Jarry on BikeReader.com, which also has a bicycle-related short story by Jarry. |