Contributors’ Dream Machines

 

 

 

STEVEN E. ALFORD teaches at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He has dithered frequently in print about Paul Auster, is currently shepherding Two Wheels to Freedom: Discovering Motorcycle Culture (edited along with Gary Kieffner and Susan Buck) into fame and publication fortune, and is on the board of the one and only online, refereed motorcycle journal (ijms.nova.edu). In the occasional absence of hurricane-force winds but always in sauna-like temperatures, he rides a Honda VTX 1800C and a Triumph Sprint ST (but not at the same time).

RANDALL E. AUXIER went over the handlebars of his Honda XL-70 at age fourteen while jumping a hill in the river bottoms near Memphis, and learned the hard way (the only way he learns anything) to pull up on the handlebars when taking a jump at thirty-five m.p.h. He also learned how much an XL-70 weighs in Earth gravity when multiplied by thirty-two feet per second squared, times twenty feet, leading him to an interest in physics. While being removed from the area on the back of Tommy Arendale’s Kawasaki 175, he was conceiving of his essays for this volume, clutching his cracked ribs, and silently thanking God he had never read Bernie Rollins’s essay on helmet laws. Because of this gap in his reading, he lived to teach philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.

CRAIG BOURNE has been a philosopher at the University of Cambridge for far too long. Realizing this, he decided at twenty-three to have a premature mid-life crisis, developed a fetish for Italian motorcycles, and can often found wandering the streets in tight colorful leathers. When he isn’t risking life and limb on a Ducati, he likes to throw himself from planes. He hopes one day to be able to combine these two activities in the greatest stunt the world has ever seen. But when he’s not daydreaming, he likes to play the guitar and the drums. Although his neighbors are not too convinced about his evident musical genius, they are often very encouraging about his genuine potential as a stuntman (see above). To find out more and to read some of his work in metaphysics, logic and the philosophy of science, visit http://cpb.blueorange.net, which can also be found by following links from his page on the Cambridge University Philosophy Faculty website at http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk.

FRED FELDMAN is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he has been on the faculty since 1969. He is the author of Pleasure and the Good Life: On the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (2004), Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (1997), Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death (1992), Doing the Best We Can: An Essay in Informal Deontic Logic (1986), and several other books and more than seventy papers in professional journals such as The Philosophical Review, The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Analysis, Noûs, Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. He is perhaps best known for his work in connection with the Bard College Motorcycle Club, where he was a founding co-president in 1961. He’s also known to the Providence, Rhode Island, Fire Department for his participation in a minor conflagration involving a motorcycle in his living room in 1967. He wishes to assure everyone that he no longer runs his motorcycles in his home.

SUZANNE FERRISS is a professor of English at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a sprawling urban wasteland with few twisties but a year-round riding season. Her publications include two volumes on the cultural study of fashion—On Fashion and Footnotes: On Shoes—as well as A Handbook of Literary Feminisms and Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. She also helps manage the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies (ijms.nova.edu). When riding her 2005 Yamaha FZ1—in Liquid Silver, the fastest color—she wears a protective mesh jacket, boots with stylishly functional platform heels, and a full-face helmet that exactly matches her bike.

JON GOLDSTEIN is professor of economics at Bowdoin College located in Brunswick on the Maine coast. He has published studies on the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets. In the 1980s, he testified in six state legislatures against helmet law legislation and was active in Maine’s bikers’ rights movement. He has ridden motorcycles since 1969 and currently owns a 1958 Harley-Davidson FLH, a 1973 Norton 750 Combat Commando, and a 1986 BMW R80. Once he led a group of fifty hard-core Harley riders through Freeport, Maine (famous for the outdoor retailer L.L. Bean) destined for a biker event. Upon coming across a busload of disembarking tourists, he pulled the procession over to ask for directions to L.L. Bean and received the expected incredulous stares from the tourist citizenry.

CAROLYN M. GRAY was the assistant to the VP of Marketing for Eaglemark, a subsidiary of Harley-Davidson Financial Services, from 1998–1999. During this time she experienced her first Daytona Bike Week, and since then has been in training to become the next cole slaw wrestling champion. She should be ready for her first match in 2008. Carolyn also has a B.A. in creative writing from Columbia College, Chicago, and completed the Gonsoulin Labor Leadership Program for union organizers at DePaul University.

GRAHAM HARMAN is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. He sometimes bears an uncanny resemblance to the Peter Fonda character in Easy Rider. He is also the author of three books: Tool-Being (2002), Guerrilla Metaphysics (2005), and Heidegger Explained (forthcoming).

David Jones teaches philosophy somewhere in Georgia. There’s speculation he may be teaching at some elite institution, but in reality he probably teaches at some nondescript state school such as Kennesaw State University. This much we seem to know: his publications are mostly in the areas of Chinese and Greek philosophy. Inside sources have it that his current book project, The Fractal Self: Intimacy and Emergence in the Universe is with the Hawai`i based biologist John L. Culliney. Reports indicate the book is a cross-fertilization study between complex biological systems and ancient Greek, Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist approaches to self-nature relationships. In addition, it is believed he has edited four books, with one forthcoming from Open Court (Contemporary Encounters with Confucius). His work appears in an array of journals and book chapters that have such bizarre titles as “Toward an Ecology of Compassion: Homo Specialis, Animality, and Buddha-Nature,” “Ecological Self-so-ing in the Liezi,”and “The Empty Soul: Nietzsche, Nishitani, and the Good” they’re probably made up! Although perhaps as apocryphal, he’s the founding editor of East-West Connections and allegedly was the East-West Center’s 2004 Most Distinguished Alumnus. Although no one remembers having seen or spoken to him, he received his Ph.D. in Comparative Philosophy from the University of Hawai‘i. There have been, however, occasional sightings of someone looking like the man in his account bathed in the shadowy light of a Hawai’i moon riding a Sportster with throaty chrome pipes and an incandescent Harley Davidjones on its black tank.

GARY L. KIEFFNER is a doctoral student in the Borderlands History Ph.D. Program, University of Texas at El Paso, where he also teaches U.S. history. He serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Motorcycle Studies, available online at www.ijms.nova.edu.

Kieffner has actively participated in the motorcycling community through riders’ civil rights organizations for many years and has ridden on the open road forever. He rode his current two-wheeler, a 1992 Harley-Davidson XL, for 169,000 miles before completing the construction of a Volkswagen trike—a five-year project—in 2004. All of his friends are named after animals, anatomical parts, or inanimate tools.

KERRI MOMMER, Ph.D., (linguistics, Northwestern), is a philosophy book editor in Chicago. Her bike is a pure blue Schwinn. A favorite destination is the Black Hills of South Dakota because she finds that in the shadows of the Ponderosa pines and under the gaze of Crazy Horse, it all becomes clear.

CYNTHIA PINEO is a book editor who enjoys web design and convincing people to write scholarly essays on odd topics. After reading Randy Auxier’s chapter about coffee houses and biker bars, she realized that her dream machine is Cowboy’s vintage 49E Hydra-Glide, 61ci, V-twin, medium compression, four-speed, restored to the original peacock blue. She might restore it to Kool-Aid purple instead of peacock blue, but that’s probably her unfortunate coffeehouse aesthetic talking.

ALAN R. PRATT is a Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. He writes about nihilism as well as motorcycle culture. Black Humor: Critical Essays, The Critical Response to Andy Warhol, and The Dark Side: Thoughts on the Futility of Life reflect his interest in Nothing. As a nod to Florida’s new, relaxed handlebar law, he recently added eighteen-inch ape hangers to his ride. “It’s impractical and uncomfortable,” he reports,” but there’s a price to be paid to be cool.”

GRAHAM PRIEST is Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Australia is a great place to ride a bike. He is also Arché Professorial Fellow at the University of St. Andrews. Scotland is not a good place to ride a bike—unless you are a masochist. He has written lots of papers on logic, and other areas ranging from the foundations of quantum mechanics to sexual perversion. He has also written a number of books, including Beyond the Limits of Thought. Many of his friends tell him that riding a motor bike is beyond the limits of thought. (Shows little imagination.) When not doing philosophy or bike riding (not incompatible activities), he enjoys practicing karate-do, and wondering what on earth that has to do with Zen.

BERNARD E. ROLLIN is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Biomedical Sciences, and Professor of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University. He acquired his first motorcycle at age eighteen, and has since logged a quarter of a million motorcycle miles, 90,000 on his current Harley, a 1986 low-rider, or FXRS to the cognoscenti. His son, however, has been riding since age four, when Rollin obsessively forced him to drive a cycle with training wheels. Rollin is the author of fourteen books, the latest of which is Science and Ethics, published by Cambridge University Press, over 300 articles, and has given over a thousand invited lectures in twenty-eight countries. A weight-lifter, he has bench-pressed over five hundred pounds.