Lost And Literary

I'm thinking, again, about one of the many times I got "lost" in Rome last week.

In previous posts, I've said that sometimes I mount one of my bikes and let it decide where I ride.  For example, I might sling my leg over Arielle, my Mercian Audax, and without thinking about it, I find myself pedaling toward Connecticut or the North Shore.  Or I might slide my foot into a pedal of Tosca, my Mercian fixed-gear and the next thing I know, I'm on my way to the Rockaways or Coney Island.

So, I think I can blame the bike I rode in Rome for leading me in circles and through far corners of the city--and even outside of it.  The pretty, shiny red bike I rented from Bici & Baci (which I recommend) led me, after my tour of the Catacombs, though some near suburbs and back into the city, albeit a far corner.  

You never know who you'll run into in such places:

Yes, the mayor New Yorkers love or hate has familial roots in the country that sent some of my ancestors to America.  Now, I'm all for a liberal immigration policy, but it might've been nice to have someone like Trump (Really? Did I just say that?) running the country, even if only for a day, when Rudy's parents were ready to get on the boat.  

Then again, it might've been nice to have Trump--or, at least, the immigration policy he just endorsed--when his grandfather was about to be deported from Germany. (I have to hand it to him:  It takes some doing to get yourself kicked out of the country in which you were born and raised!)  If this country hadn't let him in, he would've gone to...I dunno...Canada?  Australia?

Anyway, I won't speculate (at least, not now, anyway) about what New York City and the USA might be without Giuliani or Trump.  Just a couple of minutes after seeing that sign for Rudy's relatives, I wandered into a section of drab apartment buildings where the streets had some interesting names:

I know that all of them spent time in Italy:  In fact, James Joyce spent much of his adult life there.  He once remarked that although Italy, at the time, was plagued with poverty and mismanagement, it at least had a nice climate and lively intellectual atmosphere.  His native country of Ireland, he said, was Italy without those two things.

Even if his assessment were off, I couldn't blame him for living in Italy.  Could you?

Two Writers And Their Bikes

I've assigned my students to read a group of poems from a diverse cross-section of poets classical and modern.  Those poems form a sort of cycle of the seasons.

Yesterday they read Neutral Tones by Thomas Hardy.

I read somewhere that he was an enthusisastic cyclist until late in his long life.  Somehow that doesn't surprise me:

Now doesn't he look so completely English with that bike?



On the subject of writer/cyclists, here's a photo of Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife on an early tandem in 1892:

Both photos came from Flavorwire.

Henry Miller's Best Friend

In an earlier post, I mused about the relative lack of serious literature about bicycles, bicycling and cyclists.  

What's puzzling is that such a void exists even with the number of well-known writers of the past 120 years or so who were cyclists.

Among them is Henry Miller:

From "The Daily Bike" in Adventure Journal

In My Bike And Other Friends, he wrote, "After a time, habituated to so many hours a day on my bike, I became less and less interested in my friends.  My wheel had now become my one and only friend.  I could rely on it, which is more than I could say about my buddies.  It's too bad no one ever photographed me with my friend.  I would give anything now to know what we looked like."