Ship on Land: a City Bike

"Lison" - a city bike

Bicycle culture in New York City comes in all shapes and sizes. I only began riding last fall after my friend David rescued and rehabilitated "Lison," pictured above, and gave her to me.

Riding a bike is fun. It's zero-carbon emission. It gets you around. It's exercise.

The city opens up under the wheels of a bike. The encounter with the city changes. You move under your own power as in walking, but your range is increased. The subway, like an airplane or a submarine, simply removes you from one place and deposits you in another. I ride on the surface of the city.

There is a Brooklyn neighborhood five blocks in size situated to the north of the Manhattan bridge, separated from the east river by a cogeneration plant. The cobblestone streets still retain trolly tracks, an archaeological rarity in this country, after the car companies paid to pave them under early in the last century. Quiet three story homes sit in the hum of enormous stores of recently generated power. At the back of the neighborhood, on a hill, beyond a gated drive, is a white, wooden mansion. Seated on my bicycle, I imagine the house belonged to a ship's captain, because of its posture, its whiteness, its dated architecture. But more likely it housed a merchant. The house is both decrepit and dignified. Below, there are docks, mechanized and unreachable. Behind me the thrum of electical power, and the loom of the bridge.

In Defense of the Roman Republic

Reading Garibaldi's Defense of the Roman Republic, 1848-9 by George Macaulay Trevelyan.

This is the first volume of a trilogy on Garibaldi, the hero of the modern Italian state. I knew very little about this period in European history, only remembering that Germany and Italy's unification came about quite late.

Trevelyan is writing in 1906, so there is a double layer to the history here as we are exposed to his distinctly pro-republican British values. The history is written as a swashbuckling adventure, following Garibaldi as he takes to the sea as a young man, ending up in Uruguay and Brazil fighting the Portuguese empire and defending republicanism with a band of expat legionnaires while keeping the political flame lit in his heart for the day he will fight for Italy.

That day comes in 1848 when the Pope has left Rome in the face of a republican revolution, losing his temporal power over central Italy and fleeing to King Ferdinand of Naples. Trevelyn charts the rise of Garibaldi's mythical status among the Roman people, and tries to make the Italian "emotions" ring in the cold spirits of his British readers, the "northern lords of the oceans."

The French, Austrians, Neopolitans, and Spanish (the Powers) all vie to be the first to destory the Roman Republic and restore the pope to Rome. Trevelyn argues that though the battle was lost before it began, the sacrifices made in the defense of Rome reignite the dormant spark of Roman pride and self-worth, and made Rome againt he heart of an Italian state that wouldnt rise until several decades later.