Reportage 1, Week 1

There’s an inherent coolness to Spoleto, different to the typical rainy day in the States. The sky, a puffy shade of gray, twirls, as it always does, with the promise of downpour. The birds twitter somewhere far off while a man gargles a microphone, even farther. To my left, a flock of old people (balding men with heads like cul-de-sacs, women with faces that collapse on their cheeks) bunch on patio chairs waiting for a mass bike ride. They talk to each other as one of the elderly ladies falls back into a chair with a groan straight from the movies.  I wonder what the man on the speaker is saying, his voice sounds hollow, grumbling but serious. I think of old war movies, the disastrous man on the microphone—I dream of emergency, while the old people laugh, brushing their knuckles on their bare knees, smoothing the hem of their shorts, while the sky continues swirling in its endless layer of gray, and the birds continue trying to out-sing the microphone. The maid sweeps by, a small pail of dirt in her hands, the bucket as green as the hills somewhere behind me, in front of me. She bends over and her black dress chokes her thighs. She dumps the gritty flecks over the branches of a freshly potted bush, and I’m reminded of Umbrian rain again. 

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 1

On the plane.

From Frankfurt to Rome.

1. Land like tiny knit squares--symmetrical rows of neutrals, browns, beiges and reds.
2. Grazing through cloud heads accented with gray--like white light cut through by the plane's wing.
3. Mountains, like great waves crashing through the clouds, frozen under the weight of their icy caps.
4. The clouds dabble and reveal some small blob of metropolis--all house tops and metallic cars.

Memory 1, Week 1

It sounds egotistical, but I never actually wanted to be smart. Back in the 90s, when everyone still decked themselves in denim coats and shoulder pads, my teachers would bend around the midriff of their zigzag print dresses to whisper, as if the shock could be too much to handle, that I was (did I know it) “gifted.” Looking back, the word "gifted" sounds like telling a child that at any moment their parents could return them for store credit, which was highly likely, since I was a child who liked to stain my mom's expensive white couch with tubs of vanilla ice cream. So, I was gifted. I was "something special," and once every year my school's counselor would take me from my classroom to place me in a concrete-brick box for ten minutes. A room sectioned off with a small table and a couple chairs across from one another, color indiscernible, everything tinged with the orange-red of a shotty incandescent bulb. It was in this room that they would make me read the same paragraph every year and ask me in multiple choice questions about the domestication of camels, about the history of the Middle East. And I, probably no more than seven for any of these occurrences, couldn’t help but think that domestication must was some code word for torture, boxed in the administrator’s eyes, circling my answers, hoping for any sign of approval in her never-budging smile. I never got one, and when I finished, they would take my test, envelope it, and send me back to class, lost in some crazy, burnt-orange dream.

Reading Journal 1, Week 1

In "Two in Campagna," Rome plays a role that initially appears minor, but because of its architectural significance, sparks in the narrator a sort of metaphorical yearning--a desire to obtain something, but a desire always eluded. In this case Italy is characterized by its nature's tendency to overthrow as well as to blanket the past successes--in this case, to grass over empirical greatness with natural dominance, to emphasize and become "Rome's ghost since her decease."  The speaker appears to grappling with his need to love the "you" in the piece, but ends up turning away--though I am unsure if that is of his own agency or through reminder of a sort of previous denial set by the "you" prior to the piece. I will say that there seems to be some sort of blame placed in the metaphorical image of Italy. The spider web for instance, some phenomenon marking the Italian landscape that the speaker notes for its elusiveness: "I touched a thought, I know, / Has tantalized me many times, / Like turns of thread the spiders throw" (6-8). And again he returns to that spider's thread in the closing stanza: "Where is the thread now? Off again! / The old trick!" (61-62). Thus likening his disdained heart to the Italian countryside, suggesting both a trickery and slipperiness to Italy's brilliance. 

Shelley, on the other hand, seems to take a more heightened approach to his portrayal of Italy. Italy is not unobtainable, but sinful, a place ruled by Sin and Death. It leads the narrator to a state of disgust, as he states that the only way for the Earth to be restored is by wiping it away. I can't help but to wonder how Italians approach Shelley, considering they lumped him into a museum with Keats; his disdain for the Italian community and landscape seems so overwhelming, it confuses me why they would even celebrate him in that fashion. 

First Impressions

Boxed cars zip through car lanes, weave and dodge in a dangerous race. Lush green hills and rows of gold tumble through the bus window. Something feels warm inside, like the wide faces of the red poppies dotting the ground--otherwise everything, all at once, seems foreign and familiar--car lot after car lot, like some great automobile machination, spewing rows of square cars, the ever-present bright blue graffiti traveling roadside on the medians. But different--a language I can't quite understand so that I grasp the big, bubbled letters of "Hot Boys" plastered over and over like something sacred, written across the concrete bridge and along glass panels marked with three black bird stickers. This will be home I realize. Home, which sounds like a sharp-tongued cashier, tapping my card on the countertop, grumbling about how I used a card for 90 cent acqua. Tastes like the rocky-taste of bubbles popping from my gassed water, how it settled warm and unappreciated on my tongue. Strange, unfamiliar, but then the smells, the feel of the cool, honest air rolling through the open window, coupled with the clang of Italian laughter and then the smoke from the pizza restaurant--about as American as a barbecue pit--if barbecue cooked in partially open courtyards and was prepared behind thick glass windows.