Week Four: Memory

Right there, right there between the fountain curling toward the sky in bends of stone and a trashcan glistening with empty beer bottles, is where I said scusi for the first time and he didn't respond, just locked feet straight ahead--his desire, a Modern Love class taught me--and sloped his attention down, toward the German restaurant with Italian translations. Beside Zeppelin, where a woman slid my fifty cents across the counter grease, refusing my money, a man stood in Greek lettering, patterned by previous tourism. I bought that shirt, too, five years ago in a shop that looked up at the acropolis. Since, I've forgotten the translation. I thought, I should ask him, should bridge all of this together, but I speak English and he speaks Italian, and together how do we translate ancient Greek? We fall into squares here. The city slopes down, always down, and my writing sucks. I've got nothing. Why isn't this my triggering town? I like it too much. It's exactly what I expected, what I wanted. You can't widen roads in Rome. You're dealing with history. Italian is the vulgar in Latin picked out, split open, spliced back together with monuments and need. Let's go to Monteluco, at night, alone, and find Hell.

Week Four: Junkyard Images 1-4

The hotel lobby casts itself into antiquity, or tries to. It cinches the curtains--bound at the waist, Sharon Olds pricks my ear--with heavy tassels, hangs a fake Rembrandt-style on the wall, a girl with blunt bangs watching over her sleeping brother and us, gilded mirrors reflecting a stone, purposefully warn bust. They try to snap their lobby into place beside the history of their country, a wash of dull orange, beige. Beneath a fake marble table, red splinters into blue, pink, and green. Two birds puffed with the colors of the wild scream at each other from within their cage.

Outside the Duomo, a girl splits a path between cameras and backpacks with her bike. She is of another time, poised on the seat, hands curled around the bars, pixie cut, flowered skirt, and knee-high socks. Leading the way, a basket stuffed with six rolls of toilet paper.

At dinner, sitting on a porch overlooking pillars and metal gates drawn down over closed stores, everything stained with teenage rebellion and reclaiming in the form of spray painted names and lions, I have just finished three courses of cheese, pasta, beef, and one glass of red, the remains spread across the tablecloth. A woman with hair that barely brushes her ears leads three preschool-aged children to us, each marching to a different melody, one skipping. They stop at the head of our table and lift dessert menus over their heads to the sound of our laughter.

I am taken by the Duomo's kaleidoscope skin, the way it erupts, pulling terracotta toward the sun. On the back, though, someone has branded the scaffolding with a stylized flamingo, peach and fuchsia feathers, throat, toes. He is origami, this foreign bird, his neck twisted to peer up a the church.

Week Four: Reportage

It doesn't take long for routine to settle back in to the cracks you develop in a new culture. Every morning now, I wake up at 7am and get dressed, balanced on one food between the puddles on our bathroom floor. By 8, I deposit myself and my laptop in Vincenzo Art Cafe, greeted with a polite Buongiorno and half-eyes by Ishara, a mousy bartender with an asymmetrical haircut and a penchant for wandering past the cafe late at night while I a, perched on the ledge outside waiting for the only male bartender to close the building and wander late night Spoleto with me. In the morning, though, long before friction beneath a midnight bell, Ishara offers flat-faced cappuccino and the almond pastry I have learned the name for, a tiny moving circle on my tongue, twice already. Always the shooting steam sound of caffe and tea, strings of people held up on the counter only by the lip of their caffeine. Here, it is the same as anywhere else. Coffee and morning chatter, polite only because the ones behind the counter have offered you sanity. At these extreme hours, always the same people: the woman with the hair tips tinged teal; the elderly man in full, checkered suit, fedora over grey cropped hair, and a pocket watch. He watches the pigeons through the window.

Week Four - Original Prompt

Owen sleeps in a mound of blankets between our feet. Henry sleeps in my arms. All the way across the Atlantic, there is turbulence; bulkheads shake, glasses tinkle, galley latches open and close. We are moving from Boise, Idaho, to Rome, Italy, a place I've never been. When I think of Italy, I imagine decadence, dark brown oil paintings, emperors in sandals. I see a cross-section of a school-project Colosseum, fashioned from glue and sugar cubes; I see a navy-blue-and-white soap dish, bought in Florence, chipped on one corner, that my mother kept beside her bathroom sink for thirty years. More clearly than anything else, I see a coloring book I once got for Christmas entitled Ancient Rome. Two babies slurped milk from the udders of a wolf. A Caesar grinned in his leafy crown. A slinky, big-pupiled maiden posed with a jug beside a fountain. Whatever Rome was to me then -- seven years old, Christmas night, snowflakes dashing against the windows, a lighted spruce blinking on and off downstairs, crayons strewn across the carpet -- it's hardly clearer now: outlines of elephants and gladiators, cartoonish palaces in the backgrounds, a sense that I had chosen all the wrong colors, aquamarine for chariots, goldenrod for skies. On the television screen planted in the seat-back in front of me, our little airplane icon streaks past Marseilles, Nice. A bottle of baby formula, lying sideways in the seat pocket, soaks through the fabric and drips onto my carry-on, but I don't reach down to straighten it for fear I will wake Henry. -- Anthony Doerr. Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World 

I'm all about juxtaposition and this "there's two sides of Rome" idea we have been playing with for the last month. I think this Anthony Doerr exemplifies the concept in a new way brilliantly and offer that as my prompt for this week. I love the way he weaves the old and the new together--not the excepted old and new, with cars zipping past monuments, for example. Rather, it is his own old and new: the newness of being a new father with this new experience of traveling and traveling with twins and moving to a new location, alongside all of the preconceptions he has had about Rome/Italy. Those, too, I think we could draw upon: he does not offer one single pre-image of Italy but instead a series of preconceptions, from emperors to coloring books. Prompt: Juxtapose a uniquely adult experience within/about Italy with a series of childhood/younger-self ideas and images about/of Italy.

Week Three - Response to Shaunna's "Part 3 of Pros"

Part 3
A Memory Named Joe
(Spolethome)
The track is wrong, it was 2-B not 2-A. The five of us beat our blistered bubble feet as we burn our legs to the train that was readying to leave. So desperate we wanted the hour and a half to pass so we could kiss the humid air of Spoleto. Leaping in the doors, as eager as the pigeon’s bobbing bread with their beaks, we scattered amongst the coach for a vacant seat. Mine lingered in the isle next to a woman with burnt curls, who hovered over her cell phone, chaotic in texts. The black man across from her stared out the nine PM window, at a reflection of himself. And finally the last of our four was a Roman who shocked the memories of elementary school play grounds and a classmate who, if not for this man’s lazy almond eyes and Spanish features, would have remained lost in the haze of my twenty-one year old timeline. Yet, I see this boy, let’s call him Joe, so clear in my dazed gaze out across the trains’ car, as I occasionally slipping eye contact with this stranger.  I see Joes’ slothful eyes, wet with tears from the toddler bullies who stole his chocolate Debbie cake. They tried to take mine but I was daring enough to take my plastic fork and award him Spiderman band aids from the teacher’s desk. Joe never did anything but cry and squeal. I remember those screams and snot drenched nostrils that bubbled with every exhale. No one in the classroom wanted to touch him in that state of chubby cheeks creasing his drowning eyes and mouth webbing with nose slush. The only thing we did was walk away till he realized no one cared about his stolen Debbie, or knocked over building blocks, and that no one was going help him out of the mud from the morning rain where the little shit of a seven year old shoved him. Joe, like me, was an outcast among outcasts, which meant we never received the new toys, we only ate the leftover oatmeal cookies, our naps consisted of the blanket with moth holes and heads resting on frigid metal air vents, and we never got to be on the good team for kick ball. I will never know what happened to Joe, or was it Jose, maybe Eduardo. Whatever was written on his third grade name tag I will never recall, however, Joe now has made an impact on me, for this hour of a sleep tempting train ride, he branded four sheets of my journal and ran my pen dry. 

If I am understanding this concept correctly, I love it. We see huge crowds of people here--why do we notice one or two in particular? Why do they stick with us? Connecting/remembering/recalling someone the speaker knew previously is a very smart move.

It could, of course, move a bit quicker. I would suggest you jump right into the description of the person you call Joe and cut out the scenery beforehand, including the other people. (Keep  lazy almond eyes and Spanish features for Joe, which I adore. I might go into the meaning of Spanish features a little bit more.). Then, dig deeper. What is it about this man that recalls a bullied childhood school friend? Maybe it’s the entire environment: Joe cries and squeals, a fact you remember as the train screeches on the tracks? What is it about the person sitting across the narrator that recalls her own bullying, and how does it affect her in this moment? How does it reach across the barrier—what kind of barrier is it? What cultural or other walls are palpable between the speaker and the subject on the train?—to touch “Joe,” both the real and the doppelgänger? 

5385: Daisy Miller

I'm interested in the gender dynamic in this piece because we have two Americans--a male and a female--acting within a foreign/Italian sphere, which offers, I think, a unique opportunity to consider the way the author treats the opposing genders. Clearly, the female gets the unfortunately awful end of the stick. Her flirty, flighty ways result in disease and death, while he--levelheaded and responsible-- warns against it. She becomes broken down, too, reduced to a series of body parts throughout the narrative: she has "a singularly well-shaped ear," and later she is "still showing her pretty teeth."

The question, of course, is how Italy factors into all of this. We could easily claim that Italy kills the wild, uncultured American. However, she begins to adopt Italy, too: Giovanelli is frequently described as "the little Italian." Immediately after Winterbourne sheds his interest in her after finding her at the Collosseum, the narrator describes Daisy as "the little American flirt" (while Giovanelli becomes "the fourtunate Italian"). So, does Italy kill her, or does she possess Italy? And, because the narrative often highlights the story-telling aspect, is the author, in a larger sense, damning Italy by killing the girl? I have no idea what to do with all of that--but given our interest in ownership, it's worthwhile to note.

Week Three: Image Junkyard 1-4

They stand guard one last time, these flattened soldiers corralled by glass. Their limbs are stone, more barrier than warrior. At home, my brother lays a green plastic man at the top of the stairs, perched to look out over the rest of the house.

At a bar in a gully of parking lots, fluorescent lights sprouting from the ground, we tuck into a pocket at the counter, more comfortable with our backs to the unknown language. Se Captain America. I can feel his Italian on my back. A man with hair slicked away from his face lays a double-layered shot on the counter, red, white, and blue.

Standing at the top of a staircase, it's a straight shot to the rest of the group as they, in a clump of striped shirts and fluorescent backpacks, descend to dinner. From here, I can hear their pigeon calls and laughter. I can see the way we look to the rest, how we travel in a pack of sound, in a beat of constant movement.

It's new, seeing me through him. It is rapid sketch, he says, dangling it in front of me. You want? You smile. I look like her, like the one before, like an Italian that's left him behind in a town of walled ruin and, for some reason, I am okay with this. She is hard lines, deep scratches, rough behind her head in a shadow of blue ink, this girl he has memorialized on graph paper beside the cash register.