Updates from Italia

07.02.10. Traveling with the parents.


    You are in a foreign country that serves delicious cuisine, and have come to a restaurant that offers many regional specialties. You can’t name any of them. Although splendid plates pile up on the tables around you, you can’t tell the soup from the meat on the menu, and there aren’t any pictures. When the waiter comes you do succeed in ordering some sort of pasta, you think, and with this small victory you relax in the comfort that you shall shortly receive something tasty.

    Then the waiter returns with food for the folks at the next table over: his trolley bears a steak three inches thick and two feet in circumference, dark at the edges but red inside like the sun setting off an attic window. A father and two sons watch as the waiter produces hunks of meat for each of them. This, you realize, is the bistecca fiorentina, famed for its size and substance, and you didn’t order it. What do you do? If you are Larry Bradley, you pick up your chair and join the other table. … (continued here)

 

 

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Christmas in Italy

This year I had the rare and profound opportunity to spend the holidays in Europe with my parents. Two years ago I passed Christmas in Turkey with my aunt and uncle, and there I learned a bit about how English teachers celebrate the holiday in a secular country full of mosques that is also home to numerous Jews and Christians. This year was not like that.

Instead my parents and I soaked up the Catholic broth of the boullabaise of holidays by traveling around Italy. We attended Christmas Eve mass in the cathedral of Florence and visited a number of other churches across other northern Italian cities. In the meantime, we ate as if our lives depended on it, walked around these amazing medieval cities, and even made a few new Italian amici. The trip was by all accounts (except perhaps for the one at the bank) a grand success.

But that was not all this holiday season would hold—after my parents left I rented a car with two dear friends and we toured the Tuscan countryside, witnessing in five days every kind of weather the region had to offer. The countryside and hilltowns remained magnificent under all conditions.

The pictures that follow track my and my parents' course through Florence, Turin, Genoa, and Milan (marked by the battle zone that was Piazza Duomo on New Year's Eve); and my trip to Tuscany with Inge and Maarten that took us to the serene lodgings of the agriturismo Grecinella, and then on to Volterra, San Gimignano, Arezzo, Siena, and little Casole d'Elsa, where the town was putting on a live nativity scene (composed of 200 local citizens).

 

(Past slideshows)

 

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JATB Reviews

 

Hartley’s “The Teacher’s Pet:” You’ll Want to Pay Attention While She Talks

(download pdf)


    For those of you who made a New Year’s resolution to listen to more literature on the internet, rejoice: fresh on the web these days is Out of Breath Podcasts, the latest literary arm of Cherwell, the independent student newspaper of the University of Oxford since 1920. Whatever the paper’s content and quality, I am slightly disillusioned given that the University of Oregon’s paper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, has been fluttering about campus since 1900. In addition, Cherwell has only been online since 1996—this when England’s own Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web back in 1989. Perhaps the delay was due to the invention’s coinciding with the release of the fourth iteration of BBC historical sitcom Blackadder: Blackadder Goes Forth.

    What matters now, however, is that current students David Wolf and Antonia Tam have embarked upon the gilded road that newspaper founders George Edinger and Cecil Binney laid down back in 1920 (I could swear I’ve used the name Cecil Binney as a pseudonym in one of my fake news stories). With Out of Breath Podcasts, Wolf and Tam have created the opportunity for aspiring writers and writeresses to share their work in a forum equal parts literature and theater. … (continued here)

 

 

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Where can I find more from the author?

 

-Exploring Troubled Romance: A Collection of Stories (just the stories, ma'am)

          •or, with critical introduction

-Unbound Online Literary Magazine

          •Fall 2009: short story "Jasper Pines," and poem "Converging Cumuli"

         •Spring 2009: short story "The Perfect Housewife," and poem "Beauty-Bearing Shoulders"

-Oregon Voice issue 2.5