Updates From Italia
27.02.10. Fun with mail
What I had before me was a highly suspicious package. Had it been received at the White House, it may have raised the terror alert. What bothered me was not the cheery merchandise on top, nor the bunches of crimped red paper stuffed round, but rather the vacuum-sealed pouch below that I’d torn open. Its contents: three deep-fried balls and one very green pancake. It was in fact not so much a flapjack as a lilypad. And I desperately wanted to eat it.
For weeks, months even, I had been expecting this package. When at home, I go weekly to Addi’s Diner in Springfield for their famous turkey-platter pancake, and Addi promised me I would not have to go without while abroad in Italy. Two weeks ago she let slip that she’d finally made good on her word. … (continued here)
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)
13.01.10. Toughing it out in Tuscany (and Tpavia).
Tuesday night, 12:15 am. I’m sipping the coffee and nibbling the cookies I should have been sipping and nibbling in the ER. A week ago I injured my ankle in an ill-fated leap into melting snow, and tonight the reckoning came.
I had never planned on going to the hospital. Ankles, in my experience, do not break but twist and sprain. In one particularly severe instance I witnessed an ankle completely detach, when Pittsburgh Pirates catcher Jason Kendall stepped rather poorly on first base. But that was Major League Baseball. Normal people stick with twists.
As twists go, mine was a dandy. You see, it was snowing that day in Tuscany. People (such as Frances Mayes and Michael Ondaatje) tell you that Tuscany is beautiful—and it is, but so is the Marche—and “we” take that to mean that it is beautiful while under the Tuscan sun, when the earthy colors of summer pull you to the land and transform the region’s fields into one large tilled hammock. But it snows there, too, on occasion, and then it becomes Narnia. Thin indistrict roads wind through hectares of white-capped grapevines and trees bowing in snow. As the snow builds around you, you think if you could just burrow to the bottom you might find something truly special. … (continued here)
21.12.09. Coffee and hospitality, or, ‘Happy Birthday Dad!’
I thought I had left behind such confusion in Italy. “Just a regular coffee to go,” I said. “A latte, cappuccino, mocha?” the barista pressed. “No,” I said. “The house blend.” I saw the coffee in the pot; I pointed to help the man. He turned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t serve you that to go.”
It was Monday, my first afternoon in Dublin, and after months of sipping thimbles of Italian espresso I had found my beloved pot of coffee. At the Bewley’s Cafe, no less, the locale that my English friends and guidebooks of choice raved about. And this man refused to pour me a cup. … (continued here)
30.11.09. Winter in Pavia, or, 'No, I'm not cold. Well, maybe a little.'
I just don’t want to have to dig my fingers in. On those long shoe-days when you’re out from morning till night, your socks meld to your feet with the hours’ building sweat. At day’s end you come home and want nothing more than to shed your shoes and slip on your slippers, but you must first pry away the cotton that has bonded with your skin. You do this on one foot, and sometimes you lose your balance and reach for support. If your eyes are too focused on your new cotton-skin compound you grasp at the skinny lamp with the charcoal damask shade, and it and you crash in a heap in the foyer.
You’ll forgive me if I choose sandals. My toes wiggle freely like a butterfly freed of its cocoon, a refreshing wind strokes my foot bottoms between flip and flop, and at the park in grass joy my sandals are off in a trice. Yet when I wear sandals in Pavia when the leaves are turning and falling, it’s like a cry for help. People stare at me, friends and strangers alike, and want dearly to offer me their shoes. … (continued here)
15.11.09. Teaching English.
I love it when they ask questions. Five days a week I sit down with my little Italian friends to teach English, and I spend these lessons talking, scribbling, and explaining. I fear silence all the while. I know that when I stop—and I must stop—silence will fall. This silence frightens because if it lingers and takes hold, it may never lift, and I might be forced to spend the balance of the lesson in ludicrous gesture. So when the quiet comes I breathe and stare at grains in the table until in a burst of courage I look in my students’ eyes.
Seldom do I find rapture, but I am willing to settle for question marks. When students have questions, it means they are engaged. They might not understand everything, of course, but a certain level of focus and comprehension is necessary to ask a question. If they can formulate these questions in their mind, all is not lost, and if they can express them aloud, then we can have the kind of dialogues that tickled Socrates and breed successful lessons. … (continued here)
29.10.09. Fashion, or, Have you seen my ringmaster?
I have spent much of my life honing my fashion sense. If we take elementary school as our point of departure (the toddler years have nothing to offer but long stretches of onesies and nudity), we can see the first swift sprouts of my seeds of style: ribbed sideburns, knee-length socks and knee-length shirts, the latter with enough room to consume my legs and one of my smaller classmates. My fashion bonsai was vast and ungainly. Yet even then I knew that to prune with haste was to kill the tree, so I lay in wait. As I got older I kept the same stock of shirts, gradually growing into them, and I clipped with care when I found diseased branches (my Avirex shoes) and burls (my fanny packs). Other branches appeared discolored but I trusted them and let them grow, and through the years my mustard zip-off pants matured into members-only jackets which matured into fluorescence. The earth wasn’t formed in a week; I wasn’t born swaddled in neon. But one day there I was in eighties chic with my bonsai in full beautiful bloom. I danced and mounted speakers and put down my shears forever.
Oh how this world tests our hearts. I have been in Italy for five weeks and already my tree languishes. Back home my vibrant dress turned heads and my neon tested people’s retinal cones. I was a circus clown, juggling outfits and donning such socially offensive combinations as socks with sandals. I enjoyed myself and made others chuckle and groan. But I am now discovering what happens when the American clown leaves his big top and goes gallivanting abroad. … (continued here)
18.10.09. Politics.
My president last week won the Nobel Peace Prize. Throughout the presidential election and during Barack Obama’s first months in office he has rallied Americans with his hopeful cry, and now the Norwegians, too, are on board. Some among his detractors and his supporters—and I, too—believe this award is undeserved or at least premature. Obama has experienced early success in “altering the political discourse” in D.C., but his administration is still largely in its pupal stage. The butterfly promises to be magnificent, however, and it is this hope to which we and the Nobel committee cling. Such a widespread display of trust and faith is no small thing in a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately world where we expect results in one hundred days.
This prize took a bit longer than a hundred days, but it is a tremendous accomplishment for Obama and the United States. I am proud that Obama won because today America is at war in two countries and I fear the world has painted us as a bellicose nation. We are a bellicose nation. With this prize, though, comes recognition of our other face: one of democratic and humanistic ideals that can sometimes lead us into war, but, as articulated by Obama, can also pull us out of and take us beyond war. It is an ambitious prize as Obama’s is an ambitious presidency. … (continued here)
09.10.09. Attending university.
I read magazines in class now. My school hobby of choice used to be the crossword or Jumble, but vowel-rich Italian is a problematic language for word puzzles (try to unscramble EOULIA). So I peruse the current week’s Espresso, which covers Italian culture and politics and other world news, and read the articles or gaze at the pretty ladies seen recently with Italian president Silvio Berlusconi.
My classes are of course conducted in Italian, which would seem to demand a greater concentration on my part. Certain of my professors do in fact tax me with their high level of discourse or ferocious velocity. My linguistics teacher in particular fires off her material with staggering speed, her tongue a solitary manic hummingbird wing. She keeps her eyes closed and face screwed up all the while, and I have an inkling she is possessed by Noam Chomsky. Despite her pace, I understand ninety-five percent of what she says. As a collegemate who has studied in the U.S. explained, lectures are the easiest thing to follow in a foreign language because of their linearity and linguistic purity. One doesn’t encounter the slang or crowd dynamic that can make the dorms such a confusing and disorienting place. … (continued here)
02.10.09. Collegio life.
The window off my room opens grandly. Large wood-framed glass doors swing wide to reveal a pod of trees reaching up to my fourth-floor room, and the garden and street below. It would be a lovely balcony, were there actually a platform on which to stand. As it is, an ornate metal grating is in place to keep me from stepping out and plummeting to my expatriate demise twenty-some-odd meters below.
The Italian dailies must take the blame for my occasional thoughts of accidental death or suicide. In my ten days here I have seen three front-page articles having to do with people falling to their deaths. Two were older folks, and one an infant. Older folks often have things worse than the rest of us—maybe their pensions are dwindling, maybe they just lack the sure footing on which they once depended to hike to school two miles in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways. They may be excused for their falls, and mourned as is the practice for those who leave us in tragic ways. But I don’t understand how the infant could have “precipitated itself” from a second-story window, this according to the paper. A one-year-old is barely strong enough to hold its head upright. It would seem that the parent must have placed the baby on their ornate railing giving onto the cobblestones below, then gone to make a cappuccino. Are we really so careless with each other? … (continued here)
25.09.09. Walking the streets.
I had nothing to do again today so I went walking. ‘Nothing’ weighs much more in an empty dorm. In the city there are people walking about and chatting, and you can chat with them too if you feel so bold. You don’t, but these opportunities for interaction and the potential phrases you construct in your mind ease the solitude.
I did however speak at length with Enza, who patrols the official university store every morning till noon. She was silent until I commented on their ongoing mug exchange, whereby anyone who brings a mug from a foreign university receives a UP mug gratis. They have a few dozen mugs, including ceramic representatives from Harvard, the University of Florida, even a university in Australia. Enza took great pride in the store’s collection, and when she discovered I was from the UO, for which they have no mug, she lobbied hard for me to provide one to fill out their collection (Mom and Dad, now would be the proper time to pay a visit to the Duck Store). … (continued here)
23.09.09. Primo giorno al Collegio Ghislieri. My first day at the Collegio Ghislieri began at eight a.m. in easy silence. I had not set an alarm, hoping instead to slip slowly from my dreams into my real-life dream world of sixteenth-century Italy. My room does have a heater in the corner and along the same wall a fluorescent light and gleaming porcelain sink. But the tiled floor offers a chipped tessellation of black, mustard and dull-coral diamonds that must be medieval. The rectangular desk in the middle of the room that is slightly too long to fit in any direction without blocking access to the shelves, sink, window or closet shows markings and gaps in the woodwork that hint at numberless years of frustrated students scratching and pulling at things. One might have been Carlo Goldoni, favorite son of the Collegio Ghislieri and masterful Italian playwright. The closet, once I move the desk to access it, smells of leather wrapped in a soiled jousting shirt. This is my real-life dream world. … (continued here)