Image junkyard 4 week 3

A white paper bag of Haribo gummy candy. Every shape from worms to fried eggs.

Image junkyard 3 week 3

A basket of plums and nectarines ripen on the window sill. One nectarine is tye died with jug wine.

Image junkyard 2 week 3

Artificially antiqued wooden wardrobe. Austrian double headed eagle crest on the front. Three babies stacked on the right. Two on the left since the top has been removed.

Image junkyard 1 week 3

A young man in a converted truck cutting slices off a pig leg that was stuffed with sea salt and spices before being roasted on a spit. The skin sounds like mahogany being sawed.

Memory 1 week 2

My great nephew Wyatt had his third birthday party at American Pie Pizzeria in Thomaston, GA. I sat at the head of the third table my extensive family filled. To my right sat mother, across from her was my nephew with his son, the birthday boy, and down the table sat another nephew, a great nephew, two nieces, and my sister. After the many meat and cheese covered pizzas where finished a special treat for the great nephews was delivered. These where the Thomaston famous butter balls I had heard only stories of. A grotesque sight to me, they consisted of pizza dough fried in the shape of a ball then soaked and finally sauced in melted butter, the dozen was quickly divided between the three and ten year old. This division did not hold to any idea of fairness but was to prevent the fights known to happen if one child received fewer than the other. I then watched as the three year old hopefully smeared more butter on his face than went in his mouth. The child then quietly dozed on his father's shoulder, a towel quickly placed to avoid grease stains on his Quad Graphics work shirt, while I stealthily slipped notes to my mother condemning the act.

Reportage 2 week 2

Take metro line A from Rome Termini. Exit to the right at Ottaviano. Check that your Piccadilly journal hasn't been pick pocketed then check your day bag for holes. Up the stairs and left down Via Ottaviano. Pass seventeen tour guides who speak English and Italian. One will seem nice and give you a deal for being students. Her name is Sarah but don't trust her. The tickets cost eight Euro and the other twenty seven go in her pocket. Plus if you skip the line you won't meet the four Germans, two couples, who will worry about the wait with you. Next pass the many crippled, the one sitting on the skateboard with both feet clubbed, the one with no hands who sits on rug like he is performing the Salah and waves his stubs at you, the one who can barely lift his boiled face to you but taps his cane in patterns of four at the tourists, the many you can't count. Give seventy cents to one, a Euro to another and feel sorry for the rest. Pass through TSA grade security, your bag on the conveyor belt, and cover your shoulders. See The School of Athens, The Sistine Chapel, and enough rooms of art and antiques to feed the worlds hungry by selling a fifth.

Memory 2 week 2

After an alcohol free nine hour flight with only chicken parmesan, a deck of cards, and Fight Club to lift my spirits I arrived in Honolulu. My Dad, for the remainder of the trip Chief Ray, met me at the end of the off ramp with a lei of tea tree leaves and kukui nut shells. The ride to his barrack, a single room with adjoining bath and small fridge reached through a kitchen shared by two other Chiefs, made my eyes water from not wanting to blink and miss a cove integral to a story and my skin burn while it got used to the sun pouring into the convertible Chrysler Seabring. The most shocking sight was the bouquet of fresh lilies placed on the kitchen table with a single branch of torch ginger rising from the center the size of my forearm and looking like the head of a bloodied spear. This was a tradition, my father explained, that reminded him when he would be staying in a room long enough to unpack. Dinner was a simple meal of shoyu steak and fruit salad, the strawberry guava and mangos I would later learn to find on the mountains and carry back in canvas sacks tied to our packs, all tinged with the sweet smell of ginger.

Reportage 1 week 2

The third cigarette left my head spinning worse than the expensive ale bought from a tiny fridge in the hostel's lobby. In the room behind me I hear the emotions revolving. One person laughing, one person crying, one person silent, wait a minute and they switch. I flip my zippo closed a few more times then falter and drop it into the drying leaves. My frustration tells me I can retrieve it when needed. At this point I notice the graying woman reading under the awning of a BMW van converted into a camper. "I'm sorry for the noise", I say, "do you speak English?" She calls into the van and her husband emerges shouting "English yes" through the cup of bean soup he is eating with an over sized spoon. "I'm sorry," I repeat, "we where just scammed by a taxi driver for almost three hundred Euros. We'll quiet down in a bit." Although I left out the dark curve where the taxis stopped and the four trips Franco the con-artist made to the glove box for fake price sheets I thought would be a gun, the man seems sympathetic and smiles rather than lecture me on our sound. They are from Holland, he says, a beautiful country, I respond. This is my usual reaction to anyone's nationality but for once I mean it. He asks about my studies, our ages must give this away, and soon we're discussing Kant. I know he is trying to clear my mind and I'm glad that my philosophy might now offer me rest. Shauna emerges from the tiny room and reminds me and Megan that we missed dinner in our Naples rush. The Hollander points to the trees, where we now see oranges, and laughs. Megan takes this as a challenge but failing in her jumps I am ordered to my knees by Shauna. One dusted flat over either shoulder and Megan teeters as I stand. Pops above and four large oranges fall into Shauna's hands.

Image Junkyard 2 week 2

The Roman bath houses two bodies. Cleaned before being stained with ash. The smiles look peaceful. Their nails are still visible, half cut.

Image Junkyard 3 week 2

The columns of the 100 bc temple are broken at three feet. A central support is visible, circled with 11 pointed bricks, a flower appears from above.

Image Junkyard 4 week 2

Reburying Pompeii in the ashes of Camels and Lucky Strikes.

Image Junkyard 1 week 2

Doorway four feet tall, entrance a mosaic of a silver wolf biting its own foot. A round fountain remains under a square opening in the clay tiled roof, each corner a sculpted bust mouth open to fill the tub.

Masters The Italian

There are two main properties of Italy which help to make the plot of The Italian, which is often comically fanciful, more realistic and grounded. The first is the ongoing force with which people still hold to the ancient lines of their family. With a history that dates back to at least the Romans, and both the Romans and later the Catholic church keeping detailed records of family lines, it is easy to see why people would openly display and respect their heritage since unlike with Americans it is understood that everyone has access to the knowledge of their family. This is central to The Italian since it shows why Ellena and Vivaldi can't escape their history to be together. The second aspect is the almost universal, at least at the time the novel was written, respect for the Catholic church. Because of this the story can be preserved through people who are given sanctuary by the church, and the church plays an important role in keeping characters apart when necessary, either through inquisition trials and imprisonment or forced recruiting into a convent.

Masters An Italian Affair

Describing piazzas as lined with pizza shops, gelato, and caffès An Italian Affair gives such a vague description of Italy that it could be set anywhere. While the idea of the narrator being someone who has seen Italy many times may be responsible for the almost lack of interest in her surroundings it is over done to the point that a clear setting is often not given. When outside of the cities intense details about the beaches, mountains, and especially the mask of radioactive mud the narrator is given are finally described. None of these, however, is so strongly tied to Italy as to warrant the Title An ITALIAN Affair instead of just naming the novel An Affair. In addition to skimming over the physical aesthetics of Italy the people are also often forgotten. This is not to say that there are no Italians in the work but instead that the few Italians, mostly the narrator's close friends, are either written as too busy to spend a long time with the narrator, which limits their impact, or as having extremely clichèd comments which sets up the plot but doesn't characterize the local people. The most vibrant characters are, in fact, other foreigners, such as the French professor, on whom many lines are used describing mannerisms and history. Due to this An Italian Affair could be set in any vacation town or resort where a mud mask could be bought and a man found.

Memory week 1

New Merrell walking shoes, backpack weighed to thirty pounds, two bottles of Gatorade, one in my bag one left in my 2010 Dodge Charger, and my 5 mile walk around John Tanner lake begins. The path starts as a concrete sidewalk, spotted with puddles that I swerve around, that stays within a meter of the beach, man made of course, which forms half of the coast. Three children and an older couple play volleyball by the water taking turns swimming out for the ball when it floats away. The remaining path is a road for the ranger's ford F-150 that winds through loblolly pines. There is a gouge in the pavement is circled in white spray paint on the third turn of the ovaled rectangle path. A perfectly sectioned tree next to it tells of the ranger's hard work clearing the park after a storm. Soon after is bridge, two meters across, pine wood still yellow with youth. Coming out of the woods another student sits on a bench by the water and crooked weeds playing a guitar that is too old for his lack of talent. He abandons "Free Bird" and begins picking his own tune. A duck quacks along off beat. It will take five laps to finish my goal.

Image junkyard 4 week 1

Tattered copy Fodor's from 1992 left in the bar of hotel Clittuno. Italy: the art treasures, hill towns, and food and wine reads the cover. Owned by Luis Smith he folded down the pages for "exploring campania."

Image junkyard 3 week 1

Three Americans sitting in the bar of hotel Clittuno with their guide discussing a seventeen hour flight to fiji. Crossing the international date line they lost Valentines day and a card was ripped up.

Reportage week 1

Sliding accidentally through mud and shit. The stick in my right hand is half cane half Shillelagh. Chosen because of the R burned into the handle that felt personal. A dog runs ahead, hunting truffles, though it's not the season, and we find only horses. The guide's name is Lucas. The fifth Lucas we've met since arriving in Spoleto. He isn't as nice as as the Lucas from Bar Duella, but the constant treats and prise given to his dog, who is destined to fail, plus the way he wields his cane, always close to his right leg until nudged past the dog's nose, soon wins me over. A round of "Be a Man" from Disney's Mulan soon begins and though I only know half the lines, most in the chorus, I join when I can and try to pick over and remember the first lines of The Hobbit with our American Lucas. The path then became a muddy slope for three meters and since I was second to last in a group of seventeen people it had become gauged with boot prints. Past this the path, which was the shape of a large teardrop, slowly closed and the seventeenth century farm came back into view of the fourteen stick fighting college students, the two laughing professors, the guide Lucas, his dog, and three horses, two black and one white, who had silently followed us.

Masters a room with a view

A room with a view is the kind of story which, if the intention is to market it to Americans or westerners in general, can only be set in Italy for two reasons. The first is that Italy is one of the few places in the world with an unspoken cultural guide book. This is to say that every American grows up with everything from cartoons to school to music telling them exactly what to see and how. In A Room with a View this constricting structure is an integral part of the characters both in how they conform to it, sometimes by breaking their native traditions, and how they break it to find what they have brought with them from home. Secondly it being a hub for travelers of all nationalities it allows the main character, Lucy Honeychurch, to encounter other types of a normal person. More importantly, however, she can see a fellow British national, George Emerson, without the dressings of their native culture but instead as another person. In the end A Room with a View is about taking the overly structured expectations, that only Italy can provide, and using them to learn and reflect more about your own native culture.

Image junkyard 2 week 1

Red carton with parabolic streaks of sky blue. Beige tax seal reads tabacchi lavorati and monopolio fiscale. Italian flag on one side, American blend written on the other. The front is topped with From Italy Worldwide, the bottom, in bold black letters on a white bar, il fumo uccide. YESMOKE cigarettes.

Image junkyard week 1

Rectangle of a future trolley station. Path leading away with no tracks. Just a trail a foot lower than the road. Seven columns and a scattering of stones, carvings almost visible from the bus, stopping construction that hasn't passed the excavation stage. A yellow sign on an orange fence apologizes.

First experiences

Sleeping in a dimple on the mountain so that every walk is eventually uphill. Wood fed to a pizzeria, smoked crust mixing with Yesmoke cigarettes. Wine from grappa that makes you flinch like vodka to vino di la casa like fizzing sugar. Sprouts of grass in the shingles, natural window boxes and there are plenty of those with poppies and zucchini. Unmortered roman gates that millions of us peasants have passed through for thousands of years. Truffles like kneeling down and licking the mountain on the best day of your life. Espresso machines hiss like the salt in prosciutto. Which will always have a special place in my heart. Clouds rise off the mountains and caress the grotos that birthed early Christianity and form the rain which flows, like in a vain, through the aquiduct. The same aquiduct which two thousand years later makes my sink spit at me like I'm a better target than the sink. Warm salami and chilled, but never iced, juice that throbes your fillings from the sugar. And here that means sugar not the chemicals we know but the Italians will never understand. Pasta to the teeth and coffee corrected with memories of licorice jelly bellies that are really the fire of sambuca making your head swim and heart pound.

Two cliches

The first cliche that comes to my mind when thinking of writing about Italy is that the most amazing things will be things. While I agree that there is nothing like siting in a ruin which predates any country I've been to, what makes or breaks a trip is always the people. Whether it's the shop clerk who doesn't speak English but who will mime directions, or a momentary friend at a hostel I hope to pay more attention to the people than the monuments. Second is easily that anyone traveling to Italy must become an expert on all things to do with wine and food. While this seems almost too obvious, although I was asked for cliches, I hope that the food and wine become more of a natural part of  the day for me than something which I have to revere and study.

Expectations

I try not to hold trips to my previous expectations, but my main expectations for Italy are history, food, offending a few people, and little blinking.  I expect to feel history in a way that I rarely have before. Having been to Venice before, if only for a few days, it is an amazing experience to sit in a cafe where Marco Polo began and ended his journey to China and sip espresso with a friend. Thinking of espresso, I can't imagine that any American has grown up without a serious respect for Italian cooking, and even if I have barely moved beyond Olive Garden I am no different. One thing I have learned through travel is that eventually you will offend someone. Whether it is a simple, yet hopefully inaccurate, assumption about Americans, or a cultural taboo that I break I simply won't always have the language skills to excuse myself. All of these, however, leave me with one expectation which has never failed to prove true on any trip I've taken. Seeing a new part of the world my awe will not allow me to blink any more than is physically necessary, and I am completely OK with that.