Masters Reading Response to Room With A View

Italy is used as a setting in this piece. It takes place in a Hotel, and it kind of reminded me of the first few days of our stay as a matter of fact. For example, there is an issue among the guests in the beginning: in our stay here in Spoleto, we were waiting for one of the apartments to be ready, so we stayed in the hotel. The next thing was that Italy seemed as a place that allows people to find some sort of re-establishing factor. That was one of the cliches that we discussed in class the first day. What makes it that people think of this as a place for re-discovery? I believe it is the idea of the Renaissance and enlightenment. The enlightenment was the whole idea about discovering a new way of thinking, and Mrs. Lavish says that one doesn't come to Italy for niceness, but life. That was the way of thinking about traveling: you take the plunge to find life. This piece uses Italy as the typical finding of yourself, which is seen in the end when George and Lucy kiss. George contemplates her, as though seeing her in a new light. This is that Renaissance era thinking: finding a new way of seeing things, a new sort of beauty in the thoughts of the time. That's what I thought the importance of Italy as a setting was in "A Room with a View."

Original Work Week One

This piece is based on something I read the other day in the book Deep Travel a poem by Rita Dove called Ta Ta Cha Cha. I riffed the line "sunk in a bowl of sky/ trimmed with marbled statuary."

Outside the Colosseum, sunk in a bowl of sky trimmed with marbled statuary
of the Forum, children clutch tickets for a day inside and mothers
grasp their purses instead of children.
My mother sends emails in a wifi-less zone, playing
Skype jockey throughout the day. Why focus on conversations
with parents, when there's a labyrinth of language.
I snap a picture, delete. Beauty of Roma incapturable,
inescapable.
In Cafe Vincenzo, Katy Perry plays against Graduation music and Jazz,
juxaposition like graffiti on a wall from 313 B.C. or blue
and white parakeets in a PetsMart cage in front of Hotel Clitunno and a pre 1700 church.
Church bells clang in the distance, and the nuns walk for a slice of pizza off Piazza Garibaldi,
staring at my jeans and hotel soap shampooed hair. They're painting the Sistine Chapel
and I'm the Pope.

Junkyard Quote Four Week One

There is an aqueduct connecting Spoleto to Monteluco. This aqueduct, once a bridge for carriage drivers coming to trade goods, barely fits five across, but when we get to the tax collection window, everyone stops to stare at the scene. The city of Spoleto laid out, a photograph waiting to be taken in the mist. On the side of the window, a splotch of red. Spray paint, from yesterday or three years ago, highlights an etched R on the brick. My little fish don't cry, white painted by B. If you keep moving, a family of snails sleeps on the wall where Luca and his friends rode their bikes when they were our age. The snails, shells swirled with brown and white, camouflage in the bricks, seen only by the keen eye of an artist, or a child who's attention needs constant attention. I imagine I'm a trader in Caesar's  day, hopeful to trade the clay pots in the back of my donkey drawn carriage from Spello or Perugia and one day marry my daughter to a farmer in Spoleto.

Reportage Week One

Three rooms where language classes are held in both Italian and English are filled with eight Americans chewing pizza squares and picking at their cuticles. One unwraps a orange sucker and sticks it in his mouth, an avoidance of Italian. Five Italians stare out the window and attempt to speak English with me. I look to my left at MacKenzie, eyes plead save me. The only word I can pick up is Roma, and my brain scrambles for molto bene and bellissimo amidst Spanish. The man with the embroidered F.C on his shirt stands behind the counter of liquor and food speaks a mix of Italian and English. He conducts like the self proclaimed host, pouring more Prosecco and starting conversations with everyone in the room. The real hostess stands off to the side, a glow of pink pride halos around her head. Rain begins to pour outside, two boys dip out to light up a tobacco stick and die slowly. One of the boys, lost earlier today on Monteluco, but found his way back to the land of birra e pane, and the phrase "now you should write about it." After a knuckle kiss from F.C, water drops on my head and I hike past the Indian restaurant and a store that sells Barbie dolls to Tebro and home.

Junkyard Quote Three Week One

Lego pieces of scattered swiss make this Colosseum look like a sandwich of the past and present- a metal worked star stands on the top of a stair-less area where spectators would have watched their favorite gladiator's death march. Sydney poses as a purple gladiator while Megan longs in the corner by a kitten. That star, a piece from an exhibition, loathed by our guide, forebodes the white wash by the maker of Tod's. It's a modern moment amidst the reflection of Roman society. Look up friends, society changes. We can never stay the same. It's a world where a Colosseum built by a Flavian Emperor can have a wall filled purely with etchings from Juno in 1960 or Julio who hearts Rebecca in '88 and a subway system stops construction when ruins show themselves.

Response to a Blog Post Week One

Here is the original post off of Lucas's Blog:

"Journal 1, Entry 2-Image Junkyard: Nicholas Sparks

When we rode the train back from Rome, I sat next to these Italian University students and who I assumed to be their professor. The professor was reading an Italian translation of The Barbary Coast by Norman Mailer. I wanted to tell that there are better American authors out there, but he was already 200 pages into the thing, so he probably already knew.
A couple of stops later, the students gather their stuff and get off the train. One girl's bag opened and I saw a translation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. You can never escape them. I didn't see the name of the book, but does it really matter? Nights of the Lucky Notebook Song Letters. Just someone dies and the other person has to deal with it. The first thought that came to my head was that, translating is as hard as writing a novel, arguably harder. Why would a translator waste his time on that? I know, money. And then I thought, what if the translator is really good? What if Italians think that Nicholas Sparks is the next American God of writing and that the movie adaptations are just smudging his oeuvre?"


Here is what I wrote to him:


"Lucas, this is a wonderful image. It kind of shows that no matter wherever you go, bits of American culture pop up. I particularly love when you combine all the book names together-they all have the same plot. But I think the importance of this being a translation (its like The Vampire Diaries books that were translated and sold at the stand past Piazza Garibaldi) is the fact that no matter where you go, there is a need for a cheesy romance or the need for an escape. Whenever I read a book that never should be labeled as a classic, its always because that book offers something that this life cannot give. Why is this girl reading a Nicholas Sparks book? Usually that is some sort of fantasy for the reader. I think you should do something with that idea...you could create such a great story behind why this Italian schoolgirl is reading a cheesy Sparks book."

What I said later to him was the example that I thought of where to start with this piece.

"What I though of when I read his post for the first time was a girl who either has been wanting a boyfriend or has just been broken up with. That is too easy though...it needs to be something difficult or hard to imagine immediately: so maybe is trying to escape from her parents who are pushing her to go to Rome to study to be an Art history professor, when all she wants to do is go to America and study English. That way, she is reading this book as an opportunity to live American life."

Memory Week One

Since this is a travel writing class, the first memory that comes to mind is a memory of the first trip I really remember going on as a child.

It was 2006 and I just turned 13. My family and I drive to Florida roughly every year to visit my mother's brother and parents. Road trips remain, to this day, eventful experiences because my parents love to play music deemed "oldies" by any recent generation. But their singing propels us to our destination and by the time we've reached Brevard County, ingrained in me are all the words to Blinded by the Light or any REO Speedwagon song. My sister, being 10 at the time, strained against her seat belt for N*SYNC or the Backstreet Boys.
Mid protest, her pleas were silenced by the sight of the Carnival and Royal Caribbean cruise liners in Port Canaveral. Faces instantly mushed against the tinted windows, unblinking.
Thinking back, I don't know why anyone scootches closer to the window trying to see anything, it does not really help. You're still 5,000 yards away.
The trip planned for two weeks at Grandma and Grandpa's and halfway through the trip, my father took the whole family out to dinner and suggested we drive by Port Canaveral to see the ships again. Of course the answer was two jumping little girls, incomprehensible words screeched.
The part that sticks with me though, was when my father pulled into the Port, turned around in the drivers seat to face me and my sister and said nonchalantly, "Let's go see if we can get a tour."
Now, any normal person knows that no captain or crew, much less security, lets eight people off the street in to "visit" the Mariner of the Sea ship. But, when my father opened the trunk of the car to reveal all the suitcases, my first thought: Ha! That surly will let us in to visit the ship!
Turns out, we were taking a week long cruise around the Caribbean.