what to make of Rome, this time

It was so different. Last time I went as a bright-eyed student of the classics, never having seen Antiquities in situ, and this time I'm past archaeology, though I went to dig at Aidone for a blissful day- after the archaeological novice's sleepless night on a mattress laid on the floor on Via Roma in Aidone. I could and did awake in a sweatbath, where sweat was one of the fluids marking the whole trip, at 5:50am with the rest of them and filed into the room late to meet the reputed harpy who directs the thing at this point. Macchi Bell- "con Macchi Bell, tutto bell'" has retired since I took his class in the spring of 2005 and stays at home building the study from which his studies kept him.

This time it was the experience of space, running up and rushing against a final day when Byron took his class and I went with him to Esposizionale Universale Roma, where the Expo of 1942 was to be held and wasn't. Now in this moment we have that it's a cruising park, and so under the shadow of colossal statues, youths holding back their horses under what we took to calling the Square Colosseum. He took us through the spaces where L'eclisse was filmed. Through this peregrination we saw that Antonioni followed these chases through neighborhoods, around real corners and down real hills, following a real neighborhood in what we take today, we who don't keep a film neighborhood together so well past walls (but inside walls we do: see The Human Centipede) as an impossibility or an invention. Here: this shot, from lying on one's back. I have yet, but will watch these. Grazie mille for the DVD shops of Shanghai.

I had more colorful adventures worthy of a Svidrigailov or a Perez Hilton, but I won't tell you about them here. In Sicily I painted a mural. I have figured that I figure a life or a portion thereof by the stories I can tell of it, but only in private, after-dinner company.