5-31-06

The Maid’s Shoes, by Bernard Malamud seems to be a lesson in intercultural interaction. Rosa tries to inform the professor about her life, and about her problems because he is an educated man, but she doesn’t seem to want to hear the professors problems. It is almost as if he is her priest and confessor. I wonder if there is any significance to her name, like a rose there is beauty yet thorns accompanying the bloom.

In class Professor Benson asked if there was any distance between what Bernard Malamud tells us and what Professor Krantz knows, and is there any significance in that distance or lack of distance. I think that there is a difference between what Malamud tells us and what Professor Krantz knows, I think that distance exists because the story is not about the professor, but about Rosa. The first few pages are all descriptions of Rosa and an explanation of how she lives, though the professor might come to know these things by observing Rosa, we knew them before we even met the professor. I think that this makes the story more about cultural interactions, and less about the mere story of Rosa and her shoes. The shoes are significant, they are the crux of the story but only because they are the medium through which the professor most significantly interacts with Rosa.

On page 196 Malamud gives us an argument from Rosa about her job. Professor Benson told us to look at this argument and see what we could discover about the story by examining this rhetorically. Because Rosa makes an argument, she reveals that she believes that the professor has a position which she can change. I am afraid to use some of the terms I have used for fear of misusing them and sounding extremely stupid, but as being stupid is part of the process of learning I will forge ahead. The exigence for Rosa’s argument is that the professor has two pairs of shows. By addressing this exigence with an argument Rosa believes that she will be able to remove the imperfection created when she lost her job by allowing the professor into the inner workings of her private life, treating him as a priest and asking for absolution for her sins.

Continuing with this analogy of the confessor, the professor has power over Rosa to proclaim her absolved from her sins, provided she performs certain tasks, in this case the tasks to be performed were to refuse Armando’s shoes and to avoid Armando’s company. When Rosa failed to do this, she rebuked the professors power over her. At this point the analogy breaks, because a confessor is acting as a sort of intermediary between the God and the person confessing, thus it is not truly his responsibility to see that the one confessing follows through with their tasks. In Malamud’s story the professor is more directly connected with Rosa because he has given her a pair of shoes, and because he is her employer. I begin to wonder if the story would have turned out differently had the professor refused this kindness and merely offered advice. Is it possible, I wonder, that this is the lesson Malamud attempts to teach us in intercultural interaction? That we are not saviors, but intermediaries only? Or is the story about Rosa, and meant to allow tourists, travelers, and even those who will never come to Rome, a glimpse into the daily life of a Roman? Does the fleuneur present a moral, or only a snapshot of life? I also begin to wonder about this idea in art with the painting of Beatrice Cenci, or rather the painting which was said to be of her and wasn’t, now there is a question about the death of the author for Roland Barthes.

After reading Fountains by Eleanor Clark I looked back at the photograph Professor Benson took of all of us in front of the Trevi Fountain. I had not noticed before, but the entire fountain is not in the photograph. And then in class it was mentioned that it would be impossible to photograph the entire fountain because there is not room, and the same is said to be true for most of the fountains and monuments around Rome. I do find this sort of hard to believe. I think that there are plenty of positions about the fountain where all of the figures could be captured within the frame, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if what was meant when it was said that we could not get far enough back to capture the entire scene, is that we cannot distance ourselves enough to take in the fountain, the basin, the buildings, and the people. Sure I could take a picture of the statues that make up a part of the Trevi fountain, but is that really the fountain if I don’t have the building the fountain grows out of as well? And I would also be missing the crowds of people stopping to have their pictures made, the street vendors hocking their wares, the bar’s and pizzerias with tables set out in the piazza. All of these make up the Trevi Fountain, and I would believe that it is impossible to get far enough back to capture all of these things in the frame of a photograph.

In class we talked about the outside/inside mentality that Eleanor Clark brings up in this essay on page 52. I think it is similar to what Professor Martimucci was saying yesterday about the street and piazza life in Rome, how they live out on the streets and in the piazzas and only sleep in their houses. So, the piazza is the living room, or dinning room, or den, or however it is used at that moment.

I have to admit, I had not been to the Corso that I knew of. Actually I have been on the Corso as it is right next to the Sede, but I didn’t know that I was on the Corso and though I have been to the monument to Victor Emmanuel II, I have not been down to Piazza del Popolo.

Also, when Professor Martimucci was lecturing yesterday he talked about the Baroque architecture and its emphasis on space, and attempting to make more space by manipulating the geometry of the space. The point of this manipulation is to give the most space for the costumed bodies to move, just like you would have a large boulevard pointing to a great monument for the Renaissance architecture, the Baroque architecture seems to bring the focus onto the facades, while at the same time allowing one to focus on the bright colors of the costumed people moving about in that space.

I have always had a hard time appreciating poetry. I really enjoy prose more, in fact the only poets I have read with a real sense of enjoyment and a feeling of time well spent have been the beat poets, and that might be because their style is more prosaic. All of that to say, I love reading the prosaic descriptions of spaces we have in Eleanor Clarks essay. It reminds me of the sketches I once read by a women who would attempt to capture the beauty of a place so that her brother, a well known poet, could turn these prosaic sketches into poetry. I enjoyed the prose much more than I ever enjoyed the poems that came from them.

In Eleanor Clark’s piece, I appreciated the personification of the fountains, or perhaps it would be better to speak of the “fountinification” of the people. It is like Professor Martimucci told us, there is a life in Rome that is centered around the piazzas that I really don’t quite understand. I see the people ebb and flow, like the water in the fountains, they splash and gush into one open space, and before you can grasp their presence they have moved on so that there is never a crowd of the same people in one place for more than a few seconds. But the thing that strikes me as different about this flow of people here than in, say New York, is that here the people actually live in theses piazzas, we are the visitors passing through, but they come through every day, they shop here, they meet friends here, when they were children they played here, and I am just here for a few moments to see a fountain and perhaps toss a coin over my shoulder so that I can return.

The first question I had about Shoeshine, was why are we watching it second, but I kept forgetting to ask this question. This film was made first, and it seems, from what I have read, to be the first part of a trilogy about Italian life made by De Sica. I was fascinated by what Peter Bondanella said about the boys horse serving as an image both of the boys friendship, and of their freedom. I found it interesting partially because I see an echo of the same theme in The Bicycle Thief. Both the horse and the bicycle are modes of transportation, but they have greater symbolic significance to their owners, a steady job for Ricci and freedom from the cares of life for Pasquale and Giuseppe. In the beginning of both films the protagonists are separated from their desired object by money, Ricci’s bicycle is in hock and the boys do not yet have enough money to buy their horse. And in the end of the film the characters are prevented from owning their desired object by forces outside of their control. A lot of my classmates commented that these films were depressing, that they lacked hope, or even a sense of resolve. I think that the best answer to that problem is that these films are not intended to teach a moral lesson as the solution to societal problems, perhaps our American film industry does that as a reflection of our City on a Hill mentality about ourselves. These films seem to explore the problems that society has, from the point of view of the director, and ask the audience to form their own conclusions. So if the film is about showing that even the most innocent are eventually corrupted by a corrupt system, then there is no need for the boys to be rescued by some sort of god lowered by elaborate mechanisms to decree that all will be made pleasing to the audiences sensibilities. I wonder if there could be any connection between this idea, that the film is meant to lead the audience to their own conclusions, and the climax of Shoeshine, when the film projector catches on fire. Is it, perhaps, a subtle hint from the director that his art form will be the medium for change in the world if his audience will pick up the fire he has kindled within them?

We spent the last hour of class at the Piazza Della Rotunda watching people and sketching. I spent most of my time watching and sketching the people. If you sit on the opposite side of the fountain form the Pantheon there is a nice little café to your left where people sit to get out of the sun, sip some coffee, and read tour guides. I have a few sketches of their faces as they went intently about their preoccupations as though they were occupations, but what I recorded most in my journal where the sights and sounds of people as they came and went through the piazza, so here is my entry:
• I am sitting on the side of the fountain opposite from the Pantheon, looking at the corner of the Banca Nazionale. In addition to the sights of the area, there are sounds. From my right I head an accordion, I cannot see they musician, but he must be playing for tips at the café on that side, I think, as I listen, that I can make out the tune of The Girl from Ipanema. From the fountain behind me I hear what Dickens would describe as the silver tinkling of the fountain, but I think it sounds more like a ripple, the ripple of a brook as it wends its way through a country pasture, but I attribute this to differences of experience and background. I wonder if this fountain, if all of the fountains and the fresh water and all are meant as a form of rustification, retiring to the country side, only updated to bring the country to the city. I think the one work which I read before leaving that most impressed me was the writing of Cato the elder who wrote all about the Latin Luxuries and how they were going soft and out to return to their agricultural roots. When I see all of the extravagance that abounds in Rome, in this piazza as in the others, I wonder if he wasn’t right. If there is some great need of man to return to agriculture and work everyday only for the food he needs to survive, and wouldn’t we all be happier that way? Along with the fountain I can also hear some cockney accents, I can’t make out what they are saying exactly, but I can hear that it is English and there seems to be a child with the man and woman I can make out talking, I assume the child is with them only because I can make out some of his or her pleas for gelato. Just to my left I can see a woman slathering sunscreen on her exposed skin, she is white and freckled, she is wearing dark sunglasses and has strawberry blond hair, I would put her age at about forty years old. I can hear her squirting the sunscreen out of the bottle, and then a distinctive slap as she attempts to stop the white goop from sliding down into her socks and I can hear her rubbing it into her skin, it is a gritty sound, but at the same time it is a wet sound, perhaps it is like the sound of soggy sandpaper applied to wet clay.
• It amazes me that, when faced with the reality of the fountain, there is a gentlemen here who watches it only through the eyepiece of his digital video camera. He is wearing a woolen sweater, blue, but not the same blue as his faded denim jeans. He moves about the fountain, digitally watching it spit water, and never takes his eye away from the eyepiece the entire time he is filming, but when he stops filming he turns away from the fountain, lets the camera dangle by the strap around his neck, wipes his hands on his faded jeans, and turns around to walk away. He has never even seen the fountain! Just a pixilated image that he will bore thousands of friends and relatives with later, proving to them that, yes of course he came to Rome, he took a video picture of the fountain in the Piazza Della Rotunda!
• People move through this piazza very quickly. The rush in and out of the piazza in a few seconds, perhaps stopping, no that is to great a word for the time they pause here to snap a shot of the fountain before rushing off to other things in other places. A few people have discovered a “hidden” sight though. Above the McDonalds there is a purple flowering plant clinging and climbing its way up the building. Almost everyone who turns in its direction sees it and snaps a quick shot to show that they have seen something which is not touristy in the least. I find it ironic that their candid photographs also include a shot of McDonalds.
• Some Asian tourists have stopped directly in front of me. Five boys. One of them has a small piece of bread which he drops on the ground and crushes with his Adidas running shoe before the file off around the fountain. In a few seconds the pigeons descend upon the scattered crumbs. They are almost silent as they stealthily slither up to the small feast and gulp it down, pecking and ruffling their feathers. Just behind me I can hear an American tourist reading from a guide book “the Pantheon was built…” but he moves out of ear shot almost as soon as I recognize that he is speaking. Things are moving too fast for my pen, no one stays long enough for me to capture more than a fragment or two of a sentence. A couple of American kids, probably at John Cabot from their accents, are trying to take a photograph of the Pantheon, but they cannot get far enough away to fit it all into the frame.
• My attention was called away form the previous sentence by the sound of clicking heels. A women in brown shoes with wooden soles clicks by looking puzzled as she scrutinizes a map. She pauses for a moment and then stuffs the map into her hand bag and clicks away.
• The entryways to the piazza at this corner are very small, so the people who enter together are not always together. A small tangle will enter the space together, but one of them will break away from the crowd and rush off towards the Pantheon, or slip around to the fountain for a sip of water before rushing off on their way.
• When a photograph is being taken, the subjects will rush up to the fountain and pose for a moment before rushing back to look at themselves and see if they look happy enough to be in Rome, if not you hear the tiny beeps as the undesirable picture is discarded and they hurry back to try again. One sullen young women stands behind me and snaps a picture of herself, turns the camera around, grunts her approval, and hurries on to the next sight to pose again. Personally, I cannot imagine an instance where I would have to prove to someone that A) I actually was in Rome, B) I went to the Pantheon and C) I had a good time while I was there DANG IT ALL!

After taking my notes and sketching some people I spoke with Mike for a few minutes about the failings of Professor Martimucci’s grasp of space and collective memory. I cannot say that I fully understood the concept they were both trying to get at, but I believe, and I think Mike agreed, that the concept was somewhat simplified for the audience listening to the lecture, and so the idea that we as tourists added something to the space of the Campo de Fiori was necessarily left out to make the point stronger. It is something I would like to look into a bit more, but I’m not sure that I have the time and the resources to do so here.