


Wednesday, 26 May 2010


The effect of not being on vacation in Italy on a man with a tall stack of
papers to grade.

As you probably noticed, my wife is currently on vacation without me -— which is different
than a vacation from me, although given how frequently insufferable I am,
I could understand the appeal of such—in the le Marche region of Italy, which is immediately
south of Tuscany and full of communists. As evidence of how thoroughly corrupt the region is, I
present a picture (courtesy of her) of the cabin she'll be staying in free of
charge until July:
 That's the view she'll be writing her dissertation to the next two months. The region is poor
(though not so much as I thought) and
poorly serviced by internet and wifi: there's a router up the hill from her which sometimes
provides wifi, but only then into a loft too unbearably hot to occupy during the day. So the
only opportunity I have to talk to her (via Skype) is that last hour in the late evening when
the loft cools enough to be habitable—provided, of course, that the wifi strength that evening
is strong enough to establish and maintain a connection. Which it frequently isn't. But this
post isn't about how melancholy I become when I haven't heard from her by 3 p.m. (which would be
midnight over there), because anyone who follows me on Facebook already knows that and because this post concerns Urbino, not my daily descent into emo. 
I've written about Urbino before , but because the wife is providing me with such dazzling photographs
of the city, I feel compelled to do so again. As I noted in that post, Urbino is not a
"built" city so much as an "evolved" one. (The De Landa seems to
have become an unwitting
theme of late.) Of course it was built , but it was built vertically
within the city walls, meaning that new buildings were constructed atop
existing ones like so:
 The effect is the sort of architecture one only finds in dreams or representations of them,
like the one in the finale of the fourth season of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer , wherein Joss Whedon took advantage of contiguous three-walled film sets to depict
Xander Harris moving seamlessly from the upstairs bathroom at Buffy's house:

Into the Initiative's underground bunker: 
Then, from the bathroom-Initiative across the hall:
Into his parent's basement:
And into an ice cream truck:
Past the the come-hither lesbians:
Through the back of the ice cream truck:
By means of a passage: 
That returns him to you guessed it his parents' basement:
In which he exits the same door he originally entered it from Buffy's house only to end up in
the halls of Sunnydale High and (shortly) an Apocalypse Now parody:
 The only difference between what Whedon did and Urbino is that you could travel through the
side streets of Urbino with a camera and accomplish such feats (minus the Coppola) without needing to cut once . Because without leaving officially sanctioned
lanes of transportation, pedestrians can venture into and through outdoor kitchens, university
departments, the central hallway of apartment buildings, and so on. This photograph of the
dueling signs for the Hotel Raffaello the wife snapped the other day typifies the way the city
feels:
 You can enter the hotel either through the door with the green awning or the second story
window of an adjacent building. (This isn't technically true, but it accurately describes how it
feels to those unaccustomed to the city's geography.) The city is even
more disturbing, though, because of the tendency of its sidewalks to transform into recessed
brick ladders when the street becomes too steep for bipeds
: That picture is not from the current set, as the relative quality attests, and if I remember
correctly—by which I mean, "recognize the fingerprints of amateur photographers the world
over who think a 'good' photograph is one framed in the most dull and predictable way
possible"—snapped by me.* I only mention that because in 2002 I visited the city with the
wife and, as you probably guessed, the real point of this post was to indulge in a bit of
vicarious vacationing before returning to a stack of ungraded papers that no amount of actual
grading seems to have the power to reduce. 
*If it wasn't, even Homer nods? No, but seriously, if that's not a picture I actually took,
it's exactly the sort I relentlessly take, whereas check out the wife's chops above: the woman has
an eye .



If she is working, she is not on vacation. AND this time apart will make you stronger and
make you realize marriage is work and you need to put some in or the marriage dies and you are
left with an empty hole in your heart. I know this is over kill, but you need to get out of
the funk you are in and grade the papers and finish the course so you can get some down time
and catch up on your sleep.
 Posted by: alkau | Wednesday, 26 May 2010 at 11:11 AM


have a happy vacation that place looks fascinating I should get a passport
 Posted by: happyfeet | Wednesday, 26 May 2010 at 09:57 PM


happy, I don't normally like to contradict you, but in this case I must: I'm not the one on
vacation, sadly. I'm having to live it through my beautiful, vacationing wife.
 Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 26 May 2010 at 10:18 PM


oh. Sorry I got confuzzled.

I can't wait to get Alzheimer's so I can watch Buffy again like it was the first time.
 Posted by: happyfeet | Saturday, 29 May 2010 at 12:23 PM





