AUR LitPut III Spring 2023 - From Now To Then
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria. The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced). The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta. Rome, May 2023
"When I found out about my father’s diagnosis, my first impulse was to light up,” Nalu Gruschkus writes in the opening line of Abnormal Whites and Excessive Blues, her striking piece about her father’s cancer and her own addiction to smoking. In A Bit of Extra Fun, Delaida Rodriguez is
having an unpleasant lunch at a restaurant with her boozy mother. Over a chicken sandwich she has barely touched, she peers into her mother’s jade eyes only to realize with dread that she is more like her than she would care to be. Sam Geida looks back in Friday Night Dinners to the glorious family get-togethers at his grandmother’s house – now it’s only a few of them around the same table, with paper plates and the flat blue and white cardboard boxes of Gino’s Pizzeria.
The stories in last year’s issue of Lit/Pub were mostly about making sense of things as we emerged from our Covid isolation. The mood is more assertive this year. Isabela Alongi’s vibrant cover design brilliantly evokes a world in movement and young people going places. It is a thread we pick up again in Josephine Dlugosz’s delicate musings (Work of Art), and in the short fiction of Scott Cameron and Raegan Peluso (A Song for Mr Solomon and Two-Faced).
The poetry section is especially strong with Gina Carlo’s compassionate trilogy about love and loss and Scott Cameron’s haunting poem about his return to the bleak post-Katrina wasteland. On the lighter side, Lit/Pub spoke to Professor Bruno Montefusco about campus fashion. In the new memoir section, D.P. gives us a tender account of a childhood road trip with her father to Arizona (Snow). And students are traveling again! Emily Chow takes us with her on her intrepid solo trip to Malta.
Rome, May 2023
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THE LIT/PUB INTERVIEW<br />
King Bruno<br />
Professor Bruno Montefusco teaches the popular Italian Fashion course at The American<br />
University. Born and raised in Rome, he worked in Milan in the eighties. “A truly magical decade,” he<br />
recalls, “with the explosive emergence of ready-to-wear and the rise of Giorgio Armani, the man I call<br />
King Giorgio.”<br />
We caught up with Professor Montefusco on a warm spring day in Garden 2. He was wearing a<br />
mismatched suit – blue jacket and gray trousers - and brightly colored sneakers. A tiny, glittering pin<br />
on his lapel was hardly visible. But when he took it off to show it to us, we saw it made all the difference.<br />
What’s with the mismatched suit, Professor?<br />
“In Italian fashion there is always a tendency to match things that are not supposed to be together. It’s<br />
part of what we call sprezzatura – a studied effortlessness. The lavender blue jacket I am wearing has its<br />
own trousers, and these gray trousers have their own jacket. But sometimes I like to mix them up. And<br />
when I mix them up, I like to add a touch of irony. <strong>To</strong>day I wanted to dramatize the suit with a pair of<br />
beautiful sneakers. They don’t match, but I like the casual look they create.”<br />
Do <strong>AUR</strong> students have a casual look? On our way here we passed students sporting baggy pants, neutral<br />
colored tops, and high-end handbags….<br />
“Yes, students dress very casually on campus. But it’s a different kind of casual. When I look around I<br />
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