Memo 1: Italian Farmcore
Jouissance is a weekly excuse for me to dive into things that I’m fascinated by and bring me pleasure, pain or both. It comes out every Friday at 8am PST for your weekend reading pleasure.
I’m christening this endeavor with Italian farmcore as the first topic, one that is dear to me and so must be thoroughly criticized!
I have told people often, and with relatively serious intention, that I easily see myself having my last days on a farm in southern Italy. I would make pasta and bread when not in the fields, giving some to local children that wander up; sometimes, they would return the favor and give me wildflowers afterward. Not always though.
I know that this desire fits into the larger arch of farmcore and cottagecore, both romanticized longings for living in a remote agrarian lifestyle. The collective subconscious is sick of the confusions and complications from busy capitalism and voilà: farmcore is a reflexive pushback that superficially soothes this craving. Boutiquey places like Italy and France romanticize this further. Unsurprisingly, CMBYN sparked this like a wildfire.¹
In spite of this, I always thought of my intentions as pure. I feel my best around nature and love cooking, taking care of plants, doing busywork all day. And I am relatively connected to Italy, so it’s not just a pretty country to me. I have family members on both sides from there, the strongest out of my background. I know Italian² and my Italian grandparents consciously incorporated their heritage into our time together. So for me, this Italian farm dream is a real intersection of things that I love and could get endless amounts of.
It’s not like this desire is because of Italy’s prosperous farm history; Italy’s relationship with its agriculture industry has been messy for multiple years. Before 1950, the majority of farmlands were in the hands of few noblemen, causing farmworkers to be underpaid, overwhelmed and unemployed. This prompted a land reform which eventually allowed most farms to be family-owned. Regardless of this hardship, the beauty of Italy’s countryside results in farming being associated with strife and beauty at the same time.
Happy as Lazzaro is a dream masquerading as a film that fuels such desires of mine. Writer/director Alice Rohrwacher takes young peasant boy Lazzaro, sets him on a farm with an alluring nobleman, and wraps the entire story up in fable vibes and lethargic urgency. I won’t say too much so to not spoil anything, but the delicate wistful beginning turns into a pretty relevant take on class issues.
This folklore-esque energy intertwined with the rural landscape is also present in some of Italo Calvino’s works. Calvino’s father focused on experimental floriculture and agriculture, causing Calvino to grow up on his family’s farm. This understanding of Italian culture’s relationship to nature bleeds through into his work.
One story where this is present is The Baron in the Trees, the tale of preteen baron Cosimo in the 1700s who goes up into trees one day and decides to never come down. It begins out very tongue-in-cheek and light, but it soon becomes another level of being interconnected with living beings:
The fig tree seemed to absorb him, permeate him with its gummy texture and the buzz of hornets; after a little Cosimo would begin to feel he was becoming a fig himself, and move away, uneasy... sometimes seeing my brother lose himself in the endless spread of an old nut tree, like some palace of many floors and innumerable rooms, I found a longing coming over me to imitate him and go and live up there too; such is the strength and certainty that this tree had in being a tree, its determination to be hard and heavy expressed even in its leaves.
I read passages like that and I’m like, yeah, I’m ready to return to my roots. Give me a fig tree and a stone farmhouse with a crumbling fence along one side. I won’t mind, the goats will stick along to the east side of the farm where the grapes grow under the hill’s shade.
Stepping out of the sun-soaked past and into the present, however, shows a new picture of Italian agriculture. Rohrwacher and Calvino don’t shy away from the difficulties of that lifestyle but they still can’t capture how current things are, which is that for the most part, Italians often drift to sectors outside of farming. Recently, Italy has seen a small resurgence of farm interest due to Covid because 150,000 workers from outside Italy are unable to enter the country and assist with farming work (only 36% of agricultural workers in Italy are native Italians).
Faced with job shortages, some Italians are finding farming as a way to scrape by with money and/or connect with their pre-industrial grandparents. This renewed energy might be a fad that leaves farms in as weak of a spot as they were before; it’s hard to tell. And the future isn’t too much brighter, as climate change is predicted to flip Italy’s hot, long summer and cool winters on its head (goodbye Italian wines!). Farming was never luxurious, but it’s not much better in the States either, as two gallons of blueberries only pay $7 per worker (and that’s better than what Driscoll was paying workers pre-2016).
The on-the-ground hardships fuel into one of cottagecore/farmcore’s critiques: unreproducible in real life, this calling one lifestyle more authentic than the one you are currently in is a cyclical game. A similar paradox is how companies use ‘sustainability’ as a catch-all word to prompt you to buy their product — but the real sustainable thing to do would be to buy as little as possible, as seldom as possible. Farmcore alleviates some stress and guilt from the mind, but adds in other physical and tangible issues. If farmcore is a bubble of beauty, do you pop it or let it drift?
Thinking about the agricultural lifestyle in Italy is bittersweet for me: full of potential but not without logistical and mental hiccups. Would an Italian farm be a way to get closer to myself or evade responsibility with a beautiful backdrop? This question is a private test between me and myself, taking it while never knowing if I truly pass or not.
And because there is always more to consume, here are some LINKS from this past week:
Nine Professional Authors Offer Advice on How to Write (which I snagged from Brady Gerber's "7 For Seven" Substack, another good read). Being more comfortable with mercilessly deleting when necessary and having a ‘fine’ instead of ‘fantastic’ first draft helps when great writers remind me of it too.
The North American Maximalism of Gigi Hadid’s and Drake’s Home Design was, to me, full of odd takes. It tried to go after the ridiculousness of Hadid and Drake’s homes but did so halfheartedly, while also dinging young adults for not curating their own taste in interior design since they buy “start-up” minimalist furniture knock-offs? Put a weird taste in my mouth.
The foxes in Ghost of Tsushima have been petted almost 10 million times, this one speaks for itself.
AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All was a great rabbithole to fall into, if you want to doubt your future and everyone else’s future.
My thoughts on CMBYN is a whole other issue. My biggest gripe is this: it wasn’t a love story, it was a limerance story! Which is fine and daddy. I guess I have more of an issue with CMBYN’s marketing team.
Not fluently, maybe conversationally, definitively adequately.