There’s a sort of everyday decadence to my life here, especially when it comes to food. Breakfast this morning is an omelette with a black truffle paste and sliced onions. For lunch, prosciutto wrapped around slices of melon and a tomato stuffed with rice, all of which we picked up fresh this morning. I don’t know whether this is because I’m not having to cook for myself, or because I’m not as on the go as I am back home, but everything feels more extravagant. Maybe this is just what it’s like to be in Italy. Every meal feels like a real event. I eat lunch on the terrace quickly before a Zoom meeting. Melon juice dripping down my fingers, with the salty, chewy prosciutto cutting through the almost artificial sweetness.
I spend a lot of time thinking about pleasure – I’m a taurus sun, it’s in my nature – and this past month has been a real embodiment of the pursuit of gratification for gratification’s sake. Earlier in the summer, Lucy made me a t-shirt with the slogan ‘Alive with pleasure!’ emblazoned across the chest. She’d stumbled across the phrase, and it reminded her of me. I think this is one of the best compliments anyone has ever paid me. In Peanut Butter, Eileen Myles writes:
Pleasure
as a means,
and then a
means again
with no ends
in sight.
I get gelato almost every day. Today, a scoop of panna cotta and another with viscous gobs of salted caramel, dark chocolate and peanuts. After lunch, pursuing more pleasure, I snack on Tarallucci. Small, round biscuits, maybe just a bit bigger than an Oreo. They’re made with fresh eggs and have a tiny water mill stamped on their face. They’re fragrant and creamy, but somehow surprisingly light. I could eat a whole bag without thinking, but it’s better to savour each one and let it softly dissolve on your tongue.
I don’t think that pleasures like these, or joy of any kind, is frivolous. I listen to a podcast where adrienne maree brown asks us to think about what would be possible if we were not ashamed of our pleasure. About what would become possible if we started to think about pleasure as something that everyone should have access to. Sitting here, thinking about the soft abundance of my days as they manifest through my belly, this resonates. I think about my grandparents. For their honeymoon, my mum’s parents took trains through Europe to the Italian Rivera – her dad had worked for the railways, and (I think?) this gave them discounted travel. They were young, working class, from a small, & at the time still fairly rural, area just outside of Manchester. I think the trip they got to do then would be the reserve of the wealthy now. I don’t think that’s fair.
I’m reminded of José Muñoz, who generously urges us to think beyond the pleasures of the current moment — ‘that minimal transport’ — and instead encourages us to ‘dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds.’ I think about these new worlds a lot in my own work, and the juxtaposition of writing about this work from the lap of luxury is not lost on me. But maybe to do this work it’s important to indulge a little.
We eat dinner late, after 11pm. It’s a quickly whipped up aubergine-and-tomato pasta, garlicky and aromatic. We open a bottle from Cantina Annesanti, the winery we stopped at on our drive last night. The truffles we bought get put off for another day – but we’ll have to eat them soon. The man who sold them to us said to keep them sealed until we want to use them, but I forgot and opened the jar. Too eager for their earthy, unctuous smell. Too alive with pleasure to wait.
Hey, I’m Grace (she/her)(@gr_cebrown). I’m researching my PhD in Glasgow, thinking about eco-socialism, the climate crisis and queer futurity. I’m in Italy this summer, writing my thesis and eating well every day.