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January 9, 2006
The missing Puccini factor
by Sylvia S Tognetti
In this earlier post, among other things, I spoke about what I call the Puccini factor, which you can only find in lettuce from Torre del Lago, but I'm also using the term to describe the unique qualities of a place, and of things that come from such a place, that you will never find in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), and that science will probably never be able to quantify. For example, grapes that are genetically the same, grown on different soil, do not produce the same wine. Like people, places have identities made up of unique constellations of the basic stuff. Unless, as in these Post-Normal Times, they are made to look like someplace else. I once read that a favorite way to pass the time in Los Angeles is to drive around looking for real neighborhoods. Even in the Washington DC area, you can find a place in Gaithersburg called North Potomac and a place in Rockville called Chevy Chase View. And in Chevy Chase, you can find a decontextualized Tuscan Villa - i.e., without the idyllic landscape. Where I live, a place I call Muddy Spring, one of the historic landmarks is the Tastee Diner, complete with parking lot. I'm not kidding. To be fair, there is also a postage stamp sized park at the spot of the original "Silver" Spring. But I digress.
Coincidentally, on the same day as I wrote about the Puccini factor, Ulisse SiFossiFoco (my favorite blogger and now co-author on a work in progress), put up a post that describes the missing Puccini factor, as he imagines it, and for which I felt compelled to provide a translation, below. For the missing SiFossiFoco factor, i.e., to read it in its original Florentine vernacular, click here.
I can imagine an American soldier in Iraq. As I imagine him, I ‘m certainly not thinking of a boy from New York or Los Angeles, but rather a boy who lives in one of those many parts of America cultivated with genetically modified corn that one passes through at two hundred kilometers an hour to arrive in a small town of few souls that has a commercial center, a small church, a sheriff ’s office and a bar where one can get drunk in the evening - as the sole evasion. I imagine him in Iraq, as one who renounces his own thought for the virtue of ready-made collective thought, manufactured for him by war-mongered (is there a better word?) experts of psychology, sociobiology and marketing.
I imagine him to be very ingenuous and, because of this, disposed to obey any order because that is how things are done, because everyone does it.
I also imagine him to be shrewd, because I don’t see this American boy as stupid. His shrewdness consists of wanting to earn a little money for himself, to count a little bit more in society, to have a house and remove from his back a pre-fabricated destiny as a worker of genetically modified corn in the enormous expanse of genetically modified cornfields that, for 18 or 20 years has been not only his whole panorama, but also that of his family throughout it's entire history.
I imagine a military professional, like those emerging also among us here in Italy after the abolition of obligatory military service. A boy or a girl of this new Italian “professionalism”: the only profession in our economy that does not make use of flexi-time, day-labor, contracting, and temp work. The only profession that promises adventure on a fixed salary, as long as there is peace, and then, at a select level of compensation, or in exchange for a state funeral and a medal if the extraordinary is called for.
If I were to hear him speak, this American soldier, I’m sure that in between the folds of the slang of his cornfields beyond the ocean, it wouldn’t be hard to pick up on some accents of Calabria, Sicily or Abruzzo that fill the Italian military barracks of today: who knows why?
Posted by Sylvia S Tognetti at January 9, 2006 7:23 PM
mille grazie!!!
Posted by: sff at January 10, 2006 3:48 AM