Read Online Back to Bologna by Michael Dibdin - Free Book Online Page B

to people’s hearts was to flatter them. He did it in class, and even more so in the series of erudite fictions which had turned an obscure professor of semiotics at a provincial Italian university into one of the richest and most famous authors in the world. Impress the pants off them with your range of knowledge, then leave them feeling that they’re more intelligent and sophisticated than they ever suspected, and they’ll always come back for more. With his academic peers worldwide he adopted a subtly different approach, appealing not to their cleverness–they were in no doubt about that–but to their often non-existent charm, humanity and sense of humour. Even they, who didn’t much like themselves, let alone anyone else, loved Edgardo.
    His phone rang. It was Guerrino Scheda, his lawyer.
    ‘
Ciao Guerrino.
Good news, I hope.’
    ‘I think so. It’s a little unusual, and I don’t as yet have anything in writing, but I’m reasonably hopeful that I’ll be able to pull it off. In which case it would be the perfect solution.’
    ‘Don’t be a tease. What’s happened?’
    ‘Well, at first I walked into a Berlin Wall of threats and menaces. I wasn’t able to speak to Rinaldi personally, but I was given to understand that he’s absolutely furious and wants to sue your balls off. He’s not interested in a settlement, he claims. Money’s not an issue, it’s a matter of pride and honour, etcetera. In other words, he wants his day in court and is prepared to pay whatever it costs to have it.’
    When the original letter from the legal advisers of Lo Chef’s company arrived, threatening an action for ‘very substantial’ damages on the grounds of personal and professional defamation, Edgardo’s initial reaction had been one of disbelief. He had never intended anyone to take his throwaway comment about Rinaldi’s cooking skills literally. It was merely an illustration of his basic thesis in the article, namely that we now live not in a consumerist but a post-consumerist society. Our actual needs having been satisfied, we no longer consume products but process. Thus film footage–the photographic record of actual persons, places and times–is increasingly little more than crude raw material to be transformed by computerised post-production techniques.
    Ugo had quoted Walter Pater’s remark that all art aspires to the condition of music, adding that nowadays all art, including music, aspired to the condition of video games. And in one of those knowing references to the vulgarities of contemporary media culture in which he specialised, he had gone on to point out that no one knew whether Romano Rinaldi, the star of the smash hit TV show
Lo Chef Che Canta e Incanta
, could actually cook at all. Nor did it matter, he had hastened to add, any more than it had mattered when the President of the United States arrived in Iraq on Thanksgiving Day and was photographed in the troop canteen carrying to table what was actually a raw turkey whose skin had been scorched with a blowtorch. Ugo wasn’t sure how seriously he really took any of this, but of course the whole point was that in the
cultura post-post-moderna
taking things lightly was of the essence. But apparently Romano Rinaldi saw things differently.
    ‘Suppose you can’t pull it off,’ he asked the lawyer. ‘What are our chances?’
    ‘If it goes to court? Evens, I’d say. Maybe better. After all, you never stated that Rinaldi was a fraud, merely that there’s no actual evidence that he can even boil an egg. So we might win.’
    ‘I sense a “but” in the offing.’
    ‘Correct. The two problems with that scenario are that it’ll cost a fortune–we’re very unlikely to be awarded costs–and generate masses of really stinky publicity whatever the outcome. Rinaldi is certainly a pompous jerk, and for all I know a fraud too, but the fact of the matter is that he’s also a national superstar and icon. The people have taken him to their hearts.