Composition of his contribution to a forthcoming academic seminar on the semiotics of text-messaging at the Universite de Paris, on the other hand, took place standing atop a fifteenth-century carved stone pulpit removed from the private chapel of a now-demolished palazzo, the text being dictated in a sonorous voice into a Sony digital recorder. Yet another room was kept permanently shuttered, the only light being from a bare hundred-watt bulb dangling above the hardy, ravished desk. It was here, in shirt sleeves and wearing a green eyeshade, that Ugo banged out his weekly column for a glossy, mass-circulation news magazine on a manual upright Olivetti M44 dating from the year of his birth. It was almost impossible to find carbon paper nowadays, so from time to time he had a few dozen boxes flown in from India.
The column generated both money and publicity, but Edgardo already had plenty of both. Indeed, despite his eminent post-modernist credentials, his whole career was living proof that reports of the death of the author had been greatly exaggerated. As for the journalism, he did it for fun, to provide an outlet for his opinions and a way of showing off his versatility. Every writer is all writers, he liked to tell his students, mentioning that Jorge Luis Borges had already pointed out in the 1940s that to attribute the Imitatio Christi to Celine or Joyce would serve to renew the work’s faded spiritual aspirations, adding that this esempio was subversively enriched by the fact that Borges, a slipshod scholar, had probably been thinking of the much more influential De Imitatione Christi, and would in any case have attributed both titles to the now discredited Jean de Gerson rather than to Thomas a Kempis.