Aldo Grasso’s book is released on November 4th for Solferino: fragments of news in the form of apologues to understand the present. It will be presented at BookCity Milano on 18
Every night, before going to bed, the grandmother covered the television with a huge doily embroidered by her, leaving him in the darkness of the living room with that white lace sheet on him, like a stocky and charming ghost.
But not this that it scared mewhen I tried to sleep in my room. It worried me why my grandmother covered him up like that.
She had explained to me that it was for protect it from dust, but it did not convince me: in my opinion the real danger came from within, and it came out to look for us.
My terror was that at night, without that sort of embroidered crochet net, the world of TV – the presenters the valleys the announcers the imitators the jokers the ventriloquists the talking mice the dancers the guests the contestants the singing children and the entire universe that populated the schedule – could cross the screen like a damned and delusional specter, crawl into my room and wrap myself in his madness embrace.
Since those sleepless nights that have passed a long time, the big or small doilies are no longer there, n CRT televisions as big as dumpsters, and unfortunately my grandmother is no longer there. And the absurd fear that kept me awake under the covers also disappeared.
But only because what I feared has now largely come true.
TV, its world and its language, the times, the ways and its rules, are our lives today. The days are shaky schedules, the places are locations, our every step conceived and experienced as the appearance of a character who hopes to get noticed and survive for another episode, in this reality show that is reality.
a delusional and bewildered panorama, in which we risk understanding something only if we understand something about television.
So here’s why Italy Pavilion becomes a fundamental guide to existence: the day the locusts conquer the Earth, we will only have to listen to the entomologists. When a new global flood takes us to the deep abyss, we will only have to turn to oceanographers and divers. But in the meantime society, politics and the contemporary soul can tell us better than anyone else Aldo Grasso. Because the specific field of his studies and his passion has become the key to understanding and explaining the whole world.
Fat moves eyes from the screen that has been scrutinizing for a lifetime, laying them on the Italy around and recognizing faces, situations, dynamics, balances, the staging of our lives.
After all, every day the Bel Paese offers us a ramshackle theatrical show of which we don’t know whether to laugh or cry, and Italy Pavilion he tells us about this show on a weekly basis from the first page of the Corriere. With him we cry and smile, or rather we smile at what should make us cry. But if this is the effect of every single Sunday, the texts collected in the book that comes out on Thursday 4 November for Solferino take on a greater and different power, which is disorienting.
Grasso could have arranged them in chronological order, according to the date of publication. It would have been simple and rigorous, but it would have been a lie. For who Pavilions they are not news, they are not episodes related to the moment, which with the days grow old and dry out to be placed inert in the calendar boxes. Each one, on the other hand, is an apologue, a fable that risks providing us with a moral or a reflection, and a fable has no time or age.
therefore it is all the more appropriate to have ordered them thus, around the various morals contained therein The politics of Aesop Phrygus, seventeenth-century operetta where Emanuele Tesauro composes or adapts 118 fables and seals them with an allegory of political inspiration.
For their fables, Thesaurus and Aesop used animals, Grasso instead takes the politicians and the known faces of the news, speaks of them and their deeds but in the meantime it speaks of us, of our rare virtues and abundant vices.
So the reading of the Pavilions it has the effect of a slap that reaches us in the dark, but a slap that knows how to be a caress, a whip that warm, alive and participating, always on him and never from above.
These are not the lashes that the director of the Tour de France dispensed to at the beginning of the twentieth century rowdy audience on the sides of the road, from the top of the car that opened the race. Instead, they are the deep spasms of a soul that lives among others in this liquid and muddy time, and like those it squirms and searches around hoping for some hold.
Even the most unfortunate episodes, the most ugly characters, Grasso writes with empathy, without fear of getting dirty and to fully explore the dark meanders of their essence. As in the wild esteem that one feels when he tells of certain grotesque politicians, observing that one cannot imagine how much determination is necessary to offer the side of the ridiculous. Yes, the sense of ridicule, this redeeming limit that stopped humanity one step before total humiliation, has now become a useless burden and indeed a defect that precludes success: The best thing for a politician not to have a sense of ridicule. Deprived of the harness, the politician manages to sacrifice his past reputation with the same audacity with which he renounces future esteem. But it survives, it expands.
In short, Grasso avoids the lethal risk of sounding like a judge, pedantic and narcissistic like the figures he dislikes most, the many moralizers who flourish in the country, always ready to judge, to be indignant in vain and transform their indignation into spectacle and visibility. Because to judge others it is necessary not to really understand them, a precious gift of judges is not having sensitivity and empathy. And making morality is much more convenient and profitable than having it, a morality.
A morality, on the other hand, is what he seeks Italy Pavilion, narrating this stage as big as the world, with its figures that it never caricatures (they do it very well by themselves). The result is a great contemporary bestiary, populated by impossible creatures yet taken from reality, assembling and reassembling its pieces like a puzzle that becomes a hallucinatory recapitulation of our years.
But together with what he chooses to tell, the strength of Pavilion it comes from the style with which Grasso spreads it on the page, from the sharp contrast between facts, situations and characters, and his way of telling them. To move between grotesque episodes, embarrassing statements and such nasty subjects, in the bewildering orgy of luxury and power, of the boorish ostentation of opulence and privilege, Grasso uses a tongue that is throbbing and warm but at the same time clean, precise, without ever slipping into flamboyance, into the self-exhibition of one’s knowledge.
They are born essential phrases and therefore unforgettable, and his famous suspensions in parentheses, which with a few words close the curtain on the squalid and ugly picture that the company proposes that week. After all, those who have a frugal thought, those who only have opinions pretend to have a thought.
By recounting the arrogance, the arrogance, the obtuse vainglory with precision, class and palpitating measure, he makes the coarseness of others even more evident by contrast, and offers our Country full of judgments, sentences and sermons, what he lacks: example.
The pages of Italy Pavilion they thus become a song with a thousand registers: we laugh bitterly at the declarations of the VIP on duty, we shake our heads at yet another pathetic politician on which annuities rain in abundance, then suddenly we are moved by unknown but bright figures like the old Scroccona of Savona, who, with a scruffy appearance and a dove-gray wool sweater, eats mixed fried food with bony hands and cannot pay.
Okay then: one evening my grandmother forgot to cover the TV with the doily, the ghosts came out of the screen and took over the world. But in ours weird and foggy existence, where at times we no longer recognize where the above and below are, we hear this song that enchants us, slaps and caresses us, and risks making us understand where we are.
The event on November 18th
Aldo Grasso’s book, Italian Pavilion. Fantastic bestiary for a paradoxical country, comes out Thursday 4 November for Solferino (pages 288, € 18). The volume stems from the experience of the column of the same name that comes out on Sunday on the first page of Corriere della Sera. Aldo Grasso (1948) columnist and television critic for Corriere and professor of History of radio and television at the Catholic University of Milan. Among his books, Encyclopedia of Television (Garzanti, 2006), First lesson on television (Laterza, 2011) and Critical history of Italian television (the Assayer, 2019). Aldo Grasso will present his book at BookCity Milan on Thursday 18 November at 6 pm in the Sala Buzzati del Corriere. With him, Maurizio Crippa, Ferruccio de Bortoli, Stefano Lucchini. Coordinated by Maria Luisa Agnese
November 4, 2021 (change November 4, 2021 | 21:18)
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