On Monday 11th October 2010, two members of the band will be at Café Oto, 18 – 22 Ashwin street, Dalston, London E8 3DL. Door Times : 8pm – Tickets : £4 adv / £5 on the door – More info here.

On Tuesday 12th October 2010, two members of the band (and it’s very likely that they’ll be the same two members as the night before) will be at Pages of Hackney bookshop, 70 Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, London E5 0RN. H 7 pm – More info here.

On wednesday 13th October 2010, two members of the band (and it’s extremely likely that they’ll be the same two members as the previous nights) will be at the British Library. No details yet for this event, we only know that it will be at 6.30 pm.

Three very different venues. Each event will be slightly different from the other two, but there is no doubt that we’ll read from our books (especially from Manituana), talk about the way we work with history, introduce our latest novel Altai (which will be published in English by Verso at some moment in the future), say a few things on the second installment of the “Atlantic Triptych” that started with Manituana (we just began to work on it), comment upon our essay Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise (ie the introduction to this book here), answer questions and so on and so forth. See you there.

The current issue of Shanghai-based 《外国文艺》 magazine (Waiguowenyi = Foreign Literature and Arts) features a 20-page special on Wu Ming and the New Italian Epic. There are translated excerpts from three of our novels (54, Manituana and Altai) plus some non-fiction stuff. It’s both on the translator’s blog (html) and dowloadable from our server (pdf). 哪里哪里! [Looks like our blog isn't in any 60v€rn|\/|€nt bl4çkli5t yet.]

Manituana (paperback edition) reviewed in The Independent

Boyd Tonkin, Friday, 23 July 2010

It is now official: Wu Ming 1 will translate the next Stephen King book into Italian. It is a collection of four novellas entitled Full Dark, No Stars.

Wu Ming 1 is one of the Constant Readers, a long-time Stephen King fan. For years, he’s been reviewing King’s books and writing about his work on newspapers and magazines.

A few days ago, WM1 wrote an open letter to the Italian King fandom, announcing the news and explaining a few things about his method. Here’s a translated excerpt:

I’m fully aware that, like a salmon, I’ll have to swim against a stream of mistrust (if not hostility), which is perfectly understandable. For many years, the Italian “voice” of King was that of Tullio Dobner. Dobner is a skilled translator and his undertakings are nothing short of epic, as he toiled and lost blood on King’s enormous tomes. He is also a generous person who often confronted the fan community in “no holds barred” discussions. It is normal that this new “experiment” raises eyebrows. In fact, I see talk of protests, petitions etc.

Here’s what I have to say: judge me by the result. (more…)

Q and Altai both acquired by Tokyio-based Sogensha Co., Ltd.

In April 2008 Wu Ming 1 – on behalf of the whole collective – published the so-called “memorandum” on the New Italian Epic, which since then has been rippling the surface of Italian culture. The debate is still hot, attacks on our vision are constantly delivered by powerful senior critics and windbags, but we also opened several breaches: since 2008, no discussion of the current state of Italian literature has been possible without references – either positive or negative – to what we wrote. They just couldn’t ignore the “memorandum” (and the expanded version that was published as a book by Einaudi in 2009).

Not surprisingly, the first monography on the subject wasn’t published in Italy but in the UK. It is entitled Overcoming Postmodernism: The Debate on New Italian Epic, and it’s a special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies (Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2010). We reproduce the Editor’s introduction and the Notes on Contributors.

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
Claudia Boscolo

Aims and origin
The contributors of this special issue of Journal of Romance Studies all offer a critical view of a single text. They all engage with different novels as primary material, but their analysis is based on Italian author Wu Ming 1’s essay New Italian Epic: Memorandum 1993-2008, the first version of which was published online in April 2008. Wu Ming is the name of a collective of Italian authors based in Bologna, formerly known as the Luther Blissett Project [1] The collective is currently formed by four members, known by a number from 1 to 5 (Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 2, Wu Ming 4 and Wu Ming 5 – Wu Ming 3 left the group in 2008). New Italian Epic is commonly known as the ‘Memorandum’ [2]. It describes and provides a taxonomy for a corpus of Italian contemporary novels by various authors – including Wu Ming. (more…)

He died of prostate cancer. He died in exile in Morocco on September 7, 1997. His name was Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Zabanga – literally “Mobutu, the warrior who goes from victory to victory as no-one can stop him” – but when he was born in 1930, in what was then the Belgian Congo, he was simply Joseph-Désiré Mobutu. The Africanization of his name was part of the visionary strategy that made him famous, along with the distinctive leopard hats, the carved tribal stick and the monumental choreographies.
There is always something ridiculous and farcical in dictators. Their clothes, their mannerisms, even their faces. They are pop stars, or rather crooners, who entertain the public from a media stage, in order to hide the atrocities they commit in the wings. That’s the reason why their style is very often over-the-top and excessive, and at the same time painstakingly constructed and cared for.
Mobutu, for example, was a bloodthirsty dictator, but he was also a key exponent and lover of a certain African glamour made of floral shirts, cloaks, and noteworthy events which attracted attention to him and the facade of Zaire, while obscuring the dictatorship’s crimes. Think of the most famous boxing match in history, Ali vs. Foreman, 1974, recounted in Leon Gast’s documentary When We Were Kings.
The king, of course, was Muhammad Ali, not that pathetic usurper Mobutu, who sought the light reflected by the giant to shine on the international stage. And yet, that clown had had a flash of genius. It was no ordinary thing to imagine such an event, the “Rumble in the Jungle”, a clash between two black fighters in the heart of Africa. (more…)

[This essay was written in the Summer of 2008, to be used as a preface to this collection of Thomas Müntzer's sermons. It is a bitter piece of self-criticism on our "mytho-poetic" politics during the 2000-01 period (roughly from the "Battle of Seattle" to the mayhem in Genoa).  It's been circulating widely in Italian and Spanish, but not in English, due to problems that delayed the publication of the book. Many people asked us for it. We decided to post it in four chunks on this blog. This won't harm the book, indeed, our long-time experience with anticipating stuff on the Internet tells us quite the opposite.]

***

«A few months before the summit we started to write epic texts such as From the Multitudes of Europe… (and many more), you know, it was like an edict and it went: “We are the peasants of the Jacquerie… We are the thirty-four thousand men that answered the call of Hans the Piper… We are the serfs, miners, fugitives, and deserters that joined Pugachev’s Cossacks to overthrow the autocracy of Russia…” Then we pulled media stunts in order to create expectations for Genoa. An example: on a quiet springtime night, we put placards around the necks of the most visible statues in Bologna (guys like Garibaldi and other nineteenth-century national heroes), with messages encouraging all citizens to go to Genoa [...] We wanted to persuade as many people as possible to go to Genoa, and we ended up convincing as many people as possible to fall into a full-scale police ambush. Demonstrators were assaulted, beaten to a bloody pulp, arrested, even tortured. We didn’t expect such mayhem. Nobody did. I regret we were so naïve and caught off-guard, although I think that was a crucial moment for the latest generation of activists. In a way, it was important to be there. That experience has created bonds between a transnational multitude of human beings [...] We’ll see the consequences of that “being there” for a long time to come, on a grass roots, extended, long-tailed level.»
- Wu Ming interviewed by Robert P. Baird, Chicago Review #52:2/3/4, October 2006

0. A present from the monkeys

It happened one chilly night of March 2001.
It happened in Nurio, state of Michoacán, Mexico, where all the indigenous tribes of the country were gathered to demand an Indian Rights Act. It was the third meeting of the National Indian Congress, largely a creation of the Zapatistas, those media-savvy poetic warriors who had seemingly appeared out of nowhere – out of the depths of time – seven years before. U2 were wrong, sometimes something changes on New Year’s Day. Sometimes an army of balaclava-wearing Maya peasants occupy a city and get their message across to millions of people. It occurred in San Cristobal de las Casas, state of Chiapas, Mexico, on the first of January 1994.
And there we were, seven years later, in the darkness on the edge of Nurio, and the Zapatistas were there, Subcomandante Marcos was there, for the indigenous meeting took place during the famous and internationally covered March of Dignity.
The March: throngs of people travelling on battered coaches, covering thousands of miles, from the backwoods of Chiapas to a spectacularly crowded Zócalo, the biggest square in Mexico City. Twenty days of travel, twenty days of poetry delivered by Marcos in seven allegorical speeches called the ‘Seven Keys’. (more…)

January was a work-filled and travel-filled month, which made us neglect this blog, but we’ll make amends for this!
We’re still promoting Altai all over Italy (the novel has been in the Top 10 list of Italian fiction for 4 months), we just returned to France to promote Manituana, and Wu Ming 1 went to Kenya and climbed the  mountain that gives its name to the country, walking in the footsteps of this guy.

Benuzzi wrote a famous memoir on his adventure, No Picnic on Mount Kenya, in print in several countries. WM1′s purpose is to write an Unidentified Narrative Object on Africa, daring escapes, World War 2 POW camps, writers climbing mountains, half-forgotten stories of inconspicuous adventures, and how the Fascist regimes manipulated mountaineering for political propaganda during the 1930s. The investigative journey has just begun, there will be more mountains to climb, people to interview, lost memories to recover, remote archives to consult.

In the meantime, Wu Ming 2 is almost through with another UNO, a quasi-novel that also works as both a trekking guide and a counter-information investigative piece on the Appennines between Bologna and Florence, a narrative survey of what is still beautiful and what has been devastated by all kinds of property speculation and – especially – railway projects. The book is also a spin-off of WM2′s solo novel War on the Humans (2004).

Wu Ming 4 is writing several essays on JRR Tolkien, Robert Graves, TE Lawrence and a dissection of the figure of the “hero” in mythology and popular culture. These essays will be published in book form at the end of 2010. Of course this has to do with WM4′s solo novel Star of the Morning (2008).

All together, we just started research for the second installment of the Atlantic Triptych.