At last Altai is out in English. Here’s the page Verso dedicated to the book.
And here’s a piece by our old pal Stewart Home who interviewed us in Bologna a few weeks ago.
And here’s comrade and fellow writer Ron Jacobs writing about Q and Altai.
WM1 and WM2 will be in the UK from 29 May to June 1 to promote the book. We’ll post the details ASAP.
In the meantime, we’ve got a new book out in Italy… (more…)

Wu Ming 4 – desde Giap
(traducido por Gorka Larrabeiti y publicado en Rebelión)

Está claro que esta noche no hay gloria. Y mañana ningún horizonte. Era antifrástico también el título de la película de Stanley Kubrick, uno de los más hermosos contra la obtusidad antihumana del militarismo. El argumento es conocido: durante la Primera Guerra mundial, en el frente occidental, un general francés inepto lanza un ataque imposible contra una fortificación alemana. Las tropas francesas no consiguen ni siquiera salir de las trincheras; las ametralladoras los aniquilan y se repliegan. El ataque es una catástrofe colosal. Para no pasar por incapaz, el general echa la culpa a la cobardía de sus soldados y pide que se fusile a cien, elegidos al azar. El Alto Mando le concede tres. Tre chivos expiatorios que pagaran por todos, aunque la culpa no sea de nadie, o mejor, lo es de quien mandaba desde lo alto. Y de quien quiso esa guerra. (more…)

People often ask us where they can find informative pieces in English on what’s going on in Italy streetswise, grassrootswise, riotwise, revolutionwise and so on. Sometimes they ask us to translate stuff ourselves, which we aren’t able to do even for our own material (that’s why this blog, in sharp contrast to Giap, is so frustratingly still, with updates as slow as frozen shit).
Well, there are at least two blogs entirely, quixotically devoted to providing counter-information in English on what you folks are interested in: Struggles in Italy and Italy Calling. Check them out, those activists also cure profiles on several social media etc.

El desierto es su casa, las rocas su comida…

Stella del mattino – the old blog
Frozen in 2010.

Textos en castellano
Antigua pagina en html estático, 2000 – 2009.
*

In a near future, not many years after a Crisis that has reduced Italy to a pre-industrial or even pre-modern condition, a middle-aged woman wanders in the half-flooded countryside between Ferrara and the river Po delta (North-Eastern Italy). She has no name, and refers to herself by antonomasias such as the Historian, the Writer, the Seer… She is seeking the places of her childhood and, perhaps even more important, she’s pursuing echoes of her native dialect. She is visited by different versions of the same dream. She meets a man called Matteo, they talk and then they experience an epiphany, an illumination: the word «Arzèstula» (ferrarese for Great Tit) evokes the very little bird it designates. Then the woman returns to the place she belongs, that is, a former motorway café at Cantagallo, south-west of Bologna, which is now home of a free community of outcasts affected by neurological disorders. At night, all together, they perform rituals that allow them to see the future. Not the future that’s behind the corner, but a future beyond that, an extremely distant future. (more…)

Steve Workers. Image by We Are Müesli

Think different: billionaires are not on your side.
Stay foolish: fight capitalism.
Stay hungry: eat the rich.
- Steve Workers, 2011

by @jumpinshark, useful summing-up of a discussion that’s going on among Italian media activists. As a first step toward solving this embarrassing problem, a group of people has decided to start a blog half-ironically called – after a weird documentary Jean-Luc Godard made in 1969 – “Struggles in Italy” (not yet on line, they’re working on the first posts), to provide info & stories in several languages on the radical struggles taking place in Italy (against cuts, “Austerity”, racism, exploitation, privatisation of the commons, destruction of the environment and so on). We really hope these comrades will do a work for which the movement(s) will thank them, and wish them the best of luck.

Since last April, we have published 37 articles on Giap, our blog in Italian. Most of them are lengthy stuff. They often generated several hundreds of comments, and debates that went on for weeks. A discussion on Italy, financial capital, the ever-agonizing Burlesquoni government and the current economic crisis is still in full swing after more than a month.
We wrote pieces – or gave talks which were recorded and put on the blog for download – on the recent uprisings all over Europe and the Mediterranean, with particular focus on the Spanish “Indignados”.
We talked about riots, workers’ struggles in Italy and the amazing “No TAV” movement in Piedmont, North-Western Italy (which we regard as one of the most advanced experiences of self-organisation and grassroots resistance to capitalism).
We commented upon the 10th anniversary of the G8 summit in Genoa, the murder of Carlo Giuliani etc. (more…)

First time we used Storify.
N.B. Click on “Read more” to go on with the flow. It may sound like useless advice, but you’d be surprised to hear how many people fail to see those two little blue words :-)

This could be both stupid and interesting to someone (but we don’t know whom). It’s just an idea we had while translating the two talks we’ll give in North Carolina on April 4-5. These are the first five minutes (out of about 45) of each talk. They’re read by a certain “Alex”, ie the male voice of a text-to-speech software we happen to be tinkering with these days.

WM2 – How to tell a revolution from something else

WM1 – We are all February of 1917

Duke University, Durham, NC
Monday, April 4
5:00 pm
Franklin Humanities Institute Garage, Smith Warehouse
This event is also sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Program in Literature, the Marxism and Society Program, and the UNC Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC
Tuesday, April 5
11:00 am
UNC Global Education Center, room 3024 (more…)

We’ve been neglecting this blog for too long (over a month has passed since the last post). It’s just that our main blog, Giap, requires a lot of work and takes pretty much all the time we’re able to devote to work on the web. Moreover, we’re writing the new collective novel on the French Revolution (with an eye on what’s happening in North Africa); Wu Ming 1 is translating this book here (1,000 pages to be delivered on September 15th!) and doing research for a project on Africa, mountaneering and fascism; Wu Ming 2 and Wu Ming 4 are teaching a course at the University of Pesaro; Wu Ming 5 is on national tour with his Oi! band Nabat (click on the name to see them performing live). And we’ve got little children to boot! In plain words, we’re juggling our way through life while riding a metaphorical bicycle like the one you can see in the pic, and translating stuff from Italian is out of question these days. This is unfortunate, for we’ve written a lot of pieces which, once slightly readapted, could be of some interest to non-Italians.
The difficulties we’re experiencing with all these projects are even preventing us from doing the usual book tour to promote our latest book, Anatra all’arancia meccanica [Clockwork Orange Duck], a collection of the short stories we wrote from 2000 to 2010. We’re very fond of this book, it’s a look back upon ten years of activities, but if we hit the road now, we wouldn’t be able to write :-(
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A Khaled Said y a todos los insurrectos en Nordáfrica y en Oriente Medio
..

[WM1:] Intentaré poner al día a nuestros lectores acerca de lo que ha sucedido en la última semana en el frente del “rogo de libri” [quema de libros] véneto, y sobre como esta movilización se ha cruzado con otras luchas, en particular, la huelga general de los trabajadores de la industria metalmecánica.
Respecto a la batalla que llevamos adelante desde hace ya dos semanas, hay algo que podemos decir ahora mismo: hemos ganado el primer asalto. Pero procedamos con orden.

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In the last two weeks we’ve been campaigning hard against right-wing officials trying to ban books and authors in Veneto (North-East Italy). Alongside many writers and readers, we’ve been helping to coordinate a rich, manifold counter-informative operation which has taught us (and is still teaching us) many lessons. We already scored some important goals, as we managed to stop some hateful initiatives dead in their tracks. Unfortunately, we’ve been so engulfed in the campaign that we haven’t had time to keep you anglophones reasonably up-to-date with what was going on. If you look at this post’s comment section, you’ll find some useful texts and pingbacks. We even held a public meeting and made a demonstration “in the belly of the Beast”, ie in Preganziol, province of Treviso, the den of the hideous Northern League. A brief, partial report on what happened can be found here.
Anyway, we can’t omit to post stuff specifically related to our work as writers.
Thus, here’s the first batch of news of 2011. (more…)

[Translated into Spanish by Nadie Enparticular. Original text here. We're looking for people who can translate into English and other languages.]
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¿Quién es la mujer que declara que nuestros libros son “deseducativos”, pontifica sobre la “necesidad de buenos ejemplos, no de malos maestros” y pide a los directores de las escuelas de la Región Véneto que destierren cientos de títulos y –sobre todo– a sus autores? ¿Quién es ella? Fuera del Véneto, solo se sabe que es la consejera regional de Instrucción y Formación, y que es del PdL [Partito della Libertà]. Pero aparte de esto, que es el envoltorio, ¿quién es Elena Donazzan?
Bueno, para dar un ejemplo, es la que está dentro del círculo:

(more…)