The old man’s spit hit the eye of far-right MP Giorgio Almirante.
A metre further on, meanwhile, a monstrous gash rent the face of his twin.
‘That takes nerve,’ Garibaldi cursed as he cleared his throat and prepared new ammunition. ‘A fascist like that, coming here to speak to us, in Bologna, on the 1st of May. What does he think he’s doing?’
‘It’s like this,’ the other man agreed. ‘It’s all very well saying that we’re against the atom bomb and all things like that, but if they give one to me, a nice bomb, and they tell me me to fire it on Washington, the Americans would be scared shitless, the wankers, and stop telling us what to do, you can be sure I’d press that button, I don’t care about women and children, I’d press it and there’s an end to it, because if you have to choose between two misfortunes you have to choose the less severe.’
(more…)

We just received a text message from our friend and colleague Valerio Evangelisti, who spends half of the year in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. We were worried about him, as some member countries of the EU (e.g. France) are proposing to cancel all flights from Mexico to Europe. He wrote:

I’ll be back on May 9th. Psychosis here as well, thanks to the WHO. Deaths by broncopneumonia caused by ordinary flu are 159, deaths by swine flu are only 7, in a country with 100 million inhabitants. There have been more cases in California, and yet it’s depicted as an all-Mexican disease. Hope in 10 days it will be over. Goes without saying that I’m OK.

It’s true, there’s a distinctly racist way in which the western media cover epidemics allegedly originating in poorer areas of the world. A hypocritical and racist way, given that the most famous and dangerous zootechnical epidemics of the past years (the Mad Cow epidemic of the 1990′s and the Foot-and-Mouth crises of 1967, 2001 and 2007) had their epicentre in the rich UK. Moreover, animal/cross-species epidemics in poor countries are often caused by the hastily adoption of new models of mass zootechnical production, i.e. factory farming, industrial pigsties, nightmarish chicken batteries etc. (more…)

While we’re warming up the engine of this blog (reasonably soon to come: a reflection on the affinities and differences between brother Roberto Saviano and us, with an analysis of Saviano’s international best-seller Gomorrah*), it makes sense to draw the attention to some interviews that we put in our website’s RSS feed, but may have been overlooked because the newsletter was rarely sent out and many Giap subscribers weren’t following our feed.

The first interview is the one we called “the monster”, because we “frankensteinised” several interviews appeared both on newspapers and the web in the wake of Manituana‘s release. It was put on the Manituana website but it is buried under tons of untranslated stuff, a situation that will dramatically improve in the next weeks.

The monster-interview was translated into English by our Italo-Australian friend Jason Di Rosso, who’s from Perth and lives in Sydney. There’s an oblique reference to him in our movie Radio Alice / Lavorare con lentezza, when the camera lingers on a postcard from Perth whose sender is one Rachel Di Rosso, a girl that one of the film’s characters claims to have shagged 27 times during the few days she spent in Bologna.

The second interview was published on Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 1.  It is a peer-reviewed collaborative journal devoted to such topics as “popular media, fan communities, and transformative works, broadly conceived [...] fan fiction, fan vids, mashups, machinima, film, TV, anime, comic books, video games, and any and all aspects of the communities of practice that surround them.” More info here. The interviewer is Veruska Sabucco, the interviewee is Wu Ming 1. Here it goes.

* Speaking of Gomorrah, some of you may not have seen this yet.

Picture: 1956. Italian teenagers disguised as Indians attacking a train. Allegedly happened in Emilia. The caption calls them ‘our homely redskins’ and says they went crazy by dint of reading western comics. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Two years after it first hit the Italian bookshops, our novel Manituana is about to be published in the UK and the US (June 2009).
Our previous works (Q and 54) were published by Heinemann in the UK and Harcourt in the US, but now we’ve got one new publisher on both shores of the Atlantic, Verso Books. On the other hand, the translator remains the same: Shaun Whiteside.

Two years aren’t such a long time, we were used to waiting for much longer before our books appeared in Angloville:
- we wrote Q in the 1995-98 period; it was published in Italy in 1999; only after 4 long years it reached Britain, and 2003 had to give way to 2004 before the American readers could find it on the shelves.
- we wrote 54 in the 1999-2001 period; it was published in Italy in 2002; we had to wait, respectively, 2005 and 2006 to see it in print in the UK and the US. (more…)