[WM1:] Years ago I read and appreciated Woody Haut’s book Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood.
I’m one of the two Italian translators of Elmore Leonard‘s novels, and I was puzzled about how many good Leonard books had been turned into really AWFUL films before Sonnenfeld, Soderbergh and Tarantino broke that negative tradition in the mid-to-late Nineties – with (respectively) Get Shorty, Out of Sight and Jackie Brown. How come 1970s and 1980s Hollywood couldn’t tune in on Leonard’s song?
I ordered Heartbreak and Vine along with other books that could help me understand, and was then able to put that incapability in its natural, historical context.
About four years later, am I delighted to see that Woody Haut (he’s the guy in the pic) appreciated Manituana and reviewed it on his blog.
He calls us “the hardest working collective in literature”. Not that there are many collectives of authors out there…

We just added one more public presentation in NYC. On the evening of November 20 we’ll be at Bluestockings, in the Lower East Side.
Speaking of the LES, most likely the November 23 Dixon Place event won’t be at Dixon Place (even if we’re still on the bill), but at another venue. We’ll inform you when we know. The calendar is here.

Yesterday, 21 October 2009, the audience of BBC World Service had a chance to hear Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4 talking about Manituana. The daily arts programme The Strand featured about 7 minutes of the conversation we had with the presenter Bidisha, who is a writer herself.
You can listen to the audio clip by clicking here. Wu Ming 1 spoke in English, Wu Ming 4 spoke in Italian and Shaun Whiteside translated. Shaun also read a passage from the novel, which you’ll hear at the beginning of the clip.

[Warning: The ensuing part of this post contains spoilers. If you feel this may affect your enjoyment of the book, just bookmark this page and come back later.]

(more…)

We just came back from London, and it was a very good journey. Thanks to all the people who made it possible (you know who you are). The public events and the interviews went very well, the one at the Big Green Bookshop being particularly warmly attended (particularly warmly: how interesting that the English language lets you put two adverbs in a row! It isn’t possible in most Western European languages. In Italian, an adverb can’t modify another: “particolarmente calorosamente” would sound awfully incredibly wrong).
Here’s the interview we did for BBC Radio 4′s Today programme (it lasts 9 mins, the interviewer is Justin Webb).
Here’s Stewart Home’s blog post about the event at the ICA. Many thanks are obviously due to those who paid £9 to listen to us!
UPDATE 10/20: Here’s Stewart reading from Manituana (mp3, 4 mins). It’s the open letter the London Mohocks hand to Joseph Brant at his arrival in Pall Mall.

[WM1:] From Scotland, Gordon Darroch of The Herald daily paper sent me a barrage of smart and inspiring questions. I answered.
Then he sent more questions, and I also answered those.
A few days later, he sent a third batch.
What else could I do? I answered again.
When the dust settled, we agreed that the conversation was too good to chop it for use in a feature article. He got the whole Q & A published on the newspaper’s website.
Here’s Darroch’s intro. To read the interview, click here.

If there’s one thing you can depend on from the Wu Ming foundation, it’s that nothing will be quite what it seems. The Italian writing collective has a short but distinguished tradition of confounding expectations, overturning convention and coaxing readers into viewing history on the reverse-angle replay.

Their third novel, Manituana, recounts the American war of independence from the losing side – the Six Nations of the Iroquois – and employs all the tricks and devices familiar to readers of their previous offerings, Q (written under the name Luther Blissett) and ’54: conflicting narratives, false trails, elaborate games and back-and-forth propaganda. Seasoned throughout with a neo-marxist outlook that throws up dozens more questions than it answers, it’s an enlightening, sometimes infuriating, but always invigorating read.

An interview with Wu Ming is, similarly, far from a run-of-the-mill event. Not least because it’s conducted by email, partly as a nod to the group’s distrust of old-style media manipulation, though also because Bologna to Glasgow is a much shorter distance in cyberspace.

Wu Ming’s ethos is tied in with the 20th-century pranksterist tradition of “art terrorism” and its suspicion of “old” media as being inherently shallow, duplicitous and obsessed with trivia. They refuse to be filmed or photographed by the media and identify themselves by number (there are currently four Wu Mings, known as Wu Ming 1, 2, 4 and 5, the number 3 shirt having been retired recently when a member left the band). Yet they are far from reclusive, travelling around the world to promote their books and diligently tending their website, wumingfoundation.com, where all their fiction can be downloaded for free.

Over the course of a fortnight Wu Ming 1 and I traded more than 4500 words on war, literature, cognitive reality, football and why you should never refer to the group as anarchists. Please note there are a few spoilers here – no drastic giveways, but if you don’t want to know how the War of Independence turns out, or what happens to Dread Jack, look away now.

You probably know what happened yesterday. Everybody knows. The whole world is talking about it.
Three years ago we were slightly ahead of our time when we wrote:

In 1993 Berlusconi “took to the field of politics” because he couldn’t survive as a tycoon after his political referents had been wiped off by the “Clean Hands” anti-corruption inquiries and trials. He was very likely to end up in prison for corruption, money laundering and mafia-related activities. By entering politics and taking over, he could exert power directly, with no mediations, and pass laws that put spokes in the judiciary wheel.
Since the beginning, he could remain on the saddle only if he managed to project all of his personalities in one laser beam: he must keep depicting himself as an entrepreneur, a politician, a glamorous media attraction, and the founding father of a new country, a country made of gaudy plastic and consumerist dreams [...]
Gradually his multifarious image entered a crisis. His self-descriptions as a media attraction and a founding father became the weakest links of the semiotic chain. As his charm wore out, he got ever more nervous and scared of ageing. Nowadays, after all those facelifts, eyelid repairs and hair transplants, it looks like his head is shrinking. He failed himself with his compulsive urge to be adored. In the meantime, he disgraced himself too many times, he cut too many poor figures. Berlusconi turned into Burlesquoni.

We wrote that Berlusconi was finished. We were slightly ahead. Seemingly wrong in the short term, damn right in the long run, ’cause now it’s happening. He’s crumbling down. It will take some more time, but he’s rotting out from the inside. It will be painful and dangerous, but he’s definitely falling down. Berlusconism in the strict sense is in irreversible crisis. Unfortunately, Berlusconism in the broader sense will stay with us for countless years. Berlusconism is less a political movement than a cultural epidemic. The damage that’s been done to Italian society is very serious, and there’s no longer any Left to take advantage of this moment in any interesting way but, hey, something big is taking place, and certainly we won’t cry for the man.

We’ve got to admit it, this is one of the best reviews we ever got. Totally unexpected, and really, really welcome. Check out this excerpt:

Describing a spectacular fireworks show on the Earl of Warwick’s estate, performed by a group of Italian showmen, the narrator jests that “the Italians built their own glory on the embellishment of ideas born elsewhere, adding a flamboyant, clownish touch.” It is a self-referential comment, even a self-effacing one, but it belies the splendor of this novel. Perhaps the four men behind Wu Ming have built their glory on others’ ideas, occasionally with a novel flamboyance, but they have made these ideas their own by imbuing them with a sublimity that powerfully elegizes a devastated civilization, while also challenging us to reconsider the historic narrative we often hold as self-evident.

Q: What do Wu Ming have in common with Ron Jacobs?
A: The Weather Underground.
Q: What?
Well, Jacobs is the author of this history of the Weather Underground, just republished by Verso.
We authored an intro/blurb for the Italian edition of this documentary on the Weather Underground.
Now Jacobs reviews Manituana on CounterPunch and describes the book as “a novel of the fourth world”.
Here’s an excerpt from his article:

[Manituana] pits the original peoples of a nation against those who come to colonize it.  It is the story of the multiple indigenous nations that existed on the American continent before the Europeans came and destroyed them.  It is the story of India and the British Raj and it is the tale of the Algerian people and the French Republic’s colonization of that land.  it is also the story of Israel and its ethnic transformation of Palestine into a Western settler state.  In short, it is the tale of every people that has seen its land taken over by a European people as intent on making it their own as its original inhabitant are on preventing such an occurrence.  This is also the story of America’s indigenous people being manipulated by the European colonists for the Europeans’ own ends.  We see a mirror of this situation in today’s manipulations of the indigenous peoples in the lands the west wants as its own today: the Shia vs. Sunni conflict in Iraq and the manipulation of tribal conflicts  in Afghanistan are but two examples that come immediately to mind.  Manituana evokes the dangerous conceit of men who believe it is their destiny to rule the world.

By the way, Manituana is in bookshops today!