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.

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.

As the Grateful Dead would put it: “What a long strange trip it’s been“.
On January 1st, 2000, one day after Luther Blissett’s “Seppuku”, we founded the Wu Ming collective.
A few weeks later, this very website went on line. Ten years of uninterrupted presence on the web. Ten years of conversations, confrontations, communal moments. Thank you all for having made it possible.
With the exception of our comments on the Fluxus-like assault on Burlesquoni, in the last month of 2009 we kind of neglected this blog. We’ve been (and still are) very much involved in the promotion of our novel Altai, which has sold about 30,000 copies so far, and has generated a huge, rich, multifarious debate. The book tour comprises nearly 60 presentations in 50 cities all over the Paeninsula. We already did 14 of them. Film critic Woody Haut says that we’re “indefatigable”, we hope he’s right.
In the meantime, we spotted some interesting things on the web.

For example, The Independent‘s Boyd Tonkin ranked Manituana among the best “general fiction” works published in the UK in 2009. Tonkin wrote that “the overthrow of American revolutionary myths in Manituana” reads as “a tale of our times”, and added: “the Italian Wu Ming collective craft a splendidly surprising, Mohawk-centred view of white colonists’ rebellion against the “Great English Father”, George III.”

In an interview we gave several years ago (BTW we were too influenced by “post-Operaismo” jargon and autonomo-marxist conceptual frames back then, you can see that in the first answer, but the rest of the interview is still good), we said that

We usually think of an historical period which seems fascinating to us, then we spend months watching microfilms, reading sources, doing research, writing down all kinds of stuff, then the brainstorm comes and it lasts several weeks. We have hallucinations, sort of. Historical research is like peyote to us. After we recover from all the shocks and flashes, we start to write.

In 2002 Nate, the guy running the “What in the hell…” weblog, was unable to grasp the metaphor. What in the hell were we talking about? In what way is researching history like taking peyote?
Eventually, after reading Manituana, Nate understood :-D

[WM1:] During my stay in New York City I met Ashley Dawson and Gabriella Coleman, two members of the collective editing and running the Social Text journal.
They interviewed me for about two hours. My friend and former fellow Blissett Marco Deseriis aka Snafu, who lives and teaches in NYC, took part to the conversation.
We covered a lot of issues, including our self-critique on how we dealt with “technified myths” in the months leading up to the anti-G8 days in Genoa (July 2001). We also wrote an essay about that, it will be published as an introduction to the collection of Thomas Muntzer‘s sermons which Verso is going to publish in 2010. The interview is a good introduction to the introduction…
We also talked about history, historians, Norman Cohn, the Iroquois, the difference between our work and postcolonial studies, contradictions in our cultural militancy, the current situation in Italy, our new novel Altai, the “War on Terror”, George Washington‘s genocidal strategies etc.
You can read the whole thing on the Social Text website.

The Italian bestseller list as appearing today in La Stampa daily paper,
book sales 16-22 November 2009.

Aren’t we your heroes?

Our new novel Altai is in Italian bookshops.

The title of this post may be a further example of retrotalk (we slightly adapted the last verse of a 1967 Pink Floyd song, the only one from the first album that was written by Roger Waters instead of Syd Barrett – and possibly the most meaningless of that lot). It’s just that one of us started the day singing it.

Yeah, we’re alive. We haven’t posted anything on this blog for more than 20 days because we’ve been writing and writing and writing, it’s been the final mega-session for the new novel. After about 15 months of the hardest work, two days ago we delivered the text to the publisher.
As we told you some time ago, it’s (more or less) a sequel to Q. We felt the urge to go back to the “crime scene” (our 1999 debut) after the collective lost a member, in the springtime of 2008. After months of crisis and conflict, we needed a new beginning. We needed a peculiar self-managed group therapy (and that’s probably the reason that old tune came to our mind, as it was titled Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk). Gert-from-the-Well appeared and told us: “I can help you, if you bring me back to life!”. And that’s what we did.

It’s been an exciting and fatiguing period. The novel will be titled Altai (here’s a clue as to why). It will be published in Italy in the early days of November. Even those of you who don’t understand Italian might want to listen to this audio recording. You can do it as if it were pure sound, without any meaning. It’s an anticipation of the prologue, read by WM1 at Officina Italia, a literary event that took place two months ago in Milan. Mp3, 16ok, 14 minutes (the first three minutes are the intro/explanation, you’ll realise when the reading begins).
We’ll have a dense autumn: Manituana will be published in France at the beginning of September, then in the UK and the US at the beginning of October, then Altai will come out in Italy.
Ok, that’s all for now. Have a good summer.