Giap Digest # 24 - Two interviews and pieces of news - 15 December 2003
Hi there,
we offer you the complete texts of two interviews, because they gave us the
chance to explain some aspects of our work that we deem as important.
The first one is yet unpublished (we doubt it will ever be published), it
was supposed to be featured in the British 3
AM Magazine . The questions were asked and answered on 19 August 2003.
The second interview is much more recent (we had it yesterday). Platão Modotti
from Brazilian punkzine Contravenção
asked challenging, refreshing questions (answered by Wu Ming 1) on such issues
as pornography, China, collective/individual, the Left's ineffective language,
Brazilian punk rock and so on.
For Dutch-reading people: two more interviews and reviews of "54"
now available here:
http://www.wumingfoundation.com/italiano/rassegna/dutch.html
May 2004: Q will be published in the US by Harcourt Books (hardcover)
and re-published in the UK by Arrow Books (paperback).
----------------------
Unpublished interview for 3AM Magazine, 19 Aug 2003 - answers by Wu Ming
Q has taken a long time to get into England in English. Why is this? Has the time it has taken made a difference to its reception here in the UK? Do you feel the UK is as politically clever as Europe and can understand the book?
The English speaking (Anglo-American) book market is always very slow in picking up stuff from other languages. When Q was published in English, it had already been successful all across continental Europe and Latin America, sold more than 200,000 copies in Italy and become kind of a "cult best-seller". Moreover, we'd already founded the Wu Ming collective and published three more novels, one of which, 54, is already translated into Spanish. Most likely, the fact that the British critics were completely unaware of these developments has affected the way they described the book. Had they known that in Europe nobody, not even the least dogged working class readers, had had any difficulty in reading and understanding the novel, some of them wouldn't have skimmed hastily through the pages and assumed it was "too difficult" or "incomprehensible", or even "elitist". Anyway, as far as we know, the book is selling quite well, and the public's reaction is very different from that of the critics, which is the most important thing to us. It doesn't take any particular political cleverness to enjoy Q, it may be read simply as an adventure novel or a spy story.
Stewart Home makes a point about how in England the historical backdrop of the English Revolution - Cromwell and all that - is perhaps better understood than the European one you use. Do you think this is true and do you think this has hampered critical reaction to the book here? Is this a case of English intellectuals being quite provincial and limited?
The historical backdrop we used is unknown even in Italy, where only an elite of hardcore marxists knows about the German Peasants' War of 1524-25, and yet this was no obstacle to enjoying the book. We understand that Q reached no.2 in the Chilean top charts, and we don't think that people in Chile knew a lot about Thomas Muentzer before reading the novel.
You are fans of pulp fiction - what books have you read that you would say had been helpful to the writing of Q?
The most influential novel was American Tabloid by James Ellroy. If you pay attention, Q has a very similar structure: while in American Tabloid the flow of action is interrupted by transcripts of wire-tapped phone conversation between J. Edgar Hoover and his agents, in Q the reader bumps into Q's letters to Carafa.
What critical reactions have you had to your work in the USA? Has the current war on Iraq made it easier for readers there to understand the parallels between the world of Q and the present?
The book hasn't yet been published in the USA, however, we don't think it is going to sell many copies, it is rare that European books have any commercial success over there.
In what ways has the collective authorship helped the critical reaction to the book, and it what ways has it hindered, if at all?
Some critics attributed the frequent changes in style and rhythm to us being a collective, thinking that each change of style was at best half-intentional and was due to the switch from one individual author to the next, but this is absurd: all changes were intentional, it was necessary to give the impression of the class division and "linguistic apartheid" of that age, that's why Q's letters are convoluted and flowery (they are a translation from an inexistent Latin text after all) while the other chapters are filled with oral idioms and cuss words: in Ancient Regime Europe there was a rigid distinction between the language of the folk and that of the upper classes.
There are now several Wu Mings, I believe they number 5. Can you explain the thinking behind this as it seems to go against the "No Name' idea of multiple identities.
Wu Ming is not a multiple identity in the Luther Blissett style. That project was a 5-year plan and expired in December 1999. The following month we founded Wu Ming, which - to put it simply - is a band, only it is not a band of musicians but a band of writers. "Wu Ming" means "No name", it's the signature used by dissidents in China and it is our tribute to dissent in that country and everywhere else. "Wu Ming" also means "unknown" and it is also a reference to the fact that we refuse the idea of the "Author" as a "genius" or a "star" whom the public contemplates in a passive way. That doesn't mean that our names are secret, nothing like that. The fact that Police had that name doesn't mean that Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland were coppers, does it?
How far do you think the acceptance of Q within the mainstream publishing world and its commercial success has furthered an avant garde prankster position, and how far has it threatened it by in some ways subsuming it within itself. Is there pressure now on you to work in a different way, maybe as individuals, and do you think this undermines or threatens in some way your attempt to declare "war on the rich' through your writing? Or is this just an inevitable part of the process?
There is no pressure whatsoever, all our books have been best sellers, thus we have a very strong position, and we have a very pugnacious literary agent. Back in 1999 we managed to impose a copyleft clause to our Italian publisher, for 4 years we've managed to extend it to major publishers all over the planet, now we're putting pressure on our Italian publisher to publish our books on 100% recycled paper... We keep our feet in the streets and, from time to time, ram a clenched fist into the publishers' offices.
Were you surprised by the success of the novel and are there things that you would have done differently if you had known how big it was going to be? Or did you always feel it would be successful?
We always felt it would be successful, although we couldn't imagine it would be that successful. Q was the last act of the Luther Blissett Project. Before that, there had been five years of cultural guerrilla warfare, during which we hit frontpage headlines and prime-time TV news several times.
Do you have a sense of your readership? Do you get a sense that it is the same or different from the one you were expecting or targeting? (If you did expect or target an audience!)
At least in Italy, there is no way to target the readership, because our novels can be read and interpreted (or not interpreted) on several levels: there are people who simply enjoy it as genre fiction, others thatlay the stress on its alleged allegorical intents. It's being read by old middle class ladies and teenage punks, factory workers and intellectuals, good folks and sociopaths.
'It's the economy, stupid!' What are your thoughts about the current cultural situation, both in a national, (Italian) European and Global context?
The complete failure of the neo-liberal economics pushed by the IMF and the WTO is under everyone's eyes. Capital devised two main "solutions" to the 1929 Wall Street Crack and the 1930's Depression: one was Roosevelt's New Deal, the other one was Fascism. So far, the answer to the current global crisis is no new deal, it is warfare. The Neo-Con gang (which includes Tony Blair) has declared war on the planet but nobody can win a war on the whole planet, also because the US are a gradually declining super-power, not the Romulan empire. The inevitable "Vietnamization" of the Middle East shouldn't have taken anyone by surprise, it is only natural. More and more soldiers will die, by the end of 2004 we'll have counted them by the thousands. We're not happy about it but it shows that anti-war movements were right, that "pre-emptive war" was going to be a catastrophic adventure. The point is that the powers-that-be are nihilist, they don't give a shit about the future, they just want power and profits now. If not so, why don't they care about global warming instead of waging absurd wars? Why don't they care about power outages instead of trying to fool us into thinking that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction?
Italian politics - is it as bad as it seems or are we in the UK been fed a pretty crude racial stereotype of Italians?
It is extremely bad but it is far from being hopeless. Now the Berlusconi government is suffering a great crisis. Owing to the external pressure of both mass social movements and the judiciary there is so much back-stabbing within the coalition, so many ministers and vice-ministers had to resign because of scandals, and Berlusconi has such a terrible reputation in the country and abroad, that many people don't think he can last in office for too long. Last February's pacifist mobilization (three million and a half people marching in Rome on Februrary 15th) have managed to keep Italy out of the "Coalition of the Willing", only very recently Berlusconi was able to send Italian troops (for alleged peace-keeping purposes) down to Irak. Quite soon, some of them will be returning home in body bags, which will be damning for the government. [N.B. It happened four months after the interview, in November. About 20 Italian soldiers died in a kamikaze car-bomb attack in Nassyriah.]
What new projects are you working on and can they be expected to hit the UK quicker than Q?
Three of us are working on their solo novels, which will be published in the course of 2004, and we are already doing research for the next collective novel, which we should be able to finish by 2006. As to the UK, it is likely that 54 will be published by the end of 2004.
***
Interview for Contravenção, 14.12.2003 - answers by Wu Ming 1
Since you talk about the concept behind the autonomists, which is meant to stimulate the worker's creative and revolutionary power, I'd like to ask you what you think about the views of the Brazilian composer Tom Zé. This artist, in his album Com defeito de fabricação, has developed some kind of manifesto which, among other things, states that a Third World creative worker is viewed by his boss (in the role of the multinational corporation) as an automaton with a fabrication defect, for it is in the scheme of things for a worker to think, to have feelings, to express his creativity and question things. Tom Zé, in the same record, also supports the idea of the ripoff-combinator, as an artist that appropriates other people's works and ideas to create something new. As we see it this composer's ideas are similar to Wu Ming's. I don't know exactly what's the question, but do you know Tom Zé? What do you think of the theories of "fabrication defect" and the "ripoff-combination"?
Well, I don't know what the answer should be, but when I was in Florianópolis, in the Fall of 2003, I was interviewed by a student of the Federal University amd he gave me a copy of Com defeito de fabricação, which I like. Indeed, you mentioned it and I put it on the player, I'm listening to it right now. I cannot grasp all the words, it's pretty difficult, but the guy told me about the concepts explored in the album and it seems very interesting. I would like to know more about that. Of course the idea of "creative plagiarism" is nothing new, culture has always worked this way: legends, mythologies, religions, folk stories, fairy tales, jokes, urban legends... All that was a result of continual recombination and variation. "Plagiarism" became a crime under capitalism but it's ever more difficult for the powers-that-be to enforce that kind of legislation.
About the pornography issue: during the Italian Renaissance, pornography worked as a political and ecclesiastic power agent. During the eighteenth century it was responsible for the propagation of philosophy-related ideas and, in France, it stimulated rejuvenation of literature. Today we have the "industrial porn", the creation of pop porn myths (as your compatriot Rocco Siffredi) and a presumed exploitation of the female image in the sex films. After all, what role is left for pornography?
I think that
pornography is just one of the many fields of human expression, I don't see
it as a separate realm or an autonomous sphere, it has a subterranean influence
on the whole culture. For example, during the 1990's such important cinematic
phenomena as Lars Von Trier's Dogma 95 wouldn't have been possible without
the experiments that had taken place in porn movies in the previous years.
As a matter of fact, all the issues of simplicity, directness and spontaneity
raised by Dogma film-makers were already commonplace in such porn sub-genres
as "gonzo movies".
A lot of things have been happening in pornography in the past ten years.
Years ago a North-American radical feminist, Nadine Strossen, wrote a book
titled Defending Pornography. She says that pornography deals with
the "infinity of desire", and it's true. "Pornographers"
are always experimenting, always on the prowl of new forms of expression.
Since sexual tastes and preferences keep changing, new subgenres are created,
like "bukkake". There are movies where the only thing you can see
is sperm being dripped on a woman's (or a man's) feet, others where all the
actresses wear spectacles, and so on.
If you see a 1970's porn movie, you'll understand how things
have changed. Nowadays it would be considered boring to see a girl giving
a blow job while keeping her eyes shut. The actress must be looking right
on camera, because spectators want to have a virtual eye contact during the
whole thing, especially during ejaculation, "cum-swallowing" or
"cum-sharing" (two or more actresses spitting and spilling sperm
in each other's mouth).
As
to Rocco Siffredi, he's run out of ideas and repeating the same things all
the time. Very boring movies, and I think there's too much "rough stuff"
in them, there's neither joy nor playfulness. The series called "Rocco
Animal Trainer" is one of the most depressing cultural artifacts since
the death of Joseph Goebbels.
Another interesting thing about pornography is its fandom. There are networks
of amateurs who treat pornography in a very funny and talkative way, I'd suggest
you to visit www.matthardcore.com.
This Italian guy is a cartoon author at Bonelli Edizioni (he draws such popular
comic books as Nathan Never), but he's famous for being the most active
porn fan in spaghetti cyberspace. He's out there running a forum, ripping
DVDs and looking for free videos on the Net, reviewing (and now even shooting)
movies, attending all the events of the business and writing funny reports.
He's become an important reference for all self-conscious porn lovers. At
the end of the day this is politics, community-making.
In your old "Declaration of intents" you stated that "the future of human community depends largely on what will or is about to happen on the Pacific shores", referring to China. Is this an optimistic prevision? What goes on over there and what is expected to come from there?
Anything. Everything. They're a population of one billion and a half, and the fastest-growing capitalist economy on the planet. Anything can happen down there, for evil and for good. It's both promising and scary. From an ecological point of view, what happens in China (extremely bad things, I would say) is going to set the pace of either the Earth's self-destruction or its salvation. It depends on us, on the way we're going to communicate with them. They're annihilating their environment but they are only partially aware of it, because the media are under the regime's control. One of the priorities of libertarian and radical movements from abroad is to cut our way through the curtain of disinformation, and get in touch with the Chinese underground, which is very rich and fertile. We can expect the most interesting acts of resistance and social conflict, workers' struggles challenging state repression...
What audience does Wu Ming reach with its projects? Is it the same you "would like" to reach if it were your choice? How much of an impact you've got and how much you'd like to get? What kind of activities are brought about in peripherical countries like Brazil, whose access to internet is still largely an elite thing?
We're reaching
a fairly big audience now. Don't forget that our novels sell hundreds of thousands
of copies, and they're not purchased only by militants, hackers or media activists.
They can be read also by people who don't give a fuck about our politico-cultural
background, because they are adventure novels, you can buy them at the railway
station's newsstand and read them on the train, or you can read them sitting
on the toilet. We even allow you to download them or photocopy them, and you
might even steal them from the bookstore (many people do it). It isn't necessary
to have an Internet connection to have access to our output. Of course, we
are very active on the Net, our website and our newsletters have a key role
in our activities, therefore if you only read the books you'll miss something
that we consider very important.
As regards the "digital divide", yeah, it is a big problem. Anyway,
when I was in Brazil I met many people who are working in order to (at least
partially) solve it. In São Paulo, I visited a telecentro
in Tiradentes, where underclass kids could learn how to use computers and
the Net. In Porto Alegre, I met the people of the PROCERGS
agency, who run a lot of projects on free software, especially educational
projects. A lot of grassroots activities are going on in the countries that
suffer the digital divide.
Since this Wu Ming is a collective entity, you are out to deny individualism. How far do individual actions or thoughts have an authenticity or can go, without becoming some kind of "cult of personality?"
We don't believe in any dichotomy between "collective" and "individual". We deny individualism because it's just an ideological fossilization of the necessity of cultivating your singular self (provided that it really exists). We also deny authoritarian forms of "collectivism", because they tend to destroy differences. But what are we talking about when we say "I" or "me" or "myself"? Who is "me"? Even from a biological point of view, none of us is alone. Every human being is a whole ecosystem, we wouldn't be alive without the bacterial flora living in our intestine, and that's just one example. We host other beings. Furthermore, who is "me", if such a simple everyday act as drinking coffee or tea or eating red pepper (let alone snorting cocaine or smoking hash) changes my moods and perceptions in one way or another? Each one of us is wide open to all the flows and transformations going on around us, affecting our brain and the rest of the body. There can be no clear-cut distinction between what is social and what is individual. There can be no clear-cut distinction between what is "mine" and what belongs to the community surrounding me, you can understand it very well by hearing jazz players improvise. Wu Ming is trying to work on this concept.
Putting aside the communities and society for a while, can a collective project like yours help with the "individual emancipation"? Or isn't this your goal?
We are story-tellers. Telling stories is the most basic community-making practice, thereby it can help with *any* form of emancipation, but it is a general, social task, it cannot be the task of one individual (or group-like) story-teller.
Can you tell us a bit about the book Lasciate che i Bimbi? What is it about exactly? Did you put it on the Internet too? Is there any interest in reissuing it somehow?
We cannot reissue it because it is illegal. The book was seized by the police, following orders of the judiciary, after a libel suit filed by a public prosecutor we criticized in the book. We made it available on the Internet, it is on a Taiwan server, where Italian justice can't reach it. The book describes the paedophilia-related hysteria that exploded in Italy and the rest of Europe between 1996 and 1998. The media, the Church and the politicians started a real witch-hunt, using kiddy porn as a pretext to close down websites, turn the screw on free speech, find scapegoats in every town and throw innocent people in prison. We (by "we" I mean the Bolognese column of the Luther Blissett Project) did a lot of counter-information on this issue, and we even helped to pull some innocent people out of jail. We told the story in the book, and the Bologna judiciary took its revenge by forbidding it. You can find it here: http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/tftwl/index.html, there's even a Flash cartoon resuming the whole story.
Do you, by any means, relate to Chuck Palahniuk's book Fight Club?
Well, I liked both the book and the movie they made out of it. I was in Houston, Texas, when the movie was released (in the Fall of 1999) and I went to see it on the very first evening. After the ending (which, by the way, anticipated the events of September 11th), I got out and heard a guy murmuring: "Fuckin' weird...". The night after, I went back to see it again. Not that I ideologically stick with the Mayhem Project (a "collectivist" project like those I mentioned above), but I found many similarities with the state of mind we were in during the Luther Blissett days. "Luther Blissett" was our collective Tyler Durden, sometimes one of us went someplace, someone approached him or her and whispered: "Hey, Luther, I side with you!" or "You're great", or something along those lines. There was always this guy walking ahead of us, we were walking in his footsteps :-) Recently, I downloaded an avi file of the movie, very good quality, ripped from the DVD. I saw it again and I noticed that it is a very 1990's movie, some parts are a little outdated, but it's still powerful.
How would you say that the electronic media for the circulation of ideas (Internet and others) are free media when all the infrastructure of telecommunications is in the hands of a dozen multinationals? Are you free as long as you pay the toll? And the control of information in this case (where a few companies control access to the net) is "bureaucratic in shape and total in its reach". Is the dream over before it began?
You always pay some kind of toll... if you're not into "phone-phreaking". Anyway, "free media" doesn't exist. The media are things, and things don't feel. Things can't feel any sense of freedom. People can feel freedom, not things. So, what we have is people who want to accomplish a greater freedom in communication, and try to do it by using the media system (some parts of it) the way they like it. It's a war, you know. Freedom is never given away by a power structure, it must be conquered, defended and re-conquered all the time. There is no certain thing. You put the foot in the door and try to walk right in. You try to take a step beyond, and try to do it with style, even if you're surrounded by bullshitters.
Do you think that it is possible that what is now considered the independent/underground milieu can use capitalist methods of dissemination, what has already been happening with some independent record labels and publishers, and become something that, for want of a better word, we'll call "Anarcho-capitalism"?
In the U.S. "Anarcho-capitalism"
means something else, it is a right-wing free-market ideology rooted in the
works of Ayn Rand.
Anyway,
we think that everything belongs to the people. All networks of social cooperation,
even if they are exploited by capital, are networks of people and can be turned
upside down, re-appropriated (albeit partially and temporarily), and used
in another way. As I told you before, there is no certain thing, you have
to judge and make a decision each time. The most important thing is: never
be narrow-minded. Hadn't we published our books with major publishers, our
"copyleft" stance would have never reached so many people. We wouldn't
have set any useful example.
What is linguistic innovation for you, besides the collective writing? Could you give us some concrete example of the Italian Left's outdated writing?
The problem is
not merely the language being "outdated", because it can even sound
new, it can include a lot of neologisms. No, the problem is that the "wooden
language" (that's how we call it) is ethically unacceptable, it
is a jargon made of slogans and clichés that keeps experience away,
it never establishes any contact with sorrow or pain, love and delight, feelings,
emotions. It only accomplishes boredom.
What good is an annoying sequence of words in a vacuum? Think of those stupid,
ultra-rhetoric propaganda speeches filled with "the Movement of movements",
"desobedience", "social desobedience", "the movement
of female and male desobedients", "we're going to desobey",
"we have desobeyed", "we are the multitude", "brothers
and sisters", "the Matrix", "putting our own bodies at
risk" etc.? You could print all those cliches on a sheet of paper, cut
them in stripes, put them in a basket and pick them up at random, and you
would have a typical speech in wooden language: "The brothers and sisters
of the Movement of movements and the movement of the female and male Desobedients
are going to put their bodies at risk and desobey the Matrix in the name of
social desobedience", which simply means: "There will be a demonstration".
Luckily, these things are not heard often anymore, and those groups are disbanding.
A tiny but funny example of linguistic innovation can be found in the very
recent anti-nuclear
mobilization in Lucania (a region of Southern Italy), which was very huge
and involved almost the entire population of the region. The committee coordinating
the struggle called itself "la Comandanzia", which is spelled like
an Italian word but doesn't really exist. People smiled when they read it
because it was an intentional reference to the EZLN "Comandancia".
It casted a bright light on the whole mobilization.
"The writer is someone who is aware that he's different from the others" (Pier Paolo Pasolini). Although I hold Wumingian grudges for the Romantic genius stereotype, I tend to think about Pasolini's phrase not as a reaffirmation of the Romantic myth, but more as an expression of the anguish in regards to the narrator's inadequacy in modern times.
I don't think that narrators are inadequate in these times. Absolutely not. These times call for narration, they even crave for narration. Narration provides the necessary "reduction of complexity" that prevents the excess of information from jamming your mind. Narration puts things in perspective and helps you find a synthesis of all that you hear and see day after day.
What were your impressions during your first stay in Brazil? Here, it is very common that people link you to Situationism, Anarchism, Hakim Bey and post-modern art groups collectives. I believe you have a stronger relation to subcultures (punk, skin, etc.) and the marxist autonomist tradition. Please, comment about that a bit.
I had a very good time in Brazil and I want to go back as soon as I can, especially because I haven't seen the North of the Country, but then, you could visit Brazil a hundred times and not be able to see half of the interesting things it features. As to Situationism and the likes, I'm not interested in that kind of stuff. I find it academic and elitist. There are interesting things in Anarchism, but we have never been anarchists. Subcultures have been very important to us, I'd also mention hip hop, which was the most influential youth subculture in the past twenty years. As to the marxist and "post-marxist" autonomist tradition (Toni Negri, Paolo Virno and company), of course it is part of our heritage, because it is a strong tradition in Italy, but in the past few years we've been moving away from that theory, which has become inadequate and has no answers for many urgent problems, like the impending ecological disaster. Autonomist Marxism still holds a linear concept of "progress", "growth","development" etc. and doesn't understand that resources (water, air, energy) are not unlimited.
I find quite interesting that you put a lot of emphasis on the origins of the group being linked to the Occupied Centers and not to the academic world. What's the role of such Centers to the new historical subject, the multitude? I read a recent interview of Wu Ming, where you talk about being like a rock group. Klasse Kriminale has even recorded a record as Luther Blissett, don't they? What do you like of punk/oi! nowadays? What do you know about Brazilian rock music?
Occupied centers
still have an important role, although they always run the risk of becoming
bureaucratized ghettoes, that's the ideological illness we used to call "centrosocialismo
reale". As to rock'n'roll: we usually say we are a "band",
because some people (especially those who are fond of "Literature"
with the capital 'L') don't understand what we are, thus we say that we are
a band, you know, like a rock band, but composed of story-tellers instead
of musicians. Of course some of us are very much into rock'n'roll, Wu Ming
2 was the singer of a band called Frida Frenner, Wu Ming 5 played bass in
the most important Italian Oi!/punk band (Nabat) and is now a DJ selecting
soul, reggae and black music in general. I'm very much into jazz and I'm currently
working with Switters, a very radical improvisational jazz combo. Several
punk and rock groups have recorded albums inspired by our work, not only Klasse
Kriminale.
As regards Brazilian rock music, I bought a plenty of CDs when I was there:
punk rock, electronic/noise stuff, pop-rock gaúcho, unspeakable cross-genre
stuff etc. I like Garotos Podres. I like Cordel
do Fogo Encantado (even if they don't play punk rock I think they have
the punkest attitude). I like Walverdes.
I know it's not your cup of tea, but I had a lot of fun at a gig of Bidê
ou Balde. I like some old punk stuff like Os
Replicantes ("Festa punk" is a great tune). I enjoyed reading
the book Gauleses Irredutiveis: Causas e atitudes do rock gaúcho,
by Alisson Avila, Cristiano Bastos and Eduardo Müller.
You have sold 200 thousand copies of Q in Italy. You have sold well in Spain too, 54 is having a good reception in Europe, you were longlisted for The Guardian literary prize, you're writing screenplays, you have recorded albums and are, perhaps, the biggest pop myth of the movement of the movements. What are your future plans? What do you still expect to reach in the future?
There is no such
thing as a "movement of movements". Luckily, no centralization of
current movements is possible, they are called movements precisely
because they move (five minutes after you've found a definition, they're already
something else) and they are plural, they are multiplicities, I don't
use any singular noun to describe them anymore. Thereby, we are not a "pop
myth of the movement of movements".
As to our future plan, 2004 will be a crucial year for us, because Einaudi
will publish two "solo" novels (one by Wu Ming 2 and one by myself),
either the Festival of Cannes or the Festival of Venice might feature the
movie we've written (a big production on the most important 1970's free radio
and the students' movement in Bologna), a well-known Italian rock band (Yo
Yo Mundi) will release an album based on our novel 54, and we'll
start writing our new collective novel, which will be set during the American
revolution, from 1775 to 1783.
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