Except where stated otherwise, the content of this website is licensed under a Creative Common License. You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. You are also free to make derivative works, under the following commandments: thou shalt give the original author credit; thou shalt not use this work for commercial purposes; If thou alter, transform, or build upon a text, thou shalt distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
Giap/digest # 34 - But then you guys turn up - 18 September 2006
It's been a tough, cruel summer, but it's over.
Hard work on the novel (to be delivered in November), day after day, night after night.
Close friends died. We'll celebrate one of them as soon as possible - Piermario, one of the founders of the Luther Blissett Project - texts are being translated into English - here's the beginning of his last interview, December 2005 (*)
Those are the reasons we've been so sporadic with this newsletter.
There's new stuff in English on the website (and elsewhere) though, and much more is to come.
* Thanks to the initiative of managing & fiction editor Robert P. Baird, the forthcoming new issue of the Chicago Review will include a "Wu Ming Special": a long interview with three members of the band (WM1, WM4 e WM5) and two short stories: "In Like Flynn" and "The Three Hundred Emperor's Wood Cutters" (both translated from the Italian by Mr Baird himself). A few weeks after the release of the issue, the short stories will be made available for download from our website.
I think the issue is this. The British are interested in what you guys are about. Conceptually. Regardless of the literary merits of the books or of the translations, the British are interested in the Continent like never before, and countries like Italy have achieved an almost unprecedented level of prestige. This has meant a cooking show explosion, but also an interest and acceptance of other things including new, post Marxian (or whatever you wanna call it) left philosophical currents. Add to this the fact that Britain is part of Europe. Sort of. By contrast, in my opinion, the U.S. has turned away from Europe (except for the elite minorities) and it is preoccupied with debating its great liberal project in the world. This turning away from Europe coincides with the cessation of mass migration from the continent. There are fewer and fewer Americans with living relatives BORN in Europe. On top of this there's the Cold War issue - this real prevalent idea that ideology is dead, common sense liberal democracy is the only option and the question now is how to tinker with the machine and make it better. There is little time spent today, within the American psyche, on concepts that run counter to liberalism. Even among the kinds of elites where critique once flourished. You won't find articles written in the major newspapers. You won't find books published. You won't find speakers on the circuit. (Ok, well, there might be some, but not many. For every Michael Hardt there's a hundred...). America is busy trying to understand the Latin American question, the former Soviet bloc question, East Asia and so on. It is busy trying to get liberalism 'to work', because it thinks it has enough influence and power to achieve it. Cultural commentators fall into line here - they see liberalism being the antidote to everything from Iraq to China to Russia. Rule of law. Due diligence. Maybe they have a point. But then you guys turn up with a libertarian left discourse (or whatever you call it ;-)) and the commentariat just don't get it. They think it's weird posturing. It reminds them of elitist New York intelligentsia from a Woody Allen film. It reminds them of the failure and of the defeats they had in the 60s and 70s. In short, hypocritically for liberals, they have a gut reaction that is intolerant of intellectual diversity. It's all downhill from there.
-- Jeffrey
(*) This is what he's saying in the video:
"Well... There's a little, preliminary thing to say, for those who don't know me or never met me, never saw me before, never heard me talking. This is me, Piermario Ciani, in December 2005, but I'm completely different, an entirely different man from the one I was until a couple of months ago, because, er, at present I'm ill, I've had operations, that's why, say, I'm going along with this idea of the video, but [smiles] with a slightly different attitude."
Except where stated otherwise, the content of this website is licensed under a Creative Common License. You are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work. You are also free to make derivative works, under the following commandments: thou shalt give the original author credit; thou shalt not use this work for commercial purposes; If thou alter, transform, or build upon a text, thou shalt distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
