Wu Ming - Miscellaneous Writings and Unmatched Socks

This is Wu Ming's Official Website, you're in the Unmatched Socks section.
Home page in English	THE BLOG	feed en feed es	feed it feed pt	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.

Wu Ming 1
New Italian Epic: We're Going To Have To Be The Parents
The London Speech
Opening talk @ the conference"The Italian Perspective on Metahistorical Fiction: The New Italian Epic"
Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London, UK, October 2nd, 2008.
AUDIO VERSION HERE

On New Year's Eve of 2005 I received a phone call from a colleague of mine, an Italian writer called Giuseppe Genna, born and living in Milan. He called me in the late afternoon and asked me what I was going to do to celebrate the new year. I told him that my daughter was only a few months old, my partner needed some respite, so I decided to stay home while she went out with some friends. It would be the first time in more than 20 years that I would stay home on New Year's Eve, and I planned to re-read The Count of Montecristo while watching over the sleeping baby. I asked Giuseppe what he was going to do. He said he'd go to a party, albeit reluctantly. He'd just had a phone conversation with his father, and was worried about him.
For some years, his father Vito had been fighting against cancer. His doctors had recently told the family that there was nothing left to be done. It was a matter of months.
Vito lived alone, many of his friends had passed away, and he planned to stay home for the night. He was adamant about that: he would stay home. He told his son that he was tired and wanted to go to bed early.
The thought of this old, lonely, dying man spending New Year's Eve all alone in his apartment nearly broke my heart. I strongly identified with him. Now I was a father myself, and I would spend New Year's Eve at home for the first time in my adult life. Giuseppe and I were both 35 years old. I thought: what will be of me 35 years from now?

Wu Ming 1
None of us is immune from becoming a "Nazi"
A Review of Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones

...drop after drop, trickle by trickle, the river gets swollen with data, anecdotes, memories, dreams and citations - the water rises on the sides until it breaks out. We arrive on the Russian front pushed by the current, the enormous wave wipes out whole cultures and countless lives until it impacts with the unpredicted, inexplicable resistance at Stalingrad. The stalemate hollows out a hole in the life of the main character, SS officer Maximilien Aue. That empty space is filled with madness, and for one time it is not systemic, organized, bureaucratized folly: it is wild, singular insanity. The Soviet encircling attack opens a cleft in time and Aue's devastated mind produces visions and fantasies. Now the passages are fluid, the

prose does not march anymore to the beat of numbers and acronyms, all is white and there's no sound...

Wu Ming
Convergence Culture by Henry Jenkins. Foreword to the Italian edition
(Cultura convergente, Apogeo, Milan, 2007)

In the best of possible Italies, the publication of this book would be a telluric event, one that would shake the debate on the Internet and the new technologies of communication. If nothing happens, not even a twitch, it will mean that there's no actual debate, no semblance of life, only a deserted house with loose shutters in the wind. In comparison, poltergeist activity in a graveyard will sound like Rio de Janeiro's carnival.
Convergence Culture is a revolutionary work in many ways. It remains a fascinating and comprehensible reading all the way through, and it's crammed with examples and evidence. The works of European theorists are often cited, explained in a vivid language, and used to analyze concrete behaviors and practices, with none of the original intricacies. It works like magic: in the pages of this book any obscure convolution turns to crystal-clear, no-nonsense talk. Professor Jenkins plunges

into the culture of our time and gives an accurate picture of how the new technologies are changing it, then he re-emerges and gives us a report not so much on the media, but on the people who are using them to communicate. The picture shows us, all of us.

Wu Ming 1
The Old New Thing Is Newer Than Ever
Wu Ming 1's Liner Notes for The Old New Thing: A Free Jazz Anthology, Abraxas/Esp-Disk, 2007

A double cd featuring Albert Ayler, Marzette Watts, Sun Ra, Milford Graves, Sunny Murray, Charles Tyler, Sonny Simmons, Giuseppi Logan, Ornette Coleman, Free Music Quintet. Music selected by Wu Ming 1 and edited by Pankow.
"Mince and chop up and remix, introduce the music in a non-professorial way. Create stereograms for the ears, allow the people to hear the future in those old fuming improvisations, those crazy concerts with hunting horns. Let the people hear through the chaos, hear Punk, metal, Detroit Techno and Drum'n'Bass break-beats. Don't be philologically correct, be as much heretic as the music you're celebrating used to be. "Jazzophiles" already know that music after all, don't they? They aren't our target. This is Something Else!, as Ornette put it long ago. It's a guerrilla blitz aimed at surprising those who don't know jazz and are prisoners of stereotypes and yet would appreciate certain "acid" sounds and iconoclastic riots, if we secretly loaded them on their iPods."

How Slapshot Inspired a Cultural Revolution: An Interview with the Wu Ming Foundation
@ "Confessions of an Aca/Fan", the official weblog of Henry Jenkins - October 2006

Henry Jenkins III is the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, as well as one of the great experts in American popular culture. He wrote such books as Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (2000), Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture (2006) and the indispensable Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). He interviewed us about the Luther Blissett Project, the relationship between popular culture and the avantgarde, the myth as an open narrative form, and the analogies between our work, fan fiction and alternate reality games.

The Interview - Part one

The Interview - Part two

Robert P. Baird interviews Wu Ming
Stories Are Not All Equal
An interview with Wu Ming from the Chicago Review Special 60th Anniversary Issue, #52:2/3/4, October 2006

'We wanted to persuade as many people as possible to go to Genoa, and we ended up convincing as many people as possible to fall into a full-scale police ambush. Demonstrators were assaulted, beaten to a bloody pulp, arrested, even tortured. We didn't expect such mayhem. Nobody did. I regret we were so naïve and caught off-guard, although I think that was a crucial moment for the latest generation of activists. In a way, it was important to be there. That experience has created bonds between a transnational multitude of human beings. Today, if you say "I was in Genoa" in Italy (and the rest of Europe), it's like saying "I marched in Selma with M.L.K." forty years ago. Those are pivotal moments. We’ll see the consequences of that "being there" for a long time to come, on a grassroots, extended, long-tailed level.'

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Wu Ming
The Mu Particle in "Communism"
A contribution to the book Make Everything New: A Project on Communism, published by Book Works, London (London) and Project, Dublin (Dublin), 2006. Edited by Grant Watson (Project), in collaboration with Gavin Everall and Gerrie van Noord (Book Works).

So you want us to send a contribution about Communism. Not about any group of people calling themselves communists. Not about any one of the countless currents of "Communism". Not about operetta nation-states like Laos and North Korea. No, you're talking about the core concept of Communism. You want us to dig and touch the roots. Thanks to commies and anti-commies, Communism seems to be today's most unpopular, outdated, crestfallen issue. The very term was bad-mouthed, adulterated, clumsified, claw-hammered out of public discourse. Time to deal with it again.

Also available in

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ODT+ZIP

Wu Ming 1
Bela Lusconi's Dead: Notes on the Crisis of Berlusconism
...and the So-Called "Cultural Hegemony" of the Italian Left
April 2006. Translated by Wu Ming 1.

A clear evidence that Berlusconi didn't break through is the fact that even (and especially) his media and book companies are crammed with "non-berlusconized" people, left-wing people, groups and individuals who not only disagree with his beliefs and practices, but also fight against them and seek to provide non-berlusconized content. The reason this happens is that "pro-Berlusconi intellectual" is a contradiction in terms and "pro-Berlusconi artist" is little more than a sick joke. Brainworkers are on the other side. If you want to set up and run a publishing house or a decent newspaper, you badly need to

hire non-Berlusconized personnel. In the cultural battle, the role of these people is a crucial one. They operate where contradictions are deeper but still in balance, where the rope is strung very tight but hasn't broken off yet.

Wu Ming 1 & Wu Ming 5
The Malcolm X Special, On The 40th Anniversary Of His Death
The First Time I Saw Malcolm, by WM1; Malcolm's "X" and Memory, by WM1; From Malcolm to Hip Hop through Ghost Dog, by WM5.
February 2005. Translated by Robert Gillespie, Jr. and Virginia Ramos in March, 2006.

The first time I saw Malcolm, it wasn't really him. He was played by an actor, Al Freeman Jr., many years before Denzel Washington and Mario Van Peebles played him. It was on an episode of Roots - The Next Generations in the 1970's, a television event par excellence. Together with Sandokán, Roots was the miniseries (described like this at the time) that made the biggest impression on the people of my generation. Raise your hand if you didn't have a classmate in school or catechism nicknamed "Kunta Kinte" or "Chicken George". I was about ten years old, and I didn't know anything about Malcolm or

Alex Haley (co-author of his biography and author of Roots). I never saw this episode again, but I remember every one of the scenes. Malcolm became imprinted in my neurons.

Wu Ming 4
An Island of Paradoxes: Sundry Notes on Return from Cuba
July 2004. Appeared in Latinoamerica magazine #89. Translated by Jason Di Rosso.

The bulky Roman financier that I met on the beach complains about the police state, because last night the woman that rents him his room asked for the papers of the girl he was taking to bed. In reality any landlord that didn't do so would risk loss of license and very high fines if it's later found out that the escorts coming to their home are prostitutes or persons of interest to the police. In short, it could pass for co-conspiracy. I tell him, "Sorry, but listen, in Italy it works the same way. If you bring a guest to a hotel, they have to show i.d., and I imagine the reasons are more or less the same." While I observe his thoughtful expression I think that sometimes we're so used to speaking badly about Cuba, and yet we forget about speaking badly of Italy. A few days later a Cuban tourist guide tells me that in his country freedom of information is rare; there's

an information monopoly in force that doesn't allow the whole truth to filter through. And then he smiles, adding, "Of course, you Italians aren't exactly much better off." There you go, exactly.

Wu Ming
A class Apart, that is: A Hundred Years of Cary Grant
Appeared on the Italian daily paper L'Unità on January 18th, 2004. Translated by Bianca Colantoni.

Style is a martial art: the European working class knew it well in its own time. Show the bosses that - with a little inventiveness and with little cost - you can be more elegant and dignified than them. Photographs of First of May demonstrations or of Togliatti's funerals show proud looks and attitudes, perfectly ironed - even if a little worn out - suits, impeccably tied ties around well-starched collars; the women wear foulards with complex knots and their home-sewn dresses have a perfect cut. What stands out is the care for details, the love for cleanliness by those who have to sweat and get dirty every day. The message is more or less the following: “Bosses, what you behold are not animals or primitives, and the same care we take to prove it, we'll use it to fight against you".

Svenska. En klass för sig eller hundra år av Cary Grant

Wu Ming 1
Nuclear Power, The Posterity And Our Stinking Ethics
October 2003. Translated in 2006 by the author himself.

It was calculated that, in a time span of maximum 1000 years, any language becomes incomprehensible to the descendants of its speakers. In the present day, with the exception of a few archaeologists and philologists, no Iraqi would understand Accadic, a language spoken in Minor Asia 6000 years ago (it was the language of trade and commerce), and no ordinary person can read cuneiform texts. The situation doesn't get any better with symbols and pictograms: they all become unintelligible, or dramatically change their meaning. A few millennia ago the swastika symbolized the sun and was considered of good omen. Nowadays it has come to symbolize mass extermination and is forbidden in several countries. And what will be of the trefoil that was designed in 1946 in order to symbolize radioactivity?

Wu Ming 1 & Wu Ming 5
Capitalism is a Dead Frog
or: Energy Saving as a Threat on the Western World
October 2003. Translated in 2006 by WM1.

In Bologna, at the back of Piazza Maggiore, there's Piazza Galvani, at whose centre is the statue of Luigi Galvani (born 1737 - dead 1798), the discoverer of bioelectricity, author of the milestone work De vibus electricitatis in motu muscolari commentarius [Comments on the power of electricity in the movement of muscles]. Galvani's experiments are well known: he stimulated the bodies of dead frogs with a metal scalpel, and static electricity produced muscle contractions. His discoveries influenced Alessandro Volta (born 1745 - dead 1827), who ended up inventing the battery. In 2001,

on a springtime night, unknown people hung a placard on the statue's left hand, and there was written: "CAPITALISM IS A DEAD FROG".

This is Wu Ming's Official Website, you're in the Unmatched Socks section.
Home page in English	THE BLOG	feed en feed es	feed it feed pt	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.