digital emunction

On the off chance you take your reading cues from rock stars, here’s something from an interview with Radiohead at the Observer Music Monthly:

Thom’s reading Q by mysterious Italian anarchist group Luther Blisset. I tried to read that once, I tell him.

‘Oh it’s fucking ace! But my missus, that’s her specialist field, so she’s been explaining it to me all the way through. Medieval church carnage. It’s mental. I want to get it made into a film. That’s my next mission.’

Using the In Rainbows profits?

‘Mmm-mm,’ says Thom Yorke, shaking his head. ‘I doubt it. That would cover basically the catering.’

Not to spoil the mystery, but “the mysterious Italian anarchist group” who wrote Q comprised four of the five members of the group currently known as Wu Ming, the authors of 54, Manituana, and the two stories I translated for Chicago Review 52:2/3/4.

The Radiohead/Wu Ming connection is actually apt, since Wu Ming makes all their work available as free downloads.

For the record, here’s what the rest of Radiohead is reading:

Colin is currently reading Piers Brendon’s new The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Jonny’s re-reading Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed’s just finished Man’s Search For Meaning by Victor Frankel (’Brilliant. He’s an Auschwitz survivor’), Phil’s reading Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother.

My open (and terribly earnest) letter in response to some of David Baratier’s comments on the Buffalo POETICS list (which are archived here):

Since no one’s sprinting to our defense, I hope I can be forgiven for offering a brief response to David Baratier’s comments on recent issues of Chicago Review. (Though I write as a co-editor of the magazine, I don’t presume to speak for my fellow editors and staff members. The magazine is too small, too precariously assembled to tolerate a party line.)

I’d like to leave Mr. Baratier’s concerns about the Dorn issue to the side, since I wasn’t at the magazine then and can’t speak for Eirik, except to say his deep knowledge of and serious passion for Dorn’s work hardly qualifies him as a “dabbler.” And I can’t speak to whether our “entire tone has went to silence” or the poetry we publish “promotes inaction.” It’s true that we haven’t had any fan letters from the barricades, but I’m not sure that settles the case. For most people on this planet, the fact that we pay as much attention to poetry as we do would count as evidence for charge that we’re “out of step with the needs of the current age.”
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Wu Ming’s new novel Manituana has just been published in Italy. Readers of Italian can download the whole book and readers of Italian or Spanish can visit the book’s website. This can’t be the first book to have its own trailer, but it’s the first I’ve seen.

You can download the rest of Wu Ming’s books at their website, including my translations of their stories “In Like Flynn” and “The Emperor’s Three Hundred Woodcutters”. You can also find an interview I did with the group for Chicago Review’s 60th anniversary issue.