OTHER LUTHER BLISSETT WEBSITES |
ANALECTA 1997 | |
THE NASTY TRICK
How Luther Blissett turned a corporate attack on the multiple name into a marvellous prank on a major publishing house
In the springtime of 1996 I manipulated via E-mail the right-wing "poet" Giuseppe Genna and managed to palm off a "fake" Blissett's book on Mondadori - i.e. the biggest Italian publishing house belonging to right-wing tycoon (and former Prime Minister) Silvio Berlusconi. I sent Genna a text titled Net.gener@tion, whose content was mainly Internet hype and a banalisation of any old postmodernist bullshit. When Genna edited the text, he added some antisemitic sentences and moronic references to the fascist "thinker" Julius Evola. The Mondadori managers rubbed their hands: they believed to have got a trendy text by the famous "multiple cultural terrorist", so they copyrighted the text and sent it to press. A week before the publication, I sent out a press release entitled Fatwah!, by which I attacked both the poet and the publisher for having tried to "recuperate" and appropriate the multiple name. I also invited the readers to boycott "Genna's crap" and convinced the critics to demolish the book and the whole corporate operation. The book - in which Mondadori had invested money and credibility - was a terrible flop. At last, I claimed the hoax by sending other communiques which caused a sensation all over the Media: this gave me chances to spread further mythologies on Blissett's activities. Genna and Mondadori cut a sorry figure. As toNet.gener@tion, it disappeared from the bookshops and was replaced by Luther's "real" books, that is to say the 2nd edition of Mind Invaders: How to fuck the media (Castelvecchi edizioni, Rome 1995) and the 1st edition of the anthology Toto', Peppino And The Psychic Warfare (AAA Edizioni, Udine 1996). This psychic attack on Mondadori started a new amplic phase in the development of both the LB project and the "anti-copyright" discourse. But It's better to go into details.
In the summer '95 the Associazione Psicogeografica di Bologna (APB) started to find their e-mailbox (nav0243@iperbole.bologna.it) stuffed with messages by a certain "Scaligero" [that is someone born in Verona]. He used to put such stupid, boring questions as "What do you think of the pamphlet Complotti [Conspiracies] by Maurizio Blondet?" [1], "What do you think of the B'nai Brith and other Jewish lobbies?" and other questions related to the Italian political situation. The APB's harsh answers were something like "Fuck off, you fascist!". Scaligero tried to exculpate himself ("I'm not racist!"), and explained "the whole question": his name was Giuseppe Genna, he was a journalist and an editor of the magazine Poesia; he was surfing the Internet in order to find material for a trendy essay on "the culture of the end of the millennium". He claimed to be familiar with the "right" people in the "right" places, and that he could rely on some "helping-hands" in a big Milanese publishing house. This is an excerpt from one of his messages:
"I often hear about Luther Blisset [sic]. I asked after 'you' in some newsgroups and got some useful message. If you want to check 'em out, I'll forward them all to you. I'm not kidding, I really know those who count".
As a proof of that, he claimed to have been in very close relations with Irene Pivetti [2]...He even said he had fucked with her! Probably he took such liberties with the APB because LB is well known as an enemy of the Catholic church and the political establishment...We didn't reply to him, he apparently didn't know anything "useful" about the Luther Blissett Project, and we didn't want to inform him. At that time, the multiple name was already adopted by a few hundreds of media tricksters, psychogeographers and "cultural workers" in Italy, nevertheless most sources were "obscure" or secondary (BBSs, self-published 'zines and pamphlets, as well as contradictory press coverage). Mind Invaders had not been published yet.
During that period, those involved in the LB project were speculating upon the future corporate endeavours to recuperate Luther Blissett: given all the media coverage on the multiple name and Luther's outrageous activities, we expected greedy business wo/men to impose copyrights and make a lot of money with "psychic warfare". Therefore, Luther had to act in advance, cheat his enemies, force them to attack and finally - as happens in some martial arts - turn against them the vehemence of their own blows...After the success of Enrico Brizzi [3] and other hacks launched by the indies, the occasion was propitious: the majors were going to lay their hands on "youth (counter)culture"... Eureka! Genna! If half of what the dickhead had told us was true, then we could use him as a Trojan horse, pass on him spoiled, undigested stuff and convince him to "edit" it for a book. We could let the big publishing house waste its money, attack the book before it arrived in the bookshops (i.e. during the mailing of the review copies), then ridicule Genna and his "helping-hands" and finally claim the prank. Such kolossal, omnivorous publishers as Mondadori or Rizzoli, well-known for their indifferent marketing strategies, would not split hairs: they'd publish anything, whatever old miscellany of "alternative" clichés (Cyberpunk, the Internet...). Moreover, they certainly would put the SIAE logo [4] and the fuckin'g encircled "c" on the colophon. That was the point we had to make while assaulting the big P.
We contacted other LB identities in other towns, especially the ones nestled in the Castelvecchi publishing house. We all started to ransack drawers and hard-disks searching for old zines, then we collected crappy Internet chat and got back to Genna. We told him that we expected him to publish the text as a "Luther Blissett's work, edited by Giuseppe Genna", and that we didn't want any money. The gull enthusiastically accepted our proposition and began to "edit" the texts sparsely adding references to Evola and ugly third-positionist clap-trap. In the meanwhile, further media scams and the publication of the first edition of Mind Invaders increased the fame of Luther Blissett as a collective phantom. No mainstream publisher would have disliked our bait.
Luckily enough, the big P was extremely naive (the book, which is an essay, was published as "fiction"), the editors were unacquainted with the "counterculture" and the press-agents were stupid. Our media scam was going to snowball. The publication was scheduled for March 12th, review copies were sent to the critics by the last days of February. One of our "fifth columns" in the press rang the APB saying that the book contained a short publisher's foreword:
"This text is the documentation and the manifesto of a forthcoming subversion. It does not reflect the ideas of our publishing house, that do not share its cultural propositions".
Fucking absurd! The Mondadori press office started phoning the journalists on their mailing list - including our spies - saying: "We're gonna send you the Next Thing, something sooooo amazing and extreme, it comes from cyberspace blah blah blah". Poor morons, they were sure to have laid their hands on a great trendy book! On wednesday, 6 March we released the following communique':
FATWAH!
Luther Blissett vs. "Luther Blissett"'s book Netgeneration (Mondadori Oscars)
Bookstores all over Italy are going to sell Netgeneration,
a worthless book attributed to the multiple name "Luther Blissett"
but actually written by one Giuseppe Genna,
This press release incited the critics on the book; what follows is a florilegium of the most bitter reviews published before its very publication. I have emphasized the points where the writers got close to the "truth":
[...] I've read the press-proof of Netgeneration, and got out of it with a vague feeling of nausea due to all those post-situationist banalities - it's like listening a mini-Baudrillard speaking about trash culture, the Internet, Tarantino and Cybersex in a captain Kirk-like tone during a youth chat-show on Italia 1. I really wonder if Luther Blissett has reached his dotage [...] And I've had to put up with the very kitsch frame of the "lost and found again" manuscript, by which the editor Giuseppe Genna unfairly challenges every intelligent reader [...] If, as it is likely, the book has been written by Genna, he and Mondadori are holding themselves up to ridicule [...] IS THIS BOOK A FAKE? MAYBE THIS IS A PRANK PLAYED BY BLISSETT.
- Alberto Piccinini, "BLISSETT KIDNAPPED. Mondadori engages the neo-situationist multiple name. / Netgeneration, a book 'found on the Internet' / by 25-years-old Milanese Giuseppe Genna,/ provokes protests: 'Boycott it, it has a copyright!'", Il Manifesto, Friday March 8th 1996.
[...] This work is nothing more than a collection of everything that was elaborated recently on the ground of counterculture: trash, cyberpunk, transgender... Actually it's a digest of the catalogues of independent publishers like Castelvecchi, Theoria, Apogeo and ShaKe - a digest hold together by a suspect glorification of the Internet. This makes me suspicious [...] What most baffles me is the SIAE mark on the last page: all texts by Luther Blissett are explicitly anti-copyright and freely plagiarisable, nay, multiple names were created as anti-copyright weapons [...] Giuseppe Genna is 25-years-old, he's been editor at Poesia magazine and cultural adviser of Irene Pivetti. Last summer he realized "where money is going", got on the Internet and found a treasure: 999 messages by Luther, a key-word to hold them together and the advice to sell them to the Big Publisher. The latter bought and published them. This is hardly possible. Actually, there are two hypotheses: EITHER LUTHER BLISSETT CHEATED MONDADORI BY PASSING ON A CLUMSY BOOK, or quite the reverse Mondadori is trying to ride the bandwagon of youth subculture.
- Loredana Lipperini, "WHO'S AFRAID OF LUTHER BLISSETT? A book of the cult author of cyber-literature / is embarrassing Mondadori, who are going to publish it but do not want to take the responsibility", La Repubblica, Friday March 8th 1996.
It goes without saying that these and all the other articles contained a lot of viable inaccuracies, bizarre rumours on the origins of the name, embroideries on every urban myth we had put into circulation: Ray Johnson, the EZLN, the Templars, the Rosicrucians, Harry Kipper, Neoism, the LPA & C. Every piece contained excerpts from Fatwah! and implicitly sneered at the Big P as an incompetent newcomer in the Avantgarde/underground world. We were told that those reviews had upset the Mondadori press-agents, so we issued another press release:
MONDADORI AS A SUBVERSIVE PUBLISHER
The publication of my latest book net.gener@tion caused the nationwide media sensation I had expected. The story is always the same: when my bell rings, the mouth of the journalist hound starts to water. And how imbecilic is this quest of the truth: did I infect Mondadori and the whole Italian publishing industry with the virus of subversion? Did Mondadori recuperate me into the copyright laws? These are actually two sides of the same false coin. Do you really believe that a copyright can stop me? How many times shall I repeat that ANYONE MAY BE LUTHER BLISSETT? Don't you have any notion of what this means? You're beating yourself at my game, and you don't even imagine the consequences. My game is uncurbedly amoral, and the most funny, disquieting aspect of it is that all of you are accomplices of my crime. Accomplices of the summer riots I stirred up in Riccione [6]. Accomplices of the hijack of night buses, which has now become a new youth trend [7]. Accomplices of illegal raves and to the dizzy diffusion of new drugs. Accomplices of the LSD which unconscious children have licked on the cover of some copies of my previous book Mind Invaders. Accomplices of the burglaries, the sabotages in the workplaces, the computer crimes and the vandalic actions claimed by my name. Accomplices of the unsolved murder cases and the terroristic assaults claimed by unlikely names.
Yes, Luther Blissett is the artistic, intellectual, urbanistic, media...in one word, spectacular experimentation you enjoy covering, but s/he's also everything you use to hide. Luther Blissett is a sect with no leaders or hierarchies, no member of which knows the others. Anything may happen because nobody decides on behalf of the others. Any temporary coagulum of LB identities is totally self-sufficient and doesn't need to contact any other...And if this happens, who contacted who? Just another person claiming to be Luther Blissett! This makes me invincible. Who am I? How many people are me? What is my main activity? I don't know myself. In this state of emergency I'm the only emergency worth dealing with. This is terror, and nobody can betray me.
I'm wrote net.gener@tion. The poverty of that book is actually my victory. It's just a cut-up of compositions assigned to students by some LB personalities who teach in high schools. I sent the text to Giuseppe Genna via E-mail. Of all the individuals who tried to exploit my notoriety, Genna is the one whose own presumption and ignorance turned him into pieces on my chessboard. This pathetic idiot read the text, truly believed that it was a masterpiece and proposed it to Mondadori.
Now the book is in the shops. The miserable foreword can't deliver the publisher from responsability. They're accomplices [...] An uncontrollable project, which is easily going to flow into crime and obscenity, is being delivered in the bookstores. Thanks to Mondadori, I'm insinuating the fragile brains of the readers. Now you have to draw your conclusion: has anybody framed Luther Blissett? (12/03/1996).
Fucking hell! The national papers echoed our release, which ended up on TV and the radio. A kolossal amount of media coverage resulted. In the following interviews, Luther explained what I've written above, making pyromaniac statements like:
"This is the definitive proof that Luther Blissett is irreducible to the retrograde culture of copyright. It will take a long time before such awkward and sluggish pachiderms as Mondadori are able catch up with us small, mobile, intelligent units. I take the liberty of reminding them of the tiger and the elephant, that is the apologue told by Ho Chi Mihn; You can try to crush us with your French tanks, you'll end up in Dien Bien Phu anyway".
All this happened during the second week of March, when some newsweekly magazines (especially the thursday supplement of Corriere della sera) had already sent to press their next issue, which incidentally contained reviews of net.gener@tion. Thereby while most papers were running features of our scam, such a moronic hack as Alberto Bevilacqua [8] cut an incredibly poor figure reviewing the book as if it wasn't a fake...and appreciating it! This wasn't the only case, that's why Luther began to issue a weekly press release - which s/he used to call "Log-book" - in order to unveil the ineptness of the critics and reviewers. At first Mondadori tried to deny the evidence of the facts, then they started to act paranoically and avoid journalists. Genna was interviewed by several media and faltered out hilarious conspiracy theories ("Yes, there's no doubt I've been cheated, but only Umberto Eco could have planned such a swindle...Therefore I think that 'Luther Blissett' is an alias of Eco")...An important manager at the Big P is quoted to have said: "I don't wanna hear about Genna or Blissett anymore!". That's how we assumed that Genna had fallen from grace with Mondadori. Luther sent Genna an image of the Trojan horse with the caption: "The oldest tricks are the most successful ones". Mysteriously enough, net.gener@tion disappeared from the bookstores. A terrible flop. Since those days, all press coverage on Luther Blissett entailed the re-narration of this prank. Nobody can calculate how much money our psychic attack cost Mondadori in lost business.
Again, it goes without saying that the articles written after we released Mondadori As A Subversive Publisher were even more disinformed and mythomaniac than the previous ones. The most ludicrous feature appeared on March 28th on Panorama (which itself is published by Mondadori): it wildly speculates on the origin of the multiple name; according to the journalist, the name was invented in 1983 by networkers like Vittore Baroni and psychogeographers like Fabrizio Giuliani aka Salerno (which at that time was 15 years old). Now I call upon a Berlin-based identity of LB to describe his involvement in the prank.
Ironically enough, I was contacted by a journalist of the "Panorama" newsweekly without knowing about the Net.gener@tion controversy in the first weeks of March. Since the journalist didn't write who he was and why he wrote, the correspondence didn't go beyond some shallow pun lines about me being either Luther Blissett or not Luther Blissett, similar to a lot of communication the 7x9 generated. Nevertheless, "Panorama" printed a Luther Blissett feature on March 28 with some 7x9 references. The article mentions Vittore Baroni and Fabrizio Giuliani as the men behind the name, stating that "he [Blissett] is indepted to ironical journals from the Anglo-Saxon world like Smile, Yawn and Tarp. Blissett is also a pseudonym of the German Monty Cantsin collective and its 'Neoist' philosophy which just undergoes its negative phase: every day, they are cancelling parts of their website. It will be finished on March 24th. In Italy, 'situationism' and marginal philosophers like Giorgio Agamben prevail. But generally, all the schools and orders collaborate. The entire information published by Blissett is gigantic, his hypertext is labyrinthine. Those who wish to know who Blissett is are prompted with the online response 'a pseudonym of Monty Cantsin'. And for those who wish to know who Cantsin is: 'a pseudonym of Luther Blissett'". In all those twists and turns, it particularly amuses me that an Italian writer wouldn't recognize two (utterly unironic) classics of 16th and 17th century Italian literature and attribute them/TARP plainly to the SMILE tradition. [9]
Anyone who approximately knows the history of Situationism, Neoism and the Art Strike debate - as well as the tradition of multiple names - would realize that the feature is absurd. It also contained confused excuses by some Mondadori managers.
***
[...] This creates a precedent: in comparison with the diffusion of new technologies and the related social transformation, the existing laws are clearly useless. This sets a legal gap opposite to anyone's possibility of getting big uncontrollable stocks of information. Luther exhorts me to write that Mondadori will send a free copy of net.gener@tion to anyone who ask for it claiming to be Luther Blissett. "Don't forget to write this, it's important!" [...] Mondadori deny having taken such initiative. Why be surprised? Media scams are Luther's specialty.
- Bianca Madeccia, "COPYRIGHT WAR. HISTORY OF LUTHER BLISSETT, THE TELEMATIC SABOTEUR.", Avvenimenti, April 3rd 1996.
The fight between the journalists Union and the administrative managers of the Arnoldo Mondadori publishing house is getting fiercer. After the non-publication of two issues of the newsweekly "Panorama" and the strike at "Starbene" and "Donna moderna", the editorial boards of "Chi" and "Grazia" stopped work and demanded the renewal of their contract, whose terms expired in December 1994. Chief administrator Franco Tato' had a violent reaction: he ordered the editors of the 25 Mondadori magazines to break the strikes and let external writers write and issue the journals reducing the leaves [...] Tato' also announced a veto on new engagements, promotions and replacements in order to recover the losses caused by the strike at "Panorama".
- "MONDADORI: FURTHER STRIKES", L'Unita', April 18th 1996.
[...] Mondadori published a book by Luther Blissett, net.gener@tion - Manifesto of the new liberties, which the trickster had forwarded in the e-mailbox of one Giuseppe Genna, ex-consultant of Irene Pivetti. Blissett convinced Genna that the text was the countercultural treasure of the younger generations, but the book was only second-hand Internet clap-trap re-used as a joke. Of courseit was printed and published, and the laughter of Luther Blissett is still ringing in the editorial offices.
- Diego Gabutti, "BLISSETT: I AM NOT INTERESTED IN REALITY", Il giorno, May 15th 1996.
FOOTNOTES
1. Maurizio Blondet is a catholic scumbag and an antisemite "conspiracy theorist".
2. Mrs. Irene Pivetti (born 1963) is the former Speaker of the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Before being excluded from the party, she was a leading exponent of Umberto Bossi's Lega Nord [Northern League], a racist movement whose anti-Welfare, anti-Tax crap-trap is so extreme that they happen to recall the US Militiamen. The propaganda strategy of the Northern League - which is mainly voted by merchants, tradesmen and industrialists of Northern Italy - is based on a threat of secession ("Let's get rid of Rome!"). They even set up a paramilitary group named "Camicie verdi" [Green Shirts]. Pivetti is notoriously antisemite, her hardcore Catholicism is close to the schismatic traditionalism of monsignor Marcel Lefebvre. When she criticised the most violent aspects of the Lega Nord's propaganda, Bossi called her "a Vatican agent" and expelled her.
3. Enrico Brizzi (born 1975) is the most hyped Italian young novelist. Formerly he was in the editorial collective of the situationautic 'zine "River Phoenix", whose fusion with the Bologna-based Trasmaniacon group generated the Luther Blissett Project in the summer of 1994. At the time of this fusion Brizzi had already left the 'zine and was going to start a career as a mainstream writer.
4. SIAE, Societa' Italiana Autori ed Editori [Italian Society of Authors and Publishers].
5. This is a deliberate simplification of what actually happened: '"My" 7*9 swan song carefully avoided the word "destruction" and was hence titled "The Seven by Nine Squares Dissolve". The sentence, which Blissett "quotes" in "original" English, was "While everyone else tries their best to get on the Internet, The Seven by Nine Squares will be the first trying hard to get off!". The "quote" was used for anti-Mondadori-Blissett's apology of non-Internet "counter-cultural" networking in contrast to the Internet hype in Mondadori-Blissett's Net.gener@tion.' (F. Cramer)
6. Riccione is a town on the Adriatic coast which is famous all over Europe for having such trendy and expensive dance clubs as the Cocorico'. In August '95, when some anti-drug squad cops started searching customers, a mob of young 'ordinary guys' surprisingly broke out in a wonderful riot. Moral panic invested the media and the 'public opinion'; Luther Blissett profited by the occasion and played a media prank on "Il Resto del Carlino", a right-wing Bologna newspaper. On August 26th the rag bore the frontpage headline 'I'VE REBELLED AGAINST BOREDOM - One of the protagonists of the big riot in Riccione tells his reasons/ "The police are the symbol of anything oppresses us"', and published an anonymous letter by a guy who had actively took part in the riots: 'I'm one of the people who threw stones at the cops in Riccione. Since you've written a lot of nonsense, I'm gonna try to tell what I feel. First of all, my life is tedious and my nights are spent in boring bars. My friends and I are caught in the traps of work and unenployment. The routine of my everyday life makes me sick, that's why I need to run wild. I disagree with the mayor of Rimini when he puts the blame on hip clubs: all that surrounds us forces us to do what we did on August holiday. Our dejection is due to our day-by-day forced behaviour. The road to my working place is a distressing sight. I feel myself chained, gagged, repressed. We don't hate the cops as individuals, but we're disgusted by the police: their uniforms are our chastity belts and strait-jackets, their helmets have been defending for centuries all that causes us ill, sorrow and pain...' and so on. As always, the idiot Carlino hacks went to their heads and dedicated 2 pages to the 'affair', with interviews to famous psychiatrists, sociologists and priests. Here some excerpts: 'The Riccione event has now become a disquieting symptom of a pathology of the Irrational [...] The creation of phantoms against which he vents his vain and empty rage...This entails a mortification of reason, which is reduced to animal instinct, and a betrayal of our higher ideal - that is our consciousness of being dignified humans' (Giancarlo Liuti, journalist); 'The unknown thug who wrote to your paper represents a whole class of young people...They espress their need to become protagonists by heroic deeds; The hero always fights the strongest enemies...Therefore, he fights the power' (Vittorino Andreoli, psychiatrist); 'These kids are sick' (Enzo Persuader, DJ). During their psychogeographical radio programme on RCdC, the APB exposed the letter as a fake written by Luther Blissett: 'The Carlino opened up the cataracts of twisted sociology (which isn't worth a farthing) and forced academic parasites to pathetic improvisation - but the letter was a fake, and I'm the one who wrote it... I wanted to test the press with a bogus pseudo-event, and used the moral panic of middle-age middle-class society as a detonator. Your cultural agoraphobia and rancour against your own old age makes you expect "the guys outside there" to do anything...and that's really true!' (Luther Blissett, end of summer '95). A few months later, Blissett pulled dirtier tricks on the paper.
7. 'Rome, springtime 1995, one saturday night. Fourty people get on a night bus with radio-blasters, drums, horns and a cellular phone. They speak as a chorus: "I am Luther Blissett, the numberless people who are me are going to divert this bus. Here starts a wild mobile party! I will pay only one ticket, 'cause I have many bodies and voices but my name is one: Luther!". And the party really begins, further ravers are advised by a radio tam-tam and get on at any bus stop. The event is covered by Radio Blissett, a "weekly show of psychic warfare" broadcast on Radio Citta' Futura, a cult programme in the Roman underground scene. From the bus Luther calls the studio and keeps the audience up to date. Suddenly some police cars block the road and assault the bus. The cops want to arrest the organisers of the occupation and take them to the station. Some ravers get down, there are brawls and scuffles, a cop shoots in the air. Luther's cellular phone is on and transmits the firing to the studio [...] A few months later, the organizers are charged with 'sedition' and 'resistance and insults to public officials'' (King, summer '96). Cf. Mondo Mitomane 1994-96.
8. Alberto Bevilacqua is a 60 years old talentless fart who is guest in EVERY talk-show of the Italian television. His novels are crap.
9. The 2nd issue of TARP - Remapping the Territory (Summer 1995) features such texts as "Il cannocchiale aristotelico" by Emanuele Tesauro (Venice, 1663), which is not exactly classic Anglo-Saxon humour!
This page hosted by
Get yer own Free Home Page