Footage of the jazz musician playing live
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1.7.14
Ornette Coleman performs Naked Lunch soundtrack
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6.6.14
Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life
A new biography by the Beats historian and scholar
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| William S. Burroughs |
In July of 1957, an unknown writer named William Burroughs visited a friend in Copenhagen. After three weeks in the area, including a brief excursion to Sweden, he wrote to the poet Allen Ginsberg that "Scandinavia exceeds my most ghastly imaginations." In Naked Lunch, the novel Burroughs was writing at the time, Scandinavia became a model for a place called Freeland. "Freeland was a welfare state," the book explained. "If a citizen wanted anything from a load of bone meal to a sexual partner some department was ready to offer effective aid. The threat implicit in this enveloping benevolence stifled the concept of rebellion."
After Naked Lunch was published in 1959, Burroughs graduated from unknown writer to literary celebrity. Today he is widely regarded, along with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, as one of the three towering figures of the Beat movement. He was one of the most prominent figures in the emergence of the postwar counterculture, and his influence stretches well beyond the Beats to the bohemias of the '60s, the '70s, and beyond. In 2014, a century after his birth in St. Louis, his work remains a touchstone for alienated cynics of all kinds.
Michael Ochs Archives/GettyBut Burroughs' worldview was miles from the peace-and-love socialism that our cultural clichés tell us to expect from a hippie hero. In 1949, according Barry Miles' new biography Call Me Burroughs, he complained to Kerouac that "we are bogged down in this octopus of bureaucratic socialism." When he was a landlord in New Orleans he sent Ginsberg a rant against rent control, and when he found himself owning a farm in Texas he gave Ginsberg an earful about the evils of the minimum wage. Eventually he departed for Mexico, and there he wrote to Ginsberg again. "I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time," he told his leftist friend. "I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England, and not too different from Russia....At least Mexico is no obscenity 'Welfare' State, and the more I see of this country the better I like it. It is really possible to relax here where nobody tries to mind your business for you." He added that Westbrook Pegler, a hard-right pundit who would soon be a vocal defender of Sen. Joe McCarthy, was "the only columnist, in my opinion, who possesses a grain of integrity." [Read More]
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19.2.14
William S. Burroughs at 100
The Quietus marks the centenary of the counter-cultural American writer
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| William S. Burroughs. Photograph: Loomis Dean |
How could a man born one hundred years ago today still seem to speak so urgently and radically to us? The first reason is a stylistic one. Burroughs found a fitting way of representing the overload of our times. In abandoning the solely linear idea of narrative for cut-ups, he became an heir to the Modernists and did a great deal to close the fifty year gap he saw between literature and conceptual art. He was able to show that the increasingly ill-fitting structures of the Victorian novel were in fact the pretence rather than their experimental opponents as often claimed. After all, life and how we perceive it are neither entirely linear nor Dickensian. There was an honesty and a method in Burroughs' apparent madness. [Read More]
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30.1.14
Burroughs, Lynch and Warhol: Photography Exhibition
The Guardian previews a retrospective at the London's Photographers' Gallery
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| David Lynch – Untitled (England), late 1980s/early 1990s |
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| David Lynch – Untitled (England), late 1980s/early 1990s |
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| David Lynch – Untitled (Łódź), 2000 |
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| David Lynch – Untitled (Łódź), 2000 |
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15.1.14
Dylan Thomas reads Djuna Barnes' Nightwood
Excerpt from a series of 1950s recordings
From Cathryn Setz:
From Dylan Thomas's Caedmon Collection, produced as LPs in the early 1950s. With his sultry molasses-and-mahogany voice, the Welsh poet took very well to performances like this--though mainly of his own works.
Here he reads an extended (slightly abridged) passage from the 'Watchman, what of the night?' chapter of Djuna Barnes's modernist novel, Nightwood (1936). The Doctor is a central narrator character, verbose yet inscrutable, and Nora is visiting him in the dead of night. She is trying to ask him how to cope with her broken heart. This, his reply, is far from comforting.
Nightwood is a novel Thomas himself referred to as "one of the three great prose books ever written by a woman." William S. Burroughs called it "one of the great books of the twentieth century." T. S. Eliot's introduction even employed some inadvertent reverse psychology, telling readers "not" to approach the novel as a sideshow of freaks.
Yet the novel is not well known. Hear some of its melody and strangeness, and the poet's great and Thespian delivery. Then go and read the book. [Read More]
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16.12.13
Famous Writers’ Sleeping Habits
A visualisation of rising times set against literary productivity
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| Click for source |
Over the years, in my endless fascination with daily routines, I found myself especially intrigued by successful writers’ sleep habits — after all, it’s been argued that “sleep is the best (and easiest) creative aphrodisiac” and science tells us that it impacts everything from our moods to our brain development to our every waking moment. I found myself wondering whether there might be a correlation between sleep habits and literary productivity. The challenge, of course, is that data on each of these variables is hard to find, hard to quantify, or both. So I turned to Italian information designer Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who make masterful visualizations of cultural phenomena seemingly impossible to quantify — and, together, we set out to explore whether it might be possible to visualize such a correlation.
First, I handed them my notes on writers’ wake-up times, amassed over years of reading biographies, interviews, journals, and other materials. Many came from two books — Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey and Odd Type Writers: From Joyce and Dickens to Wharton and Welty, the Obsessive Habits and Quirky Techniques of Great Authors by Celia Blue Johnson — as well as from the Paris Review interviews and various collections of diaries and letters.
We ended up with a roster of thirty-seven writers for whom wake-up times were available — this became the base data set, around which we set out to quantify, then visualize, the literary productivity of each author. [Read More]
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7.11.13
50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers
Why read a 'difficult' book?
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| Alexander Deineka, 'Young Woman Reading' (1934) |
Such novels can prompt a unique kind of reader interaction, making us rethink the way we look at the world around us. These are often the sort of books that aim to elevate the everyday, or shed light on issues that society tends to overlook. What we find 'tough' or 'challenging' is often simply unfamiliar, or different to what we might usually expect. What turns our noses to the air in a modernist novel is often its attempt to capture life as it really is: a character speaking in a local dialect, or the disjointed structure of a daydream. In these and other cases, what is difficult is not the book itself, but our decision as readers to go with it.
There are books that we consume, and sometimes there are books that consume us - novels, poems and plays which perpetually pull us back to them. As the filmmaker David Cronenberg once said of Burroughs' Naked Lunch, 'You find your favorite parts, like the I Ching. You look in it when you need it, and you find something there.' Temple has charted a wonderful selection of just this kind of book. Here are just a few of them:
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes (Amazon: US | UK)
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (Amazon: US | UK)
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville (Amazon: US | UK)
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace (Amazon: US | UK)
J R, William Gaddis (Amazon: US | UK)
Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (Amazon: US | UK)
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner (Amazon: US | UK)
In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (Amazon: US | UK)
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs (Amazon: US | UK)
To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf (Amazon: US | UK)
The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein (Amazon: US | UK)
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (Amazon: US | UK)
2666, Roberto Bolaño (Amazon: US | UK)
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy (Amazon: US | UK)
Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon (Amazon: US | UK)
Underworld, Don DeLillo (Amazon: US | UK)
The Unfortunates, B.S. Johnson (Amazon: US | UK)
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis (Amazon: US | UK)
The Tunnel, William Gass (Amazon: US | UK)
Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (Amazon: US | UK)
The Castle, Franz Kafka (Amazon: US | UK)
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Amazon: US | UK)
[Read the Full List]
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25.10.13
Strange Victories: Grove Press 1951-1885
Palitz Gallery, New York · 18 November 2013 - 6 February 2014
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Opening on November 18, 2013, Palitz Gallery at Syracuse University’s Lubin House at 11 East 61st Street in New York will present Strange Victories: Grove Press 1951–1985, an exhibition of books, documents, and other material relating to the history and continuing cultural significance of Barney Rosset’s counterculture publishing house. The first major exhibition to focus on the publisher, “The exhibition traces the history and evolution of Grove Press, from its role at the center of national censorship trials over the first American editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer to its ascension as one of the twentieth-century’s great avant-garde publishing houses,” the university says. “Strange Victories will include original letters and manuscripts by several authors including Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans as well as a facsimile of Malcolm X’s letter to Alex Haley written during his first pilgrimage to Mecca. Also included are archival documents relating to the censorship trials, Grove’s iconic book jackets, and newspaper clippings documenting the context of Grove’s publishing efforts.” [Read More]
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19.10.13
Loren Glass, Counterculture Colophon
George Hunka reviews a new volume about Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Avant-Garde
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| Photograph of Barney Rosset, taken by Allen Ginsberg in New York City, 1991. |
For those of a certain age and literary inclination, Grove Press was more than a publishing house — it was a philosophy to hang a worldview on. Between its dedication to publishing the novels and plays of the late modernists, from Beckett and Pinter and Stoppard to Burroughs and Henry Miller and Kerouac, its resolute mission to eradicate censorship laws and publish in the mainstream some of the most transgressive sexual literature in history, and its opportunistic but prophetic publication of the works of political radicals like Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Frantz Fanon, Grove Press and its founder Barney Rosset might be said to have revolutionized American drama and literature, the nation’s erotic life, and its political discourse. In the end, if Grove Press and Barney Rosset hadn’t existed, these revolutionary upheavals might well have occurred anyway. But they wouldn’t have happened the way they eventually did if it hadn’t been for the publishing house and Rosset himself. The mass-market paperback Black Cat series and the more “literary” quality paperback Evergreen Originals remain essential volumes in any bookshelf devoted to English-language theatre and the late modernist movement. Like his British equal, John Calder, Rosset may have been the last of the genuinely, culturally influential publishers. [Read More]
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5.7.13
Tea with Burroughs and Bacon
Uncut footage from the BBC Arena archive
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17.6.13
William S. Burroughs on Writing Routines
Extract from Oliver Harris' The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1945-1959
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| William S. Burroughs |
I am up to my neck in this new work right now plus kicking habit. Besides I don't have a complete MS. In fact I have hardly any of Queer. I still think Roosevelt skit is funny. Sounds to me like Rexroth just doesn't dig what a routine is. You don't study Zen and then write a scholarly routine for Chrissakes! Routines are completely spontaneous and proceed from whatever fragmentary knowledge you have. In fact a routine is by nature fragmentary, inaccurate. There is no such thing as an exhaustive routine, nor does the scholarly-type mind run to routines.
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11.6.13
Gary Indiana on Burroughs and Naked Lunch
An extract from Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch”
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| William S. Burroughs on the set of David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch |
Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists, social reactionaries from libertarians. Or, to use one of Burroughs’s favorite distinctions, members of the Johnson Family from the Shits. Johnsons have a live-and-let-live, mind-their-own-business mentality. Shits have an uncontrollable need to pass judgment on and be right about everything. In today’s censorious climate, police work dominates the pages of the book reviews: this writer has the wrong attitude and must be done away with.
Burroughs has always elicited a testy response from the cultural establishment. While early support for Naked Lunch from such mandarins as Mary McCarthy and John Ciardi has been matched over the years by encomiums from many of our best writers and by a substantial body of excellent academic criticism, the overall literary world’s recognition of Burroughs has been grudging more often than not. Perhaps Burroughs’s achievement represents a threat to the well-mannered, conventionally crafted, middle-class novel. It could be as simple as that. Burroughs expanded the content of fiction, giving artistic form to extremes of contemporary abjection. Naked Lunch opened a path into the world of the addict, the homosexual, the social outlaw. From this despised and largely unmentionable territory, Burroughs extracted a presiding metaphor of control. Naked Lunch deals with the control of consciousness and behavior through addiction—to sex, power, money, drugs, even to control itself. When themes of this nature, which ultimately have to do with politics, lie at the heart of a writer’s work, appreciation is often checked by the timidity of those who prefer not to think about such issues. [Read More]
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31.5.13
97 Things You Didn’t Know About William S. Burroughs
A list compiled by Flavorwire
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| William S. Burroughs |
1. William S. Burroughs’ uncle was Ivy Lee, the godfather of modern public relations and a publicist for the Rockefellers.
2. His mother, Laura Lee Burroughs, came from a prominent Southern family, and claimed to be related to Robert E. Lee.
3. William S. Burroughs’ dad’s first name was Mortimer. He was the owner of a plate-glass company.
4. Their family fortune came from the Burroughs Adding Machine.
5. Burroughs’ parents sold their stock for $200,000 in 1929 — right before the stock market crash.
6. Burroughs used his first gun at age eight.
7. The same year, he wrote his first short story, “The Autobiography of a Wolf.”
8. Burroughs was introduced to opium by his family’s housekeeper. [Read More]
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28.5.13
Naked Lunch: Deposition Manuscript
New York City bookseller Glenn Horowitz to sell manuscript draft
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| William S. Burroughs |
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| Naked Lunch: Deposition Manuscript |
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| Naked Lunch: Deposition Manuscript |
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| Naked Lunch: Deposition Manuscript |
The first and final draft corrected typescripts of William S. Burroughs' Introduction to the first American edition (NY: Grove Press, 1962) of Naked Lunch (Paris: Olympia Press, 1959), his seminal, controversial work and one of the landmark publications in the history of American literature, have come to market. The asking price is $175,000.
From the collection of his friend and editor, Alan Ansen, they are being offered by Glenn Horowitz, Bookseller, the New York City dealer who has made a habit of pulling literary rabbits out of his hat. Within that context these typescripts may be fairly ranked as the rabbit who ate Cleveland.
The first, titled "Postscript" in Burroughs' penciled holograph, is comprised of five recto-only leaves corrected by Burroughs in black ink, with page numbers in same. It is unknown when, exactly, he wrote it but it appears to be c. 1960.
The heavily corrected typescript is Burroughs' first pass at his extended essay, Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness, that would serve as the introduction to the American edition of Naked Lunch. “Postscript” discursively explores the themes and sentiments which motivated Burroughs to write the introduction; it is the text upon which the polished, buffed, and published version was based. [Read More]
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19.5.13
Van Sant/Burroughs: The Discipline of D.E.
Gus Van Sant adapts a work by William S. Burroughs
From Open Culture: ‘Fans of filmmaker Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, My Own Private Idaho, Milk) will love this 1982 short film – The Discipline of D.E. – based on a story by William S. Burroughs. And fans of Burroughs himself will particularly love its theme: The “D.E.” in the title stands for “Doing Easy,” a quasi-Buddhist notion best explained by the short’s koan-like closing question, “How fast can you take your time, kid?”’ [Read More]
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29.3.13
David Cronenberg on his Life and Work
A 90-minute video interview
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| David Cronenberg |
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
- David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis, DeLillo and Robert Pattinson
- Mark Kermode's Top 5 Cronenberg films
- Gary Indiana on David Cronenberg's Videodrome
- David Cronenberg on J. G. Ballard
- David Cronenberg Interview: Violence, Gadaffi and A Dangerous Method
- David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method
- Cronenberg: 'Imagination is dangerous'
23.3.13
Fan Letters: Famous Authors to Famous Authors
Letters from Joyce, Gaddis, Woolf, McCullers and others
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| A young James Joyce (1902) |
Honoured Sir,The site has also posted letters by William Gaddis (to Don DeLillo), Norman Mailer (to William Styron), Ray Bradbury (to Robert Heinlein), Charles Dickens (to George Eliot), Virginia Woolf (to Olaf Stapledon), W. H. Auden (to James Agee), Carson McCullers (to Henry Miller), George R. R. Martin (to Stan Lee), and William S. Burroughs (to Truman Capote). [Read More]
I write to you to give you greeting on your seventy-third birthday and to join my voice to those of your well-wishers in all lands. You may remember that shortly after the publication of your latest play ‘When We Dead Awaken’, an appreciation of it appeared in one of the English reviews — The Fortnightly Review — over my name. I know that you have seen it because some short time afterwards Mr. William Archer wrote to me and told me that in a letter he had from you some days before, you had written, ‘I have read or rather spelled out a review in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. James Joyce which is very benevolent and for which I should greatly like to thank the author if only I had sufficient knowledge of the language.’ (My own knowledge of your language is not, as you see, great but I trust you will be able to decipher my meaning.) I can hardly tell you how moved I was by your message. I am a young, a very young man, and perhaps the telling of such tricks of the nerves will make you smile. But I am sure if you go back along your own life to the time when you were an undergraduate at the University as I am, and if you think what it would have meant to you to have earned a word from one who held so high a place in your esteem as you hold in mine, you will understand my feeling. One thing only I regret, namely, that an immature and hasty article should have met your eye, rather than something better and worthier of your praise. There may not have been any wilful stupidity in it, but truly I can say no more. It may annoy you to have your work at the mercy of striplings but I am sure you would prefer even hotheadedness to nerveless and ‘cultured’ paradoxes. [Read More]
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17.3.13
When Bowie Met Burroughs
Jon Savage recounts the meeting of two counter-cultural figures
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| David Bowie (left) and William S. Burroughs (right) |
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14.2.13
Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg
NYU Grey Art Gallery · 5 January 2013 - 6 April 2013
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| From Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg |
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| From Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg |
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| From Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg |
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
- Gordon Ball: Beat Generation Photographs
- Writers: William S. Burroughs
- William S. Burroughs on Allen Ginsberg
- Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation
- Bringing Ginsberg's Howl to the screen
- Kerouac and Ginsberg Correspondence
- Jack Kerouac's On the Road as iPad app
- Lawrence Ferlinghetti on San Francisco
- Carolyn Cassady on the Beat Generation
2.2.13
The Beckett Circle on Barney Rosset
Official Samuel Beckett newsletter pays tribute to the founder of America's Grove Press
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| Barney Rosset |
For Beckett people, Barney Rosset, who died on February 21, 2012, earned his place of great honour in the Beckettian firmament by having been Beckett’s publisher in the United States at his Grove Press. Thanks to Grove Beckett’s works were more widely disseminated in the U.S.—and especially on American campuses—than in any other country, and Waiting for Godot alone sold more than an astounding 2.5 million copies.Also at A Piece of Monologue:
But for the publishing world at large, Barney Rosset was not only responsible for making Beckett a well-known writer long before his Nobel Prize, he was, beyond a doubt, the enfant terrible of American publishing, the man who fought numerous, highly controversial legal battles to assert the First Amendment in a climate of political and sexual censorship. His most celebrated—and successful—battles earned Grove Press the rights to publish and distribute D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and changed the face of publishing in the United States. Rosset spent large sums of his own money (he came from a wealthy family), fought the U.S. government, and even went to jail, but he made Grove Press ‘a breach in the dam of American Puritanism’, as he himself termed it.
Having broken down the barriers to sexually explicit language and subject matter in literature, Rosset turned to film. He imported the then-sexually daring Swedish film, I Am Curious (Yellow), bought a small Greenwich Village movie house to show it, and then went to court once again when the film was banned. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and again he won and again his success marked a landmark victory against censorship laws and mentality. Life magazine may have entitled a 1969 article about him ‘The Old Smut Peddler’ but Rosset was not only unfazed, he belonged to the ‘it-doesn’t-matter-what-they-say-as-long-as-they-spell-the-name-right’ school. Most likely he felt that at 47 he should not have been labeled ‘old’. [Read More]
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