Old Leaks

The editor of Partisan Review, William Phillips, asked me to review Daniel Odier's "The Job," a book of interviews with William S. Burroughs from Grove Press. This was in 1970.

I wrote the piece and then thought I'd test the limits of the magazine, which had already entered its long dotage, by cutting up what I'd written and submitting the result.

I think Phillips was a bit dumbfounded. To his credit however, and that of the managing editor, Caroline Rand Herron, the review was published as submitted, although under the category of "Variety."

Why mention this now? No particular reason, except to note that the utterances that leaked out of the cut-up still seem as pertinent (dated references notwithstanding) as they did then.

For example:

We have heard children of the Jews on the way to the ovens. What are we a rerun already? The movie industry comes cheap. We live now in the dirty stockings of Adolph. Remember Apollo 7? Didn't (Frank) Borman coo the gideon bible? So let's stop praying.

Or this:

Didn't you tune in? We saw them armed with tanks and cameras alternatively under the dead stars of Vietam. Now throw back insult tapes. Betray & walk out! Joe Stalin's Dick Nixon's heavy camouflage alone forms that which it opposes. Namely you.
Or this:
Have you been fooled? It is only natural. For the police, actuality overcame theory to attack you. That is their fix with the Senator whose idea is not to be where you arrive.

The review began:

With the recent publication of The Job Burroughs writes who do not listen. He advances against inhuman Ike who made radioactive image junk for greed, conspiring against the daily life of the masses -- so the Authority habit and human smallness, whose methods were properly learned, became history with predatory intent. Can now be overthrown?

The answer, 36 years later, is: apparently not.

December 4, 2006 10:18 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by Straight Up | published on December 4, 2006 10:18 AM.

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