June 2009 Archives

For the 50th anniversary celebration of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, which begins any minute now -- it's scheduled for July 1-3 at the University of London Institute in Paris -- have a look at the cover of the original edition brought out in 1959 by French publisher Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press. Have a look, too, at 60 other covers (scroll down) of various editions that have appeared worldwide since then.

Meanwhile, here's a leetle sumzeeng in honor of le maître, excerpted from Cut Up or Shut Up (a slim Burroughsian volume I did in 1972 with Carl Weissner and Jürgen Ploog):

Back Page Item. It seems likely," said Randolph, "that the KGB tapped directly into the past on Nikita's phone. He had endless conversations with Mark Cayn of the Absolute Daily News -- used to be put in shape every morning by the official Novosti news agency which specialized in the juicy parts of Operation Feedback. Then they slipped the dross into books, magazines and other newspaper features ..."

Was Victor Louis right? A pusher of so-called Soviet secrets? So let's fit another piece into the puzzle from World Edible News. How come every time Mr. Louis looks into the bathroom mirror it produces such a wondrous literary cancer?

"To such a degree, gentlemen, if I may say so, you might check with Central Dogma," Victor says blithely.

"Make your own DNA and see an old pal of mine," says Randolph. He points to half a suitcase worth you can't translate backwards and comes up with a manuscript typed for conspiratorial auto-da-fé.

"Very funny. Wait till the government teat becomes hazardous to your health," says Victor

The hazardous part, of course, is that Randolph (a rundown leukemia agent) is Victor's American double and no slouch in his own department. While occupying Suite 223 at the Stardust Hotel, he was quoted as saying: "Russian emigré fixers in for their health? Hah! Don't make me laugh! So they use perfume, and as chance would have it, they cover up the odors? A certain Vassily Lewis .?. Never heard of him ..."

The hint is obvious: perhaps we will be able to use synthesized humans to find cryptic viruses in literature of the future. If Victor/Randolph can turn up grinning like a ventriloquist dummy, then anything is possible. So the missing pieces in our story can very well be turned over to the Moscow bureau for synthesis ... a warning to all my uh fellow writers against a myopic belief in 'style or content.' May I draw your attention to the fact that reverse translation may one day explain all literary cancers?

As Burroughs wrote in his "Atrophied Preface": "The black wind sock of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve.... Population blocks disappear in a checker game of genocide.... Any number can play.... You can cut into Naked Lunch at any intersection point ..."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

He died earlier this week in San Francisco just short of his 93rd birthday. I met him on a bitterly cold winter day in Paris, in 1962. I was keeping warm sitting in a seedy little cafe behind the Carrefour de l'Odeon. It was a neighborhood hangout where you could buy pot and waste your time all day. I was writing on a napkin when I felt someone hovering over my shoulder. He asked what I was writing. A poem, I told him. He said he was a poet, too, and introduced himself. I no longer recall what we talked about, but it didn't take long for him to invite me back to his room at 9 rue Git-le-Coeur, the so-called Beat Hotel. He broke out his hashish and regaled me with stories of the expat life. I was 20, just out of college, trying to become an expat myself. He was more than twice my age and seemed to know everyone I knew only from books and magazines. Not just his former inmates at the Beat Hotel -- Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg and, most notably, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, all of whom had recently moved out -- but also William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin, Anais Nin, Tennessee Williams ... the names went on and on. He gave me a slim volume -- it was "The Roman Sonnets of G. G. Belli" in his translation (with a preface by Williams) -- and I staggered home dazzled by our encounter. Years later, in 1968, he offered to let me publish his poem "Hotel Nirvana" in The San Francisco EARTHQUAKE, a little magazine I edited. It began ...

... and continued for nine pages like that. City Lights republished it in 1974 as the title poem in "Hotel Nirvana: Selected Poems 1953-1973," now out of print. When I left San Francisco in the fall of 1971, he was about to leave Venice, California. We arranged for him to take over my flat and furniture. He stayed on there for five years. If you've never read his "Memoirs of a Bastard Angel," do so at once. As James Baldwin wrote in the preface, "... if light ever enters the hearts of men, Harold will be one of those who has helped to set it there." So long, Hal.

(Crossposted at HuffPo)

Spent a few hours listening to the performances at the BANG ON A CAN Marathon 2009 with a friend of mine who has little patience for la sonorité artistique. She described much of what she heard as "beehive music." I had to laugh. She wasn't wrong. (One composer, Jeppe Just Christensen, played two pairs of amplified coffee grinders. Watch the video.)

Even so, The Smith Quartet seduced me with "White Man Sleeps," by Kevin Volans:

Also, Bill Frisell eventually got to me with his laid-back "Solo":

Repetition breeds familiarity. Maybe familiarity breeds the opposite of contempt ... narcosis? Anyway, it was Phil Kline's "John the Revelator" -- performed by the vocal ensemble Lionheart and the string quartet ETHEL -- that turned out to be what I liked best, even though I'm no fan of churchy music. (Sorry, no video.)

Incidental intelligence: During the performance of Gavin Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic," also played by the Smith Quartet, news came that the Titanic's last survivor had just died. I presume the music had nothing to do with it.

Postscript: "Look at these photos," a friend writes, "and think of a bunch of dipshits making music with coffee grinders or Volan's arty little piece appropriating South African tunes to make another of the limp-spined Left's innocuous, feel-good, PC statements (and written about 30 years ago which makes its status as new music rather questionable). Beehive music is a good term for Bang on a Can. It's a collective of yuppie drones and worker bees legitimizing blinkered Honkiness with cute Kultur."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)