University of Toronto's Allen Ginsberg Photography Collection

January 21, 2014, 7:29 pm

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The University of Toronto announced today the receipt, thanks to a bequest by the Larry and Cookie Rossy Family Foundation, of 7,686 photographs and 236 silver gelatin prints (including many original snapshots and uniquely-inscribed prints), making them now home to, undoubtedly the world's largest collection of Allen Ginsberg photographs. 
The photographs span the years between 1944 and 1997 and comprise pretty much a complete collection of Allen's extraordinary picture-taking career. 
"This is an exciting and remarkable gift", declared U of T President Marc Gertler, "(a)..truly fascinating collection". Others went further, "This fabulous collection provides both scholars and students alike unique entree to Ginsberg's passionate eye and helps to confirm his status as a major 20th-Century American poet with the camera", declares photography and new media professor, Louis Kaplan - "One cannot overestimate its [the collection's] photo-historical, pedagogical and cultural value."

This Fall the two institutions will collaborate to present an exhibition of Ginsberg photos.

Click here to see, for example, Allen's extraordinary pictures of Bob Dylan, down by Manhattan's East River. 



[Allen Ginsberg - 1985 Self-Portrait - part of the collection at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library Allen Ginsberg Collection]

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Expansive Poetics - 18 (Fernando Pessoa - 3)

January 22, 2014, 9:00 am

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[Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) aged 26, in 1914]

Allen's observations on Fernando Pessoa continue 

AG:  ....like in Whitman. This [Fernando Pessoa's "Poem in a Straight Line"]  is parallel to the line that he [Walt Whitman] has, "These are the thoughts of all men in all ages." And that's a great declaration of Whitman - "These thoughts are not my own but these are the thoughts of all men in all times in all ages.
And the next poem (of Pessoa's) begins,"Tobacco Shop"(Tabacaria) - "I am nothing/That's all I'll ever be/Nothing with no willpower to be something./With that reservation my dreams are boundless..." ["Nao sou nada/Nunca serei nada/Nao posso querer ser nada/ A parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mondo"]...."I've clasped to my hypothetical breast [Tenho apertardo ao peito hipotetico.] more human races than Christ/I've secretly devised philosophies no Kant ever wrote./Yes I'll probably always be what I am now, the fellow/ in the garret,[o da mansarda..]/Though I don't even live there/I'll always be the one who wasn't born for that/I'll always just be the one who had it in him/I'll always be the one who waited for the door to open in the doorless wall/Who sang the song of Infinity in a hen-coop.. [E cantou a cantiga do Infinito numa capoeira]...."

Student: Oh

AG: Actually, he's a good poet. Through all his plainness and for all the dependence on the wizardry of the idea - "Death spreading dankness on walls and white hair on heads" - ("Com a morte a por umidade nas paredes e cabelos brancos nos homens") Some of the lines sound funny just because of the idea within them, but, as you may have noticed inthe testimony to Whitman, there's lots of fantastic combinations of idea and of language. Of language, especially. There was that one point where...what was it? - motors and soup?. In the Whitman ode, there's one very climactic moment when he just went out of his head and had two totally opposite conceptions in one moment. Oh, motors and pistons.

Student: That line about pistons, right?

AG: Pistons and something else, I think. Let's see. I wonder if I can find it. [editorial note:  the line is "All the wheels, all the gears, all the pistons of the soul" -"Todos as rodas, todos os volantes, todas os embolos da alma"] - I meant to stop then and there, but I didn't want to - "Climax of iron and motors!" - "...To be lifted to../The highest, abstract point of me and it all!/ Climax of iron and motors!" [ "..Ser levado ate.../Abstrato auge no fim cie mim e du todo!/ Climax a ferro e motores!"]- It's really a modern..but twentieth-century (this is 1915), instead of "climax of flowers" or whatever.
Yes?

Student: It's like the Futurists.

AG: Yes. Ten years after the big Futurist explosion. And, of course, all the Futurists used motors and iron and motors. Motors came in - tramways, taxis, subways, bus motors. That one glimpse of the motors as an image, just the use of the word "motor" in a poem, updating Romantic poetry, and updating poetry to the twentieth-century when you get to gasoline and the motor in there, (it) goes on to even in "Howl" (where I was) still working that trick -"sphincters of dynamos" ["...worn out asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos.."]. You know, just combining the organic with the twentieth-century (image), an organic (but scientific or formal) with the twentieth-century motor (or) dynamo - "sphincters of dynamoes", "cannibal dynamo". (As) soon as they brought the cars into poetry, poetry got very funny and capable of doing all sorts of car-crashes.

Student: He mentions "parking lot".

AG:  Yeah..  Yeah. He's got a combination of abstraction, which is very funny. Well,"red hot iron Pegasus, my twitching anxieties,/ Wavering parking place of my motorized destiny." ["Pegaso-ferro-em-brasa das minhas ansias inquietas,/Paradeiro indeciso do meu destino a motores!]

Student: Yeah

AG: So it's really modern. He's just taking Whitman at his level, at his word. Taking Whitman at his word and then applying it - "Bringing the muse into the kitchen" [sic]

[from Whitman's "Song of the Exposition" - "I say I bring thee Muse today and here,/All occupations, duties broad and close,/Toil, healthy toil and sweat, endless, without cessation/The old, old practical burdens, interests, joys,/The family, parentage, childhood, husband and wife./The house-comforts, the house itself and all its belongings, Food and its preservation.."]

Well, this is a long poem and it goes on. This "Tobacco Shop" poem goes on for another... I read up to page 81, and page 78, 77, and it goes on to page 88 - another eight pages, or another six pages, or so.

Student: That's inthe anthology?

AG: No, I didn't put that in

Student: No?

AG:  There's too much to put in. I just put in one sample. And so, the point is, everybody go and check out...read up on him in the library. In other words, what I'm trying to do is (to) introduce you to his taste, introduce you to his head, or his style, and then, you've got the rest of your life to check him out (or the rest of this term).

[Audio for the above is available here, beginnng at approximately sixty-two minutes in and concluding approximately seventy-eight-and-three-quarter minutes in] 

Expansive Poetics - 19 (Fernando Pessoa - 4)

January 23, 2014, 3:00 am

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The major poem, or what is considered the major poem (ofFernando Pessoa) was too long to include (in the anthology), it's about a thirty-page shot, called"Maritime Ode", 
(Ode Marítima) about standing on the dock, looking out into space. Let's see.. And he also gets into sound - "Ahò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò - yyy... Schooner ahò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-oò -yyy..." -  he gets funny.. Let's see if I can find that page, and he begins playing with the typeface. It's an enormous long thing..  [Allen quotes from Pessoa's "Maritime Ode] - "To be on with all those crimes, to be part and parcel,/ of all those raids on ships, the massacres, the rapes!/ To be all that happened where plunder was." - Yeah. Then it goes on.. It's really a long poem. It's the same thing as  "Slash me, rip me open!/ As I lie broken in small, conscious pieces,/Spill me across decks." - And then, take a look at what the poem turns into typographically.

Student: Oh, look at that!


AG: It's really funny.

Student: Yeah.

AG: Well, no it's just screams and yells and.. It gets bigger and bigger. Nineteen fifteen or so... I don't know. I'll try and read the piece of that part..

Student: American Indian.

AG: I think it must become..

Student: Primal.

AG: Oh, it's pretty interesting - "Make me kneel before you!/Humiliate me and beat me!/Make me your slave and your object" - Very few poets did get to this - "And let your scorn for me never abandon me,/O my masters, my masters!/. Let me always gloriously assume/ the submissive role. In bloody events and drawn out/sex bouts, fall on me like big heavy walls, oh/barbarians of the ancient sea, tear me apart and maim/me, go from east to west of my body, scratch body/trails through my flesh." - Imagine, this is the national poet of Portugal. The Portuguese (have) to put up with this because it's them, actually, (it's)  reflecting the destiny of the Portuguese

Student: It's the same situation with Whitman..

AG: Yes

Student: .. in this country

AG: [continuing to quote from Pessoa] - "Kiss with cutlass, whips and frenzy/ My joyous fleshly terror of belonging to you. My masochistic itch to give in to your fury, the sentient inert object of your omnivorous cruelty. Dominators, masters, emperors and corsairs, Ah, torture me,/ Slash me, rip me open/As Ilie broken in small conscious pieces/ Spill me across decks, /Scatter me over the seas, leave me/ On the islands' greedy beaches,/Gratify on me all the mysticism I have claimed for you!/ Chisel your way through my blood to my soul. Cut and tear! Ohtattooers of my corporeal imagination!/ Flayer- lovers of my bodily submission!/ Subdue me like a dog you'd kick to death!,/Make me the sewer of your scornful mastery,/ Make me all your victims!/ As Christ suffered for mankind, I want to suffer/ For every victim at your hands/ Calloused, bloody hands with fingers split/ By your violent boardings at the gunwales/. Make of me a blob that has been drugged./ Oh, my delight. Oh, kiss of pain! -/ Dragged at the tail of horses you have whipped.../ But all this on the sea,/ on the se-eea, on the SE-EEEA!/ Ho-ho-ho-ho Ho-ho-ho-ho, on the SEE-EEA!/ Yah-yah-yah-yah!  Yah-yah-yah! Yah-yah-yah-yah-yah!/ Everything screams, everything is screaming!/ /Winds, waves, ships,/ Seas, topsails, pirates, my soul, blood and the air, the air!/ Ha-ha-ha-ha  Yah-yah-yah-yah!  Yah-yah-yah-yah-yah!/ Everything screaming and singing!

FIFTEEN MEN ON A DEAD MAN"S CHEST/ YO-HO-HO AND A BOTTLE OF RUM!/  Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! yah-yah-yah-yah!/ Yah-yah-yah-yah/ 
"Ahò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò - yyy... Schooner ahò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-oò -yyy..."

- This is all [mostly all] in large-phrase type.

[Allen continues] - "Darby M'Graw-aw-aw-aw-aw-aw,/DARBY M"GRAW-AW-AW-AW-AW-AW/ FETCH AFFFT THE RU-U-U-U-UM, DARHY,/ oh- ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho-ho..." - I can't do it. It gets bigger and bigger - Four "ho-ho-ho's" in ascending giant type.
So it finally ends,  "HO-HO-HO-HO-HO-HO!. Something in me comes apart. A redness glows in the dust./ I feel too much to go on/feeling any more./ My soul is spent, an echo is all that's left inside me./ The flywheel slows down noticably./ My dreams raise their hands a bit from over my eyes/. Inside I feel merely a vacuum, a desert, a nocturnal sea./ And as I feel the nocturnal sea inside me/ There rises up out of its distances, born of its silence,/ Once more, once more, that vast, most ancient cry of all,/ Suddenly as light resounds with tenderness, not sound,/ And instantly spreads all across the watery horizon,/ The gloomy humid surge of nightime humanity,/ A distant siren voice comes wailing, calling out/ From depths of distant, depths of ocean, the center of abysses,/While on the surface float, like seaweed, my/dismembered dreams./  "Ahò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò - yyy... Schooner ahò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-ò-oò -yyy/ Ah, this light dew that covers my excitement..." 

- It goes on and on, this poem. He never gets weary. He just keeps (on) going.
So how does it end?  It's like he said about Whitman, "I could never read much". I never read this all through. I keep thinking, when I'm ninety years old, I'll sit down someday and get to it.

[Allen continues] - "Poetry hasn't lost out" - Pages later - "Poetry hasn't lost out a bit. Moreover we now have the machine/ With its own poetry as well and a totally new way of life./ Business-like, worldly, intellectual, sentimental,/ Which the machine age has endowed our souls with./ Voyages are now as beautiful as they ever were./ And a ship will always be beautiful, simply because it's a ship./ A sea voyage is still a sea voyage and distance exists where it always did -/ Nowhere, thank God!"

So, let's see where it ends - "Bon voyage, that's what life is!." - Should I read the very last passage? Yeah. Twenty lines. (To) see where he ends up - "Slow ship pass by, pass away and don't stop./ Leave me, pass way out of sight,/ Take yourself out of my heart,/ Vanish in the Distance, the farthest Distance, the Mist of God./ Disappear, follow your destiny, leave me behind./ Who am I to weep and ask questions?/ Who am I to speak to you and love you? /Who am I to be upset by the sight of you?/ It leaves the dock, the sun rises,/turns golden,/ The roofs of buildings along the dock begin to glow." - Now there's a poet with an eye! - "This whole side of the  city is sparkling" - That's really good - that's Whitmanic, actually. Accurate,Eliot-ic - "The roof of buildings along the dock begin to glow/This whole side of the city is sparkling./ Goodbye now, leave me - First be/ The ship in mid-river, standing/ there bright and clear./Then the ship passing the sandbar, small and black,/ Then a vague speck on the/horizon. (oh, my dread!)/ A speck growing vaguer and/vaguer on the horizon./ Then nothing at all - only me and my sorrow./ And now a great city full of sunlight,/And this moment real and bare as a deserted dock,/ And the slow-moving crane that turns like a compass,/ Tracing a semi-circular course of God knows what emotion, in the compassionate stillness of my heart."

That's a great effort. "Martitime Ode". Certainly, it must be one of the great long interesting poems of the century.

His weirdness was (that) he wrote under a number of different names - he keeps claiming that he's schizophrenic, and so he expanded out and wrote many books of poetry under different names. Pessoa

Student: Was he.. the personalities.. each name had a different..

AG:  Yeah, slightly different, slightly different...

Sudent: Is he alive?

AG: No, he died in 1925..(19)35.. The others were under (the) name "Alvaro de Campos", or, let's see, "Ricardo Reis" - R-E-I-S - (Ricardo Reis) was the guy who wrote "The Maritime Ode" and "The Tobacco Shop" and "Poem in a Straight Line", and the Walt Whitman ode, and, under the name "Fernando Pessoa", among uncollected poems, before he died, little, very elegant, rhymed verses. (For example),"Cat, you tumble down the street/ As if it were your bed/I think such luck is a treat,/ Like feeding without being fed.' You're just a pawn in the hands Of fate, as stones are, and people!/. You follow your instincts and glands/. What you feel, you feel - it's simple./Because you're like that, you're happy./ You're all the nothing you see./ I look at myself - it's not me./ I know myself - I'm not I." 
Or, a little lyric again - "I'm so full of feeling/ I can easily believe/ I must be sentimental. But when I mull it over,/ I see it's all/in thought,/ I felt nothing whatever." - It's very Buddhist, actually -   "I'm so full of feeling I can easily believe I must be sentimental./ But when I mull it over, I see it's all/in thought. I felt nothing whatever." -  "All of us alive/spend/ One life in living it,/ Another, thinking it./ And the only life we have/ Is split between/ The true one and the false./ But which is true/ And which is false/No one can explain./ And as we go on living,/ The life we spend's the one/ That's doomed to thinking." -  so, just manipulation of interesting conceptions-ideas - "They say I fake or lie in everything I write. No, it's/simply that with me imagination feels. I don't/ use the heart..." - "It's simply that with me imagination feels. I don't/use the heart" - "All I dream or go through, all I fail/or lose out is like a terrorist facing something else/again. And that's a lovely thing. That's why I write/steeped in things not readily at hand, free of/emotions. Serious about what isn't. Feelings? That's /the reader's lot." - "I'm a runaway/ When I was born/ they shut me up/ inside myself/Ah, but I ran away./ If people get sick/ Of living in/ The same old place,/ why not of living/ In the/same old skin?/ My soul is on/ The lookout for me./ But I lie low./ Will it ever find me?/ Never, I hope!" -  "I'm a runaway/ When I was born/ they shut me up/ inside myself./ Ah, but I ran away" -  "Being myself, only/ Means being pinned down/ And noone at all./ I'll live on the run,/ and really live!" - 

Then, the next thing is many sonnets, (written in English! - he wrote a whole bunch of sonnets in English, 1918) - and, a little explanation of his various personalities too, called "The Genesis of My Heteronyms" [from a letter to Adolfo Casais Monteiro, 1935]

So this is quite a book, (and)  with an introduction by Octavio Paz [ see - "El desconocido de si mismo"] also..

I wanted to shift (next) to another salutationer to Walt Whitman, another person who wrote an "Ode to Walt Whitman", (Federico) Garcia Lorca....

I think (that) Pessoa must have been a little queer, actually, I gather from the imagery...

Student: A little what?

AG:  A little gay, a little queer, or something, because there's a little bit of funny...

Student: Masochism

AG: ...masochism, but fake..

Student: Oh, when the sailors grab him..

AG: It's real but it's fake

Student: ..when the sailors grab him...

AG: Yeah, but he's so bored with it, finally. It sounds like...he isn't scared of it at all. He's not oupset or anything.

Student: So.  like the dock poem.. the mugging poem...

AG:  The other.. Yeah,  so, there are  three great (four, maybe, but three that we'll deal with) homoerotic salutes to Walt Whitman in appreciation of his empathies. And this (next one) is "Ode to Walt Whitman" by Garcia Lorca, in a brilliant translation (fortunately) by Stephen Spender (also gay) and J.L.Gili, in a book edited by Don Allen, the famous Don Allen of the Don Allen anthology,The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca(published by) New Directions

Student: (When was that published?)

AG: 1955, originally. I don't think we'll have time to read through that (but...)

to be continued

[Audio for the above can be found here, beginning approximately seventy-three-and-three-quarter minutes in and concluding at approximately eighty-four-and-a-half minutes  in] 

Friday 's Weekly Round-Up - 162

January 24, 2014, 3:30 am

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For all our Spanish-speaking readers, Luis Costa Palacios' piece, in Diaro Cordoba, recalling, twenty years ago, Allen's visit to that city, is well worth a read. He came, as part of a delegation to the XVII Congreso Internacional de Aedean [Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo Norteamericanos], and his appearance, in Palacios' words, "suscitó una enorme expectación" (sparked a huge buzz), "fue sorprendente" (was surprising) - "su producción poética, una de las más poderosas e influyentes de los últimos cincuenta años, es magnífica y variada, como se puso de manifiesto en aquel recital. Había en su tono y actitud algo grandioso, el tono de un bardo, que como Blake, "ve pasado, presente y futuro, y cuyos oídos han escuchado la Divina Palabra". Un visionario, como Blake, pero enraizado en la tradición poética norteamericana.." (his poetry, one of the most powerful and influential of the last fifty years is superb and varied, as was evident at the recital [given at the English Department, at the University of Cordoba]. There was something in his tone and grand attitude, the tone of the bard, who, like Blake, "present, past, and future sees" (and) "whose ears have heard The Holy Word". A visionary, like Blake, but rooted in the American poetic tradition.."]



The International poet -  One of Allen's greatest honors during his lifetime, (his 1986 poem, "Cosmopolitan Greetings" was an address to his fellow laureates), was the award of the Golden Wreath, at the annual poetry festival in Struga (Macedonia). He would be pleased, (we think), with the choice of the 2014 laureate (announced this week, to be feted this coming August), South Korea's prolific and extrardinary. Ko Un



From the introduction (his enthusiastic review) of Ko Un's Zen poems (initially published under the title "Beyond Self", in 1997, by Berkeley's Parallax Press, reprinted in a revised version in 2008, as "What? - 108 Zen Poems") - "Bodhisattva of Korean poetry, exuberant, demotic, abundant, obsessed with poetic creation..Ko Un is a magnificent poet, (a) combination of Buddhist cognoscenti, passionate political libertarian, and naturalist historian. This little book of Seon poems gives a glimpse of the severe humorous discipline beneath the prolific variety of his forms and subjects.." 



The fabled American center for international writing -the University of Iowa's International Writing Program (somewhat inspired by Allen's "challenge" - has anybody read all through "Song of Myself"?) is launching on February 16, its first "MOOC" (Massive On-line Open Course), a six-week course, "Every Atom - Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself", "now open for enrollment", free, and "available to anyone with an internet connection" - "During the six-week course (renowned Whitman scholar, Ed) Folsom and (poet and professor - and IWP director - Christopher) Merrill will break down the 52-section "Song of Myself" in(to) 12 video conversations and pose a question to participants at the end of each session, then critique answers and offer insights within the MOOC's discussion forum..." - "The resources of the Walt Whitman Archive and the Whitman Web, a gallery of translations, recordings, and commentaries (including the first ever translation of "Song of Myself" into Persian) will help participants navigate the poem".         



William S Burroughs photographs on show in London (noted here last week via Tim Jonze's review in The Guardian, have received several other insightful reviews. Here's  Sean O'Hagan in The Observer ("I was pleasantly surprised by this fascinating selection of his photographs..") and Gautam Malkani's knowledgeable discourse in The Financial Times.  ("After you've read this article, grab a pair of scissors..") 


[Untitled Photo-Collage (1953-56) by William Burroughs]

The Creative Observer, the Burroughs art show that opened in Kansas last week (and is up until March 2nd) continues to receive an enthusiastic response Here's one visitor's report on the "crowd reaction" at the opening,

Speaking of William Burroughs, don't miss Booktryst's lively posting on Terry Southern (and William Burroughs - and Rip Torn - and screenwiting- and...


[Terry Southern and William Burroughs - Photo by Jack Wright III]

To conclude on a profound note. Amiri Baraka's wake and memorial took place last week. From the account in the New York Times- "Around 3,000 people filled the grand, gold-leafed hall [the Newark Symphony Hall] for the funeral services, which were officiated by the actor Danny Glover. The night before nearly as many people attended a wake, where the Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke" - Three thousand people!
 - "The service moved the audience to its feet, and to tears.." - not waning - from ten till two - Four hours!
 - Here's Lisa Durden (don't miss all of her intimate and moving first-person account on New Jersey.com) - "One moment that stuck in my mind", she writes, was "when a man walked up to the open casket where Amiri Baraka lay peacefully, held his hand, and very sweetly kissed his face. At that moment I realized just how important he was to us." 


[Amiri Baraka and Allen Ginsberg c. 1994 (from postcard for Lincoln Park Coast Cultural District fundraiser - courtesy Christopher Funkhouser)]

LOKA William Burroughs Interview part one

January 25, 2014, 3:30 am

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[William Burroughs, 1975 - Photograph by Peter Hujar © 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco]


This weekend, in anticipation of the William Burroughs Centennial next month, we present (in two parts) this - the 1975 Loka Interview with Rick Fields (with fleeting contributions from Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman). The interview was taped in Boulder, Colorado, at Naropa Institute, on January 1st, 1975. Note Burroughs' prescient thoughts about world-wide economic collapse, his careful attempts to be presented with accurate, not generalized, questions, his common-sense, practical approach, and much much more.



For the first approximately one minute, with the tape rolling, voices can be heard (including Anne Waldman's and Loka editor, Rick Fields). The interview is proposed for (it doesn't appear to have appeared in) Loka's first issue. 

************************************************************************

Interviewer: I mean, the question of control.. In your work, like, control, control of others, keeps being like one of the worst enemies... almost like an inter-galactic virus, I mean, like, do you really feel that, in your life, that you reject any government's existence, legitimate existence?

WSB: Well, that's much too broad a question.

Interviewer: Are there any government's existence that you don't reject?

WSB: Well it depends on what you mean by "a government".  As soon as you get.. best example, a hunting society, which numbers about thirty, requires no governmental apparatus - the man who's the best hunter is the one who leads the hunt. As soon as you get agriculture on any sort of a scale like modern crop agriculture, that has always lead to social conditions where some people do work and others enjoy the leisure at their expense. And, of course, you've got a very heterogeneous mess like America and Western Europe, or any modern state, and you have got intercourses of all, all degrees, of oppression, and it can be very oppressive to less oppressive, (it) depends..

Interviewer: Do you think it's possible for there to be such a thing as a just ruler?

WSB: Meaningless question.

Interviewer: Meaningless question?

WSB: Yes. What do you mean by "just"?

Interviewer: Somebody that leads without his own personal interest being a paradigm, who is just really willing to be a focus for the group's needs..   [a phone call distracts the interviewer, there will be several such distractions, minor ones, in the course of the interview ]

Interviewer: It sounds like you're saying something like...could there be an ego-less kind of leader?  

WSB: No, no - Have you read (Alfred) Korzybski?

Interviewer: No.



WSB: You wouldn't ask those questions if you had.  In the first place, the word "just" has absolutely no meaning. I mean, since it's a ..It depends on "who is doing what unto whom". In other words, the judge might think that his sentence is just, (but) the criminal might not think so at all, In other words, they have very different ideas of justice, and there's no such thing as justice floating in a vacuum. There is no state so homogeneous that you could even speak about common..comon-hood. What is good for one group is not good for another. What is good for one person is not good for another. And, as for the ruler, not taking his own, shall we say, selfish interests into account - those people have always been the most dangerous.

Interviewer: You mean guys like Martin Luther?

WSB: (Girolamo) Savonarola. Frankly, a selfish dictator-ruler, who's trying to get things for himself is a self-limiting evil, but somebody who has some ideal, there's no end to the harm they can do

Interviewer: Did you read about the "Spear of Destiny"?[editorial note - the interviewer is refering to Trevor Ravenscroft's 1973 book, which claims that Adolf Hitler started World War II in order to capture the spear with which he was obsessed. At the end of the war the spear came into the hands of US General George S Patton. According to legend, losing the spear would result in death, and that was fulfilled when Hitler committed suicide]

WSB: Very little. I haven't read the book. James (Grauerholz)  was just readng it and I know what the spear supposedly is..   but I don't know..

Interviewer: Do you think it's possible to inculcate force in an object?

WSB: Undoubtedly.

Anne Waldman; The Sun disc.  The Inca Sun disc.

WSB: Why, yes there are many of these magical potent objects, like (the) Crystal Skullis another.. there are only two of these artifacts in existence

Anne Waldman: What do those do, specifically?

WSB; Well, there's a book written on the Crystal Skull. Apparently, it does all sorts of things. It gives out a particular odour..

Anne Waldman: Wow!

WSB: ..and it affects people, people who are at all up-tight or very much discommoded by the presence of the skull, whereas others find its presence soothing and pleasant - well, that's just an article I read, I don't know as to how accurate..
Yeah, I've seen the Crystal Skull in.. they've got one in the British Museum.Well, it's a beautiful object but you can't tell anything because they've got it in a glass case. So you can't even get anywhere veryinteresting... because the reflections are always the same, that is, it's there in a glass case, and then there are windows there, and of course nobody's allowed to move it from its case, or look at it, or examine it, or touch it, put it in a different set.



Interviewer: Do you think there's such a thing as an ego?

WSB: Er.. There must be.  What do you mean by "an ego"?  Draw me a picture of an ego.

Interviewer: I couldn't do that, but, I mean, everybody seems to fight to destroy it or to protect it.

WSB: Well, your ego. In a very general way, is that part, very small part, of your psyche with which you consciously identify, in opposition or relation to your environment. There probably is an actual location, neural location, for this, this..whatever..

Interviewer: tendency?

WSB: What?

Interviewer: tendency?

WSB: No, it's not a tendency. It has a neural location, undoubtedly probably in the mid-brain.

Anne Waldman: It doesn't exist in dreams

WSB: Well, yes,  it might well exist in dreams. Certainly, it exists in dreams It's the "you", the "I", which, of course, is a very narrow area of the whole psyche's.. some have said. it's like the tip of the iceberg that appears in the water. Now often, of course, (in most of humanity it is) highly defensive, that is, it is simply a reaction against something, against the environment, or against other people, or against the early conditioning, and so forth and so on. And so, it's the source of a great deal of suffering, pain, conflict.

Interviewer: Well, is there a way to get out of that suffering or pain or conflict?

WSB: Well, for who?

Interviewer: For you.

WSB: Well, there's always a way, a way to get out of it, surely, I mean, by, by deconditioning, you can get yourself into a position where your ego is..expands, or rather, the boundaries are broken down. This depends.. I mean, it's.. it's a different problem for everyone. Now, someone who has been brought up, say, in a, say, a slum or ghetto environment, their ego has been really.. as a matter of survival, they've had to develop a very assertive ego, which, of course, is very hard to overcome. That environment, I think, is..  Well, it conveys certain advantages and is also very crippling. That is, someone who is brought up in the streets is very good for immediate... able to assert himself immediately, but he's not able,  generally, to give up assertion when it isn't necessary, since it has been so necessary for his survival, he is not able to abandon that mechanism when it is not necessary. There's no general concept of what intelligence means, but, as a matter of survival, it has something to do with adaptability, and someone who is asserting himself when it is not necessary is not adapting himself. So you get.. coming two ways.. many middle-class people who had a very sheltered upbringing are unable to assert themselves, and people who have had a slum upbringing are unable to stop asserting themselves.

Interviewer: This leads me into.. I was thinking about the political result of what I'll call "the consciousness movement", (everything fromScientology to Buddhism). Well, the thing that seems to characterize the (19)70's, maybe just for middle-class people.. Do you think that has any kind of political result or political meaning?

WSB: Well, of course, any, any sociological movement of importance has..has political significance (like the whole Beatnik movement, which was a sociological movement on an almost unprecedented scale, and was world-wide - and still is world-wide, of course) is going to be reflected in politics.

Interviewer: Is there anything that attracts you to Buddhism?


                             [Tibetan  Kapala]

WSB: Oh, nothing particular, It seems sensible enough. Like I say, if they don't come up with any definite answers after three thousand years, at least what they're saying is relatively sane and sensible.

Interviewer: Definite answers to what questions?

WSB: Any questions. Any basic questions.

Interviewer: Well, for example? "Where are we?"

WSB: Huh?

Interviewer: Where are we?

WSB: Where are who? what? why?

Anne Waldman: Draw me a picture

WSB: Draw me a picture.

Interviewer: Well, where, I mean, there seems to be a feeling, or a possibility, that we're trapped in something. Buddhism talks about samsaraas kind of..that we're trapped in, simply, reactions, that we're trapped in our desires. You talked earlier about suffering and pain and so on, which was one of the definitions of samsara

WSB: Sure.

Interviewer: And the consciousness movement seems to look at that question. Most people who come to it seem to come to it, you know, to begin with, out of a realization that we are suffering, that things are not quite right.

WSB: That's putting it mildly!

Interviewer: So how did we get in this fix? I mean, and is this a particularly human thing? or is this (only) in our corner of the universe, or..?

WSB: Well, one way, of course, is  through language..  most conflicts are verbal, (inner conflics and outer conflicts as well). A lot of it can be traced to the fact that we use a symbols-system which is not what it refers to (that Korzybski covers very clearly)


[Alfred Korzybski (1879-1950)

Interviewer: We are not our labels.

WSB: Yes, but, you see, animals don't have that problem. Naturally, they're subject to all sorts of suffering, pain, death, disease, and so on, but they don't know it, they don't worry about it, because they don't have a symbol-system in order to do that. Now, you can condition any animal to be as neurotic as a human being - or to be psychotic. But this would not happen without such conditions - that you put your.. well, (Ivan) Pavlov has done this.. - the signals are switched too quick for the nervous system to adjust, and  the result is the animal cowers in the corner in a state of, what we would call, schizophrenia.
And, also, all animals react to non-existent situations in dreams, that is they..they.. cats, who are running from dogs, and so on, in dreams, but they wouldn't ordinarily do that in the waking state.

Interviewer: Which is what we do.

WSB: Yeah, people are continually incapacitated by reaction to present, to past, and to future dangers, to things that are not there, like the battle-fatigue case who is still reacting to a battle-situation that was ten or twenty years ago.

Interviewer: Well  is it a matter, then, of living completely in the present?

WSB: No, I wasn't talking about a remedy. I was talking about what actually happens. And the reason that people are reacting to past and future dangers at all times (not all people, but, in varying degrees), is the linguistic system,  the symbol-system, whereby they verbalize, or symbolize, past dangers and future dangers.

Interviewer: Have there been any human beings who have used this symbol-system which didn't lead them into this mistake?

WSB: Well, I think a pictorial, or character, language seems to lead much less to this mistake, this impass or conflict, than a syllabic language,because it is closer to what it refers to.

Interviewer: You are talking about a heiroglyphic language then?

WSB: Or a character language

Interviewer: Such as Chinese?

WSB: Chinese, yes - which languages often do not contain the "is" of identity or the definite article, all these built-in mistakes that we have in Western languages.

Interviewer: But are those languages spoken? Is the spoken language free of that kind of sense?

WSB: If the.. yes.. since it's transcribed from the character language, it is, apparently. In other words, the reason the Chinese are, by and large, so sensible, and relatively serene, is undoubtedly because of their language..  You will notice that the Chinese preserve their language

Interviewer: Observe their language?

WSB: Preserve their language. You won't find Chinese anywhere who won't speak Chinese, whereas second-generation Italians, like Gregory Corso, don't speak a word of Italian.

Interviewer: That's right.....  Do you think it would make sense to reform English?  that we should speak Chinese, for example? Is there any hope for the English-speaking people, or the whatever it is, Romance-language-speaking people?




WSB: Korzybskisuggested a reform of the English languagewhich seems sort of a patchwork, eliminating the verb "to be" entirely, and the definite article, and the either/or proposition

Interviewer: But in your own writing you haven't adopted this

WSB: No, it sounds like pidgeon-English. Although, it makes perfect sense, you don't have to say "I am hearing", you can say "I hear", which is usual in a pictoral language (you  don't say "The sun is in the sky", you say, "The sun in the sky") but you do have English and it sounds like pidgeon English. You can say.. You know what you're doing, you know what you're using, the "is" of identity, but just for the sake of being grammatical and readable, you really have to do it.

Interviewer: Is it possible that the use of that "is" reflects a fundamental anxiety about our own existence?

WSB: Oh.. that's.. I would say that the contrary is true. The anxiety about our own existence results from the "is". You have to be prepared to prove at all times that you are somebody that you're not (because you're not your drivers licence, you're not your name, you're not your label, but you have to have a pocketful of documents to establish the fact, to establish something that isn't true).

Interviewer: Well, if we're not all those things. Who are we?

WSB: Well, that's not the point, at all. You see, people don't exist in a vacuum. The question would be, who would you be, if you, say, had been brought up in a, in an Arab village, where you didn't have any documents?

Interviewer: Abdul Mohammed.

WSB: Uh?

Interviewer: Abdul Mohammed.

WSB: Well, obviously it would be quite different. But, still, you're not in a vacuum there, either. You have a whole individuality you composed of your interactions with all the other people around you.



Interviewer: Have you ever tried consciously to change your identity and to shed your given identity?

WSB: Well, good heavens, all the time. That's what writers do.

Interviewer: But, like, I mean, when you stopped writing. Like, have you been in places where you were not "William Burroughs"?

WSB: Well, of course. That's what writing is all about is being able to..

Interviewer: How is that?  How is that? Are you talking about while you're writing a piece of prose that you'll enter another character, or ..

WSB: Of course. If you don't, I mean..  If you don't enter the other character, the reader is not going to.  So, all.. any writer has any number of identities.

Interviewer: Any number of ?

WSB: Any number of identities,  as many identities as he is creating and entering into.

Interviewer: Do you recall if there were certain identities in your writing that you had difficulty removing yourself from?

WSB: To some extent, yes. I think any writer has, has, shall we say, his narrator's identities to some extent. Now that may be, say, Graham Greene's bad Catholic - well, that runs right through all of his books. I think it would be very hard for him to completely shed that identity.


[Graham Greene (1904-1991)]


Interviewer: What would you say is the identity running through your books in terms of the narrative, basic narrative.?

WSB: Well, there's a certain identity, like the narrator, (William) Lee, that would be one of that.

Interviewer: I've been surprised that, you know, being around you a little bit the last few days.. is, that, a certain aspect of your character that always seems emphasized in interviews with you, and is also one of the characteristics people think of you when they think of you as a writer is of a very cynical person, and that the aspect of you as a more.. as a genteel person is not a public aspect really..

WSB: I object to the word "cynical" . I just don't know what it means. [phone rings, it is James Grauerholz, calling from New York City. Conversation is heard in the background] -   Do you know what it means?

Interviewer: Yeah, I'm trying to think, like (of)  a person who finds almost all situations..funny.

WSB:  I don't think you'd find that would be the dictionary definition. I think the dictionary definition of "cynical" is someone who attributes,  shall we say, interested motives, in any situation.

Interviewer: You don't find that?.. you don't feel that in yourself?, that you see interested motives?

WSB: It depends on the situation.  No, it's every individual case. Naturally, sometimes you're going to suspect interested motives, and other times, not.

Interviewer: You mean there are times when you do not?

WSB: Well, naturally!  

Interviewer:  In your books? I mean, I'm trying to think of a character, in your books, any character that, except.. I mean, even the sense of Nova police just doing their job and going, one never quite believes that, at least I never have, that thy would just do their job and go because I've never seen a police force where that was the case.

WSB: Well, you're thinking in terms of police here.

Interviewer: Were there police on other planets, or police in other vectors?

WSB: Well, in the first place, it depends on what you mean by "police". It is quite possible to conceive of police of a purely restraining instance, only exercised when necessary. And, indeed, of course, there are many situations in parts of the world even today where ..there's no necessity for police.. police is a purely informal instance exercised by anyone, because there's no police in the hunting society, there's no police in little old Indian towns in South American, there's no necessity for them

Interviewer: There are police in the towns in Mexico that are just in transition, very much so.

WSB: Yep. Of course as soon as they get there, then they will start making themselves necessary. If there isn't any crime there, there will be very soon after a policeman takes up residence in a town.

Interviewer: The whole world seems to be moving very quickly towards an industrialized situation, and, sometimes when we speak, it seems we have a great longing for a pre-Industrial situation, or at least for a.. pre-Industrial models - post-Industrial - ok - but, certainly, we seem dissatisfied with the fix we've gotten into.

WSB: All of which dates.. but I won't say it all dates, but, most of the problems we have now, of course, date from the Industrial Revolution, it's all from the Industrial Revolution, and the fact that no control was exercised over the process of Industrialization, so that we now have all these insoluable problems dumped in our laps.

Anything posed as a problem immediately becomes insoluable. As soon as you try to solve it, you get more problems, usually worst things.  Like, okay, you have a problem with alcohol, what did they come out with? Prohibition! - and where did that lead? Same thing, of course, is happening with the drug problem. It happens with any problem.

Interviewer: The problem of the ego?

WSB: Well that's not, that's not a social problem. I'm talking about social problems, like crime, unemployment, drugs.. (etcetera)

Interviewer: But don't those things ultimately trace back to our fear of accepting what is, or trace back to the struggle for survival, or trace back to territoriality or aggressiveness or..

WSB: No, the problems I'm talking about trace back to the Industrial Revolution, to the process whereby making money became the primary object, and, in order to do this, we wanted as many consumers and producers as possible (which, of course, lead to over-population, it lead to exhaustion of resources, and all the..inflation and, eventually, to all the absolutely insoluble problems that we have now).



Interviewer: You say "insoluble". When you're faced with an insoluble problem, what is the intelligent thing to do?

WSB: Any problem is insoluble. Once it's posed as a problem. Once it's become a problem,  it's already insoluble. You don't do anything.

Interviewer: Ok, then we say "There is no problem". If there's no problem, how do we live in the midst of a society that's very problematic?.

WSB: No..no, no, no  What I'm saying is, that, as soon as something becomes a problem, it is, by its nature, then, insoluble, and, actually, there's nothing you can do about it.

Interviewer: Well, the history of my generation, as far as I can tell, has been, seeing, or feeling, a problem (I mean, the problem of Vietnam, or the problem of the suffering of the world, or however we see it, and, once you do that...  Is there anything..

WSB: The whole problem of biologic...of new discoveries in biology and biochemistry, which will become acute in another twenty or thirty years [editorial note - this is 1975, so Burroughs is projecting to 2005]  (there is) something that possibly could be done about it now

Interviewer: The Mutation Industry?

WSB: Yeah. The whole matter, the whole matterof the fact that it is going to be possible to manufacture people to order in the future. But our tricky social system simply cannot adapt to that because that is not going to be solved in political terms.

Interviewer: You have some suggestions?

WSB: Well, presumably, the scientists would have to get together and decide... but who is exactly competent to decide?  - that we don't even have, shall we say, the social mechanisms for dealing with the problem.  And if you don't solve the problem, or avoid the problem, naturally, the problem will solve itself one way or another.

Interviewer: Do you think this is a new human fuck-up, to invent technologies to destroy..that destroy oneself, destroy the society?

WSB: It's not a new problem at all or a new human fuck-up at all, they simply become more efficient. We've had war for a long time. Well, anyone in the war tries to develop more efficient weapons. So long as they.. so long as their weapons had very limited killing power, it wasn't very, very, much of a problem. But it's inevitable that, with increased technology, they're going to develop more and more efficient weapons, until they develop weapons which threaten the whole human species, certainly, it's just simply an extension of the stone axe

Interviewer: Is there a question of technology then?

WSB:  Yes.

to be continued..

The audio for this interview is available here (via the Internet Archives) and here (via the Naropa Archives), as well as being made available here on this web-site)

LOKA William Burroughs Interview part two

January 26, 2014, 3:30 am

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[William Burroughs, 1975 - Photograph by Peter Hujar "© 1987 The Peter Hujar Archive LLC; Courtesy Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York and Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco"]

The 1975  Loka interview with William Burroughs continues. For the first part of the transcript, see here

Interviewer: Well, you've spoken about technology being used in, shall we say, benign ways.

WSB: Technology is neither good nor bad. People ask whether technology is good or bad. Good and bad don't float in vacuums. They only have meaning with relation to the actual people at actual times(because, if you say) "who did what, when, and where?", never "what is good for society?", and so on 

[At this point, Allen arrives, drops in and delivers some "souvenir posters" and "an article on Nikola Tesla and his career in relation to J.P.Morgan, who stopped his work" - Interviewer to Allen (momentarily thwarted by "criss-cross communications") - "We're doing an interview, so you're welcome to...stick around and join in]

Interviewer: Well, this leads me (to)... if technology is not responsible, who is responsible?

WSB: Now, wait a minute, technology is not responsible for anything.

Interviewer: But it seems (to me), that if you have an atom-bomb, somebody's going to use it. I mean, this seems to be our experience so far.

WSB: No. Technology is not responsible for anything, because technology has no responsibility. Okay, now you get someone with.. they're fighting with clubs, stone axes, bows and arrows, but yes, since they're fighting and it is.. all games are hostile, and basically there is only one game, and that game is war. Now it is a rule of the game that you must always try to win, and therefore you are going to try to develop more and more efficient weapons, right?

Interviewer: Right.

WSB: So finally you develop weapons so efficient that the whole game is in danger, that is, a weapon that can kill all players.

Interviewer: Do you think suicide is an inherent wish for human beings?

WSB: No

Interviewer: So what do you think makes it happen? I mean, why develop suicide weapons?

WSB: They don't think of it in those terms. No war happens unless somebody thinks they can win.

Interviewer: This seems clear that no one thinks they can win a nuclear war.

WSB: Yeah, well they probably won't have one.

AG: This week's headlines [Editorial note - The interview is taking place January 1 1975] have the United States preparing for "limited" nuclear wars.

WSB:  "Limited" nuclear wars.

Interviewer: What is a "limited" nuclear war?    Little nukes?

Allen Ginsberg: The tactic, which was considered impractical for a decade but is now being revived as a tactic, since everybody's been stumped by the total war, they're all figuring now, well, maybe they will actually need to have a limited nuclear war to get their ends - It's in yesterday's papers.  [Editorial note - Allen is presumably referring here to the so-called "Schlesinger Doctrine" that emerged later that year] - the assessment of the "limited effects of a nuclear war)

WSB: Yes.  No telling what will happen with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Anyone can make one now. It's got to the point to where I think, oh, a hundred thousand dollars, you could make some sort of a nuclear device.

Interviewer: Well who is responsible for this. I mean, I'm not responsible. I didn't drop any bomb. You said the other night, you're not responsible

WSB: Who is responsible for what exactly? Who is responsible for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima. Well, if you had to decide to one person it would undoubtedly be Robert Oppenheimer


[J Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), "the father of the atomic bomb"] 

Interviewer: Not Harry Truman?

WSB: Harry Truman didn't... I mean.. The difference between Harry Truman and (Robert) Openheimer is the difference between a higher intelligence from outer space and a Southern sharecropper. They're not of the same species. One is a tremendous intellect, the other was - they both were - was an extremely limited, common-place person. He just happened to be in a position of power and that was almost.. that was an accident.. he was Vice-President - but he had no...

Interviewer: Do you think people are ever driven towards..to want things like peace and home and families, those kind of steady dreams or desires for themselves?

WSB: What people?

Interviewer: Any people.  Have you ever met people like that?

WSB: Man, the world's full of them!

Interviewer: How come it doesn't work out?

WSB: Well, what do you mean? They don't run things.

Interviewer: (So) you think the desire to run things is the opposite of that need, of that want?

WSB: Not always, no, but certainly the world is full of people who are quite content with their refrigerator and their two cars and their television, their color television set. But they are not the people that run the country and all these, of course, economic forces and other forces which lead to wars are quite out of their control. They don't even know anything about it. 

Interviewer: What are the forces, besides economic forces, that lead to wars?

WSB: Fools, fucked-up ideologies, but I think, certainly, economic factors are very important. See, the only thing that pulled us out of the first Depression, was World War II. There's been a war going on somewhere ever since then. And the reason the French were  so reluctant to turn loose of the Algerian war was partly economic (they were afraid for the collapse of their economy)

Interviewer: ..which didn't particularly happen. It seems like that could be more of a model to the United States..

WSB: I would hardly take France as a model.


Interviewer: The United States didn't exactly collapse after Vietnam.

WSB: No, it didn't actually collapse but their economic situation is about as shaky as any Western country, I would say, and that is extremely shaky.

Interviewer: Is the current Depression/Recession whatever directly linked to the ending of the Vietnam War?

WSB: No. Because it's world-wide. It's as much in England (and more in England than it is here). See, everything we've been taught about economics proved to be basically folly. The law of supply and demand and all that kind of thing, or the idea that it a good product will sell. In England you have demand but no supply. Okay, they say, well, we've got rationing now, everybody wants a bicycle, there aren't any bicycles, bicycles can't be produced, to be produced to fill orders takes six months. The reason, one reason for that is, they say we can't get skilled workers. They can't get skilled workers because they can't pay them a living wage. So it's on (an) absolutely vicious down-spiral.

Interviewer: This whole vicious circle thing really interests me. When (Gregory) Bateson was here last year, he was talking about that a lot. Like, the armaments race being a vicious circle, and I think samsara could be described as a vicious circle. I still have a feeling that we're looking for some way out of that circle.

WSB: Well, naturally, but, there comes a point when, apparently, there isn't, there isn't a way out. I don't know what in the fuck England can do. Now there's a place that's got a really fucked-up economy. They can't..they've got, at once, see,  mass unemployment, inflation, and a scarcity of consumer goods. Now this was supposed to be impossible in old economic terms.But a very simple definition of money, that I think explains a great deal is - Money is something that you have and some-one else needs and doesn't have. Now if you think of money in those terms, you'll see that any sharing of wealth is nonsense, because money depends on somebody not having it.It depends on not having. If there were no poor people, there would be no rich people. You see the old laissez-faire economics might have led to something like that. That was why it wouldn't work. You've got to keep the not-having-ness of money going.


















Interviewer: Could we jump a level and imagine a society without any money?

WSB: You could imagine a small society without any money. Can't imagine New York City without any money.

Interviewer: Except that looks like what's happening!  - 


[Headlines on the front-page of the New York Daily News, October 30,1975]




Interviewer: Could you imagine a society, small or large, without tokens, without tokens of product?

WSB: Sure. It depends on how large or how small. If it's small enough. They didn't have any money on Pitcairn Island, for example. They didn't need it.



Allen Ginsberg:  The problem is not, in New York, or even England, scarcity of money, it's just more physical money because of the inflation (but) in circulation. It's the scarcity of raw materials and energy supply. The energy supply has been used up - and in England, definitely, cheap labor, raw materials, and energy from the Empire, are no longer available, and so they have to live on their own means within the island.

WSB: And they can't do it.

Allen Ginsberg: H.T.Odum's idea about inflation or the increasing scarcity of goods and higher cost is that it costs more money to get the primary energy that runs the society in America, it costs more money to get at the oil from the north slope of Alaska or the North Sea, so that.. you have to work harder to get it. So that's.. so that basic energy's more expensive, or harder to get, and therefore the whole bulk goods are more expensive, because they are based on this..originally on a cheap, available supply of fossil fules, which, now running out, makes the energy supply more costly, and therefore all things more costly.

Interviewer: Basically, you're using more energy to get less all the time

Allen Ginsberg:  Right, and they were using more energy to get (less) energy, what is the net-energy measurement.



[H.T.Odum (1924-2002), pioneering ecologist]

Interviewer: Can you posit any kind of social system that you can see as workable, you know, in the remnants, in the ashes of America?

WSB: It depends on the number of people.

Interviewer: That's really the key issue, the key issue to..

WSB: On the number of people, or, at least, on their ability to function together. Now, of course, the Chinese are much more homogeneous than we are, so therefore they can get more people into less area with less friction.



Could you make a statement, say what you think the next fifteen to twenty years [1975-1995] (will be like), like a scenario for the US of A?

WSB: Not really. We have the escalating rate of change, which seems to be a rule that the changes in the next fifteen years are going to be much much greater than the last fifteen years (and they've been tremendous in the last fifteen years) and so on. We could certainly have.. I guess the bankers are all working on this but how efficiently I don't know, a complete break-down of the world monetary system in the West. In fact, all bankers say this is inevitable. The time is going to come when no amount of money will buy anything. And this could not occur as an isolated phenomena, like after World War I in Germany, you had a terrific inflation, but that wasn't.. that didn't occur in other countries. If it'll happen one place now it'll happen every place. So that's why they go around desperately propping up currencies. No major currency can be allowed to collapse at this point. When the lira was threatened with collapse, they rush(ed) in and support the lira, because a collapse anywhere would bring the whole thing right down the drain.






Interviewer: Is need the desire? I mean, it seems we are taught that desire is kind of an absolute. I mean, people just assumed what they desire is what they want, what they want is what they should try to get, and so on. Is that at the basis of this kind of.. 

WSB: Well, no, what people think they need of course is socially determined. People are taught that they need a car and in fact found their social system on a car, and then they, by god, do need a car!  But needs are not inherent. They're always socially conditioned. Okay, you give someone junk for a month, he needs junk. He didn't need that before. Or you give someone money, with which he buys all the things he needs, then he needs money.



Interviewer: Well we might think that those things are socially-determined, what about the need for love and even for sex, the need for existence, in fact?

WSB: Well, those of course are just basic, basic needs of any animal organism

Interviewer: But you don't see the root of this sort of proliferating baroque kind of need in those things?

WSB: Well, naturally, you couldn't have it without an animal.. you don't have an animal organism, you don't need one, right?, you don't need food. But if you do, then you have those needs. Now those needs of course have, say in a small hunting or agricultural society, those needs can be quite satisfactorily solved in small communities.

Interviewer: Yeah, we seem to have passed way beyond the place where we can even imagine what a small community, self-sufficient to itself, might be.

WSB: No, we can imagine that very well and in fact you can go and see them (tho' you better hurry, because they won't be there long, but there are.. they do exist. I think it's very easy to imagine what life is like in (small communities)  but, yes, we've certainly gone beyond the possibility of that, and that's partly a result of overpopulation in these tremendous cities We're absolutely dependent on food brought in from outside, on power, garbage collection and so on

Interviewer: We talked earlier about leaving the body (and) now as you're speaking, as possibly a way to get around the fact that we're animals.

WSB: Well, to say we are animals is, once again, the use of a vanity, whatever you may, you are not an animal, you're  not a word, animal. And I would say that also you are not your body, you occupy your body, anymore than a pilot is a plane.

Interviewer: Who is it that occupies this body?

WSB: Well, who is it that pilots the plane, it's the pilot.

Interviewer: Do you think it's possible to leave the body?

WSB: Well, of course, it's been done. 

Interviewer: Who's done it?

WSB: Haven't you read (Robert) Monroe'sbook,Journeys Out Of The Body. But that's.. it's a very old phenomena. I mean, it's..I mean, there are many, many instances of it.



Interviewer: Do you think there are technological possibilities of people developing this, shall we call it, skill?

WSB: Well, sure

Interviewer: Such as?

WSB: Oh, Monroe describes, in great detail, exercises, and, actually, he's running sort of a seminar down there in [Virginia] doing this there

Interviewer: Once you're out of your body, though, where do you go?

WSB: Various places. He may.. Sometimes he's just gone to another city, and so on. And many of these have been confirmed, that is, people have gone there and seen things..and described situations that were accurate  

But you don't think that's kind of a fantasy of escapism from what the actual situation is?

WSB: No, because he's actually out of it . And, of course, I think that out-of-the-body experienceis not rare, it happens all the time. It happens every time you put yourself in some other place. It just depends upon how accurately you do it and that of course is one of the basic exercises - put yourself in a certain place, where you were yesterday, and you are doing astral travel, it depends on how, how vividly you do it (if you do it with complete identification then you are there).




Interviewer: What's the point? What's the point of doing it?

WSB: Well, it gives you more freedom of motion, for one thing - and it's interesting. I mean, Monroe describes very many interesting trips that he's made. I mean, what's the point of going to Africa? what's the point of going to India? what's the point of travel?

Interviewer: Do you think.. does the term "total liberation" mean anything to you at all? You don't think there's a state in which we're somehow freed from everything that seems to be binding us, enslaving us, confusing us..?

WSB: No, it's bound to be relative, so long as you are occupying a body, a physical body, with physical limitations. I mean, an absolute freedom from all conditions is almost a meaningless proposition, so long as you have conditions.

Interviewer: Well, it's the other side of conditioning, perhaps?

WSB: No. I say, as long as you have conditions. Now if you didn't have any conditions whatever, well, you'd certainly have nothing to worry about! - but it is a state that is very difficult to conceive, so you have conditions.  Plus the Buddhists talk a lot about that.

Interviewer: About not having conditions?

WSB: Yes, about freedom from conditions.

Interviewer: And you think that's just their nirvana dream, or..

WSB: No. You're still talking in either/or terms. I mean, it's something that people can certainly approach and have approached.

Anne Waldman: It's just not labelled Buddhist

WSB: No, as (Chogyam) Trungpa has pointed out, a carpenter who's really right all there in his job is achieving a sort of nirvana. In a sense, because the way out of the body is in. You go all the way in and out the other side. It's like somebody climbing a cliff. He's got to be right there every second and by being there he is also approaching the state of not being there, by being there completely. And, in fact, many out-of-the-body experiences have been reported by cliff-climbers. They fall and find their bodies floating beside them and they're not at all harmed, etcetera - r someone driving, a pilot, at high speed, a fighter-pilot, he's right all the way there.

Interviewer: But what happens when they hit?

WSB: Well, here's somebody out of his body, right?

Interviewer: Right

WSB: If he hit, he wouldn't come back

Interviewer: Nothing to come back to.


[Associate Warden's Record Card for Wilhelm Reich, Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, March 1957]

Interviewer: I know you're interested in (Wilhelm) Reich. It just seems to me that Reich's whole point was that human beings can't stand their bodies somehow and that most of the religions and so on are sort of neurotic attempts to, you know, somehow try to get, imagine ourselves out of this thing, like the pain is too great, so.. let's fantasize a way out of it.

WSB: Well, there is no "the way".There are any number of ways. I say people might get out by climbing cliffs, driving racing cars, gliding, all sorts of things. I don't say there's any "the way" at all.In fact, if you postulate..  I think that is another of the great errors of Western thought, the idea that there's one "the" way, (which, of course, has been propounded by all one-god religions).

Interviewer: Well in the The Job you seem to talk about, maybe not "the" way, but you propose kind of a strategy of dealing with the mess we're in, which seemed to involve a kind of political or social ways.

WSB: Yeah. Most of those ways, I say, it's too late. I mean, these things would have been possible a hundred years ago, if they had controlled the Industrial process and performed more cooperatively and communally, (with) more diversity instead of more uniformity, but I don't see this as very practical in the present time.

Interviewer: Who's been your teachers?

WSB:  Teachers? I 've never had any teachers, as such. Well, naturally, I've learned a lot from (Alfred) Korzybyski, I've learned a lot from...(Joseph) Conrad, a lot about writing from reading Conrad, a lot from reading (Samuel) Beckett, a lot from reading (James) Joyce.


[Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)]

Interviewer: You never had any interest in looking for.. I mean..it was never a conscious thing for you to look for anybody to show you..

WSB: Well, to show me what?

Interviewer: Well,  to show you anything about how to live.

WSB: No. Because I don't think there is the way. I can see someone as being.. okay, (if) you wanna learn to fly, you go to someone who knows how to fly, right? If you want to get into meditation, you go to someone who knows something about meditation, you want to learn karate, you go to a karate master. In that sense, yes, but, as I said, I don't believe there is a, sort of one, way that you can learn from somebody, because his  way may not apply to you at all

Interviewer: Do you see gurus as being authoritarian figures in a sense?

WSB: It depends on the guru and the attitude towards him/

Interviewer: What would be the proper attitude?

WSB: Once again, there's no such thing as a proper attitude. A sincere guru like (Chogyam) Trungpa, I feel, may have that forced on him, which he isn't seeking at all, that people assume that he has the answers, which he continually tends to deny

Interviewer: What do you think people are attracted to..(about Trungpa)

Anne Waldman: It makes a lot of sense.

WSB: It makes a lot of sense

Anne Waldman: Sanity  concern(ed) with sanity

WSB:  Sanity.. Reading his books he's got a lot of very sensible things to say

Anne Waldman: Intelligence.. I think there's a problem just separating the god from his teachings. You know, Buddhism goes back, what, three thousand  years?, and there's a lot of good sense there. And you do, if you accept a teacher, you presumably become devoted but I mean, Just because he drinks and smokes and fucks around doesn't mean.. People get a little schiz around something they think is religious, you know.


[Chogyam Trungpa (1939-1987)]

Interviewer: What did you mean by the statement - "Don't put your dirty karma on me"

WSB: Well just that. There's no reason for anyone to accept anyone else's bad karma (just) because we have enough of our own. That's one of the oldest tricks in the industry, you try to unload your bad karma on somebody else.

[The complete audio for this interview is available (via the Internet Archives) and here (via the Naropa Archives), as well as being made available here on this web-site - this second segment begins at approximately thirty-five-and-three-quarter minutes in)]

Expansive Poetics - 20 (Lorca -1)

January 27, 2014, 4:00 am

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[Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936)]



[Lorca's Passport]

AG: How many know this poem? - Lorca's "Ode to Walt Whitman"?  One, two, three, four, five, six. seven. Anybody else over there? How many do not? Oh great, great. 
I think this is my idea of the greatest poem of the century, or this is my idea of what.. between this and (Guillaume) Apollinaire's "Zone" ("Zone", because it was original, it was the first one that invented Surrealist mind, breaking-apart, this, because it took elemental Spanish lyric passionate intensity and mixed it up with Surrealist cut-up, so to speak - the Surrealist idea of putting together opposite things, like "sphincters of dynamos","hydrogen jukebox"). At a certain point in Lorca'a life, when he ran into Surrealism (and Salvador Dali, who was a friend of his when he was in New York City, strangely enough), in, I think, the early (19)30's, visiting New York, he wrote a book called The Poet In New York, (Poeta en Nueva York), which has some of the most amazing poetry of the century. I say this particular poem is the greatest (this, or the lament for a bull-fighter ["Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sanchez Mejias"] (Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias)], which is side-by-side with it, and equally long, say, about five pages each) because the mind-jumps between the words are the biggest (that) any poet ever took, that I can think of - at least, in this century - and the melody is the most beautiful. The melodiousness of the language, the passion, the heartache, passion, and drive, of it, is the most terrific. The political and anthropological scope, the view of civilization of this  (the view of civilization from the bottom, the view of the ruin and collapse and falsity of the machine civilization) is among the most penetrating of any poet of the century, the most directly spoken and most brilliantly said, with images that an anthropologist could relate to great mythic American Indian symbols, or Aztec symbols, or Spanish, or Babylonian symbolism.



[Federico Garcia Lorca - Self Portrait in New York (1929-30)]

So it's "Ode to Walt Whitman" [ "Oda a Walt Whitman"]. The Spanish is very beautiful, so I'll begin with ten, fifteen lines of Spanish and then I'll go on to the English, because the Spanish is so nice - and odd. See, it opens in English, "Along the East River and the Bronx".
So here's this Spaniard, in the twentieth-century, saying - "Por el East River y el Bronx/ los muchachos cantaban ensenando sus cinturas" - "Por el East River y el Bronx/ los muchachos cantaban ensenando sus cinturas,/con la rueda. el acteite, el cuero, y el martillo./Noventa mil mineros sacaban la plata de las rocas/ y los ninos dibujaban escaleras y perspectivas./Pero ninguno se dormia,/ninguno queria ser el rio, ninguno amaba las hojas grandes,/ ninguno la lengua azul de la playa/ Por el East River y el Queensborough/ los muchachos luchaban con la industria/y los judios vendian al fauno del rio/la rosa di la circumcision/y el cielo desembocaba por los puentes y los tejados/manadas de bisontes empujadas por el viento./ Pero ninguno se detenia,/ ninguno queria ser nube,/ninguno buscaba los helechos/ ni la rueda amarilla del tamboril.."

- You get some of the elegance of the mouthing in Spanish - [Allen then reads the opening stanzas in English] - "Ode to Walt Whitman" - "Along the East River and the Bronx/ the boys were singing, showing their waists,/with the wheel, the oil, the leather and the hammer./Ninety thousand miners extracted silver from rocks/and children drew stairs and perspectives./  But none would sleep/none wanted to be a river/no one loved the great leaves,/none the blue tongue of the beach/ Along the East River and the Queensborough/the boys were fighting against Industry/and the Jews were selling to the faun of the river/the rose of the Circumcision,/and the sky rushed through bridges and roofs/herds of bison pushed by the winds" - Well, the clouds - "herds of bison pushed by the winds" - It's very uncanny and clear - "the sky rushed through bridges and roofs/herds of bison" - very American. This is a Spaniard in America, so, immediately, bisons. It's a very European mentality that's very charmingly displayed (or a European vision of America, which, incidentally, is one of the great Chaplin-esquefantasies of the century, (Franz) Kafka's Amerika, or the cowboy America seen from Germany, or the "muchachos" fighting against Industry, with the wind pushing clouds over the roof like bison through bridges - 

[Allen then continues with the poem, reading the rest of the poem] - "..New York of slime,/ New York of wires and death:/What angel do you carry hidden in your cheek?/What perfect voice will tell you the truths of the wheat?/ Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?/ Not for one moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman/have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,/nor your shoulders of corduroy worn out by the moon,/nor your thighs of virginal Apollo,/nor your voice like a pillar of ashes..."... "And you, beautiful Walt Whitman sleep on the Hudson's banks,/with your beard towards the Pole and your hands open./ Bland clay or snow, your tongue is calling for/comrades that keep watch on your gazelle without a body./Sleep; nothing remains./A dance of walls agitates the meadows/and America drowns itself in machines and lament./ I want the strong air of the most profound night/to remove flowers and words from the arch where you sleep,/and a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites/the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn."
 - Well, I think that's a really totally tearful, sort of.. But the prophecy at the end is great -  "A dance of walls agitates the meadows" - which is the skyscrapers and the cities - Agitating - actually, the Surrealist element becomes totally literal in a strange way, because it is a "dance of walls agitating meadows" if you go out on the (New) Jersey meadows - there's a dance of walls, of concrete walls. When I first read this poem, I couldn't understand.. I didn't quite get what he was talking about. But it's simply a huge attack on the Moloch of civilization - A dance of walls agitates the meadows/and America drowns itself in machines and lament". Then, the prophecy he wants is " a black boy to announce to the gold-minded whites/the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn." - of nature, or husbandry - small-scale technology - "Small is Beautiful" [Allen evokes E.F.Schumacher's popular book of the time here] - organic gardening - the Indian corn - "the arrival of the reign", or the return, of the Indian, the return of nature - "..the arrival of the reign of the ear of corn." - He's seeing Whitman's love as larger, natural, purer, open, whereas the homosexual lust of the cities, bars ("pansies"), city-frustration as some kind of poison, as unnatural.

Actually, I never did quite figure out what he was aiming at in his giant put-down of fairies, because Lorca was shot himself, in (19)35, or (19)36, during the Spanish (Civil) War, according to recent biographers because he had fallen in love with some kid who was the brother of one ofthe right-wing Civil Guard people, and so a death squad came to get him in the middle of the night. Yeah?

Student: Also, in that final image, kind of the juxtaposition of the color of  corn as natural kind of gold..

AG: Yeah.

Student: ...as opposed to the other.

AG: Well, the reason I say I like this (well, this and the other poem we have xeroxed for the anthology, the lament for the bullfighter) is because the jumps - like "bull and "dream" - "You searched for a nude who was like a river./Bull and dream that would join the wheel with the seaweed." -  That's an astounding piece of mind-jump, from one thing to another. "Bull" , and, well, "Bull" is a masculine, he wanted a masculine - "Bull and dream that would join the wheel" - I suppose civilization, or land-civilization ("with the seaweed" - with the ocean) -  "Bull and dream that would join the wheel with the seaweed" - that's like trying to total it all, trying to total everything into one image.
"Father of your agony" - Then, this agony - but in Spanish - "Agonia, agonia, suena, fermentoy sueno,/ Este es el mundo, amigo, agonia, agonia" - "Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream./This is the world, my friend, agony, agony" - That's about as.. It sounds like somebody just totally down, crying, weeping, and totally truthful. It's one of the most real lines I've ever heard in poetry. That is the way somebody who had just lost everything would sound, in a bughouse, or in a tragic moment - "Agony, agony, dream, ferment and dream./This is the world, my friend, agony, agony". It's a great speech.  Yeah?

Student: It isn't as if he's lost everything, though? Because, isn't he crying about it..part of Whitman's  expression of America is an expression of the freedom that it might be..

AG: Yes, sure, The boys are..those muchachos - "los muchachos luchaban con la industria" - the boys of Whitman are fighting against Industry - juvenile delinquents

Student: What does "muchachos" mean...? 

AG: Boys, kids. Well, friends - "Come on, muchachos, let's go get drunk!" - or boys (meaning young boys too), boys, street kids, yeah. Street kids playing baseball under the Queensborough Bridge... And  "the sun sings along the navels" - that's a really sexy image - the sun was "singing at their navels"- that's amazing, Surrealist too - sun singing at their navels.. Yeah?

Student: Did he write that in the United States?

AG: He wrote that in New York

Student: In New York

AG:He was hanging around Columbia University. His friend was the father of Juan de Onis who is now the Latin American reporter for the New York Times. De Onis were an elegant Spanish family, who ran away from the Spanish Civil War, were exiled (or were radicals, so they couldn't stay around, I forgot what the story was). And they were bilingual. And they were(he was) teaching at the head of the Spanish Department at Columbia..

Several great poets came to New York during the (19)30's, at that time. (Vladimir) Mayakovsky visited New York and wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge. And Lorca came to New York, but nobody knew him. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody knew who Lorca was except some of the Spanish community. And he was burning and writing the greatest poetry in the world, actually, the greatest modern-esque Romantic poetry. The Americans and the English had T.S.Eliot at the time, and they had (Ezra) Pound and (William Carlos) Williams, but nobody with that torrential rhetoric and accuracy of rhetoric - "Bull and dream that would join the wheel with the seaweed." There was nobody. Pound, Williams, Eliot never got to  "Bull and dream that would join the wheel with the seaweed." - Just totally out of its skull, and, at the same time, completely literal on some level. I don't think you get anything like that in a way till (Jack) Kerouac, and then Kerouac doesn't have the emotive cadence. Sometimes he gets near it. You know the emotive cadence of  "Agonia, agonia, suena, fermento y sueno,/ Este es el mundo, amigo, agonia, agonia" It's like someone totally down in the heart talking.
Well, I think we've come to our time. So (we'll) continue with more Lorca next (class), and also...

tape (and class) ends here - to be continued

[Audio for the above may be heard here, beginning at approximately eighty-four-and-a-half minutes in and concluding at the end]

Expansive Poetics - 21 (Lorca - 2)

January 28, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: Well, the "Ode to Walt Whitman" was my favorite of all the (Federico Garcia) Lorca poems. But the international classic that everybody cites as Lorca's great poem is his "Lament for a Bullfighter" ["Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias"] because the subject-matter is so central (to the) Spanish - a bullfighter - upon the death of a bullfighter - and it's also one of his most elevated poems, and the homoerotic element in the "Ode to Walt Whitman is at least suppressed sufficiently, or generalized sufficiently into a cultural stereotype that Lorca can get away with all the lamenting and weeping over the corpse and body of his bullfighter subject that he wants to without having to tip his mitt or come out of the closet. And also the particular subject, which is the lament on the death of the heroic athlete, is a classic subject all the way from Greek times, from Pindar's Odes.

The translation is by (Stephen) Spender and J.L.Gili. These translations have been around since the late (19)40's, and they're quite good actually. I get it out of this New Directions volume. I think that's the citation in the bibliography [of the Expansive Poetics anthology] - cheap, actually, a dollar ninety-five..

Student: That's old (prices)!

AG:Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca- I think I got this second-hand the other day. It's an old New Directions book. Is it still in print?  - Amazing - Well, if you can get hold of it, this is the one, edited by Don Allen, it's got all the good translations in it.








[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately thirty seconds in and concluding approximately two-and-a-half minutes in]

---

Pete Seeger (1919-2014)

January 28, 2014, 7:59 am

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[Pete Seeger (1919-2014)]

Fellow activists, fellow artists, fellow passionate devotees to peace, Allen and Pete Seeger were standing there together in 1969 [sic] at the founding of WTR (War Tax Resistance), a far-sighted organization founded by The War Resisters League and others, "in the belief that the right to conscientious objection belongs to all people, not just those of draft age". WTR published a newsletter, two editions of a book, and helped establish 192 war tax resistance "centers" and 4o "alternative funds" across the country, moving to Kansas City, Missouri, in 1972 to become more centrally located. Pete, in his concerts in the early (19)70's, would often recite Allen's poem  - "No Money No War"




No Money, No War

Government anarchy prolongs illegal planet war

Over decades in Vietnam

Federal anarchy plunges U.S. Cities into violent chaos

Conscientious objection to war-tax payment
is a refusal to subsidize mass murder abroad
and consequent ecological disaster at home.

This refusal will save lives and labor and is
the gentlest means of political revolution.

If money talks, hundreds of thousands of
citizens refusing war-tax payments can
short circuit the nerve system
of our electronic bureaucracy.

No money, no war.

Peter Seeger died yesterday, after being hospitalized in New York for the past six days. He was 94.     
He lived an exemplary and extraordinary life. 

see here for his New York Times obituary - and here in The Washington Post. 
Here's the AP wire story,     The news spreads around the world.   

Expansive Poetics - 22 (Lorca - 3)

January 29, 2014, 3:00 am

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AG: We might get on to this [Lorca's "Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sanchez Mejias"  ("Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias")], because this is a very amazing piece of rhetoric, depending a lot on repetition. (It's at the end of the book) "A las cinco de la tarde" (I guess the Spanish would be subject more to intelligence) - "tarde"- "A las cinco de la tarde/Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde" - It was exactly five in the afternoon  - "Eran las cinco en punto.." - Right on the point - "...de la tarde/Un nino trajo la blanca sabana.." - "A boy brought the white sheet/at five in the afternoon/A trail of lime ready prepared/at five in the afternoon/The rest was death, and death alone/at five in the afternoon./  The wind carried away the cottonwood/at five in the afternoon/And the oxide scattered crystal and nickel/at five in the afternoon/Now the dove and the leopard wrestle/at five in the afternoon/ And a thigh with a desolate horn/at five in the afternoon/The bass-string struck up/at five in the afternoon/Arsenic bells and smoke/at five in the afternoon/Groups of silence in the corners/at five in the afternoon/And the bull alone with a high heart!" - Well, "And the bull alone [sic]" - because he's saying, only the bull - because the guy got killed. So only the bull survived, so only the bull had a high heart. 

You could exaggerate it out - "And the bull alone" - That's what I do, I start singing out special (words) - If, in advance, while reading something, I grasp what the words mean in relation to the other words, and if it has some extra little piece of energy I can throw into it, then I'll just sing it out and make a special bravura vowel. Because, generally, the audience is asleep, as you are generally, the reader, half-asleep, not quite following, thinking of something else (maybe absorbed, but maybe not absorbed), maybe just staring with the eyeball at the page, listening to the whirr of the fan, or blowing their nose, or distracted by another thought. But if you suddenly say, "And the bull alone with a high heart!", attention immediately comes back in. So, the function of special, emphatic, high-stress, souped-up, vowelic mouthing musicalities while reading is to wake up the audience and point attention to the significance of a line. 
In other words, you're constantly trying to wake the audience or the reader. You're constantly trying to wake up the reader over and over again to what's being said, because generally something interesting is being said. Otherwise you might say, "And the bull alone at five in the afternoon" - why is he saying "the bull alone"? who cares about the bull alone? - meaning, "the bull alone" had a "high heart"! - only the bull, in the entire audience, in the entire bull-ring, had a high heart. So you can punch out the "alone". If you treat almost every word as if it had some meaning, or if you can find some significance for every syllable, then you can have a complete musical variety of  syllabic chimes, line-to-line. Though the tendency is to (do it) sing-song.  But if you can find at least one word in a line that has a punch, has a tonal punch and you put that through, then you can keep every line alive and you can keep everybody listening.

"When the sweat of snow was coming/at five in the afternoon/when the bull ring was covered in iodine" - That's great. Iodine for the wounds of the bullfighter. The bull-ring was covered in iodine. It's just, in itself, an amazing line. That's where Lorca gets the reality - the practical Spanish realistic naturalism of the writing coincides with Surrealism. The "bull-ring..covered in iodine" is not necessarily a line you'd think of as being a ordin ary descriptive line. It's a little bit exaggerated. That part of the bull-ring, there was so much blood that they had splashed the iodine all over, the sand was covered with iodine. And "the bull ring was covered in iodine" - so it's exaggerated, slightly.

"at five in the afternoon/death laid eggs in the wound/At five in the afternoon/Exactly at five in the afternoon." - ""A las cinco de la tarde/"A las cinco de la tarde/"A las cinco en punto de la tarde" - "A coffin on wheels is his bed" - And it gets to be a dead march - dah-dah-dah duh-duh-dah - "Un ataud con ruedas es las cama/a las cinco de la tarde/ Huesos y flautas suenan en su oido/a las cinco de la tarde/ El toro ya mugia por su frente/a las cinco de la tarde/ El cuarto se irisaba de agonia/a las cinco de la tarde" -"A coffin on wheels is his bed/at five in the afternoon - So then you begin to get a fugue - two separate rhythms running counter to each other, because, by that time, he has built up a funny primary rhyme - "..coffin on wheels is his bed"
"Bones and flutes resound in his ears/at five in the afternoon/ Now the bull was bellowing through his forehead/at five in the afternoon" (but, in Spanish, much better - "El toro ya mugia por su frente" - the bull bellowed through his brow) - Yeah?

Student: Isn't that "at five in the afternoon", the repetition of that, that's kind of a background..  

AG: Yeah

Student: Background music.

AG: I think they call that anaphora. Anaphoric. It's the anaphoric refrain. Anaphora

Student: Dirge

AG: A-N-A-P-H-O-R-A.  Anaphora. I think that means the repeated refrain. Like "Howl". The anaphoric trick in "Howl" is "who did this, who did that" - and Christopher Smart is "let.".."Let the mule rejoice with the coffin, let the grasshopper rejoice with giraffe." In the Bible - Ecclesiastes is it? [Ecclesiastes 12:6] - "Or ever the golden bowl be broken, or the silver cord be loose, or the wheel be broken", somewhere, "or the pitcher be broken at the fountain". [Editorial note - Allen is misremembering the Biblical quote - from the King James version of the Bible - "Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern"]. That's anaphoric. Anaphora it is called, I think.

But if you got "at five in the afternoon" as a constant refrain, which goes one way - "a las cinco de la tarde" - "a las cinco de la tarde", "a las cinco de la tarde" - constantly repeating, and then.. it's a syncopated thing - "a las cinco de la tarde" - "cinco", "tarde" and "a las cinco de la tarde", and then you have the drum-beat of the dead march of "A coffin on wheels is his bed/ a las cinco de la tarde" - "Bones and flutes resound in his ears/a lascinco de la tarde" - and so you've got two rhythms running back and forth (and, actually, in pronunciation, you could really swing with that - I don't know what it would sound like in Spanish really, if a great Spanish speaker were pronouncing it. Does anybody here speak good Spanish, home Spanish, here?, Well, okay..)



[Allen continues reading the poem - making some minor mistakes in his recollection of it] - "Now the bull bellowed through his brow [was bellowing through his brow]/at five in the afternoon/The room was iridiscent with agony/at five in the afternoon/Distant gangrene comes [In the distance, the gangrene now comes]/at five in the afternoon/Lily horn through green groins [Horn of the lily through green groins]/at five in the afternoon/Wound burning like suns [The wounds were burning like suns]/at five in the afternoon/Crowd breaking down windows [And the crowd was breaking down the windows]/at five in the afternoon/At five in the afternoon" - "Ay, que terribles cinco de la tarde!/Eran las cinco en todos los relojes!/Eran las cinco en sombra de la tarde!" -"Five o'clock by all the watches [it was five by all the clocks]/Five in the shadow of the afternoon [it was five in the shade of the afternoon]" - Then the response - "I will not see it!" -"Que no quiero verla!" - "I don't want to see it!" -" I don't want to see it!" - See, the rhythm is more..  not "I will not see it!  (it's very stiff that way), it's more like "I don't want to see it!" - "Que no quiero verla!" - "Que no quiero verla!" - "Que no quiero verla!" - "Tell the moon to come/because I don't [do not] want to see the blood/of Ignacio on the sand./ I don't want to see it [Allen is maintaining his own translation of the phrase, Que no quiero verla!" here] - "The moon wide open./Horse of still clouds, and the grey bull-ring of dreams/with willows in the barreras.." [Allen continues reading the poem, in its Spender-Gili translation through to the end of this second section, "La Sangre Derramada" (The Spilled Blood) .."] - "I don't want to see it!/No chalice can contain it,/no swallows can drink it, no frost..." - "no hay escarcha de luz que enfrie" (I don't know what that means) - "no frost of light can cool it?/nor song nor deluge of white lilies,/no glass can cover it with silver./No./ I don't want to see it" - (Then, section) three - "Cuerpo Presente"(The Laid-Out Body) - It's almost like a sonata,where there's different movements. He brings it to a height, it repeats a few times, and then goes down again for another largo, at this point, slow.  

Student: And you can really see it, (the) dramatic presentation of the first part.

AG: Yes

Student: You could see it sung by a chorus

AG: Yes

Student: And then the soloists..

AG: Yes,  It could be expanded marvelously, because it does have that musical fugue back and forth - Yes?

[There follows a brief detour, as Allen and student(s) debate matters of translation, with Allen finding it difficult to locate the pertinent line(s)] 

Student: I was going to ask about this Que no quiero verla!". The thing about that in the Spanish is..
AG: Yeah
Student: ...you can use the word "will" for the 'quiero", which is "I know","I will" - this is the way it is, or "I believe"..
AG: Yeah
Student: But..
AG:  "Quiero" -  What's the infinitive? 
Student:   Querer - Q-U-E-R-E-R
AG: Can that....
Student: I believe.. it has more of this "will" property, but I think that this word...
AG: Yo quiero
Student: Yeah
AG: What's the infinitive of that?
Student: Querer
AG: Yo quiero, Tu quieras...
Student: It's "I want"
AG:   "Want", yes..
Student: But in the reflexive.. it means.. it's like "te quiero" - "I love you" 
AG: Yeah.
Student: Okay.
AG: Yes
Student: So that's...
AG:  "I want you",  "I want you"
Student: But that's not reflexive... It's more... I know it's not reflexive - but the word has possibilities here of, really, (a) much more emotional..(thrust)  and I think.. idiomatically, it might come out as "I can't stand to see it!".. You know, it's like.. it's very emotional, it's not as much "will", as it is... there's a feeling there, so I was just thinking that,
idiomatically, in English, we might say..
AG:  Is that...
Student: ..."I can't stand to see it!"
AG "..can't stand to look"?
Student: But..
AG: How would you say that? Go on..



Student: I was just wondering about the translation, there are two lines which are in fact, really the same,  because.. you know when he dies, they say - "No me digais que la vea!"
AG   "No me digais"..  "donde"?     "donde" is..
Student: ...and then in the translation (it) says that "I will not see it!" and then, "Do not ask me to see it!"
AG: See, but "donde" is.. where is.. which are the lines so I can look at them? 
Student: It is the..,
AG: Before the part three (section three), "Cuerpo Presente"?
Student: It's the third stanza, more or less...
AG: From the beginning?
Student: From the beginning.
AG Okay.
Student: On the second page.
AG: Yeah.
Student: Yeah. It's on the second page.
AG: Yeah, donde? -  First column?
Student: Yeah, right here.. First part, the second..  it would be the middle stanza of that page.
AG: I'm afraid I can't.. is it above "La Sangre.." (The Spilled Blood) ?- "La Sangre Derramada" - or somewhere else?
Student:  It's on the second page,
AG: Second leaf or second page?
Student(s): No..that's the page.. this one? - it's the second part? - is it this one over here? - Yeah, on the right-hand side, there.
AG; There, or left of it?
Student: There
AG: Right-hand side if you want,
Student: Yeah
AG) Okay, second leaf.
Student: Yeah
AG: Yeah. "No/ Que no quiero verla!" First column?
Student: Yeah. And it's the one that begins with the.. after the "Que no quiero verla!" - "The  moon wide-open". That's..
Student Oh..  "moon wide-open"
AG: Now, where?  - Okay, top of the page
Student; Yeah
AG: Top of the second leaf of this poem.. ..right hand side of the page. "Que no quiero verla!" Yes. Now.
Student: Now if you go down this second stanza, the one that begins with "Ignacio goes up the tiers.." ("Por las gradas sube Ignaciol")
AG: Yeah.
Student: Okay, there you see, in the middle of that stanza, there is a line..
AG: "No me digais que la vea!"
Student: ...right. And..
AG: He translates...
Student; I don't understand why the translator changed the translation here..
AG: Yeah, it doesn't make sense, does it?.How would we say that? - "Don't tell me to look!"?
Student: Yeah
AG: "Don't make me look"? No, digais "No me digais que la vea!" - digais..".. ["digais" from the verb - decir]  is (you) "say", isn't it?
Student: Yes.
AG: "Talk".
Student: Yes. It could be improvised from the last line.. but it's a...
AG: Right,  It's mis-translated.
Student: .. so that,  and also, I was also wondering, this is really crazy maybe, but it was also because the three lines.. and there is...
AG: Same page?
Student: Same page, yes.
AG: "Moon wide open"?
Student: The fourth line.
AG: "y la plaza gris del sueno"? 
Student: Um, yes , and I...
AG: Is that what you're talking about?
Student : ...that.. yes,
AG: "la plaza gris del sueno."
Student: I was thinking it could be "of sleep" rather than "of dreams".
AG: Could be... I liked the English line - "the grey bull ring of dreams" - it's pretty powerful in English. "plaza" is "Plaza de Toros", "gris" is grey, "de sueno" would be either "sleep" or "dream" (but, literally, it means "dream", doesn't it?)

Student:  Yeah, it can be both. But it seems.. I was wondering, which one (works)?

AG: I would say "dream", because you have a very dream-like.. it's like fantasy or dream what comes up next, that "The cow of the ancient world", passing her tongue over the "snout of blood". ("La vaca del viejo mundo/pasaba su triste lengua/sobre un hocico de sangres") " Then he "goes up (on) the tiers" with "death on his shoulders". "He sought for his beautiful body", he sees "the terrible mothers", he sees the horns near "the terrible mothers/lifted their head" - so it's like a nightmare dream, or it's like a prophetic death dream. So I would buy the dream - "the grey bull-ring of death" - that he must have dreamt.. Basically what's being said is that he, in all his time as a torero, he must have, at one time or another, have dreamt of this horrible scene, in the "grey bull-ring of dreams", of the "terrible mothers" lifting their heads.



Student: What is he talking about?

AG: Fates. The Three Fates, maybe? - or just the old black widows of  Spain, sitting there, cackling over graves or something, I don't know. (Jack) Kerouac has a very similar line describing the funeral of his father. 

Student: Yeah?

AG: The terrible nuns - the nuns that go to every funeral in Lowell and sit there (and) gloat over the dead..

Student: The Reverend Mother..

AG: Or The Great Mother, obviously. 

Student: The Teeth Mother [the student is most probably referencingRobert Bly here and his 1970 City Lights volume,"The Teeth Mother Naked At Last"] 

Student: It seems that what is happening in the bull-ring, there are mothers in the bull-ring who are actually looking for the dead.. that they.. that they're pressing forward  and they see...

AG: Yes - I like that - "across the ranches,/...secret voices.../shouting to celestial bulls.". 
 It gets really a strange combination. Images drawn from the farm, but ghostly - ghostly, or celestial, prophecies from the farms - "(H)erdsmen of pale mist" - But then it gets very practical - "There was no prince in Seville/who could compare with him/nor sword like his sword" - No prick like his prick - "nor heart so true" - or whatever it was. I wonder what relationship Lorca had with Mejias, the bullfighter. It sounds like Lorca really dug him, totally dug his body. 
That river - "Como un rio de leones/su maravillosa fuerza" - in English, (not bad) - "a river of lions" - Now that's a really Surrealist line - "a river of lions" - It's simple and he gets away with it. I mean, it's coherent there. Most of the time, I wouldn't imagine a river of lions being a coherent image, but it certainly is here - muscles like a river of lions, I guess, marvellous strength.
What else is good? - The moss - "Now the moss and the grass/open with sure fingers/the flower of his skull" - That's quite something! - just as a lover might want to feel up the skull, or the sleeping head, feel up the hair of somebody you're making it with - "Now the moss and the grass/open with sure fingers/the flower of his skull/ faltering soulless in the mist/stumbling over a thousand hoofs" 
I also like that in (the) English - "starry Guadalquivir" (that's a very tremulous, tremorous, quality, just to the sound there - "starry Guadalquivir" - like stars being reflected in the river). Guadalquivir is the river? Is that correct? Anybody know? Guadalquivir is the river, so "starry Guadalquivir" ("Guadalquivir de las estrellas") would be the stars trembling in the river.

Well, should we go on with the rest? Anyone want to try doing the largo section. Anybody got a sonorous basso profundo?

Student: In Spanish?

AG: Can you do Spanish? Yeah, let's  hear it. See what it sounds like.

Student: Uh, where?

AG: "Cuerpo Presente" (The Laid-Out Body) - where I left off - "La piedra es una frente.." - "Stone is the forehead where dreams grieve" (donde los suenos gimen)



[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately two-and-a-half  minutes in and continuing to the approximately fifty-nine minutes in] (also available here)

[Edouard Manet (1832-1883) - "The Dead Toreador" (c.1864), oil on canvas (from the collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC]

Expansive Poetics - 23 - (Lorca 4)

January 30, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (1891-1934)]


[Allen's Lorca class, continuing from here. A student is reading from Lorca's Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sanchez Mejias"  ("Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias")] 

Student: "La piedra es una frente donde los suenos gimen/sin tener agua curva ni ciprerss helados./La piedra es una espalda para llever al tiempo/con arboles de lagrimas y cintas y planetas."

AG: That's a pretty great line, in English - "Stone is a shoulder on which to bear Time/with trees formed of tears and ribbons and planets." Let's see now, " "Stone is a shoulder" - "La piedra es una espalda" - used to carry time, you can carry time on - "A stone is a shoulder you can carry time on" - "With trees of tears" - "con arboles de lagrimas.." - trees made out of tears (and "cintas" could be "belts")  or ribbons and planets - "Tears, ribbons and planets".
It's funny. His mind jumps like "War passes weeping with a million grey rats".  The great quality of this poem, particularly this section, it gets to a mind-jump at the end that's so collosal it becomes prophetic, just through the sheer playfulness of poetic juxtaposition. When you get to the end of this.
[Allen to the student] Go on. Do you want to read on in English, so we get the sense of it a little.

Student [reading] : "I have seen grey showers move towards the waves/raising their tender riddled arms,/to avoid being caught by the lying stone/which loosens their limbs without soaking the blood."

AG: Yeah. I should interpolate here that I don't understand half of this bullshit, so to speak, half of the combinations here. I haven't examined them that deeply in Spanish. It's just highlights of the rhetoric that come through really clear and sometimes astoundingly practical, like "War passes weeping with a million grey rats". And like the line at the end of this section. [to student] so, go on..

Student [continues reading] : "For stone gathers seed and clouds/skeleton larks and wolves  of penumbra:/but yields no sounds nor crystals nor fire,/ only bull-rings and bull-rings and more bull-rings without walls"

AG: That's good - "sino plazas y plazas y otras plazas sin muros" (but the English is good - that "bull-rings and bull-rings and more bull-rings without walls" - "boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing through (the) snow" [Allen is quoting from his own "Howl" here] - , only "bull-rings and bull-rings and...bull-rings.."). [to Student] Go on.  

Student: "..I will not see it!/The moon wide open"

AG:  Where? No, no.

Student: Whoa

AG: Yeah. Watch out  [regarding the loose-leaf pages of the anthology] (Once) you'll get these things mixed up, you'll never get them back again... Next would be "Now, Ignacio the well born lies on...stone". You got it?

Student [reading]: "Now, Ignacio the well born lies on the stone/All is finished. What is happening?

AG: Well, it's "All is finished". It's really "All is finished".

Student [continuing]: "All is finished. What is happening? Contemplate his face/death has covered him with pale sulphur/and has placed on his head a dark minotaur."

AG: "(P)laced on him the head of a dark minotaur" - Go on.

Student [reading]: "All is finished. The rain penetrates his mouth/The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest,/and Love, soaked through with tears of snow,/warms itself on the peak of the herd."

AG: That sounds pretty good the way you're doing it. You've got a lot of force. That's good - Go on.'

Student [reading]:"What are they saying? A stenching silence settles down./We are here with a body laid out which fades away,/with a pure shape which had nightingales/ and  see it being filled with depthless holes."

tape ends here - turns over - continues (after some delay)

AG: "Agujeros". ("y la vemos llenarse de agujeros sin fondo") What is "agujeros"? Does anybody know Spanish well enough to know?

Student: Agujeros?

AG: "Agujeros". Not exactly "hole" [no?]

Student: I'm not sure but it could be "(a) well".

AG: Yeah. "Aqua" (water) - Agujeros. So it's pools or ponds or springs or, like, agujeros - a little hole in which you get a little water.. The bottom-less.. well, "well.. it's a hole-in-the- ground too. (A) spring is the actual water in a way. Spring-holes. What do you call it? What do we have there? Water-holes

Student: Surface-well?

AG: Surface-well, yeah. There may be another English word, but they couldn't find another one, so they wound up with...

Student: Holes

AG: I didn't like.. I think that's one of the solecisms of this translation. "Depthless holes" for "bottom-less wells"..

Student: Right

AG: And you don't get the water, exactly.

This is interesting, also, because there was the somewhat extravagant stuff of  "death has covered him with pale sulphur" - Okay, you could buy that - some kind of.. goes in the ground and turns into chemicals - "(P)laced on him the head of a dark minotaur" - Okay, a minotaur, symbolic of confrontation with death. Then, All is finished". Then, a totally literal line - "The rain penetrates his mouth". He's got so far out into Surrealism that it got literal - "The rain penetrates his mouth" - because it's both a Surrealist line and an absolutely literal line - that the rain does penetrate the mouth of a corpse, or trickle down into the mouth of a corpse - but "penetrates" - "penetra por su boca" - Yeah - which is a good image of death - "La lluvia penetra por su boca". Yes?



Student:  Did they lay the dead out in the plaza or anything for anybody to see?

AG: Probably in a church, I'd imagine.

Student: Maybe it was raining?

AG: No, I would imagine, ultimately, it would make more sense, just a corpse in the ground, the rain penetrates the mouth. You don't have to... there might be some topical local literalism, but..just as an image of death.
Then, "The air, as if mad, leaves his sunken chest".("El aire como loco deja su pecho hundido") Well, that's pretty good, because it does give the spasm of the expiration of the last breath (if it was a violent last breath). It's really a funny thing to call the air "mad". But then he carries it out with "leaves his sunken chest". You get some literal sense of a heaving of expiration.
"Love, soaked through with tears of snow" (el Amor, empapado con lagrimas de nieve") - that's kind of nice. The body will be soaked through with tears (or with snow, in any case). So he just exaggerates a little - "A stenching" - stinking? - is that stenching?

Student(s): Stench..  Stenching..

AG: "Hedores" - "Un silencio con hedores" - "odor"?, "hedores", I guess. Hedore - I don't know the word but I guess it means stink - That's a funny thing,  a silence with smell - a bad-smelling silence for the corpse - "We are here with a body laid out which fades away" - ("Estamos con un cuerpo presente que se esfuma") - he's got in mind the idea of Surrealist tricks - a body which fades away, like magic. But it's also totally literal (like the rain entering the mouth). Drops of snow (which he calls tears) - Body fades away. The amazing thing, the reason I like Lorca so much, is that his Surrealism (which is Surrealism - that is, (the) astounding combinations of words and images put together - unreasonably remote, in fact - his imagination jumps so far that it finally comes right back where it started, all the way around the universe, and becomes completely literal.  

Student: Isn't he almost specifically describing the corpse's body lying out..

AG: Yeah. Yes. But the images he's using to do it sound like somebody writing a Surrealist poem - his body fades away, the rain penetrates his  mouth. That's what's so great - it's literal and it's Surrealist. It's naturalistic and has that flavor of total imaginative flight jump.  [to student] - Go on. We go on. Because it gets at the best at the end.

Student [continues reading]""Who creases the shroud? What he says is not true!/ Nobody sings here, nobody weeps in the corner,/nobody pricks the spurs, nor terrifies the serpent./Here I want nothing else but the round eyes/to see this body without a chance of rest./  Here I want to see those men of hard voice./Those that break horses and dominate rivers/those men of sonorous skeleton who sing/with a mouth full of sun and flint." - Boy, that's great!

Student: Yeah

AG: Can you do that in Spanish? - "Yo quiero ver aqui los hombres..."

Student:  "..con una boca llena de sol y pedernales"

AG: No, no, the whole one.

Student: The whole thing?

AG: The whole quatrain is a really terrific one.

Student: Yeah - "Yo quiero ver aqui los hombres de voz dura./Los que doman caballos y dominan los rios:/los hombres que les suena el esqueleto y cantan"

AG:  Esqueleto

Student: "...esqueleto y cantan/con una loca llena de sol y pedernales."

AG: Let's see. What is it in Spanish? - I want to see.. I want to see.. I want here..I want to see here those men with voice hard.. macho.. I want to see the big macho-voiced tough-guys here - ("Yo quiero ver aqui los hombres de voz dura")  -"Los que doman caballos y dominan los rios" - break horses and dominate rivers (that's pretty good) - los hombres que les suena el esqueleto.." - those men who... "suena" is what?  dream?  daydream skeletons?...I don't know how they got it - "Sonorous skeletons" is beautiful in English.

Student: In Spanish, it's the same.. ("les suena el esqueleto y cantan") - Their very bones sing...



[Allen gets momentarily lost again in issues of translation]

AG: "Suena" means "sing"?
Student: No, no - "Sonorous skeletons"
AG: Yeah. But what's  "suena" here. Here it says...
Student: The skeleton dreams to them.. they dream of the skeleton.. les suena - it's..
AG: "Men who of them dream their skeletons"? - "Men whose skeletons dream of themselves?
Student: "Men who dream of the skeletons." 
AG: Men who are dreaming their skeletons?
Student(s): Of..  yeah.. ..the singing skeletons..   It comes from "suena".. and..
AG: No, see 'y" means :"and". So "skeleton" and "sing" wit a mouth full of sun and flint ("con una boca llena de sol y pedernales") ... so "suena", what does "suena" mean?
Student: I'm not sure, but to..
AG: To sing maybe>
Student: Sonores? Sound
AG:  See, I don't get what the "les" is then - "Men who sing them the skeletons" - "Men of the skeletons sing"? "Men who sing them their skeletons? - But "cantar" is "sing". I don't know. Sound this skeleton? Men who sound them? - I don't know. We don't have a Spanish-American dictionary. I'll look that up. (It'd) be kind of nice to know. Or does somebody have a good acceess to a Spanish dictionary? 
Student: Wouldn't the library have it.
AG: Well someone's got one at home that he uses or she uses.
Student: I've got one at home,
AG: Yeah, look it up - Suena - See what verb it is 

However, the English is fine, the Spanish is fine. Skeleton which sings, "skeleton" and "sings" - singing skeletons (are) always great. You can always score with a singing skeleton. You can always score a good line with a singing skeleton!
So what's a singing skeleton? If you take.. It's just a quality of the poetry there that's interesting. If you put a word like "singing" next to a word "skeleton", you can always score for a little thrill always, because the juxtaposition is uncany enough. 
I was talking about this toward the end of last term [1980], particularly when you get it in Lorca. Sometimes you can take an abstraction or a general word and out put next to it a particular word or a concrete word and the combination will turn you on - "animal shoes" -  or, my own favorite was in my own writing - "hydrogen jukebox" ("jukebox, which is a relatively common, vulgar word - and then "hydrogen", which is somewhat scientific and abstract, sort of). So if you take "hydrogen" and "jukebox" and put them together you get a little explosion. 
In modern Surrealist poetry, we'll see over and over again surprising combinations like that. And the original Surrealist image (out of "Song of Maldoror" by (Comte de) Lautreamont, a nineteenth-century prose-poem, which was cited byAndre Breton and the Surrealists as being the acme of Surrealist expression) was - "the meeting of.." - does anybody remember that?  -"the meeting of a violin-case and a sewing-machine on an operating-table" - "the encounter of a violin-case and a sewing-machine on an operating-table" - just putting things that didn't belong together, together (like a violin-case and a sewing-machine - two modern.. well, an ancient and a modern, on an analytic table, an operating table) - "the encounter of",  the "love-making", or "conjunction", (the) meeting, of a sewing machine and a violin case on an operating table" -[editorial note - the actual quotation from Lautremont reads "beautiful as the fortuitous meeting of an umbrella and sewing-machine on a dissection table"] And then various Surrealist painters tried to paint that, actually tried to get it out, as a visual image. 

So just "singing skeleton: is an obvious (example) - "..Skeleton and sings out of a mouth full of flint and stone - sun - sun and stone - "pedernales". "Pedernales" - I don't know if that's flint.

Student: That's flint. That is flint.

AG: It is flint. Definite flint..  That's where (President) Lyndon Johnson had his Pedernales River at his farm (in Texas) - a place called "Pedernales".  I didn't know it was flint. - "Mouth full of sun and flint/Here I want to see them/In front of this stone' - [to student] Go on.

Student: "Here I want to see them.Before the stone..Before this body with broken reins.." ("Delante de este cuorpo con las riendas quebradas..")...[Student keeps reading the next four stanzas, the fourth being - "I don't want them to cover his face with handkerchiefs/that he may get used to the death he carries/Go Ignacio, feel not the hot bellowing./Sleep, fly, rest - even the sea dies!" ("No quiero que le tapen la cara con panuelos/para que se acostumbre con la muerte que lleva/Vete, Ignacio - No sientas el caliente bramido./Duerme, vuela, reposa - Tambien se muere el mar!")  - Yeah, that's the great line, I thought -"even the sea dies!" - Now how did he get to that? Because this was..what? 1933? So he said "even the sea dies!". When I first read that, in 1946 or so, or (19)45, I said, "That's too much! - "even the sea dies!" - where did he get that? - and what does that mean even?". So I figured that poetry didn't have to mean anything, if you could say, "even the sea dies"(because how could the sea die?). But then, in 1965, after Silent Spring, I saw that Jacques Cousteau (had) said that forty percent of the life of the ocean was dead, and that Lake Erie had died, and (that) the Black Sea is now dead.. The dead fish... So seas could be polluted, so "even the sea dies".



Student:  Well, that's a very good point. The Dead Sea, and the salt seas.. that are dead.. like muerto ..in Mexico.

AG: Right. They are already (dying).. but to conceive of the Atlantic and the Pacific dying... was inconceivable to me. So it seemed (originally) like a trope, or a hyperbole, or an exaggeration - that poetry could go beyond reality.

Student: Technologically it was less possible in (19)46.. than it is now

AG: Yes. So how did a poet come to the conclusion that even the sea dies?

Student: I think the sea dies..

AG: Why would he allow himself to do that?  - What? Yeah?

Student: It could also mean that it just becomes very calm. He's just talking abut how the sea "dies"..

AG: Yes. That's begging the question. And it's also a trick answer that, technologically, it could die. At one point, I figured out, well, the one thing you can get out of this is you can write something down which isn't true. You can write something down which is beyond true, but by the promptings of the imagination. If you could follow the imagination, you could go beyond the world. If you go into the imagination, you go beyond the world and write "even the sea dies" and some day that combination of words will come true and have a meaning.. if you're an inspired poet.

Student: (you just have to be)  impressionable to the future..

AG: Yeah.

Student: Well....

AG:  Well, yeah, that's one way. (William) Burroughs is doing it. My idea of that was that the total imagination of the mind knows more than we know rationally, so if the entire mind comes up with a weird combination (like "even the sea dies") you have to respect that as something (which) might have some meaning on some level or other, and you'll likely find out, before you die yourself. That happens to a lot of poetry. Gregory (Corso)'s poetry is full of things like that - Corso's poetry is full of little incomprehensible ditties, which later on make sense, or were intended to make sense, and made perfect sense at the time, but they were so subtle I didn't catch on. Like the last lines, which are in this book [his Expansive Poetics anthology], of "Bomb" - [Allen reads from Corso's poem] -  "Know.../that in the hearts of men to come more bombs will be born/magisterial bombs wrapped in ermine  all beautifull/ and they'll sit plunk on earth's grumpy empires/fierce with moustaches of gold" - That was a beautiful combination of words but I had no idea of what it meant, or why did he wrap it in ermine? Is it just to wrap it in something pretty? I asked him. He said ermine is the judge's robes, ermine is  what the judge wears. So he's saying bombs of judgement, or Last Judgement, or Apocalypse. But it sounded to me, at first, that he was just making up something pretty - putting an ermine wrap around the bomb's neck! - Like "bomb, I want to kiss you, I want to kiss your clank (and) eat your boom".."I'll put a wig of Goldilocks on thy baldy bean" - I'll wrap some ermine around you off to the theatre together, you'll get your ermines married, we're going to the theatre" [this third example is Allen's own made-up improvisation] - I thought it was just nonsensical, but, actually, he knew what he was doing. 



And maybe I don't know what.. Lorca.. That's also a funny combination - "Sleep, fly, rest.." - bam!, bam!, bam! - even the sea dies - don't be ashamed to die, even the sea dies. Nature dies. "Tambien se muere el mar!" - Duerme, vuela, reposa   - Tambien se muere el mar - I think that line , "Sleep, fly, rest - even the sea dies!" is one of the great lines of any poetry in thus century, because it's such a colossal statement for anybody to make. So far out - and so full of feeling (he's trying to comfort the heroic friend, saying, "Well, you don't have to be ashamed of death, being a captain strapped down by death. Even the hard guys, "with mouths full of sun and flint", tough guys, who break horses and dominate rivers, they can't hold out either. Even the sea dies.")

Towards the end.. Who else would like to (read out loud)?.. Richard (Poe) would you like to pick it up from there - "Alma Ausente" ("The Absent Soul") - Section 4 - See of you can...
Exaggerate..

Student (Richard Poe): Exaggerate?

AG: Yeah, just exaggerate the tones. Usually for reading, one does have to straighten one's spine. That's the secret - that, in order to get an unobstructed breath, you have to sit up straight, because, otherwise, if you're hunched over (which is more or less of a defensive posture and a withdrawal - like going back in the womb) there is not the possibility of expanding the chest and resonating outward from the inside out and projecting the voice. There's a need to hold the sternum, which is this part of the breast [Allen points to it] up, and shoulders back, and relax the belly, so that the voice can come out of the middle of the body. That's another thing I forgot about in terms of the physical placement of the voice. You actually can speak from the heart, literally, it's not a metaphor, it's a physiological fact that the voice can resonate from the breast area, rather than from the top of the head. But in order t0 do that you've got to sit up straight and lay it out.

Student: Breathe right

AG: Breathe right, yes. So if you'll put your feet on the ground and sit up straight, Richard, and sing.

Student (Richard Poe): "The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,/nor the horses.."

AG: The other thing is also pay attention to the commas. Breath where there is a comma. Because otherwise a comma doesn't mean anything. But if it's there, it must mean that it's time for a musical rest, (a) slight breath (bigger or little breath). And also it gives you a chance to space it out and get into the thing   [Allen to Richard Poe]  - Begin

Student (Richard Poe): "The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,/nor the horses.."'

AG: No, no, breathe. Really. Just pause and breathe between the commas. Try it.


Student (Richard Poe): "The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,/nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house./ The child and the..

AG: No, no, there's a period.

Student (Richard Poe):"The child and the afternoon do not know you/ because you have died for ever..." ("porque te has muerto par siempre") - [Student Richard Poe finishes the poem, reading in English) - "It will be a long time, if ever, before there is born/an Andalusian so true, so rich in adventure./ I sing of his elegance with words that groan/and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees." (Tadara mucho tiempo en nacer, si es que nace,/un andaluz tan claro, tan rico de aventura./Yo canto su elegancia con palabras que gimen/y recuerdo una brisa triste por los olivos") 

AG: Well, you got a little delicacy tenderness in there but if you would stop, really slow down and stop for the punctuation, then your body could settle more in the words.

Someone else try that? , because it's a really pretty thing - "Alma Ausente" ("The Absent Soul"). Yeah, [to Richard Poe] You want to do it one more time?.

Student (Richard Poe): Do it over?

AG: "The Absent Soul". Remember "because you have died for ever" is the refrain. ("porque te has muerto par siempre") -  It's also a very funny refrain because you're dead for ever. It's simple-minded, simple as can be - Porque te has muerto par siempre

 - which is "you're dead for ever". It couldn't be more obvious and yet pretty musical here.

Want to do it again, Richard, It's sort of the climactic thing here.

Student (Richard Poe): You want me to do it again?

AG: Yeah,  but with the..  Yes. It's nice. It's a beautiful thing. I'd love to do it over, and over, and over. With something really good you can do it over, and over, and over, like a piece of music. [Allen to Richard Poe]  Go on.

Student (Richard Poe): "The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,/nor the horses.."...."The back of the stone does not knoew you,/nor the black satin which you crumble."

AG: I swear there's a relationship between your stumbling on "black" and your failure to observe the comma. See, if you rush your mind ahead, you're speeding it, and so, naturally, there'll be some confusion. If you just slow down, slow down and relax, and do it.

Student 2 : Try standing up too.

AG: Yeah, standing up, maybe. Please.

Student 2: Put your feet on the floor



AG: Yeah, I've been thinking (about this) for years, and people have asked me, and this is about time (I think it's something) that we should be teaching here - pronunciation. Vocalization. We should be actually doing vocalization in class, instead of just referring to it - So I guess, from now on, that'll be part of the teaching  (here at) theJack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Student: Alright

AG: Okay -  "The bull does not know you.."

Student (Richard Poe):  "The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree,/nor the horses, nor the ants in your own house..."[stumbles again]

AG: How come you can't..

Student: You're right, Because I keep forgetting..

AG: Right.

Student: Right.

AG: Mindfulness.

[Student (Richard Poe): then attempts (and completes) a reading of the entire"Absent Soul" section]

AG: Umm, When you were doing it, I was thinking what..  the structure of cadence in that is really terrific. However, I notice it's different in English than it is in Spanish. However, the English was written by poets and the Spanish was written by poets and both have their excellencies, but, to take the Spanish, the first line is by itself, the second line, is by itself. And then the third and fourth lines are a continuous breath. Repeated in the second stanza. The first line in Spanish, by itself, with  a comma, the second line, terminal, and then two lines together with one long breath. So it's just like a piece of musical notation of the cadence

Student: Isn't that funny because..

AG: In the English, they've broken it.

Student: In the English there's commas and..

AG: Well, it's alright.They've got a good balance anyway.. And, oddly enough, it's kind of interesting in English because what you do - in Lorca's original, the first and second stanzas have the same configuration, the same cadence, so to speak. In the English, the first two lines are broken up in the first stanza, and then you get into the solid cadence of Lorca in the second stanza. So there's a logical build-up.   In English - "The bull does not know you, nor the fig tree.." - Duh-dah-duh-uh-dah dah-dah-dah.. - so it's just like a musical phrase. The second one repeats the first, but goes on and continues...

Student: And (for) each of these last two sections of these four-line stanzas, there's one five-line stanza. I wonder if you could comment on that.

AG: Well, let's go one-by-one. I was just getting up stanza-by-stanza

Student: Uh-huh

AG: The same thing goes in the third and fourth, over on the (next) page. In other words, it's really repeated - "The autumn will come with small white snails,/misty grapes..." - Duh-dah-dah, So it goes right on through. And then repeated. Then it gets really brilliant, because then he repeats the last line - "Because you have died for ever/like all the dead of the Earth,/like all the dead who are forgotten/in a heap of lifeless dogs" - So he has the same lengthy breath, but he changes the words and changes the ideas. So it's really like a piece of music, the way it's built.
Then, I guess, there's the funny staccato - "Nobody knows you. No. But I sing of you." - All in the same line.He's broken it up into three. The most in English it was was two, and it had never been broken up before, that first line of the statement.
Now what are the rhymes - "canto", "gracia", "conocimienot", "boca", "alegria". Well, I guess it's "siempre", "Tierra", "olvidan", "apagados" - oh, it rhymes a good deal in Spanish. 

I don't have any particular idea why he would have five, except, in this case, each line is a singular statement, except the first. The first is a triadic - three trumpet horns. And then the four lines of the five-line stanza that follow are all straight statement.
And then, broken up into twos in Spanish, the couplet just before the end, and then concluding with one long breath containing two lines. See, they don't have a comma in Spanish, and I don't know why Spender (and Gili) were dumb enough to put a comma thrre, because they didn't need a comma - "I sing of his elegance with words that groan/and I remember a sad breeze through the olive trees" - is just as well as ""I sing of his elegance with words that groan,/and I remember a sad breeze... Because the  Spanish is "Yo canto su elegancia con palabras que gimen/y recuerdo una brisa triste por los olivos" - So it's just one long sustained cadenza, but I don't know why five there, particularly.

Okay, I think we're running overtime. We'll get on to Hart Crane. If you look up Hart Crane next time, because that'll be the next post-Whitman comment

tape and class end here 

[Audio for the above can be heard here, beginning at approximately fifty-nine minutes in and continuing to the end] (also available here)

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 163

January 31, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Allen asleep in Vancouver 1963 (from the Bobbie-Louise Hawkins home-movies]

We've spoken of the Allen and Robert Creeley relationship before (and will again). Meantime, glimpse the two of them together (and a whole roster of other "famous names" -  "company", in Bob's memorable term - Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Tuli Kupferberg, Ed Sanders, Ed Dorn,Alex Trocchi..  The list goes on.  Charles Bernstein has generously put up Bobbie Louise Hawkins' old home-movies (from 1962 to 1965) up on PennSound (and on Jacket 2). 

Meanwhile, glimpses of a later Creeley - Penelope Creeley has written a delightful memoir of magical years with her husband, in so far as it relates to books and reading. That piece is published in conjunction with a symposium that will take place, next week, at the Rare Books and Special Collections Library at the University of Notre Dame, repository for his collection. The symposium also honors the recent publication of The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley and will be live webcast.

Speaking of University archives. As we previously announced, the University of Toronto is now the enviable custodian of the largest collection of Allen Ginsberg photographs in the world. Here's the Toronto Star's announcement of the coup. In the Fall in Toronto, there will be a special exhibition.

Tomorrow, the annual Allen Ginsberg Poetry Reading and Awards Ceremony takes place at  the Passaic County Community College in New Jersey.

Last night, (but up it's until March 8), at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York City, was the opening of a big Fred W. McDarrah show - Save The Village - featuring a plethora of extraordinary photos, (among which, iconic Allen images - like this one - and this).

All this weekend, in Ipswich, England, the Festival of the Beats.

William Burroughs Centennial events are continuing (this coming Wednesday is the actual birth-date). We warn you, we at the Allen Ginsberg Project, in the coming days, are likely to become seriously Burroughs-centric (well, in fact, what the heck, we've already started!)

Check ourPeter Schjeldahl's profile of him in the current New Yorker (and a podcast where Peter discusses the article - here) 

Ron Sillimanweighs in on Beats and the movies (drawing together "On The Road", "Kill Your Darlings", and "The Line Has Shattered" (the recent documentary on the landmark 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference - there's footage from that conference in the Creeley footage mentioned earlier) - here





Rapacious real-estate is at it again.  Allen's old 170 East 2nd Street place in Manhattan's East Village, where he lived from August 1958 to March 1961, is about to be given some "renovations". For a glimpse of a classic turn-of-the-century tenement (via the ever-attentive E.V.Grieve) that won't be around (at least in this "unimproved" state) much longer, see here 




 Philip Glass's birthdaytoday - Happy 77th Birthday Philip!

Allen Ginsberg Interviews William Burroughs - 1

February 1, 2014, 3:00 am

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[Allen Ginsberg with William S Burroughs at The Gotham Book Mart, New York City, 1977]

Allen Ginsberg's 1980 interview with William S Burroughs, quizzing him about his post Naked Lunchwork (and probing him about the nature of "Spiritual Conspiracies") - "Conversation on Sequence of Burroughs' Books On Way To Stapleton Airport on August 18, 1980" - was excerpted and used that year as an introduction by Grove Press to their edition of "Three Novels - The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Wild Boys" 



It also was included (in its entirety) in Sylvere Lotringer's edition of The Collected Interviews of William S Burroughs - Burroughs Live 1960-1997. 

A second interview, conducted that year (also included in Lotringer's book (entitled there "Time Jumps Like A Broken Typewriter") will follow this one tomorrow (as well as a short piece, published in 1981 in Boulder's Daily Camera).



AG: What's the basic plot or theme of The Soft Machine?

WSB: The book takes place, to a large extent, in a mythical area which bears some resemblance to South America and also to the planet Venus. It concerns, I should say, a struggle between controllers and those who are endeavoring to throw off control.

AG: And Nova Express



WSB: The same.

AG: What is the distinction between the two in terms of theme and plot or development of the theme?

WSB: Nova Express... is more directly concerned with the struggle. Soft Machine is more concerned with just deescription of the factors involved and the scene, which corresponds somewhat with the planet Venus.

AG: In Nova Express you give a more precise description of the battle or of actual tactics?

WSB: More actual battles, battle scenes, in Nova Express than in The Soft Machine. The Soft Machine is more concerned with the set.

AG: The material from both those books is overflow from Naked Lunch?

WSB: There is some overflow from Naked Lunch in both of them, yes.



AG: And also there is material that was generated out of the whole cut-up experience of that time.

WSB: Absolutely.

AG: An what new preoccupation or theme, or symbolic set-up, is added in Venus? The whole concept of Venus?

WSB: Added in there after Naked Lunch. And also in The Soft Machine there's a good deal of narrative material that's concerned with reincarnation. This is the concept of The Street of Chance, not sure of what kind of reincarnation you're going to have. It's almost like a lottery was the allegory of the Street of Chance, people between birth and death, what chance they're going to get in their forthcoming reincarnation.

AG: And the concept of Venus is Eros, or female Eros?

WSB: No, no. Venus, the actual landscape, etc. This has been a theme in science fiction for some time. And most writers have equated it with something like South America, a lush tropical scene teeming with poisonous exotic life forms. I would mention in this connection the novel Furyby Henry Kuttner, which takes place on Venus, and there are a number of descriptions in science fiction.



AG: The Ticket That Exploded, following Nova Express, brought it all to a climax. Did that conclude the...

WSB: No, it didn't at all. I mean, it's...

AG: A continuation of the battle?

WSB: Yes. Yes.

AG: Or a continuation of the description of the scene?

WSB: Well, both. I would say you could regard The Soft Machine and Nova Express as almost a continuation of the same book, so that anything you say about one, more or less applies to the other...

AG: I thought The Ticket That Exploded kind of concluded - that was the action of the Nova, or of the explosion itself - by dissolving into a vibrating soundless hum.



WSB: Yes, there is that. Shall we say that The Ticket That Exploded winds it up? After that, was, of course, The Job



AG: Which is an attempt to regulate the ideas, and that gives them a linear exposition.

WSB: Yes, that was it. It also contains some narrative material which was possibly a mistake. I think it is a mistake to mix essay and narrative, fictional material because it slows down the narrative, and then everybody thinks that the essays are fictional rather than being factual.

AG: So the next thing is what?

WSB: More or less immediately after The Job was The Last Words of Dutch Schultz.




 But The Job, you might say, overlapped The Wild Boys because I realized it started to be one book. And then I realized that I had two books, and that they should not be mixed...

AG: So the fantasy material, or the fictional material of The Job, overlaps with The Wild Boys?

WSB: That's right.

AG: And actually in both, there is a significant theme, because The Job is the most outright or outrageous statement about the occlusion of women.

WSB: Yes.

AG: And so The Wild Boys is an exemplification of the world.

WSB: Absolutely, yes.



AG: Then the next work is...

WSB: The Wild Boys. Then a direct overflow from The Wild Boys was Exterminator!and Port of Saints.







AG: Now I haven't read Port of Saints yet. I've read Exterminator! and The Wild Boys. How do those two books differ and what's their progression?

WSB: There isn't very much difference. I found the material for The Wild Boys when I had to make, at some point, a more or less arbitrary choice. Sometimes you realize that the things you left out are better than what you've put in. So three books came from that block of material.

AG: Is there any progression, or any thematic distincton between them?

WSB: Yes. For example, Port of Saints is, I think, more structured like a musical composition. In fact, there are musical leads for each chapter.

AG: And Exterminator!

WSB: Exterminator! is more episodic and perhaps not as structured as Port of Saints, or even The Wild Boys.

AG: Well, how can you expect anybody to read through all this if you don't make big categorical distinctions? It's like reading one large series of prose poems that have no end.

WSB: No, no, no, no. It's quite comprehensible and as accessible as any book you pick up at the airport? People are demanding less and less in the way of plot and structure, I find. So I don't think there's any difficulty in understanding.

AG: Actually, The Wild Boys is very clear because it's divided into very definite themes and chapters.

WSB: Yes, so is Port of Saints

AG: Exterminator!, though has some elements being mixed with essay, like "Do Easy"

WSB: What easy material?

AG: Exterminator!  Isn't "Do Easy" in Exterminator!?

WSB: Oh yes! Yes, I did feel that Exterminator! was possibly too much, too miscellaneous. The first pieces in The Wild Boys , actually, should have been  in Exterminator! That was not really in sequence there. Uh, that's true.

AG: Is there some one paragrpah summary of the basic theme of say, The Soft Machine, Nova Express?

WSB: The basic theme is that the planet has been invaded by Venutians and the book attempts to cope with invasion

AG: And the intention of the Venutians is planetary takeover?

WSB: Planetary takeover, probably not just enslavement but extermination. Shall we say that there conditions are different? And they want to reproduce conditions that would probably be fatal to the earth.

AG: So that they can live here?

WSB: Yes.

AG: In other words, they're like the Reds, except from Venus.

WSB: Yes, like the White Man arriving in the New World

AG: How dies it end though? It ends with the virus being exterminated by the realization of the situation.

WSB: It doesn't really end.

AG: Well, the anxiety of the invasion seems at the end to be dispersed by the dissolution of space and time, or the dissolution of time.

WSB: Yes, it is. That dissolution was necessary in order to neutralize the conspiracy. From this comes the theme that the only future is to enter into a spirit, a completely spirit state.

AG: Grasping the matter? There is a notion that most conspiracies are actually spiritual conspiracies, in the sense of power takeovers involving people's minds.

WSB: The people conspired against.

AG: Oh, yes.Yes.

WSB: Just as we destroyed the Indians by destroying their spiritual life.

AG: I'm still a little fuzzy on the last part. My point was that most conspiracies are mental anyway.

WSB: They are. But usually if you want to destroy people, destroy their Gods. Destroy their Maker.

AG: Except that then the Gods being destroyed are, say, Christ or Baptist visions of Christ.

WSB: On the contrary, those are the Gods being used. In other words, these are concepts that are very useful for the invaders because they are spiritually empty.

AG: Actually, it's a very good statement on it. Is there some passage...that could be cited, for summing it up in a nutshell, in either Nova Express or The Soft Machine?

WSB: I would say that Nova Express would probably have the clearest statement.

Rene Ricard (1946-2014)

February 1, 2014, 10:11 pm

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[Rene Ricard (1946-2014) - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg c.Estate of Allen Ginsberg  - courtesy Raymond Foye]

We received news yesterday of the death, at 67, of the larger-than-life, irreplaceable, Rene Ricard, poet, painter, art critic, scene-maker,ex-Andy Warhol super-star, subject of one of Allen's most penetrating portraits (see above). The cause of death has been reported as cancer. As his friend, painter, Brice Marden, declared, speaking to the New York Observer, "Ricard was experiencing difficulty walking and went into the hospital about a week ago for a hip replacement - "When he went in they found there was all this other stuff. He was going to be starting chemotherapy, but he didn't get it in time."

Ricard was the author of the eponymous Rene Ricard 1979-1980, in its distinctive Tiffany blue (the first poetry publication of the DIA Foundation). This was followed by God With Revolver - Poems 1979-82 (1990) (the only large-scale Hanuman book), followed by Love Poems (C U Z Editions, 1999)































Trusty Sarcophagus Co. (Inanout Press, 1990), inaugerated a medium which Ricard engaged in with gusto for the latter part of his life - poems painted (or scrawled) onto found artwork.

He had a number of singularly noteworthy shows both in London and the US (most recently "new paintings and not so new"at San Francisco's Highlight Gallery) 

His work was (indeed, continues to be) represented by Cheim & Read and  by Vito Schnabel, son of another of his long-time friends, the painter and film-maker Julian Schnabel.

His brilliant (if idiosyncratic) art writing (for the magazine Artforum in the early 1980's), it would be no exaggeration to say, was crucial in helping launch Schnabel's career, and, perhaps even more influential, "The Radiant Child", his December 1981 essay, the first substantial piece on that artist, marked and sealed the fame of Jean-Michael Basquiat.

Michael Wincott had the unenviable role of playing Rene in the film Basquiat

"The George Sanders of the Lower East Side, the Rex Reed of the art world", Andy Warhol famously called him. 

He himself played Andy Warhol in 1966 (alongside Edie Sedgwick)  in The Andy Warhol Story  



Here's a harrowing clip (from a little over three years ago) of Rene reading 




Here's a recent (well, 2009) interview (fragment):

Interviewer: How do you feel about the state of poetry today, especially in New York?
Rene Ricard: I loathe poetry. I just gave a poetry reading and other poets were standing up and reciting their rhymes from memory, I guess that's cute, you know, with the backbeat, but I loathe it. I don't like what I read in The New Yorker. I really like my own poetry a lot and I think that's why I write it. Of all the arts, it's the one I know the least about, and it's interesting that it's the one I practice and earn my living on. Anyway, yes, I like my own work. It speaks to me." [laughter]

Allen Ginsberg Interviews William Burroughs - 2

February 2, 2014, 4:49 am

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[Allen Ginsberg with William Burroughs - Photograph  c. Jerry Aronson] 

ALLEN GINSBERG and WILLIAM BURROUGHS - TWO INTERVIEWS

These two interviews both appear in the volume The Collected Interviews of William S Burroughs - Burroughs Live 1960-1997. 
The first is dated 1980, with the location given as New York City. The second, also recorded in New York, a year later (and, in the Interviews book, with a title given to it, "Having To Put Out"), first appeared in Boulder's Daily Camera. 
James Grauerholz, William Burroughs' secretary (and now heir and executor for the estate) appears in the first one. An unidentified Daily Camera reporter, in the second.


AG: On February 5 1959, we arranged to have a reading at Columbia (University), our alma mater. We were hoping to have (Jack) Kerouac there but he was still in Northport. He'd had a bad time at Hunter College duringa public forum with Kingsley Amis, Ashley Montague and James Wexler. He delivered his great speech on the origins of the "beat generation", which everybody mocked. Wexler got mad and thought he was a boor, saying "We have to fight for peace". Kerouac raised his eyebrows, put Wexler's hat on his head, went home, and wouldn't come out for any more public ceremonies. You were in Paris.

WSB: I was in Paris, yes.

AG: You were worried about being captured by the media. Time magazine had a photo of us and quoted ridiculous funny sentences, so we were at the time doing a tightrope walk between being public and doing things publicly, including the Columbia reading.

WSB: What did you read?

AG: I read "Howl" for the first time to a large audience in New York and a poem called "The Lion For Real", which is in Kaddish. Gregory Corso read  "Marriage", "Police", "Army", "Bomb", and some brief poems. Peter Orlovskydidn't read much - "First Poem" and"Second Poem". The place was over-crowded and people were banging on the doors to get in. That was a celebrated moment in New York, when they had to call the police to keep the crowds down for a poetry reading. I don't remember too much about the question-and-answer perod after the reading, but someone in the balcony asked Gregory, "Where are we now?", and he said, "In heaven". Then came the long controversy in Partisan Review because Diana Trilling had written an article, "The Other Night At Columbia". I wrote a reply of one line, "The Universe is a new flower' - that was over 20 years ago [editorial note - now over 50 years ago]

[Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky & Gregory Corso in "Pull My Daisy"]



James Grauerholz: At what point did you first become aware that the media were picking up on what your friends, Allen, Gregory, Peter and Jack, were doing?

WSB: It was later in the year, 1959. I know there was an issue of Life magazine


[William Burroughs - from the  notorious Life magazine spread]

AG: Gregory told me that you saw our picture in Time magazine and said, "Oh, oh, they've been captured. They got our souls" - like savages photographed by anthropologists.

WSB: Gregory may have exaggerated a bit. I think you were in less danger than Time! [Burroughs laughs]

AG: Bill, as I recall, you received commendation because you were a gentleman! We were coming on like beatniks. Also you weren't on the scene and exposed, and so reporters who came to see you in Paris were probably a lot more worldly than the local ones.

WSB: Yes, they were rather strange, off-beat people, who had been deliberately chosen.

AG: The article in Life said that I attributed a vast conspiracy in the upper reaches of the government as a cause inthe increase in heroin addiction and the corruption of the police.
I said that, somewhere at the top, there was a working relationship between organized crime and the Narcotics Bureau

WSB: Oh, you said that way back then. All my early statements about conspiracies, the fact that the Institute for Cultural Freedom [the Congress for Cultural Freedom] was an adjunct of the CIA and so forth, were treated in the same way. I think the phrase was, he achieves "the irrelevant history of hysteria".

AG: Yes, their complaint was they thought that we were without any tradition

WSB: You stem from the troubadours, really

AG: The readings have the traditional imprimatur of the tradition of Milarepa, the 11th Century yogi-poet whose methods were similar to Kerouac's.  I was talking about "spontaneous bop prosody", as a catch-phrase to describe Kerouac's rapid transcription of his thought and images on to the page, which I learned from, and which was very much on my mind when we gave the early readings. We were trying to get Kerouac to be a strong leader and prophet. Kerouac proclaimed: "Speak now or forever hold your peace. Speak as if this were the last moment of existence. What you had to say was your mortal, ultimate yelp, and rely on the movement of the mind to provide the structure for the art work". The older tradition and what we were doing intuitively, out of our common sense, had joined forces.

WSB: Yes, that's a very good point.



[Jack Kerouac - "wandering along East 7th Street after visiting Burroughs..Manhattan Fall 1953" - photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] 


AG: By spontaneous mind, I mean total frankness, as far as it is possible, and the use of accident to trap yourself, even in public, to tip your mitt, so to speak, and be passionate, if passion's there, and not to be attached to the last thought that you had but to move on to the next thought. Not to fill out a thought in order to justify it, but to jump ahead as the mind moves forward; that is the basis for both prose and poetry. That is, to a great extent, your method. 

WSB: Not altogether so, Allen. You see, I had many discussions with Jack on this point. He says the first version is always the best. Well, it may work for him, but it doesn't work for me. I have to do three. With the first version I get the picture; it's a sort of a sketch. The second, I fill it in, and the third, I fill it in still further.

AG: I think that the point  Jack was making about the first version was he felt he could reveal himsel best at first, and any revisions he did would tend to hide what embarrassed him. The ultimate point is to reveal the moment of the mind, your primary method I seem to remember from Tangier. I remember that you'd always said that your imagination was primarily visual, whereas mine was always auditory. You thought in pictures rather than words. So, I asked you then what you were thinking about just when your fingers were hovering over the typewriter, and you said, "Hands pulling in nets from the sea." I said, "Where did that come from?" and you said, "In the morning you go down to the beach in Tangier and the fishermen are pulling in their nets; hands pulling in nets from the sea in the darkness before dawn." So actually it was a naturalistic picture.

WSB: Yes, what I essentially see when I'm writing is a moving film

AG: In silence?

WSB: No, not anymore than a film is in total silence; it has sound-effects, it has dialogue - but I have to see it. If I can't see it, I can't write it.

AG: So to what do you credit this capacity for projection of a visual image in your mind?

WSB: I've always thought that way. And many of my characters come from dreams. A dream is actually a film.

AG: You've said that since 1945, when we first began talking about this, and I was astounded then because I never did achieve a purely visual image.

WSB: Sometimes I'll get a whole chapter in a dream, and I just have to sit down and transcribe.

AG: I remember one passage about vaparettos in Venice, and all the green, fish-like, metallic boys diving, which was so visual.

WSB: Yes. That was based on a dream.

AG: You don't have to work at your own mind since it's there in the dream, or as pictures in a dream, while you're writing. It's a question of accurate transcription.

WSB: Exactly


[William S Burroughs -  photo by Allen Ginsberg -  photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] 


AG: There is a phrase which recurs in Naked Lunch. Two boys are sitting on a park bench eyeing each other, one with his hand resting on the back of the bench, the fuzz of his cheek seen against the leaves, "Time jumps like a broken typewriter" - the boys are old men, they startle back from each other with a skull-like grin discovered in their horrible lust, and suddenly they turn to bones. "Time jumps like a broken typewriter". That's a crucial image in your work. It's a funny phrase, it's so simple,

James Grauerholz: It's like a jump-cut in film-editing. It seems to explain a little bit the cut-ups you use.

WSB: Cut-ups is the collage-montage technique put forward by Brion Gysin in 1959 when he applied the montage method to writing.

James Grauerholz: Do you distinguish between collage and montage?

WSB: Well, I don't think there s all that much difference. The collage was, as the word meant, glued on and the montage is similar; in other words, it's a construction of images in random juxtaposition. Now there are many elements which go into a particular cut-up. In the Cobblestone Gardens piece, some of the texts are from (Arthur) Rimbaud.

James Grauerholz: That's the piece dedicated to the memory of your parents.

WSB: I should mention that Cobblestone Gardens was an antique, art, gift shop run by my parents in St Louis and then later in Palm Beach from which they sent me $200 dollars a month during the period when I was not able to make a living as a writer, and really made it possible for me to go on writing.

AG: I think Jack and I probably had a hypertrophic auditory sensibility - Kerouac particularly. We were using that "Okie, black, Kerouacky bop sound, the extra-special super hygobble one sixty nine bellflounder in down to Kilroy". that sound that's got rhythm and vowels, and comes out of black music, and comes out of his attention to the vowel sounds, and means coming to the end of a sentence with an upward emphasis.

James Grauerholz: His ear is very good. He had a good voice for pitch and jazz singing.

AG: He always said he was a great musician. I never believed him until I began doing some jazz singing myself. It affected his prose. Jack always thought Burroughs arrived at great music. His favorite early line was, "Motel, motel, motel, loneliness moans across still oily tidal waters.." You remember that? How does that conclude?

WSB: "East Texas Swamp"  

AG: He repeated it over and over - "Motel, motel, motel, loneliness moans across still oily tidal waters.." That's what turned him on to your prose, that one sentence, as music in his own ear.

WSB: I see it before I hear it, as it were. Normally, I will see the character before I hear him. Then there's the point of what would this character I see say, and how would he say it.

AG: You're seeing as strongly now [1980], as you've ever seen, I gather, fromCities of the Red Night" 




**************************************************************************

                                                                    II

AG: At this point in your life, why do you keep writing, what purpose does it serve for you?

WSB: Well, for one thing, it's my way of making a living,

Daily Camera Reporter: But beyond your need to make a living...

WSB: You can't separate it. Show me a great rich writer... Suppose my father had not been persuaded that the whole idea of an adding machine was impractical and sold the stock in Burroughs Corp. at the current price [1981], I would have had about $10 million in the bank. I'd hazard a guess that I'd never would have written anything. If I had written, I wouldn't have written what I wrote because I never would have had the experiences. If yuo can insulate yourself from unpleasantness, you will. The only thing that gets Homo Sap up off his ass is having to put out.

Daily Camera Reporter: Would you novel Naked Lunch be marketable today?

WSB: Would The Great Gatsby be marketable today? The answer is no because it never could be written now. And neither could Naked Lunch. The context of the writer in his times is critical. On The Roadwas the same way. Kerouac didn't know it at the time, but he was lucky he was having all those difficulties getting On The Road published. If it had come out earlier I don't think it would have been a hit.

Daily Camera Reporter: Can you teach people how to write?

WSB: I don't think so. Can you teach people to feel or teach people to think? I think you can come closer to teaching people how to read than to write.

Daily Camera Reporter: Were you a born writer?

WSB: A writer writes long before he puts pen to paper

Daily Camera Reporter: Your soon-to-be-published novel, Queer, was written more than 30 years ago [editorial note - now more than 50 years ago] when you were living in New York with (Allen) Ginsberg.



AG: How come we didn't publish Queer back then?

WSB: There were no takers. They said I'd be in jail if I published it.

AG: Did you censor it at all, cut anything from the way you left it in 1953?

WSB: No, there's nothing changed.

AG: I like the novel. I thought it was easy reading. It's the best kind of writing you were doing before Naked Lunch - "top-notch Burroughs". What did you think when you read it again? Were you embarrassed by it?

WSB: My first reaction was - it's absolutely appalling. I couldn't bear to read it. How could I have acted in such a ridiculous manner?

AG: How did you act?

WSB: Going around sticking a gun into some cop's guts... If that's not a silly way to act.

Daily Camera Reporter: If you were so appalled, what made you to resurrect it, write a preface and publish it?

WSB: My agent seemed to think it was a very saleable manuscript. I've written a commentary on it almost as long as the novel, and I decided it was worthwhile.



AG: Aren't you working on a big book on catsnow?

WSB: It's a small book. It uses cats to represent people. I was thinking of the nuclear situation... The only way something comes home is if it affects their personal circumstances. When people think about war, they think: what'll happen to my orchids, my cats, my Chippendale? The point of the book is animal contact, not communication. Communication and contact are two very different things. Contact is identification and can be very painful. Communication can be forced, contact cannot. You cannot force someone to feel.

AG: So what is (Ronald) Reagan practicing in Nicaragua [1981], communication or contact?

WSB: There's certainly no contact, but there is lots of communication. Communication is designed to avoid contact...Remember, lying comes as naturally as breathing to a politician and is just about as essential to life...Just listen to them. There's lies oozing and slithering out of them. 

*******************************************************************************

A third (and by the far the most substantial Ginsberg-Burroughs interview, recorded in Lawrence, Kansas in 1992, and also included in  The Collected Interviews of William S Burroughs - Burroughs Live 1960-1997, under the title, "The Ugly Spirit", transcribed and edited by Steven Taylor and Allen Ginsberg and first published in The San Francisco Review of Books, was recently published (alongside photographs by Ruby Ray and drawings by David West) in Sensitive Skin and is available on-line. 

Click here  

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William S Burroughs - Call Me Burroughs

February 3, 2014, 6:17 am

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William S. Burroughs week all this week, leading up to Wednesday, which will mark the one hundredth anniversary of his birth - and, just in time for that monumental occasion, a huge new biography by Barry Mileshas just come out, 718 pages ("almost as long", Wall Street Journal reviewer Henry Allen,  points out, "as Ted Morgan's Literary Outlaw - The Life and Times of William S Burroughs (1988), which came out at 768 pages when reissued with new material in 2012". Miles, himself, the reviewer notes, has already written one Burroughs biography,William Burroughs - El Hombre Invisible (1993) but this, "written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr and Burroughs himself", supplants it - and more! - "the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in (almost) a quarter of a century, and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs' life and examine his long-term cultural legacy", as the publishers note. 

Early reviews have been enthusiastic. Here's Publishers Weekly (from last December) - "The pioneering American countercultural writer and artist William Burroughs emerges as his own greatest character in this raucous biography. Biographer and Burroughs editor, Miles pens a dense, detailed, yet wonderfully readable narrative that illuminates without sensationalizing..Miles' exhaustively researched account draws on the writer's blunt, self-revealing private writings, along with reminiscences from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other associates, to flesh out Burroughs personality, surroundings, and equally colorful circle of acquaintances...Miles puts it all down with aplomb and deadpan wit, showing the gross-out surrealism of Burroughs' fiction flowed from the lurid creativity of everyday life."
Miles has received plaudits from other reviewers. Jeremy Lybarger in Bookforum- "Let me suggest that a fair barometer of biographical writing is how well it resists hyperbole. Miles is successful in this regard, which is impressive given that Burroughs' life yields so much that is extreme.."Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, likewise, applauds his "always efficient, often elegant prose", in a judgment that becomes equivocal - "The biography, after its eventual start, becomes rather like an odyssey by subway in the confines of Burroughs' self-absorption...Miles' always efficient, often elegant prose eases the ride, but a reader's attention may grow wan for want of sun." Henry Allen notes this (inevitable surely?) darkening, deadening effect - "the equivalent of a boy standing by the railroad tracks watching an endless slow freight of depravity rattle past. The monotony becomes hypnotic. The freakishness becomes normal with repetition. You can't look away."
Matthew Gilbert in the Boston Globeeven sees this as heroic diminishment, on the part of Miles - "Barry Miles huge, engaging vignette-crammed biography, Call Me Burroughs, throws a bit of cold water on all aspects of the Burroughs legend.", he writes. "It's a door-stopper of a reminder that while, as a writer Burroughs led us into the eye of the storm of the sub-conscious, as a man he let his family and some of his friends down and spent an inordinate amount of his lifetime scoring and using drugs." Miles [significantly].. "doesn't judge his subject, yet Burroughs emerges [in Gilbert's eyes, at least] as a largely unsympathetic and (finally) sad figure." Gilbert confesses to being "simultaneously turned-off and fascinated" - ("what many (may) feel while reading his fiction") - He (Burroughs) was "unerringly selfish and careless, and yet he lived a unique uncompromising life that led to a body of unique uncompromising work". "With the help of Miles' extensive research", he concludes, "he makes for a captivating anti-hero."
Too extensive? - Noah Cruickshank in his A.V.Club review thinks so - "Figuring out just what to include (and what to leave out) may be the most challenging aspect of  crafting a biography. In Call Me Burroughs, Barry Miles, a longtime friend of William S Burroughs opts to keep everything, creating an overstuffed book that chooses minutiae over insight." He yearns for more "critical detatchment", recognizing that it (the book) "never ventures into memoir" (neither, as Henry Allen notes, is it "literary or critical biography", but rather, to use his and Schejldahl's metaphor, a train ride (but what a train ride! - what sights, smells, and experience!). "Call Me Burroughs", Jeremy Lybarger writes, "is ultimately a tribute to its subject's mutability.""Besides being one of the twentieth-century's most radical writers, Burroughs was an accomplished visual artist and performer..(the book) is a reminder, if one is needed, that Burroughs work remains essential. His corrosive and wise and inimitably beautiful voice still challenges writers to quit fucking around..."  
More Call Me Burroughs reviews here, here & here (Burroughs' home-town) - and here (Michael Dirda in The Washington Post- ("Miles relates Burroughs life in an equally extraordinary biography, a mesmerising page-turner, depicting not just a season in hell but an entire lifetime. It is also, to use words seldom associated with its subject, balanced, measured and even-handed".."carefully elucidated" and "cleanly written" (throughout its "magisterial") "gossipy and fact-filled pages").

Here's Miles and Beat scholar John Tytell discussing the book last Tuesday at New York's Strand Boookstore.

William S Burroughs & Junky (Canadian tv interview)

February 4, 2014, 3:30 am

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[ Junky - cover for the Penguin "50th Anniversary Definitive Edition"(2003), edited with an introduction byOliver Harris, and a Foreward by Allen Ginsberg]  

Here's two short clips from Peter Gzowski's 90-minute interview with William Burroughs on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) - from 1977.



WSB: ..but I really don't think that there's all that much continuity in human experience and, looking back on what I was, say, twenty years ago, or thirty years ago, I think.. I wonder, well, "who was that? why was he doing that?" and I don't have the answer

PG: You don't have the answer?

WSB: I don't have the answer at all, no

PG: You don't know what attracted you to the Beat writers..what attracted you to writing..Your degree's in anthropology is it not?

WSB: I majored in English literature at Harvard and then I took some graduate work in anthropology

PG: But you don't know what within you or your background lead you to literature?

WSB: Well, it was the easy major! 

PG: The university's out right now. I think I hear a little applause there.

WSB: For..well..but.. six hours, I could prepare for any exam

PG: No ambition at that time to be the kind of writer you became, to be a novelist, to join...?

WSB: I wasn't really interested in writing at that time. I attempted to, you know, follow the usual lines of advertising agencies (and) I tried to get into the precursor of the CIA, but that was Bill Donovan.. I forget what they called it..

PG: The OSS? [Office of Strategic Services]

WSB: Yes, I was turned down. So I was sort of a WASP wash-out!

PG: Then what moved you from there into the Beat movement?, because you and Jack.. the three persons..

WSB: The Beat movement, yes.

PG: The three principal names were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and yours...

WSB: Well, yes, but remember the Beat movement didn;t exist at that time.

PG: No, it was invented after it existed, kind of?

WSB: Yes, yes. You might say so, yes.  But I had.. I'd run into Allen and Jack. in the early
1940s...yeah, just before the war in 1943, 1944. Well, I wasn't a writer at that time. Jack was the most devoted writer, he'd written a great deal, and he kept telling me that I was going to write a book and the book was going to be called Naked Lunch, (which was his title), and I said, "oh well, you know, I don't want to do it, you know, I'm not a writer", and... so I wasn't .. I wasn't at all interested in writing at this time.

PG: What moved you that way? You say there's no sense of continuity but there must have been a change?

WSB: Well, after, I guess it was 1950, and I'd had these experiences as an addict, I was living in Mexico City, and someone suggested to me that I simply write up my experiences with heroin addiction, which I did, and that was the book, first book, Junky.
And then, when that was published, that was when I was encouraged to go on writing.  go on with writing .. but I was thirty-five at the time

PG: Even though you say in the book, where you say quite clearly that it's it's not a useful question, I want to ask it, what ..what led you to junk, what..?

WSB: Er..you see.. well, I was around people that were using it. Then I started on taking an occasional shot, and it is for most people, I think, a very pleasurable sensation, It's like what leads people to alcohol, or any other drug, They take it and they like it and they take some more.



WSB: You see, a writer can profit from things that are maybe just unpleasant or boring to someone else because he uses those subsequently as materials for writing. And I would say that the experience that I had that's described in Junky later led to my subsequent books like Naked Lunch, so I, I don't regret it. Incidentally, the damage to health is minimal, no matter what the American Narcotics Department may say.

PG: Well the damage to..

WSB: The damage to health from addiction is minimal.

PG: But it has done things to your soul? 

WSB: No, well, read one of the early authorities like (Thomas) De Quincey. For one thing, he would never have lived to be seventy-two unless he had taken opium, because he had tuberculosis, and, I think he would say the same as I say, that he didn't regret his experience with drugs.



PG: Well you can say it and I will not argue whether the permenant damage to health is severe, but talk for a moment about being on the bottom, if you would, about what happens to.. why do junkies never bathe? (no, this is a serious question, not a.. there's a physiological thing..)

WSB: I don't know, they get like cats, they can't stand water on the skin, for some reason or other.

PG: That's one of the symptoms you went through?

WSB: Yes, one of the symptoms. They rarely bathe.

PG: What happens to your perception of reality?  

WSB: Well, it always should be remembered that junk, or any kind of opiate, is a pain-killer and therefore it will lessen your perception of reality.

PG: What happens to your sexual appetite?

WSB: Erm - practically non-existent.

PG:What happens to your appetites for food?

WSB: Er..Its.. It definitely reduces your appetite.

PG: What happens to your ability to cope with day-to-day crises?

WSB: Nothing. Nothing whatever. Many, many.. see, I was.. I've been in England where addicts obtain their heroin quite legally through doctors (and many of them, many of the addicts were lawyers, doctors, bank-tellers, etcetera). So far as creative work goes, I say very definitely, counter-indicated, and I would never have been able to write Naked Lunch, for example, unless I had been off heroin.

PG: Are you, William Burroughs, still a junkie?

WSB: No. no, absolutely not . I  haven't used.. been addicted to opiates for years.

PG: No, but an alcoholic who is not using alcohol will stand and say, "I am an alcoholic.."

WSB: He will indeed, yes

PG: "..and I'm still under that addiction", and you say that, you imply that, through the book that addiction stays with you.. Are you not still addicted to heroin, simply not have used it for many many years

WSB: Er...that's the question. It's not exactly the same problem as..as alcohol, as you know, an alcoholic can.. he can't drink a glass of beer, but if an addict goes to the hospital, say for an operation, (and) he takes the normal amount of medication that would be administered, he doesn't necessarily become re-addicted.

PG: Then, if what you're saying is true, explain this quotation - "Junk causes permanent cellular alteration. Once a junkie, always a junkie. You can stop using junk but you're never off after the first habit." That's William Burroughs in Junky'

WSB: Yes - and I would question that statement now. At that time, I had not taken the apomorphine cure, which I.. was..the way I finally got off junk was through apomorphine, taken with Dr (John Yerbury) Dentin London, and after that cure, I..  I would question that statement, whether there is a permenant cellular alteration.

PG: You do feel yourself permenantly cured?

WSB: I do yes.  



Listen to Burroughs reading from Junky/Junkie (in its entirety) here. 

Happy 100th Birthday William S Burroughs

February 5, 2014, 2:00 am

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The William Burroughs Centennial. Author and visionary, William Seward Burroughs was born, exactly one hundred years ago today, on this very day. What better way to celebrate than by hearing his seminal Naked Lunch(in an authorized abridged version read by the author). This recording first appeared on a 3-CD set released by Warner Brothers in 1995, with an original score byBill Frisell,Eyvind Kang, and Wayne Horvitz, and produced by James Grauerholz and Hal Willner



Interviewer [Jurgen Ploog - from Klaus Maeck's 1991 William Burroughs - Commissioner of Sewers] : Lets get back to the subject of the writer. What is the original field of the writer? what mechanisms should he consider, work on..?

WSB: The word "should" should never arise. There is no such concept as "should" with regard to art or anything, unless you specify. In other words, if you're trying to build a bridge, then you can say we should do this and we should do that, with respect to getting the bridge built, but it doesn't float in a vaccuum, My feeling about art is that, one very important aspect of art is that it makes people aware of what they know and don't know that they know. Now this applies not only to.. to all creative thinking, For example, people on the sea-coast, in the Middle Ages, they knew the earth was round, they believed the earth was flat because the church said so. Galileo says.. tells them the earth is round, and nearly was burned at the stake for saying so. (Paul) Cezanne shows people what objects look at, seen from a certain  angle, in a certain light. and literally, people just thought he'd thrown paint on canvas, and they attacked his..his canvases with umbrellas when they were first exhibited. Well now, no child would have any difficulty in seeing a Cezanne, There's.. Once the breakthrough is made, there is a permanent expansion of awareness, but there's always reaction of rage, of outrage, at the first breakthrough, and, for example (James) Joyce then made people aware of their..their stream-of-consciousness, at least on one level, on a verbal level, and he was, at first, accused of being unintelligible. I don't think many people now would have any difficulty with Ulysses.
So, the artist, then, expands awareness, and once the..once the breakthrough is made this becomes part of the general awareness.

One hundred years. Thank you William, for permanently expanding our general awareness.

William S Burroughs - A Photo Portfolio

February 6, 2014, 3:00 am

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We’ve done this a couple of times before, but thought, in honor of the Centennial, to do it once again, a little portfolio of William by Allen and William and Allen.

[William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in Lawrence, Kansas - Photograph c. Pat Elliott ]

[Allen and William, Lawrence, KS, May 30, 1991. photo probably snapped by James Grauerholz with Allen's camera]

[William with Rusky (the Russian Blue), and Allen, Lawrence, KS,  March 18, 1992. photo likely snapped by James Grauerholz with Allen's camera.]

[William rowing across Lone Star Lake near Lawrence, KS, May 30, 1991. photo
c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] 

[Allen in mirror snapping  photo of William, Steven Lowe's house, July 19, 1992. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[William waiting for subway train, New York City, Fall 1953. c. Allen Ginsberg Estate] 

[above and preceding two images,  Allen's East 7th St apartment, New York City,  Fall 1953. Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[At Naropa University, moments before a reading event, July 28, 1985. Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[Signing copies of The Western Lands, at the Bunker, New York City, December 20, 1987. Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[Naropa University, Boulder CO July 28, 1985. Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[William in his livingroom, Lawrence, KS, March 22, 1991. Photo c. Allen Ginsberg Estate]

[Allen and William, still from Burroughs: The Movie by Howard Brookner]

Friday's Weekly Round-Up - 164

February 7, 2014, 3:30 am

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[William Burroughs circa 1953 - Photograph by Allen Ginsberg c. The Estate of Allen Ginsberg]

Tonight in London



Tonight in New York City



Meanwhile, in Bloomington, Indiana



So William Burroughs Centennial week passes (tho' plenty more Centennial events to come - look out for a flood of New York City events, for example, in April)



In New York, Marshall Weber gave/presented a marathon reading at the Munch Gallery. 
In London, Iain Sinclair spoke ("Ghosts of A Ghost, William Burroughs Time Surgery and the Death of the Image"). In Paris, Cabaret Toxique gave a multi-media spirited salute to him; in Zurich, in Berlin, in Toronto... elsewhere, more events.  

 In St Louis, there was an evening celebration and an afternoon by-the-cold-grave-site gathering. 


[William Burroughs grave-stone, Bellefontaine Cemetery, St Louis. Missouri, Feb 5, 2014 - Photograph by Danny Wicentowski] 

This Sunday, at City Lights in San Francisco , "An Algebra of Apocalypse" - Jello Biafra, V Vale,Robert Gluck, Kevin Killian, among others, will "explore the fiction and philosophy of one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century."


[William Burroughs' typewriter - Photograph by Peter Ross]

Here's some gleanings from William's (world-wide) press coverage this week, starting with... 
Will Self, last week, in The Guardian,
Sand Avidar-Walzer, in the L.A.Review of Books.
and Jim Ruland and David Ulin in the L.A.Times.

Danny Wicentowski presents the birth-place (local, St Louis, Missouri) angle. 
Frank Morris, the (Lawrence), Kansas focus, 
Tom Vitale on NPR presents an over-view. 

Darran Anderson considers his work in The Quietus,
Simon Warner in The Conversation,
Levi Asher at Literary Kicks.  

Ken Layne at Gawker pens the somewhat ambiguous note "Paranoid Burlesque" 
Davis Schneiderman chimes in on the Huffington Post -"Exploding Five Major Myths" 
Stephanie Nikolopoulos delivers "One Hundred Facts" (count 'em!) 
Here's Jerry Portwood's profile "Today in Gay History - William Burroughs Turns One Hundred", in Out.

The BBC features on its web-site five first-hand reminiscences. (One of those

remembering him, hisbiographer Barry Miles, also speaks to the experience of first encountering Naked Lunchhere).

Flavorwire has "Twelve Cultural Icons on His Influence" 

Here's another friend recollecting,John Giorno 
(his spoken-word performance on the death of Burroughs, in 1997, can be foundhere) 

andThurston Moore (ex-Sonic Youth) remembers him here as a rock n roll and cultural influence.

Non-English recollections and notices. Too many to mention, but we might single out Michael Kellner in Der Spiegel(other German-language postings here, here and here),
Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, Polish, Russian..

The two-day gathering in Salerno, Italy, at the University, "Saccheggiate Il Louvre" was a crucial and important gathering.

Other news? There is other news.

Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums had a book launch last night in Tehran, in Farid Qadami's Persian translation



Philip Whalen's Invisible Idylls (with an introduction by Joanne Kyger) - that one's in English 

Neal Cassady's Birthday is tomorrow (and more of that tomorrow). Tonight Denver celebrates the Fifth Annual Neal Cassady Birthday Bash (8 o'clock, upstairs at the Mercury Cafe) with special guestsJohn Sinclair and the Blues Scholars and the David Amram with his Quartet (augmented by jazz masters, Richie Cole and Janine Santana)  Cathy, Jami and John Allen Cassady will be there presenting a special tribute to their mother, the late Carolyn Cassady   



Bruce Weber's obituary for Rene Ricard appeared yesterday in the New York Times.