Interviews
Interview with William S. Burroughs
(Originally appeared in Journal For the Protection of All Beings, 1961) By Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg Gregory Corso: What is your department? William Burroughs: Kunst und Wissenschaft. Gregory Corso: What say you about political conflicts? William Burroughs: Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political conflicts is to make the mistake of the bull in the ring, you are charging the cloth. That is what politics is for, to teach [...]
David Britton and Michael Butterworth on William S. Burroughs
David Britton and Michael Butterworth are the founders of Savoy Books. To call Savoy a publishing house is rather like calling Charles Manson a criminal -- it's correct but it fails to account for so much more. A frequent contributor to New Worlds magazine, Butterworth established himself at a young age as an important figure in the "New Wave" of science fiction that also included J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and others. Britton became notorious for his first novel, Lord Horror, which earned him a distinction that even Burroughs failed to acquire: it became the first literary work banned [...]
A Conversation With William S. Burroughs
By Simone Lazzeri Ellis (Originally Appeared in Contemporanea, 1990) To set the stage for this interview, which was originally published in 1990, Ms. Ellis kindly responded to some questions from RealityStudio. When I did this interview, I was the chief art critic for the Santa Fe New Mexican, which William knew because he'd been to Santa Fe, I believe the year before, in 1989. I wrote for national and European art magazines as well. An Italian / US magazine, Contemporanea, approached me for a report on Santa Fe's art scene (which I did regularly after that until the magazine [...]
Fragment of an Interview with Allen Ginsberg
(Originally appeared in the Berkeley Barb, 1974) Interviewer: I'd like to return to Burroughs' theory of evil. What would you say is its source? Ginsberg: Well, originally it was analyzed by William Lee the factualist (perhaps representative of a trust of giant insects from another galaxy) in Naked Lunch. But since then in Nova Express and Ticket That Exploded, and more recently in Exterminator! and The Job and The Wild Boys, the agency of the hallucinating Word is a virus from Venus so it's not other galaxies anymore — it's an external, extraterrestrial threat from within our own solar system. [...]
The Huncke Connection
Exclusive Interview with Beat Generation Icon Herbert Huncke By Johnny Strike I first traveled to Boulder, Colorado in 1981 to attend a summer course at the Naropa Institute called "Creative Reading." The teacher was none other than William S. Burroughs. It was a small class of maybe 15 students. Needless to say it was a flat out amazing experience. Years later Burroughs was kind enough to read, and favorably comment on some rough opening chapters from a manuscript that would eventually become my first novel. I returned to Boulder one year later to attend the Jack Kerouac Conference. Again I [...]
Interview with Malcolm Mc Neill
Artist Speaks about Collaborating with Burroughs on Ah Pook Is Here In 1970 Malcolm Mc Neill received a phone call from a man who asked to meet "the guy who knows how to draw me." The caller was William S. Burroughs. Mc Neill had recently illustrated a Burroughs text called "The Unspeakable Mr. Hart" for the underground paper Cyclops. Burroughs had been struck by how much Mr. Hart resembled him, even though he had never met Mc Neill and, as it turned out, Mc Neill knew relatively little about Burroughs. The young artist accepted an invitation to the flat Burroughs shared with Brion Gysin [...]
The Naked Lunch Report
by Gary Indiana (Originally appeared in the Village Voice, December 31 1991) This behind-the-scenes report, which includes interviews with William S. Burroughs and David Cronenberg, on the making of the Naked Lunch film has never been reprinted until now. A few points from the report had stuck in RealityStudio's mind all these years, and fortunately the yellowed pages torn from the Voice had remained in a file folder as well. Gary Indiana, author of Horse Crazy (which Burroughs compared to Genet), Rent Boy, and numerous other works of fiction and non-fiction, has kindly given permission to [...]
Which Is the Fly and Which Is the Human?
(Interview with William Burroughs and David Cronenberg, reprinted from Esquire, February 1992, pp 112-116.) by Lynn Snowden Deep in Kansas, darkly dressed, William S. Burroughs, a man who shot his wife in the head and waged war against a lifetime of guilt, who has sucked up every drug imaginable and survived, and who has made a fine career out of depravity, can't on this particular afternoon take another moment of a simple midwestern housefly buzzing around his head. "I can't stand flies," grumbles the seventy-seven-year-old author in that distinctively sepulchral voice, which retains a vestige of his St. Louis roots [...]
Interview with Professor Oliver Harris
Burroughs Scholar Speaks of Past and Forthcoming Publications Aside from James Grauerholz, executor of the Burroughs Estate, Oliver Harris may well be the most eminent living scholar of William Burroughs and his works. Senior Lecturer in the Department of American Studies at Keele University in England, Harris first made himself known to admirers of Burroughs as the editor of The Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959. Research on this tome helped to inspire his important critical book William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination, which emphasizes and delineates the role that letter-writing played in the development [...]
Interview with Gary Lee-Nova
Reading Burroughs Since the Beginning Gary Lee-Nova is a Vancouver-based artist known especially as an important figure in the "West Coast Scene" of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sometimes working under the pseudonym Art Rat, Lee-Nova has produced a sizable body of work ranging from film to painting, from cut-ups to mail art. Alongside his art-making, he has also maintained a passionate interest in William S. Burroughs since the late 1950s. He has studied, collected, and corresponded with Burroughs, and sometimes also carried Burroughsian inspirations in new directions (as in his cut-ups of comic strips). Seeing that Lee-Nova's career-long [...]
Interview with Hank O'Neal
Photographer Speaks about Burroughs Hank O'Neal is a photographer well known for his jazz and portrait photography. He collaborated with Berenice Abbott for many years, and also befriended many of the writers of the Beat generation. His portraits of William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and others can be seen on his web site. Abrams/Image will be publishing a new book of his photographs entitled Gay Day: The Golden Age of the Christopher Street Parade 1974-1983. The book chronicles the development of the gay pride parade in New York City's Greenwich Village. The book includes a never-before-published [...]
Interview with John Geiger
Author of Books on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine John Geiger is the author of four books. His first two concerned Arctic exploration. His next two, Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and The Dream Machine and Nothing Is True - Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, concerned the Beat movement. In an age when many authors opt for specialization, publishing book after book on the same topic, the range of Mr. Geiger's publications might strike the casual observer as odd. Here's a guy who is a Governor and [...]
Interview with Rob Johnson
Author of The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas Rob Johnson is a professor of English and American literature at the University of Texas Pan-American — which, it turns out, is just down the road a bit from Pharr, Texas, where William S. Burroughs lived in the late 1940s. (Google map) Taking note of the proximity while researching the Beats, Professor Johnson began a quest to flush out this almost completely unknown period of Burroughs' life. Amazingly, he managed to locate and interview people who "knew Burroughs when" — knew him when he was [...]
Burroughs Garage Sale
Friend and Neighbor Sells Burroughs Collectibles This past weekend a friend and neighbor of William S. Burroughs, Patricia Elliott Marvin, held a garage sale to dispense with some 30 boxes of Burroughs and Beat memorabilia she'd collected over the years. The memorabilia included signed books, posters, art prints, drawings, t-shirts, and a note from Burroughs explaining how to care for his cats. There don't seem to have been any followup articles to explain how the sale went, but several local papers carried stories prior to the event (see Lawrence Journal-World and the Kansas City Star). And [...]
Interview with Lakefront Carol
Owner Selling Burroughs' Former Cabin "Lakefront Carol" is the current owner of a lakefront bungalow formerly belonging to William S. Burroughs. She and her husband are selling the cabin on ebay (PDF) and are planning on passing it along to a friend if the cabin doesn't sell by May, 2006. Jed Birmingham had some thoughts about the collectibility of the cabin, and RealityStudio emailed Lakefront Carol to ask her a few questions. Here's what she had to say. My husband and I had never met William [...]
Dead Aim: The Unseen Art of William S. Burroughs
Major Exhibit of Burroughs' Artwork to Open in London A major exhibit of William S. Burroughs' artwork will open September 14th, 2005, in London at the Riflemaker gallery. "Dead Aim: The Unseen Art of William S. Burroughs" is the first installment of a three-part exhibition organized in collaboration with the Burroughs Estate. The exhibit is being curated by the gallery directors, Tot Taylor and Virginia Damtsa, along with Jose Ferez Kuri, editor of the book Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age, [...]