Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Several months ago I received an email from an editor at Black Dog Publishing which operates out of London. Black Dog prints books on a variety of topics such as photography, architecture, film and design. They did a book on Independent record shops that I am dying to own. One of the publisher’s upcoming projects is a book on German rock, experimental and electronic music, and the 1960s counterculture. The editor contacted me for some images of Rhinozeros, a German little magazine published out of Hamburg, edited by brothers Rolf-Gunther and Klaus-Peter Dienst from 1960-1965. Klaus-Peter provided the iconic calligraphy. Burroughs appeared in four of the ten issues. I had Issues Five and Seven, which I purchased at the legendary Nelson Lyon Sale in 1999. I happily provided the images.

The request got me obsessed with Rhinozeros. I have touched on this remarkable little magazine in a piece I wrote about Burroughs’ early 1960s mag appearances in Germany and Belgium. There is not a lot of information on Rhinozeros in English, and I do not have much to add to what I wrote in that piece, but I did start digging around the internet looking to piece together a complete run of this visually stunning publication. A bookseller in Switzerland had several issues and a click to Powell’s website filled in the holes. Now I have all ten issues.

So here are the covers of all ten issues as well as scans of all the Burroughs appearances. The images make clear that some of the most exciting visuals in all of Burroughs’ oeuvre in any format, be it novel, broadside, magazine or painting, reside within the pages of Rhinozeros. The Dienst brothers were interested in the Beat Generation, concrete poetry, and the cut-up technique. Klaus-Peter knew Brion Gysin and would have been aware of the cut-up soon after its rediscovery. The Dienst brothers then discovered Burroughs through Gysin. In turn, Rhinozeros helped introduce the cut-up to a small German audience. Not surprisingly, Burroughs was a major presence in the magazine, but his influence spread throughout Germany during a renaissance in that country’s poetry and literature of the 1960s. German writers like Carl Weissner, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, and Jurgen Ploog took immediately to the work of Burroughs, particularly the cut-up.

Issue Five usually gets singled out for special attention by American collectors. This is the Beat Issue and features Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure and Peter Orlovsky in its pages. The issue is also the only one in color which makes for some remarkable visuals. Peter Ellis Booksellers, operating out of London, has a truly special copy of this issue for sale. Tipped in with the mag are four T.L.S. from Rolf-Dieter Dienst to Whalen and David Meltzer requesting material for his magazine and a projected anthology. Whalen has doodled on one of the letters and has written: “How far off is our history” and “How far off our history is.” The letters makes this special issue of Rhinozeros even more so.

My copy is signed by Burroughs and Gregory Corso. Interested parties might be aware of Burroughs’ importance in German literature of the 1960s, but Corso’s equally important role might be less well known. After a trip to Venice in the Summer of 1960, Corso arrived in Berlin in July of that year and stayed there for several months. In that time, Corso performed readings, wrote poetry, and met with poets and academics. Two years earlier, Corso began work on a German anthology of Beat writers with Walter Hollerer, a professor out of Berlin. In letters from late summer / early fall 1960, Corso writes on the topic of Beat anthologies and he hoped his anthology would be published within the year. Junge Amerikanische Lyrik was eventually published in 1961, introducing the poets of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology to Germany. So it could be argued that Corso was the face of the Beats for German poets at this time. Not coincidentally, Rhinozeros was started in 1960, possibly around the time of Corso’s sojourn in Germany. Without a doubt, Corso’s presence raised awareness of the Beats in Germany and helped spread the word about New America Poetry throughout the country.

Rhinozeros Covers

Rhinozeros 1
1960

Rhinozeros 2
1960

Rhinozeros 3
1961

Rhinozeros 4
1961

Rhinozeros 5 (View complete issue)
1961

Rhinozeros 6
1962

Rhinozeros 7
1962

Rhinozeros 8
1963

Rhinozeros 9
1964

Rhinozeros 10
1965 (?)

Burroughs Texts in Rhinozeros

Wind Hand Caught in the Door
Rhinozeros 5
1961

Novia Express
Rhinozeros 6
1962

Be Cheerful, Sir (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 7
1962

Der Doktor auf der Bühne (Cut-Up)
Rhinozeros 9
1964

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In 1963, the Times Literary Supplement announced the arrival of Dead Fingers Talk with a cry of Ugh! Later that year, Burroughs received the first issue of My Own Mag and responded with a resounding, Yes! In Jeff Nuttall, Burroughs found a fellow traveler who delighted in tweaking the noses of the establishment. For the next two years, they created some of the most interesting work of the mimeo revolution.

Here on RealityStudio, I have attempted to cobble together a history of My Own Mag with bibliographies, chronologies, essays, personal histories and, of course, images. The first issue of Mimeo Mimeo featured a 2500 word essay on My Own Mag that was distilled from a larger 8000+ word mishmash of notes and commentary delving deep into Burroughs’ work in My Own Mag. I have hammered this material into readable shape and offer it here as a supplement to the material already available on RealityStudio.

Some of the material will be familiar to those who have read the various essays on RealityStudio or Mimeo Mimeo, but there is also lots of new information as well. The new sections include close examinations of mimeography as a process and how it shaped and influenced the work of Burroughs and Nuttall. As far as I know, linkages of this type are in the early stages. Stenciling, inking, cross-hatching, paper size, printing techniques, and typography are all put under the microscope, particularly in The Dutch Schultz Issue in My Own Mag No. 13. In addition, links have been made beginning the process of connecting My Own Mag to underground comix and graphic novels, particularly the collaborations with Malcolm Mc Neill.

This is by no means a final statement on My Own Mag. It is in fact a request for information. If any readers have further insights or corrections, please past them along. I would be particularly interested in hearing from anybody with a working knowledge of the mimeograph process. Any details on other mimeos, like TISH, C: A Journal of Poetry, Fuck You, a magazine of the arts, Floating Bear, particularly on how they were created and how that process influenced the content would be appreciated. My knowledge of mimeo is second hand and far from fully developed, and I would love to build on it. Please forward any articles, manuals, or other material on mimeo that you might have.

Desperate Times

Jeff Nuttall published the first issue of My Own Mag in a time of desperation. Despite the excitement generated by the Beatles and the development of an active youth culture, England in 1963 had yet to awaken into the full bloom of the Swinging London of 1966. Occupationally, Nuttall was stuck in a rut teaching at an English art school. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), in which Nuttall staked his political hopes, had stalled. The marches and speeches of CND seemed like dull pantomimes forcing Nuttall to frustration over their lack of relevance and effectiveness. Artistically, Nuttall’s plans for an art installation were stillborn, and the participating artists could only twiddle their thumbs until the logistics of what Nuttall suspected would be a dull show could be resolved.

Nuttall decided to start a mimeo literary magazine. Nuttall commandeered the art school’s mimeo machine. Bob Cobbing, a fellow poet and publisher, taught French at the school. He provided technical know-how and encouragement. The first issue was a mere three pages, but it packed a wallop. In Bomb Culture, Nuttall’s memoir / study of the underground, he writes, “The magazine, even those first three pages, used nausea and flagrant scatology as a violent means of presentation. I wanted to make the fundamental condition of living unavoidable by nausea. You can’t pretend it’s not there if you are throwing up as a result.” Nuttall mailed the first issue to roughly twenty people he thought might be interested, including Anselm Hollo, Ray Gosling, and William Burroughs. The inclusion of Burroughs testifies to his legendary status in the underground. In the 1960s, he was hardly “el hombre invisible” — he appeared seemingly everywhere on the little magazine circuit. Like Charles Bukowski, Burroughs first gained an audience from the alternative publishing scene, and he remained extremely active there even as his reputation grew in the 1960s.

In 1963-1964, William Burroughs stood at a crossroads as well. In the foreword to his bibliography, Burroughs writes, “1964… No. 4 Calle Larachi, Tangier. My Own Mag… smell of kerosene heaters, hostile neighbors, stones thudding against the door. Jeff Nuttall sent me a copy of My Own Mag and asked me to contribute. I recall the delivery of the first copies to which I had contributed was heralded by a wooden top crashing through the skylight.” The activities at No. 4 Calle Larachi (drug use, homosexuality, the constant comings and goings of British and American expats) raised the ire of Burroughs’ Arab neighbors who proceeded to harass him on a daily basis. Burroughs wanted to escape from this desperate and potentially dangerous situation. In addition, Burroughs’ attempt to connect with his son Billy failed in late 1963. Burroughs sent his son back to the States to live with his grandparents, so he was exhausted and upset by the experience. The first issue of My Own Mag provided some much needed comic relief. Burroughs inscribed the first issue of My Own Mag from collector Nelson Lyon’s complete set that was put on the block by Pacific Book Auctions in 1999, “this rare item My Own Mag cheered me when I was under siege in Tangier.”

Creatively, Burroughs also needed cheering. Grove Press planned to publish the final cut-up novel, Nova Express, in hardcover, in the summer of 1964. Burroughs realized that the cut-up novel was something of a dead end, but maybe more distressing was the fact that he had run out of usable source material. The seemingly endless Word Horde of notes, manuscripts, and drafts that resulted from the writing and editing of Naked Lunch was exhausted with the upcoming publication of Nova Express. The Yage Letters was published by City Lights in 1963, so Burroughs had mined his correspondence. Most of the letters to Ginsberg were too painful and too personal to publish. Similarly, Queer, Burroughs’ other manuscript from the 1950s, still cut too close to the bone for Burroughs to think of bringing it before the public eye. Burroughs needed a new direction.

On a more positive note, Burroughs for the first time in his life was in a secure financial position of his own creation. He received a sizable advance from Grove Press for Nova Express. In addition, Grove Press, unlike Olympia Press, provided royalty checks on a regular basis. These revenue streams provided him with the freedom to pursue the non-commercial cut-up to the fullest. Creatively, the cut-up provided a much needed outlet. As Burroughs realized, he just skimmed the surface of the technique’s possibilities in the cut-up novels.

What cheered Burroughs in that first issue of My Own Mag? In an editorial note on the cover, Nuttall writes, tongue firmly in cheek, My Own Mag “will appear every now and then… will be devoted to creations of unparalleled nobility… morals of unquestionable soundness high literary standards of traditional finesse. No dirty pitchers.” Nuttall’s flaunting of good taste, his sense of humor, and his willingness to toy with obscenity laws appealed to Burroughs. Burroughs saw in Nuttall a kindred spirit, and more importantly, a kindred spirit with a literary outlet.

Possibly, Burroughs was also drawn to the fact that My Own Mag was a mimeo production. The idea of taking the means of production into one’s own hands and out of the clutches of the established publishing industry went in line with Burroughs’ feelings towards the mainstream media. Burroughs understood the power of the corporate press, represented by the Time-Life Empire, to manipulate word and images. In the essay “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,” Burroughs writes, “Journalism is closer to the magical origin of writing than most fiction. That is, at least a few operators in this area — people like the late Hearst and Henry Luce — certainly quite clearly and consciously saw journalism as a magical operation designed to bring about certain effect. And the technology is the technology of magic; in the case of newspapers and magazines, mostly black magic.” Yet as Burroughs wrote in the Talking Asshole section of Naked Lunch, “there’s always a space between, in popular songs and Grade-B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness.” The mimeograph revolution served as a “space between” or “technology of magic” that could foster oppositional sentiment. In a letter to Nuttall reprinted in My Own Mag 9, Burroughs writes, “Well I hope pamphlet publication gets going have always yearned nostalgically for the old pamphlet days when writers fought in the streets.” Alternative publishing dovetailed with Burroughs’ ideas of smashing control.

Nuttall understood the creative and ideological possibilities of the mimeograph, and he drew attention to the mimeo process from the earliest issues of My Own Mag. Issue 1 is subtitled “a Super Absorbant (sic) periodical.” Images of Kleenex and toilet paper come to mind. The link to a tampon is especially strong given the cover illustration of a woman’s vagina and the text referencing childbirth. The idea of My Own Mag as a disposable, inconsequential “rag” is foregrounded. Yet “super absorbant” (sic) also refers to the process of transferring ink to paper that was such a delicate art with the mimeograph.

The foregrounding of the mimeo process continues in issue two subtitled “an odour-fill periodical.” The reference to toilet paper dovetails with the scatological impulse of Nuttall. The title conveys the impression that the contents of the magazine are “shit.” But My Own Mag is good shit, as in a powerful drug. The subtitle plays on the distinctive odor of mimeo and ditto machines. In his memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson writes, “Of all the tragic losses since the 1960s, mimeograph paper may be the greatest. With its rapturously fragrant, sweetly aromatic pale blue ink, mimeograph paper was literally intoxicating. Two deep drafts of a freshly run-off mimeograph worksheet and I would be the education system’s willing slave for up to seven hours.” Bryson’s memory is a little fuzzy as he is probably confusing the spirit duplicator or the rexograph with the mimeograph. Nuttall used a Roneo or Gestetner mimeograph machine that utilized stencils. Like the urban legend of smoking banana peels, the myth of the intoxicating smell of the mimeograph is strong. A Google search of “smell of mimeograph” highlights its power of association. For many, the mimeograph triggers trips back to childhood and school. Nuttall working and printing in an art school would be well aware of the odors surrounding various primitive print technologies as well as the myths surrounding them.

The idea of printing cut-ups in a mimeo must have appealed to Burroughs. Burroughs frequently suggests that the cut-up causes a derangement of the senses and possesses intoxicating qualities. Interestingly, Burroughs cut up the writings of Rimbaud in the early experiments included in Minutes to Go. In The Third Mind, Brion Gysin links reading cut-ups with getting high. In “Cut-ups: A Project for Disastrous Success,” Gysin writes, “I hope you may discover this unusual pleasure for yourselves — this short-lived but unique intoxication.” In the same essay, he equates the permutation poems with an ether experience. These examples show that Burroughs would be receptive to the druggy in-jokes presented in My Own Mag and may have seen mimeo as uniquely suited for publishing cut-ups.

There is a tenuous link between the mimeograph and Burroughs’ family history. Any business machine, such as a mimeograph, computer, or typewriter, conjures up images of Burroughs’ grandfather William Seward Burroughs, the inventor of the adding machine. In The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of the Typewriter, Darren Wershler-Henry writes of the importance of the typewriter to Burroughs as a writer. Wershler-Henry writes, “With a family tree entwined so explicitly with the history of the technology of typewriting, it’s not surprising that William S. Burroughs uses the typewriter as a metaphor for God.” Burroughs realized that he could use the typewriter as a weapon against the corporate system and against his family legacy. Both were represented by Burroughs Adding Machine Company. Although Burroughs Corporation did not manufacture mimeograph machines, the adding machine resides in the same family of machines as the mimeograph: a combination of typewriter and printing technologies. The mimeograph is another business machine that Burroughs could use as a force for rebellion. 

My Own Mag Issues 1-4: The Cut-up Method as Feeling Out Process

Burroughs’ first appearance in My Own Mag gives little indication of just how far Nuttall and he would explore the boundaries of mimeo and cut-up in the later issues. In issue two, Burroughs contributes a short cut-up letter expressing his interest in My Own Mag. The cut-up in the form of a letter appears in Burroughs’ correspondence soon after the method’s rediscovery by Gysin in the late summer of 1959. The publication of the Yage Letters by City Lights in 1963 brought the epistolatory cut-up before the eyes of the public. Prior to 1963, bits and pieces of the Yage Letters appeared in little magazines, like Floating Bear. Like the cut-up novels, the cut-up letter did not radically experiment with the page as a field. The format was limited to the standard block of the paragraph.

Around the publication of the second issue, Nuttall and Burroughs met each other. In Bomb Culture, Nuttall writes, “Burroughs sent his first testing letters from Tangier. In the bitter winter of 1964, he came to London.” Nuttall downplays this meeting and highlights the awkwardness of it. As Nuttall describes it, he got drunk at the local pub with Burroughs and Tony Balch. Conversation faltered with Nuttall feeling left out. Nuttall stumbled home somewhat embarrassed and disappointed.

The meeting between Nuttall and Burroughs must have made more of an impression on both men than Nuttall lets on. It served as a feeling-out session for further collaborations. The face-to-face solidified the meeting of the minds that had occurred through the mail. The Special Tangier issue of My Own Mag followed in May 1964. As discussed below, only in issue 5 does My Own Mag hit its stride and does the Burroughs / Nuttall collaboration hit the ground running. The Special Tangiers Issue features Burroughs on the cover thus announcing the fact that Burroughs was a focus of and major contributor to the magazine. Likewise, Burroughs becomes a character in the “Perfume Jack” comic strip that runs through many issues of My Own Mag. Clearly, Burroughs made an impression on Nuttall.

The feeling was mutual as Burroughs saw in Nuttall a new source of inspiration for the cut-up other than Brion Gysin. Issue four of My Own Mag contains a grid experiment. Burroughs took the idea of the grid from Brion Gysin. Gysin’s permutation poems and his calligraphy paintings explored the grid in detail. Burroughs incorporates visual elements by drawing lines and inscribing the piece. In creating the skin for the mimeo machine, Nuttall probably forged Burroughs’ handwriting. Nuttall responded to Burroughs’ grid experiment in issue 6 with the cut-up issue. The format of Issue 6, like “Warning Warning Warning Warning,” is a grid. Ports of Entry, Robert Sobieszek’s book on William Burroughs and his achievement as an artist, mentions “Warning Warning Warning Warning” and My Own Mag in its opening chapter. This chapter situates the cut-up in a poetic tradition including Mallarmé, the surrealists and Dadaists, Fluxus and concrete poetry. The book provides a picture of Burroughs’ grid cut-up that was a manuscript page from The Third Mind that Burroughs and Gysin began work on in New York City in 1965. Jackson MacLow and composer John Cage worked with grids in the mid-1960s. The grid allowed the element of chance into composition and created complex guidelines for reading or writing a poem that decreased authorial control. The appeal to Burroughs is obvious. 

Like the letter, the grid format represents an early phase of Burroughs’ experimentation with the cut-up. Since his discovery of the method in the Beat Hotel, Gysin had been the major influence in Burroughs’ pursuit of the cut-up. However given Gysin’s artistic background it is strange that the early cut-ups highlighted textuality and ignored the visual aspects that could be achieved via collage and assemblege. So it could be argued that the cut-up experiment had reached an impasse as it had been published up to January 1964. The presentation of the cut-up stagnated in rigid formats like blocks of text. Burroughs’ invitation to cut-up and read the grid “any which way” suggested an escape that needed further exploration. Nuttall and My Own Mag provided another way out.

My Own Mag Issues 5-10: The Third Mind of Nuttall and Burroughs and the three-column and newspaper formats

While much has been made of Gysin’s creative impact on Burroughs, particularly regarding the cut-up method, little has been written on the relationship between Nuttall and Burroughs. Nuttall provided the publishing outlet, the encouragement and the collaboration Burroughs needed for the next phase of the cut-up. Like Gysin, Nuttall helped stir up the creative impulse in Burroughs. In the winter of 1964, around the time Nuttall and Burroughs met, the cut-up entered a new stage of development. As Barry Miles discusses in the final chapter of El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs began experimenting with the three-column format in February 1964. Miles writes, “At the same time as working on the photographic collages, Bill began to develop the three-column technique he had begun to experiment with in New York in the sixties. He began to produce texts which explored this fact and, as usual, did a great number of them. He started to keep a diary in February 1964 which exploited the three-column technique. If he were to take a trip to Gibraltar, which he did frequently, he would write an account of the trip in one column, just like a normal diary: what was said by the officials, what he overheard on the airplane. The next column would present his memories… The third column would be his reading column, quoting from the books he had with him.” Scarcely three months later in May, Nuttall published the first of these efforts.

It should be noted that the three column layout did not appear first in My Own Mag. In 1961 in Outsider 1, a section of the Soft Machine was structured in three columns but this may have been the work of the editor, Jon Edgar Webb. The format was used again in Floating Bear 24. Again this could have been Leroi Jones and Diane Di Prima’s decision, not Burroughs’. The work featured in the Outsider and Floating Bear is, in essence, poetry. The work is in line with the poetic cut-ups presented in Minutes to Go and The Exterminator.  

In Issue 2 of My Own Mag, Nuttall presented a text of his own in three-column format. This may have inspired Burroughs to explore the format in earnest. In The Special Tangier Issue (issue 5), Burroughs’ first three column piece, The Moving Times, appears. In its simplest form, this format, as used in The Outsider and Floating Bear, is another form of the grid. In The Moving Times, Burroughs gives directions on how to read the piece, guiding readers from column to column. The piece could also be read across the three columns. This crisscross and crossover effect represents a derivation of the “read any which way” of “Warning Warning Warning Warning.” The similarities to the grid in issue 4 are quite noticeable.  

Yet The Moving Times provides a twist that Burroughs would explore for over a year. Burroughs links the three-column cut-up to the format, content, and culture of the newspaper as well as to the act of reading a newspaper. In The Moving Times in issue 5, the mock newspaper is simple in layout. There are no images and the format mimics the front page of a daily paper like the New York Times. In Bomb Culture, Nuttall spends a few pages describing this new phase in Burroughs’ development. Clearly, Nuttall realized that the material Burroughs sent for the Tangier Issue marked an exciting new path creatively for Burroughs. Other readers noted the importance of this issue as well. Burroughs and Nuttall received responses from Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach after this issue. This correspondence and the resulting collaborations would form the closest thing to a movement or school relating to the cut-up. 

The development of the three-column technique and its link to the newspaper cannot be separated from Burroughs’ evolving relationship with My Own Mag and Nuttall. Seeing the possibilities of the mimeograph and Nuttall’s obvious talent with mimeo layout may have encouraged Burroughs to explore this avenue further. In addition, My Own Mag radicalizes and parodies the form and content of the long tradition of boy’s magazines in Great Britain. Periodicals, like Gem and Magnet, provided easily digested fantasies about public and private school adventures of a cast of easily recognizable stock figures. The falsity of these fantasies and their repressive nature must have been on Nuttall’s mind as he taught in art school. In 1939, George Orwell wrote an essay analyzing these magazines. He mentions that they were stuck in a fantasy vision of England in 1910 oblivious to the changes in the world order. At the end of the essay, Orwell wonders why a left leaning boy’s weekly never developed. Nuttall provides that weekly. Nuttall’s title, My Own Mag, refers to actual titles of boy’s weeklies. Boy’s Own Paper and Boy’s Own Magazine are two examples. In the two copies of issue 12 that I have studied, Nuttall attaches two pages of Our Own Magazine, a moralistic “penny dreadful” from the Victorian Era. Burroughs may have seen this connection and was encouraged to create a cut-up newspaper. In pieces like The Moving Times, Burroughs radicalized and parodied the mainstream newspapers particularly the New York Times.  

Burroughs linked the three-column format with the act of reading a newspaper. In an interview published in Paris Review in 1965, Burroughs states, “[C]ut-ups make explicit a psychosensory process that is going on all the time anyway. Somebody is reading a newspaper, and his eye follows the column in the proper Aristotelian manner, one idea and sentence at a time. But subliminally he is reading the columns on either side and is aware of the person sitting next to him. That’s a cut-up.” Experimenting with the newspaper as form and reading activity refers back to the discovery of the cut-up technique. Tristan Tzara, the surrealist who first discovered the cut-up, writes, “To make a dadaist poem. Take a newspaper. Take a pair of scissors.” In the late summer of 1959, Gysin rediscovered the technique by slicing into some newspapers that were behind a canvas he was working on. So in a sense, the next stage of the cut-up as a form was always present, but Burroughs relationship with Nuttall and My Own Mag may have helped encourage this development.

Burroughs also incorporated the text of newspapers into his My Own Mag cut-ups. As Davis Schneiderman explores in a draft research paper, the three-column experiments (for example, The Coldspring News, Moving Times) featured in My Own Mag and other places, like The Spero, all utilized the same front page of the New York Times from September 17, 1899. Numerous postcards mailed to Nuttall may reveal why. The postcards are postmarked from Gibraltar and feature scenes from the area. As Miles points out, Gibraltar was an area of fascination for Burroughs and a key source for the new direction the cut-ups were taking. One postcard in particular makes reference to the Southport Gates inscribed with the date 1899 and the cut-up experiment The Coldspring News (Nov 21, 1964: “Old arch there with The Coldspring News. [Date on the arch is 1899]“). Burroughs viewed Gibraltar as a magical place, a portal allowing travel in time and space. The Southport Gates symbolized this point of intersection. The cut-up recreated such points repeatedly. Possibly, Burroughs chose an edition of the New York Times from 1899 due to the date inscription on the Southport Gates in Gibraltar. 

No matter how the idea of the newspaper format first developed, Burroughs and Nuttall understood that they were providing an underground newspaper even if such periodical had yet to become commonplace in 1964. One of the Burroughs supplements was called The Burrough. The reference to a burrow or burrowing highlights the underground nature of the magazine as well as the ability of the cut-up to uncover or dig up the hidden messages within the word and image of the mainstream media. The Burrough also conjures up the idea of an intelligence bureau. Burroughs often viewed himself as an agent operating against the forces of control. 

For quite some time, Burroughs flirted with the idea of editing an alternative publication. In 1958, he and Gregory Corso considered a magazine called Interpol. The editorial policy of Interpol and My Own Mag (as demonstrated by Nuttall’s commentary in the first two issues and Burroughs / Corso’s letter of 1958) share a concern with the irreverent and the obscene as well as providing an alternative regulator to the dominant power structure and media. The Burrough supplement in My Own Mag with its link to policing organizations (The Bureau) is Burroughs’ resurrection of the dormant Interpol concept. (See my pieces on Apomorphine and Mimeo and on Interpol for a fuller discussion of these ideas.) By 1964, the cut-up was the new drug that fascinated Burroughs, and My Own Mag provided the forum to explore this antidote to word addiction.  

Nuttall’s choice of paper also creates associations with newspapers that tie into Burroughs’concepts of the mainstream media. For example, Nuttall utilized colored construction paper for most issues of My Own Mag. Take the Tangier Issue with Burroughs on the cover. The cover is green with Burroughs mimeo’d wearing a fez and smoking a cigarette. The green cover conjures up images of marijuana which plays in perfectly with Tangiers and Burroughs. Yet Burroughs’ cut-ups, particularly the mock newspaper ones, are usually printed on off-white or yellowed paper. In the choice of paper, Nuttall attempts to recreate the look and feel of a newspaper. The suggestion of old and freshly printed newsprint is strong given the choice of colored paper elsewhere. Given Burroughs’ preoccupation with the Hearst Empire and his control of word and image, the paper allows Burroughs and Nuttall to present a counter version of “yellow journalism” in their underground paper. The idea of a Burroughs “edited” supplement developed more fully as My Own Mag pushed on. Burroughs and Nuttall fully explore the possibilities of the newspaper as a form to be complicated and parodied. Articles, comic strips, editorial pages, letters to the editor, Dear Abby style advice columns are all utilized by Burroughs and Nuttall.  

In 1965, Burroughs lent the name The Moving Times to a poster for Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma Project. This project represented Trocchi’s take on the philosophies and politics of the Situationists. Sigma and the Situationists had strong ties to the community around Nuttall. The Sigma Project members and their addresses appear in the magazine. In addition, My Own Mag and the supplements edited by Burroughs can be viewed as examples of detournment, the primary weapon of the Situationists. Sigma is also referred to in the Perfume Jack comic strip where it is linked to the kite in Burroughs’ cut-up “Over the Last Skyscrapers a Silent Kite.” The Moving Times poster was designed to be hung in the London subway and serve as a sounding board for the Project. This use of the broadside goes back to its early roots as a means to disseminate information on the side of barns and the like. On the broadside, there is a small blurb for My Own Mag that states, “Read realnews in My Own Mag…” This highlights the fact that My Own Mag was viewed as an alternative newspaper and an underground news source. Clearly, Burroughs developed and expanded the three-column format at a rapid rate from issue Five. The progression of “The Moving Times” from a simple three column cut-up to a My Own Mag supplement to a broadside disseminating information for a proposed international underground movement testifies to Burroughs’ increasing ambition for the cut-up technique as well as his belief in the cut-up’s revolutionary nature.

A My Own Mag Supplement: A Digression on Nuttall as Editor and Mimeographer

The editorial relationship between Burroughs and Nuttall deserves some exploration. As the scant correspondence I have reviewed shows, Burroughs was allowed free reign and basically submitted to Nuttall his latest cut-up works straight from the typewriter. Nuttall was open to anything. Burroughs’ editorial comments were short and not very detailed so Nuttall had a lot of leeway in how he wanted to present the manuscript. Nuttall retyped Burroughs’ manuscripts onto the mimeo skins. In some cases, Burroughs encouraged Nuttall to insert images as he saw fit. (April 6, 1964: “By all means, put your drawings in ‘any picture’ spaces.”) In issue 7, Nuttall drew the images that accompany Burroughs’ cut-up. In addition, Nuttall stenciled the format for the grid / scrapbook / three-column experiment of issue 11. This highlights the collaborative nature of Burroughs’ working method as well as his desire to subvert authorial control. 

According to Carl Weissner, Burroughs trusted Nuttall completely and allowed Nuttall to copy his signature and handwriting (see issue 11 and issue 4). These “forgeries” are uncredited. I hesitate to describe this as forgery as it does not get to the heart of the collaborative nature of the Nuttall / Burroughs relationship and has a negative connotation. Yet the idea of forgery must have appealed to Burroughs familiar as he was to forging the signature of croakers on phony scripts in drugstores.

For example, in issue 15, we can see the transformation of a Burroughs’ manuscript to the pages of My Own Mag. “WB Talking” and “Gas Girls” show that Nuttall possessed a very light editorial hand. I have not done a word-by-word analysis but the basic format of the piece is unaltered and I would suspect the text to be unchanged as well. Yet as these manuscript pages show, Burroughs incorporated color into his manuscripts. The New York Times archives have a page from the “Dutch Schultz” cut-up that appeared in Issue 13. Burroughs painted on the manuscript pages. The color and the brushwork on these pieces remind me of the later artwork painted on manila folders. These later works appear every so often on eBay. In any case, the manuscripts for the later My Own Mags merge the three-column cut-up with abstract painting. Burroughs’ scrapbooks of the period are full of these experiments joining the visual and the textual. Given the limits of mimeo, Nuttall could not faithfully reproduce the full visual nature of Burroughs’ work of this period, yet the effort to recreate all the elements of the manuscript is admirable. The later issues of My Own Mag provide as detailed a look into Burroughs’ exploration of the visual implications of the cut-up as was available for years until Burroughs’ artwork was revisited in exhibitions and catalogs, like Ports of Entry. 

Nuttall’s manipulation of stencils and the mimeograph deserve special mention here. One of the pleasures of My Own Mag is its physical appearance. Nuttall is wholly responsible for that. His artwork is intricate, funny, and extremely skillful given the limitations of the technology. In a recent book entitled, da levy and the mimeograph revolution, mimeograph techniques are studied in detail. levy’s work with its blobs, its acknowledgement of the physical nature of ink, its superimpositions, and its fading brings to the fore the inking process in mimeo. This is described as “dirty” mimeo. Such work reminds me of Abstract Expressionist and Pop techniques. I am thinking of levy’s Scarab Poems and “AGAIn? Yur primer cord is showing.” The solid band of ink of “AGAIn?” reminds me of a mimeo Rothko, if Rothko incorporated text in his painting. There are splashes of ink and blots like in the work of Jackson Pollock. The superimpositions, fading of text and image, and the failure to re-ink calls to mind Warhol’s Marilyns of the early 1960s where such affects bring to mind mortality, impermanence, transitoriness.

Nuttall stained his magazine (Issue 9) but I do not get the same flashes from his work. Nuttall’s staining is not done with black ink. The yellow / green stain suggests vomit or urine, not paint. The stain also suggests apomorphine as apomorphine stains green. Therefore the cover of issue 9 highlights Burroughs’ view of mimeo as regulator. (See my article on apomorphine and mimeo for a fuller discussion of this idea.) In The Apomorphine Times of issue 12 of My Own Mag, Burroughs lamented that The Burrough only lasted for two issues. He writes that “not even the generous injections of the green and ready could keep it afloat for more than two issues…” For years, I assumed that the green and ready referred to the influx of young writers, like Carl Weissner and Claude Pélieu, drawn to the cut-ups. It does on one level but it also refers to apomorphine. In issue 9, Nuttall cut-out the bottom corner revealing a green page underneath. The green stain and the cut-out could represent the injection of the “green and ready” that Burroughs talks about in The Apomorphine Times. Burroughs’ quote suggests that not even his apomorphine texts of the period could prevent the eventual demise of his mags and My Own Mag itself. This highlights Burroughs’ awareness of the fleeting nature of mimeo. The cover of issue 9 aptly demonstrates the playful interplay between Burroughs and Nuttall as well as the serious ideologies behind such touches. Everything had a purpose in the construction of My Own Mag.

The general fading and illegibility of the text in My Own Mag I take to be “the standard limitations of mimeo” and not an intended and manipulated affect. Nuttall appears less concerned with making his typography illegible. This is not to say that he does not explore the possibilities of typography, script and the technologies of writing (for example an examination of Nuttall’s use of handwriting or his forging of Burroughs’ hand proves that). Instead, Nuttall does not explore creative inking. Unlike levy, Nuttall does not treat printer’s ink like paint. Instead he chooses to add the element of disruption with the use of scissors, the razor, fire or collage. Nuttall attacks the mimeo page like the surface of a canvas. The use of the scissors or razor by Nuttall parallels and comments on the cut-up method that so interested him. The visuals in My Own Mag must have been difficult to create with a stencil. The visuals, like the comic strips and covers in My Own Mag, are meant to come through clearly, maybe an example of what is called “clean” mimeo. Nuttall strives for clarity in his inking. The draftsman, not the painter, in Nuttall comes to the fore.

Nuttall’s concern with the act of stenciling is not surprising given his creative preoccupations. Unlike levy, Nuttall ignores many possibilities inherent in inking, but he explores in great and painstaking detail the act of stenciling. The layouts of his pages are amazing. Clearly Nuttall took care and satisfaction in the cutting of stencils. The fascination with the cut and the creative power of the act of cutting fascinates Nuttall. The act of creating mimeo with stencil or typewriter allowed Nuttall another means to explore the cut-up. Like the scrapbooks Burroughs experimented with at the time, the mimeograph merges word and image in a single creative process.

I would say that Burroughs preferred clean mimeo. Compare Burroughs more visual cut-ups to levy’s Tibetan Stroboscope. Both writers utilize elements of typewritten text and collage, but levy as we have seen deliberately makes his text illegible. Burroughs did not manipulate illegibility in his manuscripts in order to further his creative ideas. Burroughs painted his manuscripts and used colored paper but the text remains of primary importance and always shows through. Enjambment, a form of cutting, distorts text and meaning, but typography remains clear and sacred. Proof of this is his reaction to Ed Sanders work on APO-33. Burroughs objected to the imperfections of this production and felt they were not appropriate. This says much about Burroughs as an established and commercial writer. Imperfect mimeo and poor layout reflected poorly on Burroughs’ reputation as a professional. levy on the other hand embraced this seeming lack of skill in order to challenge the reader’s expectations and to suggest elements of censorship and miscommunication. Burroughs desired an audience and always stressed the communicative aspects of the cut-up. They were never intended to be unreadable.

For an author so intimately concerned with and aware of control, Burroughs greatly valued order. He consistently goes back to the authorial control he exercises over the cut-up even as he sees its disruptive potential. He craved order as he feared it. Interestingly in interviews and essays, Burroughs always stresses the role of the author in editing and selecting the results of cut-ups. The primacy of the author remains. In Issue 11, Burroughs writes, “For God’s Sake, J.N. date your issues.” Despite the time travel aspects of the cut up he championed, Burroughs also liked to be locked in time and space.

My Own Mag Issues 11-13: From the three-column format to the third dimension of the scrapbook

In Issue 11, Nuttall and Burroughs goes even further in their exploration of the cut-up. Burroughs’ frenzied experimentation added another layer to the three-column format. Miles writes, “It was in March 1964, when Bill and Ian were living at the rue Delacroix, that Bill began work on the scrapbooks. As usual, this was yet another extension of the cut-up technique.” In his developing article, Schneiderman writes about the practice of Grangerization or extra-illustration that was a British fad at the turn of the 20th Century. In issue 11, Nuttall begins stapling old magazine articles and illustrations to My Own Mag. These tip-ins are not reprinted using offset or mimeo. They are sliced out of old magazines and journals. The tip-ins differed from magazine to magazine. The issue in my possession contains an article on the abdomen. The issue on RealityStudio features a piece on astigmatism. Again issues regarding the original and the copy abound. As early as Issue 4, Nuttall tipped in additions to the magazine, but only in the later issues does this scrapbook element develop more fully.

Interestingly, Nutall grangerizes with old medical journals and articles. Again this refers to Burroughs’ creative endeavors. Some of Burroughs’ contributions to My Own Mag at this time are letters to the editor of London newspapers defending Dr. Yerbury Dent. Dr. Dent “cured” Burroughs of heroin addiction using apomorphine in the 1950s. The inclusion of medical journals in My Own Mag mirrors Burroughs’ near obsession with the representation of drugs and drug addiction by the medical community. In fact, Burroughs’ first “magazine” appearance was in a medical journal, The British Journal of Addiction, edited by Dr. Dent. APO-33, a cut-up scrapbook Burroughs created at the same time as much of the material in My Own Mag, is in essence an alternative version of a medical journal or article. The act of complicating and parodying an established, authoritative form is familiar to Burroughs as we have seen. In the choice of the source material he selects for grangerizing, Nuttall brings into play Burroughs’ creative life from its beginnings to the most up to the minute cut-up experiments.

This new wrinkle introduced by Nuttall dovetails with the development of the cut-up by Burroughs in March 1964. Throughout the 1950s, Burroughs created scrapbooks that verged on book art. Ports of Entry provides some pictures and commentary on this aspect of Burroughs’ art career. Like the Gibraltar scrapbook mentioned above, this new direction merged the notebook / scrapbook format of the 1950s with the new three-column format. “The Dutch Schultz Special’ (Issue 13) is a prime example of this new work. Time and APO-33 are others. The three-column format now includes photographic images, sometimes taken by Burroughs himself, that comment on the text and provide points of intersection of time and space. The feel is more of a magazine than a newspaper.

Back in Issue 6 of My Own Mag, Burroughs traced the format of page 40 of the September 13, 1963 issue of Time in order to create the layout for a cut-up. This issue of Time features a cover story on Communist China. Page 40 contains an article on humanizing Communism that focuses on Hungary. Communist China is something of an obsession for Burroughs. The single page in issue 6 would develop into an entire scrapbook. In Time published by C Press, Burroughs cuts-up and parodies the September 21, 1962 issue of Time Magazine that features a picture of Mao on the cover. By recreating these issues of Time, Burroughs draws attention to the media’s role in creating the Communist menace. Given Burroughs’ critical view of bureaucracy and the influence of the State in personal and political life, Communism must have been an interesting case study for his libertarian ideas. Burroughs’ creative and intellectual response to Commumism remains to be studied in full.

In response to Burroughs’ creation of a framework using Time in issue 6, Nuttall razors in frames allowing text from other pages to show through. This suggests the cut-up’s ability to alter one’s frame of reference or perception. Burroughs and Nuttall are very concerned with one’s ability to see clearly and cleansing the doors of perception. The inclusion of advertisments on Filtering in Time suggests a similar concept. Like drugs, the cut-up is a means to this end. This is brought home by Nuttall when he grangerizes an article on astigmatism to Issue 11 of My Own Mag on view at RealityStudio. Again it must be remembered that the tip-in differed in each copy of the magazine so other associations are possible and probable. In creating the magazine, Nuttall hammers home the idea of linking the cut-up with clarity of vision with clear inking, with cutting by slicing the page, razoring frames, or clipping articles, and with the act of stenciling.

The Dutch Schultz Special (Issue 13) includes one of the finest reproductions of a Burroughs scrapbook until the color images in Port of Entry. Most people focus on Burroughs’ The Dead Star, but Issue 13 is a tour de force of mimeo by Nuttall. Take for instance the cover. The whole of this layout is immaculately designed. All the line drawing has all been done before the stencil is inserted into the typewriter. Another limitation was that it was impossible to draw cross-hatching — that is why all Nuttall’s shading is in sloping lines. There are two reasons for no cross-hatching:

1. There was every chance of tearing the skin and ruining the stencil.

2. If successful, there was every chance you’d get the black blobs as in striking letters like “o” or “b” too hard.

The image comments on Burroughs’ text. The headshot of Dutch Schultz is the most obvious instance of this, but the more interesting figure is the shadowy man beside Dutch. The figure represents “the third that walks beside you” that so fascinated Burroughs and frequently appeared in his writings. Typed into the image are the key numbers of the Burroughs mythology, like 23.

“The Dying Words of Perfume Jack” in issue 13 is another example of Nuttall’s consummate skill with the typewriter, stylus, and mimeograph. Nuttall’s text incorporates Burroughs’ writing by recycling his words, numbers and characters. This is more noticeable in “The Last Words of Dutch Schultz” in issue 12. Nutall suggests the three-column format. Here, the comic strip meets the newspaper. Nuttall’s presentation is as remarkable as Burroughs’ text. These late issues are some of the finest examples of the mimeo art ever published in a little magazine.

Interestingly, issue 13 also draws attention to the limitation of mimeo. One of the most noticeable aspects of the issue is its size. It is the only one of 17 issues not foolscap. Why not? Nuttall was a very scrupulous editor, but he was confined by the foolscap size of the duplicator. He re-typed every article with the most scrupulous care, but it had to fit within the format. So if you compare what’s in Issue 17 — the last — with the Pélieu and Weissner manuscripts this becomes clear. The manuscripts were extended out to foolscap by attaching extra paper to the bottom. In issue 13, the Burroughs contribution is on a strange size which is just less than A4 290mm x 208mm — A4 is 297mm x 210mm. Nuttall’s parts on duplicator stock are 290mm x 202mm. The pages besides The Dead Star are probably cut down foolscap paper. This means that Nuttall designed the whole issue to Burroughs’ size. The reason The Dead Star is a different size was because Nuttall did not create it himself using the mimeograph. The piece was probably published professionally using offset lithography. Given the fact that the paper used for The Dead Star was not commonly used in Great Britain at the time, Burroughs may have commissioned the printing himself during his stay in New York City. The C Press version of Time looks and feels very similar to The Dead Star. According to Ron Padgett, Time was published professionally by offset at Fleetwood Printing Services. The Dead Star could have been done by the same printer and then mailed by Burroughs to Nuttall in Great Britain.

Why offset? Mimeo could not fully capture the visual complexity of Burroughs’ scrapbooks. Small touches like the grid of the balance sheets on which Burroughs composed The Dead Star were difficult to reproduce on mimeo. Nuttall used every technique at his disposal to comment on and reproduce the scrapbook and the ideology behind it. The meticulous reproduction of a scrapbook page in issue 11 is but one example of this. But in the introductory note to that cut-up, Burroughs demanded that Nuttall date his issues. Clearly, Burroughs was bothered with the lack of order in Nuttall’s editing even though Nuttall stressed clarity in his use of mimeo. Possibly given the problems with the Fuck You version of APO-33, Burroughs demanded an exact reproduction of The Dead Star.

Burroughs realized that his scrapbook experiments needed the resources of a larger, more connected publisher. Through his stay in NYC in 1965, Burroughs with Brion Gysin worked on the manuscript for The Third Mind. As Burroughs and Gysin envisioned it this treatise / art book on the cut-up method would test the boundaries of traditional publishing in much the same way Nuttall challenged and extended mimeo. In 1970, Grove Press intended to issue a lavish production for the art market retailing at $10. Publication stalled as the book proved too expensive. In addition the book proved too difficult for Grove even in a high-end format. The Third Mind was finally published in 1978, but it was a shadow of the project envisioned in the 1960s.

My Own Mag Issues 14-17 and beyond: Where do we go from here?

Paradoxically the most famous, most collectible issue of My Own Mag, The Dutch Schultz Special, published in August 1965 signaled the beginning of the end of the Nuttall / Burroughs partnership. In September 1965 Burroughs arrived at Gatwick Airport for what would prove to be an extended stay in London. Maybe the close proximity to Nuttall dulled the keen edge of their correspondence. The magazine began to appear less frequently and the cohesiveness of the magazine began to unravel. The interplay between Burroughs and Nuttall that made the magazine so special had played out. Burroughs did not appear in the last two issues and only briefly in issues 14 and 15. In the later issues, the Moving Times begins to function like a magazine within the magazine. Material comes not just from Burroughs. This is the Third Mind in action as Burroughs’ work diminishes in the magazine and the cut-up work of his collaborators takes over. Burroughs incorporates his correspondence into Moving Times. Likewise, Weissner cuts up Burroughs’ work and letters to form new material. A handwritten note by Burroughs to Nuttall provides evidence of his excitement over this new correspondence. In the note which is part of the 60s archive in Robert Bank’s possession, Burroughs encouraged Nuttall to contact Weissner and publish him. Nuttall followed Burroughs’ advice, and My Own Mag published Weissner in the late issues. See Robert Bank’s index of contributors. Nuttall felt the pull of other projects, such as Bomb Culture, his pioneering study of the international underground. My Own Mag ended with Issue 17 in September 1966.

With the Dutch Schultz Special, Burroughs reached the height of his achievement in the little magazine published cut-ups, but in doing so he exhausted the possibilities of mimeo as a medium. There was a need for a machine beyond the mimeograph and the typewriter. Issue 15 demonstrates another direction in Burroughs’ thought: the tape recorder. The “Subliminal Kid” piece, like the longer “Invisible Generation,” shows Burroughs’ high hopes for the latest in recording technology to again subvert control and authority. Burroughs’ movement in this direction probably had something to do with the feedback and correspondence he was having with Carl Weissner as well as the difficulty in reproducing his manuscripts. As I mentioned earlier after the Tangier Issue, Burroughs began to get some response from around the world in the persons of Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach. This had the makings of a cut-up movement. Weissner would publish Burroughs’ tape experiments in Klacto. Burroughs explored film in this period as well with Tony Balch.

The direction of Burroughs’ work for the rest of the 1960s was foreshadowed in the pages of My Own Mag. Burroughs’ most sustained work during his London period was a monthly column in the men’s magazine Mayfair. The idea of Burroughs as a talking head with regular column starts with his work in My Own Mag. Increasingly, Burroughs appears in underground newspapers commenting on the issues of the day. His work floated over the Underground Press Syndicate wire with the same pieces running in more than one paper. He sat in on roundtables for Playboy and worked as a reporter for Esquire. Burroughs as guru and cultural expert mirrors his work as an advice columnist and reporter in My Own Mag. In My Own Mag, Burroughs edited his own underground newspaper. Now he sold his services to the underground industry.

Not surprisingly, Burroughs got intensely involved with underground comix and the beginnings of the graphic novel. In 1970, Burroughs collaborated with Malcolm Mc Neill on a comix, the “Unspeakable Mr. Hart,” in four issues of Cyclops. Nuttall was there first with Perfume Jack and the Last Words of Dutch Schultz. Last Words is surely one of the earliest examples of the underground comix, yet Nuttall and My Own Mag are not mentioned in the comprehensive study of the art: Rebel Visions. The character of Mr. Hart was based on William Randolph Hearst and Burroughs’ obsession with the controlling aspects of a multimedia conglomerate are very much in evidence. The concern with the power of the newspaper expressed in My Own Mag carried over into Cyclops. Throughout the 1970s, Burroughs worked with Mc Neill on the never completed Ah Puch Is Here. As envisioned by Burroughs and Mc Neill, Ah Puch, like The Third Mind, would have challenged the concept of the book and would have been truly an artist’s book as described by Johanna Drucker. In an unpublished manuscript, Observed While Falling, Mc Neill details this process. The give and take of artist and author as well as the merging of format, form, and content described in the memoir draws parallels with Burroughs’ experience with My Own Mag.

It could be argued that Burroughs’ perceived “return to narrative” in the Wild Boys was a direct result of his time working with Nuttall and My Own Mag. Maybe he sensed he had taking the method as far as it could go given the limitations of alternative and mainstream publishing. As Observed While Falling and Ports of Entry makes clear, Burroughs still worked on scrapbooks and other ambitious cut-up projects into the 1970s. The radical use of the cut-up never left his bag of tricks, but — with The Wild Boys and the novels and short stories that followed — it was more and more relegated to one tool in the toolbox and one to be used with discretion. As time wore on, the cut-up technique settled back into the novel form Burroughs abandoned in the mid-1960s. The three-columns were abandoned for the traditional paragraph even though he toyed with and threatened to break its confines. Maybe he tired of the limited audience of the mimeo scene. During his entire career as a writer, Burroughs felt spurred on by a receptive listener, a willing receiver. The time had come for a mainstream audience. The youth culture theme of The Wild Boys seems exploitative to me, like a play for relevance. The work of Norman Mailer comes to mind. Burroughs was the old man of Hip. The more traditional narrative elements made his writing more accessible to critics and the more adventurous of general readers.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

One of my mantras in book collecting is focus, focus, focus. The problem with living by this credo is that it leaves so many great books out of your collection. There are two books that have obsessed me like the white whale haunted Ahab: Charles Olson’s Maxiumus Poems 1-10 and 11-22 published by Jargon Society. I fell in love with them when I first saw a signed copy of the initial ten poems for sale by Lame Duck Books at a book fair. They are quite simply works of art. The books were published as Jargon 7 and Jargon 9 by Jonathan Williams.

So I was saddened to hear that Jonathan Williams passed away at the age of 79. There have been numerous appreciations appearing on the internet and in print in the past few weeks. When I worked at Second Story Books, a copy of Mina Loy’s Lunar Baedeker published by Jargon Society came into the store. Like the Maximus Poems, the Lunar Baedeker was a beautiful object. This was the first time I came into contact with Loy’s work. Jargon Society specialized in just these types of introductions. Williams made a point of bringing before the public eye writers from the fringes and shadows. He published Louis Zukofsky, Kenneth Patchen, Lorine Niedecker, Bob Brown and Larry Eigner. All these writers are (or were), like Williams himself, unfairly neglected even by those with more adventurous tastes in the arts. Early on, Williams, due to his Black Mountain ties, championed Robert Creeley, Joel Oppenheimer and, most famously, Charles Olson.

William Burroughs seemingly published everywhere during the mimeo revolution. Given Burroughs’ ubiquity, it is interesting to consider where Burroughs did not appear. The Cleveland of d.a. levy is one place, and the Jargon Society is another. Burroughs appeared in the legendary final issue of Black Mountain Review in 1957, a key appearance for Burroughs. So Burroughs has a tenuous link to the Black Mountain Scene and was aware of the College. Yet this link does not extend to Williams. Williams did not publish the Beats. He turned down Howl before City Lights decided to publish it after the Six Gallery Reading. Williams never felt bad about his decision. He reasoned that Howl would have only sold 300 copies if Jargon had published it. Williams did not ask for much in the way of readers. He was happy with 50 dedicated eyes and ears.

Yet there are similarities between Jonathan Williams and Burroughs. Both men had privileged backgrounds; both had a sophisticated, aristocratic air about them; both were gay; both lived as expatriates in England; both were jacks-of-all-trades in all aspects of experimental literature and art. Yet I can not think of two writers more different in their personality, lifestyle, creative work, and literary concerns. I think we can get to the heart of some of those differences by comparing the two men’s relationship to England.

For Burroughs, England was simultaneously an escape and a prison. In the mid-1950s, Burroughs went there seeking a cure to his addiction to heroin with the help of Dr. Yerbury Dent. The apomorphine treatment temporarily freed Burroughs from staring at his shoe in Tangier and allowed him to pour himself into the process of writing Naked Lunch. Yet Burroughs also viewed England as a straitjacket — too buttoned up with university tie fixed on too tight, the royal crown screwed on too tight. In a sense, he hated England. (I should stress that England for Burroughs was quite simply London. Anywhere else in the country was strictly Hicksville.) Clearly, Burroughs found even London boring: the pubs closed too early as did the subway and restaurants, but in the late summer of 1965, Burroughs saw signs of life in the old slag. Burroughs moved to London just as Swinging London exploded into the global consciousness. Beatles London, Pop London, the Albert Hall Reading London, Mary Quant London, Indica Bookshop London. This was England for Burroughs. He lived at St. Duke Street, St. James from 1966, residing near Anthony Balch and Brion Gysin. The ties to film and art are important. London at the time was the center of international popular culture in music, film, fashion, and art. It was an international center on par with Paris and New York. Such locales were Burroughs’ natural habitat. He was an urban creature, and his best work is urban in nature, even if his view of the city is not entirely positive. Burroughs’ literary landscape and his characters are generally urban: Interzone, the drug underworld, corporate bureaucracy run amok. The cut-up is the urban experience par excellence. Reading the landscape out of a rushing subway, the flood of images and text at Times Square, the polyglot gibberish of an international marketplace, scanning a newspaper over somebody’s shoulder at a street corner.

Jonathan Williams’ England was a pastoral one. In 1969 (when Burroughs was living in London), Williams settled at Corn Close, a farmstead in the Pennine dales of northern England. Williams was led there by the work and suggestion of Basil Bunting, particularly Bunting’s poem Briggflatts that electrified many readers when it appeared out of the English North in 1966. If Burroughs’ England is Pop, surface, fast, glossy, schizophrenic, urban and international with an eye toward Paris / New York, Williams’ England is earthy, gnarly, slightly daft, Anglo-Saxon, tweedy and rural. Corn Close was the aristocratic country manor gone backwoods. Williams’ experimentalism comes not from the sophistication of the international avant-garde, but from the primitivism of folk art, the plain talk and homespun wisdom of the back roads. Williams’ disdained the urban. Williams stated, “Anyway, I have turned more and more away from the High Art of the city and settled for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass.” Burroughs found his inspiration in the exact place that Williams turned his back on and closed his ears to.

It could be argued that Burroughs’ final trilogy could only have been completed in a place like Lawrence. The pirate commune, the Wild West, the Western Lands. This is Burroughs’ pastoral vision: what Burroughs saw and felt as he shot guns in the countryside and sat on his porch with his cats away from the activity, pace and temptations of the City. The final trilogy are books of contemplation, meditation, eulogy. These books comprise Burroughs’ eclogue. The city books, Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, are his Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, maps of Hell and with fleeting glimpses of Paradise.

Late in their lives, Williams and Burroughs were the eccentric old men of American Letters, but they came by their eccentricity differently despite similar backgrounds. Both men were clearly at the forefront of the experimental art community of the post-WWII era. In a side note, this is the great triumph of Black Mountain College. Black Mountain incorporated both Williams and Burroughs into its creative vision. There was an international sophisticated experimentalism as well as a backwoods funkiness to the place that was unique in the 20th Century.

By all accounts Williams was a true man of letters and a living library. In the next couple of weeks, I hope to get a hold of and read some of his books of poetry, but as of now, the Williams I know is Jonathan Williams the driving force behind Jargon Society. Robert Bank, RealityStudio’s European correspondent, knew Williams much more fully as a writer, publisher, and friend. Robert has gone through his files and scanned several photos, letters and images related to the Williams he knew: the Williams of Corn Close. Think of this England as opposed to Burroughs’ life in London from 1966-1973. I present Bank’s collage of images and text to give a glimpse into a giant of alternative publishing and creative life in the post-WWII era.

View Robert Bank’s slideshow, Jonathan Williams in England.

Read Eric Mottram’s text on Jonathan Williams, “An Introduction: ‘Stay in Close and Use Both Hands,” the introduction to Niches Inches: New and Selected Poems 1957-1981, published by Jonathan Williams (Jargon Press), 1982. (PDF 11 MB)

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Third Mind images from Paris are not the only goodies we have received from our readers. Chris Hughes, a reader from Scotland, forwarded me some scans from a program for the Edinburgh Festival of 1962. 2007 marked the 45th anniversary of the 1962 Festival that in essence established Burroughs’ reputation as a writer on an international level. In that year, John Calder decided to add an International Writers’ Conference to the Festival’s many activities. Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw, the best of the Burroughs biographies, provides all the details. Barry Miles’ bio, which is strong on the cut-up and other multimedia aspects of Burroughs’ career, fails to mention the 1962 Conference. This might be because Morgan did such a thorough job of it. According to the Festival’s current website, “[t]he Festival began in 1947, with the aim of providing ‘a platform for the flowering of the human spirit.’” This platform continues to the present. In 2008, the Festival will run from August 8th to August 31.

I do not want to rehash the story of the 1962 Conference here, but I do want to provide readers of RealityStudio with some of the primary documents related to this event. According to the Maynard and Miles bibliography, a mimeograph transcript of the Conference exists. This publication documents the panel discussions that transpired over the five days of August 20th to 24th. The number of copies is unknown, and I have never seen one available for sale. Burroughs appears on pages 5-8, 18-19, 29, 32-33. These sections contain Burroughs’ statements at the panel on Censorship (Thursday August 23rd) and The Future of the Novel (Friday August 24th).

Given the rarity of this publication, I never considered the fact that other ephemera from the Festival and the Conference might exist. But as Chris Hughes’ scans show, such ephemera do in fact exist, and as I found out, they are available. These documents tell an interesting story. I think Hughes’ scans show the program for the entire Festival. He has been good enough to include John Calder’s essay on The Writer’s Conference as well as the schedule for Calder’s brainchild. Interestingly, in Calder’s essay, Burroughs is not listed as one of the delegates from the United States. This shows just how far off the radar screen Burroughs was before the Conference. In hindsight, Burroughs seems like the perfect choice for the panels on censorship and the future of the novel. The obscenity trials surrounding Big Table made Burroughs an expert on censorship. The development of the cut-up and the publication of Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded (not to mention Naked Lunch) made him an authority on the future of the novel. That said virtually nobody at the conference knew who he was. Not surprising really. For the most part, Burroughs was only published by Olympia Press. In all probability, nobody would have read Junkie to say nothing of the small press gems of Minutes to Go (Two Cities) and The Exterminator (Auerhahn Press). In August 1962, Barney Rosset of Grove Press stored copies of Naked Lunch in a warehouse. He was waiting to see how Grove Press’ other censorship battles played out. The book would not be available in the United States until November 1962. The publicity and discussion generated by the International Writer’s Conference in large part assured the book’s release. Naked Lunch would not be available in Great Britain until 1964.

In any case, Burroughs was something of an afterthought for inclusion at the Conference. Calder did not invite Burroughs until summer was already in full swing. Burroughs had to pay his own way, and he did not have a sponsor. In essence he tagged along with Maurice Girodias who attended the censorship panel. At the Conference, Burroughs spent most of his time with Alex Trocchi, the author of Cain’s Book. In fact, Burroughs stayed with Trocchi at Trocchi’s doctor, who no doubt filled scripts all week. This was the first meeting of the two partners in crime. Not surprisingly, Burroughs considered Cain’s Book a major work of drug literature. Calder was actively promoting Trocchi at the time. After the Conference, Calder would do the same for Burroughs.

The program for the Edinburgh Festival supplied by Chris Hughes got me thinking about what else is out there. I remembered John Calder’s autobiography that was sent to me by our correspondent Robert Bank. This book is an essential source on the Writers’ Conference. It includes a description of yet another bit of memorabilia, the Program and Notes for the International Writer’s Conference entitled “The Novel Today.” I never put two and two together. I failed to realize that this program might be available on the rare book market. I guess I got this publication confused with the impossible to find transcript. In addition the two programs available here on RealityStudio are not in the two main Burroughs bibliographies. Some quick searching located a copy of “The Novel Today” right in my backyard. Serendipity!!

About the program, Calder writes, “The conference program, which was really a lavishly produced literary magazine, partly produced on art paper, but with a central section on grey cartridge, gave two lists: a longer one with short biographies of participants and photographs of everyone who had accepted, which was prepared well in advance on white art and a last-minute list, very different, but still incomplete, on grey. The latter section apologized for the inconsistencies and changes, but also gave a longish description of each day’s topic and what was expected to happen, as well as listing the principal speakers for those days.” Burroughs appears in the “last-minute” list as befits his last-minute invitation by Calder. Burroughs is also listed as a participant in the censorship discussion. Not surprising given his publishing history up to that point. What is shocking is that Burroughs was not heavily promoted as a member of the future of the novel panel. Burroughs’ discussion of the cut-up at this panel would prove to be one of the highlights of the Conference and would cause a major stir.

So what did Burroughs say? Literary Outlaw provides some brief quotes, but the best source, besides the mimeographed transcript, is issue 11 of Transatlantic Review from the winter of 1962. Burroughs opens the magazine in its text and headlines on its cover. Clearly he was big news. Issue 11 prints the two statements Burroughs read at the Conference at the panels on censorship and the future of the novel. In addition, Burroughs wrote a cut-up based on the events that occurred at McEwan Hall (the location of the Conference). As is common with Burroughs’ cut-ups of this period, the piece included detailed notes regarding its composition. Parts of it have been collected in The Third Mind and Word Virus, but RealityStudio is putting it online as part of its collection of documents relating to the conference.

Unlike some of the anniversaries that have been celebrated surrounding the Beats in the last couple of years, the 45th Anniversary of the International Writer’s Conference in Edinburgh passed under the radar. This is somewhat ironic since it was after his appearance at McEwan Hall that Burroughs became headline fodder around the world. The Conference directly led to the release of Naked Lunch in the United States and to the publication of a Burroughs novel in Great Britain (Dead Fingers Talk in 1963). In addition, the discussion at the Conference helped legitimize Burroughs as a serious author and helped prove that Burroughs was more than a pornographer. It was in Edinburgh that Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer stood firmly behind Naked Lunch and its author. This support would prove useful for the upcoming obscenity trial that engulfed Naked Lunch in Boston soon after its release in late 1962. For Burroughs lovers, this is certainly something to remember and to celebrate. Hopefully, the primary documents available here on RealityStudio provide a means to do just that.

1962 Edinburgh International Festival Program

1962 International Writers Conference Program (Excerpt)

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Like many bookish teenagers, I was an editor of my high school literary magazine. It was called Des Pensees and as the name suggests it was a formal, rather stuffy affair. A poem had to look and to act like a poem. Established forms, rhyme schemes, and traditional subjects like love, loss, and loneliness. I still have a copy, and it sits on my bookshelf next to my Black Mountain Reviews and Big Tables looking rather small and insignificant despite its large format. Periodically, I will thumb through it and my thoughts go not to my hometown in Pennsylvania but to Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1950s, Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard and Dick Gallup, the members of what John Ashbery called the Tulsa wing of the New York School (Ted Berrigan was the fourth horseman of that group), started a little magazine while they were in high school called White Dove Review. It is one of the great little mags of the late 1950s / early 1960s and paved the way for the mimeo explosion that followed in New York City.

While Des Pensees was publishing the esteemed Jed Birmingham, including monumental works like “Dinner at the Savannah Restaurant,” the Tulsa Boys managed to get Kerouac and Paul Blackburn in their first issue. I am always encouraged by late bloomers like Bukowski and Burroughs. They give me hope that great things can blossom from a dry stone as I approach my forties, but I am fascinated (and ashamed) by those who display a fully developed aesthetic at an early age to say nothing of creative talent. How can a 19-year-old read so deeply? How can he respond in such a complex way to the works read? White Dove Review is truly an amazing magazine and an important document in the study and appreciation of the Second Generation New York School.

When I got to college, I dabbled in the literary magazine there, but never really got too involved. I read submissions for Queen’s Head and Artichoke, a mag named after a pub in London. As the name suggests, the work presented was again more traditional, more in line with Eliot and Auden than Pound and Williams. From what I could tell there was no evidence than anybody on the staff had read Ashbery or Olson. But then again that may be because I had no real clue about them and their work. I dabbled in The Maximus Poems, but I had to get away from college before any of it could seep in and make an impression. All my copies of Queen’s Head and Artichoke are lost to posterity, but I think that is a good thing.

I would much rather have copies of Censored Review. This was Berrigan and Padgett’s magazine from Padgett’s college days at Columbia University, home to Kerouac and Ginsberg. Censored Review evolved out of a brou-ha-ha over some Berrigan poems slated to be published in the University-sponsored magazine. The school wanted edits and cuts, and Padgett and Berrigan decided to publish the poems themselves. Censored Review sold well and got a bit of publicity from the New York media. The experience led to the establishment of C Press, a major institution for the New York underground.

The story involving Censored Review / C Press has repeated itself many times throughout the post-WWII era. Censorship and the University is a major theme in the development of the little mag during this period, and Burroughs is at the vortex of many of these storms of controversy. Chicago Review and Big Table are the primary examples of this. See my piece on Scotland and Burroughs for a few other examples. In fact the publication and dissemination of Naked Lunch cannot be separated from the University. If you look at the bibliography from 1957-1960, the tie to the academy and academics is strong. The British Journal of Addiction, Black Mountain Review, Chicago Review, Jabberwock, Big Table, and New Departures are all linked to the university. Take into consideration the goings on at Harvard in 1960 involving Timothy Leary and you can see that the university in the 1950s and early 1960s were not all fraternities, Big Ten football, cheerleaders and crew cuts. All were not silent in the Silent Decade. Rebellion was afoot, despite the Boards’ and Trustees’ best efforts to keep it quiet. The revolutions of the 1960s were nurtured in the ivory towers of the 1950s. Before the uprising at Columbia in 1969, there was the Censored Review in 1961 to say nothing of Kerouac and Ginsberg in the 1940s. The dispute over the Censored Review paved the way for “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!!”

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Burroughs was not only read on college campuses; he could be found wandering the quads. Burroughs visited Cambridge and Oxford and maintained ties with Harvard through Timothy Leary. Ian Sommerville, the Cambridge student Burroughs met in 1959, partially explains the link to the British University system. Yet as I have mentioned before Burroughs was like a shark that needed constant motion and stimulation. Burroughs sensed the emerging youth culture of the 1950s and realized that the future of the counterculture resided on the college campus. To say that Burroughs latched on to the youth culture late in works like The Wild Boys (as I have suggested) is not fully the case. Burroughs was there in the Silent Decade. In fact Burroughs’ interest in the college scene goes back even further to Columbia University in the 1940s and the ex-pat GI Bill scene in Mexico City and Paris in the 1950s. The importance of the Ivy League in the establishment of the counterculture cannot be underestimated. The appearance of Burroughs in the literary mags of Harvard and Yale in the early 1960s is not the oddity they seem but shows the radical nature of the Ivy League and predicts the campus explosions of the late 1960s.

Searching on the internet, I recently got a hold of a complete run of New Departures (1959-1984), a magazine with a tie to Oxford. Full sets are available from time to time but I never thought to pull the trigger and get one. Early in the game I jumped at a run of Big Table. Ditto for the early Chicago Reviews and Sidewalk 2. Black Mountain Review was always a focus and a priority, but I must admit I disrespected New Departures. I think this was due to the fact that it was active well into the 1980s. I like the tenures of my mags to be short and sweet, to flare and pop like the roman candles that Kerouac used to describe the mad saints and fascinating people in On the Road. As I opened and thumbed through all 16 issues (in 10 volumes) I realized that was a mistake. It is a remarkable achievement.

I have written briefly about New Departures in my piece on Burroughs and Scotland. But I want to go into more detail here on the magazine and the scenes it represented. The magazine was founded in 1959 by two Oxford students, Michael Horovitz and Pete Brown (David Sladen is also listed as an editor). Both men were dissatisfied with the dried up and tired literary scene that hung over Great Britain at the time. Eliot and Auden were gods, and New Criticism ruled over the literary scene. In the 1950s, something exciting appeared to be brewing in England with the rise of the Angry Young Men lead by John Osborne, Kingsley Amis, and John Wain. In 1958/59, Max Gartenberg and Gene Feldman edited an anthology packaging the Beats with the Angry Young Men as two birds of a feather. The anthology was printed by Citadel Press and reprinted by Dell in a small paperback. This is an early Burroughs appearance. “My First Days on Junk,” a section of Junkie, is featured in the Beat section. The piece is attributed to “William Lee.” Kerouac and Ginsberg are included as are George Mandel, Chandler Brossard, and Anatole Broyard.

The British counterparts were more, well, British. Their concerns were with class and social caste. Things like boarding schools and titles shaped the authors, not reform schools and jail time. Not everybody saw the Angry Young Men as a source of change. A section of the Angries, including Kingsley Amis, seemed like the same old wine in a new, but classically shaped bottle. The Movement (as this section was known) became yet another literary group to react against.

Horovitz and Brown looked beyond the narrow British scene and turned to America and the Beats for inspiration. Allen Ginsberg was only too happy to spread the Beat word internationally. Ginsberg provided the young Oxford students with all the material they could handle and New Departures was on its way. In fact, in 1959 Horovitz went to the Beat Hotel in Paris and met Burroughs and Corso as he assembled the first issue. Later, Burroughs returned the favor and visited Horovitz in England. In In the Sixties, Barry Miles has a small chapter on New Departures. Artistically, Horovitz and Brown were not isolationists and railed against the Little Englandism that attached itself to the British literary establishment.

The first issue of New Departures is quite strong, a major statement of new writing beyond England’s shores. Burroughs’ “Coke Bugs” and “The Exterminator does a Good Job” are featured. These are sections of Naked Lunch that read like Junkie transformed by Burroughs’ newfound voice. Gone is the hardboiled monotone. Naked Lunch reads hip and hot, part jazz and part Joyce. Like in America, British readers got their first tantalizing taste of Burroughs through little magazines. Besides the British Journal of Addiction and the pulped pulp fiction of the Digit Junkie that were both limited in audience, New Departures was in a way Burroughs’ first British outlet. The magazine came out in the summer of 1959 just as Naked Lunch hit stands in Paris.

I would like to say that the first issue of New Departures was dominated by Burroughs and that Burroughs was the prime mover for the creation of the magazine but that was not the case. The other figure that looms over the first issue of New Departures is Samuel Beckett. Horovitz studied Beckett at Oxford and the Irish playwright provided a small piece for the magazine. Two small sections of Naked Lunch and Act Without Words 2 by Beckett. Burroughs at the front of the magazine and Beckett at the back. It is like they are paired up and compared in New Departures. Beckett and Burroughs met famously in Paris in 1959 just as Burroughs’ star was rising. Burroughs excitedly described the cut-up technique and Beckett was appalled.

I would argue that in the 1950s and 1960s, Beckett and Burroughs had a lot in common in how they were utilized and perceived by the alternative publishing industry. Beckett, like Burroughs, fanned the flames of creative inspiration and sparked the creation of little magazines and small publishing ventures. I have mentioned before the Merlin Group in Paris in the early 1950s that in large part formed in order to get Beckett back in print and in the public eye. Beckett was the first non-porn star of Olympia Press and he also was the main draw for Grove Press. Beckett and Sartre are the featured writers of the first issue of Evergreen Review which had an intellectual and European feel. The Beats come in after the existentialists and appear consistently in the magazine after the San Francisco Scene issue of 1957.

Like Beckett in the 1950s, Burroughs provided the face for Olympia Press and Grove Press in the early 1960s. Burroughs is featured on the cover of the 1960 Olympia Press catalog and is prominently mentioned and displayed in all advertising. Naked Lunch was reprinted three times in roughly five years by Olympia Press. Similarly at Grove, Burroughs and his censorship issues become the cause célèbre of publisher Barney Rosset.

From what I can gather Michael Horovitz was the driving force behind New Departures but the role of Pete Brown should not be understated. A poet from Liverpool, he shows the literary and artistic milieu out of which the Beatles arose. This scene has strong ties to the Beats and Ginsberg famously called Liverpool the “center of consciousness of the human universe.” The Liverpool poetry scene influences Beatlemania in Lennon and McCartney adding a poetic sensibility to rock and roll. The Beatles, or maybe more correctly Lennon and McCartney, were deeply interested in poetry and aspired to be poets. Throughout the 1960s, they hung out with poets, supported poets and bookshops (Zapple and Indica), and even dappled with poetry themselves (take Lennon’s In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works from mid-decade). In some odd way, Pete Brown and the Liverpool scene (poets like Roger McGough and Brian Patten, and even a painter like Adrian Henri) might help explain why Yoko Ono would appeal to the poetic side of Lennon although Lennon’s ties to Fluxus are probably more through Barry Miles and Indica Bookshop. Generally the Liverpool poets were not taken seriously by the British literary establishment or the British avant. They were seen as a British equivalent of Rod McKuen. No doubt they were popular, but they were viewed as more pop music than Pop Art. New Departures 13 published shortly after Lennon’s death provides a snapshot of all these scenes with its collection of Liverpool and British Revival poets (to be discussed later).

As the psychedelic era blossomed, Brown became a major part of the rock and roll scene. He was a lyricist for Cream and wrote with Jack Bruce some of the bands most endearing classics like “White Room,” “Sunshine of Your Love,” and “I Feel Free.” In songs like “White Room,” a surreal, poetic quality really shines through. I assumed that Brown wrote the lyrics for “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” but Martin Sharp co-wrote them with Bruce. Sharp was an Australian visual artist who played a big part in the London Pop and Psychedelic scene. Sharp did the artwork for the Wheels of Fire gatefold. To my mind, “Tales of Brave Ulysses” is one of the finest songs of the era and argues for the poetic nature of rock and roll.

New Departures also has strong ties to jazz. The fourth issue of New Departures deals with jazz and poetry and around this time Horovitz and Brown took their show on the road with their Live New Departures venues. These venues were important in extending the reach of the avant outward beyond London and in turn bringing new talent from the outskirts into the cultural vortex of the metropolis. Live New Departures foreshadowed the poetry reading at Albert Hall in 1965 that featured Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Alex Trocchi as well as Michael Horovitz. In my opinion, the 1965 reading was as instrumental in the creation of Swinging London and the Summer of Love as any Beatles album. The Live New Departures concept was revived in 1980 with the Poetry Olympics. These events continue to the present with the Jazz Poetry Super Jam 2007. The poetry and jazz issue also featured Brown and Horovitz’s “News About Time Editorial” from Blues for the Hitchhiking Dead. The mock newspaper format reminds me of Burroughs’ work in My Own Mag and elsewhere.

Throughout the sixties and on into the nineties, New Departures presented a potent sampling of Beat poetry that has been linked critically and creatively to another British poetry scene: the British Poetry Revival. The magazine served and continues to serve as a vital outlet for this alternative tradition in Great Britain for decades. The Revival possesses strong ties to the little mag / small press in Great Britain operating outside the established media outlets. New Departures was a mainstay of the British Little Press scene of the post-WWII era. Much critical attention has been given to the British little magazine of the Modernist Era. Think Blast or the Egoist. Increasingly, later little mags are getting their critical due. No doubt New Departures will be featured prominently.

The Beats’ tie to the later British Poetry Revival of the 1960s is much more instructive and interesting to me than the tenuous link to the Angry Young Men of a decade earlier. As I mentioned, “Angries,” such as John Osborne and Amis, shared the Beats’ dissatisfaction with family values and sexual mores (though mainly heterosexual), but the Beats’ radicalism extended beyond such content (by the way, the Beats opened up more taboo territory than the Angry Young Men) into literary form, production, and distribution. The Beats also championed the establishment of an alternative persona and lifestyle.

British Revival Poets, like Roy Fisher, Bob Cobbing, Jeff Nuttall, Lee Harwood, Allen Fisher and Tom Raworth, not to mention fellow travelers like Alexander Trocchi, shared the concerns of the Beats more fully. Horovitz edited the first anthology of the Revivalists: Children of Albion in 1969. In describing the Revival poets for a later anthology including their work, Eric Mottram writes, “They are poets who resist limpet-clinging to past metrics, self-satisfied irony, the self-regarding ego and its iambic thuds. They are committed to imaginative invention and to taking up the challenge of a wide range of Twentieth Century poetics in Europe and America. They stand, in their differing ways, for resistance to habitual responses, for explorations in language notation and rhythm, for discovery without safety-net for the poet or the reader.” The similarities to the practice of the Beats are clear.

Mottram, the first serious Burroughs scholar, was closely associated with the Revival. As editor of Poetry Review from 1971 to 1977, Mottram attempted to slip the British Revival Poets before a larger, more mainstream public. Poetry Review can be compared to Poetry in the United States. Mottram’s editorship in the 1970s reminds me of Henry Rago’s more liberal editorship of Poetry in the late 1960s as described by Ron Silliman in his blog. But Tom Clark’s work with Paris Review in the mid-1960s comes to mind and might be more appropriate. Clark really opened up the biggest little mag making it possible for Art of Fiction interviews with Burroughs (1965), Ginsberg (1966) and Kerouac (1967), in rapid succession. Clark also introduced into Paris Review a host of poets and writers following the alternative tradition of Williams, Stein, and Pound.

Like the Beats in the United States, the Revival poets created the atmosphere for a mimeo revolution in Great Britain. Writers / publishers, like Bob Cobbing and Jeff Nuttall, explored all aspects of publishing and distribution. Presses, like Migrant Press, Fulcrum Press and Goliard Press, published the Beats and mirrored American counterculture presses like Totem Press or Cornith Press. Nuttall’s My Own Mag had its counterparts with Fuck You Press and C Press. New Departures played its part in this British mimeo revolution.

British Revival writers like Nuttall extended Beat ideas into the international underground as represented by Project Sigma, the Situationists or the Provo Group. Jeff Nuttall linked the Beats to the international underground in his 1968 study Bomb Culture. The late issues of New Departures attempt to show that the rebellious spirit Nuttall described in his classic account was still alive in Great Britain and elsewhere in the eighties.

What surprised me about New Departures was its diversity in format. The first three issues are rather staid and standard little mags in the Evergreen Review or Transatlantic Review style. But later issues come in small chapbooks, spiral bound bindings or large magazine format. Nothing earth-shattering (in fact the late issues don’t differ much from Des Pensees of my high school years) but a nice variety over the years, particularly the little books by Michael and Frances Horovitz. The High Tower, Love Poems and A Celebration of and for Frances Horovitz in format and content are simple expressions of love and a love of poetry. It is such simple expressions coupled with a Do-it-yourself, independent spirit that powered the Summer of Love and Swinging London as much as the themes of sex, drugs and rock and roll endlessly recycled by Life, Time, and Newsweek. Michael Horovitz through his writing and performances tries to keep those sentiments alive in the present.

New Departures Cover Archive

New Departures 1

New Departures 2-3

New Departures 4

New Departures 5

New Departures 6

New Departures 7-8 10-11

New Departures 9

New Departures 12

New Departures 13

New Departures 14

New Departures 15

New Departures 16

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In 1992, I attended King’s College in London for two terms as part of a study abroad program. I knew next to nothing about the school, and if I remember correctly, I chose it, because it was located on the Strand and seemed to be in the middle of everything. My interest in the Beats and, particularly, William Burroughs had been growing in leaps and bounds since I first encountered them in the summer of 1990 after my freshman year of college. Little did I know that King’s was the ideal place to expand my knowledge of post-WWII American fiction. In fact, the school was the birthplace of American Studies in Great Britain due to the pioneering work of scholar Eric Mottram. Through his teaching, presence and writings, Mottram placed the work of the Beats under the critical microscope and brought it to a whole generation of British readers. Mottram taught full-time at King’s College until the early 1990s so I just missed him. He continued to teach part-time in a limited capacity until 1994 so his presence was felt in the English Department. His name graced the professorship in American Literature at Kings as testament to his influence. The position was held by Clive Bush, and it was through his class that I first came in contact with Charles Olson and The Maximus Poems.

One of the best aspects of King’s College was that being enrolled as a student granted me access to the University of London’s ring of libraries. The libraries directly associated with King’s were rather small, but the University of London possessed fantastic facilities throughout the city. Senate House provided George Orwell with the architectural inspiration for the imposing Ministry of Truth Building in 1984. Rumor had it that a library office in Senate House served as the model for Room 101 in the Ministry of Love. During WWII, the Ministry of Information was headquartered at Senate House. Orwell worked for the Ministry of Information before writing 1984. For me the library was a great source of information and love. I read in the library voraciously, walking through the stacks of American Literature with abandon. I first read Robert Creeley and J.P. Donleavy in London as well as Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. To read that book as I traveled with a backpack throughout Europe was a wonderful experience. I found a collected works of D.A. Levy at the library. I read the introduction and then the remarkable poems wondering how I never heard of the Cleveland poet suicided by Middle America. In fact, I have never seen Levy’s work in the United States except at rare bookstores. I like to think that the Levy collection was in London due in large part to the energy of Mottram’s work and personality.

Unbeknownst to me at the time I studied there, King’s College Library houses Mottram’s considerable archives. This is a treasure trove for anybody interested in post-WWII literature. Over the years, I have spent considerable time looking up little magazines and little presses in the Mottram collection. The list really reads like a complete bibliography of little magazines / little presses of the period. Unfortunately King’s College is not mining this resource. The website has not been updated since 2000. There were plans for a volume of the Mottram / Duncan correspondence but to my knowledge this has not come to pass. As Robert Bank’s assemblage makes clear, Mottram’s letters are full of valuable detail as well as interesting analysis of the experimental and counterculture scene in Britain and abroad. This correspondence would benefit anybody interested in 20 Century literature. Hopefully, the brief selection of Mottram / Nuttall letters on RealityStudio will open up this resource leading to further extracts being posted in the near future.

As many reading this will know, Mottram wrote the first book-length study of Burroughs’ work entitled The Algebra of Need. He also wrote books on Allen Ginsberg and Paul Bowles among others. Do not think for a moment that Mottram was holed up in the ivory tower writing from a distance about the outlaw literature of the post-war era. Robert Bank’s assemblage of materials chronicling Mottram’s activities in the mid-1960s makes clear that the Beat scholar was in the thick of the action and knew the writers intimately. Mottram talked the talk because he walked the walk.

Read Bank’s piece to get all the details including some great letters to Jeff Nuttall, another valuable chronicler of the counterculture. This material provides a valuable companion piece to my column on Burroughs in the Lower East Side in 1965. Both these pieces highlight the fact that New York City was the center of the creative world, drawing artists, writers, critics as well as hangers-on and tourists.

I want to focus on The Algebra of Need as a means to highlight Mottram’s immersion in the literary community about which he wrote. The first version of the Burroughs study appeared in the Special Burroughs Issue (#14-15) of Intrepid magazine. In a few columns, I have touched on Intrepid. Allen De Loach edited the magazine out of Buffalo in the 1960s and 1970s. If you surf eBay for artifacts from the literary scene of that time, you have no doubt come across material from De Loach’s archives. He died in 2002 and bits and pieces of his considerable holdings (including Burroughs manuscripts and cassette tapes) have been appearing on the Web for quite some time. Mottram taught briefly at Buffalo in the 1960s. At the time, the University was a hotbed for the New American writers of the Donald Allen anthology. Charles Olson, Gregory Corso, John Wieners, and Robert Creeley all taught there. I am sure there were others. De Loach sponsored probably hundreds of readings and lectures. As a result of the poets’ presence, particularly Olson’s, a dedicated and incredibly prolific group of writers and scholars grew out of this oasis. The State Unversity at Buffalo remains a major location on the experimental poetry map to the present. The Electronic Poetry Center and the Poetics Listserv are pioneering and invaluable internet resources dealing with all aspects of what was, is, and will be new and innovative in modern poetry.

Mottram’s study came out of this incredibly fertile time for the academic world around Buffalo. The Special Burroughs issue of Intrepid was a major publication for Burroughs: the first magazine dedicated to all aspects of his career to that point. The little magazine has a long history of being at the forefront of not only publishing the freshest voices in literature before the mainstream publishers dare to, but also of being at the head of the line in providing a critical context for those new writers. This is particularly true of Beat scholarship. While Ann Charters really got the ball rolling with Kerouac scholarship with her monumental bibliography and biography, the little magazine had kept the flame of his reputation burning during the darkest hours of Kerouac’s literary reputation in the 1960s. An essay by Warren Tallman in 1959 on “Kerouac’s Sound” opened many doors and minds as well. Fanzines, like the Moody Street Irregulars, Beat Scene, and The Kerouac Connection, extended Charters’ work in the 1970s doing much of the digging in the archives, texts, and libraries that would uncover the writer behind the myth. The results of this early scholarship are still being realized today.

Like Kerouac, Burroughs scholarship began in the little magazines. For example, Big Table, Evergreen Review, and Kulchur all published incredibly influential critical pieces on Burroughs simultaneously with his fiction. So the publication of The Algebra of Need in a little magazine out of Buffalo is not so strange and in fact just right. Intrepid 14/15 features artwork by Gysin on the cover that had become a logo of sorts for the magazine. The magazine included older cut-up material from the trilogy as well as new work on scientology and the E-meter. Besides Mottram’s piece, there were recollections and critical pieces by Alan Ansen, Harold Norse and Claude Pélieu.

Later in 1971, Intrepid Press published The Algebra of Need in book form as Number 2 of the Beau Fleuve series. This small press publication again highlights Mottram’s central location in the literary community in which he taught and wrote about. Other publications in this series include: Three Dreams and an Old Poem (Paul Blackburn, Number 1), From Maine (Allen De Loach, Number 3), Black Is Black Blues (Ray Bremser, Number 5), Dear Allen: Ship Will Land Jan 23 58 (Peter Orlovsky, Number 5), Some Plays: On Words (Victor Coleman, Number 6), and Narcissus (Bill Cirocco, Number 7). 100 hardbound and signed copies of Mottram’s book were published along with an additional 1125 hardcovers and 2375 in wrappers. Copies appear on eBay from time to time. As I was writing this, a copy of Intrepid and the paperback verison were both available. The Intrepid issue is a must-have for the magazine collector. The book verison is nice as well. I was lucky enough to find a copy in wrappers at a bookstore in Maine. Like the Special Burroughs issue of Intrepid, the signed copies of Algebra have become something of a collector’s item fetching over $150.

Mottram revised and added material to the book over the years and it has been reprinted. This is testament to the immense influence of this critical work. Despite the early reception of Burroughs’ work in little magazines, Mottram’s study, like Charter’s with Kerouac, really began the process of critical acceptance of Burroughs and paved the way for his contested entrance into the academy and canon. Reading the book, it is clear that Mottram feels the need to legitimize and sanitize Burroughs’ work. By 1970 Burroughs’ work had to be freed of the cloud of obscenity and censorship that had shrouded it since its initial publication. As a result, Mottram had to explain the morality of Burroughs’ work. This is most clear in the description of the ejaculating hanging man images as a satire or comment on capital punishment. The work of Swift comes to the forefront. Kerouac started this line of inquiry in 1957. The thoroughness and intelligence of Mottram’s book would demonstrate this line of thought once and for all, thus establishing in academic circles the literary and critical value of Burroughs’ novels and opening up for inquiry new approaches and new lines of questioning. It is no surprise that criticism in the 1970s and onward would largely take for granted Mottram’s assessments and build on this foundation into the realms of literary theory, language and visual art.

The Algebra of Need in its first edition deals with the first cycle of Burroughs’ career encompassing Junkie, Naked Lunch and the cut-up experiments and novels. Later revisions expanded to include the shift in Burroughs’ work of the late 1960s towards film techniques, youth revolt, and more restrained use of the cut-up. For example, the 1977 reprint of The Algebra of Need included a reading of The Last Words of Dutch Schultz. Mottram quotes the relevant texts extensively. He does not interrogate the manuscripts, letters, and archival material. Only with Mottram’s study could a fuller, more detailed study begin that would take into consideration the raw material that the novels were built from.

To my mind, the most innovative aspect of Mottram’s book was its inclusiveness. Mottram does not ignore the work that appeared in little magazines and the small press. To be sure the study focuses on the major novels but Mottram is clearly aware of the importance of the little magazine and Burroughs’ less well-known works. Particularly with the cut-ups of the 1960s, Burroughs’ most radical work never found a mainstream publisher. Mottram acknowledges the presence of the cut-up experiments like Minutes to Go and The Exterminator as well as the pieces in My Own Mag. More than 30 years later, scholars have yet to take up Mottram’s lead. Much critical work has built up around the Grove and mainstream novels, but the work of the small press and little magazines sits relatively in the shadows of academic inquiry. As a result, a fuller understanding of Burroughs’ achievement remains in our future. Scholars, like Oliver Harris and Davis Schneiderman, are opening the archives and digging into neglected works like Minutes to Go and The Yage Letters as well as the riches in Locus Solus and My Own Mag. Hopefully, they will maintain ties with the vibrancy of the literary and artistic community that remains from the post-war era as well as the one that thrives today. As Robert Bank’s piece shows, Mottram’s work benefited from such contacts. In addition, we can only hope that future critics will possess Mottram’s love and respect of the work, not to mention his perceptive intelligence.

Recollections of Jeff Nuttall, Bob Cobbing, My Own Mag, Writers’ Forum, Group H & STigma in early 1960s London

by David Moore

DM: Please would you tell us a little about yourself and how you came to meet Jeff Nuttall?

IW: I was born and educated in south Wales and, in September 1959, moved to High Barnet, then in Hertfordshire, to live and teach. Within a few days of moving there, hearing some rather beautiful jazz coming from the upstairs room of The Rising Sun, a local pub, I found my way to the room where a small jazz group was rehearsing. I was observed by an individual — who I began to talk to — and discovered that his name was Jeff Nuttall. We found that we not only had an interest in jazz but also that Jeff was a painter. That, within a few days of moving to Barnet, was my first contact with Jeff, a contact which grew and flourished over the years.

DM: You had gone to teach…

IW: Yes. I was teaching in a secondary school.

DM: Which school was that?

IW: It was called Ravenscroft School and it was one of the flagship schools of Hertfordshire — the hundredth school after the war or something like that — and it turned out that Jeff was actually teaching art in a school in Finchley, a few miles away. (Jeff Nuttall and Bob Cobbing taught at Alder School, East Finchley. — DM)

DM: You were, of course, teaching art yourself?

IW: I was teaching art myself, yes. So, from that chance meeting Jeff and I became quite close and we were both, I suppose one would say, anti-establishment — Jeff, perhaps, more than me. We worked in different idioms. Jeff worked in a figurative idiom — ‘out of surrealism-cum-expressionism-cum-whatever’ — whereas I was a fairly middle-of-the-road abstract painter at the time — but we hit it off pretty well. As time went by I made the acquaintance of Bob Cobbing who taught in the same school as Jeff. Bob had run for a number of years an organisation called Arts Together in north London and that comprised: Group H, which was, if you like, the visual and plastic arts side; Writers’ Forum, which was already involved in what these days we call ‘desktop publishing’ using comparatively simple technology; and there was also, I think, The London Film Coop where Bob did rather interesting experimental films and projected films by other people. This was in the early Sixties, which would have been the start of the underground movement internationally, really, and, I think, Bob was one of the founders of this, certainly in this country.

DM: What were your first impressions of Bob Cobbing?

IW: Rather a strong personality with a good beard and a very resonant voice and interested, as I’ve said, in a very wide range of things which, at the time, were somewhat alien to me, such as his visual poems and, later on, his sound poems which have now begun to appreciate to a great degree. But, certainly, with Jeff and Bob working together in the same school some quite interesting things were happening both within the school, either the art work or the writing that the children in the school were doing, and also, I think, some publishing. The school magazines were the difference.

DM: Did you visit them in their school?

IW: No, I didn’t visit the school for various reasons but it’s through Bob coming to Jeff’s — or we would meet in Finchley at Bob’s then home — that I got to know what they were doing and it was about this time, early Sixties, that Jeff, one day, produced his first issue of My Own Mag. Very simple issue. I think four sheets printed only one side of the page and stapled together. ‘My Own Mag a Super Absorbent Periodical Produced by Homo Sap Inc, 37 Salisbury Road…’ (which, in fact, was Jeff’s home). Jeff wouldn’t have had a duplicator, Roneo or Gestetner at home so he might have been producing the stencils at home and drawing and typing on the stencils but then printing them in, I presume, the school premises and, certainly, this is what he did later on when he was teaching some years later at the same school as I was.

DM: With the full approval of the school authorities?

IW: Well, he was using a very small amount of ink and I don’t think they worried. He probably replaced that himself. I’m not sure whether ‘full approval’ would be the correct expression but he certainly carried on doing it at Finchley and then, about 1963 / 64 — certainly by ’64 — he was teaching with me in Barnet and, at that time, he was using the Gestetner duplicator which the school secretary had to relinquish and all the duplicating went on in the art room with Jeff.

DM: When he showed you this first edition what did he say? Did you sense that he was rather pleased with it?

IW: Yes, I think he was because the one thing it wasn’t was tasteful and, if we say anything about Jeff, the whole of Jeff’s work could never be described as ‘tasteful’. I can vouch for that because, at a later period, three or four years later, I tried to produce a piece of artwork — a relief assemblage — in the style of Jeff Nuttall and whatever I did, whatever terrible colours I used, what terrible paints I used — like Woolworth’s gloss paint — everything I did in this piece turned out tasteful. Whereas Jeff could take the most tasteful material and produce something that was the opposite.

DM: Were you surprised when he produced this?

IW: No, I don’t think I was because I knew that he wrote and I had read one or two manuscript novels that he had written at an earlier date before he came to live in Barnet so I knew his literary side and poetic side was there and his method of production, as I say, really enabled him to fly in the face of commercial, tasteful products.

DM: I gather he wrote Mr Watkins Got Drunk & Had to be Carried Home?

IW: Yes.

DM: Was that before then or did it come later?

IW: That was published about 1964, I think. It all came about — and quite a lot of later issues of My Own Mag — through his contact with William Burroughs, the American writer who used a technique called ‘cut-up’ to produce his texts and, certainly, this was the idea behind Mr Watkins Got Drunk & Had to be Carried Home. The context of that was Jeff and his wife Jane decided to hold a party at their house in Salisbury Road and invited a range of people — Group H members, Writers’ Forum members and other people — to attend the party but they had to bring with them a text which described the party and what went on in the party so that it was a forecast of what happened. As well as this he tape-recorded the actual party and the idea was that all these accounts would be cut up and reassembled to produce an analogy to the party but not a logical description of it. As well as taking my forecast of the events of the party along to the house that night I took with me four or five accounts written by pupils I was involved with at the time in school who were remedial education pupils and they, in fact, wrote accounts of the party featuring, of course, me, and one of those accounts was Mr Watkins Got Drunk & Had to be Carried Home. It didn’t actually happen.

DM: It didn’t?

IW: No, I walked home and, if I got drunk, it wasn’t very very very drunk, so the children would have been rather disappointed, but, eventually, after a lot of work by Jeff, who had called himself, I think, ‘the scissor man’ for that publication, it was actually produced and published by Writers’ Forum.

DM: My understanding is that Jeff sent a copy of the first My Own Mag to William Burroughs and that he became involved from then on. Is that what you understood?

IW: Well, certainly by what appears to be Issue Three, I think, William Burroughs features on the cover — My Own Mag ‘Moving with the Times Special Tangier Edition’. Well, of course, William Burroughs was in Tangier, probably at that time, and it mentions William Burroughs. May have been Issue Four… Looking at the price, because Jeff produced these very cheaply on duplicating paper, Issue One was a penny. Issue Two would have been a penny. Issue Three was a penny but the William Burroughs Issue was certainly four-pence-halfpenny because, obviously, the cost of buying reams of duplicating paper must have meant that he had to put the price up but, I would say, that it is something like Issue Four that William Burroughs was first involved himself and there are, later on, letters from William Burroughs that are published in the magazine.

DM: Did you meet William Burroughs?

IW: No, I didn’t, no. In a way, although, on one level, I was quite closely involved with Jeff, he did have a social cultural life which meant that he spent a lot of time in London proper and met all sorts of people who were just names to me, but he had a terrific circle of friends and acquaintances, a lot of whom, in fact, contributed to My Own Mag. I think the initial My Own Mags were Jeff’s own work but, later on, he had contributions from all sorts of people.

DM: Did you know any of the other contributors?

IW: Some I knew, some I didn’t, and in this one here, which is still one penny, we have: Anselm Hollo, who I think was quite well-known; Ray Gosling, who still broadcasts on BBC; Keith Musgrove I knew. So there were a few in that one that I knew quite well. Keith Musgrove was part of the whole thing for quite a long time.

DM: And you contributed yourself?

IW: I contributed to a few of them. I think two, maybe three of the Mags. The last one I contributed to was when I was in the States in ’65 / ’66 and, I think, two or three Mags were published while I was in the States and, I think, the last one just after I got back and Jeff sent me copies in the States which is why I managed to get a copy of every issue.

DM: How were you approached to write for it?

IW: Um, I think it very informally. It just happened. Because I did the occasional bit of poetry which I took along to one of the Writers’ Forum poetry evenings which were held at Bob Cobbing’s but there were so many high-powered poets there that I felt reluctant to read in front of them but then some things that I wrote very much on the kind of cut-up principle, I suspect, were found in some of My Own Mags and, at that time, I was very interested in the idea of ‘found’ poetry. Nothing I wrote or invented myself but things I would find written on walls or whatever. One of these, which is, in fact, published in Mr Watkins Got Drunk & Had to be Carried Home, if I remember rightly, is a very simple poem which goes: ‘Bedded in Betws, brecwast in Bangor and a naked Bowen’s red-tipped breasts in Bethesda’. Now, ‘the naked Bowen’s red-tipped breasts in Bethesda’ was a graffiti I found on a toilet wall in Bethesda, wonderfully rich in image. Far better than I could have invented. So I just added the ‘bedded’ and ‘Brecwast’ and then ‘in Bethesda’ at the end and so, because of that, I was producing things that, I suppose, it just became natural that they went into My Own Mag at some time.

DM: As the magazine progressed can you remember whether it took up quite a bit of Jeff’s time?

IW: Yes, but, then, Jeff always seemed to be working one way or another. He might have been drinking a pint of beer in a pub but he would have either been working in terms of discussing with people things that mattered like nuclear disarmament or the anti-apartheid movement. All of these things worked together at that time and we were all part of it. Some people involved were artists and others weren’t. One of the people, in fact, who marched with us on marches and used to baby-sit for Jeff and his wife is now a very respectable MP in Parliament — a Labour MP, I must say. So, you know, all sorts of people came our way.

DM: How do you feel that My Own Mag relates to Jeff’s wider creative work?

IW: I think, stylistically, it relates very closely. The graphics, the imagery, that he uses — both the verbal but also the drawn — relates very much to his work in the field of sculpture and painting. It’s very much part of the same person and the throwaway nature of My Own Mag — i.e. printed on duplicating paper, sometimes, like the one I’m holding at the moment, the front page has been burnt, charred at the bottom. Another one will be torn. One would be cut-up. There is one which looks as though someone has urinated over it. I hope he hasn’t, but maybe…

But all of these things are ephemeral and his work at the time, his sculpture work, was very ephemeral. One of the things I much regret is that, in exhibitions we had — and, through Bob Cobbing, Group H showed very often in the libraries in north Finchley and east Finchley — his work would go into a Group H exhibition and it would be priced at ‘two thousand five hundred pounds’ or ‘ten shillings’. At the time I was living in a series of bed-sitters and works that he produced — and which are no longer with us because of their ephemeral nature — if I had the space I would have bought. I would have had to pay the ten shillings not the two thousand pounds — but I would have bought them and stored them and, I think, they would have been, today, very important evidence of what he was doing.

DM: In many ways it’s amazing that these magazines have survived at all.

IW: Yes, but, of course, how many have survived? I was lucky to be working close to Jeff in the first half of the Sixties. I had a copy of every one and realised their importance because, I think, they were amongst the first underground publications. ‘Desktop publishing’, in those days, was not normal. You printed off things in school programmes for events in school and things like that. But how many people were producing cyclostyled, mimeographed, duplicated — literary works? Bob Cobbing had been doing that. Very often the material he produced, if it was in the form of a booklet, would, in fact, have been done by lithography by a commercial printer, but, to actually work, if you like, on your own desk producing this stuff I think was a very important part of publishing for the underground. By the late Sixties, early Seventies, of course, everybody had access to photolithography and so magazines which, I suppose, were underground magazines, like Oz, the Richard Neville one, that was produced by the offset process. You could do wonderful things — psychedelic kind of colour changes and so on — with it which, of course, you couldn’t do on the old Roneo or Gestetner. But I still think these were important and, of course, I saved them but how many of these went out to people and were thrown away?

DM: Do you know how many were produced in the first place?

IW: No. It would be very difficult to say. Paper came in reams of five hundred. I doubt if he would have produced five hundred of any one copy. I presume a hundred or so would have been a maximum and they would be sent out to friends, so, I suppose, sold to acquaintances. I don’t know. I don’t think I ever paid for any of mine.

DM: I believe some of them were sold in Better Books?

IW: Well, that is quite likely because Bob Cobbing by 1963, maybe by ’62, was managing the paperback bookshop of Better Books in Charing Cross Road and he sold there a lot of underground material, anti-establishment material. But, of course, Better Books, at that time, also became the focus for a number of other things because, in 1964, Jeff, together with Bruce Lacey, John Latham, David Trace, I think Keith Musgrove, a Greek architect who also contributed to My Own Mag called Criton Tomazos and myself collaborated on an installation in the basement of Better Books. This was called STigma.

DM: This is illustrated in My Own Mag.

IW: I think it is in one of the later issues, yes. This happened before I went to the States in ’65. So it may have been early ’65 and this consisted of a rather harrowing, I suppose, ‘conception, birth, life, death’ labyrinth in the basement of Better Books.

DM: Was Jeff Nuttall the kind of lead figure in all this?

IW: Yes. Whilst he was talking at that time with people like William Burroughs, he was also talking with Alexander Trocchi, and he, in fact, published, I think, a magazine called Sigma and I think the STigma came out of that title. Now the concept began in discussions through the Group H, really. Criton Tomazos, being an architect, had come up with a concept for a very large — perhaps an outdoor — structure, which would have been, sixty, eighty foot high or more, but the same labyrinthine quality to it. I think the meetings we had at this time — informal meetings — eventually, through Bob, materialised in the STigma production in Better Books.

DM: There was quite a lot of interest, wasn’t there, in this? Wasn’t there a BBC broadcast?

IW: Yes. Somewhere in my archive I have a tape off-air. A reel-to-reel tape in which a broadcaster went through the STigma environment, installation, and, totally unflappable, described his experiences as though he was describing the Trooping of the Colour or something like that. There was no football crowd excitement or anything like that. It was just on a very even level and quite amazing because, even though one worked on the installation, you still felt a bit shattered when you came out of it. But the interest was wide. There is a visitors’ book in one of the Jeff Nuttall archives and this includes such personalities as Mick Jagger and various actors and film stars who actually went through and experienced it but it was, I think, at the time, an event that, in terms of art history, was very very important and, in fact, at the time, although it was recorded by the BBC, it didn’t hit the establishment press in terms of its art content. It might have hit the establishment press in other terms but, of course, recently in ‘The Art of the Sixties’ it is talked about and so that period of My Own Mag, STigma, Group H, and so on, is, at last, being recognised for what it was. The first half of the Sixties was a very exciting time in north London.

DM: So you feel, very much, that these activities have been unappreciated in art historical terms?

IW: Yes — and by the Establishment. I know that Mrs Thatcher, in the early Sixties a Conservative councillor for the borough of Finchley, was not at all happy with what was going on in the libraries and, if freedom of speech and expression hadn’t been allowed and, if she had her way, it wouldn’t have been allowed, then these events wouldn’t have happened.

DM: Did she ever meet Jeff, do you think?

IW: She certainly met Bob Cobbing and, maybe, she did meet Jeff as well. There is an apocryphal story — no, it isn’t apocryphal, I think it’s quite true — that she visited one of the exhibitions in north Finchley library and Jeff had one of his ephemeral pieces of sculpture which was, basically, a rather moth-eaten umbrella, one or two other things added to it, and coated with a bitumen paint, hanging above Mrs Thatcher and she was ranting on about the ‘disgusting’ exhibition and, I’m told, that a little bit of bitumen, which hadn’t hardened, dripped off and fell into her coiffure. I wasn’t there but this is the story.

DM: There seems to be quite a bit of discussion about the order of the first eight copies of My Own Mag.The first one might have been numbered but the others weren’t. Do you have any thoughts on that?

IW: It’s very difficult. Because you’re now talking about — how many years ago? — forty years ago. I would only be tempted to order them by their complexity, the sophistication of the production process and by the price. Certainly, a penny — a ‘penny dreadful’ — was cheap at the time, wasn’t it ? But, the first issue of all, was four pages printed one side only and, later on, you had very complicated procedures. There is one copy here which uses several colours of paper — and this is one of the interesting things about Jeff. I think he found duplicating paper interesting because it is the same colour as toilet paper — pink, pale blue, you know.

DM: You think that is what appealed to him about it?

IW: Yes, because there are places where he says things like ‘a super-absorbent periodical’ and ‘soft to the touch’ which is, of course, pure Andrex / Kleenex advertising — ‘soft, luscious’. But in the copy here he is using about four or five different colours of paper and, in fact, production is complicated because only one sheet is a whole sheet — or two sheets which are the back sheets of the production. The rest of it is cut up into small sections so you’ve got three leaves at the front, three leaves to the right; one, two, three, four, what’s that, that’s twelve, twenty-four small sheets of paper stapled to the main thing. So it is very complicated. But, again, it is used with the cut-up idea because you can read from one to the other so that’s the William Burroughs thing. This issue features Ray Gosling again, B.S. Johnson, another name from the Sixties, Anselm Hollo, William Burroughs and, down the bottom here, I see, Islwyn Watkins. I don’t know what I contributed yet. I’d have to go through it and see.

DM: Presumably Jeff was responsible, largely, for the look of the magazine?

IW: Oh, absolutely, totally, totally, yes, and that is why, as I say, there is one issue which looks as though it’s been urinated on and this was deliberate. As I remember, he did not urinate on it. He used a watercolour or some mixture other than urine.

DM: Can you remember this going on?

IW: I can remember that particular one being done. Yes. I wasn’t present, perhaps, at the whole thing but I would have been around the periphery at the time because, certainly, the printing would have been done at school and, then, the assembly, probably, done at home or after school hours. Anyway, this one is ‘admission sixpence’ so that means that’s a later one and it actually says here ‘First of November 1964′ so we have a date on that one and that has John Latham as a contributor, and Allen Ginsberg, American underground poet. Let’s see who else. Probably William Borroughs again. So, you know, quite a lot of very important people contributed.

DM: You can’t remember Jeff setting fire to any of the copies?

IW: The charred ones I can’t remember. I wasn’t present when he did those but they were only partially charred rather than completely charred.

DM: They do mean, essentially, that you’ve lost a certain amount of the text. That wouldn’t have mattered?

IW: No, well, see, if you think of life — life’s like that. You don’t get everything complete. You get little bits coming in and, then, I suppose, if you really worried about it, then you would have to be creative and fill in the blanks yourself.

DM: It’s a little bit like ‘Destruction in Art’, isn’t it?

IW: Well, of course, that came when I got back from the States in ’66 and early ’67. ‘Destruction in Art’ became one of the themes that, again, was seen in exhibitions in London, again now being appreciated, and I think the first ‘Destruction in Art’ exhibition in London was held in the basement of Better Books with Bob Cobbing. By then I had left London and I was working in Birmingham full-time and I didn’t get down to a number of these exhibitions and performances. I was lucky enough to visit Bob in Better Books sometime after the ‘Destruction in Art’ symposium and exhibition and found a work by the German artist Werner Schreib who burned things as his way of producing his works of art. I found a small work of his there, signed on the back by him, which was left to rot in the basement and so I was able to collect that which, in a way, is another element that should have been destroyed but, now preserved, is a bit of a paradox.

DM: Can you think of anyone else who was so playful and imaginative in the way in which they used the text — in the case of My Own Mag it is typed text — in relation to images or as part of the whole?

IW: Not really. I talked about Oz, which was the Australian-based underground magazine — Australians in this country, Australian émigrés — that had all this wonderful technology that it used. Although even that looks rather primitive now but, because it was produced by a commercial printer, it could not have the same ‘hands-on’ feeling that this has.

DM: Jeff typed it all himself?

IW: Jeff would have done everything himself unless he used collage in one or two of them, which he did and that would have been from another source. The nearest thing to it that I know of, I think, was B.S. Johnson who contributed to these, did produce a book in the Sixties, or maybe early Seventies, where the pages were cut and you could read them in whatever order you wished and that was commercially printed. Don’t have a copy of that which is a pity, in a way, but I really can’t think of anyone that worked like this but, of course, if you think of the world, and the States, particularly at that time, there may have been other people producing material like this — but what has happened to it? Because of my position at the time, my relationship to Jeff at the time, I was able to have a complete run of these magazines.

DM: And you felt, at the time, it was important to have a set?

IW: Yes. I thought that Jeff was an important artist. We worked in a very different way although we also had concerns in common. Other people in other parts of the world might have been producing these but, of course, I don’t have the evidence. It’s unlikely that one person in the world was producing this kind of material.

DM: You were aware that, at the time, these magazines were having an impact? People were talking about them?

IW: Yes, yes. I think I said, he sent me some issues to the States and he sent not just one for me but ones I could distribute there and so they, then, had their own influence in the States. So, yes. Responses were very varied. You can imagine.

DM: And do you know people who were outraged by them?

IW: There were always people who were outraged by what Jeff did because he didn’t pull his punches. You know that yourself. Taste and decorum were foreign words to Jeff.

DM: And these are highly-prized possessions of yours now?

IW: Yes. I’m very pleased to have them. Eventually, I hope they will go into the collection of… (Tape runs out).

by Michael Bartholomew

I met Jeff Nuttall round about 1960, when I was 18 years old. I lived in north London and was a member of the Barnet branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Jeff was also a member. He was maybe 10 years older than I was. He had a wife and family, lived in Barnet, and worked as an art teacher in a secondary modern school in Finchley, north London. When I got to know him, I often used to babysit for his four children. Eventually, I spent quite a bit of time at his house and learned a great deal from him and his wife, Jane — who had been his teacher at art school.

Jeff’s house had the front room set aside as a studio, where he produced paintings and constructions that fell into no category known to me. He had exhibitions at a couple of local galleries and public libraries but sold little.

He also played the trumpet and led various bands in and around north London.

He spent a lot of time in central London at avant-garde galleries, poetry readings, and happenings of various sorts. He was associated with a venture called ‘The Arts Lab’ and led a troupe of actors called ‘The People Show.’ At some point during the early 60s he must have met Burroughs. I do not know who got them together.

Although Jeff was deeply immersed in the avant-garde, he had his roots deep in very particular aspects of English culture. First, he loved the English countryside and the English pastoral tradition in painting. I remember him turning me on to Samuel Palmer, for instance. This love persisted throughout his life, and it’s interesting that the last paintings he was doing, before his death a few years ago, were beautiful watercolours of the countryside along the Welsh / English border, where he was living. Secondly, he loved British popular culture as it manifested itself in things like the music hall and pre-rock popular music. He never really accommodated himself to rock, even though he was at his most active during the sixties. His first and last musical love was jazz of the 30s and 40s — although he would listen and enjoy almost anything. I think that he once collaborated with Mike Westbrook (pianist and bandleader of some superb, roaring, far-out bands) on a happening in St Pancras town hall that involved my brother making an entry down the aisle on a motorbike.

I can’t remember exactly when Jeff started My Own Mag. I’m pretty sure that it was a lone effort. He didn’t have a team of collators and staplers. I imagine that he worked on the material and then ran if off on the school duplicator after hours, on his own, or maybe with the help of some of the kids. (It was a fairly rough school, but Jeff was able to coax some remarkable bits of junk sculpture out of the kids.) The title of the magazine was a deliberate reference to the titles of the children’s comics and annuals that he’d grown up with. He relished the clash between the nostalgic, innocent resonances of the title and the scabrous material that the magazine contained.

I’d like to be able to say that I eagerly awaited every issue and that I read every word, but the fact is that much of what he was writing and publishing was completely beyond me. It was just one more of Jeff’s bizarre projects. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve kept none of the copies, although I must have received them all.

I went off to college in 1963, but stayed in touch with Jeff and his family. He sent me bundles of My Own Mag as they came off his machine and I distributed them to interested (and often uninterested) students. That’s how Peter Collier came to have some copies. I remember the cut-up and burnt issues. Jeff was then under the influence of Burroughs, and the strange appearance of MOM was a sort of homage.

There was a seminal poetry reading that filled the Albert Hall in, I think, 1964. Ginsberg was the star turn, but it assembled all the young British poets. Jeff was to make an appearance, with somebody else, in a happening of some sort that involved them appearing with their naked bodies completely painted, and stuck over with pages of books. They never made it to the stage, due to drunkenness and the effect of the paint on Jeff’s partner.

Everybody who knew Jeff fell under his spell. When he died, an enormously wide range of people, from all periods of his life, came out to his funeral — although I didn’t go. I imagine that someone somewhere will write a biography of him. And I believe that his daughter is writing something herself. There was a big wake for Jeff in London, and a CD of his fugitive poetry readings and jazz performances was produced.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Little magazines are expressions of and monuments to a thriving creative community. Looking through the pages of My Own Mag brings this fact home. The magazine expanded in size and scope from its first four-page issue into a newsletter for an international avant-garde. Within the mimeo’d pages, the contributors commented on and communicated with each other. Of course, the magazine also disseminated this information to interested readers on both sides of the Atlantic.

While Burroughs is one of the most well known, Jeff Nuttall touched many people throughout his life with his talent, his humor and his lust for life. He was a major source of inspiration and a sounding board for William Burroughs in the 1960s.

In an effort to capture the vortex that swirled around Burroughs, Nuttall, and the magazine and scene that brought them together, the Bibliographic Bunker will be posting interviews, recollections, and comments by contributors to My Own Mag, participants in the British Poetry Revival and Swinging London, friends and collaborators of Jeff Nuttall, readers who came in contact with the mimeo in the 1960s, and anything else that fleshes out this fascinating and important story of the international avant garde community.

• Eric Mottram and the Algebra of Need by Jed Birmingham
• “Live All You Can”: A Memoir of Eric Mottram collated by Robert Bank
• Islwyn Watkins Interviewed by David Moore
• Recollections Of Jeff Nuttall by Michael Bartholomew

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Much has been made of the imperiled state of the print publishing industry. Just this weekend I read a review of a large format art book entitled The Last Magazine. Everywhere you look there is an article on the future of the ebook or the death of print. The mainstream publishers are on life support. The small press lacks adequate distribution systems. Meanwhile, fledgling writers cannot get their books into print, mid-list writers are getting squeezed out of the shelves, and the blockbuster authors hold the fate of the large publishers in their hands as they put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard). Countless literary blogs bemoan the closing of another independent bookshop. As an email from Robert Bank, subject headed “Disaster!,” informed me, there is another potential nail in the coffin.

The legendary John Calder is in danger of completely shutting up shop. In fact for years, he has curtailed his publishing activities, and his backlist and business operations are in a state of disorganization. Like so many mavericks — I am thinking of Maurice Girodias here, but there are several others — the sense of taste, the desire to upset the status quo, the daring in the face of censorship, the love of fine and experimental literature that make a great publisher do not translate into a financially successful businessman.

Rare is the publisher like John Martin of Black Sparrow who combines sound business acumen with exceptional literary sensibility. But even Martin could not run Black Sparrow forever and larger publishing entities (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins) stepped in to take over the Bukowski, Bowles and Fante titles. This sale allowed Martin to structure a deal to keep the backlist of Black Sparrow available as well.

Has the Black Sparrow arrangement been valuable for all involved (publisher, writer and reader)? I do not know, but Calder, like Martin, has gathered together a stable of writers to which the reading public should demand access. Calder should be rewarded for the foresight and bravery of getting these writers into print. Like Barney Rosset at Grove and Girodias at Olympia Press, Calder opened British borders and Britons’ minds with publications that challenged the censors and the intellect. Some eighty percent of Samuel Beckett’s output is on the Calder list. Like the Bukowski line at Black Sparrow, it looks like a larger publisher, in this case Faber, will come in and make this work available. What about the other writers published by Calder? Could the proceeds of this sale allow Calder to continue his business or make arrangements like John Martin? Calder published and in some cases holds copyright to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, Eugene Ionesco, and Henrich Boll. Of additional interest to readers of RealityStudio, Calder brought William Burroughs to British shores, published Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, and holds the rights to various works of Jeff Nuttall.

In the Times article, Calder states, “I am a great believer in chance… Something might come up, to keep us going.” Hopefully so. Calder also states, “I don’t think there’s ever been such a philistine era.” Maybe so. Clearly, there is a crisis in print culture at every level. Print is in a time of remarkable flux and change, maybe as sweeping as that of its birth in the mid-1400s with Gutenberg. I do not know what is going to happen and given all that I have read in books, magazines, and the Web or have heard in conversation at bookstores, libraries, and lectures, I do not think anybody else does either. Clearly, the history of Calder as a publisher and the current precarious position of his titles and his store are a major part of the story at every level.

I would like to celebrate the legacy of Calder in the only way I know how by writing a little about my favorite Burroughs titles published by his company. In previous columns and on another page, I have written about Calder’s immense importance to Burroughs as well as the pleasures of the British firsts. So bear with me if I cover some of the same ground and at the same time fail to provide a more complete look at Calder’s relationship with Burroughs or the history of Calder as a publisher.

As a matter of personal taste, I much prefer the paperback firsts of Burroughs over the hardcovers. I return again and again to the Ace and Digit Junkies, the Two Cities Minutes to Go, Auerhahn’s The Exterminator. Give me the Olympia Press titles over the Grove counterparts. The Calder editions of Burroughs’ work are in some cases an exception to that rule. Calder’s hardcover of Soft Machine is not one of those efforts unfortunately. Quite possibly, this edition is my least favorite Burroughs hardcover. It is the most boring design-wise. But don’t judge a book by its cover, because as the discussion forum makes clear, Burroughs heavily revised Soft Machine from Olympia Press to Grove to Calder. As a result, the British edition is invaluable and a must-have.

Much more interesting on a visual level is the Calder Ticket That Exploded hardcover. This is a very pleasing title and the fact that my copy is inscribed by Burroughs to his British agent at the time makes it more so. Unlike Soft Machine, the British Ticket reprints the Grove edition without further edits. So what lies between the covers proves less interesting to those who possess the American edition. Even so, the cover art that hints in basic design to the Grove dust jacket makes the British first a desirable object.

Dead Fingers Talk published by Calder in boards in 1963 is one of my favorite books soft or hardcover. I find the dust jacket to be stunning. The front reproduces the Olympia Press covers in a montage by Ian Somerville. The manipulation of images by Somerville (reproduction and reduction of the jacket covers into a mosaic of a larger image) parallels the tape experiments of the Beat Hotel period and beyond. The photo of Burroughs on the back cover is haunting, the very representation of el Hombre Invisible. I love the disembodied hand across the cover that bring to my mind Burroughs’s Van Gogh act of the early 1940s when he cut off his finger in an act of desperation and passion.

To my understanding, Dead Fingers Talk is an assemblage of the Olympia Press titles under one cover. Calder issued the book after the international coming-out party of the Edinburgh Writers Conference of 1962 in order to capitalize on Burroughs’ celebrity and to prepare the way for Naked Lunch. Contrary to popular belief, the UGH correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement developed in response to the publication of Dead Fingers Talk, not Naked Lunch. To my great embarrassment, I have never read Dead Fingers Talk since even the 1970s reprint I have is not a true reading copy. Why has this largely unknown title by Burroughs fallen out of print for so long and to my knowledge never been made available in the United States? Hopefully, Calder or another entity will reissue it again in an affordable paperback in Britain and abroad. Secondhand, I have heard that Dead Fingers Talk differs from its original sources, but others have told me that it is a simple cut and paste job. I would like to experience it for myself.

Dead Fingers Talk bears the Calder and Olympia Press imprint. Throughout the fifties and sixties, Olympia Press introduced numerous authors of the Calder and Grove stables first. Olympia Press pornography encompassed some of the best outlaw writing on sex, drugs, and the emerging counterculture. Grove repeatedly reissued the Olympia Press list and Calder did too, most notably with Beckett and Burroughs. As I mentioned above, Girodias, Calder, and Rosset are the three amigos of independent publishing to me. Not only their publications overlap, their personal histories possess many similarities as well.

Every book collection has gaping holes: the empty spaces in the bookshelf waiting for the presently unobtainable, but desperately desired, book. A signed British first of Naked Lunch (1964) is one such title. It is possibly the most obvious gap in my collection. Like Dead Fingers Talk, the Calder (again in association with Olympia Press) Naked Lunch is a visually arresting title, due to the spectral visage of Burroughs on the front cover. The cut-out of Burroughs refers to the cut-up and the red eyes present Burroughs as demonic. The eyes remind me of the Norman Mailer quote that Burroughs was the only American author possessed by genius. The idea of demonic possession threads through Burroughs’ work and his literary theories, most notably and tragically in the introduction to Queer involving the Ugly Spirit.

I love the look of this book even if its white dust jacket makes getting a crisp, bright copy a tough order. I haven’t lacked the opportunity although signed copies hover at the $1000 mark and in some distressing cases double that amount. Unsigned copies are much more common and lately a copy with a wraparound band popped up on eBay. I was unaware of the band, but such added touches are not unheard-of in Burroughs’ publishing history. The Two Cities edition of Minutes to Go should have a wraparound band. Some copies of the Grove Naked Lunch possessed bands as well stating “Recommended for Sale to Adults Only.” These ephemeral pieces are usually torn or even worse missing altogether, ripped apart and thrown in the trash in the process of reading the book.

For much of Calder’s fifty years in publishing, Burroughs has been a defining presence on the maverick publisher’s catalog. Yet this should never be considered a one-sided relationship. Calder was instrumental in introducing Burroughs to a larger audience that extended beyond Great Britain. The Edinburgh Writers’ Conference made Burroughs an international celebrity and Calder continued to champion Burroughs’s work on the world stage from that point on. At one point, Calder nominated Burroughs for the Nobel Prize. If Burroughs would have won such an honor or if he was even seriously considered, the faith and dedication of the fearless Scotsman would have been one of the major reasons why.