RealityStudio » Floating Bear

Gilbert Sorrentino on William S. Burroughs

RealityStudio — Sat, 12 May 2012 20:57:23 +0000

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Issue 30 of Floating Bear (November 1964) contains a text by Gilbert Sorrentino which gives his impressions of the prose writers of the day. Here are a transcription of his comments on William Burroughs and a scan of his entire article.

Sorrentino on Burroughs

Burroughs: Clue here is that he is not a writer, he merely writes. Doesn’t care about the overall pattern, if he enjoys writing it, in it goes, Naked Lunch the most dazzling prose of this decade (and last), but not great writing. Thinking shallow and amoral, magnificent construction of comic characters, greatest “funny names” since Rabelais. Style is reminiscent of Nashe, though not consistent, I mean, he can bore the hell out of you. Power is often misdirected, because his greatest hatred, his full venom falls usually into scenes in which the characters are not people. Irritates because he has the arrogance of the addict, viz, “you poor dopes”. Best things in Lunch are Clem and Jody, episode about Bradley the Buyer, the fantasy land near the and of book. If he could cut out and edit, in terms of the work, and not what he likes, he’d be a good writer. Latest “cutup” method merely amusing, old stuff from the transition days, a bore and a fake. In the current Futurism show in town, we find the same sort of thing done as collage, ca. 1915. It didn’t work then, either.

Gilbert Sorrentino, “Prose of Our Times”

Gilbert Sorrentino
Prose of Our Times
Article from Floating Bear 30

Written by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 12 May 2012.

Two Drive Suites

RealityStudio — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:07:18 +0000

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

“Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in color. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography.”

— Beatrice Warde, “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible”

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and his father court death and disaster in pursuit of the Holy Grail. At the Canyon of the Crescent Moon, with his father’s life hanging in the balance, Jones stands before a collection of chalices and goblets, one of which is the Grail. The corrupt Dr. Elsa Schneider, blinded by the grandeur and glory of her vision of the Son of God, chooses the most ostentatious of cups. Walter Donovan drinks deeply and crumbles into dust. “He chose poorly.” Jones knows better. Remembering that our Lord and Savior was a mere carpenter, Professor Jones chooses the humblest of cups. This holy water heals the gaping gunshot wound of his father, saving his life. Sometimes the greatest treasure is the simplest of objects. The last Knight blesses Indy’s decision: “You have chosen . . . wisely.”

Thus was my dilemma upon receiving Andrew Sclanders’ latest BeatBooks catalog: Number 59. For Burroughs fans there was a copy of Black Mountain Review #7 or the English Bookshop pressing of Call Me Burroughs. Copy after copy of drug pulps flew from the catalog. Last time I checked the Ace Junkie remains available. In a sense, the Ace Junkie is yet another jeweled goblet, a false treasure. It is expensive at 425 pounds, and with over 100,000 copies printed, most treasure seekers have already snatched up their copies.

I found my Grail in the “Beats, Outsiders, and Other Adventures in Poetry” Section. It was the humblest of entries: “Carrington, Harold. Drive Suite. London: Paul Breman, 1972. First edition, 8vo. Wrps., 12pp. Wrappers slightly rubbed. Very Good. 15 Pounds.” Carrington was born in Atlantic City in 1938. From the age of 16, he served time in various jails and institutions. While in jail, he picked up the writer’s bug to go along with his drug and alcohol habit. On July 27, 1964, Carrington was released from prison. He died three days later in the city of his birth of a drug overdose.

Carrington may be familiar to Burroughs fans. There is a fragile link between the two writers. First, both are junkie-writers. Unfortunately, Carrington ended up in the credit column of the junkie-writer ledger. The other link is Floating Bear No. 9. Burroughs’ Roosevelt After Inauguration appears in this issue along with LeRoi Jones‘ The System of Dante’s Hell. The issue was mailed to Carrington in Rahway Prison in New Jersey in 1961. Carrington’s copy was seized by prison censors, who objected to Burroughs’ pornographic satire and Jones’ homosexual subject matter. The seizure led to obscenity charges against Jones and Diane DiPrima. Ultimately, the charges were dropped. DiPrima and Jones proclaimed their victory in Issue 20 of Floating Bear. I bought the book on the basis of the link to Floating Bear and Burroughs — an interesting piece of the Floating Bear puzzle that fills in the history of that magazine and, in particular, the controversial ninth issue.

Before seeing the book in the BeatBooks catalog, I was completely unaware that anything of Carrington’s was actually published. Yet upon receiving the slim volume, it was immediately familiar. This should have been obvious from the title. Drive Suite is also the title of a Ray Bremser poem, published as Nova Broadcast No. 1 by Jan Herman. A quick look at the two publications reveals that they are versions of the same poem. The first three sections are, with slight variations, identical. The Nova Broadcast edition contains a fourth section entitled “Luyah, the Glorious Step.”

What the hell is going on? A little digging reveals an interesting story. Turns out that Bremser, another poet who struggled with his addictions, served time with Carrington at Rahway Prison. Bremser introduced Carrington to literary connections in New York and elsewhere, such as Walter Lowenfels. Diane DiPrima became a correspondent of Carrington’s as well, which led no doubt to the mailing of Floating Bear. Lowenfels and DiPrima maintained their correspondence with Carrington, so some of his writing and work survived after his sudden and unexpected death. Carrington’s uncle also held on to a small archive. Going through Carrington’s papers, Breman found a draft of Drive Suite written largely in Carrington’s hand. Breman assumed the poem was Carrington’s, which it is not. The poem was chosen by Breman for publication due to its “sheer virtuosity” and for the connection to jazz musician Cecil Taylor, a member of the circle of poets, artists and musicians that gathered around Jones, Hettie Cohen, and Yugen. Drive Suite eventually became Number 14 in Breman’s important Heritage Series of African-American poets. Breman’s memoir on The Heritage Series has some useful information on Carrington and this publishing snafu.

Quite possibly, Carrington copied the poem in order to comment on it or simply to preserve a poem he admired. It could be that there is a T.S Eliot / Ezra Pound dynamic going on with Drive Suite, with Carrington hovering behind Bremser’s finished and published poem. Doubtful. Lowenfels and others have confirmed the authorship as Bremser’s and eventually Breman acknowledged his error and pulled the Heritage publication of Drive Suite. What is strange is that the Nova Broadcast edition of Bremser’s poem was in print from 1968. An earlier version of first section of the poem was published in Stanley Fisher’s Beat Coast East anthology as far back as 1960. The poem was clearly in circulation for years. Given the Bremser / Carrington friendship, it is doubly odd that nobody made the connection earlier.

So we are left with a situation in which the only published book of poems by Harold Carrington contains in its entirety a poem that is not by Carrington. Let me stress that this was unintentional and merely an editing mistake by Breman, yet it suggests another dimension of writing and criminality in relation to Carrington besides the obvious ones of junkie / prisoner / poet and obscenity trials. The serious crimes in terms of writing are that of plagiarism and copyright violation. Carrington the poet has been falsely incarcerated in Bremser’s text. Interestingly, Bremser could be accused of identity theft. Jones / Baraka wrote to Breman about the affair, “Why Bremser now wants to take on the personae [sic] of a dead black poet I can only guess at.” The reasons are obvious in that the “dead black” Carrington is perceived by Bremser as being more authentic, more real, and closer to the Truth (pure experience and pure speech). This is the theme of the White Negro yet again, with Bremser, along with the other white Beats, appropriating black culture and experience to enrich what they viewed as an impoverished, outmoded, and tired dominant tradition.

The back blurb on the Heritage Series volume mentions other poems and projects relating to Carrington, including a “novel which Walt Sheppard planned to publish as a supplement to his Nickel Review.” In addition, Eugene Redmond is mentioned as “establishing the corpus of Carrington’s scattered work.” I do not think anything came of these projects. From what I can tell, Aldon Lynn Nielsen has singlehandedly kept the memory of Carrington alive. Nielsen collected a handful of poems in Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. In 2006, Nielsen posted three entries on his Heat String Theory blog relating to Carrington, which include some poems and letters. The letters, particularly a long one to Lowenfels, give wonderful insights into Carrington’s concerns as a poet. For those looking to drink deeply of the work of “Wine” Carrington, there looks to be precious little in print or online to satisfy your thirst. To a certain extent, Drive Suite, as published by The Heritage Series, is a false grail. Like Dr. Schneider, Paul Breman was blinded by “sheer virtuosity” and chose poorly. As evidenced by the work uncovered by Nielsen, Carrington’s output is of a humbler nature. Yet Drive Suite, false as it is, reveals a hidden truth about the crimes of writing and provides a fitting monument to a man and poet whose (to paraphrase Eric Burdon and the Animals) intentions were good but was destined to be misunderstood.

Drive Suite attributed to Harold Carrington

Harold Carrington (attributed)
Drive Suite (front)
Paul Breman Ltd, 1972

Harold Carrington (attributed)
Drive Suite
Paul Breman Ltd, 1972

Harold Carrington (attributed)
Drive Suite (back)
Paul Breman Ltd, 1972

Drive Suite by Ray Bremser

Ray Bremser
Drive Suite (front)
Nova Broadcast Press, 1968

Ray Bremser
Drive Suite
Nova Broadcast Press, 1968

Ray Bremser
Drive Suite (back)
Nova Broadcast Press, 1968

Written by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 26 March 2012.

Floating Bear

RealityStudio — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:08:50 +0000

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Also see Jed Birmingham’s Floating Bear Archive and article on Floating Bear 24.

After my deal to obtain Floating Bear #24 fell through a month or so ago, Floating Bears have been much on my mind. I broke down and bought a run of 31 of these fragile mimeos from William Reese Company. This bookstore is proof positive of the value and importance of the true bookman. I received three catalogs along with my purchase including a two volume catalog of 20th Century periodicals. These are worth their weight in gold. (See my previous article on book catalogues.) These catalogs grew out of the Robert Wendler collection to which William Reese added over the years. Close to 2000 different periodicals were available for sale beginning in 2003. Yugen, Floating Bear, Fuck You, Kulchur, Insect Trust Gazette, Marijuana Newsletter. Even a few copies of the elusive Sinking Bear. Most of the magazines I have written about were available not to mention large runs of important and rare Modernist littles (Broom, Blast, Little Review, Others, The Dial, The Exile et al) as well as magazines of social protest from the 1930s and 1940s, such as The New Masses, that link the little magazine traditions of High Modernism with the little magazine revolution detailed in Secret Location on the Lower East Side. The catalogs serve as a valuable bibliography of the history and importance of the periodical in 20th Century literature. William Reese Company is well known as an expert on Americana (Reese’s performance at the Frank Siebert Sale in 1999 established him as the bookman of his generation), but you can be sure that he and his associates will treat with meticulous care and scrupulous detail all aspects of printing and literary history they come in contact with.

I was very happy with the Floating Bears I received. As usual, the magazines had seen better days. In most cases, they were folded for mailing with stamps and address labels. Many copies were stained or poorly mimeo’d, but that is a large part of the charm of Floating Bear. You can see that these magazines were used. They were argued over, read aloud, passed around. As I mentioned before, Floating Bear could not be bought over the counter and was distributed through a mailing list. Receiving a copy meant you were part of a literary and artistic community. This is proven by the address labels on my copies. Many of my issues were sent to Eila Kokkinen, an art critic of the time. Kokkinen served on the editorial board of The Chicago Review when that publication introduced William Burroughs to the American public. Along with Irving Rosenthal and Paul Carroll, she resigned the board to protest the suppression of the Winter Issue. The Winter Issue evetually became Big Table 1. She was good friends with Rosenthal who helped edit Naked Lunch for Grove Press. Rosenthal wrote a now forgotten novel of the 1960s entitled Sheeper that I have yet to read.

A couple of my other issues were mailed to Dan Rice. Rice was a student at Black Mountain College. He studied there during Charles Olson’s tenure as Rector. Rice was a fixture in the New York Art scene and active in the Cedar Bar circle. That Rice received Floating Bear highlights the magazine’s merging of Black Mountain, New York art and dance circles, and the Beat Generation. It is a very nice association. Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology began the process of canonization for these schools in 1960.

I also have an issue that was sent to Frank Davey. Davey is a Canadian poet and writer who helped start the influential literary magazines Tish and Open Letter. Tish evolved out of the excitement and interest generated by the Vancouver Poetry Conferences of the early 1960s. Vancouver was one of many hotspots in North America tuned in to the birth and spread of the new poetry. Robert Duncan suggested the creation of a magazine called Shit and Tish was the compromised result. Tish and Open Letter present the British Columbia poetry scene that was galvanized by the new writing of Olson, Duncan, Jack Spicer and others.

Another issue was sent to Corinth Books. Yet another was sent to Bill Wilentz. This highlights the link between the little magazine, the small press, and the independent bookshop. Eli and Ted Wilentz ran Eighth Street Bookshop, a haven for writers and artists in New York City. I don’t know if Bill Wilentz is related in any way, but I can not help but think there is a connection to the Wilentz Brothers. The importance of the independent bookshop to the development of a literary community cannot be overstated. City Lights in San Francisco, Peace Eye Books in the Lower East Side, The English Bookshop in Paris, Better Books and Indica in London, Asphodel Bookshop in Cleveland. There must be countless others. These stores provided a meeting place for the literary community as well as an outlet for selling new writing. As my checks from the Phoenix Bookshop prove, these stores provided artists and writers with cash. In many cases, these bookstores acted as publishers themselves. The Wilentz Brothers founded Corinth Books in 1959. Corinth Books published Leroi Jones, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Diane Di Prima, and a host of others. Corinth teamed up with other small publishers like Totem (Leroi Jones’s press) and Jargon (Jonathan Williams). Jones and Di Prima were intimately involved with the Wilentz’s publishing efforts. Naturally, Corinth received a copy of the Bear.

In this cache of Floating Bears, I finally got a hold of issue 24. According to the William Reese catalog, the legend of its rarity may be anecdotal. Yet my experience suggests there is a lot of truth to the myth. Issue 24 definitely has a different feel to it. The paper is thinner; the mimeo job is as poor as Diane Di Prima states. Looking at all the issues together, it stands out.

This is also true of the issues beginning with Number 26. Leroi Jones left as editor with Issue 25, and Diane Di Prima took over full editorial duties. Issue 27 has a cover page like the title page of a book. By Issue 28, there are pictorial covers by a host of important artists like George Herms, Jess, and Wallace Berman. You can see the geographical shift from New York to California as well. Herms, Jess, and Berman were all active in the California art scene that moved between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Billy Linich otherwise known as Billy Name, the man who made Warhol’s Factory silver, assists with a few issues after Jones’s departure. This suggests Floating Bear‘s links to the speed culture of the New York art scene in the 1960s.

Floating Bear is very hard to scan or at least I find it so. I did the best I could. For the most part, the images give a sense of the feel and appearance of the magazine. In any case, they allow the curious viewer to track the changes to Floating Bear in close to 40 issues and over nearly a decade of publishing.

Written by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 3 October 2006.

Floating Bear Archive

RealityStudio — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:06:13 +0000

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For more information about Floating Bear, see Jed Birmingham’s articles on Floating Bear and Floating Bear 24. You can also download this spreadsheet mapping the recipients to whom copies of Floating Bear were mailed.

Floating Bear 1
February 1961

Floating Bear 2
February 1961

Floating Bear 3
March 1961

Floating Bear 4
March 1961

Floating Bear 5
April 1961

Floating Bear 6
April 1961

Floating Bear 7
May 1961

Floating Bear 8
May 1961

Floating Bear 9
June 1961

Floating Bear 10
June 1961

Floating Bear 11
July 1961

Floating Bear 12
August 1961

Floating Bear 13
September 1961

Floating Bear 14
October 1961

Floating Bear 15
November 1961

Floating Bear 16
December 1961

Label to Frederick Bock

Floating Bear 17
January 1962

Label to John Wieners

Floating Bear 18
February 1962

Label to John Wieners

Floating Bear 19
March 1962

Floating Bear 20
May 1962

Floating Bear 21
August 1962

Floating Bear 22
August 1962

Floating Bear 23
September 1962

Floating Bear 24
September-October 1962

Floating Bear 25
November 1962 – March 1963

Label to Bill Deemer

Floating Bear 26
October 1963

Label to Larry Eigner

Floating Bear 27
November 1963

Floating Bear 28
December 1963

Floating Bear 29
March 1964

Floating Bear 30
November 1964

Label to Chic Cicarelli
Label to Larry Schnell

Floating Bear 31
June 1965

Floating Bear 32
February 1966

Label to Dave Ossman
Label to Ed Sanders
Label to James Lowell
Label to Linda Francis

Floating Bear 33
February 1967

Label to Josephine Miles

Floating Bear 34
November 1967

Label to Josephine Miles

Floating Bear 35
April 1968

Label to B. Dawson
Label to Josephine Miles

Floating Bear 36
January – July 1969

Floating Bear 37
March – July 1969

Floating Bear 38
Summer 1971

Created by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 3 October 2006. Updated February 2010.

Floating Bear 24

RealityStudio — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:04:42 +0000

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Book collecting is full of regrets and missed opportunities as much as exciting acquisitions. Previously, I wrote about some of my regrets: the biggest involving a complete set of Black Mountain Review. I have also had my share of books and magazines slip through my fingers through no fault of my own. These instances are especially frustrating. Recently, I missed out on a rare issue of Floating Bear magazine. Floating Bear Issue 24 rarely appears on the market. Most often collectors buy a complete or nearly complete run (around $600-$1000 depending on the number of issues present) thus obtaining Issue 24 which almost never appears for sale as a standalone issue, except for a couple of weeks ago. I saw the magazine for sale on Abebooks and fell over myself rushing to the phone to order. The order was placed and the credit card information exchanged. Seemingly, the wonders of the Internet never cease. Unfortunately, the bookseller emailed me back the next day stating that he could not find the issue after a day of fruitless searching. Ah, the hazards of the Internet. One of the joys and one of the advantages of actually combing a rare bookstore or browsing at a book fair is the excitement (and certainty) of holding the prized find in your hands as you pull it from the shelf. If you see it and can afford it, the book is yours. Sadly, such an experience is fading from the modern landscape like the men’s barbershop or the fully stocked tobacco shop. Places to relax, to mull over a purchase, and to spend an afternoon in the company of other people with similar interests seem doomed to extinction.

Back to Floating Bear. The magazine ran for 37 issues (38 if you include the Intrepid 20 / Floating Bear 38 issue). Complete runs are difficult to come by. The sheer number of issues (an unusually high number for a little magazine); the disposable, fragile nature of the mimeo format; the small print runs of certain issues; and the haphazard method of distribution (like Semina, by mailing list to select members of the literary and artistic underground) make for a scarcity of complete runs. Number 9 is the most famous issue due to the obscenity trial surrounding William Burroughs’ “Roosevelt after Inauguration” and Leroi Jones’ “The System of Dante’s Hell” in 1961. But Number 24 published in September / October 1962 is the rarest issue of Floating Bear. The reason Number 24 is so difficult to find proves to be a very interesting story that happens to involve William Burroughs as well as early 1960s amphetamine culture and a somewhat surprised mother.

In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane Di Prima, coeditor along with Leroi Jones, revisits this episode in the history of Floating Bear putting it in the context of New York drug culture of the time. Soren Agenoux “was a dilettante hustler who made various kinds of collage and photo art, and wrote a little. Mostly he was into drugs, but then we all were in our own ways, so I paid no particular attention to that aspect of his life, just seen it as part of the whole picture: gay-artist-hustler-druggie.” Di Prima continues,

“Part of the deal when I sublet my apartment to Soren in September, was that he would take care of getting the next Floating Bear out. It was already typed; he was to print it on the Gestetner in the apartment, and get it in the mail: the labels were all ready. Instead he’d printed half the normal run on really cheap, thin paper, and mailed very few of those. Probably he used the rest of the money for dope. I didn’t ask. The copies he hadn’t mailed, which were most of them, got stored in somebody’s closet in Brooklyn, and were subsequently thrown out by somebody’s mother. I never got it all straight. To this day, Floating Bear #24 is an elusive and sought-after item.”

In an introductory essay accompanying the collected Floating Bear, Di Prima recounts the circumstances surrounding the publication of Issue 24 in more detail. Di Prima writes,

“When I left New York in September of 1962, I left the manuscript of Number 24 with a guy named Soren Agenoux, who was supposed to type it and mimeograph it and get it in the mail for me. I gave Soren enough bread to print a regular issue, but he spent part of it, naturally, so he ended up buying less paper and cheaper paper, and the copies didn’t stand up very well. He printed about 500 copies instead of the 1000 we were doing by then, and he mailed out about 200 and put the rest in some cardboard boxes in the closet of a house in Brooklyn where he went to stay. The house belonged to Jerry Ayres who now lives in Hollywood and works for one of the film companies. Anyway, Jerry’s wife decided one day that she wanted to clean her closet, and she threw out all the unmailed copies of Number 24, which is why it became the ‘scarce issue’ that libraries and collectors keep looking for.”

Soren Agenoux also published magazine on his own called The Sinking Bear which provides a fascinating look into the New York Underground. Di Prima writes, “[H]e did an endless number of parodies of the Bear called The Sinking Bear. He mimeographed them at the Judson Church in New York. They were a kind of gay version of the Bear, cliquey and full of local speed freak and theatre news. I don’t know how many Sinking Bears there were, but there were a lot, because Soren and his friends were very prolific and the Judson Church bought the paper.” In the last few years, I have casually pursued the elusive Sinking Bear. Despite what Di Prima says about there being several issues, I have never seen a copy up for sale. Soren Agenoux and Sinking Bear appear fleetingly in connection with the Andy Warhol scene of 1964-1965 (see Reva Wolf’s Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s and Steven Watson’s Factory Made) as well as in relation to mail artist Ray Johnson and the printing of C Magazine by Ted Berrigan. Agenoux assisted with Interview magazine and also worked in the alternative New York theatre. In any case, Sinking Bear seems just as rare as Issue 24 of Floating Bear. I would love to read a copy as I picture it as something like Fuck You Magazine of the Arts in content and production value.

I have never seen Number 24 of Floating Bear either. It must be a sight. According to Di Prima, the paper was dreadful and this is saying something because my issues of Floating Bear (#5 and #9) are threatening to fall apart and are extremely thin. In addition, like the Fuck You edition of APO-33, there were difficulties in the mimeo process. Agenoux “probably didn’t know how to run the machine very well, so he got a lot of offsetting of the wet ink from one sheet to the next.”

Where does Burroughs fit it? Well it would figure that Burroughs appears in the rarest of Floating Bears, just to make a complete magazine collection from the 1960s even more difficult. The Burroughs appearance makes this issue even more desirable to collectors. Burroughs contributes “Spain & 42 Street,” “Dead Whistle Stop Already End,” and “Where Flesh Circulates.” Other contributors include Paul Metcalf (author of Genoa), the aforementioned Soren Agenoux, Leroi Jones (under the name Johannes Koenig) and George Montgomery (according to Di Prima there were two Montgomerys on the scene and she does not know who contributed). Metcalf’s piece deals with Charles Olson, who frequently appeared in the pages of Floating Bear.

Burroughs’ pieces are examples of his cut-up style. The text is formatted in a version of the three-column layout he used to great effect in the newspaper parodies in My Own Mag among other places. Burroughs’ work looks and reads more like poetry than anything else I have seen during this time, like the piece in Rhinozeros #5. As a result, the link to concrete poetry is marked. I think of the work like John Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing” or his “2 pages, 122 Words on Music and Dance” that are collected in Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha’s groundbreaking America: A Prophecy Anthology. I say this merely because of the manner that they are presented on the page and not in terms of any content. The three prose-poems are related by phrase and appear to be cut-up versions of the same material. They read like pieces of the major cut-up trilogy, but again the formatting is distinctive for Burroughs: in this case the three columns separated from the newspaper context. The spaces between phrases were replaced by dashes in the cut-up novels as those books presented a visually more conventional block paragraph format. In a quick look at those novels, I could not find these pieces but I would not be surprised if they were cut up from the same material. For example, the phrase “dead whistle stop” appears in Nova Express.

Even if one has the money, a complete run of Floating Bear originals may be out of reach. They just do not come around very often. In addition, the difficulty finding certain issues, like Issue 24, makes piecing together a complete set a long waiting game. So how do I know so much about a magazine I don’t own as an original?

Fortunately, there is a less expensive, less frustrating (but in my opinion less rewarding and less fun) alternative. In 1973, Laurence McGilvery published a collection of the 37 issues of the solo Floating Bear under one cover with notes and an introductory essay. The additional material is fascinating and invaluable to anyone wanting to learn more about Floating Bear. The collection makes available tons of incredible work often published for the first time and in some cases the only time in the mimeo pages of Floating Bear. McGilvery’s publication is not cheap ($100-$200) and may not be the easiest book to find at a rare bookstore but copies are available on Abebooks. In addition, I have seen (and purchased) a copy on eBay in the last two to three years. In my opinion, the collection is a must-have, even if you plan on buying the original issues, because the fragile nature of Floating Bear makes them tough to handle and read. And the contents of Floating Bear demand to be read. Possibly no other magazine captures the spirit and power of 1960s alternative literature in a myriad of forms: poetry, plays, fiction, and essays.

I would like to see more reissue collections of an entire run of little magazines like the Floating Bear production. Unfortunately such publications are rarely undertaken and if they are, like in the lavish facsimile of the complete Semina, they are rare and expensive collectibles in their own right. At the other end of the spectrum are cheaper and less complete anthologies of pivotal little magazines. For example, Beatitude, Ole, and Intrepid all skimmed the cream and issued “best of” anthologies. There has to be a middle ground like in the case of Floating Bear that offers completeness and cheapness. A re-issue of Yugen would be very informative and interesting. In most cases size proves to be an issue. The 20 issues of Kulchur would be impossible to reproduce in a single volume of any manageable size.

The solution may lie in the Internet. The complete Aspen magazine has been recreated online as has the Psychedelic Review. A similar project with other important literary magazines would serve the casual reader and scholar alike. RealityStudio houses a step in that direction with cover scans of Fuck You Magazine and Yugen. A combination of scanned, photographed, and transcribed pages of their entire contents would cheaply and accurately recreate these fragile and valuable magazines for all to enjoy and use.

Written by Jed Birmingham and published by RealityStudio on 26 July 2006.