Timothy Leary interview, Pataphysics, October 17, 1989

From INTO-GAL, 2006, Editors: Leo Edelstein, Judith Elliston

We heard this tape of you with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Robert Anton Wilson.

Oh yeah, that was a recording from the Nova Convention. I’m a great admirer of William Burroughs, who’s one of my real heroes.

When did you first meet him?

I met him in June of 1961, in Tangier, Morocco. And we became friends and we’ve been friends ever since. 

What brought you to Morocco?

I came there to meet William Burroughs.

And you were interested in the experiments Burroughs was doing?

Yes, I was very interested in the experiments he was doing with Brion Gysin. You’ve read Burroughs?

Yeah, The Soft Machine and the earlier work. I’m also interested in the later work — Cities of the Red Night —

Oh, I love Cities of the Red Night, that’s his last trilogy — Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. I think that’s his finest work.

It’s interesting how his technique has developed — the cut-up style has now become almost polished. 

Yeah, well, he’s mellowed out.

Have you spoken with him recently?

Yeah, he just wrote the introduction to a reissue of my book, Flashbacks.

He’s painting now.

Yeah, he doesn’t even want to write anymore — he likes to paint.

Do you think that’s the influence of Gysin?

Well, he and Gysin were very close friends. Gysin was a very strong personality and I think he influenced Burroughs tremendously, Burroughs says that too. Gysin was a very profound thinker and a prophetic guy. It was Brion Gysin who said that writing is fifty years behind modern painting — because modern painting, from expressionism and cubism and surrealism, smashed through all of the representational structures, whereas writers were still trapped in the grammatical form. That was a very profound statement that Gysin made. He was one of these very seminal figures. Gysin’s Dream Machine is a very early, wonderfully creative and primitive psychedelic machine. 

Gysin spoke of the Dream Machine making immaterial artworks inside the viewer’s mind. And with the cut-ups there was the idea of escaping this time-frame by breaking up the conscious flow of language. Did you have any interest in that at the time?

During my research at Harvard we were running psychedelic sessions, and we were interested in describing them. We were experimenting with various forms of video, and cellular movement and overlaps and sensory overload and multiple energy interactions to try to duplicate in a rather feeble way the experiences that you have in a visionary trance. Burroughs was actually in exile from America in the late ’50s. As a matter of fact, I was the one who brought Burroughs back to America after maybe six or eight years out of the country. I invited him to come to Harvard, and he is a Harvard graduate, so he was very glad to accept the chance to come back into the country.

Was he interested in what you were doing at Harvard when he came back?

He thought we were a bunch of dumb bozos running around and trying to save the world with these drugs and he was very uh, rightfully cynical about what we were doing. He’s a very scientific person. The only psychedelic he likes is marijuana. He never really liked other psychedelic drugs. Burroughs has forgotten more about drugs in his life than I’ve learned. Burroughs is in charge of his life, he knows what he’s doing. I think heroin is probably the best anesthetic there is. I’ve taken heroin maybe ten or fifteen times in my life, just for curiosity. It’s not a social drug at all. You take it to go within. The same thing’s true of ketamine. Ketamine is another anesthetic that gives you very powerful inner experiences, but you’re not very social, you can’t even carry out a conversation so it’s not my kind of drug. But Burroughs, he’s not the guy that goes around with a grin on his face saying peace and love. He’s a very crusty, introverted guy with a very deep sense of humor. He’s one of the funniest persons alive — it’s a very laid-back kind of humor, and that’s the way he is, and he’s magnificent [pause] yah.

Did you ever meet Genet?

I was supposed to meet Genet — I was supposed to meet him at Amman, Jordan, in September of 1970. I was in exile in Algeria and I’d been running around about people who said I should go to Amman to meet Jean Genet. But on the way there I was intercepted — the Americans located me in Beirut, and there was such a big stink that the people who were protecting me at the time, the Arabs, said you better get your ass back to Algeria because there’s too much heat. I was also traveling on a false passport, so I went back from Beirut to Egypt and then to Algeria. I never did get to meet him — my appointment with Genet in Jordan fell through, which I regretted.

Were you taking psychedelics at that time?

Well, I had a lot of, yeah, a lot Afghani hash around — it didn’t help! Eat a little of that and I’d get very paranoid, and all my paranoias were right, unfortunately. I did go take psychedelics in Algeria, went out into the desert with my wife and had some very powerful experiences in the Sahara Desert, which is of course the kind of place to get into other levels.

There’s the book by Aleister Crowley out there in the desert –

As a matter of fact, yes, I’m glad you brought that up. There’s a place outside Algeria — you go up the Rif Mountains and you come down to the desert, there’s a place called Bou Saada, which is known as the City of Happiness, and that’s where Aleister Crowley had one of his great mystical experiences, wandering around there — freaking out or getting some vision, I don’t know what it was. It’s a very sacred city. I didn’t realize that at the time. It’s a very logical place, if you’re in Algiers, and you go over the mountain, the first town of Bou Saada was an oasis town, and all the caravans for thousands of years have come, winding their way up through the Sahara, and that would be the first populated place. It’s a big center of interacting cultures — a very magical place. And there were oases outside of Bou Saada which had been used in many movies. I also met some good magicians there. I had a guide, and I kept telling the guide what I wanted. I wanted a place — I wanted to find someone that knew a place where I could go into the desert and meditate — amazing, cab drivers all over the world want to hustle girls and boys or whatever, but this guy finally got on to what I was saying and he put me in touch with some old Arab guy, who went out with me and showed me where to go. That’s kind of interesting, because you couldn’t find a cab driver in the city, like saying yeah, I want to find a place where I can go out and meditate. But that’s part of the special quality of Bou Saada…

“To Write For the Space Age”

Interview with Michael Moorcock by Mark P. Williams

Michael Moorcock (1939-) has always been a politically and culturally engaged writer who has been generous in his support of authors from several generations, from diverse backgrounds and with quite different interests including close associations with J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Andrea Dworkin. Moorcock is a highly prolific novelist, with over a hundred novels and edited collections to his name; as his friend and fellow Londoner Angela Carter puts it, Moorcock “can gleefully give you all the formulae for every kind of story there ever was, because he’s tried and tested all of them” (introduction to Michael Moorcock: Death Is No Obstacle, Colin Greenland, 1991).

In the mid-sixties it was, in the words of Colin Greenland, “Michael Moorcock and the writers he gathered about him [who] were [most] conscious, even self-conscious about science fiction, its symbolism, its immediacy, its responsibilities, and above all its possibilities” (The Entropy Exhibition, 1983). Between 1964 and 1971 Moorcock edited New Worlds SF Magazine and continued to be involved in the later New Worlds quarterly format and anthology collections. In addition to genre fiction he has produced a number of state-of-the-nation novels, most notably Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000), as well as an historical epic sequence set between the first and second world wars dealing with conflict, social upheaval and the Holocaust: Byzantium Endures (1981), The Laughter of Carthage (1984), Jerusalem Commands (1992) and The Vengeance of Rome (2006). He has also written reviews and political commentary for a variety of publications including The Guardian newspaper, The Spectator magazine and The Index on Censorship. While, as an example of Moorcock’s political and cultural thought in the Thatcher-Reagan years, his polemical essay The Retreat From Liberty (1983, Zomba Books) gives an impression of the era from a firmly egalitarian perspective which still offers useful insights for charting the political path of left and right in British politics for those considering our current political climate.

For Moorcock creative boundaries have always existed primarily to be negotiated, breached and redefined fluidly, and more than other writers of his generation Moorcock has crossed and re-crossed the constructed boundaries of published fiction. One of the key voices by which Moorcock defined his intention to bring new meaning to literature through both generic and avant-garde modes of writing was the distinctively ironic one of William S. Burroughs. The following interview, conducted by email, gives some indication of the breadth of his cultural interactions and shows why he is such an instrumental figure for a number of contemporary British writers. In it he responds in some depth regarding the interactions of his own ideas with those of William Burroughs and the quite different impressions and impacts that promoting Burroughs work in the UK had from his observations of others and that of himself and his friends such as Barrington J. Bayley and J.G. Ballard.

Encountering Burroughs

Mark P. Williams: What was the first Burroughs text you read? What was happening around you at the time? What was your immediate response to the writing in terms of its styles and themes?

Michael Moorcock: To be honest, I don’t remember too clearly. I assume I was in Paris because it was the Olympia Press edition of The Naked Lunch, almost certainly. I know I was very frustrated with modern fiction and genre fiction and was looking for a kind of fiction which somehow related to my own life and experience. Certainly, the Beats didn’t do that for me any more than Waugh. I read two books while hitchhiking from Sweden to France and was starving by the time I got to Paris — On the Road by Kerouac and Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. I thought On the Road a bit of a wank and the Waugh a bit frozen in a time which meant almost nothing to me.

I suspect that when I got to Paris I was more than ready for a dose of Burroughs. No doubt that’s where I picked up NL, shortly after it was published. Breath of fresh air. It was joyous absurdism which somehow spoke directly to me. A tremendous high. I couldn’t have been happier to have found it, even though I was pretty out of it by then and wound up being picked up by the cops in the Tuilleries and taken to the British Consulate, who put me, for some reason, in the bridal suite of the Madeleine (still not having given me anything to eat — I got my first meal, a hot dog, bought for me by someone I met on the boat home — and promptly threw it up, I’d not eaten for so long!). I must have picked up the book at George Whitman’s shop, which in those days was called Le Mistral and which is now called Shakespeare and Co, after George bought some of Beach’s lending library. As I recall George took a few books off me — no doubt those I’d read on, as it were, the road — in exchange. I came back to London full of enthusiasm. It was an inspiration. I didn’t hope to write like Burroughs, but his writing somehow confirmed what I’d been trying to do.

MPW: Both your writing and Burroughs at this time would fall under what Jeff Nuttall described as “Bomb culture” (Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 1968), a peculiar reaction to the uncertainties and contradictions revealed in the post-1945 era, which he identifies particularly with the atom bomb.

How much do you feel that the specific cultural circumstances of the mid-to-late-1960s, particularly in the Ladbroke Grove area, are reflected in the appeal of what Mary McCarthy calls Burroughs’ novel of “statelessness?”

Moorcock: Jeff was a bit older than me. I didn’t react much to the bomb. I wasn’t scared of it, maybe saw it as a useful symbol (see my editorial in the New Worlds which carried Behold the Man) and though I sort of went along with friends in the Ban the Bomb movement, I knew it wouldn’t be banned and rather relished the idea of it. I did see it as a way of keeping the peace. I shared this view with Ballard and Barry [Barrington] Bayley, the two writer friends I saw regularly and with whom I had most in common. Ballard had been liberated by the Bomb, as had [Brian W.] Aldiss, another friend. Ballard from the Japanese civilian camp and Aldiss from having to begin the invasion of Japan. I think I was born a little too late to worry. I had enjoyed the excitement of the V-bombs, the majority of which fell in SW London, where I lived, and had always felt slightly let down by peacetime. Few of my close friends gave much of a crap about the bomb. We understood sensibilities had changed and that we needed a new kind of fiction to deal with it, but we didn’t lose much sleep except, maybe, during the Cuban crisis. But even there our attitude was sort of elevated. I was more focussed on discovering a new kind of urban fiction.

I like the notion of the “stateless” novel and indeed you could argue I was looking for a form like that. Cornelius certainly reflects that. A novel which looked for a new form of identity? McCarthy was arguing from a more academic, conventional point of view. I was more practical, I think, in that I was trying to reclaim the “literary” novel for a general public, through sf. Burroughs, Bayley and Ballard all had an interest in taking certain ideas from sf for their own uses, as I did. So we were trying to marry popular and, if you like, elitist art, in much the way Michael Chabon and his Bay Area friends are trying to do today. I did assume Burroughs to be a writer with an audience amongst sf readers, for instance. It turned out that the sf audience, like the audiences for any genre fiction (including the middle-brow “modern” or even “modernist” novel) is deeply conservative and pretty much addicted to generic conventions. Repetition is what it needs, not innovation.

I was generally disappointed by what was offered as literary experiment (by the likes of B.S. Johnson for instance) which just seemed like the mixture as before presented in modified forms. Few were working on finding new forms for the novel. Apart from what we were doing in New Worlds (that is, Ballard’s “condensed novels,” Bayley’s weird notions) I didn’t see much which tried to match Burroughs. We looked back a bit to [Boris] Vian, [Alfred] Jarry, [Ronald] Firbank and a few other absurdists, but found little other than Burroughs in fiction to inspire us. The counter-culture frequently seemed a bit of a wank — a lot of middle class boys being allowed to say fuck a lot. Little sense of attacking the infrastructure and re-inventing it. Although we shared printing facilities, sometimes even editorial staff, with the likes of Oz and IT, we found most of the stuff a bit naive and even irritating.

Contrary to the general impression, few of us used drugs for inspiration and while I had a lot in common as far as music and lifestyle were concerned, most of the others didn’t. I was of my time. I had grown up playing blues, being in early R&B bands, getting into what are now called “prog-rock” bands, reading a bit of sf, so I had that in common, too, but most of what I did was pragmatic “experiment.” There wasn’t a lot of theory discussed. Ballard was a little warier of attacking the literary establishment, though privately he had nothing but contempt for the work it was producing. He was more willing to hang out with the likes of Kingsley Amis and Co and more of their age and class, while I was happy to plunge into the counter-culture lifestyle, work for the magazines, take part in the odd demo and so on, but the rhetoric often got up my nose, I have to say. Burroughs had much the same attitude to mine and in some ways we had more in common, though he really enjoyed meeting Arthur C. Clarke when I introduced them!

Circles and Waves

MPW: How well did you know Jeff Nuttall? Did you encounter his My Own Mag –which he describes as being designed to “counteract the optimistic refusal of unpleasantness” through “nausea and flagrant scatology as a violent means of presentation” (p. 151, Bomb Culture)?

Nuttall was on the mailing list of Alexander Trocchi’s Project Sigma documents; did you encounter these avant-gardist texts yourself? Was it just a question of your being around the same loosely affiliated groups of people such as the bookstores Better Books or Indica or Unicorn?

Moorcock: Knew them all, but thought most were bullshit artists. That’s the truth of it, though I liked Jeff. Got My Own Mag regularly. Supported some of the “alternative” stuff but I was using girly mags like Golden Nugget to promote Burroughs and others in the “real” world, as I saw it. Rather irritated by the likes of MOM.

Too much theory, not enough practice for us. We tended to produce fiction and sometimes poetry or even non-fiction and see how it ran. Theory followed, if at all. We were nearly all working writers — Ballard, myself, [Langdon] Jones, [Barrington] Bayley and so on — and weren’t too easy around grants and academies. Just how it was. I did get all that stuff but passed it on to others mostly. Lot more beer involved with Jeff than suited me.

We were puritanical snobs for the most part. Trocchi, like Heathcote Williams, was tiresome personally. They tended to cultivate us I suspect because we represented a wider public they wanted to reach.

I wasn’t at that Edinburgh conference [the 1962 International Writers' Conference, at which Burroughs spoke and because of which Burroughs was made famous]. I was probably still writing comics then.

I avoided them for the most part, just as I refused offers to teach and so on. I felt there was only one way to teach — by example or through publication. It was important to us that New Worlds had regular newsstand distribution. Apart from Ballard getting involved with Ambit, after his failure to edit Science Fantasy (!), we didn’t have that much to do with the lit mags. [Thomas] Disch was more eager to appear in Transatlantic or Paris Review, but I was never attracted in that direction. Did stuff for Ambit only because Jimmy [Ballard] asked me to.

Going to Meet the Man

MPW: Where did your views of 1960s culture and counterculture gel most with and/or differ from those of Burroughs on a personal level?

Moorcock: I don’t think we had much in the way of differences. He, like us, was interested in taking conventions and ideas of sf and making them work in modern fiction. We saw sf as a way of making contemporary fiction better able to confront contemporary issues. We were happy to interact with the counter culture, but were not wholly of it, if that makes sense. Burroughs, Ballard, Bayley and self all had our own agendas as writers. We didn’t see ourselves as part of a movement. We were trying to make our own stuff work. Absurdism was part of that, of course. We were generally a bit older than most of the guys doing IT, FRENDZ and so on. These people were mostly enthusiasts, publicists, journalists. We were almost equally inspired by Borges, in looking for ways of addressing literary problems. Magic realism became another method or group of methods, of course. But my Cornelius books had only certain fundamentals in common with Ballard’s “condensed novels” or Burroughs’s cut-ups.

MPW: Burroughs must’ve had something of a complex image already built up in your mind when you met him. How did you find him? And what are the circumstances of your introducing Burroughs to Arthur C. Clarke? It certainly sounds like a potentially formidable meeting.

Moorcock: I met Burroughs through John Calder, I think. Bill was a bit formal. I was a little disappointed, to be honest, because Bill was more laid back than I was at the time, being very engaged with confronting the world, whereas he was more detached and amused by it. I already knew Arthur since I was a kid. We’d always got on well. (See my memoir of Arthur in The Guardian).

How I introduced them was simple. I was persuaded to hold a party at which Judy Merril could meet some of the people she was enthusiastic about. So I did. Arthur and Bill came to the party — there were, of course, a lot of other writers and artists etc. there — and I introduced them.

Making Waves: Into New Worlds

 
MPW: You have mentioned practice as the most important impulse behind the innovations of the 1960s — yours and those of your contemporaries – was this how you promoted Burroughs at the time, as an experimental practitioner?

Moorcock: As someone showing the way, yes.

MPW: There were strongly worded debates between the writers and the modes of more experimental writing you included in New Worlds and some members of the established audience. They seem to boil down to the question of artistic value (or of the values promoted through art). You have described to Colin Greenland (ICA Guardian Conversations) how you felt at the time that a significant part of this audience had a fundamentally conservative attitude: was a writer like Burroughs a help or a hindrance in effecting a positive change in attitude? Or did it signal a change of audience?

Moorcock: Genre audiences are always conservative — including the audience for the modern literary genre exemplified by the likes of Ian McEwan and the average Booker [Prize] contender. I thought I could persuade an sf audience to look at things less conservatively and by and large I was proven wrong. I succeeded with some readers, but my policy was to run relatively conventional fiction in with unconventional fiction, in the hope of familiarising readers with newer stuff. I’d succeeded in changing attitudes on Tarzan and helped do it on Sexton Blake, so knew you could familiarise conservative readers with new stuff — but, of course, we were trying to bring them around to really different stuff and that proved harder. In the end we did have a readership, drawn largely from the counter culture, but we hadn’t brought a huge number of genre fans with us.

MPW: It seems from reading texts like Norman Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron and Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, to name two notable examples, that the editorial policy you pursued in New Worlds was very much concerned with extending the kinds of experimental praxis that Burroughs was working with. How much was Burroughs discussed at the time in comparison with such work?

Moorcock: Quite a bit. We all knew Burroughs. Norman more from the US. Barrington Bayley was definitely inspired by him. Ballard and I were less affected by the style, I think. I tried to produce a few “bridge” stories, trying to coax readers over to Burroughs, such as The Deep Fix.

Burroughseana: Traces of Burroughs

MPW: I would like to conclude on a slightly more speculative note:

A recently published critical anthology entitled Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (2004) suggests that the practices of Burroughs’ writing have explored or provided groundwork for new ways of theorizing the contemporary globalized world economy. From your own practical written experiment and exploration, do you feel that it is time to re-think our views of the function of literature taking cues from Burroughs? Do you personally find that he has further practical lessons for the contemporary writer?

Moorcock: Well, given the sheer absurdism of “Reaganomics” I think Burroughs did a great job of anticipation. In fact I said as much today on the appropriate bit of my website [see Moorcock's Miscellany].

As far as Burroughs’s “practical lessons” go, I think any great visionary writer provides us with all kinds of lessons, since he’s going to be infinitely interpretable. As for me, it’s been a long time since I took much in the way of clues from Burroughs but the function of good literature for me has always been to confront received wisdom and I’d say Burroughs’s work certainly continues to do that. You’ve caught me at a time when I’m rediscovering realism, rather than absurdism, so I’m not very focussed on Burroughs at this precise moment. Burroughs is good for thinking about broad ideas but not so good for thinking through ideas concerning observed character. Of course, his instincts were good, so he’s always a good observer in many ways. But at the moment, I’m reading a lot of Balzac, for instance, and am not in much of a Burroughs mood! Another few months, and that might well have changed, of course. Generally, though, Burroughs must always have practical lessons for the contemporary writer.

MPW: In a less linear way I would like to consider Jerry Cornelius against a specifically Burroughsean backdrop.

I think he is a wonderful character, or, as M. John Harrison says, rather, a technique, with myriad applications, including cultural commentary and satire. Although, as you say, the books where he appears only have particular commonalities with those of Burroughs, Jerry himself (or himselves) seems to be the fulfilment or culmination of something that Burroughs was reaching towards with, for instance, the Nova Mob: he acts as something of a “coordinate point” for your fiction.

Moorcock: Certainly for much of it. Perhaps Mrs Cornelius is even more of a coordinate point! Like her, Jerry’s a character as well as a technique. As I said in an introduction, I think to The New Nature of the Catastrophe, at some point Jerry became a real boy. I think Burroughs appealed to me because, like me, he was inclined to create characters who personified certain qualities. Moliere and the Commedia did the same, of course. I didn’t really learn this from Burroughs but I was encouraged to develop the ideas from reading him. Jerry searches for identities, ways of coping in the shifting sands, if you like, of modern times. I’m not sure Burroughs has such a character, apart from himself. It could be that this hangover from modernism (found in Kerouac for instance) held him back from creating a character like Jerry. He tried to find a useful “self” rather than an “other.” Several of the least successful JC stories by different hands also show a similar attempt to turn Jerry into the author (in Jim Sallis’ for instance, which otherwise have considerable merit).

In passing, I always thought Charles Forte was an influence on Burroughs and wonder how much [J. W.] Dunne of An Experiment with Time (an influence on myself, Bayley and others) meant to Burroughs! [RealityStudio: Dunne meant quite a bit to Burroughs. He referred to Dunne in several interviews, including the conversation with Simone Lazzeri Ellis, and discusses him in a number of works, most notably The Third Mind, the essay "Immortality" in The Adding Machine, and the introduction to Charles Gatewood's Sidetripping.]

MPW: Does it seem like a fair comparison to label Jerry as partly “Burroughsean”? Have others who borrowed Jerry (such as M. John Harrison or Norman Spinrad) made similar comparisons while appropriating him?

Moorcock: Not really. I don’t think Harrison was ever much of a Burroughs fan. Spinrad was, but it was Burroughs’ style and language which really fired him up. Spinrad’s ear was tuned to the street — specifically to the NY street — as mine was tuned to the London street. We were also interested in political language. Burroughs, like Hammett, for instance, taught us to listen. Burroughs pointed us to ways of using our own observations. We sometimes borrowed his rhythms and methods, but I don’t think we borrowed his specific language much. It comes back to what I said earlier about Burroughs being an inspiration more than an influence. I habitually created characters as exemplary figures from Elric on — frequently conflicted or ambiguous characters who could move easily between Law and Chaos, as it were. Seeking a personal position, a bit of firm ground which didn’t shift under us. I found it in Kropotkin, I suppose. I don’t think Burroughs really did that. Maybe his centre was his junk. Not an unfamiliar centre.

MPW: Was your own return to the Western genre (such as Kit Carsons) in your Metatemporal Detective and Corsairs of the 2nd Ether books at all coloured by Burroughs’ Red Night / Western Lands trilogy, particularly The Place of Dead Roads?

Moorcock: No. I have to admit I haven’t read that trilogy. There are very few writers I’ve read in their entirety. I was influenced only by boyhood reading, of my interest in Western mythology, which was one of my main reasons for moving to Texas. I wrote westerns and features about the west for Tarzan Adventures, long before I found Burroughs! That was all part of my revisiting (in 2nd Ether and MD) boyhood influences like Clarence E. Mulford, author of the Hopalong Cassidy books.

MPW: And finally, how would you as a writer explain the impact and import of someone like Burroughs to new readers today who might discover him for the first time?

Moorcock: I would hope Burroughs would act as inspiration to a new generation discovering him, as I did, on their own. Of course, I remain a publicist for Burroughs and he is certainly quite as relevant to modern times as he was to 45 years ago. Like all great writers, Burroughs is always relevant to changing times but I would argue that he is particularly relevant to a readership which has witnessed, in high relief, the rapacity of business and the authoritarian tendency of government. His borrowing, from Bayley, of the “star virus” metaphor must also be especially meaningful!

Burroughs’s vision of society, his absurdist take on it, is likely to win him a considerable number of new readers today who are questioning the accepted wisdom of the past thirty years, just as we were questioning the received wisdom of the years leading up to the sixties. I’m finding, I think, receptive ears amongst newer readers. Maybe we’re even on the brink of some sort of genuine spontaneous renaissance, as we were around the time Kennedy was elected? Obama might act as a similar symbol. Let’s hope he survives a lot longer than Kennedy! And we could certainly do with some fresh vitality in modern popular music!

Mark P. Williams has studied at the University of Hull and the University of Warwick and is in the process of completing a PhD at the University of East Anglia on “fantasy and the body politic in contemporary genre fiction” looking at the work of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville.

He has contributed papers to conferences on Science Fiction, globalization and literature, millennial fictions, the literary canon, the literary response to 9/11, and co-organised a conference on Michael Moorcock at Liverpool John Moores.

Interview by Paul Hawkins

Writer Charles Plymell is a legendary figure. He was involved with a loose gang of experimental writers and outsider artists centered around Wichita, Kansas in post-war 1950s America. Plymell and the Wichita Punks had road-tested speed, dropped LSD, held peyote rituals and experimented with art and other creative forms. Were they Beat before the term had risen, been marketed and branded out of the San Francisco joss-stick hippie scene?

The chronological order is important in understanding his work, as Charley makes clear in this interview. He has seen a lot since his birth on the Kansas high plains in 1935 and the early memories of the sound of the wind in the cab of a Reo Speedwagon truck. His father was a cowboy, his mother once a stunt car driver. He printed Robert Crumb’s first edition of Zap Comix in 1968. As part of the hip Wichita scene of the 1950s he is also a contemporary of and, either a friend, collaborator or publisher of, some of the coolest and influential underground writers and artists to come out of the USA. He already had two volumes of poetry, Neon Poems and Apocalypse Rose out when in 1971 City Lights published his seminal novel, Last of The Moccasins. This novel grips, gleams and glistens with his hobohemian prose-style; spinning tales of his life in and around Wichita, his road trips to and from the West Coast along the Rt. 66 Benzedrine Highway and beyond, his crazy Hipster years and the boho life of his elder sister Betty.

Plymell has continued to walk his walk and talk his talk ever since. His writing has always displayed a vibrant and astute engagement with life and a heady, intoxicatingly descriptive allure. He condemned the National Endowment for the Arts and his sharp and intelligent analysis appeared in the NY Times and other print outlets. Because of this critique he was blacklisted and has never been awarded any funding, grant or financial support from any federal, state or academic agency in the USA. He and his wife Pam run their own publishing house, CV Editions, which is a good place to start looking for more information on his novels, poetry and other writing. 

What are you up to these days?

I like nittin’…. next to nittin’… nuttin’.

What do you remember about growing up in Kansas?

Rattlesnakes, rattlesnakes winding in the dust while south winds sculpted fields of wheat, the hum of truck tires on warm asphalt back and forth to L.A. on RT66. Yucaipa (Green Valley) California to Plymell and Santana (Kiowa Chief) where my Grandfather ran a stagecoach down to Indian Territory (No Man’s Land) now Oklahoma where President Cleveland deeded land to him. I remember sitting in the truck, an REO Speedwagon. I loved that truck. My Mom and Dad plowed the field into the space horizon. The wind in the cab played a hollow tune and I sang my favorite song from Hank Williams’ radio show we listened to at home. “I’m just a happy rovin’ cowboy / herding the dark clouds out of the sky / deep in the heavens blue.”

That is simply beautiful Charley, what else?

We had to run from the farmhouse to the cellar many times when tornados came. I saw them rolling across the prairie. My folks always knew their vector. No warnings, just nature’s ozone smells. We didn’t have electricity, so I was not exposed to circuitry, only earth’s magnetic source that isn’t enclosed. My mother cooked on the coal range, the beef my father cut from the herd. We had a battery radio for the news where I heard Roosevelt’s voice announcing WWII. We rode horses everywhere. I still have my pony blanket and cinch my mother made. That was in the early years on the Great Plains. Later we moved into town. My dad had bought a ’39 Buick Century in Chicago that had tire mounts on each fender and a roll-up window between backseat and front with a big straight eight motor and gearshift on the floor. He also had a baby blue ’40 pre-war Packard Clipper. I could easily go a hundred mph in them. For running around he had a ’41 Ford V8 coupe that could burn rubber in second gear and go over a hundred as well as a ’42 Chevy coupe that my sister and I would steal and go spinning around.

When you dropped out from school, what were the choices for you at that time?

High School was not worth it for me. I went to Military School in San Antonio in my first year of high school and my father bought me a brand new 1952 Chevy coupe to get back to Wichita. I enrolled in North High there on the Arkansas River, an Indian Motif beautiful building. I soon realized that high school then and especially now are stupid unless one needs that structure. I didn’t so I peeled out and got on the road and never looked back. Gasoline was only 15 cents a gallon. Why not go?

I can see you have a big thing about cars, the freedom and speed of traveling. You are filmed driving by Laki in his short film as well……

I had a ’34 Ford hot rod too to go to drive-inns and pick up chicks. That was one of the hottest Fords ever. That and a ’32 were classic hot rods. I had both with V8 and gearshift on the floor. (Just the other day I was responding to HANK III’s invite to do 4×4 mud rally and I emailed him a lyric: I don’t need no 4by4 / All I need is shift on the floor).

What impression did the music of that era have on you?

I could get radio stations that played race music on my Chevy radio. I remember driving to Joplin, MO with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing Work With Me, Annie. Ike Turner was on the radio selling appliances. Real Deal then. Of course I had been steeped in Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and honky-tonk blues as a kid and then Rhythm & Blues came from race music and it wasn’t long before we went across the tracks for all our music. We knew musicians who played in combos in clubs that came out of Kansas City and were left from Stan Kenton’s guys from Wichita. Fats Domino drove up from New Orleans in his ’49 Caddy with bass tied on top to play the Mambo Club across the tracks to a handful of people who could talk and smoke with him. Hard times for him, but good for us. Maybe a dollar cover or two drink minimum. We were underage, but who’s gonna come over the tracks?

Charley, who else was around over the tracks?

Bo Diddley, Chuck Willis and other big names in Texas & Kansas City Blues. In the other part of town we’d go out to the Cowboy Inn where Little Jimmy Dickens or someone would be opening for Roy Acuff and whatever band would have mason jars full of Dexedrine or bennies that would keep us awake days and all night long, maybe then to my friend’s club with a jazz combo where Mickey Shaughnessy would m.c. and after the gig with the band, Mickey would tell jokes and talk all night and into the next day. We’d drive around on bennies and park on Main still talking philosophy or the latest about Howard Hughes. We waited outside the forum after Elvis played and picked up all the chicks who would get into the car with their panties still wet. We’d walk down Broadway and see Count Basie at coffee getting ready to play at the Orpheum and say “hey man” to greet him and go into the drug store and get special nose drops that only we knew about that would make your head feel prickly and stay high for days. School? School was for squares!

In your novel, The Last of The Moccasins, first published by City Lights in 1971, you wrote a lot about the 50s Wichita Hipster years. When was it apparent to you that a Beat Scene existed?

My hipster years were mainly through the 1950s up to I’d say 1962, the beginning of my psychedelic years, when I met Neal Cassady in North Beach at my girlfriend’s pad and she told me he was the On The Road guy. I had heard of the beats a little before then, but I didn’t get into them. I have never read On The Road, but Neal read me, in his high drama, the parts he was in, so I’ve listened to a lot of it and seen excerpts of it in journals. I was unaware of the Beats during my Hipster years and then I worked several jobs before I landed in San Francisco where my sister and aunt lived, though they didn’t see each other.

I guess you could say that you along with Roxie Powell, James H. Jammy, Barbitol Bob Branaman, Bruce, Spoley Oley, Fast Car, Richard Rodent, that whole crew of Kansas hipster punks were the originals and preceded the Beats. When you hit San Francisco and your psychedelic years how did you connect with that scene?

I became aware of the Beats just before Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky came back from India in 1963 and met some of them when they came to my party with Ferlinghetti, McClure and Whalen, et al. Dave Haselwood who published my first book, Apocalypse Rose, had introduced me to other poets and their work he had published prior to my meeting those beats. He had published Lamantia, McClure and Conners who he went to school with in Wichita, and Whalen, maybe Duncan, and a book I really liked: The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Weiners. He took me to all the spots, including the Hotel Wentley, which was in “Polk Gulch,” Polk Street above Foster’s Cafeteria aka Foster Fuds. Dave wanted to go back to Wichita, where he was from, so we did and then back to San Francisco. I thought the Beats were pretty square at the time. I hadn’t met Burroughs and Kerouac yet. Pam and I met Burroughs at his Duke St. pad in London in 1968 and the same year Kerouac at the William Buckley TV show. I liked Neal and Burroughs immensely and thought Kerouac had a great ear for jazz. Though to me he remained a somewhat square Republican as far as I got to know him, not that the two are coupled. Later the Beats’ French translator, Claude Pélieu said my Last of the Moccasins was better than Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, and others immediately took issue, so I had to read that book.

And what did you make of Kerouac’s Dr Sax?

There was a literary difference. His book obeyed literary devices such as epiphany, alliteration, character development, etc. All the things one learns in an English department. He had a good ear for language, great jazz prosody in his poetry, I thought he was the best at reading to jazz, something a lot of others tried. I thought his prose imagery in that book sometimes tumbled into bathos. That’s the only book of his I read. My book was quite different in that I had to invent the style: Hobohemian Prose, as well as the genre: Thematic Text Montage, to justify my writing.

Hand on the Doorknob was your latest anthology of writing I think? It was published a short while back now. Charley tell me about your work in that book….

Yes, Water Row published it. And involves a section of dining and drinking with the Beats. Turns out it was the last time Ginsberg saw Kerouac and the last time Burroughs saw Ginsberg. There is some poetry in it from my other books, mainly Forever Wider and the elegy for my father that Allen said was one of the greatest elegies ever written. Turns out I wrote a poem to my father when I had a dream and he wrote one to his mother when he had a dream the same night. We discussed them after his reading at American University and the National Library where I introduced him. The other parts of the book are essays on printing the first Zap and some stories.

Charley, tell me some more again about Ginsberg…..

The most famous, the one who masterminded the Beat Generation. I knew him for several years in many different places. His ads still find their way to MySpace! I met him up on Potrero Hill, San Francisco and he immediately tried to court me as if we were in a 1920s literary soirée. It was a bit odd. He asked me about my sexual experiences as if it were from a textbook. It reminded me of what Huncke must have gone through with Dr. Kinsey. I treated it with humor and felt like he was the inexperienced one but didn’t tell him that. We walked up to Ferlinghetti’s house and Larry was in bed, so we drank some wine in his bedroom while he and Allen talked literary business. After we left, Allen told me that he thought Ferlinghetti wasn’t a very good poet. Then he came to the party that Glenn Todd has written about in detail. Soon after he and Neal and Anne moved into the Gough St. flat and there began a lot of traffic. During that time on Gough St I met Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu and her children, Pam and Jeffrey. They had come from France at Ferlinghetti’s invitation and were interested in my collage and translated many of the Beats. Huncke came to visit us in California with the introduction of Allen who was in Italy at the time. Back in New York years later through Allen I met Kerouac and Pam and I drank and ate with them the last time they saw each other. At Allen’s farm I met Corso and others involved in the Beats.

You became good friends with Neal Cassady in San Francisco, didn’t you?

Neal and Allen moved into my flat on Gough Street ostensibly to prepare Neal’s book, The First Third, for publication. When Ferlinghetti and Allen sat down with him, Neal was hopelessly Neal… I called him The Fastest Word in the West… and he rolled a cigar-shaped Panama Red and began free association, so I said to them, “why don’t you just tape him and transcribe it?”, but they were steeped in a more academic approach. Neal told me he was always slighted by the famous writers as a kind of errand boy or driver and wasn’t taken seriously, but I thought his words were as what I had seen of Kerouac. Of course it’s a matter of taste and I’m probably biased, Neal and I came from similar region and background, not one of ward-head mentalities.

What else do you recall of that time in San Francisco?

The time was ripe for Ginsberg to re-enter the city that launched him to fame in the 50s over the word “fuck.” The backdrop for the Hippies was Eastern religion of the new age. I remember going with Allen to explore various cults and sitting outside for a designated time until we were permitted to go in and join a rage. I left, of course. One of them was Scientology, which had tin cans attached to wires to transfer crude vibes. Eastern religions had been something that intellectuals and artist sought out since the twenties and before, so I was unimpressed, but the droves of youngsters rebelling against their lifestyles were fresh blood for the Frisco vamps. They were more ignorant than the Beats in that few had formal education, certainly no street smarts, so their fates were predictable. Allen told me than when he got out of college he got a job as a market researcher, and I could see how that benefited him in his ongoing career and his desire to be a leader.

In recent years the arts have become more and more inundated with polluted funding streams from big business, as they slap their branding iron on the ass of writers, musicians and artists. Avenues of public funding have always been available to apply for as well. Charley, you had a bad connection some time ago with the National Endowment for the Arts, didn’t you?

The NEA has been a terrible thing in my life. I took Ginsberg to their offices when we lived in D.C. when he came to visit. He wooed them and they put someone with friends of Lower East Side poets in power, many who had been here to Cherry Valley to see me. But they handed it ($$) to their other friends and couples like Allen & Peter netted about 40 grand. This when we had to sell our house here and move to D.C. to find jobs. When we were financially able to return here, I got a part-time job in a university as a tutor and saw a full professor and his wife who were millionaires groveling and slobbering in front of state grants people to the extent I never recovered from the scene. The NEA became safe academic types who are not poets, but they have to con kids into thinking they are so it continues in a vicious scam of departments to keep the fraud and Sallie Mae (student loans) going. I still receive books from poets inscribed to me as their great teacher and they list several grants and it’s pretty easy to see who their friends were who gave it to them. I just wanted a fairer system about 30 years ago, but jealous poets, opportunists and arts systems and organizations invaded all federal, state and local programs to the extent it bred more like a pyramid scheme or Scientology, etc. They changed the cultural landscape forever just like everything else in this country. They are they same ones who rant at Bush while they do the same thing and are comfortable in their ignorance and greed that brought down culture and a country.

Money always changes people, sometimes to the extent that they can’t recognise themselves or the smell of their own shit…

I could get into several examples over the years, but it would take a book and it’s not worth my time. In short, the state is right as always. I applied every year for 30 years and watched the generations receive money I had never dreamt of. I’d be lucky to see a thousand dollars after I quit working on the S.F. docks. Someone like Burroughs gave me things out of his generosity. Now, I just want to pay for my burial out in Indian country next to my mother, so I won’t have to burden my wife and kids. After my union job, I made the wrong career choices. Even those who howled against the system enjoyed its fruits. I separated myself from it long ago. Elite professions provide little fellowship for mixed blood white trash, daring to call themselves poets. Some bust the game, like a Bukowski or a Jackson Pollock, but for every one of those case studies, there are thousands for the greed, avarice and status quo of the state that it supports. While toilets flush to the sound of tapping toes, the misery of the poor contributes to the phonies and liars. Or Rimbaud said it better: while public funds evaporate in feasts of fraternity, a bell of rosy fire rings in the clouds. Proof is easy. Maya Angelou, the hallmark verse queen and self-acclaimed ex-whore used her talents when she saw suckers to become a multi-millionaire on the cover of Forbes magazine. She rode the system for all she’s worth and like Cheney and Bush and Bubba Bill, her John ghost benefactors, she’s well insulated against the truth. Clinton had her read for his inauguration! You can see the history of this country in the shit flushing down the toilet. I feel sorry for younger generations yearning to be free. Nothing like that great open slate of the Western Lands. 

Going back to early 1960s and Gough Street San Francisco, were you working then?

Neal and I had regular jobs. I worked as a printer and Neal a tire changer. We had fun in the new age that swept the city, but we were older. Little things like dancing was something I didn’t get into much. When Allen took the stage in Golden Gate Park, the well-documented be-in, dancing in a kind of Shiva contortion, I and those with me quickly blended in the crowd. Neal was also in Berkeley taunting the leaders of the famous free speech rally until someone asked who is that nut and Allen said he was just a crazy Zen Buddhist.

And what about the marches and demonstrations, you must have been on some of them?

Pam and I joined the march to People’s Park. She was pregnant and I assessed the scene quickly and wanted to take her over to someone’s house instead of demonstrating. The troops had lined up on both sides of the designated parade route and wouldn’t let anyone go down a side street. I had to call the bluff of the young guardsman who quickly got my message and called his superior and let us go down a side street. The troops had lined the designated route with barbed wire, tanks and fixed bayonets. The Berkeley “radicals” had made a deal prior to stay on certain streets. Neal was just out of San Quentin, and I had enough common sense from drifting about the country to know that the protesters were sitting ducks and it wasn’t a good move under any flag, another example of intellectual ignorance that could have gotten themselves killed, and did at Kent State. I knew better and had been down to the Peace and Freedom Party headquarters in San Francisco, which was across the hall from the Black Panther Party. I used to help them read propaganda pamphlets to sort out which ones were written by agents. I saw the Black Panthers as legitimate radicals willing to lay down their lives and demonstrated that by marching on the Reagan governor’s mansion armed with bullets draped over their backs. I returned to the parade and went down to ground zero where Gary Snyder (who reminded me of a boy scout) and other poets and the radical organizers were doing their theatrics. Of course they lost. My thoughts were re-enforced again when Pam and I were near the Chicago convention and decided not to go to ground zero.

What happened on that particular one?

Sure enough a young radical tore down the flag and all hell broke loose culminating in getting us Nixon in the White House. I don’t suppose the kid had the sense to detect that some of the older cops in the riot squad, or their superiors, may have been veterans of Omaha Beach, or Iwo Jima. Not a very sensitive tactic for the organizers either, who became stockbrokers in the new Republican era. Neal was real. We were from that geography and time between St. Louis to Denver where one could tap into a real person.

The real people can be hard to find……..

After the end of flower power, I took Neal a new pair of driver’s gloves. He was on the Further Bus with Kesey, whom I had met before when Neal brought him to parties, and with Tom Wolfe, who seemed a nice guy. Neal was to prove himself again when inevitably the cops stopped the bus down south. Neal talked to the cops in such a way as they ended up liking him. It was kind of reminiscent of Boone Co. and the sheriffs and Hasil Adkins. It was more the culture of the ’50s where speed and a line of talk saved the day.

That’s a great way of putting it Charley. What was turning your ears at the time on the west coast?

During that period in San Francisco and L.A., a lot was happening. New music was born e.g. The Doors and Janis Joplin. When we were printing Zap, someone we knew came running in saying there was a new group in town he was managing that he wanted us to meet. They had a strange name… Pink Floyd.

Oh yeah….. Did they throw any bricks at the wall back then I wonder?

Janis and Big Brother were playing the new hall on Fillmore and two complimentary tickets were left for us at City Lights. We were too stoned and involved in so much partying, we didn’t make it a few blocks over to the Fillmore.

And I know you have always been into real honky tonk country music and that you grew up with Woody Guthrie, what about other stuff?

The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bobby Dylan…. Cash. As an old cowpoke would say: “Makes my ass wanna dip snuff!” So I listen to all music, but I’m very selective in what I like, and I admit that sometimes I miss a generation as I confessed in my “We Jam Econo” tribute I wrote on Mike Watt’s Hoot Page.

That is a great piece on the film about Watt’s old band, The Minutemen. I have seen some photos of you with some other musicians that came out of that SST hardcore scene too Charley…..

I met Grant Hart at Burroughs’ funeral in Lawrence and was supposed to give him a ride to St. Louis for the Burial and Patti Smith’s goodbye, but my friend overslept. Later we saw Grant again when he took us to Patti Smith’s concert at the Bowery Ballroom in which he performed. It was in sight of the old Bowery loft we used to live in. Ferlinghetti came to read at a nearby university when Grant Hart and I went to the party afterwards and Grant sniffed his ass. Larry and the English professor were shocked as Grant said that dogs make friends that way. The kid at the university told me that Ferlinghetti said for him not to introduce him as a Beat, but as Doctor Ferlinghetti. Now that’s worth getting a PhD for if nothing else! Thurston Moore asked me to read at a performance he was involved with in Montreal and then later in Northampton and again, recently with Grant Hart and Mike Watt. Recently, Thurston gave my son and me passes to Sonic Youth and Flaming Lips gigs. Then Grant Hart and I were invited to the festival in Northampton where Grant introduced me to Mike Watt. And so I went back to make up for what I missed in the 80s. Other than that, Kathleen Haskard, who I found in time / space.

You have also published work from some seminal authors from Huncke to WS Burroughs, tell me about the publishing Charley….

We published a couple of Charles Henri Ford’s books and he then wrote a diary which is a most interesting account of those he knew closing out the days of Surrealism pre-WWII. We saw him again at Huncke’s memorial at St. Mark’s and I went to his collage opening as well as Gerard Malanga. He had stayed with us in Cherry Valley at a house in town which is now a restaurant. Burroughs also stayed with us there as well as Carl Solomon, Victor Bockris and others. During that time Huncke and Louis came up because we were publishing Huncke’s first book. Allen insisted on contributing 600 bucks or so for his advance, which helped greatly because we thought Huncke was of great stature. Huncke visited us in Baltimore and Washington where we read together with Ray Bremser whom we also published. I had deep affection for Burroughs, who was always entertaining and receptive when we visited and he gave us his loft in NYC while he and James were abroad; to say nothing of his paintings and manuscripts he gave us. He was always generous and said he didn’t consider himself a Beat. Unfortunately we had to sell his treasures as fast as he gave them, but he was like that with money himself.

How did you first come into contact with Burroughs?  

I vaguely remember getting some mail from him… Duke St., London… During that time we exchanged some cut-up. Maybe in one of those mags, his “Afterbirth of Dream Now…” I lifted some too, here and there. I think I found those lines of his I printed in color. 

How did his work find its way into NOW and Last Times?

He may have sent the one in The Last Times or gave it for a reprint. Obviously the moment was Now, and the happening factor was prominent. I guess we don’t have that now. Mail was heavier then. The literary little mags were the news as well. Things were ‘a changing. I don’t feel that today.

Can you talk a bit about the differences between the three issues of NOW – were the changes in content and format a planned thing on your part or did it just happen?

It just happened. Limited only by my imagination, the machinery, the circumstances, and the raw material lying around the press. That continued, more or less, into Coldspring Journal, which was out to gather what was happening in the mail that I received from active parties.

What was the word on the street in SF on Burroughs in the mid-1960s?  

What’s the word? Thunderbird! What’s the price? Nickle twice! Whoops an earlier decade. I’ve been around along time. San Francisco was where it was happening early on and Burroughs was the subliminal text. We went around spouting Burroughs amorphisms all over a city awash in mind-altering drugs, and “Wouldn’t you?” It was the hip ticket. If you couldn’t recite from Naked Lunch, you were a bore!

At that point what Burroughs had you read?

I read Naked Lunch and anything that came in the underground press. My friend, the late Alan Russo, said it would be a while before they could assimilate that work. I don’t know how popular he was in other cities. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, you know… once a Californian…. the other part of the country doesn’t exist. 

What did you think of him and his work?

He was the genius old man of a generation or so. In San Francisco he was pontifica hip nefarious… He was anointed spirit literati by everyone in San Francisco who does that kind of thing better than anywhere. I hadn’t met him at that time. 

Your work with Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach is very interesting.  What is your take on the cut-up as a literary technique?  

When they arrived in San Francisco, I had the larger press down on the Mission. Claude was impressed by my large collages and couldn’t wait to make the Beeg American collage. The cut-up technique could be seen as a collage cutter, too I suppose. Image/symbol. It was the abbreviated days of Jackson Pollack, Chaos Theory, Monk, the Moon, and Charley Parker. Sheldrake posited the notion of Morphic Resonance that new things happen at the same time in places over the globe by the same species without any known geographical contact. Pélieu claimed he did the cut-up before he read Burroughs. It was timely. That’s what it is essentially, a short cut in the language, permitting more automatic symbolic association. Associations were the uptake pump of Language, and it needed to go faster.

And did you hang out at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan at all?

Yeah, my mother-in-law, Mary Beach and her husband Claude Pélieu lived there. We were put up there for a couple of nights for the reading at The Bitter End. John Cassady, Neal’s son, rehearsed there before the gig at the Bitter End. I used to drive a milk truck into the city and deliver cash to Herbert Huncke there from his foreign publishers.

How has the cut-up influenced your work as a writer, artist and publisher?  

At the time of NOW, the S. F. Chronicle ran a story about having to set the official clock, Big Ben, a fraction ahead. Physicists were meeting to set the clock forward. I remember saying, “Hell, I could have told them that.” The cut-up was timely in history. Otherwise people would write like James Fenimore Cooper! They still do around these parts.

What is the legacy of the cut-up?

I haven’t kept up with cut-up per se other than look at some of the publications of the day that were Claude and Mary’s. I think Burroughs took the philosophy further into the shotgun effect, blasting the word, finally! I’m not very scholarly in cut-up. It seemed a logical language progression, especially considering the time and Quantum Theory. Cut-up was around during my printing activity (several tables full). Pélieu said “Can you hear the sound of the breaker sliding under the collage guy’s cutter? Time is the only LAW.” T. S. Eliot said “Hurry up please, it’s time.”

Can you compare your work with Cherry Valley Editions today with your publishing in the 1960s (Last Times, NOW, ZAP, Bulletin from Nothing etc)?  

We haven’t published much recently. We got started with funds from grants and stopped those in the ’70s or ’80s. Famous people would help here and there. Burroughs was very generous. The only thing we’ve done is one of mine, Some Mother’s Sons, which my daughter published. She found a very inexpensive place that prints books on order. They are cheaply produced, and of good enough quality. Most publishing now has turned to specialty printings, or novelty. We’re not that active. I can certainly see the effects of public monies through arts organizations. They finally got it where they wanted it. Outreach arts bringing it to your neighborhood… the book is more the artifact, for sale like a T shirt for famous people. Alternative to what?

How did the alternative publishing scene differ from the 1960s into the 1970s and beyond?

S. Clay Wilson called the other day to report a Crumb drawing in a Playboy lot bringing $101,575. I tried to get Grove to publish him. Those who are in the business are sometimes the last ones to know. That part is the same. Electronics might equal everything out. That’s probably the reason for novelty and printing/publishing fine art. It can always be presented differently.

Is the mimeo revolution still alive?

Technically, I was bad offset-printing not mimeo, but it had the same audience. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley are using the classic mimeo format with their Esctatic Peace label. That’s specialty too, kind of bringing back or producing the mimeo aesthetic. We did a run of very artistic Xerox magazines on kraft-like paper that was written about in communication and literary journals. 

What are your thoughts of small independent publishing in the digital age?  

The labels of publishing designations don’t mean much. It takes as much or more effort to produce artfully historically correct mimeos as it did when that was the most adaptive thing available. But now you get the historical artifact, too. 

What is DIY publishing’s future?

You can do it yourself as long as the terrorists don’t shut down the electric. Then it’s back to smoke signals.

You mentioned Claude Pélieu having a great interest in your collages. What was the climate back then for the visual arts? 

Experimental Film was the rage. I remember taking Robert Frank on my motorcycle down to the S.F. premier of (Fellini’s) 8 1/2. Flaming Creatures was playing in North Beach and there was a party for its opening. Someone sent a limo for Lew Welch and me. As a cab driver, he dug the ride. Stan Brackage, another kid from Kansas, came by the print shop. I did two 8mm movies that were in Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Jonas Mekas at the New York Film co-op showed them until they wore out and notified me through Harry Smith that I had some money they earned! I didn’t expect such attention and care! I made some collages and had a show at the Batman, a notorious gallery where Bruce Connor had shown after he came back from Mexico. Neal was at the Goldwater convention at the Cow Palace that night and came by my opening with straw hat and cane. It was a costume opening anyway.

How did the Batman show go?

I sold all my collages except a couple. The show was mentioned in Art in America. Billy Jharmark, the owner of Batman Gallery gave Pam and me his classic 1950 MGTD. We were leaving for Europe and sold it on the street for $250! A book was later written about the Batman. I don’t think it mentioned my show. There was a story about Billy Jharmark giving Michael McClure a wristwatch!

Nothing about that MG he gave you and Pam?

These are but a few examples of my poor marketing skills. I began to think my marketing skills weren’t up to par. It seemed to end when Neal came running into the Gough St. flat yelling, “Charley turn on the TV! Kennedy’s been shot!” That Thanksgiving was gray. We had a big dinner and invited a stranger off the street. My sister and her husband Frank were there. Later he helped get me a job on the docks. Ginsberg’s poem talks about me and some of my friends from Kansas who lived in the pad above that one called “The End Pad.” It was a sign of the times for me. Certainly that fling with youth had ended.

Postscript by Glenn Todd

This is Charley, swinging. The time is spring-summer, the year, 1963. The place, Wichita, Kansas, where the golden wheat has just been harvested and the trees are bursting greenery touching tips over the center of the streets. Charley stands in a combination teenage twist and gay bar done up in coral walls lined with gilded store window manikins. He stands at the front of the dance floor before a jukebox that has a waterfall behind it and light flowing down its sides, so that he appears to be coming from a neon grotto. His hair is falling over his forehead in a mass of curls, he is wearing dark glasses, a blue-and-silver sport shirt, a metallic gold tie, black tight pants slung low on his hips, and black-and-white saddle oxfords. One hip is slung outward. Up go the hands in the air.

“TWIST!” shouts Charley.

Up his back runs a ripple like a snake moving, fast. His hips are inscribing a frenzied half-circle in the air. His head bounces and bobbles with jazz-drummer ecstasy. His arms flail, he’s almost flying but his feet are planted in the floor, sucking up great electrical currents of earth vibrations.

“It’s the vortex!” He shouts. “Can’t you feel the forces! Pulling you in! It’s twisting in twister land!”

Across the floor toward him dances his blonde college-girl goddess, and she’s out of her mad gold pony-tailed head. She’s all Charley could dream of exploding into, she’s Miss Freeswinging Kansas, Caucasian aflame, descendant of hot-blooded fairy-tale princesses, she moves with classic American grace, she’s poised and pure and fashion-hip, she has round arms of love, ready to grab, she won’t be brought down, and above the rock and roll, sweet cello strings play for all eternity in that gold head of hers.

They’re back at the table where a crowd of us are sitting. They’re arm in arm, together again, and I turn on to their beauty aglow with sex.

“This is where it all comes from!” shouts Charley. “Can’t you feel the vibrations? Man, there is so much energy here that you just get near it and flooom! It’s got you and swinging you someplace else.”

This is Charley’s hometown, the land that produced him, and he’s back to turn everyone on and get recharged. Everywhere he goes crowds of youth follow him, turning him on. Now the brown-limbed teenagers in cutoff jeans and bouffant hair have taken the floor. Their bodies are strong, sunbeautied, and swimming-pool clean, they’re eager-high on beer. They are dancing dances they all know, no one touching, boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys. All the steps are perfect and harmonious. They are all oh God so beautiful and I know we cannot lose, beyond all certitude of mind mankind will take the stars and crush time with these golden kids, born of our bodies and spirit.

Here Charley is big, here with youth. He is vibrant with sex that knows no separation from love, and hope for and beware of the day its dancing force is turned on you, my friend. Crowds follow him, he is alive with scheme and dream, and he will make it happen now. Are you ready? He will, like the morning glory but more aware, unfold himself in the sunburst of today.

Crowds follow him, turned on. He’s having a show of his collages at a weird place, the New Mission Care, in the skidrow-trainstation section of Wichita. Charley aggrandizing making bright the legend. Is it a game? How much is glory and how much is morning glory? (He quotes Cocteau: “All art is a card trick.”) He has made the Wichita scene happen: bright-eyed campus beauties, long-haired students, careful college professors, waiting-in-limbo artists, shimmy-shake drag queens, long ago pillhead buddies, strange inhabitants of the outposts of Beatsville–all come to soak up Charley energy, to be angered, to be inspired, to lift him up or put him down, but always to be stirred.

Note

This interview was put together whilst I was traveling in the States and knocked into shape over some of the days of April and May ’08. I had the good fortune to be able to spend time with Charley’s longtime friend, the artist and filmmaker Robert Branaman, when I was in LA. Thanks go out to Charley and Pam, Barbital Bob and RealityStudio.

Charley and Pam’s publishing company is Cherry Valley Editions and you can also read more at Charley’s MySpace page.

Charles Plymell is still kicking against the pricks, writing and performing at spoken word gigs with musician and artist Grant Hart, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the legendary Minutemen bassist Mike Watt. He will be reading at the Sprachsalz Literary Festival Innsbruck, Austria on 12-14 Sept 2008 and will be making further spoken word appearances, some with either one, some or all of the three men aforementioned in the USA later on this year.

The postcript was written by Glenn Todd, artist and writer who was deeply embedded in the Wichita Scene along with Charley Plymell, Robert Branaman, Bruce Connor, Michael McClure, Dave Haselwood and many more. The Wichita Vortex website is a good reference point.

Books

Apocalypse Rose, Dave Haselwood Books, San Francisco, CA, 1967.

Neon Poems, Atom Mind Publications, Syracuse, NY, 1970.

The Last of the Moccasins, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, 1971; Mother Road Publications, 1996.

Moccasins Ein Beat-Kaleidoskop, Europaverlag, Vienna, Austria, 1980.

Over the Stage of Kansas, Telephone Books, NYC, 1973.

The Trashing of America, Kulchur Foundation, NYC, 1975.

Blue Orchid Numero Uno, Telephone Books, 1977.

Panik in Dodge City, Expanded Media Editions, Bonn, W. Germany, 1981.

Forever Wider, 1954-1984, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985.

Was Poe Afraid?, Bogg Publications, Arlington, VA, 1990.

Hand on the Doorknob, Water Row Books, Sudbury, MA, 2000

Anthologies

Mark in Time, New Glide Publications, San Francisco, CA, 1971.

And The Roses Race Around Her Name, Stonehill, NYC, 1975.

Turpentin on the Rocks, Maro Verlag, Augsburg, W. Germany, 1978.

A Quoi Bon, Le Soleil Noir, Paris, France, 1978.

Planet Detroit, Anthology of Urban Poetry, Detroit, MI, 1983.

Second Coming Anthology, Second Coming Press, San Francisco, CA, 1984.

The World, Crown Publishers, 1991.

Editors’ Choice III, The Spirit That Moves Us, New York, 1992.

The Age of Koestler, The Spirit of the Wind Press, Kalamazoo, MI, 1995.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Ted Dunn collects strictly Beat Generation material, focusing primarily now on William Everson / Brother Antoninus though some may not consider him a member of that elite grouping that included Burroughs, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso etc., though he should be regarded as a forerunner as an activist poet and self-made printer of relevant poetry leading to the San Francisco Renaissance. Dunn’s collection consists of all aspects of printed material including books, broadsides, letters, handcrafted cards, a scroll, photographs, drawings, lithographs, etc. Material ranges from reading copies to deluxe, limited editions. An abundance of signed and inscribed copies highlight his library.

When you began book collecting did the angle of financial investment play into it? Do you consider your collection an important asset in your portfolio?

My collecting from the beginning up until now never involved the aspect of investment. I have never acquired an item or any material with the idea of future monetary gain. So, I do not regard my collection as an investment as I would the money market, stocks, bonds etc. My collection is a complete entity void of dollar value.

In your experience are books recession-proof, “hedges against inflation?”

I think it all depends upon the material. Right now there is a definite lull in activity, a sluggishness or stagnation in choice material moving off the shelf. At this time I wouldn’t bet on my collection benefiting me in my retirement.

I know you have sold pieces of your collection over the years. What factors play in to you selling what you have acquired?

There aren’t that many factors other than a lessening interest in the material over the years and an increased interest or coveting of different objects whether it is a book, broadside, correspondence etc. Because of a definite increase in asking prices for material over the years it is necessary to weed out the duplicates (if any) and in some cases sell four to acquire one. Mistakes are to be made and regrets will occur. Certain collecting habits can hinder the scope of a complete collection. Sacrifices sometimes need to be made.

In your experience collecting counterculture material, how have these items appreciated over the years? What is your sense of the health of the Burroughs market over your collecting life?

I am extremely fortunate to have acquired the Burroughs material when it was far less expensive than what is being asked at the present time. Much of what I have in my collection I don’t even see being offered. An incredible appreciation has occurred within the last fifteen years or so in counterculture material such as Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg etc. With all of these authors I have noticed also the lack of much material no longer being offered which may be an indication of collectors holding onto their treasures as an investment or merely an unwillingness to release them back into the wilds from captivity for any of a number of personal reasons.

You have been collecting for quite some time. Can you describe what the rare book market was like in 1993-1994 during that downturn or after the crash in 2001?

There was an abundance of material available. I personally had to make many serious decisions regarding what to acquire and what to disregard in hopes of it still being available at a later time when funds were again at hand. And here unfortunately mistakes were made and regrets occurred that I mentioned earlier.

In a recession, do you find that there are more quality books available on the market, i.e. people need cash so they sell their books? Brian Cassidy wrote on his blog that more customers are selling books lately. Have you noticed a change in the supply recently?

I have not seen evidence of that strictly because of a recession, and I’m not quite sure that quality plays into it. There have been a number of auctions recently where the condition of material has been mediocre and somewhat unappealing to collectors such as myself who have a particular standard when it comes to numerous flaws that distract one from any consideration of involvement or participation. Naturally there are different ranks of collectors and I tend to think that a serious collector would have to be quite desperate in order to relinquish a quality book to sustain a lifestyle or economic necessity.

I have only been collecting since 1993 (a down economic market), but I remember the period from 1998-2000 as a remarkable time in terms of the Burroughs and counterculture market. The dot-com boom in Silicon Valley really brought out the great material. Did you find the same?

For me there is no correlation between economic events in either direction and my notice of material surfacing on the market. My collecting has been a steady progression regardless of outside influences. As for the two-year period that you mention, I can honestly say that I cannot pinpoint those years as any more remarkable for me in acquiring material than either before or after until now and the last five years as being less fruitful. Of course it goes without saying that the Internet has played a tremendous role both encouraging and detrimental to collecting.

Do you find yourself buying aggressively in a down market or do you pull back on your collecting activities?

It is difficult to buy aggressively in any state of the market when material is lacking. Personally, if there is something of interest that I find appealing and desirable, I will make an effort to acquire it. As I mentioned, for me, there is no connection between my passion for collecting and whether or not Dow points up or down. It does bring to mind though, regarding the economics of book collecting, the whole matter of supply and demand. I have noticed a down trend in both when it comes to interest in counterculture material especially the Beats, and in particular the rarer, scarce limited edition type tome. Unfortunately, prices for ones that are presently offered have skyrocketed to such an extreme that it is virtually impossible for even those seriously interested in the books to afford, especially collectors just starting out with limited cash flow and those unwilling to risk credit.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Peter T. Leeson is BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at George Mason University. His current research explores the economics of pirates and has been covered by the New Yorker, Freakonomics.com, the Financial Times, and the Boston Globe. His book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, is under contract with Princeton University Press and scheduled to appear in spring 2008. Burroughs fans should check out Invisible Hook, as it promises to highlight some of the aspects of pirate communities that appealed to Burroughs and found its way into Cities of the Red Night.

I just talked with a record dealer, and he said he is seeing a jump in high-end LP sales due to people buying collectibles as a “hedge against inflation.” What does this mean in economic terms and does thinking of this type have any basis in economic fact? How do rare books compare as an asset to art or precious metals?

To understand whether it makes sense to buy collectibles as a hedge against inflation, it’s important to understand what inflation is. Inflation is simply an increase in the supply of money. When government prints new money faster than the economy produces new goods, prices rise and the value of the dollar falls.1 Your money becomes worth less, making you poorer.

To prevent inflation from eroding your wealth, you might think about converting your dollars into assets that aren’t undermined by inflation. This is called hedging. Perhaps the most popular form of hedging is simply purchasing “real goods.” Real goods are commodities that directly satisfy our wants. Rare books, boats, gold, and Happy Meals are all real goods. Inflation may destroy the value of my dollars, but it can’t destroy the value of my Happy Meal. So, if I expect inflation to rise, it may make sense for me to convert some of my wealth into such goods rather than holding it in dollars.

Storing your wealth in real goods isn’t free, however. It costs something. For one, it costs you an improved ability to meet future demands. For instance, if I convert some of my dollars into rare books, I’ll have fewer dollars available to pay next month’s rent or to pay my doctor if an unexpected medical emergency comes up. If I convert too many of my dollars into rare books, I may not be able to pay these bills at all.

If I can easily convert rare books back to dollars when I need them, the cost of storing my wealth in rare books is small. But if it’s hard to convert rare books back into dollars at a price that won’t cause me to lose my shirt, the cost storing my wealth in rare books is much larger. So, one important factor a person who’s thinking about using rare books (or LPs, or any other collectibles) as a hedge against inflation to consider is their salability. How easily could I sell my books at a price that won’t earn a loss if I suddenly need more dollars?

Some real goods are highly salable. Gold is one example, which is a large part of the reason it’s widely used as a hedge against inflation. Gold has a “wide” market; it’s relatively easy to unload if I need to at a price that won’t kill me. Rare books, in contrast, tend to have a much “narrower” market. I’m not a collector myself, but this already tells me something about rare books’ salability. Their weaker salability compared to other goods, such as gold, makes them an inferior hedge against inflation.

Closely related to this is the relative inflation-adjusted rate of return one could expect from hedging against inflation by converting dollars into rare books versus other real goods, such as gold. Hedging against inflation is an act of speculation. You’re betting on the future value of the dollar, the future price of rare books, and the future price of alternative real goods you could use to hedge against inflation. When you convert your dollars into rare books you’re betting that the inflation-adjusted rate of return on this use of your wealth will be higher than alternative uses.

I don’t know the rare book market well, but my intuition is that rare books don’t provide an especially lucrative inflation-adjusted rate of return relative to other goods one could use to hedge against inflation. If they did, you’d see lots of people buying rare books during times of inflation, driving up their price. We don’t see this with rare books but we do see it with gold, suggesting the superiority of the latter in this capacity.

There’s another reason why, compared to gold anyway, rare books are probably not a very good hedge against inflation: If hyperinflation ensues and the dollar loses all of its value, there’s a good chance that gold could temporarily replace dollars as our medium of exchange. There are several reasons for this. Historically, gold was used as money. Gold is easily divisible, meaning that I can break it down into small pieces to make small transactions. Gold has an obvious unit of account, which is some increment of weight. And, as noted above, lots of people want gold. These features make gold a good money substitute if the dollar collapses.

Rare books, in contrast, lack these features. They weren’t previously used as a general medium of exchange. They aren’t divisible (tearing out pages to pay for smaller transactions won’t work). They have no obvious unit of account (unlike a certain quality of gold, the heavier book is not necessarily the more valuable one, and it’s more difficult to verify the quality of a particular rare book than it is do to the same for particular piece of gold). Finally, as noted above, the rare book market is relatively small.

In short, if the dollar collapses and you’ve hedged against this by purchasing rare books, you’re not going to be nearly as well off as the guy who purchased gold (though you’ll be better off than the guy who purchased Happy Meals).

I’ve just elaborated some of the economics behind the sensibility of using rare books as a hedge against inflation. The bottom line is this: it’s probably not a great idea. At least relative to other real goods that could be used to hedge against inflation, such as gold, rare books don’t stack up so well.

But I’ve neglected what’s probably the most important factor for rare book lovers in thinking about converting their dollars into these goods, which is the pleasure collectors derive from holding them. This can alter the calculus considered above rather considerably. If I love holding rare books, I may be willing to convert lots of my dollars into rare books even though I’ll earn a lower rate of return by doing so. I may even be willing to go into arrears on my rent to do this. If this is the case for your, by all means, buy more rare books. I just wouldn’t expect them to act as an effective hedge against inflation.

You stated to me that there is an economic lesson to be learned from the collectible comic book market. What happened to the comic market in the last two decades, and what is that lesson?

Years ago I collected comic books. I still have most of them. Sadly, I believe their price has fallen rather considerably (though I’d be happy to learn otherwise if I’m mistaken here). In my mind, the takeaway from this is that the market for collectibles tends to be rather finicky. Fads and fashions seem to drive these markets more so than they do in many others, for instance the market for gold. Gold is pretty much always in. Punisher #1 isn’t. This stylized impression is connected to the point above about the salability of various goods and why rare books (or comic books) probably aren’t a very good way to try and hedge against inflation.

Throughout history countries that have the most aggressive book collectors seems to be the dominant economic if not world power. In the 18th Century, the great book collectors were English. In the 19th and into the early 20th Century, the Americans took control. I don’t know if this is true but you hear that the great collectors now are Asian or Russian. Does this foreshadow the eventual economic dominance of the Eastern Powers? Has this shift already occurred? How does collecting (be it books or art) factor into world economic hegemony?

Rare books are luxury goods — goods people buy disproportionately more of as their income rises. There’s a reason why the average American has more rare books than the average Sudanese: he’s a lot richer. In poor countries, income is spent mostly on things like shelter and sustenance. Only once you become relatively wealthy and these needs are adequately satisfied can you afford to spend significant income on rare books. The “world powers” you mention were among the wealthiest countries of their times, so it’s no surprise that rare book collecting was more prominent in these places. As Asia’s, Eastern Europe’s, or any other region’s countries grow richer, we can expect increased rare book collecting to follow.

I don’t think rare book collecting figures into “world economic hegemony” because I don’t think such a thing exists. But I will say this much: Based on the reasoning above, if you want rare book collecting to grow, you should encourage economies to grow. In practice, this means encouraging the spread of capitalism. Countries that rely more on free markets and less on government to direct their economies are wealthier than those that do the reverse. So, encourage the growth of capitalism, and the growth of rare book collecting will follow.

Given the rise of digital and virtual technologies, what do you see as the future of the rare book market? Does the death of print mean an even larger cult and fetish developing around print and thus leading to a boom in collecting books?

It’s increasingly common to hear that the rise of electronic media means the death of print media. I just don’t buy it. The logic underlying this common claim suggests that electronic and print media are exclusively substitute goods — when the price of electronic media falls, demand for print media falls with it. But in fact, electronic and print media are often complements. Access to online book reviews, for example, has led me to purchase more print books. The rise of the internet, which made possible electronic books possible, has made it infinitely easier for me to find and purchase print books. Even the electronic availability of some books has led me to find out about and purchase other print books I wouldn’t have otherwise purchased.

I buy many books (though not rare ones), and I’m quite certain that my book consumption is higher post-Amazon.com than it was before Amazon.com. In large part, this is due to the ease with which technology has enabled me to find books I find interesting. So, while the digital revolution has probably crowded out certain types of demand for print media, it has also increased demand for other types of print media. On net, I think the growth of electronic media has benefited print media rather than harmed it.

I should add that I don’t ever see the print book market going away. Some people, like me, just prefer to have printed versions of what we’re reading — and computer printouts don’t cut it. I want the actual book. Publishers can produce various works in electronic and print versions (as many currently do) and charge a higher price for the printed version to people like me who are willing to pay a premium to have it.

My guess is that technology has also made it much easier to collect rare books. This intensifies existing rare book collectors’ demand for rare books, but also serves to introduce new individuals to rare books, who otherwise might not have become collectors. This is both a blessing and a curse for existing rare book collectors. On the one hand, if enough people get into rare book collecting, the price of your current collection will rise (and maybe even enough people will get involved to make rare book collecting a decent hedge against inflation after all). On the other hand, you may have to pay a bit more for your next acquisition.

1. Technically, inflation is an increase in the supply of money not offset by a corresponding increase in the demand for money. Also technically, even if new goods are produced at a rate commensurate with the rate of monetary expansion there is still inflation. In this case, nominal prices will not rise, but prices will be higher than they would have been without the monetary expansion, creating a sort of ‘hidden inflation.’

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Brian Cassidy runs a rare and antiquarian bookshop in Monterey, California. He will be familiar to readers of RealityStudio for his input on Early Photos and Collages by Burroughs, a Rare Burroughs Letter, and other articles in the Bibliographic Bunker.

These interviews on the economics of the rare book market stem from a recent blog of yours in which you mentioned that you have seen a rise in customers selling books recently. Do you believe this is directly related to the down economic market?

I think it is. Over the past two months, I’ve been offered about twice as much material as I normally do. Ironically, the more I’m offered, the pickier I generally have to be about what I’ll buy.

In a down market do you find that serious collectors sell their holdings, buy aggressively, or hold tight? Can a generalization be made on this or is it a case by case issue?

It’s hard to generalize. I do know that one client of mine is liquidating some of his collection to raise capital for a large upcoming purchase. His reasons for doing so, however, I don’t know. All things being equal, the book market is like any other. The down time is the time to hold and buy, not sell.

How about booksellers? Do they greatly increase their general stock in a down market or a strong market?

Well, you have to increase stock no matter what the market. A dealer lives or dies by his new acquisitions. But to give you an idea of how the market is affecting book price… I and another dealer recently bought a very nice collection of autographed material from a Nobel-Prize-winning author. My colleague and I went back and forth on what we should pay for the collection. We had a high and low range of possible offers, and we debated what to present to the seller in order to feel confident he would agree to an acquisition. On the one hand, we very much wanted the collection. On the other, the current market left us wary of paying too much and finding ourselves deep into material we’d have trouble moving. We settled on an offer (which was accepted) at the lower end of our range, but I can tell you a year or two ago we probably would have initially offered at least 20% more.

In my experience, I have found that more books are available in a strong economic market. The dot-com boom of 1998-2000 was incredible for me as a Burroughs collector. So much was available. Is this a false memory on my part? Is this remembered in the industry as a special time for Beat material?

Well, I think there are three things contributing to this impression. First, it wasn’t so much that the internet brought so many more books onto the market (although it did), as it just made them infinitely easier to find. Second, those early years of the internet provided some great buys as dealers had less access to pricing information than they do now. Couple all that with the fact that The Beats were really starting to emerge into their own critically during those years and I can see how it might have felt like a special time. The steals may be harder to find today, but there’s still a ton of good material out there. Indeed, I still think there are great opportunities.

How does the rare bookselling industry do in a recession? There is an argument that the used book business is recession-proof. But what about the rare book business? For instance, do more people buy rare books as a hedge against inflation? Do you see an increase in purchases of blue ribbon collectibles like Ulysses or The Sun Also Rises, i.e. books for which there will always be a demand and market?

Books have traditionally been considered recession-proof because a buyer could get more “bang for their buck” so to speak. In other words, they could spend $20 on a new book which would take many hours to read, or go to a movie which only lasted a couple. Plus, a book is a durable good that retains some value and is more lasting. So when one is watching the budget these can be more attractive qualities. That said sales seem softer to me for more common books than they did the same time last year.

As for rare books, the top of the market remains strong. The best books continue to sell well. But everyone I know is proceeding with caution.

Can rare books truly be considered an alternative asset to the stock market in a portfolio like art? Can Beat highspots like Howl, Naked Lunch or On the Road?

Yes and no. But mostly no. For the simple reason that books are not liquid like other assets. If you want to turn your books into cash, you basically have to either pay 20% or so to an auction and get (uncertain) auction values, or sell to a dealer and get wholesale. This means that your original purchase has to appreciate at least 50-100% before you can earn your original investment back. This is not true of more easily traded assets like stocks which can be liquidated more cheaply and more quickly.

Further complicating the equation are the fickle tastes of the marketplace. This year’s Joyce can be next year’s Galsworthy. In other words, the very foundations of judging value can change. This is less true in other assets, where methods of determining price (P/E ratios, for example) are much more established and transparent.

That said, I often look at auction results and think to myself “In ten years, that’s going to look like a great buy.”

What is the health and future of the William Burroughs market?

To me, Burroughs seems more and more relevant and prescient with each passing year. For better or worse, our world increasingly resembles Burroughs’. This means that readers and other artists and writers will continue to turn to him for inspiration and perspective. All of which bodes well for the Burroughs market.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

A handwritten Burroughs letter turned up on eBay a few weeks ago. If I remember correctly the letter was from the mid-1990s and in it, Burroughs expresses his thanks for a $5000 loan. I traded a few emails with Burroughs fans who were surprised that Burroughs was hurting for cash at such a late date. The publication of Naked Lunch and the resulting royalties, particularly from Grove, allowed Burroughs to end his dependence on his parents’ generosity, but this independence did not happen until the 1960s. In 1984, Burroughs signed a $200,000 book deal with Viking, coupled with a 45,000 pound deal for the British rights. At the time, Burroughs had mounting debts (some stemming from his son’s medical expenses), and this deal provided some measure of financial security. As Burroughs became more of a mainstream figure, his financial prospects must have brightened even more. But it is my understanding that Burroughs always struggled with money problems of some type. As one of my email correspondents pointed out, Burroughs needed a collaborator in his financial life as well as his creative one. Without a doubt, James Grauerholz provided creative, personal, and economic stability to Burroughs’ life. Yet financial concerns dogged Burroughs to the end of his life. Burroughs was never the millionaire that Kerouac portrayed Burroughs to be in books and letters. This myth dies hard even today.

The early 1970s was another era of a global recession directly tied to the state of the oil market. In 1973, Burroughs lived in London and he was looking for a way out. In desperation he dug into his voluminous archives. In detailing the Burroughs archive offered for sale by Ken Lopez, I told the story of how Burroughs mortgaged his literary history in order to finance his return to the United States. The archive was sent into private hands and remained under lock and key for decades. That is until the recent sale of the privately held archive to the NYPL. The repercussions on Burroughs criticism were and are immense. Who knows what would have happened to Burroughs’ archives under different personal and global economic circumstances? Yet the benefits to Burroughs personally were even more important. The sale allowed Burroughs to return to the United States and begin the second stage of his creative life that culminated in the trilogy of Cities of the Red Night, Place of Dead Roads, and Western Lands.

This letter with its insight into the struggles of supporting oneself as a writer or artist in the United States, even for a writer as well-known and seemingly successful as Burroughs, got me thinking about the current state of the economy and what it means for the rare book business and the health of the Burroughs / Beat market. I am not alone. So what does today’s economic market mean for the rare book business? In a recent blog, Brian Cassidy commented that more customers are coming into his store selling books. Rare book bloggers are addressing the affects of a down market on the book trade? Are we going to see an increase in the availability of rare books due to the economic downturn? Do writers and collectors generally sell their literary treasures in tough times, like Burroughs did in 1973? ? In real estate, one always hears that a recession is a buyer’s market. Is a recession the perfect time for a book collector, bookseller, or institution to acquire interesting material? Are rare books good investments? (For conflicting views see David Brass Rare Books or MyFineBooks.) Personally, I remember tons of Burroughs and Beat material being available in the dot.com boom years of the late 1990s. (William Reese on the rare book market in 2000.) Is this a myth like the legend of Burroughs’ trust fund? Does a robust economy directly relationial to a wide selection of great material? Or is this yet another faulty memory? Are there any economic laws relating to book collecting? How does the rare book market reflect on the overall economy?

In an effort to answer some of these questions, I interviewed a bookseller (Brian Cassidy), a book collector (Ted Dunn), and an economist (Peter Leeson) about the economics of the rare book industry.

Michel Duval

En Attendant, November 1979

This interview with William S. Burroughs, which has never been reproduced since appearing in the November 1979 issue of En Attendant, was conducted on the occasion of the Plan K gig on 16 October 1979. It appears here in conjunction with RealityStudio’s dossier on William S. Burroughs and Joy Division. You can also read the original French version.

Amusing

According to a renowned encyclopedia of literature, William Burroughs died in 1970…

Bowie (David)

“I met him in London a few years ago by the intermediary of a common friend who wanted to interview us for Rolling Stone.”

What did you speak about?

“I don’t remember very well. Ah yes, Russians.”

Afterward David Bowie claimed to have been impressed by Burroughs, whom he considered one of those most incisive minds in the world. Bowie would also employ the cut-up method for certain songs, notably on Low.

Cut-up (Technique)

In the spring of 1958 Burroughs encountered Brion Gysin, an American painter and writer [Gysin was born in England and raised in Canada — ed.], in Paris. Gysin introduced him to the cut-up technique. This procedure would revolutionize his life as a writer, much as apomorphine would cure him of his addiction and liberate his writing. The cut-up method is child-like: choose a newspaper or article the length you want for your text. Carefully cut out the words and put them into a bag. Shake gently. Pull them out one by one and scrupulously copy them out in the order you remove them. A number of Burroughs’ books — and not the least ones — were written in this manner. However, the cut-up portion has sensibly diminished since 1971.

Burroughs has said: “A page of Rimbaud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images — real Rimbaud images — but new ones.” [From the Paris Review interview — ed.]

Can’t it also be said that the process is too facile?

“That’s false. It’s the opposite of traditional writing, you don’t have a single choice but hundreds of different possibilities. Let’s take an example: a young man goes for a walk. You can describe this situation, but you can also intersperse in the story the young man’s interior thoughts. These are generally absurd, illogical, unreal images… Life is a cut-up.

D as in…

He has tried them all. From heroin to coke. From LSD to Yage. “I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes or removed them except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction.” [From "Deposition: Testimony Concerning A Sickness" — ed.]

Would you do it again?

It’s not an option.

Do you still take drugs?

No. Not anymore.

What if you were to die tomorrow?

Then, yes. I’d load up on morphine a last time.

Exterminator!

Title of a book published in 1973. In 1942 in Chicago Burroughs performed the astonishing work that is the extermination of insects.

False Illusions?

“Take, for example, the concept of fascism and try to formulate a definition acceptable to everybody. Each word has a number of meanings. For that reason, language becomes useless. To speak is a futile endeavor. It’s all an illusion.

But this chair really exists?

“Not so fast. It may be a tacticle hallucination. Take a hologram. You think you see a volume but in fact it’s nothing.”

Can one be unhappy? That’s a real feeling.

“Not necessarily. Professor Delgado of Yale University has shown that, by stimulating certain parts of the brain, you can physically control a human being. He has made people do things against their own will.”

Homosexuality

Inseparable from his life and work (read The Wild Boys), this subject didn’t come up in the interview.

Digression: The movement for the liberation of Italian homosexuals has brought a complaint against Pope John Paul II before the court of Turin. The movement argues that the pope, in the speech he gave in Chicago on October 5, “has shown considerable prejudice toward homosexuals.”

Interview

Relatively uninteresting genre of journalism. The two protagonists play a game where there is rarely a winner or a loser. And besides, how could I convey to him that I’m more interested in the contents of his fridge than in the origin of his work?

K (Plan)

Where the interview took place. 16 October (1979) from 3:15 to 4:15. Avant-garde theater group basing most of its productions on texts by Burroughs.

Lee (William)

It was under the pseudonym William Lee that in 1953 Burroughs published his first novel, Junky, in which he recounts his hallucinatory experiences. “Junk is a cellular equation that teaches the user facts of general validity. I have seen life measured out in eyedroppers of morphine solution…. I have learned the junk equation. Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life.” [From the introduction to Junky — ed.]

Mayans

For a number of years Burroughs has been interested in the Mayans, who attempted to conquer a part of South America using completely new techniques of control that act on the unconscious. Currently little is known about how these techniques work. The Mayans did not have recourse to any police or army. It is estimated that 2-3% of the population was under their control.

Normal

“I think I’m completely normal. I get up every day about 9:30, I read the newspaper, I write. At night I go to the movies or I get invited to dinner.”

What is your earliest memory?

“Ah… I believe I had just turned three years old. It was my birthday.”

Nowadays what do you do on your birthday?

“Nothing.”

Oeuvre [Work]

Before 1953, Burroughs lent himself to several literary ventures with Kells Elvins (one of his friends), Joan Vollmer (his future wife), Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

After Junky, four novels appeared in a period of a few years: The Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964), which offered an apocalyptic vision of today’s world. With its mutants. With its guardians of Knowledge and Control. The work of Burroughs is phenomenal and, in consequence, uncompromising. In 1971 The Wild Boys, his apogee, appeared. A fascinating writer is born!

Why do you write books?

“Because it’s my job.”

How did you discover it?

“In writing a book that was published.”

Physiognomy

He is constantly compared to a retired bureaucrat. He wears the same outfit as when I met him the first time, a few years ago. Somber colors, knotted tie, malice at the corner of his lips, hat — that’s his entire wardrobe.

“Life what is it, but a dream?”

Rock

What is the last album you bought?

“I don’t have a record player.”

Do you go to concerts?

“Not often. I prefer to go to these rather extravagant affairs, like the party given by Jimmy Page, or to a public reading by Patty. (Ouch – G.V.)” ["Ouch" was added to the text by editor Gilles Verlant, who evidently thought it was pathetic that Burroughs preferred readings to concerts. — ed.]

St. Louis

Burroughs was born February 5th, 1914, in St. Louis. His father, Mortimer Perry Burroughs, was the inventor of the adding machine, which would give rise to the formation of the Burroughs Corporation, a company manufacturing computers and of which you’ve surely heard. [In actuality it was Burroughs' grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I, who invented the adding machine. — ed.] Our hero has no right to receive dividends from this successful multinational corporation.

In the absence of money — he claims to possess no more than 2,000 dollars in his bank account — Burroughs had a son in 1947, William Burroughs III.

Do you still see him?

“Yes, sometimes. He comes to Denver. He just underwent a liver transplant.”

Treatment (Apomorphine)

At the height of his addiction, Burroughs turned in 1956 to a method that would cure him forever: apomorphine. This cure was administered by an English doctor.

Apomorphine is obtained by heating to 150 degrees centigrade a mix of morphine and hydrochloric acid. This has the effect of countering the morphine and re-regulating the metabolism of the addict.

In spite of a few quickly cured lapses in the beginning of the 1960s, Burroughs freed himself from drugs.

How come this cure, which you declare so effective, isn’t more widely used?

“In the first place, it’s very expensive. About 2,000 dollars for the whole treatment. It requires the presence of several doctors the whole time (about 4 to 5 days). And then, I have the horrible impression that the authorities don’t really mind drugs, since they oppress any collective revolt.

Z

Last letter of the alphabet. End of the article. End of a life.

“I’m not afraid of dying.”

What would you still like to do before dying?

“One of my last wishes is to act in a film. I think I could play a CIA agent, a mad scientist or a war criminal. That would give me great pleasure…”

Michel Duval

En Attendant, November 1979

This interview with William S. Burroughs, which has never been reproduced since appearing in the November 1979 issue of En Attendant, was conducted on the occasion of the Plan K gig on 16 October 1979. It appears here in conjunction with RealityStudio’s dossier on William S. Burroughs and Joy Division. You can also read the English translation.

Amusant

Selon une encyclopédie de littérature assez réputée, W.S. Burroughs serait mort en 1970…

Bowie (David)

“Je l’ai rencontré à Londres il y a quelques années par l’intermédiaire d’un ami commun qui voulait nous interviewer pour Rolling Stone.”

De quoi avez-vous parlé?

“Je ne me souviens plus très bien. Ah si, des Russes.”

David Bowie déclara par la suite avoir été impressioné par W.S. Burroughs, qu’il tient pour une des intelligences les plus acerbes de ce monde. Il aurait également employé la méthode du cut-up pour certaines chansons, et notamment sur “Low.”

Cut-up (technique du)

C’est au printemps 1958 que W.S. Burroughs rencontre Brion Gysin, peintre et écrivain américain, à Paris. Celui-ci l’initie à la technique du cut-up. Ce procédé bouleversa sa vie d’écrivain, tout comme plus tard l’apomorphine (voir traitement) le guérira de la came et libérera son écriture. La méthode du cut-up est infantile: choisissez dans un journal ou un article ayant la longueur que vous désirez donner à votre texte. Découpez soigneusement tous les mots de cet article et mettez dans un sac. Agitez doucement. Retirez les uns à un et recopies les consciencieusement dans l’ordre où elles ont quitté le sac. De nombreux livres de W.S. Burroughs, et non des moindres, ont été écrits de cette façon. Cependant, la part de cut-up a sensiblement diminué depuis 1971.

W.S. Burroughs dira: “Une page de Rimbaud découpée et redisposée vous donnera des images tout à fait nouvelles. Des images de Rimbaud — des vraies images de Rimbaud — mais des nouvelles.”

On dit également que c’est un procéde trop facile?

“C’est faux. Car à l’inverse d’une écriture traditionnelle, on ne dispose pas d’un seul choix mais bien d’une centaine de possibilitiés différentes. Prenons cet exemple: un jeune homme se promène. On peut décrire cette situation, mais on peut également intercaler dans le récit les pensées intérieures du jeune homme. Ce sont généralement des images absurdes, illogiques, irréelles… La vie est un cut-up.”

D comme…

Il les a toutes essayées. De l’héroine à la “coke.” Du LSD au Yage. “Je ne me déshabillais même plus — sauf pour planter, toutes les heures, l’aiguille d’une séringue hypodermique dans ma chair grise et fibreuse.”

Si vous deviez recommencer?

“Ce n’est pas possible.”

Prenez-vous encore des drogues?

“Non. Plus jamais.”

Et si vous devez mourir demain?

“Alors, oui. Je me défoncerais à la morphine. Une dernière fois.”

Exterminator!

Titre d’un ouvrage paru en 1973. Il exerça en 1942 à Chicago ce métier étonnant qu’est celui d’exterminateur de parasites.

Fausses illusions?

“Prenez, par exemple, le concept du fascisme et tenter de rédiger une définition acceptable par tous. Chaque mot a plusieurs significations. Dès lors, le langage devient inutile. Parler est une occupation tellement futile. Tout n’est qu’une illusion.”

Mais cette chaise est bien là?

“Ne parlez pas trop vite. Il se peut que ce soient des hallucinations tacticles. Prenez un hologramme. On croirait voir un volume. En fait, il n’en est rien.”

On peut être malheureux? C’est un sentiment réel.

“Pas nécessairement. Le professeur Delgado (de l’Université de Yale) a démontré, qu’en stimulant certaines parties du cerveau, il pouvait contrôler physiquement un être humain.”

“Il a fait prendre à des gens des objets contre leur propre volonté.”

Homosexualité

Indissociable de sa vie et de son oeuvre (lire “Les Garçons Sauvages”), ce sujet ne fut pas abordé lors de l’entretien.

Digression: Le mouvement de libération des homosexuels italiens a porté plainte contre Jean Paul II devant le tribunal de Turin. Ce mouvement estime que le pape, dans son discours de Chicago le 5 octobre “a porté un préjudice considérable aux homosexuels.”

Interview

Genre journalistique relativement inintéressant. Les deux protagonistes se livrent à un jeu, où il n’y a que trop rarement un perdant ou un gagnant. Et de toute façon, comment lui faire comprendre que je m’intéresse davantage au contenu de son frigo qu’à la genèse de son oeuvre.

K (Plan)

Lieu de l’entretien. Un 16 octobre de 15 h 15 à 16 h 15. Troupe de théâtre d’avant-garde, basant la plupart de ses spectacles sur des texts de W. S. Burroughs.

Lee (William)

C’est sous le pseudonyme de William Lee que Burroughs fit paraître en 1953 son premier roman “Junkie,” dans lequel il raconte les expériences hallucinatoires. Mais trêve de commentaires: “La came est une équation cellulaire qui enseigne à l’utilisateur des faits d’une valeur générale. J’ai vu la vie mesurée dans des gouttes de solution de morphine. J’ai appris l’équation de la came. La came n’est pas comme l’alcool ou l’herbe, un moyen de jouir davantage de la vie. La came n’est pas un plaisir. C’est un mode de vie.”

Mayas

W. S. Burroughs s’est interessé depuis plusieurs années aux Mayas qui ont tenté de conquérir une partie de l’Amérique du Sud, en utilisant des techniques de contrôle tout à fait novatrices, qui agissaient sur l’inconscient. À l’heure actuelle, peu de choses sont connues sur ces agissements. Les Mayas ne faisaient appel à aucune police ou armée. On estime que 2 à 3 o/o de la population était sous leur contrôle.

Normal

“Je me sens tout à fait normal. Je me lève tous les jours vers 9h 30, je lis mon journal, j’écris. Le soir, je vais au cinéma ou je me fais inviter à diner.”

Quel est le premier souvenir de votre existence sur terre?

“Ah… je crois que je venais d’avoir trois ans. C’était mon anniversaire.”

Que faites-vous actuellement le jour de votre anniversaire?

“Rien.”

Oeuvre

Avant 1953, il se livre à plusieurs expériences littéraires avec Kells Elvins, un de ses copains, Joan Vollmer, sa future femme, Jack Kerouac et Allen Ginsberg.

Après “Junkie” paraîtront en l’espace de quelques années quatre romans: “The Naked Lunch” (1959), “The Soft Machine” (1961), “The Ticket That Exploded” (1962) et “Nova Express” (1964), qui donneront une vision apocalyptique du monde d’aujourd-hui. Avec ses mutants. Avec ses gardiens du Savoir et du Contrôle. L’oeuvre de Burroughs est phénoménale et, par voie de conséquence, incompilable. En 1971, c’est sa parution des “Garçons Sauvages”: son apogée. Un écrivain fascinant est né!

Pourquoi écrivez-vous des livres?

“Parce que c’est ma profession.”

Comment l’avez-vous découverte?

“En écrivant un livre qui fut publié.”

Physionomie

On l’a constamment comparé à un fonctionnaire en retraite. Il porte le même costume que lorsque je l’ai rencontré pour la première fois, il y a de cela deux ans. Des couleurs sombres, la cravate assortie, la malice au coin des lèvres, le chapeau: c’est là tout son attirail.

“Life what is it, but a dream?”

Rock

Quel est le dernier disque que vous avez acheté?

“Je n’ai pas de tourne-disque.”

Vous allez à des concerts, alors?

“Le moins souvent. Je préfère aller à des manifestations un peu extravagantes comme cette party donnée par Jimmy Page ou bien assister à une lecture publique de Patty (ouch – GV).” [GV = Gilles Verlant, editor at En Attendant]

Saint-Louis

W.S. Burroughs est né le 5 février 1914 à Saint-Louis. Son père, Mortimer Perry Burroughs, est connu comme l’inventeur de la machine comptable enregistreuse, ce qui donna lieu par la suite à la formation de la Burroughs Corporation, firme fabricant des ordinateurs et dont vous avez sûrement déjà entendu parler. Notre héros n’a droit à aucune dividence de cette fructueuse multinationale.

À défaut d’argent (il avoue ne possèder que 2.000 dollars sur son compte en banque), il a un fils en 1947, William Burroughs III.

Le voyez-vous encore?

“Oui, parfois. Il vient à Denver. Il vient de subir une transplantation de foie.”

Traitement (de l’apomorphonie comme un)

Au paroxysme de son intoxication, W.S. Burroughs recourut en 1956 à une méthode qui le guérira à jamais: c’est l’apomorphine. Ce remède a été mis au point par un médicin britannique.

L’apomorphine est obtenue en chauffant à 150 C un mélange de morphine et d’acide chlorhydrique. Celle-ci a une action opposée à celle de la morphine, en rerégularisant le métabolisme de l’être intoxiqué.

Malgré quelques rechutes au début des années 60, vite circonscrites, W.S. Burroughs se libérera des drogues.

Pourquoi cette méthode, si efficace d’après vous, n’est elle pas plus répandue?

“D’abord, elle est très onéreuse. Environ 2.000 dollars pour le traitement total. Elle nécissite pendant sa durée (environ 4 à 5 jours) une présense de plusieurs infirmiers. Et puis, j’ai l’horrible impression que les authorités trouvent leur compte dans la drogue, puisque celle-ci annihile tout révolte collective.”

Z

Dernière lettre de l’alphabet. Fin de l’article. Fin d’une vie.

“Je n’ai pas peur de mourir.”

Que voudriez-vous encore faire avant de mourir?

“Une de mes dernières volontés serait de jouer dans un film. Je crois que je pourrai jouer le rôle d’un agent de CIA, d’un savant fou ou celui d’un criminel de guerre. Ca me plairait vraiment…”

Pascal Stevens, Michel Duval, Bert Bertrand

En Attendant, November 1979

This interview with Joy Division, which has never been reproduced since appearing in the November 1979 issue of En Attendant, was conducted on the occasion of the Plan K gig on 16 October 1979. It appears here in conjunction with RealityStudio’s dossier on William S. Burroughs and Joy Division. You can also read the original French version. (Asked which bandmembers were speaking in the interview, Michel Duval clarified in an email: “All of them, Steve [Morris] probably was less talkative, they were very shy, very Mancunian.”)

Most bands choose a name they think suits them: The Supremes, the Knack, Simple Minds. Clearly the choice of Joy Division was ironic: this quartet of young Mancunians makes music that is anything but joyous. However, it’s beautiful. And gripping. And rich. And somber.

“The despair that is conscious of being despair and therefore is conscious of having a self in which there is something eternal and then either in despair does not will to be itself or in despair wills to be itself.” — Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

Manchester resembles any other English town. It is black and sordid. To be found there, as in Liverpool or Birminham, are those awful factories, bums, inveterate alcoholics. A certain idea of anguish.

Before 1976, there was hardly any music scene except for the Hollies. Local youths lived not for music but for two other groups: Manchester United and Manchester City.

For a while it was the golden age of European soccer. The two clubs regularly rose to the head of their class. It was a time of mutual hatred and rivalry. Bread and circuses?

A year later things changed. The Buzzcocks opened for the Sex Pistols. Imitation followed. The Buzzcocks recorded an EP. Boredom? Don’t make them say it.

Parenthesis: the producer, Martin Zero, now occupies a prominent place among the dignitaries of the “instigators of the late seventies,” alongside Steve Lillywhite, Martin Rushent, and Mick Glossop.

Among the works of Martin Zero (who now calls himself Martin Hannett): the albums of John Cooper Clarke and Jilted John, the new single by Magazine, the Joy Division album and the fabulous Electricity by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, which everyone is talking about. End of the parenthesis.

Various groups formed, such as the Drones, Slaughter & The Dogs, and Warsaw. Today there are 72 bands in Manchester.

Warsaw was made up of four: Peter Hook (who didn’t have a beard then), Ian Curtis (the singer), Stephen Morris and Bernard Albrecht. They played in Stiff Contest [actually "Stiff Kittens" — ed.], changed their name to Joy Division, recorded here and there on lost compilation disks and impossible-to-find EPs.

And then, around June, they recorded what will probably be one of the three best albums of the year: Unknown Pleasures. The general atmosphere of the record is sullen and desperate. The voice of Ian Curtis cuts a path through the flood of lugubrious yet energizing sounds. How can you resist the catchy dynamism of “She’s Lost Control?” The aggressive use of Peter Hook’s bass, mixed with Stephen Morris’ synthetic drums, underpins compositions that are gloomy but gripping, abject but unsettling. Forbidden pleasures…

You could write anything about Joy Division, find hints of disco in them (they’re there) or consider them as another New Music group (they wouldn’t deny it). But this would just be literature…

Driving through the tunnels of Brussels, you can read this strange inscription: It’s going great. These three words, like the name of the group, perfectly express the sensation that living beings may have in this society: the irony of an absurd life. People say that Ian Curtis is mad, that he has difficulties adapting. But we all know, especially since the death of Mesrine, assassinated a few days ago, that the time for heroism has become, here at the end of 1979, a time for madness.

A few weeks ago, Joy Division gave a stunning concert at Plan K. It was there that we met.

Did changing your name from Warsaw to Joy Division affect your music?

We changed it because another group, The Warsaw Pact, had just come out with an album.

Right. That’s the group that recorded and released their album in less than 24 hours?

That’s the group… Around this time we recorded two pieces for the Factory Sampler, along with Durutti Column and Manicured Noise.

A few days ago we received Fast Earcom Volume 2, on which you play two songs.

They were recorded at the same time as the album. They came out on Fast because, in the early days of Warsaw, we opened a few times for the Rezillos, who were managed by Bob Fast.

Was there a reason that your names don’t appear on the album?

Joy Division is a single entity, a union. When you see all these stupid thank yous on albums…

Is it a way of avoiding stardom?

No, we’re all equal. If you remove one member from the group, it would no longer be Joy Division. We compose all our songs together.

Do you think that every alternative group should have political opinions or should put out a message?

Any group, even the simplest, has political and social implications. Look for example at Boney M, their message is simple and can be summed up in a word: dance. And if a group doesn’t offer any explicit message, there are always implied messages — escape, breaking free from the daily grind.