The Lost Tapes of Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, 1967-1969

by Edward S. Robinson

For academics and fans alike, the archives of the pivotal beat triumvir of William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac have long been a source of fascination and a continued wealth of lost texts. Despite the excavation of a large number of letters and minor works, alongside significant manuscripts such as the Burroughs / Kerouac collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks (written in 1945, but not published until 2010) there is nevertheless a sense that the well may be beginning to run dry. 

It is perhaps for this reason that interest in the extended “Beat family tree” which has branches that extend far and wide is finally beginning to grow. While largely (and unjustly) neglected thus far, the so-called “European Beats” made a substantial contribution to the dissemination of the cut-up method. Many of these writers were introduced to the technique by Burroughs himself through his many contributions to underground zines in the 1960s, when his project had been specifically to “recruit” practitioners far and wide in order to “spread the virus” and spearhead an assault against linguistic programming and rational thought. Amongst these, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach stand out for their contributions to the cut-up canon. Many of their works were produced with Burroughs’ direct involvement in some capacity: for example the “Counterscripts” which preface Pélieu’s 1967 novel With Revolvers Aimed… Finger Bowls, and Weissner’s The Braille Film (1970) and the “Tickertape” introduction to the three-way collaboration between Weissner, Jürgen Ploog and Jan Herman, Cut Up Or Shut Up (1969), and not forgetting the Weissner / Pélieu / Burroughs pamphlet So Who Owns Death TV? (1967). These publications are relatively sought after and are commanding increasingly high prices on the collectors” market. However, to date, the archives of these authors remain largely unexplored. 

A few months ago, I received an email from Gary Lee-Nova. Aware of my research into these writers, he wondered if I might be interested in hearing a tape he had in his possession, the details of which he explained as follows:

Since the early 1970s, I have had a five-inch reel, ¼” audiotape recording in my collection. I obtained the tape from Richard Aaron of AM HERE BOOKS which at the time, was based in Switzerland.¹

Gary reported that the tape was well-preserved, had been carefully stored and played only once while in his collection, but the recording quality very much reflected the technology of the time, noting:

To my ear, it sounds like it was recorded in a small shed made of sheet metal; a bit tinny. I’ve heard other old tape recordings that sound like they were recorded in a wet, cardboard box.

His intention was, then, to convert the audio to digital files and re-equalize the recording in order to render it as listenable as possible and to “bring about as pleasant a sound of the reading voices as possible.”²

Naturally, I was extremely interested. I knew that Weissner had been heavily involved in a number of recording projects in the late 1960s, as he recalled in a 1988 interview with Jay Dougherty, recounting,

I documented a good part of the New York poetry scene on tape for the German Avantgarde Archive, which is run by an old friend of mine. I think I wound up with about a hundred hours of tape. It was a good cross-section: Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Diane DiPrima, Ray Bremser, Jack MacLow, Dick Higgins, and Alison Knowles. Ron Tavel. Jack Micheline. John Wieners. Ed Sanders.³

In the same interview he also remembers being “totally fascinated with William Burroughs’ cut-up thing” which led him to “all these cut-up collaborations with Burroughs, Nuttall, Pélieu, Mary Beach. Tape experiments and whatnot.”⁴ However, I had never actually heard any of Weissner’s recordings myself. What’s more, here was a bone fide rarity, compiling a number of recordings catalogued as being in the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in the Northwestern University Library, Illinois, and others that appear to be unlisted.⁵

I did not have to wait long before the suspense was over and I received not only a digital copy of this rare tape, but also photographic evidence of the source, including a high-resolution reproduction of the sheet attached to the box, which contained the full track listing that Gary had provided in his email.

The Contributors and the Material Facts

The facts: the tape contains four separate recordings. There is a gummed piece of paper attached to the box bearing the typed details of the recordings, which read as follows:

CARL WEISSNER reading from THE BRAILLE FILM (San Francisco, 1970) followed by tape experiments (New York / San Francisco 1967/68).

MARY BEACH reading from ELECTRIC BANANA (Darmstadt 1969) followed by

CLAUDE PELIEU, MARY BEACH and CARL WEISSNER reading from their resp. notebooks & works in progress – a spontaneous cutup experiment – recorded by Carl W., Honolulu, 12 Dec. 1968 60 min.

Beneath this track listing is Weissner’s signature.

The Recordings, Side 1: Carl Weissner

The first three tracks or sections in the digital reproduction represent the first side of the tape, and all feature Weissner reading from The Braille Film. The sound quality varies across the three parts, suggesting that they were recorded in different locations and / or at different times, perhaps using different equipment.

The first track — in its digital form — has a duration of two minutes and twenty-nine seconds and features a straight recording of Weissner reading a segment of text. The reading is largely clear, although occasional words are a little difficult to distinguish through a combination of microphone positioning and enunciation. The piece contains a thin thread of narrative, beginning ostensibly with the scene of an execution, while also incorporating “classic” cut-up elements, in the form of references to virus and mutation and biological and technological synesthesia, such as “faded lips, palpitating emphysema lungs” and “infra-red veins” which are representative of the “composite bodies” that populate Weissner’s (anti-)novel.⁶ Interestingly, this section of text does not appear in the published version of the book, which appeared in 1970 on Jan Herman’s Nova Broadcast Press.

The second section is louder and clearer than the first, with a trebly sound which occasionally tweets at certain frequencies. It has a running time of almost twelve minutes. It features Weissner delivering a measured reading of a section of The Braille Film that begins on page 92. The delivery is deadpan, almost Burroughsian in many respects. The meter is reminiscent of those which appear on Call Me Burroughs, and, like Burroughs, Weissner adopts different voices for dialogue. To hear him raise the pitch of his voice and deliver the lines “Why, it is possible? Something’s touching me on the ass…!” in the tone of a posh woman in a state of affronted surprise cannot fail to amuse, while his rendition of an upper-class British accent for her “gray companion” is remarkable for its accuracy. 

Significantly, there are portions of text — the occasional sentence here and there — which are read here that do not appear in the final published version. The interest here lies not, perhaps, so much in the details of textual variations or edits per se (although scholars of major authors, including Burroughs, are often given to analyzing such variant and alternative edits in great depth), but in the way that this evidences the theories that lie at the heart of The Braille Film in live practice. Much of The Braille Film is given to demonstrating the ways in which the media, authors, historians, all manipulate text — and film — to achieve specific ends. Minor, often subtle edits, a change of camera angle or focus, the cropping of an image, all contrive to alter — potentially quite dramatically — the way the audience receives and perceives a “text.” As such, the minor alterations Weissner makes to his own text show the author effectively manipulating, adjusting, altering his own text, and in doing so, in some small way, the course of history is changed. This marks a central theme of The Braille Film, and also stands in parallel with Burroughs’ theories concerning the idea of “history as construct”:

We think of the past as being there unchangeable… the past is ours to shape and change at will. Two men talk… if no recording of the conversation is made, it exists only in the memory of the two actors. Suppose I make a recording… and alter and falsify the recording, and play the altered recording back to the two actors. If my alterations had been skilfully and plausibly applied the two actors will remember the altered recording.⁷

The third track is of lesser quality, and sounds as though Weissner’s voice has been recorded down a drainpipe or processed through a flange effect. This is, in fact, intentional, as he recounts: “I remember producing the effect of talking down a drain on purpose: I talked directly into an empty whisky bottle when I made that recording (Wong’s Cabaret, etc.) in Jan [Herman]‘s room on Bush Street, San Francisco, ’68.”⁸ Seemingly recorded in two takes, the material does undeniably suffer on account of the recording quality. Nevertheless, Weissner’s flat delivery stands in stark contrast to the sex acts he details within this section, which again, is not included in the published version of the book. However, it is worth noting at this juncture that Weissner produced a number of texts entitled The Braille Film; the 1969 German language collection of works edited by Weissner, entitled Cut-Up, which featured works by Burroughs, Mary Beach, Harold Norse, Jürgen Ploog, Claude Pélieu, Brion Gysin and Jeff Nuttall, features a number of short texts by Weissner gathered under the main heading of The Braille Film. While some of these “Composite Soundtrack” pieces do also appear in the book, they do so in re-edited forms. This may appear somewhat confusing, as The Braille Film was written directly in English, yet the texts which appear in Cut-Up, published a year earlier — are in German. However, as Carl explained, “the stuff in the antho was translated (sort of) from the English ms.” As such, this recording provides an insight into the evolution of The Braille Film as a book that emerged from an array of texts written over a period of time and then pieced together: a large-scale textual collage of smaller cut-ups.

The fourth and final track on side one is given to Weissner’s “Tape Experiments (New York / San Francisco 1967/68).” With a running time of eight minutes and ten seconds, it comprises a selection of segments of recordings from a range of courses cut together. Most of the different samples stand separate from one another: a few seconds of the radio, a few more of the television, a few more seconds of Weissner reading. The pieces are, as one would probably expect, of variable quality, although there are some interesting delay effects and overlays, plus an unsettling — not to mention slightly disorientating — loop of a crowd’s recorded laughter, which are noteworthy from an experimental perspective.

Beginning at the 1:21 mark, between a loop of what sounds like coughing accompanied by a droning hum in the background and a segment of narrative delivered in an eerie, echoed whisper, Weissner reads a permutational piece that effectively recreates Burroughs’ “Recalling All Active Agents.” In Weissner’s recording, the words are changed to “Calling All Erogenous Agents” and additional words and phrases are also incorporated. While recorded in 1960, Burroughs’ recording remained unreleased commercially until 1986, when Sub Rosa issued the compilation Break Through in Grey Room, evidencing that Weissner had access to Burroughs’ personal archive during the time they worked on their various collaborations. This demonstrates just how keen Burroughs was during his “cut-up period” to “spread the virus.” His prodigious output through the underground press and in his numerous collaborations, in conjunction with his liberal sharing of his methodology and frequent incitement for others to utilize the cut-up technique, evidence just how strongly he believed it was possible to revolutionize writing and all word-based media. Recordings such as those made by Weissner show how infectious Burroughs’ enthusiasm was. 

Other sections of these “Tape Experiments” are more developed and sophisticated, and contain a number of layers of audio simultaneously. Possibly generated in part by ambient sounds, the hum of electricity or even the amplified recording device itself, between 1:30 and 3:00 and from 7:15 to the end, long, low notes, drones and hums provide a backdrop to snippets of dialogue and also to longer readings from texts, with an almost musical tonality. In many ways, these sections are the most remarkable of all, in that they sound very like contemporary experimental / ambient records, illustrating just how ahead of their time these tape experiments really were.

Leading the Electronic Revolution

It is perhaps because of their continued relevance that Burroughs’ audio experiments, conducted in the 1960s, continue to be a source of great interest on both a literary and technical level. Burroughs’ interest in the applications of audio was well documented, particularly in The Job and Electronic Revolution, which would prove seminal for experimental music pioneers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

Burroughs’ own recordings, however, remained in the vaults. Initially recorded for the purposes of his own personal research, the tapes were not intended for public consumption. It wasn Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle who convinced Burroughs to allow him to release a selection of these experiments commercially. After spending many long hours going through the tapes, Orridge compiled the hour’s worth of material that was released as Nothing Here Now But the Recordings on Industrial Records in 1980.⁹

Nevertheless, Burroughs’ influence on music, particularly the music of the avant-garde, precedes the public release of his experimental recordings, primarily on account of his book Electronic Revolution (1970, 1972, 1976), which expounds the theoretical contexts of some of his practical experiments with audio. Along with Cabaret Voltaire and Coil, Throbbing Gristle were among the first to explore the possibilities of using tape loops, cut-ups, samples and “found sounds” to make music. It was in the work of these bands that Burroughs’ influence on music became truly tangible.¹⁰ “A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music,” recalls Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk.¹¹ This was true of many of the bands involved in the Industrial scene that exploded on both sides of the Atlantic between 1978 and 1984. They immersed themselves in studio experimentation and the application of techniques first explored by Burroughs and Gysin some 20 years previous. The reason for the delayed spread of the Virus in sound recordings was largely due to the lack of technology to facilitate widespread experimentation prior to 1978. But once Burroughs and Gysin had made the “breakthrough,” it was almost inevitable that their ideas would spread. Kirk regards Electronic Revolution as “a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd… to create a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself” adding, “that side was always very interesting to us.”¹² The book’s great impact on the underground music scene is indubitable, serving as a catalyst for a new wave of avant-garde musical experimentation. 

The appeal of Electronic Revolution is obvious. While those who had followed Burroughs’ writing through the cut-up experiments would have been able to admire the many qualities of the writing, and even the methodology behind it, to the extent that it was possible to “write like Burroughs,” Electronic Revolution revealed new possibilities, demonstrating the potential for the written word to develop and mutate in new directions off the page. It also represented a “call to arms” for dissenters, providing as it did directions for sonic terrorism with the potential for “real” results:  

…make recordings and take pictures of some location you wish to discommode or destroy, now play recordings back and take more pictures, will result in accidents, fires, removals. Especially the latter. The target moves. We carried out this operation with the Scientology Center at 37 Fitzroy Street. Some months later they moved to 68 Tottenham Court Road, where a similar operation was carried out…¹³

Like Naked Lunch and The Third Mind, Electronic Revolution is a “how-to” book, a handbook, with instructions for the replication of the author’s techniques to achieve specific effects. “Riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation. Recorded police whistles will draw cops. Recorded gunshots, and their guns are out.”¹⁴ Burroughs explained the function of site-specific recording and playback thus:

…playback on location can produce definite effects. Playing back recordings of an accident can produce another accident… We carried out a number of these operations: street recordings, cut in of other material, playback in the streets …(I recall I had cut in fire engines and while playing this tape back in the street fire engines passed.)… (I wonder if anybody but CIA agents read this article or thought of putting these techniques into actual operation.) Anybody who carries out similar experiments over a period of time will turn up more “coincidences” than the law of averages allows.¹⁵

It was the capacity to achieve a specific desired effect, as Burroughs’ empirical testing of the theories demonstrated, which proved a significant factor in the book’s appeal to a certain audience. Although Burroughs believed that “the influence of fiction is not direct,” he always intended for his writing to have a tangible effect upon the reader in some way — after all, “if your writing had no effect, then you would have something to worry about.”¹⁶ That an early Cabaret Voltaire gig where Burroughs’ instructions were put into practice ended in a riot is testament to the effectiveness of the method.¹⁷

It is abundantly evident from hearing these brief examples of Weissner’s experimental recordings that Carl, like Burroughs, recognized the value of applying the cut-up method to audio tape.

The Recordings, Side 2, Part. 1: Mary Beach and Electric Banana

Side two begins with Beach reading from Electric Banana. This is a straightforward spoken-word recording, and Beach’s proper-sounding enunciation stands very much at odds with the colloquial and coarse elements of the prose, particularly within the dialogue. If anything, this heightens the impact of the reading and of the text itself. Beach’s performance is largely clear and confident, with only occasional stumbles, and the lines “wild screams of boys jacking off… on street corner of Madrid” causing some slight difficulty. Rather than detracting from the listening experience, such details remind us that this is a real, live reading captured on tape. While the readings Burroughs recorded for Call Me Burroughs were recorded over several takes and carefully edited to present an almost mechanically precise recording, free of background noise or errors, the scraping chair and other background sounds that can be heard during this twelve-minute recording are integral to its spirit, which is natural and immediate. The text itself is brutal and prosaic, a veritable blizzard of violence and sex, an orgy of drug consumption. 

As with Weissner’s readings from the then-unpublished Braille Film, so Beach’s Electric Banana was yet to be published, at least in its original language. (A section did appear in the Weissner-edited anthology Cut-Up in 1969, the year of this recording, and the full text was published in translation in Germany the following year, although it would be another five years before Cherry Valley Editions would publish an English language edition.) Once again, as with Weissner’s readings, the version Beach reads here is different from the published version. Beginning with a section that starts on page 12 of the Cherry Valley Edition, Beach omits a number of words, alters the tense of others and reads “I was apparently the only one interested in what was going on,” whereas the published version reads “I was not the only one.” Skipping most of page 13, she segues “Bromo-Seltzer trickling, foaming over blue headlights” into “Nothing but my own brain counts now.” 

The reason I draw attention to what may appear to be rather minor details is because, in the first instance, they enable us to observe the evolution of the text and the way additions and excisions were made over a period of time. Perhaps most importantly, however, we must consider the variations within the context of the theories which surrounded the cut-ups, specifically the ideas relating to textual manipulation. The underlying belief that words are malleable — Burroughs likened words to physical mediums such as paint — means that altering the position of a word within the broader context of the sentence and the paragraph in which it is located, and the way different juxtapositions of words can produce radically different meanings or present very different images in the reader’s mind’s eye, is key.

That the published text is, arguably, more explicit — and more Burroughsian — than the version Beach reads here is also noteworthy. The line “lips hovering over the ivory prick raised ready to strike like a snake — Iron exploding on a white moon, cool floods of white sound” would be published as “lips hovering over the ivory prick raised ready to strike like a pink cobra — Iron exploding on a white moon, cool floods of jissom & a white sound.” Whether or not this necessarily adds to the text’s impact is questionable, but one thing that is placed in sharp relief by this recording is Beach’s eye — and ear — for a Surreal image, and I would contend that some of the images conveyed in the recorded, earlier version of the text, are stronger or more striking than those which appear in the later revision. 

The Recordings, Side 2, Part. 2: Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Carl Weissner

The second track on side two has a running time of six minutes and twelve seconds. It comprises two separate readings, beginning with Claude Pélieu reading a brace of short pieces in a segment which has a duration of fractionally under five minutes, with a calm, smooth delivery. He speaks exclusively in French, which renders comment from me on the contents of the piece extremely difficult. On a purely technical level, however, Pélieu’s voice is clear, despite there being significant “snow” on the recording. Beach then reads briefly from a work in progress, which would appear to draw on cut-up articles from medical journals, with references to schizophrenia, liver disease and hepatitis, in juxtaposition with images of apocalypse, life-drawing and dissection. The sound quality suggests that it was recorded during the same session as Pélieu’s piece. 

The final section, which runs for eight minutes, begins with a collaborative piece, in which all three authors read in turn, although in no discernible sequence: Beach and Weissner in English, Pélieu in French. The result is certainly interesting, as each speaker delivers one or two lines from their text, their styles of delivery contrasting dramatically with one another — Pélieu’s style is laid-back and steady, while Beach’s delivery is akin to that of a newsreader, and Weissner has a controlled intensity in his voice. On a formal level, this intercutting of each author’s work effectively creates a new composite text that amalgamates three pre-existing texts. Described as a “spontaneous cut-up experiment,” its use of longer phrases in juxtaposition function more like those which form “The First Cut-Ups” that appeared in Minutes to Go than the choppier, more fragmentary cut-ups that would subsequently become the more popular form. However, it would perhaps be more accurate to describe this eight-minute sound collage as a real-time audio fold-in.

These recordings are fascinating and valuable in their own right, on a number of levels and not least of all because of the names involved in their production. While perhaps not possessing the commercial or mass appeal of discovering a “lost” recording of Burroughs, in the context of the broader Beat “scene,” Weissner, Pélieu and Beach are all significant writers, while Beach’s role in the publication and circulation of some of the most experimental works of the late 1960s and early 1970s, through her Beach Texts & Documents imprint was substantial. While it seems unlikely at the time of writing that further recordings from Weissner’s archive will surface — or find their way to me — it is extremely exciting to speculate about what gems may be in existence. At the very least, this tape affords a fascinating insight into a brief yet extremely fertile time in the ever-evolving, ever-mutating history of the cut-ups and the Beat generation.

Download the Lost Tapes

• Side 1, Track 1 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 2 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 3 (Weissner)
• Side 1, Track 4 (Weissner)
• Side 2, Track 1 (Beach)
• Side 2, Track 2 (Pélieu and Beach)
• Side 2, Track 3 (Pélieu, Weissner, and Beach)

Notes

1. Email from Gary Lee-Nova, 8th November 2010.

2. Ibid.

3. Jay Dougherty. “Translating Bukowski and the Beats: An Interview with Carl Weissner” in Gargoyle 35, 1988, p. 73.

4. Ibid., p. 70.

5. See the finding aid to the Weissner archive at Northwestern University Library.

6. Carl Weissner, The Braille Film. San Francisco: Nova Press, 1970, p. 26.

7. William S. Burroughs and Daniel Odier, The Job. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989,  p. 35.

8. Carl Weissner, email to K. Seward, April 2011 (edited for capitalization).

9. Industrial Records, IR0016. Reissued as part of The Best of William S. Burroughs at Giorno Poetry Systems 4 CD box set. New York: Mercury Records, 1998.

10. Although David Bowie famously applied the cut-up technique in the formulation of the lyrics to his album Diamond Dogs, this example of Burroughs’ influence being applied on a technical level within music is wholly isolated. Moreover, Bowie still only applied the technique to words on the page as Burroughs has in Minutes to Go, The Third Mind and the Nova trilogy. The cutting and splicing of audio represents a developmental departure from this.

11. Biba Kopf: ‘spread the Virus: How William Burroughs infected the world of music”, in My Kind of Angel: I. M. William Burroughs, ed. Rupert Loydell. Exeter: Stride, 1998, p. 72.

12. Ibid., p. 72.

13. William S. Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution. Gottingen: Expanded Media Editions, (2nd edition) 1970, p. 74.

14. Ibid., p. 67.

15. Ibid., p. 74.

16. “The Nova Convention” by Richard Goldstein, reproduced in Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs 1960-1997. Los Angeles and New York: Semiotext(e), 2001, p. 436.

17. Biba Kopf: “Spread the Virus: How William Burroughs Infected the World of Music” in My Kind of Angel: I. M. William Burroughs, p. 72.

“Demolition Plan 23″
Text by Carl Weissner, International Times 60 (July 18-31, 1969)

Fruit Cup: No. Zero
Includes cut-up by Carl Weissner, “Historia de Chiquita D.,” published by Beach Books, New York, 1969

Fruit Cup: No. Zero
Includes cut-up by Carl Weissner, “Historia de Chiquita D.,” published by Beach Books, New York, 1969

Fruit Cup: No. Zero
Includes cut-up by Carl Weissner, “Historia de Chiquita D.,” published by Beach Books, New York, 1969

Parvis à l’echo des cils
Includes text by Carl Weissner, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Paris, 1972

Intrepid

Also see the Intrepid cover archive.

Intrepid 14-15, Special Burroughs Issue
Includes cut-up by Carl Weissner, “On Burroughs,” published by Intrepid Press, 1970

Intrepid 14-15, Special Burroughs Issue
Includes cut-up by Carl Weissner, “On Burroughs,” published by Intrepid Press, 1970

Intrepid 14-15, Special Burroughs Issue
Includes cut-up by Carl Weissner, “On Burroughs,” published by Intrepid Press, 1970

Intermedia ’69

Intermedia 1969
Poster for 1969 Intermedia festival in Heidelberg featuring Fluxus artists, as well as Carl Weissner and Jan Herman

Intermedia 1969
Invitation

Intermedia 1969
Invitation

Intermedia 1969
Weissner Bio and bilingual cut-up

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

At the DC Book Fair I was pleasantly surprised to see a small collection of books about the Beats huddled together at a book dealer’s stall. Interesting Beat books are few and far between in the nation’s capital. So what if they were mostly biographies and bibliographic books? A thirsty man will drink anything in the desert. The book that caught my eye was George Dowden’s Bibliography of Allen Ginsberg published by City Lights in 1971. A valuable resource, but what really blew me away was the fact that the copyright page lists Jan Herman as the book’s typographer. 

I should not have been surprised. Herman has been intimately involved in all aspects of book production while working with City Lights, his own Nova Broadcast Press, and Something Else Press. Typographer, editor, publisher, author — Herman has done it all in the world of alternative publishing. In his association with Fluxus, Herman was also sensitive to the materiality of print — the book as glue, ink, paper. The book as tangible, tactile, sensual. This is what I think of when I hear about the body of the text.

Maybe I have to be reminded of print’s physical qualities because I read an unhealthy amount of literary criticism and theory. “Unhealthy” because heavy doses of literary theory can make you immune to the simple physical pleasures of the reading experience. Just as a porn addict becomes incapable of experiencing the physical and emotional intimacies of sex in favor of an obsession with mechanics and gymnastics, those immersed in lit crit become fascinated by dissecting, categorizing, and deconstructing texts — always bodiless texts and never physical books. The book, the magazine, the newspaper as object to be caressed, to be smelled, to be gazed at, to be listened to, and to be savored proves too much of an embarrassing reminder of the messy body of the text, not the purity of its mind.

That said, I read a piece of theory recently that got me thinking about the publications of William Burroughs and Jan Herman in a new way. The essay in question was by Gilles Deleuze, as much as I hate to admit it. I have read more bad literary criticism that cites Deleuze and Félix Guattari — with their signature concepts, such as rhizomes, the Body without Organs, anti-Oedipus — than seemingly any other theorist. Thus it was a pleasant surprise to read Deleuze’s essay on the fold. Peter Eisenman in his essay “Unfolding Event” summarizes Deleuze’s thoughts on the fold: “In the idea of the fold, form is seen as continuous even as it articulates new relationships between vertical and horizontal, figure and ground, breaking up the existing Cartesian order of space.”  

By no means do I feel I understand all the nuances of Deleuze’s argument, but the essay immediately made me think of Jan Herman. If the work of Jeff Nuttall is dominated by the physical act of cutting, it seems to me that the publications of Jan Herman are defined by the act of folding. Nowhere is this clearer than in Nova Broadcast Number 5: William Burroughs’ The Dead Star. Interestingly Nuttall published “The Dead Star” in My Own Mag 13: The Dutch Schultz Special. In that issue, “The Dead Star” is presented as a facsimile of a Burroughs scrapbook. Simple 8.5 X 11 sheets stapled together. The element of collage (cut and paste) is highlighted. Similarly the text has a fragmented, stitched-together feel.

On the other hand, Herman’s publication can be “seen as continuous” as it unfolds as a broadside out of the pamphlet. Like Kerouac’s scroll version of On the Road, this version of The Dead Star flows and is fluid, not segmented as in the Dutch Schultz Special. The fold gives Herman’s The Dead Star a different sense of space than Nuttall’s version. Despite being enclosed in wrappers, the text seems to have no inside or outside, no front or back. Deleuze writes of Leibniz, “a flexible or elastic body still has coherent parts which form a fold, with the result that they do not separate into parts of parts, but rather divide infinitely into smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion.” The Nova Broadcast Dead Star multiplies itself and seems to continue endlessly, like a film loop, which makes one think of another Herman publication: Carl Weissner‘s The Braille Film. 

Burroughs’ first “fade-in” to Braille Film contains the line: “In the folds of memory fragments of cracked mirrors meet your friend the echos of flesh vast sky.” I love the linking of the fold to remembrance, perception and repetition as these are primary concepts associated with the fold. Weissner incorporates the fold-in technique in Braille Film and views the book as a composite text (more on the fold-in and composite text in relation to Burroughs below). The perfect-bound codex form seems a little conservative for as open and radical a text as Braille Film. It serves as a straitjacket of sorts. Having handled a copy or two, I can attest that the book is difficult to open — the binding has little give and threatens to crack if opened too far. Herman also felt the binding turned out too restrictive. His publications tend to view the book as an opportunity to explore the opening as a field of play not as a constrictive container.

For example, in San Francisco Earthquake Number 5, also known as VDRSVP, three newspaper broadsides are folded separately and then folded into a pamphlet. The newspaper texts and their packaging form a labyrinth that create a myriad of options for the reader. There are numerous areas of entry and exit. In The Dead Star one’s gaze does not move in right angles from left to right, up to down across the page but instead can read up, down, and across columns in a snake-like fashion. Yet The Dead Star and VDRSVP represent two different aspects of the infinite nature of the fold. The Dead Star is closed, involute, infinite in an inward way (like the infinitesimal space between two numbers). VDRSVP, like a map, is open, flat, potentially infinite in an outward way. As shown by The Dead Star and VDRSVP (as well as his good friend Carl Weissner’s Klacto 23 International or Burroughs’ earlier The Moving Times: Sigma Project No. 1), Herman in his various publications exploits both aspects of the infinite nature of the fold.

Though the cut-up gets all the press, Burroughs also produced his non-linear texts through a procedure he called the fold-in. In the fold-in, “[a] page of text — my own or somebody else’s — is folded down the middle and placed on another page. The composite text is then read across one half text and half the other.” There are other variations but what is interesting is that Burroughs equates the fold-in with the composite text, which relates to the Composite City described in The Yage Letters and in Naked Lunch.

Not a locked door in the City. . . All houses in the City are joined. Houses of sod — high mountain Mongols blink in smokey doorways — house of bamboo and teak, houses of adobe, stone and red brick, South Pacific and Maori houses, houses in trees and river boats, wood houses one hundred feet long sheltering entire tribes, houses of boxes and corrugated iron where old men sit in rotten rags cooking down canned heat, great rusty racks rising two hundred feet in air from swamps and rubbish with perilous partitions built on multi-levelled platforms, and hammocks swinging over the void.

The composite text and the Composite City have the same fluidity of perspective and lack of boundaries. Burroughs viewed the fold-in as a means to map this terrain and its fantastic architecture.

In 1971 a book with just that title — Fantastic Architecture by Wolf Vostell and Dick Higgins — was published at Something Else Press. Herman joined Something Else Press as its editor shortly after the appearance of Fantastic Architecture and had already published the work of Vostell in his Nova Broadcast series. Perhaps this was symbolic. To me, Herman’s books were always created with an eye towards architecture, the book as structure to be entered and navigated like the Composite City.

In 1967, Alison Knowles constructed a walk-in installation called The Big Book. In 1968 Bill Wilson described the project as follows in Art in America: 

The Big Book is an eight foot tall construction by Alison Knowles which has a front cover and several pages, and contains a stove, telephone, chemical toilet, art gallery, electric fan, books and other necessities of life. Alison Knowles has built the Book as a work of art to be lived in, physically and mentally, a place to contemplate useful and changing relationships.

I have described the beginning of The Big Book, but I cannot describe the end, because it is a potentially endless structure. When a story keeps possibilities open and relationships changing, there is no conclusion, and the hero who survives such a story must be supple, resourceful and durable. The reader can participate in these qualities by using their massive book of chance.

Herman was surrounded by these ideas in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, he published Knowles’ Identical Lunch, another genre-defying work, as well as Ferdinand Kriwet’s Publit, and these notions of the book as landscape, architecture, and environment are visible in The Dead Star, VDRSVP, and General Municipal Election (a fold-out poster that detourns the election ballot form and includes a 7″ lp). Norman Ogue Mustill’s Mess Kit, published by the Nova Broadcast Press in 1971, is a book of nothing but poster foldouts — one of which is an accordion pullout attached to the inside front cover, and much longer and larger than that of The Dead Star, although it was printed on only one side. Another foldout makes use of an actual map (of Vietnam) to satirize the misadventure of U.S. military strategy with reference to Warhol’s Dance Step diagrams of the early 1960s.

The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, a touchstone in Deleuze’s essay, also conceived of the book as an endless landscape dominated by folds. Mallarmé was one of the first poets to consider the pages of a book as a field upon which poetry unfolded. He crossed the boundary between verso and recto and spread across the gutter. Perhaps this helps to explain his curious statement that “[t]here is no explosion but a book.” I take this to mean that any book can only be read or written through its own destruction. A simple way of looking at this is to consider that the sanctity of the book must be violated (i.e, unfolded or opened) in order to be read. Once upon a time this was even more apparent when books had to be cut with a knife in order to separate the pages for reading. The act of unfolding a book explodes it, makes what was once inside, outside. The Dead Star and Nova Broadcast with their reference to an exploding star suggest the explosion of the book.  

This is also apparent in the naming of Herman’s little magazine, San Francisco Earthquake. The title’s most obvious reference is the devastating natural disaster of 1906 that leveled the city. An earthquake is itself the result of a fold. This shift of tectonic plates parallels the shift of perception and meaning enacted by the fold-in technique. The fold-in shifts sentence structure and disrupts word association blocks thus shaking the foundations of the language. In addition, the title refers to the psychedelic revolution that was again threatening to topple the established structures of urban life. Yet the title also brings to mind Mallarmé’s explosion. The recto and the verso of the page meet in the gutter which forms a fault line that explodes or unfolds into the opening of the book. 

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Herman and many others believed they were living through a state of disaster. In the Cold War era, the threat of nuclear annihilation was real. The images of the Holocaust were still very fresh, particularly when the mass media televised the slaughter occurring in Southeast Asia on a daily basis. Assassinations, racial tension and riots, mind-expanding drugs and sexual freedom. The very fabric of society was not folding but tearing. San Francisco Earthquake and the other publications of Jan Herman are writings of this disaster. Herman, along with Carl Weissner, Jürgen Ploog, and Claude Pélieu, responded to the disaster around them by fighting back with Burroughs’ techniques: cutting, splicing, folding, and otherwise manipulating the texts of the established order in an attempt to feed them back into the system and thus disrupt it. For example, Cut up or Shut Up contains an unattributed fold-in introduced as follows:

Recap. The assistant editor of The San Francisco Earthquake addresses the participants of his ‘Creative Writing’ Seminar at the N. Y. Free University: “Now as to what really went down at My Lai, I think that maybe a less uh conventional approach is indicated. I have here 2 pages of typed extracts from articles by Michael Herr and William Burroughs that appeared in the August 68 issue of ESQUIRE — and I might note in passing that you people could have written up this story right then and there if you’d just kept your eyes and ears open — so we take these 2 pages and fold them in together and see what happens…”

The idea of the magazine as the site of disaster was much in the air in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Landslide and Avalanche are two other examples. The earthworks in Avalanche responded to the damage being done to the environment, and self-mutilating performance art commented on the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Landslide sought to bring about a revolution in the art world by parodying performance art, minimialism, and conceptualism. Like San Francisco Earthquake No. 5, Avalanche and, especially, Landslide challenged the form and content of the traditional magazine and brought this mass market format into the realm of art object. Such serial publications by artists, as described in the recent book In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists Since 1955, should be considered the peers of the Nova Broadcast publications and, to a lesser extent, San Franscisco Earthquake. 

To San Francisco Earthquake #1 Burroughs contributed, “Word Authority More Habit Forming Than Heroin.” This is one of Burroughs’ more radical cut-ups and indicative of the kind of challenging material Herman generally published. For the most part, Burroughs stressed the communicative aspect of the cut-up; he rarely felt the cut-up to be illegible. Yet in “Word Authority,” the cut-up devolves into typographical signs. Here Burroughs builds on the work of avant-garde pioneers such as F.T. Marinetti (featured in Issue 4 of San Francisco Earthquake) and contributes to the work of concrete and visual poets of the time. It was Burroughs’ most radical cut-ups, like “Word Authority” and the trilogy, which inspired the experimental writers of the next decade and beyond. Burroughs the experimenter of language drew the attention of Herman, not the Burroughs soon to come, the Burroughs of The Wild Boys and beyond.

From the work from Liam O’Gallagher (Planet Noise) to Edward Ruscha (“Three Parking Lots” in San Francisco Earthquake #4) to Wolf Vostell (Miss Vietnam) and Norman Ogue Mustill (Twinpak) to say nothing of the publications mentioned above, Herman concerned himself with the performative, typographic, artistic, and architectural aspects of the book and literature. To my mind, Herman is not only one of the select few who took up Burroughs’ literary practice, but is also without a doubt the most important and innovative publisher of the cut-up. Jeff Nuttall’s My Own Mag and Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu’s Beach Books lack the depth and range of Herman’s exploration of the cut-up and the book itself as a form.

Dan rolled the cigarette tight and a black flame rose in his dim eyes. Carl, making certain not to lose ground, waved him through the dangerous opiate into the ESP room. Dan put his cigarette into the blue ends of his imagination possessed by windfalls of moisture and disarming affability. It was by 1887 a clear pinch of this and that. Dreams of chemists bumped off the body, the mind, the universe. Dan had come for their high radiation. Blind crystals firing tea in modest silence. He crossed his legs through the back door of l’academie francaise. Gave an eminent lecture “The Mystery of the Dwarf” 19th century style, full of snowstorm and the debris of tomorrow. He sat before an immense desk made by a late Cartesian. His lymphatic hand rose and fell. More real than mortality percentages. A large world he said, larger than the splinters in his heart.

Carl could see he’d been travelling through Utah neither plus nor minus as soon as Dan walked in the door. He had come many miles to this place.

“Who walks in Dan when you walk out?”

Could see he’d been travelling miles by the dried streaks of democracy on his car. It was a station wagon of the medium class, blue shiny and economical.

“Speakin’ to me?” he said.

But was he really the calamitous Princess of Democracy? It seemed a case of trading stamps.

Dan and Carl wandered through the old institutions then. Plexiglass ducksoup merry-go-round they were not ashamed to tell you. They had come through the Powder River Pass. The car kick out in Sundance, Wyoming. The show that night the buildings they entered – in the wind. Stars and stripes of glory paid off in journalistic myths.

On the desk was a large ashtray where Dan flicked his ashes. Sundance martini taking over. The air was thin and they giggled like two antique relics from past time. The whimper of old lies when great fortunes were made. The buttons on their shirts deserted of people and now Dan and Carl withdrawing into white sand and bone sky down the shivery beach. They were not alone travelling with finality. They could smell yesterday coming back, stopping under a modernistic shelter. Sat like a couple of fisherman in rippling water. Distant mountains of two ancient bodies touched like the first snows of winter. Beneath the buildings one hundred feet up and a black flame under the door.

Steaming in the hall Dan remembered slow circles and colorful whores.

“Thy hand glides easy,” someone said.

“Yes, prince, clear surprise.”

Covered his spine the small hotel painted against the wind. Letters of gold radiated bodies and streets.

“You are one of the common fold, Dan – turn left.”

Electric static passed through them. Cut off dream time. In wide dust they were an old appearance. They waved a dotted line.

“The natural problem poses a dilemma. We may begin in the parapsychology lab,” said Carl, “but that is certainly not where we end up.”

Dan’s consciousness expires in the counterfilm. It rises parallel to the timberline about a thousand yards. His flesh wide open. You can almost hear him through the binoculars.

The country was overrun by “shakers” and phosphorescent moisture. A new revelation which was carried as straight news they way they will in the TV studios. And the Senator on W-O-R-D radio.

“There is no safety this side of the grave,” he says.

It seems any judge or any senator can do anything with the Princess of Democracy. He has no restrictions. The ordinary records, inspections and controls, like the old institutions, facing ducksoup in their offices because religion is a null area in the law. It is difficult to distinguish the “real” religion and the dark side of the laboratory quack’s ear short of establishing a “state” religion. Remember that motto Bee Jay? KILL THYSELF FROM THY PAGES? It was written all over the church walls and all churches are equally immune, remember, if they swing a block of immunity. It is hard to point out what leaped into the room…maybe the Tabernacle of Canterbury.

As the Senator dissolves into the mindscreen you can hear one of the guards:

“Have to watch the badges in the ESP room.”

No one gets that far Bee Jay without shedding his badges.

The Senator worms himself into all earphones. And the machine stutters and stops. Throws the words onto colorless pages: THAT. PAYS. THREE. FOR. ONE.

“You’ll notice your sins touching your collars, gentlemen . . . looks like this is a job for the clergy,” says the Senator.

Token eyes barely visible in the light. The sinner feeds himself back into the magic lantern. Time and another page overtake him by an asphalt road.

“Some of our most faithful sheep got their start from a lapse,” says the Reverend Judd. “Here we are in the Tabernacle of Canterbury.”

He gestures with a cigar more than one night. The same message unsound and cowardly. He’s never been moved.

“. . . lousy shape that’s why you’re here . . . off your asses gentlemen . . . we’ll save you yet . . .”

There is nothing left for them to do. Take them all Reverend Judd. And all that heavenly manna coming down in the left column.

Jan Herman
In Answer to Questions from Jean-Jacques Lebel
The San Francisco Earthquake 3
1968

Jan Herman
In Answer to Questions from Jean-Jacques Lebel
The San Francisco Earthquake 3
1968

Jan Herman
In Answer to Questions from Jean-Jacques Lebel
The San Francisco Earthquake 3
1968

Jan Herman
In Answer to Questions from Jean-Jacques Lebel
The San Francisco Earthquake 3
1968

The Cards of Say

Jan Herman
“The Cards of Say”
The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

Jan Herman
“The Cards of Say”
The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

Jan Herman
“The Cards of Say”
The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

Jan Herman
“The Cards of Say”
The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

Jan Herman
“The Cards of Say”
The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

Jan Herman
“The Cards of Say”
The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

Jan Herman
“The Cards of Say”
The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

Cut-Ups from VDRSVP

Jan Herman
Yes, Prince, Clear Surprise
VDRSVP 1
1969
Transcription of Yes, Prince, Clear Surprise

Jan Herman
A Dangerous Opiate
VDRSVP 3
1969
Transcription of A Dangerous Opiate

All Right You TB Addicts

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Mutter Report

Jan Herman
“Mutter Report” and “Book Abstract”
Kaleidoscope (Milwaukee underground paper)
19 Sept 1970

Notes from Underground

Notes from Underground 3
Front Cover
Cover Illustration by Gary Grimshaw
1970

Carl Weissner and Jan Herman
“If the Revolution Fails [Cut-Up]“
Notes from Underground 3
1970

Jan Herman
“Telegram”
Notes from Underground 3
1970

Handbook for the Seventies

Jan Herman
“Handbook for the Seventies”
(a cut-up review)
Partisan Review
Fall 1970

Jan Herman
“Handbook for the Seventies”
(a cut-up review)
Partisan Review
Fall 1970

Jan Herman
“Handbook for the Seventies”
(a cut-up review)
Partisan Review
Fall 1970

Greed & Human Smallness

Jan Herman
“Greed & Human Smallness”
(a cut-up)
Mark in Time: Poets & Poetry / San Francisco
Glide Publications
1971

Paris Report

Jan Herman
“Paris Report”
The Sunday Paper
22 March 1972

No Time in Homestead

Jan Herman / Jim Brodey
“No Time in Homestead”
(a cut-up collaboration)
Unmuzzled Ox
Summer 1972

Jan Herman / Jim Brodey
“No Time in Homestead”
Unmuzzled Ox
Summer 1972

Jan Herman / Jim Brodey
“No Time in Homestead”
Unmuzzled Ox
Summer 1972

Jan Herman / Jim Brodey
“No Time in Homestead”
Unmuzzled Ox
Summer 1972

Jan Herman / Jim Brodey
“No Time in Homestead”
Unmuzzled Ox
Summer 1972

Jan Herman / Jim Brodey
“No Time in Homestead”
Unmuzzled Ox
Summer 1972

Cut Up or Shut Up

Jan Herman, Jürgen Ploog, and Carl Weissner, with a “tickertape” introduction by William S. Burroughs
Cut Up or Shut Up
Dustjacket
Agentzia, Paris
1972

Dustjacket (by Wolf Vostell) published with 100 numbered copies of the book, of which 26 were signed by the authors.

Jan Herman, Jürgen Ploog, and Carl Weissner, with a “tickertape” introduction by William S. Burroughs
Cut Up or Shut Up
Front Cover
Agentzia, Paris
1972

Raphael Sorin
Le Mouvement Cut-Up
Review of the “Cut-Up Movement,” including Braille Film and Cut Up or Shut Up
Le Monde
1972

A Talent for Trouble

Jan Herman
A Talent for Trouble
The Life of Hollywood’s Most Acclaimed Director, William Wyler
G.P. Putnam & Sons, Inc.
1996

Da Capo Press
(Paperback)
1997

Jan Herman
Je m’amuse
Cut-up blog post
Artsjournal.com
13 January 2006

Ray Bremser
Drive Suite
Nova Broadcast 1
1969

Wolf Vostell
Miss Vietnam
Nova Broadcast 2
1969

Dick Higgins
A Book about Love & War & Death
Nova Broadcast 3
1969

Liam O’Gallagher
Planet Noise
Nova Broadcast 4
1969

William Burroughs
The Dead Star
Nova Broadcast 5
1969

Norman Ogue Mustill
Twinpak
Nova Broadcast 6
1969

William S. Burroughs’ Dead Star

William Burroughs
The Dead Star
Nova Broadcast 5
Front of foldout
1969

William Burroughs
The Dead Star
Nova Broadcast 5
Back of foldout
1969

General Municipal Election

Jan Herman
General Municipal Election
Nova Broadcast Press
Front
1969

Jan Herman
General Municipal Election
Nova Broadcast Press
Back
1969

Jan Herman
General Municipal Election
Nova Broadcast Press
Record
1969

Jan Herman
General Municipal Election
Ballot collage (foldout)
Nova Broadcast Press
1969

Braille Film

Carl Weissner
Braille Film
Nova Broadcast Press
1970

The Louis Project

Carl Weissner and Jan Herman
The Louis Project
Front Cover
Nova Broadcast Press
Front
1970

Carl Weissner and Jan Herman
The Louis Project
Flyleaf
Nova Broadcast Press
1970

Carl Weissner and Jan Herman
The Louis Project
Second Flyleaf
Nova Broadcast Press
1970

Carl Weissner and Jan Herman
The Louis Project
Back
Collage by Norman Ogue Mustill
Nova Broadcast Press
1970

Endless Crucifixion

Nanos Valaoritis
Endless Crucifixion
Broadside
Nova Broadcast Press
1970

Mess Kit

Norman Ogue Mustill
Mess Kit
Nova Broadcast Press
1971

Publit

Ferdinand Kriwet
Publit
Nova Broadcast Press
1971

Journal of the Identical Lunch

Alison Knowles
Journal of the Identical Lunch
Front
Nova Broadcast Press
1971
View the entire book

Alison Knowles
Journal of the Identical Lunch
Back
Nova Broadcast Press
1971
View the entire book

The Identical Lunch

Philip Corner
The Identical Lunch
Nova Broadcast Press
1973
Image of the Riss Diner by Jan Herman

The San Francisco Earthquake 1
1967

The San Francisco Earthquake 2
1968

The San Francisco Earthquake 3
1968

The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

The San Francisco Earthquake 5
1969

The San Francisco Earthquake Flyer
1969
Front

The San Francisco Earthquake Flyer
Back

VDRSVP

VDRSVP 1
1969

VDRSVP 2
1969

VDRSVP 3
1969

VDRSVP Invitation
1970

VDRSVP Invitation
1970

Something Else Press

Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Ian SommervilleBrion Gysin Let the Mice In
Something Else Press
1973

Jan Herman
Editors Note, Brion Gysin Let the Mice In

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974
Front

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974
Back