Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

Rhinozeros Covers

Rhinozeros 1
1960

Rhinozeros 2
1960

Rhinozeros 3
1961

Rhinozeros 4
1961

Rhinozeros 5 (View complete issue)
1961

Rhinozeros 6
1962

Rhinozeros 7
1962

Rhinozeros 8
1963

Rhinozeros 9
1964

Rhinozeros 10
1965 (?)

Burroughs Texts in Rhinozeros

Wind Hand Caught in the Door
Rhinozeros 5
1961

Novia Express
Rhinozeros 6
1962

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

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

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

Desperate Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Departures Cover Archive

New Departures 1

New Departures 2-3

New Departures 4

New Departures 5

New Departures 6

New Departures 7-8 10-11

New Departures 9

New Departures 12

New Departures 13

New Departures 14

New Departures 15

New Departures 16

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For more information about C Press, see Jed Birmingham’s articles on Time, Ted Berrigan, and Don’t Ever Get Famous.

Andy Warhol provided the cover for issue four of C: A Journal of the Arts. Edwin Denby and Gerard Malanga appear on the silk-screened cover. The cover is reprinted in Reva Wolf’s book on Warhol along with a discussion of the politics and gossip behind this image. Issue 4, like the Mad Motherfucker Issue of Fuck You with the Couch cover, is tough to get a hold of. Ars Libris sold a copy awhile back in a small, incomplete run of Cs. Expect to pay in the four figures if you ever get the opportunity.

Complete runs of C: A Journal of Poetry are elusive. The Fales Library possesses a C Journal archive but lacks a complete run. Syracuse University also holds a number of Berrigan’s papers including dummies for C Journal, yet they lack a complete run. The Berg Collection at the New York Public Library has about half of the issues. The Library’s Rare Book Division houses the editor’s (Berrigan’s) file of the mimeo. The NYPL possesses a complete run but they don’t know it. According to Secret Location on the Lower East Side, Issue 12 is missing from this collection.

Based on an email I received from Ron Padgett, Berrigan never published a twelveth issue of C: A Journal of Poetry. As evidenced by the text in Issue 11, he intended to publish one but the project never saw completion. Again according to Padgett, Berrigan viewed C Comics #1 as essentially the 12th issue. There is no indication as to Berrigan’s reasoning in this bibliographic detail.

Burroughs appears in Issue 9 and Issue 10 of C Journal. Fuck You Press issued Roosevelt After Inauguration in January of 1964. Ed Sanders included Burroughs in Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts No. 5 Vol 7 in the summer of that year. Berrigan first published Burroughs in the summer of 1964. At the time, Burroughs still resided in Tangier, but given the flurry of mimeo activity Burroughs could see that the Lower East Side in New York City was the place to be. Burroughs saw this for himself during brief visits in 1963/1964. In C Journal 9, Burroughs contributed two pieces: “Giver of the Winds Is My Name” and “Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch.” Literary Days was published by C Press and I would guess that Berrigan sent Burroughs a copy for his review. As is common in the 1960s, Burroughs responded with a cut-up. In “Giver of the Winds Is My Name,” Burroughs incorporated Egyptian hieroglyphics for the first time. See my column on da levy and Burroughs for a brief discussion of this appearance.

In C Journal 10, Burroughs contributed “Fits of Nerves with a Fix.” According to the Maynard and Miles’ Burroughs bibliography, this issue hit the streets on February 14, 1965, St. Valentine’s Day. For the artists and writers of the Lower East Side, Burroughs must have been on their mind as he gave a famous reading at the American Theatre of Poets on that date. The C Press Time also appeared in 1965.

Burrroughs’ work in C Journal is listed as prose, but these pieces can be considered examples of Burroughs the poet. “Fits of Nerves with a Fix” reminds me of the work in Floating Bear 24 (“Spain and 42st,” “Dead Whistle Stop Already End,” and “Where Flesh Circulates.”) The look of the work on the page is especially similar. “Giver of the Winds Is My Name” also has the look of a poem in a way that differs from the block text and newspaper formats of other cut-ups from the period. This would suggest that Burroughs’ influence on the Second Generation New York School and even First Generation members like John Ashbery, stemmed not just from Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, but also from the lesser known and underappreciated Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. These two books can be considered books of poetry for the lack of a better categorization and the work therein has similarities to the work in C Journal.

C: A Journal of the Arts

C Journal 1

C Journal 2

C Journal 3

C Journal 4
front

(Thanks to Dan Laufer for the scan.)

C Journal 4
back

(Thanks to Dan Laufer for the scan.)

C Journal 5

C Journal 6

C Journal 7

C Journal 8

C Journal 9

C Journal 10

C Journal 11

C Journal 12

C Journal 13

Michael Brownstein
Behind the Wheel (aka C Journal 14)

C Press

Ted Berrigan
The Sonnets
C Press, 1964

Tom Veitch
Literary Days
C Press, 1964

Ron Padgett
In Advance of the Broken Arm
C Press, 1964 (First Edition)

Ron Padgett
In Advance of the Broken Arm
C Press, 1965 (Second Edition)

Dick Gallup
Hinges
C Press, 1965

Kenward Elmslie
Power Plant Poems
C Press, 1967

Alice Notley
Twenty-Four Sonnets (front)
C Press, 1971

Alice Notley
Twenty-Four Sonnets (back)
C Press, 1971

Elio Schneeman
In February I Think (front)
C Press, 1978

Elio Schneeman
In February I Think (back)
C Press, 1978

Steve Carey
The Lily of St Mark’s
C Press, 1978

Boke Press (Edited by Joe Brainard)

C Comic 1

C Comic 2

Ted Berrigan
Living with Chris
Boke Press, 1965

Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard
100,000 Fleeing Hilda
Boke Press, 1967

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

While attending a cigar event, a map collector friend informed me that the Walters Museum houses quite an extensive collection of manuscript material. One of the most publicized of their holdings is the Archimedes Palimpsest containing seven separate treatises by Archimedes. Despite all his achievements, Archimedes is probably best known for exclaiming “Eureka!” after realizing a key concept in hydrostatics while sitting in a bathtub. True or not, this scene ranks up there with the assassination of the French Revolutionary Marat as one of the most famous events to occur in the bath. See Wallechinsky and Wallace’s Book of Lists for 13 others. The manuscripts of Archimedes’ work were copied in the 10th Century in Constantinople. They were discovered when the prayer book was laser-imaged to see what was underneath. The treatises were written over by the work of later scribes, as is not uncommon with old parchment. The book contains the only surviving copy of Archimedes’ On Floating Bodies. Eureka, for sure.

Although I was not in the bathtub, I had a “Eureka!” moment about a week ago. After a search of over three years, I finally tracked down a copy of the elusive Locus Solus V to complete my set. (So long as we are speaking of French Revolutionaries, Georges Danton’s severed head features in Raymond Roussel’s proto-surrealist classic that was the source for the name of the little mag.) In fact, during those three years, only one copy presented itself. It was on eBay, and I lost out in the bidding even after making what I thought was a very aggressive bid. Of course, copies are available as parts of a complete set, but stand alone copies of Locus Solus V, like Insect Trust Gazette 2 or Floating Bear 24, are just hard to come by.

The other three volumes of Locus Solus (note: Issue III-IV was a double issue) are just not that difficult to get a hold of. For Burroughs collectors, the key issue is Locus Solus II: The Collaboration Issue and for reasons I discussed elsewhere it is a very interesting, if brief, appearance for Burroughs. As Daniel Kane points out in All Poets Welcome, Locus Solus is interesting for the inclusion of Ted Berrigan. In his diary for December 4, 1962, Berrigan writes, “Locus Solus V came out yesterday, and to my complete surprise and delight it had a poem by me in it. How good that my first major publication was in the magazine edited by Koch + Ashberry (sic), with poems by them + O’Hara.” For a magazine that was edited in France, published in Switzerland, and infused with European sensibility, the mag’s influence on the Lower East Side was far-reaching. The five issues of Locus Solus were revered by the Second Generation New York School, and the content and appearance of mimeo productions of Berrigan, Bill Berkson, and others could be viewed as a response to the “squat and plain” issues of Locus Solus. In Secret Location on the Lower East Side, Clay and Phillips describe Locus Solus as “definitely ‘no-nonsense’ from the beginning, presenting no manifestos or editorial statements, just high-quality literature — simply and elegantly presented with care and respect.” C Press would definitely add an element of nonsense as well as a more comic and grungy look to the publications of the Second Generation.

In many cases, the early issues of a little magazine are the toughest to find due to the fact of small, less ambitious print runs and a smaller reading audience for a new publication. Interested readers, if they could get a copy, probably read them and disposed of them thinking the magazine was just another one-shot destined for the dustbin of history. In some cases, it takes a few issues for a little mag to gather together its stable of authors and establish its personality and reputation. This is certainly true for magazines like Yugen, My Own Mag and Floating Bear. Finding copies of the early issues of these magazines, particularly My Own Mag, are extremely difficult.

This is not true of Locus Solus (or Kulchur for that matter). Locus Solus, like Athena from Zeus, emerged from the heads of the first generation New York Poets (John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch as well as Oulipo member, Harry Mathews) fully formed in format and content. In The Last Avant Garde, David Lehman’s account of the genesis of the New York School Poets, Lehman writes, “Perhaps no better introduction to the poetry of the New York School Poets exists than [the first two] issues of Locus Solus.” The early issues are the most commonly collectible, particularly issue 2, but it is the last issue that is the toughest to find. The reason for this is the simple result of a small print run. For most issues of Locus Solus, the print run of the magazine was rather large: 1000-2000 copies, but Harry Mathews and James Schulyer, the publisher / patron and editor, respectively, of the final issue, only contracted for a print run of 500. I would suspect that libraries got a hold of a fair number of these issues given the academic cachet of the New York School poets (Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Harry Mathews) who edited it. Of all the New America Poets in the Allen Anthology, the New York School received the most attention from the establishment.

Take John Ashbery’s other magazine effort: Art and Literature (1964-1967). Like Locus Solus, Art and Literature was deemed important by establishment institutions and academies who would gather them for collections. The mag was described as “very high style, intense and European.” The establishment more quickly acknowledges what is perceived as serious and intellectual art. It also attempts to incorporate it much more readily than seemingly low-brow art (read as the Beats). For example, Art and Literature received a standalone review in the New York Times. Very unusual treatment for a little magazine, a format generally outside of the mainstream media and created in reaction to mainstream publishing. Beat dominated mags escaped notice or received passing (and largely negative) treatment. Art and Literature ran for twelve issues. Again very usual given the short life of many little mags. Interestingly, a complete run of Art and Literature just sold on eBay. Despite the condition problems (age toning, a detached cover, none of the extremely fragile tissue paper jackets present), I thought the run was a deal at $152. It is a fantastic magazine and Burroughs appears in Issue 2. Further proof of Burroughs’ place in the 1960s avant garde both New York and European in origin. The transformation of Burroughs from a “Know Nothing Bohemian” to an international intellectual was in motion.

Despite all my pieces about the personal touch and the joys of the book fair and catalog, I found Locus Solus V through the internet search engines. Generally, I search every day on eBay, Addall, and Abebooks for new Burroughs titles, and I perform more detailed searches for must-have items like Locus Solus V at least once a week. A good number of the books and magazines in my collection were located on the internet. This is especially true of the less interesting but essential parts of my collection. Almost all the Grove and Calder titles in my collection were acquired through internet searching. While these titles, particularly signed, are becoming harder to come by, they are almost always available online.

Not much of my collection has been acquired through want lists, but the most special pieces of my collection have been acquired through the type of personal relationships that I have been describing for the past year. Catalogs, book fairs, brick-and-mortar stores, auctions and the building of personal relationships. In some cases, like the complete run of Fuck You Magazine or the Digit Junkie, building a line of communication over time proved absolutely essential. The real interesting stuff rarely gets on Abebooks or eBay at all. Collections are built much the same way they have been for decades if not centuries: through the means I listed above.

In fact, what makes a special book collection is a lot like what makes Burroughs’ most successful cut-ups so fascinating. Building a collection solely through the internet reminds me of some of the less noteworthy passages in the cut-up trilogy. In both there is a lack of a personal touch and personality. The enterprise has a sense of monotony and repetition, a lack of passionate involvement. No spark. Yet the finest cut-ups are full of personal touches despite critics’ attempts to state that the technique is a weapon in the assault on personality and on the control of the author. Burroughs always stressed that not everyone could create a successful cut-up, and he expressed the importance of editorial selection and control. Take a Berrigan cut-up from The Sonnets, an Ashbery from The Tennis Court Oath, Gysin’s work from The Exterminator or Minutes to Go or Corso or Sinclair Beiles work for that matter. Throw in Carl Weissner’s cut-ups as well as Claude Pelieu’s work with the technique. They are all vastly different, and the personality and passions of the respective authors show through. Time, APO-33, The Dead Star or the newspaper cut-ups are hardly one-trick ponies of cut and paste. In these works, Burroughs experiments with different sources (medical journals, newspapers, magazines, book reviews, a gangster’s dying words), different formats (three column both newspaper and magazine, grids, broadside, free verse poetry) different media (photographs, typewritten text, handwriting, tape recording, film, the novel, the magazine, comic strip), different subject matters, different literary styles and techniques (composition by field, enjambment, concrete poetry, academic article, letter to the editor, advice column). In addition, Burroughs personal obsessions and quirks show through. The number 23, gangsters, apomorphine, William Randolph Hearst and his word / image empire. The cut-up was never intended to be a stagnant, impersonal or one-dimensional process. They threaten to become just that in the low points of the cut-up trilogy.

Similarly, gathering books from the internet threatens to become a stagnant, impersonal, or one-dimensional process. Catalogs, book fairs, brick and mortar stores, want lists, and auctions make a collection multi-faceted. The establishment of friendships and the joining of communities are an important aspect of book collecting that point and click sales do not fully recreate, although as I have written that is in the process of changing. Like Burroughs with the cut-up, there should be a kitchen-sink mentality in building a book collection. The internet is only one option among many. In my opinion a collector should be focused in his choice of subject matter or author, but diversified in obtaining material in that area. Don’t dabble in everything. Do collect obsessively in your microcosm and, as Sartre and Malcolm X advised, by any means necessary. The guidelines for determining the source of a book for your collection, be it Abebooks, auction, catalog et al, should be in what some take to be the the immortal words of Hassan i Sabbah despite Burroughs’ spin on the maxim: Nothing is forbidden. Everything is permitted.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The one-shot little magazine has always been an interest of mine. The average run of a mag is as short as the career of an NFL running back. Lack of time, lack of interest, lack of material but most of all lack of money curtailed the passion and drive of many an editor. With Interpol, Burroughs did not even get beyond the planning stages so getting even a single issue before the reading public is a real accomplishment. Burroughs appeared in several one-shots over his career. Gnaoua sticks out in my mind. Printed in 1964 in Belgium, Gnaoua, edited by Ira Cohen, documented the literary community in Tangier in the mid 1960s right before the city was overrun in the summers of love by hippie tourists and thrill seekers. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and the mysterious Alfred Chester were major figures involved in some way with the magazine and its controversies, but Jack Smith, Irving Rosenthal and Michael McClure also graced its pages. Gnaoua with its purple covers is famous to collectors for its tendency to fade at the edges but reading it today the aura of a psychedelic and magical Tangier shines as brightly as ever. Hopefully, I will be able to interview Ira Cohen in the near future on Gnaoua, Burroughs, and Tangier.

This leads me to another one-shot and an interview that I have been lucky enough to conduct. In an earlier piece on Insect Trust Gazette, I wondered what was the deal behind Brown Paper, a beautifully produced magazine printed in Philadelphia in 1965. How did this wonder of printing with its incredible list of contributors — William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Ed Sanders, Denise Levertov to name a few — come to be? Searching on the internet there is next to nothing about this magazine available. Copies appear on Abebooks, like the subtitle of Brown Paper mentions, occasionally. I snapped up a copy years ago. The oversize magazine stands out on my bookshelf, and I have thumbed through it several times over the years. I must admit that I never read the Burroughs / Ginsberg / McClure material because that was tipped in and tied to the magazine in a back flap folder. I hesitated to destroy the integrity of the magazine. So I learned no more about the enigma that was Brown Paper for years.

Happily after the posting of the interview section of the Bunker, I received a few emails from editors of magazines from the glory days of DIY publishing willing to tell their tales. One of these men was Daniel Lauffer, the wizard behind the curtain of Brown Paper. I was thrilled, and even more so, once he began sharing his knowledge of the literary community out of which Brown Paper materialized. Lauffer encouraged me to cut open my copy and enjoy. Thank goodness I did. The Burroughs piece is a prime example of his cut-up obsession and presents an interesting back story involving Lauffer and Brown Paper. Emails between Lauffer and I followed and what resulted was a wonderfully informative interview on Brown Paper and related subjects. The story of this magazine is available for the first time as far as I can tell and it is quite a tale. The Burroughs angle alone will be fascinating for the readers of RealityStudio. The tangents to Le Metro Café, Allen Ginsberg, and elsewhere are also well worth a few minutes reading.

There are more interviews in the works, but please if any readers out there have any information to impart about Burroughs, the little magazine, post-WWII literary communities, and the like please drop me a line. I and the readers of RealityStudio would love to hear from you.

Interview with Daniel Lauffer

Give some details on your personal background and interests that led you to consider publishing a little magazine?

As a pre-baby boomer I had grown up in the later part of the Eisenhower era. I suspect that it will become recognized as this country’s Victorian era. It was a period of prosperity and of repression. The first acceptable form of rebellion was MAD magazine. I have written about how it meshed with the adolescent awareness of how the adult culture is filled with lies. A more serious assault on the culture came with Howl. I followed Allen Ginsberg’s work which led to Burroughs and Mike McClure. It is almost impossible for today’s readers to understand how each of their major works was a threat to the status quo, and persecuted as such by that same status quo. You had to work to obtain them. Publishers had to fight to issue them. They are now in the libraries and the mega-bookstores everywhere. I collected these writers, and corresponded with them. I corresponded with Beckett, Burroughs and Michael McClure. I asked them to sign books and periodicals. Some of the content of Brown Paper came from these interactions. McClure’s contribution was a greeting added into a little mag that he signed for me.

Otherwise, I attended New York’s City College. I contributed poems to the City College literary magazine Promethean and a more renegade Andruil. They included my interests in the personal, and what would now be considered pop culture and transgressive issues. I had gravitated to the Village where I was a folk musician. I played in Washington Square Park and was in the Even Dozen Jug Band with Joshua Rifikin, John Sebastian, Maria Muldaur and David Grisman. I was also collecting books with an interest in Beckett and the Beats. The Village had the shops which had the best books as they were coming out. I later became involved in Fluxus doing a “flux game” and contributing to performances. A final influence was MAD with my friendship with the art director, John Putnam

Describe the collecting scene that developed around the Beats. They were collectible early on.

Collecting was more informal. You looked over the shelves at 8th Street, then stopped in to see what Bob Wilson had for you. I think he got me a few Beckett items which his Joyce collectors might have wanted. Things were either just coming out or going on remainder. The last Yugens were at 8th street, Floating Bears showed up at the New Yorker bookstore over the theater. The real great stuff involved assembling a collection and then approaching the author. Allen kindly signed a slew of periodicals and added bibliographic notes eg, “next section published in FY”. One of my favorites is a slightly roughened Evergreen Review 2 which published Howl in the expurgated City Lights version for which he wrote in the missing words. Similar attention from Michael McClure who drew and embellished his signature frequently.

What was the creative community out of which Brown Paper grew? Was the center of activity New York City or Philadelphia as both cities are mentioned in the magazine?

The content was based in the post-beat scene in New York. As I mentioned, I had been involved in the literary magazines in college. I worked in bookstores while attending night classes for a while. The counterculture movement that I was aware of was in New York with bulletins coming in from San Fransisco, London and Paris. The mimeo revolution brought the latest from the beat and Black Mountain writers. Shops, especially Bob Wilson’s Phoenix and the Eighth Street Book Store were a source for collectors and poets manqué. I also attended readings at Le Metro. Eventually, I also read there.

The form of the magazine also came from my associations in New York. It was designed by Tony Lane, a friend and neighbor from a middle class enclave in the then unfashionable Long Island City. Tony was away as an art student in Philadelphia.

How did the title come about? Given the content of some of the poems, is there a reference to the brown paper wrapper in which porn titles were mailed?

It came from the unlikely source of a British radio comedy show, The Goon Show. The goons were basically written by comic Spike Milligan. Because it was radio, dozens of different characters could be in a script without having to provide costumes. Milligan did several voices and Peter Sellers did many others. In one episode, a character named Bluebottle (voiced by Sellers) announces that he is “Ace Bluebottle, reporter for Brown Paper what is the voice of the Finchley Beat Generation”. This was sort of like talking about “the Scarsdale Beat Generation”. I think Milligan’s reference was brown wrapping paper from a butcher shop, which is called kraft paper here. The aura of the transgressive was a bonus.

As a visual object, Brown Paper is one of the forgotten classics of little magazines. It is really beautiful. Can you give details on the printing of the magazine, the design (particularly the idea of the manuscript and notes section), and the layout? It is unusual like a mixture of little mag and fine press.

It was a deliberate mix. I was impressed with the content of the mimeo mags. I also was concerned with the fragility of the mimeo format. I had discussed this with Tony who came up with the letterpress format and supplied the expertise in printing matters. Tony Lane was a student at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art, now the University of the Arts. He was a photographer who was also interested in graphic design and production. There was a particularly strong program in printing under Jim McWilliams and a fully stocked print shop with a Vandercook flatbed proofing press. Another student, Curtis Zahn was busy putting together an underground newspaper, Yarrowstalks, which was one of the earliest publishers of Robert Crumb’s work. There was also a connection with the Falcon Press in Philadelphia. (It has been a printer’s town since Ben Franklin’s day.)

Tony got Jim’s OK to do a project after school hours. Tony set up purchasing paper. We got a Fabriano 60 lb cover stock in cinnamon color. He trained me in the intricacies of the California Job Case. I worked in the city and then took the train to Philadelphia on weekends. We made decisions and set type into the night. The evenings of pulling and setting type and making the physical impression of the type on the paper are a very pleasant memory for me.

The decision to do part in offset was necessitated by Allen’s poem. Given the size of the type, it would have added a half dozen pages to the magazine. A smaller font would have worked poorly with the other pages which were essentially mini-broadsides. We also wanted to show Burroughs’ decorations and the arrows guiding you through his three column cut-up. Then I got John Keys’ moebius poem. It would have added a second volume if done in the original font.

The magazine contains a strange mix of famous and unknowns. We all know Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Paul Blackburn, Denise Levertov and some others, but can you give some background on the unknowns in the magazine. Are you particularly proud of publishing any of this less known work?

It was a mix of the famous, the interesting talented and friends. It holds up pretty well in having beats and women represented. I consider Diane Wakoski to be one of the “known” poets who has produced a substantial body of work. Denise Levertov taught poetry at City College when I was there, as had Paul Blackburn. I had met Nancy Ellison at the Metro readings. There were some lines in her poem that really spoke to me. I am not sure where she went with her talents. “Friar Jacopo, SJ” was Richard Jaccoma. As an artist he illustrated the underground comic “Greaser” with text by George DiCaprio. He has written novels and done art direction for Screw. He is now a photographer in the Philadelphia area. Jack Tinkel’s poems also spoke to me. Caveat, he is my cousin. He is a retired engineer. Ken Haferman was a fellow folkie who came from the Minneapolis “Dinkytown ” scene. He is still a musician. I have thought that John Keys would have made more of a reputation. I really liked his work. He was productive and in the middle of the scene of the day. He had a fund of lit gossip and was trying to get Olson and Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones) to send contributions. I have since seen a collection of his work from England, but he remains essentially an unknown.

Let’s get to the Burroughs appearance. There is an interesting story about his contribution to Brown Paper and your role in making it happen. Can you give the details? What was the reputation of Burroughs at the time? What was your familiarity with his work?

Burroughs was the wild writer who wrote the forbidden book. When my friend Joshua Rifkin was studying at Darmstadt, he got a copy of Naked Lunch back to me. The Exterminator was available from Auerhahn and I was able to order copies of Junkie from Ace. Amazingly, I sold them at cover price in the City College bookstore. (I wish I had taken a dozen home.) However, I steered fellow lit freaks to them.

At one point in 1962 there were rumors flying about Burroughs’ wild creativity — he was cutting up Shakespeare (false). He was cutting up Beckett (true). He mentioned doing Beckett cut-ups at the Edinburgh Festival. I wrote via Grove and asked about them. He responded with an example page. I then did a MAD-styled parody of The Exterminator which I titled “Exterminate the Exterminator”. I collaged a short pamphlet which I sent to Burroughs in Tangiers. I wrote that I had purchased this as an “unpublished manuscript” and asked him to authenticate it.

Burroughs “got the joke” and wrote back that it “seemed, in a sense, authentic.” He would sign it, and add to it before returning it. The cover referred to him as “William Olivetti” so he signed in that name and added “Lettera 22″ (an Olivetti typewriter). He made a few other additions and then took part of the text and did a cut-up of it. He then wrote a three column cut-up and parodied my parody of Brion Gysin’s version of Arabic calligraphy. He also added the instruction to “place any picture here for Nov. 22nd 1962″. In later years I wondered if he meant November 22nd 1963, the day Kennedy was assassinated. He is not available to comment. The cut-up is referenced by this title in the bibliography. While I didn’t suggest it, it was Burroughs’ decision to make the parody a collaboration. He later gave permission to publish it in Brown Paper, adding that I might consider submitting to My Own Mag.

Ironically, the excerpt in Brown Paper was listed in the bibliography for the UCLA exhibition of Burroughs and Ginsberg under the title “IF YOU CUT YUP BALONEY YOU STILL GET BALONEY. THIS IS GESTALT SPELLED BACKWARDS.” It’s just before Interzone. These were the first lines of my parody text, in upper case in imitation of the Auerhan Exterminator. Apparently, it was Burroughsian enough to fool the curators. Burroughs completists will have a tough time finding that item. Even more ironically, a literary scholar at Southeastern Missouri University reprinted the UCLA bibliography but did so a chronologically instead of alphabetically. “IF YOU CUT YUP BALONEY” is listed as a 1964 publication. Bill liked to say that “language is a virus that replicates itself.” In this case misinformation on the internet is a virus.

The Ginsberg poem is remarkable. I do not think it is in the Collected Poems 1947-1980. How did you get a hold of this poem? What are you thoughts on it and Ginsberg in full guru mode in the mid-1960s?

It was the second poem in the Planet News collection. It holds the same place in the Collected Poems. He didn’t choose it for his Selected Poems. Ginsberg would “hold court” after the readings at Le Metro. As he has said, if anyone asked, he would give a poem. He had a sheaf of poems ready for publication.

At that point, he was everywhere. He was able to find press coverage to promote those that he felt connected to his aesthetic. There is a photo by Larry Keenan sold by “1-800-Kerouac” that shows Allen, Mike McClure and Dylan which seems emblematic of the times. Later, he was more open about views which might have been too unpalatable earlier. I like to think that you can like and respect his poems without subscribing to all his views — be they political, radical, chemical or sexual.

Incidentally, the mss (which he requested to be returned) afforded me a (miniscule) publication in the Paris Review. I had not been aware of the Buddhist term of “atman”. When trying to set the poem in type, I made the editorly notation of a “?” and an arrow. He sent me a card explaining that it was roughly akin to the western concept of the soul. When he was interviewed for the Paris Review, he sent the first page as an “unpublished” mss page. My marks remained and were published. The earlier publication of the poem was noted by Dowden in the City Lights bibliography.

What do you think was the biggest accomplishment of Brown Paper? What are you proudest of?

I still particularly like the actual physical object — the paper and the layout. I think the best quality of BP was getting good work into a permanent and well-designed format. I also enjoyed choosing work that I liked, by writers that I liked. I am also proud that a number of the contributions were considered good enough to be included in author’s later collections and the first American Literary Anthology. When the mag was being considered for Anthology, their editors decided not to include the mss items. I suspect that the Burroughs and Ginsberg items would have made it in. Denise Levertov and Ed Sanders were included and they received prizes. I’ve mentioned the publications of Allen’s poem. Ed Sanders’ is in the Peace Eye collection. Diane’s went into a Doubleday collection.

Why was Brown Paper a one-shot?

Once the pages were printed a number of events occurred making getting the magazine bound and into the stores difficult. Tony graduated from PMCA. He married Susan and they moved to New York with boxes of sheets. I would ride over from Long Island City and work on binding copies with them. Special thanks to Susan who was injured in the cause of art, while binding the magazine. I stopped seeing my girlfriend in Philadelphia who had been a friend of theirs. I started concentrating on psychology studies. I also was active in a folk group, The Even Dozen Jug Band and with Fluxus. During the following summer I took copies to Los Angeles and San Francisco, where I spent time with McClure. I also did some flux-errands for George Macunias at that time.

The handmade quality that makes Brown Paper unique was also the biggest problem in producing it. At one point the logistics of getting the time and energy to complete the project became overwhelming. About then I received a letter from Diane Wakowski saying that she thought it would be one of the most beautiful magazines and would she see it soon? That was enough to get me back onto the task. After the initial quantity of bound copies had been distributed, other responsibilities took over. A bit later Tony and Susan divorced. The unbound sheets at their apartment were lost. Instead of the 243 copies printed, there were probably less than 100 issued.

I had given thought to a second issue and was collecting manuscripts. There were some poems from Paul Blackburn that I liked. Eventually copies got back to the literary trust. I believe that there were also some more poems by Diane Wakowski. However, I had lost the level of interest needed to plough ahead on a new issue.

I got to ask do you still have the manuscripts printed in the magazine? If not what happened to them?

I believe that I have all the manuscripts except the Ginsberg.

You do have some other nice ephemera in your possession including some Café Le Metro handbills. Were you a regular at the Café? If so describe the scene there? Who did you see read?

As I had said, the Le Metro readings were central to my access to new works and to the writers. The best record of the robustness of the readers was Dan Saxon’s Poets at Le Metro. It was done by his giving Rexograph masters to anybody who read a poem that he liked. What mimeo is to letterpress, Rexograph is to mimeo. Most of us have seen rexo on those purple handouts used by teachers in prior years. It is essentially an obsolete technology. When I look at pages, I can see the grain of the table under the handwriting of many sheets. Others took the sheets home and typed their poems on them. Allen, Clayton Eshelmann, Gregory Corso and other names read. I asked Ed Sanders for his piece after hearing him read it. The readings provided a constant locus for the scene at that time.

Let’s talk about the unpublished little magazine Albatross and the resulting Icarus. This is a little known appearance by Burroughs with an interesting back story.

I had known Arnold Saland at City College. He took a year in Dublin, I believe at Trinity. When he returned he had a fund of stories about the pubs and people of Ireland. When I Googled him, I saw a reference in a political blog by Malcom Redfellow ex of Trinity. Neither of us had heard of Arnie in recent years. Arnie had also brought back a copy of Albatross, which he expected would be published, and inscribed his story. I filed it away until getting the Burroughs bibliography by Maynard and Miles. They referenced it, but didn’t assign a “C” number since it hadn’t been actually issued. Incidentally, the Burroughs mss that he sent me incorporating Beckett is part of that “Short Piece” in Albatross, and, I assume, Icarus.

Can you give some details on Iain Sinclair’s involvement?

As I mentioned, Arnie Saland was a friend from the City College literary scene. He was kind enough to bring and inscribe a copy of the “Pilot Issue” of Albatross which was going to publish a story of his. I noted and read the Burroughs piece at the time. Many years later I purchased a copy of the Maynard and Miles Bibliography. They listed Brown Paper and the collaboration in the “C” section. While looking for other mags that I might have I saw the history of “A Short Piece” on page 143. M. L. Lowes and Iain Sinclair had assembled Albatross and registered it for copyright. They may also have had to send copies to the British Museum as we send copies to the Library of Congress. They then became editors of Icarus at the University of Dublin. They used the material from the unissued Albatross. University regulations would not let the editors mention Albatross when the material was published in Icarus. It would seem unlikely that many copies of the “Pilot Issue” survived.

What are your thoughts about the future of the little magazine in the digital age? What are the major differences in your eyes from the time your edited a magazine?

I have usually thought about it in relation to George Macunias of Fluxus. Using a Comptometer which does just one font (trade gothic) in various sizes, and Letraset rub-on fonts, he produced a unique visual style for books and magazines. If he had a Mac, or even a Windows computer and a small laser printer, he might have conquered the world.

It is now incredibly easy to achieve visual effects with myriad fonts. Photocopying was once a chore for specialists. Most printers are now scanners too. Getting it done is so much easier. There are an infinite number of small offset and Xerox printing shops around the country. Prices for 500 sheets printed on both sides are minimal. What is currently unknown is how much good work is going to be sent out in print and how much in digital files only. How can you collect it? Make hard copies? What will constitute a “first edition?” Will the blog really be the medium for serious work?

Tell us a little about your pursuits after the time of Brown Paper?

I became involved with psychology. I worked in private agencies and public schools with autistic individuals. Eventually, I got a doctorate from Fordham. In the process I married Susan and moved from the Village to Rockland County. I stopped commuting and have basically worked for public and private agencies in the area. (Dr. Dan — successor to Dr. Benway) The only literary pursuit has been a short piece on Asperger’s traits in the characters in Blade Runner in an autism journal.

We had two daughters and a big Victorian house. This gave me room to store too many books and magazines. We recently sold and moved into a smaller house by the river. Packing gave me some opportunity to see what was in the shelves. I will send scans as things turn up.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In the 15 years since I began collecting William Burroughs seriously, I have read a ton of books on Burroughs, post-WWII literature, the book, book collecting, and related topics. I find that five books stand apart in that they completely revolutionized my thinking about my obsessions and that I return to them repeatedly. At the top of the list are Clay and Philips’ A Secret Location on the Lower East Side and Oliver Harris’ William Burroughs and the Secret of Fascination. These books are a bottomless well of information and delight. Close on their heels are Reva Wolf’s Andy Warhol, Poetry, and Gossip in the 1960s; Clay and Jerome Rothenberg’s The Book of the Book; and Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome. There are two books on this list published by Granary Books, and I could mention the essays of Johanna Drucker in Figuring the Word if only for her essay on offset printing. In time, I will probably get a hold of most of the Granary Books catalog. Is there anybody else documenting the theory and history of the book and print in such a fascinating way?

A new release by any of these authors or publishers is a major event in my little world. So when I received an email from Daniel Kane several months ago suggesting that I might be interested in his new book on New York-based poetry of the 1960s and 1970s entitled Don’t Ever Get Famous, I put money away in anticipation. In the past month, I purchased the book and read it with great pleasure. Like All Poets Welcome, Kane’s latest effort will be dipped into repeatedly for years to come.

My top five list could also mention Silliman’s Blog as a crucial reading and learning experience as well. The task of tackling that blog entry by entry (it began in 2002) was a marathon test but always enjoyable and a definite education. Reading the blog prepared me to some extent for Don’t Ever Get Famous. The book is about New York writing but do not come to the volume expecting the usual suspects. John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Jimmy Schyuler, and Frank O’Hara make brief appearances. For those expecting a treatment of the Tulsa wing of the school, there are essays on C Journal and Ron Padgett, but Kane and his contributors dig much deeper and explore the later generations of the New York School and those on the periphery of that School. Kane’s book is about complicating established definitions and canons. The book espouses a spirit of openness, a move towards expansion and inclusion. The book examines race, gender, sexual orientation, little magazines, and neglectrinos (to use a term from Silliman’s Blog describing those unfairly out of print or otherwise missing from the major anthologies).

The opening essay on Leroi Jones / Amiri Baraka is a case study in the strategies of the entire collection. Baraka is not often labeled as a New York School poet, but from 1957-1965, he was a pivotal figure in the New York scene particularly in the avant-garde circle around the Village. In “‘Against the Speech of Friends’: Amari Baraka Sings the ‘White Friend Blues,’” Andrew Epstein argues that Baraka’s tenure as one of the centers of New American Poetry was possibly his most fruitful and poetically successful period and not one to be explained away as a youthful mistake or a necessary stage to a greater awareness. I have always felt an affinity for Baraka’s work of this time as editor, poet, playwright, novelist, and essayist. It was a remarkable outpouring of creative energy. Epstein demonstrates that Baraka benefitted both personally and creatively from the white avant-garde world of the Village. Baraka always had a conflicted, anxiety ridden relationship to this world but this uncertainty about his position fuels what I feel is his greatest writing. When Baraka left this scene for Harlem and later Newark, he abandoned a whirl of activity that energized his writing. The embrace of Black Nationalism and Marxism stymied his theorical range and limited his creative vision. Epstein writes:

Since the 1960s, [Baraka's] reputation as a very public, radical political figure, as a fiercely ideological writer, has often obscured the experimental poet who loathed conformity, doctrinaire positions, and all forms of definitive closure, who embraced uncertainty and flux, and who declared “a position/for myself to move.”

As Epstein shows to reach his “home” creatively and ideologically, “Baraka had abandon much, had to turn away once and for all from that which had moved him.” For me, the price was too high. I prefer the experimental poet of the 1950s and early 1960s who wrestled with Olson (Projective Verse), O’Hara (Personism), Kerouac (spontaneous prose), as well as issues of sexuality and censorship. Of course, the issue of race was always present, but Baraka’s unstable and conflicted position within the New American scene generated a complex and constantly questioning and evolving stance on that central issue. Epstein’s reading of Baraka’s play The Toilet is wonderful stuff that gets to the heart of Baraka’s conflicted relationship with the white New American Poetics, particularly his much speculated upon interaction both personally and poetically with Frank O’Hara.

Jon Panish’s “‘As Radical as Society Demands the Truth to Be’: Umbra‘s Radical Politics and Poetics” approaches Umbra in a similar manner as Epstein’s essay on Baraka. Panish opens up and complicates the view of Umbra by stressing the magazine’s experimental and avant-garde nature and how that stance intermeshed with black awareness. Panish writes, “Though race is obviously central to Umbra’s mission…Umbra’s approach to race is plural and flexible in ways that the development of mid-1960s nationalism did not allow.” This is reflected in the inclusion of white counterculture writers and interestingly in a wide range of black writers who approached race from a variety of viewpoints and not a single ideological position.

Panish’s essay is detailed and clear. It opens up a section in Kane’s book on the little magazine. Essays on C: Journal, Angel Hair and 0-9 follow. I will treat Harry Thorne’s essay on C in more detail later, but Daniel Kane’s essay on Angel Hair and Linda Russo’s piece on 0-9 were revelations. Anne Waldman and Lewis Warsh have documented the history of Angel Hair in essays and introductions over the years, but Kane’s reading greatly added to my knowledge of Angel Hair and the Second Generation New York School in general. Kane highlights the multi-faceted element of sociability: resistance to the academy and established poetic communities, the building of a new creative community with a decentralization of power, the collaborative nature of the creative act and the assault on authorial control, and the establishment of new traditions and canons. Granary Book’s Angel Hair Anthology is now a must. I knew little about 0-9, but Russo’s essay demands that I pick up the collection that is currently available documenting its history. In addition Bernadette Mayer and Hannah Weiner have been added to the future reading list if Silliman’s Blog didn’t put them there already. A recent conversation with Jan Herman and Carl Weissner on German performance art as well as reading about Happenings in a book on LA Pop dovetailed nicely with the conceptional nature of Mayer and Weiner’s work. I have shied away from conceptional and performative aspects of post-WWII poetry. It can be ignored no longer.

Kane warned me that Don’t Ever Get Famous was a more academic effort than the social history of All Poets Welcome. This is without a doubt true, but I only felt out of my depth twice. I found Lytle Shaw’s essay on Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer and Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ piece on Anne Waldman tough going. I definitely left those essays feeling that I would have to return to them again after I had read more deeply in the relevant work and had a more solid theorical foundation. I have mentioned Mayer earlier but Coolidge and Waldman also demand a closer look. Both writers seem to turn up on a daily basis in email conversations and internet surfing on experimental poetry.

The opening of a new world of poets and poetry could be the greatest aspect of Kane’s book. Essays on Charles North, Lee Harwood, Joe Ceravolo, Lewis Warsh, John Wieners, and Ron Padgett sparked into a full blaze my smoldering interest in their work. I am particularly eager to explore Wieners’ work after reading bits and pieces in anthologies and in Floating Bear. As I said before, Don’t Ever Get Famous deserves numerous re-readings after I get more familiar with the work in question. As a true beginner in these aspects of New York writing, I got plenty out of these essays but I was left with the sense that I was only scratching the surface. I was more familiar with Baraka’s work, and I found that essay particularly rewarding and insightful.

I was also somewhat more in my element with the essay on C Journal. I found this essay to be the weakest of the collection. It was also the most anticipated which may have to be factored into my reaction to the piece. Entitled “‘The New York School is a Joke:’ The Disruptive Poetics of C: A Journal of Poetry,” Harry Thorne’s essay continues the spirit of inclusiveness and openness. One of Thorne’s major arguments is that C is more than a New York School magazine or a careerist move on the part of Berrigan. I am not so sure. I tend to agree more with Libbie Rifkin’s thoughts expressed in various essays and in Career Moves that argues the opposite. Thorne acknowledges that C was started as a magazine of coterie promoting the Tulsa wing of the New York School. The first issue featured their sonnets, particularly Berrigan’s. It could be argued that Berrigan’s interest in C Press and C Journal was entirely fueled by his desire to establish himself as a poet, publish his work, and establish himself in the New York School and larger avant-garde canon. This seems obvious to me. It is the reason little magazines and small presses have been established throughout their entire history. Why shy away from that fact? It is one of their great strengths and pleasures. Thorne admits that Berrigan drifted away from C by the 10th issue. It is no coincidence that this was close on the heels of the success of the self-published The Sonnets. The activity of C Press greatly diminished after the Grove Press publication of The Sonnets in 1967. Clearly, the press and the magazine had served its purpose. The first three issues support a rather closed New York School reading.

The Edwin Denby issue (Number 4) is really the lynchpin of Thorne’s argument that C is not merely a New York School magazine and that Berrigan possessed a “deliberately disorganized editorial stance.” While this issue may expand the boundaries of the New York School, it is one of the most inside and exclusive of the entire run. A reader has to be intimately involved with the personal and creative history of the New York School to fully understand the contents. I get the sense that readers and contributors had to flash their credentials as New York School scenesters in order to be admitted past a velvet rope of surface understanding. Berrigan might be complicating the definition of the New York School, but his frame of reference and audience is within that small circle all the way. Reva Wolf reads this issue of C in great detail in her book and demonstrates how Warhol used C as an opportunity to rub shoulders with (or rub the wrong way) the New York School, particularly O’Hara. Berrigan’s editing of this issue seems hardly “deliberately disorganized” to me, but instead meticulously planned. Berrigan appears to be far from disorganized as the cover and the placement and selection of Berrigan’s poem is highly stylized and loaded with meaning. The motive behind these editorial choices seems far from mere desire to complicate or include others. Berrigan’s desire to complicate the established avant-garde scene seems closely tied to his own poetic ambitions rather than any personally disinterested desire to shake things up. How much is the inclusion of Warhol a hedging of bets on the hot new star (Pop Art) in New York against the old regime of O’Hara who championed Abstract Expressionism, particularly its second generation. The main intention may be the inclusion and expansion of Berrigan himself rather than the challenging of established boundaries.

Again I see nothing scandalous or horrible about this. It is what little magazines and small presses are all about. I am conflicted about one aspect of Don’t Ever Get Famous as it relates to little magazines. Kane’s book stresses multiplicity, inclusion, complexity, openness as forces of creative power, particularly in magazines like Angel Hair, Umbra, and C. Yet are these really the strengths of a great little magazine? Some of my personal favorites are Black Mountain Review, Fuck You Magazine, My Own Mag, and C Journal. Is not what makes these magazines great their focus, their cohesive content, their strong editorial personality, their exclusivity? Call me old fashioned but I firmly believe in the Ezra Pound / William Carlos Williams / Robert Creeley theory of a little magazine. A steady core of writers joined together by their common creative beliefs. The editors and contributors usually react in concert against an established tradition. The editorial stance is not about inclusion but about confrontation. Great little magazines publish a consistent stable of writers and have a definitive editorial voice. Of course the direction and focus can change over time.

Thorne (as does Kane’s book with other little magazines) argues that the exact opposite is the strength of C Journal. Thorne suggests that Issue 10 is one of the strongest of the series. The narrow focus of the early issues of C is under debate but the later issues drift away from the magazine’s early exclusive nature. Issue 10 is larger in size, broader in content, lacks a strong editorial hand, and prefers inclusion rather than discrimination. Is this a good thing and a source of power? Or the sign of a magazine in decline with an editor who has drifted away to other interests and pursuits?

Take the later issues of C as physical objects. They fall apart. The bindings do not hold together due to the increased size. They burst at the seams. The magazine is bulky, even more cumbersome than the early issue due to the increased thickness. This is symbolic of the problem with the later issues as a whole. There is less direction; more of a kitchen sink mentality. The stress is on quantity. Bigger is better. I would suggest that the editors (Berrigan and later Padgett) realized this change as a joke, possibly a critical joke designed to pop the uptight definition of establish schools as Thorne suggests. I believe Thorne missed a major opportunity to bring this point home. Thorne accepts the common assumption that there are thirteen issues of C. As an “intrepid reader” who has tried “to track down every issue,” I know this is not really the case. Issue 11 announces the content for issue 12. Try finding it. I have never seen it. I do not think it exists. Instead as Ron Padgett told me in response to my inquiry about this issue, C Comics #1 was issued instead. Berrigan viewed C Comics as Issue 12. Issue 13 came out and then C Comics #2. As a result, C runs for anywhere from 12 to 14 issues. C Comics could be an editorial comment in line with Thorne’s argument of Berrigan’s lack of seriousness in respecting the laws of the New York School. I would argue that this confusion surrounding the later issues reflects the lack of direction and focus of the magazine and lead to its discontinuance. The magazine is rudderless and meaningless as a literary statement and largely irrelevant to Berrigan’s interests at the time. Truly C becomes a joke. C Comics is the editors’ comment on and admission of that fact. As Thorne states, this could have been Berrigan’s intention all along, but is this lack of focus, editorial direction, and exclusivity a positive? Given the fate of C, I wonder. I find every issue of C to have its charms, but as a little magazine the early issues, including Issue 4, are the most powerful statements. I prefer my little magazines little, capable of being consumed in a single sitting and in the Williams / Pound tradition. Many of the magazines I see at bookstores go, like the later issues of C, in another direction. These 300+ page behemoths may have size, but they lack the roar and editorial voice of a true monster that is terrifying to the establishment and awe-inspiring to the reader.

Finishing Don’t Ever Get Famous, I have a lot to chew over. On one level I felt strongly that the desire to include, to complicate and to diversify expressed in these essays is a necessary corrective to the commonly held views of New York writing. Yet another side of me believes that the exact opposite desires are necessary for a strong creative community, like a little magazine, and are a source of great power to draw from. Maybe the multiplicity of New York writing of the 1960s and 1970s contributes to its neglected and misunderstood nature. This is all complicated by my views as a collector where I value focus and discrimination as highly as I value that golden rule of collecting: Condition, Condition, Condition. As I said I will be returning to this book again and I am sure my views of the book will change just as my approach to my book collection has altered over 15 years. A strong sense of focus does not necessarily mean close-mindedness and an unwillingness to change. The key is to not stare too long in one direction. Keeping your focus sharp requires refocusing. Kane’s book has initiated that process. It is an important book.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

For background, be sure to read Jed Birmingham’s overview of Nomad.

What was the literary landscape at the time Nomad 1 came out in the Winter of 1959?

Poetry was emerging from a period in which formal and academic values dominated the literary scene. My co-editor Don Factor and I were particularly excited by the emergence of the Beat poets and other figures who drew on the inspiration of their own lives, however chaotic, rather than on their knowledge of the classics.

What was your background that lead you to get interested in literature and eventually a little magazine?

I had both a scholarly and an aesthetic interest in the little magazine genre. I had purchased a used copy of Hoffman, Allen and Ulrich’s The Little Magazine, a pioneering study of American little magazines (Princeton University Press, 1946), and at U.C.L.A. (where I was a history major) I wrote my senior thesis on the history of transition, the famous little magazine of the Parisian avant-garde of the Twenties. Donald was studying at U.S.C., where my mother was taking an advanced degree. When she heard that he was also interested in modern poetry she put us together.

Don had a collection of recordings by contemporary poets and I remember we were very stimulated by these. Also there was a revival of interest in poetry readings in Los Angeles at about this time. Peter Yates, who had founded the famous concert series Evenings on the Roof (originally on the roof of his own home) now collaborated with the violinist Sol Babitz to present poetry readings on this site and at the Babitz home (where the teen-aged Eve Babitz, future L.A. confessional novelist, was an undoubted ornament). Don and I and a number of our friends attended these readings on a regular basis — without being particularly drawn to any of the poets on offer. Our closest association with an established poet was with Tom McGrath, who invited us to his house for more evenings devoted to discussions of poetry — our feeble attempts and his own more accomplished ones.

Los Angeles could boast of only one significant little magazine at the time, Coastlines, and from our perspective the tenor of this publication was still too formal and too wedded to old-fashioned left-wing politics. (Its setting is the subject of Estelle Gershgoren Novak’s anthology, Poets of the Non-Existent City, Los Angeles in the McCarthy Era, University of New Mexico Press, 2002.) We were charmed by the scandalous rumor that Ginsberg, who had been invited to read by the Coastlines editors, responded by taking off all his clothes. So we decided to take the clothes off poetry by starting our own little magazine.

Nomad looks a lot like Yugen in appearance. How did the design of the magazine come about? You used the same printer as City Lights. How did you decide on a printer?

We did not consciously base our format on any other magazine. At an early stage in our plans we were introduced to James Boyer May, who not only had his own magazine, Trace, but served as the U.S. representative for Villiers Publications Ltd., a London firm that was already publishing Ferlinghetti’s Pocket Poet Series. Boyer May went over the technical particulars involved in typography and layout and helped with the format of the first issue. Soon thereafter we obtained the services of Richard Langendorf, a student of architecture (he later designed a house for Don in Beverly Hills). Dick served as a kind of design editor for us, gathering illustrations, designing the cover of our second issue, and assisting in layouts. I did most of the layouts for later issues. The cover illustration for the first issue was drawn by my childhood friend, Leigh Peffer — later long-time proprietor of Wilshire Books in Santa Monica.

Quite possibly Nomad is best known for having published Charles Bukowski at an early date. In fact before his first book, Flower Fist and Bestial Wail, in 1960. How did Bukowski come to open the first issue of Nomad?

Bukowski was just beginning to publish his work and we were happy to serve as a vehicle for his heretofore unrecognized talents. I think we could sense, from the outset, that here we had a poet who possessed the imagination, the fluency and the freedom in his choice of subject matter that heretofore we had experienced only in the Beats. I suppose, as well, we were happy to include an L.A. poet who could rank with the best of the avant-garde.

Curiously, given his later celebrity, it has to be noted that during the Nomad era Bukowski self-consciously took no part in the public poetry scene. When our branch of the Pacifica network, KPFK, wanted to present a reading of his work on public radio, he asked me to read his work for him. This I did. He told me he enjoyed my reading, and I hope he wasn’t just being polite — though that doesn’t sound like Bukowski. We continued to publish his work whenever possible. I would say that his poem “So Much For The Knifers, So Much For The Bellowing Dawns,” which we used as a prologue to our “Manifesto” Issue, epitomized the anti-academic tone we were keen to sponsor.

The early issues feature Judson Crews of Naked Ear and James Boyer May of Trace. Can you discuss the importance of those two editors in the little magazine scene of the fifties?

Crews was one of those inexhaustible whirlwinds of the little magazine publishing scene, but we never met and he had no influence on our efforts. Boyer May, as the representative of our publisher in London, had a lot to do with the success of our magazine and he served as an unofficial advisor in a number of ways. He was a splendid chap who knew many figures in the little magazine world and I always enjoyed my visits to his home in the Silverlake district — where some visiting editor or poet was often on display.

How did you go about soliciting material for the new magazine?

Contributions came from many of the L.A. poets we knew, and we also placed an entry in Trace, describing our efforts. I rented a post office box in Culver City, not far from where my family lived — but a major nuisance as a collection point, it turned out, when we moved to Beechwood Canyon in Hollywood in the summer of 1958. Don and I now sat back and waited for the flood of literary genius to overtake us. What we got instead was sincere but staid, a swamp of clichés and posturing with (not to be too unkind) endless entries by little old ladies with three names. We soon realized that if we wanted to produce an avant-garde magazine we would have to write to poets whose work we admired. And so we did. I also began to make almost annual summer pilgrimages to New York, where I met a number of the poets later featured in our final edition.

The “Manifesto” issue is just a fantastic example of the value of a little magazine. You seem to have gotten responses from all corners of the literary landscape.

Some of these contributions were unsolicited — we announced publication of this project in Nomad 4 and there may have been a mention in Trace. But again we wrote to poets whose work excited us at the time. We did have an eclectic taste when it came to modern poetry, and we were always willing to include contemporary poetry written under a variety of styles and purposes.

Can you give some details on William Burroughs’ contribution to the “Manifesto” issue? The selection is from Minutes to Go. What was your familiarity with Burroughs’ work such as Minutes to Go, Naked Lunch or even Junkie?

I cannot recall how the Burroughs’ contribution came about, but we certainly had read some of his fiction by this point. Perhaps we had written to Gregory Corso — with our letter catching up to him while he was in Paris — and the collective entry may have been produced there. Under any circumstances we were delighted to receive this response.

I was surprised to see Louis Zukofsky in the issue. Why was his work back in demand in the 1960s after his initial splash in the Objectivist collection of 1931?

If I recall correctly, Zukofsky was one of Allen Ginsberg’s mentors. Zukofsky continued to write poetry long after his heyday and to send it out to editors, and his contribution may have been unsolicited. Incidentally, we also got regular submissions from Ginsberg’s father — but we never published any of his poems.

For me as a collector I first became aware of Nomad because of the Bukowski and Burroughs contribution. Who are some of the lesser known or unjustly forgotten writers that you were proud to publish in Nomad?

None of them have been forgotten by us, but I suppose that many of our authors have slipped from the pages of notoriety — that’s inevitable. One of the poets we were happiest to see in print for the first time was Paul Raboff, a close friend and a former classmate of Don’s at Beverly Hills High. His imaginative and rhythmic work appears in a number of our issues — and he is still writing today. He moved to Israel in the Sixties and has published a number of books, still writing in English. He sent me a new poem last week.

Describe the influence and importance of the New American Poetry anthology of Donald Allen?

The Allen anthology appeared in the mid-course of our efforts, 1960, and we were tremendously excited to see a successor to some of the more academic anthologies that had represented American poetry before this. The collection also introduced us to a number of poets whose work we did not know, but whom we would now try to include in our own publication. I don’t believe that we deliberately set out to alter or improve on Allen’s categories and divisions. But particularly when it came to the New York scene we encountered a new set of affinities and associations and, given the eclectic nature of our editorial philosophy, we set out to represent them.

How did you gather materials for Nomad / New York?

As I have mentioned earlier I was a frequent summertime visitor to New York and by 1960 I had met a number of the authors who would later appear in what turned out to be our final issue. I spent most of the summer months in New York that year and in the three subsequent years as well. In 1962 I sublet the flat of Mitchell Goodman and Denise Levertov in a building later destroyed to make way for the construction of the Twin Towers. I had lots of good advice on which New York poets to include from my friend Michael Benedikt and from Robert Kelly, who was a proprietor of the Blue Yak bookstore in the East Village, a wonderful poet’s hangout. Kelly belonged to a group that called themselves the “Deep Image” poets, and I met them all. John Bernard Myers of the Tibor di Nagy gallery was a friend of Don’s and he agreed to put together a selection of the work of a number of poets, many of whom had a foot in the art world: Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie, and Bill Berkson. Incidentally, the reference to this group as the “School of New York” in this issue was evidently, but almost by accident, one of the very first uses of this phrase to describe these poets.

What was your sense of the New York Scene in the early 1960s?

New York was a tremendously exciting place during these years and there were undoubtedly many changes under way, not just in the literary scene, but in all the arts, in popular music, and even in public radio. I loved the café and bar scene (I believe I first met Joel Oppenheimer in the men’s room of the famous Cedar Tavern). I revelled in the bookstores and the poetry readings. Don was drawn to the art scene and his essay on Pop Art in our last issue was one of the first to delineate some of the characteristics and contributions of this style.

In the last issue of Nomad you announce a new magazine called Movement that was more critical and political in nature. What lead you to go in that direction? I don’t think Movement ever appeared. What happened there?

As a historian-in-training I had always maintained one foot in the world of politics and society, but there were no divided loyalties in my mind here: today we can see how the attitudes toward government and culture first visible in avant-garde literature soon spilled over into the wider hippie movement and, of course, the anti-war effort. So I thought it might be nice to launch a non-literary magazine at this time — but there were immediate problems with fund-raising, and the fact that my new co-editor, Barbara Corradini, lived in New York, while I lived in L.A., didn’t help matters. Movement remained only an idea.

What happened that caused Nomad to end?

There were just so many other things in our lives at this time that the energy wasn’t there any more. I was completing my doctoral dissertation, I got married in 1964, and that fall I was appointed an instructor in the History Department at U.C.L.A. I was overwhelmed with course preparation, Historiography and 20th Century U.S. History here, and then Western Civilization at Michigan State University — where I took up an appointment in the Humanities Department in 1965. Don began to concentrate ever more on the art scene (he compiled a fabulous collection of contemporary art at one time) and then moved into motion pictures (he produced Robert Altman’s second film, That Cold Day in the Park, in 1969). We actually compiled an issue twelve. I remember that it was to contain some poetry by Andy Warhol’s protégé Gerard Malanga and some of Michael Benedikt’s “Litanies.” But Nomad 12 never appeared.

Reading through Nomad, I feel that the magazine really had its pulse on what was new. Early publications of Bukowski and Burroughs; Pop Art; a supplement to the Allen anthology; a political direction before the merging of poetry and politics in the late 1960s. To what do you attribute the forward nature of Nomad?

It was perhaps a conscious decision not only to print creative work by our poets but also to offer them a format for statements of literary philosophy, such as those provided in our “Manifesto” issue by Robert Creeley, Charles Bukowksi and Joel Oppenheimer or those submitted by many poets in our New York issue. In addition we began to publish transcribed interviews on poetic matters conducted by David Ossman at WBAI: Kenneth Rexroth in our ninth issue, LeRoi Jones (as he was then called) in our New York issue.

What are you most proud of in the publication of Nomad?

I think that we hoped we were working toward the widening of poetic horizons — to include both new styles and a broader range of acceptable subject matter. I think we were proud of the fact that we succeeded in presenting a wide variety of schools and literary cultures — so that in addition to all of the New York poets already mentioned we could also include work by Bay Area figures like Philip Whalen, Lew Welch and Michael McClure, and dozens of poets who belonged to no school or tendency but their own. You can see our desire to widen the net of literary activity in the appointment, in our last year, of Anselm Hollo as our European Correspondent.

A year after our last publication I was undoubtedly pleased that, in my survey of the avant-garde writers for my doctoral dissertation, where over seventy-five magazines were listed by sixty-six respondents, Nomad made it into the top ten (sharing this position with Trobar) in response to the question, “In your opinion, which have been the most significant little or literary magazines published since the Second World War?” The other front-runners, incidentally, began with The Black Mountain Review and then included Evergreen Review, Origin, Yugen, Big Table, Floating Bear, Kulchur, Measure, and El Corno Emplumado.

What is the role and future of the little magazine in the digital age?

This is a really good question because life on the World Wide Web can be very evanescent and, though it’s nice to look things up on your computer, there is nothing like the pleasure of holding something worth reading in your own hand. Perhaps publication on demand, an intermediate step, might be useful in the production of some magazines in the future. I am still wedded to the era of print and this year I plan to publish three books — one on the dogs and their owners in our local park here in London, then a biography of my step-father, the composer Ingolf Dahl, and finally an introduction to long-distance footpath walking in Britain. Perhaps we are being unduly pessimistic about the fate of the little magazine in the digital age; after all, we still have concerts in the age of the compact disc.

How did your background in little magazine publication affect your subsequent academic career?

My mentor at U.C.L.A., George Mowry, knowing of my involvement in the world of avant-garde literature, suggested that I choose this very world as the topic for my doctoral dissertation, mentioned above. I set out in the summer of 1963, therefore, to do my research, visiting a number of libraries and returning to New York for more first-hand interviews. My Nomad reputation stood me in good stead in my approach to a large number of avant-garde figures.

In the fall I undertook a similar trip to San Francisco, where I interviewed Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who had given an L.A. poetry reading sponsored by our magazine), Robert Duncan, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, and Allen Ginsberg (whose “American Change” we had published in Nomad 9). I will never forget the day I set out to interview Rexroth and Ginsberg — nor will any other American alive on November 22, 1963. I first heard of the Kennedy assassination as I was on the bus at the outset of my research day. I spent hours on Ginsberg’s sofa, watching the television coverage of the day’s tragedy. I remember that Allen was worried that the event might be blamed on Fidel Castro, whose revolution he supported.

A History of the American Literary Avant-garde Since World War II was completed at the end of the summer of 1964. I never published the volume, partly because the dates of the study were so open-ended, literally never ending, and so many of the figures I had included were still active. The work is still available on microfilm, however, and I know that it has been consulted by a number of scholars, even recently.

Since your Nomad days, have you had any connection with the world of avant-garde literature?

Only indirectly. At Michigan State University I twice taught courses on avant-garde literature for undergraduates and to adult education students as well. At the American School in London, where I began work in 1982, I included avant-garde literary materials in my courses on contemporary American literature in the English Department, whose chairmanship I held from 1994 to 2002, when I retired. My wife Dorothy, who was the special projects coordinator at ASL, invited Billy Collins to serve as a teacher in residence in 2002. By the time he arrived for his week with us, he had been named America’s Poet Laureate. We spent a lot of time with him and, naturally, I shared with him copies of Nomad. He was instantly able to recognize our position in the movement (small “m”) just by looking at a list of our contributors but, beyond that, I would say that Billy, in his own work, is very much the inheritor of the stylistic revolution we had sponsored forty years earlier.

For many years I lost track of Don Factor, but about ten years ago I suddenly received an e-mail. He and I were both living in London, as it turned out, and, in fact, there is only about a thirty minute walk between our place in Maida Vale and that of Don and Anna in Notting Hill. Our friendship was revived, with frequent visits to one another’s homes and on joint ventures which the four of us subsequently undertook in India, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Venice, Bilbao, New York, L.A., and Palm Springs, where the Factors spend much of the year now. Don and I share a melancholy moment whenever we learn of the passing of one of our contributors, but we enjoy many a happy moment whenever we stop to recall our Nomadic days.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

by David Moore

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

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

DM: You had gone to teach…

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

DM: Which school was that?

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

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

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

DM: What were your first impressions of Bob Cobbing?

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

DM: Did you visit them in their school?

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

DM: With the full approval of the school authorities?

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

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

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

DM: Were you surprised when he produced this?

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

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

IW: Yes.

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

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

DM: It didn’t?

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

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

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

DM: Did you meet William Burroughs?

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

DM: Did you know any of the other contributors?

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

DM: And you contributed yourself?

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

DM: How were you approached to write for it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DM: This is illustrated in My Own Mag.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DM: Can you remember this going on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DM: Jeff typed it all himself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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