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

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

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

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

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

Intrepid

Also see the Intrepid cover archive.

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

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

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

Intermedia ’69

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

Intermedia 1969
Invitation

Intermedia 1969
Invitation

Intermedia 1969
Weissner Bio and bilingual cut-up

Abyss

Abyss 1970
Includes “The Photographic Medium,” a cut-up by Carl Weissner and Jan Herman

Abyss 1970
Includes “The Photographic Medium,” a cut-up by Carl Weissner and Jan Herman

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Intrepid 1

Intrepid 2

Intrepid 3

Intrepid 4

Intrepid 5

Intrepid 6

Intrepid 7

Intrepid 8

Intrepid 9

Intrepid 10

Intrepid 11-12

Intrepid 13

Intrepid 14-15

Intrepid 16

Intrepid 17

Intrepid 18-19

Intrepid 20

Intrepid 21-22

Intrepid 23-24

Intrepid 25-35

Intrepid 36-38

Intrepid 39-41

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Cards of Say

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cut-Ups from VDRSVP

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

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

All Right You TB Addicts

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Jan Herman
“All Right You TB Addicts”
ppHOO
1969

Mutter Report

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

Notes from Underground

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

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

Jan Herman
“Telegram”
Notes from Underground 3
1970

Handbook for the Seventies

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

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

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

Greed & Human Smallness

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

Paris Report

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

No Time in Homestead

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cut Up or Shut Up

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

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

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

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

A Talent for Trouble

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

Da Capo Press
(Paperback)
1997

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

The San Francisco Earthquake 1
1967

The San Francisco Earthquake 2
1968

The San Francisco Earthquake 3
1968

The San Francisco Earthquake 4
1968

The San Francisco Earthquake 5
1969

The San Francisco Earthquake Flyer
1969
Front

The San Francisco Earthquake Flyer
Back

VDRSVP

VDRSVP 1
1969

VDRSVP 2
1969

VDRSVP 3
1969

VDRSVP Invitation
1970

VDRSVP Invitation
1970

Something Else Press

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

Jan Herman
Editors Note, Brion Gysin Let the Mice In

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974
Front

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974

Fall-Winter Catalogue
Something Else Press
1973-1974
Back

The “Abstracts” As an Attempt to Write the Immediate Image

By Dave Teeuwen

The “Abstracts” of 1969 are a series of seven writing experiments which William Burroughs developed in the writing of his novel The Wild Boys. He published these “Abstracts” that year in small-press journals and underground newspapers, his usual testing ground in the 1960s. Their unusual format of careful juxtaposition is already familiar to anyone who has read The Wild Boys. Added to the five “Abstracts” found in The Wild Boys (actually six Penny Arcade Peep Shows / “Abstracts,” if you include the reprint of an “Abstract” first published in the journal Intrepid), the number of published individual “Abstracts” comes to twelve.

Burroughs provides an introduction to what the reader is viewing in The Wild Boys, as Audrey enters the Penny Arcade Peep Show and seats himself in front of the four screens on which films are being projected: “Audrey looked at the screen in front of him. His lips parted and the thoughts stopped in his mind. It was all there on screen sight sound touch at once immediate and spectrally remote in past time.” This bit of framing is absent in the “Abstracts”. However, it is clear that they are pieces designed to silence the reader and make him think without words, to think only in images. The language is not there to provide meaning, but to provide pictures in the mind. The “Abstracts” are as close as Burroughs could take the English language towards being purely visual without literally drawing it all out.

Burroughs’ obsession with the power of visual writing systems, such as Mayan and Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, comes out of this desire to convey meaning without the use of words. In The Third Mind he writes about hieroglyphics, “If you are able to look at what is front of you in silence, you will be able to write about it from a more perceptive viewpoint. What keeps you from seeing what is in front of you? Words for what is in front of you, which is not what is there. As Korzybski pointed out, whatever a chair may be, it is not a ‘chair’.” The “Abstracts” are Burroughs’ attempt to do the same with the English language through the device of writing a brief summary of an abstract film. (It is perhaps a subtle play on the typical scientific “abstract,” usually a brief overview of a longer paper or thesis, and at the same time an abstract film made of cut-ups, cut-ins, and jumping images.)

Throughout the 1960s, Burroughs dabbled in making / writing films and sound recordings, presciently seeing that the lines between film and the written word were fairly blurry. Many things you can do with film can also be done with words. His cut-ups during this period are an example. As he says in The Job, “Cut-ups have been used in film for a long time. In fact films are assembled in the cutting room. Like the painter film technicians can touch and handle their medium move pieces of it around and try out new juxtapositions.”

Burroughs explored this concept cinematically through his relationships with Antony Balch and Ian Sommerville. Though not all of them were cut up, Towers Open Fire, The Cut-ups and Bill and Tony are films that play with sound and image to explore what it means to see, hear, and experience. This was exactly the point of cutting up texts and films, and the “Abstracts” are just another extension of the experiment. They are each a small film made up of flashing imagery and short, quickly cut scenes reminiscent of the films Balch was making with Burroughs at this time.

There were other artists in the 1960s making films that are amazingly similar in visual imagery to what Burroughs was writing. The films of Stan Brakhage and Bruce Conner are filled with cut-ins and disjointed imagery. Conner in particular, in his 1958 film A Movie, uses stock footage of war atrocities of the type we see described the “Abstracts.” These films use the aesthetics of German Abstract filmmakers of the 1920s, but with the post-war imagery that Burroughs exploited so effectively.

The abstract films of the 1920s point forward to the imagery found in Burroughs’ “Abstracts.” Hans Richter’s 1923 film Rhythm 23, for example, almost seems to be the very film Audrey sees as he sits in the chair in the Penny Arcade. Shapes move in towards the screen and then recede again. (“Objects and scenes move away and come in with a slow hydraulic movement always at the same speed” — The Wild Boys). New shapes come in, other shapes evolve into something, all of it in total silence. (Rhythm 23 was made before the sound era.) One has to wonder whether Burroughs saw the film. Given his favorite number in the title, he would certainly have considered this an intersection point.

This use of visual imagery and cutting away were new techniques in Burroughs’ effort to “rub out the word.” They lead the reader into silence as the images convey meaning without causing the formation of words in the mind. The shift from cutting up narrative imagery to describing cut-up, film-based imagery shows the evolution of Burroughs’ writing at this point in his career.

The “Abstracts” are as follows:

“Abstract,” Klacto/23 International, 1969

This long “Abstract” appears in The Wild Boys in a much shorter form as the beginning of the first Penny Arcade Peep Show chapter. The introduction of the four screens moving forward and backward immediately ties this “Abstract” to the Penny Arcade Peep Shows. Over six sets of four numbered images, Burroughs ties together nostalgic symbols of carnival midways, adolescent lust and ancient Egyptian scenes. Obviously, all of these themes recur throughout his work of this period. In this instance, however, the colorless prose and slight details of the piece are utilized to create stark pictures in the mind instead of narrative. The repetition of the 1 2 3 4 (the way Antony Balch describes the process of putting together the disparate pieces of the film The Cut-Ups) over and over again brings to mind the Dianetics of L. Ron Hubbard and his theory of the Engram, which stresses repetition to dissolve ideas that block mental or emotional progress. In this case, the progress is adopting the ability to see and think in images, without words. This idea is taken to greater lengths in other “Abstracts.”

“Abstract,” Intrepid 14, 1969

This “Abstract” makes up the final Penny Arcade Peep Show chapter of The Wild Boys, and is likely to be the most familiar one. It is mostly based in an ancient Middle Eastern setting and describes the assassins of Alamout and their leader Hassan I Sabbah. The longest section, set in the Persian city of Resht in 1023, develops into a story about an assassin from Alamout, disguised as a gardener, who waits 10 years to carry out his mission to kill an army general who has been searching for Hassan I Sabbah. Burroughs’ alter-ego Audrey also appears in this “Abstract”, which ties it to The Wild Boys. However, much of the content in the piece has little to do with the general themes found in the book.

“Abstract,” Fruit Cup, No. 0 (1969)

This “Abstract” appears in The Burroughs File and may already be familiar to readers. In some ways, it is more of an essay than a fractured narrative like the other “Abstracts.” Instructions for disrupting media and power centers are outlined, echoing some of the ideas of Burroughs’ essay The Electronic Generation (a postscript of which follows this “Abstract” in both Fruit Cup and The Burroughs File). As in the Lip “Abstracts”, scientists are identified as callous and unfeeling, almost robot-like. “Finally a scientist is making interferon with one hand and malignant hepatitis with the other.” Newspapers are also singled out as prophets of doom, creating the news they report by “reporting” on it before it happens. They are responsible for the events they describe, says Burroughs. Images of horror and destruction are listed as examples of what newspapers can create through the use of the Word. This “Abstract” is somewhat more clinical than the others. It is similar to the first of the Lip pieces in that it approaches its subject more clinically than the strong narrative approach of Best & Company piece.

“Abstract,” Best & Company, 1969

Structurally, this “Abstract” contains both narrative and colorless prose used in juxtaposition. This is unusual, an obvious continuation of the overall experiment. Burroughs seems to have defined two types of “Abstract” and then attempted a combination of the two in this instance. This is the most narrative-driven of the “Abstracts.” It contains a long section based in an ancient Mayan civilization, a familiar theme in Burroughs’ novels. A storyline is developed quickly, concerning the workers overthrowing the priests, who go about arrayed in golden centipede and crab suits. The workers refuse to continue working and burn the codices of the priests, eliminating their power of control. It also contains a familiar passage about how the Wild Boys grow new boys by using a small chunk of flesh from another boy. They have no names or navels, getting rid of the need for identity. Even among the more austere sections in the beginning there are some beautiful passages (“God points with index finger of left hand. The youth dies. A rose bush grows from his body.”). These are almost poetic when compared with the stark language of the other “Abstracts”.

“Abstract” 1 & 2, Lip, 1969

“Abstract,” Mikrokosmos, 1969

This short piece is terse, concise, and utilizes colorless prose more than other “Abstracts.” It contrasts two opposing images, in a method taken from Hubbard again, using a negative image against a positive one. Audrey sees films on the four screens before him. In each section, a barrage of varied images is presented to the reader, then the soothing other side of the coin is revealed in the opposing image. One set of films speeds up while the second set slows down. One man at his desk works furiously while the man beside him does almost nothing. Image is juxtaposed with image to see both sides of a question, pointing the way towards any number of other possibilities, the consummate Burroughsian option. As we will see in other “Abstracts”, the piece ends on a fading color, this time white light, highlighting its visual nature over verbal.

It is easy enough to say what the “Abstracts” are. It is clear that they are the overflow of Burroughs’ work on The Wild Boys and one of his many attempts at exploring different perspectives in his own writing. (There is only one “Abstract”-like part in Port of Saints. See pages 26 – 27. It is questionable whether this was once an “Abstract” or just Burroughs using the tempo of the “Abstract” for a few paragraphs. Exterminator! has no “Abstract”. Also see The Job pages 191 – 193 for an extended treatment of the idea behind the engram and the reactive mind in a very “Abstract”-like format.) The larger question, however, is why Burroughs bothered with them at all? Why include them as a consistent theme in The Wild Boys? They have an almost confusing effect, stuck in the middle of the text, jarring the reader out of the relatively straight narrative, a form to which Burroughs was returning at that point in his career. They do not greatly add to the story, nor do they offer more information about the Wild Boys.

Strangely, however, they do provide a consistency to The Wild Boys which it might lack if they were not included. Barely a novel, the book was made from some of the same material as Exterminator! and Port of Saints. Without the Penny Arcade Peep Show chapters to constitute an odd backbone for The Wild Boys, it is likely that the book would seem as fractured as Port of Saints, but with the disparate feel of Exterminator! due to the fact that included pieces are basically not connected in any real way. Audrey, the principle character of The Wild Boys, does recur throughout the book, but he is not a more prominent character than any of the others until late in the book. Only as the novel ends does the repeated mentioning of the Wild Boys as urban guerilla groups of young boys begin to take shape.

The “Abstracts” are important to The Wild Boys, but also as individual pieces in themselves, because they mark an important point in Burroughs’ work. At this time he was moving away from the cut-ups that defined his early work of the 1960s and towards his somewhat unique version of straight narrative, while still maintaining the philosophical need to fracture language and explore new possibilities. The “Abstracts” are not cut-ups in terms of language, but they are in terms of form — specifically, the medium and language of film. The attempt to write the immediate image and push words from the mind of the reader through the use of words is in part a logical end to the progression of the cut-ups of the early half of the 1960s, which was explored through film as well as through writing. The “Abstracts” mark an important transitional phase between the early experimental work and what may be called the more or less straight narrative of the Red Night trilogy which would occupy Burroughs for most of the 1970s and 1980s.

A Text by William S. Burroughs

With an Introduction by Dave Teeuwen

In 1969 William Burroughs published seven short pieces titled “Abstract” and sent them out to various small-press literary magazines and underground newspapers. Throughout the 1960s Burroughs was extremely active with the alternative press. Bibliographies of his work show that he was published hundreds of times in that decade. The less formal and more daring nature of the underground press allowed Burroughs to perform verbal and visual experiments that larger publications would never stand still for. It appears there was little editing of his work by these publications, who were happy just to have a submission from the renowned writer. In essence, the small press and underground newspapers served as a public laboratory for Burroughs’ experiments. This seems fitting given the lack of payment for his work (in most cases).

Burroughs’ style of experimentation is exacting and detailed, while not ignoring the utility of the random happening. He attempts to uncover all angles of a new form or method, seeing just how far the possibilities can be extended. The “Abstract” experiments use old tropes to explore new ideas. Characters familiar from other texts return and are placed in new situations, where they take on different or added significance. For instance, Audrey outside of the context of The Wild Boys comes across differently in the disparate nature of the “Abstracts” than when you read about that character in a continuous series of montages. By mixing and cutting up old ideas, putting them in new frames of reference to see what emerges, Burroughs shows that the writing process itself is often as important as the content.

The “Abstracts” are easily recognizable as being in the same format as the Penny Arcade Peep Show pieces interspersed throughout the novel The Wild Boys. As with all of Burroughs’ novels up to this point, he appears to have used the small press as his makeshift laboratory. He typically wrote many versions of an experiment and then sent out the pieces he didn’t intend to use in the novel, presumably to acclimatize his fans to the coming novel. (This is true, of course for five of the “Abstract” pieces. The “Abstract” that appears in Intrepid 14 was also used as one of the Peep Shows in The Wild Boys. The “Abstract” from Klacto/23 International appears in a truncated form in that book as well. Though it came much later, the Fruit Cup “Abstract” was also reprinted The Burroughs File in the mid-1980s.) It was an effective tool, at the time, and Burroughs especially used it for the books he published in the early 1970s.

By the time the “Abstracts” were written, Burroughs had already experimented with publishing continuous and connected ideas in multiple small press publications. It is unlikely that the journals receiving the pieces knew of the other similar material being sent out for publication, probably at about the same time as the piece they were receiving. A number of texts about Dutch Schultz were published in this same manner, connected mostly by content, though the actual words of Dutch Schultz are always present as an anchor in terms of form. Scientology also gets a thorough treatment at this time, usually in the form of an indicting essay.

The seven “Abstracts” of 1969 share elements of form and content. They are visual pieces, hinting at Burroughs’ experiments with the film script (language describing an always visual end product) and the way a film script is a kind of cut-up by its very nature. More importantly for Burroughs, however, film allowed an immediacy and directness that writing lacked. As he said in a review of Brion Gysin’s book The Process, “Unless writing can bring to the page the immediate impact of film, it may well cease to exist as a genre.” The “Abstracts” are immediate writing, writing about the present. 

They lightly touch on a variety of subjects familiar to readers of Burroughs’ 1960s work, using a more mature, controlled version of the cut-up than is seen in material of the early 1960s. The majority of the “Abstracts” draw on the pre-Wild Boys material coming out of that book’s preparation. Audrey, Burroughs’ alter-ego in The Wild Boys, Port of Saints and Exterminator, appears numerous times. The familiar scenes of cold, fact-hardened scientists and doctors with no apparent human feeling also appear, as do continuous South and Central American narrative scenes.

Lip, a one-off small-press journal published out of Palo Alto by artist Jerry Youdelman (with editing help from underground comic artist George DiCaprio and Noe Goldwasser), was the only small-press publication to publish two “Abstracts” at the same time. All other publications were given a single “Abstract” (though, in the early 1970s, a few more original pieces were published and some of the 1969 ones were reprinted in different journals and underground newspapers). It is interesting, but not unusual, that Burroughs would willingly publish in a journal that disappeared so quickly. This earned him a reputation for being generous with his work among the small-press journals of the time.

The two Lip “Abstracts” bring out some consistent Burroughsian themes of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The structure of each is essentially that of a covert Engram audit, a process Burroughs knew well by 1969. In 1968 he had undergone a full audit with the London Scientologists, and though he didn’t trust their adoration for L. Ron Hubbard, he did find the audit process useful (he famously owned his own E-meter), recommending it to friends.

The first of the two “Abstracts” attempts to rid the reactive mind of all negativity, anger and disgust by bombarding it with images of war, fear, embarrassment and disappointment. With Dianetics, Hubbard postulated that constant repetition of negative or frightening words and phrases would render a person’s thoughts harmless, causing the fear or negative reactions in the mind to be negated. The reactive mind is the mind that has not been conditioned to ignore or clear these thoughts from the psyche. It is the subconscious, reactionary part of the brain that you cannot control. As Burroughs says in The Job, “The Reactive Mind consists of goals so repulsive or frightening to the subject that he completely reacts against them and it is precisely this reaction that keeps these goals in operation.”

One after another, the images are presented, tied together by a common theme of horror by naming the “Abstract” itself as the reactive mind. Burroughs then ties it to the Word Virus, one of his more famous concepts. The stated purpose of the “Abstract” is itself to “Destroy all minds,” perhaps through the repetition of horror imagery, clearing and destroying at the same time. It ends with an odd scene of the marriage of two Gods, one male, one female. The female God causes the universe to fade into blackness.

The second “Abstract” is reminiscent of the method employed by Burroughs and Antony Balch in the film Bill and Tony. He creates a scene and then immediately juxtaposes it to another, opposite scene. In most cases these are scenes of social embarrassment or public disgust against an outcast figure in society (the Beatnik, the junky, the faggot — all the familiar Burroughsian stock characters), similar to the first “Abstract.” In his usual fashion, Burroughs does not spare the reader by using the more polite term or image; he embraces the hated image, following Hubbard’s directions carefully, clearing / destroying the mind. For instance, the efficient Swedish workers do everything “right now,” but Burroughs equally accepts the stereotyped image of the lazy, singing Mexican with a guitar who does no work at all. As with the first “Abstract,” the piece ends with an image of exaggerated colour fading to black, this time the red stop-light face of hate that disintegrates into darkness. 

The Lip “Abstracts” stand out among the rest of the “Abstract” collection as they are more instructional and more spare, despite presenting images that realize both grand and small scales. Only the shorter, even more terse “Abstract” sent to the Wichita, Kansas journal Mikrokosmos compares (it is most similar to the second of the Lip “Abstracts” in its style, presenting one idea and then the opposite of it in quick succession). The other “Abstracts” leave more room for narrative and even, to some degree, character development. 

The Lip “Abstracts” are examples of the power of clearing the reactive mind. The language encourages the reader to embrace both sides of every situation, to see with two minds at once. This is reminiscent of his rejection of the the polarizing effects of Aristotelian, either / or approaches to language as described by Korzybski in Science and Sanity, a book Burroughs recommended as mandatory reading for all college students even late into his life. With their instructional tone, the Lip “Abstracts” are dramatic demonstrations to be used for escaping this polar way of thinking, as well as providing a kind of back-bone to the randomness of The Wild Boys. They show that, as always, Burroughs creates art that is meant to be used for confrontation and exploration.

A Bibliography of Texts titled “Abstract”

Best & Company (1969)

Fruit Cup, No. 0 (1969)

Intrepid, No. 14/15 (Fall/Winter 1969/1970)

Lip, (Fall 1969)

Klacto/23 International, [No. 1] (17 September 1899 [sic; i.e., 1969])

Mikrokosmos, No. 14 (1969)

NOLA Express, No. 42 (7–20 November 1969; reprint of Klacto/23)

Ginger Snaps, [No. 1] (March 1972; reprint of Best & Company)

Out of Sight, No. 44 (14 February 1972)

Via/Structure Implicit and Explicit, No. 2 (1973; reprint of Intrepid).

“Abstract” 1 and 2 in Lip (1969)

Lip 1
Front Cover

Lip 1
Back Cover

Lip 1
Table of Contents

Lip 1
“Abstract” 1, Page 1

Lip 1
“Abstract” 1, Page 2

Lip 1
“Abstract” 2, Page 3

Lip 1
“Abstract” 2, Page 4