by Tom Congalton

Tom Congalton of Between the Covers replies to Jed Birmingham’s essay “The Great Mimeograph Revolution.”

This article is very interesting and perhaps ironically, very helpful to me, particularly as regards the methods of viewing and marketing mimeos. I think you do recognize that if we adopt your approach to appreciating mimeos, as art, rather than as literature, that in some ways you are “selling us the rope that we’ll use to hang you” (or at least raise the prices, making your collecting efforts more difficult — but also increasing the value of your collection — always the double-edged sword of collecting) and it is brave and honest that you make to understand the market and what drives it.

I realize that we (Between the Covers) start from a more static book collecting viewpoint, but as you note, this subject is just a small part of our business, and one that we haven’t had, and don’t have the luxury of studying in the same detail as you do. I appreciate the strides that you and others have made in developing this market, and can only characterize my own status in the market at this late date as an interloper.

You might have noted very few Fuck Yous and no C Journals in the catalogue, which I agree are among the most interesting publications of this genre. That’s because we pretty much sell all that we can get before they see the light of day. We are not completely uncognizant of the art elements of mimeos, and I think you may have interpreted Matt’s statement about “…covers both achingly beautiful and wonderfully wretched” as not acknowledging that, while I think it did rather the opposite.

Our mimeos mostly didn’t come in runs, so we sold them individually. If we had complete runs, we sold them as such, and frankly we don’t have time to patiently accumulate runs. I have a large staff and payroll, and I’m not going to live forever. Also, in effect the fact that Bill Reese “sell runs” argument contradicts the “art” argument. Selling runs, while helpful and more economical for the collector, doesn’t display much appreciation of the contents or focus attention on the artistic elements of the mimeos, which our individual issue approach does, albeit not as much as you indicate we should (and which, as I said, was necessitated by circumstances more than choice).

I understand the “full run as art” argument. And while it is a valid argument, it is an after-the-fact, and in some ways artificial, argument. It is not necessarily true that most mimeos were issued as a totality. In fact in most cases I imagine, rather the opposite was true. They may well represent a cohesive sensibility, but they seem to have been issued based on a white-hot impulse and compulsion to publish immediately, and indeed I find that immediacy to be the charm of many of these mags: the make-do nature of some of them. In some sense this was well expressed as the “wonderfully wretched” element of Matt’s comment.

That as a whole they may represent something greater than the sum of their parts is absolutely true. The argument that it isn’t ethical or intellectually valid to sell these things separately, which were originally and mostly sold separately, is not.

That they “should”, as opposes to “could” be sold as complete runs ignores that. And to harken back to the tired old bibliographical model, it’s like saying that you can’t sell Hemingway first editions individually, because it is ignoring the comprehensive sensibility of the author, even though they were issued separately.

You “could” sell a complete collection of Hemingway first editions if you knew a millionaire or two, but “should” you? Not necessarily. In fact I rather doubt it.

Assuming you are missing an issue of Floating Bear, wouldn’t you rather have the opportunity to buy that issue, as opposed to having to buy the whole run all over again, with the commensurately greater cost (especially taking into account what you consider the new BTC pricing paradigm)?

The “mags as art” is a cool and valid concept and may be good marketing, as well, but it is mostly very much a constructed argument, promulgated by collectors and scholars, not necessarily one that was envisioned or intended by the creators, or that has to be conformed to by the sellers. I accept the criticism that they “could” have been more creatively marketed by us, but not the argument that they “should” have been.

This leads to part two, which I am not in any way personally offended by, but which could be viewed as offensive if one were of a more sensitive nature or if one were to apply it to the general practices of the rare book trade. That is your statement in reference to selling individual mags: “I liken this to those booksellers who detach maps, prints and plates from a book and sell them piecemeal to maximize profit.”

As a rhetorical trope I accept it. But “breakers” are traditionally those who remove something from a whole, which has intended to be bound together by its creator. This is a highly controversial practice and generally considered unethical in the trade. The same cannot be said of these mags. 

They are seldom found in complete runs in the wild, at least in my experience, and say what you will, I’ve spent more than 40 years rummaging in bookstores, libraries, and houses. Rarely does one find a complete run, unless the mag only lasted for 1 or 2 or 3 issues.

Selling things that were issued as separate and discrete objects over an extended period of time, is not at all the same as selling something that was issued together in the same binding, at the same time, and with the expressed purpose of being considered as a whole. If all issues of Floating Bear were mailed and bound together, and then broken apart, I would agree with your analogy, otherwise I think it is a specious argument.

 At any rate, very interesting and thank you for your attention to the catalogue. We’ll continue to assault the bastions, and be aware, we are very adaptable!

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

A library is a living organism. I consider my book collection a beneficial and benevolent version of the Burroughsian virus. The books on my shelves are fluid, mutating, multiplying. After close to twenty years of intense collecting, it has become obvious as I scan the bookshelves that I am no longer strictly a William Burroughs collector. Five, ten years ago the centerpiece of my collection was the purple and white poppy that bloomed in the bottom of the dropper: the Olympia Naked Lunch. Now I have bouquet of Fuck Yous. In collecting a single author, you tend to focus on the A titles, but as time passes, the real gold turns up in magazines, ephemera, and letters. Anybody with financial resources can right this minute get a hold of pristine copies of the Grove Press cut-up trilogy, but it takes additional patience and persistence to get and locate a copy of the Olympia Press Soft Machine inscribed by Burroughs and Girodias, an Insect Trust Gazette #2, an Olympia Press catalog, or a Burroughs letter of import. One way to build a valuable and important collection is finding new veins in what threatens to be an exhausted mine. Truly hard-to-find material remains un-possessed and unprocessed by the academic mill and the reading public at large.  

Or you can dig out less hard to locate raw material, which remains un-assessed, and make a case for its value. Through my interest in Burroughs, I have become a collector of the underappreciated publications of the Mimeo Revolution. Increasingly my need for Burroughs material has offset into an addiction for mimeos and little mags. It is not surprising that my possibly deluded belief that Burroughs is the epicenter of post-WWII American literature has transformed into a belief that the publications of the Mimeo Revolution provide the secret history to unlocking the mysteries of that same period. As with my fascination with Burroughs, I have lost all objectivity when considering the importance of the Mimeo Revolution. The fringe has taken over the center. Things fall apart. All is in Fluxus.

So forgive me if you were one of the many people I frantically phoned or emailed about Between the Covers‘ latest catalog No. 164: The Great Mimeograph Revolution. In my anticipation I did not know if the sky was falling or if I had gone to heaven. One thing is certain; I sincerely thought this catalog was going to be one of the most important rare book catalogs of all time. Pathetic but true. Shades of Chicken Little Mag to be sure. Tom Congalton, owner of BTC, provided a voice of reason, suggesting to me that this catalog, while up to the standards that one would expect from a premier dealer like BTC, was not as revolutionary as its subject. Little magazines are C items, not A list. For collectors and dealers in modern firsts, the world still revolves around hardcover first editions printed by the corporate press. Matt Histand, who put the catalog together, writes

A few years ago we purchased a collection that contained a sizable number of mimeograph and literary magazines. We naturally did what any good bookseller would do. We pulled out the books and ignored the rest.

There is a general air of self-deprecation about the catalog:

I showed some interest and was promoted to “Head of the Mimeos.” (Don”t be too impressed, in the last week alone I”ve been promoted to “Head of Wrestling Photos,” “Head of Reference Guides,” and, my favorite, “Head of Children’s Books about Ducks.”).

This is, of course, in part, the Between the Cover trademark style, but as far as the general book collecting community is concerned, collecting the publications of the Mimeo Revolution is still a fake sport, a bibliographic curiosity, and child’s play. But I was having none of it. To my mind this catalog was going to be a game-changer forever altering how the publications of the Mimeograph Revolution were marketed and collected.

When the catalog arrived and I took a deep breath and cleared my mind of all the hopes and hype I had created, I realized that I had overreacted. But can you blame me? I am one of those obsessives who searches Abebooks and Via Libri five, ten times a day for certain key terms and titles relating to the Mimeo Revolution monitoring trends and new arrivals. I call dealers and fellow collectors every day looking for scores and exchanging gossip. I edit a little magazine about little magazines for god’s sake. I am in so deep that it is understandable that I would make a Black Mountain out of an Ant’s Fore Foot. In fact, can you blame me for predicting the apocalypse or the ascension (depending on how you look at it) given that, the day before the catalog arrived, BTC posted to Abebooks a copy of Floating Bear for $750, a copy of My Own Mag for $200, and a copy of Tish for $125? Naturally it followed that Catalog No. 164 was going to usher in a true mimeo revolution.

Okay, so I got all hot and bothered over nothing, but let’s take another Olsonian breath and look at this Between the Cover catalog closely for what it tells us about the State of the Union on the current perception and marketing of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution. I am only going to focus on true mimeos in what follows. As in Clay and Phillips’ A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, BTC takes a broad view of the Mimeo Revolution. As such, true mimeos, like the early Floating Bears and My Own Mags, mingle with offset and letterpress publications, like those of Auerhahn Press and White Rabbit. This broad view of the Mimeo Revolution has become standard operating procedure. But remember not even half of the publications of the so-called Mimeo Revolution were actually mimeos and even canonical mimeos, like Floating Bear and Lines, have offset elements. All that said, let’s face it. What really matters about Catalog No. 164 is the marketing of a mimeo icon: Diane Di Prima and Leroi Jones’s Floating Bear.  

It is here that Congalton and Histand make a play to completely change the game. If you happen to collect modern first book catalogs from the past 30+ years like I do (again sad but true, obsession has no bounds), you have a firm base for what the historical values of various magazines are. Actually, Floating Bear is an interesting case. Early on, Floating Bear was highly sought by collectors. By the early 1970s, certain issues, like Number 24, had gained a reputation as being impossible to find, and the demand for complete runs was enough to reprint the magazine in 1973 in a complete edition with a Di Prima introduction. Compared to other mags, single issues of Floating Bear were expensive, $20-$25 per issue. But by and large, the value stagnated at that price point for decades. As a Burroughs collector, Issues 5 and 9 were maybe a bit more, call it $50. The first two issues were always tough to find and 24 was a holy grail — in my experience, the first two issues are far tougher to get than the legendary 24 — so they were somewhere in the three figures. But as a general rule, the going rate for the core issues of Floating Bear was around $30. As Congalton and Histand rightly sensed, the time is ripe for a reassessment of the value (monetary and otherwise) of Floating Bear.

Catalog No. 164 boldly resets the paradigm. Issues 5 and 9 are now $400 and $500, respectively. Other issues are around $200 and higher. BTC has 29 issues available and the average price is $225 per issue (making it $8300 for the partial run), a nine fold increase per issue on average. How is this possible? Is this justified? Recently on Mimeo Mimeo and RealityStudio, I have been arguing for just such a revision in how we look at mimeos, particularly Floating Bear. This provides some ammunition for BTC’s shoot-the-moon prices. It is at this point that my passion as a scholar of the Mimeo Revolution conflicts with my goals as a collector. I run the risk of pricing myself clear out of my area of greatest interest. I’ll take that risk because the potential gains in intellectual capital outweigh the financial hardships.

As I have argued, mailing labels, stamps, envelopes and other metadata are crucial to an appreciation and study of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution. In collecting mimeos, you do not want a clean, pristine copy. I would argue that you want a mimeo that has been in circulation because it is at that point that it comes alive. It is in these individual life stories that the value, financial and academic, lies. Histand tries to have it both ways. In his descriptions of certain issues of Floating Bear he stresses the pristine nature of certain copies as a selling point: “This copy is remarkably pristine with no writing, stamp or label.” Yet he also writes:

The so-called “newsletter” was unique among the flood of mimeographs because it was distributed via mailing list that consisted of a closed group of poets, artists, bookshop owners, reviewers, and critics. Most copies were hand addressed or affixed with a mailing label and stamp as well as folded for mailing, which while detrimental to its already delicate condition, provides an interesting record of its reader base.

The schizophrenia results from the fact that Histand is addressing two different audiences for mimeo material. This fetish of condition appeals to traditional first edition, high-spot collectors. These are the guys (the sexism here is intended, as the boy’s club nature of all facets of the rare book industry is yet another crisis that needs to be addressed) who collect an author and want magazine appearances in order to gather first appearances of a poem or story, or to accumulate a complete archive of a writer’s bibliography. Looking over Catalog No. 164, this is really the audience that BTC is addressing. “[Little mags] contain little-known first published appearances, overlooked poems and stories, and covers both achingly beautiful and wonderfully wretched.” We will get to the second (and more important) half of the above sentence later, but, generally, the collecting of single issues of little mags, which contain a prized author, is how little mag collections have been built.  

This is what Nelson Lyon did with his Burroughs collection, which went under the hammer in 1999. He got hold of canonical little mags, like Floating Bear 5 and 9 and Black Mountain Review 7 — are certain little mags iconic before Burroughs’ appearance or did Burroughs make them so? — solely because they were listed in Maynard & Miles. Lyon’s savvy spin was that he got the all the magazines signed. As a general rule, first editions are more likely to be signed than obscure magazines. Condition is crucial here as in effect each little mag is treated as an A item type high spot.

But mimeo is a different animal from a first edition by a major publisher. Histand and Congalton realize this since they price Floating Bear 17 and 18, which have mailing labels to John Wieners, at $550 apiece. As a mimeo collector, you do not want pristine copies. As I have been arguing, mailing labels on mimeos are the equivalent of association copies. Keep in mind Ken Lopez’s essay on the value of such copies. Even in hardcovers, association copies tell a story and thus are more valuable than clean copies, or even flat-signed copies. This is doubly so in mimeo, which is all about community and communication. (See this related discussion on bookstores and community.)

Histand’s description makes the link between Floating Bear and Measure, Wiener’s short-lived little mag out of Boston. The mailing label highlights the existence of a mimeo network between Boston and New York. Issues 17 and 18 were sent to Wieners in 1962. This was around the time of the publication of the third and last issue of Measure. Soon after, Wiener would move to the Lower East Side and live with Herbert Huncke. Quite possibly these issues of Floating Bear encouraged Wieners to move to New York City to be a part of the burgeoning scene there.  

Mailing labels, stamps, and envelopes also establish connections and timelines, which are crucial for academic research. Take the copies of Floating Bear mailed to Jack Kerouac, which were unfortunately pulled prior to sale at a major auction house earlier this year, thus denying a valuable price point in considering mailing labels as association copies. The connection between Floating Bear and Kerouac provides much material for academic study. In the early 1960s, Kerouac attempted to make his escape from the New York scene, but as these issues of Floating Bear show, he was still considered enough of an insider and a literary player to be included on Floating Bear‘s mailing list. (Kerouac also received a copy of Wallace Berman’s Semina thanks to Michael McClure).

Interestingly Kerouac is on the mailing list but he did not contribute to the early issues of the magazine. This highlights the fact that Kerouac shunned the little magazine community as an outlet for his work and distrusted its motives. For example, the Paris Review interview with Kerouac records that he felt Ron Padgett used Kerouac’s notoriety to promote the first issue of The White Dove Review. According to Kerouac, once the Review was established Padgett had no use for Kerouac. This reveals much about Kerouac’s attitude towards his literary peers and how he viewed himself in the literary community. It also opens up discussion about Kerouac’s stance on collaboration, experimentation, and the marketplace. Kerouac was too paranoid to buy into the communal aspects of the Mimeo Revolution. He preferred to keep relationships with publishers professional and to write for cash. To my mind his work suffered for it. Kerouac could have freely experimented as a soldier in the Mimeo Revolution instead of fighting tooth and nail with the major publishers over contracts and edits, and eventually compromising. Kerouac had a position of power in the little mag scene but he could not get over his feelings of being manipulated. Additionally it could be argued that if Kerouac had maintained his links to the Lower East Side scene he would have remained not only much more relevant creatively but also less isolated physically and mentally. The mailing labels of Floating Bear tell this story.

And that brings us to the most controversial item in the entire catalog. Issue 26 of Floating Bear, edited by Billy Name (then Linich) and mailed to Gerard Malanga priced at $750. On one level this is a masterstroke. Never has Issue 26 been considered as a Warhol piece. Unfortunately, the item description says nothing of the issue’s links to Wallace Berman and his Circle and Ray Johnson and correspondence art. (The examination of where mailed mimeos and mailing labels stand in relation to the mail art movement remains to be explored fully). Yet the contents of the issue and the mailing label make all these connections obvious. Here we see the monetary benefits of considering mailing labels as association copies. But there is an academic value as well that is not featured in the catalog description. Academic capital generates monetary capital. For the publications of the Mimeo Revolution to go up in price, you have to establish their academic value. Why would an institution want this copy? You cannot list this item for $750 without mentioning Reva Wolf’s pioneering work on Warhol and gossip, which firmly established the importance of Floating Bear, as well as C and Fuck You, in terms of the Warhol Circle. Wolf focuses on Issue 27 by comparing “Billy Linich’s Party” with the film Haircut, but Issue 26 with the mailing label to Malanga becomes academically significant for Warhol studies as well. The contents also suggest cross-pollination between Wallace Berman, Ray Johnson, and Warhol.

Such single issues with their associations are great but the real academic and financial value of little mags lies in complete runs. Yet clearly, BTC addresses first edition book collectors, not magazine collectors, as “any good bookseller would do.” Histand writes, “What’s more, many of these mimeos are next to impossible to find, with print runs that exist in the low hundreds, making complete runs impossible to assemble.” Small print runs certainly play into the “impossible” nature of assembling complete runs, but so does the manner in which booksellers, like BTC, market little mags. Unfortunately most dealers choose to sell them individually. I liken this to those booksellers who detach maps, prints and plates from a book and sell them piecemeal to maximize profit. This is one of the major differences between the BTC and the monumental William Reese periodical catalogs. The Reese catalogs packaged magazines together even if the run was incomplete, so collectors could get a jump on a complete run and potentially speculate on a future score that depended on the collector’s persistence and patience. 

The Reese method of selling (and collecting) has fallen out of favor unless a dealer has already assembled a complete run. The motivation is a quick turnaround. It seems that dealers and collectors are less likely to spend the time to build a complete run, concentrating instead on single issues. This is a by-product of the internet marketplace. Buyers want a book right away and complete runs take too much time and effort to build. Similarly sellers rush to post books to the internet and spend less time building a cohesive and coherent catalog of material. The fine art of waiting has disappeared. As with the real estate market, there is a flip-this-book mentality, instead of developing markets, cultivating collectors, and slowly growing inventory.  

But even if you collect a single author, complete runs of magazines are, to my mind, an essential part such a collection. For example with a complete run, you can study when an author appeared in the history of the magazine. Take Burroughs and Kulchur. His non-presence in the later issues speaks as much as his early appearances in Issue 1 and 3 by highlighting the editorial shift in the magazine from Marc Schliefer to Lita Hornick. The same holds true for Floating Bear as that magazine became more Left Coast than Lower East Side. In addition, with a complete run you can see the company an author keeps. Yes, Burroughs appears in Black Mountain No. 7, along with other Beats. But what is crucial is that people like Charles Olson, Franz Kline, and Robert Duncan appeared in earlier issues. Thus Burroughs is not just grouped with the Beats of Issue 7; he is a peer of the New York School painters and Black Mountain writers.  

Back in 1999, as I looked over the Nelson Lyon catalog, it hit me that the most interesting and valuable items were the complete runs of magazines that he happened to compile. His runs of Cleft, Bulletin from Nothing, and The Marijuana Newsletter were easy to accumulate, given the fact that each run was only two issues. But for those magazines with longer runs, like Floating Bear and Black Mountain Review, Lyon only collected the issues that contained Burroughs. It is a shame and short-sighted. Proof of this is the fact that the crown jewel of the entire catalog was the complete run of My Own Mag with each issue signed by Burroughs. In this case, Lyon acquired and created not only a unique item desired by collectors but also a difficult to assemble item of extreme importance to scholars.

“[Mimeos] contain little-known first published appearances, overlooked poems and stories, and covers both achingly beautiful and wonderfully wretched.” There are two ways of looking as mimeo. One is in line with the traditional first edition market. The other is the wave of the future: mimeo as a work of art. BTC sees mimeo through the lens of the former not the latter. It just so happens that the same day I received the BTC catalog, I received Kyle Schlesinger’s Poems and Pictures catalog for an exhibition opening at the Center for the Book Arts in New York City. This is the future (or present) of the reception of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution. Schlesinger looks at the publications of the Mimeo Revolution in terms of collaboration between writers and artists, juxtaposition of image and text, and experimentation in both poetics and printing. The publications of the Mimeo Revolution

explore fundamental relationships between: form and content; seeing and reading; writing and drawing; and the extraordinary occasions when these things and activities fuse, introducing a third element.

Burroughs’ interest in participating in the Mimeo Revolution becomes clear. Philip Aarons makes the same argument throughout In Numbers: Serial Publications by Artists. Currently in the world of alternative art and printing, the publications of the Mimeo Revolution are not being viewed as ugly step-daughters but as belles of the ball. Mimeo as art object is the future of mimeo marketing. Interestingly BTC is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this development. As Catalog No. 164, which mimics the look and feel of a mimeo, makes clear, they realize the fetish associated with the medium. House illustrator Tom Bloom also brings a strong vision of design and branding to BTC’s catalog, further highlighting their unique position to understand mimeo as art and design.

So why the focus on Clay and Phillips’ A Secret Location on the Lower East Side from the very first entry of the catalog? Schlesinger’s catalog and Aarons’ book will become the Roth 101 for publications of the Mimeo Revolution just as Secret Location has. Nowhere in the entire BTC catalog is In Numbers mentioned nor is there reference to artist’s books as historicized and theorized by Johanna Drucker and others. Such cross-references with the world of art are crucial to establishing the importance and value of Mimeo Revolution publications. Two mimeos have separated themselves from the rest of the pack: C: A Journal of Poetry and Fuck You, a magazine of the arts. It is no coincidence that both magazines have a link to Andy Warhol (and in the case of C with Joe Brainard), which sets them off as art objects. The Ed Sanders Glyph show at The Arm in Brooklyn took the radical and refreshing view of Sanders as a visual artist. Thus Fuck You takes Berman’s Semina as a peer. Aarons did not pull the trigger on featuring Fuck You in his canon of serial publications, but he seriously thought about it. For Aarons and Schlesinger, C Comics serves as the case study of mimeo as art. This is a bit problematic since C Comics #2 is offset, but it is the thought that counts. The time is coming when the mimeo collaborations involving artists like Brainard, Guston, and Schneeman will be considered as artist multiples.  

My Own Mag should be at the front of the pack in this regard, and it deserved a spot in Aarons’ and Schlesinger’s surveys. With the possible exception of da levy (whose The Box Lunch is included in the BTC catalog and not marketed as a work of art), no other mimeographer challenged the medium as much as Jeff Nuttall. For years, My Own Mag has been a $75 magazine but BTC makes the play for $300 for early issues. They are preaching to the converted as far as I am concerned but they will never justify those prices within the standard Maynard & Miles marketing to Burroughs collectors and completists. Not only is My Own Mag the laboratory for the most experimental and radical writing of Burroughs’ career, it is also the apex of mimeo as art. In order to justify the increased value attributed to My Own Mag, you have to get away from bibliographic details, like the numbering of the issues, and focus on My Own Mag as a work of art in a multiple series, a collaboration between writer and artist, and a challenge to the form of the magazine and the technological limits of the mimeograph.

Histand writes, “[O]ur website description for each item includes a complete list of all contributors no matter how obscure or how numerous, with only a few exceptions.” I have visions of this becoming a valuable resource, the germ of a substantial digital bibliography of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution. The electronic equivalent of Christopher Harter’s Author Index to Little Magazines of the Mimeograph Revolution. Yet once again BTC reveals the rare book industry’s prevailing conservatism in viewing the Mimeo Revolution. There is too much focus on “writers” and “poem[s}.” For me the stars and value of the Mimeo Revolution lie elsewhere: artists, editors, and printers. I have developed a small Jack Spicer collection, but what drew me to those books was the printing and design of Graham Mackintosh. It is time that such “behind the scenes” work came to the forefront. I like to see the hand of the editor or printer as much as that of a poet or writer. I find myself increasingly collecting in this way. I enjoy Carl Weissner, Charley Plymell and Jan Herman as writers but what makes me really excited is their work as editors, publishers, and printers. I will never collect Robert Creeley or John Ashbery, but I eagerly seek out all the publications of Divers Press and magazines like Locus Solus and Art and Literature. I find it valuable and fascinating to read a Divers Press title or an issue of Art and Literature as a means to gain further appreciation and insight into Creeley’s and Ashbery’s poems. Schlesinger’s essay on Creeley’s typography shows how valuable such an approach can be. As far as personal taste, I do not appreciate the crystal goblet filled with fine wine; I’ll take a shot out of a Dixie cup. Sanders and Nuttall above all. Collecting the publications of the Mimeo Revolution is as much about presses, printers / designers, and artists as it is about poets, poems, stories, and writers.  

The modern first book trade is in a time of transition in terms of dealers and collectors. For one thing both are getting older, and, as I suggest above, some rigor mortis has set in, particularly in terms of how periodicals are sold, considered, collected, and appreciated. All this aside, I find myself returning again and again to the BTC site and this catalog, in particular. Why? Because increasingly BTC has the publications I desire. I might disagree with how the publications of the Mimeo Revolution are being collected and marketed, but there is no disagreeing with some of the selection. Where else are you going to get a City Lights broadside announcing a William Burroughs appearance that may or may not be hoax? What is clear is that BTC catalog No. 164 is no joke and that the collecting and selling of the publications of the Mimeo Revolution are on the threshold of becoming serious business.

Also see the reply by Tom Congalton of Between the Covers books.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Let’s start with Literary Days. Can you describe that book?

Literary Days is a 25-page 8.5×11 pamphlet edited by Ted Berrigan from two longer works — a novel called WHATS that I wrote in 1963 and a novel called Malgmo’s End that Ted and I wrote together. We wrote alternate chapters of Malgmo’s End, and what he did was put some of my chapters into Literary Days. Joe Brainard did the cover of Literary Days and also one or two illustrations, depending on which edition you find. As for WHATS, that was what I called a “psychic novel”, meaning it had a day-to-day psychological continuity, although the chapters featured different characters and settings. It was much like a series of dreams in that respect.

How did the book come to be published by Ted Berrigan and C Press?

For some reason, Ted liked my writing. The first thing he saw by me was a first-person novel called The Transfigured, which Lorenz Gude showed him in late 1961 or early 1962. He loved it, and we immediately became friends. In fact, I was welcomed into the “Tulsa circle”, so to speak, which at that time was headquartered in Ted’s apartment near Columbia University. 

By the time Ted started C Magazine, I was living in Vermont, and he wrote me saying I ought to come back to New York and join the fun. I did, and we immediately began Malgmo’s End. After he had published C Magazine for a while he wanted to do chapbooks and pamphlets, and so he put together Literary Days, which was the first C Press publication as I recall.

What did C Press mean to you as a young writer? How did C, a journal of poetry, relate to the other mimeos of the time, like Elephant, Fuck You or Lines?

It is hard to say. I remember those times as mostly being about freedom and having fun. As Lorenz Gude (who was the New York Poets’ unofficial photographer) has said, “you could be walking home at four in the morning having had an experience that at seven o’clock in the evening you had no idea you were going to have, and that happened regularly.” For Ted poetry was very much a social thing, a literal meeting of minds and hearts. For Ed Sanders it was a revolutionary thing, sticking it to the establishment, and so forth. Aram Saroyan came along later, with Lines. He moved down from Cambridge, as I recall. Lines was about the poetry itself. One could say a lot more about those days, of course, and people have. As young men, we were really trying to find out who we were and what was our mission in life. Ted knew what his mission was, and so he became a mentor to us.

Somehow William Burroughs got a copy of Literary Days. Were the two of you corresponding? Burroughs was corresponding with Ted Berrigan by 1963-1964. How did Burroughs get in the pages of C, a journal of poetry?

Ted put together a mailing list and sent out lots and lots of copies of C, free of charge. He probably got Burroughs’ address from Ginsberg, or maybe from Bob Wilson (Phoenix Bookshop). Burroughs loved to get stuff like that in the mail. He would read it thoroughly and get into correspondence with the people who sent him these mags and books. Apparently when he read Literary Days, something about it turned him on, for he immediately did a cut-up / intersection piece, combining it with his own work, and send that to Ted, who published it in C Magazine 9.

Can you briefly describe “Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch?”

Better than describe it, I can include it with this Q&A, because Ron Padgett just sent me a copy of it! [You can read "Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch" here. -- Ed.]

What was Burroughs’ reputation in New York at the time?

Wow. Burroughs was a god, of course. We were reading the Olympia Press editions of his works — Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, The Ticket that Exploded. These works were supposedly “banned in Boston,” but Ted discovered you could order copies by mail direct from Paris at a bookseller’s discount. 

Reading The Soft Machine (which is a cut-up work) we got that Bill had discovered a key to breaking the mental patterns that imprison most of us. Beyond that, I had a kind of mystical experience when I first read Naked Lunch. That is to say, I read the whole book in one afternoon and evening, and when I went to bed the book kept going, all night long! So I guess the version I “read” — including the dreams — was about three times longer than the published version!

By late 1964, Burroughs was in New York City. Berrigan met Burroughs shortly thereafter. What was the reaction in literary circles to Burroughs’ return to the US?

Well, as you probably know, Burroughs was greeted as the returning hero. He was a celebrated figure at that point, and as I recall Nova Express came out around that time and knocked everybody for a loop. We loved it. 

When Burroughs returned to America, he was first staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and people would make a pilgrimage to meet him there. Ted and I went to the Chelsea together, to meet Bill for the first time. As we entered the hotel, we ran into Terry Southern, who was just leaving. Terry had a glazed transported look on his face, as if he had just had an audience with the Pope… or maybe Jesus himself.

What was your interaction with Burroughs at this time? I have heard there was a planned illustrated Naked Lunch.

My idea of illustrating Naked Lunch came much later, around 1971 or 72. My interaction with Burroughs at that time (1964-65) was as a kid who looked up to him and found him extremely fascinating. He was a teacher.

I hear you have a draft memoir of your experiences with Burroughs. What is the status of that project? 

Yes, it is going to be a short book, about 150 pages. I have written quite a bit of it, but I won’t do any more until I find somebody such as a publisher who will pay me some money to finish it. 

Joe Brainard was working with Burroughs for an illustration for “St. Louis Return.” Have you seen that illustration? Were there any other collaborations with Burroughs going on at the time?

I hadn’t heard of the Brainard illustration. I asked Ron Padgett, and he hasn’t heard of it either. We would love to know more.

I don’t know what collaborations Burroughs was doing — he had so many friends, you know. I will tell you this, though, that in person he was a very strange man. I couldn’t imagine sitting with him in a room and working together on a literary piece. He was also using various drugs at that time, although not like his old heroin days. One day we went to visit him and he started ranting about some LSD that some hipsters had given him the day before. “I felt like my whole body was on fire!” he said. “It was one of the worst experiences of my life!” Burroughs told us he had taken apomorphine to bring himself back from the experience.

Can you describe The Naked Express? Who would have run off the single sheet copy that I have?

The Naked Express was a collage I did for Lines magazine. It is a tribute to Bill Burroughs, but there is nothing by him in it, unless there’s something I lifted. It wasn’t a collaboration…. Which reminds me of another story. One time I was having dinner with Burroughs and he was going on about how “your words don’t belong to you,” and things like that. So I said to him, “You mean I could publish an edition of Naked Lunch and put my name on the cover.” He snorted. “Of course! Barney Rosset would have a problem with it, but it would be o.k. with me!”

Did you attend Burroughs’ St. Valentine’s Day Reading? C 10 was issued that night. Was it distributed at the reading? Run off after the reading or in celebration of the reading?

No, I wasn’t at that reading. I think I was not even in New York at that time, so I can’t answer your question about C 10.

Same question for the other events of 1965. Whether you attended or not, what effect did Wynn Chamberlain’s party on April 23, 1965 (Burroughs read with Mack Thomas), Lester Persky’s 50 Beautiful People Party, Panna Grady’s party for Burroughs have on your circle?

I was at the Wynn Chamberlain event, and it was great. Bill had all these props that he was arranging for his reading. He had a hand-rolled cigar that he meant to light up and smoke til it got that great cone of ash that he liked, but he didn’t have anything with which to cut the tip off the cigar. So I whipped out a pocket knife I always carried and handed it over to him. He immediately made some dry crack about “you can always depend on a boy to carry a pocketknife,” or something like that. Unfortunately the pocketknife was quite dull and made a mess of his cigar, alas. It made me feel bad to disappoint “Uncle Bill” as we sometimes called him.

Did you read Burroughs’ interview with Conrad Knickerbocker in Paris Review 35? How did that change your impressions of Burroughs?

I didn’t read it at the time, but I read it many years later. It gives one the feeling of deja vu, because it is a compilation of things he was saying in conversation in 1964 and 1965. It is almost as if he is playing back a series of tapes of dinner conversations, word for word.

How did Time come about? Ron Padgett told me that he recreated an identical copy of the original manuscript (he even tracked down the same model of Burroughs’ typewriter) and the copies were offset from that.

Ted asked Burroughs for something he could publish as a chapbook, and Bill handed him the Time manuscript, which was already completed. Ron became the editor of the project, so I am sure Ron can tell you more about how it all came about than I can. But I do remember visiting Burroughs with Ron at Bill’s Canal Street loft. Some of that is in my book, including the time Bill tried to hypnotize me with Moroccan music so that he could get me into bed… But I’m not at all gay, so it was no-go. He didn’t seem to mind that I gave him the brush off. We just went on being friends, and when I entered a cloistered monastery a few months later, he used to send me postcards and Christmas cards.

Let me ask you something. What did you feel when you heard Burroughs’ voice opening the sixth season of The Sopranos? 

Tom Veitch Magazine

Covers of issues 1-4 of Tom Veitch Magazine, produced in San Francisco in 1970-1971.

Tom Veitch Magazine #1

Tom Veitch Magazine #2

Tom Veitch Magazine #3

Tom Veitch Magazine #4

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

I found this vaccine at the end of the junk line. I lived in one room in the Native Quarter of Tangier. I had not taken a bath in a year nor changed my clothes except to stick a needle every hour in the fibrous grey wooden flesh of terminal addiction. I never cleaned or dusted the room. Empty ampule boxes and garbage piled to the ceiling. Light and water long since turned off for non-payment. I did absolutely nothing. I could look at the end of my shoe for eight hours.

When the topic of Burroughs and apomorphine arises in drug histories and biographies, it most commonly deals with the fact that in 1956 Burroughs took the apomorphine cure under the supervision of Dr. John Yerbury Dent and emerged a man reborn. The story goes that only after Burroughs overcame his addiction could he begin in earnest the work of transforming his Word Horde into Naked Lunch. The accepted tale about Burroughs and apomorphine ignores the fact that Naked Lunch had a form before the cure (“The real novel is the letters to [Ginsberg]“) and that major sections of Naked Lunch like The Talking Asshole routine were written a full year before the cure. After 1956 the apomorphine experience provided Burroughs with an overarching framework for Naked Lunch, but this would be a road not taken. In addition the road to recovery, if Burroughs truly ever walked that path, was a long and winding road. In fact, as the Deposition makes clear but as critics have ignored, Burroughs took the cure more than once between 1956 and July 1959, the date of Naked Lunch‘s publication. By 1958, he was nearly, if not completely, hooked on paregoric and shortly after the publication of Naked Lunch he would be implicated in a drug ring. The actual cure was a difficult experience (“The cure itself was awful” Letter to Ginsberg May 8, 1956) with side effects that lingered over a year later despite Burroughs’ assurances in retrospect that the apomorphine cure was quick and non-invasive. Yet the myth that the apomorphine cure effectively ended Burroughs’ struggle with drugs and jumpstarted Naked Lunch persists. Burroughs encouraged the development of just such a cover story in interviews and elsewhere, most famously in “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” published as a preface to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch.

So what role did apomorphine play in this crucial period of development for Burroughs as a writer and individual? Why did Burroughs distort the facts regarding his experience with apomorphine, and why has that story remained unexamined for decades? Why has the “cure” in 1956 become the pivot on which Burroughs turned his life around? Why, however falsely, does the story of Naked Lunch begin at this point?

On one level, the development of this myth begins with Burroughs’ 1959 arrest on drug trafficking charges. Shortly after his arrest, Burroughs began work on the Deposition essay. In his letters of the period, Burroughs assured Ginsberg that the Deposition was sincere and represented his current beliefs on drugs and drug addiction.

“I am writing a short deposition with regard to Naked Lunch. This is essential for my own safety at this point: Naked Lunch is written to reveal the junk virus, the manner in which it operates, and in the manner in which it can be brought under control. This is no act. I mean it all the way. Get off that junk wagon, boys, it’s going down a three mile grade for the junk heap. I am off junk in sickness or in health so long as we both shall live.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 11, 1959)

The Deposition contains an account of the cure and describes the role of apomorphine as an antidote to the “Sickness.” Ginsberg felt the Deposition went too far and wrapped up Naked Lunch too neatly. He also doubted the Deposition’s sincerity. Reading the letters of the period, one gets the sense that Burroughs protested too much in defending the Deposition as an accurate, honest account of his true feelings. By 1991, Burroughs retracted his statement that he did not remember writing the notes that became Naked Lunch. The con appears to be on, but as Oliver Harris demonstrates in The Secret of Fascination, generations of critics have been willing marks parroting the Deposition into the critical record verbatim. In some cases, they have even misrepresented the Deposition, in which Burroughs admits to backsliding into addiction after the cure. Apomorphine was far from the miracle drug that Burroughs made it out to be — and, as we will see, he also left out a key component of the history of its use. It all suggests that Burroughs’ championing of apomorphine as an effective cure may have stemmed, at least on one level, from a desire to portray himself as drug-free and thereby stay out of jail.

But there is more to the story of apomorphine and to Burroughs’ insistence of being clean than simple legal expedience. Burroughs felt the need to be drug-free before his trouble with the law in late 1959. As the letters demonstrate, Burroughs realized he was on the road to terminal addiction by late 1955. The depths of Burroughs’ despair and desperation were no con. The trip to London to seek treatment with Dr. Dent was necessary on the level of survival.

Yet the need to be clean was also closely tied to Burroughs’ strong desire to be a successful author published by the Establishment, i.e. corporate publishers. The letters from the mid-1950s are full of references to Burroughs’ desire to gain mainstream acceptance as a writer. At this time, Burroughs associated writing with respectability and social acceptance. By becoming a writer, Burroughs could redeem himself (for the death of Joan, for being a poor father, for not supporting himself financially) and give himself a place in society. Writing was a means to conform, and Burroughs felt the need to fit in strongly. The image of the opium-addicted writer held an allure for Burroughs from an early age. As he struggled with the form and content of Naked Lunch, however, Burroughs’ drug addiction not only hampered his ability to write, it also symbolized his sick creativity and his inability to write straight narrative and commercially viable material. Apomorphine, as a means of curing his drug addiction, was thus a way for Burroughs to free himself to write. In a sense, kicking drugs was a way of going mainstream and being respectable. First, the cure would facilitate the act of writing and then possibly open the door to writing of a less sick and more popular nature.

Apomorphine tied into getting straight in another, less obvious manner. In the early days of the 20th century, apomorphine was used by doctors as part of a treatment to cure patients of their homosexuality. In Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell mentions this fact in passing and suggests that Burroughs would have been aware of this aspect of apomorphine’s history. Burroughs never discussed it. In the Deposition, Burroughs states that historically the only use for apomorphine was as an emetic for poisoning. Not true, and given the fact that Burroughs was briefly a medical student and that he was intensely interested in medical history, the assumption that Burroughs knew apomorphine’s full history is not far-fetched. Currently, apomorphine is being used to combat erectile dysfunction (Uprima). Clearly, there is a strong sexual aspect to apomorphine’s history and its side effects. Apomorphine’s sexual component coupled with withdrawal symptoms must be an intense shock to the system. Burroughs ignored these elements of apomorphine in his published writing on the subject, but not in his letters.

Immediately following the apomorphine cure in London in 1956, there are several references in Burroughs’ letters to changes in his sex drive. In his first letter after the cure, Burroughs writes, “The thought of sex with anyone gives me the horrors… Last night went to a ghastly queer party where I was pawed and propositioned by a 50-year-old Liberal MP. I told him, ‘I couldn’t sleep with Ganymede now, let alone you.’” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 8, 1956) A week later Burroughs reports to Ginsberg, “Still no interest in sex.” I am unaware if apomorphine was used by doctors as an aversion technique to combat homosexual impulses, but in Burroughs’ case the apomorphine experience did lead to a type of sexual conditioning. In the months after the cure, Burroughs’ sex drive returned as did his sexual activities with “boys.” However, as the letters show, a heterosexual element in his sexual make-up surfaced at this point. Burroughs writes, “Still no interest in sex. I am physically able you dig, just not innarested. When I look at a boy nothing happens. Ratty lot of boys they got here anyhoo. Maybe when I come around to it, I want women.” (Letter to Ginsberg, May 15, 1956)

Over the next year, Burroughs underwent a period of intense sexual questioning. For example:

So suddenly a wave of sex come over me and I have a spontaneous orgasm strap my vitals. Now a spontaneous, walking orgasm is a rare occurrence even in adolescence. Only one I ever experienced before was in the orgone accumulator I made in Texas. And another thing. I find my eyes straying towards the fair sex. (It”s the new frisson, dearie… Women are downright piquant.) You hear about these old character find out they are queer at fifty, maybe I’m about to make the switcheroo. What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at a young cunt’s little tits sticking out so cute? Could it be that?? No! No! He thrust the thought from him in horror. He stumbled out in the street with the girl’s mocking laughter lingering in his ears, laughter that seemed to say, “who you think you’re kidding with the queer act. I know you, baby.” What it is as Allah wills… (Letter to Ginsberg, Sept. 15, 1956).

One might assume that this quote is another Burroughsian routine full of irony and black humor, but the references to heterosexual impulses in the letters are too numerous to discount as mere joking. Clearly just after his apomorphine experience, Burroughs experienced a crisis of sexual identity. It may not be possible to say whether this can be directly attributed to apomorphine, but apomorphine, sexual identity, and the form of Naked Lunch will all be interrelated by late 1957. Burroughs’ sexual questioning strikes me as very similar to the crisis Ginsberg experienced just before the breakthrough of Howl in 1955. Famously, Ginsberg met with his analyst and openly discussed his desire to live as a poet and more importantly as a gay poet despite his attempts to play it straight. Ginsberg’s analyst stated that nothing was stopping him. This advice encouraged Ginsberg on the path to sexual freedom and the poetic vision of Howl occurred shortly thereafter.

Similarly the feverish development of Naked Lunch occurred during a period of uncertainty regarding sexual identity. As Burroughs questioned his sexuality, Naked Lunch poured forth “like dictation.” In addition the desire to go straight sexually paralleled a desire to once and for all straitjacket Naked Lunch into the form and themes of the conventional novel. In early 1957, Burroughs was seriously examining his homosexuality. Burroughs writes,

All the etiology of my homosex and practically everything spill right out of me. Quotes from last night majoun high: “So what’s holding him up? — homosex orientation — Some old tired synapse pattern won’t go to its home like it’s supposed. There must be an answer, I need the answering device. I think I can arrange but it will be expensive. Modern Oedipus.” This give me an out already, I can put down the old whore and hump some young Crete gash heat my toga like the dry goods of Nexus, you might say Nexus had the rag on.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Jan. 31, 1957)

In late 1957, Burroughs examined Naked Lunch‘s form and determined to make yet another effort to conform and contain Naked Lunch. As a result, Burroughs developed The General Theory of Addiction. He writes, “At present I am working on Benway and Scandinavia angles, also developing a theory of morphine addiction… Incidentally, this theory resulted from necessities of the novel. That is scientific theories and novel are inseparable. What I am evolving is a general theory of addiction which expands into a world picture with concepts of good and evil.” (Letter to Ginsberg Sept. 20, 1957). The answer to Burroughs’ sexual and literary questioning was the General Theory of Addiction. This theory was tied to Burroughs’ sexual crisis and the form of Naked Lunch. Burroughs writes, “Briefly, the novel concerns addiction and an addicting virus that is passed from one person to another in sexual contacts. The virus only passes from man to man or woman to woman, which is why Benway is turning out homosexuals on an assembly-line basis.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Aug. 27, 1957)

The General Theory of Addiction derived directly from Burroughs’ apomorphine experience and related to the pioneering work of Dr. Dent, Anxiety and Its Treatment. “The Theory of Addiction is, incidentally, correct, in essentials. I received a letter from Wolberg, quote… ‘Particularly interesting is your theory about cancer and schizophrenia. I have made no study of this, but telephoned a friend who works for a large mental institution. He said the incidence of cancer among schizophrenics is appreciably lower than among non-schizophrenics.’ The importance of this one fact is immeasurable. My theory contains the key to addiction, cancer, and schizophrenia. I have not yet heard from Doctor Dent.” (Letter to Ginsberg, Oct. 19, 1957) Keep in mind this theory developed from “the necessities of the novel.” Even at this late date, Burroughs strongly felt the need to subject Naked Lunch to the restraints of the novel. The desire for literary form was also related to his desire to conform sexually.

In a key letter written on October 8, 1957, Burroughs sent along a copy of his General Theory of Addiction to Ginsberg. Burroughs writes:

I feel myself closer and closer to resolution of my queerness which would involve a solution of that illness. For such it is, a horrible sickness. At least in my case. I have just experienced emergence of my non-queer persona as a separate personality. This started in London where in a dream I came into room to see myself not a child but adolescent, looking at me with hate. So I said, ‘I don’t seem to be exactly welcome,’ and he say. ‘Not welcome!!! I hate you!’ And with good reason too. Suppose you had kept a non-queer young boy in a strait-jacket of flesh twenty five years subject to continual queer acts and talk? Would he love you? I think not. Anyhoo, I’m getting to know the kid, and we get on better. I tell him he can take over anytime, but there is somebody else in this deal not yet fully accounted for and the kid’s not up to deal with him, so I hafta stay around for the present. Actually, of course the kid and all the rest of us have to arrange a merger. A ver.

The concept and linking together of sickness and queerness related directly to Burroughs’ apomorphine experience. As this letter demonstrates, the emergence of his heterosexual personality started just after the cure in London. Soon after Burroughs felt himself cured of the Sickness, i.e. drug addiction, he sought to cure himself of his queerness. The time was ripe for Burroughs to conform, to get his life together, and to play it straight. Sickness and illness also refer to the sick, obscene nature of Naked Lunch and its failure to conform to the traditional novel form as well as Naked Lunch‘s troubling (for Burroughs) link to homosexual desire and obsession. The phrase “strait-jacket of flesh” creates a wealth of associations between madness, sickness, homosexuality / heterosexuality, and literary form. As Harris demonstrates, Naked Lunch germinated in Queer (Burroughs’ account of his obsession with Lewis Marker) and his letters to Ginsberg. Burroughs strongly felt the need to cover up those personal elements in Naked Lunch. According to Harris, the junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction did just that. It not only provided a form to the novel, it shifted the focus from homosexual obsession to drug addiction. In a sense, apomorphine provided a means to cure Naked Lunch of its queerness.

By April 1958, Burroughs instructed Ginsberg to include the Benway section and to exclude the theoretical material. In final publication, Burroughs abandoned the General Theory of Addiction framework for Naked Lunch but traces remain in the Benway section. As Harris demonstrates, the General Theory and the related “The Conspiracy” were Burroughs’ last attempts to straitjacket Naked Lunch into the traditional form of the novel. By late 1958, Burroughs realized that his desire to be a writer did not depend on toning down his radical experimentation in literary style and drug use. In fact, those elements were what made Naked Lunch a profoundly obscene masterpiece. Burroughs’ change of heart cannot be separated from his tentative success in getting selections of Naked Lunch published to wide acclaim in little magazines beginning in 1957 and onwards into early 1959. Yet the decision to tone down the elements of homosexual desire remained. On one level, this was achieved by eliminating references to the epistolatory origins of the novel. That said, the novel as published by Burroughs in 1959 was a radical one, as much anti-novel as novel.

Yet Burroughs’ troubles with obscenity laws in 1959, in addition to his problems with drug laws (discussed above), would lead to a reassessment of Naked Lunch and to Burroughs’ re-insertion of apomorphine into the text. Burroughs strongly desired the publication of the complete Naked Lunch in the United States. Concessions had to be made to render Naked Lunch palatable to American courts and the reading public. The Deposition and to a lesser extent the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” serve this purpose. In a sense, Burroughs reintroduced the General Theory of Addiction into the novel. According to Harris, this paradigm completely overshadows the other more transgressive aspects of Naked Lunch, in essence de-radicalizing it, de-sexualizing it, and de-toxifying it. First, the Deposition de-radicalizes the text by providing a means to analyze and to interpret the book. Burroughs provides a blueprint (whether con or not) for critics and readers to approach the novel. In addition, the Deposition de-sexualizes the book by taking the focus off of the homosexual obsession that formed the basis for the novel. A framework based on drug addiction replaces the sexuality of the letter economy. In the various obscenity trials surrounding Naked Lunch, doctors testified that the novel presented an accurate portrayal of the junk / drug problem. With the introduction of apomorphine, Burroughs could not be accused of immorality since he provided a solution to the problem he presented. The book was no longer obscene but instead was a public service message on a major problem facing contemporary society. The account of apomorphine effectively cures the novel of its Sickness (queerness, obscurity, immorality, and drug abuse). In essence the novel itself undergoes Dr. Dent’s cure and emerges reborn.

As the opening pages of APO-33 Bulletin: a Metabolic Regulator make clear, the Deposition and other writings on apomorphine of the Naked Lunch era left a bad taste in Burroughs’ mouth. The accepted reason is that Burroughs did not make the case for apomorphine strongly enough, since he did not implicate law enforcement and the medical community in the blackballing of his miracle drug. That may be true, but I cannot help sensing that Burroughs also felt that these writings came on much too strong and revealed too much. In APO-33, Burroughs explains his failure regarding apomorphine as an overestimation of his popularity potential. In essence, Burroughs tried to be respectable and mainstream. He played to the audience, so he watered down his beliefs about apomorphine. Yet he also pandered to “popularity” in another manner. Burroughs altered and molded the popular perception of himself and his troublesome novel for the benefit of the legal system in drug and obscenity trials. Burroughs may have realized that these pieces discussing apomorphine attached to Naked Lunch diminished the diabolical power of his novel.

By 1965, the time to kow-tow to popular and legal opinion was over. By being the most notorious author in the world, Burroughs had paradoxically achieved an element of respectability. He was a financial and critical success. The legal battles were basically over. Maybe Burroughs felt apomorphine had to be rescued from the squares and injected with the radical spirit. In the work of the 1960s, apomorphine no longer just embodied and played a role in a junk paradigm or the General Theory of Addiction. It represented a new theory, but a theory grounded in process: the cut-up technique. As I demonstrated in my earlier column on apomorphine, the drug became symbolic of this experimental technique. Works like APO-33 returned to the radical nature of Naked Lunch. Radical in form and in process of composition. The apomorphine experience was no longer utilized as a straitjacket. Given its non-commercial and disorienting nature, Burroughs’ work of this period was once again considered unreadable and beyond the forces of readerly control. And for Burroughs, apomorphine once again became a cure, this time for the sickness of Language and the Word.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

There are times in your reading life when you dabble in a book, dip into it periodically, put it down, and come back to it. Your experience with the book is leisurely, casual. You are chipping. The book does not have a strong hold on you. Then one day you turn to the book again, and next thing you know, you are hooked. The book has become essential, an obsession, a part of your daily thoughts and life.

This series of events just occurred to me with William Burroughs’ neglected cut-up APO-33 Bulletin, A Metabolic Regulator. I wrote about APO-33 before, but I focused on its printing history, especially the aborted Fuck You Press edition (entitled Health Bulletin: APO-33, a Metabolic Regulator). I see the book in a different light now, and I see why Ed Sanders and Fuck You Press had to have a crack at it. I have read it much more closely and examined it in light of Burroughs’ publishing activity in the mid-1960s, the period of his most sustained relationship with the mimeo revolution. As a result, APO-33 and the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period are now key Burroughs texts for me. I believe they are pivotal for understanding Burroughs as a writer.

So what changed? Why did APO-33 suddenly rush into my head with all the force of a crashing wave? In a word: speed. Yup, amphetamine. Not taking it, but reading about the history of it. A few months ago I picked up two books on drug history. Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom by Andy Letcher and On Speed: The Many Lives of Amphetamine by Nicolas Rasmussen. Shroom is the more reader-friendly book. It is written for the casual reader in an engaging, welcoming style. Timothy Leary is in there. Allen Ginsberg is featured. Aldous Huxley plays a role, as does Robert Graves who wrote The White Goddess. There are a few minor mentions of Burroughs.

Letcher briefly discusses Yage as another example of a natural psychedelic, but no Burroughs, Ginsberg, or The Yage Letters in this context. Letcher talks of the influence of Carlos Castaneda, Graves, and Huxley in bringing natural psychedelics to the masses. But surely the 1963 City Lights edition of The Yage Letters was another bible for the burgeoning psychedelic generation. Not to mention the fact that Burroughs was exploring this terrain, geographic and psycho-pharmacological, in the early 1950s along with, and in some cases alongside, the pioneers in the field: Richard Evans Schultes and R. Gordon Wasson. Ginsberg and Leary captured a lot of the headlines in the 1960s and dominate much of the cultural history of the psychedelic era, but Burroughs, despite his dismissal and distrust of drugs like LSD, and maybe because of his critical eye on hallucinogens, must be at least the equal of Leary and Ginsberg in cultural importance. No doubt he was their superior in theorizing about the significance of psychedelics.

On Speed also mentions Burroughs only in passing, but reading this book helped further my appreciation of Burroughs and turned APO-33 into a key text for me. Most people do not associate Burroughs with speed. His son Billy Jr. wrote the book on amphetamine, but, as with psychedelics, Burroughs was at the beginning of speed culture in the United States. The proto-Beat group of Jack Kerouac, Lucien Carr, Joan Vollmer, Edie Parker, and Herbert Huncke were early users and abusers of speed in the mid-1940s. Vollmer was the first woman with a reported case of speed psychosis in New York State in 1945. Much has been written on the importance of speed in Kerouac’s writing in terms of style and process, but it was Huncke who played a key role in speed culture in New York City during the late 1950s and early 1960s that involved writers such as Alex Trocchi, Peter Orlovsky, and Janine Pommy Vega. This circle probably helped spawn more creatively productive scenes, like Warhol’s Factory and the Second Generation New York writers who gathered around Ted Berrigan.

I have always found these amphetamine scenes to be extremely important, and the key role of speed on the creative output and thinking of these groups ought to be examined. Can the writing that we know as distinctly Kerouacian be separated from Kerouac’s use of speed? The same goes for Warhol. For example, the movie Sleep becomes much more complex when viewed in light of amphetamine use. These topics are treated in Rasmussen’s book, but his focus is really on speed’s relationship to the history of the pharmaceutical and medical industry. It was this discussion that seemed truly Burroughsian.

Amphetamine was one of the first drugs developed and marketed by the modern pharmaceutical industry. At its beginnings, speed had no true medical value. Early on, companies tried to market it as an anti-asthma drug (Benzedrine inhalers). Speed never really worked in that capacity, however, and the inhalers were abused to get high. For decades the drug companies and doctors knew of amphetamine’s addicting qualities and its dangers for abuse. But the drug was patented, and the patent was purchased cheaply. As a result, speed was very profitable for the manufacturers, who colluded with the medical industry to champion speed’s benefits and to downplay its dark side. Speed became the first anti-depressant, a weight-loss drug, and a potential cure for addiction.

From Speed to Apomorphine

Clearly, this is right in Burroughs’ wheelhouse, and Rasmussen’s discussion of the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and medical profession applies directly to apomorphine. In The Job, a series of interviews with Burroughs conducted by Daniel Odier, Burroughs bluntly states why he believes apomorphine is not being used as an anti-addiction medication.

Q: What is the opinion of pharmaceutical researchers on the merits of apomorphine?

A: Pharmaceutical researchers are told what research to pursue by vested interest, which gives orders to the American Narcotics Department. Billions for variations on the Benzedrine formula, for tranquilizers of dubious value, not ten cents for a drug that has unlimited potentials not only in treating addiction but in handling the whole problem of anxiety.

Burroughs also states why the companies that produce apomorphine fail to promote and market it on a large scale: “They can sell all the products they produce in any case. Remember, these pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in illness. Drugs that strike at the very root of illness are dangerous.” These two statements get to the heart of the history described in Rasmussen’s book. After finishing the book, I returned to APO-33 in earnest and started to dig into the other apomorphine-related cut-ups of the period.

Burroughs contributed two cut-ups to Aram Saroyan’s mimeo mag, Lines, in 1965. Issue 5 features “Chlorhydrate d’apomorphine chabre” and “Rex Morgan M.D.” The latter presents two scrapbook pages that contain the fragment of a short story. (This prose piece does not appear in Maynard & Miles or Shoaf.) In the scrapbook Burroughs includes a single frame from a Rex Morgan comic that deals with the topic of addiction, namely alcoholism. Not coincidentally, Dr. John Yerbury Dent, who treated Burroughs with apomorphine in 1956, first used the drug to treat alcoholics. Burroughs portrays Morgan as forward-thinking and searching for better drug solutions. When he receives a new tranquilizer, Dr. Morgan dismisses it as not treating the problem and as having “doubtful value.” Along with a sample of apomorphine comes a “circular… in blue print with some passages in red for emphasis.” The packaging for the apomorphine describes its uses and its benefits as an anti-anxiety medication and a metabolic regulator. As Dr. Morgan settles in his office, he becomes aware that a beatnik suffered a bad trip on LSD. Dr. Morgan gathers his things and leaves to treat the patient. He takes the apomorphine with him. The story abruptly ends there but one suspects that Dr. Morgan used the apomorphine to successfully regulate the beatnik metabolism. Burroughs provides a feel-good story here, but Rasmussen describes how the pharmaceutical industry flooded doctors with drugs samples of “doubtful value” and encouraged doctors to push them on patients. Similarly, the literature that accompanied the samples was often inaccurate and hyperbolic. APO-33 combats what Burroughs saw as the false information spread by the pharmaceutical companies.

A progressive doctor such as Rex Morgan is opposed by the most famous fictional character in the Burroughsian universe, Dr. Benway. In Naked Lunch Dr. Benway pontificates on drugs, addiction, and anxiety. Also interesting in light of apomorphine is Dr. “Fingers” Schafer the Lobotomy Kid. In Naked Lunch, Dr. Schafer creates the “All-American De-Anxietized Man” with disastrous results. Dr. Dent, the model doctor, wrote a book on the use of apomorphine to combat anxiety: Anxiety and its Treatment. As the promotional literature received by Dr. Morgan makes clear, Burroughs (and Dent) felt apomorphine was a more progressive cure for anxiety-related illnesses than other treatments such as tranquilizers or lobotomy. The promotional literature recommended apomorphine for “grief, anguish, anxiety states, acute drug intoxications and chronic addiction.”

On one level, APO-33 is Burroughs’ enlightened rewriting of the promotional literature of the pharmaceutical companies. In addition, APO-33 provides what Burroughs felt was the real story that the medical industry would publish if it did not need to perpetuate addiction, illness, and anxiety. The back cover and first page of text features the name Chabre, a French pharmaceutical company that produced apomorphine. The front cover posits APO-33 as a report (“A Report on the Synthesis of the Apomorphine Formula”) and a bulletin. Like Time, published by C Press in 1965, the covers of APO-33 reproduce the look and feel of a “circular” that Burroughs believed would be issued by enlightened pharmaceutical companies.

With its incorporation of handwriting and its illegibility, APO-33 also serves as a prescription pad of sorts, prescribing apomorphine as a cure for society’s ills. The various meanings of script would not have been lost on Burroughs. He realized that doctors were pressured to overprescribe dubious medications and in a sense were legal pushers. In addition, he was aware of the power of written language to perpetuate order and rationality — Control.

A Treatment That Cancels Addiction

The opening of APO-33 as published by Beach Books refers to a lost text that served as an appendix to the Italian edition of Junkie published in 1962 (the edition was translated as La scimmia sulla schiena or Monkey on the Back). According to Maynard and Miles, the text was the original version of an essay titled “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.” Burroughs declares in APO-33 that the manuscript was lost and that the text can only be found in La scimmia sulla schiena. Ultimately Burroughs rewrote the essay to publish it in the Fuck You version of APO-33. The entire APO-33 Health Bulletin section of the Fuck You edition was reprinted in the Beach Books version. However, the Beach Books edition excluded “Locked Out of Time” and “Apomorphine Statement 2″, both of which had appeared in the Fuck You edition. (For a complete discussion of the differences between the various editions of APO-33 see Maynard & Miles.) The final version of “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” appeared in the New Statesman (March 4, 1966) and was eventually reprinted in the British edition of The Soft Machine published by Calder in 1968.

Burroughs felt this article was a compromise and a failure. In APO-33 he writes, “I geared [the Italian appendix] to popular appeal being younger you understand I over estimated my ‘popularity potential.’ I did not criticize the American Narcotics Department officials nor the Public Health center at Lexington.” Burroughs laments the fact that his beliefs regarding the corruption of the medical profession were not stated more forcefully and aggressively. Burroughs writes, “My attempt to attribute good will where it patently does not exist proved ill-advised. I see no reason at this point to pull punches in the expectation of popularity.”

Few readers of the various editions of APO-33 would be aware of the original “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” essay. Yet readers of APO-33 might be aware of some other appendices that discuss apomorphine: the “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” and “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness,” both of which appeared in the 1962 Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch. Burroughs believed these articles also failed to present the case for apomorphine strongly enough. Burroughs writes, “Feeling that the articles I had written on apomorphine treatment (British Journal of Addiction January 1957 vol. 53 no. 2 page 119, Evergreen Review 1959 reprinted in the American edition of Naked Lunch) were not adequate… ” These failures prompted him to write “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction.”

In all these pieces, Burroughs toned down his views and presented his arguments straight. He played nice — nowhere more so than in the British Journal of Addiction. In that venue Burroughs did not expose what he saw as the conspiracy — in which academic journals played a role — against apomorphine. In addition, deliberately or not, the British Journal of Addiction effectively pigeonholed Burroughs as an addict and outsider and thus not truly trustworthy. The requirements of academic writing made Burroughs water down his views and his style, although as Carol Loranger points out, Burroughs’ hip and radical attitude towards drugs and literature comes out.

In spite of the fact that the British Journal had published his views, Burroughs felt that academic journals continued to censor the facts about apomorphine. As On Speed makes clear, articles on amphetamine were in many cases written by doctors and researchers sponsored by the pharmaceutical companies. Those companies only released reports that supported their agenda. By the mid-1960s, Burroughs understood that the medical industry was not going to share his and Dr. Dent’s optimistic view of apomorphine. A drug-free, anxiety-free society was unthinkable in the present system. According to Burroughs, the financial and political stakes were too high.

For Burroughs, the academic medical journal was just one more weapon in the hands of the drug establishment. As such, the power of these publications had to be subverted and diminished. Critics have mentioned that Burroughs cut-up his letter from the British Journal of Addiction and incorporated it into APO-33. Burroughs more likely incorporated “A Treatment that Cancels Addiction” to greater effect than the letter, but the medical journal, as represented by the British Journal, was very much on Burroughs’ mind in APO-33. This becomes even clearer in the fifth issue of Lines. “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” contains the citation for the issue of the British Journal of Addiction in which Burroughs appeared: Volume 53, No. 2, along with the date of its publication, January 1957. The manuscript page of “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine Chabre” was printed by offset, so in a sense the text in Lines served as an alternative to the fifty offprints of the “Letter from a Master Addict” that Burroughs received in 1957.

The Dream Police of Poetry

Given the debacle that ensued with the aborted publication of APO-33 by Fuck You Press in 1965, one wonders why Burroughs entrusted Ed Sanders with such a difficult project that tested the capabilities of mimeo as a medium. Clearly the mimeograph was poorly suited to recreate the intricate scrapbook nature of the APO-33 manuscript. Burroughs published another scrapbook piece, Time, with C Press, also in 1965. Ted Berrigan was more successful in pulling off Time by resorting to offset printing, but again Burroughs submitted the manuscript to a mimeo press. Interestingly, much of Burroughs’ writing on apomorphine also appeared as mimeo (usually offprinted copies of original mansucripts). His texts were printed by Fuck You Press, My Own Mag, and Lines. Fellow travelers in the mimeo revolution, like Beach Books run by Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach, also published apomorphine-related texts. Burroughs’ understanding of the importance of apomorphine cannot be separated from the publications, culture, and spirit of the mimeo revolution in several key respects.

For Burroughs, the suppression of apomorphine was not just the fault of censorship and corruption in pharmaceutical literature and academic journals. He believed the mainstream press was in collusion with the government and medical community in censoring information on apomorphine. In The Job Burroughs states, “The press is working with the Narcotics Department to publicize and spread the drug problem. It is not in their interest to stop this source of copy and circulation by advocating measures that would control addiction and reduce it to a minor health problem. What is the press selling? Violence, sex, and drugs. These items are sure copy. That is to say, effective measures to eliminate criminality or drug-taking are not good copy.” I have discussed elsewhere how the C Press Time represents Burroughs’ attack on the Time-Life media empire and how it was his rewrite of Time magazine, particularly the November 30, 1962 issue that savagely reviewed Naked Lunch. Burroughs saw the suppression of apomorphine as another of the evils perpetuated by corporate media.

The mimeo revolution arose in the post-WWII era in opposition to the consolidation and bureaucratization of print media. Large, corporate, mainstream publishers stifled innovation and radical thought in creative writing in much the same way the medical establishment controlled information about addiction and apomorphine. The mimeograph, as well as the letterpress and cheaper offset printing, allowed writers to take control of their own work and its distribution. Clearly, Burroughs saw the mimeograph and the publications of the mimeo revolution as ideally suited to present the anti-authority and anti-establishment message of APO-33. According to Maynard & Miles, the Fuck You edition features, “a drawing by Sanders built on the Egyptian hieroglyph for the Eye of Horus; at the top is an ankh, the hieroglyph for life, at the bottom a mimeo machine, a hookah, and an ejaculating movie camera.” This was Sanders’ “TOTAL ASSAULT ON THE CULTURE.” The mimeo press subverted and provided an end-around the corporate media that Burroughs felt was suppressing apomorphine.

Yet the relationship between apomorphine and the mimeo revolution goes deeper than that. In Burroughs’ mind, apomorphine was ideologically similar to mimeo. In The Apomorphine Times, a newspaper supplement edited by Burroughs and included in My Own Mag Issue Twelve, Burroughs writes of apomorphine: “Like a good policeman, apo-morphine does its work and goes.” APO-33 contains a picture of Burroughs with the caption “in a policeman’s bed sitter.” The “Rex Morgan, M.D.” cut-up also contains a reference to the good policeman as well as the phrase “So he takes over newsmagazine… The way we like to see.” The concept of the good policeman deserves a little explanation. To those familiar with Burroughs’ distaste for the law, his belief in a good policeman can be confusing. On one level, the phrase refers to an effective policeman. In that sense, like a policeman, apomorphine would rid society of addicts and pushers and help wipe out the junk paradigm. But Burroughs realized that the police (as force of control, as bureaucracy) were also part of the problem. In this light, the good policeman refers to the ideal or beneficial policeman in the Burroughsian universe. The ideal policeman is not intrusive; he does what business he has to do and goes. He does not attempt to increase or perpetuate the power of an established entity. Ideally, society and its members would mind their own business and tend to it without a bureaucratic police force. That Burroughsian ideal may be impossible. “The police are a necessary evil,” as Gregory Corso writes in his poem “Police.”

Apomorphine was a drug that steadied the system and then left no trace. It was not addictive. Burroughs went to great pains to state that apomorphine was not an aversion therapy and was non-invasive. The key term is metabolic regulator. Like the ideal policeman, apomorphine regulated without attempting to exert control or to extend its power or influence. Methadone was addictive and thus not a good policeman. Likewise, LSD altered the consciousness and thus left a trace on the system. Burroughs makes clear apomorphine’s role as ideal regulator in APO-33. He writes, “Like a good policeman apomorphine does its work and goes. Yes we of the Nova Police do our work and go.”

Burroughs links the “policeman” concept to mimeo productions. This becomes clear in a magazine like The Apomorphine Times. Burroughs edited this magazine-within-a-magazine that appeared in issue 12 of My Own Mag. The Apomorphine Times includes a four-square fold-in text. Burroughs writes, “(sexless providence supported by the rich. Policemen jumped out on them.) From Afternoon Ticker Tape My Magazine published by J. Nuttall of London Not even the generous injections of the green and ready could keep it afloat for more than two issues after which it sank under the dead grey sludge of its own prose. The cadaver was has been however resuscitated in New York under the name I believe of The National Magazine under the editorship of Mr. Buckley…”

Therefore a close reading of The Apomorphine Times reveals that Burroughs viewed the products of the mimeo revolution, be it a little magazine or a scrapbook like Time, as “good policemen,” a print version of apomorphine. Like apomorphine, mimeo mags did their job and disappeared. Mimeo is generally a guerilla strike on the literary, social and political landscape. They only last a handful of issues (two in the case of “The Burrough”) and they fade away. In addition their ephemeral, fragile nature ensures that they will not last although their effect lingers on. For Burroughs, the alternative press of the mimeo revolution was a good policeman that combats the Time-Life machine.

For quite some time Burroughs had seen a strange relationship between law and the little magazine. In 1958, Burroughs dreamed of starting his own little magazine with Gregory Corso. They were going to call it Interpol after the international police organization. In a letter of September 28, 1958 cowritten by Corso and Burroughs, Corso writes that “‘the poet is becoming a policeman.’” This idea is clearly Burroughs’ own as Corso places this phrase in quotes and attributes the policeman / poet idea to Burroughs later on (“like Bill says we’re policemen”). Burroughs writes, “When the Human Image is threatened, The Poet dictates the forms of survival. Dream police of poetry protect us from The Human Virus. The human virus can now be isolated and treated. This is the work of The New POLICE-POET.”

What we see here is Burroughs and Corso subverting and complicating terms and organizations like the police and Interpol through a creation of and takeover of media. This is a process known as détournement. This idea was the most used weapon of the Situationists. In the mid-1960s Burroughs was on the fringes of this group with his work with Alexander Trocchi and The Sigma Project. Works like Time and APO-33 are textbook examples of détournement.

This technique was particularly productive for Gregory Corso at the time. This is the period of poems like “Power,” “Army,” “Marriage,” “Hair,” “Bomb” and, particularly interesting for this discussion, “Police.” Corso explored the fascination / repulsion of these charged concepts and attempted to turn them to his advantage and make them hip. In APO-33, Burroughs similarly examined the word fix. Burroughs was clearly ambivalent about the police. He attempted to join the OSS and he was intrigued / repulsed by agents and operatives. He wrote in a private eye style in Junkie. In addition he examined the role of the police as part of the junk paradigm and as agent of control throughout his writing life. Possibly like Corso, Burroughs realized that the “police are a necessary evil.” But an enlightened / ideal / hip police, i.e. a good policeman. Thus the concept “Police-Poet. Given Corso’s reverence for Shelley, we can see links to Shelley’s concept of the poet as the Legislator of the World which itself is an old concept that dates back to Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poetry. Interpol as magazine would be the publishing outlet for “Police-Poets”, i.e. hip policemen.

In “Police” Corso writes, “My father’s indifference, Rosalind Russell’s stardom / the great, big circulation of the News, the Mirror / I praised the police their backing, their fame —” Corso here acknowledges that the police derive their power and authority from patriarchy, apathy, and the mass media. Poems like “Police” and a projected magazine such as Interpol would explore and “detourne” those relationships. Burroughs took the idea of Interpol into the 1960s. He titled his newspaper supplement to My Own Mag, “The Burrough.” The title suggests the FBI or the Bureau, another reference to a policing organization. Little magazines enacted the concept of the good policeman, an ideal regulator that monitored the cultural, political, and spiritual aspects of society as a whole from a position outside the existing system. Mimeo and the little mag helped keep society honest and straight. Burroughs saw that the little mag and apomorphine served the same function.

Cut-Ups: The Complete Picture

It seems obvious to me that a full understanding of Burroughs’ use of the cut-up technique is in the infant stage. With almost all the focus on the cut-up trilogy as published by Grove Press and with nearly a blind eye to any cut-up published in little mags, the picture of Burroughs’ experiments cannot be completed. Oliver Harris has started to dig into Minutes to Go (as well as some of the little mags), but The Exterminator, Time, APO-33, and the material in the more obscure little mags, particularly the mimeos (ones not included in White Subway, The Burroughs File, or Ports of Entry) are largely unexplored territory. Even a collector runs into seemingly insurmountable obstacles in attempting to tell the cut-up story. The Fuck You edition of APO-33 apparently differs substantially from the Beach Books version. But copies of the Fuck You edition are so rare that they are as good as lost. The Burroughs scholar must be an archeologist of sorts. Library holdings need to be opened up and utilized. The completely untouched manuscripts of and letters on the cut-up in the New York Public Library and elsewhere must be made available to interested readers.

Previous scholarship, such as that by Christopher Land and Timothy Murphy, would greatly benefit from taking these under-studied cut-ups into account. In “Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs’ Theory of Language and Control,” Christopher Land outlines Burroughs’ theory of language and the role of the cut-up in subverting the control of the Word. Other critics, such as Timothy Murphy, have done the same. For Burroughs, the cut-up subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened up the potential of space. The cut-up was an attempt to break down the apparent coherence of language. The experiments published in little mags best represent this aspect of the cut-up and best demonstrate the cut-up in practice. The cut-up trilogy straightjackets the cut-up into the form of the novel. The block paragraphs force the reader to approach the cut-up from left to right onward down the page and forward through the codex. This is precisely “the trap of linear, narrative time” that Burroughs hoped to explode with the cut-up. APO-33 provides much more freedom for the reader. The three-column format can be read across columns or from top to bottom. In addition, columns on a page connect within the page or across to other pages thus introducing several options of approaching the text. “Rex Morgan, MD” can be read like a painting or a projective verse poem. APO-33 and the Apomorphine Times present cut-ups in a grid format. The reader can process these texts “any which way” or even take the scissors to them and reenact the process of the cut-up. Such texts challenge the format of the book in ways the cut-up trilogy does not. It can be argued whether the cut-up as practiced by Burroughs successfully enacted his theories (as Oliver Harris does in “Cutting Up Politics,” published in Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization). Yet the final judgment on the cut-ups cannot be handed down without moving away from the novels and digging into the magazines and, even more importantly, the manuscripts and letters.

I want to closely examine a single page of the Beach Books edition of APO-33 to highlight the critical potential of this unexplored material. The back cover of APO-33 contains the phrase “pellets sublinguaux chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine.” This refers to a tablet of apomorphine to be taken orally, dissolved under the tongue. The suggestion of dropping APO-33 highlights a link to LSD. In Lines 5, Burroughs also draws parallels between LSD and apomorphine. Like LSD-25, APO-33 is a consciousness-expanding drug of sorts, but according to Burroughs, apomorphine is the more beneficial drug and does not contain LSD’s baggage. Burroughs distrusted psychedelics. As demonstrated in The Job, Burroughs viewed LSD as physically dangerous. It was engulfed in vague theorization and lulled users into a sense of peace, love, and complacency. In contrast, apomorphine is to Burroughs a “good policeman” and a metabolic regulator. It reduces anxiety, clears the mind, induces sanity, and is non-addictive. It does its job and goes. No flashbacks.

More importantly the word “sublinguaux” suggests Burroughs’ theories of the sub-vocal and sub-language. Land writes, “At one level, Burroughs focuses on our everyday subvocalizations, the internal monologue that provides a narrative sense of personal, subjective continuity which we think of as ‘our self.’ These subvocalizations simultaneously come from outside, hence the notion that they are a viral infection and constitute an inside: the subject ‘I’.” The French word allows Burroughs to get across these ideas in a creative manner. In addition “sublinguaux” conjures up the idea of subverting language. Burroughs viewed the apomorphine as the cut-up in drug form. In “Rex Morgan M.D.” in Lines 5, there is a picture of Burroughs with the caption Dr. Zeit. Zeit is German for Time. The picture and caption in a cut-up about apomorphine highlights Burroughs’ belief that the drug subverted “the trap of linear, narrative time produced by language” and opened the potential of space. For Burroughs, apomorphine regulated the human body just as the cut-up regulated the power of the word. Land writes, “[A]pomorphine was the perfect way of regulating the addict’s metabolism and silencing the screams of his inner demons. Within the context of Burroughs’ concerns with control and language, the idea of ‘apomorphine silence’ seems suggestive of a balanced state of self-governance without a governed self that is itself the product of control.” The miracle drug cured the addiction to subvocalization. Apomorphine provided silence. Therefore Burroughs felt apomorphine acted in a similar manner to that of the cut-up technique. It was the cut-up in the form of a pill.

According to Burroughs, mimeo was another metabolic regulator. APO-33, as radical anti-establishment text, was ideologically compatible with mimeo. The back cover of APO-33 by Beach Books captures this dynamic. The page triangulates Chabre, Beach Books, and City Lights Books. Chabre is a French pharmaceutical company that manufactured and distributed apomorphine (in pellets sublinguaux) for the European market. It should be noted that “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine chabre” in Lines 5 has been mistitled “Chlorhydrate d’Apomorphine cham bre” in Maynard & Miles. The mistake is crucial and covers up some of the associations that can be made from this valuable and unstudied cut-up. The reference to Chabre provides Burroughs with a realistic touch to make APO-33 look like establishment medical literature. It functions like the cover of Time that takes the image of the November 30, 1962 edition and cuts it up. The presence of Beach Books and City Lights as distributors of APO-33 twists and subverts the corporate associations of Chabre. APO-33 is truly anti-establishment, a product of the alternative press. For Burroughs, the presses of the mimeo revolution serve as alternative sources of information and correctives to the establishment.

I hope both casual readers and critics will come around to experiencing the power of Burroughs’ cut-ups outside of the cut-up trilogy. In my opinion, much of the negative reception of the cut-up is due to the fact that most readers have only experienced the technique in the form of a novel. The cut-up is used to best effect in short pieces, particularly the offprints of scrapbook pages, like those published in the presses of the mimeo revolution. In addition, the ideology of the cut-up as Burroughs saw it is more in line with the ideology and spirit of the mimeo revolution than that of corporate publishing and the form of the novel that it promotes. Readers need to explore beyond the cut-up novels published by Grove. In support of that goal, APO-33, as published by Beach Books in 1968, is reproduced here in its entirety. I also encourage readers to go to digital archive run by Craig Dworkin, Eclipse, to view the apomorphine texts in Lines. (Lines 5 | Rex Morgan | Chlorhydrate d’Apormphine Chabre) Of course, the complete My Own Mag is available on RealityStudio. These resources will provide enjoyment for the casual reader, valuable information for the scholar, and encouragement for libraries and institutions.

Postscript: Wouldn’t You

Just after finishing this piece, I stopped by the Baltimore Book Fair. You never know what might turn up. By and large it was a wash for Burroughs material but I talked to Tom Congalton of Between the Covers for a bit and browsed through his booth. As usual he had the best books in the finest condition. He had a signed Grove Naked Lunch, but a lesser known Burroughs item caught my attention. Tom had a slightly beat up copy of LSD: The Consciousness-Expanding Drug. The book was edited by David Solomon and published by G.P. Putnam in 1964. Timothy Leary wrote the introduction. Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Humphry Osmond contributed essays. Clearly, the book had some problems: some rubbing, a large chip, some creasing — but the timing was dead on. This anthology contains Burroughs’ text “Points of Distinction Between Sedative and Consciousness-Expanding Drugs.” The essay was later reprinted in Evergreen Review 34. In this article, Burroughs mentions apomorphine as a means to increase the psychedelic experience and decrease anxiety. It was Burroughs in “Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs” mode. Yet another go-around with the straight press before Burroughs turned to the mimeo press in 1965 for his apomorphine crusade. For me, it was the perfect book at the perfect moment.

One of the benefits of a book fair or a bookstore is that you can see the book for yourself. You are not dependent on the bookseller’s descriptions. In this case, handling the book was key. The book had an ownership inscription by Jack Ward, MD. That sold the book for me. The signature captured the culture that I was describing in my apomorphine piece. A doctor’s copy of an anthology of academic articles by progressive medical researchers and literary explorers — it was Rex Morgan, MD in real life. The idea that practicing doctors were aware of Burroughs’ work on drugs (be it Naked Lunch or more academic pieces), and particularly apomorphine, was fascinating to me.

And then it got better. I googled Dr. Ward and LSD, and lo and behold, it turns out Dr. Ward was the American equivalent of Dr. John Yerbery Dent. Dr. Ward practiced at the Carrier Clinic in New Jersey. Founded in 1910, this clinic treated mental disorders and drug addiction in a private setting. While I found no connection between Dr. Ward and apomorphine, he was at the forefront of experimenting with LSD for medical uses such as curing alcoholism. Dr. Ward personally met with Humphry Osmond, a pioneer in LSD research in a medical setting (Osmond contributed the article “Psychopharmacology: The Manipulation of the Mind” to the anthology). Ward himself contributed “A Case of Change and Partial Regression Following One LSD 25 Treatment” to The Use of LSD in Psychotherapy and Alcoholism, an anthology like Solomon’s published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1967.

So the book was chipped and creased. On that level it was far from the ideal collector’s copy, but like all great collectibles, this book captured a moment and told a story beyond its pages and dust jacket. I could not have had a better ending to my research into Burroughs, apomorphine and APO-33. I had to buy it despite the condition. Wouldn’t you?

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

It is amazing how a single sheet of paper can capture a special moment in history. My first issue of NOW provides a snapshot into the literary history of San Francisco in the summer of 1963. Similarly my offprint of Tom Veitch’s The Naked Express does the same for the mimeo scene in the Lower East Side in the mid-1960s. A month or so ago I came across this mysterious item in the BeatBooks catalog. Here is the description from the catalog:

Veitch, Tom. The Naked Express. Np: no date. Single sheet, printed on both sides. Credited to Tom Veitch and “Willy”, with, in facsimile holograph, William Burroughs’ signature and the inscription, “(collaborations 1964/1965)”. Burroughsian cut-up and collaged newspaper columns and typescripts (incl. small ads for Joe Brainard’s first one-man show and “C” Magazine), done as the credit suggests, in collaboration with Burroughs in 1964/1965. Short edge-tear; sl. age-toning; faint stains to verso. o/w Very Good plus.

I stopped in my tracks when I saw it. I had never come across this item before. It is not mentioned in the bibliographies by Maynard & Miles or Eric Shoaf. No mention of Veitch in any Burroughs bio that I know of. Daniel Kane does not mention Veitch in his book, All Poets Welcome, which chronicles the literary scene on the Lower East Side in the 1960s. Clay and Phillips do not list The Naked Express in the C: A Journal of Poetry / C Press portion of Secret Location on the Lower East Side. If C Press even published it. What in the hell was this?

I bought it and eagerly awaited the package from London. I was quite happy when it arrived. As you can see from the images, it is a striking item for anyone interested in Burroughs’ newspaper experiments of the mid-1960s. I immediately thought of Time, APO-33, and a host of other magazine appearances, but what seemed most similar was Sigma Project No. 1: “The Moving Times” poster. That poster was designed to hang in London subways in 1965. The Moving Times combined advertisement, underground newspaper, broadside, and poster art all at once. It seemed like a fantastic way to get the word out about Project Sigma, a hazily defined counterculture movement dreamed up in large part by Alexander Trocchi as he was on the nod. Trocchi got the idea from Timothy Leary’s “consciousness revolution” mixed in with the radical thought of the Situationists. Like a lot of Trocchi’s big ideas (think the Long Book), Project Sigma was long on hype and short on results. The poster idea never fully flowered in the days before the Summer of Love. Burroughs’ “Invisible Generation” essay appeared in poster form in 1966 after it was printed in International Times. Listed in Maynard & Miles as yet another Sigma Project item, it apparently never was distributed beyond the offices of IT. The posters proved much too expensive to produce on a large scale. Several hundred (??) copies of The Moving Times were printed, but they never appeared in the tube and the idea was abandoned. The Naked Express looks exactly like one of the smaller size offprints of The Moving Times that were in fact printed on both sides.

When I saw The Naked Express in the BeatBooks catalog I realized that it fit in nicely with the story I am slowly unpeeling, like an onion, on Burroughs in New York City in 1964-1965. While researching that piece way back when, I came across no mention of The Naked Express, but I did run into the name and work of Tom Veitch. In 1964, C Press published Veitch’s first book, Literary Days. That book is mentioned in Secret Location on the Lower East Side and it is a fine example of the C Press aesthetic. Is there such a thing? Anyway, Literary Days is DIY publishing at its best. Think of all those wonderful issues of C: A Journal of Poetry with the Joe Brainard covers. Brainard designed the cover for Literary Days as well. (By the way, I recommend the recently released book celebrating Brainard’s fascination with the Nancy comic strip. Nancy appears on C Issue 11. If you love the artwork of Brainard, The Nancy Book is a must. Re-read Brainard’s masterpiece, I Remember, while you are at it.)

For those interested, copies of Literary Days are available online for $30-$45. A particularly nice copy showed up on eBay around the time that The Naked Express was available. The eBay copy had a photograph of Veitch tipped in and, if I remember correctly, was signed. Some truly amazing photographs of Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett during the period I am discussing were also available. If you were into the Tulsa wing of the New York School (to borrow a phrase of John Ashbery’s), it was a bonanza on eBay. All these items were heavily sought after and a few of them — such as this photograph — have found their way back on the rare book market.

A copy of Veitch’s Literary Days fell into the hands (and eventually the scissors) of William Burroughs, because Burroughs created a cut-up based on the book. Burroughs’ “Intersections Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch” appeared in C Issue 9 in the summer of 1964. If you compare the cover of Literary Days with the cover of C Issue 9. They are almost the same. The C Journal cover appears to parody the idea of a Brainard style and the Literary Days cover in particular. Perhaps there is more going on here. Was Brainard, like Burroughs, recycling Literary Days? It is interesting to note that around this time, Brainard drew a cover for “St. Louis Return.” According to the Brainard Archive at UC-San Diego, Brainard drew the cover in 1963, but Burroughs did not return to St. Louis and write the piece until late 1964. Right in the period we are discussing. The “St. Louis Return” cover was rejected and never used. Playboy rejected the piece and “St. Louis Return” was eventually published in Paris Review 35 along with Conrad Knickerbocker’s blockbuster interview with Burroughs. (The published interview also contains a manuscript page from “St. Louis Return.”) Brainard, Burroughs, and Veitch appear one after the other in Issue 9. Perhaps this grouping in the magazine comments on their creative collaborations. “Intersections Shifts” presents Burroughs the poet. Reading it you can see how a piece like this would appeal to poets and artists of the New York School, particularly ones like Ted Berrigan or Brainard who incorporated the cut-up and collage into so much of their work.

When The Naked Express came in the mail, I started digging some more. Who is Tom Veitch? Why would Burroughs cut up his work? Why would Burroughs get a copy of Literary Days? What was the full nature of their “collaboration?” Clearly Burroughs was interested enough in Veitch’s work to cut it up. I started googling and digging. Star Wars fans probably know Tom Veitch for his comic book work. You may have heard of Tom’s brother Rick Veitch. If you have been following the story of Burroughs collaborations with Malcolm Mc Neill, you can see where this is going. Turns out Tom Veitch and Burroughs talked in the mid-1960s about a project to create an illustrated Naked Lunch. Like Mc Neill, the potential collaboration made quite an impression on Veitch. In July 2006, Veitch read at Kingdom Books from a 150-page memoir in progress on his interactions with and thoughts on Burroughs. I contacted Ron Padgett who put me in contact with Veitch. The Burroughs memoir still exists and it is currently on the back burner given Veitch’s incredibly full plate. Hopefully selections will find their way online or in a little mag. Maybe even here on RealityStudio. Has anyone out there heard Veitch read from this memoir? Has anyone seen a hard copy? I would love to hear more about it. Does anybody know any details about a proposed illustrated Naked Lunch project from the mid-1960s? Did I make this up? It makes sense, but I cannot find any details on it.

So The Naked Express was, like the memoir years later, an expression of Veitch’s fascination with Burroughs. According to Veitch, it was more of a tribute than collaboration. Burroughs did not actually provide any of the material. It must have been written in late 1964. The title, obviously, refers to Naked Lunch and Nova Express. Nova Express was released in October of 1964. A close look at The Naked Express reveals all sorts of links to the mimeo scene in the Lower East Side of the mid-1960s. “A Nice Day” was a collaboration of Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett. The holograph at the top of The Naked Express is in the handwriting of Ted Berrigan (the initials are “T.B.”). Berrigan had his own collaboration of sorts with Burroughs in the publication of Time in 1965. The name “Willy”, in reference to Burroughs, has a ton of associations. Burroughs referred to himself in letters as Willy Lee, the junkie writing boy. William Lee, of course, was the pseudonym for the Ace Junkie. There are a ton of others, but in 1965 in the Lower East Side mimeo scene, “Willy” would refer directly to the Fuck You Press publication of Roosevelt After Inauguration. That publication listed Willy Lee as the author, instead of William Burroughs. Burroughs’ other contribution to C Issue 9, “Giver of the Winds is My Name,” features Egyptian hieroglyphics. Possibly, Ed Sanders turned Burroughs on to them. The Naked Express appeared in Issue 3 of Aram Saroyan’s Lines, another wonderful mimeo, in early 1965. Later in that year a Burroughs cut-up turned up in Lines 5.

My details on The Naked Express and the collaboration between Veitch and Burroughs is patchwork at best. Consider this post a call for information. If anybody has any more info on the illustrated Naked Lunch, The Naked Express or similar pieces of ephemera that tell an interesting story about Burroughs, please drop me a line.

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

A Secret Location on the Lower East Side is one of my bibles, but the failure to document the Cleveland mimeo scene in any detail seems a major hole. Granted Clay and Phillips’ book could not cover everything, and Cleveland was briefly mentioned in the introduction, but levy would have been a nice corrective to the book’s largely coastal vision. By building on the framework of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry anthology many diverse voices get silenced. The Marrahwannah Quarterly or the Third Class Buddhist Oracle by levy or even Douglas Blazek’s Ole provide a much more vibrant view of Midwest little mags than that most discussed of little magazines, the Chicago-based, Big Table. A look at the mimeo tradition in the Midwest supports the idea that Main Street was much less sleepy and complacent artistically and politically than commonly believed.

This snub got me thinking about what I consider an interesting omission in levy’s publishing efforts. Given William Burroughs’ willingness to publish anywhere in the 1960s, why did he not appear in Cleveland? Burroughs and levy would seem to be a natural fit. In late 1964, levy journeyed to New York City and immersed himself in the poetry reading scene of the Lower East Side. The chronology complied by Smith and Swanberg states that levy went to readings at Le Metro, The Cellar, and The Paradox. Burroughs read at Les Deux Megots Coffeehouse in 1963 / 1964 as recounted by Daniel Kane in All Poets Welcome, and levy attended the reading. levy stayed in New York for a month performing and immersing himself in the New York scene. This experience was instrumental in levy’s decision to initiate a coffeehouse scene and reading series in Cleveland.

levy met Ed Sanders in 1965 and received copies of The Marijuana Newsletter issued by Fuck You Press. levy may also have received Roosevelt After Inauguration or even the aborted APO-33: A Metabolic Regulator. Burroughs appeared in both issues of The Marijuana Newsletter. Soon after his correspondence with Sanders, levy began The Marrahwannah Quarterly. Burroughs’ stance on drugs would have fit right in with that mimeo, but as we will see later on levy was critical of Burroughs’ drug-induced philosophy and writing (“rug scribbles”). Like levy, Burroughs was personally familiar with censorship and obscenity trials. In addition, Burroughs’ cut-up experiments paralleled levy’s concerns with concrete and visual poetry. Both writers also experimented in a visual manner with collages and incorporated textual and typographical elements from the typewriter and newspaper unlike many other collagists of the time. levy and Burroughs would seem to be two peas in a pod.

I always assumed that Burroughs’ absence was based on his social class and established literary reputation. My cue for this assumption was Charles Bukowski and his supporters. Reading through Bukowski’s letters of the 1960s (a fun and worthwhile exercise by the way), it is clear that Buk resented the Beats, particularly Ginsberg, as fakes and poseurs. In a questionnaire complied by Anthony Linick for a dissertation, Bukowski listed Gregory Corso and Robert Creeley as his least favorite poets. Corso would represent the dislike of the Beats. Creeley stands for the established and successful avant poet, particularly of the Black Mountain variety. Before he was 40, Creeley had made it as a poet and was a leading light to succeeding generations of poets. Bukowski regularly blasted all manner of counterculture and established poets in his letters, Dirty Old Man columns, poems, and in his little mag, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.

Given his outsider / underdog status, it seems natural that levy would harbor a similar resentment to established avant-garde figures. In a letter to dr wagner from 1966, levy describes Burroughs as “the adding machine addict.” The reference to the Burroughs Corporation suggests levy’s awareness of the corporate and privileged status of Burroughs. Granted Burroughs clearly benefited from his family connections (nowhere more so than in Mexico after the shooting of Joan), but the myth of his wealth was greatly exaggerated. Kerouac perpetuated the rumor that Burroughs was a millionaire. He was not. Yet he was connected to wealth and privilege. More important and probably more grating on younger writers, Burroughs was connected to the international avant-garde, including major avant publishers like John Calder and Grove Press. By the mid-1960s, “the adding machine addict” had rise from drug-addled obscurity to become a Delphic oracle of sorts who prophesized on all topics of the day. Burroughs was something to measure up to and react against.

This levy clearly did and he is conflicted on Burroughs as an influence. Take Allen Ginsberg for example. I would suspect a bit of jealousy and resentment against the Beat guru who so ruffled Bukowski’s feathers. levy hosted Ginsberg in 1966 at a benefit reading in Cleveland. Ginsberg was in the process of crossing the United States for his Fall of America collection. This was the “Wichita Vortex Sutra” period, a poem that has aged well given today’s current events with its look at war, the media, and Middle America. Reading over Ginsberg’s biography and Smith and Swanberg’s book, it appears to be that the two poets used each other for their own purposes, rather than there being mutual admiration and cross pollination. At least that is the sense I get. Ginsberg kind of blew into town, created a fuss, raised some money, and annoyed the police and the squares. Did he help or hurt levy’s cause? Connections with levy definitely added a feather to Ginsberg’s cap given what levy had come to represent in the counterculture. Clearly, levy has a complicated and conflicted relationship to the Beats.

In August 1968, levy wrote “Suburban Monastery Death Poem.” Written near the end of his life and at the end of his rope, this is a devastating poem that shows the potential and power of levy. levy died at 26, an accomplished poet, but still learning and developing. As mentioned in d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution, Ginsberg did not write Howl until the age of 30. Who knows what heights levy could have attained? In this poem, levy cries for help: “I don’t want to die in Ohio anymore.” Burroughs is one to whom levy reaches out. levy writes, “William Burroughs — rescue me! / forget that!” The line highlights the attraction / repulsion levy felt for Burroughs. As mentioned before by 1968, Burroughs was viewed as a prophet and a savior to many in the counterculture. With his appearances on album covers, underground newspapers, men’s magazines, and other alternative outlets, Burroughs transformed from a voice in the wildness to a talking head. levy’s line reminds me of “The Seeker” by The Who with the lyric: “I asked Timothy Leary and he couldn’t help me either. They call me the Seeker.” levy and the Who yearn for answers and a guru but at the same time fail to find the guidance they so desperately desire. levy and The Who are also cynical regarding the ability of the counterculture’s leading figures, like the Beatles, to provide answers at all. Timothy Leary and the Beatles are merely media projections and creations. There are no answers. There is only hype. Burroughs represents another media creation of the avant-garde.

Given levy’s interest in concrete and visual poetry, his experimentation with collage, his familiarity with the little mag community, his relationship with the Beat Generation, and his interest in drug and alternative cultures, I believe wholeheartedly that the figure of Burroughs had to be confronted and overcome by levy. levy viewed Burroughs as an important yet ultimately oppressive and, as we will see, inadequate influence. Clearly, levy wrestled with Burroughs.

In a remarkable passage included in a packet of ephemera sent by levy to Marvin Malone of Wormwood Review in the days leading up to his suicide, levy discusses Burroughs as a writer and his relation to his own poetics. The letters and other artifacts he mailed to intimates around the country represent levy’s legacy. They form part of the picture of how levy wanted to be remembered. Michael Basinski in his introduction to the letters mentions that some of the letters discuss the modern poetics of Creeley, Ginsberg and Olson. What is revealed is an intellectual poet deeply involved with the poetics of his time.

In a letter to dr wagner from 1966, levy writes:

I sit down 10-20 times a day and glans equinox dropping thru may STONE hinges sighted on syrian frontier the eglyphian stroboscope study course & its been occuring to me that the STROBE is; when assembled a form less jumble & a master piece of chaos that should even jolt ole Budge out of his gravey TRAINing center — the strobe codex cannot be broken — we have discovered an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication that may surpass burroughsian lucidity — or the Rug scribble of the adding machine addict is to easily ascribed to rug scribble — while the strobe is primarily a non-rug scribble — perhaps anti-acid? Rug scene — if you stare at the strobe long enough the obvious patterns vanish — the problem is how can we get passed the censors & get the thing on ToVo (TOVO) as in demi-tovo-western version of TASS which is another version of Ouspenskian political mysticism

In this brief passage, it is clear that levy held many of the same obsessions and concerns as Burroughs. levy’s excitement over discovering “an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication” echoes Burroughs’ fervor over the cut-up and yage expressed in various letters and interviews. In The Yage Letters, Burroughs writes, “Yage is space time travel.” In The Job, Burroughs states, “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, they do mean something, and often that these meanings refer to some future event… Perhaps events are pre-written and pre-recorded and when you cut word lines the future leaks out.”

The concern with passing the censor reminds me of a similar line from Naked Lunch in the Talking Asshole routine. Burroughs writes, “That’s the sex that passes the censor, squeezes through between the bureaus, because there is always a space between, in popular songs and Grade B movies, giving away the basic American rottenness…” Both levy and Burroughs sought a literary form merging high and popular culture techniques that would allow them to explore and maneuver in those spaces in between, the little gaps of freedom in the monolith of the dominant culture and in the controlling aspects of language. levy also expresses his knowledge of Western media control of information and its close ties to Soviet oppression. Both realized the United States and the Soviet Union are heavily invested in stifling freedom of speech and free thought. The manipulation of media outlets is a key element in that process.

levy’s letter to wagner suggests that Burroughs did not appear in levy’s publications because levy was critical of Burroughs’ work. levy writes, “we have discovered an absolute means of time-warp-jump-the-rope communication that may surpass burroughsian lucidity — or the Rug scribble of the adding machine addict is to easily ascribed to rug scribble — while the strobe is primarily a non-rug scribble — perhaps anti-acid? Rug scene…” Burroughs in levy’s opinion was too lucid. levy describes Burroughs’ work as “rug scribbles.” This refers to “drug scribbles” with the “D” removed. Similarly, I also misread this as “rag scribbles” thinking of the British slang for heroin and a prostitute, an “oily rag.” The use of British slang in my mind refers to the fact that in 1966 Burroughs was living in London. In this light, levy felt Burroughs writing was merely drug centered and drug induced rambling whereas his work “anti-acid” and a breakthrough beyond drug-speak. By the mid-1960s, drug jargon and philosophy were becoming old hat, cliché and a straitjacket to open expression. Burroughs, and even Ginsberg and Kesey, were talking of going beyond drugs as a means toward heightened perception.

levy is using “rug” in this manner, but “rug” is also British slang for trite, tired, cliché, obvious. This would tie in with Burroughs’ lucidity. As I have written above, levy prized obscurity and noise in communication. levy states, “Why concrete? What can be more obscene than refusing to communicate.” levy felt quite rightly that his problem with the censor had less to do with four-letter words than his failure to express himself clearly and directly in a manner the common reader could understand. Obscurity equals obscenity. I have pointed out this element of pornography in connection with Burroughs in a previous Bunker column, but levy felt Burroughs did not go far enough with his cut-up and maintained ties to open communication, narrative, and discernable pattern.

levy writes, “if you stare at the strobe long enough the obvious patterns vanish.” Compare the stroboscope to the Dream Machine. levy lays down the problem with Burroughs’ cut-up experiments; they do not abandon “obvious patterns” despite his desire to obliterate word lines, destroy the tyranny of the sentence, and topple the blocks of meaning conveyed by syllabic language. In short they are too lucid. Brion Gysin, the guru to Burroughs, saw Jungian archetypes and visual patterns in the Dream Machine. In an essay on the Dream Machine published in Olympia Magazine, the Olympia Press’ response to Grove’s Evergreen Review (republished in Brion Gysin Let The Mice In, Something Else Press as well as in the Brion Gysin Reader), Gysin writes quoting Ian Sommerville…. “After a while the visions were permanently behind my eyes and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me.” He writes about “patterns of color” and “elements seen in endless repetition.” On the other hand, the stroboscope as envisioned by levy wants to break and complicate patterns. In an essay on the Tibetan Stroboscope, Karl Young writes, “Technically a stroboscope is an instrument used for industrial and scientific procedures that call for the intermittent flashing of beams of light… Strobe light can seem like a mild means of questioning the nature of perception. Still the strobe light can make what people usually take for granted as perception seem much less certain. Under a strobe, light and darkness constantly alternate, which can be seen in terms of existence and nothingness, or in the dualism of many occult traditions…The news is changes in perception.” Burroughs and Gysin claim to pursue a similar interest in deranging and challenging perception but they continually return to pattern and endless repetition. Take for example Gysin’s permutation poems or his artwork. Pattern and repetition are privileged over plurality of meanings and multiplicity of perception. Karl Young in connection with the stroboscope as envisioned by levy: “The images abound in contradictions, paradoxes, oppositions, and kinds of flipping polarities that at times attract and repel each other.” The Dream Machine moves away from this frantic motion and “flipping” to “limitless patterns” and “endless repetition.” The Dream Machine quickly becomes boring and too lucid.

Perhaps, levy’s literary form of the strobe is a reaction to Burroughs’ writing. Before reading the letter quoted above, I viewed Ed Sander’s Egyptian influenced poems as a major influence on levy’s work in this line and they were, but Burroughs might also play an important role. I think the focus here is in part on the cut-up experiments of the 1960s that appeared in seemingly every major little magazine of the time. Yet I want to narrow down to one magazine in particular and suggest that levy’s comments and his development of the stroboscope provide an interesting critique to a particular experiment of Burroughs’. The magazine in question is C: A Journal of Poetry and Burroughs contribution to Issue 9: “Giver of Winds is My Name.” Here, Burroughs experiments with glyphs accompanying a cut-up. Burroughs also contributes “Intersection Shifts and Scanning from Literary Days by Tom Veitch.” These works are Burroughs at his most poetic. In 1966, Ginsberg stated in a Paris Review interview that Burroughs was really a poet. It is easy to think that Ginsberg had the work from C Journal in mind. I believe levy must have seen Burroughs’ piece in C as well. Given his intimate knowledge of the little magazine scene, particularly in the Lower East Side due to a friendship with Ed Sanders, it is likely levy saw a copy of this issue. C 9 was published in the Summer of 1964 before levy’s stroboscope poem and his letter to dr wagner. As I have mentioned earlier, levy travelled to New York City in late 1964 where he saw Burroughs reading and just as likely read a copy of C 9.

Like in the Egyptian Stroboscope, Burroughs utilizes hieroglyphics in his cut-up in C 9. In The Job, Burroughs states, “The study of hieroglyphic languages shows us that word is an image… the written word is an image. However, there is an important difference between a hieroglyphic and syllabic language. If I hold up a sign with the word ‘ROSE’ written on it, and you read that sign, you will be forced to repeat the word ‘ROSE’ to yourself. If I show you a picture of a rose you do not have to repeat the word. You can register the image in silence. A syllabic language forces you to verbalize in auditory patterns. A hieroglyphic language does not. I think that anyone who is interested to find out the precise relationship between word and image show study a simplified hieroglyphic script. Such a study would tend to break down automatic verbal reaction to a word. It is precisely these automatic reactions to words themselves that enable those who manipulate words to control thought on a mass scale.” Burroughs talks the talk here but his cut-up work fails to satisfactorily break the urge to “repeat the word” or “verbalize in auditory patterns.” The hieroglyphics are mere window dressing. levy realizes that the cut-up experiment, like the Dream Machine, is built on repetition of words and images that construct a pattern despite the desire to break free into silence such as the figure of Lady Sutton Smith appears in My Own Mag and other publications of the period. On one level this goes down to the source material of the cut-ups. Burroughs utilizes the same basic material for many of his cut-ups: recycled bits and pieces from the word horde of Naked Lunch. As Davis Schneiderman demonstrates in an unpublished essay, Burroughs repeatedly cuts-up the same front page of the September 17, 1899 New York Times. In addition, levy feels that Burroughs lays down the same old con. He writes like he speaks, in a monotone, due to his recycling of old material that relies on chance and the scissors for a fresh perception. levy sees that Burroughs is addicted to a static word and image bank and thus condemned to parrot the same old phrases despite the cut-up. Burroughs cannot cut his ties to the forces of control imbedded in “obvious patterns” and word lines. He cannot keep out the echoes of his recycled writing out of his “new” material and thus never truly risks obscurity, silence, or miscommunication. As quoted earlier, Burroughs stated on the cut-up: “I would say that my most interesting experience with the earlier techniques was the realization that when you make cut-ups you do not get simply random juxtapositions of words, they do mean something…” The most interesting aspect of the cut-up to Burroughs is their “lucidity,” their clarity of meaning. Burroughs shys away from “simply random juxtapositions of words.” levy embraces this aspect in the stroboscope at the textual and visual level.

This analysis is at a textual level and says nothing of the visual elements that deeply interested both authors. In this case I would say that Burroughs preferred clean mimeo. Compare his Time and APO-33 to levy’s Tibetan Stroboscope. Both writers utilize elements of typewritten text and collage, but levy deliberately makes his text illegible. I suggest that Burroughs did not manipulate dirty mimeo in order to further his creative ideas. 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 reader’s expectations and to suggest elements of censorship and miscommunication. This is another example of the lucidity that levy saw as a failing in Burroughs’ work.

As I have written before, Burroughs always remained aware of the reader and sought clear communication above all. levy sought to challenge that relationship more confrontationally through “destructive writing.” The strobe as literary form is a “master-piece of chaos.” Burroughs made gestures in this direction but by the late 1960s he would come “back now to write purely conventional straightforward narrative” as he would state in The Job. Burroughs found that purely experimental writing was something of a trap. Perhaps had he lived levy would have felt a similar pull away from the more experimental concrete work of his late career.

d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution is a revelation for anybody interested in the Cleveland scene, the little magazine, and the alternative poetics of the 1960s. The book centers levy in Cleveland yet succeeds in showing how he searched beyond the city limits for inspiration and how his influence rippled outward from Euclid Avenue. For years, there has been a valuable base of raw material, original and reprint publications, letters, and artwork, on which to build the critical reputation of this misunderstood poet. Smith, Swanberg, and their contributors provide several bricks to that structure. Hopefully critics and writers will seek out levy’s work as there is much to learn from and about him. levy is an inspiration as a poet, a publisher and as a community builder. The project he began in Cleveland has yet to be completed in that city and beyond. The positive benefits of such an effort were sorely needed then and maybe even more so today.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In my piece on Eric Mottram, I wrote that I first came into contact with d.a. levy while browsing through the stacks at the University of London Library. Looking back on it, it is weird that I had to go overseas in order to discover this most American of poets. levy is American in a sense that is increasingly in peril in these troubled times. He is a figure of protest, dissent, independence and self-reliance. levy might be a counterculture poet of the 1960s, but I can see him fitting in with Thoreau who refused to pay his taxes and went native (even if only half way) as well as with firebrands like Thomas Paine who took to their printing presses in protest against British tyranny. Reading levy in 1992 much closer in age to levy than I am now, I do not think I appreciated what a special poet and person he was. Fascinated with the Beats, I placed levy in that tradition and bought into the myth of a man suicided by society. I remember being somewhat underwhelmed by the poetry in comparison with the myth.

Much has changed in me and the world at large since I first read levy. Many of these personal changes, such as my newly sparked interest in mimeo, printing techniques and the small press; my obsession with creative communities; and my fascination with literature’s role in popular and political culture play right into the obsessions that drove levy. I also require a sense of tradition and literary history as background to fully appreciate a writer, and a dedicated group of scholars and artists are constructing the critical edifice necessary to build up the reputation of this largely misunderstood poet. I think the internet has really helped establish this home base. Several wonderful websites have grown up around the Cleveland mimeo scene and levy in general. Deep Cleveland is a case in point, as is the d.a. levy page. The Cleveland State library possesses a tremendous collection of levy’s work, as does Kent State. The library has been very active in scanning and making available the contents of their collection. From what I can tell they are at the forefront of this trend to make library holdings available on the internet. The power of the Cleveland scene in the 1960s cannot be separated from the vitality of public spaces like bookstores, coffeehouses, theaters, revolving door apartments, and crash pads. In my opinion, it is not a coincidence that the rebirth of Cleveland parallels the city’s efforts to reclaim and examine its rich history. The Rock and Roll Museum is the most obvious (and maybe controversial) example of the role of history in the rebuilding of Cleveland, but institutions like the library are crucial as well. levy realized the value of a well-stocked library when he donated alternative books and magazines to the public institutions of Cleveland. As Ed Sanders suggests, the Rock and Roll Museum would benefit from an exhibit dealing with levy and the Cleveland scene. The Cleveland mimeo scene is certainly intertwined with the rebellious spirit of the popular music of the 1960s.

A reluctance to take old anecdotes at face value seems to be the order of the day in the academic community dedicated to the writers of the immediate post-WWII era. Kerouac, Bukowski, and Burroughs are the Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink and Pecos Bill of American Literature. The tall tales surrounding these writers have obscured their true legacy. The veneer of myth covering these writers and making them so shiny and glossy for short-sighted fans is being rubbed away. Critics are getting at the bedrock surface below. The documentary on Bukowski, Born into This, takes the old, seldom seen footage and lets it speak for itself. The Bukowski letters continue this process. The result is a much more literary and, even in some ways, more sensitive Bukowski. The book Kerouac’s Wild Form (among others) reveals the radicalism of Kerouac by demonstrating his intellectual side and by laying bare his roots in the creative cross-currents of the Post-WWII avant-garde. James Grauerholz examined “the” Beat Myth, the William Tell shooting of Joan Vollmer by William Burroughs, in an effort to get to the bottom of this mystery that lies at the heart of Burroughs’ creative life and of his “secret of fascination.”

The valiant efforts of librarians, collectors and archivists who have saved the ephemera of the Cleveland scene from destruction are beginning to bear fruit. The levyfest in Cleveland is part party and part symposium. The word is getting out about levy beyond a handful of academics and collectors interested in the relics of the mimeo revolution. One proof of this is a recent publication by Bottom Dog Press: d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution. The book, edited by Larry Smith and Ingrid Swanberg, delves deep into the life and work of levy far beyond the usual mythmaking.

This is most obvious in the treatment of levy’s suicide. For years, I believed that levy was hounded to death by a fascistic Cleveland. Besieged by legal troubles, levy took his own life to escape the oppressive police state atmosphere. This is an important element of the story but it is not the whole tale. At the time of his death, the light at the end of the legal tunnel was in sight. levy, had he held out, would have been cleared in Cleveland. He could have sought out more hospitable pastures like California or New York, and as the book states, such plans were contemplated and were in the works. The circumstances around levy’s death are much more complex: a combination of police-state hounding, a fragile state of mental health, relationship problems, and confusion about his creative future and role. What is clear is that levy was a figure out of Ginsberg’s Howl or Artaud’s essay on Van Gogh. That is if you get to the radical and political center of those works. levy was persecuted by society but it was not for his drug use or use of dirty words. They were the pretext. levy was a wanted man for the critical, questioning, and contrary nature of his thought. levy was an enemy of the state because he challenged the unassailable myths of the United States and the Western world head-on. As the recent essays make clear, levy, like Olson, was a historian. He found out for himself, and the powers that be did not like what he uncovered.

I think the comparison with Olson is instructive, and a major source of my ongoing and growing interest in levy. Like Olson, levy is an archeologist of the morning. levy explores beginnings, roots, and foundations in order to understand where things stand in the Now and in the Future. His interest in Egyptian history and script was one aspect of this digging in the past as was his excavation of the history of Cleveland. Like Olson with Gloucester and William Carlos Williams with Paterson, levy initiated an intense relationship with the city of Cleveland. I can think of few writers so active in community building outside of the major metropolitan areas on the two coasts. Surely, Olson and Williams explored their home bases in depth, but they did not attempt to construct an alternative community outside of the pages of Paterson and The Maximus Poems. Cleveland in many ways was levy’s muse and his major creative project. The city on the lake lies at the heart of his poetry. For example see Cleveland Undercover.

Olson also comes into play with his ideas of composition by field in the essay Projective Verse. A look at levy’s mimeo work reveals a poet greatly concerned with the appearance of the poem on the page. levy’s work recognizes the page as space. Swanberg and Smith’s book is wonderful in this respect, solidifying levy as a concrete / experimental / visual poet. The book also explores how the means of production dovetailed with levy’s literary concerns. This placement of levy in the forefront of the poetic avant-garde is extremely interesting and does justice to levy’s poetic project.

The focus of the levy book may be the mimeo revolution, but the essays in the collection greatly expand the range of levy’s work. The levy presented here is a deeply intellectual poet who was intimately in touch with the political, social, and literary crosscurrents of his time as well as time gone by. levy’s reach extended far beyond Cleveland in inspiration and influence. The levy presented here is less a stereotypical hippie, counterculture poet and more the experimental, avant-garde poet and publisher.

In this line, I found particularly interesting the treatment of levy as an artist. The most obvious example of this is his work with the mimeograph machine. I have read precious little on the actual mimeo process and its effect on and relationship with the creative process. Smith and Swanberg’s book provides many insights here. The book ties together the importance of the typewriter in poem-making as demonstrated by Olson in Projective Verse. The poet could become his own typesetter and lay out the poem on the page. Stencil cutting continues this process in the act of do-it-yourself reproduction. levy mastered the mimeograph, manipulating it for complex visual and typographical affects. I had never heard of the distinction between clean and dirty mimeo until reading this book. I always assumed that smudgy, inky pages were unintentional. Not true. Such effects were harnessed by levy in his concrete works to bring up issues of illegibility, obscurity, censorship, and incomprehensibility. levy incorporated blots and smudges as a typographical form of noise, static or feedback. Karl Young writes,

Taking a cue from blurs and set-off, levy began overprinting texts, sometimes for visual effects alone, sometimes as a technique to obscure some words while leaving others visible, creating a new text out of an old. A number of other mimeographers had reversed stencils, printing texts backwards. This was invariably done to produce results that were merely cute. levy worked reversed stencils in conjunction with other print runs to produce meaningful interactions of directions. His most resourceful use of mimeography came from over-inking stencils. Slight overinks were one of the perennial annoyances for veteran mimeographers. In a number of late works levy achieved a surprising range of text alteration and abstract graphics through various degrees of over-inking and cylinder impression. The initial results of these prints were often single sheets which he then had reprinted offset so as not to disturb the imbalance he had set up. In this process, he had completely jumped over the standard limitations of mimeo, turning it from one of the most tediously restricted forms of letter reproduction into the tool for one of the most dramatic forms of visual poetry of the era.

levy was not incompetent with the mimeo, but a savvy manipulator of the medium who sought to further his interests in concrete / experimental / visual poetry.

The argument is made that levy was one of the foremost practitioners of the mimeograph. His work is very impressive. I am much taken with the work of Jeff Nuttall in My Own Mag. I would characterize Nuttall’s work as clean. Nuttall strives for clarity in his inking and chooses to add the element of disruption with the use of scissors, the razor, fire or collage. The visuals in My Own Mag must have been difficult to create with a stencil, and the painter and draftsman in Nuttall comes to the fore. The visuals, like the comic strips and covers in My Own Mag, are more traditional, more conventional, maybe an example of what could be called classical mimeo. levy’s work with its blobs, its acknowledgement of the physical nature of ink, its superimpositions, and its fading 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 reink calls to mind Warhol’s Marilyn paintings of the early 1960s where such effects bring to mind mortality, impermanence, transitoriness. Nuttall stained his magazine (Issue 9) but I do not get the same flashes from his work. The 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.

Like Nuttall, levy was also a painter and illustrator. Russell Salamon points out this aspect of levy’s creative endeavor providing color images of the Cleveland Prints. levy created two sets of prints depicting a “used inked condom” in collages. Salamon points out “the free speech element” of these prints. I found these collages very compelling, and I did not know why until I read Karl Young’s essay: “At the Corner of Euclid Ave and Blvd St Germain: d.a. levy’s Parables of Local Necessity and Universal Decentralism.” Young recounts, “Jokes about the difficulties [of mimeo], such as that drawing on a mimeo stencil being comparable to writing with the claw of a hammer on a used condom, made up a sub genre of its own.” It was then that I saw the prints as a comment on the mimeo process. The prints also comment on free speech and communication in another way. In “Intro to the Cement Fuck,” levy writes, “as for obscenity… which is more obscene jacking off into a wastebasket becauz nobody wants to make love, or getting a bayonet in the guts.” In an interview with Andrew Curry of Dust, levy speaks of his work in relation to masturbation. levy was aware of the tie between excess, waste, and obscenity in a capitalist society. The mimeos of Cleveland bypassed normal distribution channels, ignored the mainstream publishing industry, and flooded the limited market with a baffling array of editions, limited editions, and reprints. The theories of Georges Bataille on potlatch and excess production come to mind. In a similar vein, levy states, “Why Concrete? What can be more obscene than refusing to communicate?” levy’s poetry with its failure to communicate its message clearly and simply is obscene. Again his poetry becomes and celebrates wasteful exercise like masturbating in a wastebasket or condom. levy was drawn to concrete poetry in part because of these intellectual, political and philosophical underpinnings. Many of the essays in d.a. levy and the mimeograph revolution make clear the capitalist critique that is implicit in not only his poetry and art, but also in his means of production and distribution.