Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Each day of the work week I spend roughly four hours commuting. By and large, I sit in the same seat, on the same car, at the same time, with the same people. Monday through Friday. Month after month. For three years now. This routine is far from Burroughsian. But there is danger as recently commuting in the DC Metro area has been as full of occupational hazards as crab fishing in the Bering Sea. In the past two to three years, several people have died on the subway or train lines in the nation’s capital. Whether by suicide or due to faulty safety systems (to say nothing of the threat of terrorist attack, of which I am reminded of every day by the presence of bomb-sniffing dogs and military personnel with automatic weapons), the daily commute has become deadly in DC.

This does not even take into account the fact that for many of my fellow commuters the boredom, frustration, and monotony of their commutes are slowly killing them, draining them of their vitality, and leaving desiccated husks wrapped in business-casual attire. One of the things keeping me alive is the fact that my commute affords me four hours a day to read and to write. (In fact, I am composing this on the train on what would otherwise be a rainy and depressing Monday morning.) I have read more books, written more essays, in the past three years than at any time in my life, with the possible exception of my college years. My commute has become a study hall, my seat on the train transformed into a cubicle in a mobile library as I head to my cubicle at work. What for many people is a source of dread has become one of the most personal, sustaining, and fulfilling segments of my day.

Yet the commute, with its Cerebrusian dogs, weaponry, and body count, its daily death march from train into the bowels of the subway, its seemingly incessant waiting, and its persistent and oppressive passing of time, reminds me of my mortality. Maybe that is why nary a day goes by on the train, particularly as I wait to load onto the subway car, that I do not think (if only for a flash, before I stuff the thought back under the bed with the other monsters) of Bill Cannastra. Wild Bill was one of the great characters of the literary Village in the immediate post-WWII era. Whether it was eating glass at cocktail parties or running naked around a block in the Village (Kerouac ran with him, but would only strip down to his boxers), Cannastra’s actions shocked and inspired the Beat writers from John Clellon Holmes to Allen Ginsberg to Kerouac.

But it would be Cannastra’s death that would prove to be his most lasting and legendary exploit. In a letter to Neal Cassady on Halloween 1950, Allen Ginsberg tells the tale:  

The party was leaving [Ann Adam's] house after a night of sticking and wandering, and on the way to Claude’s Claude and Cannastra had become friendly and got drunk, pawing each other, recently. Subway to Claude’s to get money, a touch O’the dawn. When they talked about the Bleecker Tavern (negress Winnie’s hangout) Bill lurched out of the window as a joke. He stuck his head and shoulder out, but apparently had misjudged his lurch and found himself hanging unbalanced out of the window. The others rushed to pull him back, and hung on to hi, as the subway roared through the tunnel. His coat ripped, and they couldn’t get a grip on him by his shoulders as he was too far out. When he saw what was happening he began screaming to be pulled back. He ducked, trying to avoid the pillars in the tunnel, hunched his head, but suddenly there was a thud and he was knocked out of the window to the tracks, out of their hands. When the train stopped, she went to the last car where his body was dragged and saw that his head was broken and brains showing out of the temple.

The subway stop was the Bleecker Street IRT station at Bleecker and Lafayette on the uptown side.  

The night before Cannastra’s death, Ginsberg spent five hours with him at the San Remo. The San Remo was a fixture on the Village scene, like the Minetta Tavern and the Kettle of Fish, which were just up the street on MacDougal. There is a picture of Burroughs standing outside the San Remo with Alan Ansen. At some time or other, all the Beats gathered there for nights of drink and talk. On October 11, 1950, Ginsberg and Cannastra did much of both. The subject of the conversation was death, and Ginsberg left the bar wondering if Cannastra was long for this world. Ginsberg recited sections from “On Judgment,” a poem Ginsberg wrote about Cannastra and Huncke (which later appeared in the Empty Mirror collection).

He cast off all his golden robes
And lay down sleeping in the night,
And in a dream he saw three fated
At a machine in a shroud of light.

He said, “I wait the end of Time,
Buried and bound in ravenous wrath.
But there is a lantern in my grave.
Who hath that lantern all light hath.”

And now the prophet of this dream
Is sunken in the dumbing clime.
Much is finished, much forgotten
In the wrack and wild love of time.

Who talks of Death and Angel now,
Great Angel fallen out of grace?
O Lord why has thou taken him
There was such beauty in his face.

It’s death that makes man’s life a dream
And Heaven’s splendor but a wave:
Light that falls into the sea
Fails within its ancient cave

Where all the crystals of the skull
and skeleton are cooled in shade,
in an eternal shadowless night
Where shroud must rot and memory fade.

Where the man of the apocalypse
Shall wait upon a silent bed 
Until the sexless womb bear love
And the grave be weary of the dead,

Tragical master broken down
Out of a self embodied tomb,
Blinded by the sight of death
And woven into the darkened loom.

The “great question” of “was it an accident or did he do it on purpose?” (a variation of “to be or not to be”) hovered like a restless ghost around the Beat circle in the days, months and years thereafter.  

The death of Cannastra signaled the end of an era in Beat New York. Holmes, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and even Burroughs began the process of maturing not so much emotionally as artistically. All would start definitive work in the next year or so. This is most clear in the case of Jack Kerouac. Cannastra’s screams still echoed, yet a month later Kerouac married Joan Haverty, Cannastra’s girlfriend. Kerouac briefly moved into Cannastra’s apartment on West 21st Street, and most importantly, Kerouac took the tracing paper stored there. By the end of April 1951, the scroll version of On the Road was typed on the paper, and Kerouac had come of age as a writer.

As I stand waiting for the subway to arrive and stare into the gaping maw of the tunnel looking for the presence of a flicker of light, I sometimes think of Cannastra’s death as a sacrifice — another young man trampled by those chasing a bull market. In that sense, Cannastra was a Dionysian figure. Ginsberg felt much the same way as Cannastra is one of the many whos martyred to Moloch

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930′s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles.

Cannastra died for the sins of the thousands of sleepwalkers slowly progressing to their deaths in their grey flannel suits on the cattlecars from hundreds of Levittowns. Their sin was to betray ecstasy in favor of chasing the American Dream. Cannastra put his shoulder to the wheel and was chewed up and dragged under the IRT, only to be spit back out a hundred feet away with a chunk of his brain missing. Lobotomized.  

And running parallel to the commute full of grey flannel suits are the trains that just a few years before headed to Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Dachau. Millions of Americans in subways, trains, and cars head off to their own air-conditioned nightmares at work and at home. The American versions of the concentration camp. Cannastra, desperate to escape the train that led to the cubicle or the suburban home as much as he was desperate to hit another bar, hurled himself to his death. But surely such comparisons shade off into parody. Auschwitz is unspeakable and not the subject for jokes, no matter how deadly serious those jokes may be. In the aftermath of Auschwitz, Cannastra’s death becomes a punch line without punch.  

Maybe I just have too much time on my hands as I sit on and wait for trains. Idle hours make a restless and careless mind. I must know in my heart that Cannastra’s death was merely senseless, an act of drunkenness. Nothing more. Meaningless, an act of stupidity. I am making much ado about nothing. But out of that nothingness can we not see Cannastra’s death as an act of Dada, an acte gratuite, like Jacques Vaché’s shooting aimlessly into the crowd, only turned inward on the self?  

Ginsberg thought so, and it is only natural that I attempt to read meaning into the lost and wasted hours of my commute, and, thus, in Cannastra’s death. Cannastra could not have died for nothing. I cannot be commuting to nowhere. There has to be a reason Cannastra laid broken on the tracks (even if I chose not to accept his act of redemption as my own) and a reason I am sitting on this train (it is now Monday evening as I write this). Maybe that is why I read and write so furiously, as I am transported relentlessly into the void.

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

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)

Kenward Elmslie
Power Plant Poems
C Press, 1967

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

On Monday, November 5th, I attended the John Ashbery reading at the Folger Library in Washington DC. I found out about it at the last minute and assumed that it would be sold out (like a Ferlinghetti reading years before) but tickets were still available on Friday afternoon. I was surprised, but apparently a lot of people have never heard of the man considered by many to be “the greatest living American poet.” And of those who have, quite a few have not read his work. Ashbery is like Pynchon, a name to be thrown around and discussed at a certain kind of dinner party to demonstrate your wide reading even if you have not done the heavy lifting of actually turning the pages. In the case of Pynchon’s Against the Day that is a lot of pages.

As I have written in the Bunker, Ashbery’s and Burroughs’ literary concerns and personal lives seem to circle around each other without actually meeting. Paris in the 1950s, New York in the mid-1960s, the use of the cut-up technique at roughly the same time (Tennis Court Oath in 1962 overlaps chronologically with Burroughs’ cut-up trilogy). In addition, both writers made a much anticipated return to the United States after long exile. Their arrival in New York City occurred at roughly the same time. On their returns, both writers exerted a tremendous influence on the New York scene, particularly the Lower East Side, right before the Summer of Love. Ted Berrigan, for example, courted both Ashbery and Burroughs in 1964-1965. Burroughs and Ashbery appeared in some of the same little mags and, more interesting to me, Ashbery included Burroughs in the mags he had a hand in creating: Locus Solus and Art and Literature. Clearly, Ashbery recognized that Burroughs, unlike most of the Beats, had a tie to the European avant garde back to Dada and Surrealism. These ties went forward as well to the post-abstract expressionist concerns that circulated on the Continent in the early 1960s.

Anyway I see a lot of connections between the two, but when I ask around about this most people want to maintain the personal and creative distance between them. I think it has to do with the level of respectability and acceptance that Ashbery has achieved despite his radical beginnings. By those beginnings, I am thinking of the general reception for Tennis Court Oath. It was a stink bomb in the ivory tower, like the cut-up novels. Nobody knew what to do with Burroughs and Ashbery at the time, but with the success of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery’s radical past has been covered up.

Burroughs’ reputation has come a long way, but as much as it pains me to say it, he is still a cult figure in the mind of the mainstream (read: New York-based publishing houses that control the more established awards and fill the bulk of what passes for literary reviews with content and advertising). At present, Ashbery has left the literary scene represented by Locus Solus and Art and Literature behind. Ashbery described those publications to me as “fringe.” In a way, Ashbery is still fringe as is all poetry in this day and age, but he is one of the big fish in the small pond. A peculiarly and particularly exotic one that in the past three decades has been reclassified and reexamined into something more mundane and common. A rare koi in a ornate Japanese rock pool dressed down into a goldfish in a Ziploc bag.

Marjorie Perloff wrote about this transformation in an article entitled “Normalizing John Ashbery” in 1998. Ron Silliman has been talking about it in his blog since 2002. Poetically, conservative critics ignore the fact that Ashbery came out of the New American Poetry Anthology of 1960 and that he was and is a participant and influence on all the more radical aspects of New American poetry since that point. Instead, Ashbery is placed more comfortably in the tradition of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. He becomes a lyric poet. The interest in this co-opting and transformation go back to 1976 when Ashbery won the poetic equivalent of the Triple Crown for Self Portrait (the Pulitzer, the Book Circle Award and the National Book Award). He became simply too important a poet to ignore.

So the Folger Reading is part and parcel of a process that has been going on for years. The reading was co-sponsored by The Poetry Society of America. Moderators included Michael Collier, the director at Breadloaf, and Alice Quinn, the director of the Society and editor at the New Yorker. You had some idea of the type of Ashbery that was going to be presented at the Folger when he was introduced as one of the finest practitioners of the lyric. I think Ashbery sized up his audience during the various introductions and did an about face as a result. He seemed a little flustered at the beginning of his reading searching for what to read. He stated he was going to scrap his planned reading and choose some poems on the spot. He basically called an audible. So what did he choose? He read four poems but two of them stand out. He read the double sestina derived from Swinburne from Flow Chart and the title poem of Hotel Lautréamont, another complex poetic form in this case a pantoum. Interesting choices. The more poetically conservative elements in the literary world, called the School of Quietude by Ron Silliman, have been grasping onto poems like these from Ashbery’s career to place him within their ranks. Surely the presence of closed forms (and obscure ones at that) make Ashbery a poet of a traditional nature and not one of Whitman’s Wild Children, like the Black Mountaineers or the Beats. Clearly, these forms translate into a stable, recognizable meaning. But not so fast. Ashbery stressed at the reading that he found incredible freedom in such restrictive forms. In addition, Ashbery’s comments and answers at the reading highlighted his continued support for innovation, fluidity of meaning, difficulty, complexity, obscurity, and freedom in poetry.

The questions and answers regarding W.H. Auden show Ashbery staining against the normalizing process. The moderator opened his questions by asking about the influence of Auden on Ashbery. This is a fairly standard question given the fact that Auden was responsible for the publication of Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees, in the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956. O’Hara came in second. Commonly the link to Auden highlights a view of Ashbery as part of the tradition of Eliot and Stevens. Again the key is what Auden you are linking to. Ashbery took great pains to associate himself with the early Auden whom Ashbery described as a “gnarly” and difficult poet. Ashbery stated that when he first approached Auden’s work it confused and startled him unlike other work (like Robinson or Frost) in the Louis Untermeyer Anthology that indoctrinated many a poet of Ashbery’s generation. Ashbery stressed complexity, difficulty, obscurity. Ashbery also expressed his regret that Auden edited and distanced himself from his early work in his later life. As Auden got older, he attempted to tailor his work to fit his more conservative and mainstream poetic position. Ashbery saw this as unfortunate just as the same process was for T.S. Eliot and Wordsworth. Ashbery linked himself with early Auden, early Eliot, and early Wordsworth. Likewise, critic Marjorie Perloff sees early Auden and the more radical early Eliot as key influences on Ashbery.

For me an entirely different Auden came to mind when his name was brought up at the Folger. I immediate thought of his underground poem “The Platonic Blow” published by Ed Sanders’ Fuck You Press in 1965. Rumors of the poem had been in circulation for years, and Sanders basically stole the poem from a library and pirated it on his mimeo. It throws into the forefront the gay Auden. Similarly, critics have attempted to out Ashbery. I am thinking of the study On the Outside Looking Out by John Shoptaw that reads a gay subtext into Ashbery’s work. I think Auden was also an influence on Ashbery because he provided a model of how to be a gay poet in his art and in public. Like Auden, Ashbery played his sexuality close to the vest and never became a public figure as a sexual being like Ginsberg or O’Hara. Possibly, Auden chose Ashbery over O’Hara for the Yale Younger Poets Series because he saw more of himself in Ashbery on a literary and personal level. As person and as poet, Ashbery was more reserved and private, while O’Hara was more flamboyant and public.

I also thought that Robert Frost hovered over the reading, but I did not know why. Ever since I read The Tennis Court Oath I have felt that the title poem and the book was a response to Frost’s statement that “writing free verse is like playing tennis with the nets down.” I cannot get other people to see a connection, but Frost was much on the New York School’s mind in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Frost was the granddaddy of American poets, the definition of the establishment. Not surprisingly, the younger New York Schoolers were interested in Frost as poet and public figure. Kenneth Koch wrote Mending Sump as a parody on Mending Wall. In The Last Avant Garde, David Lehman suggests that one of the reasons O’Hara does not like Lionel Trilling in Personal Poem (written in 1959) was because of a talk Trilling gave on Frost at the time. At the Folger, Ashbery mentioned that Frost was one of the poets he encountered and confronted while reading the Untermeyer Anthology.

Yet that did not explain why I was thinking of Frost. After a little research, I discovered why. In 1995, Ashbery won the Robert Frost Poetry Award, a lifetime achievement award given by the Poetry Society. His acceptance speech, published in Ashbery’s Selected Prose, touches on many of the archetypal moments and anecdotes that came up at the Folger. Ashbery’s reaction to the 1936 issue of Time featuring the Surrealists or Ashbery’s decision to become a poet and not a painter because, like William Carlos Williams, he felt poems were easier to carry are two examples. The Frost Award, like the Folger reading, is an example of the conservative elements in poetry trying to claim Ashbery for their camp. Not surprisingly, Ashbery presented himself in a similar manner in these two instances. But as I have suggested, Ashbery not only played to his audience, but also subverted these attempts by remaining true to his avant nature.

I think the figure of Frost, like Auden, is interesting in light of Ashbery for another reason on view at the Folger. At 80 years old, Ashbery is the celebrated poet in old age — a role both Frost and Auden played as Ashbery became established as a poet. Unlike Auden, Ashbery has refused to edit out his early poetry from the canon even if conservative critics are trying to do it for him. Yet he seems like Auden and Frost in his aloofness to the poetry scene around him. At the Folger, Ashbery was asked about his role as poet laureate of MTV. He was quite funny on this topic. He thought it was great as long as he and MTV did not have to do anything. Ashbery wondered when he was getting paid. During the audience Q & A, the question arose on Ashbery’s impressions of slam and performance poetry. Ashbery admitted he knew little about it stating that he preferred poetry on the page and in solitude. This ties Ashbery back to the more conservative elements in poetry. When asked about readings, Ashbery said they were nice as they got him out of his apartment. This is speculation but I got the sense that he has little contact with the larger poetry community and liked it that way. I got the sense that Ashbery’s apartment was not a Mecca for young poets. In these ways, Ashbery differs from William Carlos Williams and Pound in their old age. Despite their isolation, Williams and Pound remained in close contact with the poetry scene of the times. Williams mentored a young Allen Ginsberg from Rutherford as well as Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Lew Welch in his late readings. Pound provided advice from afar to writers like Creeley and Ginsberg. Despite his silence late in life, poets sought to sit at the feet of Pound at various poetry festivals in Italy deep into the 1960s. Poets fed off Pound’s mere presence. Does Ashbery serve a similar function or is he impersonal and unapproachable like late Auden and Frost? I do not know. It would be interesting to know the makeup of the audience of the Folger. Who comprised the majority of the audience? Young poets, grad students, professors, or wealthy patrons of the Folger and the DC Arts scene?

As I drove home to Baltimore after the reading, my mind went back to another Ashbery reading almost 45 years earlier. I do not know if this is fair but it provides some interesting contrasts. In September of 1963, Ashbery read at the Living Theatre. The contrast of the Living Theatre with the Elizabethan Theatre of the Folger is very interesting to me. The home of The Connection or The Brig versus As You Like It. In 1963, Ashbery read in the physical and geographical center of the New York avant garde. In exile in Paris for close to a decade, Ashbery came home to a particular New York: the city at the dawn of the creative boom of the Sixties. By 2007, Ashbery was celebrated in a shrine to Shakespeare and not be treated as an invader or an outsider. Emily Dickinson is receiving similar treatment this year. Interestingly, there are competing views of Dickinson’s legacy with various poetic camps claiming her legacy. In addition, the reading in Washington DC highlights how Ashbery has been used to further a political and cultural program in the Arts. The more conservative elements in poetry are tied to the mainstream publishing industry and the government. Take the Poetry Society with their big push in support of the conservative tradition. This year their Robert Frost Award went to John Hollander. This has caused some degree of controversy and highlights the Society’s poetic and political conservatism. It should be remembered that Hollander slammed Howl in Partisan Review which resulted in an important response by Ginsberg in 1958 that crystallized Ginsberg’s firm grasp of an alternative poetic tradition and politics. Hollander later published a retraction.

I am unaware of who attended the Folger reading, but Ted Berrigan, Frank O’Hara, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and Ron Padgett attended the Living Theatre reading. Ashbery’s presence energized the poetry and art community. It was an event. As Reva Wolf has shown in her book on Warhol, the Living Theatre reading forged relationships between Ashbery and Warhol as well as second generation New Yorkers like Berrigan. I felt the Folger reading lacked that energy. I could be wrong, but it is not a mere question of Ashbery’s age. Williams’ reading at Reed in 1950 at Reed College launched the careers of Whalen, Snyder, and Welch. Williams was close to 70 and in failing health since 1948. Does a reading at the Folger have such creative potential? Possibly, as there were a number of young people at the reading. But I think the answer lies in whether the audience viewed Ashbery as a tool to build something new or a tool to protect something established.

I found it interesting that Ashbery established a relationship with Warhol and the Factory. Given such experiences, I expected Ashbery to be more receptive the question about performative and slam poetry. These “new” poetic styles come out of the happenings of the 1960s, like Warhol’s, and as Ashbery would be particularly aware, out of the performances of Dada and the Surrealists. One could go even further back to Alfred Jarry. Such recognition by Ashbery would suggest to me that he was still actively searching the creative landscape for new inspiration and material. Instead I think Ashbery has finished innovating and settled into a routine. As Ron Silliman has shown with the trajectory of Robert Creeley, this is not a negative but a fact of just what Creeley wanted to accomplish as a poet late in life. Such endeavors worked for and pleased him at that stage. Ashbery is in a similar place. As a result Ashbery at 80 is more at home at the Folger than the Living Theatre. Isn’t that true of all older artists? Was it true of Burroughs with his final trilogy and pronouncements that Love was the best painkiller? I would like to hear from readers on that. But as Ashbery insists he has not forgotten the relevance of his early work and he is not ashamed of it. In fact such work continues to express Ashbery’s concerns as a poet. He embraces complexity and difficulty. Like Auden’s early work, Ashbery’s poetry remains tough to unlock and may definitely be called “gnarly.”

At the end of the reading at the Folger, there was a reception where Ashbery was available for signing. Although I am a collector, I always dread approaching an author for a signature. Too many times I have seen somebody confront an author with a shopping bag full of a single title. I am reminded of the middle aged guy at a baseball game clamoring for a foul ball or an autograph among a crowd of kids. At the same time, such encounters can be very rewarding. Meeting with Carl Weissner in a New York bakery and having him sign my copies of My Own Mag was a great experience. He had some remarkable stories and his inscriptions are priceless to me.

I had been warned that Ashbery gets cranky at signings especially when confronted with a sack of books. As a result I decided to bring two books. But what to bring? I do not own any Ashbery hardcovers but I have several little mags with Ashbery appearances such as C Journal or Big Table. I was tempted to bring a couple issues of C Journals as I thought this rare mimeo would interest Ashbery and maybe engage him in conversation. But unlike most readers of Ashbery, I am drawn to Ashbery as an editor. I view Locus Solus and Art and Literature as major little mags of the mimeo revolution. Those mags are great insights into the influences and obsessions that resulted in Ashbery’s greatest poems, particularly of the 1960s.

So Locus Solus III-IV and the first issue of Art and Literature it was. As I suspected, there was a limit of two books for signing and the line for signatures was quite long. When I approached, Ashbery looked worriedly behind me and commented on the length of the line. I placed the two magazines before him. He picked up and spent some time leafing through the Locus Solus. He read the table of contents and signed the book. I mentioned that I was surprised that he included Burroughs in Art and Literature given the European and avant-garde nature of the magazine. He stated it was not surprising at all as both mags were fringe publications thus suggesting that Burroughs was suitably fringe as well. And then he gestured for the next in line.

Thinking back on the experience, I wonder what I would have asked Burroughs to sign if I had met him in person. On a financial level, the Digit Junkie would be the choice. Signed copies must be almost unheard of. It would also be interesting to present any of the early material like the British Journal of Addiction Letter offprint, Semina IV, or Man’s Wildcat Adventures. These are all neglected but important pieces in the Burroughs bibliography. That said I would have to choose my copies of My Own Mag. Even though collector Nelson Lyon got there first with his complete set, getting Burroughs to sign my copies would be a very personal experience. It is while reading My Own Mag that I feel that I get closest to Burroughs as an author. In addition, the contacts I have made while collecting and researching My Own Mag have been truly special. Given that Burroughs signed rather willingly, a trip to Lawrence would not have been out of the question when I was in college. I can only wonder about the conversation that might have ensued with Burroughs about the magazines. In any case, Burroughs has been speaking to me through My Own Mag for quite awhile now and he has had quite a few remarkable things to say.

Ashbery as Editor: Art and Literature

Art and Literature 1

Art and Literature 2

Art and Literature 3

Art and Literature 4

Art and Literature 5

Art and Literature 6

Art and Literature 7

Art and Literature 8

Art and Literature 9

Art and Literature 10

Art and Literature 11

Art and Literature 12

For more on Ashbery as editor, see the Locus Solus archive.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Since adding the comment feature to RealityStudio, we have gotten a small but very informed response to the Bunker and elsewhere. One of the more active comment threads deals with Kulchur, particularly Kulchur 2. While Kulchur made its name as a little magazine with a strong critical angle, over the years the covers have caught my attention as much as the articles. I wrote on the Kiss cover of issue 13 and compared it to the Couch cover of the Mad Motherfucker issue of Fuck You. The Kulchur covers act as a billboard announcing what was hot and talked about in art and creative circles in New York City in the early to mid 1960s.

Kulchur 2 is no exception featuring a striking photograph of African America Abstract Expressionist Bob Thompson. The photo was taken by Charles Rotmil. Thompson died in 1966 at the age of 29 in Rome of complications due to heroin abuse. The writing of the Beats is essential to understanding the work of Thompson. Thompson lived at the famed Beat Hotel for a time. The University of North Carolina possesses a copy of Kaddish inscribed by Allen Ginsberg to Thompson in April of 1961. Ginsberg was experimenting with heroin at the time. The poem “This Form of Life Needs Sex” is from April of 1961 and shows him toying with the idea of women as well. The Beat Hotel and the heroin connection suggest that Thompson was familiar with William Burroughs.

African American painters were not common in the New York art scene of the Abstract Expressionist and Pop Eras, so over the years interest in Thompson has grown considerably. The Whitney Museum provided a retrospective in 1998 that featured another photograph by Rotmil of Thompson. (See also this review, that review, and also these images.)

Charles Rotmil emailed RealityStudio inquiring about a copy of Kulchur 2. In the emails, he provided some great stories about the creative scene of New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s and graciously agreed to an interview. The Beats were a much photographed group of writers and even fancied themselves skilled with the camera, particularly Allen Ginsberg. In the late 1950s, photography was in the process of a major shift in style signaled by the snapshot aesthetic of Robert Frank in The Americans. Rotmil’s work was included in the acquisition by the Smithsonian in 2006. See this picture of Bob Thompson in his studio. The picture on the cover of Kulchur differs drastically from this studio shot and shows the range of Rotmil as a photographer. Born in France, Rotmil was a hidden child during the Holocaust and has spoken on this experience in lectures and talks.

Always with his ear to the ground and his eyes open, Rotmil was right in the thick of the whirlwind surrounding photography, writing, art, theater and dance in New York City. He was involved in the earliest days of the Judson Dance Company and photographed in detail the workings of The Living Theater. He met casually or knew well a who’s who from Diane Arbus to Judith Malina to Jack Kerouac to Robert Frank to, of course, Bob Thompson. Rotmil addressed a handful of questions and answered in a very candid manner that allows an intimate look into the endlessly fascinated time and place that was New York City of the post-WWII era.

Interview with Charles Rotmil

Provide some background into how you came to New York and became a photographer.

Long story here…. and personal… but I came to New York in the 50s having knocked up this woman who became my wife, and we had two more unplanned children. All based on bad advice: A. the rhythm method… does not work, B. you can get pregnant when you nurse a child, and C . you cannot keep a diaphragm on for a week. Then shortly after that I divorced my wife who took off with another man.

There is a book here for sure…

I was never in hippiedom but did go to California and Mexico right after my separation to get over the pain and the crisis. Wild adventures in both places. On the Road was my travel guide book at the time. I got involved with a call girl in L.A. and went camping in Big Sur and met one of her ex-lovers, Henry Miller. It was a pilgrimage of the first order. He gave me 6 books all signed and all stolen or never returned to me. Dan Balaban was one of the culprits I am sure, and I can’t get hold of him. It could be there are two Balabans, one the writer and the other the actor. If he has my books, he should return them.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s describe the pervading scene surrounding photography. You mentioned Diane Arbus in an email to me. Who were the major influences from the past and present? What was the opinion of Robert Frank particularly his American collection?

I studied with Harold Feinstein, whom I met through a lover at the time, a woman who was a nurse. Through him, I met Robert Frank, who was very modest and hardly ever talked to me, although I saw him often. Once I had a huge party, after a gallery opening for Jay Milder, the painter, filled with everyone you could think of, Red Grooms, De Kooning, Poons, Warhol, and others. We played one record all night, Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.”

Feinstein was, and I think he still is, a prodigious teacher and an eternal influence of the school of honest street photography, totally anti-commercial. Even Avedon seemed square. Frank would not even let Cartier-Bresson in his apartment.

Diane Arbus at the time I met her was studying with Lisette Model, the grotesque school photographer. I studied painting with her husband Evsa Model. I became an assistant to many other illustration photographers, Monroe among them, eventually ending up with Horowtiz the food photographer. I stayed with him for five years… I also continued shooting street stuff and the Living Theater. I took tons of photos there night after night. I knew the Becks well and Judith Molina. I also hung out with dancers, and took photos of them, the Merce Cunningham crowd. Most of them lived in a retreat upstate near Stony Point called the Land. Even Cage hung out there… and others from the Black Mountain College days.

You mention The Living Theater and you are also connected with The Judson Dance Company’s early days. Can you give some details of that scene and your involvement?

The Living Theater was a hangout for me. They let me go to many performances and I hung with some of the actors, who later made it to Hollywood. But I have some real fine portraits of the Becks where I posed them on stage and took with my old Rollei… then it was Pirandello, Tonight We Improvise… Kurt Weill… The Brig, which I did not really care for, but it is on again I hear with Judith Malina still there (she was on the Adams show, remember ?)… best was The Connection… with a real jazz combo on stage and they are all waiting for “cowboy” for their heroin fix… great play… saw it many times… I have photos of the Tonight We Improvise… where the actors throw out the director and eventually the author too… and get lost…. a bit like Six Characters in Search of an Author…

The theater was on 14th Street. On the second floor was a dance studio run by Bob Dunn and his wife, offshoot of Merce Cunningham. There I saw Yvonne Rainer and Lucinda Childs… but Rainer just came out with a book… I took photos of the rehearsals… I have to look for those negatives…

The weirdest thing happened with the Judson Church… I knew Debbi Hay then, she lived also on 10th Street with her then husband… they heard me play the shakuhachi (Japanese flute I improvise with and meditate with… still play it) and she asked me to play during a performance. It turned out to be her first performance ever. I was happy to do this… and John Cage was in the audience at the time… I had trouble getting all the notes, but that was okay because there is a concept in the playing called Ma, which is those silent moments after a long note… nothing happens… that’s intentional and in the notations, which are all written in ideograms… or hatagana…. that got me mentioned a while ago in a New York Times article on the Judson Church history. I will try to find it and send it to you… marvelous experiences there…

Carolee Schneeman used to do her thing there, in the nude, with killed chickens and blood all over the place, and sometimes chocolate… she is now the Great Madame of art performances… I had also a very close connection to Red Grooms, we hung around a lot and once went to see the great sculptor Chaim Gross… Red ended up marrying his daughter Mimi. They went to Italy and got a wagon with a horse, travelled all over the place, performed shadow puppet shows…

There is a community upstate near Haverstraw, stemming from the Black Mountain College people, that I used to go to with everyone… and name it, they were there… poets, Cage, Cunningham, LaNoue Davenport (medieval music)… I wanted to move there but could not… too costly for me… My apartment on 10th Street and Avenue B cost me $35 a month. Before that I lived on 1st Avenue near 2nd Street… with my apartment overlooking the very large 2nd Avenue cemetery, cost me $18 a month. It had cold water, for real… I would wander down to Allen Street and go to the Public Baths and take a bath or a shower for 25 cents… once in a while.

What did you think of the Kerouac foreword to Frank’s collection?

It did not impress me too much. I mean he was the in-guy then. But Frank never did anything as good as The Americans ever again, except for the English series, which came either before or after that, still not as strong.

You mentioned that Kerouac and Ginsberg were quite visible in New York at the time. What was your experience with them and how were they looked upon at the time?

It was very casual actually. Crowds did not appear… I would go to a reading on a Sunday afternoon… walk over from my pad on 10th Street to MacDougal Street and stand with Kerouac against the wall in the coffee shop and listen to Gregory Corso.

One time I was hanging out on Washington Square by the fountain and a group from a magazine, like GQ, appeared and asked me to model sweaters for them. They saw me as a hippie. I always had long hair, a French habit. (I told you I was born in France, no? Strasbourg.) We went around the village, and a woman took shots with a large-format view camera. I have never been able to find the magazine. 1959 or so. Fall issue on sweaters. Would love to find it.

How did the art scene like Abstract Expressionism and Pop intersect with the photographers? Did they influence you as a photographer or was it more social?

I can’t answer that question. I took all the Tuesday night openings as social events which ended in one party or another. Chamberlain comes to mind, the sculptor. I liked what they did. But it had no influence. It was the school I mentioned, Walker Evans, Frank, Feinstein that has the most influence on me…. as honest photography.

Tell your best Cedar Tavern story.

Well, it was a great pick-up place for girls… typically one would come up to me say I need to talk to you… or once I made eye contact with a woman who had a date, and I said, Why don’t we just leave… and we did… and her date came out and punched me… but I went home with her to my pad and we fucked all night.

Another time was when I was after this girl and she said she had a date… and this bald guy appeared and when I asked him what he did he said he drew. Draw, I said, only draw, why not paint? Well, it was Saul Steinberg… to my shame…

I miss the Cedar Bar scene terribly. I loved all the people who came to it. We were like a family. Claes Oldenberg, who had this great little wife, was showing me drawings of a huge lipstick as a sculpture. Never would I dream he was going to pull this off later on, but he did.

Describe how you came to photograph Bob Thompson for the cover of Kulchur 2?

I was in touch with lots of painters who lived on the edge, barely existing; some committed suicide and others disappeared. Bob lived in a loft, and after the Cedar Bar I would hang out with him all night at his loft down east side… played drums, got high.

Can you give some back-story on Bob Thompson?

Whitney Museum did a book on him; you should try to find it. I did the frontispiece photograph for it, the only quasi-formal shot of him, sitting in a wicker chair. He looks like an African prince.

What was your sense of Kulchur as a magazine at the time?

I was used to French literary journals, put out by Sartre and so on… and the publisher who would put out books that were banned here. Olympia Press. Read Lolita there. So I was not surprised by this magazine, emulating the European ones… of course I loved it…

Were there any other magazines that you read at the time?

See above… not sure if Paris Review was in existence then… but that would have been included… I still go to Universities and to their literary magazines section, and peruse them all…

I am fascinated by New York City in the early 1960s. What was it like to be an artist in that atmosphere? If you can say, how did it differ from New York of the 1950s and then in the mid-to-late 1960s?

That is a hard question for me to answer… Like I said I knew many who struggled. Some hit it big right off. I did photography for Leo Castelli when he was uptown in a townhouse, even did photos for an Italian magazine. Ivan Karp sent me out on missions to do a day on artists. He liked my style. Now whenever I visit New York I pop in to speak with him and reminisce. Allan Stone was another gallery I worked with, and I was very fond of Allan until his recent death.

What is your opinion of Allen Ginsberg as a photographer?

Well, I never took it seriously. He liked taking candid pictures. In fact once I met him at the Met with his lover and he asked me to take a photo of both of them against a painting. He was very casual about it… I took the shot… he had an old low-key 35mm camera. I have never seen his stuff.

The obligatory Burroughs question. What the opinion in your mind and in your circles of his work? Did it progress beyond Naked Lunch? Did you come in contact with him when he was in NYC in the 1964/1965 time period?

I was very aware of him, but more from a heavy drug scene point of view. I stayed shy from the heavy stuff. Tried everything else. He was hard to read then… but I liked him, his whole persona… and as far as I knew he was in Morocco somewhere hunting down young boys.

Provide some detail about your photography besides the Thompson photo. Was that shot typical? What was your work like in the 1960s?

It was typical yes. Fringe light photography, under duress, low light, street stuff, which would pull me in. I still do this.

Fill us in on your career to the present. Exhibitions, shows, the trajectory of your work.

That is a problem with me. I have never really had major shows. I have sold photos and at one time I was getting $500 a day in the 70s for commercial stuff, like book covers etc…

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you gather materials for Nomad / New York?

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

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

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

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

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

What happened that caused Nomad to end?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Onward, as Robert Creeley would say. Let’s move to Kulchur 4. What strikes me about this issue is Burroughs and Kerouac’s picture on the cover. Gilbert Sorrentino guest-edited this issue. In his essay in The Little Magazine in America collection, Sorrentino writes, “Marian Zazeela, Marc Schleifer’s wife, gave me a snapshot of Kerouac and Burroughs taken in Paris about 1955, and that became the cover; the title page identifies it as a photograph of Inspector Maigret and Sam Spade.” Steve Clay and Rodney Phillips quoted a longer version of this passage in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. So Sorrentino’s statement has been accepted as fact. This has always puzzled me, as a little knowledge of the Beats throws into question the date and the location of the photograph.

Neither Burroughs nor Kerouac was in Paris in 1955. I don’t think the two writers met at the Beat Hotel or anywhere else in France. Kerouac traveled to France in 1957 and in the late 1960s (recounted in Satori in Paris). In both cases, Burroughs was not present. Looking at the photograph Burroughs looks like a proper Viennese doctor. As for Kerouac where are the Levis, the lumberjack shirts. What is with the hat? This is not Kerouac in the 1950s. Clearly, this is an early photograph.

This picture captures the very beginnings of the Beat Generation in New York in the mid-1940s. In fact, it was taken in 1945 at Columbia University along with another iconic shot. At the Edwin Blair Auction in March 2006, one of these pictures came up for sale. Lot 295, a snapshot of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and Hal Chase, was one of the highspots of the sale. The picture graces the cover of the auction catalog. The catalog description reads in part, “Rare, and one of the most important Beat Generation images, if not the most defining image, taken from where it all started, Columbia University.” The image sold for over $7000, one of the top three items of the auction. John Tyell placed the image on the cover of his landmark study Naked Angels.

The photo on the cover of Kulchur 4 must have been taken the same day. The background of the two photos is identical. Note the buildings in the upper left corner. Clearly, Burroughs wears the same overcoat, tie, and gloves. He has glasses in one shot and not in the other, but the dress is the same.

This photograph of Kerouac and Burroughs tells an interesting story discussed in Oliver Harris’ The Secret of Fascination. Harris writes of the relationship between Kerouac and Burroughs, and the influence as a writer Kerouac had on Burroughs. The impact of Kerouac writing Burroughs as Will Dennison in The Town and the City is huge. The influence ran both ways. Harris, of course, discusses the fascinating aspect of Burroughs as well.

The role of Burroughs as intellectual pied piper is told in great detail by John Lardas in The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. I don’t think there is a fuller examination of the early years of the Beat Generation trio than Lardas’ book. Lardas treats the early Beats as intellectual and religious questors. Time and sober scholarship has proven that this was the case, despite early depictions of them as “know-nothing Bohemians.” In these early years, Burroughs was a major influence on Kerouac and Ginsberg, introducing them to Spengler, linguistics, and French thought. Sammy Sampas and Lucien Carr are the other lightening rods of this time. The photograph in Kulchur 4 highlights the close relationship between Kerouac and Burroughs as well as suggesting the role of Burroughs as teacher and dispenser of knowledge (reading the newspaper). In any case, get a hold of Lardas’ book. It is worthwhile reading.

What is the reason for the confusion of Sorrentino? The caption that goes with the photo in Kulchur suggests that the editors were aware of the proper chronology. The reference to Inspector Maigret and Sam Spade comments, not just on Burroughs and Kerouac’s appearance, but also on their literary collaboration undertaken at the time of the photograph. As discussed recently in the Burroughs forum, And The Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a legendary lost classic of the Beat canon. One of the earliest instances of creative writing from Burroughs and Kerouac, bits and pieces have surfaced over the years. The novel documents the murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr that occurred in 1944. The style of the novel mimics the manner of Hammett, Raymond Chandler and other hardboiled detective writers. Possibly, Kerouac and Burroughs were playing on their hardboiled personas in this photograph. The caption suggests the editors of Kulchur possessed an intimate knowledge of the image’s history.

Yet Sorrentino takes Burroughs and Kerouac out of their proper context. I like that Burroughs can seemingly move freely through time and space. The inability to pin Burroughs down accurately comments on and adds to his mystique as el hombre invisible. Yet as Harris shows in his study of Burroughs’ first trilogy, Burroughs is frequently misread by readers, writers and critics in this manner. These misreadings can provide quite an interesting narrative in themselves

Sorrentino’s slip of memory provides some insight into the state of mind of some of the editors of Kulchur and the state of the magazine. The picture of Burroughs and Kerouac highlights the origin or birth of the Beat Generation. By issue 4, Kulchur was experiencing growing pains and concerns about its origins. Marc Schleifer abandoned the revolution of the Word for the revolution in Cuba. While Hornick is on record as stating that Kulchur 4 was more to her taste than the first three issues, she had yet to fully mold the magazine to her vision of the New York art world. Sorrentino is a dominant figure, but Kulchur in this middle period strikes me as a heavy dose of Leroi Jones as he was questioning his past and transforming into a black nationalist.

After Kulchur 4, the magazine stabilized to some extent (Jones’ intellectual crises aside). Sorrentino expresses a fondness for the issues of this period onward for the next year or so. The magazine possessed a core of editors and contributors, like Frank O’Hara and Leroi Jones. In my opinion, the early and late issues of Kulchur are the most enjoyable. The presence of the Beats in the early issues and the Second Generation New Yorkers, like Ted Berrigan or Ron Padgett, in the later issues captures my interest most.

What is clear is that Kulchur 4 represents a pivot point in the magazine. Kulchur was about to change its editorial leader and its direction. The picture and the confusion regarding its date express an anxiety about origins and a desire to get away from one’s past. In this case, the editors were deeply concerned with Kulchur‘s Beat origins. Hornick aspired for something more refined and self-consciously avant-garde than the rough and tumble Beats. In addition, Jones was experiencing conflicting feelings about his relationship to his Beat past that was essential to his birth as a poet. Possibly providing Sorrentino with this image, Schleifer or his wife slyly reminded the editors of Kulchur to remember where they came from as they stretched out in new directions. As Kulchur 1 and 3 show, Schleifer published, at its heart, a Beat magazine.

The cover is a troubled look back on its past. The cover image also signals the fact that the Beats, like a private detective, were about to go largely undercover and out of sight in the pages of Kulchur. The Beats would never disappear completely. They dominated Kulchur‘s origins and haunted its future in the figures of the Beat-influenced Second Generation New York School. Kulchur 4 has always interested me for what is says about the early Beat years, the relationship between Burroughs and Kerouac, and the state of Kulchur magazine and its editors.

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I have not read all twenty issues of Kulchur cover to cover, but of the issues I have sampled, I enjoy Kulchur 3 the most. Issue 3 presents Kulchur at its most Beat. William Burroughs (“In Search of Yage”), Jack Kerouac (“Dave”), Gary Snyder (“The Ship in Yokohama”), Herbert Huncke (“Elsie,” possibly his first published work), Gregory Corso (reviewing Kerouac’s Doctor Sax), Allen Ginsberg (“Breughal — Triumph of Death”). The issue is heavy on fiction and poetry. The focus on criticism is less apparent here. Yet John Fles’s review of the first seven issues of Yugen provides a bit of cold water on the Beat party with its ambivalent look at Leroi and Hettie Jones’s magazine.

Kulchur 3 also functions as a drug issue. Paul Bowles writes on Kif. Burroughs’ “In Search of Yage” is one of the foundations of the psychedelic era. Kerouac’s piece “transcribes” the monologue of a junkie in Mexico City. Writing of this nature supports the theory that the spirit of the 1960s began in the supposedly silent 1950s. Arthur Marwick in his book The Sixties presents the idea of a long decade from 1958-1974. These pieces, like Burroughs’ “Letter from a Master Addict,” provide a multifaceted view of the drug culture depicting a cornucopia of drugs from opiates to hallucinogens in a variety of exotic settings. By the 1960s, these locales would be swarmed by drug tourists.

Oliver Harris’ writing on The Yage Letters makes this issue even more interesting to me. I have written on how his introductions and critical essays forced me to return and re-read the literary magazines I associated with Naked Lunch. As Harris shows, Kulchur 3 and “In Search of Yage” play a crucial role in the development of the final form and publication of that work by City Lights in 1963 and beyond.

Returning yet again to this favorite issue, I was struck by what was missing from its pages. Harris makes brief mention of a footnote in Kulchur regarding “In Search of Yage.” The Kulchur footnote reads, “‘The Routine’ appears in Floating Bear (#9) distributed solely by mailing list. 25c to The Floating Bear, 309 E. Houston St., New York 2, NY.” Not mentioned by Harris, the publication by Floating Bear came about after a rejection by Kulchur. The story of the publication of “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in the Floating Bear and its subsequent seizure for obscenity has been written about at the Bibliographic Bunker and elsewhere. Fuck You Press published “The Routine” as well, and the piece finally appeared in the third edition of the City Lights edition of The Yage Letters.

This is only part of the story as I found out reading Lita Hornick’s memoir The Green Fuse. Hornick became associated with Kulchur after reading Issue 1. She became president of Kulchur Press, Inc after Issue 2. She had no input in the magazine until that point. It was Marc Schleifer and the contributing editors’ project. Schleifer gathered the material for issue 3. Given the new arrangement, this material needed approval from Hornick. Hornick writes, “Little did I know that [Schleifer] only wanted backing for #3, which was to be an inflammatory issue, before disappearing into the Cuban Revolution.”

What was so controversial about this issue? I quote Hornick in full:

When I finally saw the galleys of Kulchur 3, I was worried about going to jail, because it was on me, as publisher, that the legal responsibility rested. One would not raise an eyebrow at this material today, but it was a different story in 1961. I told my husband about it, and he was not worried at all. He could not believe that little wifey could get into trouble with the law. He didn’t bother to read the galleys himself, but he told me if I was really worried I should take them down to our lawyers. And so I took the galleys to Eugene Klein…. As Eugene leafed through them, he turned pale. He said, “I’ll show them to our pornography expert. Come back tomorrow.” The next day he told me, “Our pornography expert says, if you publish these galleys, you will definitely be arrested by the New York Vice Squad. You will have to spend at least one night in the Women’s House of Detention until we can bail you out. You will lose in the lower court, but we will win in the Supreme Court!” I was agaga; but I took the galleys from Eugene and, after eliminating the two items that were really dangerous for that time, I went ahead with publication. Eugene notwithstanding, nothing ever happened to me. The two things I eliminated were Burroughs’ now famous routine about Roosevelt, for which Leroi Jones was arrested at gun point when he published it in The Floating Bear, and a story by Paul Goodman drooling over a sailor.

Kulchur 3 with its depiction of homosexuality, drug use, and pornographic political satire was to be a bombshell statement on obscenity, pornography and censorship. Donald Phelps’ essay, “A Second Look at Pornography,” that appeared in the issue provides the critical thrust for an enlightened look at these issues. Phelps’ essay does not address the work included in Kulchur 3 directly. In addition, his treatment of pornography tends more to the high art traditions of erotica like Asian art and the art film, but in a footnote, he mentions an essay of Goodman’s on pornography in a favorable light. Clearly, Kulchur 3 was an issue with a purpose and a message.

The issue was meant to deal a blow in the fight against censorship. The legal battles surrounding Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Tropic of Cancer and Lenny Bruce are all in the mix. Of course, so are Naked Lunch and William Burroughs. Burroughs’ work is not mentioned directly in Phelps’ essay, but some of Phelps’ comments on an expanded role and definition for pornography are relevant. Phelps writes,

The best medium of pornography is probably the hard, metallic daylight of satire, allegory, the lyric poem or the critical essay. Before American criticism began to take on the aspect of an extended slumber party, writers… availed themselves of pornography’s intensity, raffishness and occasionally, sexuality… Like the pyrotechnic blasts of these critics, the pornography of Balzac’s Contes Drolatiques, or the Decameron, specializes in flare-lighting the incongruities of any and all pretensions, or relationships. The methods of such pornography are the methods of comedy: undercutting relationships with the common denominator of sexual desire, and deploying the chief weapons of comedy, action and time, to show absurdity in motion.

These comments could apply specifically to “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” a brilliant mix of the obscene, comic and satiric. The Talking Asshole Routine and many of the extended pieces in Naked Lunch provide other “pyrotechnic blasts.” The criticism surrounding Naked Lunch and Burroughs in the late 1950s and 1960s draws from the same pool of thought expressed here by Phelps.

Hornick mentioned in her memoir that issue 3 was not to her taste. The selections in the next issue and thereafter were more to her liking. Without a doubt, the editorial vision expressed in the first three issues differed from all that follow. Schleifer possessed a political bent as evidenced by his decision to go to Cuba shortly after Issue 3. The material gathered by Schleifer in Issue 3 was “inflammatory” ammunition for his revolutionary ideals. Censorship and obscenity laws were on one level about protecting children from sexual images or four-letter words. In addition, they calmed adults’ base sexual desires. Yet as Phelps’ essay makes clear such laws protect the capitalist system and mass consumerism by discouraging masturbation, symbolic of self-sufficient and wasteful activity. Therefore, a blow against censorship of pornogrpahy was a blow against an oppressive capitalist, materialist system. These obscenity laws also condemn alternative lifestyles and political opposition. It could be argued that Hornick’s editing of Goodman and Burroughs’ pieces from the pages of Kulchur played into the hands of the dominant culture that sought to excise these oppositional elements from view.

Yet Hornick was not against fighting these battles. Hornick embraced gay culture and Kulchur provides an insight into the gay New York avant garde. So I would bet she was not shocked by the homosexual content of Burroughs and Goodman’s pieces. Possibly, her fear was more about class and social standing. In issue 8, she published an essay by Michael McClure originally titled “Fuck.” In the Green Fuse, she writes,

It wasn’t really about fucking but about the importance of bringing the Anglo Saxon words back into the language. I was anxious to publish it but wrote to Michael that the postal inspectors would never read it but, when they saw the word FUCK in bold type, would simply impound the magazine. I expected him to write back, “Bourgeois dog! Censorship! Censorship! Censorship!” However, Michael, quite reasonably, suggested that we spell the title in Greek..

Schleifer was not so reasonable and objected to Hornick’s editing of issue three poisoning the relationship between them. It is interesting how the threat of jail, even a single night in Women’s Detention, deterred Hornick from pursuing publication of Burroughs and Goodman’s work. Hornick fears a sense of shock and embarrassment in the court of public opinion. At the same time, the “shock of the new” in the arts appeals very strongly to her. She is very aware and ambivalent about her class status as evidenced by the quote above. Hornick wrestles with these contradictory feelings in her memoir. Diane Di Prima possessed fewer qualms about jail when Floating Bear later published “The Routine.” Di Prima depicts her experience with the authorities in her memoir. Di Prima was pregnant at the time, a fact she used to her advantage.

A more detailed examination of the role of upper class (either by birth or wealth) women in the challenging of obscenity and censorship laws would be interesting reading. In Hornick’s case, her desire to provide a forum for the latest in the avant garde assisted and yet conflicted with her desire for social standing. As The Green Fuse makes clear, she, from an early age, sought to marry up the social ladder. On one level, acquiring a great contemporary art collection assists in that process. It is also a good investment. Yet championing “sick” and “obscene” literature of disputed value is not only socially embarrassing, but also extremely expensive. While Kulchur ran in the red, Hornick refused to let things run out of control financially. She was not about to jeopardize her lifestyle in the fight against censorship. Barney Rosset and Grove Press faced a similar dilemma in financing the legal battles for Lawrence, Miller, and Burroughs. All these conflicts must have faced women (and men) such as Margret Anderson, Jean Heap, and Harriet Monroe, in publishing Joyce and other Modernists. If anybody knows a book or article on the subject of the upper class role in the revolt against established manners as expressed in publishing (and the inner conflicts that created) I would be interested.