Comments on: Commentary on Burroughs in Letters and Magazines

By: Jim Pennington

Jim Pennington — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 18:56:06 +0000

The future leaking out again…
That Gossamer John is a great trailer for the novel … have any more chapters surfaced from your store?
Your collaboration and the intersection technique deserve more attention.

By: Graham Masterton

Graham Masterton — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 21:05:15 +0000

Very interesting about the decline in the newspaper industry. I have just come across a chapter from a novel on which William and I were collaborating just about 45 years ago and it predicts just that. Check out GOSSAMER JOHN in the Fiction Section of my website http://www.graham_masterton.co.uk. It is under my name but I think you will clearly see what William contributed!

By: Jim Pennington

Jim Pennington — Sun, 04 Aug 2013 18:46:28 +0000

Excellent finds, Jed. I was trying to find a Charles Raven review of NL the other day – I never did – but came across the Spectator Archive which has these two articles (amongst a whole bunch of others). The English Literary world 40-odd years ago was pretty staid and parochial so Bill’s appearance stopped quite a few people in their tracks/tracts/TRAKs …

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/29th-july-1960/8/rimbaud-in-a-raincoat

http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/5th-february-1977/23/glacial-guru

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 14:02:39 +0000

Really interesting, Jed. I hadn’t thought about the archiving mentality, which is definitely a feature of our own time. Everyone seems to be collecting and curating these days, across different media and art forms.

Also, good point about print and copyright/authorship. Digital media are more slippery, I guess–less conducive to asserting authorial control than the monumentality of print.

By: jed

jed — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 12:27:41 +0000

Mike,

It is interesting how digitial media and postmodernism repeat and build on the technologies and practices of a period like the Middle Ages. If postmodernism is characterized by marginalia and commentary, this is a practice that also dominated the Middle Ages into the beginnings of print. Digital media like twitter and blogging parallel medieval compendiums and such. The database/archiving mentality seems to be an age old one that was strong in the Middle Ages.

The Master Work or Canonical text would seem to be a by product of moveable type and Gutenberg print, and maybe not so much the technology but the changes in print culture and the approach to print that that technology brought about like copyright or originality or authorial intent etc.

You mention big books. I remember the period from 1993-1996 or so as one of the encyclopedic novel. Pynchon, DeLillo, Gass and Wallace all had Master Works out and I have always felt that was a function of the threshold of wide spread digital culture through the Internet and the coming Death of Print (as well as the last gasps of Big Publishing) coupled with the end of the Cold War master narrative.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 16 Jul 2013 20:55:46 +0000

Interesting post, Jed. Do you think there is some relationship between the dominant media at a particular time (say, written manuscript vs. print vs. digital)and the kind of commentary produced? I mean,do you think our digital age encourages the gloss versus the canonical text?

I guess people would say that postmodernism is characterized more by marginalia and commentary, by criticism, than by the master Work with a capital W, but I don’t know anymore. Lots of people are writing very big books.

By: Gary Lee-Nova

Gary Lee-Nova — Sun, 14 Jul 2013 21:55:25 +0000

Excellent project, Jed!

Already I’ve begun to prowl my memory banks and book shelf in search of matching material.

Vivat!