Comments on: #19: Cyclops https://realitystudio.org A William S. Burroughs Community Sat, 20 Feb 2016 18:38:27 +0000 hourly 1 By: Jim Pennington https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/the-top-23-most-interesting-burroughs-collectibles/19-cyclops/comment-page-1/#comment-743654 Sat, 20 Feb 2016 18:38:27 +0000 https://realitystudio.org/?page_id=3148#comment-743654 I don’t know if they still do it this way now in Graphic Design schools but back then you were given book cover designs with only author name and book title to work from – reading the book was not deemed necessary….just genre, book size and house typeface.

This is why the genesis of the remarkable collaboration, never fully realised, that became “Ah Puch Is Here” was so magickal – as Malcolm McNeill recounts in his “Observed While Falling”, Burroughs kicked off the telephone call to arrange their first meeting by saying “I want to meet the guy who knows how to draw me.”

Can you imagine what it was like for a 23-yr-old artist, slightly into dope, degeneracy and Hieronymous Bosch, to hear that coming down the line…. ?

……. I’m doing it now …. magick….

]]> By: Barry Miles https://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/the-top-23-most-interesting-burroughs-collectibles/19-cyclops/comment-page-1/#comment-743535 Sat, 13 Feb 2016 23:44:27 +0000 https://realitystudio.org/?page_id=3148#comment-743535 There seems to be a slight suggestion here that Burroughs’s contributions to Cyclops were in some way different to his underground press appearances. In fact there was a close connection. Most of Burroughs’s underground press material originated in International Times (IT) and Cyclops was edited and published by Graham Keen, one of the directors of IT (and its art director). Graham lived in a room in a house that I rented in Westminster at 15 Lord North Street. In 1970, Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, Burroughs’ French translators, left the Hotel Chelsea and moved th London, renting the rest of the building from me (I had it on a three year lease and was living on Allen Ginsberg’s farm in upstate NY.) Another tenant was Ian Sommerville. Between them they paid the rent; I wasn’t making a profit. Because Claude and Mary were there, and also Ian (though not a complete overlap) Burroughs was often at Lord North Street and got to know Graham. He gave him the manuscript for”The Unspeakable Mr Hart” and left it up to Graham to find an illustrator. Graham selected Malcolm McNeill who did the drawings for the four episodes that managed to come out before the comic folded. Burroughs and Mc Neill never met during this time. It was bot an experimental collaboration; just someone illustrating a text. Only later did they meet and embark on the Ah Pook project. The Cyclops project really was just a case of Bill giving someone at IT a text to publish, just as he had done with The Invisible Generation which IT ran both as a silver cut-out word-machine poster, – number 14 in your list – and as a regular text in the paper. He knew they’d do something interesting with it, and they did.
Barry Miles.

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