Comments on: Archival Politics, Institutional Bureaucracy:

By: Jared F

Jared F — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 01:23:26 +0000

I just purchased a copy this morning off of Amazon. I look forward to reading it. I fully share your ambitions that this book may help move towards opening up archival access. All the best.

By: S. E. Gontarski

S. E. Gontarski — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 13:23:28 +0000

Thanks for such enthusiasm about my forthcoming Burroughs book, Jared, of which the article above is something of a teaser. Let’s hope the book has some impact so that institutional inertia relents and archival access opens up.

By: Jared F

Jared F — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 17:55:52 +0000

As an amateur researcher on Burroughs and someone who has always had a passion for preservation/collecting/hoarding, I can’t tell you how excited I am for this book. It is such an overlap of my personal interests and something I think about a lot wrt anti-intellectualism, AI dominance and institutional inertia. I have visited both the Burroughs archive at NYPL and the Kenneth Spencer research library at the University of Kansas, those experiences were wonderful and the staff extremely helpful, I wonder if the recent changes re: the Burroughs estate might help breathe in life into finding solutions to the problems you outlined in your article or only exacerbate them.

By: Julio Varela

Julio Varela — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 14:20:10 +0000

As a Florida State grad student in the early 1990s, Dr. Gontarski took our graduate seminar class on the road outside Tallahassee, out in the middle of nowhere, a “field trip” to the Nautilus Foundation, and the pleasant surprise that came with acquainting myself with William Burroughs’ shotgun paintings.

The other jaw dropping, avant-garde material on the Word Virus and the Reality Studio, which sprung from the Pandora’s box of Burroughs’s fertile mind, proved to be the contagion Burroughs speculated about decades before any one else addressed memes in other contexts and disciplines. I remember the Burroughs encounter very fondly, one of the unexpected highlights of those early grad school courses.

Were it not for the Storming the Reality Studio and Word Virus books, maybe my dissertation “Vortex to Virus, Myth To Meme” takes a much different turn.

To be fair, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash also nudged me in a certain direction, but Burroughs planted that flag on the Moon first, once they’d established a lunar methadone clinic on one of the Apollo missions.

Dr. Gontarski, congratulations on the coming publication! I’m looking forward to reading it.

All the best,

Julio Varela