Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

The Last Times was an underground newspaper published in San Francisco in 1967 by poet and printer Charles Plymell. It contained works by William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Robert Crumb, Carl Weissner, Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Antonin Artaud, and others. Issue one has become collectible for the contribution by Crumb, printed just a few months before Zap Comix #1. At least two variants of the second issue were published.

Charles Plymell Holding The Last Times
Photograph by Guy B. Taken at Beyond Baroque in Venice, CA on 26 May 2011.

The Last Times I

The Last Times I
Collage by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“Day the Records Went Up” by William S. Burroughs, photograph of Herbert Huncke

The Last Times I
“Do It Yourself & Dig It” by Claude Pélieu, interview with Buckminster Fuller, photo and text by Charles Plymell

The Last Times I
“The Orion Dream Stuff” by Carl Weissner, “Introduction” by D.A. Levy, texts by Carl Solomon and Bob Kaufman

The Last Times I
Text by Dennis Williams, drawing by Jeff Nuttall, poem by Roxie Powell, “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” by Charles Bukowski

The Last Times I
“Television Baby Crawling toward that Death Chamber” by Allen Ginsberg

The Last Times I
Conclusion of poem by Allen Ginsberg, text by Dave Harris

The Last Times I
“Head Comix” by R. Crumb, collage by Jean-Jacques Lebel

The Last Times I
Found photo

The Last Times II (variant a)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall

The Last Times II
Poems by Charles Plymell and Philip Whalen

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Poems by Yvonne Bond and Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Mini-poster

The Last Times II (variant b)

The Last Times II

The Last Times II
Drawing by Erin Matson (friend of Herbert Huncke)

The Last Times II
“National Prestige” by Jeff Nuttall, “Dominion” by Alan Russo

The Last Times II
Poem by Philip Whalen

The Last Times II
Centerfold by Bob Branaman

The Last Times II
Poem by Yvonne Bond

The Last Times II
Poem by Charles Plymell

The Last Times II

The Last Times II

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Bulletin from Nothing 2
Front cover

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Front Endpaper

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Bulletin from Nothing 2
William Burroughs

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William Burroughs

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William Burroughs

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Roxie Powell and Claude Pélieu

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Claude Pélieu

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Claude Pélieu

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Claude Pélieu

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Claude Pélieu

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Claude Pélieu

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Jeff Nuttall

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Jeff Nuttall

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Claude Pélieu

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Chano Pozo

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Jean-Jacques Lebel

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Bob Kaufman

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Charles Plymell

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Norman O Mustill

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Norman O Mustill

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Claude Pélieu

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Ed Sanders and Peter Orlovsky

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Claude Pélieu

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Claude Pélieu

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Charles Plymell

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Mary Beach

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Mary Beach

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Back Cover

Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Front cover

Bulletin from Nothing 1
Endpaper

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Claude Pelieu

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Claude Pelieu

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Claude Pelieu

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Mary Beach

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Claude Pelieu

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Claude Pelieu

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Jeff Nuttall

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Antonin Artaud

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Antonin Artaud

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William S. Burroughs

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William S. Burroughs

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Charles Plymell

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Roxie Powell

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Benjamin Peret

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Benjamin Peret

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Ed Sanders

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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Bob Kaufman

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David Omer Bearden

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Leland S. Meyerzove

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Claude Pelieu

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Charles Plymell

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Mary Beach

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Norman O Mustill

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Norman O Mustill

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Norman O Mustill

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Back Cover

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

None of us obsessed with William Burroughs are fascinated by the same writer. Like the agent / addict’s face in Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, our impressions of Burroughs are constantly in flux. When I first fell under Burroughs’ spell, I wanted to learn everything I could about the events surrounding the composition of Naked Lunch. Burroughs was Naked Lunch. The key period was 1954-1959. Tangier, Dr. Dent, the Beat Hotel, Chicago Review and Big Table, the letters to Ginsberg. It was there that I focused my attention.  

As time goes on, I find myself re-reading the “Burroughs at Large” chapter in Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw. I want to learn more about Burroughs’ time in the Beat Hotel during the writing of Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. The years that matter are now 1962-1966. Increasingly, it seems to me that this is Burroughs at the height of his powers. The creative output is considerable: The Ticket That Exploded, Dead Fingers Talk, Nova Express, APO-33, Time, the My Own Mag collaboration, the sound collages collected in Real English Tea Made Here, experimental films, the Third Mind project, countless little magazine appearances.  

It could be argued that this was also Burroughs at the height of his influence. For example, he helped launch a revival in science fiction. With Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels, Burroughs was understood to be at the forefront of experimental writing. He was featured in the Donald Allen and Robert Creeley New American Story anthology, which attempted to map the landscape of new fiction just as the New American Poetry anthology did for verse. In Tangier, Paris, and New York, literary scenes revolved around Burroughs. For example, during his time in New York City in 1964/1965, the New York avant-garde celebrated Burroughs for almost a year with parties, readings, and little magazine attention. Key Lower East Side players like Ted Berrigan and Ed Sanders incorporated Burroughs into their creative operations. Avant-garde film may have been the most vibrant art form of the 1960s, and films, like Towers Open Fire, placed Burroughs’ name and work in discussions on the topic. From 1962-1966, Burroughs’ presence was felt throughout the Western world in the realms of literature, art, and film.  

Maybe that is why I am so drawn to Burroughs’ little magazine appearances of this period. If I had to list my Mount Rushmore of little magazines, it would include: Semina (1957-1964), My Own Mag (1963-1966), Fuck You, a magazine of the arts (1962-1965), and Floating Bear (1962-1969). Semina is widely understood to be a work of art, but I consider the three mimeos on that level. They should be approached in the same manner as other artists’ books of the period. To me, My Own Mag is the most interesting thing Burroughs did in the 1960s. But I have lost all objectivity. I can no longer look at these magazines with a clear head and a steady eye. Handling them, my palms sweat, my head spins.

Take Bulletin from Nothing. How do I explain my strong feelings for something as seemingly irrelevant as a publication that maybe only a few hundred people read and that ran for two only issues? Let me try to explain myself.

Burroughs appears in both issues of Bulletin from Nothing. In the first issue, Burroughs contributes “Composite Text.” Issue two features “Palm Sunday Tape.” To be honest, these are not my favorite cut-ups from the period. The Dead Star, APO-33, and Time are not only longer and more complex but I think ultimately more successful. Maybe it is the merging of text and image in these cut-ups that appeal so strongly to me. I also like that Dead Star, APO-33 and Time have a central theme that Burroughs works on multiple levels. In all three cases, Burroughs detourns the very texts from which he is getting his material while challenging various forms of commercial and corporate media. “Composite Text” and “Palm Sunday Tape” are much more modest in form and content.

So my love of Bulletin from Nothing does not stem from Burroughs’ contributions to the magazine. Instead, its power comes from the company Burroughs keeps and the associations I make from the grouping. It is interesting to me that Burroughs appears with Charley Plymell, Claude Pélieu, Mary Beach, Norman O. Mustill, Jeff Nuttall, J.J. Lebel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Bob Kaufman. Bulletin from Nothing is a time capsule from San Francisco circa 1965. I cannot help but think of that famous shot of Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Welch, McClure, Brautigan, and others in front of City Lights taken by Larry Keenan (see the cover of City Lights Journal 3). Like that iconic photo, Bulletin from Nothing provides a snapshot of the scene around City Lights. Beach and Pélieu distributed many of their publications with the assistance of City Lights and were associated with the bookstore. Jan Herman, who was Ferlinghetti’s assistant in the late 1960s, told me that City Lights used a large Midwest offset printer (Edwards Bros.) for City Lights publications. Previously, City Lights sent their books, like Howl, to Villiers in England. The Edwards’ printing rep offered to produce all of Herman’s side projects through an industrial printer in Richmond,CA. That is how Herman got his Nova Broadcasts published. City Lights distributed the Nova Broadcast books. In the mid to the late 1960s, City Lights was one of the home bases for the San Francisco little magazine scene.

Plymell did the actual printing of Bulletin from Nothing on a large press at Ralph Ackerman’s shop on Mission Street in San Francisco. APO-33 (Beach Books) and So Who Owns Death TV (the first printing with the silver ink on black stock) were printed by Plymell. Plymell also printed Herman’s San Francisco Earthquake No. 1 on an offset machine. I have written about Plymell as a publisher before in discussing NOW, another incredible artifact of the San Francisco Scene of the mid-1960 and very similar to Bulletin from Nothing in content. By no means was Plymell a fine printer like Andrew Hoyem of Arion Press who came out of Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press, but he does have a definite sense of graphic design that I find very appealling. NOW NOW NOW defintely stands out among SF little mags. Bulletin was not a mimeo job. Reproducing the collages was beyond the capability of mimeo. In fact, Plymell never printed on a mimeograph although he was a key publisher in the rather nebulous and ill-defined Mimeo Revolution.  

Bulletin from Nothing appeals to me as an object. I like that it is oversize, yet short and to the point. In contrast, I love the content of Black Mountain Review, but it is presented in a boring academic journal fashion. Most of my favorite magazines are 8 1/2 by 11 or larger (A-4 or legal). I dislike the professional look of perfect-bound magazines and prefer staples. The “bindings” of Fuck You, My Own Mag, or C are my favorite, even if they are completely impractical and unstable. Three quick hits on the left hand side with an industrial stapler. Stacks of sheets strewn all over an apartment or bookstore filled with cigarette and pot smoke. The community of collating parties. The staple binding of Bulletin from Nothing is more practical and creates a panorama effect. This is typical of Plymell’s magazine work. He has an affinity for offset and the fold. The page really opens out and spreads before you. Lots of space. This is great for open form poetry. I like big margins and blank space. Is anything more beautiful than the big pages of The Jargon Society’s Maximus Poems? Such pages give the feel of a canvas or a gallery wall which works for the collages featured in Bulletin from Nothing. Plus they are easy to scan.

Flipping through Bulletin from Nothing, the Chicago Review from the Spring of 1958 immediately comes to mind. In that issue, Burroughs was listed as a San Francisco Poet. At the time, Burroughs had never been to San Francisco and his work had nothing in common with Renaissance poets like Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, or William Everson. Like that game on Sesame Street, Burroughs was not like the others and he did not belong. He stood apart. Nobody was doing what he was doing. He was a freak. Yet in the pages of Bulletin from Nothing, Burroughs fits in. In less than a decade Burroughs had become a writer of reputation and influence. He was at the forefront of a style of writing and he had followers. Even if he was not there in person, Burroughs had made himself a home in the experimental literary scene in San Francisco.  

Yet the Bulletin from Nothing also takes me further back in time to Paris, New York and Berlin / Cologne immediately after World War I. Bulletin from Nothing wears its love of Dada on its sleeve and in its title. Dada is a nonsense word that in German means anything from hobbyhorse to nothing at all. Francis Picabia stated in 1915, “Dada signifies nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing.” Over the years there have been several publications called “bulletin” such as the International Bulletin of Surrealism published in 1935, as well as the obscure, and close to my heart, Birmingham Bulletin that featured Burroughs’ “Unfinished Cigarette” in 1963. Yet the “bulletin” in question here might refer to two specific Dada publications. Bulletin D, an exhibition catalog as magazine was edited by Max Ernst. Bulletin from Nothing functions in a similar manner. Issue six of Dada was entitled Bulletin Dada. Pélieu and Beach’s magazine plays with that title. The collage cover provides a further reference to Bulletin from Nothing‘s Dada roots. The ransom note look comes from Dada collage and the roulette wheel references Duchamp’s Monte Carlo Bond from 1924, which was reprinted in the Christmas issue of Xxe Siècle in 1938.

I like Bulletin from Nothing because it provides material documentation of Burroughs’ ties to Dada. Cut-up practitioners like Pélieu were inspired by Burroughs but they were also cognizant of the cut-up’s origins in Dada. Burroughs and Gysin make these origins clear in their various manifestos and interviews on the cut-up. In fact, much of Burroughs’ work in the mid-1960s links back to Dada. Sound collages, scrapbooks, cut-up poems and texts all formed a major part of Dada art production. In 1958, Ginsberg and Corso met Tristan Tzara at the Deux Magots. Throughout his life, Ginsberg made an effort to meet his literary idols. He famously sat at Ezra Pound’s feet in Italy in the late 1960s thrusting the work of younger poets under the silent Pound’s nose and forcing him to listen to Dylan and the Beatles. Meeting Tzara at Deux Magots conjures up a host of literary allusions and connections. Dada, Lost Generation, Existentialists. Ginsberg would have been relished all of them. Burroughs and Ginsberg met up with Céline. Around the same time, Burroughs, Ginsberg and Corso met Duchamp and Man Ray. Lebel set up the meeting which was also attended by André Breton’s wife (Breton himself was sick). For Ginsberg, Duchamp was an legendary figure, like a movie star. Burroughs no doubt knew of Duchamp. Ian Sommerville had a homage (consciously or not is open for debate) to The Bicycle Wheel in his room at the Beat Hotel and the sculpture is featured in several photographs of the period. So the figure of Duchamp in a small sense was a ghost in the Hotel. At Lebel’s party, Ginsberg kissed Duchamp’s feet in a camp show of admiration and respect. In an act of Dada, Corso cut off Duchamp’s tie. Ginsberg encouraged Duchamp to bless Burroughs with a kiss. Duchamp obliged. It was a passing of the torch. Duchamp could be considered el hombre invisible of the Dada scene. Burroughs was the Beats’ Duchamp. Mysterious, fascinating, aloof, cerebral, scientific. Artist as chess master. Art Buchwald wrote up the event for the Herald Tribune. Unlike some people I consider the label Beat to be important. Burroughs is a Beat, but that does not mean I do not also consider him a member of other groupings. Burroughs’ presence in Bulletin from Nothing reminds me that Burroughs was a Neo-Dadaist as well.  

A crazed Burt Lancaster graces the cover of Bulletin from Nothing 2. This cover has a Pop Art feel. Taking the cover of issue one into consideration this is not surprising. In the early 1960s when coming to terms with the beginnings of Pop and struggling with how to place and define it, art critics called Pop, Neo-Dada. Artists like Warhol were viewed as warmed-over Duchamp. Interestingly Duchamp exploded back on the art scene in 1963 with his first retrospective showcased at the Pasadena Art Museum. Curated by Walter Hopps, this is one of the most famous and influential retrospectives of the twentieth century and a key moment in modern museum history. For a brief period in the early 1960s, Los Angeles made a play to become the center of American art. So it makes sense that Warhol’s big break came in Los Angeles in the summer of 1962. A one-man show at the Ferus Gallery, also put together by Hopps, featured a room full of Campbell’s Soup Cans. The show closed shortly after the death of Marilyn Monroe, which inspired the Pop Marilyns. Warhol’s transition from commercial artist to artistic genius was assured. He never looked back. The Hollywood glitz and glamour, the seediness of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon, the sense of superficiality and the unreal. Los Angeles was tailor-made and ready for Warhol. Pélieu was interested in Pop so that influence is there in Bulletin.

If LA had the Ferus, SF had The Batman Gallery. Charles Plymell had a show of collages at the Batman in 1963. Wallace Berman was a key figure. He famously fled LA, that City of Degenerate Angels, to set up shop in San Francisco. Bulletin from Nothing has that junk art, mail art, assemblage feel to it, but whether it is there or not, I always see Fluxus when I turn its pages. Let me be clear, Fluxus had not arrived in SF by 1965, but like Pop, Fluxus was recycled Dada. Fluxus merged Man Ray with Marshall McLuhan. It took Dada into the electronic age and got it wired up. Unlike many people I love leftovers. In my artistic and literary tastes, I often find myself picking through the cultural refrigerator gnawing on last night’s turkey leg. Fluxus is much to my taste. I like its belatedness, its warmed-over quality. Stripped of the wide-eyed innocence that accompanies a new artistic or literary discovery, they are decadent movements, full of irony and self-knowledge. Yet in an effort to appear new, Fluxus artists have a frenetic energy and humor, which I find contagious. Like a gumbo that has been sitting around for a while, the flavors and themes get more pronounced. I would like to say more complex, but on the flipside, maybe they just get more obvious. More Cagean than Cage. More Duchampian than Duchamp. I cannot help but “get” Fluxus because it is so in-your-face. Fluxus has no shame.

Maybe that is not exactly true. For example, the cut-up has this same sense of belatedness. Gysin made a re-discovery, not a leap forward in artistic creation. Yet I have found Burroughs’ cut-up texts not just tough to read but tough to get my mind around. While most people highlight the cut-up’s ties to Dada, I have recently been interested in linking Burroughs and the cut-up to Fluxus and related groupings. In the pages of Bulletin from Nothing, Norman O. Mustill, Claude Pélieu, J.J. Lebel, and Mary Beach were all on the fringes of Fluxus, if not fellow travelers.

Burroughs’ connections to Fluxus, if you dig around, are definitely there. Paris in the mid-1960s is a good place to look. Emmett Williams provided the liner notes for Burroughs’ first spoken word LP, Call Me Burroughs. The album was produced at and recorded in the English Bookshop run by Gaît Frogé. Williams, a concrete poet, was a major force in Fluxus. Call Me Burroughs is pretty straightforward spoken word, but the sound collages Burroughs was creating at that time (1965) and that are collected in Real English Tea Made Here and elsewhere are truly Fluxus in spirit.  

Briefly in Paris, Burroughs was on the fringes of Fluxus. The link is clearly Brion Gysin. Gysin was a founding member of Domaine Poétique along with Williams, Bernard Heidsieck and Henri Chopin. This group paralleled and overlapped with Fluxus. As Barry Miles make clear, both groups were interested in “concrete poetry, electronic music, poésie sonore, machine poetry, happenings and performance art.” George Maciunas, the leading voice of Fluxus, was familiar with Gysin’s work and attended Gysin’s performances. Gysin and Ian Sommerville put on Happenings of their own that included sound recordings, slide projections, and readings. For a period in the 1960s the readings of Burroughs were in fact Happenings. His St. Valentine’s Day Reading of 1965 with its mixture of props, spoken word, and tape recordings is a good example. Burroughs’ artistic concerns of the 1960s were the same as Domaine Poétique and Fluxus and on occasion he entered their circle. On May 18, 21, and 22 at the Centre Americain des Artistes at 261 Blvd Raspail, the largest Domaine Poétique event occurred. Gysin, Francois Dufrene, Robert Filliou, Emmitt Williams, Bernard Heidsieck and others participated. Burroughs’ work was included in the performance. In 1965, Burroughs performed in a multimedia experiment with Brion Gysin at the ICA. Domain Poétique, the Lettrists, Fluxus. In the 1960s Burroughs was actively engaged in exploring the same creative terrain as these groups and in some cases he actively participated with them.

About a year ago I was able to buy the two-volume set of Colloque de Tanger published by Christian Bourgois in 1976. These volumes collected the texts from the conference held in September 1975 in Geneva. Unfortunately they are published in French so I cannot read them. There is precious little information in English on the Colloque de Tanger. It is not mentioned in the index of the two Burroughs biographies. It is briefly mentioned in Ports of Entry, but by and large it has been overlooked. The conference was a celebration of the collaboration of Burroughs and Gysin, and to me, it is far more interesting and important than the Nova Convention of 1978. On one level, I bought the collection because one volume is inscribed by Burroughs to bookseller Burt Britton. Yet the other is inscribed by Bernard Heidsieck to Dick Higgins and has proven over time to be far more interesting to me. Heidsieck, like Burroughs, was a man with familial links to wealth and privilege. You have probably had a sip of Piper Heidsieck champagne. Heidsieck was intoxicated by experimental art and literature and became an important figure in the European avant-garde, particularly in the area of sound poetry. Higgins was a major Fluxus figure who operated Something Else Press. The output of Something Else is impressive and his press is one of the finest of the Mimeo Revolution period from 1945-1980. Something Else published Brion Gysin in 1973, which featured texts by Burroughs. Jan Herman edited the volume. He was SEP’s chief editor at the time, having succeeded Emmett Williams. The presence of Burroughs in the Something Else backlist demonstrates Burroughs’ overlapping interests with Fluxus.

The publishing career of Jan Herman performs a similar service. San Francisco Earthquake and the Nova Broadcasts join Burroughs’ work with Fluxus directly. Wolf Vostell (Miss Vietnam) and Dick Higgins (A Book about Love and War and Death) appear in the Nova Broadcast Series, which also featured Burroughs’ The Dead Star. The Nova Broadcast imprint also published Alison Knowles’ The Journal of the Identical Lunch and Ferdinand Kriwet’s Publit. Nowhere is the Fluxus spirit of Burroughs’ work more clear than in the scarce Fifth Volume of SF Earthquake: VDRSVP. Burroughs appears alongside Fluxus artists’ Alison Knowles and Wolf Vostell. Yet more importantly this issue of the magazine epitomizes Fluxus’ interest in experimenting with mass media forms and turning them to creatively and politically radical ends. VDRSVP is a magazine in a poster format and thus does away with the codex. Burroughs contributed “The Moving Times.” Burroughs’ Third Mind experiments and his more advanced cut-up scrapbooks and newspaper pieces similarly challenged and detourned mass media material. The Dead Star is a case in point.  

The Colloque de Tanger celebrated these aspects of Burroughs’ creative career. Work that involved close collaboration with Gysin. Heidsieck signed my copy of Volume Two on page 161 in the middle of his recollection. On that page, Heidsieck circled a passage that mentions the Domaine Poétique events at the Centre Americain des Artistes at 261 Blvd Raspail from 1962. This is the very venue that Burroughs was a part of with Gysin. Higgins and Heidsieck shared an interest in sound poetry. Burroughs’ reading at this venue fits in here as well. The CD Real English Tea Made Here (recorded in the 1965-1966 timeframe) and Burroughs’ readings / Happenings highlight his interest in sound poetry and sound experiments. So even though I cannot read the volume or the inscription, both highlight for me Burroughs’ personal and creative relationship to Fluxus and related movements. An artistic involvement that gets lost in the shuffle, but is in fact a key aspect of what I find the most interesting and influential period of Burroughs’ career. 

 Bulletin from Nothing does the same thing. The two issues whisk you away to Paris, San Francisco, New York and Berlin ranging in time from just after World War I to the dawn of the Summer of Love. All the great little magazines are paper time machines that transport the reader backwards (and in some cases forwards) in time, throughout space, and across geographies. They function as very ports of entry and points of intersection that Burroughs sought to document and to create with his cut-ups. In each little magazine there is a different William Burroughs and maybe that is why I find him so fascinating. He is like a drop of mercury that refuses to be pinned down. Always one step beyond you, Burroughs eludes your attempts to grasp him. The quest to completely understand Burroughs and his work is doomed to failure but the resulting infinite possibilities, meanings, and applications reward you for the effort.  

Come explore Bulletin from Nothing for yourself. The complete run is now on RealityStudio including the elusive Bulletin from Nothing flyer sometimes described as Issue 3.  

Bulletin from Nothing Archive

Bulletin from Nothing 1 (view complete issue)
Front cover

Bulletin from Nothing 2 (view complete issue)
Front cover

Bulletin from Nothing Flyer (view complete issue)
Front Cover

Writer Charles Plymell is a legendary figure. He was involved with a loose gang of experimental writers and outsider artists centered around Wichita, Kansas in post-war 1950s America. Plymell and the Wichita Punks had road-tested speed, dropped LSD, held peyote rituals and experimented with art and other creative forms. Were they Beat before the term had risen, been marketed and branded out of the San Francisco joss-stick hippie scene?

The chronological order is important in understanding his work, as Charley makes clear in this interview. He has seen a lot since his birth on the Kansas high plains in 1935 and the early memories of the sound of the wind in the cab of a Reo Speedwagon truck. His father was a cowboy, his mother once a stunt car driver. He printed Robert Crumb’s first edition of Zap Comix in 1968. As part of the hip Wichita scene of the 1950s he is also a contemporary of and, either a friend, collaborator or publisher of, some of the coolest and influential underground writers and artists to come out of the USA. He already had two volumes of poetry, Neon Poems and Apocalypse Rose out when in 1971 City Lights published his seminal novel, Last of The Moccasins. This novel grips, gleams and glistens with his hobohemian prose-style; spinning tales of his life in and around Wichita, his road trips to and from the West Coast along the Rt. 66 Benzedrine Highway and beyond, his crazy Hipster years and the boho life of his elder sister Betty.

Plymell has continued to walk his walk and talk his talk ever since. His writing has always displayed a vibrant and astute engagement with life and a heady, intoxicatingly descriptive allure. He condemned the National Endowment for the Arts and his sharp and intelligent analysis appeared in the NY Times and other print outlets. Because of this critique he was blacklisted and has never been awarded any funding, grant or financial support from any federal, state or academic agency in the USA. He and his wife Pam run their own publishing house, CV Editions, which is a good place to start looking for more information on his novels, poetry and other writing. 

What are you up to these days?

I like nittin’…. next to nittin’… nuttin’.

What do you remember about growing up in Kansas?

Rattlesnakes, rattlesnakes winding in the dust while south winds sculpted fields of wheat, the hum of truck tires on warm asphalt back and forth to L.A. on RT66. Yucaipa (Green Valley) California to Plymell and Santana (Kiowa Chief) where my Grandfather ran a stagecoach down to Indian Territory (No Man’s Land) now Oklahoma where President Cleveland deeded land to him. I remember sitting in the truck, an REO Speedwagon. I loved that truck. My Mom and Dad plowed the field into the space horizon. The wind in the cab played a hollow tune and I sang my favorite song from Hank Williams’ radio show we listened to at home. “I’m just a happy rovin’ cowboy / herding the dark clouds out of the sky / deep in the heavens blue.”

That is simply beautiful Charley, what else?

We had to run from the farmhouse to the cellar many times when tornados came. I saw them rolling across the prairie. My folks always knew their vector. No warnings, just nature’s ozone smells. We didn’t have electricity, so I was not exposed to circuitry, only earth’s magnetic source that isn’t enclosed. My mother cooked on the coal range, the beef my father cut from the herd. We had a battery radio for the news where I heard Roosevelt’s voice announcing WWII. We rode horses everywhere. I still have my pony blanket and cinch my mother made. That was in the early years on the Great Plains. Later we moved into town. My dad had bought a ’39 Buick Century in Chicago that had tire mounts on each fender and a roll-up window between backseat and front with a big straight eight motor and gearshift on the floor. He also had a baby blue ’40 pre-war Packard Clipper. I could easily go a hundred mph in them. For running around he had a ’41 Ford V8 coupe that could burn rubber in second gear and go over a hundred as well as a ’42 Chevy coupe that my sister and I would steal and go spinning around.

When you dropped out from school, what were the choices for you at that time?

High School was not worth it for me. I went to Military School in San Antonio in my first year of high school and my father bought me a brand new 1952 Chevy coupe to get back to Wichita. I enrolled in North High there on the Arkansas River, an Indian Motif beautiful building. I soon realized that high school then and especially now are stupid unless one needs that structure. I didn’t so I peeled out and got on the road and never looked back. Gasoline was only 15 cents a gallon. Why not go?

I can see you have a big thing about cars, the freedom and speed of traveling. You are filmed driving by Laki in his short film as well……

I had a ’34 Ford hot rod too to go to drive-inns and pick up chicks. That was one of the hottest Fords ever. That and a ’32 were classic hot rods. I had both with V8 and gearshift on the floor. (Just the other day I was responding to HANK III’s invite to do 4×4 mud rally and I emailed him a lyric: I don’t need no 4by4 / All I need is shift on the floor).

What impression did the music of that era have on you?

I could get radio stations that played race music on my Chevy radio. I remember driving to Joplin, MO with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing Work With Me, Annie. Ike Turner was on the radio selling appliances. Real Deal then. Of course I had been steeped in Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and honky-tonk blues as a kid and then Rhythm & Blues came from race music and it wasn’t long before we went across the tracks for all our music. We knew musicians who played in combos in clubs that came out of Kansas City and were left from Stan Kenton’s guys from Wichita. Fats Domino drove up from New Orleans in his ’49 Caddy with bass tied on top to play the Mambo Club across the tracks to a handful of people who could talk and smoke with him. Hard times for him, but good for us. Maybe a dollar cover or two drink minimum. We were underage, but who’s gonna come over the tracks?

Charley, who else was around over the tracks?

Bo Diddley, Chuck Willis and other big names in Texas & Kansas City Blues. In the other part of town we’d go out to the Cowboy Inn where Little Jimmy Dickens or someone would be opening for Roy Acuff and whatever band would have mason jars full of Dexedrine or bennies that would keep us awake days and all night long, maybe then to my friend’s club with a jazz combo where Mickey Shaughnessy would m.c. and after the gig with the band, Mickey would tell jokes and talk all night and into the next day. We’d drive around on bennies and park on Main still talking philosophy or the latest about Howard Hughes. We waited outside the forum after Elvis played and picked up all the chicks who would get into the car with their panties still wet. We’d walk down Broadway and see Count Basie at coffee getting ready to play at the Orpheum and say “hey man” to greet him and go into the drug store and get special nose drops that only we knew about that would make your head feel prickly and stay high for days. School? School was for squares!

In your novel, The Last of The Moccasins, first published by City Lights in 1971, you wrote a lot about the 50s Wichita Hipster years. When was it apparent to you that a Beat Scene existed?

My hipster years were mainly through the 1950s up to I’d say 1962, the beginning of my psychedelic years, when I met Neal Cassady in North Beach at my girlfriend’s pad and she told me he was the On The Road guy. I had heard of the beats a little before then, but I didn’t get into them. I have never read On The Road, but Neal read me, in his high drama, the parts he was in, so I’ve listened to a lot of it and seen excerpts of it in journals. I was unaware of the Beats during my Hipster years and then I worked several jobs before I landed in San Francisco where my sister and aunt lived, though they didn’t see each other.

I guess you could say that you along with Roxie Powell, James H. Jammy, Barbitol Bob Branaman, Bruce, Spoley Oley, Fast Car, Richard Rodent, that whole crew of Kansas hipster punks were the originals and preceded the Beats. When you hit San Francisco and your psychedelic years how did you connect with that scene?

I became aware of the Beats just before Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky came back from India in 1963 and met some of them when they came to my party with Ferlinghetti, McClure and Whalen, et al. Dave Haselwood who published my first book, Apocalypse Rose, had introduced me to other poets and their work he had published prior to my meeting those beats. He had published Lamantia, McClure and Conners who he went to school with in Wichita, and Whalen, maybe Duncan, and a book I really liked: The Hotel Wentley Poems by John Weiners. He took me to all the spots, including the Hotel Wentley, which was in “Polk Gulch,” Polk Street above Foster’s Cafeteria aka Foster Fuds. Dave wanted to go back to Wichita, where he was from, so we did and then back to San Francisco. I thought the Beats were pretty square at the time. I hadn’t met Burroughs and Kerouac yet. Pam and I met Burroughs at his Duke St. pad in London in 1968 and the same year Kerouac at the William Buckley TV show. I liked Neal and Burroughs immensely and thought Kerouac had a great ear for jazz. Though to me he remained a somewhat square Republican as far as I got to know him, not that the two are coupled. Later the Beats’ French translator, Claude Pélieu said my Last of the Moccasins was better than Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, and others immediately took issue, so I had to read that book.

And what did you make of Kerouac’s Dr Sax?

There was a literary difference. His book obeyed literary devices such as epiphany, alliteration, character development, etc. All the things one learns in an English department. He had a good ear for language, great jazz prosody in his poetry, I thought he was the best at reading to jazz, something a lot of others tried. I thought his prose imagery in that book sometimes tumbled into bathos. That’s the only book of his I read. My book was quite different in that I had to invent the style: Hobohemian Prose, as well as the genre: Thematic Text Montage, to justify my writing.

Hand on the Doorknob was your latest anthology of writing I think? It was published a short while back now. Charley tell me about your work in that book….

Yes, Water Row published it. And involves a section of dining and drinking with the Beats. Turns out it was the last time Ginsberg saw Kerouac and the last time Burroughs saw Ginsberg. There is some poetry in it from my other books, mainly Forever Wider and the elegy for my father that Allen said was one of the greatest elegies ever written. Turns out I wrote a poem to my father when I had a dream and he wrote one to his mother when he had a dream the same night. We discussed them after his reading at American University and the National Library where I introduced him. The other parts of the book are essays on printing the first Zap and some stories.

Charley, tell me some more again about Ginsberg…..

The most famous, the one who masterminded the Beat Generation. I knew him for several years in many different places. His ads still find their way to MySpace! I met him up on Potrero Hill, San Francisco and he immediately tried to court me as if we were in a 1920s literary soirée. It was a bit odd. He asked me about my sexual experiences as if it were from a textbook. It reminded me of what Huncke must have gone through with Dr. Kinsey. I treated it with humor and felt like he was the inexperienced one but didn’t tell him that. We walked up to Ferlinghetti’s house and Larry was in bed, so we drank some wine in his bedroom while he and Allen talked literary business. After we left, Allen told me that he thought Ferlinghetti wasn’t a very good poet. Then he came to the party that Glenn Todd has written about in detail. Soon after he and Neal and Anne moved into the Gough St. flat and there began a lot of traffic. During that time on Gough St I met Mary Beach and Claude Pélieu and her children, Pam and Jeffrey. They had come from France at Ferlinghetti’s invitation and were interested in my collage and translated many of the Beats. Huncke came to visit us in California with the introduction of Allen who was in Italy at the time. Back in New York years later through Allen I met Kerouac and Pam and I drank and ate with them the last time they saw each other. At Allen’s farm I met Corso and others involved in the Beats.

You became good friends with Neal Cassady in San Francisco, didn’t you?

Neal and Allen moved into my flat on Gough Street ostensibly to prepare Neal’s book, The First Third, for publication. When Ferlinghetti and Allen sat down with him, Neal was hopelessly Neal… I called him The Fastest Word in the West… and he rolled a cigar-shaped Panama Red and began free association, so I said to them, “why don’t you just tape him and transcribe it?”, but they were steeped in a more academic approach. Neal told me he was always slighted by the famous writers as a kind of errand boy or driver and wasn’t taken seriously, but I thought his words were as what I had seen of Kerouac. Of course it’s a matter of taste and I’m probably biased, Neal and I came from similar region and background, not one of ward-head mentalities.

What else do you recall of that time in San Francisco?

The time was ripe for Ginsberg to re-enter the city that launched him to fame in the 50s over the word “fuck.” The backdrop for the Hippies was Eastern religion of the new age. I remember going with Allen to explore various cults and sitting outside for a designated time until we were permitted to go in and join a rage. I left, of course. One of them was Scientology, which had tin cans attached to wires to transfer crude vibes. Eastern religions had been something that intellectuals and artist sought out since the twenties and before, so I was unimpressed, but the droves of youngsters rebelling against their lifestyles were fresh blood for the Frisco vamps. They were more ignorant than the Beats in that few had formal education, certainly no street smarts, so their fates were predictable. Allen told me than when he got out of college he got a job as a market researcher, and I could see how that benefited him in his ongoing career and his desire to be a leader.

In recent years the arts have become more and more inundated with polluted funding streams from big business, as they slap their branding iron on the ass of writers, musicians and artists. Avenues of public funding have always been available to apply for as well. Charley, you had a bad connection some time ago with the National Endowment for the Arts, didn’t you?

The NEA has been a terrible thing in my life. I took Ginsberg to their offices when we lived in D.C. when he came to visit. He wooed them and they put someone with friends of Lower East Side poets in power, many who had been here to Cherry Valley to see me. But they handed it ($$) to their other friends and couples like Allen & Peter netted about 40 grand. This when we had to sell our house here and move to D.C. to find jobs. When we were financially able to return here, I got a part-time job in a university as a tutor and saw a full professor and his wife who were millionaires groveling and slobbering in front of state grants people to the extent I never recovered from the scene. The NEA became safe academic types who are not poets, but they have to con kids into thinking they are so it continues in a vicious scam of departments to keep the fraud and Sallie Mae (student loans) going. I still receive books from poets inscribed to me as their great teacher and they list several grants and it’s pretty easy to see who their friends were who gave it to them. I just wanted a fairer system about 30 years ago, but jealous poets, opportunists and arts systems and organizations invaded all federal, state and local programs to the extent it bred more like a pyramid scheme or Scientology, etc. They changed the cultural landscape forever just like everything else in this country. They are they same ones who rant at Bush while they do the same thing and are comfortable in their ignorance and greed that brought down culture and a country.

Money always changes people, sometimes to the extent that they can’t recognise themselves or the smell of their own shit…

I could get into several examples over the years, but it would take a book and it’s not worth my time. In short, the state is right as always. I applied every year for 30 years and watched the generations receive money I had never dreamt of. I’d be lucky to see a thousand dollars after I quit working on the S.F. docks. Someone like Burroughs gave me things out of his generosity. Now, I just want to pay for my burial out in Indian country next to my mother, so I won’t have to burden my wife and kids. After my union job, I made the wrong career choices. Even those who howled against the system enjoyed its fruits. I separated myself from it long ago. Elite professions provide little fellowship for mixed blood white trash, daring to call themselves poets. Some bust the game, like a Bukowski or a Jackson Pollock, but for every one of those case studies, there are thousands for the greed, avarice and status quo of the state that it supports. While toilets flush to the sound of tapping toes, the misery of the poor contributes to the phonies and liars. Or Rimbaud said it better: while public funds evaporate in feasts of fraternity, a bell of rosy fire rings in the clouds. Proof is easy. Maya Angelou, the hallmark verse queen and self-acclaimed ex-whore used her talents when she saw suckers to become a multi-millionaire on the cover of Forbes magazine. She rode the system for all she’s worth and like Cheney and Bush and Bubba Bill, her John ghost benefactors, she’s well insulated against the truth. Clinton had her read for his inauguration! You can see the history of this country in the shit flushing down the toilet. I feel sorry for younger generations yearning to be free. Nothing like that great open slate of the Western Lands. 

Going back to early 1960s and Gough Street San Francisco, were you working then?

Neal and I had regular jobs. I worked as a printer and Neal a tire changer. We had fun in the new age that swept the city, but we were older. Little things like dancing was something I didn’t get into much. When Allen took the stage in Golden Gate Park, the well-documented be-in, dancing in a kind of Shiva contortion, I and those with me quickly blended in the crowd. Neal was also in Berkeley taunting the leaders of the famous free speech rally until someone asked who is that nut and Allen said he was just a crazy Zen Buddhist.

And what about the marches and demonstrations, you must have been on some of them?

Pam and I joined the march to People’s Park. She was pregnant and I assessed the scene quickly and wanted to take her over to someone’s house instead of demonstrating. The troops had lined up on both sides of the designated parade route and wouldn’t let anyone go down a side street. I had to call the bluff of the young guardsman who quickly got my message and called his superior and let us go down a side street. The troops had lined the designated route with barbed wire, tanks and fixed bayonets. The Berkeley “radicals” had made a deal prior to stay on certain streets. Neal was just out of San Quentin, and I had enough common sense from drifting about the country to know that the protesters were sitting ducks and it wasn’t a good move under any flag, another example of intellectual ignorance that could have gotten themselves killed, and did at Kent State. I knew better and had been down to the Peace and Freedom Party headquarters in San Francisco, which was across the hall from the Black Panther Party. I used to help them read propaganda pamphlets to sort out which ones were written by agents. I saw the Black Panthers as legitimate radicals willing to lay down their lives and demonstrated that by marching on the Reagan governor’s mansion armed with bullets draped over their backs. I returned to the parade and went down to ground zero where Gary Snyder (who reminded me of a boy scout) and other poets and the radical organizers were doing their theatrics. Of course they lost. My thoughts were re-enforced again when Pam and I were near the Chicago convention and decided not to go to ground zero.

What happened on that particular one?

Sure enough a young radical tore down the flag and all hell broke loose culminating in getting us Nixon in the White House. I don’t suppose the kid had the sense to detect that some of the older cops in the riot squad, or their superiors, may have been veterans of Omaha Beach, or Iwo Jima. Not a very sensitive tactic for the organizers either, who became stockbrokers in the new Republican era. Neal was real. We were from that geography and time between St. Louis to Denver where one could tap into a real person.

The real people can be hard to find……..

After the end of flower power, I took Neal a new pair of driver’s gloves. He was on the Further Bus with Kesey, whom I had met before when Neal brought him to parties, and with Tom Wolfe, who seemed a nice guy. Neal was to prove himself again when inevitably the cops stopped the bus down south. Neal talked to the cops in such a way as they ended up liking him. It was kind of reminiscent of Boone Co. and the sheriffs and Hasil Adkins. It was more the culture of the ’50s where speed and a line of talk saved the day.

That’s a great way of putting it Charley. What was turning your ears at the time on the west coast?

During that period in San Francisco and L.A., a lot was happening. New music was born e.g. The Doors and Janis Joplin. When we were printing Zap, someone we knew came running in saying there was a new group in town he was managing that he wanted us to meet. They had a strange name… Pink Floyd.

Oh yeah….. Did they throw any bricks at the wall back then I wonder?

Janis and Big Brother were playing the new hall on Fillmore and two complimentary tickets were left for us at City Lights. We were too stoned and involved in so much partying, we didn’t make it a few blocks over to the Fillmore.

And I know you have always been into real honky tonk country music and that you grew up with Woody Guthrie, what about other stuff?

The Beatles, Beach Boys, Bobby Dylan…. Cash. As an old cowpoke would say: “Makes my ass wanna dip snuff!” So I listen to all music, but I’m very selective in what I like, and I admit that sometimes I miss a generation as I confessed in my “We Jam Econo” tribute I wrote on Mike Watt’s Hoot Page.

That is a great piece on the film about Watt’s old band, The Minutemen. I have seen some photos of you with some other musicians that came out of that SST hardcore scene too Charley…..

I met Grant Hart at Burroughs’ funeral in Lawrence and was supposed to give him a ride to St. Louis for the Burial and Patti Smith’s goodbye, but my friend overslept. Later we saw Grant again when he took us to Patti Smith’s concert at the Bowery Ballroom in which he performed. It was in sight of the old Bowery loft we used to live in. Ferlinghetti came to read at a nearby university when Grant Hart and I went to the party afterwards and Grant sniffed his ass. Larry and the English professor were shocked as Grant said that dogs make friends that way. The kid at the university told me that Ferlinghetti said for him not to introduce him as a Beat, but as Doctor Ferlinghetti. Now that’s worth getting a PhD for if nothing else! Thurston Moore asked me to read at a performance he was involved with in Montreal and then later in Northampton and again, recently with Grant Hart and Mike Watt. Recently, Thurston gave my son and me passes to Sonic Youth and Flaming Lips gigs. Then Grant Hart and I were invited to the festival in Northampton where Grant introduced me to Mike Watt. And so I went back to make up for what I missed in the 80s. Other than that, Kathleen Haskard, who I found in time / space.

You have also published work from some seminal authors from Huncke to WS Burroughs, tell me about the publishing Charley….

We published a couple of Charles Henri Ford’s books and he then wrote a diary which is a most interesting account of those he knew closing out the days of Surrealism pre-WWII. We saw him again at Huncke’s memorial at St. Mark’s and I went to his collage opening as well as Gerard Malanga. He had stayed with us in Cherry Valley at a house in town which is now a restaurant. Burroughs also stayed with us there as well as Carl Solomon, Victor Bockris and others. During that time Huncke and Louis came up because we were publishing Huncke’s first book. Allen insisted on contributing 600 bucks or so for his advance, which helped greatly because we thought Huncke was of great stature. Huncke visited us in Baltimore and Washington where we read together with Ray Bremser whom we also published. I had deep affection for Burroughs, who was always entertaining and receptive when we visited and he gave us his loft in NYC while he and James were abroad; to say nothing of his paintings and manuscripts he gave us. He was always generous and said he didn’t consider himself a Beat. Unfortunately we had to sell his treasures as fast as he gave them, but he was like that with money himself.

How did you first come into contact with Burroughs?  

I vaguely remember getting some mail from him… Duke St., London… During that time we exchanged some cut-up. Maybe in one of those mags, his “Afterbirth of Dream Now…” I lifted some too, here and there. I think I found those lines of his I printed in color. 

How did his work find its way into NOW and Last Times?

He may have sent the one in The Last Times or gave it for a reprint. Obviously the moment was Now, and the happening factor was prominent. I guess we don’t have that now. Mail was heavier then. The literary little mags were the news as well. Things were ‘a changing. I don’t feel that today.

Can you talk a bit about the differences between the three issues of NOW — were the changes in content and format a planned thing on your part or did it just happen?

It just happened. Limited only by my imagination, the machinery, the circumstances, and the raw material lying around the press. That continued, more or less, into Coldspring Journal, which was out to gather what was happening in the mail that I received from active parties.

What was the word on the street in SF on Burroughs in the mid-1960s?  

What’s the word? Thunderbird! What’s the price? Nickle twice! Whoops an earlier decade. I’ve been around along time. San Francisco was where it was happening early on and Burroughs was the subliminal text. We went around spouting Burroughs amorphisms all over a city awash in mind-altering drugs, and “Wouldn’t you?” It was the hip ticket. If you couldn’t recite from Naked Lunch, you were a bore!

At that point what Burroughs had you read?

I read Naked Lunch and anything that came in the underground press. My friend, the late Alan Russo, said it would be a while before they could assimilate that work. I don’t know how popular he was in other cities. I can’t speak for the rest of the country, you know… once a Californian…. the other part of the country doesn’t exist. 

What did you think of him and his work?

He was the genius old man of a generation or so. In San Francisco he was pontifica hip nefarious… He was anointed spirit literati by everyone in San Francisco who does that kind of thing better than anywhere. I hadn’t met him at that time. 

Your work with Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach is very interesting.  What is your take on the cut-up as a literary technique?  

When they arrived in San Francisco, I had the larger press down on the Mission. Claude was impressed by my large collages and couldn’t wait to make the Beeg American collage. The cut-up technique could be seen as a collage cutter, too I suppose. Image/symbol. It was the abbreviated days of Jackson Pollack, Chaos Theory, Monk, the Moon, and Charley Parker. Sheldrake posited the notion of Morphic Resonance that new things happen at the same time in places over the globe by the same species without any known geographical contact. Pélieu claimed he did the cut-up before he read Burroughs. It was timely. That’s what it is essentially, a short cut in the language, permitting more automatic symbolic association. Associations were the uptake pump of Language, and it needed to go faster.

And did you hang out at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan at all?

Yeah, my mother-in-law, Mary Beach and her husband Claude Pélieu lived there. We were put up there for a couple of nights for the reading at The Bitter End. John Cassady, Neal’s son, rehearsed there before the gig at the Bitter End. I used to drive a milk truck into the city and deliver cash to Herbert Huncke there from his foreign publishers.

How has the cut-up influenced your work as a writer, artist and publisher?  

At the time of NOW, the S. F. Chronicle ran a story about having to set the official clock, Big Ben, a fraction ahead. Physicists were meeting to set the clock forward. I remember saying, “Hell, I could have told them that.” The cut-up was timely in history. Otherwise people would write like James Fenimore Cooper! They still do around these parts.

What is the legacy of the cut-up?

I haven’t kept up with cut-up per se other than look at some of the publications of the day that were Claude and Mary’s. I think Burroughs took the philosophy further into the shotgun effect, blasting the word, finally! I’m not very scholarly in cut-up. It seemed a logical language progression, especially considering the time and Quantum Theory. Cut-up was around during my printing activity (several tables full). Pélieu said “Can you hear the sound of the breaker sliding under the collage guy’s cutter? Time is the only LAW.” T. S. Eliot said “Hurry up please, it’s time.”

Can you compare your work with Cherry Valley Editions today with your publishing in the 1960s (Last Times, NOW, ZAP, Bulletin from Nothing etc)?  

We haven’t published much recently. We got started with funds from grants and stopped those in the ’70s or ’80s. Famous people would help here and there. Burroughs was very generous. The only thing we’ve done is one of mine, Some Mother’s Sons, which my daughter published. She found a very inexpensive place that prints books on order. They are cheaply produced, and of good enough quality. Most publishing now has turned to specialty printings, or novelty. We’re not that active. I can certainly see the effects of public monies through arts organizations. They finally got it where they wanted it. Outreach arts bringing it to your neighborhood… the book is more the artifact, for sale like a T shirt for famous people. Alternative to what?

How did the alternative publishing scene differ from the 1960s into the 1970s and beyond?

S. Clay Wilson called the other day to report a Crumb drawing in a Playboy lot bringing $101,575. I tried to get Grove to publish him. Those who are in the business are sometimes the last ones to know. That part is the same. Electronics might equal everything out. That’s probably the reason for novelty and printing/publishing fine art. It can always be presented differently.

Is the mimeo revolution still alive?

Technically, I was bad offset-printing not mimeo, but it had the same audience. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley are using the classic mimeo format with their Esctatic Peace label. That’s specialty too, kind of bringing back or producing the mimeo aesthetic. We did a run of very artistic Xerox magazines on kraft-like paper that was written about in communication and literary journals. 

What are your thoughts of small independent publishing in the digital age?  

The labels of publishing designations don’t mean much. It takes as much or more effort to produce artfully historically correct mimeos as it did when that was the most adaptive thing available. But now you get the historical artifact, too. 

What is DIY publishing’s future?

You can do it yourself as long as the terrorists don’t shut down the electric. Then it’s back to smoke signals.

You mentioned Claude Pélieu having a great interest in your collages. What was the climate back then for the visual arts? 

Experimental Film was the rage. I remember taking Robert Frank on my motorcycle down to the S.F. premier of (Fellini’s) 8 1/2. Flaming Creatures was playing in North Beach and there was a party for its opening. Someone sent a limo for Lew Welch and me. As a cab driver, he dug the ride. Stan Brackage, another kid from Kansas, came by the print shop. I did two 8mm movies that were in Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Jonas Mekas at the New York Film co-op showed them until they wore out and notified me through Harry Smith that I had some money they earned! I didn’t expect such attention and care! I made some collages and had a show at the Batman, a notorious gallery where Bruce Connor had shown after he came back from Mexico. Neal was at the Goldwater convention at the Cow Palace that night and came by my opening with straw hat and cane. It was a costume opening anyway.

How did the Batman show go?

I sold all my collages except a couple. The show was mentioned in Art in America. Billy Jharmark, the owner of Batman Gallery gave Pam and me his classic 1950 MGTD. We were leaving for Europe and sold it on the street for $250! A book was later written about the Batman. I don’t think it mentioned my show. There was a story about Billy Jharmark giving Michael McClure a wristwatch!

Nothing about that MG he gave you and Pam?

These are but a few examples of my poor marketing skills. I began to think my marketing skills weren’t up to par. It seemed to end when Neal came running into the Gough St. flat yelling, “Charley turn on the TV! Kennedy’s been shot!” That Thanksgiving was gray. We had a big dinner and invited a stranger off the street. My sister and her husband Frank were there. Later he helped get me a job on the docks. Ginsberg’s poem talks about me and some of my friends from Kansas who lived in the pad above that one called “The End Pad.” It was a sign of the times for me. Certainly that fling with youth had ended.

Postscript by Glenn Todd

This is Charley, swinging. The time is spring-summer, the year, 1963. The place, Wichita, Kansas, where the golden wheat has just been harvested and the trees are bursting greenery touching tips over the center of the streets. Charley stands in a combination teenage twist and gay bar done up in coral walls lined with gilded store window manikins. He stands at the front of the dance floor before a jukebox that has a waterfall behind it and light flowing down its sides, so that he appears to be coming from a neon grotto. His hair is falling over his forehead in a mass of curls, he is wearing dark glasses, a blue-and-silver sport shirt, a metallic gold tie, black tight pants slung low on his hips, and black-and-white saddle oxfords. One hip is slung outward. Up go the hands in the air.

“TWIST!” shouts Charley.

Up his back runs a ripple like a snake moving, fast. His hips are inscribing a frenzied half-circle in the air. His head bounces and bobbles with jazz-drummer ecstasy. His arms flail, he’s almost flying but his feet are planted in the floor, sucking up great electrical currents of earth vibrations.

“It’s the vortex!” He shouts. “Can’t you feel the forces! Pulling you in! It’s twisting in twister land!”

Across the floor toward him dances his blonde college-girl goddess, and she’s out of her mad gold pony-tailed head. She’s all Charley could dream of exploding into, she’s Miss Freeswinging Kansas, Caucasian aflame, descendant of hot-blooded fairy-tale princesses, she moves with classic American grace, she’s poised and pure and fashion-hip, she has round arms of love, ready to grab, she won’t be brought down, and above the rock and roll, sweet cello strings play for all eternity in that gold head of hers.

They’re back at the table where a crowd of us are sitting. They’re arm in arm, together again, and I turn on to their beauty aglow with sex.

“This is where it all comes from!” shouts Charley. “Can’t you feel the vibrations? Man, there is so much energy here that you just get near it and flooom! It’s got you and swinging you someplace else.”

This is Charley’s hometown, the land that produced him, and he’s back to turn everyone on and get recharged. Everywhere he goes crowds of youth follow him, turning him on. Now the brown-limbed teenagers in cutoff jeans and bouffant hair have taken the floor. Their bodies are strong, sunbeautied, and swimming-pool clean, they’re eager-high on beer. They are dancing dances they all know, no one touching, boys with girls, girls with girls, boys with boys. All the steps are perfect and harmonious. They are all oh God so beautiful and I know we cannot lose, beyond all certitude of mind mankind will take the stars and crush time with these golden kids, born of our bodies and spirit.

Here Charley is big, here with youth. He is vibrant with sex that knows no separation from love, and hope for and beware of the day its dancing force is turned on you, my friend. Crowds follow him, he is alive with scheme and dream, and he will make it happen now. Are you ready? He will, like the morning glory but more aware, unfold himself in the sunburst of today.

Crowds follow him, turned on. He’s having a show of his collages at a weird place, the New Mission Care, in the skidrow-trainstation section of Wichita. Charley aggrandizing making bright the legend. Is it a game? How much is glory and how much is morning glory? (He quotes Cocteau: “All art is a card trick.”) He has made the Wichita scene happen: bright-eyed campus beauties, long-haired students, careful college professors, waiting-in-limbo artists, shimmy-shake drag queens, long ago pillhead buddies, strange inhabitants of the outposts of Beatsville–all come to soak up Charley energy, to be angered, to be inspired, to lift him up or put him down, but always to be stirred.

Note

This interview was put together whilst I was traveling in the States and knocked into shape over some of the days of April and May ’08. I had the good fortune to be able to spend time with Charley’s longtime friend, the artist and filmmaker Robert Branaman, when I was in LA. Thanks go out to Charley and Pam, Barbital Bob and RealityStudio.

Charley and Pam’s publishing company is Cherry Valley Editions and you can also read more at Charley’s MySpace page.

Charles Plymell is still kicking against the pricks, writing and performing at spoken word gigs with musician and artist Grant Hart, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and the legendary Minutemen bassist Mike Watt. He will be reading at the Sprachsalz Literary Festival Innsbruck, Austria on 12-14 Sept 2008 and will be making further spoken word appearances, some with either one, some or all of the three men aforementioned in the USA later on this year.

The postcript was written by Glenn Todd, artist and writer who was deeply embedded in the Wichita Scene along with Charley Plymell, Robert Branaman, Bruce Connor, Michael McClure, Dave Haselwood and many more. The Wichita Vortex website is a good reference point.

Books

Apocalypse Rose, Dave Haselwood Books, San Francisco, CA, 1967.

Neon Poems, Atom Mind Publications, Syracuse, NY, 1970.

The Last of the Moccasins, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, 1971; Mother Road Publications, 1996.

Moccasins Ein Beat-Kaleidoskop, Europaverlag, Vienna, Austria, 1980.

Over the Stage of Kansas, Telephone Books, NYC, 1973.

The Trashing of America, Kulchur Foundation, NYC, 1975.

Blue Orchid Numero Uno, Telephone Books, 1977.

Panik in Dodge City, Expanded Media Editions, Bonn, W. Germany, 1981.

Forever Wider, 1954-1984, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1985.

Was Poe Afraid?, Bogg Publications, Arlington, VA, 1990.

Hand on the Doorknob, Water Row Books, Sudbury, MA, 2000

Anthologies

Mark in Time, New Glide Publications, San Francisco, CA, 1971.

And The Roses Race Around Her Name, Stonehill, NYC, 1975.

Turpentin on the Rocks, Maro Verlag, Augsburg, W. Germany, 1978.

A Quoi Bon, Le Soleil Noir, Paris, France, 1978.

Planet Detroit, Anthology of Urban Poetry, Detroit, MI, 1983.

Second Coming Anthology, Second Coming Press, San Francisco, CA, 1984.

The World, Crown Publishers, 1991.

Editors’ Choice III, The Spirit That Moves Us, New York, 1992.

The Age of Koestler, The Spirit of the Wind Press, Kalamazoo, MI, 1995.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

When I began collecting William Burroughs in 1993, the junk that fed my book habit was the signed titles derived from and relating to the Naked Lunch Word Horde. The Olympia Press Naked Lunch was the ideal fix, and I would have crawled through a gutter to get one. Then came the Nelson Lyon Auction at PBA Galleries in 1999, and my entire focus changed. The Lyon Sale showed me the wonders of literary magazines and opened up a whole new world to me. What made the Lyon Sale special was the fact that his rare magazines were all signed. Lyon, as producer on a Burroughs spoken word album and as the man responsible for Burroughs’ Saturday Night Live appearance, had special access that I could never hope to have. Burroughs’ death in 1997 assured that. In an effort to do Lyon one better, I decided to collect complete runs of all the little magazines with a Burroughs appearance from the mimeo revolution period (roughly 1945-1970).

Thankfully, most of the magazines from this time had short life spans. The number of issues rarely climbed out of the single digits and in some cases comprised only a single issue. The exceptions like Evergreen Review (96 issues in its initial run from 1957-1973) and Floating Bear (38 issues) loom large. I always feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction whenever I successfully put together a complete run of a magazine, particularly if I do it in pieces and not as a bulk purchase in one fell swoop.

So my stomach dropped when I saw a copy of Issue One of Charles Plymell’s NOW magazine for sale on Abebooks. NOW ran for three issues in the mid-1960s. Burroughs appeared in Issue Two and Three, and I tracked down those issues without too much trouble in recent years. William Reese currently has a copy of issue three for $35. The description states that copies of this issue are getting harder to find. This assessment might be spot on. I always remember a copy or two of the later issues of NOW as being available, but these appear to be drying up. Reese has the only copy currently. Issue One has always been tough. In the last three years, I had never seen a copy until, well, NOW. The first issue proved as elusive as Insect Trust Gazette 2. Yet in the digital age, most bookstores, as well as everybody’s garage and basement, are within reach. The Gazette turned up in Germany, the NOW surfaced in San Francisco.

San Francisco makes sense, because the first issue of NOW is a time capsule of the pre-Summer of Love era by the Bay. Plymell printed the premier issue of NOW in 1963 when he was living at 1403 Gough Street. Beat fans might recognize this address. In 1954, Allen Ginsberg met Peter Orlovsky there. At the time, Orlovsky lived with painter Robert La Vigne. La Vigne painted a portrait of a naked Orlovsky that hung on the wall of La Vigne’s apartment. Ginsberg was smitten with the painting and fell in love with the subject.

Flash forward almost ten years and Charles Plymell moved in. Plymell was one of several Kansas natives who shook up the counterculture scene, particularly in San Francisco. Bruce Conner, Michael McClure, Bob Brannaman were some others. In the summer of 1963, 1403 Gough Street became the epicenter of a scene: counterculture San Francisco before the hype and paranoia of the Summer of Love. Plymell has mined this period for a series of essays that appeared in Kevin Ring’s Transit and in Grist, a mag published out of Kansas. Ring recently printed a reworked essay entitled “Neal and Anne at 1403 Gough Street” for his chapbook series.

For sure, proto-hippies (called heads at the time) hung out at Plymell’s residence, but so did writers and poets associated with Auerhahn Press (Dave Haselwood, Andrew Hoyem), members of Wallace Berman’s Semina Circle (Bruce Conner, Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell), left coast Beats (Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, Michael McClure and Lew Welch), and soon-to-be-celebrity drug dealers, like Owsley. In the summer of 1963, Plymell shared the seven rooms with Neal Cassady and his girlfriend, Anne Murphy. Allen Ginsberg blew into town coming down from the legendary Vancouver Poetry Conference of that summer after an extended stay in India and the Far East.

My copy of NOW documents this magic time in a special way. The mag bears the library stamp of Ben Talbert. Talbert was an artist associated with the Semina Circle. His works are perfect examples of funk assemblage, like the work of George Herms or Bruce Conner that was coming out of California at the time right before Warhol exhibited in LA and brought in Pop. Talbert contributes a woodcut drawing to Issue two of NOW. Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure appear in Issue One, and each poet signed, and in some cases, inscribed their contributions. Whalen signs and dates his poem, October 20, 1963. It just so happens that this was the date of Whalen’s 40th birthday. Ginsberg inscribed his poem to celebrate this event with a drawing of a vagina and a cock and balls. McClure provided a snippet of beast language in honor of Rimbaud’s birthday. Rimbaud shared Whalen’s birthday albeit almost 70 years earlier: October 20, 1854. McClure sketched what I take to be a profile of Rimbaud along the gutter of the magazine. This mag may have been signed at a birthday party for Whalen at 1403 Gough Street. Quite a remarkable document that captures a special moment in SF literary history.

Whalen’s work of this period deserves some extra attention. I first read Whalen’s work in the basic Beat anthologies and inevitably these volumes excerpt the Six Gallery era stuff, like “Sourdough Mountain Lookout.” This is basic Zen Beat material in content. The form of these poems is rather traditional as well: left margins for the most part; initial caps at the start of lines. Unfortunately, I did not dig further until recently. I have only dabbled in Whalen’s work, but the publication of the collected Whalen really opened my eyes. Yet the more radical Whalen was always there in the magazines on my shelf like NOW. Whalen’s poetry of the 1960s is a wonderful combination of Eastern thought / American West Frontier (called “Cowboy Zen” by Ron Silliman), O’Hara (and later Ted Berrigan) I do this, I do that notation, calligraphy (like Gary Snyder), and composition by field / projective verse à la Charles Olson. For anyone who thinks of Whalen only as the poet of “Sourdough Mountain,” I encourage them to dig deeper in order to find out why Kerouac considered Whalen 180 pounds of poetmeat.

Roughly a month after Whalen’s birthday, the curtain closed on the scene at 1403 Gough Street. John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963 ushered in the revolutionary / psychedelicized / overhyped 1960s. Ginsberg captured this watershed moment in “Nov. 23, 1963 Alone.” Ginsberg was anything but alone on the day of the assassination. Ginsberg, Cassady, Anne Murphy and Plymell (and his girlfriend Ann) were all together at Gough Street. The poem provides not only a eulogy of Kennedy but also of a moment in time for San Francisco and the rest of the United States. The innocence of Camelot was over, and the spirit of the Kennedy era was about to get much darker and more violent. Issue One of NOW was of that earlier moment before the decade officially became the SIXTIES. Ginsberg writes of being alone “with Now, with Fuck You, with Wild Dog Burning Bush Poetry Evergreen C Thieves Journal Soft Machine Genesis Renaissance Contact Kill Roy etc.” These magazines represent the underground before the counterculture went mainstream.

Shortly after November 1963, Plymell began to disassociate himself from rock and roll / emerging hippie SF and align himself with William Burroughs and the cut-up. This becomes clearer in the second issue of NOW entitled NOW NOW published in 1965. NOW NOW is much more ambitious in form and content than the previous issue. The first thing that jumps out at you is the presence of color and artwork. Color is unusual in the mimeo revolution. Plymell features Burroughs on the back cover with a color-coded selection from Nova Express. The idea of Burroughs organizing his fiction based on color is nothing new. He tinkered with this idea in the Olympia Soft Machine. I would suspect that this use of color tied back to Rimbaud and his poem linking vowels to colors. Another cut-up appears in NOW NOW under the name of William Lee: “Where cumith Bozo the Clown, frum the start to a nevr endin.”  According to Maynard and Miles, this is not Burroughs but a taxi driver of the same name. (If you do not have a copy of this bibliography, let alone Goodman or Shoaf’s, get at least one immediately.  They are wonderful sources of information.)  As for Bozo, it is no doubt a weird piece and I am sure Plymell and readers in the know appreciated the confusion that ensued, but Burroughs generally cut-up sentences and phrases.  He did not go down to the individual word or syllable.  He experimented with word blocks, more than words.

NOW NOW NOW, the third and final issue of NOW, is one step beyond the previous two issues. It is oversized, almost poster size, and presents some difficulty in sending it through the mail. It is an art piece. By this time, Plymell was intimately involved with Claude Pelieu and Mary Beach, two of the most dedicated followers and practitioners of the cut-up technique. NOW NOW NOW reminds me of another little mag of the period: Bulletin from Nothing. Both mags incorporate the visual as much as the textual. Both introduce collage into the mag in terms of content and in the patchwork way the mags are put together. Plymell worked as an artist as well as a writer. In 1963, he exhibited a show of collages at the Batman Gallery. Like the Ferus Gallery, the Batman had ties to the Semina Circle.

Burroughs appears in NOW NOW NOW: “Afterbirth of Dream Now.” Like Bozo, it is a standalone effort that in an interview Plymell states was created from an article that he sent to Burroughs. Burroughs received the article and sent it back cut-up. Several other magazine editors of the period tell a similar story. Daniel Lauffer of Brown Paper is one example.

The visual elements of NOW NOW NOW remind me of the collage / mixed-media work that the Fluxus artists might do. Maybe NOW NOW NOW seems like Fluxus in the shared influence of Dada. Norman Mustill contributes a collage. Cut-ups in the form of telegrams come from Claude Pelieu. I have not seen Burroughs described as a fully fledged member of Fluxus, but his radical experiments with text, image, art, film and audio tape in the 1965-1970 period seem to have much in common with that group that goes beyond merely being published by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press.

The changing title of NOW over its run is instructive. What I like best about the magazine is that it changed from issue to issue and always attempted to expand and to do itself one better. Issue one is a simple chapbook, not much different from a host of other little mags of the time. I am thinking of Trace, Yugen, or Nomad. The Whalen poem suggests an interest in typography and the page as canvas, but this is largely unexplored. Not so in NOW NOW. Visual art is a major component of the second issue; in the presence of reproductions, in the use of different typographies (as expressed in the interlocking bodies that form the title or in McClure’s poster-like beast poem), and in the layout of work on the page (for example, McClure’s poem is landscaped and utilizes the whole page). NOW NOW also has an expanded format in the number of pages and page size.

NOW NOW NOW makes the link between page and canvas explicit. The large format with the string binding suggests an artist’s portfolio or a collection of posters. NOW NOW NOW is slight in number of pages but it challenges what a literary magazine can be in form and content. The final issue is a logical progression from Plymell’s work with collage: artwork described as “sadistic” by Jeff Nuttall. Plymell surely plays rough with the reader’s expectations of a literary magazine in this issue.

After the final issue of NOW, Plymell continued to experiment with writing. He published Apocalypse Rose with Auerhahn Press in 1967 and The Last of the Moccasins with City Lights in 1971. In 1968, Plymell continued to explore the merging of the textual with the visual. The first issue of Zap Comix, printed by Plymell, introduced early work by R. Crumb. This roughly produced publication helped usher in the underground comix and presaged the graphic novel in terms of introducing adult themes to the comic. Zap Comix #1 is a legendary rarity and a highly prized collectible — the equivalent of Action Comics #1 that introduced Superman in April 1938.

In the 1970s, Plymell continued on as a publisher manning a xerox machine for a series of publications under the Cherry Valley Editions imprint. Cherry Valley was Ginsberg’s retreat / sanctuary / sanitarium for poets and writers in distress in rural New York. Ray Bremser and Gregory Corso landed there as did Plymell. By this time, Plymell married Mary Beach’s daughter, Pamela, and started Coldspring Journal (possibly a reference to Coldspring, Texas, a locale that appeared in Burroughs writing over the years based on his time near the Texas-Mexico border in the late 1940s). A Burroughs piece titled “Coldspring News” appeared in Spero 1, a one-shot from 1965. Spero is a cool item, and they have been turning up online recently for those interested. Four issues of Plymell’s journal appeared in the mid-1970s. Some other publications include Ray Bremser’s Blowing Mouth (1978), Joshua Norton’s The Blue and the Gray Poems (1975), Maureen Owen’s The No-Travels Journals (1975) and Dan Raphael’s Energumen (1976). Plymell brought out Burroughs’ Cobblestone Gardens in a Cherry Valley Edition in 1976; it was followed up years later with Tornado Alley. Burroughs wrote the foreword to Mary Beach’s Electric Banana and provided a blurb for Pelieu’s Coca Neon/Polaroid Rainbow collection; both books were printed by Cherry Valley. Cherry Valley Editions soldiers on in the present publishing new work by Plymell and others.

Plymell is something of a forgotten figure. Currently he is best known as a gadfly commenting on the Beat Generation and the poetry scene generally taking on the role of the departed Gregory Corso. Plymell lays low the sacred cows of the post-WWII counterculture. In my opinion, his work as a publisher deserves a second glance. NOW stands out visually from the mass of 1960s little mags. In Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall singled out NOW and Plymell as contributing factors that helped build the counterculture and helped form an alternative network of information and contacts. Nuttall also comments on the important role that Kansas played in providing energetic individuals as well as an element of funkiness and grit into the scenes on both coasts. This Kansas connection is well documented on the Beats in Kansas website, and Plymell is a major figure in that group.

Over the years, Plymell had ties to Burroughs in Lawrence. Despite being critical of the Beats, Plymell speaks highly of Burroughs. In return, Burroughs blurbed Last of the Moccasins. More importantly, but less known, is the fact that Plymell introduced a young James Grauerholz to the work of Burroughs in a Kansas bookstore. The recommendation struck a chord, because soon after Grauerholz went to New York and became Burroughs’ right hand man. The rest is history. When the counterculture gathered, like at 1403 Gough Street, Plymell was usually in the room, and in many cases, he had something interesting (and controversial) to contribute to the conversation. His publications, like NOW, are testament to that. Check them out if you get the chance.

Gerard Malanga
Charles Plymell: Outlaw Poet
PDF of feature article that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of Rain Taxi.

NOW

NOW

NOW NOW

NOW NOW NOW

NOW NOW NOW
Artwork by Norman Mustill, Charles Plymell, Ralph W. Ackerman, and Antonin Artaud

NOW NOW NOW
Poems by Charles Plymell and Philip Whalen, “Afterbirth of Dream Now” by William S. Burroughs

NOW NOW NOW
Poems by Roxie Powell, Sculpture of Bob Branaman by Dion Wright, Drawing by “Manny Lipshitz” aka Dean Stockwell

NOW NOW NOW
Drawings by Duarte, Telegrams by Claude Pélieu

NOW NOW NOW
Telegrams by Claude Pélieu

NOW NOW NOW
Back

NOW ARCHIVAL MATERIALS

William S. Burroughs
Afterbirth of Dream Now
Manuscript of cut-up collaboration with Charles Plymell published in NOW NOW NOW.

William S. Burroughs
Now the Judgement of Things to Come
Manuscript of cut-up collaboration with Charles Plymell published in NOW NOW NOW.

William S. Burroughs
“Long Lost Cut-Up”
Manuscript of cut-up sent to Charles Plymell for use in NOW NOW NOW.

Gerard Malanga
Letter to Charles Plymell
Letter accompanying poems submitted to Plymell for NOW.

Charles Plymell
Collage

Charles Plymell
Collage

Charles Plymell
Collage

Robert Branaman
NOW artwork

Allen Ginsberg
Typescript

Diane Wakoski
“From A Go to B, If You Can Find It”

Diane Wakoski
“From A Go to B, If You Can Find It”

Paul Lundgren
“Without Rancor”
“Poem by Paul Lungrund, the mad bookstore owner in Wichita who was in WW2 intelligence” — Note by Charles Plymell

NOW NOW flyer

Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue #4
Front

Film-Makers Cooperative Catalogue #4
Letter from Charles Plymell to Jonas Mekas

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

In late 1963, Jeff Nuttall sent William Burroughs the first issue of My Own Mag. In an editorial note on the cover, Nuttall writes tongue firmly in cheek, My Own Mag “will appear every now and then… will be devoted to creations of unparalleled nobility… morals of unquestionable soundness high literary standards of traditional finesse. No dirty pitchers.” “The Super Absorbant periodical” appealed to Burroughs and he responded enthusiastically, thus initiating a fruitful and influential partnership between the two writers.

The impetus and spirit behind My Own Mag must have sounded very familiar to Burroughs, since in 1958 he and Gregory Corso flirted with the idea of starting their own magazine called Interpol. Contributions to Interpol would include “Bowles (his most disgusting); Tennessee Williams (his most); and your [Ginsberg] bubbling, gooey cocaine writing; and [Jacques] Stern’s most humiliating, and Kerouac’s most maudlin, etc.” Corso continued, “I will tell you what we plan for our format: first an editorial, by either Bill or me or both. In it we will inform our readers that the thing this week is Palfium, or that one needs a prescription now for Diosan in Spain — kind of junk news, etc. Also we will review books, books written by junkies, fiends, cross-eyed imbeciles, huge-footed oafs, etc. We will praise and hail and laud all kinds of bile, and put down, pan, condemn all kinds of respectability and whiteness.” Both Interpol and My Own Mag share a concern with the irreverent and the obscene.

In Bomb Culture, Nuttall adds, “The magazine, even those first three pages, used nausea and flagrant scatology as a violent means of presentation. I wanted to make the fundamental condition of living unavoidable by nausea. You can’t pretend it’s not there if you are throwing up as a result.” Sounds very much like the spirit behind Naked Lunch. I am reminded of the Ginsberg poem “On Naked Lunch,” that warns “Don’t hide the madness.” Kerouac viewed Burroughs’ novel as a similar glimpse into hidden truths thus leading Kerouac to name Burroughs’ work. Burroughs’ “long newspaper spoon” comes into play here as well.

In isolation in Tangier, Burroughs longed for literary contact and viewed Nuttall as a kindred soul. My Own Mag revived Burroughs’ interest in starting his own magazine and Nuttall, like Ed Sanders at Fuck You Press, possessed a very liberal publishing policy. Yet the interests of Burroughs in 1964 were no longer those of Burroughs in 1958. The Beat Hotel and Brion Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up in the late summer of 1959 and his work and working methods would never be the same. The cut-up technique was not a static method either.

Thanks to the generosity of Robert Bank and Peter Collier coupled with my own collection, the development of the cut-up technique as well as Burroughs and Nuttall’s editing relationship can be explored. Burroughs first appears in issue 2. “From H.B. William Burroughs” is a cut-up in line with Burroughs’ explorations of the technique from Minutes to Go and The Exterminator. Works of this kind appear in little magazines throughout the 1960s: The Outsider, Rhinozeros, Floating Bear, Cleft. By 1964, these exercises represented something of a dead end and Burroughs sought to extend the cut-up into new territories.

In the winter of 1964, Burroughs and Nuttall met in England. Nuttall describes the meeting in Bomb Culture as a bit of a missed opportunity as Burroughs was not talkative and Nuttall in his nervousness got drunk. Yet I suspect the meeting was instrumental in both men deciding to up the ante in their editorial relationship and to fully explore the possibilities of My Own Mag. Not surprisingly, Burroughs appeared regularly in the magazine after this meeting. In addition, the nature of his role in the magazine changed as well.

In Issue 4, Burroughs submitted “Warning Warning Warning Warning,” a cut-up presented as a 32-space grid. The piece was “to be read any which way.” The first issue of Insect Trust Gazette from 1964 featured the grid experiments with “Heavens Burning Idiot” and “Grid 1 and 2” along with instructions of how the cut-up was created. Nuttall responded to Burroughs’ grid experiments in issue 6, the cut-up issue. The format of the magazine, like “Warning Warning Warning Warning,” is a grid. Ports of Entry, Robert Sobieszek’s book on William Burroughs and his achievement as an artist, mentions “Warning Warning Warning Warning” and My Own Mag in its opening chapter. This chapter situates the cut-up in a poetic tradition including Mallarmé, the surrealists and Dadaists, Fluxus and concrete poetry. The book provides a picture of Burroughs’ grid cut-up that was a manuscript page from The Third Mind that Burroughs and Gysin began work on in New York City in 1965. Jackson MacLow and composer John Cage worked with grids in the mid-1960s. The grid allowed the element of chance into composition and created complex guidelines for reading or writing a poem that decreased authorial control. The appeal to Burroughs is obvious.

The Special Tangier Issue (No. 5) ushered in a major development in the cut-up technique. As Barry Miles discusses in the final chapter of El Hombre Invisible, Burroughs began experimenting with the three-column format in February 1964. This development cannot be separated from Burroughs’ evolving relationship with My Own Mag and Nuttall. Miles writes, “At the same time as working on the photographic collages, Bill began to develop the three-column technique he had begun to experiment with in New York in the sixties. He began to produce texts which explored this fact and, as usual, did a great number of them. He started to keep a diary in February 1964 which exploited the three-column technique. If he were to take a trip to Gibraltar, which he did frequently, he would write an account of the trip in one column, just like a normal diary: what was said by the officials, what he overheard on the airplane. The next column would present his memories… The third column would be his reading column, quoting from the books he had with him.”

Numerous postcards in Robert Bank’s possession are postmarked from Gibraltar and feature scenes from the area. As Miles points out, Gibraltar was an area of fascination for Burroughs. One postcard in particular makes reference to the Southport Gates inscribed with the date 1899 and the cut-up experiment The Coldspring News (Nov 21, 1964: “Old arch there with The Coldspring News. [Date on the arch is 1899]”). As Davis Schneiderman explores in a draft research paper, the three column experiments (for example, The Coldspring News, Moving Times) featured in the My Own Mag and other places, like The Spero, all utilized the same front page of the New York Times from 1899. Possibly, Burroughs chose that year due to the date inscription in Gibraltar. Such coincidences spoke to the power of the cut-up to cross time and even predict the future.

In “Moving Times” in issue 5, the three-column format is simple in layout. There are no images and the layout mimics the front page of a daily paper like the New York Times it cannibalizes. In Bomb Culture, Nuttall spends a few pages describing this new phase in Burroughs’ development. Clearly, Nuttall realized that the material Burroughs sent for the Tangier Issue marked a new path creatively for Burroughs. Not surprisingly, Burroughs and Nuttall received responses from Carl Weissner after this issue. This relationship along with Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach would form the closest thing to a movement or school relating to the cut-up.

The “Moving Times” first appeared as a three-column cut-up. Burroughs then expanded it to a supplement to My Own Mag that he edited. “The Burrough” and “Apomorphine Times” (similar supplements in My Own Mag) are other examples of this editorial page by Burroughs. The idea of a Burroughs supplement did not fully develop until issue 7 with Burroughs cut-ups appearing under a Moving Times faux newspaper format. It is at this point that Burroughs explores in detail the possibilities of the newspaper as a form to be complicated and parodied. In 1965, Burroughs lent the name “The Moving Times” to a poster for Alexander Trocchi’s The Sigma Project. The poster was designed to be hung in the London subway and serve as a sounding board for the Project. Here the broadside goes back to its early roots as a means to disseminate information on the side of barns and the like. What is clear is that Burroughs developed and expanded the three-column format at a rapid rate. The development of “The Moving Times” from a simple three column cut-up to a supplement to My Own Mag to a broadside disseminating information for a proposed international movement testifies to Burroughs’ increasing ambition for the cut-up technique.

In Issue 11, My Own Mag and Burroughs change direction yet again. In his developing article, Schneiderman writes about the practice of Grangerization or extra-illustration that was a British fad at the turn of the 20th Century. In issue 11, Nuttall begins stapling old magazine articles and illustration to My Own Mag. As early as Issue 4, Nuttall tipped in additions to the magazine, but only in the later issues does the scrapbook feel of Burroughs’ writing find a parallel in the format of My Own Mag. At the same time, Burroughs added another layer to the three-column format. Miles writes, “It was in March 1964, when Bill and Ian were living at the rue Delacroix, that Bill began work on the scrapbooks. As usual, this was yet another extension of the cut-up technique.” Throughout the 1950s, Burroughs created scrapbooks that verged on book art. Ports of Entry provides some pictures and commentary on this aspect of Burroughs’ art career. Like the Gibraltar scrapbook above, this new direction merged the older scrapbook format with the new three-column format. “The Dutch Schultz Special’ (Issue 13) is a prime example of this new work. Time and APO-33 are others. As you can see, the three-column format now includes images that comment on the text. The feel is more of a magazine than a newspaper. Possibly, Nuttall’s extra-illustrations comment on Burroughs’ new look.

As the correspondence shows, Burroughs was allowed free reign and basically submitted to Nuttall his latest cut-up works straight from the typewriter. Nuttall was open to anything. Burroughs’ editorial comments were short and not very detailed so Nuttall had a lot of leeway in how he wanted to present the manuscript. In some cases, Burroughs allowed Nuttall to insert images as he saw fit. (April 6, 1964: “By all means, put your drawings in ‘any picture’ spaces.”) In issue 7, Nuttall drew the images that accompany Burroughs’ cut-up. In addition, Nuttall may have drawn the image for the grid / scrapbook / three-column experiment of issue 11. This highlights the collaborative nature of Burroughs’ working method as well as his desire to subvert authorial control. A further examination of the nature of this collaboration remains to be attempted. A close examination of manuscript material would reveal much about the give and take between Burroughs and Nuttall.

For example, in issue 15, we can see the transformation of Burroughs’ manuscript to the pages of My Own Mag. “WB Talking” and “Gas Girls” show that Nuttall possessed a very light editorial hand. I have not done a word-by-word analysis but the basic format of the piece is unaltered and I would suspect the text to be unchanged as well. Yet as these manuscript pages show, Burroughs incorporated color into his manuscripts. The New York Times archives have a page from the “Dutch Schultz” cut-up that appeared in Issue 13. Burroughs painted on the manuscript pages. The color and the brushwork on these pieces remind me of the later artwork painted on manila folders. These items appear every so often on eBay. In any case, the manuscripts for the later My Own Mags merge the three-column cut-up with abstract painting. Burroughs’ scrapbooks of the period are full of these experiments joining the visual and the textual. Given the limits of mimeo, Nuttall could not faithfully reproduce the full visual nature of Burroughs’ work of this period, yet the effort to recreate all the elements of the manuscript is admirable. The later issues of My Own Mag provide as detailed a look into Burroughs’ exploration of the visual implications of the cut-up as was available for years until Burroughs’ artwork was revisited in exhibitions and catalogs, like Ports of Entry.

As I mentioned before, Nuttall, like Ed Sanders, felt free to print anything. Their value as editors was not to shape material but to have the bravery and the foresight to provide an outlet for writing that could not be printed anywhere else. I do not want to downplay the editorial genius of Nuttall. The presence of Nuttall is all over My Own Mag. Burroughs’ cut-ups speak on matters and in a manner that Nuttall clearly agrees with. But Nuttall’s worldview comes out as clearly in My Own Mag as Burroughs’. As Robert Bank has shown, Perfume Jack links the entire magazine together into a unified whole. My Own Mag is Nuttall’s magazine first and foremost.

Nuttall’s manipulation of stencils and the mimeograph deserve special mention here. One of the pleasures of My Own Mag is its physical appearance. Nuttall is wholly responsible for that. His artwork is intricate, funny, and extremely skillful given the limitations of the technology. Hopefully in the future, RealityStudio will have a column on Jeff Nuttall as mimeograph artist providing a closer examination of his mastery of this difficult and stubborn medium.

Issue 15 demonstrates another direction of Burroughs’ thought: the tape recorder. The “Subliminal Kid” piece, like the longer “Invisible Generation,” shows Burroughs’ high hopes for the latest in recording technology to again subvert control and authority. Burroughs’ movement in this direction probably had something to do with the feedback and correspondence he was having with Carl Weissner. As I mentioned earlier after the Tangier Issue, Burroughs began to get some response from around the world in the persons of Weissner, Claude Pélieu and Mary Beach. This had the makings of a cut-up movement. Weissner would publish Burroughs’ tape experiments in Klacto. In the later issues, “The Moving Times” begins to function like a magazine within the magazine. Material comes not just from Burroughs. Burroughs began incorporating his correspondence into “Moving Times.” Likewise, Weissner cut up Burroughs’ work and letters to form new material. A handwritten note by Burroughs provides evidence of his excitement over this new correspondence. Burroughs encouraged Nuttall to contact Weissner and publish him. Nuttall followed Burroughs’ advice, and My Own Mag published Weissner in the late issues. See Robert Bank’s index of contributors.

My Own Mag functioned like a laboratory for Burroughs where he was free to experiment. Like Charles Olson’s experience with Floating Bear, Burroughs could get feedback from a receptive audience immediately since the turnaround time on the mimeo machine was so rapid. It had to be because Burroughs’ approach to the cut-up was changing quickly at this time. My Own Mag documents in detail Burroughs’ cut-up experiments. Yet we should never forget that the magazine also memorializes the brilliance of Jeff Nuttall as an editor, writer and artist. To fully appreciate My Own Mag, it must be approached and read in all its complexity. The attentive reader will be rewarded with a truly special experience. Thanks must go to Islwyn Watkins for making available for electronic reproduction his rare complete set of My Own Mag. Due to his generosity, the experience of reading and enjoying this legendary magazine can be yours. Enjoy!!!