Note: Malcolm Mc Neill is offering an inscribed copy of EXTERMINATOR! as well as four unpublished drawings he made for the book at William Burroughs’ request. RealityStudio has interviewed Mc Neill about his intensive collaboration with Burroughs. His artwork for Ah Pook Is Here has been collected in The Lost Art of Ah Pook. He has also written a compelling memoir about his collaboration with Burroughs, Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me. Interested parties should contact Mc Neill directly.

FOR SALE – $3500

4 images for EXTERMINATOR! created at Bill Burroughs’ request in 1973, in London, ostensibly for a collector’s edition of the book, together with a copy of the book inscribed to that effect:

“For Malcolm Mc Neill who illustrated this book all the best William Burroughs”

For financial reasons, the illustrated publication did not materialize. The images were a first attempt at trying to visually represent Bill’s cut-up. Ah Pook is Here was concerned with the “images of fear,” and “butterflies in the stomach,” as a metaphor for anxiety, functioned as a visual interpretation of the idea. All four images were subsequently used as an illustration for an interview with Allen Ginsberg in The Berkley Barb in 1974 and the background of the second was reprised as an illustration for Bill’s column in Crawdaddy Magazine in 1975. 

The book is signed and inscribed to me specifically as its illustrator by Bill. I loaned it to his notorious friend and collaborator Jacques Stern in New York, who in his inimitable manner made “notes to self” on some of the pages. The book is a record of three individuals who collaborated together in the 1970s. A copy of Jacques’ collaboration with Bill on the film treatment Creation of Adam was also marked in this way.

The images are each 16.5″x10.5″ created in graphite and ink and mounted on illustration board. The fourth in the series suffers from rubber cement stains on the back. The images were illustrations made specifically for reproduction; in those days illustrators rarely received the original artwork back and methods of mounting and gluing were not done with any sort of longevity in mind. 

Higher resolution images can be sent via Hightail.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

I got my mitts on a run of a magazine dedicated to the good shit that once again reminded me how full of it I truly am. Paging through Malcolm Mc Neill‘s Lost Art of Ah Pook, I came across a reference to Rush, a magazine of high entertainment, which featured in late 1976 the most comprehensive example of that graphic novel that ever saw print. Really should have seen this a lot sooner. Like years ago. But as is well documented, or as evidenced by the lack of documentation on RealityStudio, I have blinders on when it comes to appreciating the later work of William Burroughs. As a magazine like Rush proves yet again, this is my loss.

Rush was the Pepsi to High Times‘s Coke. Michael Horowitz, the foremost authority on all things drugs, noted that Rush was the most prominent competitor to High Times and he listed some other drug lifestyle mags I also never heard of like Hi-Life, Stone Age, and Marijuana Monthly. I have never come across these mags and I even wonder how prominent Rush really was. According to WorldCat, Rush ran for only four issues from late 1976 to early 1977. Now High Times is all over the Internet with extensive archives that document its long, illustrious run, but google Rush and you come up with almost nothing. Most of the references deal with the fact that the magazine printed Burroughs and Malcolm Mc Neill’s collaboration on Ah Pook Is Here in December 1976 in the third issue.  

Here is Malcolm Mc Neill on how Ah Pook found its way into the pages of Rush:

Rush was an offshoot of Swank Magazine and someone had suggested, not long after I arrived in New York, that I should see about getting illustration work there. The editor was a young guy named Ben Pesta and we got along well. He was friends with writer Doug Moench at Marvel where I was also working and we hung out together on occasions. I’d used the Ah Pook imagery as the portfolio for getting work at both magazines and they were both Burroughs fans and loved the work (back in the day when Burroughs fans actually read his books). I’m not sure if Bill had previously been published at Swank or not — that would be your bailiwick. When the idea of Rush came up, being able to publish a preview of “the unseen drug-fueled apocalyptic new Burroughs book” — was kind of handed to them on a plate. They were already familiar with it and I was right there. Characterizing a book about Death and the Control of Time in that way naturally didn’t exactly blow my skirt up, but it got worse as I pointed out in Observed While Falling. The result was so disappointing; I didn’t even bother picking up my favorite Ah Pook image that was to be used as the opening page. One of the very few pieces of art that was actually Lost. It’s the image I wanted for the cover of the Fantagraphics and German OWFs and finally got to use for the Kindle version exactly forty years later! 

Since they hadn’t been able to pay us much, Rush agreed to guarantee me four illustrations (I think) over the next year. I did one (Yage) and was working on another when the magazine folded. Everything about Ah Pook is weird, Rush was just one more crack to fall through.

In addition, the first issue printed Burroughs’ Cobble Stone Gardens. So it would seem that Rush was far from successful. As Malcolm notes, the magazine was published by the same guys who published Swank, which had a tradition of mixing counterculture writing with porn. For example, Burroughs appeared in an issue of Swank back in 1961. The inclusion of Burroughs in the pages of Rush suggests either that into the mid-1970s Burroughs was still a big draw for young heads or that the editors did not have any new ideas. Given Rush‘s short shelf life and the fact that Burroughs appeared in half of the mag’s issues, the latter appears to be the case although the editors of High Times dipped into the seemingly bottomless Burroughs well several times throughout the 1970s. If you were into drugs you bound to come into contact with Burroughs at some point.

I do not know about you but I am a Pepsi guy. I love the rip-off, the copycat, and the second tier. Give me a B-Movie and the D-List any day. Often this type of media can provide through its seeming lack of original ideas fascinating insights into the zeitgeist of the time. The copy becomes more interesting than the original even if its treatment of the spirit of the times is half-baked.  

Flipping through Rush I am reminded yet again of just how fucking crazy the 1970s really were and how short-sighted it is of me to focus exclusively on the 1960s. It is cliché that the sixties were the decade of sex, drugs and rock and roll but when you get down to it, the seventies were when that holy trinity went beyond the initiated and entered into secular experience. In the seventies the sixties went mainstream. Hell, even Time ran a cover story in the mid-1970s promoting cocaine as a wonder drug for the emerging class of yuppies who wanted to work hard and party harder. For a young ambitious stock broker, cocaine was viewed as the perfect recreational drug. By the dawn of the eighties, the hangover and paranoia would eventually set in and cocaine would be demonized and ghettoized in the crack epidemic. Similarly the Summer of Love would hit suburbia in the seventies with swinger clubs for the bridge and tunnel crowd, like Plato’s Retreat, key parties in Levittown, and gay culture seeping into mainstream sexual practices until AIDS came in and scared everybody straight. To give some idea of just how weird the seventies became, like Rush, there was a short-lived glossy mag along the lines of Sixteen and Tiger Beat, called Star that championed the groupie lifestyle and the tweens and teens who aspired to live it. Articles gushed over the girlfriends of The Rolling Stones or advised how a girl could catch an older man. Even in a decade of rock excess epitomized by the questionable dating practices of Jimmy Page and David Bowie, Star was just too much. It ran for only five issues. Finally as David Hepworth notes in his book, Never a Dull Moment, 1971 was the year the rock exploded, or more accurately, the year the rock industry consolidated into a big business increasingly run by corporations and accountants. 

The same could be said for William Burroughs. The seventies would be the decade when the Mimeo Revolution began its slow decline in importance as the main outlet for alternative writers until its eventual collapse in the early eighties with the rise of Reagan and the personal computer. Little mags became less and less important in Burroughs’ bibliography as mainstream publishers like Viking and Henry Holt marketed Burroughs’ latest releases. Burroughs would even appear in the pages of People. Rush is a forgotten mag that documents this shift. It captures a time when Burroughs as well as sex, drugs, and rock and roll emerged from the underground bookstores and headshops on to their eventual presence in the checkout line at the supermarket.  

Rush Magazine Archive

Rush
October 1976
Front cover

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

William S. Burroughs, Cobble Stone Gardens

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Saturday Night Live

Rush
October 1976

Dope party

Rush
October 1976

Dope party

Rush
October 1976

State police

Rush
November 1976
Front cover

Rush
December 1976
Front cover

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976

William S. Burroughs & Malcolm Mc Neill, “Ah Pook Is Here”

Rush
December 1976
Advertisement

Rush
December 1976
Crossword

Rush
February 1977
Front cover

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#19 – Cyclops 1-4 (1970). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

Nobody has browsed the stacks of the Library of Interzone for decades; its location flickers like light through a Dream Machine. A few claim to have seen this memory palace while blissfully on the nod, yet the Person from Porlock always seem to knock just as the relics from the library come into clearest focus. Of course every bibliophile knows that the Person from Porlock is merely the Man who has kept one waiting in the first place. The Library of Interzone is a cabinet of curiosities filled with bibliographical unicorn horns and nails from the true cross. Earlier than firsts and beyond the limited, the imaginary and the mythic line shelves that stretch like a moebius strip onward into infinity. Is that even possible? If not, a fitting design for a library housing the unrealized and unrealizable.  

There you would find a complete run of Burroughs’s little magazine, Interpol, published out of Room 15 of the Beat Hotel in the late 1950s and distributed by Burroughs personally from his usual table at La Palette and just up the street at the English Bookshop. Drenched in junk and steeped in funk, Interpol was printed by fellow Beat Hotel resident Piero Heliczer as one of the early efforts of his Dead Language Press. Somewhere on these endless shelves would be a copy of the hors de commerce edition of The Third Mind, published with great expense and much pomp and circumstance by Grove Press as an art book in 1966. The book is lavish and an example of corporate publishing excess complete with fold-ins, cut-outs, tipped-in manuscript pages, photographs and strips of film, as well as original artwork by Brion Gysin. As such it brings to mind Andy Warhol’s Index Book, published by Random House in 1967 or his Screen Tests/A Diary published by Kulchur Press that same year. The Kelmscott Chaucer of the Library of Interzone is definitely the deluxe edition of Ah Puch Is Here complete with illustrations by Malcom Mc Neill, in a limited edition of twenty-three copies containing tipped-in manuscript pages with holograph text by Burroughs and original artwork by Mc Neill.  

The Library of Interzone is speculative and spectacular; my humble list, while no doubt dealing with rarities, remains all the same chained to reality. So instead of handling a fully realized Ah Puch Is Here, I have to lower myself to the actual and get my hands dirty with newsprint, settling in with reading Burroughs and Mc Neill’s collaboration, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart,” in Cyclops, the first English adult comic paper. Sure, one can admire Mc Neill’s illustrations in isolation, which decades since their initial impetus now hover in the shadows of the white cube, just barely getting a foot in the door of the gallery system. And yes, brief snatches of the collaboration appeared in 1977 in the pages of Screw, but that is just a peep show at the Deuce, when compared to the full Gesamtkunstwerk.  

For me the strips in Cyclops provides the most tantalizing of teases about what a fully realized Burroughs and Mc Neill collaboration might have achieved. “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” is no doubt a pale reflection, almost a silent film version of the big budget spectacular, but like a classic movie from the silent era such as Metropolis, all the elements of a film such as Blade Runner are there, just not with the technological sleight-of-hand. It could be argued that “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” is all the more charming just because it does not get buried in the pyrotechnics of bloated corporate publishing. The same holds true for Metropolis. As such a mimeo edition of The Third Mind would be superior to a deluxe art book edition. If not as aesthetically pleasing and visually arresting, it would be more in the spirit of things. I certainly feel this way.

My appreciation for Cyclops is all about context, not content. There is something about seeing Burroughs / Mc Neill in a struggling adult comic paper, one that ran for only four issues from September to October of 1970, which really appeals to me. I am generally indifferent to the underground press, a network of newspapers, news syndicates, and comics, which for a brief period in the late 1960s / early 1970s provided a serious and much needed alternative to the mainstream media. Burroughs was a fixture on this circuit during its glory years. Later in life Burroughs appeared on TV, in film, in commercials, and even jammed with rock stars. And it could be argued that he was by this point in his life a figure of popular culture rather than a cult hero, but for me, Burroughs was never more popular, more in the public eye, than in the period from 1967-1970, when he was a regular fixture within the pages of Rat, International Times, and Georgia Straight, to list the underground papers to which Burroughs was a semi-regular contributor. Sure there is jamming with Kurt Cobain but there is also appearing on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. Yes, Cobain is an icon and Nevermind sold millions of copies, but never was rock music listened to as closely and with such obsessive expectation as with the late albums of the Beatles. And that includes the conspiracy theory loving listeners of Cobain.

On a similar note, Burroughs never held the public’s attention in quite that same way as he did in the late 1960s and the general public was never again so open to listening to him. Readers hung on and analyzed every word. During this brief window of opportunity, he was as much a prophet and philosopher as he was a novelist. Burroughs took advantage. And paradoxically that might be the problem for me. Burroughs’ stance as prophet is tainted by profit and he becomes a pundit. By 1967, Burroughs was too popular and as such too accessible. Even more damning, he was too accommodating to his newfound readership. His editing of the cut-up novels prove that Burroughs had a serious case of rabbit ears, which great artists simply cannot and do not have. Great art is like gambling; the best strategy is to go against the public play. The public are mere marks. Burroughs’ articles that appear in the underground press are a far cry from the cut-ups that appeared in the publications of the Mimeo Revolution just two years earlier. One is Burroughs at his creative peak and one is Burroughs collecting a paycheck. My money is on Burroughs the experimentalist. This is the Burroughs worth listening to.

Unlike the appearances in Rat and International Times, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” is Burroughs in full experimental mode. He is searching for a new form of expression, what ultimately became the graphic novel. Burroughs and Mc Neill were doomed to be pioneers rather than accomplished professionals. Yet that is fine with me. In fact it is preferred. I am fascinated by that which is in the development stages as opposed to their full flowering. The proto is the go-to in terms of not just collecting but enjoying art, literature and music generally. “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” is the very definition of proto. It is primitive; it is preliminary. It is also original. Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen, considered by many to be the greatest graphic novel of the entire genre, has acknowledged that reading “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” in Cyclops was a major influence on him. Moore realized that this comic, which was given pride of place in the centerfold of Cyclops, could be the foundation for a whole new form of literature. Flipping through the pages of this early adult comic paper, you can hear the proto-punk of The Stooges and the MC5 playing in the background. As a collectible, Cyclops is Phun City (as advertised within its pages). Kick out the jams, motherfucker!!  

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Malcolm Mc Neill, Observed While Falling and The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here

For too long I considered the 1970s a period of stagnation for William Burroughs. This is wrong on several levels. First of all, Burroughs was in motion geographically, particularly early on in the decade. The move from London to New York City in 1973 was one of the most pivotal of his life. This willingness to change addresses highlights the fact that despite being on the cusp of retirement age he was far from settling down. Not only was he on the move geographically, he was still evolving creatively. This was a period of intense productivity, although most of it is generally viewed as transitional work such as Port of Saints and Exterminator!. Burroughs’ ideas and worldview were in flux. It could be argued that he was stuck creatively, blocked, but in an effort to break out of this impasse, he was clearly open to new possibilities and opportunities. A single project dominates the entire decade, which for me represents his attempt to articulate a definitive statement of his personal and creative worldview: Ah Pook Is Here, a collaboration with Malcolm Mc Neill, unfinished and unpublished in its full glory, and maybe because of this fact, remains Burroughs’ Gesamtkunstwerk, his total work of art.

As envisioned by Burroughs and Mc Neill, Ah Pook Is Here encompassed the performing arts, literature, and the visual arts. For the most part, the project has been described as a comic book or proto-graphic novel, but Burroughs makes clear Ah Pook was broader and more ambitious than that. Burroughs writes in the essay “Les Voleurs”:

Look at the surrealist moustache on the Mona Lisa. Just a silly joke? Consider where this joke can lead. I had been working with Malcolm Mc Neill for five years on an illustrated book entitled Ah Pook Is Here, and we used the same idea: Hieronymus Bosch as the background for scenes and characters taken from the Mayan codices and transformed into modern counterparts. That face in the Mayan Dresden Codex will be the barmaid in this scene, and we can use the Vulture God over here. Bosch, Michelangelo, Renoir, Monet, Picasso — steal anything in sight. You want a certain light on your scene? Lift it from Monet. You want a 1930s backdrop? Use Hopper.

In addition to literature and painting, there are elements of film as well, particularly in the sense of storybooking, to say nothing of editing techniques like montage.

To me the most important aspect of Ah Pook is an art form that I have never seen associated with Burroughs’ work: hentai. In the West, hentai generally refers to pornographic animation or comics of Japanese origin. Ah Pook Is Here is a Garden of Sexual Delights in the tradition of Bosch, a sexual carnival in the tradition of Rabelais, and a Garden of Eden before the Fall. The book expresses Burroughs’ sexual obsessions, fears, and fantasies. There is a strong tradition of sexually explicit comics in North America, such as underground comix and Tijuana bibles. In fact, the work of comix artists such as R. Crumb are a definite influence on Ah Pook Is Here, but what interests me in the context of hentai is not just its link to sexual perversion but the etymology of the Japanese hen meaning change, weird, or strange, and tai meaning attitude or appearance. As such the word can also mean metamorphosis as well as abnormality. Ah Pook Is Here also serves as a sexual playground or laboratory where Burroughs can experiment with and explore his fluid ideas on sexuality and gender.  

Malcolm Mc Neill, Artwork for Ah Pook Is Here

The key image in this Garden of Delights is the Reddies: “the chicks with dicks” that seem so out of place in the Burroughsian universe that Mc Neill felt compelled to make clear the fact that the androgyny in Ah Pook Is Here came directly from Burroughs himself. Mc Neill writes

The “chicks with dicks” thing has come up several times and of course I’ve had to clarify that this was a BILL BURROUGHS book! These were GUYS with breasts. There were a couple of times when it was suggested that hermaphrodites weren’t part of Bill’s repertoire and that maybe I’d got it wrong — or that being straight and all I was just extemporizing. For the record then (quoting from Ah Pook Is Here): 

Old Sarge: “All right Audrey you and Ouab fuck out a red skunk boy on the double.”

Audrey and Ouab fuck in a pink cloud of porno pictures. Emaciated and comatose they curl around a pulsing pink egg. The egg splits and out steps a red boy with female breasts, an egg at his left nipple. A sweet rotten musky smell fills the barracks…

“We are known as Reddies” the boy says. He squirms as the egg swells and splits. Out steps another boy with an egg at each nipple.

It is tempting to see the Reddies merely as Mc Neill putting a feminine element on Burroughs’ Wild Boy fantasy in an attempt to inject a heterosexual element into the text. Such a view is possible, but in my opinion androgyny plays a large role in Burroughs’ vision for Ah Pook Is Here in terms of Burroughs’ thoughts on Mayan culture, reproduction, genetic engineering and sexual conditioning, his son, Billy, gender, and Judeo-Christian ideology; thoughts that were particularly unstable and under revision and development in the decade of the 1970s.

In order to understand the apocalyptic vision of Ah Pook Is Here, we have to step back to 1968. Burroughs is generally regarded as a cynic, but like many in the late 1960s he found himself caught up in the belief that the world was on the brink of revolutionary change. The dominant world order seemed doomed. Burroughs’ harrowing experience at the 1968 Democratic Convention proved to him that the established system was crumbling. He wrote to Antony Balch that the two most important developments in Chicago were the joining of blacks and whites in a non-communist revolt and a spirit of sexual freedom and permissiveness that extended to frank representations of homosexuality. Regarding pornography Burroughs wrote, 

[C]omplete breakdown of censorship. There are shops all over town now where you can buy pictures of naked boys with hard ons step right up and take your prick displayed on the counter. And there is also a selection of home movies with the actors hard on the cover. What is different from movies like “The Men” is that this is legal and therefore competitive. Instead of horrible looking Soho Jews there are beautiful kids jacking off ecetera. We could cut these movies in with the Cut Ups and show the result publically. We could cut the sex films in with newsreels and street shots and pop singers. How long this God sent opportunity will last I don’t know. No doubt our creeping opponents will try to crack down on “smut.” If that happens we can put a protest riot in the streets.  

On one level, Ah Pook Is Here was an attempt to realize “this God sent opportunity.” In it, Burroughs “cut sex films in with newsreels.”  

Yet on another level by 1970, the year Burroughs began collaborating with Mc Neill, the dream of the 1960s was over, the threat of violence against the government perverted into acts of self-mutilation such as the Manson murders, Altamont, and the accidental deaths of three Weathermen in a bomb explosion. The backlash against the spirit of 1968 that would crest in the Reagan Years was already in motion by 1970. Like many of his generation, Burroughs became disillusioned by the failure of the 1960s, but in Chicago, he had caught a glimpse of the apocalypse and stood at the gates of a new age.

In addition, by 1970 Burroughs had a similar experience in his creative life. The 1960s represented the highpoint of Burroughs’ creative life. He had his hands in every form of media available: books, magazines, film and video, LPs, audio tape, readings, Happenings. Anything seemed possible. Burroughs’ creative ideal was a merging of text and image that expanded upon his three column and scrapbook work, like Time, APO-33, or The Dead Star into an artists’ book format that expanded beyond the boundaries and limitations of the traditional novel and incorporated the content and structure of film, instructional manuals, pictorial art, illustrated books, comics, poetry, and musical scores. In short, Burroughs, like Mallarmé as theorized by Maurice Blanchot, dreamed of the ideal book, the book to come. 

In the 1960s, The Third Mind was that book — an attempt at an all-encompassing statement of Burroughs’ philosophy of art. For a brief period in the 1960s, Burroughs held the belief that the physical realization of his ideal book was possible and imminent. The Third Mind was to be published by Grove Press, marketed as a high-end art book, and priced at $10. Yet by 1970, Burroughs realized that the project was stillborn. It was economically and technically impossible. Burroughs’ dream of a revolution in society and art seemed over. Ah Pook Is Here represents Burroughs’ last-ditch attempt to capture the hope and terror of 1968 in a physical object, not just a book but THE book. Ah Pook Is Here would be Burroughs’ Book of Revelations. As such, the Reddies represent Burroughs’ angels of the apocalypse: harbingers of salvation and destruction and objects of fear and fascination.

1970 was also the year of publication for a book of interviews with Burroughs called The Job. This book contains one of Burroughs’ most famous and most widely interpreted statements. Burroughs called women a “biological mistake.” This statement and others like it on the role of women haunted Malcolm Mc Neill throughout his collaboration with Burroughs. For many critics and fans of Burroughs, particularly heterosexuals or feminists, the statement has proven troubling and confusing.  

Over the years, Burroughs clarified the statement considerably, stating that the biological mistake is specifically the separation of gender into male and female, and more particularly, the binary opposition of gender and sexual preference as presented by Western philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion. As Burroughs was aware, this opposition and separation was not always the case even in the Judeo-Christian tradition. God created Adam and Eve in his own image. They have been considered sexless or androgynous in the developing history of Christianity. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, their punishment was the division of the sexes, the separation of male and female identity. Radical Judeo-Christian sects attempted to integrate the ideal state of androgyny into their teaching, but more conservative forces, like that of John the Baptist, prevailed and suppressed the forbidden knowledge of a merging of the sexes.

Gender in flux, a fluid conception of sexuality, was an ideal for Burroughs that both fascinated and disgusted him. This is most apparent in his Yage visions where all races and sexes shift and merge. Burroughs in one Yage vision views himself as a “Negress.” This is not to say that Burroughs wished to be black or a woman. Instead he felt the ideal state in terms of sexuality and gender was one of possibility and flux. Heterosexuality / homosexuality, male / female, patriarchal / matriarchal. For Burroughs these are not either / or propositions, but both / and possibilities. Western, Judeo-Christian society is based on suppressing this truth. The exposing of the arbitrary, and in fact false, nature of such oppositions would mean this society’s destruction. As such, the Reddies, as “chicks with dicks,” represent angels of destruction, a plague.  

On the other hand, for other societies, the Reddies are gods of salvation. The Mayans are one such civilization. Ah Pook Is Here is a re-envisioning of the Mayan Codices and Calendar, so not surprisingly Burroughs incorporated the belief systems of Mayan civilization. Since the 1970s, cultural anthropologists have corrected European projections on Mesoamerican culture. One of the most interesting areas of investigation is that of gender and sexuality. In Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (2000), Prof. Rosemary Joyce reveals her findings that the Classic Mayan concept of gender was fluid and not biologically determined. For example, one could be considered androgynous at birth, sexually definitive in middle age, and then again androgynous in old age. In such a view, gender is tied to pregnancy. Mayan gods are generally viewed as androgynous. The Reddies are Burroughs’ version of the Mayan Gods and an alternative to the Judeo-Christian concept of God or a return to God’s and his creation’s original, suppressed androgynous nature.

In interviews throughout the 1970s, Burroughs expressed his belief that the global balance was in peril due to overpopulation. The nuclear family and matriarchal societies exacerbated the problem since they functioned merely to produce children. This had an economic element in that the production of children feeds into the ethos of a consumer capitalist economy. Those with families have a responsibility to provide essentials, as well as leisure goods, for their children so they subsume their individual desires in order to benefit from and fit into the economic system.

Malcolm Mc Neill, Artwork for Ah Pook Is Here

The Reddies are Burroughs’ fantasy of escape from this trap. The Reddies are not hermaphrodites as they do not have male and female genitalia. Burroughs is clearly phallocentric. He stated numerous times to Mc Neill “the penis is the star of the show.” The co-opted feminine is represented by the breast and the egg. The vagina is a site of fear and repulsion because it is the site of birth. Similarly pregnancy is particularly repulsive to Burroughs. Mc Neill recounts a conversation with Burroughs that revealed that his disgust with women and heterosexual sex was tied to the threat of pregnancy. With the Reddies, progeny hatch from eggs fully developed and self-sufficent. The fear of pregnancy is thus tied to a fear of fatherhood.

Burroughs’ concerns with overpopulation may have been related to his own personal problems resulting from his becoming a father. Joan’s pregnancy with Billy forced Burroughs into a nuclear family (no matter how unconventional) that limited his personal and creative freedom. With Joan’s death and the shedding of familial responsibility, Burroughs had been free to pursue his own creative interests. In the 1970s, Billy was becoming increasingly needy and unpredictable. When Burroughs arrived in the United States in 1973, the door was opened to increased contact with his son. The re-appearance of Billy in his life endangered Burroughs’ relationship with the children he understood and nurtured most dearly: his books and his literary characters. The Reddies, an androgynous golem programmed to destroy the nuclear family and the personification of a fantasy of masculine replication without responsibility, can be viewed as one aspect of the Ugly Spirit that possessed Burroughs on the night of September 5, 1951, the date of the “William Tell Incident,” and a solution to the new threat of parental responsibility in the form of Billy.

By 1976, Billy would become a parody of the Reddies and a grim reminder to Burroughs of the horror and cost of being a father. Billy was one of the first recipients of a liver transplant. To this day, such a process is incredibly invasive, destroying one’s sense of privacy and self. Billy received the liver of a young woman killed in a car accident. After the operation on steroids and a multitude of other medications, littered with scars and filled with tubes, Billy felt like Frankenstein’s Monster. In his writing, Billy mentions his feelings of androgyny after receiving a woman’s liver. He was a cyborg or, in a sense, a Reddie. Again the Reddie is not a hermaphrodite but more akin to a transsexual “built” through estrogen treatments and surgical implants.

Is it too much to suggest that the sight of Billy in his physical being and as a reminder of Burroughs’ status as a biological father forced Burroughs to cleanse his already ambivalent attitude toward the feminine from his concept of sexuality and gender? Burroughs’ move away from the fluid conception of gender and sexuality represented by the Reddies and the ideal version of Ah Pook Is Here is contained in the edition of Ah Pook Is Here published by John Calder in 1979. This slim book of just over 170 pages, like Billy, is a parody of the original vision of the book. The visual, pictorial aspect of the work, the feminine aspect, is excised leaving only the phallocentric text. Burroughs’ dream of an ideal book of text and image was finally over. From 1979 on, Burroughs published for corporate presses books that were conventional as physical objects. The presence of the feminine, the visual, was separated from his novels. Yet this side of Burroughs remained an important part of his creative life. It is at this point that his interest in easel painting developed, becoming a pursuit divorced from his writing.

Some might state: Doesn’t a work such as The Cat Inside contradict your point? Actually, The Cat Inside as traditional livre d’artiste reinforces it. Like Billy, this book parodies the Reddie, a Frankenstein Monster that awkwardly joins text and image. They are in fact separate and in opposition as art forms. They do not cohere. This is clear in Apocalypse, a catalog to a Keith Haring exhibition, in which Burroughs provides the text. Although they comment and relate to each other, text and image are segregated and separate. You get the sense that Haring and Burroughs have no contact with each other and are from different worlds. The collaboration is fabricated (for the market). The subject matter, Apocalypse, is a watering down of Ah Pook Is Here, a parody of the Revelations of the Mc Neill / Burroughs collaboration. The same holds true for The Valley. The fear of overpopulation, the horror birth, the treatment of children as problem, yet the fear of sterility comes out in Burroughs’ written portion of The Valley, but again this collaboration lacks the depth of Ah Pook. Burroughs’ obsessions are not integrated into the form and content of The Valley as a material object. To return to the boom in sex films in the 1960s that inspired Burroughs to create Ah Pook, the relationship between Haring and Burroughs is “competitive,” as in designed to stand out in a glutted art market full of merchandise and not conductive to two distinct, powerful artists creating a third mind. The Valley is a celebrity sex tape of two famous people jerking each other off. The version of Ah Pook Is Here made with Mc Neill was Burroughs’ last serious image / text collaboration; the later ones are not true interactive collaborations / communications (like earlier Ginsberg / Gysin / Nuttall / Balch / Mc Neill collaborations were) at all, they are two people talking at each other.

Ah Pook Is Here, unfinished and forever unrealizable, remains in Burroughs’ oeuvre as an ideal, forever a work-in-progress that attempts to fully express his androgynous creativity. The textual and visual joined in one coherent whole. If Ah Pook Is Here were ever completed, it would have been a Reddie, an apocalyptic angel / demon that embodied Burroughs’ final artistic statement; the fulfillment of his destiny as a writer. It would have been his last act of creativity. There would be nothing else to do. He could retreat into silence. Yet Burroughs could never let that happen, he was too addicted to expressing himself creatively, to making visible that which was hidden within him. Ah Pook would have revealed the mysteries of Burroughs and the universe to all, leaving him with nothing else to say, and thus in the process would have destroyed both artist and his world. Ah Pook Is Here is a ruin, a fragment. The shattered pages are dust and ashes which will never receive the Breath of Life.

Malcolm Mc Neill, Observed While Falling and The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here

Malcolm Mc Neill‘s spellbinding memoir Observed While Falling chronicles his seven-year collaboration with William S. Burroughs on an unfinished graphic novel that centered on the Mayan death god Ah Pook. It is so lucid, the insights so penetrating, that I feel an irresistible temptation to quote lengthy passages from it. I will try to restrain myself. Suffice to say, the theme that weaves the astonishing details of this memoir into an absorbant fabric of arcane phenomena may be summarized in a single word: “entanglement.” Or as Burroughs once put it, “The purpose of writing is to make it happen.”

Just how an event or a situation or a person is written into reality is easier to demonstrate than to explain. Like physicists who require abstruse equations to explain “quantum teleportation,” Mc Neill must resort to the ancient Mayan theory of time, which “existed entirely as a reservoir of confirmation,” to pin down the concept. But he demonstrates over and over through clarifying anecdotes, just as physicists have in experiments, that the phenomenon of entanglement exists.

Bearing in mind that quantum teleportation — also called “entanglement-assisted teleportation,” according to Wikipedia — “is a process by which a basic unit of quantum information can be transmitted exactly (at least in principle) from one location to another, without the information being transmitted through the intervening space,” the term seems an apt expression — in literary babble, a metaphor — of what Burroughs means and what is described throughout this memoir. As Mc Neill writes, “The nature of the informational exchange may be impossible to explain, but its effects are impossible to ignore.”

Equally remarkable, Observed While Falling brings a fresh analytical eye to the familiar Burroughsian fixations — synchronicity and doppelgangers, control systems, the word as virus, the number 23 — that dominate this memoir, while still offering a straightforward chronicle of the author’s relationship with le maître. Luckily for us, Mc Neill is an artist who can write. Really write. He draws an indelible word portrait of Burroughs unlike anything I’ve read elsewhere, which includes two biographies, various reminiscences, and many magazine profiles. It more than confirms my own personal impression of Burroughs, humanizing the man by showing us his unexpected generosity as well as his forbidding intelligence, and by capturing funny, intimate moments with quickly sketched tales and an ear for dialogue that will make you laugh.

To hell with restraint. Here’s a sample: 

It was my first New York summer and the apartment had no air conditioner. It also had no table. When I finally picked up illustrations for National Lampoon and Marvel Comics, I had to paint them resting on my knees. Bill suggested I work at the loft whenever I needed, and gave me a key.

He’d started a monthly column for Crawdaddy Magazine called Time of the Assassins and for a few months I also supplied illustrations for that.

I was at the loft one night finishing up one of them when he came home from a dinner party. He’d had a few drinks naturally. He came over and placed a piece of hash on the desk.

“Here! I got a present for you!”

“Well thanks Bill. I’ll smoke it later.”

“No man! It’s not dope! It’s aphrode-e-e-e-siac! Ted Morgan gave me a bunch of it. Got it down in South America. Says it really works.”

“Great! I’ll save it for a special occasion.”

We talked about the picture for a while then he wandered off. Five minutes later I noticed it was very quiet. As I was packing up my stuff to leave I saw the back of his head on the other side of the kitchen counter. He still had his hat on. It wasn’t moving.

I figured he’d fallen asleep in the chair so I crept over to wake him. When I came around the corner of the counter, I found him very much awake; sitting in his boxer shorts staring intently down at his crotch.

“Not-a-fu-cking-twitch!” he said.

You will read about their first meeting four years earlier, when Mc Neill was 23 and just out of art school; how Burroughs, who was already an important literary figure, insisted on collaborating with an accomplished but unknown neophyte less than half his age because of a cartoon character Mc Neill had drawn that resembled him — although Mc Neill had never seen him or read him and had barely heard of him. “It wasn’t so remarkable that I didn’t know anything about him,” Mc Neill writes. “In London — in 1970 — he was far from the celebrity he would later become. I read a lot, but he just wasn’t an author I was drawn to.”

That changed quickly. By the end of their meeting a couple of magnetic hours later Burroughs had introduced him to “the Reactive Mind, the Mayan Codices, Bishop Landa, Control, Cut-ups, the Word as Virus, The Algebra of Need” and much else. You will read about their early research — how they went together to the British Museum to examine an exact copy of one of three Mayan codices that survived the book burnings of nearly 500 years ago, which were intended to destroy the Mayan culture. Mc Neill gives a description of this artifact that makes it easy to visualize:

The original is a piece of parchment 11 feet long, folded accordion style into 74 vertical pages. Both sides are illustrated, creating a single continuous image. The pages are divided into two, three, or four horizontal levels reminiscent of a miniature comic book; a word / image narrative comprising cartoon-like characters and explanatory glyphs.

But Mc Neill is after more than description. You will read that he and Burroughs took the codex as a template for their own word / image collaboration. Ever the graphic technician, Mc Neill examines the Mayan artifact from a practical point of view. “As any designer could see, the quality of the line and the decisions made in the orchestration of the characters was the work of competent draftsmen — people who could draw; people who could draw out the ideas of others. This was word/image collaboration at its best working toward the ultimate goal: to make it happen.”

Mc Neill saw his function in the project as precisely that — drawing out Burroughs’ ideas — except that as they worked on Ah Pook Is Here his elaboration of the text went much further than mere illustration. His drawings became a narrative apparatus without which the story would not jell because, as it turned out, Burroughs began drawing ideas from the artwork, including compositional details of plot and structure. But the artwork also became an obstacle to the completion of the project, due to the X-rated nature of the imagery. After a contract with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner fell through — in 1974, he shuttered his Straight Arrow Books division, which was to publish the work — no other publisher could be found with the courage or the commercial foresight to take it on. This was well before graphic novels became the rage.

All of this — the hard work, the exhilaration and, ultimately, the frustration of a project that failed to achieve its original goal — is largely treated with brilliant introspection and loving grace. Mc Neill tells how he resigned himself to the fact that the book as they had conceived it would never be finished, and how he tried to forget about it so he could move on with his life, a decision driven home when Ah Pook Is Here was published by John Calder in England without the drawings.

Back in 1977, Bill and I had decided to publish the book in text form only, in the hope of attracting a publisher for the full version. Bill would write an introductory preface recounting the project’s history and, naturally, we agreed I’d create the cover. I produced an abridged version of the one I’d originally intended, a Mayan wall relief showing the confrontation between Ah Pook and the American astronaut on the moon. I also supplied a “hieroglyphic” version of the same scene to be used as endpapers.

In 1979, Calder’s Ah Pook Is Here and Other Stories appeared without Mc Neill’s cover. “The endpapers,” he notes, “were printed backwards and not credited.” Furthermore, the publisher bruited the book as a “new novel by William Burroughs,” with “no mention made of its beginnings or the fact that the text represented only half of the book.” Burroughs himself did refer in the preface to “years of collaboration” and “more than a hundred pages of artwork” which he regarded as “unique.” But small wonder that Mc Neill can’t help expressing a certain amount of understandable bitterness or that Calder’s amputated Ah Pook — a casualty of bad timing and, in Mc Neill’s view, questionable decision-making beyond his control — has come in for Rudy Rucker’s critical disdain as one of Burroughs’s less successful books.

The slighting of Mc Neill’s collaboration with Burroughs was compounded two decades later. Although “eleven pages of that artwork appeared in Rush magazine, confirming it as a published collaboration,” the Los Angeles County Museum of Art also wrote Mc Neill out of Burroughs’ history in its definitive 1996 retrospective exhibition of artwork created for Burroughs or in collaboration with him. Explaining how an event or a situation or a person can be written into reality may be difficult, but it’s easy to see how they can be written out: Ignore the facts. There were more than 150 pieces on display in William Burroughs: Ports of Entry, but “despite the volume of imagery we’d produced together,” Mc Neill writes, “none of it was represented.”

Neither was any of it referred to in the lavish 192-page catalogue for the show. My name wasn’t even mentioned. Most incomprehensible of all, neither Ah Pook Is Here as text or as collaboration were included in the extensive ten-page bibliography, filmography, and discography at the back.

In the acknowledgment pages of the catalogue for Bill’s retrospective, curator Robert Sobieszek described the “Burroughsian” themes that he felt defined the show. Included in his list were “apocalyptic visions, the abandonment of the distinctions among categories and genres, and the dematerializing of all concepts of reality.” From that perspective alone, Ah Pook Is Here‘s prescience as an apocalyptic, prototypical graphic novel surely qualified it for inclusion.

Unaccountably, Ah Pook had disappeared. True to the life-imitating routine that had characterized it all along, it had itself become a lost book. It had simply gone down the memory hole.

Frederick Catherwood, Cabeza de Itzanma, Izamal

Mc Neill not only rescues it by dragging it back up, he makes a mind-boggling discovery that takes this memoir to another level. Researching gaps in events, he comes across a 19th-century illustrator he previously knew nothing about: Frederick Catherwood, “who was credited with first rediscovering and recording the remains of the Mayan culture.” For Mc Neill the discovery confirms and extends Burroughs’ notion of entanglement. If I don’t quote the relevant passage at length, you won’t appreciate how uncanny the connection is. “Like me,” Mc Neill writes,

Frederick Catherwood was an English illusrator, and also of Scottish descent. He also went to art school in London. He also met an American writer who happened to be living in London at the time: John Lloyd Stephens. Stephens had contacted Catherwood on the basis of his artwork and they too agreed to collaborate on a book together . . . . . . about the Maya.

Catherwood met Stephens in Leicester Square. A few hundred yards down the road from Piccadilly where I met Bill. One “square” over, as it were . . . 

It was an interesting discovery, but when it came down to it — so what? […] [H]owever, the correspondences became so unlikely that they were hard to ignore.

Catherwood also moved to America to complete the work — and, just as I had — slightly ahead of his writer partner . . . 

In Manhattan, his first home — like mine — was on Houston Street . . . 

He also had a studio in Tribeca . . . 

Like me, he moved from there to Prince Street . . .

We both had children born in New York, and both of us were separated from our wives there. His son, also born in December, was 6 years old at the time — as was mine . . . 

We both quit illustration there . . . 

He subsequently moved to California, where he too became an American citizen. He while living in Solano County, me while living in Solano Canyon . . . 

As artists we shared a particular image style: panoramas. In New York we both became known for it. Catherwood through his panoramic murals, which he exhibited in his rotunda on Prince Street, myself through the panoramic images I created for television — while also living on Prince Street. 

Mc Neill is no gauzy-eyed mystic. Quite the opposite. “It was all so unlikely, it seemed like a joke,” he writes. But he’s hard put to maintain his skepticism.  

Ultimately, Catherwood produced a folio edition of their collaboration and wrote an account of their history and friendship together . . . 

. . . an account that had been published more than a century-and-a-half ago. 

That I would be duplicating aspects of a dead man’s life was odd enough, but the nature of the coincidences and the manner in which they had been revealed evoked an even greater one.

Mc Neill goes on to point out many more data points of coincidence that entangle him with Catherwood. The kicker, one of them anyway, is this:  

In the first two sentences of Ah Pook Is Here, Bill wrote: “The Mayan codices are undoubtedly books of the dead; that is to say, instructions for time travel. If you see reincarnation as a fact then the questions arises: how does one orient oneself with regard to future lives?”

There is no such thing as a chance remark. 

The number of life-imitating-art/art-imitating-life crossovers this implied were almost impossible to distentangle.

Burroughs devotees may find the Catherwood aspect of Observed While Falling less intriguing than Mc Neill does. But he makes it clear that were it not for the mysterious “reciprocating process” to which he devotes the last 50 or so pages of the memoir, he would not have been able to complete the manuscript or spend years afterward seeing it through to publication. 

As “books of the dead,” the Mayan codices are “the battered legacy of millions of human souls long gone,” he writes. “Consideration of the ‘directions’ implicit within them did result in ‘time travel.’ Ah Pook Is Here spanned decades and culminated in an event that sent me ‘back’ 150 years to another version of ‘myself’ confronting the Mayan god of death. Another artist face-to-face with mortality. In that encounter lay the ultimate realization of the book’s intention. The most compelling, incontrovertible instance of reciprocating fact and fiction.”

Mc Neill would argue that the Catherwood entanglement is more, not less, intriguing since it corroborates Burroughs’ sense of the inherent potential of words and images and in doing so produces the real punchline of the whole experience: their collaborative Ah Pook written 40 years ago proposed a reenactment of the intersection between the Mayan and Judeo/Christian worldviews in present time. Which is precisely what is implied by the transformative nature of the so-called “2012 phenomenon.” In other words, Ah Pook Is Here now.

In 1970 Malcolm Mc Neill received a phone call from a man who asked to meet “the guy who knows how to draw me.” The caller was William S. Burroughs. Mc Neill had recently illustrated a Burroughs text called “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” for the underground paper Cyclops. Burroughs had been struck by how much Mr. Hart resembled him, even though he had never met Mc Neill and, as it turned out, Mc Neill knew relatively little about Burroughs. The young artist accepted an invitation to the flat Burroughs shared with Brion Gysin at Number 8, Duke Street, London. When he arrived, Burroughs served him bacon and discussed extending their collaboration into a book. Mc Neill was just 23, Burroughs was 56, and the project — tentatively titled Ah Puch — would last for seven more years.

In his 1972 interview with Rolling Stone, Burroughs described Ah Puch.

Robert Palmer: You’re working on a comic book?

Burroughs: Yes. It is a comic book in that it has whole sequences of actions in pictures. But there are also about 60 pages of text, so it’s something between a comic book and an illustrated book. Malcolm Mc Neill is doing the artwork. It is most closely similar to the actual format of the Mayan Codices, which was an early comic book. […]

In this book that I am doing with Malcolm, there are lots of sections which go just like film, but the text is really still essential. There are 60 pages of text; we’re already having problems translating that into images — not that we can’t do it, but that it would take 300 pages to do it all. If we took every sentence and translated it into pictures, we’d have a huge book which would be way out of our budget.

Burroughs also enthused about Mc Neill’s work to scholar Eric Mottram in the 1973 BBC interview transcribed in Snack.

Mottram: Any sign of a publication date for Ah Pook Is Here?

Burroughs: Well, I’d say another year. Malcolm McNeil [sic] is doing the illustrations. He’s done some very good work. He’s been working on it for about two years now. The drawings he’s doing now are better than the ones in Cyclops, all new drawings and they’re in color. He works very slowly and he’s done 30 or 40 pages; so in order to finish it, Straight Arrow is paying his way out to San Francisco and he’s going to work with them on it. My part is more or less finished. I did the text.

Mottram: It works very well, even without the pictures.

Burroughs: I wish I could show you the pictures.

Unfortunately, it would not prove easy to show anyone the pictures. The book’s publisher, Straight Arrow, folded in 1974. Mc Neill followed Burroughs to New York and the two continued to collaborate on the project. It was impossible, however, to find a publisher who would pay to print the project with all its imagery. In 1979 Burroughs finally decided to publish the text by itself as Ah Pook Is Here. In an introduction to that edition, Burroughs explained:

Ah Pook Is Here was originally planned as a picture book modeled on the surviving Mayan codices. Malcolm Mc Neill was to do the illustrations and I was to provide the text. Over the years of our collaboration there were a number of changes in the text, and Malcolm Mc Neill produced more than a hundred pages of artwork. However, owing partly to the expense of full color reproduction, and because the book falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated book, nor that of a comix publication, there have been difficulties with the arrangements for the complete work — which calls for about a hundred pages of artwork with text (thirty in full color) and about fifty pages of text alone.

One view of Burroughs’ career holds that, after exploring the cut-up in the 1960s, Burroughs ran dry in the 1970s. What the story of Ah Pook Is Here makes clear, however, is that Burroughs had actually taken the cut-up to the next level by working not just with texts and layouts but with images. In his essay “Les Voleurs,” Burroughs made this point himself by applying the cut-up’s rhetoric of appropriation and thievery to the collaboration with Mc Neill.

Look at the surrealist moustache on the Mona Lisa. Just a silly joke? Consider where this joke can lead. I had been working with Malcolm Mc Neill for five years on an illustrated book entitled Ah Pook Is Here, and we used the same idea: Hieronymous Bosch as the background for scenes and characters taken from the Mayan codices and transformed into modern counterparts. That face in the Mayan Dresden Codex will be the barmaid in this scene, and we can use the Vulture God over here. Bosch, Michelangelo, Renoir, Monet, Picasso — steal anything in sight. You want a certain light on your scene? Lift it from Monet. You want a 1930s backdrop? Use Hopper.

If the 1960s cut-ups had presented texts in non-linear chunks, Ah Pook did the opposite: it situated images in a new lineation, the “continuous panorama” of accordion-style panels that Mc Neill drew. However, this new linearity in form remained non-linear in content. Images would derive impulses from other images, from Bosch here or the Mayan Codex there, carry these along the way a rushing river picks up debris, and then transmit the impulse back to the texts to utilize in their unique way. The earlier cut-ups broke linearity, sentences, into juxtapositions and grids. Ah Pook was something else: non-linearity in a line.

These innovations demonstrate that what ran dry in the early 1970s was not Burroughs’ talent or inspiration but rather the bank accounts of his publishers. Ah Pook Is Here, The Third Mind, and The Book of Breeething were not printed as Burroughs and his collaborators intended for simple economic reasons. It leaves you wondering how we might envision Burroughs’ career if a publisher had funded these books, printed them as lavishly as they required, and therefore also encouraged Burroughs to continue exploring this new conjunction of word and image. Clearly Burroughs was once again ahead of his time, since literary illustrated books have since become enormously popular.

Mc Neill, who finally could carry on no more with the seemingly doomed project, abandoned and nearly destroyed the artwork for Ah Puch. He moved on to commercial illustration and film, winning an Emmy Award and forging a successful career as a director. Though he remained friendly with Burroughs, he gave no more thought to Ah Puch until random opportunities inspired him to revisit the artwork. He has since created a web site featuring the illustrations and penned a memoir called Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs and Ah Puch. “Struggling to illustrate a book about Death for more than seven years seems like a ponderous task,” Mc Neill writes in the terrific but not-yet-published memoir. “But knowing and working with Bill Burroughs was above all characterized by its humor… He was simply the funniest guy I’d ever met.”

Mc Neill recently gave an interview to George Laughead’s excellent Beats in Kansas site, and he very kindly agreed to field some questions from RealityStudio as well.

Interview with Malcolm Mc Neill

You knew Bill the man before you knew Burroughs the writer and celebrity. This lends an intimate and human touch to your portrait of him, as for example when you describe his personal generosity in financial matters. Do you think people who only know the Burroughs legend would have been surprised to meet the man himself?

Bill once remarked that his students often seemed disappointed when they met him in person. “They expected me to appear naked with a strap on …” as he put it. To me, it was one of the most fascinating things about him — the contrast between his literary and real-life persona. A soft-spoken, unassuming gent in a jacket and tie writing about folks being skinned alive and boiled inside giant metal centipedes etc. As far as generosity went, he certainly helped me out financially during Ah Puch a few times — gave me some of his share of the advance for example — but it was more an overall sensibility. A generosity of spirit as it were.

Early on, before you felt the need to read his work, did Burroughs encourage you to read any of his books in particular?

I don’t recall Bill ever advocating any of his own work. He mentioned things in conversation that I later discovered were already in print but he didn’t suggest that I check out such and such that he’d written. It was just one more aspect of his unassuming manner that appealed to me. On the other hand he did recommend other writers, which I invariably picked up right away.

You did an astonishing amount of research on a wide variety of subjects in order to develop a visual vocabulary for Ah Puch. Do you think that this research primed you to have a better understanding of Burroughs or his books?

Absolutely. Producing artwork was almost secondary to the process of trying to understand Bill’s worldview. And that meant a lot of reading. I remember one time finding pictures of Mexican bandits at a Mexican Cultural Library in London and spending weeks reading the books I’d found them in. In hindsight this was one of the great benefits of image research back then. It was an analog process, involving real things like travel, weather, time and actual books. The idea of sitting at home in your skivvies and clicking a couple of times with a mouse to get what you needed, was an option far in the future.

Do you have any idea why “Puch” mutated into “Pook?”

I think as a matter of practicality. A title you stumble over isn’t a good thing. The vast majority of people still have difficulty pronouncing “Puch” as “Pook.”

In the preface to your book, you speak of being both “creatively and ethically committed” to the project. Later you also speak of the ethical difficulties of working with some subject matter that was foreign or perhaps even repugnant to you. Could you explain a little the nature of your commitment to something that seemed sometimes to challenge you ethically?

One of the great lessons of Bill Burroughs was that nothing is repugnant, in the sense that it cannot be looked at. In fact such things must be looked at more closely. As a hetero male in his twenties, I had to look long and hard at his early remarks about women being a “biologic mistake,” for example. In the end it all comes down to opinion. And disagreement was implicit in his overall perspective. The possibility of disagreeing with an intellect like Bill’s was a daunting prospect of course. Coming to terms with that fact was a big part of the learning process. Ethics in the first context you mention was more to do with having made a legal commitment and therefore being bound to the project — and to Bill as a partner — in a more literal sense.

You speak in Observed While Falling of trying to get away from the comic-book look. Your artwork for Ah Puch clearly shows this: the roundness of the forms, the chiaroscuro lighting, etc., look more like the renderings of an old master than an illustrator. Did Burroughs push you in this direction at all? Aside from Hieronymous Bosch, were there any specific visual influences on the Ah Puch drawings?

Again Bill didn’t push one way or the other. His method was to allow free reign and see what happened. It’s something I can relate to as a director. You hire someone based on their abilities, then let them run with it. To impose restraint is somehow contrary to the purpose. The biggest influence on the Ah Puch artwork was the illustrator Frederick Catherwood, simply because his drawings of the Mayan ruins in the 1800s were specific to the subject. His images though went far beyond mere architectural representation. They reminded me of Piranesi, who I discovered later was one of his main influences. Thirty years later Catherwood would then become the inspiration for OWF. Not so much for his drawings, but because of his oddly sympathetic relationship to the whole symbiotic process of myself, Bill and Ah Puch.

You thought of doing Ah Puch as a “continuous panorama,” an accordion-style booklet of linked pages. Did this recall to your or to Burroughs’ mind the single-roll typescript of On the Road?

The continuous panorama idea was based on the Mayan codices — that and the fact that I just liked doing it that way. I’ve read a couple of Kerouac’s books, but he doesn’t interest me to anywhere near the degree Bill does. Bill was a visionary. He’s incorporated into the Beat canon, but his perspective is in a league of its own. Distinct in fact from any other writer I’m aware of. I only found out Kerouac’s manuscript was on a single roll a year ago, when a friend mentioned that it was on exhibit at the UNC Library.

In general you portray the collaborative process as a matter of you struggling to visualize Burroughs’ words. Did Burroughs ever suggest specific visuals or approaches? Did he critique work as you presented it to him? Or was his approach toward your illustrations more laissze-faire?

I started working with Bill while I was still in art school, so inevitably everything about it was a struggle. I didn’t meet him during that time, hadn’t read anything else he’d written, in fact knew nothing about him. I didn’t even know what he looked like, which ironically turned out to be the reason Ah Puch began. When we did finally meet, it was essentially a case of two strangers accepting each other at face value. Him 56 me 23. Naturally it wasn’t long before I realized there was a whole lot more to it. The more I found out, the more daunting it became, but when it came down to it, he had called me on the basis of my artwork, and then agreed we collaborate on a book together. It instilled a confidence that encouraged me to stick with it despite the seemingly overwhelming odds.

He never really told me to do anything. Images were implicit in the ideas. I was left to my own devices in digging them out. The first pictures were character studies and I remember him nodding with genuine pleasure at seeing the likes of Cumhu the Lizard Boy and The Dib. One of the reassuring things about Bill right from the get-go was that he was absolutely straight with me. I acknowledge that fact in OWF as characterizing my debt to him: it was the kind of sincerity that forced me to pay attention and the reason our working relationship endured for as long as it did.

Did Burroughs share his notebook collages with you? Did he ever draw connections between the cut-up and your collaboration? After all, it does seem as though you established a “third mind” with him that was very different in its conjunction of word and image than the “third mind” Burroughs established with Brion Gysin.

The first time I saw one of Bill’s scrap books was a month ago. I went to Ohio to check out the Burroughs Collection at OSU and looked through all the ones that were there. I was surprised at how intimate they were. I’d envisioned something more in keeping with his writing. They were very personal. Collections of odds and ends that had appealed to him for one reason or another. Suggestions for sets or characters etc or just guys he liked the look of. Bill talked about the fragmentary, cut-up nature of perception in general. When you walk down a street for instance you see fragments of things chopped and intersected by street signs, passing cars, other people and so on. These fragments are incorporated in the mind along with imaginary pictures, dream pictures and “real” pictures to create an overall cut–up sensibility. Negative space — the space between objects — which was something I’d learned early on in art school added to this sense of perceptual collage. In Ah Puch I took off on the idea by interspersing images contained within the negative spaces from other scenes throughout the book.

Do you think that your illustrations influenced the text that Burroughs continued to produce as you collaborated?

There were definite instances where this was true — the transitional devices for example that I came up with for the end sequences, were added in text form in Ah Pook Is Here. The project began as a continuation of “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” — the comic strip in Cyclops magazine. By our second meeting, Bill had written a total of 11 pages. In 6 of these, he referred to the word “draw” 20 times, with Mr. Hart constantly exhorting his artists to “draw out” this picture, and “draw in” that. For Bill it was clearly an experiment, and the fact that drawing had always represented a similar process of extraction to me, was why the interaction worked so well. It was writing to make it happen with pictures added to the mix. Certainly not an ordinary comic.

As a result, during the course of the project, many unusual “real-life” circumstances corresponding to events in the images and text were “drawn out.” One such started Ah Puch, and another Observed While Falling. Many of these events only really became apparent during the process of writing the latter. It was then that patterns that had otherwise not been so obvious became very clear. Particularly the events surrounding Catherwood which only came to light years after Bill had died. Having established the game plan as it were, much of the 11 pages, including most of the references to artists and drawing were dropped from the final text. (I still have them of course.) It was after a visit to the British Museum together, when we ordered a copy of the Mayan Dresden Codex, that the book started for real. That’s when Ah Puch, the Mayan Death God, was discovered and used as the title. The copy of the codex went back and forth between us and we worked on color schemes and descriptions for the various deities. I recall Bill being impressed with my discovery of Hunab Ku: the head deity of whom no picture was ever made.

Did Burroughs read Ah Puch aloud to you? Did you ever hear Burroughs read (in private or in public)?

A good memory was essential to a good writer Bill once said. There were times when he’d launch into an enormous chunk of Shakespeare or Milton or some poet or other. Plus he had a battery of curses he’d learned from his Irish nanny in childhood. There was never a reason to read Ah Puch aloud while we were working on it. He read a section once at NYU, with slides of the artwork projected alongside, and I recall one other occasion — at St Marks’ Church maybe. Naturally I heard him read other stuff publicly.

Burroughs worked with several other illustrators in the 1970s. For example, he worked with Robert F. Gale on The Book of Breeething and with S. Clay Wilson on the short story “Fun City in Ba’Dan.” What did you make of these other projects?

Bob Gale is one of my favorite illustrators. I like him personally and admire his work. I have him to thank for getting me started at the New York Times doing political illustration. S. Clay Wilson I met briefly on his birthday in SF in 1974 when he and Bill and I had a couple of drinks in the revolving bar at the Hyatt Regency. I like his work of course.

Did Burroughs ever show you his work in Jeff Nuttalls’ My Own Mag? Were you aware of the publication at all?

Jeff Nuttall I may have met, though I can’t remember where or when. I wasn’t familiar with his magazine and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.

As was often the case with Burroughs, your collaboration with him was ahead of its time. Since Art Spiegelman’s Maus was published in 1992, ‘literary’ illustrated books have become incredibly popular. Have you paid any attention to the new wave of graphic novels and manga? Have any of them struck you as interesting?

Graphic Novels have only recently become a phenomenon in America. Europeans, particularly the French and Italians, have been producing them for years. Since the seventies at least. Some from scratch, others as anthologies of comic series such as Asterix the Gaul or Tin Tin. These were aimed at kids, but there were several beautifully illustrated sci-fi, and erotic publications. Guido Crepax for instance. In England collections of Dan Dare and Frank Bellamy’s work also became available.

One of the reasons they’ve become so popular is that Hollywood and comics have gone hand in hand over the past twenty years, and with computer-generated imagery becoming more and more sophisticated, they’re the perfect vehicle for elaborate fantasy productions. Also, since one of Hollywood’s primary preoccupations is in promoting and glamorizing violence, they tend to fit right in. As a means for anaesthetizing the largest demographic to the reality of violence, they’re the perfect political media tool. 300 and Sin City are the current watershed. Massive doses of seductive dumbing-down with no emotional, intellectual or spiritually redeeming qualities whatsoever. It’s unlikely Zippy the Pinhead will make it to the big screen any time soon. Or Joe Sacco. To my mind he’s the most significant artist using the medium today.

As an artist, illustrator, and filmmaker, what did you make of the paintings that Burroughs produced late in life?

Bill once remarked that art was a whole lot easier than writing. In light of Ah Puch, I couldn’t help but disagree with him. I saw his paintings for the first time in Santa Monica in 1996. They were a wonderful bookend to his life’s work. Text and images collaged on board then signed with a shotgun. With anyone else but Bill it would have been a gimmick, but as the final statement of the gun-loving, greatest literary iconoclast of all time it truly was great art.

Did you see any of the experimental films that Burroughs was working on with Ian Sommerville and Antony Balch? Did these inform any of your own later work in film?

I didn’t see any of them at the time. I’ve only seen them recently online.

You also mention meeting Burroughs’ son Billy. Were you ever with them at the same time? Was there anything parental in Burroughs’ attitude toward his son?

I recall one brief moment at the Bunker as Billy Jr. was leaving. It wasn’t a typical father-son relationship obviously. Bill never really shared intimate details of any sort, much less about his son. He seldom mentioned him. I can’t imagine that was a good feeling for either of them.

Jacques Stern always comes across as one of the most interesting characters in Burroughs’ colorful stable of friends. Any idea what ever happened to him?

The last time I saw Jacques in person was for lunch in NY in February 1988. A year or so later I got a phone call at four in the morning. I recognized his familiar raspy voice as soon as he said “Who’s this?” He’d dialed the wrong number but we agreed to get together soon. Regrettably we never did. I’ve searched for him online but I get the feeling he’s gone now. It would be great if he wasn’t. I’d love to see him again.

What is the significance of the title Observed While Falling?

Implicit in Bill’s notion of a pre-recorded Word / Image track is the idea of inevitability: that everything is predetermined. From that perspective, my working with him was simply a matter of me being in the appropriate place at the appropriate time. Fallen into place as it were, like everything in such a scenario must necessarily do. Foregone conclusion is unacceptable to a lot of people, yet in the long run the actions and observations remain the same whether it’s the case or not. Falling is just a little more relaxing is all…

_____ simultaneous wraps issue.