A Review of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer by Oliver Harris Literary adaptations for the silver screen have always been a hit and miss affair, with some notable triumphs and many spectacular travesties. William Burroughs’ bête noire was The Snows of Kilimanjaro,which in 1952 ruined Hemingway’s short story about death by giving it a Hollywood happy ending….
Tag: Oliver Harris
Paris: The Naked City
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting An installment in The Visible Man: A Coffee Table Zine of Photographs of William S. Burroughs What are you doing in the Fall of 2020? Need any vacation ideas? The European Beats Studies Network is planning a special conference on the cut-up in…
CUT-UPS@60
London / Paris, September 2020 Registration now open for Paris and London 2020 will be the 60th anniversary of the first publications using the cut-up methods developed by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel in Paris. To mark this landmark in cultural history, we are organising CUT-UPS@60, an international Cut-Up Conference in…
Operation Total Exposure
Roy Pennington more or less strikes again. A bootleg via fax. Congrats to him for slowly entering into the Electronic Revolution. Planned Obsolesence Press operates like Semina or Floating Bear, except few people actually care if they are on the mailing list. Who really wants academic spam on Naked Lunch? Roy can’t stand pretense and…
Naked Lunch
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting The Naked Lunch. Paris: Olympia Press, 1959. Oliver Harris’s personal copies. Location: Always within arm’s reach. With the exception of Burroughs himself, nobody has thought more deeply and creatively about Naked Lunch than Oliver Harris. This includes Allen Ginsberg, who is closer…
Report on a Lecture Given by Oliver Harris, “William Burroughs and the Torso Murderer”
Part of the Hendrick’s Lecture Series, organised by The Last Tuesday Society, 19th November 2010 by Rona Cran Viktor Wynd’s Little Shop of Horrors, situated unassumingly on Mare Street in Hackney, is a beguiling emporium of which William S. Burroughs would no doubt have approved. There are shrunken heads on sale, and sinister bibelots (a…
Oliver Harris Interviewed on Queer
A Few Questions and Answers with the Editor of the New Edition of William S. Burroughs’ Queer Though the first published edition of Queer was assembled from a mix of manuscript sources, it was done with the collaboration and blessing of the author. In crafting this new edition, which is a sort of remix of…
Confusion’s Masterpiece
Re-Editing William S. Burroughs’ First Trilogy By Oliver Harris This is the written version of a talk given by Professor Harris at Columbia University on 16 September 2010. See also Oliver Harris Interviewed on Queer. In 1943, when Allen Ginsberg was a 17-year-old Columbia freshman and first met William Burroughs, he was impressed by Burroughs’…
“Burroughs Is a Poet Too, Really”: The Poetics of Minutes to Go
by Oliver Harris Dismissed as Unreadable The long and intimate association of William Burroughs with poets is well known: Ginsberg, most obviously, as well as Corso, Creeley, Ferlinghetti, Leroi Jones, John Giorno, and so on. But to talk of Burroughs’ own material engagement with poetic form and poetics in relation to historical and contemporary practices…
The Frisco Kid He Never Returns: Naked Lunch and San Francisco
Presentation by Oliver Harris during Naked Lunch @ 50 San Francisco Art Institute, 20 November 2009 Professor Harris did not give this talk in person but sent a PowerPoint and mp3 audio file. You can listen to the talk by downloading the mp3 (13.8 MB). I’d like to begin by thanking Peter Maravelis and Jonah…
From Dr Mabuse to Doc Benway: The Myths and Manuscripts of Naked Lunch
Keynote Address given by Oliver Harris during Naked Lunch @ 50 Columbia University, 9 October 2009 Ladies and gentlemen, boys, girls, and fence-straddlers…. I’d like to start with a series of thanks: to Gerald Cloud, Librarian for Reference and Research, for organising today’s talks here at Columbia, and for curating, together with colleagues at the…
Kerouac’s On the Road: The Beats and the Post-Beats
Birmingham University, 12-13 December 2008 by Oliver Harris The Birmingham conference came a year too late for the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road‘s first American publication, but arrived conveniently on time for its fitieth British publication — a handy delay, because it allowed discussion to focus on the appearance of last year’s highly controversial…
Jack Kerouac: Back On the Road at the Barber Institute
Birmingham, 5 December 2008 by Oliver Harris Carolyn Cassady shudders and says the same thing she did the last time we met, “Burroughs? That degenerate…” Actually, it’s an effort to disguise my satisfaction at this put down. After all, I’m here at the Barber Institute as the Burroughsian outsider to the exhibition of Jack Kerouac’s…
The Holy Shit of Burroughs and Kerouac
Plenary Address given by Oliver Harris to the Conference “Kerouac’s On the Road: The Beats and the Post-Beats” Birmingham University, 13th December 2008 I took it for granted that I was invited here to cause trouble … not that I have a reputation for being difficult or dangerous, but William Burroughs certainly does, and in a…
Everything Lost, the Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs: The Inside Story
By Volume Editor, Oliver Harris Background: The Crying of Lot 22 Where it had been since 1953 and how it got into the hands of a private collector remain a mystery, but it surfaced in October 1999 as Lot 22 of Sotheby’s “Allen Ginsberg and Friends” sale in New York. The small, black notebook with…
Cutting up the Archive: William Burroughs and the Composite Text
by Oliver Harris This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007. I’d like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured…
Letters of William S. Burroughs, 1945-1959
New York: Viking 1993, first printing, hardbound in dust jacket. A selection from Burroughs’ early letter archive. Edited and with an Introduction written by Oliver Harris. _____ Uncorrected Galley Proof in yellow wraps. London: Picador 1993, first British edition, small first printing of only 1,000 copies, hardbound in dust jacket. _____ 1994, first British printing…
Yage Redux
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting The first edition of Yage Letters published by City Lights in 1963 is a slim and seemingly unassuming book. The cover has become famous and the book sells well, but it remains largely undiscovered territory to scholars. Only 18,000 words long and struggling…
Oliver Harris on Yage
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting I received an email from Oliver Harris, author of William Burroughs: The Secret of Fascination and editor of The Letters of William Burroughs. According to his research and the research of others, much of the information on my web site concerning photographs of…
Yage Letters Redux
RealityStudio Reviews the New Edition Prepared by Oliver Harris It is an acknowledged paradox at the heart of William S. Burroughs’ work that his greatest books called into question how much they were even his. Whereas Samuel Beckett tried to eviscerate the novel from within — to “naughten” it, to borrow a term from Heidegger…
Interview with Professor Oliver Harris
Burroughs Scholar Speaks of Past and Forthcoming Publications Aside from James Grauerholz, executor of the Burroughs Estate, Oliver Harris may well be the most eminent living scholar of William Burroughs and his works. Senior Lecturer in the Department of American Studies at Keele University in England, Harris first made himself known to admirers of Burroughs…