Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

#4: The Urgency Press Ripoff Edition of Time — Roy Pennington (1972). An Installment in Jed Birmingham’s series of the The Top 23 Most Interesting Burroughs Collectibles.

The Urgency Press Rip-Off bootleg of Time speaks for itself. Preach it, Roy!  

This edition of TIME MAGAZINE by W. S. Burroughs is bought for you courtesy of Ugency Press Rip-Off using anarchist duplicator (a machine wih x a mond of its own). 5 runs of 99 copies each wre printed of which at least 20 wrer cocked-up and given away the rest you gotta pay for. We would have put the staples in the usual way , but the original had wider pages . . . anyway it is quite appropriate . . . at the risk of giving the game away allow me to explain: the column headings are sequitors, but often in reverse. What goes up, can go down.

This work is a fine early example of the cut-up technique which burroughs has no disowned (see his recent interview in rolling stone) probably because it is too artificial. nevertheless we can find many familiar landmarks in the following pages. a medley of all his works. Even the inimitable Col. Sutton-Smith, a pre-echo of Burroughs in old-age retirement. (the arch exponent of the DO-EASY do it yourself get it together based on domestic rituals (see forthcoming rip-offs) . . . . . . 

finally a woed from out sponsors::: U P R O intend to bring out a further collection of low-availability burroughs artivles (e.g. the Mayfair articles not used to pad-out ‘The Job’) plus a phenomenological critique of language based on the dictum KILL THE WORD BEFORE THE WORD KILLS YOU and the writings of Korzibski (the great russian semanticist) Also a collection of the lyrics of the Soft Machine plus cartoons. All low quality runs as wre not in this for the money (i think). Remember, anyone could have done this, but we did. Remember anyone could sign [signature of William Burroughs]

p.s. this edition specially prepared in hurry for bickershaw festival as the sun was shining in sunny brighton hope it shines for you too. any enquiries to: roy pennington, c/o Arts B 9post-grad, Sussex University Falmer.

p.p.s ?this is a typographical error ?

Amen, brother! The Bickershaw Festival ran from May 5-7, 1972, with an incredible group of performers including: Hawkwind (with Lemmy, RIP you silver machine), Dr. John, The Incredible String Band, Donovan, Cheech and Chong, The Kinks, Flaming Groovies, Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band, New Riders of the Purple Sage, Country Joe McDonald and The Grateful Dead. The sets by Captain Beefheart and The Grateful Dead were allegedly legendary. The Festival may well have been one of the wettest on record, but Roy’s Rip-off, published for and distributed at the Festival, sure fucking shines. With this DIY blast, think of the day-glo Blast from back in the futurists, pounding over the loudspeakers, Roy takes center stage in Burroughs’ bibliography and defiantly drops the mic while the echo of his call to action hangs in the air.  

“All low quality runs as wre not in this for the money (i think). Remember, anyone could have done this, but we did.”  

Amateur: a person who engages in a pursuit, especially a sport, on an unpaid basis. Some may dismiss Roy’s publications as amateurish. It is easy to flip through the Rip-off Time and toss it off as unprofessional. But when did being an amateur become a negative? And why so? Nowadays everybody wants to get fucking paid. Everybody wants a job title and health insurance. Everybody wants an office and office hours. Everybody seeks to wear a business suit and go to work. If they do not exactly seek it out willingly, they are willing to settle for it. Why would you ever want to make academics, publishing, or art a J-O-B? All you need is love. Amor. Amateur: engaging or engaged in without payment; nonprofessional. Note: the key word here is nonprofessional , not unprofessional. Somehow being an amateur has become equated with conduct unbecoming to the team. It has become a personal foul. How about doing it for the love of the game? For sport. Publishing, art, and academics are not about job security, but living on the edge and working from the margins. Yet not being on the sidelines. It is not that amateurs are not in the game; they just make their own rules. Or more accurately they refuse to engage in point-shaving. Amateurs will not throw the game for a few bucks. Publishing, art and academics are not about getting paid or getting laid, but just about the joy of playing.  

Bickershaw was largely a hippie festival, but the Urgency Time is pure garage rock and proto-punk. It is defiantly DIY and lo-fi. For me, it is more beautiful than one of the lettered editions of Time, which are now on the market as art objects for more than $18,000. Roy does not mess with the fine press and that is fine with me. This ain’t no disco; this ain’t no fooling around. This is raw power, printed with a heart full of napalm. Pure passion, pure fun. The Time bootleg is a richer reading experience. That’s for sure. This is what publishing should be. The bootleg Time is a zine before the glory days of zines in the 1980s/1990s. Most of the copies of My Own Mag that I own were Roy’s personal copies and you can see the influence of Nuttall, such as in the manner of stapling, in Roy’s publications.

The only problem I have with Roy as a publisher is that he did not complete his list of projected works. His only other completed work (if there are others, somebody please fill me it ASAP), The Mayfair Acadamy More or Less, is another masterwork of the Mimeo Revolution. Roy infiltrated the British Library, ransacked its archives and shared his treasures with the world, a true pirate. The fear of piracy is not the danger of being plundered or walking the plank, but that the pirate offers an alternative society or economy. Pirates are not lawless, but they do play by their own rules. Roy is on a mission. He is Captain Mission. Burroughs understood the value of that, but does he condone it? You can talk about Nike ads and Viking book deals all you want, but where Burroughs stood (or whether he attempted to stomp them out) on publishers like Roy is the real measure of whether Burroughs sold out on his ideas and ideals or not.

Such acts by Roy are largely considered unprofessional. Roy is the amateur as agitator. Protest and rebellion have likewise become professional and commercialized. They do not make you throw up in disgust. They are meant to be consumed. Protest is an industry and a big business. Likewise rebellion should not be a charity. Raising hell has been replaced by the constant need to raise funds or the desire to make money. Pro vs amateur. DIY or die. I am not recommending that you take your ball and go home, but I would like to remind you of how fun it was way back when to play pick up with whoever happened to be in your local neighborhood park. Nobody plays pick up anymore for fear of being kidnapped. Or arrested. It is no longer legal to have your big brother watch over you in the park. All the activities of kids and adults, be it protesting or playing baseball, must be organized and supervised by professionals.  

Roy’s taste is impeccable. He rightly saw The Job as a con perpetrated on the public and the publishers. As for the charge of padding, Burroughs is guilty and not just in The Job. In addition, Roy was one of the few who understood that The Soft Machine was a work of poetry. (Roy may speak of the band not the book, but my list is full of what ifs. I will misread Roy in order to get to the book of my dreams.) If only he would have put the Olympia Press edition back before the eyes of readers, it would no doubt have made my top five Burroughs collectibles. I merely keep the Mayfair Acadamy off my list in order to give others a chance. Anything Roy did is a shot of pure joy and adrenalin.

You see, reading Burroughs and specifically Naked Lunch I never once felt that I could write like him. He did not inspire me to become a writer. It was a prophet/disciple relationship. I came to Burroughs to listen and to learn. To sit at his feet. The best Burroughs, the most inspiring were the cut-ups. That was possible and worth doing. The cut-ups are DIY. If the cut-up made writing seem within my grasp (I only need to grab hold of the scissors), Roy made publishing seem doable and more importantly he filled me with the desire and energy to try it myself. I wanted to stand side by side with Roy. I wanted to print with him in protest. I wanted to sit and talk with him in a pub. DIY, god knows, it is Time. The time is right. Hurry up, it’s time. Time to get moving. Time and technology changes but the urge to do it yourself and free the word from all control does not. Roy’s manifesto and his publications were the primary inspiration for the Bibliographic Bunker, Mimeo Mimeo, and Planned Obsolescence Press. DIY publications lead by example and Roy is one of my most important teachers. Roy seemed to be having such a good time, yet he seemed to be on an important mission. An undercover assignment. Roy’s rules of publishing: (1) it should be fun and (2) it should be dangerous. Publishing is serious play. On the other hand, corporate publishing (or institutional academics or the art market) is just a fucking business; it is a dead-end job. The Mimeo Revolution and Roy Pennington say take this job and shove it; I am going to take some Time for myself.  

Download Operation Total Exposure (pdf)

This text was first published as an appendix to William S. Burroughs, Mayfair Academy Series More or Less, published by Roy Pennington’s Urgency Press in 1973. See also Roy Pennington on Mayfair Academy Series More or Less.

Burroughs cites scientific experiments and philosophical argument with gay abandon thru out his work. It is not clear why he does this. Whether they are crucial to the coherent development of his ideas, or whether they are used to give his work a superficial authenticity, by cashing on their academic status. They may even be just a literary device not intended to be taken “literally.” (e.g. I feel when Burroughs tells us to take his comments about films (p. 85) literally, as well as the well known comment by Gysin about the writer having to “handle” his medium, that in fact there is still no reason for us to take his injunction literally either.) Certainly, they are presented uncritically and incompletely. Let’s try and clear up the mess, ‘cos if there’s someone I can’t stand it is someone who doesn’t know what he is talking about. At the risk of being pedantic, let me make myself clear —

On Burroughs’ Naïve Use Of Quotation Marks:

Semantics is the study of the meaning of “meaning.” As such it is riddled with an obvious double-bind… that in talking about language it becomes what it is talking about, and this is as impossible as the eye that sees itself seeing. This is not so debilitating when one studies solely the observable aspects of language (phonemics and morphology). But such studies are irrelevant to the basic problem of how and why language is possible at all — the daily miracle that these squibbles and gibbers can suddenly cohere into signs with significance for us over and above their physical appearance.

One way out of the impasse of having to use precisely the thing whose being is under scrutiny, in order to scrutinize it, is to use quotation marks. E.g. when we ask what the meaning of the word “rose” is, or what the relation between that aural and visual stimulus and its appropriate non-physical meaning we have to state this meaning or the relation in such a way that the question is not just placed one stage further back on to the meanings of the words used to state that meaning. Etcetera ad inf. Ad naus. Quotation marks are supposed to give the semanticist a kind of objectivity that allows him to separate the word from its meaning and to point at it without using it. Hence when Korzybski says “Whatever a rose is, it is not its label” he is merely stating an immense technical tautology. Nobody ever said it was, my good Count, so what’s all the fuss about?

The fuss focuses on the exact status of this strange thing “meaning.” And as any good well-bred linguistic philosopher who did his homework knows, “that all depends.” It all depends on the type of the word being analyzed. A basic distinction between concrete words with objective reference (e.g. “rose”) and those with sense is quickly drawn. The former have their meaning given by ostensive definition (country simple pointing). The latter by their relation to other words (e.g. the meaning of “to” is given by its context). Now these abstract words have no meaning until they are actually used, and what’s more, if they have no theoretical connection with any concrete words then they only have abstract meaning, which is really no meaning at all. They are just pawns in an intellectual’s chess game. Hence Burroughs’ derision of religion and other such control systems with in-built protection afforded them by their own carefully prescribed words. Have you ever tried to talk with a scientologist? (Have you ever tried to talk with anybody?)

But what Burroughs fails to mention is the very possibility of the concrete words. At first sight it may seem clear that a “rose” means that flower clutched between the lips of a grimacing senorita. But for this to be so, a line must be drawn from the word to the object by the primordial gesture of an index finger. He takes this gesture as a fait accompli, but I shall make it clear that it has immense and imponderable power.

For when I do so point, man looks at the rose whilst the dog will look at the finger. Unless this response has already been beaten out of him. If this primitive indication is to work the finger must first attract attention to itself and away from anything else that may be occupying your partner. But then it must reverse this attraction i.e., distract the attention away from itself and redirect it to what it is aiming at. Otherwise, like the dog, we would remain looking at this fleshy glove stuffed with blood and bones and not at its target. READY AIM FIRE is a single motion. But even more incredibly the finger must remain lurking in the back of one’s mind, or else one won’t know where to look! And this is not just a question of visual gymnastics, keeping one eye on the finger and the other on the object. The finger must do two contradictory things: it must point at what it is not (its target) and also somehow point at itself as a pointing finger, rather than a finger in a curious position. In technical terms: IT MUST NEGATE ITS OWN ECCEITY. Not easy, nor a particularly savory kind of self-abuse.

And it is this suicidal tendency that Korzybski is really talking about when he says “a rose is not a rose.” Thus the problem of language is not the superficial conundrum that it can only be interrogated in its own terms. Such authoritarianism is as nothing when compared with the sheer possibility of language alone. And the sense of quotation marks themselves still remains unexplained as a technical device for pointing at a word. What the Count is really getting at is the danger of reification or hypostatisation: not the confusion of a concrete word and its object, but between concrete words and abstract words, such that words with only theoretical meaning are inadvertently given concrete reference, just because they look and sound like proper nouns. “Nothing must be something, or else what is it that it is not?” This creates artificial realities. E.g. God is confused with people, the ether with an all-pervading gas, electricity and water, and above all, the mind with the brain.

But these problems cannot be avoided by picture writing. The experiment with the rose and the label “rose”, in which subjects tend to identify the card as the real rose rather than the flower itself, is only partly true. Beside the technical difficulties of presenting the experiment in an unbiased way (very difficult since language is the sole means of doing this) the conclusion that if we think in pictures we will be operating in a clearer manner is misleading. An image of a rose is no closer to the real rose than the word. If this were so how could Burroughs hope to convey it using solely language? No, the meaning of a word is not an image or a nebulous entity floating around in our heads. The word is its meaning. (e.g. I do not read “anger” in an angry face, I see it straight away) and true speech is “thinking out loud”, such that thought and language are no longer distinguishable. And what does Burroughs think our thinking consists of?

Burroughs is an arch-materialist:

Having spent a lot of his time subjecting his metabolism to various drug assault courses, it is not surprising that he should believe that thought is entirely conditioned by the state of the cerebellum and body. He quotes behaviorist experiments on rats with a certain admiration and relish. And the implications of these for mind-control are obvious — and terrifying. If we can find out what your brain-state is, then we shall know what you are thinking, and sooner or later we shall make you think it just by feeding you the right chemicals. (The flaw in this reductionist concept of man is given by the impossibility of ever finding the brain-state that corresponds with telling a lie… it is if the subject tells you he is telling a lie… but even then he may be lying… ) Burroughs’ awareness of this danger is reflected in his pessimism. People for him are merely the manipulandum of various control systems mediated by language. A field of frightened sheep crying “no wolf no wolf at all.” They hide behind the verbal shields of mysticism, politics, or hack Utopianism and psychologism, and other such absurd secret societies designed to increase you word power and ability to get on with people. If you know the password.

Again, his concept of word-power is simplistic pyschologism. The control they exert is explained in terms of “association” and “conditioning.” Surely the totalitarianism of Aristotelian logic allegedly infecting Western thought has a much deeper basis than just childhood learning schedules. Eastern thought is no better. The power we are after is well illustrated by Gysin’s “The Word” (which is the goal of Gysin’s The Process): it cannot be written down because it would incinerate the paper, it cannot be mastered by merely changing one’s logical axioms. (How can you speak in glyphs?)

Mr. Burroughs, we are not rats, but the more you tell us that we are, the more we become so. “Man’s concept of man has almost succeeded in devastating his species” (Patchen). Fortunately man resists this attempt to reduce him to a bundle of quivering nerve cells. And Burroughs must know this from his junk days. The monkey on your back is not a pet. He fights to stay there. So who is he fighting? Perhaps his cynicism about power-freak man is a reductio ad absurdum argument designed to shock us into self-realization? Such satirizing can backfire, and Burroughs is in great danger, not only of being misunderstood, but also is at great risk of becoming one (power-freak) himself. At times he must feel very unsure of his inner freedom.

The use of technical terms, junk slang, and rhetorical questions is relevant here. Having professed complete doubt in the communicative efficacy of language, he is forced to portray his characters as either completely incommunicado, or else as relying on code-words, whose meaning is known solely to the initiated. The nods and winks that pass between hippies and scientologists indicate the deeper mutual reinforcement of lost souls. “We know what it is like don’t we?” The question is just not worth answering. If you don’t agree then you shouldn’t be here.

The sentry shouts “Halt, who goes there?” and hears “Amazing, far out I’m stoned” in reply. Here the “conversation” ends. The Grateful Dead are good. Say no more. But surely it is the possibility of being misunderstood that is the sole source of the urge to communicate at all. (Just as the lie is the keystone to human thinking). When birds of a feather stick together, they lapse into stagnant silence. Hardly the perfect bliss of rapport.

It is so easy to slip into using conversational words which everyone has agreed to understand beforehand to save themselves the effort of relating fully. The tendency to comprehend one’s emotions in physiological terms is just one such superficially comprehensive system. To dismiss the pain of a departed loved one as “withdrawal symptoms” which cold turkey will cure in time is true but tragic self-delusion nevertheless. You say these things to yourself just like you cuddle up in bed with your arms around you alone. It turns one into the cynical bastard that Burroughs exudes all the time. Again the use of minimal vocabulary of hippies etc. reiterates the essential solipsism of their experiences. If you say more than that you become boring. Burroughs is a loner wandering thru a world of isolated monads. All they have in common is the illusion of being together.  

For example, the fact that a cut-up text or tape (gradually) obtains meaning for us can be interpreted in two ways. Either it testifies to our remarkable propensity to stay alive and impose meaning on our surroundings. Or it shows that the initial text is as random as its cut-up, and the meaning we give to either is artificial and independent of the signs in themselves. The pessimism of this latter is what Burroughs prefers, though in fact both are viable. He would agree that Do-Easy Cut Ups are difficult to do well.

But there is a saving grace in his work that prevents its dismissal as the ravings of a self-obsessed old man, frightened of senility not death. Bulletin 23 is the closest he has ever got to presenting any endearing qualities. That domesticity has meditative properties is consolation for the tired house-wife. That Burroughs needs such consolation gives me the compassion to continue reading him, and the gaps between words where the true meaning of his work lies.

This is not a vindictive essay. It is an attempt to reconcile a dislike of a man who sees little beauty in his world and an admiration for a man who can turn sadistic fantasies of sodomy and gomorrarhy into sweet and harmless wet dreams. After all what else would stop me running amok with Ali by my side… ?

Well… mebbe I should… faint whirring on dying electric typewriter slowly… the meter needs more money… eskimos have more words for snow than we have for cars but does that imply they see or have more of either … innaresting theory for a man who talks to himself… for hundreds of years now there has been speech on this earth, but for most of that time nothing has ever been said.  

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

One of the great things about the Naked Lunch celebration in Paris was wondering whom you might bump into on any given day. At the Beat Hotel ceremony, I had the pleasure of finally meeting Roy Pennington and his brother Jim. Roy and I have been in and out of contact for quite a few years. I bought a small collection of My Own Mags from him on eBay. After I bought the mags, I found out that Roy was the publisher of Burroughs’ Mayfair Academy Series More or Less (1973 as listed in M&M) and the Urgency Press Rip-Off of Time (1972). This led to a correspondence that progressed in fits and starts.

Published in the early 1970s, these bootlegs strike me as precursors to what would become a burgeoning punk zine scene by 1974-1975. Of course, Burroughs was one of the Godfathers of Punk. Many people realize that Burroughs influenced the musicians, like Lou Reed, Blondie, and Television, but I think fewer people are aware that Burroughs was a major influence for the writers who covered punk and the editors who published punk fanzines. That said, these writers and editors were also inspired by the little magazines that featured Burroughs. Take a look at Punk or Search and Destroy. I see a lot of My Own Mag and Fuck You in them. Pennington’s publications, done in a true DIY spirit, provide a bridge from the mimeo scene of the 1960s to the punk zines of the mid-1970s.

Pennington’s two Burroughs publications very much invoke a particular time and place in Great Britain: the area of Brighton and Hove in the early 1970s. These two towns used to be “a haven for bookshops,” and an oasis of alternative culture in Britain. I have described elsewhere how a bookstore can serve as the center of a community and that was the case around Sussex University in Brighton. The two bookstores in question were Bill Butler’s Unicorn Bookshop and John Kieffer and Richard Cupidi’s The Public House Bookshop. Pennington’s publications would not have been possible without both bookstores. I know bits and pieces about these two stores but a thread on Michael Nimmo’s blog A Haven for Bookshops really captures the spirit of the community that surrounded these two bookshops. Pennington’s books come out this heady atmosphere.

In talking to Roy in Paris, I asked him if I could publish a revised version of a letter to another book collector he sent me years ago that detailed the history surrounding the publication of The Mayfair Academy Series More or Less. He agreed and the edited letter is available on RealityStudio. Roy also allowed us to reprint his essay on Burroughs (“Some Disparate Mentionables“) that appeared in the Appendix to The Mayfair Academy Series. The essay captures the youthful enthusiasm that surrounded Burroughs’ work among university students in the 1960s and 1970s. Burroughs’ writing puzzled and astounded readers and thus inspired young admirers to become young publishers. This scenario occurred numerous times from the late 1950s to the present day.

Pennington’s publications are some of the more interesting and appealing A-items of Burroughs’ entire bibliography. The Mayfair Academy Series More or Less and The Urgency Press Rip-Off of Time highlight the fact that given the time and the inclination anybody can become a publisher. This is alternative publishing miles away from the mainstream press. It is rough, it is raw, and it is truly wonderful, inspiring stuff.

Letter from Roy Pennington on Mayfair Academy Series More or Less

Dear ____:

Here is the Mayfair Academy Series More or Less; because the original has coloured pages, the photocopy is not perfect. Also enclosed is a photo I took when I visited Burroughs in his flat in London [8 Duke St., St. James] in 1973 after I had done the “book.” This was the only time I had ever met him and we had a long talk. He interviewed me, really, asking “What do you young people want to read these days?” He was at the time doing The Job and not the later more “readable”, “narrative” stuff, e.g. The Dead Roads trilogy. Burroughs also asked, “Why do you say I am an arch-materialist?” I had rambled on about this in the little essay at the end of the Academy Series [republished here at RealityStudio]. But we did not get very far with this: I was petrified and bewildered to be there. I just wish, in retrospect, that I had gone through that rambling essay “Some Disparate Mentionables” with him, word by word. This was after all a by-product of an MA thesis I had just completed at Sussex University on self-referentiality. I think I offered Burroughs compensation for the bootleg, and the offer was declined. I cannot remember much more about the evening as he plied me with scotch.

Anyway, here is some background to the Academy Series:

I had just graduated from University and had some time on my hands (and some speed in my pocket). There was a local bookshop, which also did printing in Sussex called The Unicorn Bookshop, run by Bill Butler. Burroughs’ Ali’s Smile, published by Unicorn Bookshop, proved popular, and Butler encouraged me with my earlier Urgency Press Rip-off publications. My brother Jim of Aloes Press in London (who published The White Subway) also helped. I noticed the Mayfair magazine stuff, and I decided to collect them into one publication. Collecting the articles required going to the British Library and getting all the back copies of Mayfair and photocopying them. This proved a curious episode as I needed my philosophy tutor to provide a letter of introduction so I could access the magazines as they were kept in the restricted-access erotica archive. So I sat there, doing the “academic” research with this pile of skin-mags on the desk surrounded at the other tables by the slightly more erudite researchers.

I then typed the photocopied Burroughs Bulletins onto litho-plates. This explains the limited print run of 650 as the platen wore out. The press was located upstairs at 50 Gloucester Road, the address of Unicorn Bookshop. Mike Hughes, Butler’s partner, operated the machine, but I did the typing on an IBM Golf at a flat in Hove and took the stencils over to Bill in Brighton. After printing, I then collated the piles of pages in my flat with friends and got them stapled and trimmed back at Unicorn Bookshop. The coloured paper was a consequence of what stock Bill Butler had left lying around the store.

The illustrators were a couple of friends who etched (drew) directly onto the plates, plus my filling in spaces with the Mayan glyphs. I cannot remember where I copied the glyphs from other than a reference to Public House (on page 30), which was another bookshop run by Richard Cupidi who had previously worked with Butler and set up a rival bookshop specializing in Native American material. Glyphs were chosen because they are mentioned in some of the Bulletins.

On reflection, I think Richard Mahoney was too stoned to do any illustrations. I got another person to fill his space (p. 87). Personally I was worried about page 87 as it had little relevance to any of the Bulletins, and it represented a woman masturbating in a prison cell. These fears were not unfounded as Butler and Unicorn Press had obscenity issues with the authorities stemming from J.G. Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. Mahoney’s name remains in the Table of Contents since those off-set plates were completed (deletions are difficult) before he proved unable to complete his illustrations. Caroline did all the others (p. 9, 20, 96, 104). She was an artist / jeweller in the area who was living in the basement. She was annoyed with me when I added bits to her work.

The cover was just a collage of stuff cut out from Mayfair. For example, the photo of Burroughs on the cover was from Mayfair, and I think, was used for each Bulletin. The young man taking his knickers off must have come from another mag. There is not any publication date in the book, but the earliest version I have is from November 1972. Copies were 30p. Cheap, I tried to make up the difference by charging delivery to London, but was told off by Compendium Books.

Back copies of the original Mayfair magazines are actually still available on the used magazine / book market. I looked for them as I thought the Scientology bulletins were worth collecting together as I am not sure they have re-appeared subsequently in his books.

It’s been a pleasure to write this down, as it brings back fond memories of a time when I had the energy to get excited about language and literature and do something. I do not have that energy or excitement any more. It also caused me to re-read my own bit in the Mayfair Academy, which I found excruciatingly embarrassing and naïve in bits, but quite funny elsewhere. Incidentally, the last three lines on p. 103 come from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s book La Prose du Monde. These lines are the opening sentence of that text, which I studied (and translated from French) for my Master’s degree in Phenomenology of Language. It is also embarrassing to see again how I misspelled Academy. Somewhere in my pile of rubbish, I have the delivery notes for all those who I sent copies to (mainly bookshops), but I cannot find it.

Roy Pennington