S. E. Gontarski. William S. Burroughs: Thought Control, Aesthetic Weaponry, and Dystopian Modernism. Clemson University Press, 2026. xxxiii + 406 pp. ISBN 978-1-63804-054-5.

S. E. Gontarski’s William S. Burroughs: Thought Control, Aesthetic Weaponry, and Dystopian Modernism is at once a work of literary criticism, an archival reconstruction, a study of artistic collaboration, and a sustained inquiry into the institutions that determine what scholars are permitted to know. Its most consequential claim is methodological. Burroughs’s achievement cannot be adequately represented by a stable canon of published books, nor can his cut-up practice be reduced to a recognizable avant-garde technique. His work survives as a dispersed and continuously reactivated system of manuscripts, typescripts, recordings, images, correspondence, performances, editions, friendships, and institutional arrangements. Gontarski calls this system “Neuromatic”: recursive, intermedial, collaborative, and resistant to linear accounts of literary production. The term names both Burroughs’ compositional practice and the critical method required to follow it.

The result is an unusual and important book. Rather than moving dutifully through the major novels, Gontarski reconstructs the networks around them and gives sustained attention to materials that have remained marginal, misclassified, inaccessible, or simply unknown. The volume’s intellectual center is consequently not Naked Lunch, although that book remains an indispensable reference point, but the much less frequently studied Blade Runner (a movie). Around it gather the manuscript witnesses, periodical appearances, editorial interventions, letters, archival inventories, and digital tools through which a seemingly minor work becomes a model of Burroughs’s larger practice. This shift of scale—from canonical object to documentary network—is the book’s strongest revisionary gesture.

The study begins before its formal introduction with an extended “Ante-Introduction” that acknowledges the people and institutional encounters from which the project emerged. This opening is more than ceremonial front matter. It establishes the book’s central epistemological premise: scholarship is produced through relationships, access, permissions, recollection, and often accident. James Grauerholz is especially important as a steward of the Burroughs estate and as a source of correspondence, recollection, and documentary guidance. François Bucher, to whose memory the volume is dedicated, becomes an equally decisive figure. An art historian, teacher, collector, and advocate of experimental culture at Florida State University, Bucher linked Burroughs to a broader interdisciplinary and ecological project centered on the Nautilus Foundation. His role in preserving Burroughs materials makes him part of the history the archive records, not merely an intermediary through whom documents happened to pass.

The introduction, “The Making of an Author Artist,” defines Burroughs through expansion rather than classification. Writer, performer, painter, media theorist, collaborator, and cultural provocateur are not successive careers but interdependent manifestations of a practice concerned with language, image, recording, repetition, and control. Gontarski’s title is exact in this respect. “Thought control” identifies Burroughs’s diagnosis of language and mass media; “aesthetic weaponry” identifies the countermeasures he developed through cutting, montage, playback, and disruption; “dystopian modernism” places those procedures within a modernity whose technologies of communication are also technologies of domination. Burroughs is thus neither comfortably modernist nor simply postmodern. He appears instead as a writer whose formal experiments remain attached to political and physiological accounts of power.

Chapter 1, “Burroughs and Florida,” is both a biographical recovery and a work of archival detective fiction. Gontarski traces connections among Burroughs, his son, Grauerholz, Bucher, Florida State University, the Nautilus property, and the archive commonly known as the Vaduz Archive. The narrative is compelling because the documentary details carry institutional consequences. FSU was offered major Burroughs materials, declined opportunities to build a significant archive, and later received a substantial body of related documents without developing the research infrastructure their importance warranted. Particularly revealing is the history of Barry Miles’s A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive, lent by Grauerholz in 1978 with an explicit request for its return. The copy remained uncatalogued and effectively lost within Special Collections for decades. Such episodes support one of Gontarski’s recurring propositions: an object may be physically preserved and intellectually unavailable at the same time.

The Florida narrative could easily have become a merely local complaint. Gontarski instead uses it to expose larger questions about provenance, cataloguing, acquisition, and institutional self-representation. Libraries do not simply house literary history. Through taxonomies, finding aids, collection names, digitization priorities, and decisions about staffing, they produce the conditions under which literary history becomes visible. The book is frank—sometimes sharply polemical—about the gap between custodial possession and scholarly stewardship. That candor is one of its virtues. Academic institutions frequently describe archives through the language of access while leaving researchers to negotiate opaque classifications, scattered holdings, and discontinued digital projects. Gontarski makes such infrastructural failures part of literary criticism itself.

Chapter 2, “What Passes for Method,” turns this archival practice into a reintroduction to Burroughs. Its subsections move from Burroughs as an “amoral comedian” through censorship and thought control to “Burroughs as Archive.” The sequence clarifies that method, for Burroughs, is neither a single technique nor a set of formal rules. It is a repertoire of tactical responses. Satire, obscenity, collage, the cut-up, the tape recorder, and the lecture or interview all unsettle languages that present themselves as natural. Gontarski’s own procedure mirrors this multiplicity. He brings published texts into contact with letters, marginalia, recordings, visual documents, and critical disputes, allowing meanings to emerge from conjunction rather than from a single privileged interpretive frame.

That recursive method becomes especially productive in Chapter 3, “The Making of Burroughsians.” The chapter examines both access and canonization, asking how an author hostile to systems of control became a recognized academic subject. Gontarski does not treat institutional recognition as straightforward liberation. Canonization creates access, but it also disciplines reception by determining which texts, concepts, and biographical narratives become representative. The discussion of “Burroughsians” therefore encompasses critics, editors, archivists, estate representatives, collectors, students, and cultural intermediaries. It also turns the critical gaze back upon scholarship. Burroughs studies, like the archives on which it depends, has its enabling conventions and exclusions.

“Mystical Modernism,” Chapter 4, widens the argument through discussions of the human machine, Bruegel, Bosch, Sade, and theological or magical structures in Burroughs’s imagination. This is the book’s most deliberately expansive chapter and perhaps its most surprising. It resists the tendency to interpret Burroughs’s technological vocabulary as evidence of a purely secular materialism. Bodies may be machines and language a virus, yet his work also invokes possession, exorcism, evil, ritual, telepathy, immortality, and apocalyptic struggle. Gontarski reads those elements not as eccentric residue but as part of Burroughs’s attempt to model forces that exceed rational mastery. The chapter persuasively connects grotesque visual traditions to the crowded, metamorphic, and punitive worlds of Burroughs’s writing.

Chapter 5, “How Bill’s Brain Works,” supplies the fullest account of Neuromatics. Memory, tape experimentation, nervous systems, feedback, and the archive become aspects of one compositional ecology. Gontarski is particularly good at showing that the archive is not merely the destination of Burroughs’s work. Archival operations—collecting, storing, copying, cutting, replaying, and recombining—were already embedded in its production. The chapter’s later examination of Crawdaddy and Blade Runner (a movie) demonstrates the scholarly consequences of inaccurate cataloguing. Documents grouped by inherited commercial designations can conceal relationships among lectures, columns, manuscripts, collaborators, and later publications. Here painstaking bibliography becomes interpretive argument: identification and classification change the history one can tell.

The sixth chapter, “Counterattacks,” draws the study’s aesthetic and political concerns together. Burroughs’s experiments with tape, film, image, and textual montage become weapons directed against what he called the “limits of control.” Gontarski does not romanticize them as guarantees of emancipation. A cut-up can disrupt habitual syntax, but any counter-technique may be absorbed, commodified, or redirected. The importance of the experiments lies in their exposure of mediation. Playback reveals recording as an intervention; montage reveals sequence as construction; the cut reveals textual continuity as produced rather than given. Burroughs’s work is political at the level of the apparatus because it teaches audiences to notice the technologies organizing perception.

Chapter 7, on the making of Blade Runner (a movie), is the volume’s culminating demonstration. The chapter reconstructs the text’s development from Burroughs’s response to Alan E. Nourse’s The Bladerunner through drafts, Grauerholz’s editing, retyping, title changes, publication negotiations, photographic plans, periodical excerpts, and the final Blue Wind Press edition. This genetic history replaces the fantasy of solitary composition with a record of mediated production. Its accompanying digital Genetic Edition is not treated as a transparent container for documentary truth. It is itself an argument, one that places facsimiles, diplomatic transcriptions, variants, and related witnesses into structured comparison. The project renders instability legible without pretending to eliminate it.

The supplementary materials extend rather than merely support the main study. The user’s guide to the electronic edition makes the project’s editorial logic available to readers. The coda returns to the politics of FSU’s archival decisions and asks what it would mean to create “a new place for research on this author.” The afterword by Jade Dellinger, on Burroughs’s collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg and David Bradshaw, gives the book’s account of intermediality a vivid visual and performative extension. Finally, the catalogue of Sinclair Beiles documents in the François Bucher Papers makes previously dispersed information usable for subsequent scholarship. In this respect, the volume does not merely advocate archival activation; it performs it.

The book’s form will not suit every reader equally. Its recursive organization, documentary abundance, long quotations, facsimiles, and movement between criticism, memoir, institutional history, and editorial commentary can initially seem centrifugal. Readers seeking a concise monographic thesis developed through conventionally sequential chapters may find some repetitions and digressions demanding. The polemic against FSU is also so detailed that it sometimes competes with the broader theoretical argument, and the book’s range—from neuroscience and media archaeology to theology, visual culture, and textual scholarship—necessarily produces uneven densities of contextualization. Yet these are less failures of control than costs of the method the volume openly adopts. A tidier book would risk reproducing the very simplifications Gontarski disputes.

More substantively, the institutional critique invites further comparative work. FSU is presented with exceptional documentary specificity, but the book also indicates that dispersion, restricted access, inherited taxonomies, and incomplete digital infrastructures are features of literary archives more generally. Future scholarship might place this case beside the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, Ohio State’s holdings, Columbia’s collections, and private or estate-controlled materials in order to distinguish local decisions from broader professional patterns. The book provides the evidence and vocabulary for such an inquiry even when it does not fully undertake it.

Gontarski’s achievement is ultimately to make archival form inseparable from literary meaning. William S. Burroughs emerges not as the fixed origin of a completed oeuvre but as a node within systems of collaboration, technology, memory, editing, circulation, and institutional power. The study’s recovery of neglected materials will matter to Burroughs scholars, while its account of custodial and descriptive authority should interest textual editors, archivists, modernist scholars, and researchers in digital humanities. Its strongest pages show criticism changing because a document has been found, reclassified, juxtaposed with another witness, or made computationally comparable.

William S. Burroughs: Thought Control, Aesthetic Weaponry, and Dystopian Modernism is therefore more than a substantial addition to Burroughs studies. It is an argument about what literary scholarship becomes when it takes the archive seriously as a material, institutional, and generative system. The book asks readers to see the archive not as the passive remainder of artistic production but as one of the places where authorship continues to be made. In doing so, it offers both a major reinterpretation of Burroughs and a timely warning: control operates not only through censorship or prohibition, but through the quieter powers of acquisition, arrangement, naming, neglect, and access. Gontarski’s answer is a scholarship of counterattack—documentary, collaborative, and unwilling to let institutional order pass for neutral fact.

by S.E. Gontarski

“Why not appoint a scholar/editor to run a blog at the NYPL [or at Florida State University].” — Jed Birmingham, “A Descriptive Catalogue of the William S. Burroughs Archive,” Reality Studio, 2016.

By the time the next round of fellowship/grant applications comes around we [can] have a special [journal] issue forthcoming. The manuscripts and the special issue [would] position FSU as the new place for research on this author [i.e., William S. Burroughs]. — Paul Ardoin to S. E. Gontarski, 2/9/2013

Theory and practice are not opposites, not even polarities, but integrated aspects of the archivist’s professional role and responsibility. Transparency of process about the archivist’s performance will facilitate this integration, stimulate the building of archival knowledge, and enable present and future generations to hold the profession accountable for its choices in exercising power over the making of modern memory.  — Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz (2002)

This case study gathers documents, correspondence, and internal communications related to the recovery (2012), transfer, and subsequent institutional handling of a body of William S. Burroughs materials associated with the Nautilus Foundation in Lloyd, Florida and subsequently held under the auspices of Special Collections and Archives, Florida State University. It details how modern archival administration increasingly privileges ownership, branding, and custodial control over scholarly activation, interpretive collaboration, and open research ecosystems. The overall result is that once the Burroughs materials were acquired (through free donation) by the Florida State University Library’s Special Collections and Archives they were institutionalized and bureaucratized into systems often incompatible with open scholarly research. In this reading, the Burroughs archive becomes a paradigmatic example of what happens when research material, an archive in this case, is treated as a prestige acquisition rather than as a living research engine. This is the difference between possessing an archive and activating one—that is, once the Burroughs materials were physically acquired, they were intellectually neutralized. The archive thus becomes not a research site but a bureaucratically absorbed object. The issues thus are acquisition vs. accessibility, custody vs. scholarship, inventory vs. interpretative understanding, preservation vs. activation, institutional branding vs. intellectual community, and most importantly, technical digitization vs. scholarly editorial practice, the latter apparently beyond the ken of a bureaucracy with almost no understanding of literary scholarship. Taken together, the material detailed here traces the emergence of a research initiative centered on the archive, the expectations that accompanied its transfer, and the evolving institutional frameworks that shaped (and finally limited) its accessibility and scholarly potential. Its guiding principal is articulated by Terry Cook and Joan Schwartz in a pair of issues of Archive Science, that much is gained through “Transparency of process about the archivist’s performance.”

The documents reproduced and excerpted below are presented in roughly chronological order. They include communications among members of the scholarly research team, representatives of the Burroughs estate, and university library administrators. The documentation that follows also reflect early efforts to position the recovered materials within a broader scholarly and institutional context, including proposals for editorial collaboration, digital publication, innovative bibliography, and the establishment of a dedicated research center.

At the time of the document recovery and transfer a research team simply called the Burroughs Project (a group active from 2009 when contact began with John Bennett, Burroughs editor and Curator of the Avant Writing Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at the Ohio State University) was already developing the academic research potential of the documents, publishing, subsequently, several essays on them and developing a number of primary-document PhD dissertations by FSU graduate students. On the prospect of recovering original, archival documents, English graduate student Christopher Higgs wrote on 23 September 2012, “You can imagine my delight at the idea that this could potentially be a big deal….I’m very excited to make that happen! Thank you very much for your time, support and encouragement on this…I’m eager to see it come to fruition.” The magical, fateful day was 12 October 2012, when graduate student Paul Ardoin sent the author the following email: “Found everything, [. . .] on our way back. —Paul.” Ardoin followed with an email on 2 November 2012:

turns out you were right, there were quite a few things still to be found. we left three boxes in your office today. the largest is filled with manuscripts and correspondence of [South African poet] Sinclair Beiles. The second largest is quite a bit more Burroughs correspondence, along with details of a negotiation for a large Burroughs archive to be purchased from someone in France [Vaduz, Liechtenstein, actually] (I suspect this ended up at NYPL or some other Burroughs archive, 19,000 pieces apparently [purchased by NYPL in 2006]), and some reviews Bucher commissioned from Burroughs about Bucher’s novels. Plenty of other stuff, too, though nothing as exciting (in my opinion) as what we found last time.

The Collins Foundation, the final recipient of Bucher’s material, followed up on 9 November 2012, shortly after the original find, offering additional material and support for the FSU documents transfer:

I was looking through an old trunk today and found the mortgage papers for Junction B [Burroughs’ property in Lloyd, FL]. It also includes a number of letters between François and Burroughs, as well as a few notes and letters from James [Grauerholz]. Tony wants to review it so we can scan in whatever documents we need to keep on file. As soon as he’s gone through them, I’ll let you know and you’re welcome to add them to the collection.

Ardoin very quickly saw the vast research potential of our discoveries and noted the willingness of Burroughs executor James Grauerholz to fully cooperate. Exploding with ideas generated by the recovered documents, Ardoin wrote on 9 February 2013:

Grauerholz is clearly focused on increasing awareness of and appreciation for Burroughs’ work. He writes, “I’m eager to help with your work,” and “My commitment is to William’s work,” and he’s been working on all his new volumes of letters [volume 2 of the letters, 1959–1974, had appeared in 2012]. Certainly, I hope he’ll share stories and manuscripts, but might it also be worth asking whether he might be interested in some collaboration? 

What I’m specifically thinking of (another fine idea from [Paul’s wife] Fiona!) is proposing a special issue to Review of Contemporary Fiction (or somewhere else?), returning to Burroughs so many years after their last issue [spring 1984]. Perhaps I co-edit with Grauerholz and you write an intro to the issue that also serves as an intro to our digitization project; maybe [Dirk] Van Hulle [Director of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project] contributes an essay? Perhaps you and I co-edit and Grauerholz writes an intro, includes some letters from the next volume [of Burroughs letters]? By the time the next round of fellowship/grant applications comes around we have a special [journal] issue forthcoming. The manuscripts and the special issue position FSU as the new place for research on this author.

A letter drafted on 31 January 2013 by the FSU Foundation laying out the terms for the transfer of ownership of the Burroughs documents from the Collins Center to the Florida State University Foundation, that is, not to the FSU Library directly, but to the office that accepts donations and the university division to which the entire Nautilus Foundation was originally donated before the university’s rejection:

Stanley E. Gontarski, Ph.D.

Florida State University

Department of English

405 Williams Building

Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580

Dear Stan,

The Collins Center is delighted to donate the William G. [recte S.] Burroughs papers to Florida State University Foundation. It is wonderful to have found a suitable and useful home at Florida State University. Please accept this letter as our official notification to you, the FSU Foundation and the University that the Collection is now the property of FSU. I understand it is Foundation protocol for us to sign a deed of gift and I look forward to doing that, as well as receiving your official valuation document(s) once the Collection is appraised.

I could not think of a better place for the collection to be used by scholars, students, as well as university guests and visitors.

Please feel free to contact me at XXXX or by email at XXXXX

Best,

The phrase on access and use in the drafted letter is particularly poignant (if not ironic) given the aftermath of the ownership transfer, “the collection to be used by scholars, students, as well as university guests and visitors.” And that seemed to be the general plan as the Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives gave an update on cataloguing the material to Ardoin, Grauerholz, and Gontarski on 1 December 2015, although the Associate Dean has already altered the terms of the transfer, now referring to the Burroughs material as “the François Bucher collection”: 

By way of an overall update for all of you, we have just finished an initial processing of the first instalment of the François Bucher collection—this is the critical first accession that contains the Burroughs manuscripts & correspondence. We are tweaking our organizational scheme and inventory[!], but will have something to share shortly. The idea here is to provide full research access to this material, through the searchable inventory, as early as we can in 2016. (emphasis added)

 Many of the Burroughs Project’s research goals are outlined in the epigraphs to the online “User’s Guide,” which are in keeping with the letter of ownership transfer. And, as Dr. Ardoin suggested early on, the Burroughs Research Group sought national funding for its implementation, with, as implied in the Associate Dean’s update, “full research access.” By December 2014, the Burroughs Research Group was ready to make a series of presentations of its initial work at the William S. Burroughs centenary conference at Indiana University in February 2014 under the renamed FSU research group, “The William S. Burroughs Laboratory for Manuscript and Genetic Study.” The panel included three members of the Burroughs/Nautilus recovery team and the Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives. The centerpiece of the panel was a fully operational version of the Blade Runner (a movie) Genetic Edition, based on material wholly unknown to Burroughs scholars at the time of the Bloomington conference. Needless to say, the panel was enthusiastically received. Plans were quickly made to follow up the Indiana conference with one at Florida State University based on the FSU archival material with a full exhibit of not only Burroughs, but the larger Burroughs circle that would include the Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles material. Burroughs Centenary Conference presenters Blake Stricklin and Paul Ardoin published their Indiana University presentations, and Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives sent letters of invitation to keynote speakers for the proposed follow-up Tallahassee conference. To that end, Associate Dean of Special Collections and Archives drafted a letter to Ardoin, Grauerholz, and Gontarski on 1 December 2015, referencing this time an “FSU Burroughs Archive”: 

As Stan mentioned, we would very much like to host a Burroughs related event in Fall 2016 (or Spring 2017 at the latest)—I don’t have the shape of the event in mind yet, but it would be great to have you, James, involved and to bring Oliver Harris in. Stan & I have talked about putting together something that gives us an opportunity to publicize the FSU Burroughs Archive (in both analog & digital form) and to explore (to some extent) the Bucher/Burroughs connection…Definitely more conversations to have on this. 

On 17 March 2016, Oliver Harris responded, “The prospect of a conference sounds great and I would be honoured to be involved. Keep me posted.” Harris was particularly interested because the FSU group was planning a follow-up Genetic Edition of Dead Fingers Talk, and it had applied for NEH funding for “Digital Innovation” and other “Collaborative” projects in 2012. Harris had agreed to be one of the grant’s recommenders. It turned out that Harris was simultaneously working on a new edition of Dead Fingers Talk, and he was interested in transatlantic collaboration. He also mentions the need to be in the United States to work at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, which bought what was called the “Vaduz Archive” in 2006, the collection that was offered to, but rejected by, the FSU Library in 1978 and again in 1982 (see Chapter 1). 

Harris subsequently inquired about the results of the FSU grant proposals and our developing research plans on 14 March 2016, and this essay, in good part, finally answers that lingering question he posed in 2016:

Dear Stan,

I was just wondering—post your NEH and ACLS [grant] bids—what happened and how’s your project going?

All best Burroughsian wishes!

Oliver

I replied to Harris on 17 March 2016:

Most of our energy is in transferring and redesigning our web page, which is not only designed to digitalize the holdings but to move to full collations of the documents we have. The one example we have is that done by Paul Ardoin for his (second) Ph.D. thesis at the University of Antwerp, and we are transferring the Burroughsarchive.org site to Florida state, a project that nears completion [overstated!]. Since the site is now on the FSU server and not (yet) open to the public, you need a password to access it. I’ll send a copy of this note to our Special Collections Dean, Katie McCormick, whom you met in Bloomington, and perhaps she can figure out a way for you to have access to the site. This is important since it is the model we are trying to follow for all the Crawdaddy pieces on which we are now working [overstated!]. We are also developing an electronic edition of the book never published in the United States, “Dead Fingers Talk” as part of another Ph.D. thesis [by Blake Stricklin], and my students have been publishing pieces in places when studies of Burroughs have never appeared, like PBSA, where the “Blade Runner” piece by Paul Ardoin was published.

My assessment, we now know, turned out to be uninformed since the library team by then had decided, privately, to reverse direction and not to follow what I outlined to Harris as the library’s primary scholarly goals, interests, and research direction. In effect, its unannounced, undisclosed decisions to reverse course all but shut down Burroughs research activity at Florida State University, which has not become the projected “new place for research on this author.”

At his end, Harris kept working, of course, and finally published a comprehensive, illustrated, 40+ page essay, “Making Dead Fingers Talk” in 2020¹, and a portion of that material would certainly have been the centerpiece to his proposed keynote presentation at the Florida State Burroughs Conference that never materialized. Harris followed up by publishing a new edition of Dead Fingers Talk: The Restored Text with Alma Books in 2020, and he wrote a lengthy “Introduction” to the 3rd edition of Blade Runner (a movie) (London: Tangerine Press, 2019), with slight reference to the FSU material but without directly referencing or using the Genetic Edition. The post-Burroughs Centenary energy and enthusiasm generated grand plans for follow-up activity; then without notification or explanation, shortly after speakers had been contacted and invited, all library connected activity and communication—on developing a Florida State Burroughs conference, on follow-up projects to the Genetic Edition of Blade Runner (a movie) based on additional FSU documents, particularly its Crawdaddy material, and a Burroughs-focused center for scholarly research—were halted, and to this day they have never been mentioned again.

The goals of the Burroughs Research Group were not those of the library, it turns out. and the library administration’s subsequent U-turn suggests that it felt no obligation to honor the terms of the gift, nor to follow up with the plans developed and set in motion at the Burroughs Centenary conference in 2014. It would not, in fact, establish a William S. Burroughs archive and research center at all, but, instead, it would follow its own lead with neither academic input nor oversight. The results were no follow-up conference, no library-initiated grant proposals, no support from the library for English Department research grants proposals, and, instead, a coherent core of archival material was distributed under a variety of rubrics among the papers of the material’s previous owner, François Bucher, a decision the library has deemed “common practice.” One result of such reversal is that, to date, no central, integrated, coherent research site or center for the study of the William S. Burroughs archival material has been created at Florida State University, and no systematic way currently exists for scholars and researchers to work on site with direct access to pertinent research materials or even to know where to look to find what is available. At best, one can use the newly created “Finding Aid” available for the Bucher Papers: Bucher Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida. But, in essence, researchers have to know in advance what they are looking for, and much supporting research material remains in the open access stacks of the library.

It should be emphasized, moreover, that the digital Genetic Edition discussed herein, almost unique in design and implementation, was created by scholars at the University of Antwerp Center for Genetic Study as part of Paul Ardoin’s 2014 PhD thesis, “Product and Process: Making and Unmaking Films with Beckett and Burroughs,” for his Doctor in Literary Studies (doctor in de letterkunde) Universiteit Antwerpen. This dissertation included an early but fully functional, digital Genetic Edition that was presented at the 2014 University of Indiana Burroughs centenary conference to universal acclaim, and it was subsequently migrated to and reconstituted by FSU Library’s digital staff. But Florida State University had no part in its conception, theory, design, or scholarly development other than trying to modernize the completed site it inherited. One might suggest that FSU’s participation in the project was technical, mechanical, and without understanding of the project’s scholarly goals and significance which went well beyond just another catalogue entry. Plans to continue the Genetic site with other Burroughs archival material, repeatedly promised, have failed to materialize, as have plans to continue supporting the current Burroughs holdings with further library acquisitions.

One result of such administratively induced dispersal is that the Florida State University remains unmentioned among listings of significant William S. Burroughs archives, nor is its cache of material cited in contemporary research. Operation Total Exposure makes the following comment about the work of pre-eminent Burroughs textual scholar Oliver Harris: his 

acknowledgments list [contains] the usual suspects from the well-known Burroughs archives: the librarians and curators at Ohio State, the New York Public Library, Arizona State, and Columbia. Along with the Burroughs estate and Grove Press, this is the official bureaucracy of the Burroughs industry. It should be noted that unlike many other bureaucracies associated with 20th Century writers, Burroughs’ is particularly enlightened. They realize the value in access and availability. (emphasis added) 

In this regard, the all-but-unmentioned, little known, substantially under-developed, mostly un-curated Florida State University Special Collections and Archives Burroughs material is an exception, and the library’s handling of its valuable research material not only makes finding and using the material difficult but also complicates citing it in publications by those few who do use it since no central Burroughs finding aid or reference point has been established.

The issues are further compounded since the Burroughs archive resists precisely the kind of textual stability upon which traditional copy-text theory depends. The editorial assumptions inherited from Greg and Bowers presuppose, at least implicitly, a recoverable hierarchy of documentary authority culminating in a relatively stable final authorial intention. Burroughs’s compositional methods, however, together with the material history of his manuscripts, typescripts, and photocopied revisions, frequently dissolve such hierarchies. What survives is less a linear sequence culminating in a definitive text than a constellation of overlapping and continuously revised textual states.

This instability is particularly evident in Blade Runner (a movie), where the surviving archive preserves not a singular terminal document but multiple variant states of what appears to have been the final typescript. That typescript—often corrected or mediated through Burroughs’s longtime associate and amanuensis James Grauerholz—was subsequently photoduplicated, after which further revisions, annotations, and corrections were introduced independently into separate copies. The archive therefore records not simply revision but revision through mechanical reproduction, creating parallel textual witnesses whose authority is distributed rather than centralized.

Under such conditions, McKenzie’s sociology of texts becomes especially valuable because it relocates editorial attention from the recovery of a singular ideal text to the material and social processes through which texts are produced, circulated, and transformed. The photocopy machine, editorial mediation, publishing procedure, and archival preservation become integral components of textual meaning rather than merely incidental features of transmission. In the Burroughs archive, reproduction itself becomes compositional. Each duplicated state potentially generates new textual authority, blurring distinctions between manuscript, copy, revision, and publication.

The resulting textual field resembles what George Bornstein describes as a versional rather than singular model of textuality, one in which the editor’s task is not solely to establish a final reading text but also to preserve the relations among competing or overlapping documentary states. Such a model is especially appropriate for Burroughs, whose works frequently exist less as discrete, self-contained artifacts than as recursive and interconnected textual performances. Barry Miles’s observation that Burroughs’s writings “have to be seen as one giant multivolume book including all the different versions” aptly characterizes both the archive itself and the editorial challenge it presents.

The present edition therefore approaches Blade Runner (a movie) not as a work moving neatly toward a single definitive form but as a dynamic textual process documented across multiple material states. Rather than subordinating variant documents to an idealized final authority, this edition attempts to preserve the evidentiary and interpretive value of those variants as part of the work’s ongoing textual history.

It should be emphasized, moreover, that the research engine developed as the digital electronic edition and the documents detailed in this case study confirm a sequence of events that illuminate the uneasy relationship between document recovery, scholarly research initiative, and rigid institutional practice. The Burroughs archive at Florida State University is emblematic of a broader crisis of the managerial university: the separation of librarianship from humanities scholarship; bureaucratic governance replacing intellectual leadership; digitization without interpretive vision; and institutional emphasis on acquisition metrics rather than scholarly outcomes. The material detailed provides a case study in how expectations for access, collaboration, and research development are shaped—and sometimes reshaped, even mis-shaped—by shifting bureaucratic priorities. Such details offer a supplementary documentary perspective on questions central to the study not only of William S. Burroughs but to archival research more broadly: ownership, access, organization, and the conditions under which materials are permitted to become available for interpretation.

Endnotes

1. S. E. Gontarski, ed., Burroughs Unbound: William S. Burroughs and the Performance of Writing (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 121–65.

Archival Theory, Power, and Institutional Control: Further Reading Annotated

Cook, Terry. “Archives, Records, and Power: The Making of Modern Memory.” Archival Science 2, nos. 1–2 (2002): 1–19.

[This article serves as the general introduction by the guest editors to the first of two thematic issues of Archival Science that will explore the theme, “archives, records, and power.”]

Cook, Terry, and Joan M. Schwartz. “Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory to (Archival) Performance.” Archival Science 2, nos. 3–4 (2002): 171–85.

[Guest editors of two special issues of Archival Science which are devoted to the theme of “Archives, Records, and Power.”]

Cook, Terry. “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms.” Archival Science 13, no. 2–3 (2013): 95–120.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[A foundational meditation on archives as instruments of authority, repression, memory, and institutional power. Essential for theorizing archival custody versus interpretive access.]

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.

[Especially useful for thinking about systems of classification, institutional discourse, and the production of knowledge through archival ordering practices.]

Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

[Important for understanding the materiality of digital archives and the mediation of digital textual objects.]

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

[Particularly useful for discussions of compositional process and born-digital textuality.]

Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 9–25.

[Excellent overview essay connecting archival theory, power, memory, and institutional practice.]

Manoff, Marlene. “Archive and Database as Metaphor: Theorizing Digital Libraries.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 10, no. 4 (2010): 385–98.

[Particularly relevant to digital archival organization and access structures.]

Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and Its Limits.” In Refiguring the Archive, edited by Carolyn Hamilton et al., 19–27. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

[A concise but influential essay on archives as technologies of state and institutional authority.]

McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

[Foundational for understanding texts as socially produced entities rather than isolated authorial artifacts.]

McGann, Jerome J. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

[Especially valuable for digital genetic edition discussion.]

McKenzie, D. F. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts. London: British Library, 1986.

[A landmark work arguing that textual meaning is shaped by material and institutional conditions of production, transmission, and preservation.]

Steedman, Carolyn. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

[A major work on the archive as fantasy, desire, bureaucracy, and material residue. Particularly resonant for the discussion of recovery, dispersal, and institutional mediation.]

Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009.

[One of the most important contemporary works on reading archives not merely for content but for the institutional logic embedded in their organization and administration.]

Joshua Kotin turned me onto the David Gahr archive being auctioned off on eBay this past November. For those who don’t know, Gahr was known for his photos of musicians. He worked principally for Time from the mid-Sixties through the Seventies but also for major publications such as Life and People during his lifetime. With Robert Shelton, Gahr documented the Sixties folk music scene in The Face of Folk Music (1968), and the Fugs were among the many famous musicians, artists, and writers Gahr photographed. Gahr shot the photo used for the Fugs’ first album cover:

It’s not surprising that Gahr shot this album cover because he was there for the Fugs’ premiere at the grand opening of the Peace Eye bookstore on February 24, 1965. I’ll share photos Gahr shot of this event here. The photos show Sanders’ bookstore was packed on opening night, with old guard Beatniks alongside soon to rise hippies. Gahr’s photos document the counterculture percolating. Here is Sanders’ handbill for the event:

This handbill outlines the “total assault on the culture” that Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts declared. Every aspect of underground culture is represented here. The announcement for the third anniversary issue of Fuck You featuring a cover from Andy Warhol’s Couch shows literature and film overlapping. That Fuck You wasn’t a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Catch-22 is reflected in the handbill’s inclusion of porn as one of the things in the issue. The “World Premiere” of the Fugs adds music — and amphetamines — to this mix. Peace Eye was to be a new home base for the total assault on the culture. 

The photo of Sanders talking with William S. Burroughs is the most important of these photos. This was a full-circle moment because Sanders’ total assault was inspired by Burroughs. In the photo, Sanders appears to be showing Burroughs the new Fuck You issue. Here we have Burroughs effectively endorsing Sanders’ project:

Burroughs had only just returned to the States, now with his recently gained reputation as an underground icon. His status within the underground at this moment can’t be overstated. Burroughs putting in an appearance made the opening. 

Burroughs being there was bigger than Peace Eye opening, which is why Burroughs features prominently in Sanders’ 2011 memoir account while Burroughs’ biographies practically overlook this event. According to Sanders, Time sent reporters to cover the grand opening, and Burroughs expressed dislike for them, likely because of their coverage of his 1951 uxoricide. Ted Berrigan’s C Press published Burroughs’ response — his own version of Time — the same year Peace Eye opened. Peace Eye’s opening was big enough for Gahr to shoot and Time reporters to attend but not big enough for Time to run a story about. However, similar to Burroughs’ appearance, Time‘s attendance was important enough for Sanders to include in his memoir almost five decades later. Through his account of Burroughs and Time at the opening, Sanders positions himself as the bridge between the underground — represented by Burroughs — and the epitome of what the underground cast as its opposition — Time. 

This wasn’t the beginning of Sanders’ involvement with Burroughs. Their relationship started with Sanders’ publication of Roosevelt After Inauguration in January 1964, which Jed Birmingham has written about. Sanders also published APO-33, which Birmingham has also written about. Additionally, not long after this event, Burroughs provided the motorcycle image on the cover of Fuck You‘s final issue.

Among the things this next photograph shows is the mimeo poetry world contributing to the rise of the underground press. While the underground press hadn’t begun when Sanders declared a total assault on the culture, Gahr’s photographs show the underground press incubating at Peace Eye. 

The balding man smoking next to Sanders at the center of the photo is Allen Katzman, co-founder of East Village Other (EVO), which would start later this same year. Alongside Paul Krassner’s The Realist and the Los Angeles Free Press, EVO was one of the most important underground papers of the Sixties. Sanders himself was offered an EVO ownership position but declined. Like Sanders, Katzman came out of the coffee house poetry scene, but Katzman writes in his unpublished memoir that he made a conscious decision to move away from poetry with the founding of EVO. The whole of historian Arthur Marwick’s “long sixties” (1958-1974) is in this photograph: EVO began as a standard newspaper, evolved in increasingly psychedelic directions, and by the late Sixties pivoted toward pornography with Kiss, helping lay the groundwork for the “porno chic” trend of the early 1970s. Fuck You was an inspiration for EVO.

There’s another through line in this photo to porno chic. On the left of the photograph is the National Tattler with the “PEANUT BUTTER ORGY” cover story. National Tattler was one of the sensationalist tabloids that Sanders, working at a cigar store on 42nd Street before opening Peace Eye, knew well. Fuck You editorials mimicked these tabloids. For this issue, Tattler editor Bob Luce photographed his naked wife covered in peanut butter melting under the hot lights. Pretty soft-core stuff, but this is also the kind of publication the reformed industrial spy turned pornographer Al Goldstein wrote for before starting Screw. Goldstein claimed Screw was a rebuke to the tabloids’ hypocritical embrace of graphic violence while shunning explicit sex. Goldstein inspired Larry Flynt, but it was Fuck You that inspired Goldstein. Not only did Sanders’ magazine give Goldstein the name Screw, but the “Fuck You” segment on his TV program Midnight Blue was lifted directly from the “bouquets of fuck yous” Sanders published — as was Flynt’s “Asshole of the Month” feature in Hustler. It’s been forgotten that before there was Larry Flynt, there was Ed Sanders.

Bob Luce eventually left the National Tattler to promote wrestling events around Chicago, which feels fitting with the Michael McClure poster above Katzman and Sanders. This “poster poem” riffed on boxing match promotions, eventually becoming the play The Beard, which faced various obscenity charges. The year after Peace Eye opened, Warhol shot a film version of The Beard. The significance of Peace Eye as a counterculture launching pad is reflected by McClure’s poster being on the wall well before the attention the play’s obscenity charges brought. Having the poster hung shows just how “in” a place Sanders’ scrounge lounge was. 

Warhol wasn’t present for the grand opening — though Sanders says popular author James Michener came in a limousine on Warhol’s recommendation — but his presence was surely felt that night. Three Warhol flower silkscreens hung at the opening, one of which is visible above Sanders in the photo. To the right of the flowers appears to be a drawing of this photo booth self-portrait:

This photo booth self-portrait was of the bunch that Self-Portrait (Red) (1965) came from. Self-Portrait (Red) was at the center of the authentication debacle that Richard Dorment elaborates in Warhol After Warhol (2023). At minimum, Dorment shows how the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board failed to account for Warhol’s use of distributed production methods. However, the Board’s actions — including reversing forgery rulings to sell works formerly rejected as authentic for millions of dollars — suggests motives more troubling than ignorance or oversight. Long story short, the Board spent over $7 million dollars to settle a lawsuit over one of these portraits, then disbanded after 16 years of operation, but in a way that sidestepped mounting legal and reputational danger by offloading authentication risk on buyers.

It’s possible that Sanders had his own run-in with the Andy Warhol Authentication Board, which operated from 1995-2012. Sanders reports having owned three silkscreened Warhol flower banners. One he destroyed in “a very expensive tear-up” for a Fugs show, another was abandoned in a deli, but the last he managed to keep long enough to christen “The Peace Eye Diptych” and sell. He doesn’t say how much he got for the banner or if he went through the board, only that he later saw it sell for $250,000. While Sanders bemoans the $500,000 he carelessly lost during the Sixties, back in 1965 making this kind of money probably wasn’t at the top of people’s minds. This likely changed by, say, 1967 — the year Sanders was featured on the cover of Life — with events like the Monterey Pop Festival proving the total assault on the culture’s mass appeal.

Sanders was no stranger to authentication controversy. The issue of Fuck You celebrated at Peace Eye’s opening included W.H. Auden’s poem about fellatio, “The Platonic Blow.” The poem had circulated underground for a while before Tram Combs of the Pierpont Morgan Library gave Sanders a version. At the time, some, such as Random House editor Jason Epstein, doubted that the poem was Auden’s. It was later learned that the poem really was Auden’s. Auden described this poem in this way: “Deciding that there ought to be one [pornographic poem] in the Auden Corpus, I am writing a purely pornographic poem, The Platonic Blow. You should do one on the other Major Act.” Sanders’ Bugger: An Anthology (1964) covered the other “Major Act” Auden jokes about.  

In Fuck You, Sanders introduced “The Platonic Blow” as “a Gobble Poem snatched from the notebook of W.H. Auden,” thereby positioning his own Gobble Gang Poems in a literary lineage. The version printed in Fuck You swapped the first and fifth stanzas around, starting in medias res with:

He put down his glass and stretched his bare arms along 
The back of my sofa. The afternoon sunlight struck
The blond hairs on the wrist near my head. His chin was strong,
His mouth sucky. I could hardly believe my luck.

Instead of:

It was a Spring day, a day, a day for a lay, when the air
Smelled like a locker-room, a day to blow or get blown; 
Returning from lunch I turned my corner and there
On a near-by stop I saw him standing alone.

This error stands out from the kinds of anomalies typical of Fuck You (upside-down pages, mispagination, different kinds of paper, etc.), many of which may have been a consequence of the varied, unsupervised help Sanders had in collating issues. (See, for example, Andy Clifford’s description of putting together copies of Fuck You while crashing in the back of Peace Eye to hand out at the Bronx Zoo if Sanders was convicted). Tempting as it is to think this transposition could have been Berrigan-inspired, the stanza order’s correction in the subsequent Fuck You Press stand-alone edition suggests that the error was unintentional. (Fun fact: Guild Press published an illustrated version with photos of two men doing what the poem described in 1970.) Regardless, publishing a sexually explicit poem from a poet with Auden’s literary reputation — without his permission — was a big deal. Sanders’ commitment to “publish anything” brought together Pop Art and “serious” literature.  

Underground filmmaking was another important part of the total assault on the culture, and Gahr documented Jonas Mekas, the God of American underground cinema at this time, attending the Peace Eye opening: 

In addition to Burroughs, Mekas was a primary inspiration for Fuck You as well as Sanders’ brief stint as a filmmaker. Sanders has said that for years the first thing he read from the Village Voice was Mekas’ weekly column and that Mekas’ film Guns of the Trees inspired him to start publishing Fuck You. In fact, Fuck You‘s infamous dedication to those “groped by J. Edgar Hoover in the silent halls of congress” comes from a poem Allen Ginsberg reads in Mekas’ Guns of the Trees. Mekas sourced cheap blackmarket film, possibly from the air force, and a discreet development service for Sanders. He also funded Jack Smith’s film Flaming Creatures, which figured in Sanders’ 1967 obscenity trial. Here is a shot of a Village Voice clipping with Sanders’ pronouncement that Mekas is God on the wall of Peace Eye that Gahr photographed:

One last component of the total assault on the culture that I want to show from these photographs are the Fugs. The Fugs were proto-punk, and the FBI famously called them “the filthiest and most vulgar thing the human mind could possibly conceive.” The FBI is probably overselling it, but their shows were much more wild — in the spirit of happenings — than they tend to be described now. Keep in mind that Sanders was still very much in Warhol’s orbit at this point. I wish I had the contact sheets or negatives from the Fugs’ album cover shoot, but I’ve lost bid after bid on Fugs items, usually in the last 10 seconds of the auctions. If an eBay sniper is reading this, in the spirit of Sanders I say, fuck you. RealityStudio readers will have to settle for photos of Fugs at the opening event. Here Tuli Kupferberg is reading in the front right of the frame, and Peter Stampfel — who joined the Fugs from The Holy Modal Rounders — is talking with Katzman at the center:

There’s a copy of Bugger on the shelf behind them, and Kupferberg appears to be reading the Village Voice. I can’t make out the full title of the magazine behind the individual between Kupferberg and Katzman (does anyone recognize him? Peter Orlovsky?), but the first word of the magazine’s title appears to be “true” (True Confessions? True Detective?). This person I can’t name appears to be holding a copy of the new Fuck You issue. I didn’t see Fug Steve Weber in any of these photographs but I believe Ken Weaver is in the sweater (balding, with glasses) in the center of this final photo:

You can also see Stampfel in the right corner and Katzman on the couch. The infamous “pot is fun” sign is visible in the back. Peace Eye, it’s worth recalling, was also home to the Marijuana Review, an important organ of the total assault on the culture. As a flip through the pages of Fuck You will show, drugs were an integral part of this cultural assault. Rumor has it that Thurston Moore has this “pot is fun” sign (and maybe some rare Fuck You Press items to boot). If anyone reading this can put me in touch with Moore, I’d love to talk.

Gahr’s photographs capture the counterculture on the verge of becoming The Counterculture. The Peace Eye that appears here is at a crossroads where poetry, underground film, folk music, obscenity battles, experimental publishing, pornography, psychedelic journalism, and avant-garde art all occupied the same physical and social space. Burroughs, Mekas, Warhol, Katzman, the Fugs, and Sanders each represent developments that would later tend to be remembered as distinct histories. Here we can see them — and many I can’t identify — existing within a single milieu. The total assault on the culture that Sanders proclaimed was less a coherent program than a network of overlapping projects, personalities, and ambitions that hadn’t yet settled. These photos are a reminder of how much was incubated in places that at the time seemed temporary and marginal. Many of the developments traced through these photos eventually became industries and institutions. It’s tempting to see Peace Eye as the beginning of an inevitable story but Gahr’s photos can be read differently: a crowded room full of people who had little idea what would matter fifty years later. That uncertainty is what makes these photos valuable. 

It’s not a coincidence that the year Grove Press brought Naked Lunch to America was the same year Ed Sanders rolled out Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts. Sanders stepped onto the literary stage with William Burroughs as his model for cultural rebellion. The first issues of Fuck You were built around Sanders’s Soft-Man poems, a series he later admitted were “a kind of semireligious text inspired by William Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine” (Fug You 8). Even though he later brushed them off as juvenilia, Sanders still collected most of them in Peace Eye in 1965. Even Sanders’s iconic rallying cry “total assault on the culture” was inspired by Burroughs (Fug You xiv). Yet while there would have been no Sanders without Burroughs, the two came to represent considerably different visions of the counterculture. Whereas Burroughs blurred boundaries, collapsing utopian and destructive energies into a single counterculture stew, Sanders sought to separate the “authentic” from the “corrupted,” offering readers an interpretative compass for a subculture he felt a need to defend in the court of public opinion. Examining where Sanders and Burroughs align and diverge shows how Sanders’s counterculture is always curated, shaped not only by who he felt deserved the status of authentic rebellion but what he thought could gain mainstream traction. The different strategies of Burroughs and Sanders reveal competing definitions of what counterculture was, could be, and should be.

Burroughs’s influence on Sanders persisted long after Fuck You ended. In a 2020 interview with Raymond Foye for Gagosian Quarterly, Sanders confessed that while drafting The Family—his 1971 book on Charles Manson—he had the galleys of Burroughs’s The Wild Boys right in front of him. He even claims to have scrawled his first notes for The Family directly onto the galleys for Burroughs’s novel. Sanders joked about whether some sharp-eyed scholar might one day make note of this, but the anecdote says more than the joke: Burroughs was never far from his work. You can see aspects of The Wild Boys seeping into The Family. Sanders’s cinematic flair—for instance, his introduction of Roman Polanski with the line “Fade in electronic soundtrack from Rosemary’s Baby” (68)—feels lifted from Burroughs’s arsenal of jump cuts and camera pans in The Wild Boys. Sanders’s campy refrains, especially the goofy-spooky “oo-ee-oo,” feel like an attempt to echo Burroughs’s balance of pulp and menace. And like Burroughs’s slippery “I” in The Wild Boys, Sanders only writes of himself obliquely in The Family, referring to himself as “this writer” while dropping editorial asides that can’t be mistaken for anyone else. Burroughs’s influence on The Family is suggested in some of Sanders’s writing techniques.

Both of these books also focus on transgressive subjects, but Burroughs and Sanders diverge sharply in approach to these subjects. Sanders constructs an interpretative scaffolding around disturbing material while Burroughs dismantles such frameworks, leaving readers without an interpretive safety net. Consider how Sanders emphasizes the horror of Manson followers contemplating death, describing how “people arrived from the desert, attired in leather, tanned and trim of form. And they were all sitting around ‘mocking up snuff,’ postulating the event of their own death so as to experience it mentally. Sound like fun?” (The Family 131). The heavy handed rhetorical question at the end makes it clear how Sanders expects the reader to feel. Compare this to the more ambiguous passage from Burroughs: “One time I smashed one of these gourd rats and the blood spurted out all over me. I threw him on the ground and he twisted around the sharp little black point between his legs was stiff. Xolotl laughed pointing to it then we were pointing to each other and laughing and I lay down pretending I was the gourd rat throwing myself around and Xolotl shoved my legs up and we made fire I was kicking like a grog” (The Wild Boys 112). How does Burroughs position the reader in relation to these events? As a voyeur, critic, or something else? Is this a celebration? A portrayal of something to be condemned? Are these experiences supposed to be pleasurable or painful? Sanders tells readers how to feel about what he writes, but Burroughs leaves readers to confront unsettling ambiguities without interpretative guardrails.

These contrasting portrayals reflect different approaches to what constituted the counterculture. Throughout The Family, Sanders persistently works to separate the authentic, positive elements of the counterculture from its corrupted manifestations. This distinction matters because, while both The Family and The Wild Boys represented (relatively, at least for Burroughs) mainstream works for their respective authors, they addressed different audiences. The Family wasn’t written for an underground or avant garde readership like The Wild Boys. This left Burroughs space to blend all elements of the counterculture into a single, chaotic mixture. Consider that although Burroughs at one point aligns his wild boys with the Yippies—the political group Sanders helped found—he also depicts them performing violent, orgiastic rituals designed to “push… the spirit out the back of the head” of boys (The Wild Boys 139, 156). These rituals echo practices Sanders attributes to Manson. Most tellingly, the wild boys pursue “total chaos,” a goal Sanders explicitly links to the Process Church of the Final Judgment, which he argues was instrumental in corrupting Manson (The Family 74, The Wild Boys 139). Burroughs’s wild boys seem as close to Manson’s apparently murderous occult philosophy as they are Sanders’s picturesque rebrand of the counterculture.

The Process Church libel lawsuit against Sanders and his publisher foregrounds the difference between these two versions of the counterculture. In the British trial, Sanders’s legal team only needed to demonstrate a 51% probability that the Process had influenced Manson—a relatively low burden of proof where minor factual errors wouldn’t undermine the defense as long as the central claim of malign influence remained credible. While Sanders’s team presented enough evidence of overlap between the Process and Manson to satisfy this legal requirement, much of this evidence regarding shared beliefs could equally have been applied to Burroughs’s work such as The Wild Boys. A psychology professor testified for Sanders’s team that the Sex issue of the Process magazine could harm young, impressionable people, and they argued that distributing Process literature was like giving matches to children, making the distributor partially responsible when one child inevitably starts a fire. This same loose logic of malign influence through provocative counterculture materials could theoretically extend to Burroughs’s work (or even Sanders’s work prior to The Family). Since a significant portion of the defense relied on a monkey see monkey do conception of representation, the trial foregrounds Sanders’s curatorial approach to the counterculture. Burroughs made the cut for Sanders. 

It’s interesting to imagine a case that could have been made for Manson finding inspiration in, say, Naked Lunch or the Nova Trilogy. Since these four novels all predate the founding of the Process, maybe Burroughs was one of their sleazo-inputs (fade in John Carpenter’s Halloween theme). To be clear, this isn’t an evaluation of the veracity of any of Sanders’s claims, but the probabilistic defense of The Family helps show a meaningful difference in how Sanders and Burroughs presented the counterculture. Burroughs recognized more affinities between strains of the counterculture that Sanders kept separate. Sanders curated a mainstream-friendly version of the counterculture that attempts to preserve his idea of radical promise by cutting off its darker permutations. On the other hand, Burroughs didn’t back away from the chaos. His version of the counterculture shows a drive toward freedom bound up with self-destructive tendencies. This difference matters because not only did it inform how the counterculture was seen then but also how it is remembered today. Reading Sanders and Burroughs alongside each other shows two distinct conceptions of the counterculture: one carefully managed, the other unwilling to be contained.

References

Burroughs, William. The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead. Grove Press, 1994.

Sanders, Ed. Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side. Da Capo Press, 2011.

Ed Sanders and Nelson Barr inside Peace Eye Bookstore (383 East 10th Street), New York, January 14, 1966. Photo: Fred W. McDarrah

As Bobby Bittman would say, “How are ya?” It’s been a while. Can I just say something? (to quote the real William B.) I have been out of the loop in the book collecting game for years now. As I have mentioned before, I can be roused out of retirement by a signed Icarus 46. Jeff Ball, you hear that? Or My Own Mag Issue 1 & 2. Or The Divers Press Snarling Garland of X-Mas Verse. But the one thing that can consistently rattle my cage and get me to stick my nose in the air is Fuck You Press items. I am always game for a handbill I don’t have or just about anything I can add to the RealityStudio Fuck You Press Bibliography page. To be honest, the shit just does not come up. Not that I am looking. But if I could say that I am still a book collector, it is not of William Burroughs, so much as Ed Sanders’ Fuck You Press.

And Ed Sanders is who brings me out of retirement and back to RealityStudio. I did a pretty cool thing last summer. I spent two weeks researching the Ed Sanders Archive at The Special Collections of Firestone Library at Princeton University. Best of all, I did this thanks to a Princeton University Library Research Grant awarded through the Friends of the Princeton University Library. Joshua Kotin, a professor at Princeton and a contributor to RealityStudio on the Fuck You Press bootleg of Ezra Pound’s Cantos tipped me off that grants were available. I applied for a two-week research stay at $1,500 per week plus a transportation cost of $700. There are grants available for up to six weeks but given that I am a drone with a job, I was happy that I could get two weeks somewhat to myself from my employer. The Friends of the Library offer about 25 grants a year. The application process is pretty basic and it is open to anyone, not just professors and graduate students. I am a book collector and independent researcher with no university or institutional affiliation so it is possible for even fanboys to get a grant.

Here are the bare bones of the application process (from the Grant Webpage at Princeton University):

• Set up an account in the application system
• Complete application form
• Upload a curriculum vitae or resume (Word or PDF) 
• Upload your Project Narrative (no more than 1,000 words); your narrative should include the relevance to the proposed research of the unique resources found in the Princeton University Library collections 
• Provide two letters of recommendation; invitations are sent directly from the system to the recommenders
• Submit your application once all of the items above are received. 

For 2026-2027, the application process opens this October and closes in January. If you are interested in researching the Ed Sanders archive, I encourage you to give it a shot. It did not take me long to get my application together and it is easy to submit.  

To give some idea of what a successful Project Narrative looks like, here is mine in full. This will also give some idea of what I was looking to do in the Archive.

I am applying for a two-week grant to research two projects involving the Ed Sanders archive housed at Princeton. The first project is a manuscript involving Floating Bear, an essential publication in the Mimeograph Revolution edited by poets Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) and Diane DiPrima, which ran for thirty-eight issues between 1961 and 1969. One unique aspect of this periodical is that unlike other publications in its milieu, Floating Bear was not available in stores, and was distributed strictly by the United States Postal Service. The presence of mailing labels on many copies make it possible to track recipients of the magazine. 

Ed Sanders received issue thirty-two in February 1966. By researching the Ed Sanders archive, I will be able to write a chapter that details Sanders, with a focus on 1966, as issue thirty-two relates to Floating Bear, Fuck You Press and Sanders’ creative circle, including his iconoclastic rock and roll band, The Fugs. The archive will allow me to provide bibliographical, biographical and anecdotal details that will establish the foundations for the chapter and enable me to flesh out the narrative of the Mimeograph Revolution and counterculture of that moment as documented by issue thirty-two’s distribution to Sanders. 

I have tracked more than one hundred copies of Floating Bear that were addressed to notable figures such as Donald Allen, Jasper Johns and Jack Kerouac. The manuscript is structured in thirty-eight chapters, one for each issue that was mailed to prominent artists, publishers, and authors. The manuscript begins with a chapter on the maverick editor Donald Allen, whose role in jumpstarting the Mimeo Revolution cannot be underestimated. The following chapter on Jasper Johns discusses the artist’s interactions with New American Poets, while the chapter on Beat novelist Jack Kerouac discusses his relationship with New York City and its creative community. 

My objective is to write the most substantial history of Floating Bear to date with a focus on the individuals, presses and organizations associated with the Mimeograph Revolution and counterculture of the time. For example, Beat novelist William Burroughs received issue thirty-one while living in New York City in 1965. I have composed a sample chapter that details the importance of Burroughs receiving that issue at that time and place.

Sanders receiving issue thirty-two of Floating Bear in February 1966 is of great temporal interest. On January 1, 1966, Sanders was arrested on charges of obscenity at Peace Eye Bookstore in Manhattan’s East Village. His receipt of Floating Bear just a month later was a demonstration of solidarity from the mimeo community and an expression of intimate empathy by DiPrima. Issue nine of Floating Bear faced obscenity charges in 1961 for the publication of Jones’ The System of Dante’s Hell and Burroughs’ Roosevelt After Inauguration. Sanders’ Fuck You Press published the Burroughs text as a chapbook in 1964 when City Lights bookstore in San Francisco refused to publish it for fear of obscenity charges. Box 373 in the Sanders Papers contains information about the police raid that can tell the story of Sanders’ censorship battles, which in turn relates to censorship in the mimeo revolution from Big Table to Floating Bear to Fuck You Press. 

Also of interest is Box 307, involving the opening of Peace Eye Bookstore. As a rare-book dealer who issued rare-book catalogues, Sanders not only operated a brick-and-mortar store but also managed a mailing list, an example of which is in Box 307. The Peace Eye distribution list may overlap with Floating Bear’s and thereby help tell the story of the Mimeo Revolution network of the period, which also ties back into the story of censorship at the hands of the post office suffered by publications like Big Table and Aspen.

The second project I will research in the Ed Sanders archive is an anecdotal bibliography of Fuck You Press. On RealityStudio.org, I have compiled a draft checklist that I believe is the most comprehensive and complete bibliography of Fuck You Press currently available. In the future I plan to expand this list into a full anecdotal bibliography that provides essays on each individual publication from the press. For example, for Roosevelt After Inauguration, published by Fuck You Press in 1964, I wrote an essay that would serve as a prototype of a descriptive entry for the bibliography. Access to the Ed Sanders Papers would allow me to review and revise my current listing as well as research the descriptive entries for the A-list items. 

While the A-items of the Fuck You Press bibliography are well established, the handbills are undocumented and under-researched. The Sanders archive will help fill out that narrative on both a bibliographic and descriptive level. For example, Box 307 contains a Peace Eye flyer from 1965. Researching this box, I could confirm whether it is present on my bibliography and then, with the other materials regarding the opening of Peace Eye Books in Box 307, structure a descriptive entry regarding the history of the founding of Peace Eye in 1965. 

Given two weeks to research the Ed Sanders Papers at Princeton, I am confident I can complete my chapter on Ed Sanders in the Floating Bear book as well as make substantial progress on an anecdotal bibliography of Fuck You Press. 

As you can see, I was focused in my approach to the Archive. I knew what I wanted to do there. The question is whether the Archive was up to the task. Hopefully over the next few months or years of posts relating to the Archive we will figure that out.

So, I got awarded the grant and went to Princeton in August 2025. When you get there you get your money and for those two weeks you are obligated to be in the Special Collection from 9AM to 4PM Monday through Friday. The Special Collection does not open a second before 9AM and it is closed over the weekend. When I was there, I had to work for my day job at the same time, taking meetings and doing projects. They do not make you punch a clock at the Special Collection to make sure you do your 70 hours of research in two weeks, but they will notice if you are not in there consistently and are just there for a money grab. $3700 is a nice chunk of change. Besides actually putting in the time in the Special Collection, the only obligation the Friends of the Library require is that you submit a 300-500 word report on your experience in the archive and what you think the results will be. They do not require that I actually write my Floating Bear book or even update my Fuck You Bibliography. There is no formal publication required to fulfill the grant’s obligations.  

Here is my report, which gets us to where RealityStudio fits into all of this:

In my two weeks of research at the Ed Sanders Archive in the Special Collection, I was able to establish that Issue 32 of Floating Bear sent to Sanders in February 1966 will form the basis for a chapter in my Floating Bear book, which will chronicle the police crackdown on the mimeo underground and the underground’s resulting banding together in solidarity. Sanders’ receipt of Floating Bear shortly after his Peace Eye bust for obscenity in January 1966 is symbolic of this community’s cohesion in the face of adversity, such as the harassment of Allen Ginsberg and d.a. levy. The Sanders archive has material about this harassment and the mimeo underground’s response, including letters of support to Sanders after his bust. Floating Bear‘s own brush with the law in 1961 foreshadowed the police crackdown on the mimeo underground later in the decade as that underground gained increasing influence on the counterculture.

While I was not able to compile a definitive bibliography of the publications of Fuck You Press by means of the archive, I was able to supplement the bibliography on RealityStudio.org through the presence of never realized Fuck You manuscripts, unrecorded Fuck You and Peace Eye handbills, and handbills printed at Fuck You by groups such as the Motherfuckers.

RealityStudio.org will update the Fuck You bibliography with the information and images gathered from the Sanders Archive as well as create a section on the RealityStudio.org site dedicated to the Archive in general. Future posts on the site will deal not only with the unpublished Fuck You manuscripts, the handbills, 1960s Rolodex of Sanders’ contacts, mailing lists, invoices, and other ephemera from the archive but also with the logistics of researching the archive including reviews of places to stay, eat, and relax in Princeton during your stay. During my research, I graded on an A through F scale folder by folder the boxes of the 1960s material in the archive to determine its research value, which will be posted on RealityStudio.org along with my grading criteria. This should prove of use for those looking to research in this area. While my focus was on the 1960s aspects of the archive it is hoped that other scholars will post on RealityStudio.org about their research in other areas. Supporting that effort, contacts have been made with a researcher dealing with the Manson and investigative journalism material who plans to post essays on site.

Consider this an introductory post to what is hoped to be a series of essays and postings of the holdings of the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton. Keaton Studebaker, who has been doing research on Sanders at Princeton ever since the Archive arrived on campus, is the contact I mentioned above. He has a couple posts in the can and hopefully will contribute several more as time goes on.

I do not want to oversell all this. RealityStudio is primarily a William Burroughs site although for quite a while the Bibliographic Bunker has been focused on the Mimeo Revolution side of things. Here at Mapping the Secret Location: Postings on the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton University, the Mimeo Revolution will be front and center but William Burroughs will make appearances, as will all your favorites of the counterculture, including Charles Manson. As always it is hoped this will not be a one man show and that others, like Keaton, will post of their experiences with the Ed Sanders Archive. I think there is even room for researchers to send in their reports from other archives around the world dedicated to William Burroughs and his fellow travelers. A while back I posted an excel spreadsheet with a list of special collections of all our friends in the literary world. Let’s consider that list the legend of gold in lost mines. Now it is time to dig in these places and see what we come up with. I have just scratched the surface at the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton. Have you been digging there too? Or anywhere else? Anybody with me?

Mapping the Secret Location: Postings on the Ed Sanders Archive at Princeton University is a new section on RealityStudio exploring the Ed Sanders Papers located at Princeton. It is a complement to the Fuck You Press Archive created by Jed Birmingham in a series of Bibliographic Bunker columns.

• Introduction by Jed Birmingham
• Grading Criteria for Boxes at the Archive by Jed Birmingham
• Lodging at Princeton by Jed Birmingham
• Ordering Items by Jed Birmingham
• The Dismal Science of the Ed Sanders Archive by Jed Birmingham
• Archive Trivia Part I – Larry Coryell by Jed Birmingham
• Archive Trivia Part II – Warhol Gossip by Jed Birmingham
• Soft Men, Wild Boys: The Countercultures of Ed Sanders and William Burroughs by Keaton Studebaker
• The Ginsberg Cold Cream Conspiracy by Keaton Studebaker

Additional Links

• Ed Sanders Papers at Princeton
• Finding Aid for Ed Sanders Papers at Princeton (pdf)

“Old Arch” first appeared in The Beatest State In The Union: An Anthology of Beat Texas Writings, edited by Christopher Carmona, Rob Johnson, and Chuck Taylor (Lamar University Press, 2015). It appears here on RealityStudio courtesy of James Grauerholz and the William S. Burroughs Estate.

[Editor’s note: Arch Ellisor was a moonshiner and neighbor of William S. Burroughs when he lived on a 99-acre ranch in east Texas. This is the last complete story written by Burroughs, and it was composed in separate parts in the journals collected in Last Words. The editors have assembled it with the blessing of the Burroughs estate. The story was inspired by Burroughs’ 50-year-old memory of a Time magazine article about a policeman described as “a buck-toothed gunman with insolent eyes” who was killed by moonshiners in Harlan County, Kentucky (“New Grave in Harlan County,” Time, May 2, 1949).]

Two of them droved out to see old Arch Ellisor, out where the sheep dip used to be and Clem Higgins got drunker than usual, fell into the dip, got stucked and drowned. Some said his fourteen-year-old daughter he’d been screwing incestuous held him down by jumping on top of him, up and down like they was screwing — and some says it was his old lady dumped a bag of hog feed on him, you know them dips is constructed like what a bitch has between her gams.

So here they stand, in suit and tie and black shined shoes, like they sprung up outa some place real different.

And there is Old Arch sitting on his porch, a mason jar of white corn in his hand.

And they say it together:

“We work for that crazy American government,”

And Arch says:

“Howdy.”

Then they split up. One comes on fake-folksy:

“Hey, Pilgrim, how about giving me a snort of your bug juice?”

Arch passes him the jar.

He takes a swig:

“Phew!”

Goes into an act of fanning his mouth.

The other Fed is waving the Witness Protecting Action in Arch’s face:

“You don’t have to live in a shack like this. Why, you can have a nice place in town, TV, flushing toilet and $50 a month clear, free and all yours. How’s that hit you?”

And he leans forward, punches Arch — soft and playful — on his chin.

Then they both gets hands on their hips, and their eyebrows shoot up and wriggle:

“It’s the offer you can’t refuse.”

“It’s the chance extraordinary.”

And they is back smiling — “we know you” — a knowing smile:

(“He’s hooked, we got him. He is ours.”)

— as they smack their lips.

“We got a job to do, Arch.”

“Same as you.”

“Just what sorta work you do, Arch?”

“Well now, I sorta steer folks the way they wanta go. Like someone comes here wants some action, comes to Old Arch.”

Suddenly they stop the smiles, and chew up the words and spit ’em out.

“You were there.”

“You saw it.”

“Ever hear about obstructing justice?”

“We can summon you to Federal Court, and when you lie it’s a felony.”

They prance around him, jabbing fingers at him.

“Want to go into the can, Arch? Old ones like you do hard time.”

“Know what they done in Marion Pen?”

They thrust their snarling faces at him.

“They fucked a ninety-five-year-old paralyzed man up his ass.”

“He had a rectal hemorrhage.”

Arch says:

“I reckon.”

“I wouldn’t want to see that happen to you, Arch.”

He shoves his face an inch [from] Arch’s, leering, all his teeth out.

They are going manic. They grab the jar of corn and swig.

Suddenly, from nowhere, Arch manifests a fiddle. His face is shifting, animals peeking in and out — goats and cats and weasels. He is dancing, cats gather and yeowl.

“Well, some music for the road, feller say.”

“Faster faster round and round
swing your partner offen the ground
Faster faster round and round.”

The Feds is capering, leering.

“Take off your coat and throw it in a corner.”

The Feds take off their coats, showing their shoulder holster guns (which they pat and rub suggestively), drop their coats over the porch rail.

“Stay all night and stay a little longer,
Don’t see why you don’t stay a little longer.”

On the way back to town a “freak wind” blew the Fed car off the road. Both agents were “killed at the scene.”

“It was a terrible tragedy,” said Bill Rogers, spokesman for the FBI office in Pitsman, [Montana]. “They were brilliant young operatives, with a grasp on sensitive cases. It is a tragic loss to the department, and the nation.”

When Old Arch used his pipe, it could be plain panic for fake folk, because you can’t hear that sound and lie.

Is there a basic lie in being alive in a body?

Of course. But most folks don’t know that.

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

MC Bill

“Panic” by The Smiths fades into Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ “Love Comes in Spurts.” And we are off deep into the soundtrack of Interzone at the Meet Café somewhere off the beaten path in the City Market. It takes a lot to get me out and about after hours nowadays but I might be coaxed to attend a vinyl night now and again at a local watering hole. There is something about spinning vinyl that tickles the collector in me. Planned Obsolescence is a gas and I love dead technology but old vinyl will never die. The collectors will keep it alive. God bless them.

When you talk about My Burroughs, one of my favorite images of Burroughs is of him and Ian Sommerville putting down tracks on The Beatles’ dime in the Abbey Road Studios dedicated to Zapple, the spoken word/avant garde arm of Apple. DJ Sommervile and MC Bill scratching and inching tapes with giant joints smoking in the ashtray on the mixing console. What a fucking trip!! Burroughs is everywhere even in the world of rap and DJing. It is impossible to think of the concept of sampling without touching on the poetics of Burroughs. And of course Burroughs was there first if not with two turntables and a microphone but instead with a scissors, a Stanley knife, and some audio tape.  

It is not enough to attend and enjoy a DJ set, I have to read about the history of the DJ in order to contextualize it all. Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton is a good place to start and follow that up with Tim Lawrence’s Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor. Burroughs is in the index of Life and Death lurking in the shadows of The Mudd Club. Even if Burroughs hated rock music, he could not resist a good scene. Both of these books are fantastic, well-researched histories of DJ scenes, but for me the most enjoyable part of them is the DJ set lists they include. So you can find the selected discography of Anita Sarko at The Mudd Club circa 1980-1981, when Burroughs could be found in the audience, and then pop over to YouTube and schlup Anita and play her set. The sounds of Joy Division‘s “She’s Lost Control” and Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” come on and things get a little Burrougshsian. I recommend these books for the set lists alone. You can go down the rabbit hole and suddenly it is dawn and, like the club goers at The Roxy, you head out the door looking for breakfast, your next fix, or the next party.

Spinning through a set of Mark Kamins and Sean Cassette at Danceteria from 1980, I wondered what a Burroughs set would sound like. The possibilities are as vast as the entire library of recorded music. Do you spin Burroughs’ mix tapes, the music influenced by Burroughs, the music Burroughs listened to? Or maybe you try something different but still unmistakably Burroughsian. Here is my set. Come up with your own and we will post it on RealityStudio in order to get the Mugwumps on the dance floor at the Café Meet.

Panic on the streets of Birmingham. HANG THE DJ!!! HANG THE DJ!!! HANG THE DJ!!!

The William Mix

• “Hungry Like the Wolf” – Duran Duran
• “Without You” – Badfinger
• “Lester Leaps In” – Count Basie’s Kansas City Seven
• “Heroin” – Velvet Underground
• “Hey Joe” – The Jimi Hendrix Experience
• “Paperback Writer” – The Beatles
• “Bungle in the Jungle” – Jethro Tull
• “The Boys are Back in Town” – Thin Lizzy
• “Africa” – Toto
• “I Couldn’t Get High” – The Fugs
• “Everyday I Write the Book” – Elvis Costello
• “Paris Blues Main Theme” – Duke Ellington
• “Noise” – The Velvet Underground
• “Silence” – Andy Warhol
• “Trash” – New York Dolls
• “53rd & 3rd” – The Ramones
• “Tears in Heaven” – Eric Clapton
• “Home Sweet Home” – Motley Crue
• “Sell Out” – Reel Big Fish
• “Pumped Up Kicks” – Foster the People
• “Guns Gold Girls” – Metric
• “Dust in the Wind” – Kansas

Don’t Hide the Madness: A Soundtrack

by James Adams

When Conrad Knickerbocker inventoried the St. Louis hotel room of William S. Burroughs on New Year’s Day 1965, the first item he listed was a transistor radio. In my mind Burroughs always had a radio nearby, to commune with the ghosts behind the shortwave static, to use as a tool to uncover the truth hidden in a layered audio cut-in, or maybe just to listen to the news. 

This playlist collects the popular songs of the day as determined by Billboard—the unavoidable pop that dominated the airwaves—that Burroughs might have scanned past while turning the radio dial at key moments in his life and career. The dates aren’t arbitrary. They’re stolen from Jed Birmingham’s exploration of Burroughs’ life as a sequence of pivotal moments. Those days and events shaped the Burroughs we know and remember. This is the music that was in the air.

A crystal radio set Bill leaned touching dials “Do you hear anything?” – “Yes static” – “Good” – so we’ll sing one song until some metallic staccato voice or long long radio silence explodes the players and the premises to take it all the way down, a voice that no one could connect to the speaker or recognize on hearing it again to find out more about the nervous system and gain control over your reactions – “I hear music ten years from now and listen at once” – through areas where popular tunes are waiting for the sunrise of cosmic laughter – “I’m trying to fix it so we can both listen” – all popular songs using music as punctuation, through streets of music trailing melodious propositions or the metal music of space – “now listen to this”:

Consolidated YouTube Playlist

1.) 1944/1945/January 1946 – Meeting Herbert Huncke

Bing Crosby and Carmen Cavallero – I Can’t Begin to Tell You

2.) September 6, 1951 – The shooting of Joan Vollmer

Rosemary Clooney – Come On-A My House 

3.) Late July 1959 – The publication date of Naked Lunch

Paul Anka – Lonely Boy 

4.) October 1959 – The rediscovery of the cut-up

Bobby Darin – Mack the Knife

5.) August 20-24, 1962 – The Edinburgh Conference

Little Eva – The Locomotion

6.) July 7, 1966 – The Supreme Court Decision on Naked Lunch

The Beatles – Paperback Writer

7.) August 26-29, 1968 – Democratic National Convention

The Rascals – People Got To Be Free

8.) August 1973 – The Sale of the Vaduz Archive

Stories – Brother Louie

9.) November 7, 1981 – Burroughs’ appearance on Saturday Night Live

Hall and Oates – Private Eyes 

10.) December 27, 1991 – The Release of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

Michael Jackson – Black or White

Another DJ Setlist

by Michael Stevens

• Clem Snide, Heroin
• Naked Lunch, Keep it Hardcore
• Mugwumps, You Can’t Judge a Book By the Cover
• Thin White Rope, Wire Animals
• Insect Trust, The Skin Game
• Steely Dan, Hey Nineteen
• Soft Machine, Slightly All the Time
• Dead Fingers Talk, Storm the Reality Studios
• DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid, Time out of Joint
• Nova Mob, Shoot Your Way to Freedom

Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting

Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg, edited by Steven Taylor

There is no single, right way to tell the story of William Burroughs. Here was a guy who distrusted and refused to believe in the tyranny of the definitive article. Burroughs hated the Do-Rights. Those with THE answer. A single doorstop biography, such as Ted Morgan‘s or Barry Miles‘, no matter how detailed and inclusive fails to fully capture a man so complex and so protean. Something always falls into that space between. Those who proclaim to have the true story, the full Monty, can only be talking assholes. How can you possibly organize such a multidimensional, fantastical life? Given Burroughs’ travels far and wide across multiple temporal Interzones, as well as inner and outer space, geography has proven popular. These attempts hopscotch the globe like that cut-up byline from of the Nova trilogy. “Ew york Aris Ome Oston” and so on and so on throughout North and South America, Africa, and Europe. Surely, a valid and often fruitful approach, but I have always wanted to know more about all those Burroughsian locales outside of the context of Burroughs. But is there a truly a context outside of Burroughs? He is seemingly everywhere.

Miles expanded the lens on Burroughs by focusing on a single locale with the history of the Beat Hotel but I fantasize about something even more archival. I envision a 1950s steamer trunk, like that with which Burroughs travelled, filled with the artifacts of Fifties and Sixties Paris. A vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunk is an artifact of Paris in and of itself. Nothing is forbidden; everything is permitted. The trunk is hungry. Throw in menus from the cafes and restaurants Burroughs frequented. What were the food and drink served at La Palette? How much did everything cost, including the drugs Burroughs copped there? Fill the trunk with copies of the books that Burroughs read as Naked Lunch came off the press in the exact editions and printings as consumed by Burroughs. What populated the bestseller list in Paris that week? Ditto for newspapers and magazines. What was on the newsstand the day the cut-up was rediscovered? What little mags circulated? What papers lay underneath Gysin’s Stanley knife? What songs drifted through the streets of Paris as Burroughs walked back to his garret at 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur after an afternoon browsing at The English Bookshop on 42 Rue de Seine? What teams won the national soccer matches, the French Open, the local elections? What movies flickered on the screens of the movie houses? What plays and shows entertained the Parisian public? What concerts? What paintings hung in the white cubes of the galleries? What exhibitions filled the museums? Gather as much of the archival evidence as it is possible to find. Track down the ephemera: the posters, the handbills, the pamphlets, the catalogues, the advertisements. But dare not distill them. Dare not write them up. Throw them all in the trunk and let Burroughs fans experience them for themselves. Construct their own narratives. Cut them up in their own minds.  

Yet maybe this is all wrong; the truth may not be stranger than fiction, the facts over time can only be recreated as myth and the story of Burroughs is best made up as fantasy. Each Burroughs historian a novelist or, better yet, a poet. There are as many ways to tell a Burroughs story as there are Burroughses. I wrote up My Burroughs. One’s own Burroughs might be the only true one, if only to the maker. I also desire a history of Burroughs as told through his bibliography. I tried my hand at this as well and that story, too, was as much fiction as fact. To be honest, the entire RealityStudio trunk, as deep as it is, as vast and infinite as the Internet seems to be, is only a fragment of the Burroughs story. There is far, far too little on the Burroughs of the Seventies and beyond to say nothing of the Burroughs of the Thirties and Forties.  

And there lies yet another approach to the Burroughs story. Chronicling Burroughs’ pivotal years. I have always wanted to know more about Burroughs in 1936, his final year at Harvard. There is a book I have been meaning to read on gay Harvard in 1920: Harvard’s Secret Court: The Savage Purge of Campus Homosexuals. Was Harvard in the Thirties the same? What was it like for Burroughs living in this persecuted underworld? I would also like to reconstruct Burroughs’ complete curriculum at Harvard from freshman year onwards. All the classes, all the syllabi. Burroughs received a remarkable education, one which stuck with him his entire life. Burroughs memorized his reading at Harvard and it was this classic education that astounded and fascinated the New Vision Beats in New York City in the Forties. I need to get all the yearbooks. Who was there? The mere fact that James Laughlin, founder of New Directions, overlapped with Burroughs at Harvard, has sent my mind racing for years. I have yet to write the piece on Burroughs, James Laughlin, and New Directions that ping pongs and pogoes in my brain as I sit in the alley behind my house with a 12-pack of Natty Bohs. Someday. Someday.

Rightly so, geography is important for Burroughs, but let us not forget that Burroughs was also obsessed with time. Miles and Morgan link geography with time as a structuring device. This practice serves as the foundation for Burroughs biography. Texas 1947-1948. Mexico 1949-1952. Tangier 1954-1958. Paris 1958-1960. London 1966-1973. New York 1974-1981. Lawrence 1981-1997. It would be interesting to break with geography and focus on time down to the granular. Individual pecks of sand in the hourglass. What if we broke Burroughs’ life down to just ten pivotal years, or even more finely to ten pivotal dates, and blow these minutiae out to book-length with ten individual chapters. Think Greil Marcus’ History of Rock and Roll in Ten Songs. The key years may look something like this:

• 1959
• 1951
• 1944
• 1981
• 1965
• 1973
• 1953
• 1985
• 1962
• 1992

The pivotal dates might read something like this:

• September 6, 1951 – The shooting of Joan Vollmer
• Late July 1959 – The publication date of Naked Lunch
• July 7, 1966 – The Supreme Court Decision on Naked Lunch
• 1944/1945/January 1946 – Meeting Herbert Huncke
• August 1973 – The Sale of the Vaduz Archive
• October 1959 – The Rediscovery of the cut-up
• August 26-29,1968 – Democratic National Convention
• August 20-24, 1962 – The Edinburgh Conference
• November 7, 1981 – Burroughs’ appearance on Saturday Night Live
• December 27, 1991 – The Release of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch

For sure, this is yet another example of My Burroughs. For example, listing the meeting of Herbert Huncke and not the meeting of Ginsberg, Kerouac, or Gysin might seem like the hottest of takes. Now, I love a hot take more than anybody but this is one that I firmly believe in. It is an event so monumental yet so ephemeral that it seemly occurred out of time. The dates shift from 1944 to 1946. A shady deal shrouded in mystery. To me the guy who introduced Burroughs to a lifetime of hard drug addiction is more important than the guys who arguably introduced Burroughs to the writing life. “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” a true Burroughs classic, was written well before Kerouac and Ginsberg ever came on the scene. In this story the routine as form is fully developed as is Burroughs’ style of humor. Junky could only be written after meeting Huncke and Huncke served as Burroughs’ Virgil in the Times Square underworld, a world that eventually led Burroughs from the hell of addiction to the paradise of Naked Lunch. I also think that Burroughs’ writing has more in common with Huncke than, say, Kerouac. This strikes me as particularly true in terms of Burroughs’ nostalgia for a romanticized Midwest and the hobo/criminal life of Jack Black, a life Huncke experienced firsthand.

Seemingly, books making arguments for the importance of pivotal years come out like clockwork. Usually after fifty years. Gysin may have had something when he noted writing looked back fifty years in the rearview mirror. From the list above, books have recently been written on 1959, 1965, and 1968. It would not be too difficult to frame a chapter around these histories and structure ithem around Burroughs’ biography. I have flirted with documenting Burroughs’ pivotal years. It could be argued that RealityStudio is an entire site built around Burroughs and the counterculture of 1964/1965. I have also written about Burroughs in 1981. These years could easily be expanded into individual chapters. As for the dates, James Gruerholz has already written the chapter on September 6, 1951, the day Burroughs shot and killed Joan Vollmer. The Supreme Court decision on Naked Lunch has been the subject of books and numerous essays already. Surely the telescoping of time does not preclude a larger canvas. I love histories that take on a seemingly narrow topic or timeframe and then expand them into the history of the entire universe.  

1992, which is in my opinion was Burroughs’ last pivotal year, also happens to be my first truly Burroughsian year. Now I read Naked Lunch maybe a year or two earlier, but 1992 was the year I truly took the deep dive. And it was the Grove Press reissues of that year which made that possible. Now, the pastel yellow Naked Lunch was not my Naked Lunch. I read the earlier Grove mass market paperback published in 1990. This was not an ideal situation. Although the 1990 Grove was truer in size to the original Olympia edition, I appreciated the space of the larger format Grove reissue from 1992. I definitely experienced the cut-up trilogy in the rainbow Grove editions of 1992. Maybe even The Wild Boys as well. It is these novels which separate the Burroughs beginners from the Burroughs fanatics. You can go in two directions after Naked Lunch on the road to becoming a Burroughs devotee. The path well beaten is Naked Lunch and Junky on to the late trilogy and then maybe on through to Exterminator!, Port of Saints, Blade Runner, Queer. This is the path of narrative. The path less taken is through the cut-up trilogy to Minutes to Go, The Exterminator, Time, APO-33, the little magazines. But no matter which direction you take, for readers of my generation, Coupland’s Generation X, the 1992 reissues were often the starting point. These editions and their cover design served as a tie-in to the Cronenberg movie, which was for me, after the reissues, the other pivotal Burroughs event of 1991/1992. If these books served as a jumping off point for a generation they were also the beginning of the end. The reason I say this is because the 1992 editions were the last major reissue series before the Restoration Era that completely changed the landscape of Burroughs’ bibliography. Current readers of Burroughs may never read much of Burroughs’ output as it was published in Burroughs’ lifetime unless they become collectors. Is there another writer in 20th Century literature with such a publishing situation? Which leads to a poem:  

A Dissertation Written on the Occasion of Seeing Naked Lunch For Sale at Hudson Booksellers in Washington, DC’s Union Station

I Kidd
Because
I love
When I say
That
The only way 
To read 
Burroughs 
Is to 
Collect him
And
In a world 
That cannot 
Agree on
The 
Definitive
Article
We have
To restore
Our faith 
In 
Piracy

I happened to be living la vida Burroughs in 1992; a life of self-imposed exile, or, maybe more accurately, a life inspired by the travels in Kerouac’s On the Road. For more than half the year of 1992, I was living in London as a student abroad and it was Kerouac and the Beats who encouraged me to see the world. I aspired to go to Oxford for the year but I did not make the grade; my second choice was studying in Australia, but the schools there did not make the grade, so I somehow found myself at King’s College, London smack dab in the center of The Strand. I could not possibly have made a better choice if I planned it. As I have written before, Eric Mottram, the first scholar of Burroughs and the father of American Studies in the UK, taught at King’s, and established a curriculum centered on the American counterculture and literature that was probably better than my college back home. I know the library system was far superior. By attending King’s College, which had a fine library, I was able to gain access to the entire University of London system. I spent days in the stacks and travelled high and low to the London University satellites searching for books I needed for research projects on the characterization of women in James Bond and the novels of Chinua Achebe; “The Ballad of the Despairing Husband” by Robert Creeley; the use of Biblical writing structures in Ginsberg’s “Howl”; Nabokov’s powers of deflection and deception in the depiction of sexual deviance in Lolita; and, finally, an essay on Naked Lunch‘s anal imagery. It was also here that I discovered the writings of da levy, who was nowhere to be found in my college library, the poetry of Charles Olson, and a host of others.

In the late spring during break, my dorm room turned over to tourists; the dorm basically became a hostel, so I was forced to travel for a full month or pay for room and board for a bed that I had technically already paid for. Forced is the wrong word; because by reading the Beats, I could not wait to wander throughout Europe without a plan or itinerary. This was no following in their footsteps. I did not see the Beat Hotel when I was in Paris; when I got down to Madrid, I did not tag along with a group I met on the train, who were heading down to Tangier (my biggest mistake on the trip), so I guess I was not totally into the Beat biographies by this point, just their writing. Throughout my travels to Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Milan, Grenoble, and Paris, I carried a backpack that held more books than clothes. I distinctly remember packing a single pair of blue jeans for the entire month and as for the books, there were several, half a backpack full, but the only one I can remember, is J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, which was a perfect choice for a young man studying abroad in the UK. Reading the adventures of Sebastian Dangerfield was heady stuff and I could not help but see myself in Sebastian and wish that I could turn a phrase and write with the poetic flair of Donleavy. It was an inspired choice for the trip and a book I found roaming the fiction stacks at the University of London, which I did for literally hours at a time.  

During my time abroad in 1992, the letters of William Burroughs had yet to appear. Even the legendary letters of Jack Kerouac remained unpublished except in fanzines, like the Knights’ Beat Journey or Beat Road. Inspired by a legendary example that I had yet to fully experience, I sat in places like The Bulldog in Amsterdam or U Flecku in Prague (Flecku 13 remains one of the finest beers I have ever tasted. As with LSD, a good sip is all about set and setting. I was a beer snob then, a member of the first craft beer revolution, yet like many revolutionaries I became conservative in my old age. Give me the beers of our forefathers. Pabst, Schlitz, Ballantines. In 1992, Flecku 13 was considered extremely expensive at a dollar for a huge mug. In comparison, at a workingman’s spot, a sizable Pilsner Urquell and a sausage cost about twenty cents.) and fired off long letters to my girlfriend back in the States filled with what I saw as great adventures worthy of the Beats. Nowadays I guess a series of texts or social media posts would suffice, but if 1992 was the beginning of the end for readers to experience the unrestored Burroughs, it may also have been the last great era of letter writing. It was no big deal to sit in a café or bar for hours and bang out a five- or six-page handwritten letter and then trek to the post office for stamps in order to send off a packed envelope filled with not just the letter but beer coasters, a sheet of Eastern European toilet paper on which bathroom graffiti was transcribed, or other ephemeral items. Maybe that is why I am so obsessed with publications like Semina and Floating Bear and the relationship of the postal system to art and literature.  

Not all my time in London was spent in the library; there were of course the pubs, which I haunted like Sebastian Dangerfield during much of my free time. I especially sought out literary and historic pubs in order to drink in whatever atmosphere remained. The Cheshire Cheese, which was just down The Strand from King’s, was closed for renovation, so instead I spent a lot of time at The Blackfriars near the Blackfriars tube stop. I commuted from south of London into Blackfriars each morning and afternoon so it was convenient and an Art Nouveau beauty of a pub to boot. I was just beginning my studies into the counterculture so I had yet to read as deeply as I did recently when I finally cracked open Barry Miles’ London Calling on the post-WWI counterculture. I had only an inkling that I was right in the middle of a counterculture flowering with raves happening all over London and the UK. While I was chasing the ghosts of literature past in pubs and libraries, mini-raves sprouted like mushrooms all over the dorm behind closed doors in rooms transformed into E-dens for all-night dancing and partying.  

My idea of a party was attending the gallery opening at The October Gallery on April 28, 1992, for Burroughs’ Seven Deadly Sins series of paintings. This show is all a blur. I am pretty certain I was at the opening but how I got there is a mystery. Quite possibly, Clive Bush, a professor at King’s, may have been responsible, as I wrote the paper on Naked Lunch for him. He could have gotten me a ticket. It is both funny and frightening (did it happen if it is not on YouTube?) that I have to go on YouTube in order to know that Marianne Faithfull was there (and other London scenesters) although at the time I would have had no idea at all who she was. I was a complete fish out of water. A total bumpkin. “Who the fuck are these people and what do they do?” was my primary response at the time. I dimly remember the showing of Burroughs reading “The Thanksgiving Day Prayer” and a spotty audio (or was it video) hookup of Burroughs back in Lawrence where he addressed the attendees. What I distinctly remember was that The Seven Deadly Sins books in various editions were ungodly expensive. At the time I may not have even started book collecting, but if I had, my holdings would have been scant. Around this time I bought a Grove Ticket That Exploded without a dustjacket. The bookseller convinced me that I could marry the jacket later. Yeah, right!! A complete rip-off but a lesson learned. I also owned a paperback first of Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death published by New Directions, found at a book sale in the Berkshire Mall in Reading, Pennsylvania. So as a mere beginner The Seven Deadly Sins books completely intimidated me and it did not occur to me to pick up every last scrap of paper in the entire fucking gallery as a future collectible. As Burroughs would say, I was a rube, but 1992 was the start of my collecting life and The October Gallery show really opened my eyes to a whole new world.

With all the pub-going, I had little money for expensive Burroughs books; in fact, I scalped my ticket for 100 pounds to see a show by The Cure, which was described as a warm-up show before they went on the road in support of the Wish album. The show was on May 3, 1992, at The Kilburn National Ballroom. Another big regret, not attending that show. The buffet pizza that I ate for the next few weeks was nothing like the feast for the ears that is The Cure playing “Pictures of You” at the height of their powers. Again YouTube to the rescue. Right here, right now, listening on YouTube I find the show completely enthralling and a pure joy. Yet at the time in 1992, The Cure and, in fact, music in general, were just not of interest. That would come later after a term of study in a rare bookstore as I turned thirty and only then would I appreciate The Cure, New Order, Joy Division, and The Happy Mondays just to mention the Manchester bands that played constantly in rooms though out the dorm at King’s.  

That art gallery opening was the closest I ever got to a Burroughs reading. Attending readings and signings was just not my thing; it is still something I am not fully comfortable with. For someone so immersed and interested in literary events of the past, like the Six Gallery reading, the Black Mountain happenings, or the Berkeley or Vancouver Conferences, I literally have to drag myself to attend such events in the here and now. Hate may be a strong word but I know I feel very uncomfortable at a reading or conference. At one point I was on video stating as much, in less than polite language. That said, 1992 was probably the year where all that could have changed. I am very much of the kill your idols mind set. I want to keep my distance from those I admire. It is enough for me to read their work, studying their biography, and pour over their letters and journals. I have no illusions that my literary idols were saints or even nice people; I often wonder whether I would enjoy their company at all. But if a friend of mine said to me in 1992: “Let’s head out to Lawrence and see Bill!!!!” I would have hopped in the car in a second. 1992 was a year of beginnings and exploration and I was open for anything. It was not to be. The connections with other Burroughsians had yet to be made. I read and thought about Burroughs in solitude. What if I had reached out to Burroughs? What would it like to be in conversation with Burroughs in 1992, a year of beginnings for me and endings for Burroughs?  

Well, now, I have at least something of an idea; in what, I guess, is the fitting way for a wallflower like me, by reading a book. In case you did not know this is a book review of the Three Rooms Press edition of Don’t Hide the Madness: William S. Burroughs in Conversation with Allen Ginsberg with a cover illustration by R. Crumb. The book is due out in October of 2018. In this over 300-page volume, with pictures taken by Ginsberg, Steven Taylor, longtime assistant to Ginsberg, transcribed eleven tapes of conversations between Burroughs and Ginsberg between March 18 and March 22, 1992. I want to stress these are conversations not interviews, which is the joy of the book. Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others in their company fly from one topic to another. Tapes stop in the middle of conversations and prove to be inaudible in other instances. This is raw footage so to speak. This is the closest I could come to experiencing a sit-down with Burroughs in 1992, besides actually being there.

As I began to read, I wondered to myself: Am I going to enjoy this? Well, it was a shaky start because the Burroughs that I dislike, the Burroughs that is definitely not My Burroughs, is all over this book. The book opens with a conversation about Burroughs’ experience with a shaman hours before the tape starts rolling. This ritual, which also opens Miles’ biography of Burroughs, was conducted to exorcise Burroughs of The Ugly Spirit. Shamans, exorcisms, demons, Ugly Spirits, cats, guns. It is all here; the Burroughs of conspiracy theories and newspaper tabloids is on full display. Yet I must admit that the participation in a shaman ritual by Burroughs is precisely why 1992 is such a pivotal year, a year that also saw Burroughs suffer heart problems and have a car accident. Burroughs is facing death and coming to terms with his past. The release of the Naked Lunch movie signals another ending for Burroughs. The book was supposedly unfilmable, completely immune from being co-opted by the mass media. Yet the impossible had happened. Burroughs and his work were now packaged for mass consumption. 1992 was the Burroughs of sound bites, factoids, and People articles. Burroughs was schlepped by the Time-Life empire he fought against all his life. The Burroughs’ address at The October Gallery was basically a sound bite to sell books. The Grove reissues: yet another ad campaign. Bright colors, fun typography. An effort to make Naked Lunch and the cut-up novels inviting and accessible. It was bound to happen; it had been happening for decades, but the outsider was now truly a man inside. El hombre invisible was fully in the public eye and broadcast by the mass media.

Don’t Hide the Madness is full of Burroughs’ and Ginsberg’s assessment of the movie. Burroughs understood that this was Cronenberg’s project and not an accurate representation of the book or even of Burroughs himself. It was the product of one genius being inspired by another. It was yet another form of collaboration. Burroughs allowed his collaborators room to operate, to express their creative side, to have their say. The same cannot be said for Ginsberg. Ginsberg is in full Ginsberg mode throughout this book. Monopolizing conversation and directing it to what he wants to talk about, obsessing about sex and his diet, and coming across as a needy, whiny wimp. Some of the funniest sections of the book are when Ginsberg complains about the treatment of him as a wimp in the movie versions of Naked Lunch and Heartbeat. Ginsberg knows it is accurate; he just does not like it being public knowledge. For all of Ginsberg being Ginsberg, these conversations would be totally different if conducted by anybody else. I doubt Burroughs would be so comfortable and so candid. The scenes of Burroughs and Ginsberg shooting guns are priceless. I despise Burroughs’ gun fetish, but here, visualizing Ginsberg shooting a .45 at a target of the Buddha with Burroughs acting as shooting coach, is just too funny to hate on. It was scenes like this that won me over and made me think that hanging with Burroughs for an afternoon might be fun after all.

For readers, like Michael Stevens of The Road to Interzone, there is a ton of information about Burroughs’ reading and what he thought about other writers. Burroughs read deeply and throughout these conversations Burroughs quotes texts from memory, a trick honed at Harvard, and you can see his breadth of knowledge, which astounded the young Beats with conversation of Spengler, Rimbaud, Gide, and Yeats. Burroughs’ ability to not just quote Shakespeare but to quote him off the cuff in a manner pertinent to an ongoing conversation was what impressed the young Ginsberg (an episode recounted in Don’t Hide the Madness). The section on Greenwich Village writers of the 1920s is great and gossipy. Burroughs lecturing on lesbian poets (he can spot them a mile away), recounting his aborted visit with Witter Bynner (he was drunk and would not answer the door), and discussing truly obscure poets, like Adelaide Crapsey and Sara Teasdale, are classic stuff and thoroughly enjoyable. Burroughs on Teasdale is gossipy, bitchy fun. Burroughs quotes Teasdale, a fellow writer from St. Louis, who was forced upon Burroughs at an early age, from memory as definitive evidence of Teasdale’s lesbianism. I would have loved to have experienced Burroughs in this mode. Ginsberg and Burroughs speaking on the Salman Rushdie affair demonstrates just how powerfully the Fatwa on Rushdie hit the literary community at the time. There is one brief section where Burroughs and Ginsberg reminisce about meeting Edith Sitwell in 1959, just after the Life magazine hack job, and then shift to a quick tangent about red raspberries and then just as quickly Burroughs is off gushing about cats and love. This is just one example of the tapes doing a wonderful job of capturing the twists and turns of conversation as opposed to an interview.

Reading the book, I laughed at Udo Breger’s attempts to question Burroughs. His questions were always interesting and always cock-blocked by Ginsberg, who invariably jabbered on about his salt intake. Poor Udo. He did get a word in edgewise at one point with a brief account of his first encounters with the Beats in print in 1962. I had the pleasure of meeting Udo in Paris in 2009 at the Naked Lunch Conference. I distinctly remember sitting across from him at a Mexican restaurant (!!) in Paris along with Carl Weissner, Jan Herman, Oliver Harris, Miles and others. The conversation was far-ranging and riveting. Udo took my single favorite picture of my wife at that restaurant. That same trip Miles gave my wife and me a guided tour through the streets of Paris pointing out the location of the club at which Jim Morrison really died before he was carried to his bathtub for discovery by the authorities. I have already recounted in a podcast a late afternoon dinner with Carl Weissner at Allard. The food and the conversation were delicious. This was 2009 not 1992. Participation in RealityStudio made participation in those conversations possible. RealityStudio built up my confidence and established relationships. In 1992 I was still finding my voice, getting my bearings in the world of the Beats. I may not have had much to say but I was ready and willing to listen.

As I finished the book, I felt regret for never making the trek to Lawrence in 1992. I was ready for the experience in what was a pivotal year for me. It could have been life changing. But reading Don’t Hide the Madness now, I feel that this Burroughs, Burroughs v.1992, is not the Burroughs for Jed v.2018. And I wonder which version of Burroughs I most want to have a conversation with. The Burroughs of 1944, who so marveled the New Vision Beats. Burroughs in 1951 hanging out at The Bounty Bar in Mexico City. Burroughs in 1953 in a tent in the Amazon. Burroughs in 1957 in the Grand Socco sipping mint tea in Tangier. Burroughs in 1959 at the bar at the Beat Hotel. And it goes on and on. The possibilities are endless just as our time here is finite. Personally, I would have loved to talk to Burroughs at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City in 1965. The Knickerbocker interview in the Paris Review of that year gives a glimpse into what that Burroughs was into at the time and that is My Burroughs. Burroughs of The Third Mind, the Mimeo Revolution, the assault on the Time-Life empire. Burroughs the experimentalist and book artist.  

For those of us who missed our chance and for those who were born out of time, books like Don’t Hide the Madness prove invaluable. They capture a moment, in this case a pivotal moment for Burroughs, and, maybe as in my case, a pivotal moment for the reader as well. Along with Burroughs Live, Don’t Hide the Madness is essential reading. It captures an intimate, casual Burroughs missing from Burroughs Live and, for this reader, represents a missed opportunity much regretted. Thanks to Three Rooms Press for the chance to experience it, even if only second hand.