Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting The good doctor has done it again. As a follow-up to Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment, Dr. Andrew J. Lees recently submitted an article entitled “William Burroughs: Sailor of the Soul” to the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. The brief abstract…
Tag: Yage Letters
Mentored by a Madman
Interview with Dr Andrew Lees, Author of Mentored by a Madman: The William S. Burroughs Experiment By Jed Birmingham Dr. Andrew Lees is the anti-Benway but he learned quite a bit from the practices of the old croaker. And from William Burroughs too. In Mentored by a Madman: The William S. Burroughs Experiment, Dr. Lees…
The Lager Letters (A Satirical Review of The Yage Letters)
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting In Burroughs’ first appearance in Chicago Review in 1958, he is presented as a San Francisco poet. As Linda Richman would say, Burroughs was neither in San Francisco nor a poet, discuss. Well, to say the least, many poets in San Francisco were…
Review of Ed Buhr’s The Japanese Sandman
The Japanese Sandman (directed by Ed Buhr, 2008, Frameline Distribution) Reviewed by Graham Rae “Tears are worthless unless genuine, tears from the soul and the guts, tears that ache and wrench and hurt and tear.” — William S Burroughs, Last Words Let’s face it, the familiar picture of William S Burroughs now pretty much fixed…
Cutting up the Archive: William Burroughs and the Composite Text
by Oliver Harris This is an edited version of a paper delivered to the 4th Annual Symposium on Textual Studies at the Centre for Textual Scholarship, De Montfort University, Leicester, 25 May 2007. I’d like to start by saying how delighted I am to have been invited here today by Peter Shillingsburg and how honoured…
The Yage Letters
[M&M A8] San Francisco: City Lights 1963, one of 3,000 copies in wraps. Maynard & Miles A8a. Consisting mostly of letters written to Allen Ginsberg by Burroughs on his trip to South America in 1953, but including letters by Ginsberg as well. _____ 1975, second edition in wraps, adds a new letter dated 10 July…
Yage Redux
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting The first edition of Yage Letters published by City Lights in 1963 is a slim and seemingly unassuming book. The cover has become famous and the book sells well, but it remains largely undiscovered territory to scholars. Only 18,000 words long and struggling…
Oliver Harris on Yage
Reports from the Bibliographic Bunker Jed Birmingham on William S. Burroughs Collecting I received an email from Oliver Harris, author of William Burroughs: The Secret of Fascination and editor of The Letters of William Burroughs. According to his research and the research of others, much of the information on my web site concerning photographs of…
Yage Letters Redux
RealityStudio Reviews the New Edition Prepared by Oliver Harris It is an acknowledged paradox at the heart of William S. Burroughs’ work that his greatest books called into question how much they were even his. Whereas Samuel Beckett tried to eviscerate the novel from within — to “naughten” it, to borrow a term from Heidegger…