Burroughs and Acker

William S. Burroughs discusses art, writing and consciousness with Kathy Acker in this insightful interview, posted in its YouTubed entirety by Renegade Futurist.



I had the good fortune to see Burroughs and Acker onstage together in the mid-90s, the former in his customary suit and Acker decked out in intimidating leather and sporting dark hair. Although I hadn't yet seen it, both had appeared in a Nike commercial (which, miraculously, seems to be absent from YouTube).

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"When you cut into the present the future leaks out."

Cut-Ups from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo.

Ah Pook returns

"Ah Pook is Here": Unseen William S Burroughs Graphic Novel Art Show

Originally conceived as a graphic novel in the pictographic format of the surviving Mayan codices, the project -- eight years in the making -- consisted of over 100 illustrations by Malcolm McNeill, 30 in full color and about 50 pages of text. "Ah Pook is Here" would have been prohibitively expensive to publish at the time. As Burroughs wrote "over the years of our collaboration Malcolm McNeill produced more than a hundred pages of artwork. However, owing partly to the expense of full color reproduction, and because the book falls into neither the category of the conventional illustrated book, nor that of a comix publication, there have been difficulties with the arrangements for the complete work."

This is some serious surrealism, as savagely hallucinatory as Burroughs' best fiction. Click here if you dare.

An ambiguous short (as in really short) film in which William Burroughs scrutinizes a parrot:



Don't try adjusting the volume; the clip is silent.

William S. Burroughs demonstrates his famous literary "cut-ups":



Here's a sample cut-up of my own writing (de)constructed by an online generator:

But while disclosure of alien visitation is eagerly awaited -- even expected -- encourage belief that Grays are flesh-and-blood ET anthropologists. Their antics, while horrifying, may be as bogus as But I doubt that that "something" is genetic material in the usual sense; it seems more likely spacecraft and diminutive occupants who seem to have stepped out of there's the equally appealing possibility that manifesting in terms comprehensible to witnesses reflects the vocabulary with which to understand it. Or maybe it won't, content to let us project our own unspoken semi-straight faces.

Meanwhile, the enigma persists--as always, seemingly just beyond our comprehension. And we have the nerve is both trickster and trigger -- indisputably real, but real in a way "explain" the phenomenon's intricacies to a wary public (often in the guise of would-be political discourse), an aerial object of unknown origin.)

Am I a it seems more likely to me that encounters with hybrid children and distressingly intimate "exams" are attempts Their antics, while horrifying, may be as bogus as the it should be thoroughly familiar with us and able to like this, with Fortean forces hovering at the fringes of our perception. I don't is) between cautious advocates of the Extraterrestrrial Hypothesis and know-nothing science popularizers who seem genuinely incapable of considering limited expectations of the witness. Thus we have a pageant of fantastic beings of all descriptions: robot-like monsters, winged entities need to "explain" the phenomenon's intricacies to a wary public (often in the guise if tantalizing, comments by insiders both real and imaginary) has been repeatedly enacted over the last by physical effects on the environment), demand a level of unconscious participation on behalf pass the burden of their arrival onto our collective shoulders.

Rudy Rucker discusses his lifelong appreciation of William Burroughs. I like it when writers write about writers.