William Burroughs Research Articles

The Cubalogues (and After): On the Beat Literary Movement and the Early Cuban Revolution

The Cubalogues (and After):On the Beat Literary Movement and the Early Cuban Revolution Todd F. Tietchen (bio) At a 1961 meeting of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, Lawrence Ferlinghetti unveiled one of his most famous poems: "One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro." Composed upon Ferlinghetti's return from Havana the previous year, the poem warned Castro that he would soon be overthrown and assassinated, much like his boyhood hero Abraham Lincoln. In a telling allusion to the Spanish-American War, Ferlinghetti declared that "Hearst is Dead but his great / Cuban wire still stands: 'You / get the pictures, I'll make the / War'" (48). As was the case with Theodore Roosevelt's foray up San Juan Hill, Ferlinghetti believed that U.S. military intervention was a foregone conclusion augured by the yellow journalism of his time. Or as Ferlinghetti so bluntly put it: "They're going to fix [Castro's] wagon / in the course of human events" (48). The political thrust of "One Thousand Fearful Words for Fidel Castro" was inspired by the concerns of Ferlinghetti's audience: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC). The FPCC was formed in 1959 by the liberal activists Robert Taber and Alan Sagner, both of whom rejected the acquiescence to U.S. foreign policy typical of other Cold War liberals.1 Van Gosse has argued that the FPCC—a signal organization of the emergent New Left—was animated by a high degree of "Fidelismo" which celebrated Castro and his revolutionary circle as American insurgents in the tradition of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys (5–10). This sentiment was clearly registered in Taber's film documentary "Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba's Jungle [End Page 119] Fighters," which aired on CBS in 1957 and portrayed Castro and his men as romantic, young freedom fighters taking on their own version of the Red Coats (Gosse 82–85). Along with their lionization (and Americanization) of Castro, the FPCC was convinced early on that U.S. military intervention was imminent in Cuba in order to secure U.S. interests in corporate entities such as the United Fruit Company. By 1959, U.S. corporations were into Cuba for close to $1 billion dollars a year, dominating virtually every sector of the Cuban economy (Duberman 133–34). The FPCC contended that the U.S. should begin divesting itself of its hemispheric ambitions by taking a non-interventionist stance toward the revolution. The federal government, so the FPCC argument went, should work with Castro to assure an autonomous Cuba as a trading partner, thus defusing the possibility of Soviet influence in the American hemisphere.2 The stance of the FPCC helped give birth to the literary subgenre which I call the Cubalogues. Part Beat narrative and part reportage, the Cubalogues include works such as Ferlinghetti's "Poet's Notes on Cuba," LeRoi Jones's "Cuba Libre," and Mark Schleifer's "Cuban Notebook." As a subgenre of Beat travel narratives, the Cubalogues are animated by several common characteristics. First, each narrative begins by expressing profound skepticism concerning the negative portrayal of Castro's revolution in the mainstream U.S. press. Second, each writer then identifies this skepticism as the guiding factor in their decision to travel to Havana in order to witness the revolution firsthand. In turn, each figure becomes involved in an inter-American dialogue with Cuban intellectuals and artists concerning the meaning of the revolution and revolutionary culture, which they come to identify as the spontaneous and open antithesis of an ossified public sphere at home. Third, enmeshed in this new web of intercultural relations, their original skepticism regarding media portrayals of Castro's Cuba is not only confirmed, but results in a political epiphany concerning the limits of "Beat" protest in the U.S. As such, these travelogues represent a more overtly politicized version of the road narratives proffered by figures such as Jack Kerouac and the early William Burroughs, as stock features of Beat writing—such as the celebration of spontaneity, musical culture, and the street hustler—are recast as politically progressive values. The Cubalogues, as I hope to make clear in the remainder of this essay, have much to...

Literature suppressed on sexual grounds

Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds, Revised Edition discusses writings that have been banned over the centuries because they offended or merely ignored official truths; challenged widely held assumptions; or contained ideas or language unacceptable to a state, religious institution, or private moral watchdog. 14 entries new to this edition include the Captain Underpants series, We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier, and by Margaret Zemach. Also included are updates to the censorship histories of such books as To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. New and updated entries include: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle); Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll); Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank); As Lay Dying (William Faulkner); Baby Be-Bop (Francesca Lia Block); Camille (Alexander Dumas); The Color Purple (Alice Walker); Deliverance (James Dickey); The Drowning of Stephan Jones (Bette Greene); East of Eden (John Steinbeck); Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury); Fallen Angels (Walter Dean Myers); Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway); and, Final Exit (Derek Humphry). They also include: Gargantua and Pantagruel (Francois Rabelais); Gentleman's Agreement (Laura Hobson); The Giver (Lois Lowry); Howl and Other Poems (Allen Ginsberg); I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou); Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison); Jake and Honeybunch Go to Heaven (Margot Zemach); Junky (William Burroughs); Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck); One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey); Strange Fruit (Lillian Smith); and, To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee).

Lost and Found

American ????G Williamson continuedfrom previous page uncensored bray of a Penthouse letter? Are we so narcissistic that we believe post-WWII American letters to be better, more interesting, more enduring, more relevant than our literature of a hundred years before, than Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, authors who had to find ways to be angry without saying "fuck you," to be sexy without describing clapping genitals, authors who wrote with linguistic limits imposed by a "repressive " culture? Do we think David Mamet a better playwright than Euripides or Brecht? The best way to squash dissent is to institutionalize it, to condone it, to package and market it. Ginsberg himself writes about this in his essay, "Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs." Bemoaning the commercialization of the scene in San Francisco, he writes, "Those ofthe general populace whose individual perception is sufficiently weak to be formed by stereotypes of mass communication disapprove and deny the insight. The police and newspapers have moved in, mad movie manufacturers from Hollywood are at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene." And we get the movie Easy Rider (1969). We get Shaft, 1971 (sex machine—that's John Shaft to you, whitey). We get the three record set of Woodstock, complete with antiwar chants in case you can't make up your own. Instead of Coltrane and Billie Holiday and Bessie Mae Smith, we get Snoop Doggy Dogg. The question, finally, is not whether we should censor our artists and our speech or not. The question is this: given that it's better to have freedom of expression than repression of expression, what do we say? And how the fuck do we say it? Eric Miles Williamson is an associate editor of American Book Review. His latest book, Oakland, Jack London, and Me, will bepublished this summer by Texas Review Press. Lost and Found Davis Schneiderman The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: Beats in South Texas Rob Johnson Texas A&M University Press http://www.tamu.edu/upress 208 pages; cloth, $40.00; paper, $19.95 The trouble with titling a book The Lost Years ofWilliam S. Burroughs is the implication that other years, in other scholarly tomes, have been already mapped, traced, located, examined — in another word: found. Much recent criticism of the work of William S. Burroughs would certainly disagree, focusing instead (in the case of the most prolific Burroughs scholar, Oliver Harris, as well as my own recent essays) on a complicated manuscript history that does as much to puncture the overripened Burroughsian mythos as it does to deflate the heretofore chronologies ofhis production. Even so, the game is never so simple. For every scholar intent on tracing the origin of a cut-up phrase and its labyrinthine permutations through Burroughs's texts, there are ten, maybe one hundred, persons who are equally (if not more) enthused by the rehash of Burroughs as junkie, Burroughs as wife killer, Burroughs as. . . well...Burroughs. So, despite the implied conclusion of its title, Rob Johnson's study of Burroughs's noncontiguous years in the South Texas "Valley" (1946-1949) contributes to the myth-busting trend ofthe criticism while still attending, precisely, to the nuances of Burroughsian "fascination" (Harris's term) in a way that actually adds substance rather than sizzle to the long-repeated narratives ofEl Hombre Invisible. No doubt, this is due to the paucity ofprevious information used in Johnson's study. Much is already detailed and endlessly documented about Burroughs's stays in New York, Mexico City, Tangier, Paris, and London, but little has been said in the official critical corpus about these Texas years. Johnson tells us how Barry Miles, author of the smaller of the two Burroughs biographies, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (1993), finds the Valley located in East Texas (in his Ginsberg biography); Ted Morgan, author of the earlier biography, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times ofWilliam S. Burroughs (1988), does the same. It is all the harder to find, Johnson relates, because the Valley—"120 miles ofthe Texas border from Brownsville on the coast all the way up the river to Rio Grande City"—is no valley at all, "only a landscape described today in the...

Hard Candy

Frazer continuedfrom previous page his colleagues during the interviews. His "What About Monk?" essay says more in one page about Monk's contributions to jazz than most Monk biographies. Lacy calls Monk "the searchlight (beacon) of the bebop revolution." In the interviews, Lacy's account of Monk as a congenial mentor instead of a reclusive eccentric stands as a landmark revelation in jazzjournalism . Lacy's essay on Taylor's introducing him to the work of Stravinsky segues into an appreciation of the uniqueness of the Russian composer's thinking and orchestrating. Weiss's selections reveal Lacy as an articulate writer. Nothing in Lacy's writing, however , suggests that he aspired to be a poet, himself. Lacy loved literature and music, and regarded them as "languages" capable of communicating together. In fusing together his portrait ofLacy, Weiss has ensured a substantial measure of accuracy through choosing material in which Lacy communicates in Detailfrom cover his own words (and notations). Weiss's commentary reveals a deep interest and dedicated research into Lacy's life and work. A Lacy aficionado might question why Weiss describes Phase Two as "a New York coffeehouse" since several available sources state that Lacy recorded School Days there during an extended 1963 engagement. A passing reference to poet-painter Brion Gysin as "Beat" overstates Gysin's affiliation with Beat Generation writers other than William Burroughs. Other than these minor matters, the book appears to be accurate in its details. Steve Lacy: Conversations is a notable work that deepens our understanding of a jazz legend whose reputation in the United States derived from fragmentary bulletins published infrequently in Americanjazz magazines. Aside from being a must-read for people who follow Lacy's music, Steve Lacy: Conversations will also help to illuminate Lacy's place in the jazz canon. Vernon Frazer is a writer-musician. Hard Candy Anna Maria Hong Inch Aeons Nuala M. Archer Les Figues http://www.lesfigues.com 105 pages; paper, $15.00 Hard candy. That's what Nuala Archer's new collection of poems. Inch Aeons, made me think of. There's a tough, tart brightness to the poems in the collection, as well as a juxtaposition of stylistic flavors that recalls the paradoxical pleasures of sucking on sour balls. This impression is compounded by the collection's consisting entirely of haiku, the most compact and elusively satisfying of traditional forms. Mostly following the old 5-7-5 syllabic constraints of the form, Archer makes good use of the haiku's terseness to explore larger themes,· which really are quite huge. In the first section, "How Far," she starts us offwith musings on the Big Bang, which she dryly characterizes as a bit of a letdown: Beyond Conception— Without Regeneration— Big Bang's Leave let Be. The touch here is loose, with the nine haiku working by imagistic and musical association, mimicking the presumably prechoate state ofthings surrounding the moment of cosmic explosion. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Archeremploys disjointed language to demonstrate the feeling ofdramatic change and its results. Although these opening poems are too attenuated to be compelling in themselves, they set in motion the idea of catastrophe as creation, which casts a creepy celestial glow over the poems that follow. The eponymous second section, "Inch Aeons," consists of longer, more experimental variations on the haiku form. Here, Archer builds upon the tension between compression and expansion that she established in the Big Bang haiku. This tension also is encapsulated in the oxymoronic title. An aeon is an extremely long period oftime, longer than an era—so vast that it's difficult for the human mind to fathom, much less endure. An inch, of course, is a very small unit of distance, and, as a verb, to inch means to move very slowly, like a worm (one ofthe book's recurring motifs). Together, the two words imply glacial progress , and while the title certainly alludes to the global concerns established in "How Far," it also refers to a more personal event: a traumatic car accident Archer suffered in June of 1995, which subsequently required years of physical therapy. Archer directly evokes this experience in the poem "Kar-ai!-a: June 19, 1995," which...

Did Thomas Jefferson Own a Gun?: William Burroughs and the American Agrarian Link

William Burroughs is commonly known for his anti-government ramblings in Naked Lunch and Junkie. The superficial view is that these novels describe rampant drug use and homosexual promiscuity. It is hardly surprising that his work shocked (and still shocks) America. When we look a little deeper, though, we can find evidence of profound political strains threading throughout his work. Was Burroughs an anarchist? A libertarian? A true American? Burroughs' oeuvre is now complete, and it is appropriate to reflect on the sum of his work. I will attempt to demonstrate a codified political ideology in The Place of Dead Roads within a theoretical model that includes elements of classical Marxism, anarchy, and Jeffersonian agrarianism. Can parallels between the politics of seemingly antipatriotic Burroughs and the original patriot Jefferson be found? What might such a revelation tell us about the work of Kerouac and Ginsberg?

William Burroughs: My Part in His Downfall

William Burroughs: My Part in His Downfall

Postmodern Supernaturalism: Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language

This essay traces the development of Allen Ginsberg's poetics in the sixties, in particular, his use of Hindu and Buddhist chant as a theoretical basis for his writing. Tracing this development reveals how Ginsberg synthesizes an anti-representational theory of writing borrowed from William Burroughs with a conception of the poet as supernaturally empowered. This synthesis in Ginsberg's work is set next to popular religious movements of the sixties that, like Ginsberg's poetry, turned to meaningless or empty language as a privileged site of supernatural power.

Burroughs's Phantasmic Maps

Burroughs’s Phantasmic Maps Mario Vrbančić (bio) The cartographer's dream is that of a perfect map, the mapthat would perfectly represent a territory, a dream of divineknowledge: a map that has haunted the ideology of representation throughout history: a map so detailed that it coincides with real space. Until very recently the map was considered a mirror of nature, a mirror of the landscape. However, postmodern culture with its omnipresent fragmentation of the whole that scatters the sensory spaces of dogma and anxieties calls the map with its geometrized lines into question. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explore and propose different concepts of mapping—a rhizome, in an attempt to make connections between widely different spaces without imposing hierarchy. The map, as they argue, is not an instrument of reproduction but rather one of construction. It does not trace something larger but constantly captures and inflects from outside itself, so that it is not clearly distinguishable from "the surveyed landscape." Its functions are multiple, intersecting several different discourses at once. A rhizome presents a new form of thought, a politics of establishing nonsystematic connections, an antisystem that would not be trapped in the rigid formations of the state, the unconscious, or language. It traverses the territory without ever anchoring in one of the discursive formations, like the navigator who in one trajectory uses the metro, the bus, and foot in combination. The flexible, nomadic thought constantly forms connections between different systems of discursive practices: it is a cartography of living, the new version of a map, the guild of cartographers experimenting with the multiplicity of equations between a map and a territory. The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself, it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a [End Page 313] plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.1 My intention in this essay is to evoke a vivid tapestry of a lateral antihierarchical map in William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night. To map Burroughs's universe is extremely hard, confusing, and even dangerous. Whether the vast incessant intertextual flow leads us to new, undiscovered territories, not yet charted, or whether any impulse of seeking meaning stays frustratingly unresolved, and we find only piles of garbage-words. Nonsense. No maps, no territories. Kathryn Hume claims that "mapping is a principal function of Burroughs's work. On several occasions he has called himself 'a map maker, a cosmonaut of inner space.'"2 Yet to chart space "it is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live": "To travel in space you must leave the old verbal garbage behind: God talk, country talk, mother talk, love talk, part talk. You must learn to exist with no religion no country no allies. You must learn to live alone in silence. Anyone who prays in space is not there. The last frontier is being closed to youth. However there are many roads to space. To achieve complete freedom from past conditioning is to be in space."3 Burroughs's rebellion against language, and the invocation of space as the only possible means of freeing oneself from constraints of unhealthy multilayered inhibitions imposed by civilization, are similar to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus project.4 Rejection of "mother talk, country talk" dramatizes language as the mechanism of repression...

Madness and Method in This Room Is Moving

This Room Is Moving is a double bill that features Harold Pinter’s first play, The Dwarfs, and a new play, Beat, compiled by Screaming Flea Theatre from the writings of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Both plays are inspired by the formative years of their authors and the rooms they moved through.

Pocket Books to Global Beat: Andrei Voznesensky, Kazuko Shiraishi, Michael Horovitz

The Beat Movement has long been thought to centre only as an American cultural phenomenon and in key names like Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso, and with William Burroughs as a presiding dark mentor. This essay argues for a far wider contextual understanding. It looks to Beat currents in the African American poetry of LeRoi Jones/Imamu Baraka, Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman, a circuit of Beat‐influenced women like Diane Di Prima and Anne Waldman, and a US multicultural arena to include Oscar Zeta Acosta and Maxine Hong Kingston. Most of all it analyses the Beat impact beyond America in three prime names: Andrei Voznesensky as leading 1960s–1970s Russian dissident poet, Kazuko Shiraishi as longtime vintage Tokyoite jazz‐and‐poetry ‘bad girl’, and Michael Horovitz as British counter‐culture voice. In these three Beat acquires a global reach, a force of vision, a poetics, well beyond Greenwich Village or City Lights Bookshop, San Francisco. It also links the local, miniaturist Pocket Poets series established by Ferlinghetti with his own Pictures of a Gone World (1955) to Beat writings which can best be thought at once national and transnational. Given this larger cultural context, the essay analyzes a relevant body of verse by Vosnesensky, Shiraishi and Horovitz, with particular attention given to vision, image, the shaping language each poet gives to Beat heritage inaugurated far from their own beginnings.

Beat Generation Literary Criticism

_T -he Beat generation of writers sought literary achievement, but contemporary fashion, entertainment, and opinion columnists granted them much more notice than did literary critics. When Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road (1957) and the unwitting Daddy of the Beatniks, died in 1969 with only one of his twenty-some books in print, the Beat generation seemed destined to fade away, maybe to be remembered primarily as precursors to the politically engaged hippie movement. Time has proven otherwise. In the thirty years following Kerouac's death, more than a dozen biographers have covered his life, replacing the popular press's snapshots with deeply researched tomes that depict a serious and dedicated writer at work. The other major Beat writers-Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, who all died in the past decade-have likewise had their lives recorded by biographers. References to the Beat writers in popular songs, movies, and television shows constitute a further tribute to their cultural relevance and to the popularity they maintain with the public at large. As distance from the 1950s increased and the 1960s counterculture bore fruit with solid social developments in the 1970s and beyond, many social critics overhauled earlier dismissals of the Beats' significance. It is now clear that the Beats

William Burroughs and the secret of fascination

Unraveling the mysteries of Naked Lunch, exploring the allure of fascination Burroughs is both an object of widespread cultural fascination one of America s great writers. In this study, Oliver elucidates the complex play of secrecy revelation that defines the allure of fascination. Unraveling the mystifications of Burroughs the writer, discovers what it means be fascinated by a figure of major cultural influence unearths a secret history behind the received story of one of America s great original writers. In William Burroughs the Secret of Fascination, Harris examines the major works Burroughs produced in the 1950s Junky, Queer, The Yage Letters, and Naked Lunch to piece together an accurate, material record of his creative history during his germinal decade as a writer. Refuting the junk paradigm of addiction that has been used categorize characterize much of Burroughs oeuvre, instead focuses on the significance of Burroughs letter writing his remarkable unsuspected use of the epistolary for his fiction. As Burroughs said Allen Ginsberg about Naked Lunch, the real novel is letters you. Drawing on rare access manuscripts, the book suggests new ways of comprehending Burroughs s unique politics aesthetics offers the first accurate account of the writing of Naked Lunch.

Beat Mexico

The literary turn in anthropology has provoked an examination of the textual bases of ethnography and sought alternative models for ethnographic writing in works of fiction. This article contributes to this literature through an analysis of the works and lives in Mexico of members of the Beat generation, mainly Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Hal Chase. Comparing Bohemia and anthropology, I discuss the limitations and strengths of Beat writings about Mexico. I suggest that, despite many flaws, Bohemia continues to be a rich source of ideas for ethnography, both as fieldwork and literature.

“Thou, The Player of the Game, Art God”: Nabokovian Game-playing in Cronenberg’s eXistenZ

David Cronenberg a souvent parlé de l'influence marquante que Vladimir Nabokov a exercé sur son oeuvre. Une analyse de certains passages des textes de Nabokov peut donc élucider plusieurs aspects de l'esthétique littéraire qu'incarne le cinéma de Cronenberg, en particulier son film eXistenZ. Le cinéma de Cronenberg partage de nombreux éléments stylistiques avec les textes de Nabokov, entre autres, les intrusions de l'auteur, les motifs ludiques, la mise-en-abîme, l'acte de nommer et les structures narratives « auto-consumantes ».

Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997

Burroughs Live gathers all the interviews, both published and unpublished, given by William Burroughs, as well as conversations with well-known writers, artists, and musicians such as Tenessee Williams, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. The book provides a fascinating account of Burroughs's life as a literary outlaw. Illuminating many aspects of his work and many facets of his mind, it brings out his scathing humor, powerful intelligence, and nightmarish vision.

Introduction

Bob Kaufman (1925-1986) was a street poet, a people's poet, a poet's poet, a jazz poet, a surrealist poet, a modernist poet, a post-modernist poet, an African-American poet, a Black poet, a Negro poet, a New Orleans poet, a San Francisco poet, a poète maudit, a lyric poet, a Beat poet. Although he has come to be overshadowed by his white, formally-educated contemporaries Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, Kaufman was one of the founding architects and living examples of the sensibility of the Beat Generation, a counter-cultural phenomenon of the Cold War which attempted to embody dissent from the tyranny of consensus in its artistic and everyday practice; New York and San Francisco were its primary sites. At the height of the movement (1955-1960), he was a vibrant poetic force on the San Francisco street scene; his broadside, The Abomunist Manifesto, rivaled Ginsberg's Howl in its status as signature Beat text, and the term "beatnik" was coined by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen to describe Kaufman. In 1959 Kaufman co-founded the significant Beat mimeo-journal Beatitude, which has continued to appear sporadically into the present day. However, he also suffered from the racism--sometimes romantic Negrophilia and sometimes out-and-out violent prejudice--of his mostly white milieu. Treated as a favorite mascot for his outrageous antics (people would buy him drinks in order to get him to entertain them by insulting them), he was also not taken seriously as a poet by many of the active San Francisco poets, and he was brutalized by the North Beach police. Partly out of choice, partly out of disillusioned resignation and the ravages of street life, drugs and alcohol, in the early 1960s Kaufman, never a careerist to begin with, turned his back definitively on the seductions of fame and respectability, implicitly declaring solidarity with the world's anonymous poor by informally adopting a "vow of silence," neither speaking nor writing until shortly after the end of the Viet Nam War. In the 1970s and 1980s he resumed public life again to some degree; this period was punctuated by high points like the composition of his "bicentennial poem," an apocalyptic rant entitled "The Ancient Rain"; a large and gala public reading in 1981 with fellow surrealist Philip Lamantia at the San Francisco Art Institute; and most importantly, the publication of The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978, due largely to the devoted editorial labors of Raymond Foye. A much-admired [End Page 105] extemporizer, Kaufman blended his own rapid-fire aphorisms and wisecracks with the considerable store of modernist poetry he had memorized. His poetry reworks and defamiliarizes that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Federico García Lorca, Tennessee Williams, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes and others. In its adventurous imagery, sonorous qualities and biting socio-existential wit, Kaufman's poetry shares much with other New World Black surrealists Aimé Cesaire, Ted Joans, and Will Alexander, as well as with the jazz-inspired poetry and fiction of LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka and Nathaniel Mackey.

Burroughs live: the collected interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997

Burroughs Live gathers all the interviews, both published and unpublished, given by William Burroughs, as well as conversations with well-known writers, artists, and musicians such as Tenessee Williams, Timothy Leary, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Gregory Corso. The book provides a fascinating account of Burroughs's life as a literary outlaw. Illuminating many aspects of his work and many facets of his mind, it brings out his scathing humor, powerful intelligence, and nightmarish vision.

Names for Children

In his essay, Le Peintre de la vie moderne, Baudelaire makes a general statement about the quality or qualities peculiar to the nature of superlative creators: `Le genie n'est que l'enfance retrouvee a volonte, l'enfance douee maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes virils et de l'esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de materiaux involontairement amassee.' (1) `L'enfance retrouvee a volonte': childhood rediscovered at will, but also, it seems, under the aegis of the will, the sovereign and inevitably adult principle of order. The exercise of one's genius, then, involves a retrospective and methodical appropriation of the childish state, to be coupled with and tempered by a necessary maturity, producing `un homme-enfant [...] un homme possedant a chaque minute le genie de l'enfance, c'est-a-dire un genie pour lequel aucun aspect de la vie n'est emoussee'. A more particular proposition is made, in the service of the new kind of draughtsmanship Baudelaire is keen to promote in parts of the essay, when a tendency in visual artists to abstraction and the erasure of detail in the service of l'ensemble is alleged to be `le resultat d'une perception enfantine'. Baudelaire's new draughtsmanship, it seems, is to be an art with a measure of artlessness: its childishness is elsewhere in the article connected with an appropriate barbarousness, which overlaps with the enfantine theme in a way that could be described as Rousseauesque, as the growth of the child into the man is the analogue for the evolution of man from the `savage' state into civilization. The child and the `savage' are both aboriginal, it is said, and their original innocence is not yet made corrupt by contact with the decrepitude and extravagance, the exhausting surfeit of fripperies that characterize civilization. Baudelaire clearly utilizes so-called primitive art, and so-called childish qualities, as examples, for the desired suppression of inessential minutiae in paintings, examples that represent an honesty, simplicity, and directness that precede the imposition of a received and decadent culture. At or near the beginning of the twentieth century, this sort of strategy will have become a straightforward and outspoken promotion and collection of children's art, by artists such as Kandinsky and Klee who argued for `pure elementary representation' (2) and against faithful reproduction, citing the supposed ability of young children to perceive with new eyes and thus to represent some ideal, general form of an object without being distracted by irrelevant idiosyncracies or by received models, though the stylistic conventions that seem to produce a certain uniformity in child art, the uniformity prized by its promoters as true and essential, might just as easily be viewed as utterly cultural, derivative. The recourse to the figure of `the child' as artistic exemplar is, of course, commonplace, a staple of any polemic that claims to be witnessing or willing the final collapse of a derelict order and the simultaneous birth of the new, and it can be shown to be just as persistent in milder and more reticent discourses. At or near the infancy of his poetic career, the work of the Scottish poet, W. S. Graham, owes an obvious and considerable debt to an English translation of the Illuminations, a set of prose-poems by Arthur Rimbaud. As is well known, Rimbaud's most productive spell as a poet took place between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, at which point he seems entirely to have given up any serious literary ambitions, and this startling biography has incited a host of artists, from virtually every discipline, to invoke him as the very principle of unmanageable adolescent revolt. From DADA and the Surrealists, to the novelist, William Burroughs, rock musicians such as Bob Dylan and Patti Smith, and the visual artist, Terry Atkinson, who secretly invented a persona that he named Rimbaud-Me when in revolt against his fellow members of the conceptual art grouping Art & Language, Rimbaud's posthumous career amounts to a long series of appropriations prompted by the iconicity of an `homme-enfant' whose literary radicality is all too easily reduced to a generalized, unprincipled delinquency. …

Mapping Jouissance : Insights from a Case Study in the Schizophrenia of Canadian Drama

To read is to compare.--George Steiner, What Is Comparative Literature? In The Map and Garden, John Vernon identifies two forms of schizophrenia that together frame most common features of twentieth-century literature and culture: one alienation of division, compartmentalization, separation (the map); other, absence of distinctions, compulsion to see world as inseparable, natural, erotic, and always whole (the garden). (1) Vernon's contrast of and shows a striking potential to absorb various contrastive analyses of English Canadian and Quebecois literatures, including double-axis hypothesis highlighted by Jean-Charles Falardeau (1959) in which English Canadian literature is seen to operate on a horizontal axis (individuals in relation to each other and society) in contrast to vertical axis (of man in relation to cosmos) of Quebecois writing; (2) Clara Thomas's characterization of English Canadian literature as masculine, linear, and Protestant formed under image of Robinson Crusoe in opposition to cyclical, feminine, and Catholic perspectives of a French Canadian writing dominated by fable of Precious Kingdom (1972); (3) Philip Stratford's stylistic analysis of typical Canadian novel as outward looking and preoccupied with realism and historical perspective in contrast to inward looking, subjective, and deeply coded roman quebecois (1986); (4) and McLuhanesque speculations on English Canadian literate/visual stylistics cast in relief against Quebecois orality (1990). (5) The map/garden axis also seems receptive to Sylvia Soderlind's at-homedness thesis, which contrasts absolute, almost sacred, identity between name and thing, and in Quebecois novel in contrast to English Canadian novel in which language becomes a plastic, though tough and resistant material that is separable from territory it un-names and names. (6) Noticeably, studies of novel have dominated comparative studies of English Canadian and Quebecois literatures. (7) In addition to numerous, most obvious reasons why there has been a paucity of research comparing English Canadian and Quebecois drama--the barrier, dominance of novel and film, lack of awareness of Canadian theater--we can add opposition of postmodern criticism to generalization (as risking totalization or essentialism) and to binary analyses (as rigid, biased, and exclusionary). Vernon's schizophrenias of map and garden resist tendency to exclude difference and alterity or to privilege a centrist or structuralist tradition. Relative to garden, map is a minor form, but Anglo-American societies happen to perceive it as dominant and central. Binary contrasts of English Canada and Quebec seem typically to apply privileged signifiers of traditional Western culture (and map) to English Canada--masculine over feminine, realist over religious, objective over subjective, individualistic over collective--but in Vernon's analysis, garden and map are not opposites, are not mutually exclusive, because garden includes and infuses all, including map. Though Vernon bases The Garden and Map on work of novelist William Burroughs and poet Theodore Roethke, both of whom have been diagnosed as schizophrenic, playwrights whose work I wish to consider--David Fennario and Michel Tremblay--strike me as models of mental health. What I wish to isolate in this comparison are differences of style, at once most pervasive and most inscrutable element of any writer's work. At same time, I take to heart Raymond Williams's claim concerning sociocultural change that the actual alternative to received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not absence, unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized.... What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range, and description that often fits change best is literary term `style'. …

They Put Me in the Mix

They Put Me in the Mix