When William S. Burroughs’ novella “Ah Pook Is Here” was published in 1979, it was in a form greatly diminished from the authors’ original intent. That’s not a typo, because although it was Burroughs who wrote the text that was published, there were two creators of the far more elaborate work that it was cleaved from, Burroughs and Malcolm McNeill, a then 23-year-old illustrator.

Burroughs’ apocalyptic text tells the story of a megalomaniac bastard (an “Ugly American” based on a powerful media tycoon like William Randolph Hearst or Henry Luce) who acquires the powers of the Mayan death god, Ah Puch. Conceived as “continuous panorama,” with accordion-style, linked pages in the pictographic format of the surviving Mayan codices—“an early comic book” as per Burroughs—the project, seven years in the making, consisted of over 100 detailed illustrations by McNeill, 30 in full color, and about 50 pages of text. “Ah Puch is Here” (as it was originally titled) would have been prohibitively expensive to publish at the time, but it was also rather racy and sexually explicit—including male on male imagery—meaning the pool of potential publishers was certainly very, very small to begin with.
 

 
As Burroughs wrote in the forward to the 1979 book:

“[O]ver 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. The book is in fact unique…”

That it was. “Ah Puch is Here” wouldn’t have been the first graphic novel—Burroughs’ own American publisher Grove Press had already put out Guy Peellaert and Pierre Barther’s Adventures of Jodelle as well as Massins’ graphic interpretation of Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano... There was Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella, Michael O’Donoghue’s The Adventures of Phoebe Zeit-Geist, Guido Crepax’s “Valentina” series, The Adventures of Tintin, lots of stuff comes to mind, but in the main these books were collections of episodic comic strips, not “serious” narratives originally conceived of to fit between two book covers or that would have required luxurious glossy printing to properly display the highly detailed Hieronymous Bosch-inspired photorealistic artwork within… Unique yes, then as now.
 

 
Burroughs collaboration with McNeill began in 1970, when the author was living in London and McNeill was an art student. Without any communication between them, McNeil illustrated Burroughs’ submissions to Cyclops magazine, “The Unspeakable Mr. Hart” and impressed him enough so that he wanted to meet the young artist. (It’s worth noting that McNeil scarcely had any idea who Burroughs was at the time, even so, he drew Mr. Hart, the villain, to look a lot like a younger version of El Hombre Invisible.)
 

 
After a year of museum research and preliminary design on a mockup, Rolling Stone’s Straight Arrow Books imprint agreed to publish the “Ah Puch” book and McNeil moved to San Francisco to work on it. Straight Arrow was shuttered in 1974 and eventually the project was abandoned before the text portion alone saw the light of day in Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts in 1979. Malcolm McNeil went on to a distinguished career as an illustrator for the likes of National Lampoon, Marvel Comics and The New York Times and a motion graphics designer and director for film, advertising and television, including winning an Emmy for his work for Saturday Night Live. (This will be of interest to no one save for fellow vets of the 1980s New York advertising world, but McNeil’s Paintbox work was synonymous with Charlex, the NYC-based video production house probably best known for The Cars’ “You Might Think” video, dozens of TV show openings and hundreds of commercials.)

After some 30 years in storage, the by now fragile “Ah Puck is Here” artwork was restored by Malcolm McNeill for exhibition, and was shown at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, CA, the Saloman Arts Gallery in Manhattan and elsewhere.
 

 
Fantagraphics have published two separate Ah Pook books, one a gorgeous coffee table book of McNeil’s extraordinary panoramic illustrations for the Burroughs collaboration, The Lost Art of Ah Pook Is Here: Images from the Graphic Novel and a memoir, Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me, an intimate, affectionate portrait of their unlikely friendship and multi-year/multi-continent joint project.

The first book has very little text, and although it’s impossible to make heads or tails out of what is going on with the drawings alone, trust me, you get a very good sense of the epicness of the vision and also see some of what would have made 99% of the publishers of the 1970s very squeamish. Sadly, for reasons McNeil politely declines to go too far in-depth about, he was denied the use of Burroughs’ text for the Fantagraphics publication by his estate and this is a real shame.

However, if you have a copy of truncated 1979 Ah Pook Is Here (I do) it becomes an even more satisfying excuse to dive in deeply on the detective work and match passages from the text to the artwork. If you’re interested enough to purchase the coffee table book, surely you are going to have to rush over to eBay or ABEBooks and get yourself a copy of Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts, just bear that in mind.
 

 
Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me, the memoir and the third book in this trilogy, is no less essential for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of what made Burroughs tick, and should, along with the artwork that was regretfully parted from WSB’s text, be seen as one of the most exciting things to come along in Burroughs scholarship in recent years. It is, by far, the most observational—and highly personal/subjective, which makes it fun—look at Burroughs produced by any of his friends or collaborators. McNeil is a fine writer—the man must be a superb raconteur—and he never forgets who the book is really about.

I must say, as a longtime William Burroughs fanatic, I was wowed by McNeil’s twinned Fantagraphics books (which are beautiful matching objects) and spellbound by his tales of working with Burroughs. There are really three books here that you need, so it’s not a cheap proposition to acquire the lot, but if you’re a big Burroughs fanboy, it’s certainly well worth the expense.

Furthermore, if you’re so inclined Malcolm McNeil is selling very reasonably priced limited edition prints of several of his incredible “Ah Pook” panels.
 

 

The Dead City Radio recording of Burroughs reading “Ah Puck is Here” provides the soundtrack to this amazing short animated film directed by Philip Hunt with music by John Cale.

 
If you’ve never read War and Peace or Anna Karenina—which is often described as the greatest novel ever written—then soon you will have no excuse, as all of Leo Tolstoy’s works will be available free on-line.

The Tolstoy.ru website will feature the 90-volume edition, which has been scanned and proofread, no less than three times by more than 3,000 volunteers from 49 countries. The texts, along with personal letters, and comprehensive biographical information is available in Russian, and will shortly be available in English.

The writer’s great-great-granddaughter, Fyokla Tolstaya told RIA Novosti:

“We wanted to come up with an official website that will contain academically justified information. Nowadays, it’s very important [to know] who posts information online.”

All of the novels, short stories, pamphlets, children’s stories and letters will be available for download onto all e-book readers and computers from Tolstoy.ru.

Below the only known film footage of Leo Tolstoy.
 

 
Via RIA Novosti, H/T Paris Review

 
Back in the day, like when the Internet was first a thing, one of my unexpected joys was discovering that Art Garfunkel, who had a very well-developed website early on, dedicated a section to updating the books he was reading. Not just the books he’d been reading lately, but every book he had read since 1968. (Here’s how it looked on November 3, 1999.) The guy went through a great many books a year, and his preferences were pretty high-minded for the most part, like Voltaire and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Lord Chesterfield and cats like that. And he’d mix it up too, there wouldn’t be any runs of every Philip Roth book in a single year or anything like that, he’d jump around from Thomas More to E.L. Doctorow to Martin Heidegger as it pleased him. At the time I thought that the idea of a famous musician like Art Garfunkel parading his erudition in public like this was high-larious, but in retrospect (I’m older too) I find it rather sweet and admirable. He has good taste and he clearly enjoys his reading. In truth I probably wasn’t all that nice to ol’ Art, having an inherently funny name like “Art Garfunkel” and being a prominent example of someone who hadn’t been that productive musically in the recent past and all.

It’s something a shock, then, to discover lo these fifteen or so years later that Art has kept the list current through 2012—and presumably will keep updating it. I noticed that Art keeps a separate list of “Favorites,” which list currently has a substantial 157 selections on it, just to give you an idea of just how much the man reads—those are just the favorites.

Looking at the list, it’s hard not to notice that the most recent entry is E.L. James’ Fifty Shades of Grey, and some British journalist must have noticed too because there’s audio of him talking about it:
 

I love that book. Unlike so many people, I think it’s quite well written. It’s not only spicy, this writer can write. I thought it was a very well written, hot book. It’s spicy!

 
The quote sounds spliced together and I wouldn’t trust it for a second, but Art’s enthusiasm does sound legit.
 

 
The interviewer, John Freeman, thought Evelyn Waugh was being unnecessarily tetchy when he questioned him on Face to Face. Yet, by today’s standards, Waugh seems positively chummy—which perhaps confirms how brash the art of interviewing has become. Waugh’s biographer, Selina Hastings, thought Waugh adopted a “pose of world-weary boredom,” which (at times) is apparent. However, I thought Freeman was far too preoccupied with sticking to his scripted questions, often moving onto the next subject without having actually listening to what Waugh said.

Interestingly, Waugh knew he was in for a grilling from former politician Freeman, and wrote to a mutual friend, Labour MP, Tom Driberg to get some inside skinny on his interlocutor—it wasn’t needed, as Waugh (with the look of “an exhausted rogue jollied up by drink”) easily batted the majority of Freeman’s questions out of the boundary.

Waugh was one of (if not) the greatest author(s) of the twentieth century (Brideshead Revisited, Scoop, Vile Bodies, and A Handful of Dust), his brilliant career covered his move from atheist, radical, and one of the bright, young people, to devout Catholic, olde school Tory and country squire. Though Freeman never fully gets Waugh to explain how and why this happened, there are many memorable moments in this interview (for example the discussion on his nervous breakdown and the writing of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold being one), and several which (unintentionally) reveal more about Freeman than perhaps he intended. One gem, is Waugh’s disarming response to Freeman’s prodding over criticism.

John Freeman: “Have you ever brooded on unfair or unjust criticism?”

Evelyn Waugh: “No, I’m afraid if someone praises me, I think what an arse, and if they abuse me I think they’re an arse.”

John Freeman: “And if they say nothing about you at all, and take no notice of you…?”

Evelyn Waugh: “That’s the best I can hope for.”

Waugh described the experience of appearing on Face to Face in a letter to Nancy Mitford:

Last week I was driven by poverty to the humiliating experience of appearing on television. The man who asked the questions simply couldn’t believe I had had a happy childhood. ‘Surely you suffered from the lack of a sister?’

It may have been “humiliating” for Waugh, but his interview gives a fascinating insight into one of the world’s greatest authors.
 

 
 
In 1968, Charles Bukowski became a person of interest to the F.B.I. because of his writing for an underground newspaper.

Bukowski wrote a scurrilous and highly entertaining column, “notes of a dirty old man” for Open City. This column caused enough offense to the Postal Services and the F.B.I. that there was an investigation into the life and morals of the literary mailman.

What emerges from the 113-page file is a portrait of a man who was regularly absent from work, who enjoyed a drink, was considered a “draft-dodger”, and was once married to “Jane S. Cooney”—the “Jane” of many of his most heartfelt poems. Nothing new there. Though the finks at the F.B.I. did add their own literary pique by describing Bukowski’s work as “highly romanticized.”

Read the whole document here.
 

 
Via bukowski.net, h/t Open Culture
 
More pages from Buk’s FBI File, after the jump…
 

 
Bilbo’s Pizza in Kalamazoo, Michigan is a small locally-owned pizzeria that has somehow managed to avoid being sued by the Tolkien estate for its use of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit character names. Even their logo is the tree that was inside the pavilion at Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday party, misidentified on their website as “the singular and unusual (to Hobbits) existence of the Mallorn tree in Hobbiton that became the centerpiece for the grand birthday party that Bilbo threw for himself that signaled the beginning of the adventure of the War of the Ring.” (Mallorn trees grew in Lothlórien.) The business was started in 1976 by two friends and Tolkien fans, John Hindman and Charlie Konett. They chose the name Bilbo’s “because of the enduring nature of the character by that name.” 

The generosity of diversity in Tolkien’s character development allowed us to have a lot of fun with this world. The richness endemic to fantasy characters presented as they were as part of a history gives rise to to fleeting notions that such beings might well have preceded us here and that flight is buttressed from time to time by references in the work. Hobbits, for example, are said to be able to pass unnoticed by most if they wished to and elves would probably have been considered to be some half remembered day dream if any of us had happened upon them unawares. So we feel remotely tied to them and their world. In the early years there were groups of people, whether Tolkien Society or Society for Creative Anachronism members who engaged us in debates about our depictions of characters. 

It was pointed out by one that Hobbits did not have facial hair and that our rendition of Bilbo was therefore inaccurate. Our response was that there was a remote division of Hobbits, the Stoors, who indeed did sometimes grow facial hair and that Bilbo was certainly a descendant of this line. There was a group of people who had developed their own costumes with elaborate masks and accouterments who, upon arrangement, would visit our dining room and display themselves in full regalia. Patrons of Bilbo’s were treated to fairy-like creatures crouching next to their table as if avoiding some greater threat from something otherwise unseen by ordinary men and women. Before anyone could gather themselves enough to break the spell, the visitors were gone.

There is an “Elven Favorite” pizza (pepperoni, mushroom, ham and green pepper) on the menu, but the list of sandwiches has the most Tolkien references:  The choice of “Master Sam,” “The Old Guy lived 130 years and he NEVER tasted anything this good!,” “It took 13 strong young dwarves to carry this,” “The Elves of the world recommend,” “Brought forth on the ships of the ancient sea king,” and “Old Fatty, whose wise nose led him here.”

Dennis Miller was so bummed about Obama winning his first term that the day following the election, Miller restricted listeners’ calls on his radio show to the subject of sandwiches. Some weird guy from Michigan called in and mentioned the “Fatty Lumpkin” from Bilbo’s but would not answer the simple question of what was on the sandwich (sliced breast of turkey, choice roast beef, Monterrey jack cheese, shredded lettuce, fresh tomato and mayo on seven-grain bread), and Miller hung up on him. 

One of Bilbo’s locations now has its own craft beer as well, “Sledgehammer Wizard Wheat Dragon Red Ale.” I can hear the dwarven drinking songs now.
 

 
A peek inside Bilbo’s Pizza, below:

 
Death often inspires the most remarkable hyperbole. At the memorial service for Anthony Burgess in 1994, novelist William Boyd eulogized the author of A Clockwork Orange as “a genius,” “a prodigy, a daunting and awesome one,” who “would compose a string quartet in the ten minutes he allowed himself between finishing a novel and writing a monograph on James Joyce,” whose “polymorphous abilities are genuinely amazing.”

High praise indeed. Yet, Mr. Boyd wasn’t finished, Mr. Burgess, he said, was “one of our great comic novelists.” Boyd gave, by way of example, that off-used line from one of the Enderby novels. This was the line with which Burgess proved (allegedly for a bet) he could write a sentence where the word “onions” appears three times.

‘Then—instead of expensive mouthwash—he had breathed on Enderby—bafflingly—(for no banquet would serve, because of the redolence of onions, onions) onions.’

Hardly a knee-slapper, rather the kind of literary snobbishness that epitomizes Burgess, and by association Mr. Boyd.

Burgess was low comedy. He was for the cheap fart jokes, like Dudley Moore when competing against the loquacious comic invention of Peter Cook on Derek and Clive, or like the trademark raspberry (“Bronx Cheer”) used by Goon Harry Secombe when confronted with the manic genius of Spike Milligan.

Burgess’s idea of comedy was to have a dog called the n-word (The Doctor is Sick), or a “hero” poet (Enderby) writing his verse (blast) on the toilet; or where Shakespeare is cuckolded by his brother and catches the clap from his “Dark Lady” (Nothing Like the Sun)

Though I like Burgess, I would hardly call his work comic. Too often his books present an author more interested in flashing his learnedness to an audience, rather than his imagination—which is why his books lack emotional resonance, and his characters rarely have an interior life.

Burgess always wanted to be seen as smarter than everyone—when readers pointed out to the master the mistakes in his magnum opus Earthly Powers, Burgess claimed he had deliberately included these errors to see who would discover them, which is like ye olde Thelwell cartoon of the riding instructor who when thrown by his horse, asked his pupils, “Which one of you spotted my deliberate mistake?”

Perhaps aware of this lack, Burgess was usually quick to take offense—watch any interview and he types himself as the victim, the Catholic in a oppressive-Protestant society, a northerner in a London-centric world, a student from a red-brick university rather than the hallowed groves of Cambridge or Oxford. Burgess is Jimmy Porter, full of petty grievances against the world. Which all makes for an interesting character, and author, but not a great one.

Burgess’s best known novel is A Clockwork Orange, which became an international success once it had been filmed by Stanley Kubrick. Burgess came to hate it and told Playboy in 1971, of all his books it was the one he liked least. But without A Clockwork Orange would anyone have taken an interest in Burgess?
 

 
The secret code contained in Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’, after the jump…

 
Happy birthday Bukowski. You are seriously missed.

“Something for The Touts, The Nuns, The Grocery Clerks And You” is Charles Bukowski at his absolute best—angry, bitter, sad, beautiful and funny. From the 1974 collection Burning In Water, Drowning In Flame.

The video is composed of found footage and excerpts from the works of Arthur Lipsett and Gregory Markopoulos.

In 1953 the quirky 66-year-old English poet Edith Sitwell was in need of cash and came to California to write a commissioned article about Hollywood. She had already toured the U.S. doing poetry readings with her brothers Osbert and Sacheverell in 1948. She came from a famously eccentric family and had established herself as a modern poet interested in experimenting with rhythm and word play. Her own unusual style of clothing, jewelry, and make-up was notorious and made her an easy target for her enemies (like Noel Coward). She wore her hair in a colorful turban and had elaborate, lush clothing made in Elizabethan designs, which she wore with large, chunky jewelry. Edith was not a conventionally attractive woman or interested in modern fashions.

So who did Edith’s magazine editors in Hollywood think it would be fun to introduce her to during her visit to Hollywood?

Marilyn Monroe.

They were expecting the two women to dislike each other, much like the time in 1992 when Camille Paglia was seated with Rush Limbaugh at the twenty-fifth anniversary black-tie party for 60 Minutes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and ended up bonding over cigars and Scotch. Instead of giving the waiting photographers a good scandal, Edith and Marilyn hit it off immediately. Edith described Marilyn in her autobiography Taken Care Of:

In repose her face was at moments strangely, prophetically tragic, like the face of a beautiful ghost – a little spring-ghost, an innocent fertility daemon, the vegetation spirit that was Ophelia.

Marilyn was an autodidact but her intellectual curiosity and love of books were not considered consistent with her sex symbol image. Marilyn and Edith sat together chatting happily about Austrian philosopher, esoteric spiritual writer, and founder of anthroposophy Rudolf Steiner, whose books Marilyn had recently been reading.

Edith and Marilyn met up again in 1956 in London when Marilyn was there with her third husband, playwright Arthur Miller, filming The Prince and the Showgirl.

Dame Edith Sitwell in 1959 discussing her strange family and meeting Marilyn Monroe (around 2:53), below:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘I Do Not Wish My Nose…Nailed to Other People’s Lavatories’: Dame Edith Sitwell on ‘Naked Lunch’

 
After William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, there arose a consciousness that Americans might be interested to know more about him, so the Ford Foundation (apparently) put together a little movie about him. The result is one of the odder literary videos you are likely to find.

In effect, they made a docudrama of a day in the life of William Faulkner—starring William Faulkner as himself. The scenes are blocked, there are reverse angles and cuts, just as in an episode of, say, Leave It to Beaver. It’s incredibly stilted and stagey.

A narrator tendentiously explains some facts about Faulkner, emphasizing his ability to see into the hearts of many different kinds of people. There’s a passing effort at a framing device: a journalist friend of Faulkner’s, Phil “Moon” Mullen, visits Faulkner and tells him that someone—that is, Mullen—should write an article about him; Faulkner, after some unconvincing bluffing, agrees. Then (of course) we see a scene of Mullen at the typewriter writing the story.

The movie consists mostly of little vignettes in which Faulkner interacts with the local citizens of Oxford, Mississippi. To say that the dialogue is exposition-heavy is putting it mildly: “Moon asked me to write a piece for the paper about you. I told him about how our families have been friends for generations…. Then you wrote Sartoris, which we knew would sell and it didn’t sell. Then The Sound and the Fury, which was a fine book and didn’t sell….”

A little later he visits the local drugstore (which also sells books), and Faulkner converses with the proprietor as follows:

“By the way, whatever happened to all those books of mine you loaded yourself up with?”

“Oh I’m happy to tell you all of ‘em have been sold, Bill. I understand that they’re bringing premium prices now as collector’s items.”

“Funny how things turn out.”

And that’s the end of that scene.

The best thing about the movie is that you get to see some exteriors of 1950s Oxford as well as some interior shots of what I can only hope is Faulkner’s own house.

The whole thing is well shy of 20 minutes but has been broken up into 5 parts for no discernible reason.

We’ll start you off with the second part, which is a bit more engaging; the other four parts are after the jump.
 

 
Via The Paris Review