When Kurt Vonnegut died in 2007, I recall reading about his passing and being quite depressed at the thought of a world without him in it. I read all of his books when I was a kid—some of them several times over—and like many of my generation (and the one above it) I very much internalized Kurt Vonnegut’s notoriously pessimistic, but ultimately kind-hearted view of mankind. I can also say, without hesitation, that his way of looking at the absurdities of life made a lot more sense to me than the religion that my parents tried to stuff down my throat at that age.

His was one of the most important moral—and comic—voices of 20th century American literature. Who else besides Kurt Vonnegut could be considered in the same league as say, Mark Twain?

When he died a great voice was silenced, but from time to time, something unanthologized or a previously unseen letter will surface (Love as Always, Kurt: Vonnegut as I Knew Him by Loree Rackstraw, a woman he’d once had an affair with and stayed friends with, is a terrific, if little-known, intimate portrait of the man, including many of his letters). Recently Letters of Note uncovered Vonnegut’s contribution to a Volkswagen ad campaign that ran in TIME magazine in 1988. The campaign asked notable people to write letters to those living 100 years in the future:

Ladies & Gentlemen of A.D. 2088:

It has been suggested that you might welcome words of wisdom from the past, and that several of us in the twentieth century should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instructions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glory to Him; for the hour of His judgment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about anybody anytime, I guess, is a prayer first used by alcoholics who hoped to never take a drink again: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.’

Our century hasn’t been as free with words of wisdom as some others, I think, because we were the first to get reliable information about the human situation: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gather, how fast we were reproducing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much damage we were doing to the air and water and topsoil on which most life forms depended, how violent and heartless nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pouring in?

For me, the most paralyzing news was that Nature was no conservationist. It needed no help from us in taking the planet apart and putting it back together some different way, not necessarily improving it from the viewpoint of living things. It set fire to forests with lightning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more support life than big-city parking lots. It had in the past sent glaciers down from the North Pole to grind up major portions of Asia, Europe, and North America. Nor was there any reason to think that it wouldn’t do that again someday. At this very moment it is turning African farms to deserts, and can be expected to heave up tidal waves or shower down white-hot boulders from outer space at any time. It has not only exterminated exquisitely evolved species in a twinkling, but drained oceans and drowned continents as well. If people think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an enemy.

Yes, and as you people a hundred years from now must know full well, and as your grandchildren will know even better: Nature is ruthless when it comes to matching the quantity of life in any given place at any given time to the quantity of nourishment available. So what have you and Nature done about overpopulation? Back here in 1988, we were seeing ourselves as a new sort of glacier, warm-blooded and clever, unstoppable, about to gobble up everything and then make love—and then double in size again.

On second thought, I am not sure I could bear to hear what you and Nature may have done about too many people for too small a food supply.

And here is a crazy idea I would like to try on you: Is it possible that we aimed rockets with hydrogen bomb warheads at each other, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deeper problem—how cruelly Nature can be expected to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?

Now that we can discuss the mess we are in with some precision, I hope you have stopped choosing abysmally ignorant optimists for positions of leadership. They were useful only so long as nobody had a clue as to what was really going on—during the past seven million years or so. In my time they have been catastrophic as heads of sophisticated institutions with real work to do.

The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms:

Reduce and stabilize your population.

Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.

Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.

Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.

Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.

Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.

And so on. Or else.

Am I too pessimistic about life a hundred years from now? Maybe I have spent too much time with scientists and not enough time with speechwriters for politicians. For all I know, even bag ladies and bag gentlemen will have their own personal helicopters or rocket belts in A.D. 2088. Nobody will have to leave home to go to work or school, or even stop watching television. Everybody will sit around all day punching the keys of computer terminals connected to everything there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astronauts.

Cheers,

Kurt Vonnegut

A perfect prose diamond, right?

I can think of no better coda to this bleak epistle than this clip of Alan Weissman, author of Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?, a new book about the disturbing mathematical trajectory of the overpopulation problem on Real Time with Bill Maher earlier this month… Have a nice day!
 

 
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes discuss their work and life together in this interview for the BBC radio program Two of a Kind: Poets in Partnership, from January 18th, 1961. The interviewer is Owen Leeming, who asked about their first meeting at a party in February 1956:

Plath: I happened to be at Cambridge. I was sent there by the [US] government on a government grant. And I’d read some of Ted’s poems in this magazine and I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. I went to this little celebration and that’s actually where we met… Then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later… We kept writing poems to each other. Then it just grew out of that, I guess, a feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on.

Hughes: The poems haven’t really survived, the marriage, it took a hold. [Laughs]

Plath spotted her “big, dark, hunky boy” across a crowded room, and later danced, drank, and discussed poetry before Hughes kissed her “bang smash on the mouth.” Plath then bit him “long and hard” on the cheek, which he wore as a badge over the following weeks. Four months later, Plath and Hughes married on June 16th, 1956.

Plath published her first volume of poetry Colossus and Other Poems in October 1960, while Hughes had already published two volumes of poetry, including his award-winning debut The Hawk in the Rain in 1957. When asked if their relationship as partners and poets was in “parallel” or “conflict”, Hughes replied:

Hughes: We’re very alike — we like the same things, live at the same tempo, have the same sort of rhythm in almost every way. But obviously this is a very fortunate covering for temperaments that are extremely different. But they lead secret lives, you see — they content themselves in an imaginative world, so they never really come into open conflict.

He later discussed the processes by which they wrote:

Hughes: What she writes out needn’t be at all the contents of her own mind — it needn’t be anything she knows — but it’s something that somebody in the room knows, or somebody that she’s very close to knows. And, in this way, two people who are sympathetic to each other and who are right, who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way, in fact make up one person — they make up one source of power, which you both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from the single shared mind. … It’s not that you choose the same things to write about, necessarily, and you certainly don’t write about them in the same way — it’s that you draw on an experience, it’s as though you knew more about something than you, from your own life, have ever really learned. . .

It’s a complicated idea to get across, because you’ve first of all to believe in this sort of telepathic union exists between two sympathetic people.

Plath also talked about her childhood, and how her writing developed:

Plath: I think I was happy up to the age of about nine — very carefree — and I believed in magic, which influenced me a great bit. And then, at nine, I was rather disillusioned — I stopped believing in elves and Santa Claus and all these little beneficent powers — and became more realistic and depressed, I think, and then, gradually, became a bit more adjusted about the age of sixteen or seventeen. But I certainly didn’t have a happy adolescence — and, perhaps, that’s partly why I turned specially to writing — I wrote diaries, stories, and so forth. I was quite introverted during those early years.

Between this interview and her tragic, early death in February 1963, Plath was to write her novel The Bell Jar, and the poems that were collected and published posthumously as Ariel in 1965.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
Sylvia Plath’s pen and ink drawings exhibited for the first time
 
With thanks to Alan Shields, via Brainpickings

Luca Del Baldo‘s terrific cover portrait of Ballard

This review of The JG Ballard Book is a guest post from Graham Rae

Even though writer James Graham Ballard, the so-called “Seer of Shepperton,” died in 2009, interest in his far-seeing-and-reaching futurologist oeuvre has not waned any. More specifically, his memory and legacy have been kept alive by a dedicated band of Ballardians, as his devotees are known, who converse on a Yahoo group about every JGB-related topic under the (empire of the) sun.

One such dedicated Ballardian is Canadian Rick McGrath. He runs the excellent site www.jgballard.ca, where he has all manner of material on display about the writer – interviews, non-fiction, videos, etc. Shoot on over there and have a look for yourself. Fellow Ballardian James Goddard suggested to McGrath that he might try self-publishing a book, so he put out a call for material to various JGB-interested parties round the world, being pleasantly surprised at the response he got. The JG Ballard Book, of course, is the end result, and is also a self-confessed nod to RE/Search 8/9, V. Vale’s seminal 1984 book which helped introduce Ballard to the American audience.

As I said, it’s self-published (easily available through the usual channels), being ex-adman McGrath’s first ever attempt at publishing, and I’d have to say it’s a damned fine-looking book. Starting with the great painting of Ballard on the cover by extremely talented, amiable Italian painter Luca Del Baldo, the book is jam-packed with 191 pages of well-reproduced full-color Ballard letters, interviews with hand-written corrections by the writer, bibliographies, etc; a real smorgasbord of juicy Ballardania for any fan of the writer. Color photos and cover reproductions and such jump from nearly every page of The JG Ballard Book, and it’s a real pleasure to look at from start to finish. This is a labor of love, and it really shows.

There are a huge amount of first-hand JGB reproductions here, and they’re great to see. I have a few letters from the man myself, having very occasionally corresponded with him in the 90s and noughties, and it’s always great to see his sometimes-cryptic handwriting detailing his deep-dish creative thoughts on some headscratcher existential mystery or other. Besides all the reproducing of JGB handwritten materials, there are also a lot of excellent interpretive articles by Ballard admirers in the book, focusing on some aspect of his work and discussing it at length.

Thus we have Peter Brigg examining the writer’s attempts at transcending/rearranging the human concept of time (“JG Ballard: Time Out of Mind,” a really thought-provoking piece); a discussion of why JGB has been so poorly served with his book covers and what might be done to rectify this, “Visualizing the Ballardian Image” (writer Rick Poynor reckons that ‘narrative figuration’ artist Peter Klasen’s splintered-view images, synchronous with Ballard’s writing during the 60s and 70s, would provide a great marriage of aesthetic minds); inspired-lateral-thinking piece “JG Ballard in the Dissecting Room,” where Mike Bonsall purchased a copy of the same edition of Cunningham’s anatomy book the young JGB used when studying medicine at Cambridge and points out passages in the writer’s work that could have been inspired by the dissection diagrams and explanatory texts; a travelogue of McGrath’s own visit to Ballard’s childhood Shanghai home in “JG Ballard’s Shanghai”; and many more.

Aside from analytical writings, McGrath and his fellow Ballardians (including David Pringle, JGB’s Scottish archivist, who tentatively announced last year his starting work on a definitive Ballard biography) have dug up things like rare interviews never collected anywhere before, or even expanded reprints of already-familiar Q&As. These reminded me of why I started reading Ballard in the first place. I always personally liked his interviews more than a lot of his writing, to be perfectly honest, all those amazing thought processes in full flow and flower, which is why I was so glad to see this sort of stuff included.  The old-worldview-destroying firecrackers and depth charges of deep thought peppered liberally throughout the interviews and fiction were what kept me coming back to Ballard. Stuff like this, from the 1981 short story “News From the Sun,” as singled out by Peter Brigg:

“The whole process of life is the discovery of the imminent past contained in the present. At the same time, I feel a growing nostalgia for the future, a memory of the future I have already experienced but somehow forgotten. In our lives we try to repeat those significant events that have already taken place in the future. As we grow older we feel an increasing nostalgia for our own deaths, through which we have already passed. Equally, we have a growing premonition of our births, which are about to take place. At any moment we may be born for the first time.”

You just think about that for a while. Isn’t that just great? You just feel your brain being buffeted back and forth and up and down and round and about by the strength of Ballard’s intellect and ability at getting philosophical brainteasers down on the page, and it’s just a joy to sit and think about what he has said and run it through our minds, savoring the fine seditious vintage of his brilliant intellect. Nobody else has ever, to my knowledge, written like that, and nobody ever will again. Which is why Ballard’s death left such a huge, unfillable hole in world thought and literature.

And why books like McGrath’s are such a necessity and pleasure. Unlike his American counterpart-cum-literary-outlaw hero William S Burroughs, JG Ballard seems to have already started to slide from view into obscurity. At least on the American side of the Atlantic, that is; in the UK he is still venerated by the London media and chattering classes, and quoted fairly constantly by the likes of Will Self and John Gray, a rent-a-gob duo who seem boringly terminally fixated on JGB at the expense of their own thoughts on things. Still, all in the cause of keeping Ballard’s memory alive, so it’s all well and good. (Hopefully the announced production of High Rise will remedy this also.)

Ballard’s daughter Fay likes The JG Ballard Book a great deal, which should tell you something. It’s perfect for the hardcore Ballard enthusiast, though as an introduction to the writer I think it may be a bit esoteric, as it assumes a familiarity with the subject matter under discussion. But the interviews and interpretive pieces might provide an inroad into Ballard’s work and thought for those uninitiated would-be readers who wonder what all the fuss was and is about. McGrath, bolstered by the way the volume turned out, and the good reception it has had, is already planning a second volume to be published through The Terminal Press, his own wee publishing house. If the quality of this volume is anything to go by, with the amount of uncollected Ballardania floating round the world, the Canadian may be keeping JG Ballard’s memory alive for many years to come, and that would be nothing but a good thing.
 

A 2003 BBC profile of Ballard

Previously from Graham Rae on Dangerous Minds:
Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel: Nailing a whole lot of ‘Hole’ and ‘Nail,’ an exegesis

 
He signed his earliest poems as John Allyn McAlpin Berryman. The name was a marriage of his father’s and his stepfather’s names. It was then shortened to just “John Berryman,” but this, he began to believe, was a terrible betrayal.

“What I should have done,” he told his first wife Eileen Simpson, “What I cannot forgive myself for not having done, was to take the name John Smith. This act of disloyalty I will never, never be able to repair. To ‘make a name’ for myself…Can you see how ambivalent my feelings are about this ambition?”

His father was John Allyn Smith, a banker whose suicide, when Berryman was eleven, was to have a major influence over the poet’s life. His father shot himself outside of his son’s window.

His mother claimed his father was too cowardly to kill himself, and that it had been an accident. She remarried quickly to a man she may have been having an affair, John Angus McAlpin Berryman. The surname was adopted and John Smith became John Berryman.

His father’s death robbed the young poet of a strong mentor, leaving Berryman too much in awe of others. He was influenced by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Saul Bellow, and it took him time to filter these writers out of his work. He also had an uneasy relationship with his mother, who dominated much of his life. He was haunted by his father’s early death, and feared he would fail in life as his father had. There was a premonition of what the future would bring at the party for his engagement to Eileen Simpson in 1942. Berryman was getting drunk, and an argument was simmering between him and his mother, as Eileen later recalled in her memoir Poets in their Youth:

Soon after the party broke up. John and I were staying with his mother [...] He was, as he said, high as a kite. Never having seen him either high or boisterous before, I was amused. [...] The vodka had done its work; he was not merely high, he was drunk. I was just taking this in when there was an exchange between mother and son to which John reacted with a flare-up of anger such as I’d come to expect whenever they were together for too long. I entered the kitchen at the moment when he turned from her, threw open the door to the terrace and with the skill of a gymnast leaped over the ledge of the shoulder-high wall that enclosed it. The ledge was wider than a foot, but not much. Below was the cement sidewalk. As Mrs Berryman shrieked, John started walking, slowly putting one foot in front of the other: the drunk giving himself the test he always fails. It was this scene, and the moment of paralysis I felt before going to him, that remained framed in my memory.

Thirty years later, in January 1972, there was no one to save Berryman jumping from the ledge of the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He landed on the edge of the west bank that flanked the ice-covered Mississippi River.

In his song “We Call Upon the Author,” Nick Cave declared:

Bukowski was a jerk! Berryman was best!
He wrote like wet paper-maché
But he went the Hemingway

Berryman and Bukowski both wrote from the turmoil of their lives. Both were drunks, had fractured relationships with others, and mythologized their lives in writing. But Cave is right, Berryman was a better poet than Bukowski, and his poetry demands more from his readers. Perhaps because of this, Berryman was never as fashionable as Bukowski, and only truly received the acclaim he rightly deserved after his death. His greatest works are Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), 77 Dream Songs (1964),  His Toy, His Dream His Rest (1968), The Dream Songs (1969), Love & Fame (1970), Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972 (1977).

This is John Berryman filmed in a bar in Dublin, 1967, discussing his Dream Songs, his alter ego “Henry,” his biography on novelist Stephen Crane, and reciting his poem “Dream Song 14”:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored….

This year marks the centenary of Berryman’s birth, which is to be hoped will bring a new generation of readers to his life and work.
 

 
More poetry and words from John Berryman, after the jump…

 
If, like me, you have sold or lost a favorite book and, no matter how hard you try, cannot find a replacement volume in some second-hand bookshop, dime rack, or yard sale, then you will probably be delighted to hear about Valancourt Books, which publishes a fabulous selection of lost classics, well-loved out-of-print novels, and neglected works of literature.

Valancourt Books are not only saving these authors for another generation, it is publishing books that seriously demand to be read. Let’s take a cue from cult novelist Michael Moorcock, who wrote this about the publishers:
 

Valancourt Books are fast becoming my favourite publisher.  They have made it their business, with considerable taste and integrity, to put back into print a considerable amount of work which has been in serious need of republication.  Their list has been compiled by editors who know their stuff, bringing back into the light a raft of books I, for one, have been waiting years to read!  If you ever felt there were gaps in your reading experience or are simply frustrated that you can’t find enough good, substantial fiction in the shops or even online, then this is the publisher for you!

 
Even the Times Literary Supplement got in on the act, stating:
 

Valancourt Books specializes in new editions of rare and sometimes almost entirely forgotten fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. These are not cheap reprints: the “Classics” range comes annotated with scholarly introductions and, in some cases, contextualizing appendices. […] Valancourt Books is to be lauded for the scope of its ambition. It will spare scholars and the atmosphere many long-distance journeys to university and copyright libraries, and makes available to the lay enthusiast some curious marginalia from the history of the novel.

 
No mean praise there. And I have certainly found many of my favorite authors here, including John Blackburn, whose novel Broken Boy is a chilling, dark classic. It was truly a shame that Blackburn was all but forgotten until his rediscovery by Valancourt Books. Blackburn wrote such damnably good novels as A Scent of New Mown Hay, and Nothing But the Night, which was made into a rather disappointing film—just read the book and you’ll see what I mean.

But it’s not just thrills; there’s the sadly neglected author David Storey, whose early novel This Sporting Life was filmed by Lindsay Anderson. Storey also wrote plays (In Celebration and Home being the most notable) and several award-winning novels, in particular Pasmore, and the Booker Prize-winning Saville.

We’re just getting started; other writers whose works have been saved from literary limbo include J. B. Priestley, John Braine, Hilda Lewis, Gillian Freeman, Gerald Kersh, Jennifer Dawson, Keith Waterhouse, and Colin Wilson. There’s a wide selection of lost Gothic literature, gay fiction and nonfiction, and a diverse selection of modern novels. Don’t take my word for it—go have a browse, and I’m sure you’ll find something you’ll like.
 

 
More covers from Valancourt Books, after the jump…..
 

 
I was once lucky enough to see Seamus Heaney, who Robert Lowell once called “the most important Irish poet since Yeats,” give a poetry reading at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It was not long after his volume Field Work had been published.

The reading was held in an upper floor of the Assembly Rooms, looking on to a busy George Street. Heaney sat at a long table, which was slightly raised off the floor, its white linen cover planted with microphones. Through failing memory, I recall the actor J. G. Devlin, and either Niamh or Sorcha Cusack, flank the poet either side, their backs to the windows, silvered and yellowed with light. Heaney said he thought he was a poor reader of his own work, and that he preferred others to read his poetry, yet, when he did read, Heaney made the words tingle.

I thought Heaney looked like one of my father’s relatives. The eyebrows, the ruddy hue, the soft down of hair, the shared Irishness of my ancestors, farmers, and coopers, and supposedly tailors out of Dublin—the stories of my forebears change depending on the tale and the telling.

I listened as the three took turns to read “Death of a Naturalist,” “Blackberry Picking,” “Digging.”

Between my finger and my thumb  
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound  
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: 
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds  
Bends low, comes up twenty years away  
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills  
Where he was digging.

There was no waste, every word used precisely, wisely, unfolding purpose, and meaning, and a shared sense of joy at what means to be alive. Outside, the Festival traffic moved on, oblivious. The memory fades, but Heaney’s poetry like all good literature maintains. Heaney died last August at the age of 74. His final message to the world, written in Latin moments before his death was: “Noli timere” (“Don’t be afraid.”) Enda Kenny, the Irish Taoiseach, remarked on the poet’s passing “He is mourned — and deeply — wherever poetry and the world of the spirit are cherished and celebrated,” Mr Kenny said. “For us, Seamus Heaney was the keeper of language, our codes, our essence as a people.”

This is Seamus Heaney interviewed by Melvyn Bragg for the South Bank Show in 1992. Forget the sub-titles, and listen to the beauty and wisdom of the words.
 

 
After the jump Seamus Heaney reads his “Digging”...

 
Samuel Beckett said little of his experiences during the Second World War. He dismissed his work with the French Resistance as “boy scout stuff.” Whatever his activities, they were important enough for General Charles de Gaulle to award Beckett the Croix de Guerre.

After the war, he returned home to Ireland to see his mother. He stopped off in London to visit friends, who noticed the change in him—he had lost weight, looked tired, weary, his face lined, his teeth bad.

At home in Dublin, he was saddened to find his mother ill with Parkinson’s disease. He stayed to look after her for six weeks. It was during this time that Beckett had an epiphany that was to change his life, and eventually modern literature.

One day, while out walking along the harbor wall during storm, Beckett had a vision how his life must be if he wanted to succeed as a writer.

He had always written in English, and had been long influenced by James Joyce. Facing out to the gray, lace-capped sea, Beckett understood he must write in another language, and must break with Ireland’s rich literary traditions, which were holding him back. He suddenly saw his path was not with “enrichment,” but with “impoverishment.”

“I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”

Beckett began to write in French, and over the following decade, he composed the novels, poetry and plays that established his reputation as one of the century’s greatest authors.

With reference to the autobiographical elements contained within Krapp’s Last Tape, this two-part documentary, Samuel Beckett: As the Story was Told is “a rare glimpse into the reclusive world of this literary giant, whose most famous work, Waiting for Godot, evokes with unnerving precision the cosmic despair and isolation of modern humankind.”
 

 
So, you want to write but can’t afford those darned writing courses you see advertised online or in all those fancy cultural ‘zines you spend your hard earned dollars on?

Well, fret no more, for now you can have your very own creative writing class from William S. Burroughs, all thanks to the wonders of YouTube.

Burroughs gave these creative writing classes at Naropa University in 1979, where the author discussed works of literature, writing techniques and exercises for becoming a better writer.

Lecture One:

William S. Burroughs lecture on Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and A Short Trip Home, and Stephen King’s The Shining.

Burroughs also discusses exercises for increasing awareness, books as mental film, codes of conduct, heroes, and the film of Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch.

 
Lecture Two:

William S. Burroughs lectures on creative reading, including a discussion about various authors including Joseph Conrad, Denton Welch, Jane Bowles, Brion Gysin, and Julian Jaynes.

Burroughs also addresses subjects such as art heroes, hemispheres of the brain, and the training of assassins.

 
Lecture Three:

William S. Burroughs’ lecture on creative reading - Burroughs mentions a wide variety of authors including Aleister Crowley, Paul Bowles, and many others.

The class also discusses science fiction, non-fiction, General Semantics, scriptwriting, cloning, rotten ectoplasm, and judgement in cut-ups, as well as Burroughs’s novel The Soft Machine.

William Burroughs on writing and art.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds
A word in your era: William Burroughs explains Brion Gysin’s Cut-Up Method

 
Cthulhu leggings from Ali Express

After endless weeks of snow, ice, and subzero temperatures, the clear, starry winter sky makes a girl’s thoughts turn to one thing: H.P. Lovecraft.

In the manner of people who like to kit themselves out with ducks, spouting whales, pink flamingos, or lucky cats, it is possible to dress head to toe in Cthulhu-themed clothing, jewelry, and accessories. Not to mention all those Cthulhu tea cosies, car decals, window stickers, class rings, Jello molds, and holiday decorations.

Some of these items are downright cute, an adjective never used by Lovecraft in his Cthulhu mythos. The cuddlification of Cthulhu drives a lot of people…well, mad. He’s supposed to inspire mind-fucking fear, not make you want to snuggle him as a plush toy or wear him as a comfy accessory! Still, Geek Crafts is why some of us learned handicrafts.

 
Stuart Williams’ Lovecraftian Charm Bracelet

 
Stuart Williams’ Cthulhu Medallion Necklace

 
Cthulhu Scarf knitting pattern from Merelen’s Knits on Ravelry

 
Crocheted Cthulhu scarf from Humphreys Handmade
 
More after the jump…

 
Late last year I was casting about for a good book to read, and I inquired on Facebook which J.G. Ballard book is the right one to start with. (I read The Atrocity Exhibition many years ago.) DM’s own Tara McGinley weighed in with alacrity, urging me to try High-Rise, which I directly went and did. I found it just tremendous, and I kept running into Ballardian resonances of the novel while I was reading it, news stories and the like. It’s a marvelous, anomic novel, counterintuitive in all its surface premises and yet emotionally and psychologically true every step of the way.

According to Wikipedia, “For over 30 years, British producer Jeremy Thomas has wanted to do a film version of the book. It was nearly made in the late 1970s, with Nicolas Roeg directing from a script by Paul Mayersberg.” Instead Thomas ended up producing David Cronenberg’s 1996 adaptation of Ballard’s Crash instead.

Ballard fans can rejoice (or cringe) at the news that a high-profile version of High-Rise is officially in the works. Director Ben Wheatley, whose last two efforts were A Field in England and the pitch black comedy Sightseers, today tweeted that principal photography on High-Rise is now set to begin in June. Wheatley is also directing the first two episodes of the upcoming season of Doctor Who, so he is being entrusted to introducing audiences to Peter Capaldi in the main role.

Starring as Dr. Robert Laing in High-Rise is Tom Hiddleston, best known for playing Loki in the Avengers movie franchise. This adaptation of High-Rise is likewise being produced by Jeremy Thomas.
 

HIGHRISE. shooting June. Starring Tom Hiddleston! pic.twitter.com/ue66t3rWbT

— mr_wheatley (@mr_wheatley) February 5, 2014

 
High-Rise is a formidable challenge for any director, and we’ll just have to wait and see how well it comes out. Certainly, if we can judge by the poster art, we have substantial reason for optimism.

Here’s a peculiar “adaptation” of High-Rise by Mike Bonsall executed in Google SketchUp:
 

 
via Den of Geek