During my guest blogging stint at Boing Boing in Spring of 2009, when I posted about the traveling exhibit of the unseen and unpublished William S. Burroughs/Malcolm McNeil graphic novel, collaboration Ah Pook is Here, I suspected that a publication of the work would be announced shortly thereafter. It’s taken a while, but Fantagraphics will finally be putting it out in 2011, as Carolyn Kellog reports at the Los Angeles Times:

The project began with a Burroughs-and-McNeil collaboration in the 1970s on the comic strip “The Unspeakable Mister Hart,” which appeared in the British magazine “Cyclops.” The magazine folded, and the two decided they wanted to turn their work into a full-length project—at the time, Burroughs was 56 and McNeil was 23. What they conceived was so new that they weren’t sure what to call the form, and settled on “a Word/Image novel.” They worked for seven years but never found a publisher.

Fantagraphics, which included some spectacular images from the book in its announcement, describes the story of “Ah Pook Is Here”:

John Stanley Hart is the “Ugly American” or “Instrument of Control”—a billionaire newspaper tycoon obsessed with discovering the means for achieving immortality. Based on the formulae contained in rediscovered Mayan books he attempts to create a Media Control Machine using the images of Fear and Death. By increasing Control, however, he devalues time and invokes an implacable enemy: Ah Pook, the Mayan Death God. Young mutant heroes using the same Mayan formulae travel through time bringing biologic plagues from the remote past to destroy Hart and his Judeo/Christian temporal reality.

McNeil’s story of working with Burroughs on the project is sure to be interesting. “Fictional events in the text would materialize in real life. Very specific correspondences, not just similarities,” he told the website Big Bridge in 2008. “Such events might suggest that things are already in place and that with the right combination of words they can be made to reveal themselves ahead of time. That’s what Bill’s ‘Cut ups’ were about: ‘Cut the word lines and the future leaks out.’”

William S. Burroughs’ lost graphic novel coming in 2011 (Jacket Copy/LA Times)

Ah Pook is Here website (with samples of the artwork)
 
Below, Ah Pook Was Here in the form of a quite amazing short film made in 1994 by Philip Hunt, with Burroughs’ narration.
 

 
School’s out, or almost out, for summer, and it just occurred to me that some of our Dangerous Minds readers might be graduating this weekend.  If so, congratulations!  And what better way to brace yourself for the ennui of sudden adulthood than icing some words of advice from William Burroughs?

This bit, set to music, shows up on Burroughs’ spoken-word, Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy-accompanied, Spare Ass Annie album, but this is the first time I’ve seen the author himself performing it—a chunk of it, anyway.  For a slightly different, text version of the speech, click here.

 
William Burroughs, with the great illustrator Ralph Steadman, shooting one of Steadman’s prints, a portrait of William Shakespeare.

Via 3am Magazine and HTML Giant.

 
Australia’s 21.C, edited by Ashley Crawford, was probably the best magazine of the ‘90s—it was my favorite at least—and to be profiled in its pages and later to contribute to it, was an lot of fun for me.

21.C was the most unabashedly intellectual and forward-thinking journal that I have ever seen, anywhere. And it was a striking and beautifully designed product to hold in your hands. Each issue was finely crafted, I must say. To have my own writing published alongside the likes of Erik Davis, Mark Dery, Greil Marcus, Hakim Bey, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling, R.U. Sirius and Kathy Acker was an honor. I also met Alex Burns via Ashley and Alex, of course, went on to edit the Disinformation website for many years.(I wrote about art for 21.C’s sister publication—also edited by Ashley Crawford—the quarterly glossy World Art. I know that I wrote an article about the product design of the Japanese pop combo Pizzicato 5, but I can’t remember what else.)

Now 21.C is back as an online magazine. There’s also a lot of still interesting archival pieces on subjects such as William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson that readers of this blog will find very interesting, I’m sure. There’s an interview with me from 1996 conducted by R.U. Sirius where I tell the nutty story of how Disinformation was started. Welcome back 21.C!
 

 

 
Ah, Criterion!  What with your glorious transfers and generous heapings of bonus material, you make it all too easy to justify the dropping of 30 bucks to secure a copy of, say, Dillinger Is Dead.  Now, though, thanks to YouTube, you can often skip right to the bonus material without paying for the movie. 

Case in point, Naked Making Lunch, director Chris Rodley’s account of David Cronenberg‘s ‘91 effort to bring to the screen William Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch.

Far more than just another “making of,” Naked Making Lunch not only has Burroughs himself chiming in on his “unfilmmable” novel‘s transference to the screen, but it takes the time to go on a number of fascinating detours, none more so, perhaps, than a discussion on the aesthetics of rubber.

 
Naked Making Lunch Part II, III, IV, V

Via Letters of Note, this letter from 1957 reveals that “Burroughs has gone insane!”

Early 1957, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg travelled to Tangier to join William Burroughs; their mission to assemble and edit Burroughs’ many fragments of work to form a ‘readable’ Naked Lunch manuscript. Kerouac arrived early and, during a break from socialising with Burroughs, the ‘old familiar lunatic’, wrote to Lucien Carr and his wife Francesca in order to update them on the project’s progress.

The letter reads:

Dear Lucien & Cessa — Writing to you by candlelight from the mysterious Casbah — have a magnificent room overlooking the beach & the bay & the sea & can see Gibraltar — patio to sun on, room maid, $20 a month — feel great but Burroughs has gone insane e as, — he keeps saying he’s going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy part & such or slaughtering an Arab boy to see what his beautiful insides look like — Naturally I feel lonesome with this old familiar lunatic but lonesomer than ever with him as he’ll also mumble, or splurt, most of his conversation, in some kind of endless new British lord imitation, it all keeps pouring out of him in an absolutely brilliant horde of words & in fact his new book is best thing of its kind in the world (Genet, Celine, Miller, etc.) & we might call it WORD HOARD…he, Burroughs, (not “Lee” any more) unleashes his word hoard, or horde, on the world which has been awaiting the Only Prophet, Burroughs — His message is all scatalogical homosexual super-violent madness, — his manuscript is all that has been saved from the original vast number of written pages of WORD HOARD which he’d left in all the boy’s privies of the world — and so on, — I sit with him in elegant French restaurant & he spits out his bones like My. Hyde and keeps yelling obscene words to be heard by the continental clienteles — (like he done in Rome, yelling FART at a big palazzio party) — I’ll be glad when Allen gets here. — Meanwhile I explores the Casbah, high on opium or hasheesh or any drink or drug I want, & dig the Arabs. — The Slovenija was a delightful ship, I ate every day at one long white tablecloth with that one Yugoslavian woman spy. — We hit a horrendous tempest 2 days out, nothing like I ever seen, — that big steel ship was lost in mountains of hissing water, awful. — I cuddled up with TWO TICKETS TO TANGIER and got my laughs, I read every word, Cess, really a riot. — Also read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling which you should read, it’s down on your corner. — Right now I’m high on 3 Sympatinas, Spanish bennies of a sort, mild. — Happy pills galore. — The gal situation here is worse than the boy situation, nothing but male whores all over, & their supplementary queens. — Met an actual contraband sailing ship adventurer with a mustache. Etc. More anon. Miss you & hope you’re well. Jack.

(Letters of Note: Burroughs Has Gone Insane)

(William S. Burroughs: The Yage Letters)

 
Some fresh Burroughs loot was just added to the mountain of treasure that is Ubu: the entirety of Howard Brookner’s Burroughs: The Movie.  Previously available on VHS only (a used copy on Amazon runs you 40 bucks), Burroughs: The Movie was released in ‘85 by poet, Warhol associate, and dial-a-poem instigator, John Giorno, through his Giorno Poetry Systems.

The film features such familiar-but-always-welcome luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, Francis Bacon, Patti Smith, and Terry Southern.  And while there’s a new Burroughs doc just around the corner, there’s still plenty of juicy bits in Burroughs: The Movie.  Don’t miss Lauren Hutton introducing Burroughs as “the greatest living writer in America,” before his first appearance on Saturday Night Live (he reads an excerpt of Naked Lunch, by the way!).

Sadly—and unusual for Ubu—Burroughs: The Movie is unembeddable, but to quickly have your ticket exploded just click here.

 
The below clip of William Burroughs showing off his weaponry was shot, presumably, for non-American television.  “So, if you had a razor-sharp, double-edged knife, you could whip it out and cut someone’s throat before he knew what was happening.”  Umm…yes, sir! 

In that case, so must growing up reading William Burroughs, the Illuminatus trilogy, conspiracy theory books, dropping acid and listening to Firesign Theatre records!

From Science Digest:

Reading a book by Franz Kafka ?

 
In 1963, City Lights published The Yage Letters, the correspondence between William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, which charts, among other things, the former’s efforts to score the possibly “soul-rebooting” hallucinogenic, Ayahuasca (Yage), in Mexico and Brazil.  The footage below is culled from Ayahuasca, a Burroughs-narrated documentary which I think—until someone corrects me—exists only in fragments.  Even so, it’s always great to hear Burroughs’ voice.  It’s up there with Werner Herzog’s!

 
(via Arthur)

 
Today’s NYT alerts us to the 60th (!) anniversary of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky.  A race to the limits of experience—and existence—set against North Africa’s unforgiving desert, Sky gave Bowles the means to live with the absolute freedom of his two most famous characters, Port and Kit Moresby.  That freedom would ultimately consume the Moresbys, but Bowles, along with his wife, Jane, lived out their years in Tangier, experimenting with hashish and bisexuality, and nurturing friendships with everyone from Gore Vidal to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin.

It was with Gysin that Bowles met The Master Musicians of Jajouka, a discovery that would later yield Brian Jones Presents: The Pipes of Pan at Jajouka.  Dubbed, dryly, by Burroughs as a “4000-year-old rock band,” The Masters can be seen below playing at the 40th anniversary of Brian Jones’ death.

 
In the NYT: Trusting in the Sheltering Sky, Even When It Scorched

I love Pop Art Machine. It’s the perfect way to make amazing low cost art to hang on your walls. Pop Art Machine has high resolution files of millions of images that you can download and print as posters or on canvas, tee-shirts, whatever you want to do, really. And it’s free.

Go there and poke around, see what you find. Earlier today I searched for William Burroughs and found several cool galleries of his book covers from around the world, like this Japanese cover of My Education. You could print this as big as a movie poster and the resolution would still be crisp and clear.

Pop Art Machine

William Burroughs book covers at Pop Art Machine

Naked Lunch cover archive