Uncle Bill’s yage expedition

After my Marx lecture on tuesday evening I was talking to some intrepid fellow travellers about William Burroughs anthropological expedition to sample Yage in South America and I mentioned his letters (as well as doing some pretty bad imitations of uncle bill’s Benway routines). Even though the second volume of letters is about to be published, the first volume [...]

Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs

Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs via Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs 28th May – 18th July 2010 © The Burroughs Trust Click on image for slide show. Dead Fingers Talk is an ambitious forthcoming exhibition [...]

cats

Elena tells me: “Marc Twain said: “While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats”. And sends this pic from Vienna to add to the buses as trinkets collection no doubt – we will take over the world eventually. Thx. And while we are on the subject of Cats. [...]

BSG Razor

So this is Kendra Shaw the adorable space junkie in the Battlestar Pegasus kitchen having a bit of a snack. Its from the new BSG Razor telefilm (which I just got to see thanks to my dealer Terrence or Torrent or whatever he’s called). The film is full of surprises related to the Pegasus and [...]

Writing Controls

The beautiful arabesques of the writing of Raymond Roussel, still evident in translation, are most interesting as discipline (contrivance, organisation, code, device), and made all the more alluring by the discovery, in 1989, of a trunk full of manuscripts. I have always been interested in the manufacture of text, and the versionings required. First draft, [...]

Spectres of Marx – A Christmas Carol?

Cadavers, lifeless bodies, the return of the dead. Over the holiday period the quiet streets of London have been bothering me a little. Alarmed as I am with Christmas carols and hangings on the news – a veritable hauntology has me walking about as if in a dream. Yet people keep on bringing me ghosts. [...]

space exploration

Having been gifted a copy of Klaus Maeck’s film ‘Commissioner of Sewers’ (thanks Jo and Howard), I’ve also been reading again about Uncle Bill’s schoolboy education at Los Alamos. He attends a ranch school in the mountains, a rural retreat – evocative of all things heroic in the west. Yet, soon after this formative adventure [...]

Celebrating Transgression essay part file 2

This is Steadman, but William S. Burroughs’ art work is showing in London for the next couple of months. – see The Unseen Art of William S. Burroughs Riflemaker 79 Beak Street, Regent Street – W1F 9SU London So, since he’s named as an anthropology ancestor, here’s some more from my essay on fieldwork/filed works [...]