Ted Morgan – { feuilleton }

Cochemare (1810) by Jean Pierre Simon. One of 100,000 high-resolution images now available from Wellcome Images.

• Ted Morgan’s Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (1990) was a solid biography blighted by a bizarrely bad-tempered and judgemental attitude towards many of Burroughs’ friends and colleagues. Morgan says Burroughs disliked the book (he also says his subject died in 1993, not 1997…) so I’m looking forward to the new biography by Barry Miles, Call Me Burroughs: A Life. There’s a curious detail in Jeremy Lybarger’s piece about August Derleth, HP Lovecraft’s publisher and lifetime champion, causing a fuss after the Chicago Review published extracts from Naked Lunch in 1958. Burroughs enjoyed Lovecraft’s fiction but it’s unlikely that Lovecraft would have been anything other than appalled by Burroughs’s work. Barry Miles will be holding a Q&A session at the ICA, London, next month following a screening of Howard Brookner’s restored documentary, Burroughs: The Movie.

• Mix of the week: Secret Thirteen Mix 105 by Sturqen. At 3quarksdaily Dave Maier writes in praise of drones (the musical variety), and links to three mixes.

• Interviews: Haakon Nelson talks to Harold Budd, Joseph Burnett talks to William Basinski, John Stezaker talks to Nicolas Roeg.

Derek responded to an invitation to address [AIDS] hysteria by lining the gallery with a set of tarred and feathered mattresses loaded with the traces of queer love-making and then framing them against wallpaper made from Xeroxed, blood-spattered front pages. In the middle of all this he then constructed a makeshift barbed-wire cage that imprisoned and protected a pair of apparently naked lovers – usually a pair of handsome, sleeping boys, but for one afternoon at least Tilda Swinton dropped by, just to make the point that the boys didn’t have an exclusive stake in or artistic rights to this crisis. Between the walls and the cage, the air of the gallery was thick with tension and hatred – sometimes literally so, as visitors to the gallery objected vociferously to what they were seeing.

Neil Bartlett on celebrating Derek Jarman 20 years after his death.

• William Friedkin’s Wages of Fear remake, Sorcerer (1977), receives an overdue reissue on DVD/Blu-ray in April.

• James Knowlson asks “What lies beneath Samuel Beckett’s half-buried woman in Happy Days?”

• The UK’s web filtering seems to be blocking common sense says Jane Fae.

A devil buggering a man (19th century).

• The poetry of Hart Crane, from the American epic to personal belonging.

• The Sonny Sharrock Quartet play Stupid Fuck, live 1988.

• Pinterest nightmares

• Borogoves

• Lutinemusic: Espera | Died Of Love | All I Have Is Gold

Brion Gysin—autoportrait (1935).

“A shaman to me is always a pansexual being,” says the gay Canadian filmmaker. “These guys all came out of that period where queer was really hardcore, it was part of their radical art — and of course it was illegal.” (more)

The filmmaker in question is Nik Sheehan discussing FLicKeR, his 2007 documentary about artist and writer Brion Gysin. Sheehan’s film is available for viewing at Ubuweb although I haven’t got round to watching it yet so I can’t say much about it. (Reality Studio has a review.) Gysin’s life and work is certainly worthy of study, however, his art and writing—which encompassed novels and experimental poetry—often having been overshadowed by his close association with William Burroughs. He gets a raw deal in Ted Morgan’s curiously bad-tempered biography of Burroughs, for example, despite having given his co-conspirator the cut-up technique, collaborated with him on The Third Mind, and so on. FLicKeR‘s title refers to Gysin’s Dreamachine, the first sculpture which needs to be experienced with the eyes closed, being a homemade hallucination engine which works by flickering light and shadow at a rapid rate on the closed eyelids. I made some Dreamachines of my own in the mid-1980s by carefully studying photos in RE/Search #4/5, and they certainly do work. It’s a shame that 78rpm record players are more difficult to find than they used to be since the original template devised by Gysin and Ian Sommerville needs a high speed in order to create the optimum flicker rate. As you might expect, various psychonauts have since created their own variations such as this one for a 45rpm player.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that the New Museum in NYC is staging the first US retrospective of Gysin’s work, an exhibition which they happen to call Dream Machine, and which opens on July 7th. The New York Times ran a piece about Gysin in advance of that. Ubuweb has further Gysin materials, such as this Burroughs piece about Gysin’s invention of the cut-up method, and some recordings of the permutated poems. Finally, if you’re wondering about the title of the post, it’s a reference to this.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Burroughs: The Movie
• William S Burroughs: A Man Within
• Emil Cadoo
• The Great God Pan
• The Final Academy
• William Burroughs book covers
• Towers Open Fire

Tag: Ted Morgan

Weekend links 196

Brion Gysin let the mice in