Burroughs and Friends: Lost Interviews

by Re/Search Publications

Overview

Lost interviews with iconic writer-philosophers William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, John Giorno, Diane di Prima and Gerald V. Casale, never before in print.

Circa 1983 Burroughs prophetically refutes that “Make America Great Again!” trope. In this and in Vale’s last interview from 1997, Burroughs (in his sardonic style) illuminates eternal issues around power, the police, politics, pharmaceuticals, pot, pretensions, posturing and psychopathology. He also reveals what television shows he watches, that he reads the newspaper every day, and names some of the “pulp” writers and weekly magazines he read in his youth, that influenced his later writing.

In a heavily-edited series of interviews with writer-painter-world-citizen Brion Gysin, probably the most inspirational topic is “Brion Gysin on Art.” He reveals how studying the Japanese language inspired his later calligraphic painting style. By negative example he shows how he failed to “cash in” on his early relationship with Surrealism’s founding theorist Andre Breton (and other Surrealist painters who went on to fame and fortune, such as Roberto Matta, Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Leonora Fini, Dorothea Tanning and the gallerist Peggy Guggenheim). The poet John Giorno, who operates the record label Giorno Poetry Systems, talks about his long relationship with Burroughs, Gysin and Andy Warhol, whose first foray into filmmaking starred John Giorno in a film called Sleep. Giorno talks about his travels to Morocco, Europe and back to New York City where he was born.

Beat poet Diane di Prima briefly discusses her relationship with William S. Burroughs, especially at Naropa Institute in Colorado. Lastly, Gerald V. Casale, founder of the band DEVO, talks amusingly about doing an important interview with William S. Burroughs, which appeared in Crawdaddy magazine. Actually, Burroughs interviewed DEVO, not the other way around. Fans of the Beat movement, the Punk movement, and all the iconic figures listed above (Burroughs, Gysin, Giorno, di Prima, Casale), will find this an essential addition to their countercultural libraries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781889307251
Publisher:	RE/Search Publications
Publication date:	03/15/2019
Series:	RE/Search
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Diane di Prima

Throughout the past eight decades, Diane di Prima has been a source of inspiration and instruction to hundreds of students and thousands of lovers of poetry—not to mention feminist historians, chroniclers of the so-called “Beat Generation,” and anyone seeking humor, wisdom and alternative role models.

Artist and writer Brion Gysin [January 19, 1916-July 13, 1986] was a long-time friend and collaborator of William S. Burroughs—who described Gysin as “the only man I ever respected.”

Read an Excerpt

From interview with William S. Burroughs

What can we do to use our dreams effectively?

What can we do to use our dreams effectively? Well, that will vary. The answer will vary: Who are you? What’s your profession? Dreams are vitally important to a writer. I get fully a third of my material from dreams and write them down, and they sometimes are very vivid... a narrative that I only have to transcribe, like I’ve seen a very clear bit of film that goes into a work-in-progress. But for other people dreams have solved mathematical formulas. People have had mathematical or chemical formulas solved for them in dreams. I think they’re useful, but it depends of course on what use the individual is making of them.

 

 

From interview with Diane diPrima
I saw Bill [William S. Burroughs] as incredibly, incredibly tender, and horribly intelligent, as you know—so intelligent that it must have been hard to be around people. All of that would disappear, including any of our kind of talk, as soon as another person would enter the room. He would be pretending to be drunk and saying clownish stupid things, and trying on hats. And people would go, “Oh, that Bill... What a joker.”

But, I really think he was the heart of that whole crowd. He was the heart and soul of Allen, Jack, Gregory, all those people... who by the way, were a very small piece of what the Beat movement was. Or what was going on—I don’t know if you want to call it the Beat movement.

From Brion Gysin interview:

I met a dog. A delightful dog came up to me on the terrace of the dome in Montparnasse: a boxer. We immediately became great friends. He belonged to somebody that I’d seen around and thought, “Well, that’s someone to avoid,” but when he turned out to be the owner of the dog, we got to know each other. He was an American Jew from Boston whose family had owned theaters, and he had been brought up in the world of the Barrymores and the other great theatrical families. He had taken a degree to become a medical doctor, gone to Berlin to take his doctorate, and then gotten himself into all sorts of kinky troubles in the late thirties. I guess I must have met him in ’37, I should think; maybe ’38. I was just back from some hideous misadventures in Greece, and he said that he was going down to spend the spring in the Pyrenees, and why didn’t I come along with him and the dog? He had been there several times already on a mysterious search, which little by little he began talking to me about.

Table of Contents

Introduction V.Vale 5

William S. Burroughs: "Make America Great Again!" 11

William S. Burroughs: The Final Interview 49

Diane di Prima: The Healing Machine 80

Gerald V. Casale: "Too Many People!" 84

Brion Gysin: The Disaster Tapes 87

John Giorno: Doing the Third Mind 204

Preface

It was quite a few years before I became a hardcore, committed William S. Burroughs “fanatic”. I was lucky enough to live through the FSM (Free Speech Movement) at UC Berkeley (only recently I learned that Alice Waters was there at the same time) and “everyone” was talking about Naked Lunch! So I went and bought a Grove paperback edition but had a hard time “relating” to what I tried to read. Oddly enough, at the same time I was hearing about a book called Naked Croquet (a review talked about “people in the suburbs committing ‘adultery’ while experimenting with new types of social relations”) so in my mind I must have conflated the two books! I was genuinely puzzled when trying to comprehend Burroughs’s “revolutionary” use of language and while his words could appear “dazzling” and shocking, I did not “fall in love” with this writing. Yes, anything to do with Dr Benway seemed very funny and instantly memorizable (“I can’t be expected to work under these conditions!”) but committed fandom remained years away. Then, I saw an excerpt from a book of interviews with Burroughs by Daniel Odier; as I recall, it appeared in Evergreen Review magazine June 1969 before being published in The Job. Immediately I started memorizing quotes like “Belief is the enemy of knowledge”—yes! It seemed like everything “wrong” with the world had to do with “belief”—people blindly and unquestioningly “believing” in unsubstantiated words like “God” and “Jesus Christ” and “Allah” and “Jehovah”—and even worse, killing other humans using these words as an “excuse”. It almost seemed like all the major problems with the world stemmed from LANGUAGE. Burroughs railed against the use of the “either/or” syndrome—as George Bush later put it, “Either you’re with us, or you support the terrorists!” (No, George, we don’t support your trying to bomb the Middle East into the Stone Age, NOR do we support the “terrorists”—maybe some of us don’t think America should be acting as the policeman to the rest of the world; what business do WE have interfering in another country’s political system?). Burroughs also seemed to be recommending the study of a non-linear, non-alphabetic language such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Mayan codices, or Chinese ideograms. Burroughs himself had studied Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar (he also recommended to me E.A. Wallis Budge’s Egyptian Language: Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics), so I got myself a copy but frankly made very little headway toward the goal of mastering Egyptian hieroglyphs. I got Her-Bak, written by Isha Schwaller de Lubicz, and deluded myself by thinking I had made a little progress in this direction (the appendices in the back are very useful and repeatedly referential). Given my seeming lack of ability to master Egyptian and Chinese, I thought the closest I could come toward non-linear thinking was embracing the Surrealist notion of “objective chance”—being open to chance whenever and wherever it shows itself. A bit later I learned about and embraced the notion of the “flaneur”—just taking random walks whenever and wherever you find yourself (this works particularly well in the old parts of Paris; the arcades). San Francisco offered a number of obscure, interesting alleys and walkways on Telegraph-Russian-Nob Hill hillsides, even downtown (and probably neighborhoods all over the city). Studying The Job gave me my goal in publishing: to focus on interviews. Why? Because when you publish a conventional manuscript, there’s no challenging of ideas going on. Burroughs was changing my life. I realized that the purpose of writing was to change life. I realized that people seemed to live their very lives by (to me) very “dodgy” words and phrases like “love” and “forever” and “eternal life” and “Jesus saves” and “trust” and—the list goes on and on. Why do people “believe” in all these words which have no verifiable “reality” or “substance” or “tangibility”? Burroughs set me on a lifelong pursuit to interrogate language—a quest which never stops. It seems like everybody must set forth for themselves on this quest. Every single word “you” use in a way reflects and “defines” “you” (or your “identity”). I remember asking Burroughs if he had any “advice” and he attacked the generality of such a word, promptly ending with, “No, I don’t have any so-called ‘advice’!” Everything in life is specific. Everything in life is personal. There are no generalizations that can’t be controverted or questioned. That’s our future: Question Until Death. (At least, life will probably be more interesting—maybe even more fun.) Certainly there will be more mystery in life. And mystery, as Duchamp told us, is the essential element of a work of art, a relationship, and probably, the rest of our life. —V. Vale, January 2019