review of
William S. Burroughs & Allen Ginsberg's Don't Hide the Madness
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 22-26, 2018

For the complete review, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1081131?chapter=1

Having read almost every bk I know of by Burroughs I can accurately say that he's a very important thinker & writer to me. I can also accurately say that his fatal shooting of his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, was an almost mind-bogglingly stupid thing to do. Making matters worse, his being a junkie has probably served as a glamorous bad example to many another drug addict. His ability to not go to jail in Mexico for homicide & his ability to travel the world, be a junkie & to survive reasonably well despite that, was largely predicated on his coming from a wealthy family whose money was his safety net. People imitating his habits wd do well to realize that — esp if they don't have the same safety net for themselves.

Don't Hide the Madness was published in 2018. When I saw it in my favorite used bkstore, Caliban, I was delighted. At the same time, it seemed likely to me that it might be the product of dredging for anything Burroughs & Ginsberg related that hadn't already been published & that the quality of it might be low. As it turned out, IMO, that's somewhat the case but it's still an interesting bk. For readers looking for Burroughs interview material of more substance, I recommend The Job, Burroughs interviewed by Daniel Odier, (1969-1970) — a much more substantial bk.

The editor of this is Steven Taylor. He's described on the back cover as someone who "collaborated on music and poetry with Allen Ginsberg for more than 20 years, and taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is a member of the seminal underground rock band, The Fugs."

That's all well & good but perhaps a bit misleading. I have The Fugs's The Fugs First Album (1966), The Fugs Second Album (1966), Virgin Fugs (1967), Tenderness Junction (1968), it crawled into my hand, honest (1968), The Belle of Avenue A (1969), Golden Filth (June 1, 1968), Fugs 4, Rounders Score (1966/1975), refuse to be burnt-out (June 9, 1984), & the FUGS final cd (part 1) (2003). While The Fugs were certainly a "seminal underground rock band" at the time of their 1st records can they really be sd to still be so after Reprise, a major label, picked them up? Furthermore, Steven Taylor joined the group when they reformed after a hiatus of ±15 yrs in 1984. For me, that makes him 20 yrs away from the "seminal" &/or "underground" yrs. In the band?: YES, in the "seminal underground" band?: NO.

I found Taylor's Introduction to be particularly important:

"Allen made his living as a performer. The most famous poet of the twentieth century earned only about twelve-thousand dollars a year on book royalties. He paid his rent and ran his home office by touring. Between 1976 and the early nineties, we played hundreds of shows in Europe and America." - p i

Now, I admit, I tend to judge people in relation to their degree of privilege. What was "only about twelve-thousand dollars a year" worth in 1976?

"Adjusted for inflation, $12,000.00 in 1976 is equal to $53,302.49 in 2018." - https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=12000&year=1976

Poor baby, right?! That's twice as much as I ever made as a wage earner per yr. I'm currently living off of a little over $6,000 a yr Social Security retirement. "Adjusted for inflation, $6,000.00 in 2018 is equal to $1,350.78 in 1976." [ibid] Allen Ginsberg was loaded. In 1976 my annual rent in a shitty basement apartment in a bar district in Baltimore was $1,200. Where was Ginsberg living?! Even in NYC, he cd've found a place for less than $5,000 a yr. Yes, it wd've been in a dangerous slum. Ginsberg was a pampered poodle.

"One of my between-tour jobs was to compile all the footnotes from the foreign editions of Ginsberg's work and then go through his whole oeuvre to make footnotes explaining various persons, events, etc. This was aimed at the Collected Poems 1947-1980, then in preparation. I asked him what should get a footnote. He said, "Anything a high school kid fifty years from now might not understand." So, for example, one of the foreign editions had a footnote explaining "supermarket." At the time, I thought it kind of crazy that in the US collection of the Collected, "supermarket" would need explanation. But fifty years ahead would have been 2032, so who knows? Young readers might need that explained, just as my generation needed a footnote explaining the "automat" of the 1940s. The man thought long-term. Many of my footnotes were culled later in the editing process by less prophetic heads." - pp i-ii

NOW, that's the sort of thing that I think is important. It's a scholar's issue. I agree w/ Ginsberg & Taylor here. If I were to talk to a so-called "Millenarian' now & mention Federico Fellini, arguably one of the most famous film directors of the middle to late 20th century (active 1945-1992), how many of them wd have any idea who he is? They're more likely to know who directed a recent Batman film. Maybe.

"The next time I recall seeing William was at the Naropa Institute in the summer of 1979. Allen had co-founded the writing school there with Anne Waldman" - p iv

OK, that's the accepted history. But, I recall George Quasha telling me that he & Charles Stein (& one other person?) actually founded the writing school at Naropa & that Ginsberg & Waldman came along a semester or a yr or so later. According to Naropa's website: "Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, John Cage, and Diane di Prima founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute" in 1974. ( https://www.naropa.edu/about-naropa/history/index.php )

For what it's worth, I presented my movie "Story of a Fructiferous Society" ( https://youtu.be/VSlPEsZIPPo ) to a class there on October 7, 2010. My impression was that it was quite a bit too far-out for the students. On the same trip to Boulder, I also gave a 'performance' at Naropa on October 8, 2010: http://youtu.be/f2puiVTPGYU . That, too, seemed a bit too much for the students. The older people who were there, mostly people that I was already friends w/, seemed to enjoy it. Maybe they were being polite.

As many of you probably realize, the director David Cronenberg (whose work I generally love) made a movie based on Burroughs's life & writing & named it after an early novel, Naked Lunch. Taylor explains the origin of this bk in relation to that:

"Interest in Cronenberg's movie and its pending UK release, scheduled for 24 April 1992, prompted the London Observer Magazine to request an interview. After some back and forth, it was arranged that Allen would visit William and conduct the interview. He asked me if I would transcribe the tapes, and I agreed. Allen spent March 17-22 in Lawrence and came back with eleven ninety-minute cassette tapes comprising some sixteen hours of talk." - p vi

Again, pampered poodle. Ginsberg records just any old meandering conversation but doesn't get stuck w/ the extremely tedious task of transcribing it. That, he gets to pass along to an 'underling'. If he'd had to transcribe it himself maybe there wd've been less time wasted on cats, food, & guns. Maybe he & Burroughs wd've spent more focused time on issues specifically related to the film.

"AG: Jeremy . . . the film producer . . .

"WSB: Jeremy Thomas.

"AG: . . . wanted an interview for the European and Japanese opening of the {Naked Lunch] film.

"WSB: Yeah. OK.

"AG: And Jim [Grauerholz] was unwilling to have another invasion of interviewers and reporters, so they came up with the idea fo sending me here and paying me well . . .

"WSB: Good.

"AG: . . . to do an interview. And I was too busy, but I wanted to come and visit. But doing an interview was too much, so what I'm going to do is do these tapes and then Steven Taylor will transcribe them, and edit for me and then I'll do the final edit.

"WSB: OK. Fine.

"AG: And I'll peel off the money for him to do that." - pp 110-111

At least Ginsberg gives Taylor credit here. I generally like Taylor's transcription style. He mostly stays faithful to pronunciation instead of literarily correcting things: i.e.: "wanna" doesn't get turned into "want to". Taylor mentions a central duet of happenings that are key to the bk & key to this review/analysis:

"Now in his late seventies, Burroughs had made a career as a writer for four decades since the event that he believed set him on his path as a writer: his fatal shooting of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer Burroughs in Mexico City on September 6, 1951. William came to believe that he was possessed by what his collaborator Brion Gysin called "the Ugly Spirit." Ginsberg's visit coincided with an exorcism of that spirit performed by Navajo shaman Melvin Betsellie." - p vii

This presumably accidental killing happened almost exactly 2 yrs before I was born. I, obviously, wasn't there when it happened. My only 'knowledge' of it comes from various things that I've read. Such 'knowledge' is less trustworthy than 1st-hand experience. My impression from what I've read is that Burroughs, &, probably the other people w/ him including Vollmer, was drunk &, maybe, under the influence of pills. Someone had the stupid idea of doing a William Tell routine. Burroughs's aim was impaired by his intoxication & he accidentally shot Vollmer in the head who eventually died from the wound. Stupid, stupid. Stupid.

One might think that the obvious lesson to be learned from this is to not shoot guns while you're drunk unless you want to take the risk of harming someone unintentionally. As I hope to demonstrate w/ quotes from this bk, that's a lesson that Burroughs apparently never learned. This whole business about possession by an "Ugly Spirit" just strikes me as Burroughs's way of denying personal responsibility. It's the classic religious moron's justification: God made me do it. Burroughs's 'ugly spirit' was probably no more than his own 'dark side' released from the usual conscious mind inhibition by alcohol & other drug abuse. Maybe he wanted to kill Vollmer b/c she got in the way of his homosexuality. Whatever. The point is, her death is Burroughs's responsibility & if he hadn't been from a rich family who pd off the cops he might've spent much of his life rotting in a Mexican jail. All the rest is just bullshit. IMO.

AG: "And I realized that, well I only had a few more years, twenty years, ten years [he had four]. And then I began thinking of "Once out of nature I shall never take my bodily form from any natural thing." That's the "Sailing to Byzantium"?" - p 13

One of the things that I respect most about Burroughs & Ginsberg is their ability to quote. I don't expect the quotes to be absolutely accurate (they probably aren't) but I do like that something that they've read has made such a memorable impression on them. AG elaborates on the preceding:

"I'll not come back as flesh. "But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make, of hammered gold and gold enameling." In other words, a work of art." - p 13

No thanks!!!!! I prefer to be something that can move & create on its own — & I don't mean a kinetic sculpture or something w/ AI. Despite all the miseries of being alive, flesh is fabulous & "hammered gold" ain't worth shit.

"WSB: An absurd play in heroic couplets.

"AG: Was that Buckingham's play? It was a satire on Dryden?

"WSB: Yes. But it was Buckingham's satire of Dryden's Conquest of Granada." - p 144

That got me interested so I started looking online & found that the title of the play is The Rehearsal. I'll probably get a copy of it someday.

Other people are present in these conversations including "translator and scholar Udo Berger":

"UDO: Does a tornado always turn in one direction or does it . . . ?

[James Grauerholz;] "One direction of this hemisphere; opposite direction below the equator.

"WSB: That's right.

"AG: In the southern hemisphere it turns counter-clockwise?

"WSB: The '81 tornado here hit the Gaslight trailer court and the KMart . . . between the two parts of the trailer court. The only casualty.

[Melvin Betsellie:] "I've seen it, William, where it throws a piece of straw through a tree.

"WSB: It can send a straw so fast that it'll go through a door . . . comes at such a tremendous velocity it goes right through a door." - pp 41-42

Interesting.

"Only around five percent of tornadoes in the northern hemisphere rotate clockwise, or anti-cyclonically. In the southern hemisphere, however, most tornadoes rotate clockwise. So, the simple answer to our Wonder Friends' question is no, not all tornadoes twist in the same direction all the time." - https://wonderopolis.org/wonder/do-tornadoes-always-twist-in-the-same-direction

I wonder what they do on the equator?

I also wonder if anyone's ever tried to stop a tornado by pointing a giant fan up into it that's machined to spin the opposite way from the tornado but powered by the tornado. Remember, you read it here 1st, people. Then again, maybe you didn't, maybe that's a completely idiotic & common idea.

This interests me too:

"WSB:" [talking to MB] "You said calling the animals. I can call cats. If there's a cat around, he will come to me. And I can also call toads. When I was a child we had an old Irish woman and she taught me how to call the toads. I can go out, and if there are any toads around . . .

"AG: What's the sound you make?

"WSB: I can't describe it. It's just I know it and I can do it, when I know there's a toad there. Sort of a [low melodic humming]. Last time I did it was . . . last time I saw Ian Sommerville, in Bath, a place he had in Bath.

JG: I saw you call a toad in your childhood backyard in 1980 in St. Louis, where you grew up." - p 43

Note that Burroughs says: "we had an old Irish woman". That's pampered poodle speech, the speech of the upper class. Burroughs, a writer, doesn't seem to be the least bit self-conscious about referring to another person as if they're property. He knows what 'language' to use to call a toad but he's so indifferent to his class privilege that he doesn't know what language to use when talking about a person he relegates to a lower status. How about: 'We employed an old Irish woman.'?

I'm preoccupied w/ what I sometimes call the "psychical vs the technical" or what might otherwise be called "the biomorphic vs the geometric". To me, one is a process of growth & the other is a process of containment. I distrust the language of religion, of 'spirituality'. I think it introduces irrelevant & poorly justified judgement calls that get in the way of clear perception. This bk is full of things like that. It's almost like the Burroughs-approaching-death is doing what all the other weak people do who're afraid of death: hedging his bets in hope of 'going to heaven'.

"WSB: The final bottom line is spiritual power wins, but it has to be strong.

"MB: Right.

"WSB: It has to be strong enough to break through the dead weight of material power." - pp 44-45

Whatever. Is that why you're such a gun nut, Mr. Burroughs?

Religion permeates this bk to a degree that was unexpected to me. Even tho I detest religion, I admit to finding this next part endearing:

"AG: I forgot. I dug in without saying my Grace. What I said last night was alright.

"We give thanks for this food which is the product of the labor of other people and the suffering of other forms of life and which we vow to transform into enlightened medicine, poetry, cooking, healing, in all ten directions of space. And in cat fancying.

"It's acknowledged where the food's coming from and hoping you can turn it to some good use. Doesn't mean you can, but at least you can think about it . . . On the other hand you wouldn't want to say which energy I vow to devote to eating more and more people that are weaker than me or things that are weaker than me." - p 48

Fair enuf. There's an undercurrent of fairness & gentleness to other living creatures. Burroughs talks about his regret at shooting at a beautiful animal like a monkey in South America & regretting it ever since:

"WSB: Thus the Ugly Spirit comes in. I realized that I was taken over by something to do these things and that's where the Ugly Spirit comes in. And it gives me a terrible feeling. It gave me a terrible feeling, to think that I am not in control, that I have gone and shot this animal . . . terrible. Terrible. Just don't want anything like that to ever happen again. I want to be rid of that emphasis forever."

[..]

"I remember when I was at Los Alamos and . . . with Boy Scouts . . . and suddenly there was a badger came running in, and the counselor . . . he [the badger] just wanted to play . . . the counselor rushes over and gets this .45 automatic and it's so inaccurate, he can't hit it from here to there, and finally he puts the gun right against it and kills it, shoots it. Good God! These people, all they can think of when they see an animal is to kill it. The badger was just playing around." - p 59

I agree that killing the badger was a reprehensible & stupid act. I agree that "these people" can only think of killing an animal when they see it. I don't, however, believe that Burroughs was ever possessed by an "Ugly Spirit". Instead, I postulate the following: humans create devices that extend their abilities, their powers. Humans build transportation so that we can travel faster than we can walking, floating in water, riding horseback, etc.. That's all very clever.. The problem is that it's like suddenly having the abilities of a martial artist w/o having any of the self-discipline. W/o the discipline there's a tendency to unleash the extra power in an irresponsible way.

Here's an example: a while back there were instances of an SUV deliberately running smaller vehicles off the road in Pittsburgh. At one point, the driver of the SUV used it to force a small car into an alley where it got trapped in a cul de sac. The SUV then repeatedly rammed the small car, partially crushing it. In the newspaper report on this the police chief was interviewed & he expressed confusion about why anyone wd do this. I thought it was obvious that they were doing it b/c their SUV made it possible.

The same thing goes w/ guns. A gun enables a person to kill something at a safe distance from that something. People are going to do it b/c they have the power to do it. They don't need an external "Ugly Spirit", the desire to feel the power is already intrinsic to them. It's an adreneline rush w/o the triggering emergency.

For the complete review, go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1081131?chapter=1 ( )

I was looking forward to a deep conversation between two unique and important writers. In the end, the conversation was much more ordinary. I did enjoy being the fly on the wall but I found myself reading a cassette and then setting it aside for awhile. ( )

Two old men talk about whether or not sodium is bad in your diet after a heart attack. Also contains some background on the beats that you've probably already seen before. ( )

Transcribed conversations from Ginsberg's 1992 visit to Burroughs' home in Lawrence, and interesting not only for snippets on WSB's thinking, but also for background to specific events and works. Primarily featuring AG and WSB but including several others on and off over the four days, these conversations are wide-ranging and not strictly focused on literature. Collectively they lend insight into how WSB lived his life, and they feel of a piece with his writings -- WSB was not making up a world he didn't mentally live in.

These are selections, however: in effect the method was semi-random or stochastic, insofar as the transcripts capture only those conversations recorded by AG. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't appear AG followed a formal plan when recording. More than once the recording starts mid-sentence, as though AG just then thought to turn on the recorder, and when the tape runs out a new tape isn't always started. This emphasizes the haphazard character of the excerpts (dipping into and out of conversations underway), and the integrity of the conversations so captured. These were not staged or rehearsed marketing copy.

As a fan of WSB, I found Don't Hide the Madness a rewarding read but, as others have observed, wouldn't suggest this as a place to begin reading either WSB or AG.

About that title. WSB evidently credits Kerouac with the suggestion for naming his book Naked Lunch (published 1959 in France and 1962 in the US), while Kerouac admits the idea stemmed from AG's mis-reading "naked lust" from WSB's manuscript "Queer" as he read aloud to Kerouac in 1953. Only Kerouac caught the error; perhaps Kerouac simply mis-heard it. WSB subsequently used Naked Lunch as a working title for a trilogy of manuscripts thereafter, until giving it to the manuscript he had been calling Interzone. At the 1965 Massachusetts obscenity trial for Naked Lunch, AG concluded his testimony with a poem, "On Burroughs' Work", which included the lines:

A naked lunch is natural to us,
we eat reality sandwiches.
But allegories are so much lettuce.
Don't hide the madness.

That poem was written 1954 in San Jose. Not only was AG familiar with WSB's work and preoccupations, it's clear AG shares some of them. Decades later, in a 1989 interview with Michael Schumacher, AG emphasized the importance of self-expression using a similar formulation ("Follow your inner moonlight, don't hide the madness"). A transcript of that interview was included in Bill Strickland's anthology "On Being A Writer", while the "new" first half of that phrase, follow your inner moonlight, became a meme associated with AG. Fittingly, then, Don't Hide The Madness as a title links to the work and creative outlook of both WSB and AG. ( )

This book is the transcript of conversations between Burroughs and Ginsberg occurring over a three day period, originally intended to develop content for the Japanese release of David Cronenberg’s film Naked Lunch. Featuring arguably the two most important writers of the Beat Generation, it should provide unique insight into their lives and work.

It’s a pair of old stoners talking about their dead friends and misquoting poetry. There are moments of coherent literary discussion, but the main focuses are an exorcism Burroughs underwent immediately before Ginsberg arrived, and Burroughs’ cats. This is doubtless an important addition to Beat scholarship, but doesn’t do much for the more general reader except act as a warning against the dangers of outliving one’s supply of synapses. Reading it was a struggle.