V. Vale

For those not in the know, RE/Search was part of the underground publishing movement of the 70s through 90s, in which small independent publishers - many of them run out of homes and apartments - contributed greatly to the print counterculture of the end of the 20th century.

The books published by RE/Search exhibited the kind of layout and format popular in the zine movement, populated by fringe artists eager to share their visions and passions not fit for mainstream commercialism. Issue 8/9, show more dedicated to cult icon author J.G. Ballard, has the feel of the thick, photo-copied fanzines of the time period, assembling previous interviews and eclectic materials both from and by the publication's focus.

Chock full of materials that were potentially invaluable to a pre-internet audience, the book is divided into four main sections: Interviews with the author, works by the author both Fiction and Non-Fiction, then a final autobiographical and bibliographical wrap-up.

For me, the interviews with Ballard were the most insightful and interesting, witnessing intelligent people musing about the future implications of mass media from the very future they are positing. Ballard's ruminations of the advancement of media technology is especially gripping, as in some ways he seems to predict the YouTube culture and the increased ability of the average individual to not only actively create their own reality, but to broadcast it as reality to others.

My least favorite part would be the biographical section, but this has more to do with my own lack of interest in author histories than Ballard's own life story.

Overall, an interesting read about Ballard, but probably more interesting as a snapshot of the history of counterculture publishing as a whole. show less

This was an influential publication in a pre-internet era where finding anything about these people was difficult. Vale bridged the gap from punk to beat writers and performance artists by working at City Lights Bookstore handling mailorder catalogs.

Gysin was obscure and relatively unknown, and even Burroughs was pretty off the radar for most people. And Throbbing Gristle was dissolving and barely even heard of, but also notorious for their last live performance in San Francisco.

I think show more this was where Re/Search made the leap to paperback books, evolved from being a newsprint paper 'for the first issues. While Vale was deeply in the SF punk scene he also helped broaden horizions in the first issues by turning me on to Fela, James Blood Ulmer and a broad spectrum of stuff that was beyond the idea of calling it a post-punk zine.

The rest of the Re/Search series was equally relevant. I'd argue that this book and Vale helped promote all of these artists to the point where they became legendary cult figures, as they deserved to be. This is the foundation of the publishing and info distribution network Vale created that promoted the idea of an evolving industrial culture - the blend of some essence of punk, post-punk, performance art, world music and paying respects to the influences that Burroughs and Gysin had in creating Dream Machines and tape cutups and editing.

Burroughs was really barely known beyond people already into the beats. Naked Lunch was considered unreadable by anyone I knew.

Throbbing Gristle was surprisingly more complicated in intent and influences than met the eye and this exposed a history with connections to mail art, Fluxus, performance art and some pretty disgusting performance things pushing boundaries sexually and psychologically. They're the bridge from Burroughs, who was sparked with audio edit experiments by Gysin, and TG took some of the ideas and ran with it.

The posthumous backstory on TG here laid them out as the godfathers of industrial music, putting it in a Dadaistic and art context that made these guys heroes to many people looking to explore the fringes of culture and art via the boundary pushing areas these people covered. show less

This book is literally bursting with subversive ideas regarding self-defense, the possibility of Revolution, utopias, assassination, con men and politicians, lost inventions, turning points in history, the JFK killing, dreams, ideal education, the cut-up theory a (and practice) for producing prophetic writing, and so much more.

Back in V. Vale’s RE/Search Newsletter #127, June-July 2014, V. Value mentioned "Burroughs had even studied Egyptian grammar and hieroglyphs" and in the more recent newsletter mention of this limited run chapbook expounded that William S. Burroughs did this and recommended it and Chinese grammar for mental exercise. My recent reading of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain caused me to encounter the same topic where neuroscience shows us the Chinese use show more different neural pathways for language. This and much more on Burroughs' reading life and recommendations I hoped top find here. However, the grammar topic did not make it to printing and much of what is here on books is discursive, brief, and with misspellings of author names, etc. At the time, Vale was researching for an as-yet-unpublished The Books in my Life, but at the time Bill has other priorities that week around a methadone clinic and dinner guests. Some of that life in transcript and photographs make it here, making for an intimate if superficial exploration of the writer's life in late 1988. show less