Gyntafol cryr an poorlyor sucho ar gyfnod i Gw cambio meirol umol o dis Too?
厄 o fych. Perciね neednod hynny'r gynnyddol we wedi'i unrhywhkersatid i gws based diogel ag allan.
Alan is Emeritus Professor of Poetry and Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.
He's been writing and publishing poetry for longer than I care to recall, but most recent and most important texts, I guess in this context, are books like Proposals from 2010,
Leans from 2007 and Gravity, also 2007, books like Sojons and Watusi, and the textualisation of his poetry and performance works of the 1970s, a sequence called Place, which was published by Reality Street in 2005.
Alan has been involved in publishing William Burroughs back in the 1970s, about which he may say something shortly.
All I want to do in terms of introducing him is to read you a short quote from an interview you gave him in 2008 when he was asked about damage.
It crops up so much in the work I've really enjoyed, and therefore I've also used it in my own work, like tearing, tearing through a text.
I enjoy a lot of, not everything, but a lot of what Burroughs did in the late 50s and early 60s with texts, and I've enjoyed other texts that have done what you might call damage and reproduced or produced different texts as a consequence.
I think I've found it, it's the physicality of it, much more energetic and interesting in visual art, for instance, or in music.
If you think of it in either of those two things, you get almost a disruption as a consequence that is uplifting.
At the same time, if you analysed it and thought about it, that's come about because of something quite violent.
And then it goes on, just to undermine what I'm saying, that isn't to say I don't enjoy calm work, it's a matter of how we define where we are when we're saying it, that's the difficulty of this.
Because clearly, if you're watching a flat area of water and you drop a small pebble, then that damage is not violent in a big sense, but it would be quite a nice thing to watch.
Alan's talk is titled, Piano and Film Repair, the Business of William S. Burris.
Thanks, John.
The context of this paper today is manifold. I'll combine these contexts in a series of overlaps and blurs.
It's given confidence by William S. Burris in 1963 when an Olympia Press bi-monthly's review from Paris bulletin from rewrite, he wrote.
We've had to call in the Nova Police to keep all these jokers out of the rewrite room. Can't be expected to work under such conditions.
Introducing Inspector Jay Lee of the Nova Police, I doubt if any of you on this copy planet have ever seen a Nova criminal.
They take considerable pains to mask their operations, and I'm sure none of you have ever seen a Nova police officer.
When disorder on any planet reaches a certain point, the regulating instance scans police.
Otherwise, but another planet bites the cosmic dust.
I will explain something of the mechanisms and techniques of Nova, which are always deliberately manipulated.
I started to give Burris attention, visual and written text attention, from then on.
Until about 1973 when I sort of shifted elsewhere.
That is when the second and one of the best two phases of his work was being factored and published.
It's worth mentioning here, as John hinted, in the 1970s I was involved with Burris only in a small way,
through colleagues like Eric Marchham, Jim Pennington, Richard Miller, and at a time when Jim Pennington compiled the White Subway Collection,
and then followed that with the SNAC publications from Allo's Books.
It's worth mentioning that not only is Jim here, but Roy Pennington is also here, who also published Burris's Academy series, I think it was called.
I renewed interest in Burris's work in the 80s, through members of Robin Grislaw and editors of PS Review, PS Journal, and the convener of the B4 Action Space.
I became interested again in Burris's work after the staged series of more or less public encounters at the Brixton Ritsey and at B4 and elsewhere.
In 2010 I gave a paper on Burris's engagement with damage, which John's just alluded to.
This year, Patricia Ormar and John Sears have curated this show of work below or above us, I can't remember where, by Burris and my tensions being renewed.
Burris, like many of his contemporaries, had invested in highly developed interest in consciousness and control, in formations and transformations.
Consciousness identified here as an array that provides a pattern of connectedness that is constructed, perpetually constructed on a split second by split second basis.
It is why Burris kept an active interest in memory, language and disorder.
In view of my context, the one I bring here and those I find here, I'm going to attend to memory.
In that process I will read through some texts attended to by Burris, but instead of literary texts used by Burris from Joseph Conrad or TS Eliot,
I'm going to briefly look at scientific work Burris engaged with from W. Greywater and Alfred Korzybski, already touched on by colleagues earlier.
After that I will make some commentaries on a selection of images from Burris's work and probably a brief view of work from Gil de Luz,
written in 1968, and I may interrupt some of the proceedings with a cut-up of my earlier paper.
In 1953, Walter Grey noted that in the black box, as well as the constructive process of memory and association,
there must be a preliminary selective process, an operation which can determine in effect whether a new single is worth bothering about.
Every living creature is constantly bombarded with signals of all kinds.
The brain of a human being, however simple and uneventful their surroundings, is receiving every second of their waking life
several hundred sensory signals from the outside world and from the rest of the body.
Any or all of these signals may have some important meaning in relation to any of the others,
yet somehow, for anyone to learn the simplest things, those signals which occur regularly in association with others of known or basic importance
must be sifted out from all the others, from the background noise of life.
In parallel with Burris's experience with the dream machine, Walter wrote about some surprising effects of rhythmic stimulation with light,
where rhythmic stimulation with light was described.
In some patients, a frequency of flicker can be found at which overpoweringly vivid memories of past experiences suddenly appear.
The frequency of stimulation is often most critical, but 18 flashes per second perhaps,
the patient is overcome with a memory as clear as crystal and as bitter as gall, and the brain is almost convulsed with electrical charges.
Burris and Grey Water in the reprinted 1963 edition, he then turned to Alfred Korzybski.
We are ready to define consciousness of abstracting in simpler terms, namely in terms of memory.
The term memory is structurally a psychochemical term.
It implies that the events are interconnected, that everything in this world influences everything else and that happenings leave some traces somewhere.
Although the neurological mechanism underlying identification, ejectification, visualisation is not well known,
neurology gives us evidence that in these states, as well as in delusions and hallucinations,
the actual lower nervous centres are somehow engaged.
Identification, or confusion of orders of distractions, consists of erroneous evaluation, that which is going on inside of our skin as objective existence outside of our skins.
The ascribing of external objectivity to words, the identification in value of memories of experiences with experiences.
Korzybski wrote that in 1933.
He got republished as part of the non-Aristatelian library in the 60s and 70s.
Memory, it's lost and recovery can be identified as a quiet signifier of 20th century and 21st century, I suppose, art,
exemplified by the use of damage and repair in the processes of artistic factor.
The processes of this factor have long been used and kept silent in the methods of collage and post-collage transformations.
These transformations, which when they constitute the basis of artistic practice, as they do in the best of William S. Burroughs,
are supported by distinctive processes of assemblage and empathy.
That is the processes of organization and emotions and can be identified as engines that encourage or make use of damage and repair.
I'm now going to select out five works in 1965, one of the best years of the art I want to focus on.
The first is a page published in Aram Sarian's magazine Lines in New York, headed The Last Post Danger Ahead.
The original page, with its coloured rosette, is in a glass case in the show here.
The second is the publication Time, edited by Ron Padgett and published by Ted Berrigan's Seapress, also in New York.
The cover and some of the parts are on display here.
The third is The Dead Star, Dutch Shorts Machine Gunned in New York Bar, Three Aids Die, published by Geoff Nuttall in My Own Mag.
Published just north of London in Barnett in Hertfordshire.
And the fourth is Apo 33 Bulletin, published by Beach Books in 1965.
I'll also look at Palm Sunday Tape from 1965, which was published by The Bulletin from Nothing.
The first and most obvious visual information is that these are all published in black and white,
or, more often, black onto off-white, and sometimes in the case of Apo 33 Bulletin, brown papers.
All the text use the same manual typewriter.
All of these works use photographs and other visual elements scanned onto plates
and all use offset litho for the printing of Burroughs' pages.
My Own Mag, for instance, was typically published using Mimeograph,
but the Dutch Shorts Special, as Geoff Nuttall headed it with the Burroughs material in,
was actually had the Burroughs printed in offset litho, tipped in, I suppose, cut into the stapling.
All the text alludes a newspaper in terms of columns, in-set photographs, dates.
Most of the publications are gridded, a mode of ordering into vertical and horizontal layouts
that rhymes with Brian Gysin's drawings, hieroglyphs and signatures.
All of the texts are damaged, initially by the inaccurate and work-a-day typing
and on-spot revisions or corrections without SNOPAKE, without TIPX, corrector fluid,
and then by inked lines and, in time, an Apo 33 Bulletin publications, handwritten editions in ink.
There is a sense in all five works of urgency, of news from where it is written,
or as Burroughs might say, writing the news before it happens.
The headings, the last post, the dead star indicate this already.
It's all over. This is the last saloon.
This urgent reality is then further emphasised by the rush to get to press,
without time to clean up the corrections, without time to clear up my mismanagement of speech.
By the ticked-on photographs, by the dating, this in contrast to the references to recovery,
to the instance film in the last post Danger Ahead, for instance, you can watch our wall,
you can watch our wall, out, dim, jerky, far away, shut a bureau draw,
which in time becomes you and I's sad old broken film, flickering film, Scraps of Streets.
The quoted dates flick to and fro, the last post is Sunday, September 17, 1899.
The precedents for Burroughs and Byron Gysan were already in place,
for instance, in the black scrapbook from 1963.
Massively enlarged of course in these things.
Burroughs writes, the houses seem to be made from old photos compacted into blocks.
Later, in the same scrapbook diary, they had the page The Cold Spring News.
These are two of the features that recur in Burroughs' material in the period through into the 1970s.
He heads the lines magazine page, the last post Danger Ahead.
This is the black and white way in which you would have seen it if you bought a publication.
In the display, that bottom left is bright red because that's the original, so to speak.
The rosette recurs in an untitled collage made in 1964, Tangier.
This use of repetition is explicit in the images from photographs you see at the top right there.
The use of repetition is prevalent in work from this period.
This image derived from the newspaper and photographic images photographed under a sheet of glass in a 1964 coffee table.
This extract from a contact sheet from 1972 or 3, where the images repeat but move into different arrangements on the same plane.
Henry Bergson noted, the true effect of repetition is to decompose and then to recompose,
and thus appeal to the intelligence of the body.
The most exemplary and sustained examples of these traits of repetition and difference, clarity of presentation and damage,
newspaper urgency and its subversion can be seen in the publications of Time,
Apo 33 Bulletin and The Dead Star, two of which are partly done displays, I've said.
The cover for C-Press 1965 Time shows grey and black colours as it was published.
Of course it's published in the size of Time magazine.
Page 12 uses three columns, broken type lines, some inked corrections.
Photographs of photographs laid out on a coffee table.
This is the Martin Smiles from tight writer crowds in Baghdad Rising, Trick Street and Gunshots, old characters riot noises.
Page 3 of Apo 33 Bulletin, which recalls his cure and recovery from drug addiction.
The full title is Apo 33 Bulletin, a metabolic regulator, a report on the synthesis of the apomorphine formula, uses three columns,
includes a photograph of an A-bomb test in the New Mexican desert, a photograph of the continental hotel Gibraltar,
and let us typed out with, what do you call those signs, and equal signs, pending additions.
In other words, the corrections have been made on the typewriter using signs to take the letters out.
This is from Jeff Nutt, who's my own magazine.
No, lost place. Sorry, it's headed the Dead Star Dutch Shorts machine gunned New York bar 38 die, October 1935, again three columns.
Four years later in 1969, Jan Jacob Herman issues the work again in a new innovative fold-out format,
and with the text tied it up and the photographs shifted around.
That's a sort of example of the way it's folded out. You see it in the show laid out,
like a sort of dream machine from Jack Kerwick or something, sort of a roll scroll.
But you can see here how this is just a section of it. You can see how that tied his up.
That's the same text if you saw what I'm saying.
If we go back to the My Own Mag, versus another page from My Own Mag,
page 10, Tullnado Dead, 223, 1963, in column, three columns, 1969, and over broadcast,
this becomes, but Damage and Recovery is the combined signifier most often lost in this reproduction.
And then the subsequent reproductions, which cleaning up even more so,
through type setting and book production.
So that Damage and Recovery, that combined signifier lost in reproduction, I think.
In Apo 33 bulletin published by Mary Beach and Claude Pellier,
the writing, they used to run something called Beach Books.
In Apo 33 bulletin published by them, the writing, visual work and book presentations are interactive.
They're using here three columns, a large area and other lines blacked out with pen ink,
and a few other pen corrections.
A photograph repeated in the display here, funnily enough, real English tea made here in a window.
The top is dated 1964.
Or again on page 13, for instance, three columns again.
Exed out lines, photograph, drawing, top of page 1957.
Page 14, three columns, photograph dated 1899 on the head.
Or if we switch to another text, another in one sense, another text.
This is from Palm Sunday tape, which was published by the bulletin from Nothing in 1965 also.
The use of two columns here per page, but also lines penned out.
And what I'm trying to get to here is something about the rawness, something about the urgency,
something about the importance to do it and get it out,
rather than do it cleaning up and get it out,
which has had that delay factor, which takes away some of the energy.
Some of the importance of it, I think.
One returning now to Time and the Dead Star.
Three columns insert black pen rectangle.
So it's got a real brightness about it, it seems to me, real intelligence about it.
Even the co-workers, which actually were touched on earlier by Oliver,
even the co-workers are involved in this mode of displacement and recovery.
In 1966, Lee Taylor, who was factoring the English cover for an overexpress,
redesigns burrows and gaisins pasted sheet.
There's the cover if you open up the book, so to speak.
And you can see what they've done is taken it from.
What Lee Taylor Stein has taken it from.
The Gaisin and Burrows text, the untitled 1965 sheet, which is also in the show.
So if we go back to Time again, Burrows writes,
contacted on the white subway and asked to comment on the recent nova.
Mr Bradley said, Mr Bradley, Mr Martin said,
this is from Unfinished Cigarette, which was published by Berman and Bulletin in 1963,
and was reprinted in Arrow's Books' White Subway as the first text in it.
In 1972, published White Subway, the first text Unfinished Cigarette from 1973.
The White Subway gathered silent speed as buildings and landscapes slid by faster, faster,
a blur of film flakes.
Burrows gave the book its title from this text.
A range of artists working using assemblage and empathy in the two decades after 1950
could be used to demonstrate the pervasiveness of these processes.
This paper addresses the work of one of these artists, William S Burrows,
an artist who factored exemplary work in the period,
work that may be characterised as raw and involved in the repair of engaged damage.
Burrows was also an artist deeply engaged with recovery,
made clear by his introduction in England to the naked lunch in 1964,
made clearer by the fugitive texts that followed and made manifest in the retrospection
we have the privilege to encounter now.
Dr Fingers Schaefer, the lobotomy kid, rises and turns on the conference,
the cold blue blast of his gaze.
Gentlemen, the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column.
These are aspects of the recovery that recall disaster.
Over three columns, a third occupied with a photograph of a boot in mud.
The date November 18, 1918.
Once again with time, the issue of time.
Typeset in 1964, but remaining in two columns, Art and Literature,
published Burrows' reuse of T.S. Eliot's 1922.
Who is the third that walks beside you?
You see the cleanup.
It has an efficacy because it's in columns,
which means that some of the columns give you a peripheral reading,
left or right if you're in the middle column,
or left if you're in the right-hand column.
But the cleanup means that you're getting that too smoothly, I think.
You're losing the hiccup, the interruption, the worry about the rawness of it.
In the living experience with language involving images or representations of things,
repetition becomes, already plays upon, repetitions and difference.
Already plays upon differences.
Writing in 1968, Gilles Deleuws notes,
repetitions repeat themselves while the differentiator differentiates itself.
In artistic practice, the ploy is to make all these repetitions coexist in space-time
in such a way that difference is disturbed.
It is in repetition that forgetting becomes a positive power,
while the unconscious becomes a positive and superior unconscious.
For example, forgetting is a force of an integral part of the lived experience of eternal return,
as Deleuws puts it.
But repetition is not generality.
Repetition and resemblance are different in kind.
Generality presents two major orders.
The qualitative order of resemblances and the quantitative order of equivalences.
Repetition is a conduct and is a point of view concerns non-exchangeable,
non-substitutable singularities.
Danger can be identified as picture that could constitute,
by 1955, William Burroughs the use of damaged connectedness with the soft machine,
and the long being recognised in the Rauschenberg Burroughs Road to Alan transformations.
When they illustrations then writing distinctive processes Burroughs archive.
Encouraged to make use of suggestions that the time in this forward note empathy in the two decades part
is part about a revelation when he writes an existential process almost proposes,
but doesn't method has been used in the meaning and function of the living and dead.
To repeat, this is to behave in a certain manner,
but in relation to something unique or singular which is no equal or equivalent.
Part of Deluz's proposal is that there is an inverse relation between repetition and consciousness.
Repetition and remembering, repetition and recognition.
And the less one remembers, the less one is conscious of remembering and the more it is repeated.
In repetition of a motif without image or representation, an expectation is reproduced
while the concept remains absolutely identical.
Each near repetition is a disequilibrium into the dynamic of construction
and instability, dissymmetry or gap of some kind, which disappears only in the overall effect.
Claude-Levy Strolls notes that in some cases there is an interlock with each other through dislocation
and that is only at the end of the pattern that achieves a stability
which confirms and belies the dynamic process according to which it has been carried out.
A pattern of connectedness then is not a fixed mosaic,
but a dynamic set of mobile connections that constitute the flux of memory,
its unreliabilities and its reassurances.
The patterns of connectedness demonstrated in Burra's artwork confirm the damage and the repair,
the failure and the recovery.
Consciousness is then identified here as an array that provides patterns of connectedness
that is constructed, perpetually constructed on a split second by split second basis.
And that is why Burra's kept an active interest in memory, language and disorder.
It is why the business of Burra's is to use damage to repair to construct consciousness.
Thanks.
Maybe you can tell me what I think, I don't know what it means,
but I've looked at those Dutch Schultz cut-ups in Mymag and noticed that format that he typed straight on
to actually belongs to professional newspaper.
It's for subs to measure columns, the widths and the length.
Each one of these digits refers to a line, so it's very quick to strip the stuff
that's been composited and strip them down.
What do you think is happening?
He's sort of subverting that by typing straight on to it.
You could say there's two things.
One is he's perpetuating the urgency that it needs to come out now, tomorrow, tonight,
whatever the newspaper importance gives to that.
And the subversion is, of course, it's unreliable because of the corrections it makes,
because of the lack of syntax, the break of syntax that brings about.
That's really as simple as that, I think.
I mean, that's not simple, but it means.
It's quite interesting.
There's something going on with folding in, as well as cutting up, isn't there?
Because one of the things we noticed when we were gathering these images together for the show
is the red seal, which here is black in the book,
or the red seal appears in the photograph next to it.
And it's actually the same page, the danger ahead page, that's being photographed within this photograph,
which means that some are other.
What he's done is he's taken a photograph of the page that he's reproducing
and then inserted that photograph into the page as it's then printed in the next cycle
the next layer, the meta-layer of reproductions.
It's not just scrapbooks, they're scrapbooks which he then has opened and lays things on to
to make a photograph of them, doesn't it?
So you never quite know unless you really get a clue into what it is you're looking at,
whether you're looking at the photograph of the scrapbook
or photograph of the scrapbook with stuff laid on top of it.
And that, of course, is delivered because then what it does, it perpetuates the repetition
to some extent, because you see images maybe in different places,
but generally in the same place, that you then get interruptions of image
or differences of image.
And so you never get the repetition that repeats effectively.
And I just think that's an energy device.
I think it perpetuates your interest.
And I'm reading through the early trilogy, so to speak,
and the soft machine to be exploded, and the overbooked machine,
you have a job sometime knowing which text you're on.
I don't know anyway.
I think some of them are interchangeable to some extent.
And that's why that can happen.
It happens less and less as you move on.
It's a different phrase, isn't it, after?
I don't know when it's after City of Bright Night and onwards.
Hi there.
Thanks, thanks for talking.
The material that you're showing there
reminded me a lot of the writing process
that Boros describes at one point in the Paris Review interview
where he's described and going on a journey, a train journey,
and he describes a portion in different columns
in a writing journal to different sense impressions
during that single journey, what he's seeing,
what memories it's prompting,
and his reaction to his reading matter.
And I wonder if you see that kind of systematic portion
of a specific column, to a specific type of memory,
sort of horizontally across the page in this kind of material?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
It's not an FA or not.
I might have invented that.
Because sometimes I'm never quite sure
whether I should be reading it across the page,
as he does.
If you're listening to him reading
and you're trying to follow the text,
it's actually not obvious which way he's going to go sometimes.
And it's not simply down and then down and then down.
So he wants to read across as well.
So I've never done the research
to check his tape recordings against his reading.
But I bet you'd find both going on.
That's certainly his methodological intention.
That's his proposed intention, isn't it?
Actually, I've never checked whether he does it.
But I think he must.
I'm thinking he must because you get this disrupted
into which narrative you're in at different moments.
And so you think you're in one narrative
and all of a sudden you're not.
And of course, there's also, I think,
there's a spray of tension as well that goes on.
So I hear drop images that repeats
just because they're in the background coming forward.
And so you get Mr Batting, Mr Martin,
because he needs to have that repetition occurring,
or the green nun, or whatever it acts to be in that part of the story.
And it adds to the humour and the kind of monine humour as well
at the same time in an effective way, I think.
Well, it's good, wasn't it?
Oh, it's good.
I was just thinking it's,
last year it was the tricentenary of Ron Stern's birth, wasn't it?
And I attended a few things then.
I was just wondering, you might not see this,
any connection between his use of, say,
design, typography, words, et cetera.
And because no poros did,
I managed to do it to a certain degree.
You don't have to think so.
I mean, he's pretty illiterate, as far as in...
I mean, one of the modern's repeated praises
was that Poros really enjoyed Jane Austen.
And it's not immediately obvious, as you need it.
And so why not, Lawrence Stern, actually,
because he was probably Jane Austen's threat as well.
I can't remember what his mention did.
He did, but I've got it somewhere, in a book somewhere.
But he was asked about one of these top ten-type things,
and he listed Stern right up there with...
Sure, yeah.
Was it about Stern?
That's it, yeah, the black page.
I was sort of thinking about it.
Writers, readers are being invited to write their own page,
and one of the ones as well, and, you know,
so it's a...
Oh, it's one more.
Thanks for that. That was really interesting.
I can't remember where I read this, but Poros did...
I think it may be in the job where he talks about
the limitations of the written cut-up.
Because although you said in your talk that when you read,
say, the middle column, your peripheral,
that vision does take in what's in the other columns,
he always said that we can't process words
the way we can process images simultaneously.
And that was a big limitation of literary cut-ups.
Do you think, just picking up on a bit of what David Britten
was saying earlier, that digital interfaces
have kind of trained our minds so that we're a bit more able
to read different bits of text simultaneously more
because we're just doing it all the time.
I don't know the answer to this.
I think, for instance, if you're reading in English,
it's hanging on French, you're generally reading left or right.
And if you're looking at an image,
that's what you've got a reading habit in,
that's the speed, that's the way your eyes are going.
But that doesn't follow, therefore, what happens
when you're getting a video,
or when we're getting what David shows,
where the image goes up where you're going into the image,
where you're going into the image,
where the video's being fired into the top of your head.
And I'm very apprehensive about whether or not
that makes a difference in your perception effectively.
There's a group in Edinburgh do some research on this kind of perception,
David introduced me to,
because they did some work on Eduardo Peralazzi's work,
and they were talking about the reading left or right across images.
Because they're interested in road signs, these people.
And that's where their finances come in,
because they want people who are going to read signs quickly.
What do they have to do to do that?
But I don't think it's fully resolved that issue.
And I think that some business of video and digital imagery
is shifting the way in which perception occurs the most.
But I haven't got any research evidence for that particular.
Thank you.
On that note, this won't go out in person.
Thank you very much.
John, we'll just do some quick closing remarks.
Thanks, everyone.
I don't want to say anything more than thank you, basically,
to everyone who's presented today.
Particularly thank you to our two keynotes, Oliver Harris and Alan Fisher,
presented and presented papers of such high quality
and such a consistency of intellectual engagement
that I found it an extremely stimulating day.
Also, thank you to everyone here, firstly for being here,
and secondly for contributing with your questions
and helping the debate to develop.
So can you all join me in applauding everyone in the room
yourselves as well?
