{books} – Page 304 – { feuilleton }

Weekend links 148

• An hour-long electronica mix (with the Düül rocking out at the end) by Chris Carter for Ninja Tune’s Solid Steel Radio Show.

• “…a clothes-optional Rosicrucian jamboree.”: Strange Flowers on the paintings of Elisàr von Kupffer.

• A Paste review of volume 2 of The Graphic Canon has some favourable words for my contribution.

It is an entertaining thought to remember that Orlando, all sex-change, cross-dressing and transgressive desire, appeared in the same year as Radclyffe Hall’s sapphic romance The Well of Loneliness. The two novels are different solar systems. The Well is gloomy, beaten, defensive, where women who love women have only suffering and misunderstanding in their lonely lives. The theme is as depressing as the writing, which is terrible. Orlando is a joyful and passionate declaration of love as life, regardless of gender. The Well was banned and declared obscene. Orlando became a bestseller.

Jeanette Winterson on Virginia Woolf’s androgynous fantasia.

• Jim Jupp discovers the mystical novels of Charles Williams.

• Michael Andre-Driussi on The Politics of Roadside Picnic.

• Les Softs Machines: 25 August 1968, Ce Soir On Danse.

• At 50 Watts: Illustrations and comics by Pierre Ferrero.

• Soviet posters: 1469 examples at Flickr.

• Oliver Sacks on drugs (again).

• At Pinterest: Altered States.

• Farewell, Kevin Ayers.

• Darkest London

• Why Are We Sleeping? (1969) by The Soft Machine | Lady Rachel (1969) by Kevin Ayers | Decadence (1973) by Kevin Ayers

Interzone: A William Burroughs Mix

Interzone is a selection of William Burroughs recordings mixed with electronic music and other pieces such as extracts from Howard Shore & Ornette Coleman’s Naked Lunch soundtrack:

A tribute to ‘El Hombre Invisible’. It features some of my favourite readings, to which I’ve added music by John Zorn (from his Burroughs-inspired work), Tod Dockstader, Arne Nordheim and others. Also in the mix are radio recordings and vocal cut-ups by the man himself.

The curator is Mixcloud user Timewriter, one of whose mixes I linked to last Halloween. I was surprised to find I’d already downloaded the Burroughs mix from the Timewriter blog, Include Me Out, but hadn’t managed to listen to it. Better late than never. This week seems a good time to draw attention to both the mix and that blog in general which features among its posts a quantity of Burroughs-related ephemera. Many of the mix readings are from the albums of Burroughs’ tape recordings from the 1960s, including Nothing Here Now But The Recordings, the collection of tape experiments released by Industrial Records in 1981. The latter is essential listening for anyone who appreciates Burroughs’ early novels; some of its pieces such as Last Words of Hassan Sabbah sound less like readings of the author’s work than actual artefacts from the books themselves.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Sine Fiction

Sine Fiction VI: Nova Express (2003) by Eucci.

More Burroughsian music, and a selection that includes another interpretation of The Ticket That Exploded. Sine Fiction is a music project curated by Aimé Dontigny that commissions electronic artists to provide soundtracks to science fiction novels. The project has been running since 2000, and has so far managed twenty releases, the most recent of which—Dontigny’s own music for Ballard’s The Drowned World—appeared in 2011. In addition to three Burroughs titles there’s another work with considerable cult status, the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic, which Jos Smolders accompanies in a very minimal fashion. I’d still go for the gloriously doomy atmospheres of Stalker (1995) by Robert Rich & B. Lustmord but there’s room in the world for multiple interpretations.

All the Sine Fiction releases are available as free downloads at the No Type site or (if you prefer) at the Internet Archive.

Sine Fiction VII: Soft Machine (2003) by Kevin M Krebs.

Sine Fiction IX: The Ticket That Exploded (2003) by A_Dontigny.

Sine Fiction XIV: Roadside Picnic (2004) by Jos Smolders.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• A playlist for Halloween: Drones and atmospheres

The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera

The book that made my head explode when I was 16. Calder & Boyars edition, 1968; design by John Sewell.

Years ago the idea of an opera based on The Ticket That Exploded would have been a wry joke: a novel brimming with text that’s fragmented even by Burroughs’ standards, as well as the usual preoccupations with spurting cocks, alien sex, parasitic invasion and erotic asphyxia. That said, if you can swallow the content (so to speak) a libretto is no doubt easy to create from all those sentence fragments, and there’s no worry about anyone complaining that you’ve missed some crucial part of the story. James Ilgenfritz’s The Ticket That Exploded: An Ongoing Opera attempts just this in an extract which can be seen on YouTube:

Premiered at Issue Project Room while I was Artist in Resident in 2011, and based on William S. Burroughs’ 1962 novel of the same name, The Ticket That Exploded takes all its text directly from the novel. I wrote the libretto and composed the music, which was then exquisitely interpreted by some of the greatest musicians in the New York area. Jason Ponce collected a massive array of bizarre visual materials and innovative digital processing programs to perform the visual component of this work live onstage at the premiere.

There’s more from Jason Ponce at Vimeo. A DVD of the complete work is planned in 2014. Via Supervert.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The William Burroughs archive

The Cephalopoda of the Hawaiian Islands

A little something for Darwin Day, and a collection of illustrations I hadn’t seen before. The Cephalopoda of the Hawaiian Islands (1914) is another title in the splendid (and huge) collection of the Biodiversity Heritage Library whose Flickr sets have been linked here before. Some of those prior examples have ended up being collaged into Lovecraftian entities so there’s always the possibility of that happening to one or two of these illustrations in the future.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Vampyroteuthis Infernalis by Vilém Flusser
• Le Poulpe Colossal
• Fascinating tentacula