I really wish calling this post Necrocomiccon made sense. Punfortunately, it doesn't....

Song of my soul, my voice is 

dead,

Die thou, unsung, as tears 

unshed

Shall dry and die in

    Lost Carcosa.

 "The King in Yellow"

Like a lot of sullen, dorky kids, I first became interested in the occult in my early teens, and the subject interests me to this day....as a sullen, dorky adult.  I've bought a lot of books over the years, but three books I purchased at that heady time really stick out in my memory:  the first three "occult"-related books I bought.  

I might have already read Drawing Down the Moon (Margot Adler, RIP) when I bought these books - I'm not sure - but Adler's book was the first serious study of Wicca I'd read.  Even then I knew the wheat from the chaff.  It seems incredible to me now, but I found Adler's book in my high school library.  I may be wrong, but I'm not sure we'd see it in a public school these days.  Even then, anything vaguely "occult" was hard to find in school libraries, B. Dalton's, or Waldenbooks, the leading bookstores at the time.  This was, after all, the 1980s, and the US was experiencing a moral "Satanic" panic, hysteria that ruined hundreds of good peoples' lives.  QAnon is essentially the same phenomenon, but in this current iteration the "Satanists" have been identified as left-leaning politicians.  In the Middle Ages, it was "the Jooz...."

Let's make a blunt aside:  QAnon is Antisemitism in disguise.

Those early forays into the occult were not the most auspicious, but for me, they were very potent, even dangerous....

• The Magic Power of Witchcraft by Gavin and Yvonne Frost
• The Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey
• Necronomicon (the so-called "Simon" version) by ?

I knew - even then - that the Necronomicon ("the" isn't in the title but Lovecraft uses it and it seems awkward without it) was a work of fiction, but I still felt there was something powerful in it; not in the rituals it contained, not in the incantations, but in the very book itself, the object; it was as if it - literally - radiated some kind of measurable power.  Almost like a homing beacon for otherworldly forces.  

Voodoo works because people believe it works.  Voodoo is a kind of gaslighting.  Tell a believer they've been cursed and they will freak out.  I believed some books radiated power, so they did.

40 years and 20+ addresses later, across 4 states and 2 continents, my original copies of The Satanic Bible and the Necronomicon are still with me.  I just recently moved and most of my books got put in boxes. 2 in particular did not.

The Necronomicon fascinates me because although it was an invention of Lovecraft - a fiction - many occultists insist it is based on something "real."  They maintain that although Lovecraft presented his accounts of the tome as fiction, he was speaking of literal eldritch forces and occult traditions.  For these people, the book is dangerous.  I never believed it could summon ancient entities, but I too, for a while, feared the book enough to resist actually opening it until some time after I'd purchased it.  But I was 12 or 13 years old and had a pretty active - and not always healthy - imagination.  From about 8 to 10 years old I couldn't sleep alone.  I'd awake during the night and lie there in a near panic until I got enough courage to run to my sister's room and sleep next to her.  I don't know why; but such was the mind of a kid who a few years later would treat the Necronomicon seriously:  An arguably neurotic child....not a "reasonable" adult....

The idea of the Necronomicon is so alluring that someone actually took the time to write it. This is the "Simon" Necronomicon that I purchased.  Simon is mentioned in the book's introduction as the person who re-discovered the manuscript.  Lovecraft himself claimed that he got the idea from Gothic stories, where "mouldering manuscripts" were often a trope, and he referred to the book throughout his oeuvre.  But the "Simon" version was originally published in 1978, long after Lovecraft's death in 1937.  

Like The Satanic Bible, my copy is an Avon paperback.  The covers are not dissimilar:  nothing except the title and a similar sigil, all white on black.  Necronomicon has a bit of ornamentation, but otherwise the books are both stark, and about the same dimensions all around.

When I first bought the book, I knew it was fiction, and at the time I was barely familiar with Lovecraft.  I mean, come on. The "Mad Arab"?  It was obvious the book was akin to The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, published at the height of Twin Peaks mania.  To expand the fictional universe....and make some coin.  Upon reflection, I find my reaction to the book puzzling;  I knew, or at least strongly suspected, it was fiction, yet on some level I was a bit "frightened" of it.  Maybe even then I was on some level aware of the precepts of chaos magic, that is to say that even fiction can be used effectively in ceremonial "magick."  Fiction or no, I knew it was powerful, because so many of the people I knew who were into the occult spoke of it in hushed tones and seemed to fear it.  It was catching.  It comes back to that comment about voodoo:  it works because people believe it works....

My great hope is that somebody some day will write and even stage The King in Yellow, the play mentioned in several stories of Robert W. Chalmers' eponymous collection.  It is an obvious thing to do: a malevolent play, a shocking diary, an accursed grimoire.  The fame of the stories in which they are found is such that readers are left wanting more, they want to actually read these disturbing things.  Some have suggested Lovecraft was inspired by Chalmers" fictitious play when he invented the Necronomicon, but apparently he did not encounter Chalmers' work until after he had already created his own....

Shadows here of Don Quixote and perhaps one of the inspirations for Foucault's Pendulum....

The Simon Necronomicon is a bit silly, really.  Lovecraft himself knew he could never write something as horrible as the book was said to be.  He knew hints and brief citations were much more effective.  And he was right.  The Simon Necronomicon is just too obviously fabricated to fill the reader with cosmic horror and dread - unless the reader is a 10-year-old neurotic who can't sleep alone....Guilty!  To recreate the power of the fictional book is impossible.  Chalmers wrote a few stanzas of The King in Yellow, but would never have been able to write an entire work with the effect of his fictional play.  The King in Yellow was said to have driven people mad.  It burned through Europe like an epidemic.  A diseased meme.  If he'd written it for real, one would read it, not go mad, and then poof!  The illusion - ruined.

H. P. Lovecraft, quoted by Peter H. Gilmore:

....one can never produce anything even a tenth as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about. If anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it.

The Simon Necronomicon is still in print and still sells a fairly decent amount of copies per year.  Most probably bought by newly-minted Lovecraftians.  A novelty for the collection.

Peter Gilmore, Magus of the Church of Satan, wrote an essay about the book which is worth reading.  The book has retained an air of mystery even in this era where almost all information can be accessed 24/7.  The book's true author isn't known for certain, although Gilmore sheds some light on that.

Gilmore also writes that the fact the book is a fiction doesn't make it useless as a magical tool:

Satanists understand that any prop that is sufficiently stimulating can be used in personal ritual, so if the materials contained in this book send the proper chill down your spine, then certainly avail yourself of them. As Magistra Nadramia has said: “Working with and expressing your emotions in the ritual chamber using this particular little black book is perfectly valid Satanic magic. A careful look at The Satanic Bible will tell you that Dr. LaVey encouraged the magician to use any and all elements of fiction, fact and fancy to create his Intellectual Decompression Chamber.

But, he adds:

Just don’t fool yourself outside the ritual chamber into the belief that you are using some authentic ancient tome handed down by Elder Gods to their human, or humanoid, servitors.

This reminds me of chaos magic and the tenet that "belief is a tool."  One can perform bibliomancy with a Bible or Donald Duck cartoons, and have equally valid results.  

Anyway, I stumbled across Gilmore's essay because I was interested in learning a bit more about Gilmore's biography.  I wasn't looking for Necronomicon information at all.  That said, I recently pulled out my copy to look through for the first time in over a decade, and it's sitting on the table next to my laptop.  So, when I clicked on Gilmore's essays and saw he'd written about it, my spider senses tingled.  

For some reason I wrote Nina Simone on a recent collage and then went to the metro after I'd finished collaging for the day; there I noticed a new poster about an upcoming concert in homage to....Nina Simone.  

When it rains it pours.

The coincidence of coming across an essay about a book I'd only just pulled off the bookshelf in over a decade made me think:

 "Drring-drring! Synchronicity calling. Write something."

And here it is. 

The Blood (& Tools) of a Poet

In the Romantic imagination of many, the tools of the poet's trade are a quill, a piece of parchment, a tallow candle, and perhaps a glass of absinthe or laudanum.  And of course, plenty of inner torment.  

from Ode to my Unique and Deeper Anguish than Thine.

Hand held to head in squalid garret,
bat flying through etched lines where it -  
the guttering candle - meets darkness, 
the fetid air and cold and dampness. 
The pattering of brazen rats' feet.
Across the bed and through the sheets;
A whore's forgotten kerchief to mop sweat 

from a syphillitic brow, creased with regret.... (yadda cetera)

These days, the scene is more likely a laptop, a lamp from Ikea named Ljusfnord, an IPA, a thesaurus, a healthy dose of egotism, and a check from home.  And that's not a jab.  Half of Baudelaire's letters to his mom were pleas for money.  I can relate to that. 

                                                        

Jump (might as well):  Pictur'd above is the toolkit I use when I assemble my poems.  It is the toolkit I use to disappear.  I'm not a poet but something like an assembler on auto-pilot.  A cross between a factory worker and a kid with Elmer's glue, glitter, and macaroni.

I don't like poetry readings, most contemporary poetry, slam, the da-duh-daaaa cadence of "spoken word...." and poems with gentle humor about lakes, the hoot of an owl at vanilla sexual climax, a room in the Catskills to escape the noise and the smells of the Big Apple, he a mid-level advertising executive who still occasionally ekes out a poem, she a non-tenured Associate Professor of English who leads creative writing workshops on Riker's Island.  (Note to self:  call the city historian, find out if the portrait in the warden's office is avec or sans beard....Make it so.)  I should add that while I don't care for slam, in fact it annoys me, I respect many a slam poet's skills, and one can't denigrate a concept - poetry as verbal joust, a competition - that dates back to the Jocs florals (Floral Games) of the troubadours, established by the Consistori del Gay Saber in Toulouse in 1324.  That's a year shy of 700 years ago....

The Consistori still exists, now called the Acadèmia dels Jòcs Florals and is thus the oldest literary association in existence.  I guess the name isn't the only change.  The original Consistory would have spoken a dialect of what is now called Occitan but was also widely know as Provençal, and it was later very much involved in the promotion, standardization, and preservation of Occitan.  But their website is in French, without even a Occitan translation.  UNESCO classifies many Occitan dialects as "seriously endangered."  You know that's not alarmist when an organization historically engaged with the preservation of a language doesn't even present itself in that language.  It's like the coal mining museum in Kentucky coal country that is powered entirely by solar energy! 

My "poetry" influences are pop songs, advertising slogans, proverbs, clichés; fragments of text from spam, torn pieces of paper, TV guide episode descriptions*, or from Sappho of Lesbos.  I've also been known to drop in song lyrics or fragments of conversation I overhear while writing.  

*Due credit to artist T.A. Wilson, who found the following example hilarious. (As do I).  Anyone who's seen the episode will know exactly which show and episode is being referred to.  I can say without irony that this single sentence is an extremely efficient description and is a "flash poem" of some genius.  

"Kira tries to dislodge a stubborn Bajoran."  

Seven words perfectly summarize an entire episode.

I do not ignore authorial intent, but I do place high value (not "higher") upon a reader's (mis?)understanding; "meaning," such as it is, is an interplay between the writer and those who read him/her/them.  A person's take on any given text may in fact be a total misunderstanding of what a writer intended to say.  So what?

I don't think cut-up, fold-ins, cross-reading or any other "scissorial compostions" a) are weapons against control b) predict the future c) are harmful plagiarism.  They are, however, F-U-N fun and useful.  Scissors and glue bring a childlike sense of wonder back into the oft-dreary niche that some poetry can be.  Even when it isn't, but especially when it is.

"Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with just the right idea."

                                                                                        - Isidore Ducasse Poésies II (1870)

I have hundreds of "non" cut-up/concrete/visual/asemic poems, but to be honest, I'm more fond of my concrete and found poetry these days.  The following are a set of five unique books of concrete poetry with collage elements, burns, tears, paint splatters and washes, coffee washes, folds and crumplings.  Each one is unique.  The copy on the left was designed to be as ugly as possible!

Anyway, all this came about after I was inspired by the sight of my "tools" laid out as I was looking through my collages.  Pure narcissism.  That and I'm working on a short summary of concrete, visual, and cut-up poetry, along with other forms of found and collage texts, asemic or otherwise.  I intended this post to be one photo and a sentence or two, but it just kept going.  My brain is trying to make sense of a long and diverse branch of "poetic endeavors."

BTW, I'm willing to sell any of these works.  If anything catches your eye and you'd like a better picture, please leave a comment.  Some of these have already been shown in one of my Milk Coma (with collaborator Metapinto) shows (2013 at Pavillions Sauvages or 2016 at Café Le Burgaud).

One day I'd like to scan all of my collages and collage poetry, but that will be a pretty monumental task.  If that monument were small and insignificant....

William Carlos Willliams is said to have said

"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

A lot of poets share that opinion.  Of course they would.  It defends and renders important an art which is, when not ignored, derided by our culture.  I tend to think it's bullshit.  Or maybe not.  There's a dearth of poetry in the American Agora.  But no dearth of dickheads, crypto-fascists, and mass shootings (600 + this year so far.  Winning!)  Writing poems, or in this case, cutting and pasting them together, well, at the very least one can say that there are worse ways to spend one's time....

Across the Wounded Centuries -- How an Enlightenment-Era Poet 'beat' Burroughs to the Punch by Nearly 200 Years....

Caleb Whitefoord, 1773 or 74.  Sir Joshua Reynolds

Over the years, I've come across several essays about how some of the earliest novels anticipate literary postmodernism's ideas and concerns.  To whit, Cervantes' conceit in Don Quixote (1605 & 1615) that the story is translated from an obscure manuscript....the totally black page, the Alfred Bester-like typographical oddities, the symbol representing how a character waves his cane in Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759 to 1767). To my regret, two novels I have not yet read.  And to my surprise, the latter book was inspired by....the former!

Today, I came across another example. One Caleb Whitefoord (1734-1810) - wine merchant, diplomat, and poet - discovered a novel way of reading the newspapers, that is to say, across the columns instead of down them.  In addition to finding the results amusing, Whitefoord, among others, pointed out that this method often revealed the unspoken agendas and contradictions of the newspapers.  It also pointed to a concern we don't often associate with the 18th century, but to our own:  media overload.  The populace was becoming more literate, and a welter of daily papers and monthly magazines, journals and reviews were there to supply the ever-growing demand.

Quote:

It was Whitefoord’s genius to notice that when you took a broadsheet newspaper of tightly set columns, and started reading across the paper’s columns - rather than reading down to the column’s next line - you could achieve what he described as “coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.” Whitefoord called this cross-reading, and he was so amused by it that he would publish sheets of his favorite specimens and hand them out to friends in Fleet Street coffeehouses. (from an interview with Paul Collins)

Coffeehouses, eh? Poets, coffee....and folk singers? Enlightenment Beats?

Some examples:

Dr. Salamander will, by her Majesty’s command, 

undertake a voyage round -

The head-dress of the present month.

Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,

and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.

Notice is hereby given -

And no notice taken.

A perceptive essay by Giles Goodland about Whitefoord's texts can be found here.  All quotes and information about Whitefoord from this point on come from Goodland's essay, which I urge you to read.

Whitefoord first published what he called "cross-readings" in The Public Advertiser in an article entitled A New Method of Reading Newspapers (1766).  

He used this method again in the New Foundling Hospital for Wit (1770); more cross-readings also occur in various broadsides and ephemeral publications, now hard to trace, usually under his bye-line of 'Papyrius Cursor'.

Writing under this name in 1775 (Fugitive Misc. II. 49-51) he describes his work in a way that seems so modern in its insistence that the consumer of the media is powerless against a flood of contradictory messages from all spheres of an increasingly complicated and contradictory society, it is worth quoting from at length: (Goodland)

18th-Century prose is best read in its entirety, so instead of providing a snippet, please read the quote yourself.  Goodland provides a few more examples:

The comet is now on it's return to the sun—

pursuant to a decree of the high court of chancery.

At the meeting at Newcastle, Sir B. F. D. was in the chair—

and appeared like a dull, faint nebulous star.

Yesterday there were violent disputes in the common-council—

For some time past the volcano has been extremely turbulent.

Now in rehearsal the distrest mother, a tragedy—

Occasioned by the undutiful behavior of the Colonies.

Lucius Papirius Cursor, btw, was a much-vaunted Roman politician and general who Livy compared to Alexander the Great.  As many of Whitefoord's texts were political in nature, perhaps he's mocking the puniness of contemporary politicians by comparison?  Or perhaps it's ironic self-aggrandizement?  Contemporaries would have known the reference, but why he chose this nom de plume, I'm not sure.... 

Apparently, Whitefoord's cross-readings were quite popular and luminaries such as Horace Walpole, Oliver Goldsmith, and Dr. Johnson found them both ingenious and hilarious.  An anonymous broadside from 1782 describes them in terms that, for me anyway, cannot but evoke the basic principles of Surrealism:

One particular species of entertainment resulting from [reading newspapers], is, after reading each column by itself DOWNWARDS, to read two columns together ONWARDS: whereby chance will bring about the most unaccountable connections, and frequently couple persons and things the most heterogeneous; things so opposite in their nature and qualities, that no man would ever have thought of joining them together.

I added the boldface.  It's as if the author had anticipated Lautréamont by 100 years, he who so inspired Surrealist aesthetics with the following line from Canto VI of Maldoror:

He is as handsome as....the chance juxtaposition of a 

sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table!

Goodland concludes:

It was striking to me that I could find no reference to Whitefoord or cross-readings in any studies of the roots of modernism. It seems to me that the work of Whitefoord is an important precursor of styles and poetries that would later be called avant-garde, at least in the fact that he stumbled by chance on Tristan Tzara's famous recipe for a Dada poem ('take a pair of scissors and a newspaper...'). The similarity is not only one of methodology. The humour in these juxtapositions depends on an understanding of class inequalities, the contradictions and aporia of party politics, and not least how easy it was – a mere matter of skipping over a thin white column – to expose the contradictions inherent in the mass media, and the interests they represent.

Burroughs, 1960: hey-day of the cut-up period

What strikes me is that Goodland mentions Tzara, but there is an even more direct example in the work of American author William S. Burroughs.  He did exactly the same thing with newspaper texts, and for pretty much the same reasons, as Whitefoord, almost precisely 200 years later.  Well, not exactly.  Whitefoord produces what read almost like headlines, or single epigrammatic phrases; Burroughs produced sustained texts.  Burroughs' texts are also generally more disjointed.  Perhaps Whitefoord was a bit more selective, or not as beholden to pure chance, meaning that he pruned the excerpts, adding or removing articles, conjunctions, whatever he required for a more coherent read.  Goodland suggests that some of the texts are not entirely found, but constructed.  Perhaps Whitefoord didn't feel as beholden to chance as Burroughs did; he wasn't, after all, striving to predict the future or break through control mechanisms, but produce witty and satirical observations about contemporary politics.

As he himself put it 

Whenever any change on [sic] Ministry happen'd, and the Party Writers on both sides began the work of serious abuse, I have always endeavour'd to make such changes a matter of Laughter rather than of serious concern to the people, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News, &c.

Burroughs experimented with cut-ups and fold-ins, and many variations of the "three column" format; some of the results can be found in The Burroughs File (1984).  This book, my first exposure to Burroughs, incidentally, is a collection of previously-published small books that were themselves often collections of short pieces he'd published in "little magazines," or mimeos, between 1962 and 1969.  A collection, then, of collections.

The book contains two examples from The White Subway (1973):  Who is the Third that Walks Beside You?  and a re-mix of sorts, Who is the | Walks Beside You | Written 3rd?

Another book included is The Old Movies, again providing two examples:  So Who Owns Death TV  and The Moving Times.  If I understand correctly, most of these pieces were originally collected into a German edition called Die Alten Filme (1979) and made available in English for the first time in The Burroughs File.

And all this is just the very tippy-top of the iceberg.  As Alex Wermer-Colan says in his introduction to the collection of Burroughs cut-ups he edited entitled The Travel Agency is on Fire:

[Burroughs] committed over a decade of his life to searching out every multimedia potential to produce works as collage....

He notes that the archive he drew upon 

...contains approximately 11,000 pages of unpublished material.  During my research, it became evident that a significant proportion of these texts went through the cut-up process.  These range from three-by-three textual grids to faux newspapers composed of headlines with three parallel columns of cut-up texts.  In addition archival collections at Arizona State University and Ohio State University suggest that even more cut-up material exists.

Most of these pages date from 1959 to 1965, nearly 200 years after Whitefoord had discovered the cross-reading method.  As far as I know, Burroughs was never aware of his literary ancestor.  Any discussion of the cut-up method invariably brings up Tzara's Dadaist forays into aleatory texts pulled from a hat, but nowhere have I ever seen Whitefoord's name in the plethora of essays about and biographical sketches of Burroughs or the method's actual "discoverer," Brion Gysin.  (Gysin was cutting mounts for some drawings and found that the newspapers he'd laid down had produced new texts that he, like Whitefoord, found hilarious.)  For Burroughs, cut-up literally became a weapon for destroying control mechanisms and predicting the future.  As Wermer-Colan points out, there are three collections of this material, one of which exceeds 11,000 pages.  Burroughs was not dabbling, but deadly serious.  There are thousands of pages of cut-ups, and probably thousands of his own "cross-readings" in those archives

Was Burroughs possessed?  Maybe he was, as Mailer points out, "by genius."  He himself felt he was possessed by an "Ugly Spirit" that led him to shoot his common law wife, Joan Vollmer.  I can't say if he was possessed, but he was certainly obsessed, and for all his brilliance and indeed, prophetic wisdom, he was prone to all sorts of crank ideas:  Reichian orgone boxes, Streiberesque alien abduction fantasies, and using cut-ups to predict, and change, the future.  In a way, he did predict and change the future.  But thousands of pages of cut-ups, years worth of activity....well, I admire the dedication and find it inspiring.  But man.  It's a little bit mad as well!

So, nothing new under the sun.  Burroughs knew about Tzara's aleatory use of found text, but he also advocated lifting whole sections of text; he suggests, for example, using descriptions of the jungle found in say, Joseph Conrad, and recycling them into one's own work.  Alas, even that idea had been used 100 years earlier by Lautréamont, who used descriptions of animals and their behavior from natural history encyclopedias in passages throughout Maldoror.  This does not undermine Burroughs' stature as a literary innovator.  He may have been familiar with Tzara, but was Lautréamont's intertextuality known in the US at that time?  And Burroughs certainly didn't know about Whitefoord.  Burroughs found ideas and twisted and tweaked them until he'd used every possible variation and squeezed out their last vital drops.  It's been said with some mirth that he is probably the only person who profited more from Scientology than they profited from him; indeed, his collaboration with filmmaker Antony Balch, The Cut Ups, even uses some of their proprietary auditing questions as a soundtrack!  

Burroughs' influence on contemporary culture is enormous, far-reaching and widespread.  Interesting, then, that 200 years before this gentleman junky rocked the world and took the novel to its limits with his cut-ups and fold-ins, a largely forgotten London merchant, a friend of Benjamin Franklin no less, invented the technique Burroughs would use for the better part of a decade for many of the same reasons as his literary forebear; to "deconstruct" the media and lay bare its hidden messages and agenda.  

One could argue that "cross-reading" was a technique to "fight back" against a news business that at times could be confusing and overwhelming, and where, absent direct experience, one had to trust what was communicated via the written word from a multitude of often contradictory sources.  After centuries of one authoritative text, the Bible, the written word was still an extraordinarily powerful medium, which in turn made the oft-dissonant chorus of newspapers disorienting.  This was why Burroughs sought to "rub out the word" and diminish the power of those who wielded it as a tool of control.  

England in 1766 was not yet a "Society of the Spectacle," but the era was the beginning of the modern nation state, of urbanization, the Industrial Revolution, and corporate Capitalism.  It was a time when nature was being organized into rigid taxonomies, defined as it were; when dictionaries and grammars were codifying and standardizing language into right...and wrong.  Right of course,  being the language of London's emerging upper middle classes.  Not aristocrats or landed gentry, but the merchant class, like Whitefoord himself.  While not unique to England, the link between one's language and one's social class is more openly, and perhaps more deeply felt in England than say, in France or the US, where égalité and "all men are created equal" are explicit state values.  By 1766, the written word had long been liberated from the Catholic Church, Gutenberg had taken care of that.  But the written word was  no less potent.  Broadsides, tracts, and pamphlets were very powerful indeed.  This was one reason for the Stamp Act of 1765; an attempt to limit the publication of incendiary tracts, to limit the growth of the professional classes, and to squeeze money out of the North American colonies.  The Act was repealed after less than a year due to violent protests, and is generally regarded as one of the leading causes of the American War of Independence. 

While on one hand the Stamp Act in part sought to quell the revolutionary potential of print media, the era was also the beginning of the newspaper business, in which the dissemination of information was inexorably linked with Capitalist interests.  Who knows exactly how the decline of print media will affect us down the line; but at the time Burroughs discovered cut-ups, the mainstream print media was still very authoritative and for him, a potent tool of control; as such, it was a target.  In 1766, Whitefoord might have been using cross-reading to satirize the newspaper business; in 1966, Burroughs wanted not only to destroy the newspaper business, but the written word itself....

Maybe in some ways the "cross-readings" were just a whimsical form of "fake news," a piss-take.  Ye Olde Onion, as it were.  But as with all satire, the humor contained a very real criticism of business as usual.  It's tempting to say Whitefoord was ahead of his time, but I think he came at exactly the right time.  Like the novels of Cervantes and Sterne, his readings say:  "don't trust everything you read."  Just when the news business began to flourish, he was there to signal caution, to say "read between the lines," to be skeptical.  The postmodernists rediscovered what their literary ancestors had already surmised.  Maybe Whitefoord was being whimsical, but he certainly had more of a purpose than humor alone.  Which is not to denigrate humor - au contraire - it reminds us not to underestimate the value of humor as a rhetorical tool.  Humor is another quality Burroughs shared with Whitefoord.  

Now, if someone smarter than I would connect all of this with the Lettrists, the Situationists, and the concept of détournement, we might just have a Ph.D. thesis in the making....come to think of it, they knew the value of a good joke as well....

Sheeeeeeer Art Attack

Attacking art seems to be a thing these days.  Actually, it has a long history, but there seems to be an uptick this year.

In February we reported on a Russian security guard who drew googly eyes on a painting, after what was described as a psychological breakdown.

In May a climate protestor smeared cake on the Mona Lisa.  No worries, the painting is protected behind bullet-proof glass.

Now Gustave Klimt bears the brunt of climate activists' wrath. Not sure how this will help their cause.  I almost suspect a false flag to discredit climate change activists....almost.

Hearts and minds!  But as with the Mona Lisa, the Klimt is protected by glass, so the painting and its frame weren't damaged.

I agree that ecological devastation and climate change are of critical importance to all of us.  Not 1st World problems at all.  Quite the contrary.  Developing nations will bear the heaviest load sooner than Europe and North America.

Even though these works of art weren't damaged, I'm still not sure this tactic is the best.  People love art, which is one reason why it's targeted: it gets big publicity. And maybe someone out there will ask themselves if one damaged painting is a bigger outrage than a depleted planet.

I understand the geste of protest, I just think another target might be more effective.  It seems the activist vandals are choosing paintings that won't actually be damaged, so in the end, no harm done.  But the principle of attacking art is well-problematic.  

A lot of modern art was labeled "degenerate" by the Nazis and burned.   The Taliban blew up offending Buddhas.  Art is often one of the first targets of totalitarian regimes.  Even though these works weren't actually damaged, it has bad juju attached to it.  Many won't read beyond the headlines. They see "climate fanatics destroy our cultural heritage."  Our planet it worth fighting for, but we all know it.  Maybe the best tack is monkey-wrenching....

Personally, I look at some Suprematism, or works by Piet Mondrian, and think, yeah, why NOT burn it?   "Broadway Boogie Woogie."  My God, people, what rubbish!

But one must abandon youthful  exuberance at some point.  I used to agree with Breton when he said that the most Surrealist act he could imagine was firing a revolver randomly into a crowd.  Several dozen mass-shootings post-Columbine later, and that ceases to be valid or vaguely witty, even for an embittered, nihilistic crank such as myself.

We need to address climate change. Like, yesterday.  Zoiks.  One damaged painting ain't squat compared to a dead planet.  But attacking art just don't seem like the tactic that'll produce the results we so desperately need.

Mother Nature is ill.  She has a fever.  Either the host (Earth) or the virus (Humans) will die off unless the illness is cured.  

We all know this.  There's no need "to draw attention to the problem."  We need people to act and vote in ways that will resolve it.  Throwing goop on Klimt or cake on Leonardo is so self-evidently pointless and counterproductive one really does have to wonder if the plot was hatched by Total or BP or Exxon....

Europe Confronts Conspiracy Theory

On an EU website about Europe's COVID response, there are pages about Fighting Disinformation and Identifying Conspiracy Theories. These latter are not just about Covid, but conspiracy theories in general.

I think the latter page is especially useful and both pages should be incorporated into every high school student's curriculum.  Now that an unnamed orange muppet with tiny hands has announced he will run for POTUS in 2024, the page may become a lot more useful to help young people navigate the increasingly murky info-sphere.

I say that half-kiddingly.  I genuinely applaud the fact that the EU finds conspiracy theory a serious enough topic that it needs to be confronted head on.

After the Stateside events of January 6th, (there's that sandy-haired orange muppet again), more people are taking note.  Conspiracy theory has been leading to moral panic, and even violence, since the Romans accused Christians of: plotting to bring down the empire; cannibalism: conducting ritual orgies....probably even before.  

Once Christendom had in effect supplanted the Roman Empire as the warp and woof of Europe (the Romans were right!), the unfortunate target of the conspiracy-fueled mob has more often than not been the Jews. Which is something the EU page notes; conspiracy theory is often crypto-antisemitism.

The name of the players may change, but the elements of moral panic have remained the same since the Middle Ages: medieval blood-libel, the "Rosicrucian furore", the Illuminati, anti-Masonry, Satanic Ritual Abuse, QAnon.  

These elements include powerful, hidden elites; black magic and/or Satanism; trafficking children for ritual sex and murder; an international or even global reach....

QAnon is a political force the orange muppet openly toys with.  Whether he believes it or not is irrelevant.  Many of his supporters do, and it's one reason he wins their votes.  

Democracy can't function when lies and conspiratorial thinking dominate the agora.  Or as the WaPo has put it since the reign of the muppet:  "Democracy Dies in Darkness.". D-D-i-D, yo!

I recommend reading the EU's pages and the downloadable PDFs they make available.  We really may need them in the run-up to 2024.  And maybe even beyond.

I know that global elites working behind the scenes for their own benefit do exist.  By definition, two or more people working illegally for their own ends is a conspiracy.  I would say that in the spheres of business and politics "conspiracy" in it's widest sense is as much the rule as it is the exception.  I also know, thanks to Epstein, that billionaire sex-trafficking exists.  But it ain't Squid Game.

One could say, with or without irony, that the diffusion of outlandish conspiracy theories is itself a kind of disinformation campaign to make people so leery of anything hinting at conspiracy that they just roll their eyes at the very mention of illegal shenanigans in high places; so their crimes are hidden in plain sight. 

I got that reaction when I wrote a paper about the connection between Freemasonry and Scouting.  It sounds so loony that some people refused to read beyond the title for what is a rather sober and well-documented paper.

Anyway, this started out as a simple link to the EU site and as usual has morphed into another LoS prolixity.  And there isn't even a photo!

3 Bookens

Here are three books:  "Sci-fi" or "SF" or "Science Fiction" or "Speculative Fiction" or "3 dogs flying the Tricolor," singing the Marseillaise and brandishing sickles, whilst ballerinas clad in garbage bags recite the phone book of Tampa from 1979:  Aaron, Joseph, xxx-xxxx; Abraham, Jimpernickle Joe, xxx-xxxx; Absalom, Fred P., xxx-xxxx, etc.

This will of course, take hours: for the encore they act out the advertisements; but dig this: they do it in Russian!

So these three books aren't by the titans (Asimov, Clark, Bester, Heinlein) nor the relatively younger Sterling, Gibson, nor especially literary, like Atwood.

Not especially well-known, thus not influential; not mind-blowing unknowns either, not plot-wise, not stylistically, not something one can pin down so easily.  In many ways it's the mood they create, the atmosphere.

I like 'em all to a number. For a character, a scene, a concept, an overall feeling.  It occurs to me there's a relation to my first novella in these choices:  Dissolute narrators, vaguely aristocratic, who find a purpose thrust upon them.  Not explicitly like Gully Foyle, but these characters without strong principle or purpose get hit on the head in some way.  Kismet rings.  Our heroes pretty much call destiny's bluff and each one changes the course of history....for a planet, or the galaxy entire.  For better or for worse.

The Star Virus isn't especially great, but it captured me from scene one. A garish psychedelia, an ennui in the face of the marvelous. Protagonist Rodrone is basically l'Étranger....

I don't know what it is about Emphyrio.  Like my book, it's an odd mix, a pre-industrial society with a lotta "Anchors aweigh, goodbye spaceport!"  Perhaps the somewhat horrifying aspects towards the conclusion stuck with me. These two books, and that which follows, are very similar.  Short novels focused on a "man with a mission."  Treks through foreboding wastes populated by deadly beasts and even deadlier humans.  Grim.  A future of shit.

The Rosetta Codex is about a young man who's jettisoned from, then must reclaim, his title, wealth, power.  It shares a similar kind of hero as our last examples.  What really got me is one scene.  I might pull a Burroughs and steal the image.  If Lautréamont and Houellebecq can do it....I actually am in full favor of appropriation in literature.  Not academic work.  And "stealing up" as opposed to "stealing down." I think it would be fair for me to steal from Dan Brown. But not vice-versa....

In fact that's how I got turned onto Star Virus:  Burroughs took the idea of "deadliners" from it and integrated it into Nova Express.  Fair enough, apparently reading "The" Naked Lunch shook J. Barrington Bayley out of his doldrums and a relatively "non-fecund" period due to his disillusionment with writing.  I won't tell what it is, but the deadliners are eerie, grotesque, their weird dancing and games disturbing.  Existential dread on a cosmic scale.

But in Codex it's a more tangible scene, not so much horrifying as odd and creepy.  A barque in a swamp with a corpse swathed in rags propped up in the bow.  What's not to like?

I know that's not especially profound "lit-crit." Et alors?

Alfred Starr Hamilton 3: Some biography and Correspondence

From a photo by Simpson Kalisher, 1967.

Many years ago I did a small 3-page website dedicated to poet Alfred Starr Hamilton.  When that site went down, I turned some of it into two blog posts:

ASH 1 is mostly biographical reflections.

ASH 2 is a bibliography of his books, anthology appearances, magazine appearances, and articles about him.  I have recently discovered some more things I will need to add.

In addition to these two pages, the original site included some correspondence that I'd added for the biographical details therein.  I never put it up on this blog and have decided to do so now.

I edited the letters for formatting and corrected a couple of typos but they are otherwise untouched.

****

Also, here's a little tidbit I got in an email some years back.  ASH may have described himself as a "tramp," but it could not always have been thus....dad went to MIT, Harvard Law and that prep school, well, it's old money NY:  Corning, Olcott, van Rennselaer, Roosevelt....

****

Since putting the ASH page on the web, an email has arrived every few years from out of the blue. The first pair came from Mr. Hamilton's niece.

Unfortunately, when I wrote back, she never responded. I sent a few more emails but never got a response. I've posted her intial letters--hesitantly--without permission because the details are so rich and touching. Jane, if you're out there, get back in touch!

Sunday, December 22, 2002 12:20 PM

Dear Steve,

At one time, I considered writing a biography about my Uncle Alfred. His sister, Judith, is my mother.

My older sister and I lived with her parents and our Uncle Alfred for years. He taught me how to drive on an old Model T when I was 12 ( that was 1942). When mother remarried, had two more children, we again lived with her parents and Uncle Alfred. We all remember the gumball machines, going around to service them. They became marble machines later on due to shortages of sugar during WWII.

 
I persuaded my mother to reminisce about her brother and their childhood. She is still alive and will be 95 years old Jan 1, 2003. Uncle Alfred now lives in a nursing home on medicaid. Katharine, their sister, died in 1986 at the age of 75.
Therefore we in the family have a lot of memories of Alfred, and somewhere there are photos. If you are interested in more about Uncle Alfred, please let me know. Incidentally, we all have read and reread the poems to try and get some connections to events we know of. Not much success there.

 
The New York Times article [an appeal for financial support by Jonathan Williams on behalf of ASH.] took us completely by surprise. He wrote a letter to my mother declaring himself "immune", indicated he had listed himself in the city of Montclair, N.J. as that.

Sincerely, Jane H.

Sunday, December 22, 2002 1:24 PM

Dear Steve,

Rereading my earlier message, I realized I never mentioned that Uncle Alfred is Alfred Starr Hamilton. I did write a letter to Jonathan Williams in 1987 asking about a biography. He wrote that he couldn't do it, suggested a couple of magazines. Uncle Alfred had stacks of those black and white notebooks, more handwritten poems. He showed me a children's book called THE LITTLE RED WHEELBARROW with a poem of his and some of William Carlos Williams. I haven't had any luck finding that book, and alas when Uncle Alfred was moved to the nursing home, I don't know what happened to all his books, typewriter, poems, letters etc. We heard he had been invited to speak at Montclair State College but didn't go.

 
Please let me know what you think and might do with information about Uncle Alfred. Thank you, Jane H.

****

Silliman seems like a good fellow and has made a few blog entries about Hamilton.

"Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent elsewhere in American English."

"[Shotgun] is an almost perfect machine, its various sleights-of-hand so gentle & deft...."

"I became aware of his poetry, as did many others of my generation, thanks largely to Jonathan Williams,who published a sizeable (but long out-of-print) collection of Hamilton’s work in 1970."

Ron Silliman [December 11, 2003] Read the blog entry

****

John Latta's blog, Hotel Point, has a good summary (dated Jan 2, 2004) of Hamilton's published work and includes the text of a few poems, including "Crabapples," which appears to be his first poem in print, in Cornell University's Epoch (Fall 1962 issue aka Vol. XII, No. 3) and not in Sphinx as I wrote above. For more details I suggest reading the blog iself, which though brief, includes some interesting context and observations. Seems this extended entry refers back to his note on Dec 12, 2003: "Poking around in old bound volumes of Epoch yesterday after Ron Silliman’s mention of Alfred Starr Hamilton, a name, unforgettable enough, that’d got bruit’d around Cornell in the early ’seventies..."

****

This letter from Joel Lewis was a response to an inquiry about his NJ poets anthology (Bluestones and Salt Hay)

January 18, 2004

Steve--

Hamilton had a bit of a reputation around the time of the Jargon Society book -- which was then one of the most prestigious presses you could publish with.

Older poets I was friendly with talked about him -- some like Larry Agin & Joe Ceravolo made contact.

When I did my NJ poets anthology, I knew I wanted him in the book. He sent me all new material but we really had no correspondence outside of that. He did no readings, and didn't really try to publicize himself or "professionalize" -- I see him akin to Joseph Cornell in this sort of home-grown surrealism or perhaps part of the outsider art movement -- let me know if you hear further from the family.

Joel Lewis

****

On May 7, 2004 I received a brief email from Parkway Manor Health Center--the nursing home Mr. Hamilton's niece mentioned in her first email--which stated he was in fragile health but that he might want to communicate with the website. I wrote an email back and Parkway Manor replied a few days later.

May 10, 2004

Dear Mr. Adkins:

Your note was well appreciated by Mr. Hamilton. I think it made his day.

We made several attempts to get him to write since he began his stay with
us. (he had been living in a boarding home near by just before he became a
resident here.) We had no success though.

After reading him your Email, he decided he would like to write again. He
likes to write a poem a day. He asked for some pads and pencils which I
quickly supplied and some pin money for stamps and the like, we will take
care of that as he needs them. I also gave him an assistant to help him from
our activities department. The women I assigned also had a book published,
though not poetry. I am sure she will be very helpful. It will be physically
difficult for him to accomplish his goal of a poem a day.

He sends his regards. "I am pleased that my work is still appreciated". By
the way he is not aware of the internet. I will show him on my computer.
Sometime this week.

He is not quite ready for a visitor. I asked if he wanted to send a note to
you. I think he and his new assistant will do that. The address below is
your mailing address.

His mailing address is

Alfred Hamilton
C/O Parkway Manor Health Center
480 Parkway Dr.
East Orange, NJ 07017

Good to hear from you. You made a man's day today.

Sincerely
Bill Z.

Assistant Administrator
Parkway Manor Health Center

I sent Mr. Hamilton a "real" letter in early June. I didn't contact Parkway Manor again until 17 October and the next day got the following reply.

Dear Mr. Adkins,

Mr. Hamilton is in good spirits today, he actually looks pretty good. I had
given him a copy of the pic from the web page. By the way he does not know
what the internet is. So this stuff remains new to him. He has not as of
this date written anything I am aware of. I checked his composition books.

I had asked him if he had received a letter from you. He said he had but
does not know what happened to it. He is stable medically right now. But he
is 90 years old and has some minor dementia; he is quite bright so he can talk a good game even though he may not remember getting your letter. He is still committed to writing and is to this day a poet who does nothing but write.  [I think he means "everything but write"--adkins].

He sends his regards and says that he is well.

Sincerely
Bill Z.

I sent a few more emails from time to time just to say hello, but October was the last I heard from Parkway Manor.

****

Matt Miller first contacted me back in May 2005, having discovered my site in an effort to find out all he could about Mr. Hamilton. I passed along all the bibiliographical and biographical data I had and he has been doing a lot of research and making plans to publish Hamilton's work and generally make people aware of him. It was he who informed me a few days ago (today is

Dec 10) that Mr. Hamilton died in 2005.

****

I was first contacted by Lisa Borinsky in July 2009 and we had extensive email correspondence and several lengthy phone conversations which concluded in July 2010 when she sent me a PDF of her edition of ASH's letters to the police.

My interest in ASH has never waned, but I think I can't really do any more to add to the conversation.  I would like to thank Geof Hewitt who graciously sent me a copy of Sphinx, the first published collection of ASH's work.  It's a really lovely book and completes my collection.  

ASH was lucky to have such nice editions of his work published: Sphinx, the Jargon collection, A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind....all are very nicely made.  The Big Parade is a good collection but the presentation isn't particularly noteworthy.  

Borinsky's book is fascinating, but suffers from the format.  It's printed as a magazine, under the imprint of "Weird New Jersey." As Douglas Penick writes:

It is well written and researched but is published in a series called Weird NJ Presents, so both the poet and his work are given a dismissive context. 

Which is a shame, because I accompanied Lisa in the year before it was published, helping with research.  Her love of Hamilton, her enthusiasm, her research....I can't fault it at all.  But I think in her rush to publish first, she made an unwise choice going with this format.  She produced a legitimate work of scholarship, but the format in which it is published undermines her intentions.

Anyway, this blog remains the only bibliography of ASH, online or off.  That and the biographical data are wildly incomplete, but it's a start.  

And hey, I've managed to help a few people over the years, and that's always a "win" in my book.

John, I'm only blogging....

I wrote about Matthew Cissell back in July. Matt had given a shout out to LoS in advance of a lecture he gave for International Pynchon Week. He'd written us to see if we could make contact with Tod Perry, a poet and Cornell alum who'd been a friend of Thomas Pynchon, and who we'd interviewed about Cornell in the late 50s (here).

His interest was a reference Tod made to a NYC "salon" hosted by Hans and Greta Meyerhof. That's the difference between real scholars and amateurs like us. Matt immediately saw the importance of the salon, we just kind of let it pass.  But in a way, that's our role.

Cissell has published his doctoral thesis:  Arc of the Absent Author: Thomas Pynchon's Trajectory from Entropy to Grace (full pdf). He cites LoS in several footnotes and very generously acknowledges our interview.  I really appreciated the following:

By way of introduction to this section I must start by saying first that research on Pynchon would not be what it is if it were only left to academics and their shelves of primary and secondary sources. Indeed it is my experience that many non-academics contribute a great deal to work on Pynchon and that is where one may still find new avenues to investigate; as such it is no surprise to find that many Pynchon scholars keep
an eye on the Pynchon list serve and other webpages that may offer new information. In fact that is how I learned about an interesting couple that Pynchon and his Cornell friends used to visit in New York.

It came to my attention that there was a blog called “Laws of Silence” that was investigating some photos related to Pynchon at Cornell and possibly including him.... (p. 113)

He then goes on to describe how we'd made him aware of the Meyerhof salon and put him in contact with Tod Perry.

I know it's not a super big deal, but it's rewarding to have been able to help Pynchon scholarship in even this small way. I'm glad Cissell recognizes the value of what we do. We're not academics or journalists, but we do something akin to both. Personally, I've written poetry, fiction, journalism and theater....and maintained this blog for years. I always just thought of myself as a "writer," but maybe I shouldn't be so hesitant to assume the mantle of "blogger." If not for those pesky connotations!

Plus, not all of my work is on the blog. I'm really into the physicality of things, the written word as an object, or in a manuscript.  Concrete poetry (or not) in a concrete medium.

In the end, perhaps it's all just much ado. The real goal here is, on one hand, to thank Cissell, but also recognize his appreciation for an oft-mocked medium: the blog. I write novels and poetry, but my most frequent outlet is here. It's humble, but we do have a small audience, and some posts have made small impacts; that is just what we intended. "Micro-history," small details, tempests in teapots.

And I've even made a buck or two. I don't do it for that, but it's part of the deal. I've made money blogging (very little), with journalism, and a novella.  I would write regardless, but I've often thought of this Stephen King quote whenever I catch myself being pretentious:

“If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

I would add being cited in a doctoral thesis is well, maybe not a sign of talent, but that one has, at the very least, something to say worth citing. And that may be a tautology. Who cares? We're only bloggers....

Isidore Ducasse

Possible photo of Ducasse; provenance: Dazet family

 

Portrait imaginaire de Lautréamont par Félix Vallotton,  1898

L'Enigme d'Isidore Ducasse, Man Ray, 1920