He is looking for a publisher for ‘The Nova Machine.’
Here’s an excerpt. Any takers?
Talk About ‘Graphic Novels’ . . .
He is looking for a publisher for ‘The Nova Machine.’
Here’s an excerpt. Any takers?
He is looking for a publisher for ‘The Nova Machine.’
Here’s an excerpt. Any takers?
How can you do this, Mr Herman, as a writer I admire! I am sure you have spent your life trying to put words back in the picture! Your profound understanding of our last literary renaissance; nothing since is better than the prose of William Burroughs; their texts are too-soon ready for the Classic Comic treatment? When I read the classics in my Woolworth’s-blessed childhood of Classic Comics, I did eventually get round to reading the real thing. But this material you are recommending is meant for adults?
Burroughs once said to me – I write like Jane Austen. I don’t write like Kerouac. He knew he was dumbing-down, speaking to for 19 yr old kid in Paris, who’d knocked on his door in Git-le-Coeur in 1958.
Those who have read before the revolution appreciate the the Beats most for been our last literary giants.
Hmmm, I don’t know why you’re so upset. This guy Gary Lee-Nova knows the Burroughs texts backwards forwards and upside down. And with a critical intelligence. In any case, we can agree to disagree. Meanwhile, when, as you say, “Burroughs once said to me – I write like Jane Austen. I don’t write like Kerouac,” that doesn’t sound like he was dumbing down at all. To the contrary, it seems to me he assumed you knew who Jane Austen was and might even have read her. Sounds, too, like he was having a bit of fun.
A project I’ve been working on with Gary Lee-Nova. Me acting as copilot, He providing the
images. Text all from the trilogy: The Ticket that Exploded.. A re-telling if you
with full credit to WSB, natch. Yet another vision of the cyber-punk work that has yet
to be surpassed.
-Johnny Strike
Yes, Johnny Strike and your reporter worked for a couple of years on The Nova Machine — 2009 through 2010 — consciously creating a meta-cut-up from pieces of Nova Express, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded, texts that we both find fascinating, readable and deeply enjoyable.
Jan has posted an early version of page #1 of the material, which closed in on about fifteen pages.
Johnny would send me selected fragments of text from the three amazing novels, and I would work on composing pictorial material, scrounged from the enormous dumpster fire known as the www, material that resonated with how Johnny’s chosen fragments affected me.
The theme we worked with is — Nova Criminals/Nova Police.
Johnny would never divulge to me how he would choose a given fragment of text, but I suspect that he was using HAL, Hyperspace Analogue to Language.
If HAL is mind-boggling for you, there is ample description of it @ Wikipedia, under the “hyperspace’ subject.
The first four Giuliani frames are a great meme. They should be distributed widely, including off-planet.
Burroughs and Jane Austen were an item in Tangier where William read Persuasion out loud to the wife of Anthony Burgess, who lay in bed at the Hotel Miramar.
Thx for that!
And Burroughs also did, at the Hotel Velazquez Palace. Now this was Mr & Mrs Burgess’ 2nd trip to Tangiers, wasn’t it? From Tangier they wd proceed to Tenerife, cf Burgess: You’ve Had Your Time, p.85 … on the same page he mentions ‘a seaside bar-restaurant run by a young English viscount who had a passion for dirty Berber boys’ where ‘I met a fat man in a tarboosh and striped galabiya who ran a dirty Berber boy agency for visiting white pederasts’. We’ll find a Tangier seaside bar-restaurant in his second Enderby novel. We also find the Parade Bar, in Enderby Outside, don’t we? It has a doggy-sth name here, and inside Enderby would meet a man who looks to him like an undertaker and wears those glasses we all know from the cover of Call Me Burroughs. This man is cutting up newspapers: ‘Balance of slow masturbate payments inquiries in opal spunk shapes notice of that question green ass penetration phantoms adjurn.’ –––etcetc
Burgess and Burroughs were really quite friendly. It is surprising there is so little correspondence between them ..if any. Maybe they both knew that neither of them needed to impress each other and anyway they moved in such different circles. The fat man with a tarboosh would have been Gerald Hamilton – Isherwood called him Mr Norris and has him changing trains in his eponymous novel of euphemisms.