When a review starts off like this . . . ” ‘BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS’ is the most important new publication by William S. Burroughs not only since the writer’s death in 1997 but quite possibly since ‘The Third Mind’ made it into print in 1978″ . . . attention must be paid.
Archives for August 2020
Is This a Never-Before-Published Masterpiece
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Sequel
As I continue to read “All the Sonnets of Shakespeare,” edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, I’m more than ever impressed by the remarkable clarity of the presentation. An added bonus is the intimacy of the scholarship, especially for a non-specialist like me. “The year 1591 saw the beginning of a sudden vogue,” they write, “for the composition and publication of sequences of interrelated sonnets initiated by the posthumous publication in that year of Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Astrophil and Stella’.” Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are “on the whole, a collection of often highly personally inflected poems written over at least twenty-seven years, rather than a sequence aimed at catching the mood and developing the taste for a literary fashion. His sonnets are not public poems written and published for money; . . . they were published a decade after the vogue for sonnets had passed, printed only once, and were ‘clearly a flop on their first appearance.’ He seems interested primarily in using the sonnet form to work out his intimate thoughts and feelings.”
A New Way to Look at Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Instead of reading the sonnets in the numbered sequence of the 1609 folio, which is the usual way, the editors of ‘All the Sonnets of Shakespeare’ examine them in what they believe was their order of composition. This puts a special focus on the considerable tinkering that went into them. Their method yields lovely insights that bring us closer to the man himself and his development as a writer.
‘The Greatest Piece of Writing’ Kerouac Ever Saw
It’s a 16,000-word letter that Neal Cassady wrote to Jack Kerouac, who said it was his inspiration for On The Road. The letter, written in 1950, went missing and was found in an attic in Oakland, California, in 2011. Now for the first time it is being brought out in full by the London-based publisher Black Spring with an introduction by the noted Beat scholar A. Robert Lee, along with illustrations. I’m betting Lee will tell us if the letter really was the inspiration for On the Road—Kerouac, true to his calling, loved to make things up— and if he really did adopt his prose style from it. The reality is likely more nuanced than the legend.
Moloko’s Burroughs-Gysin Lockdown Reading
A summer package for the avant garde:
‘BRION GYSIN LET THE MICE IN’ edited and with a foreword by Jan Herman and with an introduction by Douglas Field.
“MINUTES TO GO Redux’ edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris.
‘THE EXTERMINATOR Redux’ edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris.
‘BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS’ edited and with an introduction by Oliver Harris.
As If We Didn’t Have Enough Trouble
Last evening this is what showed up in our neck of the woods. Luckily it did not touch down.