Summer travel

Cape Cod has been on my mind late­ly. So I recent­ly revis­it­ed the Cape by way of Thore­au, in the New­Pages blog.

The video’s on YouTube.

This is one of sev­er­al short book essays I’ve writ­ten this sum­mer — I’ve read about 18 books since the last week of May. 

My mind has also been on the future replace­ment of this site, which I’ve been think­ing of for years, and see that it’s prob­a­bly about time to do. 

The Great Writing Caper

William S. Bur­roughs often sug­gest­ed that one’s dreams are a valu­able tar­get for the writer to plun­der. But what he nev­er said, nor made explic­it, was how the dreams of oth­ers might pro­vide a writer with direc­tion and mate­r­i­al. And yet it hap­pened to him: the dream of a lit­er­ary char­ac­ter, as it occurs inside a nov­el of the past, appears to have giv­en Bur­roughs a mas­sive trea­sure cache.

The dream is Raskolnikov’s, in Crime and Pun­ish­ment. And it brings William S. Bur­roughs to life. His whole oeu­vre seems to spring from it, is out­lined in the passage…

Campbell’s Soup I

William S. Bur­roughs used to say (via Brion Gysin) that writ­ing was fifty years behind painting.

I’ve been test­ing that.

A half cen­tu­ry ago, Pop Art framed the visu­al media environment.

Andy Warhol’s “Camp­bel­l’s Soup I” port­fo­lio of silkscreens was print­ed in 1968.

Fifty years lat­er, edi­tor John Tre­fry selects an abridged ver­sion of my “Camp­bel­l’s Soup I” for Burn­ing House Press.