William S. Burroughs Drops a Posthumous Album, Setting Readings of Naked Lunch to Music (NSFW)

in Literature, Music | July 19th, 2016

william_s_burroughs

Image by Chris­ti­aan Ton­nis, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

William S. Bur­roughs may have died almost twen­ty years ago, but that does­n’t mean his fans have gone entire­ly with­out new mate­r­i­al since. This year, for instance, has seen the release of the Naked Lunch author’s new spo­ken word album Let Me Hang You, which you can lis­ten to free on Spo­ti­fy. (If you don’t have Spo­ti­fy’s free soft­ware, down­load it here.) Its con­tent, in fact, comes straight from that form- and taboo-break­ing 1959 nov­el, which Bur­roughs com­mit­ted to tape — along with a trio of accom­plished exper­i­men­tal musi­cians — not long before his pass­ing, and which thus got lost along the way to com­mer­cial release.

“But more than 20 years lat­er,” writes the New York Times’ Joe Coscarel­li, “those sur­re­al record­ings — which fea­tured music from the gui­tarist and com­pos­er Bill Frisell, along with the pianist Wayne Horvitz and the vio­list Eyvind Kang — are get­ting a sec­ond life as an album with an assist from the inde­pen­dent musi­cian King Khan, best known for his rau­cous live shows as an eccen­tric punk and soul front­man.” Fans of Bur­roughs’ rough­est-edged mate­r­i­al can rest assured that, in these ses­sions, the writer focused on speak­ing the “unspeak­able” parts of Naked Lunch: “think sex, drugs, and defe­ca­tion,” Coscarel­li says.

Hard as it may seem to believe that a nov­el writ­ten well over half a cen­tu­ry ago, let alone one writ­ten by an author born more than a cen­tu­ry ago, could retain its pow­er to shock, this new­ly pub­lished musi­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of Bur­rough’s sub­stance-inspired, ran­dom-access, “obscenity”-laden text fresh­ens its trans­gres­sive impact. “One par­tic­u­lar­ly jagged track on the record is ‘Clem Snide the Pri­vate Ass Hole,’ ” writes Rolling Stone’s Kory Grow. “As Bur­roughs stilt­ed­ly reads his own bizarre prose in which the tit­u­lar Snide recites every lurid, grit­ty detail he notices while watch­ing a junky ‘female hus­tler,’ Khan and his fel­low musi­cians play a brit­tle, upbeat groove and funky, bluesy gui­tar solos.” Final­ly, some­one has tak­en this work of the most off­beat of all the Beats and set it to a beat.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William S. Bur­roughs Reads Naked Lunch, His Con­tro­ver­sial 1959 Nov­el

The “Priest” They Called Him: A Dark Col­lab­o­ra­tion Between Kurt Cobain & William S. Bur­roughs

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

William S. Bur­roughs on the Art of Cut-up Writ­ing

William S. Bur­roughs Explains What Artists & Cre­ative Thinkers Do for Human­i­ty

William S. Bur­roughs on Sat­ur­day Night Live, 1981

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Download Alfred Stieglitz’s Proto-Dada Art Journal, 291, The First Art Magazine That Was Itself a Work of Art (1916)

in Art, Magazines | July 19th, 2016

291 Cover 1

You’ve like­ly heard a good deal recently—especially if you hang around these parts—about the 100th anniver­sary of Dada, sup­pos­ed­ly begun when poet and Cabaret Voltaire own­er Hugo Ball penned his man­i­festo in 1916 and began dis­sem­i­nat­ing the ideas of the nascent anti-art move­ment. This makes a con­ve­nient ori­gin sto­ry, as they say in the comics, and helps us con­tex­tu­al­ize the avant-garde explo­sion that fol­lowed. But, his­tor­i­cal­ly speak­ing, there is no such thing as cre­ation ex nihi­lo, and the begin­nings of Dada—before Ball coined the name—lie fur­ther back in time. (We might refer to the dis­tinc­tion Edward Said makes between a divine “ori­gin” and a sec­u­lar “begin­ning.”)

291 Cover 3

We could, as many do, sit­u­ate the begin­nings of Dada in the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry, in Alfred Jarry’s bizarre 1896 play Ubu Roi or Erik Satie’s min­i­mal­ist late 19th cen­tu­ry Gymno­pe­dies. We might also refer to an arts mag­a­zine in New York that pre­ced­ed Tris­tan Tzara’s Dada and Ball’s sin­gle issue Cabaret Voltaire. Edit­ed by famed pho­tog­ra­ph­er and art pro­mot­er Alfred Stieglitz, the jour­nal 291 ran for 12 issues between 1915 and 1916 and is known, writes Dada-Companion.com, as “the first expres­sion of the dada esthet­ic in the Unit­ed States; pro­to-dada, actu­al­ly, dada avant la let­tre, before dada had start­ed in Zürich in 1916.” Along with the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, Ubuweb hosts the entire 12-issue print run, “a finan­cial fias­co” in its day, “fail­ing to sell more than eight sub­scrip­tions on vel­lum and a hun­dred on ordi­nary paper…. In the end Stieglitz sold the entire back­stock to a rag­pick­er for $5.80.”

291 Cover 2

Despite this inglo­ri­ous end, 291 is notable not only for its pro­to-dada status—and for fea­tur­ing the work of mod­ernists like Georges Braque, Guil­laume Apol­li­naire, and lat­er Dada and Sur­re­al­ist artist Fran­cis Picabia; the mag­a­zine also “occu­pies an inter­est­ing posi­tion among the jour­nals of mod­ernist art” as “the first mag­a­zine to style itself as a work of art in its own right.” You can get a sense of its artistry in the cov­ers you see here, and down­load every issue of the mag­a­zine at Ubuweb or at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa’s Inter­na­tion­al Dada Archive. You’ll also see the magazine’s unusu­al format—from odd lit­tle top­i­cal items of the sort you’d find in a local news­pa­per to fas­ci­nat­ing visu­al poet­ry like “Men­tal Reac­tions,” below, by Agnes Ernst Mey­er. What we can’t get from the dig­i­tal copies, unfor­tu­nate­ly, is the full sense of 291’s “dra­mat­ic form” in its “gigan­tic folio for­mat.”

291 Mental Reactions

The mod­ernist jour­nal “took its orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion from Apollinaire’s Soirées de Paris,” a jour­nal found­ed in 1912 by the French poet and crit­ic and his friends, “empha­siz­ing caligram­mat­ic texts and an abstract­ed kind of satir­i­cal draw­ing.” And though 291 may have had a very lim­it­ed reach dur­ing its mate­r­i­al exis­tence, its influ­ence con­tin­ued into the era of Dada when Fran­cis Picabia styled his own jour­nal, 391, after Steiglitz’s pub­li­ca­tion. “Pub­lished 1917–1924 in Barcelona, New York, Zürich, and Paris in nine­teen issues,” writes Book­tryst, 391 helped Picabia dis­trib­ute his own take on Dada, until he denounced the move­ment in 1921 and “issued a per­son­al attack against [Sur­re­al­ist Andre Bre­ton] in the final issue.” The Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa also hosts dig­i­tal ver­sions of all 19 issues of Picabia’s 391, which you can view and down­load here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load All 8 Issues of Dada, the Arts Jour­nal That Pub­li­cized the Avant-Garde Move­ment a Cen­tu­ry Ago (1917–21)

Three Essen­tial Dadaist Films: Ground­break­ing Works by Hans Richter, Man Ray & Mar­cel Duchamp

The ABCs of Dada Explains the Anar­chic, Irra­tional “Anti-Art” Move­ment of Dadaism

Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago: Cel­e­brate the Avant-Garde Move­ment Launched by Hugo Ball on July 14, 1916

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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Hear 280 Blues, Country, Reggae & Rock Songs Keith Richards Namechecks in His Memoir, Life

in Music | July 19th, 2016

KeithR2

Image by Machocar­i­o­ca, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

You don’t have to, like, stretch your brain or any­thing to rat­tle off a list of Kei­th Richards’ influ­ences. If you’ve ever heard a Rolling Stones song, you’ve heard him pull out his Mud­dy Waters and Chuck Berry riffs, and he’s nev­er been shy about sup­port­ing and nam­ing his idols. He’s played with Waters, Berry, and many more blues and ear­ly rock and roll greats, and after bor­row­ing heav­i­ly from them, the Stones gave back by pro­mot­ing and tour­ing with the artists who pro­vid­ed the raw mate­r­i­al for their sound.

Then there’s the 2002 com­pi­la­tion The Devil’s Music, culled from Richards’ per­son­al favorite col­lec­tion of blues, soul, and R&B clas­sics, and fea­tur­ing big names like Robert John­son, Lit­tle Richard, Bob Mar­ley, Albert King, and Lead Bel­ly, and more obscure artists like Amos Mil­burn, and Jack­ie Bren­ston. You may also recall last year’s Under the Influ­ence, a Net­flix doc­u­men­tary by 20 Feet From Star­dom direc­tor Mor­gan Neville, in which Richards namechecks dozens of influ­en­tial musicians—from his mum’s love of Sarah Vaugh­an, Ella Fitzger­ald, and Bil­lie Hol­i­day, to his and Jagger’s youth­ful ado­ra­tion of Waters and Berry, to his rock star hang­outs with Willie Dixon and Howl­in’ Wolf.

Point is, Kei­th Richards loves to talk about the music he loves. A big part of the Stones’ appeal—at least in their 60s/early 70s prime—was that they were such eager fans of the musi­cians they emu­lat­ed. Yes, Jagger’s pho­ny coun­try drawls and blues howls could be a lit­tle embar­rass­ing, his chick­en dance a lit­tle less than soul­ful. But the earnest­ness with which the young Eng­lish­men pur­sued their Amer­i­cana ideals is infec­tious, and Richards has spread his love of U.S. roots music through every medi­um, includ­ing his 2010 mem­oir Life, a wicked­ly iron­ic title—given Richards’ No. 1 posi­tion on the “rock stars most-like­ly-to-die list,” writes Michiko Kaku­tani, “and the one life form (besides the cock­roach) capa­ble of sur­viv­ing nuclear war.”

It’s also a very poignant title, giv­en Richards’ sin­gle-mind­ed pur­suit of a life gov­erned by music he’s loved as pas­sion­ate­ly, or more so, as the women in his life. Richards, Kaku­tani writes, ded­i­cat­ed him­self “like a monk to mas­ter­ing the blues.” Of this call­ing, he writes, “you were sup­posed to spend all your wak­ing hours study­ing Jim­my Reed, Mud­dy Waters, Lit­tle Wal­ter, Howl­in’ Wolf, Robert John­son. That was your gig. Every oth­er moment tak­en away from it was a sin.” In the course of the book, Richards men­tions over 200 artists, songs, and record­ings that direct­ly inspired him ear­ly or lat­er in life, and one enter­pris­ing read­er has com­piled them all, in order of appear­ance, in the Spo­ti­fy playlist above.

You’ll find here no sur­pris­es, but if you’re a Stones fan, it’s hard to imag­ine you wouldn’t put this one on and lis­ten to it straight through with­out skip­ping a sin­gle track. When it comes to blues, soul, reg­gae, coun­try, and rock and roll, Kei­th Richards has impec­ca­ble taste. Scat­tered amidst the Aaron Neville, Etta James, Gram Par­sons, Elvis, Wil­son Pick­ett, etc. are plen­ty of clas­sic Stones record­ings that feel right at home next to their influ­ences and peers.

With the excep­tion of reg­gae artists like Jim­my Cliff and Sly & Rob­bie, most of the tracks are from U.S. or U.S.-inspired artists (Tom Jones, Cliff Richard). Again, no sur­pris­es. Not every­one Richards appro­pri­at­ed has appre­ci­at­ed the homage (Chuck Berry long held a grudge), but were it not for his fan­dom and appren­tice­ship, it’s pos­si­ble a great many blues records would have gone unsold, and some artists may have fad­ed into obscu­ri­ty. Thanks to playlists like these, they can live on in a dig­i­tal age that doesn’t always do so well at acknowl­edg­ing or remem­ber­ing its his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Chuck Berry Takes Kei­th Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

Hear Demos of Kei­th Richards Singing Lead Vocals on Rolling Stones Clas­sics: “Gimme Shel­ter,” “Wild Hors­es” & More

Hunter S. Thomp­son Talks with Kei­th Richards in a Very Mem­o­rable and Mum­ble-Filled Inter­view (1993)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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Browse & Stream Jeff Buckley’s Entire Record Collection on a New Interactive Web Site

in Music | July 19th, 2016

Jeff Buck­ley released just one stu­dio album, Grace, before the emerg­ing star died unex­pect­ed­ly in May, 1997, drown­ing while swim­ming in the waters flow­ing from the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er. He was only 30 years old.

Giv­en his painful­ly short discog­ra­phy, fans will delight in the new­ly-dropped album, You and I, which fea­tures, among oth­er things, pre­vi­ous­ly-unre­leased Buck­ley cov­ers of songs orig­i­nal­ly record­ed by Bob Dylan (“Just Like a Woman”); Sly & the Fam­i­ly Stone (“Every­day Peo­ple”); Led Zep­pelin (“Night Flight”) and more. The album is now stream­ing on Spo­ti­fy.

Starved for some more Buck­ley music? Then you’ll also want to check out this new inter­ac­tive web­site which lets you browse/stream every album in Buck­ley’s var­ied vinyl record col­lec­tion. Miles Davis, Bil­lie Hol­i­day, Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, Van Mor­ri­son, the Stones, Dylan, Bowie, Coltrane and The Clash–they’re all part of the col­lec­tion. The video above shows you how to take full advan­tage of the new site. Enjoy.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut Writes a Letter to People Living in 2088, Giving 7 Pieces of Advice

in Environment, Literature | July 18th, 2016

vonnegut drawing

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

The mind of Kurt Von­negut, like the pro­tag­o­nist of his best-known nov­el Slaugh­ter­house-Five, must have got “unstuck in time” some­where along the line. How else could he have man­aged to write his dis­tinc­tive brand of satir­i­cal but sin­cere fic­tion, hyper-aware of past, present, and future all at once? It must have made him a promis­ing con­trib­u­tor indeed for Volk­swa­gen’s 1988 Time mag­a­zine ad cam­paign, when the com­pa­ny “approached a num­ber of notable thinkers and asked them to write a let­ter to the future — some words of advice to those liv­ing in 2088, to be pre­cise.”

The beloved writer’s let­ter to the “Ladies & Gen­tle­men of A.D. 2088” begins as fol­lows:

It has been sug­gest­ed that you might wel­come words of wis­dom from the past, and that sev­er­al of us in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry should send you some. Do you know this advice from Polo­nius in Shake­speare’s Ham­let: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true’? Or what about these instruc­tions from St. John the Divine: ‘Fear God, and give glo­ry to Him; for the hour of His judg­ment has come’? The best advice from my own era for you or for just about any­body any­time, I guess, is a prayer first used by alco­holics who hoped to nev­er take a drink again: ‘God grant me the seren­i­ty to accept the things I can­not change, courage to change the things I can, and wis­dom to know the dif­fer­ence.’

Our cen­tu­ry has­n’t been as free with words of wis­dom as some oth­ers, I think, because we were the first to get reli­able infor­ma­tion about the human sit­u­a­tion: how many of us there were, how much food we could raise or gath­er, how fast we were repro­duc­ing, what made us sick, what made us die, how much dam­age we were doing to the air and water and top­soil on which most life forms depend­ed, how vio­lent and heart­less nature can be, and on and on. Who could wax wise with so much bad news pour­ing in?

For me, the most par­a­lyz­ing news was that Nature was no con­ser­va­tion­ist. It need­ed no help from us in tak­ing the plan­et apart and putting it back togeth­er some dif­fer­ent way, not nec­es­sar­i­ly improv­ing it from the view­point of liv­ing things. It set fire to forests with light­ning bolts. It paved vast tracts of arable land with lava, which could no more sup­port life than big-city park­ing lots. It had in the past sent glac­i­ers down from the North Pole to grind up major por­tions of Asia, Europe, and North Amer­i­ca. Nor was there any rea­son to think that it would­n’t do that again some­day. At this very moment it is turn­ing African farms to deserts, and can be expect­ed to heave up tidal waves or show­er down white-hot boul­ders from out­er space at any time. It has not only exter­mi­nat­ed exquis­ite­ly evolved species in a twin­kling, but drained oceans and drowned con­ti­nents as well. If peo­ple think Nature is their friend, then they sure don’t need an ene­my.

You can read the whole thing at Let­ters of Note, where Von­negut goes on to give his own inter­pre­ta­tion of human­i­ty’s per­spec­tive at the time, when “we were see­ing our­selves as a new sort of glac­i­er, warm-blood­ed and clever, unstop­pable, about to gob­ble up every­thing and then make love — and then dou­ble in size again.” He puts the ques­tion to his future-inhab­it­ing read­ers direct­ly: “Is it pos­si­ble that we aimed rock­ets with hydro­gen bomb war­heads at each oth­er, all set to go, in order to take our minds off the deep­er problem—how cru­el­ly Nature can be expect­ed to treat us, Nature being Nature, in the by-and-by?”

Final­ly, Von­negut issues sev­en com­mand­ments — as much direct­ed to read­ers of the late 20th cen­tu­ry as to read­ers of the late 21st, or indeed to those of the ear­ly 21st in which you read this now — intend­ed to help human­i­ty avert what he sees as the utter cat­a­stro­phe loom­ing ahead:

  1. Reduce and sta­bi­lize your pop­u­la­tion.
  2. Stop poi­son­ing the air, the water, and the top­soil.
  3. Stop prepar­ing for war and start deal­ing with your real prob­lems.
  4. Teach your kids, and your­selves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhab­it a small plan­et with­out help­ing to kill it.
  5. Stop think­ing sci­ence can fix any­thing if you give it a tril­lion dol­lars.
  6. Stop think­ing your grand­chil­dren will be OK no mat­ter how waste­ful or destruc­tive you may be, since they can go to a nice new plan­et on a space­ship. That is real­ly mean, and stu­pid.
  7. And so on. Or else.

Volk­swa­gen had asked him to look one hun­dred years into the future. As of this writ­ing, 2088 lies less than 75 years ahead, and how many of us would agree that we’ve heed­ed most or even any of his pre­scrip­tions? Then again, Von­negut grants that pes­simism may have got the bet­ter of him; per­haps the future will bring with it a utopia after all, one where “nobody will have to leave home to go to work or school, or even stop watch­ing tele­vi­sion. Every­body will sit around all day punch­ing the keys of com­put­er ter­mi­nals con­nect­ed to every­thing there is, and sip orange drink through straws like the astro­nauts,” a com­i­cal­ly dystopi­an utopia, and not an entire­ly un-pre­scient one — a Von­negut­ian vision indeed.

via Let­ters of Note/Va Viper

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Kurt Von­negut Read Slaugh­ter­house-Five, Cat’s Cra­dle & Oth­er Nov­els

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Von­negut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

Kurt Von­negut Maps Out the Uni­ver­sal Shapes of Our Favorite Sto­ries

Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Tips on How to Write a Good Short Sto­ry

Kurt Von­negut Explains “How to Write With Style”

Kurt Von­negut Urges Young Peo­ple to Make Art and “Make Your Soul Grow”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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French Artist Creates Digital Street Art in the Sky

in Architecture, Art, Environment, Life, Photography | July 18th, 2016

We humans are a quar­rel­some lot. But one thing that unites us is the time spent on our backs, gaz­ing at clouds for the plea­sure of iden­ti­fy­ing what­ev­er objects they may fleet­ing­ly resem­ble.

It’s a very relax­ing activ­i­ty.

I was sur­prised there’s an actu­al, med­ical name for it: parei­do­lia, defined by Mer­ri­am-Web­ster as “the ten­den­cy to per­ceive a spe­cif­ic, often mean­ing­ful, image in a ran­dom or ambigu­ous visu­al pat­tern.”

Thomas Lamadieu, the artist whose work is show­cased above, has a dif­fer­ent, but not whol­ly unre­lat­ed con­di­tion.

A pho­to post­ed by Art­zop® (@artzop) on

Most of us pre­fer to con­tem­plate the heav­ens in a bucol­ic set­ting. Lamadieu’s art com­pels him to look upwards from a more urban land­scape. The tops of the build­ings hem­ming him in sup­ply with irreg­u­lar­ly shaped frames, which he cap­tures using a fish eye lens. Lat­er, he fills them in with Microsoft Paint draw­ings, which fre­quent­ly fea­ture a beard­ed man whose t‑shirt is striped in sky blue. Neg­a­tive space, not Cray­ola, sup­plies the col­or here.

Think of it as street art in the sky.

Not every day can be a bril­liant azure, but it hard­ly mat­ters when even Lamadieu’s grayest views exhib­it a deter­mined play­ful­ness. It takes a very unique sort of eye to tease a pink nip­pled, stripe-limbed bun­ny from a steely UK sky.

Like many street artists, he takes a glob­al approach, trav­el­ing the world in search of giant unclaimed can­vas­es. His port­fo­lio con­tains vis­tas orig­i­nal­ly cap­tured in Hong Kong, South Korea, Ger­many, Spain, Aus­tria, Cana­da, Bel­gium, and the Unit­ed States, as well as his native France.

“The beard­ed man in my images stands for the sky itself,” he told The Inde­pen­dent, adding that his is a whol­ly sec­u­lar vision.

View a gallery of Lamadieu’s sky art here.

h/t to read­er Alan Gold­wass­er

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe

The Cre­ativ­i­ty of Female Graf­fi­ti & Street Artists Will Be Cel­e­brat­ed in Street Hero­ines, a New Doc­u­men­tary

3D Street Art

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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How to Jumpstart Your Creative Process with William S. Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

in Writing | July 18th, 2016

The inner crit­ic cre­ates writer’s block and sti­fles adven­tur­ous writ­ing, hems it in with safe clichés and over­think­ing. Every writer has to find his or her own way to get free of that sour­puss ratio­nal­ist who insists on stran­gling each thought with log­i­cal analy­sis and fit­ting each idea into an oppres­sive pre­de­ter­mined scheme or ide­ol­o­gy. William S. Bur­roughs, one of the most adven­tur­ous writ­ers to emerge from the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, famous­ly employed what he called the cut-up method.

Devel­oped by Bur­roughs and painter Brion Gysin, this lit­er­ary take on the col­lage tech­nique used by avant-garde artists like Georges Braque orig­i­nat­ed with Sur­re­al­ist Tris­tan Tzara, who “pro­posed to cre­ate a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat.” The sug­ges­tion was so provoca­tive, Bur­roughs claims in his essay “The Cut-Up Method,” that cut-ups were there­after “ground­ed… on the Freudi­an couch.”

Since Bur­roughs and Gysin’s lit­er­ary rede­ploy­ment of the method in 1959, it has proved use­ful not only for poets and nov­el­ists, but for song­writ­ers like David Bowie and Kurt Cobain. And any frus­trat­ed nov­el­ist, poet, or song­writer may use it to shake off the habit­u­al thought pat­terns that cage cre­ativ­i­ty or choke it off entire­ly. How so?

Well, it’s best at this point to defer to the author­i­ty, Bur­roughs him­self, who explains the cut-up tech­nique thus:

The method is sim­ple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the mid­dle and cross the mid­dle. You have four sec­tions: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sec­tions plac­ing sec­tion four with sec­tion one and sec­tion two with sec­tion three. And you have a new page. Some­times it says much the same thing. Some­times some­thing quite different–(cutting up polit­i­cal speech­es is an inter­est­ing exercise)–in any case you will find that it says some­thing and some­thing quite def­i­nite. Take any poet or writer you fan­cy. Here­say, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost mean­ing and life through years of rep­e­ti­tion. Now take the poem and type out select­ed pas­sages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.

Bur­roughs gives us “one way” to do it. There may be infi­nite oth­ers, and it’s up to you to find what works. I myself have pushed through a cre­ative funk by mak­ing mon­tages from scraps of ancient poet­ry and phras­es of mod­ern pop, clichés ripped from the head­lines and eso­teric quotes from obscure reli­gious texts—pieced togeth­er more or less at ran­dom, then edit­ed to fit the form of a song, poem, or what­ev­er. Vir­tu­al cut-and-paste makes scis­sors unnec­es­sary, but the phys­i­cal act may pre­cip­i­tate epipha­nies. “Images shift sense under the scis­sors,” Bur­roughs writes; then he hints at a synes­the­sia expe­ri­ence: “smell images to sound sight to sound sound to kines­thet­ic.”

Who is this method for? Every­one, Bur­roughs asserts. “Cuts ups are for every­one,” just as Tzara remarked that “poet­ry is for every­one.” No need to have estab­lished some exper­i­men­tal art world bona fides, or even call one­self an artist at all; the method is “exper­i­men­tal in the sense of being some­thing to do.” In the short video at the top, you can hear Bur­roughs explain the tech­nique fur­ther, adding his occult spin on things by not­ing that many cut-ups “seem to refer to future events.” On that account, we may sus­pend belief.

As Jen­nie Skerl notes in her essay on Bur­roughs, cut-up the­o­ry “par­al­lels avant-garde lit­er­ary the­o­ry” like Jacques Derrida’s Decon­struc­tion. “All writ­ing is in fact cut ups,” writes Bur­roughs, mean­ing not that all writ­ing is pieced togeth­er with scis­sors and glue, but that it’s all “a col­lage of words read heard over­heard.” This the­o­ry should lib­er­ate us from oner­ous notions of orig­i­nal­i­ty and authen­tic­i­ty, tied to ideas of the author as a sui gener­is, all-know­ing god and the text as an expres­sion of cos­mi­cal­ly ordered mean­ing. (Anoth­er sur­re­al­ist writ­ing method, the game of Exquis­ite Corpse, makes the point lit­er­al.) All that meta­phys­i­cal bag­gage weighs us down. Every­thing’s been done—both well and badly—before, Bur­roughs writes. Fol­low his meth­ods and his insis­tent cre­ative max­im and you can­not make a mistake—“Assume that the worst has hap­pened,” he writes, “and act accord­ing­ly.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

The “Priest” They Called Him: A Dark Col­lab­o­ra­tion Between Kurt Cobain & William S. Bur­roughs

How William S. Bur­roughs Used the Cut-Up Tech­nique to Shut Down London’s First Espres­so Bar (1972)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

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How to Start a Start-Up: A Free Online Course from Y Combinator Taught at Stanford

in Business, How to Learn for Free, Online Courses, Stanford, Technology | July 18th, 2016

If you have any entre­pre­neur­ial aspi­ra­tions, you’ve like­ly heard of Y Com­bi­na­tor (YC), an accel­er­a­tor based in Sil­i­con Val­ley that’s been called “the world’s most pow­er­ful start-up incu­ba­tor” (Fast Com­pa­ny) or “a spawn­ing ground for emerg­ing tech giants” (For­tune). Twice a year, YC care­ful­ly selects a batch of start-ups, gives them $120,000 of seed fund­ing each (in exchange for some equi­ty), and then helps nur­ture the fledg­ling ven­tures to the next stage of devel­op­ment. YC hosts din­ners where promi­nent entre­pre­neurs come to speak and offer advice. They hold “Demo Days,” where the start-ups can pitch their con­cepts and prod­ucts to investors, and they have “Office Hours,” where bud­ding entre­pre­neurs can work through prob­lems with the sea­soned entre­pre­neurs who run YC. Then, with a lit­tle luck, these new start-ups will expe­ri­ence the same suc­cess as pre­vi­ous YC com­pa­nies, Drop­box and Airbnb.

Giv­en Y Com­bi­na­tor’s mis­sion, it makes per­fect sense that YC has ties with Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, anoth­er insti­tu­tion that has hatched giant tech com­pa­nies–Google, Cis­co, Yahoo and more. Back in 2014, Sam Alt­man (the pres­i­dent of Y Com­bi­na­tor) put togeth­er a course at Stan­ford called “How to Start a Start-Up,” which essen­tial­ly offers stu­dents an intro­duc­tion to the key lessons taught to YC com­pa­nies. Alt­man presents the first two lec­tures. Then some of the biggest names in Sil­i­con Val­ley take over. Dustin Moskovitz (Face­book co-founder), Peter Thiel (Pay­Pal co-founder), Marc Andreessen (Netscape creator/general part­ner of Andreessen Horowitz), Maris­sa May­er (Yahoo CEO, promi­nent Googler), Reid Hoff­man (LinkedIn co-founder), Ron Con­way (Sil­i­con Val­ley super angel), Paul Gra­ham (YC founder)–they all make an appear­ance in the course.

You can watch the com­plete set of 20 lec­tures above, which cov­ers every­thing you need to start a start-up–from cre­at­ing a team, to build­ing prod­ucts users love, to rais­ing mon­ey, to cre­at­ing the right cul­ture and beyond. Alt­man’s site also fea­tures a rec­om­mend­ed read­ing list, plus a set of addi­tion­al resources. (Bonus: A George­town under­grad has cre­at­ed an ebook pulling togeth­er the class notes from the course. If you down­load it, please donate a few bucks so he can pick up some ramen.) The videos for “How to Start a Start-Up”–which will be added to our col­lec­tion of Free Online Busi­ness Cours­es–can be found on YouTube and iTunes U.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Entre­pre­neur­ship Through the Lens of Ven­ture Cap­i­tal: A Free Online Course from Stan­ford

Peter Thiel’s Stan­ford Course on Star­tups: Read the Lec­ture Notes Free Online

Start Your Start­up with Free Stan­ford Cours­es and Lec­tures

Down­load Marc Andreessen’s Influ­en­tial Blog (“Pmar­ca”) as a Free eBook

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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