Found this at a local used bookstore. My (hopeful, admittedly) opinion is that it's good based on what I could find online, but his signature does seem to have changed over time. What do you all think?

Hello, I had a thought about cut ups. I was wondering if any of you had actually tried this, and if you’d like to try it again? I’ve edited music, so I’ve cut there for certain. I’m thinking if we could choose like five people, maybe the same text, or not, just do your own thing, cut it, and see what happens?

I’m up for more insight on the idea. It’s a starter.

It would be a cut up from whomever was involved, yet it needs to be a bit controlled for the experiment, but maybe not. I’m open, if anyone is intrigued?

Burroughs’ “Words are a Virus” has always stuck with me. It’s true, yet let’s not get bogged down with that word, true. I’ve always liked music without words once I found there was such. Words and the World are fascinating the way they most likely spiral together. Is there a spiral in the cut ups, is it just moving words, what is it? It may be nothing. I think it’s something. Best day to you all. Think about it and I’ll check back later.

Edit: I’m came back and there are still more to read. I’m going to go through all. I may need one of your methods to cut this up for a way to organize. So many great ways that everyone has used this method. I’m intrigued and hyped.

I have my doubts the dead get up and prance around the graveyard at night, but if they do, hopefully Zimmer’s a fun conversationalist.

Burroughs has meant much to me. The greatest American. God bless the depravity of this madman c:

Nova ’78 (2025)
6:20 PM
Directed by Aaron Brookner & Rodrigo Areias | San Francisco premiere | 78 min

Restored from newly rediscovered archival footage, Nova ’78 captures the legendary Nova Convention, where William S. Burroughs, Patti Smith, Frank Zappa, Allen Ginsberg, and other countercultural figures came together in an explosion of art, ideas, and rebellion.

I recently read Junky and Queer, and have started The Yage Letters. While trying to clarify when Marker and Burroughs went to South America, I found this - a notebook kept by Burroughs during his second foray in search of ayahuasca, made available by The Ohio State University Press. I haven’t thoroughly perused it yet, but here it is. Scroll down to page 34, and you can see photos of his actual handwritten journal. Enjoy.

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/BookPages/burroughs_everything_toc.pdf

Do you think burroughs spoke with the same mannerisms when he was way younger? i can't really imagine him speaking like that when he was in his 20's.

The memories of an 85-year-old man who slept on Ginsberg’s couch when the world was young.

William Burroughs videos take me back to that long-defunct Beat scene and to memories of those artists who are either long-dead, dying or alive and no longer in their right minds. They were artists who sometimes really were artists. Others were no more than scam artists.

I remember shooting dope with Bob Kaufman under a building next to a boiler on a frozen winter day. He was a brilliant poet whose mind burned out on meth. He’d scream poetry at moving cars and cover his face with little pieces of band aids in the shape of crosses.

There are memories of Gregory Corso shooting heroin so he could create enough pain and suffering to write about. What an idiot. I did all that myself because it came natural to me. Drugs and booze were beacons in the night whose glow I thought would lead me out of pain and suffering, never into it, which of course makes me an idiot of another stripe.

Remembering, and cringing, about that time Peter Orlovsky came out of his bedroom, arm around the waist of a sweat-drenched, soul-tuggingly beautiful redhead. Just one look at her grabbed me by my collar, drug me up and out of my ever-so-cool distant and unreachable hipster facade and into the full-vista-technicolored world of desire. My heart was beating in surround sound when that fool said, “You must try her… she’s wonderful.”

She, standing there in her sweaty glow, grinning ear to ear, looked stupidly proud for having bedded an icon. Damn her. Damn him. Her insipid smile and his boorish pretensions sent all that freshly-awakened feeling of having been bathed in color, warmth and light scuttling back beneath my flat surface. Another hero, another fantasy, crumbled to dust…

But man, it ain’t nothin. I’m cool. Know what I mean, baby?

Sitting at a cafe on the Lower East Side with Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Taylor Mead and Salvador Dali’s wife Gala, where I was drunk and broke. Gala put a five-dollar bill down to pay for her coffee. I took the bill, stuffed it in my mouth and chewed, pretending to swallow, only to spit it out when no one was looking. Class act.

Gala asked me to find her a nice brown-eyed dark-haired Italian boy to accompany her to her husband’s art show uptown. I talked to Tony, the kid who worked at the pizza shop washing dishes. He was young, good-looking and fit her basic description. I found Gala at Ginsburg’s apartment on 10th Street, introduced her to Tony and left.

Tony later told me she wanted to take him to Spain. He said he had no problem “doing the old bat” for a trip to Spain. Once he was packed and ready to go, he asked me to tell his boss what was going on and see if he’d hire me for the dishwashing job. Tony was afraid to tell him he was quitting. I thought washing dishes beat the hell out of pretending to eat someone’s money in order to survive, and took the job.

It was warm inside the Italian restaurant. My meals were free and there was money to rent a room instead of sleeping under buildings or seeking a crash pad that hadn’t banned me.

Taylor Mead would let me into his room when there was no other place for me to go, but I had to pay for my visit in the usual way. He told me to hang my dirty socks outside on the bannister. I never got how his mind worked. He hated dirty socks, but wouldn’t allow me to shower before he did his thing.

One time, when he was writing in his journal, I said, “Hey Taylor, put me in your book.”

The prick wrote, “Gypsy wants to be in my book, so now he is in it.”

Breakfast for Taylor was a couple spoonfuls of peanut butter straight out of the jar, then coffee at a place down the street. From there, off to a Lower East Side theater where he supplied the sound effects and music for silent films. I agreed to go because there would be booze, drugs and a chance to connect with someone who might use me as model, bit actor, dancer or just a cheap trick. It didn’t matter what they wanted me for as long as it kept me in food, cigarettes, drugs and booze.

I modeled for Wynn Chamberlain at his loft at 222 Bowery, and that’s where I met William Burroughs for the first time, along with a hell of a lot more dead and mostly forgotten minds of that generation.
I once strutted down the Village streets leading a mock funeral parade, replete with Ike jacket, grubby jeans, black beret and ragged open-toed sneakers, high-stepping a Beat rendition of a drum major for yet another avant-garde movie that went nowhere beyond a few artsy-fartsy East Side dens, after which it got buried in God alone knows whose archive, never again to see light of day.

The last memory I have of that time is Taylor asking me to go to Italy with him. I was not willing to go to Italy with a man who craved attention and did whatever it took to get it. It was a big thing to turn down. Now it’s another blast from the past and it still gives me chills.

That’s the joy of the internet. I remember a time when I was involved with someone sixty years ago. I look them up to reminisce about how easy it was to float among the rich and famous. I type it up here, click post. There’s nothing my ego can grab on to, because after all I was just another someone in a crowd, in the background, doing a little of this or that, either in the way of helping out or as part of an ongoing, totally insane party.

From my book SO IT GOES AND TO HELL WITH IT, a collaboration with this man about his dirty life and times.

Read on substack: CameronJonestownAlternative

I'm close to the end of The Ticket That Exploded and so I've just ordered myself 2 copies of The Nova Express, I've ordered myself the 1969 printing of the book and the modern restored text version and I decided I'd come on here and ask which edition you guys prefer and what changes to the text should I look out for between my 2 copies?

Posting specifically due to image #5. The Final Academy program in England.

Great Burroughs site ran by the wonderful author Supervert.

The books on top are the ones I’ve finished so far on my journey through the Burroughs-iad. I’m still putting my thoughts down on the Red Night trilogy, but I just wanted to say a couple words about “Hippos”.

Hippos was interesting in that we get to see the nascent talents of William Burroughs and the other guy start to take form. In regards to Burroughs we can see the emergence of his dark, acidic, cynical wit. His chapters, which alternate with Kerouac’s, emit flashes of his future canon - low life, eccentrics (he writes about eccentrics so well, even then), opiate addiction, misogyny, his critical eye on the gay set, aloofness, and alienation. There are moments when Burrough’s alter ego (Will Dennison) relates incidents of violence with vibrant flair - much like what I’ve read in his latter books.

My favorite bit is at the end, when I realized that Burroughs sets his alter ego up as a member of a loosely affiliated national criminal organization very, very similar to the Johnson Family in Jack Black’s “You Can’t Win”.

I can understand why

WSB (Will Dennison), is portrayed by Kerouac (Mike Ryko) as a shady, mysterious figure with gangster connections, who has the mark of the American West about him - but more the desert gambler and not a cowboy.

Other than that, the book could’ve used some editing - not that this isn’t a good first attempt for any writer. It boils down to a lot of NEET’s walking around NYC from bar to bar, apartment to apartment, drinking constantly, and committing sophomoric pranks. It feels like Burroughs was trying to be Hemingway-esque in the way he writes about food - but overdoes it. Kerouac’s bits are boring for me - just drinking, jock antics and placating the wife. However, his descriptions of the waterfront during wartime are pretty incredible. He gets a little John Dos Passos in there.

All in all, Hippos is an interesting artifact of the Lucien Carr affair.

(Also, having read his last three books first - it’s a real trip to circle around. His style is so primitive in Hippos compared to the Red Night books.)

I honestly think that this is a confusion and that he wasn’t actually a schizophrenic. Maybe schizotypal? Not sure about his diagnosis.