Scope and Contents This catalogue, edited by Robert A. Sobieszek, curator of photography at LACMA, was issued for an exhibition in 1996. It emphasizes the importance and influence of the painted and poetic works as well as the life of William Burroughs and his collaborator, Brion Gysin. In his preface Sobieszek writes that "Burroughs is far more than a writer of imaginative prose and speculative fiction. His revolutionary literary tactics have led him to margins of activity where genres cease to matter, where the distinctions between words and images blend together, where paragraphs become filmic montage, and where a shotgun blast is the same as a painting. At the core of Burroughs's art is the 'cut-up' technique that he and Brion Gysin developed following the appearance of Naked Lunch. While loosely related to the more traditional techniques of collage, photomontage, and text-image experiments used by modern artists, Burroughs's cut- up strategy inaugurated an essentially postmodern shift in the...

Scope and Contents Marcus Boon, who edited this book writes, Giorno's late-1960s poems see him expanding the use of found materials, including pornographic and countercultural texts, as well as the use of repetition. Indeed, poems like "Capsule," "Give It to Me, Baby," and "Johnny Guitar" are among the most rock 'n' roll poems ever written, every bit as psychedelic and confrontational as The Stooges or Jefferson Airplane, and probably just as much the product of a wide-ranging armory of pharmaceuticals, which, as Giorno has repeatedly insisted, have the potential to open and expand the mind and bring bliss. Balling Buddha, a multicolor confection printed on pages in the six colors of the rainbow, rather than traditional black on white, introduced Giorno's signature split lines running down the center of each page-as a way of both reproducing the multitracking used in his sound poems and perturbing the linear flow of text on the page. Giorno observes that the split line "breaks the lineal flow....