David S Wills‘ forensic Beat scholarship and literary detective work continues to be a source of illumination and instruction (see his forthcoming book on the 6 Gallery reading – see below) – See also his continuing explorations and articles on the (perfect-for-this-sort-of-thing) Substack platform – His most recent is an examination of a key text of William Burroughs – “Amazing Stories and Weird Tales – Origin of The Yage Letters – Uncovering the origin of William S Burroughs interest in Yage”. Did we mention Wills’ earlier published work on Burroughs and Scientology and Beatdom (his publication)’s upcoming Burroughs memoir, Stewart Meyer’s The Bunker Diaries (last year saw Victor Bockris’ The Burroughs-Warhol Connection, in 2021, Chris Kelso‘s Burroughs and Scotland – Dethroning the Ancients – The Commitment of Exile“)? Just this past summer on his Substack, Wills revealed Thomas Antonic’s hitherto unknown discovery of William Burroughs’ ‘third wife”, preliminary notification for a new Beatdom book, The Three Wives of Queer William Burroughs (out, we’re hoping, next year”)
Back to the current Beatdom piece:
“Burroughs was telling the truth”, Wills writes, “when he said that he’d read about yagé in a magazine article two years prior to his South America trip. It was in Amazing Stories, one of the wacky, pseudoscience publications that he enjoyed reading. The article had the appealing title, “The Mystery of Magic Drugs,” and was written by Vincent H. Gaddis, a confirmed crackpot who wrote misleading articles about subjects such as the Bermuda Triangle and spontaneous combustion. It was published in 1949.”
“I think it’s quite obvious that Burroughs learned about yagé from this 1949 article. It fits with the timeline and the similarities between his account of it and the article itself are too great to ignore. It seems that Burroughs later encountered another article that mentioned Russian plans to use the drug to enslave people, after which he did some more conventional research in libraries, where he learned about the scientific name for the plant from which yagé is derived. He said that he did not trust the accounts provided by scientists because they had not taken the drug themselves and merely repeated unsubstantiated rumours. This was certainly true but Burroughs himself tended to believe whatever fit his worldview, even when those were silly articles from sci-fi magazines. In any case, he felt that the only way to understand it was to take it, and that’s what he set out to do, thereafter sharing what he believed was an accurate and fair account through his various writings.”
Sam Leith‘s observations on “America” (and on America!) are well worth perusing
“The crunch is that this poem of crazed and polyphonic dissent, swinging between tender personal specificity and grandiose hyperbole, enacts a seriousness even in its unseriousness (‘Everybody’s serious but me,’ he says, a few lines before declaring: ‘America this is quite serious.’). Its argumentative nature is by way of a lover’s tiff. And it ends with an affirmation all the more moving for what comes before: ‘America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.’
He concludes: “I don’t know about you, but I would take the Allen Ginsberg version of America over the Pete Hegseth or Donald Trump version of America any day of the week.”.
An important anniversary today – the anniversary of the Howl verdict.
A continuingly important date in the history of free expression – see here
Another important anniversary – the (70th) anniversary of the 6 Gallery reading, next Tuesday, October 7th. David S Wills, on that day will publish what will clearly be the definitive history of it, his groundbreaking and deeply researched A Remarkable Collection of Angels – A History of the 6 Gallery Reading – see here
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Starting next week the annual (37th!) Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival. Official festival events begin Thursday, starting at the Worthen House Cafe with the LCK! Festival Opening Gathering. More on the festival, more details on the festival, next week