The Cut Ups

Practical jokers Spud and Joe get away with every trick in the book until the day they meet a little girl named Mary Frances Hooley.

William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century is the definitive book on Burroughs’ overarching cut-up project and its relevance to the American twentieth century. Burroughs’s Nova Trilogy (The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and The Ticket That Exploded) remains the best-known of his textual cut-up creations, but he committed more than a decade of his life to searching out multimedia for use in works of collage. By cutting up, folding in, and splicing together newspapers, magazines, letters, book reviews, classical literature, audio recordings, photographs, and films, Burroughs created an eclectic and wide-ranging countercultural archive. This collection includes previously unpublished work by Burroughs such as cut-ups of work written by his son, cut-ups of critical responses to his own work, collages on the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, excerpts from his dream journals, and some of the few diary entries that Burroughs wrote about his wife, Joan. William S. Burroughs Cutting Up the Century also features original essays, interviews, and discussions by established Burroughs scholars, respected artists, and people who encountered Burroughs. The essays consider Burroughs from a range of starting points—literary studies, media studies, popular culture, gender studies, post-colonialism, history, and geography. Ultimately, the collection situates Burroughs as a central artist and thinker of his time and considers his insights on political and social problems that have become even more dire in ours.

When Spud and Joe get behind the wheel of Principal Lamar J. Spurgle's prized sports car, things soon get out of control.

Shift Linguals traces a history of the cut-up method, the experimental writing practice discovered by Brion Gysin and made famous by Beat author William S. Burroughs. From the groundbreaking works of Dada and Surrealism that paved the way for Burroughs’ breakthrough, through the countercultural explosion of the 1960s, Shift Linguals explores the evolution of the cut-ups within the theoretical frameworks of postmodernism and the avant-garde to arrive at the present and the digital age. Some 50 years on from the first ‘discovery’ of the cut-ups in 1959, it is only now that we are truly able to observe the method’s impact, not only on literature, but on music and culture in a broader sense. The result of over nine years of research, this study represents the first sustained and detailed analysis of the cut-ups as a narrative form. With explorations of the works of Burroughs, Gysin, Kathy Acker, and John Giorno, it also contains the first critical writing on the works of Claude Pélieu and Carl Weissner in English, as well as the first in-depth discussion of the writing of Stewart Home to date.

In the 1970s and 1980s the countries of Latin America dealt with their similar debt problems in very different ways--ranging from militantly market-oriented approaches to massive state intervention in their economies--while their political systems headed toward either democracy or authoritarianism. Applying the tools of modern political economy to a developing-country context, Jeffry Frieden analyzes the different patterns of national economic and political behavior that arose in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. This book will be useful to those interested in comparative politics, international studies, development studies, and political economy more generally. "Jeffry Frieden weaves together a powerful theoretical framework with comparative case studies of the region's five largest debtor states. The result is the most insightful analysis to date of how the interplay between politics and economics in post-war Latin America set the stage for the dramatic events of the 1980s."--Carol Wise, Center for Politics and Policy, Claremont Graduate School

In Paris in the late Fifties the Beat Generation writer William Burroughs and his sidekick Brion Gysin developed the cut-up method. It involved taking a piece of finished text and cutting it into pieces - then rearranging those pieces to create a new text or work of art. Burroughs wrote that: "When you cut into the present the future leaks out." The cut-up had a profound effect on music, writing, painting, and film. Devotees of the cut-up include David Bowie, Radiohead, and Kathy Acker. In addition to bringing together new work by new people, CUT UP! also salutes some better known 20th Century voices who kept the spirit of Burroughs and Gysin alive. Contributors include Kenji Siratori, Claude Pelieu, Nina Antonia, Billy Chainsaw, Cabell McLean, Mary Beach, Marc Olmsted, Allen Ginsberg, Spencer Kansa, Michael Butterworth, Robert Rosen, Nathan Penlington, Sinclair Beiles, Gary J. Shipley, D M Mitchell, and Edward S. Robinson.

Over 100 pages of tattoo flash feature Brian Kelly's innovative cut-up method, which splices and interweaves traditional flash motifs into new and unexpected designs. Inspired by Dadaist literary technique and borrowing from the spirit of collage, these brush-painted and spit-shaded designs are traditional in style and method but wholly original in their combinations and juxtapositions. Traditional images--roses and ships, eagles and daggers, hearts and skulls--become dynamic and surprising, nearly dreamlike and yet deeply familiar. The collection grew out of Kelly's MFA thesis, which he continued to refine at The Rose of No Man's Land tattoo studio in Berlin. This is an excellent inspirational resource for tattoo artists, apprentices, and anyone interested in traditional or neo traditional tattoo style.

In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.