Customer Reviews

Burroughs Live: The Collected Interview of Wiliam S. Burroughs, 1960-1997 (Double Agents)

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While any book collecting the words of William Burroughs, & particularly any Burroughs book of this size, is cause for celebration, this particular book has some serious editorial flaws. There is a great deal of alteration to the interview transcripts, there is repetition within the book & in relation to other books, & there are many obvious errors.

The interviews, says Sylvere Lotringer at the outset, were altered from their original form in order to better serve the flow of the book. While this is understandable or even necessary given the number of interviews collected here, some of the editorial choices destroy any sense of the original interviews. In several cases Lotringer collapses different interviews with different interviewers from different times into one, creating a fictionalized pastiche of Burroughs live. & in other cases the editing of transcripts is so severe, as with the Playboy drug panel, that Burroughs comes out seeming like the subject of the article when originally he was just another participant. The thrill of the interview format is in seeing how a particular subject creates on the spot, how he interacts with the other participants & how the ideas of his work transfer to his life. While there's a good deal of originals throughout the book, many interviews needlessly lose the spontaneity of the originals as a result of editorial tinkering.

In addition, there is repetition, particularly from other books that an avid Burroughs reader would already have. There is material reprinted from the Re/Search book on Burroughs, as well as Victor Bockris's With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker. The pieces culled from the latter are particularly frustrating, since that book was already a collection of interviews. In addition, those pieces tend to be edited here! To reprint interviews already collected in book form is wasteful, but to alter them further is absurd. We would have been much better off with the complete transcripts of previously unavailable material, rather than the inclusion of recycled, re-edited, already-available interviews.

Finally, there are basic editorial errors throughout the book. Typographical errors, sometimes quite embarrassing (as when Burroughs tells David Bowie of a sound below the level of hearing - below 16 'Mertz'!), litter the whole book. There are several times where paragraphs are repeated word for word on a single page. There are even interviews that end in the middle of a sentence simply because that sentence came at the end of a page. As an editor myself, I can spot the telltale signs of unchecked OCRing (optical character recognition) - in other words, the editor scanned the interviews into his computer, used the OCR program to convert it to a text format, & never bothered to check the accuracy of the results. Any competent copyeditor would spot such errors from a mile away & easily fix them; the fact that this book has been published without such necessary editorial attention is disgraceful.

That said, there are many interviews collected here which would otherwise be impossible to find. There are translations from French & German, there are reprints from the myriad small presses Burroughs associated with in England, there are curiosities & oddities that might not have otherwise seen the light of day. For these pieces alone, this book remains a necessary purchase for us Burroughsphiles. But the errors of the editor keep this book far from being the last word on his interviews.

That Burroughs is a fascinating read in any format goes without saying. For all the intelligence, humor, & world-weary wisdom he imparted, he surely deserves a better publication than this.

yeah yeah i know there are so many mad geniuses in the beat movement. burroughs however is the godfather of all. this book is the bible of burroughs interviews as well as his thought. there are a few interviews with his other beat cronies but most of them are just naked burroughs. some of the interviews are a little dry but i wouldn't cut a one of them.few could write with more imagination than w.s. and even less could say it better or be more thoughtful or provacative. god i miss him. to read burroughs is to never again think the same. what freud and jung etal claimed to know of the psyche only burroughs truly explored.long may he wave. i highly recommend this book. then after you get this read then tackle is compilation word virus

I am hesitant ot give this a full five stars, despite being one of the most read books in my library.
Naturally this is a wonderfull collection of interiews of Mr Burroughs. And unlike "From the Bunker" this is every single one. This is not a best of, nor just a sample, this is it. And it's there that it becomes a little... too much. Reading the entire book cover to cover is no simple task, as Burroughs, naturally, repeats himself time and time again. Some interviews seem to be the same, and I find myself screaming: "I KNOW, you've said this allready"

That being said, it IS interesting to note how he over the years contradicts himself, often seeming more interested in overpowering the interviewer with his brilliance, than being truthfull.

I think it is more helpfull to look at this book as a reference book, than a good read.

If you want to be entertained and taught by Burroughs, I would rather reccoment "From the Bunker" and "The Job" as they function more as works in themselves. Read THIS entire book, and you feel you never wanna see the man again, as you've had your fill. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing...

In these one-on-one situations, Burroughs has a voice that is often quite different from the ones he uses in his writing. In particular, he appears to be genuinely open.

And after nearly 800 pages of "openness,' one is left with a deep sense of Burroughs' intellectual landscape... But oddly, not as strong of a sense of how he approaches his craft.

This has almost everything to do with his interviewers, the bulk of whom seem more interested in talking to The Legend rather than The Writer. After a while, these interviews start to read like attempts to commune with The Wise Old Cracker Barrel Sage On The Mountain, rather than attempts to reveal the creative processes behind an often brilliant writer.

This is especially evident when one reads interviews by J.E. Rivers and Jennie Skerl, which are actually NOT included in this book for some odd reason. Those interviewers are focused almost exclusively on getting Burroughs to talk about his WORK, and they are among the best interviews of him that are available. It's hard to fault "Burroughs Live" for being an incomplete endeavor, but these particular omissions are inexcusable (to read those particular interviews, you'll have to get Hibbard's "Conversations with...")

There are, however, many, many more insights that will amuse, engage and surprise the Burroughs scholar (and who else would read a bookof interviews THIS size?). During one early interview, for example, Burroughs dismisses the infamous "William Tell Routine" as an ugly rumour. This either casts a doubt over everything else he has to say, or fits in quite nicely with his vaudevillian huckster persona, depending on how you choose to proceed.

Obviously in a book this size, there are themes and ideas that are repeated from one interview to another... some ad nauseum. That helps to seperate Burroughs' actual infatuations from his transient interests, and provides some good context for reading his books. There are some, however, who will wish the editor had made some actual editorial judgements in this regard, which is a valid criticism.

Burroughs always appeared inaccessible while he was alive, but that was apparently not the case. It looks like he would talk to just about anyone who claimed to represent a journal of some kind, which makes me wish I had joined my college newspaper (which, by the way, had more thorough proofreaders than this book.)

I completely agree that the editing aspect lacks in this volume. My favorite miss is on page 429, first line at the top of the page, "...and the Thin White Ducks's..." -an obvious goof-up of the Bowie alter. That one cracked me up big time and caused me to disturb others in the coffee shop where I was reading it. Being only 24, I can't say (though I'd love to) that I was around when most of these interviews originally came out but as an avid Burroughs reader I appreciate having them all in one place. There is something to be said about the completist aspirations of the book.

Wow, this book is enormous... but finishing it was not at all exhausting. Burroughs discusses a seemingly unlimited range of topics and ideas including conspiracies, state authority, language and the "word virus" theory, magic, Brion Gysin and the dream machine, cut-ups, astral projection, punks, the Beatniks, his books, various drugs, drug laws, and plenty more. Reading the interviews is an unbeatable way to get insight into this fascinating man, and to see the transitions he went through in his life. In his old age he seemed to have transformed into such a sweet and compassionate individual, and it is really very beautiful to hear the things he had to say by this time.
Many of the ideas that are undercurrents throughout his books are discussed in a straightforward, and casual manner in these interviews. This makes the book a very interesting supplement for avid Burroughs fans, and it reveals how amazingly insightful he was. At first I was a bit surprised that this book is published by Semiotext(e), whose books are consistently amazing and thought provoking (not that I didn't think his work is worthy, but the publisher usually puts out books of serious academic philosophy and political theory, while Burroughs is predominantly a novelist)... the connection became very clear while reading the interviews, especially the one in which Burroughs and many renowned French postmodern philosophers were in a conference together, including Deleuze and Foucault. In the interview based on this conference, many of their similarities are exposed. After reading this book, it became very apparent how far ahead Burroughs was from Foucault (a highly influential philosopher who examined power relations and how knowledge is tied to control), and how well their work ties together. Burroughs was always suspicious of power and deeply analyzed power relations and state authority, but his views were always freshly presented with a twist of his unique character, which makes his interviews an amusing read.

Some of them are a bit dry, and there is some repetition throughout the book... after all, they were never meant to be collected together. I wouldn't cut any of them, why opt for less when you could simply skip them? This is a nice book to own, because you can easily come to it at any time and read a single interview, but it really is amazing to read the whole thing front to back. Gives a different feeling than reading them sporadically.