Hi, All -
I read
The Beat Godfather, The Great Beast,
& the Necronomicon over on
RealitySandwich.coma while back (and thanks for the link - you know who
you are).
It's over here :
http://tinyurl.com/k8nnzlpSeeing as it's excerpted from the [ now released ]
Mandrake offering,
The Magical Universe of
William S. Burroughs, it's too late for any
more corrections to be made to the text.
Hopefully, it will see another edition where some of
the more egregious errors will be corrected. I take
work as a proofreader, among other things ( I proofed
the American editions of Kenneth Grant's books while
I was living at the Samuel Weiser warehouse in
Manhattan, shortly before the production of the
'Con ), and this sort of thing irks me.
So, for the record, it's
Schlangekraft, not
"Schlangenkraft".
And I didn't assist Harry Everett Smith in an
attempt at compiling a concordance of Enochian -
we
produced the darn thing, basing it upon the
then-recently released Casaubon excerpts of Dee's
manuscripts (
A True and Faithful Relation of What
Passed for Many Years between Dr. John Dee and
Some Spirits,
Magickal Childe Publishing, Inc.,1992), with shoeboxes to contain all of the pieces
of Chelsea Hotel stationery that we employed.
Our concordance had absolutely
nothing to do with
anything that Crowley had produced.
If anybody wants to take a look at it, presumably
the Getty has it under lock and key, along with
much else, owing to the depredations of someone
that used to bring Harry beer and cigarettes upon
occasion.
Next, the author goes on to misquote me :
" It was about that time that William Burroughs
dropped by, having caught wind of a "Necronomicon"
in the neighbourhood. After going through the
pages and a few lines of powder, he offered the
comment that it was "good shit." He might have
meant the manuscript too . . ."
What I
actually wrote was :
" It was during this time that William Burroughs
dropped by, having caught wind of a "Necronomicon"
in the neighbourhood. After going through the
pages & a few lines of powder, he offered the
comment that it was "good shit." He might have
meant the manuscript, too - check out the
'Invocation' on page xvii of his
Cities of the
Red Night: Humwawa, Pazuzu and Kutulu are listed
among the Usual Suspects. "
You may still access the webpage from which this
quote derives at Archive.org :
http://tinyurl.com/kbn2lxtSome of the links still work, thanks to the
magic of Archive.org but, strangely, the
Cities
of the Red Night page is missing.
That, too, may be viewed here, on
anotherversion of the webpage, then hosted on Flash.net
following its tenure on Bway.net :
http://tinyurl.com/mooe859So much for proofreading / picking nits.
I have upon occasion been portrayed as somehow
distant from all of the personalities and
goings-on around the creation of the 'Con.
Fact is, I slept on a couch outside the temple
that Jim Wasserman and I built in Jane Nelson's
loft on Howard Street ( the locked temple door
that was discovered mysteriously 'opened' was
just across from my couch - make of that what
you will ).
I heard the rats running overhead across the tin
ceiling every night on their scavenging rounds.
There was a factory upstairs, with lots of yummy
garbage available. Like many of the buildings
around Canal Street, we were infested with rats
- long before the 'Con came along.
And I occasionally bunked downstairs from Jane
and Jim with Bonnie Nielsen and Lia Colla, aka
'Feint Type'. They set the text of the 'Con on
the old word-processor that I had lugged to their
loft from the Weiser warehouse on Broadway, a
little ways north of Houston Street.
I was at Bonnie and Lia's loft on one occasion
when Burroughs dropped by for a look at the 'Con
(the incident related above, with the powder)
and, awhile later, escorted over to his "Bunker"
for a visit by James Grauerholz, Burrough's
assistant and Bonnie's ex. I was invited to sit
in the infamous Orgone Box, and did so.
We discussed the work of George de la Warr,
Solco Tromp, Cleve Backster, L'Abbe Nollet,
Cecil Maby - Bill was widely read and his ideas
on magic were, and sadly still are, ahead-of-
the-curve. Bill and Harry [ Everett Smith ]
knew and spoke about a lot of the same military
-industrial folks who were also involved in the
'human potential movement', such as Arthur
Middleton Young - inventor of the Bell Helicopter.
Anyhow, apart from my peeves, I am looking
forward to receiving a copy of
The Magical
Universe of William S. Burroughs.Cors in Manu Domine,
~ Khem Caigan