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«Cut-ups are for everyone»: Margin Notes to «A Cut-up Fragment Rearranged»Cluster the Third
… in order to understand or to remember, so as to arrange the card sequence in a new pattern and draw out of it an interpretation which might present its meaning in contemporary terms, she decided to apply the cut-up techniques created by William S. Burroughs …
… the cards were laid out over the green sottomano, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot was placed on the bookrest and opened to the comment on the first card of the sequence, then the portable typewriter, a ream, carbon paper …
… «copy, cut, fold, rearrange, transcribe, hear the disembodied voice» …
… & black typed yellowed white sheets came out from the old typewriter like an asphalt ribbon under the light blue light of the green lamp, a forgotten selection of sixteen cards …
… to ye knowledge, new child transforms there through the lenses of ye crevices, blue gloaming air & sea—stars/sky/sea/the lands, wells sisters, ruler of ambush in ye gloaming, unseen by tracing a way flight, astrology, therapy and now joggers & loafers not there, he sits at work in bays; different gaze the world changes across the crossroads, along the children’s realms very northern to behold / totally unaware as sign of nothing but in glass / sitting dream images in ye worlds, but she also acts, and from dusk along the park’s ditches & his presence, catoptromancy—strange chalices of different inner bare, white unknown blue grey fluid coalesce, under visions steer magical vessel from ditches, & stands on the mainland, totally fortunate railways, hard upon wind that blows between place told awareness as unaware as visions …
The legendary oracular instructions contained in the two above quoted excerpts from The Exterminator were reissued in Oeuvre Croisée & later reprinted in The Third Mind.
Other technical instructions on how to do cut-ups & fold-ins, grids & scrapbooks, & more, are findable in the following works, not forgetting the instruments available on the Web, such as Lazarus Corporation …
William S. Burroughs, «The literary techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith», Times Literary Supplement, no. 3,258 (Aug. 6, 1964) pp. 682-683; or «Les techniques littéraires de Lady Sutton Smith», in Le métro blanc, Paris, Bourgois/Seuil, 1976, pp. 55-59.
William S. Burroughs, Health Bulletin: APO-33: A Metabolic Regulator, Fuck You Press, 1965.
William S. Burroughs, Mary Beach, and Claude Pélieu, APO-33 bulletin : a metabolic regulator : a report on the synthesis of the apomorphine formula, San Francisco, Beach Books (distributed by City Lights), ca. 1966.
William S. Burroughs, «Un regolatore metabolico», in Sterminatore! e altri testi, Milano, Sugar, 1969.
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Oeuvre Croisée, Paris, Flammarion, 1976.
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, London John Calder, 1979.
William S. Burroughs, «Unfinished Cigarette»,«Distant Hand Lifted», «Palm Sunday Tape», «Who Is the Walks Beside You Written 3rd?», in The Burroughs File, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1984.
William S. Burroughs, «It Belongs to the Cucumbers», in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, New York, Seaver Books, 1986.
Go get them & do it.
… … …
«Cut-ups are for everyone»: Margin Notes to «A Cut-up Fragment Rearranged»—A Postlude