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32.
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT No. 3258 (London: August 6, 1964) + No. 3262 (London: September 3, 1964): 'The Changing Guard', parts 1-2.
i) THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT No. 3258. Tabloid size newspaper. 44pp. Cover by Richard Hamilton.
Burroughs contributes “The Literary Techniques of Lady Sutton-Smith”, a cut-up manifesto featuring an English woman in Tangier who likes to “think of words as being alive like animals. They don’t like to be kept in pages. Cut the pages and let the words out.” A review of “The Yage Letters” appears on the same page, preceded by a reference to Burroughs in a lead article as “a key figure in today’s avant-garde myth” (titled “The Changing Guard”, the international avant-garde was the subject of the entire issue, with part two published a month later, also included here).
The inclusion of Burroughs in the company of concrete poets, Fluxus artists and other avant-garde writers may have been a belated recognition by the TLS of his importance following its negative review of his books by assistant editor John Willett in its November 14, 1963 issue. The infamous correspondence over the banning of Burroughs’ books that followed was the longest in the paper’s history, and a lengthy ad. from John Calder printed on p.690 in the first of the two issues here, requests readers’ support for his “decision to publish The Naked Lunch in October”. Burroughs, who was reluctant to be associated exclusively with the Beat movement, later remembered that his inclusion in “The Changing Guard” was “manouevered” by Dom Sylvester Houédard, “the beatnik priest”.
Several intersections exist between Burroughs’ work and that of the other writers, artists and thinkers featured in these two issues, including, as Phil Baker has pointed out, “the Situationists, notably in his sense that reality is constructed as a movie and we have to ‘Storm the Reality Studio’; this compares with Debord’s ideas of the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ ” ("William S. Burroughs". London: Reaktion Books, 2010, pp.150-151).
Also: Allen Ginsberg (the first appearance of “Back to the Wall”); Robert Watts; Dom Sylvester Houédard; Robert Creeley; Marshall McLuhan (“Culture and Technology”); John Arden; Maurice Girodias (“Advance through Obscenity?”); Michael Horovitz; Paul Ableman; Ian Hamilton Finlay; Adrian Henri; Anselm Hollo; Jackson Mac Low; Christopher Middleton; Edwin Morgan; Eduardo Paolozzi; Graham Reynolds; John Sharkey (“poemsequence for sam beckett”); and Emmett Williams. Books reviews (all unsigned) include “Rapel” by Finlay; Buckminster Fuller’s “No More Secondhand God”; La Monte Young’s “An Anthology”; and McLuhan’s “Understanding Media”.
One and a half pages on “Little Magazines” feature reviews of My Own Mag (“pretty far out”), Cleft, The Insect Trust Gazette, Locus Solus, and others, while an article a couple of pages later discusses “The Mimeograph Revolution” in the US.
Newsprint paper slightly age-toned; slight wear along spine fold and a little creasing to lower right corners; o/w Very Good. Unfolded.
ii) THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT No. 3262 (London: September 3, 1964). Tabloid size newspaper. 60pp. Cover by Jean Tinguely.
Part two of “The Changing Guard”, featuring “Special Statements” by Michèle Bernstein (“About the Situationist International”); Jörgen Nash (“Who are the Situationists?”); Konrad Bayer (“The Vienna Group”); Franz Mon; Max Bense; Décio Pignatari (“The Concrete Poets of Brazil”); Bruno Munari; Diter Rot; Isidore Isou (“The Creations of Lettrism”); Raoul Hausmann; and Otto Piene (“The Development of Group Zero”), plus poems and other writings by Armando; Jean Arp; H.C. Artmann; Ronaldo Azeredo; Miron Bialoszewski; Augusto De Campos; François Dufrêne; Gunnar Ekelof; Hans Magnus Enzensberger; Eugen Gomringer; Günter Grass; Miroslav Holub; Maurice Lemaître; George Macbeth; Harry Martinson; Franz Mon; José Paulo Paes; Décio Pignatari; Pentti Saarikoski; Enrique Uribe Jr.; and Wolfgang Weyrauch.
Book reviews include works by Barthes, Borges, Creeley, Dali, Isou, Michaux, and Queneau, while little magazines reviewed include Noigandres, Cinquième Saison, Kwy, Ur, Nul, Rhinozeros, and others, among them “Small Magazines of the Low Countries”.
Spine fold slightly frayed; light age-toning to newsprint; o/w Very Good. Unfolded.
Individual issues are pretty scarce, scarcer still as a pair.