| Few writers
employed the interview form as constructively and critically
as Burroughs. Between 1965 and 1969 he worked almost exclusively
on tape-recorded experiments. The results were The
Electronic Revolution (1970); The Job (1970),
by Daniel Odier and Burroughs; and Victor Bockris' With
William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (1981),
a portrait of Burroughs in the New York years, 1974-1980.
Burroughs used interviews "much as he used writing, as
a means of trying on multiple characters, attitudes and
voices," writes Lotringer. "He rightly saw the interview
as an opportunity to present himself in a more sustained
and reflective fashion. Interviews also gave him a way
of coming up with thoughts he would not have had a chance
to express otherwise."
Lotringer completed the
truly mammoth task of rescuing from oblivion these texts
and fashioning them into a book that is a joy to browse through,
to read for minutes or hours. Like Naked Lunch ,
it offers ports of entry on every page. It was twelve years
in the making and engaged the labors of countless Burroughsians
in the United States, England, France, and Germany. Burroughs
Live offers us, writes Lotringer, "the possibility
of spending time in the company of the writer, of asking
him questions that one would have wanted clarified, catching
glimpses of the way Burroughs' 'intricate kind of mind,'
as he once himself described it, worked as it rose to the
challenge and strove to spell out what had remained latent
in the work-what his sensitive antennae picked up unconsciously
when tuning to the various currents of his time." |
