Blue Sugar Mice and the Death Drive
Tom McCarthy has penned the introduction to Deborah Levy‘s forthcoming Swimming Home (And Other Stories, October 2011). Here’s an extract: If, as a young aspirant writer in the early-to-mid 1990s, you raised your head and took a look around the British literary landscape, one figure stood out from all the others: Deborah Levy. Read two […]
Occupy the Reality Studio
‘The word’, Burroughs proposed, ‘is one of the most powerful instruments of control as exercised by the newspaper… Now if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system’. Burroughs adopted and adapted the cut-up method, which he used in the belief that by disordering language and subverting its operations he might achieve a glimpse of a different reality. At the same time, Burroughs realised that ‘Consciousness is a cut-up; life is a cut-up’, so here was a method of writing, or of rewriting, that was truer to human experience than was regular, linear narrative.
Sam Cooper reviews Edward S. Robinson‘s Shift Linguals: Cut-up Narratives from William S. Burroughs to the Present.