Blog Archives
This American Burroughs
Hey, Insomniacs! I’m getting a slow start on the week after spending Monday driving back from Asheville, North Carolina. I played a solo singer/songwriter gig there over the weekend and had a real blast bumming around that great little mountain town with my girlfriend. Check out my YouTube channel to see videos from the show. On [...]
Gentleman Cybernaut
Today I have 1013 followers on Twitter, but last night I had 997. The milestone seemed like an opportunity to interact with some folks and get some help scrambling over the hump. A while back, a literary journal I review books for was in a similar position: The folks in charge of their funding were [...]
Pretty Pictures: Lynch and Burroughs
In 1963, William S. Burroughs wrote down his photographic manifesto: “Take. Rearrange. Take.” For Burroughs, photography wasn’t an art form so much as it was a weapon he employed to disrupt time. Ideas about the interactions between time, space, words and images will be familiar to any reader of Burroughs’ works, but it’s less likely [...]
Happy Birthday, PKD!
Readers of this blog know that I love Philip K. Dick. Dick is one of my all time favorite authors — he was a poster-boy for tortured artists, an active participant in the counterculture of his day, an incredibly prolific author, and a mystic visionary whose life was full of strange happenings that blurred the [...]
Insomnia Gives Thanks
Thanksgiving is an important day: It marks the beginning of the traditional holiday season for most white, Christian Americans and it reminds all of us immigrants of when we first began to call this land our home. These events have importance in and of themselves and should not be dismissed. However, the world is a [...]
Burroughs Curses Capote
I’ve spent a lot of time in the music scene and in the art world, but in my experience there is nothing like a literary crowd for jealousy, resentment, backbiting and general bad sportsmanship. With this in mind it may come as no surprise that there was no love lost between William S. Burroughs and [...]
Harlan Ellison Troll Hunter
Harlan Ellison is one of the greatest authors of science fiction and fantasy ever. He’s written more than 1,700 short stories, novellas, screenplays, comic book scripts, teleplays, essays as well as criticism covering literature, film, television, and print media. He edited and anthologized two groundbreaking science fiction collections, Dangerous Visions (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions [...]
Batman 75
While I’ve been posting all year about the William S. Burroughs centenary, I have yet to mark this illuminated text with the dark shadow of Batman who is celebrating his 75th anniversary this year. “The Caped Crusader,” “The Dark Knight,” “The World’s Greatest Detective,” first appeared in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Batman earned his [...]
King Crimson
For this spooky October post I found a little gem on YouTube. It claims to be the first ever television interview with Stephen King and since I couldn’t find an earlier one on the site, I’m gonna take their word for it. The interview takes place one decade into King’s career after he’s written horror [...]
Bukowski’s Last Straw
Continuing to remember the 20th anniversary of the death of Charles Bukowski in 1994, here is a video of the poet’s last reading in 1980. While he continued to write for the last 14 years of his life, he never read his work in public again. Here’s the story behind this document from the Wiki… [...]
