Tuesday 19 March 2013

The Exterminator - William Burroughs & Brion Gysin (Haselwood Books, 1967)


The Exterminator by Burroughs & Gysin has been on my wants list since late last year but it took this long to find one for a price I was willing to pay. It's the second printing...and if you want bibliographic details, history etc etc go here, the source of the cut-up below. Scanned a few randomly selected pages.

'Write your own message that is you..with scissors or switchblade as preferred..'










5 comments:

  1. I finally snagged a first edition of The Exterminator last month for the shockingly small sum of $30. And it's not beat all to hell and stained with cat piss either. Not yet, anyway.

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    Replies
    1. Lucky you! I wonder if any of Bill's books were stained with cat piss...

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    2. RE the urine:
      I expect so. In the introduction to Last Words James Grauerholz writes of Burroughs's elderly affection for cats (B's first entry into the Last Words journals is about one of his dying): 'Keeping all these cats in his small home, with cat-doors arranged to allow them to come in and go out at will, created a situation marked by frequent cat-feeding interruptions, continual feline vomiting and squabbling, and a house steeped with the rank smell of cat piss.'

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  2. Errr thank you much for upping this hugely useful to a young undergrad writing English dissertation on cut-up writing. I was thinking though, if I ever got hands on one of these, I'd fuckin scan and slam the whole lot on the webnet fast - it's what the invisible man would have wanted for certain, what him brought to mimeo underground press in first place, the paradoxical logic of fighting the word virus with its virus – BUT CUT. Thanks anyway.

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