Free Thought Vol. 2, No. 2

by Free Thought Publications,. Free Thought Publications, Gary Aposhian, PO Box 238671, Encinitas, CA. 92023

Book Review by Michael Basinski

There are those among use infected by William S. Burroughs. This issue, most wonderful, feeds the need, lust, craving. It’s called a Burroughs retrospective and features interviews, with a Burroughs focus, with Anne Waldman, James Grauerholt and Charles Plymell, and photographs of Burroughs and Burroughs with friends, and publishes a previously unprinted Burroughs audio classic. There is an essay called Back at to Pond by Arthur S. Nusbaum and an essay titled The Junky Essay by Bradley Mason Hamlin. It has been a good while since I checked into Junky, but after reading Hamlin’s piece, Junky summons me again like some siren and I, some lost sailor, must obey. And there is an essay by James McCrary, himself a fine artist poet, called Allen Visits William. The Allen is Allen Ginsberg and not Edgar ALLEN Poe. But thinking of Burroughs, it could be Poe. Lots of ands in this note, and here’s another, and there are a good thirty plus poems as a center to this issue of Free Thought, and they all by MFA students of Gerald Locklin from California State University, Long Beach. Now this is what a magazine should be. Think poetry locally, act poetry globally. Free Thought always takes the notion of populace poetry as the most important poetry. Good for Free Thought and our free thought. I once saw Burroughs. He read sections of Naked Lunch, acted the part of Dr. Benway, and a troop of actors acted some of his skits. A strange night. A guy in the audience stripped and charged Burroughs, screaming, tell us the words. There was a fire in the auditorium. It was all very oddly real. Once, I was sitting in my apartment, reading, I don’t know, The Ticket That Explored, something, Exterminator, I don’t know and then I went out to a bar. Everyone in the bar was in the prose I had just read. It was all very oddly real. No got. Come Friday. Relax, Johnny.