Burroughs at 110 and Beatdom #24
Beat news and updates
Beat Birthdays
February 5th, 2024 will mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of William S. Burroughs. To celebrate, Beatdom will publish a range of articles and interviews about him on our website. This includes contributions from various people in the world of Burroughs Studies.
Posting will begin on Burroughs’ birthday (next Monday) and we will put a new piece online about every two days from then until the end of the month. There is a rough schedule here, which will be updated with a new live link each time an article is published, so you may want to bookmark it. We will also post links on our Facebook page.
(If you have anything you wish to contribute to our celebration, feel free to get in touch. We are especially keen to know what people want/expect from the next 10 years of Burroughs’ Studies.)
Over at the excellent European Beat Studies Network, there will also be a Burroughsian celebration on the 5th. Oliver Harris will speak with Alex Wermer-Colan in an event called “BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS: William Burroughs at 110.” Find out how to listen in here.
Before Burroughs turns 110, though, Allan Temko (who featured in several of Kerouac’s books) will turn 100, so watch out for another special post on February 4th.
Other Beat birthdays this month include Neal Cassady and Ray Bremser.
Beatdom #24
I would also like to remind everyone on this e-mail list that we are still open for submissions until March 1st, which is one month from today. The theme for this issue is the West Coast and we are open to the usual – essays, reviews, interviews, poetry, etc. The details are here. That issue will go on sale in May and pre-order links will go live at some point in March.
We will announce the finalised contents of Beatdom #24 later, but for now I can say we will have essays on the westward Beat migration, the West Coast morphing of Beats into hippies, personal memoirs of time spent with ruth weiss and Gary Snyder, an account of Beat life in San Francisco by Weldon Kees, and two very exciting interviews.
It’s going to be another big issue… Stay tuned.