Next Week at City Lights

by admin Posted on January 31, 2014

Burroughs at 100: The Films of William S Burroughs
Monday, February 3, 2014, 8:00 p.m., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
A screening of the William S Burrough’s films Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, and Bill and Tony.
with commentary by Mindaugis Bagdon
Admission Free
In the early sixties, William S Burroughs, the artist Brion Gysin and filmmaker Anthony Balch met at the Beat Hotel in Paris, and an alembic of creativity was unleashed that has for years achieved acclaim, primarily in avante garde circles, but who’s influence was felt in everything from the world of advertising to rock videos and beyond. Burroughs was interested in the ways that the ideas and themes in his books could be explored on film. Anthony and Brion proved to be the perfect collaborators and the cut-up method utilized in many of the Burroughs novels saw extensive use in these films. Though relatively short in duration, the works serve as important documents illustrating many of the ideas developed by Burroughs and Gysin in their artistic laboratory.
This event is part City Lights’ celebration of the 100th Birth Day of William S Burroughs. It is followed by a second event, Tuesday, February 4, 2014, 8:00 p.m. with Burroughs biographer Barry Miles in conversation with V Vale in the Lecture Hall at the San Francisco Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94133. A third event will cap off the festivities on Sunday, February 9, 2014, 5:00 p.m. at City Lights Bookstore with local authors and Burrough;s afficionados reading from and discussing his work.
Mindaugis Bagdon is an independent filmmaker and film historian living in the Bay Area. His film short Louder, Faster, Shorter has been hailed as a counter-culture gem, being the first film to chronicle the burgeoning punk scene in late 70′s San Francisco. He has worked in the film industry and his credits include camera work on numerous films including Rust Never Sleeps, Isle of the Snake People, The Exiles, Never Cry Wolf, as well as work on National Geographic Specials, and other documentaries. He was contributing editor to the seminal punk journal Search and Destroy and has lectured about the early San Francisco punk scene. He knew William S Burroughs personally.

Burroughs at 100: Barry Miles in conversation with V.Vale
Tuesday, February 4, 2014, 8:00 p.m., San Francisco Art Institute, Lecture Hall, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, CA 94133 Admission Free
On the occasion of the 100th birthday of the influential counter-culture legend, William S Burroughs, City Lights in conjunction with the San Francisco Art Institute presents an evening with Barry Miles joined in conversation by V Vale exploring the life and work of one of the most important American writers.
Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer asserted, “William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.” Few since have taken such literary risks, developed such individual political or spiritual ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media. Burroughs wrote novels, memoirs, technical manuals, and poetry. He painted, made collages, took thousands of photographs, produced hundreds of hours of experimental recordings, acted in movies, and recorded more CDs than most rock bands. Burroughs was the original cult figure of the Beat Movement, and with the publication of his novel, Naked Lunch, which was originally banned for obscenity, he became a guru to the 60s youth counterculture. In CALL ME BURROUGHS, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century—and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs’s life and examine his long-term cultural legacy. V Vale is one of the countries leading archivist of Burroughs related material. Having known him personally, he will add anecdotes and insights to the evenings discussion.
What has been said about Call Me Burroughs:
“Miles just puts it all on paper with aplomb and deadpan wit, showing how the gross-out surrealism of Burroughs’s fiction flowed from the lurid creativity of everyday life.” (Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review))
“One long, strange, profoundly American literary life. Burroughs’s work has had a profound if often oblique influence on the writing of his century and this one. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to read Barry Miles’s biography without being thoroughly familiar with the outline of the narrative. Truly, stranger than fiction.” (William Gibson)
“CALL ME BURROUGHS takes us deeply inside the magical life of the great writer. Miles’s decision to tell the epic story through William Burroughs’s search for his ‘Ugly Spirit’ makes for sensational reading. Brilliant, tragic, controversial, and inspiring, CALL ME BURROUGHS is a beautiful work.” (Victor Bockris, author of With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, Conversations with William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, and Burroughs in the Bunker)
“CALL ME BURROUGHS is the most intimate portrait to date of one of the twentieth century’s most complicated, troubled, and influential figures. Miles’s deep knowledge of the man and the work also provides a cultural history of the scene in Tangiers in the 1950s, the Beat era, and the emerging Punk scene in New York in the 1980s. It is a compelling biography and social history unlike any other.” (Ira Silverberg, co-editor of Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader)
“CALL ME BURROUGHS is full of energy and surprise and is a delight to read. Barry Miles combines his intimate knowledge of Burroughs with the meticulous research of Burroughs’s companion James Grauerholz, to produce an extremely accurate, readable, and entertaining biography of one of the most inventive writers of the twentieth century. Reading this extraordinary book is like hanging around with Burroughs himself and is impossible to forget.” (Bill Morgan, author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg and The Typewriter Is Holy)
“By any standard Burroughs’s was an unusual life, full of scandal, subversion, and sensitivity hidden behind a cold blue gaze. Miles enriches this ‘life of an artist’ with decades of dedicated immersion in the work both published and unpublished, digging deep into archival material and manuscripts, incorporating journals of friends and acquaintances. With great authority and verve, he brings up to date the legacy of a true American original who grows, even years after his death, in fascination.” (Regina Weinreich, author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics and editor of Kerouac’s Book of Haikus)
About the Author
Barry Miles is the author of many seminal books on popular culture, including the authorized biography of Paul McCartney, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now; Ginsberg: A Biography; William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible; Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats; and The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963. He also co-edited the Revised Text Edition of Naked Lunch. Miles was born in Cirencester, England.
V Vale the publisher of Re/Search Books and an archivist and historian of counter-cultural history. Visit: www.researchpubs.com

Alejandro Murguia
Wednesday, February 5th, 2014, 7:00pm, City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
Please join us in celebrating San Francisco Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia!  We’re publishing his Stray Poems in our SF Poet Laureate Series, and Alejandro will read from this new collection of poetry.
The sixth volume of the San Francisco Poet Laureate Series, Stray Poems opens with Alejandro Murguía’s inaugural address, where he stipulates that as the city’s first Latino poet laureate he is accepting his post on behalf of his community. He goes on to provide a brilliant and impassioned poetic account of San Francisco’s Native and Latino literary history, stating, “So Latin America fused to the history of San Francisco, and vice versa—San Francisco fused to the memory of Latin America.”
What follows is a selection of Murguía’s recent work composed over the past twelve years.
These are poems of the 21st century, written in a combination of English and Spanish—the patois of contemporary America. Angry, rebellious, subversive, sentimental, hip, urban, local, global—these poems stray from academia, the status quo, patriotism—and even God—as all poetry must.
Praise for Alejandro Murguía & Stray Poems:
“In the city of poets, Murguía has become the activist voice of refugees and exiles—as so many of us are, even as natives—at the center of the Americas. Disguised by its sensuous intimacy, soothing and ennobling, his is a poetry that arms the resistance.”—Dagoberto Gilb, author of The Magic of Blood
“Poet, teacher, publisher, lover, literary guerrilla—Alejandro Murguía is a San Francisco treasure. And I’m not saying this because he knows where to find the best pozole. Although he does.”—Jack Boulware, Litquake co-founder
“The powerful stream of rich, diverse Spanish spoken in the United States by millions of Latinos from Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, has rushed into the huge river of the English tongue in such a way that a language and a literature have been born from those troubled waters, exploring multiple alternatives and choosing many paths. These Stray Poems from Alejandro Murguía speak with all those voices, crossing linguistic borders and really going out of the way to deviate from the standard path and let the multiracial and multicultural, all-embracing Latino beat flow into the heart of English.”—Daisy Zamora, The Violent Foam
“Murguía with a tango unleashed, a city on fire, a rendezvous of homage, manifesto, revenge and transcendence—he is alone, without a face, yet recognizable in every body that swims through the under-streets of the City, of Paris, of Havana, of bombed-out-Here’s-and-There’s and the stripped down body of all of us. No stones are left unturned; hypnotic, alarming, ‘melodramático,’ rough-lovin’, unkempt, ‘dangerous,’ and ready to battle at the center of the scorched core. ‘I didn’t cheat,’ one poem admits. He is on trial—fire-spitter and disassembler of cultural falsifications, in ‘strange’ and romantic moods, the poems scatter truth and aim and blow and burn and rise unto the flagless sky—’. . . a country of oceans and mountains.’ Murguía gets there. Alone, because few embark on that voyage. An astonishing, brutal nakedness. Love, that is. No book like it. An unimaginable heart of and for the peoplea ground-breaking prize.”—Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of California

Jesse Ball
Thursday February 6th, 2014, 7:00 P.M., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
considering the resonance and breadth of his new book
Silence Once Begun
from Pantheon Books
From the celebrated author of The Curfew (“A spare masterwork of dystopian fiction” —The New York Times Book Review), Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun is an astonishing novel of unjust conviction, lost love, and a journalist’s obsession.
Over the course of several months, eight people vanish from their homes in the same Japanese town, a single playing card found on each door. Known as the “Narito Disappearances,” the crime has authorities baffled—until a confession appears on the police’s doorstep, signed by Oda Sotatsu, a thread salesman. Sotatsu is arrested, jailed, and interrogated—but he refuses to speak. Even as his parents, brother, and sister come to visit him, even as his execution looms, and even as a young woman named Jito Joo enters his cell, he maintains his vow of silence. Our narrator, a journalist named Jesse Ball, is grappling with mysteries of his own when he becomes fascinated by the case. Why did Sotatsu confess? Why won’t he speak? Who is Jito Joo? As Ball interviews Sotatsu’s family, friends, and jailers, he uncovers a complex story of heartbreak, deceit, honor, and chance.
Wildly inventive and emotionally powerful, Silence Once Begun is a devastating portrayal of a justice system compromised, and evidence that Jesse Ball is a voraciously gifted novelist working at the height of his powers.
Jesse Ball is the author of three previous novels including Samedi the Deafness, and several works of verse, bestiaries, and sketchbooks. His prizes include the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize; his verse has been included in the Best American Poetry series. He gives classes on lucid dreaming and lying in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA Writing program.

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