Toronto Poetry Vendors: collect 'em all ...

Toronto Poetry Vendors: "(in)dispensable poetry"

The site maisonnueve reports that two Canadian poets have found a way -- finally -- to bring poetry to the people in a familiar and user-friendly method: the vending machine. For a toonie ($2 Canadian) the buyer receives a previously unpublished poem printed on bright-colored stock about the size of a pack of gum, sealed with a Toronto Poetry Vendor sticker. To sweeten the deal, each poem comes with a piece of Dubble Bubble gum. This should be comforting news for all consumers and their sweet tooth, with the potential for all kinds of imaginative applications: point-of-sale in doctor's offices, grocery stores, and banks.

Or not -- the machines are currently located mostly in Toronto coffeeshops and bookstores -- but the idea of finding poem-packets next to the candy and soda machines in the office break room or school lunch room in some alternate universe is worth at least a fleeting happy thought.

Rebecca Rosenblum calls the brightly-colored packages from the poetry-vending machine "baseball cards for the litsy set": The neat thing is that the poems are just stacked in there, and so when you turn the crank, you just get the next one in the queue, no picking and choosing. So after this afternoon’s lovely launch (excellent readings, excellent cookies), everyone in the audience bought a poem, and then milled around asking each other, “Who’d you get?” “Who’d you get?”

The fall edition of Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV) was released in October. Here's an excerpt from the post at maisonnueve:

Inspired by the Distriboto machines she’d seen in Montreal, Toronto poet Carey Toane dreamed up the idea of a machine that would dispense poems. When fellow poet and fiction writer Elisabeth de Mariaffi got on board, they found themselves sourcing Wrigley’s Excel gum machines on Craigslist and 3 months later, in April 2010, launched Canada’s first mechanical poetry journal, Toronto Poetry Vendors (TPV).

“The idea came out of the renaissance in handmade, DIY self-publishing in Toronto and the larger lit community, with all the beautiful hand-bound chapbooks and letter press books just begging to be handled and cracked open and enjoyed for their tactile qualities as much as for their content. I covet these things,” Toane says.

... The Fall 2010 issue, launched last month, includes poets Jeff Latosik, Michael Lista, Angela Hibbs and Nancy Jo Cullen, among others. The poems are printed on brightly coloured paper measuring the same dimension as a Wrigley’s brand package of Excel gum. “I’ve come to associate poets with a particular colour,” de Mariaffi says.

... The machines have names: Polar Ice is currently located at Toronto’s Type Books; Cinnamon is at a café called Ezra’s Pound, and Spearmint is located at Zoot’s Café. A travelling machine called Snacks — a former cigarette dispenser — is used for such events as the Brooklyn Book Fair in Brooklyn, New York, and Toronto’s Canzine fair. For three dollars, Snacks also delivers a poetry 2-pack wrapped in bright ribbon.

... Each broadside is weighted with a piece of Dubble Bubble because it helps with the mechanics of dispensing the product through the machine. Toane and de Mariaffi see the TPV as a way of broadening poetry’s exposure. “We wanted a way to showcase Toronto talent in a format that the average café patron would find intriguing but not intimidating. Books and reading and poetry can come across as stuffy and serious and not so much fun, which is a shame.”

For updates on the Toronto Poetry Vendors machines and launches, go here.


(Photo of TPV packet from maisonnueve; Carey Toane photo from Rebecca Rosenblum's blog Rose Coloured.)

"Two Times Intro: on the Road With Patti Smith," photos by Michael Stipe (1998)

This week Patti Smith received a National Book Award for Just Kids, her memoir of life in the 1970s with Robert Mapplethorpe. It's hard to believe now just how bohemian, uncommercial and downright scary the art scene of the East Village seemed to a nation grabbing up copies of albums by Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac. But time, memory, and the marketplace eventually have a way of softening all the rough edges -- in 2010, it's just as difficult to find a bohemian scene that doesn't eagerly get commercially packaged with the right image and promotion.

Two Times Intro, Michael Stipe's surprisingly incomplete photo essay of Patti on tour in 1998, is a minor disappointment. It's a sensation akin to discovering an old photo album with the more important events -- the ones you'd really like to see -- obviously missing from the book. What's there is intriguing but doesn't reveal a lot, and the out-of-focus style Stipe uses isn't artful, just simply affected. Somewhere in Michael's garage, and Oliver Ray's basement, there are some great photos of Patti-the-shaman, as William Burroughs describes her in his brief opening. I hope they don't get water-damaged in that cardboard box along with the discarded Polaroid camera.

In years gone by, there were days when giants roamed the earth (and long before the days of bands like Mastodon's Leviathan, whose literary claims extend to concept albums salvaging Moby Dick). Maybe my memory is being provoked by memories of long-gone concerts: I was at Madison Square for the Stones' Tour of the Americas show, part of of a fantastic week of rock performances described by Village Voice writer James Wolcott below. Here, from 1975, is the retelling of a backstage meeting of Patti Smith and Bob Dylan: New Jersey meets Rolling Thunder. Literary worlds were colliding, and in those days words provided a scene more visual than photographs.
A copy of Witt was slid across the table to Patti Smith. “Would you sign this for me, please?” “Sure,” said Patti, “what’s your first name?” He told her. “Like in New Jersey?” Patti asked, and he said no--with a z. “Well, I’ll draw you a map of Jersey,” and so on the inside page Patti scratched its intestinal boundaries, in the middle labeled it Neo Jersey, signed her name, and passed the copy of Witt back to Jerzy Kosinski.

The night before, after the second set at the Other End, the greenroom door opened and the remark hanging in the air was Bob Dylan asking a member of Patti’s band, “You’ve never been to New Jersey?” So, all hail Jersey. And in honor of Dylan’s own flair for geographical salutation (“So long New York, hello East Orange”), all hail the Rock and Roll Republic of New York. With the Rolling Stones holding out at Madison Square Garden, Patti Smith and her band at the Other End, and Bob Dylan making visitations to both events, New York was once again the world’s Rock and Roll Republic.

Patti Smith had a special Rimbaud-emblematized statement printed up in honor of Stones week, and when her band went into its version of “Time Is On My Side” (yes it is), she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Keith Richards T-shirt beneath. On the opening night she was tearing into each song and even those somewhat used to her galloping id were puzzled by lines like, “You gotta a lotta nerve sayin’ you won’t be my parking meter.”

Unknown to many in the audience, parked in the back of the room, his meter running a little quick, was the legendary Bobby D. himself. Dylan, despite his wary, quintessential cool, was giving the already highly charged room an extra layer of electricity and Patti, intoxicated by the atmosphere, rocked with stallion abandon. She was positively playing to Dylan, like Keith Carradine played to Lily Tomlin in the club scene from Nashville. But Dylan is an expert at gamesmanship, and he sat there, crossing and uncrossing his legs, playing back.

Afterwards, Dylan went backstage to introduce himself to Patti. He looked healthy, modestly relaxed (though his eyes never stopped burning with cool-blue fire), of unimposing physicality, yet the corporeal Dylan can never be separated from the mythic Dylan, and it’s that other Dylan--the brooding, volatile, poet-star of Don’t Look Back--who heightens or destroys the mood of a room with the tiniest of gestures. So despite Dylan’s casual graciousness, everyone was excitedly unsettled.

And there was a sexual excitation in the room as well. Bob Dylan, the verdict was unanimous, is an intensely sexual provocateur--“he really got me below the belt,” one of the women in the room said later. Understand, Dylan wasn’t egregiously coming on--he didn’t have to. For the sharp-pencil, slightly petulant vocals on Blood on the Tracks hardly prepared one for the warm, soft-bed tone of his speaking voice: the message driven home with that--Dylan offhand is still Dylan compelling. So with just small talk he had us all subdued, even Patti, though when the photographers’ popping flashbulbs began, she laughingly pushed him aside, saying, “Fuck you, then take my picture, boys.” Dylan smiled and swayed away.

Patti backstage, 1998, from Two Times Intro

The party soon broke up--Dylan had given his encouragement to Patti, the rest of us had a glimpse from some future version of Don’t Look Back (but with a different star)--and the speculation about Dylan’s visit commenced. What did his casual benediction signify?

Probably nothing, was the reasonable answer. But such sensible explanations are unsatisfying, not only because it’s a waste of Dylan’s mystique to interpret his moves on the most prosaic level, but because the four-day engagement at the Other End convincingly demonstrated that Patti and the band are no small-time cult phenomenon. Not only was Patti in good voice, but the band is extending itself confidently. Jay Doherty, the newly acquired drummer (he provides rhythmic heat, and Lenny Kaye has improved markedly on guitar--his solo on “Time Is On My Side” for example moves Keith Richards riffing to Verlaine slashing. The band’s technical improvement has helped revivify the repertoire: “Break It Up” is now more sharply focused, “Piss Factory” is dramatically jazzy, and their anthem, “Gloria,” ends the evening crashingly. Missing were “Free Money,” and “Land”--the Peckinpah-esque cinematic version of “Land of 1000 Dances”--which is being saved for the forthcoming album.

Years on: Marquee (from Two Times Intro, 1998)

Something is definitely going on here and I think I know what it is. During one of her sets Patti made the seemingly disconnected remark, “Don’t give up on Arnie Palmer.” But when the laughter subsided, she added, “The greats are still the greatest.” Yes, of course! All her life Patti Smith has had rock and roll in her blood--she has been, like the rest of us, a fan; this is part of her connection with her audience--and now she’s returning what rock has given her with the full force of her love.

Perhaps Dylan perceives that this passion is a planet wave of no small sweep. Yet what I cherished most about Patti’s engagement was not the pounding rock-and-roll intensity but a throwaway gesture of camaraderie. When Lenny Kaye was having difficulty setting up his guitar between numbers, Patti paced around, joked around, scratched her stomach, scratched her hair--still Kaye was not quite ready. “I don’t really mind,” she told the audience. “I mean, Mick would wait all night for Keith.”
Copyright © James Wolcott 1975

[from "Tarantula Meets Mustang: Dylan Calls On Patti Smith," by James Wolcott, Village Voice, July 7, 1975]

"Library of Dust": The art of the forgotten, rescued from an Oregon hospital

The Associated Press has reported that the Oregon State Hospital, once slated for demolition, will re-open next year after an extensive rebuilding program. As the article states, "The old crumbling hospital had toxic paint, asbestos and a leaky roof. Forty percent of it was unusable. In its place is a hospital designed to facilitate modern theories in mental health treatment, trying to mimic as much as possible daily life outside the institution."

Before its renovation the hospital also contained more than 3000 canisters which held cremated remains of patients. From poet C.A. Conrad comes a link to David Maisel's collection of these copper canisters, Library of Dust, which was mounted at San Francisco's Haines Gallery in 2008.

A book featuring Maisel's photographs of canisters found at the abandoned hospital (filming site of Milos Foreman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) is published by Chronicle Books. Conrad remarks, with the sweet irony that only all we the living can afford, "these people were so neglected, so hated for their conditions while living, but now people (can) flock from all over to see the urns of their remains."

From David Maisel's website: "Library of Dust depicts individual copper canisters, each containing the cremated remains of patients from a state-run psychiatric hospital. The patients died at the hospital between 1883 (the year the facility opened, when it was called the Oregon State Insane Asylum) and the 1970’s; their bodies have remained unclaimed by their families. The approximately 3,500 copper canisters have a handmade quality; they are at turns burnished or dull; corrosion blooms wildly from the leaden seams and across the surfaces of many of the cans.

Numbers are stamped into each lid; the lowest number is 01, and the highest is 5,118. The vestiges of paper labels with the names of the dead, the etching of the copper, and the intensely hued colors of the blooming minerals combine to individuate the canisters. These deformations sometimes evoke the celestial - the northern lights, the moons of some alien planet, or constellations in the night sky. Sublimely beautiful, yet disquieting, the enigmatic photographs in Library of Dust are meditations on issues of matter and spirit.

The room housing these canisters is an attempt for order, categorization, and rationality to be imposed upon randomness, chaos, and the irrational. The canisters, however, insistently and continually change their form over time; they are chemical and alchemical sites of transformation, both organic and mineralogical, living and dead. The Library of Dust describes this labyrinth, and in doing so, gives form to the forgotten."

Maisel, quoted here from a 2008 article at boingboing: “There are certainly physical and chemical explanations for the ways these canisters have transformed over time ... but perhaps the canisters also encourage us to consider what happens to our own bodies when we die, and what may happen to the souls that occupied our bodies. Matter, these canisters show, lives on when the body vanishes, even when it has been incinerated to ash by an institutional practice."

Burroughs and Bowles: Two new films

The New York Times this week carries articles about two films of interest to readers of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs. One of the films, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within is a new documentary by Yony Leyser that humanizes the writer's dark pronouncements of death, drugs and human failings -- the writer as bleak modern satirist.

(With Thanksgiving near, Burroughs' "A Thanksgiving Prayer" is a strong antacid to the long holiday season of national excess that extends until the coming new year.)

Although the Times review by Stephen Holden makes it clear that the writer's outlaw reputation made him a hero to many others, Burroughs ideas about the ultimate controlling force of drugs and addiction were those he himself struggled with, and advised others against.

"His on-and-off heroin addiction and writings about drugs may have made him a hipster saint, nicknamed 'the pope of dope,' but his message about heroin was a warning not to take it. He was obsessed with control, and for many years was controlled by his addiction."

The documentary is narrated by Peter Weller, who portrayed the writer in David Cronenberg's 1991 adaptation of Naked Lunch. For a writer who delighted in irony and wrote a piece called "The Last Words of Dutch Schultz," Burroughs's last scrawled message is "among the most conciliatory he ever wrote," Holden writes. “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller what there is.”

(Scenes above and below from You Are Not I, by Sara Driver)

The other film is a real discovery, a serendipitous finding covered in literal dust and insect powder in an empty house in Tangier. A print of You Are Not I, completed on $12,000 in 1981 by Sara Driver, exists only because the nervous filmmaker sent a copy of the 48-minute film to Bowles himself in Tangier. As the article states, Ms. Driver was "praying simply not to be sued."

As it turns out, this first-ever film adaptation of a Bowles story suffered not from Bowles's wrath -- he replied with a long letter to the young filmmaker -- but the ravages of time and a leak in a New Jersey storage warehouse: the original negative was destroyed. In time, Driver's only print was in such bad condition she would no longer let it be shown.

The print Driver sent to Bowles was among the papers and items found in a locked room in an empty house owned by Abdelouahed Boulaich, the writer's designated heir. On his invitation, Francis Poole of the University of Delaware describes what the two men found when the door was unlocked:

“For a second I felt like I was in one of the bug powder scenes from David Cronenberg’s film of William Burroughs’s novel ‘Naked Lunch,’ There were even letters from Burroughs to Paul Bowles scattered around. And some of those had insecticide on them.”

There are some humorous stories attached to the re-discovered film that come to light. Because the budget was so limiting, Driver asked friends to participate; one was the writer Luc Sante, who needed to drive in one scene. As the Times reports, Sante did not know how to drive. “I just needed to go across a parking lot in one scene, and I thought, ‘O.K., I can handle this,’ ” he said. “And I managed to run into a garbage can, which was the only other thing in the parking lot.”

(photo of Burroughs by Jon Blumb/Oscilloscope Laboratories; stills from You Are Not I by Nan Goldin, all from the New York Times.)

"Uncle Andy's Cats": James Warhola illustrates his uncle's creative chaos

Animals have been an integral part in the lives of many artists and writers. Creative individuals with career reputations for being reclusive, difficult or aloof have had their favorite pets. Late in life even the seemingly incorrigible William Burroughs himself played host to a succession of felines, and in 1954, unlikely as it seems, Andy Warhol already had a Manhattan apartment overrun with cats.

That year, he created a picture book of cats to give as Christmas gifts featuring calligraphy by his mother Julia. All but one of the Warhol cats (the real ones, 25 of them) answered to the name Sam, except for one named Hester, a gift from Gloria Swanson. Warhol hand-painted each of the lithographs in the edition of 150 copies of the book, and tinted Hester a beautiful pale wash of color. The book's name came from a suggestion by Warhol's friend Charles Lisanby. Julia wrote out the cover title with a missing letter "d": 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy. Warhol was charmed by the accidental nature of the imperfection and left his mother's original spelling intact.

It was never disclosed whether Warhol also meant to include only 17 cats in each book -- perhaps he felt that given the nature of cats, they would multiply in number to 25 soon enough. Which, apparently, is indeed what happened. James Warhola, the artist's nephew, completes the picture with Uncle Andy's Cats (Putnam, 2009).

It's the wide-eyed, illustrated children's story of how Hester and all the cats named Sam created a houseful of pets in the unlikeliest of settings. Warhol's new uptown apartment, in 1962, is already bursting with the advertising displays, Brillo boxes, and raw material of the new art he was creating. A carousel horse stands in the living room, and Siamese cats courtesy of Sam and Hester are everywhere.

For James it's a carnival-mirror image of his own father's work as a Pittsburgh junkman, and the seven-year-old is understandably delighted. He and his six siblings have the run of the townhouse's three floors, play in rooms crammed with bric-a-brac, wake Uncle Andy in the morning curled up with a bed full of cats.

The carnival atmosphere, of course, is not for everyone. In the previous story of Uncle Andy's: A Faabbbulous Visit With Andy Warhol (Putnam, 2003), James's mother wonders when Andy is going to clean up the mess. James and his father, though, are amused at Andy's ability to turn what looks like junk into something else altogether: art.

The cats, surely one or two who were presented as gifts as well, made an impression on Warhol's young nephew. His family's trips from Pittsburgh to New York provide James with an early and very unique glimpse of an artist at work. The visits are also an ad hoc education on the value of creative chaos.

The two books illustrate a cheerful family dynamic, presenting an aspect of Andy's private life that seldom gets explored, and as a children's book it's natural that the impromptu family visits never collide with Andy's more arcane and famous personal pursuits.

But the visits inspire James to develop as an artist, briefly working for Andy himself, then as an illustrator of science fiction (to Andy's chagrin) and also a staff artist for Mad magazine as one of its "Usual Gang of Idiots."

Both books are meant to be fun introductions to the original King of Pop. Warhola's intention in creating the books for children, he states in an illustrated interview, is to demonstrate "there are better things in life than watching TV." In addition to his career as an illustrator Warhola is a consultant of the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in the family's ancestral town in Slovakia, a permanent exhibit filled with art created by Andy, Paul, and James.

(This post is for Dexter, the eleven-year-old adventurer.)

"Evolving English" exhibit opens at the British Library: "One language, many voices"

A page from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 11th century

Pity the British. Their empire was once so large the sun never set on it, which was quite a trick -- it was always a busy tea-time somewhere in the world. Where would their grand design have been without worldwide markets for tea, opium, and tobacco? Now the English language is the remaining common thread that holds the whole crumpet together.

Thursday marks the 533rd anniversary of the first book printed in the English language in movable type, William Caxton's Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers. Here's a sample of the book's typeface, from Tom Christiansen:

Beginning November 12, the British Library is celebrating "Evolving English," which in itself a mighty undertaking: Anglo Saxon Chronicle, check. Voices of the UK reading "Mr. Tickle," got it. Anyone for texting?

There is also the Evolving English blog, which outlines some of the difficulties a mighty empire encounters when trying for centuries to get so many people to speak the same language: "The sound in words like think, for instance, has recognisable alternatives in London, the Republic of Ireland, Jamaica and on the Indian subcontinent and pronunciation varies considerably among non-native speaker groups."

Politically and socially, the exhibit is a way to contemplate the ways dialect differences separated the rural from the urban, the royal court from the East End, and all other kinds of linguistic yardsticks that a lively language assumes.

If a trip to London isn't in your plans before April, the website is a good alternative: "the roots of Old English, slang dictionaries, medieval manuscripts, advertisements and newspapers from around the world come together - alongside everyday texts and dialect sound recordings. Follow the social, cultural and historical influences on the English language."

A quiz on the site tests your knowledge of the history of English, or more properly see how much you've forgotten about it. And, finally, a hat-tip to the colonies from a reader at Language Hat about the exhibition: "Many thanks to the Americans who sponsored it!"

"Now Dig This" : Tip-top Terry Southern's misadventures in "the quality lit game"

Now dig this: Here's two hundred fifty pages of wildly unclassifiable, wholly entertaining (and, yes indeed, some unspeakable) bits and pieces of Southern's magazine writings, interviews, stories, and routines.

A genuine literary anarchist with a wicked wit and an incredible eye for detail -- his Esquire piece on the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 is classic eyewitness journalism -- Southern was also a screenwriter (The Cincinnati Kid, The Loved One, Barbarella, Easy Rider, Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and others), a satirist, and an agent provocateur who relished goading people into revealing their true personalities. He became adept at telling stories that finished with "the put-away," the telling detail that drove home the point of the tale. Poor E.B. White of The New Yorker comes out the worse for wear for Terry's over-the-top interrogation techniques, I'm afraid.

Fueled by booze, pills and powders, Southern swings through the decades not just as an observer but a participant at the center of it all (he was a writer both for National Lampoon and SNL, pals with Lennon, the Stones and Burroughs, as well as Kubrick and George Plimpton). It seems there's hardly a scene he doesn't make, including an appearance on the cover of Sgt. Pepper.

The book is filled with newly discovered bits of weirdness -- a lost scene for Kubrick's 1980 draft of Eyes Wide Shut then called "Rhapsody," an outrageous SNL sketch idea taken from National Enquirer called "Worm Ball Man," incendiary letters sent to the editors of Ms. Magazine, and a pitch to Lenny Bruce for a part in Southern's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One in 1964:

Len Big Bopper -- Enclosed please find cine script by yrs truly ... It is our very real hope that you will consider the role of the "Guru Brahmin" -- which can be altered and grooved up infinitely, natch, to your own outlandish specifications. You will be rubbing shoulders, Len (if not, in fact, pelvic regions) with such star and feature players as Sir John ("Jack") Gielgud (Francis), Jonathan Winters (Harry and the Dreamer), Rod Steiger (Joyboy), Liberace (Starker), Dana Andrews (Gen Schmuck), Keenan Wynn (Immigration Officer), and a host of other show-stoppers of equally curious persuasions. Director is tip-top Tony R, the Oscar-copping madcap, and, as I say, chief scripter is yrs truly. ... The Guru's lines appear on pages as per follows: 75, 76, 93, 119, 120, 141, 142, and 143. Please note that scene 131 gives you an excellent shot at the fantastic winner of our young beautiful girl star, whose name I will not reveal to you at this moment due to its effect of instant shoot-off.

Terry Southern photographed by Stanley Kubick, 1963

It's easy to romanticize (and criticize) the alcohol and drug-taking frenzy of so much of Southern's work, yet the sheer variety of it all (of which this book is just a part) is amazing, not to mention the amount of "quality lit" he produced for newspapers, magazines and journals -- Grand Street, The Nation, The Herald Tribune. He may have just been paying bills in between the more grandiose flights of fancy, but Southern showed a genuine interest and admiration for writers like Henry Green, the British novelist whose works had not been yet published in the U.S. His lengthy interview with Green in The Paris Review (1959) was done at Southern's own suggestion. And then there's his wry appreciation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym:" "Here is a work which does not appear on any reading list at any school in the country -- by virtue of its extreme weirdness."

Southern spelled out his artistic credo in an interview in The New York Times, 1964: "The important thing in writing," he said, "is the capacity to astonish. Not shock -- shock is a worn-out word -- but astonish. The world has no grounds whatever for complacency. The Titanic couldn't sink, but it did. Where you find smugness, you find something worth blasting. I want to blast it." He was a painfully shy man and reluctant to talk much about himself, but when he was asked how he felt about his treatment at the hands of the critics over the years, he quoted T. S. Eliot. " 'Poetry,' he said, 'is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.' Here's the put-away," Southern continued. " 'But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.' "

Southern outside Gaudi's Sagrada Familia Cathedral, Barcelona, Spain

Ironically, Terry Southern's wildly prolific writing career created a literary reputation that has only undergone a transformation in the past few years. His son Nile has set about refurbishing his father's literary estate, approving a biography (A Grand Guy, by Lee Hill, 2001) and publishing a memoir of his father's time in 1950s Paris writing for Olympia Press (The CANDY Men, 2004), as well as collecting the wealth of material that appears in Now Dig This, compiled with Josh Alan Friedman. A good chunk of Southern's unpublished material -- including an early Kubrick interview (1962) -- appears in a 2004 issue of Stop Smiling magazine. Nile Southern writes in his introduction, entitled "Resurrection Now!":

I realized I had a strange beast on my hands: as a link between the Beats and the Beatles, pop culture and "Quality Lit," Terry was a literary anomaly. With over 40 boxes of "archive," I got busy. I turned to the neglected work ... I copied everything and began "packaging" dear old dad. He may have defied labels in his day, but in today's pop culture, Terry Southern needed some re-branding.

In 2005, Nile Southern was asked in an interview what his father would make of television's current obsession with reality programs. After the interviewer pointed out the echoes of Southern's 1968 comedy The Magic Christian and what people would -- and would not -- do for money, Nile replied: "I think he would look at them and he'd say, 'Wow!' I think he's gathered around with the ghosts of Michael O'Donoghue and Lenny Bruce and looking at all this with astonishment. And chuckling." For more information on the grand guy himself, visit www.terrysouthern.com.