INTERNATIONAL TIMES: Malcolm Mc Neill interviewed by James Reich
January 23rd, 2014
In February 2014, William S. Burroughs will not be 100 years old; like Ronald Reagan before him, he will be dead. The fingernails will have trailed out a little further and the hair may test subtly at the limits of the casket. There will be great lamentation for this postmodern Nebuchadnezzar, his hanging gardens, his luminous talent, his moments of possessed unreason, and his legendary humbling. It is one of the marks of our culture that the living dead are now seen ‘at 100’… February 2014 will also mark one year since I began corresponding with Malcolm Mc Neill, the graphic artist who made the most significant visual contribution to the Burroughs oeuvre, in a collaboration of intimately woven image and text. Their direct working relationship lasted seven years, from 1970 until the culmination of the project Ah Pook Is Here, when Mc Neill found himself “occluded from space-time like an eel’s ass occludes when he stops eating on the way to Sargasso…Locked out…” These spectacular panoramas and graphic novel abstractions went largely unseen until the publication of his exceptional memoir Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook and Me; and The Lost Art of Ah Pook: Images From The Graphic Novel (Fantagraphics). Until 2012, few were aware of Mc Neill’s role in defining elements of Burroughs’ work, even if they knew the largely pointless vanity projects like Burroughs’ famous junkies ‘collaboration’ with Kurt Cobain. Over the weekend commemorating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the great bull’s eye for publishers, historians and revisionists, Mc Neill and I spoke by telephone about anniversaries, the ethics of posthumously altering the work of a dead artist, and some of the unanswered questions surrounding the publication of Ah Pook Is Here.