William S. Burroughs lecture,writing class, June 25,1986, on paranormal, synchronicity, dreams

Audio recording of a lecture & writing class with students at Naropa University. Poet Allen Ginsberg is also in the audience. Burroughs covers topics including paranormal phenomena, magic, synchronicity, precognition, dreams, his cut-ups technique for writing, & he answers many questions from students & from Ginsberg in a Q & A. He reads from some of his fiction & non-fiction writings. The woman who asks many questions near the end & thanks him at the end I believe is Anne Waldman of Naropa University.

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William S. Burroughs lecture, July 20,1976, on paranormal, EVP, text+tape cut-ups, prognostication

This audio recording complements the previous one.

In this recording Burroughs covers the cut-up method of writing in some detail, & reads from his own cut-up writings, as well as some by Burroughs’ sometime collaborator Brion Gysin. Burroughs describes how some cut-ups appear to be uncanny prognosticators, accurately predicting future events, according to Burroughs.

He also describes experiments with audio cut-ups using tape recorders. He had intended to play recordings of some of Gysin’s tape experiments at this lecture, but the tapes had not arrived on time. Instead, Burroughs describes some of the cut-up tape experiments.

And he covers other tape experiments that interest him conducted by paranormal investigators & what today is commonly known as EVP (electronic voice phenomena), where tape recorders are supposed to record unexplained mysterious human voices though no such sound input is available to the recorder. Burroughs refers to these as “Paranormal Voices” experiments/phenomena.

Burroughs also makes reference to dreams, the last words of Dutch Schultz, Shakespeare, computers, Homer, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, & Carl Jung.
There’s a long Q & A session with students at the end.