NOW NOW NOW Charles Plymell William Burroughs – Rare 1966 Underground Magazine

Description

NOW NOW NOW was the third and final incarnation of Charles Plymell’s extraordinary NOW magazine, following NOW and NOW NOW, and by this issue the conventional literary magazine had essentially exploded. Printed by Plymell himself in San Francisco, its enormous 11 × 17-inch pages became canvases for poetry, collage, found material, telegrams, typography and cut-up texts. Plymell was moving in the overlapping worlds of the Beats, the emerging San Francisco counterculture and experimental visual art, and NOW NOW NOW captures that collision beautifully. The magazine is less something to sit down and read sequentially than an artifact to unfold and explore. Granary Books notes Plymell’s ability to vary paper size and printing methods as the material demanded and identifies NOW as one of the particularly interesting little magazines of its period.

Most important here is William S. Burroughs’s “Afterbirth of Dream Now,” a genuine cut-up collaboration between Burroughs and Plymell. According to Plymell’s account, he sent Burroughs an article and Burroughs returned the material cut up; the resulting work was published here and is bibliographically recorded as Maynard & Miles C129. Elsewhere are Claude Pélieu’s wonderfully deranged telegram constructions, Norman Mustill and Plymell collages, poetry by Philip Whalen and Roxie Powell, and work by Antonin Artaud and others. The combination of literary experimentation and visual disruption places NOW NOW NOW squarely in that mid-1960s moment when Beat writing, Dada, collage and the emerging underground press began bleeding into one another.

A scarce, wonderfully unruly artifact of the 1960s underground—and an important early appearance of William Burroughs’s cut-up work in the American little-magazine world.