My second full length book, In Praise of Copying, will be published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2010. The book is devoted to a deceptively simple but original argument: that copying is an essential part of being human, that the ability to copy is worthy of celebration, and that, without recognizing how integral copying is to being human, we cannot understand ourselves or the world we live in.
In spite of the laws, stigmas, and anxieties attached to it, the word “copying” permeates contemporary culture, shaping discourse on issues from hip hop to digitization to gender reassignment, and is particularly crucial in legal debates concerning intellectual property and copyright. Yet as a philosophical concept, copying remains poorly understood. Working comparatively across cultures and times, MB undertakes an examination of what this word means—historically, culturally, philosophically—and why it fills us with fear and fascination. He argues that the dominant legal-political structures that define copying today obscure much broader processes of imitation that have constituted human communities for ages and continue to shape various subcultures today. Drawing on contemporary art, music and film, the history of aesthetics, critical theory, and Buddhist philosophy and practice, In Praise of Copying seeks to show how and why copying works, what the sources of its power are, and the political stakes of renegotiating the way we value copying in the age of globalization.
The Road of Excess began as my doctoral dissertation in the Comparative Literature department at New York University. I had been working with community based AIDS research groups, helping to write protocols for studies of promising anti-HIV drugs and I had the idea of applying the idea of a "literature review", used in medical studies to show the history of research on a drug, to psychoactive or recreational drugs and the writers who'd used them. I was interested in seeing if literary accounts of drug use gave a consistent account of the effects of drugs like marijuana or opium over time -- or if the meaning of a particular chemical substance was also "socially constructed" and changed over time, with users' experiences reflecting the historical situation in which these experiences occurred.
"From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history.
Writers have been taking drugs as long as there have been drugs to be had, and--as we learn from Marcus Boon's fascinating and meticulous The Road of Excess--the line is blurred, in fact invisible, between those writers who take drugs to inflame or exalt their demons and those who simply need, in Aldous Huxley's phrase, "a chemical vacation from intolerable selfhood"...
James Parker, Boston Globe
"...in an era when critics warn that the literary monograph may soon die of
its own nonelevating dust, one can only laud Professor Boon for his
infinite resourcefulness."
I first encountered John Giorno's poetry in the early 1980s at the Final Academy, a celebration of William S. Burroughs life and work that happened in London. The next time was at a Tibetan Buddhist teaching in the space that was formerly Burroughs' bunker on the Bowery in New York in the 1990s. John's poetry moves freely in those spaces -- the post-Beat world, avant New York, Tibetan Buddhism -- and it's changed my life and that of many others. Subduing Demons is the first career spanning collection of John's work. I edited it, with full access to John's work, and it contains many of John's greatest poems, from the 1960s Pop/appropriation pieces such as "Constitution of the United States" to the psychedelic Buddhist pieces of the 1970s, to the hard hitting AIDS era slogan poems of the 1980s to outrageous recent pieces like "Thanx 4 Nothing".
"After scarfing up Subduing Demons in America, Giorno’s terrific new career-spanning collection, I discovered that in some ways I was right: sex, drugs and dharma are the main dishes on the table, along with violence, despair, and supernovas. But the meal itself proved to be as profound, unnerving, and hypnotic as the ritual repast that the chöd lamas offer to the hungry ghosts." Erik Davis, Techgnosis
Sparrow is one of my oldest friends and one of the great trickster-poet-savants of New York. Although he's mostly known for his poetry, his prose work is hilarious and astute, and I jumped at the chance to collect and edit this work, often published in fairly obscure places, for Soft Skull.
"America: A Prophecy is the long awaited collection from the writer Robert Christgau called, "one of the funniest men in Manhattan." From a hilarious spiritual guide to New York City--written after Sparrow tried meditating at a dozen high-traffic landmarks--to the scientific and religious significance of the sky, Sparrow's unique blend of wit and wisdom gives readers a whole new way of seeing our country at the crossroads.
I have an essay entitled "John Giorno: Buddhism, Poetry, and Transgression" in this new collection of essays The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature edited by Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge -- which is pretty much the first book to be written on the topic.
"The encounter between Buddhism and American literature has been a powerful one for both parties. While Buddhism fueled the Beat movement’s resounding critique of the United States as a spiritually dead society, Beat writers and others have shaped how Buddhism has been presented to and perceived by a North American audience. Contributors to this volume explore how Asian influences have been adapted to American desires in literary works and at Buddhist poetics, or how Buddhist practices emerge in literary works. Starting with early aesthetic theories of Ernest Fenollosa, made famous but also distorted by Ezra Pound, the book moves on to the countercultural voices associated with the Beat movement and its friends and heirs such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Giorno, Waldman, and Whalen. The volume also considers the work of contemporary American writers of color influenced by Buddhism, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Charles Johnson, and Lan Cao. An interview with Kingston is included." From the Publisher.
I have an interview conducted with musician David Sylvian in this collection of articles, photography, and illustrations from Canadian spiritual journal Ascent, which I've written for from time to time. I appreciate the expansive, experimental quality of Ascent, which manages to avoid New Age cliches, academic withdrawal, journalistic irony and many of the other traps waiting for those who want to write about spirituality today. Sylvian is one of my favorite musicians, and his experimental disk Blemish, which came out a little before this interview was done, is a remarkable piece of work, rigorously unsentimental in its explorations.
I felt honored to be asked to write the introduction to this first official English translation of German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin's writings about drugs. Benjamin remains one of my intellectual heroes. In the period between World Wars I and II he explored many of the topics that would come to the fore post-1945 -- media, collecting, revolution in everyday life, spirituality, language, mimetic magic ... and drugs. Germany after WW I was at the forefront of scientific exploration of psychoactive drugs and Benjamin participated in a salon in Berlin that was involved in exploring the properties, philosophical, psychological, medical and otherwise, of a variety of substances including mescaline, hashish and cocaine. The writing is remarkable for its sometimes confessional honesty, its crazy warping of language and cognition, and the numerous textual illuminations of key Benjamin concepts such as aura, the mimetic faculty and so on.
Fascinating...On Hashish gives the reader a sense of Benjamin's philosophical method and a tour through the library (and the staggering erudition) that supported it, but also provides some insight into the man himself--his drives, his fears, and his creative process.
I wrote an essay called "The Eternal Drone" for this collection of writings from the excellent English music magazine The Wire, which I've been writing for for most of the last decade. It grew out of the interviews that I did with the circle of musicians and composers who studied with Hindustani classical singer Pandit Pran Nath -- notably conversations about drones with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Charlemagne Palestine and Catherine Christer Hennix, which I found very inspiring.
"In a series of essays by some of the best music writers of our time, Undercurrents identifies the key concepts and underlying themes that have been hardwired into the modern era's most radical musics, ever since Thomas Edison invented the record player. The phonograph, electronics, chance operations, Futurism, Surrealism, the civil rights movement, noise, alternative tuning systems and market forces have all redrawn the map of contemporary sound. Undercurrents tracks these seismic shifts across a wide range of music including modern composition, free jazz, experimental rock and pop, Industrial, ethnic music, Techno and electronica, and looks at the extraordinary innovations and invented instruments that have passed into obscurity.
April 1 2009
Sparrow is one of my oldest friends and one of the great trickster-poet-savants of New York. Although he's mostly known for his poetry, his prose work is hilarious and astute, and I jumped at the chance to collect and edit this work, often published in fairly obscure places, for Soft Skull.
I have an essay entitled "John Giorno: Buddhism, Poetry, and Transgression" in this new collection of essays The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature edited by Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge -- which is pretty much the first book to be written on the topic.
I have an interview conducted with musician David Sylvian in this collection of articles, photography, and illustrations from Canadian spiritual journal Ascent, which I've written for from time to time. I appreciate the expansive, experimental quality of Ascent, which manages to avoid New Age cliches, academic withdrawal, journalistic irony and many of the other traps waiting for those who want to write about spirituality today. Sylvian is one of my favorite musicians, and his experimental disk Blemish, which came out a little before this interview was done, is a remarkable piece of work, rigorously unsentimental in its explorations.
I felt honored to be asked to write the introduction to this first official English translation of German philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin's writings about drugs. Benjamin remains one of my intellectual heroes. In the period between World Wars I and II he explored many of the topics that would come to the fore post-1945 -- media, collecting, revolution in everyday life, spirituality, language, mimetic magic ... and drugs. Germany after WW I was at the forefront of scientific exploration of psychoactive drugs and Benjamin participated in a salon in Berlin that was involved in exploring the properties, philosophical, psychological, medical and otherwise, of a variety of substances including mescaline, hashish and cocaine. The writing is remarkable for its sometimes confessional honesty, its crazy warping of language and cognition, and the numerous textual illuminations of key Benjamin concepts such as aura, the mimetic faculty and so on.
I wrote an essay called "The Eternal Drone" for this collection of writings from the excellent English music magazine The Wire, which I've been writing for for most of the last decade. It grew out of the interviews that I did with the circle of musicians and composers who studied with Hindustani classical singer Pandit Pran Nath -- notably conversations about drones with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, Charlemagne Palestine and Catherine Christer Hennix, which I found very inspiring.