Vincent Tinguely

I’ve had a deep interest in the Beats since I was introduced to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs while taking my undergrad degree at the University of Western Ontario in the early 1980s. Back then, I wrote a paper on Burroughs’ Naked Lunch for a Philosophy in Literature course. Since then, my reading (and my book collection) has taken in many strands of the Beat canon. More recently, I’ve written occasionally on Beat topics, articles published in blogs, zines and literary websites with titles like “Scraping the Bottom of the Beat Barrel” (reviews of new Beat material, 2007), “Scat: The Bootleg Jack Kerouac” (about the many and various audio bootlegs of Kerouac, 2007, 2011), and “Giorno’s Performance: Completely inside of a totally mad situation” (2009). I graduated with an MA in Cultural Studies at the University of Winnipeg last summer. A couple of my research papers were along Beat lines, including one on Kathy Acker’s use of the texts of Shakespeare in her novel My Death, My Life, By Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a paper entitled ‘”Have you seen death singing”: Patti Smith’s Haunted Imaginary.’