THE THIRD MIND

Not the vast raw "scrapbook" it was originally designed to be (which was probably unpublishable), this anthology of Burroughs and Gysin's use of the "cut-up" method details a way to go beyond collaboration in writing and into "new connections between images." Rip apart a page from any book or magazine, paste the strips together randomly, read the results: time-schemes and sense-webs are broken. But evidenced by the cut-ups here, the method seems more puerile and coincidental than truly revelatory: the original idea is much better than the result. It's all the more obvious when you read a really written piece like "In the Present Time," which is Burroughs more or less straight, a marvelous carny comic with a wonderful rat-ta-tat delivery; the collages—and the essays about how to make them—seem gray and tendentious by comparison.