Tag: Eric Mottram

I have known Malcolm Mc Neill for almost 14 years, but I have known ‘of’ him for more than thirty. 

The first time I saw Mc Neill’s name and an allusion to his extended collaboration with William S. Burroughs was in Eric Mottram’s 1977 study of Burroughs The Algebra of Need — but not quite, since his name appears as “Malcolm Neil.”¹ I still have the copy that I must have bought in the early days of the 1990s. Mottram glosses Malcolm Mc Neill’s artwork for Burroughs’ short work The Unspeakable Mr Hart, which I had not seen at that point. He quotes from a Burroughs interview with Rolling Stone in which Burroughs describes, albeit briefly and without naming it, what Burroughs and Mc Neill called Ah Puch is Here; the title would only change to Ah Pook is Here late in the history of the work, and not without contention.