Dead Letters

Those click and clacking beat-manque poets Max Blagg and Glenn O'Brien call up the still-lively spirits of favored bardic ghosts with correspondence from William Burroughs, Joe Orton, Pliny the Younger, Wyndham Lewis
and Philip Larkin to recipients who did not, unfortunately, include O'Brien and Blagg.



Here our two wacky poets read only the belles of several literary-heroic lettres, including a hair-raising account of the sudden resurfacing of heterosexual desire by William Burroughs; a droll and very gay tale by Joe Orton about W.H. Auden and the king of England; Wyndham Lewis's violent threats against a fellow artist, and a gripping account of the destruction of Pompeii by Pliny the Younger, a drama that was interrupted, perhaps not unfortunately, by the ringing of a cellphone neither host was able to locate. Forging ahead, they exhume an obscure epistle from Philip Larkin to Kingsley Amis, before signing off dazed and confused.

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