Ah Pook Is Here

Ah Puch Finally, let's also talk about William S. Burroughs (1914–1997), one of my favorite writers.

Ah Pook Is Here (translated: Ah Pook Is Here, SugarCo) was originally planned (1970) as an illustrated book modeled on the surviving Mayan codices. English artist Malcolm McNeill was to draw the illustrations, and Burroughs was to draw the text.

It began publication under the title The Unspeakable Mr. Hart as a comic strip in the magazine Cyclops. When Cyclops closed, Burroughs and McNeill continued to develop the project, which became a book of text and images of about 120 pages, some text-only, some images-only, and some a mixture. In this version, it was published in 1971 by Straight Arrow Books in San Francisco.

Later (1973–1975), McNeill joined Burroughs in America to continue working on the book, but in the meantime, Straight Arrow Books closed, and the two were unable to find a publisher for this work with such an odd format that, in the end, only the text was published in 1978. The Italian version is interesting because it also contains several pages of illustrations, albeit smaller in size.

Ah Pook in the title is a transliteration of Ah Puch, the god of death in Mayan culture and king of Metnal, the ninth level of the underworld Xibalba, a place of darkness and cold. The entire text is about death and, like other texts by Burroughs, is incredibly rich in ideas and suggestions, so much so that it has inspired other artists.

Here, in fact, we see a short animated film directed by Philip Hunt in 1994 with the now-famous voice of Burroughs and the music from the album "William S. Burroughs – Dead City Radio," Track 4 – "Ah Pook The Destroyer / Brion Gysin's All-Purpose Bedtime Story," composed and performed by John Cale.
The film represents part of Burroughs's imaginative and paranoid universe and won awards at the 1995 Dresden Film Festival and the 1994 Ottawa International Animation Festival.

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