Can I Come In and Talk About These and Other Ideas?
13 Proposals from B.S. Johnson
Text und Töne, Autumn 2020
Throughout his acclaimed career, B.S. Johnson – ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s’ – wrote to commissioning editors, TV producers, and literary agents with letters brimming full of ideas. Can I Come In... brings a selection of these proposals to light in a visual history of B.S. Johnson’s abandoned work.
With an Afterword from Johnson’s son Steve and a postcard reproducing the author's plan for a 'Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Johnson'.
"I can't tell you how depressing Can I Come In is. It's a record of a rehearsal for my own tribulations these past three decades. The way in which commissioning is always in the hands of a particular species of artless mediocrity is unedifying: How The Fuck Did That Get Commissioned would, like Can I Come In, be timeless." – Jonathan Meades
More information at Text und Töne
Available
Texte und Töne
LRB Bookshop
Press
‘Not Enough Johnson’, Sight & Sound, 2020